Crawdads, Chimpanzees & the Evolution of Empathy
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- 10 min read
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, yoga therapist, and thanatologist guiding fellow mindful mortals at the threshold of life, death, devotion, and (r)evolution. His work blends neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration to invite braver ways of being human.
Does a fish see the water it swims in? Do stars grieve when they die? And does a crawdad know it is in a barrel? An elder friend from the American South once offered me a piece of Creole wisdom that has stayed with me, put enough crawdads in a barrel and, as each struggles to climb out, they bump, grab and pinch at one another. From above, it can look like sabotage. From inside, perhaps it simply feels like survival.
As I turn 58, I have been thinking about that barrel more than I would like to admit. At an age when I once imagined myself slowing down, I find myself hustling harder, writing books, making films, teaching, studying grief and psychedelic medicine, spending time observing our primate relatives, pitching projects, raising money and trying to become an elder worthy of the word. I am doing all of this while watching a world confronted by wars, political instability, extraordinary inequality and increasingly unsettling natural disasters. We are trying to conduct ordinary human lives while extraordinary events arrive continuously through the pixelated screens in our hands.
Perhaps this is why the crawdad barrel feels less like a quaint metaphor and more like a description of our predicament. Most of us are reaching for some combination of sustainability, healthcare, recognition, belonging, security, relevance and enough time to believe our lives mattered. Even people with considerable wealth or influence may be protecting something, status, access, reputation, family, attention, accumulated resources or simply their remaining emotional bandwidth.
I understand that intellectually. Emotionally, I have been having a harder time with it.
When the crickets get loud
Recently, I sat with a wealthy acquaintance who had the capacity to help a humanitarian project of mine in several ways. I had directly asked for financial support. When a donation eventually arrived, I was surprised by how small it was relative to what I understood this person could comfortably afford.
In another situation, I approached a well-connected individual who donates millions of dollars to hospitals. I wasn't asking for millions, or even a penny. I asked whether this person might help introduce my award-winning self-published death-education books to larger hospital systems where they already had relationships. These books are intended to help children and families develop language around mortality, grief and death, subjects every human family eventually encounters. I was even willing to donate free copies.
Nothing happened.
I have also approached two neighbors, one a journalist and another a newscaster, about the humanitarian work I have been doing, including a film-festival-recognized documentary titled primates, privilege and possibility. Months later, nothing meaningful has materialized there either.
Meanwhile, I have spent approximately $6,000 on professional public relations. Despite awards, books, films and years of work accompanying people through grief and mortality, I have yet to receive the newspaper or television call I imagined professional public relations might generate.
Crickets.
My first response is not particularly enlightened. I feel hurt. Sometimes angry. Occasionally incredulous. I think, you have money. You have access. You know people. I am not asking you to buy me a yacht. I am asking you to help something I believe could reduce suffering get farther into the world.
Then the trained therapist, composed teacher and aging silverback gorilla in me has to metabolize the story.
Why do I believe another person's wealth creates an obligation to fund what matters to me? Why should a journalist use professional capital on my behalf? Why should somebody else's philanthropic priorities suddenly reorganize around my books because I believe they are useful?
Nobody owes me a ladder. Yet stopping there feels intellectually dishonest, too.
Because there is another question beneath my disappointment that is much larger than me, "Why doesn't abundance reliably produce generosity? Why, as some people accumulate extraordinary financial and social capital, does access sometimes appear to become more guarded rather than more porous?"
That question seems especially urgent while so much of the world is struggling. It is hard to hear the chirp chirp of crickets over the roar of the horrific sounds of a mudslide on my Instagram feed.
Scarcity after scarcity
Maslow's hierarchy of needs offers one familiar way to understand why people with insufficient food, housing, healthcare, safety or belonging may have little energy available for somebody else's creative dream. That framework has helped me become less reactive when friends don't read the book, attend the screening, share the article or respond to another invitation.
Perhaps they care enormously and simply do not have the bandwidth.
But material abundance does not necessarily eliminate a scarcity mindset. Human beings can acquire enough money and still worry about losing money. We can acquire influence and become protective of influence. Our contacts become social capital. Our reputations become assets. Our attention becomes something other people compete to obtain.
The barrel gets nicer. The struggle to climb to the top endures.
