Bombs, Instincts and Morals: Why Heroes Risk It Allfor Strangers

Nature ought to have washed its hands of1) us by now, and if it hasnt yet, April 15s blasts in Boston should have persuaded it to. Its not just that were evil—though we are. We build bombs, we manufacture guns, we slaughter one another with an ugly lustiness that defies the powerful social impulses that are supposed to be coded into us.

The bigger problem for nature is that were also fools. If our genes have told us once, theyve told us a thousand times: stay out of harms way. When a madmans raging, when a bomb goes off, when a 110-story building is pancaking2) down and another one right next to it is about to do the same, run the hell away. Yes, yes, you hear a lot about fight or flight, but really, you want to live? Go for flight.

At the Boston Marathon on April 15 we saw it again. The bombs went off, the victims fell, the familiar footprint of flesh and blood and terror was stamped into the streets. And people did what they are hardwired3) to do, which is that they scattered—at first. And then an equally familiar gathering began. Police and servicemen swarmed the snow fences along the streets, pulling them down to allow medical personnel in. Doctors, paramedics4) and passersby knelt in the blood to administer aid to people they had never met before that moment and might never see after it. Perhaps there were more bombs that still could go off; perhaps the same madman who set off the first ones would show up with an assault weapon next. Never mind, the caregivers rushed in anyway.

There has always been this kind of opposing physics to good and evil. Evil begins from a point source—a cartridge5) of gunpowder, a nugget6) of uranium7), a knot of hate in a single dark mind—and then it blows outward. Good gathers from everywhere around the blast and then moves—foolishly, perilously, wonderfully—toward it.

“The police were trying to keep us back, but I told them I was a physician and they let me through,” Dr. Natalie Stevens, a participant in the race, told the New York Times. Stevens performed CPR8) on a woman whom she suspected was dead; she applied a tourniquet9) to the leg of a man who surely would have been had she not been here. And it would have made a lot more survival sense for her to have done nothing of the kind.

Ethicists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have tried for a long time to figure out why we do these things—why we put ourselves in mortal danger to save other people and, in so doing, defy our one great evolutionary imperative10), which is to stay alive ourselves. There are the reductionist11) explanations, of course. Its genetic mathematics, say the sociobiologists. Its not that youll help anyone at all, just the ones with whom you have some biological connection. Youre twice as likely to come to the aid of your parents, siblings and children, with whom you share 50% of your genes, than you are to help your grandparents, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, with whom you share 25%. You move on down this way in tidy arithmetical lockstep12) through your cousins and great half-aunts and great-great-great uncles, with their 12.5% and 6.25% and 3.13% relatedness and it all makes a perfect kind of crystalline13) sense, until you ask why then youd consider helping the bleeding stranger on the Boston streets, with whom you share no genes at all, and the sociobiologists start a lot of hand-waving about tribal relatedness and collective genetics and you pretty much stop listening.

Then there are the neurological explanations. Were sympathetic creatures, but not in the prettified way we usually use that word. Our brains are wired with mirror neurons14)—cells that make us mimic the behavior of the people around us, so that we laugh when they laugh and cry when they cry and yawn when they yawn. It feels like empathy, but its nothing of the kind. If you want to survive as a social creature, you have to behave like everyone else, and mirror neurons see to it that you do. Thats not empathy. Thats fitting in.

A similar mechanistic argument is made by scientists who scan the brain and actually see where goodness lives. Moral behavior is processed in the prefrontal15) cortex16) and the meso-limbic17) region. It follows a very mappable neuronal path that is no more complex than the one that allows you to throw a baseball or write your name, and thats no more lyrical either.

And yet, all these answers just smell wrong. You can deconstruct a painting by explaining the salts and sulfides18) and esters19) that make up its pigments; you can parse20) a symphony by measuring the frequency and wavelength of the final crashing chord, but youre missing the bigger picture.

