Moritz Nestor
In 2005, anthropologist Michael Tomasello and others reported the following developmental-psychological scenario in the journal “Developmental Science”: A twelve-month-old child is playing and observes an adult using a hole punch on some documents. The two are alone in a room. It has been agreed that no speaking will take place. At some point, the adult leaves the room. Soon, a second person enters, places the first person’s items on a shelf, and leaves again – also without speaking. When the first adult returns after a while with more documents and intends to punch holes in them as well, he cannot find his hole punch and searches for it using questioning gestures. The one-year-old child, who cannot yet speak, observes these questioning gestures, understands that the adult is looking for the hole punch, and points a finger at the object on the shelf. Once the adult is holding the hole punch, the child stops pointing. Without the use of spoken language, the one-year-old child understands the searching adult’s intention and the purpose of its own pointing gesture. It has grasped the adult’s intention through intuitive empathy, shared that intention with him, and pointed at the sought-after object until the adult’s goal was achieved.
What is happening here? By the end of its first year of life, the child is for the first time able to adopt a higher-level perspective in its thinking and feeling by mentally putting itself in another person’s shoes, understanding that person’s goals, motives, and need for help – and then helping. It recognises – without the use of spoken language – what the other person needs and wants, and it helps. It establishes a mental world between itself and the other person. It can imagine what the other person wants. By pointing to the object, the other person is seeking, it shares that person’s intention. Tomasello therefore calls this process “cultural intelligence” or “shared intentionality.” It is the ability “to pursue joint intentions and enter into commitments with others in cooperative endeavours. These joint intentions and commitments are shaped by joint attention and mutual knowledge and are based on cooperative motives to help others and share things with them.”
Peter Kropotkin was one of the first scientists to describe the great significance of mutual aid in the animal and human worlds as a decisive evolutionary factor: “Thus, in the practice of mutual aid – which we can trace back to the very beginnings of evolution – we find the positive and undoubted origin of our moral concepts; and we can assert that mutual aid, rather than mutual struggle, has played the principal role in human ethical progress. In its widespread practice – even in our own time – we see the best guarantee for an even more magnificent development of the human race.” (1902)
The form of mutual assistance that Tomasello calls “shared intentionality” occurs in nature only among humans – the creatures with the most highly developed social nature. And it is important to emphasise that it does not depend on spoken language. Children do not pick up this behaviour from adults, nor do they learn or acquire it in any other way. As Tomasello says, it “emerges quite naturally” – specifically, “from around their first birthday, when they begin to walk and talk.”
Tomasello suggests that the full significance of the emergence of shared intentionality can only be grasped when one considers that, under normal circumstances, all developing human children naturally exhibit this behaviour from the end of their first year of life – the point at which they begin to think and feel from a broader perspective. At the same time, the child also begins to acquire spoken language and learns to walk upright: thinking, speaking, and upright locomotion – that is, the species-specific posture, behaviour, and means of communication. In the 1940s, the anthropologist Adolf Portmann was the first to elucidate the immense importance of this new developmental phase at the end of the “extrauterine first year” in his book “Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen” (Biological fragments towards a theory of humanity.)
Let us therefore examine more closely what is taking place in the example of the one-year-old child cited above. Three significant things become apparent:
Equality: The one-year-old treats the other person as an equal – as someone of the same essential nature. From day one, the child strives to build relationships with people. By the age of one, it begins to understand the intentions of others. When a person does this, they feel neither superior nor inferior to the other, but rather on an equal footing. The one-year-old child establishes a relationship of equality: it interacts on a person-to-person basis. There is no hierarchy of superiority or inferiority between the child and the adult. It helps because it recognises what the other person lacks. It mentally puts itself in the other’s situation and grasps their intention – all without spoken language or logical, rational thought. It forms an emotional and mental connection with the adult and their intention. It does not help out of emotional dependency on the other person; initially, the other is a stranger. But as soon as it sees this stranger searching for something, the adult becomes more familiar to it as a human being – and it helps.
Freedom: The one-year-old child performs a free act – it is not determined. It acts spontaneously, of its own accord, because it has recognised another person’s need. It is neither forced, rewarded, nor enticed to do so; no reward was held out to it. It does not act as a cost-benefit maximiser. Its motive stems from within itself: “I recognise you as a human being and help you because helping people brings me joy.” It is not prompted or moved by external factors (extrinsically); it acts out of an inner emotional need (intrinsically). And most remarkably: one might assume that helping behavior would increase if the child were rewarded for it. Yet the interesting thing is that the child’s helping behaviour actually decreases when rewarded.
Brotherliness: The reason a child helps of its own accord is that it recognises the other person as a fellow human being who shares the same essential nature. It does all this willingly; it is a source of joy for the child.
“However, as children develop further, this relatively unreserved willingness to cooperate is altered by various influences.” Lying, for example – a refusal to cooperate – “only emerges some years later and presupposes prior trust and a willingness to cooperate. If people did not assume they could rely on the helpfulness of others, lying would not work at all.” (Tomasello, “Why we cooperate”, 2009)
Isn’t that remarkable? Liberty, equality, and fraternity exist at the very beginning of life as “emotional qualities” (Annemarie Buchholz-Kaiser) – as an innate, “open-to-the-world” disposition capable of being shaped through upbringing. Today, this is no longer merely an idea, an assumption, a philosophical conclusion, or a hypothesis; it is a scientifically proven anthropological fact of the “conditio humana”.
We therefore have every reason to rethink the momentous, erroneous assumptions our power-drunk, warlike culture holds regarding the nature of the child. As the findings elucidated by Tomasello demonstrate, the human child enters the world with a keen sense of mutual respect – respect for others and for themselves – long before they can stand upright or master spoken language. An innate, open-to-the-world disposition; a potential. This “conditio humana” makes it possible to live out human dignity in adulthood – that the potential may become reality!
For let us not delude ourselves: even the worst mass murderer, whose deeds deserve our utmost revulsion, was once a small child with the potential to become a fellow human being. What failed him was a culture consumed by a lust for power and greed – a culture that, through flawed principles of upbringing and role models, shaped him into someone living in total alienation from his true self.
The duty of safeguarding the fate of future generations has always been our collective responsibility, so that we may raise fellow human beings rather than monsters capable of genocide.
