The Empathy Gap: What Ancient Ports Can Teach Us About Understanding Across Difference
- Louise Sommer
- Sep 21
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 15
The Port City of Empathy
This blog continues the journey from my previous piece, The Reward Trap: How Ancient Malta Engineered the Mind for Connection, where I explored a power shift from collaborative cultural networks to centralised states and empires and how, those changes shaped both human behaviour and specific areas of the brain.
This time, we go back two thousand years, to when the Mediterranean was a living map of trade winds, shifting sails, and the sound of many languages.
Picture Alexandria in its golden age; a bustling port city where ships from Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and the Levant docked daily. The harbour was a mosaic of cultures: Phoenician traders unloading amphorae of wine, Egyptian farmers selling grain by the sack, Greek philosophers deep in debate under the colonnades, and Jewish scholars bringing rare manuscripts to the library.
In this world, difference was not an obstacle to overcome. It was the very lifeblood of the city! Without cooperation across cultural lines, goods didn’t move, alliances broke, and the port’s prosperity faltered. The most valued skill here wasn’t brute strength or political manipulation. It was the ability to read another person, to listen, to bridge worlds with words and gestures.
In a place like Alexandria, empathy was profitable. Traders who could anticipate the needs, customs, and sensitivities of foreign merchants thrived. Misreading a gesture or ignoring a cultural norm could cost a deal, and a reputation. This created a reward system that reinforced not just commercial skill, but social intelligence.
Those who navigated diversity with respect and insight earned trust as trust was the most valuable currency of all. Therefore we should ask: What did this kind of social reward system do our brain?
The Brain’s Pathways to Understanding
Modern neuroscience tells us that empathy, the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another, is not a vague moral quality. It is a measurable, trainable function of the brain.
Mirror neurons fire when we observe another person’s actions or emotions, allowing us to “simulate” their experience internally.
Oxytocin, sometimes called the “bonding hormone,” increases trust and generosity when released during positive social interactions.
The medial prefrontal cortex is activated when we think about other people’s perspectives, particularly those outside our immediate group.
The challenge is that human brains evolved with an in-group bias. We are wired to feel instinctive empathy for those who look, speak, and act like us, and to approach “the other” with caution. In stable, homogeneous environments, this can foster social cohesion. But in diverse societies, it risks creating deep divides.
Ancient port cities like Alexandria and Carthage unknowingly hacked this bias. By creating frequent, repeated, and mutually rewarding contact between groups, they retrained the brain’s reward systems. Over time, difference became normal, and cooperation across cultures became not only possible but expected. Empathy was not a rare, saintly quality. It was in fact, a skill reinforced by daily life.
Empathy in Historical Practice
Alexandria was not alone in cultivating this culture of practical empathy. Carthage, the great Phoenician trading city, built its influence not through conquest alone, but through alliances and negotiated relationships across the Mediterranean. Its merchants were polyglots and cultural chameleons, able to adapt their mannerisms and business practices to the expectations of each port they entered.
Even the Library of Alexandria itself was a monument to empathy at scale. Not sentimental empathy, but intellectual openness. It sought to collect texts from every culture it could reach, valuing not just the preservation of one’s own knowledge, but the integration of others’ wisdom into the whole.
These societies understood something we are only now beginning to prove in labs: empathy grows in the soil of shared purpose. When your survival, prosperity, and reputation depend on maintaining trust with people different from yourself, your brain learns to map the perspectives of others quickly and accurately.
The “other” becomes familiar. The "other", becomes something enriching, possibly even rewarding.
The Great Erosion of Empathy
As I mentioned in my previous blog, The Reward Trap: How Ancient Malta Engineered the Mind for Connection, a power shift from collaborative networks to centralised states and empires transformed the very systems that shaped human behaviour. Where port cities rewarded cooperation across difference, imperial systems often rewarded loyalty to the centre, suspicion of outsiders, and rigid conformity.
The ability to navigate cultural nuance (once an essential skill for survival and prosperity) became less valued than the ability to enforce uniformity. Colonisation deepened this fracture. Entire cultures were redefined as “lesser” to justify domination. Storytelling, once a bridge between peoples, became a tool for propaganda, reinforcing in-group superiority and out-group inferiority.
The brain adapted to these new reward systems, strengthening neural pathways for division and weakening those for empathy. The result was a narrowing of who counted as “us.” Separation and division was born.
