Macacas, mirror neurons, and reviving Samuel Pufendorf

Back in late summer our outgoing senator, George Allen, used the term “macaca” as a demeaning racial epithet. However, few of those who read of that event with horror and disgust seemed aware of the honorable role that the eponymous “macaque” monkey has played in the recent study of– yes– the psychology of empathy. For in 1991, it was while studying the neural responses of a group of macaque monkeys that Vittorio Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma, Italy, first discovered the functioning of an important, perhaps seminal, kind of brain cells called “mirror neurons.”
These neurons, which were subsequently discovered to exist and to function in a similar way in humans, as well, fire when their host body performs a given task– but they also, often quite unbeknownst to the host, fire when the host observes another person performing that same task. These taks can be simple motor tasks, such as picking up a mug of tea; or, they can be emotional tasks, like crying for grief, or showing the signs of bliss, or irritation.
The existence and functioning of mirror neurons can therefore be seen as essential to the functioning of human empathy, and indeed to the inter-human connectedness that is a central feature of the entire human condition.
(My daughter, Lorna Quandt, has been studying mirror neurons a lot recently; and most of the neuro-science in this post is derived from her work. I will admit that back in 1970 I did pretty well in my Prelims exams at Oxford in Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology– before I moved on to the mundane world of the school of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Anyway, it’s good to see all these disciplines coming back together again in this way at this point…)
V.S. Ramachandran, a distinguished neuroscientist at the Univ. of California, San Diego, has predicted that,

mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

I would say that the discovery of mirror neurons, and the increased understanding of the workings of mirror neurons, might well change a lot more than just the study of psychology. For western political and social thought, and western ontology as a whole, have since the days of the “Enlightenment” been based on an understanding of the nature of the human person as, essentially, a free-standing and quite self-sufficient monad: “Looking at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other,” as Hobbes described humankind…
And then, he and most of other Enlightenment philosophers who followed him– especially within the Anglo-Saxon branch of philosophy– built upon that ontology entire edifices of political philosophy and social science.
I note, that the vast majority of those early English philosophers were the kinds of ordained Protestant ministers who were not allowed to marry; therefore, their conjectures about the nature of human relationships and obligations had a certain air of– let us say– abstraction to them. (And then there was John Locke, who not only helped draft the Constitution of the slaveholding state of South Carolina but was also a shareholder in a slavetrading company called the Royal African Corporation. Ah, those fine advocates of human freedom!)
But back to mirror neurons. What I like about their discovery is that it kind of situates, in a very physical way, things that I had long ago intuited– and even, yes, experienced, in a very direct way– about the human condition. Namely, that we humans are all connected to each other– and most likely, also capable of even greater levels of interconnectedness… And this, even if we are not even aware that these interconnections exist.
This strikes me as being much closer to the Buddhist view of the human condition: the view, that is, that denies the existence of any finitely bounded “self” and that bases its very advanced practical psychology on the need to cultivate ever greater levels of compassion. This, in clear contradistinction to the concept of the ever-solipsistic, ever self-aggrandizing “homo economicus” that has come to dominate the western understanding not just of economics but of many other branches of social science, as well… Including international relations.
So I was thinking about all this, this afternoon, and pulled out my old copy of Samuel Pufendorf’s “On the duty of man and citizen“. This work of early-modern political philosophy was published (in Latin) in 1673– 25 years after the Treaty of Westphalia, 22 years after Hobbes’s “Leviathan”, and 15 years before Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government”. Pufendorf wrote a lot about politics and international relations in the new, post-Westphalian order he was living through. His work was notable in many respects. But for me, it was most notable for his insistence that socialitas (translated variously as “sociability”, or “sociality”) is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition.

