Excerpt from The Kindness of Strangers by Michael E. McCullough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I argue further that the kindness of strangers emerged over the past ten millennia through seven different confrontations with mass suffering, and the solutions that our social instincts and our active intellective powers commended as solutions to those confrontations. To be sure, those seven historical encounters with want and woe engaged our basic social instincts—we helped in search of return favors and in search of glory— but they also engaged our ability to figure out what is important to us and our ability to reason our way to plans for how to obtain what is important to us. In short, our ancestors' encounters with mass suffering created threats and opportunities to which they applied their powers of reasoning to figure out how best to respond. And those responses turned out to be compassionate ones.

Although our social instincts and our capacity for reason furnished us with the desire to care about strangers, I argue that it was progress in three human endeavors—technology, science, and trade—that furnished us with the ability to care. We have Carnegie Heroes, Holocaust Rescuers, and anonymous kidney donors; we devote effort and resources to looking after the poor in our own countries; and we reach across seas, across borders, and even across generations to ease strangers' burdens not only because we want to, but also because we can.

In the upcoming chapter, I begin to lay out this argument by introducing the psychological obstacles that prevent us from taking an intuitive interest in the welfare of strangers. Without conscious, deliberative effort, the research from social and cognitive psychology shows, the human mind is breathtakingly insensate to the welfare of strangers. If natural selection really did design our minds to motivate us to care about strangers, as the stranger-adaptationists assert, then it must have been some pretty shoddy design work.

In Chapters 3 through 6, I will introduce you to those "social instincts and sympathies" that Darwin surmised to be the raw materials out of which our compassion for the distant stranger was fashioned. In the modern language of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, these instincts and sympathies are the products of evolved cognitive systems— little computational devices that exist in our brains as networks of neurons and synapses—that natural selection fashioned in order to motivate us to care about our friends, our relatives, and our compatriots. I begin in Chapter 3 with a cook's tour of natural selection. In Chapters 4 through 6, I explore what those Darwinian social instincts and sympathies can offer to help us explain the kindness of strangers. As these chapters will show, and contrary to what Darwin seems to have surmised, it's only a subset of our "social instincts and sympathies" that actually makes a difference.

From Chapters 7 through 13, each chapter is devoted to one of the seven confrontations with mass suffering that compelled our ancestors to think about the needs of strangers and how they should respond to them. Through this ten-thousand-year history of human compassion, I will show you how our social instincts and sympathies, along with our capacity for reason, interacted to produce the innovations and institutions that we still turn to today.

In Chapter 14, the book's final chapter, I'll weave the natural history and the human history back together, describing the instincts, the reasons, and the progress in technology, science, and trade that have conspired over the past ten millennia to create humanity's compassion for humankind.

Excerpted from The Kindness of Strangers by Michael E McCullough. Copyright © 2020 by Michael E McCullough. Excerpted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.