Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Born to Be Good reveals a straightforward answer to the question of how to be good: rely on emotions like amusement, gratitude, and compassion to bring the good to others to completion. To give life to this idea, Born to Be Good offers a conversation between Darwinian views of the origins of human goodness (you’ll be surprised to learn that Darwin believed that sympathy is our strongest passion) and gems from the great traditions of East Asian and Western thought.

The road map of Born to be Good follows the development of my own thinking about answers to these questions. It begins with a discussion, in chapter 1, of the Confucian concept of jen, which refers to kindness, humanity, and reverence. I introduce the concept of the jen ratio, a simple but powerful way of looking upon the relative balance of good and uplifting versus bad and cynical in life. The jen ratio honors my interests in Eastern philosophy and in parsimonious measurement. It is a way to think about the clues to happy marriages, well-adapted children, healthy communities and cultures.

The next three chapters take the reader on a tour of the latest discoveries in evolutionary approaches to emotion. We start in chapter 2 by considering Darwin’s nuanced analyses of the many positive emotions. Contrary to what many may assume, Darwin believed that these emotions were the basis of our moral instinct and capacity for good. Darwin and Confucius would have been very content collaborators.

From Darwin we travel to New Guinea, and Paul Ekman’s paradigm-shifting studies of the universality of facial expression. As a result of the empirical science that followed this work, we have arrived at three new ideas about emotion that are summarized in chapter 3: Emotions are signs of our commitment to others; emotions are encoded into our bodies and brains; emotions are our moral gut, the source of our most important moral intuitions.

In chapter 4 we look back in time to glean what has been learned about the evolution of human goodness. This ever-changing evolutionary science provides a context for understanding the origins of the positive emotions, where the smile comes from, why we are wired to trust and to care. The chapter brings together insights from the study of our close primate relatives, from archeology, and from hunter-gatherer cultures. The reader may be surprised to learn that:

 

We are a caretaking species. The profound vulnerability of our offspring rearranged our social organization as well as our nervous system.

 

We are a face-to-face species. We are remarkable in our capacity to empathize, to mimic, to mirror.

 

Our power hierarchies differ from those of other species; power goes to the most emotionally intelligent.

 

We reconcile our conflicts rather than fleeing or killing; we have evolved powerful capacities to forgive.

 

We live in complex patterns of fragile monogamy, preferring monogamy but often showing patterns of serial monogamy.

 

 

Each of the remaining eight chapters is devoted to the science of different emotions that give rise to high jen ratios. This science is rooted in Darwin’s deepest insight about human emotion: that the visible expressions of emotion that we observe today are clues to the ancient behaviors that led some mammals to fare well in the tasks of survival, reproduction, and care of offspring. This science would not exist without the methodology Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen gave to the field: the ability to measure millisecond movements of muscles in the face. Every chapter tries to honor the insights about emotion found in art, literature, and philosophy.