This is where conversations about late-stage capitalism can become cliché or divisive, and I certainly don't want that. Wealthy people are not one species and everyone else another. Philanthropy funds extraordinary research, hospitals, arts organizations, environmental work and humanitarian projects. People are entitled to decide what they do with their resources, and journalists are entitled to determine what constitutes a story.
But systems do not reproduce themselves only through explicitly cruel people making explicitly cruel decisions. Hierarchies also reproduce themselves unwittingly through who gets introduced to whom, which email receives a response, whose manuscript reaches the right desk, who gets invited into a room and who remains outside waiting.
In short, a caste system does not usually come out of the closet and admit that is what it is. Sometimes it sounds like silence.
That is what concerns me about the crickets during our current Anthropocene.
What our ape cousins might recognize
My experiences observing great apes have made it impossible for me to view human hierarchy as something invented by capitalism. Chimpanzees form coalitions, compete for position, remember alliances and pay close attention to who has influence. They can intimidate and engage in violence. Anyone seeking a sentimental portrait of nature should probably spend more time studying nature.
A current example makes the lesson especially uncomfortable. At Ngogo in Uganda, a once-large chimpanzee community fractured as key social bonds weakened, leadership shifted and disease disrupted the group former companions increasingly became rivals. That sounds eerily familiar in an age of tightening tribes, gated networks and social distrust. Things are getting serious in every neck of the woods. This is something we can all ape-reciate.
On the flip side, chimpanzees also groom, reconcile, play and console. Their societies contain competition and affiliation simultaneously. Research on chimpanzee behavior has documented reconciliation following conflict and suggests that social comfort can reduce signs of distress. That is the part of our primate inheritance I am most interested in strengthening, not pretending hierarchy disappears, but remembering that repair, affiliation and care are ancient survival strategies too.
This complexity feels important because humans have inherited capacities for both hierarchy and repair. We did not become successful primates solely because one magnificent ancestor shoved everyone else out of the way and reached the ripest fig first. Survival also required attachment, cooperation, memory, caregiving and knowledge shared across generations.
Somebody watched the children while somebody else searched for food. Somebody remembered where water could be found. Somebody tended an injury. Somebody noticed when another member of the community disappeared. Somebody prepared the dead for burial, fire or whatever ritual helped the living carry on. Somebody sat beside the grieving.
Our evolutionary inheritance contains both the clawing crawdad and the consoling ape.
The question we can ponder together is not whether human beings are fundamentally selfish or compassionate. We have demonstrated an impressive capacity for both. The question is which capacities our environments encourage us to practice.
Grieving a world through a five-inch screen
Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow has become one of many guides I return to during these unsettling times because his work understands grief as larger than private bereavement. We grieve people, certainly, but also places, lost possibilities, unmet needs, damaged ecosystems and futures we once assumed would be available to us.
My own Subversive Acts of Humanity approaches this predicament from another direction. When the systems surrounding us feel impossibly inhumane or natural catastrophes outdo cinematic CGI effects, what everyday acts allow us to remain recognizably human?
I certainly do not imagine either book contains all the answers. They are two voices among many. We need scientists, Indigenous teachers, poets, activists, therapists, farmers, skeptical thinkers, children, elders and people whose experiences challenge our preferred explanations.
What concerns me is that we are increasingly attempting to metabolize collective grief individually.
We watch floods destroy communities and then answer an email. We see images of war before checking our bank balance. We read about another ecological loss and then an advertisement appears for something we apparently cannot live without. Five seconds later, a dog wearing sunglasses makes us laugh. I am grateful for the dog.
I am not here to yuck anybody's yum. Pleasure, silliness, art, sex, celebration, beautiful meals and ridiculous videos can all help make an unbearable world bearable. The problem is not that we seek relief. The problem is expecting an ancient primate nervous system to absorb planetary suffering without adequate communal structures for processing it.
Human emotions require energy. Grief requires energy. Fear requires energy. Decision-making requires energy. Empathy itself requires energy. Even maintaining hope asks something of us.
Perhaps some of the apparent indifference I encounter is not indifference at all. Perhaps everyone is exhausted.
But exhaustion combined with inequality creates a dangerous social equation, those with the least resources have less capacity to recover, while those with the most resources may increasingly insulate themselves from everyone else's instability.
That is when the barrel begins to grow darker and harder to climb.
The brain that dreads can also dream
This is where my speculative-fiction brain becomes useful.
Human beings possess an astonishing evolutionary capacity to suffer over futures that have not happened. We forecast, anticipate, rehearse and catastrophize. We can become physiologically distressed about next year's election, next month's rent, tomorrow's diagnosis or what somebody meant by a text sent three hours ago.
