Compassion-based conflict resolution also requires wisdom—the ability to discern the best course of action in complex situations. In the context of conflict, wisdom helps us navigate emotional triggers, misunderstandings, and defensiveness to find a solution that benefits everyone involved. Slovic believes that individual stories “can be very effective… if there’s an action that can be taken, then, while you’re engaged.” So conflict can empower us with the motivation to help, as long as our interest is heightened because of one person’s moving story. This is an important point for the media and, more importantly, charities to note as our investment in individual lives can be used as a tool to completely change the public’s outlook on an issue, allowing for more interest and money to be raised. An example of this was a surge in interest and donations after images emerged of a young Syrian boy who had drowned and washed up on a beach after he tried to flee the conflict.
Part of the problem is the degree to which individuals identify with a social group, pick up the beliefs and concerns of that social group and reinforce them through sharing messages, for example on social media. To change ones view is therefore to change one’s group identity and sense of social belonging. We come again to the fact that humans do not make decisions purely on the basis of rationality but many other factors (Shu et al., 2019).
Indeed, many argue that we are hard-wired for caring and sharing even, in certain contexts, with strangers (Keltner et al., 2014); that our basic nature is caring and sharing (Ricard, 2015). This was partly honed in hunter-gatherer groups where it works well and is a source of joy, social safeness and meaning. We can plot the genetics, epigenetics, physiologies, and brain patterns of caring and how caring became the rich textures for compassion. Indeed, if you think of how compassion can operate to steer us to risk our lives to save others, it is probably one of the most courageous and potentially wise of motives. Caring and sharing has a phenotypic profile that is choreographed in caring environments. In non-caring environments however the caring and sharing phenotypes are very different Here phenotypes orientate the brain toward the opposite of sharing caring and compassion that is callousness and the dark side.
If it’s comfortable, you can even place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach. As you hold your body, take a moment to acknowledge where you feel your anger, sadness, or whatever feeling has risen. Bring your attention to the center of your stomach and take a deep breath, allowing space for your body to rest. Notice the space around you as you scan your entire space from front to back, side to side.
Creating Compassionate Worlds: The Hope And Disappointment
This is why it is useful to practise mindfulness and notice (without criticism) when these strategies are operating through oneself (Gilbert, 2009, Gilbert and Choden, 2013; Ricard, 2015). Tragically when these important brain nutrients of care, compassion, and love are not received, and children are on the receiving end of low warmth, neglect, or abuse, it has devastating impacts on the brain, epigenetics, and subsequent development (Lippard and Nemeroff, 2020). The suffering of the Romanian children in orphanages tragically brought home just how important affectionate caring was to the development of the brain (Chugani et al., 2001). In fact, there is now considerable evidence that our basic strategic orientation (particularly on the dimensions of “helping and concern for others” versus “lack of concern for others”) is partly set in our life histories (Del Giudice, 2016). Compassionate empathy creates an environment where individuals feel heard and validated. When one party acknowledges the emotions and experiences of another, it fosters understanding and reduces defensiveness.
In dangerous ecologies, where men have to be relatively fearless, the social organization tends to be harsh, including to children (Gilmore, 1990). Many anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers were averse to physically punishing or threatening children (Music, 2014; Narvaez, 2017, 2020; Ryan, 2019). Yet in post hunter-gatherer societies, and not very long ago, slave, wife and child-beating were allowed and legitimized and even promoted as a method for control (Gilbert, 2018).
- Our intelligence allowed us to recognize that rather than eat all our seeds, we could plant and cultivate them and could herd and cage animals.
- It prevents resentment from festering under unresolved wounds and creates a pattern of respectful interaction that can handle future disagreements constructively.
- Indeed, it is possible for children to seek out others in preference to their own parents if the parent relationship is not such a good one.
Then, Node S leads to Node I (SAJÑ) when prior models are used to make predictions of the events; the predictions cause Node A to act to interact with the events, so Node A is a conditioning factor or volitional action (SARA). In this process, consciousness emerges when the top-down model (Node I) interacts with the bottom-up data (encoded in Nodes S and A) (He and Raichle, 2009; Bachmann and Hudetz, 2014). The conceptual proliferation (PRAPAÑCA), as described above, refers to the tendency to superimpose the perspective of ego throughout all of one’s sensory experience via the medium of concept (Buswell and Lopez, 2013). PRAPAÑCA develops when the mind is already infused with conceptual thoughts (VIKALPA) that can be proliferated. Conceptual thoughts (VIKALPA) operate through the medium of generic images (SA), i.e., mental images or qualities that are generic to a class of phenomena, as opposed to those specific qualities that are unique to a given object. Closely related to VIKALPA is a mental factor of thinking or applied thought (VITARKA), which refers to a mental factor of an initial engagement of or inquiry into an object that is not sufficient for a full-blown VIKALPA (Tenzin Gyatso, 2020).
Express Empathy Verbally
We hereby introduce a technical feature of compassion meditation that is directly relevant to our second hypothesis and explain how it may counter PRAPAÑCA and VIKALPA that cause ego-preserving bias, as follows. The first three types of VIKALPA (Types 1–3) point to the fundamental reification (SAMROPA), i.e., a mistaken attribution to an object of a quality that the object does not in fact possess (Buswell and Lopez, 2013). The third Noble Truth, the cessation of suffering, refers to the realization of ultimate nature of all phenomena (Nagarjuna, 1995). The key to this realization is to understand the notion of dependent origination (PRATDA), and thus it has ontological, epistemological, and soteriological implications. The MADHYAMAKA school sees a necessary relation between dependent origination and emptiness (Ś), arguing that because everything is dependently arisen, everything is empty of independence and intrinsic existence (SVABHVA) (Buswell and Lopez, 2013). When a person directly perceives the union of dependent origination and emptiness, the person is considered to become totally enlightened, as a buddha (Nagarjuna, 1995; Tenzin Gyatso, 2009).
