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In The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen identifies the essential component of evil as a lack of empathy. While empathy has been defined in various ways, Baron-Cohen’s definition reveals its connection to both benevolence and morality: “Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion” (16).
The book begins with a description of atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, accounts that are not for the squeamish. The psychological enabler of horrific acts such as he describes and, unfortunately, of countless others perpetrated by our species, is the absence of empathy, or the ability to turn off one’s empathy. “Zero empathy” most often selectively targets people of a given race, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Baron-Cohen aptly describes this phenomenon as “turning people into objects.” Empathy isn’t always necessary for morality, but evil nearly always involves its absence.
Baron-Cohen turns from examining the lack, or erosion of empathy at this grand scale to looking at its effects in individuals, claiming that the Cluster B personality disorders are actually empathy disorders. Although in the current formulation of these disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), lack of empathy appears in the diagnostic criteria only for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, an inability to grasp what others think and feel characterizes most personality disorders. In the “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders,” an experimental section that will almost certainly replace the current category-bound definitions in the next edition of the DSM, an important criterion for diagnosing personality disorders is impaired functioning in two of four crucial categories. Empathy is one of these. (The others are identity, self-direction, and intimacy.)
Sarah Gruen might have written her novel Water for Elephants to illustrate Baron-Cohen’s theory of empathy and evil. To begin with, Gruen foregrounds empathy. Here is a passage describing the main character, Jacob Jankowski’s, feelings for the circus animals he cares for (as a veterinarian, more of that momentarily):
“It’s impossible to describe how tenderly I suddenly feel toward them—hyenas, camels, and all. Even the polar bear, who sits on his backside chewing his four-inch claws with his four-inch teeth. A love for these animals wells up in me suddenly, a flash flood and there it is, solid as an obelisk and viscous as water.”
Jacob loves the animals because he empathizes with them, grasping how they feel. And his empathy protects them from the lack of empathy of those who exploit them for money, whose treatment ranges from insouciant to abusive. Jacob knows, “There is no question that I am the only thing standing between these animals and the business practices of August and Uncle Al ... I cannot leave these animals I am their shepherd, their protector.”
The novel is narrated by Jacob, who tells of his adventures as a young man of 23 (or perhaps 20—he can’t remember), and of his current life as an old man living in a nursing home, who is 93 (or perhaps 90). The narrative alternates time periods, with the majority of episodes focusing on Jacob’s youth, but with periodic returns to the current day.
The story in the past begins when Jacob is just about to take his finals in his last year of veterinarian school at Cornell. His parents are killed in a car accident, and in addition to suffering the trauma of this sudden tragedy, Jacob learns that he is flat broke—his father (also a vet) had been treating animals for free for years because people could not afford to pay. Jacob leaves Cornell with no idea of where to go and ends up joining a circus as the vet (they don’t care if he didn’t take his finals).
A vet, a circus—yes, this novel is largely about animals, and, as you might also expect, an implicit plea for their humane treatment. But it is just as much about humans, and a plea for their humane treatment as well. In fact, the animals and humans have names that mix up categories. Rosie is the elephant (in the past) but Rosemary is the nurse who befriends the elderly Jacob (the present); Camel is the man Jacob nurses (in the past), although he is an animal doctor, and of course, there is a real camel in the circus; words that can apply to both human and non-human animals are common (“Nurse!” I bark. Nurse!”).
Animals are also shown to have capabilities assumed by many to belong exclusively to humans, claims that have been confirmed by ethologists (another pertinent book is Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?). Jacob, as thoroughly as he knows animals, is astonished when he gives an orangutan an orange that she has pointed to and the ape then takes his hand and “wraps her long fingers around it, then lets go.” Jacob realizes “in amazement” that she “was thanking me.” (A real-life example of an incident of this kind involving a chimpanzee is told by Jane Goodall in In the Shadow of Man).
The most telling and terrible similarity between human and non-human animals is that some of the members of the circus are treated like humans and others (mis)treated like animals. As the philosopher Syl Ko points out, much of our world is structured by viewing some people as animals, a category that is –wrongly—assumed to be inferior, and which establishes a binary divide between humans and animals that justifies abuse. Both people and animals (including people who are equated with animals) are abused by those who lack empathy or who are capable of turning their empathy off—by those who turn living beings into objects.
Gruen, like Baron-Cohen, connects lack of empathy with the cluster B personality disorders. Any therapist who reads the novel will easily diagnose August, the ringmaster, with borderline personality disorder, given his lightning-quick reactivity and instability of mood; his alternation of attitudes, particularly between idealization and devaluation of his wife, Marlena; his intense fear of abandonment, long before she decides to leave him; and his uncontrollable anger (Marlena lives in fear of August for years and finally decides to leave when he becomes physically abusive).
August is also abusive to the circus’s animals, particularly Rosie the elephant. Even the hardened circus workers who are used to treating the animals harshly are appalled. The owner of the circus, Uncle Al, knows there is something wrong and tries to excuse August’s unacceptable behavior by reference to mental illness, diagnosing him as a “paragon schnitzophonic.”
