The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Carol Dweck is an American psychologist and Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She is best known for research on mindsets and has found that people fall into two categories: The first is “everyday fixists” who believe that human nature (including intelligence and personality) is fixed, and the second is “everyday mobilists” who believe aspects of human nature are more akin to skills (28).

Zaki describes Dweck as one of his “intellectual heroes” (27). She was the first person to encourage Zaki to talk to non-scientists about how they viewed empathy. Together, Zaki and Dweck have conducted numerous experiments to illustrate empathy is a skill, one that people can intentionally choose to grow or weaken.

Tony McAleer spent 15 years in various white supremacy and neo-Nazi organizations. His father was a doctor from Liverpool, England who immigrated to Canada. Tony’s father was rarely around the family home; when he was, he would often be drinking. After witnessing his father cheat on his mother, Tony began to feel “angry, confused, and displaced” (53). He started listening to racist punk music and his grades dropped. He faced corporeal punishment in school when he received bad grades, which caused him to further rebel. Tony’s first introduction to hate groups was when he attended boarding school in England. After moving back to Canada, he became even more involved in these hate groups. For example, he founded the first white-power record label in Canada and the US. Tony wanted a white Canada, and while he did not want other minority groups in the country, “he didn’t necessarily want outsiders to suffer. He just didn’t care whether they did or not” (55).

However, three people changed Tony’s racist worldview: his two children and Dov Baron. Fatherhood enabled Tony “to see himself differently” (59), while Dov Baron, a Jewish man and one of his teachers, accepted him despite his past and present actions. Tony’s renouncement of hate groups and their ideology shows how empathy can be rebuilt even when buried by hatred. Through his nonprofit organization, Life After Hate, and other endeavors, he now works to help people leave hate groups.

Zaki describes German climatologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) as “that not-so classic combination of adventurer and meteorologist” (17). Wegener was the first climatologist to use weather-tracking balloons. He even broke the world record with the longest balloon flight of nearly 53 hours. He also served as the lead meteorologist on expeditions to Greenland, “denoting bombs in the tundra to gauge how deep the ice caps were” (17). Zaki credits Wegener with being the first scientist to reject the fixism of Earth’s continents. Wegener proposed that the continents had once been stuck together (an idea known as Pangea) and have slowly drifted apart (the theory of continental drift) in his book The Origins of Continents and Oceans (1915). At the time, geologists rejected Wegener’s theory of continental drift. However, the discovery of tectonic plates eventually demonstrated the accuracy of continental drift. Zaki notes that “geology was rewritten to acknowledge that even things that appear still can move” (18).