Don’t let anyone tell you that time spent watching animal videos on YouTube (“critters,” as an ex-girlfriend of mine dismissively called them) is wasted. If you’re sufficiently empathic yourself, you can learn a great deal from the intuitions stirred by watching not just human-animal interactions, or the interactions of animals with other members of their own species, but in particular by watching the unlikely interactions between animals from different species.
While humans talk as if tribal warfare and insularity are inevitable even within the ranks of the planet’s most intelligent species, us, online you can plainly see cats making friends with crows, elephants being pals with dogs, geese seeking human aid for trapped goslings, and even rare outlier complications such as a shark trying to lead humans to assist an injured whale. You can refuse to see the signs of happiness, unhappiness, comradeship, or intentionality in their various behaviors—the way a stubborn frat guy or deluded grandmother might insist that the family cat really loves wearing his party hat despite all the hissing—but there’s a whole world of empathy and communication there into which we could tap if people really tried.
The animals may have what would seem primitive motives to us—food, misplaced maternal impulses, mere physical play—but those are better motives than some that move humans. If a cat visits his dog buddy’s house at the same time each day and they go for a self-directed walk around the neighborhood together, that’s a nicer routine than some humans have. And maybe niceness is the important thing, though you wouldn’t know it from how dark and aggressive everything from our politics to our aesthetics has gotten lately.
A movie out now, Good Boy, provides one potential bridge from the dark back to empathy. It’s a great horror movie told almost entirely from the perspective of a dog, with little human dialogue. In much the way that many smart, quiet horror movies of the past decade or two create unease by making us uncertain whether the protagonist faces madness or a genuine haunting, Good Boy plays with the pitiable and spooky but endearing fact that sometimes your dog is staring at a threat but sometimes is almost certainly staring at… nothing.
He might also be smelling things more than he’s seeing things, a powerful plot thread here since the dog, Indy, has an ailing owner. Indy’s nose may sense the real dangers in the old house better than the humans do.
A behind-the-scenes segment during the end credits confirms the viewer’s suspicions that the dog star belongs to the director, that the crew was intimate and small to avoid the usual stunt-performance pressure put on animals in movies, and that the film was made in a low-key, gradual way over the course of more than a year to coax out the most emotive and sincere-seeming movements and facial expressions from its star.
As the director says twice in the behind-the-scenes segment, Indy has no idea that he’s in a movie. What looks like a terrifying moment in the finished film, full of shadows or set in a scary, unwelcoming part of the house, might have been created just by calling the dog’s name or placing snacks off-camera. Nonetheless, the result is a dramatic, slow-burn testament to the fact that in certain harrowing situations, dogs intuit the important things, even if they don’t understand everything. Think of this film as a dark but ultimately heartfelt complement to any Blessing of the Animals church festivities in which you may have participated this past weekend, like the long line of people and pets at the church across the street from my apartment here in Manhattan.
In the end, science may affirm the view—intuitive to most of us but frowned on by science-admiring sophisticates for the past few decades—that what makes animals mentally resemble us is their capacity for empathy more than their genetic similarity per se. That’s one encouraging lesson to be found in Jonathan Leaf’s new book The Primate Myth. It’s a lesson that may even give us reason one day to hope we can communicate not just with other species on this world but with creatures from distant planets. The difference between, on one hand, those beings who want to mimic and play and help each other out and, on the other, the brutes who’d just as soon bounce a rock off your head, is real and important.
Released, as it happens, the same month in which the famed primatologist Jane Goodall passed away, Leaf’s book is in part a retort to the thinking of the discipline called evolutionary psychology, valuable though that field can be (there’s no denying we evolved to possess certain skills suited for navigating our physical and social environment, after all). The book is just counterintuitive enough—arguing that in several important senses we aren’t primates after all—that at first I was afraid that either I didn’t understand where it was headed or that it might be headed in some mystical, anti-scientific direction such as the insistence that chimps and humans didn’t evolve from a common ancestor but were instead distinct, magical creations of God. Its point is more nuanced and important than that and yet, I flatter myself, resembles my dopey, gut-level reactions to those animal YouTube videos and the movie Good Boy.
Yes, Leaf argues, we’re genetically similar to chimps, but if it’s behavior and even psychology you want to examine, it may for many purposes matter less who your relatives are than how you’re accustomed to interacting with your neighbors—just as, in the purely-human realm, someone’s neighborly behavior may be better correlated to whether he grew up in a war zone than to his skin color. Humans are more collaborative and cooperative, in ways both good and bad, than loner, impulsively violent chimps are.
There’s “chimpanzee politics,” as the primatologists and evolutionary psychologists have encouraged us to notice over the past several decades, but not only is it far less sophisticated than human social organization, it’s arguably far less sophisticated than dolphin social organization, dog socialization, or in some respects even ant collaboration. It would be speciesist of us to claim, like witnesses in a latter-day Scopes trial, that we have nothing to learn from chimps and no similarity to them, but we shouldn’t exaggerate the degree to which genetics is destiny.
(As the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter argues, if a mind is a pattern, it may not even matter as much as we think it does whether it exists in a substrate of meat or of wires and metal. You might even want to call that pattern, which is not strictly speaking a physical thing, an immaterial “soul.”)
When chimps are young and relatively docile, it’s easy for humans to sympathize with them and contemplate putting them in films or teaching them, as Seinfeld once put it, to roller-skate and smoke cigars. But as chimps enter adulthood, they become too dangerous and unpredictable to use as cuddly movie costars (a point underscored in shocking fashion in the opening sequence of Jordan Peele’s Nope, a film which, taking all its multiple subplots into account, seemed to be making the dangerously un-p.c. point, surprising from a liberal black director married to a white woman, that you may be playing with fire if you take in potentially angry beings from another environment, be it chimp, horse, space alien, or pioneering black filmmaking/horse-training family).
