The opening paragraph of the book reads: "When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Zero Degrees of Empathydoesn't pull his punches either. His family is Jewish his cousin is the no-holds-barred comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, who investigated contemporary anti-Semitism by posing as an anti-Semite himself in the 2006 mockumentary film I thought it was time to bring the two things together.”īaron-Cohen has another, more personal, reason for his desire to explore the mechanics of human cruelty. “There’s a huge amount of relevant work going on in the field of neuroscience, which has really accelerated over the past 10 years. So for me, it was a question of, how do these conditions relate to each other? Does low empathy always lead to cruelty? However, there are certain psychiatric conditions – psychopaths, for example – where low empathy does result in people hurting other people. In other words, they have a problem with empathy.īut isn’t it a long way from empathy to evil? “People with classic autism and Asperger’s have difficulties with empathy,” says Baron-Cohen, “but the majority of them don’t do things that are cruel or that involve hurting others. In his considerable experience – more than 20 years of clinical practice and research – people in this category are often very good at maths or other classification-type activities, but find it really hard to read facial expressions or to relate to other people’s emotions. He places people with classic autism and Asperger’s into the latter category. He claims that human brains are predominantly attuned either to empathising with others or to understanding how systems work. The director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, Baron-Cohen’s theory of the “extreme male brain” has been highly influential in current thinking on the nature of autism. Zero Degrees of Empathy, he suggests that it's high time we gave evil a makeover. But has the notion of evil passed its sell-by date? Simon Baron-Cohen thinks it has. In our sound-bite world, the word "evil" is applied to all kinds of human activity, from rape to suicide bombings. Whether we're pondering the dreadfulness of the latest murder to hit the headlines or scaring ourselves silly with horror movies, we seem to be fascinated by the idea that evil is a kind of abstract entity that descends from the sky, gets us in its malevolent grip, and forces us to behave badly. We describe all manner of wrongdoings as 'evil', but should we be focusing instead on our levels of empathy? Simon Baron-Cohen believes our ability to empathise with others is key to unlockingĮVIL IS a topic of perennial interest to us humans.
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