Humans, instead, are guided by a sort of moral grammar—a primal ethical armature21) on which decency is built, just the way our language is built on syntax22) and tenses and conditional clauses. You know when a sentence is right and when it isnt even if you cant quite explain why, and you know the same thing about goodness too. Psychologist Michael Schulman of Columbia University likes to pose the thought experiment of the kindergarteners who are taught two rules: its not OK to eat in the classroom and its not OK to hit other children. Tell the kids that the teacher has lifted the no-eating rule and theyll happily eat. Tell them that the teacher has lifted the no-hitting rule and theyll uniformly balk23). “Theyll say, ‘Teacher shouldnt say that,” says Schulman. “That starts at a very young age.”

What starts young stays with us. Yes, were savage; yes, were brutal. It was a member of the home-team species, a homo sapiens24) like anyone else, who set the Boston bombs, and like it or not, that person is very close kin to you. But youre close kin to the first-responders too; youre close kin to the people who cried for the eight-year-old who died, not even knowing the childs gender or name, because an eight-year-old simply shouldnt die, and surely not the way this one did.

The very empathy that brings us to those tears need not be wasted on the person who committed the crime. Twelve years ago, when the rubble25) of the Sept. 11 attacks was still smoldering26), TIMEs Lance Morrow wrote, “Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical27) for decent company.” The same is true of the person or people responsible for the Boston slaughter.

But its equally true that the people who commit all of these crimes are, in many ways, the free radicals28) of our social organism—the atoms that go bouncing about, unbonded to anything, doing damage to whatever they touch. The bonds they lack are the ones the rest of us share—the ones that make us pull away the snow fences and kneel in the blood pools. “Morality,” says psychologist and ethicist Jonathan Haidt, “is a team sport.” Its far better to be part of that team than to be apart from it.

宇宙万物的主宰如今应该已不愿再管我们，如果还没有，那么4月15日的波士顿爆炸案应该足以说服它不再对人类抱有希望了。这不仅仅是因为人类邪恶——虽然人类的确邪恶。我们制造炸弹，生产枪支，相互屠杀，以丑陋的贪欲违抗本该像编码那样植入我们的强大的社会驱动。

但对万物的主宰来说，更大的问题是我们人类同时也是傻瓜。我们的基因曾上千遍地告诉我们：遇到灾祸躲着走。遇到疯子发狂，炸弹爆炸，一幢110层的高楼轰然倒塌，旁边另一幢也摇摇欲坠时，跑吧，拼命地跑。没错，没错，对于是留还是溜的问题，我们经常争论不休，但说到底，你想活命吗？溜之大吉吧。

在4月15日的波士顿马拉松比赛中，我们又看到了这一幕。炸弹爆炸了，受害者倒下了，街道上出现了熟悉的一幕——血肉横飞，恐惧蔓延。人们出于本能做了该做的事：四处逃散。但这是在一开始。接着，同样熟悉的另一幕出现了：人们开始聚集。警察和军人纷纷涌向街道上的防雪栅栏边，将栅栏拉倒，以方便医护人员进入。医生、护理人员和路人跪在血泊中，对那些他们此前从未见过、以后也可能永不再见的陌生人施以援手。也许还会有更多的炸弹爆炸，也许引爆这些炸弹的那个疯子还会持攻击性武器再次出现。但没关系，救援人员依旧纷纷涌入。

正义与邪恶对立的现象自古有之。邪恶往往发自一个点，如一筒弹药、一小块铀、一个阴暗心灵中埋藏的仇恨心结，然后向外爆发。正义则从爆炸点周围的四面八方聚集过来，然后像傻瓜一样不顾性命地冲向爆炸点，令人惊叹。

“警察试图将我们拦在外面，但我告诉他们我是医生，他们就让我进去了。”马拉松参赛者纳塔莉·史蒂文斯医生对《纽约时报》说。史蒂文斯为一位她怀疑已经死去的女性实施了心肺复苏急救，还给一个男人的腿部绑上了止血带——如果她不在场，这个男人肯定没命了。从活命的角度来看，她不这样做原本会更明智。