Uncle Al is mistaken in his diagnosis as well as his language. Yet that is not the only irony. Uncle Al also suffers from a mental illness, clearly fulfilling the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. He certainly exhibits “a pervasive pattern for and violation of the rights of others,” evidenced by his throwing men off a moving train (redlighting) as a way of firing them (he kills several workers this way); deceitfulness (he lies about many things to workers, performers, police); irresponsibility (he does not pay his workers for weeks on end); and irritability and aggressiveness (people know to stay out of his way when he is angry because he slaps them indiscriminately). These are all behaviors for which he has not a shred of remorse.
The theme of empathy pertains as much to the present as the past. Gruen’s novel speaks not only against objectifying animals but also against what might be an even more invisible license for oppression, our lack of empathy with the elderly.
The novel’s title Water for Elephants is a reference to a lie told by a new resident in the nursing home where Jacob has been forced to live by his children, an unfeeling lot; not one of the five of them will take him in even though he does not have dementia and needs minimal help with self-care. The newcomer at the home boasts of having worked for a circus and brought water for elephants to drink, an impossibility since no one could carry a sufficient amount of water to satisfy an elephant. This boast makes Jacob, who really did work for a circus and care for an elephant, feel invalidated. No one has asked about his story, and he is not enough of an “old fart” to boast of his past. He is not recognized for who he is, a form of affirmation needed by most of us.
No one asks Jacob about himself because the elderly in the nursing home are treated like objects, as are the animals in the circus. In fact, the elderly, with their wheelchairs and walkers, are pretty much herded from one activity to another. The food they are given (also an issue for animals in the flashback portion of the novel) is bland and tasteless; no one cares what Jacob wants to eat, or that he still has the capability to ingest real food rather than pablum. No one, that is, until Rosemary the nurse befriends him. Rosemary recognizes the person “inside” the elderly body, and she begins to treat Jacob with respect.
The link between cruelty to animals and psychopathology has been established in the academic psychological literature. It is glaring in egregious forms of abuse such as torture; psychopaths lack respect for all living creatures. But the subtle ways in which we turn our empathy off, seeing other living creatures as objects, are often less obvious. We don’t think about the package of chicken we buy for dinner—it is a package, not a chicken. And the factory farming industry wants to keep it that way. We also all too often fail to see the elderly people we should respect as anything other than objects, estranged forms of life who not are like us. Animals all.
It is not accidental that Gruen sets the episodes in the past during the Great Depression. The crash of 1929 demonstrated a failure of empathy at the sociopolitical level (where Baron-Cohen begins). The United States did not take care of its people when the going got tough. Where was the safety net that might have prevented the desperation and poverty that haunted our country? The Depression is omnipresent in Water for Elephants, from the group of homeless people Jacob encounters while running from a raid on a Speakeasy; to the men at the circus who will put up with unfair working conditions because they need a job—any job; to Jacob himself, who is left penniless when his parents die because his father helped others who had nowhere else to turn.
Roosevelt’s New Deal, which gave us Social Security, was a response to the Depression, a promise that we would at least be provided for in old age. President Johnson’s Great Society continued the caretaking agenda, giving us Medicare and Medicaid. But Gruen published her novel in 2006, when attempts to dismantle the social safety net had been ongoing for decades under the aegis of politicians of both parties who came to power after Johnson. Water for Elephants impugns those who lack empathy for animals, for the elderly, and for other people in their individual relationships, the “micro” level, as social workers say. But it also indicts a society that lacks empathy for those who need some help, where the gap between rich and poor, wide when Gruen wrote the novel, is even wider today.
A recent New York Times headline proclaimed “Trump Family Legacy: Empathy Is for the Weak," with a secondary headline, “Nation’s Crises Are Met With an Inability to Feel Others’ Pain.” These headlines get at the heart of what is wrong with our current political leadership. But lack of empathy also describes what has been wrong with many of our laws, institutions, and politics for many years. We have been steadily witnessing the triumph of neoliberalism, of society run according to the dictates of the marketplace, a mode that precludes empathetic responses to the unfortunate.
As one journalist explains this phenomenon: “ [I]f you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: If your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.” And losers don’t deserve our help. On the whole, we are not a particularly empathetic society. Sara Gruen’s narrative of the past speaks to our situation in 1929, in 2006, and today.
I won’t spoil the ending of Water for Elephants for you because, despite its serious themes, it is a gloriously entertaining page-turner. I have known people who never read for pleasure tell me they were unable to put the book down. But like the circus it depicts, this novel’s glittering surface conceals the best and worst of which we are capable as a species, both in the way we relate to others of our kind and in the way we relate to the creatures who share our planet.
Note: I thank the students in the writing seminar I taught for Cornell's Prefreshman Summer Progam this year (2020): Robyn Chung, Chris Cieciura, Sanaa Greene, Yay Helene Logan, Faith Taylor, and Ayleen Yanza. It was a pleasure to think through ideas and books with these brilliant and dedicated students.
References
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. American Psychiatric Publishing.
Baron-Cohen, S. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Basic Books.
de Waal, F. (2017). Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? W. W. Norton & Company.
Goodall, Jane (1971). In the Shadow of Man. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Gruen, S. (2006). Water for Elephants. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Karni, A. and Rogers, K. 2020, July 29. Trump Family Legacy: Empathy is for the Weak. The New York Times, pp. 1 and 19.
Ko, A. and Ko S. (2017). Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Lantern Books.
Monbiat, George. Neoliberalism: 2016, April 15. The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems. The Guardian, Economics Section, p. 1.
