Compassion practice, evolutionary advantage, and social resilience: the triad worth SEPR community’s attention

Abstract

Wei-Ning Xiang is a professor of geography and earth sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA; he is the founding editor in chief of SEPR. By now, the COVID-19 pandemic has been around for over 20 months. What has it shown to the world which we the socio-ecological practice research (SEPR) community should take notice of and, better yet, can dig into for insight? First, it is a recurring global common threat and super wicked problem. If the COVID-19 pandemic has ever shown anything about itself that is beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is that the pandemic has a dual identity inherited from the 1918 influenza pandemic, nicknamed “the mother of all pandemics” by American virologists David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger (Morens & Taubenberger 2018, p.1449). That is, it is a global common threat to which no human being on the earth is immune; and a super wicked problem to which a solution of any kind creates new and often worse problems.1 Exhibiting this infamous ancestral identity to its fullest extent, the COVID-19 pandemic has been doing exactly, if not more aggressively, what its ancestor did notoriously over a century ago. Since late 2019, it has dealt a punishing, devastating blow indiscriminately to human life in every corner of the world and triggered globally a tsunami of mutually exacerbating catastrophes. Once again, it has turned the global village upside down into a distrusting, fearful swamp where “a [public] health crisis became an economic crisis, a food crisis, a housing crisis, a political crisis. Everything collided with everything else.” (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2020, p.4).2 Second, suffering is a shared human experience; compassion practice promotes survival and well-being. If the COVID-19 pandemic has ever proven anything about us, Homo sapiens, which is also beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is the same dual reality our ancestors experienced during the 1918 pandemic. That is, in the presence of such vicious global common threat and super wicked problem, suffering is a shared human experience from which no one is exempt, and practicing compassion is both a moral behavior and an effective strategy for human survival and well-being. This time, like our ancestors in the 1918 pandemic, all of us are involuntarily on the virus’ blacklist, and to a varying extent, we are all victims of, inter alia, the related sickness, loss of loved ones, fear, loneliness, depression, economic hardships, domestic violence, deepened poverty, social unrest, and political turmoil. But at the same time, we are also witnesses and beneficiaries of numerous instances of compassion practice, in which people helped those, including total strangers, who were in danger or distress, even if doing so could incur a risk to their own lives and/or well-being.3 The compassionate acts people took, whether donating personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccines,4 volunteering at hospitals and nursing homes in the hardest-hit cities (e.g., Wuhan, China and New York City, the USA), or just observing social distancing and self-isolation rules, getting fully vaccinated, and wearing mask, helped save lives and assuage the suffering of others. Compassion practice has been borne out once more to be what British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) proposed 150 years ago—a moral behavior and an effective strategy for human survival and well-being that may confer an evolutionary advantage to communities and societies. In his 1871 book The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, “Darwin proposed that natural selection would favor the occurrence of compassion,” writes American psychologist Paul Ekman in a 2010 essay entitled Darwin's compassionate view of human nature (Ekman 2010, p.557). According to Paul Ekman, in the fourth chapter of this “greatest unread book, … Darwin explained the origin of what he called sympathy (which today would be termed empathy, altruism, or compassion—sic), describing how humans and other animals come to the aid of others in distress. … (H)e wrote that the highest moral achievement is concern for the welfare of all living beings, human and nonhuman.” (Ibid.) Darwin then proposed that in this capacity, compassion practice confers an evolutionary advantage to communities where compassion is widely practiced: In however complex a manner this feeling [of sympathy, or compassion—see Ekman’s note in the above quote] may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic [i.e., compassionate] members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring (Darwin 1871/2004, p.130; italics by the author of this essay). It is noteworthy that even though this facet of Darwin’s thinking about compassion practice and human evolution is unknown to many (Ekman 2010, p.557), some scholars have followed his line of reasoning inadvertently and proposed comparable ideas.5 The evolutionary advantage compassion practice confers to communities and societies is an essential part of their collective ability to effectively cope with the vicissitudes of the surrounding world. Throughout human history, it is this ability that has enabled many communities and societies to overcome extreme difficulties and survive unpredictable vicissitudes of nature and life. This ability is codified by contemporary scholars as social resilience, a nomenclature rooted in the 1973 seminal work of Canadian ecologist Crawford Holling (1930–2019) (Holling 1973).6 Compassion practice as such becomes a way to build social resilience through the evolutionary advantage it confers. At the risk of oversimplification, the nexus between compassion practice, evolutionary advantage, and social resilience can be expressed as follows: The greater the number of compassionate members in a community or society, the bigger the evolutionary advantage their compassion practice would confer, and the more resilient the community or society could become; and vice versa. In a recent essay with a provocative title Resilience: now more than ever, Swedish resilience scholar Carl Folke and coauthor colleagues advocate “nurturing resilience” as a strategy to seize the window of opportunity the COVID-19 pandemic provides for making major systemic transformational changes in the human society (Folke et al. 2021, pp.1175–1176). They write, Clearly, nurturing resilience is of great significance in such systemic transformational change towards sustainable futures and requires collective action on multiple fronts, action that is already being tested by increasing turbulence incurred by seemingly unrelated shocks (Ibid., p.1176; italics by the author of this essay). Compassion practice is certainly well-qualified as one such collective action. As articulated earlier in this essay, not only is it “already being tested by” the COVID-19 pandemic and continuously going strong, but it has also passed many tests of “turbulence” throughout human history, including the one over 100 years ago by “the mother of all pandemics.” For the SEPR community, there is a triad of social responsibilities coming along with the triad of compassion practice, evolutionary advantage, and social resilience. These are: practicing compassion in life and work to nurture social resilience in communities and societies; advocating the nexus between compassion practice, evolutionary advantage, and social resilience; and publicizing exemplary instances of compassion practice in the history of socio-ecological practice.7 Fulfilling this triad of responsibilities will enable the SEPR community to better serve the ultimate purpose of socio-ecological practice—“to bring about a secure, harmonious, and sustainable socio-ecological condition serving human beings’ need for survival, development, and flourishing.” (Xiang 2019a, p.7) The knowledge the community members generate while fulfilling one or any combination of the three responsibilities will contribute to the scholarship of ecopracticology—the study of socio-ecological practice. Therefore, both the process and outcome of this worthy endeavor should be archived and publicized through the community’s flagship journal Socio-Ecological Practice Research.8 As the editor, I pledge that they will, and hereby invite all members of the SEPR community to participate and contribute.