“On the duty of man and citizen” is a very readable single volume which is a digest or compendium of the main ideas in an eight-volume work, “On the law of nature and nations”, that Pufendorf had published one year earlier. Today, I found this online portal to a fulltext version of the book. The translation doesn’t look as fluid or clear as in my Cambridge U.P. paperback; but at least I can do some cut-n-pasting from the online version.
I love the way he builds up to his definition of “the natural law” in Book I, Chap. 3 :

6. Finally, we must also consider in mankind such a remarkable variety of gifts as is not observed in single species of animals, which, in fact, generally have like inclinations, and are led by the same passion and desire. But among men there are as many emotions as there are heads, and each has his own idea of the attractive. Nor are all stirred by a single and uniform desire, but by one that is manifold and variously intermixed. Even one and the same man often appears unlike himself, and if he has eagerly sought a thing at one time, at another he is very averse to it. And there is no less variety in the tastes and habits, the inclinations to exert mental powers, — a variety which we see now in the almost countless modes of life. That men may not thus be brought into collision, there is need of careful regulation and control.
7. Thus then man is indeed an animal most bent upon self-preservation, helpless in himself, unable to save himself without the aid of his fellows, highly adapted to promote mutual interests; but on the other hand no less malicious, insolent, and easily provoked, also as able as he is prone to inflict injury upon another. Whence it follows that, in order to be safe, he must be sociable, that is, must be united with men like himself, and so conduct himself toward them that they may have no good cause to injure him, but rather may be ready to maintain and promote his interests.
8. The laws then of this sociability, or those which teach how a man should conduct himself, to become a good member of human society, are called natural laws.
9. So much settled, it is clear that the fundamental natural law is this: that every man must cherish and maintain sociability, so far as in him lies. From this it follows that, as he who wishes an end, wishes also the means, without which the end cannot be obtained, all things which necessarily and universally make for that sociability are understood to be ordained by natural law, and all that confuse or destroy it forbidden. The remaining precepts are mere corollaries, so to speak, under this general law, and the natural light given to mankind declares that they are evident.

Well, I don’t have the time or the energy to write as much I wanted to about Pufendorf. Just pulling it off the shelf and looking at the portions I marked up a few years ago feels pretty exciting.
On a related note, the January-February issue of Foreign Policy mag has an article called “Why Hawks Win”, in which the authors, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon pull together some fairly basic insights from social psychology to demonstrate why there’s a fairly strong tendency for “hawks” to win internal arguments on war-and-peace issues. (It’s not available online yet.)
They recall that people tend to judge their own motivations as benign and those of their opponents as malevolent; and they make various other observations about the tendencies of military leaders to over-estimate their own capabilities, of political leaders to be reluctant to admit to mistakes, etc., etc. Nothing terrifically groundbreaking; but still, it’s useful to have it all pulled together like that… and especially in the present circumstances.
Bottom line: people who are decisionmakers in extremely important fields like national security affairs should constantly be reminded of the propensity of all humans– including themselves– to make such errors of judgment, and of the need to strive constantly and intentionally to “correct” for them.
And finally, back to Pufendorf, Book II, Chapter 16, “On war and peace.” I note that he is not a pacifist. But for someone arguing within the strictures of the “just war” paradigm, he does so in a clear and fairly “conservative” way:

1. It accords most closely with the natural law, if men are at peace with one another, voluntarily performing their obligations; in fact peace itself is a state peculiar to man, as distinguished from the brutes. Yet at times, even for man himself, war is permitted, and sometimes necessary; when, namely, owing to another’s malice, we are unable to preserve our possessions, or gain our rights, without employing force. Even in this case. however, prudence and humanity persuade us not to resort to arms, if more harm than good will result for us and ours from the avenging of our wrongs.
2. The just causes for which war can be undertaken reduce themselves to these: that we may preserve and protect ourselves and our belongings against the unjust invasion of others; or that we may assert our claim to what is owed us by others who refuse to pay; or to obtain reparations for an injury already inflicted, or a guarantee for the future. A war waged for the first cause is called defensive, if for the other causes, offensive.
3. And yet when one thinks he has been injured, there must be no instant recourse to arms, especially when there is still some doubt about the right or the fact. But we must try to see whether the matter can be settled in a friendly way, for example, by arranging a conference of the parties, by appealing to arbitrators, or intrusting the case to the decision of the lot…

This, from a man still remembering the horrors of the Thirty Years War that had ravaged Europe prior to the Treaty of Westphalia… From a man who served as an adviser to no fewer than three different rulers… And a man who had some really important ideas about how to build an international order (in Europe only, at the time) that allowed for states of deeply different types to co-exist in peace.
Time for everyone to pull Pufendorf off the shelf again, I think.