长期以来，伦理学家、人类学家和进化生物学家一直试图解释人们为什么要这样做，为什么我们会不顾生命危险去拯救他人，以此违抗进化论的一大法则——让自己活着。当然，还原主义者曾给出他们的解释。社会生物学家就指出，这是基因运算的结果。人们并不会帮助所有人，只会帮助那些和他们有基因关系的人。比如，你和父母、兄弟姐妹、子女拥有50%的相同基因，而和祖父母、孙子孙女、侄子侄女只有25%的相同基因，因此你救助前者的可能性比你救助后者的可能性要高出一倍。以此类推，依照这种有规律的运算法则可以算到你堂表兄妹、半姨奶姑奶、曾曾舅老爷身上——你与他们分别有12.5%、6.25%、3.13%的亲属关系。至此这种解释都看似无比清晰、完美，但你不禁要问，波士顿大街上那些流血的陌生人和你一点基因关系也没有，你又为什么会考虑帮助他们呢？社会生物学家们又开始手舞足蹈地大谈什么部落关系和集体遗传学，你基本已经听不下去了。

此外还有神经学上的解释。人类是有同情心的物种，但这里所说的同情心并没有我们通常所指的那种美化含义。我们的大脑中有一种叫镜像神经元的细胞，它使我们模仿周围人的举动。因此别人笑我们也笑，别人哭我们也哭，别人打哈欠我们也打哈欠。这听起来像移情现象，但绝不是那么回事。如果你想作为一个社会动物而生存下去，你的举止就必须像他人一样，而镜像神经元的作用就是确保你这样做。这不是移情，而是适应环境。

有些科学家提出了另一种类似的机械论调，他们通过扫描人类大脑，确实发现了“善”存在的位置。前额叶皮质和中脑边缘区域就是处理道德行为的部位。道德行为遵循一种完全可以用图表示的神经元路径，与那些可以使我们扔棒球或写出自己名字的路径一样，它并无什么复杂之处，也没有蕴藏什么丰富的感情。

然而，所有这些解释都让人感觉不对劲。你可以去解构一幅油画，说它的颜料中含有什么盐、什么酯或者什么硫化物；你也可以去解析一首交响乐，测量它末尾那震撼人心的和弦有怎样的频率和波长。但这样你就看不到更为宏观的图景了。

其实，人类是受某种道德规则支配的——那是一种原始的道德铠甲，是正派、得体的基础，正如我们的语言以句法、时态和条件从句为基础一样。你知道一个句子什么时候对，什么时候错，哪怕你无法给出明确的解释。对于什么是善你也有同样的感觉。哥伦比亚大学心理学家迈克尔·舒尔曼喜欢拿幼儿园儿童的一个思维实验来说明问题。幼儿园教给孩子们两条规则：不可以在教室里吃东西；不可以打其他孩子。如果告诉孩子们老师已经取消了不许吃东西的规定，那么他们就会很开心地吃东西。但如果告诉他们老师已经取消了不许打人的规定，他们却会一致表现出畏缩。“他们会说：‘老师不应该这样说，”舒尔曼说，“这种观念很小就有了。”

这种自小就有的观念会一直伴随我们。是的，我们很野蛮；是的，我们很残忍。那个引爆波士顿炸弹的家伙和其他人一样，都是那个以家庭为单位的物种的一员，是人类的一员。不管你喜不喜欢，那个人都和你十分相近。但和你相近的还有那些对爆炸案最早行动起来的人；和你相近的还有那些为那个死去的八岁孩童恸哭的人，他们甚至不知道孩子的性别和名字，他们哭只是因为一个八岁的孩子不应该死去，更不应该像这个孩子那样死去。

对他人苦难的感同身受使我们流下眼泪，但这样的泪水不需要浪费在罪犯身上。12年前，当9·11恐怖袭击的废墟依然余烬未熄时，《时代周刊》的兰斯·莫罗就曾经写道：“任何一个人，如果他不憎恨那些做出此事的人，或是为之喝彩，其心态之淡定都令有良知的人难以与之为伍。”这话同样适用于制造了波士顿杀戮事件的那个人，或者那些人。

但同时，从许多方面来说，那些犯下如此罪行的人是我们社会有机体中的自由基——那些游离不定的原子，不受任何约束，所到之处无不造成破坏。他们所缺乏的约束正是我们所共有的凝聚力——这种力量使我们将防雪栅栏推开，让我们跪在血泊中救助他人。“道德是一种团队运动。”心理学家、伦理学家乔纳森·海德特如是说。成为这个团队的一员要远远好过脱离这个团队。