Over the last three decades, the ever-growing interest in brain science has intersected with a similar growing interest in the motivations that allow a species to survive.  What has become evident, and what Kant, Darwin, and Kropotin allude to, is that compassion, characterized by nurturing and caring behavior, is critical to the long-term survival of many species, and most importantly perhaps, to the human species.  James R. Doty. In his preface to The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (2019).

The last part of that quote really stood out for me: “…nurturing and caring behavior is critical to the long term survival… [of] the human species.”  Such behavior has typically been ascribed to female people.  They do the majority of nurturing and care-giving so that future generations will survive and thrive, and yet they receive very little or no pay for this essential work.

In most cultures, the assumption is that female people naturally feel high levels of altruism towards members of their community and therefore need very little or no extrinsic motivation (money) to help.  This is seen as especially true with regard to members of the woman’s own family.  Imagine what modern capitalistic societies would look like if this were not true. How many husbands would be thousands of dollars in debt if their wives demanded a fee for agreeing to impregnation, a fixed payment for 9 months of carrying the child, and an hourly payment for time spent doing the extraordinarily hard work of labor and delivery?  How many children would be tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by the age of 18 if their mothers demanded payment for all the hours spent feeding, bathing, tutoring, transporting, counseling, washing and cooking for them? How many governments would be trillions of dollars in debt if their female citizens demanded substantial payment for providing the country with a workforce?  What would today’s societies look like if marrying and mothering were primarily based on monetary transactions rather than acts done out of love, kindness, compassion and generosity?

For the most part, women do not make such demands.  They do all of this work for free because strong intrinsic emotional forces as well as deeply ingrained cultural expectations compel most female people to work for their spouses and offspring in the absence of pay. 

But what about the male people?  How would modern societies look if men also felt high levels of altruism and protectiveness towards members of their community and therefore needed very little or no extrinsic motivation (money) to help?  Imagine if strong intrinsic emotional forces as well as deeply ingrained cultural expectations compelled most men to do the critical work of building roads, bridges, and houses, growing food, transporting people and products, repairing cars, and defending their communities from harm without monetary payment.

While gender roles and cultural expectations are learned, altruism and cooperation are hard-wired into both the male and female brain. Just because societies have often suppressed the male person’s tendencies towards kindness, caring and nurturing behaviors, this does not mean such natural behaviors can’t be re-introduced, developed and fostered. Just as women have now learned to do many of the same jobs as men, men can also learn to be as caring and nurturing as women.

In a society where all people, no matter what their gender, have learned to be motivated by altruism rather than monetary exchange, everyone thrives.  In a global interdependent network of people who ask “what’s in it for us” instead of “what’s in it for me,” it becomes eminently possible to find lasting and practical solutions to existential problems such as climate change, the pandemic, poverty, violence, and any other problem that currently plagues our world.  We must all learn to develop, foster and grow our innate tendencies to be nurturing, caring, kind and altruistic. As a species our existence depends on it.