The sapien brain is indeed a miraculous and exhausting piece of evolutionary equipment.
Yet the same brain that manufactures dread can imagine possibilities that have never existed.
That is why I write speculative science fiction. I don't want to escape this world. I want to practice another one.
Speculative fiction does not merely predict the future. It gives evolution somewhere to practice. Before cultures change, human beings imagine arrangements that do not yet exist. Before inventions become objects, they exist as possibilities. Before movements challenge entrenched hierarchies, somebody has to entertain the dangerous proposition that the hierarchy is neither natural nor permanent.
In my own writing, I increasingly feel accompanied by ancestors and guides who modeled very different forms of courage. The dearly departed Dolly Parton and Jane Goodall now join voices such as Howard Thurman and Gandhi in reminding us that imagination, compassion, service and moral persistence are not soft responses to hard times. They each had a way of moving humanity forward. None offers us a complete map, but together they remind me that the future is often carried forward by people willing to imagine differently and live accordingly.
Dystopia shows us the cliff. Hope asks whether we can still turn the wheel. At 58, I have little interest in hope as frosting spread over suffering. I want hope with dirt beneath its fingernails, hope that attended the funeral, saw the floodwaters, received the rejection letter, asked for help and heard nothing back. Hope that can admit disappointment without allowing disappointment to harden into contempt.
That is a much more purposeful version of hope, and perhaps the kind our ancestors are still asking us to practice.
What kind of crawdad do I want to become?
My work as a death doula, recently featured in The New York Times, has taught me that death is unimpressed by our résumés. My work teaching naked yoga offers a strangely complementary lesson, remove the clothes, titles and social signals, and what remains is a vulnerable animal body, breathing, aging, wanting, hurting and eventually returning to the earth. Naked we are born. Naked we die. Why so many layers in between?
Those layers certainly matter. Wealth, race, class, gender, sexuality and social power profoundly affect how our bodies move through the world. But beneath them remains the mortal primate, dependent upon other beings at the beginning and usually again near the end.
So as I turn 58, perhaps my task is not to stop hustling but to evolve the hustle. Ambition without empathy becomes another form of colonizing, empathy without an outward expression is incomplete. I still want my books read, my films seen and meaningful projects funded. Mortality has not made me want less. It has made me more conscious of what I want to put into circulation while I am still here.
I have a pretty good sense of where I sit within the American caste system, the culture is generous enough to refresh my memory on a near-daily basis. Still, I have no interest in answering exclusion by becoming more exclusive, or scarcity by becoming stingier. I can keep asking for a little chimp change when the work needs support, but what I am really after is social change, the chance to contribute something useful, humane and disruptive enough to matter. If anything, the challenge is to resist being caged by the very hierarchy I criticize. I shall strive to remain an empathic commoner, keep reaching sideways and downward, and help bend the culture toward authentic care for as long as I am here. Till death do me part.
So, if I get the microphone, whom will I mention? If somebody opens a gate for me, whom will I bring through? If I eventually have more than enough, will I remember what it felt like to ask for help and hear crickets? A more relational measure of success may be not simply how high we climbed, but what moved through us because we were here, money, access, creativity, knowledge, introductions, attention and care. When I have something another person needs, I want to remember the barrel and reach back.
Consider this essay my birthday gift to the world. It is longer than some of my earlier articles, but apparently this aging primate had something he needed to say. I don't expect everyone to agree with it, share it, fund it or even finish it. I simply hope it reaches some of the hearts that still care and reminds them that caring is not weakness. It may be among our oldest survival technologies.
We arrived dependent upon one another, and most of us will leave that way too. Everything in between is our brief chance to decide what kind of primate we want to be.
Onward, inward, upward.
Read more from Kenneth J. Breniman
Kenneth J. Breniman, Grief Guide & Mindfully Mortal Therapist
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, certified yoga therapist, and thanatologist whose work lives at the intersection of mortality, meaning, and transformation. Drawing from neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration, he challenges the myth of human exceptionalism while honoring the precious role each of us plays in the ongoing evolution of our species. Ken is the author of a three-body solution and subversive acts of humanity, and the creator of the See-Soul children’s grief literacy series. Through writing, teaching, and ritual-informed practice, he guides mindful mortals toward deeper humility, resilience, and collective becoming.