The Modern Empathy Gap
Today, we live in the most interconnected era in human history, yet our empathy systems often seem underdeveloped compared to those of ancient ports.
Modern reward structures can actively undermine empathy:
Speed over depth
The pace of communication rewards quick reactions, not thoughtful engagement.
Visibility over listening
Social media rewards broadcasting opinions, not understanding perspectives.
Competition over collaboration
Many workplaces value individual achievement metrics over team success.
Siloed interactions
Algorithms feed us more of what we already agree with, reducing exposure to diverse views.
From a neuroscience perspective, these patterns strengthen pathways for reactivity and self-focus rather than for curiosity and mutual understanding. In evolutionary terms, our brains are learning to treat “difference” as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst.
The irony is that in a hyper-connected world, our survival (ecological, political, and economic) may now depend on empathy more than ever. Global challenges like climate change, migration, and technological governance cannot be solved without cooperation across cultures, disciplines, and ideologies.
Rebuilding Empathy Systems
The lesson from Alexandria and Carthage is clear: empathy thrives when systems make it useful, rewarding, and necessary. Let's break this down into four groups:
Create Shared Goals Across Difference
Ancient ports were united by trade, but our modern equivalents could be climate action, scientific research, or public health. The key is to make cooperation across boundaries not optional, but integral to success.
Increase Repeated, Positive Contact
Neuroscience shows that empathy increases with familiarity. Deliberately designing interactions - in schools, workplaces, and public life - where people collaborate across cultures and perspectives is essential.
Value Cultural Literacy
Reward not just technical skill but the ability to navigate cultural nuance, adapt communication styles, and read unspoken social cues.
Slow Down the Exchange
Ports were busy, but trade required conversation, negotiation, and relationship-building. Our modern “ports” such as digital platforms, conferences, and policy forums, need to allow space for the human pace of trust.
The Infrastructure of Empathy
Empathy is often treated as a private virtue, something that lives inside individuals. But history and neuroscience suggest it is better understood as infrastructure. A network of practices, spaces, and shared purposes that make understanding across difference the default.
Alexandria’s harbour, Carthage’s trade networks, and the multicultural marketplaces of the Mediterranean were physical and social structures that made empathy not just possible, but profitable. They built the brain habits of perspective-taking into the fabric of daily life.
If we want to close the empathy gap today, we must build modern equivalents. That means designing systems in education, governance, business, and technology, that reward listening as much as speaking, collaboration as much as competition, and understanding as much as achievement.
The Port We Could Build
Today, our classrooms, universities, and workplaces are just as diverse as Alexandria’s harbour once was. The real question is: do we reward disconnection, or the empathy, that makes collaboration possible?
For higher education and leadership, this means placing empathy at the centre of teaching, mentoring, and decision-making. Just as ancient traders thrived by listening across cultures, our scholars and students thrive when empathy is cultivated, modelled, and rewarded.
The ancient ports of the Mediterranean whisper the same message the Hypogeum did: Build for the mind you want to have, and the society will follow.
I’d love to hear your reflections: How can we build modern “ports of empathy” in education, leadership, and culture today?
I would love to hear your reflections on this topic. Join the conversation on LinkedIn, where I share more insights and invite dialogue with educators, creatives, and leaders worldwide. Connect to LinkedIn here.
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Louise Sommer (MA, Educational Psychology) is the founder of Louise Sommer Studio. She specialises in creative intelligence, learning design, and leadership communication across cultures. Through her writing, consulting, and workshops, Louise helps educators and leaders build learning cultures that think, feel, and grow.
Louise Sommer Studio Blog is a free space for learning created for educators, leaders, and creatives exploring the intersection of psychology, culture, and creative intelligence.
Louise Sommer (cand.pæd.psyk.) er grundlægger af Louise Sommer Studio. Hun er specialiseret i kreativ intelligens, læringsdesign og ledelseskommunikation på tværs af kulturer. Gennem sit arbejde med undervisning, rådgivning og workshops hjælper Louise undervisere og ledere med at udvikle læringskulturer, der tænker, føler og vokser.
Louise Sommer Studio Blog er et frit rum for læring, skabt for undervisere, ledere og kreative, der udforsker samspillet mellem psykologi, kultur og kreativ intelligens.