That’s not to say I begrudge late-20th-century chimpanzee frequent TV guest star J. Fred Muggs his likely-mellow retirement, and political reporter Jesse Walker recently mentioned that Muggs, incredibly, is still alive. May he enjoy his twilight years.
Generally, though, adult chimps are, by human standards, brutal sociopaths, and as Leaf notes—affirming something I learned from an evolutionary psychology professor I knew with some low-empathy tendencies of her own—many primatologists lack a finger or two due to unexpected biting by chimps. Lest Leaf sound like he’s verging on happy-hippie territory by saying we’re more like communicative dolphins than like sporadically violent chimps, though, he explains an even more counterintuitive but important facet of our evolution, which is the degree to which animals such as us who make good collaborators developed these skills in large part to form more efficient, coordinated hunting parties.
We can all unite, but often, sad to say, we really did develop that skill for solidarity by uniting against a common enemy, and not necessarily an evil marauder—often, just a designated victim, since we were hungry. That dark side of unity, like the tendency of our passivity and civility to make us ripe recruits for armies or totalitarian political programs, is the sort of thing you won’t usually hear brought up by religious congregations even as they sing of common sacrifice, nor by socialists who want us to vote for the likes of Zohran Mamdani (like half the room in the Young Voices debate I attended last month about that mayoral candidate’s radicalism). There may be as much to learn from the ways we deviate from chimps as from our commonalities, but there will still be a mixture of reassuring and frightening psychological elements.
Taking psychology seriously, whether for political or business purposes, often entails having to make embarrassing, awkward distinctions. Wokeness may be on the ropes lately, but there’s still such a strong presumption in favor of our common humanity (as there should be) that it remains taboo in some quarters to say that some people are better suited for certain jobs or work environments than others—not just in the academy or some model utopian community but even in the typical workplace.
Rozaliya Ripa’s book Strategic Alchemy: Transforming Corporate Dynamics is a bold effort to alert the individual strategist within an organization, such as a large modern company, to the fact that you can’t get the best results merely by matching individuals to their positions but must consider the likelihood that certain personality types will be better suited to certain arms of the organization, and that the varied psyches in the company should complement each other. We can’t pretend all the members of an organization are psychologically and emotionally interchangeable, even if human resources rules in recent decades warn that we may be punished for noticing the differences.
Think of Ripa’s rational analysis of sometimes-crazy colleagues as something like the missing step between the individualistic way we tend to think about “careers” and the whole-company-at-once way we tend to think about “corporate culture.” We may need her level of analysis to understand corporate efficiency as badly as we need an appreciation for communities to understand current political crises.
If people take Ripa to heart, maybe it will lead centuries hence to something like the central role of “ship’s counselors” such as the character Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation, that is, someone whose role is stepping back to look at the dynamics of the organization as a whole, in the same way a really good engineer considers the whole vessel rather than just the broken piece at which he’s currently looking.
Oddly enough, the husband of that evolutionary psychologist acquaintance of mine once expressed on X the view that the most unrealistic thing about sci-fi is its assumption that humans will still have emotional and interpersonal conflicts centuries from now of the sort that could benefit from someone like Troi intervening. I would think studying millennia of chimp conflict and human conflict would leave one convinced that we’ll still need Troi and/or Ripa centuries from now, unless the human brain is transformed completely beyond recognition, possibly into something mechanical.
The mechanical mind could turn out to look a little like Jared Leto on a neon motorcycle if you take the third Tron film seriously. In Tron: Ares, out this week after a gap of only 15 years since the second Tron movie (the original having been another 28 years prior to that, so times are speeding up), the company Encom skirts the whole problem of how to motivate employees or soldiers by just 3D-printing them.
Just a few years ago, I probably would’ve been too distracted by practical questions about how much energy the 3D printing requires and what substance the flesh and tank treads and missiles are all being made out of to fully enjoy the movie, but we all know the real problem to be solved in movies like this, eventually, is how to get the characters to move back and forth from our world to the world of the Grid (or the Matrix, or the World on a Wire simulation, or what have you). Intuitively, 3D printing feels like as good an excuse as any, and the payoff for suspending your residual disbelief is that you get to watch perhaps the coolest-looking Tron vehicles in any of the three films. That’s something, anyway.
In Tron: Ares as in the musings above, the real question becomes whether the digitally-conjured Jared Leto can learn something like empathy. An early hint he might is his awe at sights such as rain and fireflies. That hit close to home for me, rote though it may sound from a scriptwriting perspective, since I recently swatted a firefly that was buzzing inconveniently between the outer and inner doors of my apartment building, resisting easy ejection, and what really made me feel remorse and regret that I hadn’t worked longer to figure out how to get the thing back outside was the fact that a squished firefly, it turns out, leaks a lovely puddle of glowing firefly-fluid looking for all the world like neon blood or glo-stick contents. We shouldn’t value lives more because they’re pretty, but it inclined me to be more patient with future fireflies.
Concerned for her own progeny and the threat of future combat against robots, a history professor I know, Christine Caldwell Ames, cohost of the fine history-and-pop-culture podcast History Harpies, says she’s tempted to send one or more of her teenage sons to a special camp for training in anti-robot combat and survival. I hope the kids will never need those skills, but maybe the next great leap in human evolution will divide those who took such threats seriously from those who thought it just sounded like something from that 2025 Jared Leto movie. We’ll have to work together, reading each other’s moods and facial expressions, if one day it comes down to Leto or us.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey