‘Where’s your compassion?’ It may just save your life

In a week of conversations with the Dalai Lama, captured in The Book of Joy, Tutu was at pains to point out that what we see in the news is not the truth about society as a whole. (Photo: bookshimalaya.com)

By Mark Heywood

31 Jan 2023

‘The modern world is suspicious of compassion because we have accepted the belief that nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and that we are fundamentally competing against everyone and everything. According to this perspective, in our lives of getting and spending, compassion is at best a luxury, or at worst a self-defeating folly of the weak. Yet evolutionary science has come to see cooperation, and its core emotions of empathy, compassion and generosity, as fundamental to our species’ survival.’ (‘The Book of Joy’)

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson’s 2019 book, The Body, A Guide for Occupants. It’s fascinating, fact filled and often funny. The story of man’s gradual conquest over the threats to his body (and I use the word man deliberately because women’s health, queer health or children’s health have not received the same investment of time or money) is central to the story of the past few hundred years of “civilization”.

Read a review of it here: The Body by Bill Bryson review – a directory of wonders | Science and nature books | The Guardian

But most of all, reading The Body reminded me of a fact about human existence that is so in our face that we seem to forget it most of the time. Despite differences of class, race, gender, sex, ethnic or geographical origin, the now more than eight billion humans on this planet are all basically the same.

We are born in the same way, we reproduce in the same way, age the same way, are prone to a common set of diseases.

We dream the same way, have a common set of emotions, feel pain equally, get hurt and die the same way.

(Photo: Amazon.ca / Wikipedia)

However, with the explosion of inequality, in the conduct of our day-to-day lives, we have forgotten this. We have othered people beyond our family and friends. We don’t look at a street child and register their pain, the person who lives in a park and think what it’s like to live without a proper roof; we don’t see the millions condemned to permanent unemployment without ever realising their potential for personal development.

Bryson’s jaunt through the body is not intended as a political book in any sense. Nevertheless, it becomes a stunning testament to how badly wrong our societies have gone in the past 100 or so years.

He records how our food systems have become bad for us; our health systems are bad for us; our transport systems are bad for us.

People in the US, for example, “are essentially the world’s most overfed people, but also amongst the most nutritionally deficient ones”. Despite this they spend $40-billion a year on 87,000 (most of them useless) different dietary supplements.

As a result, despite the many medical advances, Bryson points out that, in developed and middle-income countries, “it has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less-healthy lives than those of their parents. We aren’t just eating ourselves into early graves, it seems, but breeding children to jump in alongside us.”

In his final chapter on death, titled “The End”, Bryson refers to an article in Nature that noted how in 2011 “for the first time, more people died from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined. We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle.”

Covid-19 has not changed this. According to the World Health Organization, 41 million people die every year of largely preventable NCDs.

Thus, though this is a book about the body, science and medicine, we find that none of these can be divorced from society, politics, economics and inequality.

Enter kindness as a health and political strategy

Bryson doesn’t say it, but the irony is that a book that is meant to be about human triumph through science becomes a book about incipient human breakdown.

What is to be done?

If we are honest the problem is that we don’t have answers. We are caught in a system that even as it breaks down, binds itself more tightly to us, a bit like a virus. Our political and economic systems are broken, many people are disengaging from democracy and human rights, leaving the space open to naked aggression and the power of violence.

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Bryson doesn’t attempt answers to these questions. His book ends with portentous lines that (in a few decades) might serve equally well as an epitaph for our species:

“And that’s you gone. But it was good while it lasted. Wasn’t it?”

But as I turned the last page the last thought I took away was a clue about the centrality of kindness to human well-being and longevity, and its possible power to bring about a change in our politics.

US author Bill Bryson points out that, in developed and middle-income countries, 'it has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less-healthy lives than those of their parents'. (Photo: EPA / Dan Himbrechts)

In a chapter titled “Medicine Good and Bad” Bryson notes that “medical science alone cannot do it all” and that “other factors can significantly affect [health] outcomes, sometimes in surprising ways. Just being kind, for instance.”

To back this up he points to a study of diabetic patients in New Zealand in 2016 which found that “the proportion suffering from severe complications was 40% lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion”.

Later on, citing research by Jo Marchant, he exclaims how “it is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA. Conversely, a 2010 US study found that not having such relationships doubles your risk of dying from any cause.”

Snap. This is a point that has also been emphasised by social justice advocates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, as recorded in their Book of Joy. For example, as the two wise men talk about the spiritual value of compassion, Doug Abrams, the book’s scribe, cites neuroimaging research to prove how human behaviour is wired for compassion.

(Photo: bookshimalaya.com)

Says Abrams: “We have an entire brain circuit… devoted to generosity. It is no wonder that we feel so good when we help others or are helped by others, or even witness others being helped. There was strong and compelling research that we come factory-equipped for cooperation, compassion, and generosity.”

Later in the book Abrams continues:

“In the 2015 World Happiness Report [researchers] explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships. Generous pro-social behaviour seems to strengthen relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers… just thinking about it ‘significantly increases the protective antibody salivary immunoglobulin A, a protein used by the immune system’.”

Read in Daily Maverick: “The lesson according to Desmond Tutu and Kae Tempest: The Power of People’s Faces”

Thinking about this in the context of the killing of Thulani Maseko, it struck me that even though governments and dictators, criminals and kleptocrats may conspire to take away many of our political freedoms – the right to protest, to a free media and free speech, even the right to life – one thing they will never be able to stop us doing is being kind to each other.

Kindness is the mutually beneficial act that flows from feeling compassion.

Although many will sniff at it, in a world that incentivises and iconises selfish and antisocial behaviour, everyday Kindness may be one of our most radical acts of resistance and rebellion. DM/MC

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