Monkeysphere and the Limits of Caring
I have been giving quite a bit of thought to the concept of the monkeysphere. If you haven’t heard of that term, let me explain it briefly. It was coined by David Wong to conceptualize the idea that research shows there is a predicable limit to the size of the social group formed by any animal:
They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.
Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.
That brain, of course, was human.
What this means is that biologically it is difficult for any of us to consider people outside our immediate social group of approximately 150 individuals as actual people. They become abstracts, people in concept only. You doubt me? Thousands upon thousands of individual human beings died horribly in Haiti not long ago. How many of us broke down in grief when we heard the news?
The idealist in me is greatly troubled by this concept. Is there any hope we can ever care about the other in a meaningful way? The other being a person living in say Iran or Afghanistan or an inner city slum. The research underlying the monkeysphere concept says that jingoism, ethnocentrism, and isolationism are biologically hard-wired in us, and that the pursuit of social justice as a concept that extends beyond the people we individually know is pretty much doomed as an attainable goal.
Into this depressing train of thought stepped a recent blog post by my friend Danielle. In is she writes:
…mirror neurons, which apparently are highly adaptable cells that allow your brain to actually imitate the actions of what you see. For example, when you watch football on television, if you had wires connected to your brain, it would scan as if you are playing football.
Is it possible that our ability to tell each other narratives is a way we can transcend our biologically determined monkeysphere? In this idea I see the potential power of story-telling, in all it’s mediums, as a way of a person sharing his or her personal monkeysphere with us, and through the action of these mirror neutrons, being able to share in a real way the feelings of concern and compassion for the people in the other’s monkeysphere.
This is one of the reasons I keep writing.
Your thoughts?
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