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Jean Valjean, the hardened convict in "Les Miserables," has his life profoundly changed by the bishop telling the gendarmes that the silver cutlery Valjean had stolen was a gift, and then giving him two silver candlesticks that the convict had mistakenly left behind.
Things like this happen in real life. Last month my law school class heard the story of a recent graduate of Hennepin County's drug court. A hard-core addict and drug dealer, he had spent 15 years in prison and had pending felonies in multiple counties when he started in drug court. He recalled nothing positive in his entire life. But when he was told that the full drug court team was there to help him, he said that it "softened" him.
He went on to push through the program in only 18 months, without a single setback or sanction. He is now a good family man, an author, and a certified peer recovery counselor.
In my years in Hennepin County drug court and other therapeutic courts, I saw many lives changed by generosity. Generosity has power. In fact, it made civilization possible. Generosity is the tool we all have for counteracting the trends toward coarseness and narrow-mindedness that threaten to engulf us.
In my course on lawyers as peacemakers, we study the elements of human nature developed through natural selection that predispose people to cooperate and help each other. These include kin selection, group loyalty, and empathy. But most important for society is the reciprocity instinct, sometimes called reciprocal altruism.
Our genetic blueprint inclines us to respond in kind to good treatment as well as to bad treatment. We are the descendants of long lines of ancestors who prospered and reproduced because they cooperated with generous people while avoiding exploitation by retaliating against manipulators and free riders.