Peace Profits.

Teaching Empathy Economics and Challenging the Neo-Classical Curriculum for a Better World

Peace is profitable. This simple yet sadly provocative statement nevertheless reflects the truth of economic logic throughout human evolution. According to the theory of natural selection, human systems of social interaction (a.k.a. economics) developed to maximize human potential within a given environment. As a physiologically weak species, homo sapiens developed communication and behavior traits of “shared intentionality” to enable safety, security, and the ability to thrive. What determined survival, and therefore defined self-interest, was empathy: homo sapiens’ evolutionary edge. Peace was social homeostasis.

But ask the teenagers at my school, the adults on the street, and hear the rhetoric in the news, and peace only exists in the land of unicorns and the minds of the naïve.

Last week, the Environmental Science class at the public high school where I teach became a forum for passionate debate between students and the ideas of evolutionary psychologist, author, and professor, Stephen Pinker. The class is used to bravely tackling a broad spectrum of current issues facing people and planet. In a class focused on further illuminating the dire straits of the earth, it is notable that on this day, while Pinker professed positivity, students finally got pissed. For the first time, an emotionally charged debate bubbled up within the classroom, followed by self-assigned essays challenging Pinker’s platform that the planet is indeed becoming a more peaceful place to inhabit.

In a relatively affluent area of Northern California, the experiences of war and violence for these students have arguably appeared more through videogames than news, with even less personal experiences of direct violence. Ripely positioned in the heart of the “post-truth” era, well-trained students trust scientists and the supposedly school-sanctioned data. This certainly would include the Harvard professor, best-selling author, and viral TEDTalker they were shown. So, in spite of the emotional trigger Pinker elicited in the normally taciturn classroom, only the bravest of students asserted their deferent rebuttals in writing, which I encourage them to develop and publish.

In their essays, feeling unable or unqualified to refute the facts of the experts, students accepted Pinker’s data, and therefore grudgingly his conclusion, but still rejected the message. Driven by a self-interested empathy, these students insist that it is a dangerous position to tidily wrap up our current reality under the title of Peaceful Progress

Evolutionary psychology is unquestioningly complicated and filled with controversy, even as peer-reviewed data continuously emerge. The value of this learning opportunity isn’t an endless arguing the facts and shaming the opposition, traps that climate change and so many modern debates have fallen in to. What we learn is to question the narrative. What is the message Pinker is conveying with his selected data charts? What goal do we share?

For a moment, let’s leave aside an argument about the frame and the facts. What, fundamentally is the point? Is Pinker’s platform of peace offered to the public as an antidote to pessimism? “Things might be unnecessarily unjust, horrible, and violent now, folks, but they are way better than they used to be! We should all be grateful and look forward to the continued excruciating pain of slow but definite progress.”

According to other academics, (like here and most notably here) Pinker’s charts of peaceful progress are as flawed as his narrow definition of violence. Defining violence as the death of a man at the hands of another man, he fails to include climate change, extinction, pollution, emigration, poverty, hunger, depression, addiction, and abuse, which all describe forms of violence. No matter how far removed we may think our students are from it, violence is a constant as threat or companion. They’ve only known life during ongoing war on “terrorism”, funded by American taxpayers and the ravages of global warming, purchased with American money. They are not only aware of violence, but they are also guilty accomplices. Meanwhile, adults project their own detached survival strategies, lamenting teenage ignorance as we observe them blissfully posing for selfies in air-conditioned malls. But remember yourself as a teenager, multiply the threat, and check again: how many of those smiles are forced?

All of us, but especially the vulnerable, are experiencing some level of collective trauma. As 70% of mental health issues have their onset in youth and adolescence, I think we can do better than Pinker’s dismal attempt at optimism. This means we need to radically reconsider why we teach (or talk), in order to better determine what to say and how to say it.

Enter the little-understood, rarely questioned, mandatory class, scarce in science and scruples: Economics.

Examine each trauma and you need simply follow the money to see that nearly all are rooted in an economic story that pretends to follow natural laws, if not the laws of nature, then the laws of a flawed human nature. If economics cannot pretend that eternal growth is a scientific possibility, it pivots to posit that human nature dictates a self-serving and extractive inevitability.

Regardez-vous, the shamelessly blameless and faux-neutral premise of the economic textbook:

1. Economics is a neutral mathematical science, represented by the elegant and inarguable curvature of supply and demand.
2. Economics requires the efforts of esoteric mathematical minds to account for the conflict between scarce resources in a finite world and the infinite desires of a hedonistic human population.
3. Development means economic growth.
4. Economic growth always necessary and therefore always good.
5. The current economic system is the best we have ever had, and the inevitable inflation, unemployment, “business cycles”, homelessness, extraction, exploitation, war, etc., are unfortunate externalities to be taken up in other, less profitable disciplines.
6. The only economic options available include free-market, central command, or mixed. Mixed means compromise and therefore, humanity’s best effort to allow just enough personal freedom, and still protect us from our ourselves.
7. Empathy makes us over-emotional and poor decision makers.

With such a frame, just the study of economics can make students more selfish. Of course, as a teacher who opens the government textbook to find human nature described by Lord of the Flies, cyber-bully stories, and terrorist threats, I can easily take issue with further value statements that falsely claim to describe reality. What motivates me, however, is not that I am keenly aware of the perceptual bias of the textbook, though as an educator, this is precisely what we aim to expose as we teach critical thinking to students. Nor am I motivated because I oppose the political ideology of free-markets. I don’t.

What moves me to action is the perceivable emotional impact this negative narrative has on youth. Students are being taught that, as much as they feel good-hearted, and try hard to do the right thing, the very essence of their nature is at odds with the well-being of others, and their existence at odds with the survival of the planet.

Do you, dear reader, more often feel disillusionment with humanity? Do you suffer from the overwhelming weight of the world? Have you resigned yourself to finding solace in the struggle, in detachment, or in the afterlife? What difference would it make in your life, and for the world, if you saw the economic system as a design flaw and human nature as empathetic and highly adaptable? What difference would it make if economics class instead operated under assumptions of:

1. Economics as a design opportunity. (Not a neutral science container within which human behavior is studied.)
2. Anyone can participate, diversity optimizes intelligence, and everyone’s well-being is necessary.
3. “Development” reflects priorities, including the regeneration of living systems and dying languages.
4. The best possible outcome is by definition possible.
5. All pain points are valid and important opportunities to design improvements, and central to the purpose of economic study.
6. Innumerable economic ecosystems will enjoy diverse assets, values, and mediums of exchange are possible, preferable, and reflect resilience.
7. Empathy is our natural state of being and reflects self-interest and intelligence.

Pinker may be well-intentioned, but the impact of his message is an important reminder to me as an educator. When I teach, is it to impart information in order to paint a picture of reality as I see it? To what extent can my student’s and I simply agree that each of them has the right, not just to have their needs met, but to achieve their highest potential. Not only do they have a right, but it is in all of our best interest to support one another in this pursuit. Rather than being an endeavor of personal sacrifice to help others, it is one of self-interested and collective synergy. Peace is not for unicorns, and it is not even a laudable national endeavor. Peace is a practical, profitable, measurable indicator of a successful economic design in homeostasis. Peace is the goal, because peace profits.