Crucially then, the major sources of conflict throughout evolution are over resources and resource availability and access. How conflicts of self-interest are dealt with in hunter-gatherer societies is very different from how they are dealt with in highly competitive, hierarchical, resource-rich societies such as ours (Ryan, 2019; Wilson, 2019). The ancient care and share versus control and hold strategies not only create different contexts for conflict but also indicate the means of resolving them. Put crudely, in caring and sharing environments it is to reach an equitable arrangement, in a hierarchical environment it is “the most powerful wins” and suppresses the needs of the subordinates. We are only going to do that if we create the cultures, including the childcare and education and resource distribution strategies accordingly.
Second, a relative absence of storing, holding and controlling resources in favor of mobility and obtaining and sharing resource for immediate use (Lavi and Friesem, 2019; Ryan, 2019). Third, a sense of social belonging and social safeness was linked to displays of altruism, caring and sharing. Narcissistic, aggressive and exploitive forms of competitiveness were shunned. What became important was competing for attractiveness – to have a reputation as an altruist.
They work well in reciprocating Wingtalks groups of familiar others but did not evolve as a general giveaway. The problem with all motives, including caring motives, is that they are “energy” expensive and costly. Evolution has therefore built in its own criteria for dispensing it, sometimes referred to as different forms of altruism (Burnstein et al., 1994) and reciprocal altruism (Gintis et al., 2003; Colqhoun et al., 2020). Mothers of most species will only care for their own infants, not for others. In the case of sheep, for example, it can be very difficult to get a mother to adopt an orphan.
Unfortunately, this conflict between ideals and actions is not limited to Gaza — it is a universal dissonance, an ache that must be confronted to begin the process of renewal.
This is always the big problem, that as resource availability increases so does self-focused competitive behavior (Piff et al., 2018). Kasser (2016) sums up some of the key findings about the problems of materialism in his important paper. Table 1 brings together some of the themes addressed above in terms of how different strategies organize the brain. Of course, minds do not operate Lego-like systems but complex networks of dissipated circuits that produce patterns of electrochemical activity underpinning motives and behaviors. Hence, it is preferable to think of these as multiple dimensions that we can all move along to some degree according to context and life stresses.
Empathy can inspire us to work toward a more just and equitable society, but it must be paired with concrete efforts to dismantle the structures that perpetuate harm. In the heat of an argument, it’s easy to reduce your partner to the source of your pain. But when we see our partner as the problem, we lose sight of their full humanity—and our ability to connect with them as a person who is also likely hurting, scared, or overwhelmed. The blog acknowledges Rahmah (mercy) in Islam and Chesed (loving-kindness) in Judaism as universal values that transcend cultural boundaries. It critiques how these ideals, across all traditions, are sometimes narrowed or distorted in the realities of human conflict. This is not a condemnation of Judaism or Chesed but a call to reclaim these principles as living, inclusive forces.
Nothing prepared us to deal with the consequences of developing agriculture and creating environments of expanding groups, the need to work long hours tending fields and farms, and opportunities to acquire, accumulate and store vast resources. Overtime we drifted into a very different type of resource regulation strategy, giving up a caring sharing lifestyle and replacing it with a resource owning, accumulating and power seeking, hierarchical one (Harari, 2014). Tragically for our species, this facilitated the re-emergence of the aggressive dominant male hierarchies who were able to stimulate highly destructive competitive behaviors, increased dispositions to callousness and cruelty, and maintain power through threats and terrors.
It is also the source of what may eventually extinguish humanity if we do not control it. Today, truly vast resources are spent on maintaining and building local and national armies, weapons, and weapon research (including the horrific prospect of robot armies), far more than on medicine. Margaret Thatcher an archetypal ‘hold and control’ politician was a great advocate of the arms trade (Gilbert, 2018). The domain of knowing intentionality, however, is also tricky because many of the reasons we behave in the ways that we do are partly unconscious (Huang and Bargh, 2014; Bargh, 2017). Nonetheless, humans do have opportunities to gain insight into the nature of “mind” (Baron-Cohen, 2011; Siegel, 2016) and then choose to develop compassion motives and a compassionate identity; to live to be helpful, not harmful (Dalai Lama, 1995; Gilbert, 2009; Ricard, 2015). Although oxytocin is often regarded as a hormone important for bonding, it is also a hormone that makes mothers aggressive to potential threats to their offspring (Carter et al., 2017) and can power outgroup (defensive) aggression too (De Dreu et al., 2011).
In a famous chapter called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel, Wilson and Daly (1992) explore how males can treat females like property and a usable resource. However, with the nature of human sexuality (it can last much longer than most primates engage with it) the enjoyment of sexuality, the bonding and friendship of sexuality, all point to human sexuality being different in hunter-gatherer societies (Diogo, 2019). Bonobos too are matriarchal and use sexual contact quite differently, not as a resource, but as a way of dealing with conflicts and social bonding. In order to behave cruelly and callously to others, you have to either not develope, or at least not activate mechanisms in the brain such as concerned empathy. Hein et al. (2010) have shown clearly that when we see one of our colleagues experiencing pain, various brain areas linked to empathy light up. However, these areas do not light up in the same way when we see someone who is in an opposing group or team receiving pain.