Ebook Free Download | The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society | In this highly entertaining, lovingly written, and amply documented book, de Waal reverses his usual direction of argumentation, using the fact that primates exhibit rudimentary forms of human prosociality to assert that human sociality is fundamentally empathetic and altruistic. Indeed, de Waal suggests that chimpanzees exhibit a mix of hierarchical and egalitarian sensitivities, and empathetic and ruthlessly aggressive sensitivities similar to that of humans. De Waal does not even entertain the Romantic idea that humans are inherently benevolent but corrupted by an evil society, but he returns repeatedly to a critique of the American conservative tendency to view human nature as basically selfish. The bottom line is that de Waal develops a concept of human nature block by block, chapter by chapter, and then uses this concept to build a novel and very attractive political economy for our time.
This book is full of simple statements that are deeply insightful, and yet are completely incompatible with the received wisdom in various academic disciplines (I should warn the reader that I believe that the extreme parochialism of the behavioral disciplines is the major impediment of our time in understanding social behavior). Here is one of my favorites: "Instead of each individual independently weighing the pros and cons of his or her own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind." (p. 63) By contrast, imitation is virtually unnoticed as a form of rational behavior in standard decision theory.
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