Yet the instinct to touch is too wired into us to remove from our daily affairs. The ancient, evolved tendency to touch has obvious cultural translations—massages. The instinct to touch is evident in quirkier cultural forms—the hundreds of cuddle clubs that have sprung up across the country, where people lie around in euphoric, sleepy-eyed piles, cuddling nonsexually (so they claim). The need to touch is hidden in various cultural forms: manicures, pedicures, haircuts, and, I would wager, a rate of visits to medical doctors that would startle insurance companies. This instinct for touch is the source of economic innovation, like the soft carriers that allow parents to carry children where they want to be—close to the front of the body. Compared to infants carried in harder infant seats, infants who were carried in soft infant carriers that put them in close physical contact with their parents are more securely attached to their parents and more willing to explore novel environments. Thanks to Tiffany Field, touch has been integrated into medical treatment. There have now been over ninety scientific studies of touch therapy, and these studies have found that regular touch helps premature infants (who used to be deprived of physical contact), depressed teenage mothers, the elderly in nursing homes, children with autism, ADHD boys, children suffering from asthma and diabetes, and people suffering from disease.
The ancient language of touch is a backbone of cooperation; it is a source of high jen ratios. For the past twenty-five years I have played pickup basketball twice a week, participating in the most democratic institution in the United States. I have played with people from all walks of life—Andover grads, kids from the projects in Brockton, Massachusetts, novelists, medical doctors, seventy-year-olds, lapsed drug dealers, lipstick lesbians, yoga instructors, music producers, chefs, psychotherapists, tattooed firemen, cops, performance artists, and drifters off the street playing in paper-thin shoes. Points are scored. Winners win and keep the court. Losers lose and line up for the next game. Calls are made and contested, especially when the game is on the line. Ten bodies, each weighing on average 200 pounds, crash into each other for hours at a time, with a force that sprains ankles, breaks noses, blackens eyes, and wears down the knee cartilage until it’s bone on bone in the middle of life.
I estimate that I’ve played approximately 4,500 games, from Brockton to Pau, France to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Those games have involved my oldest friends and people I’ll never see again. And in those 4,500 games, where loud voices and thrown elbows reign, I have never once seen a fight break out. Sure, there are dramatic confrontations, and many a shove under the boards. But I’ve never seen a punch thrown or anything remotely resembling unadulterated aggression. That level of violence (0) proves pickup basketball to be more peaceful than randomly sampled interactions between marital partners, siblings, family members at Thanksgiving, crowds celebrating their football team’s triumph, people parking to go to the theater. At the end of the game, there is most typically laughter, respect, and a faith in the human project. The rest of the day is more peaceful.
Why? Because the violent physicality of basketball is transformed by touch. Teammates bump fists when the game begins. During the game opponents lean into each other, hand check to the hips, push forearms to the back and chest. Defenders bear-hug to stop a drive down the lane. Opponents slap rumps at a good play. There are high fives at the game’s end. The visible physics of basketball is incommensurably violent—bodies colliding at near-full speed. The language of touch in the pickup game neutralizes the aggressive intent of these actions.
How so? I asked my daughters about their first experience of another cultural form that revolves around touch—a pedicure. They had just luxuriated in one as a special treat with their mother. Here is their response:
NATALIE:
It felt like comfort.
DAD:
Why?
NATALIE:
Because they massaged your leg. You sit in a chair and they massage you.
SERAFINA:
And they put pretty nail polish on perfectly. Except it stinks.
DAD:
So what did it feel like?
NATALIE:
It was kind of painful, the scraping of your nails. But the leg massage felt like vibrations in your back, like someone was humming.
The humming vibration in the back is how touch has evolved to spread goodness and shift people’s jen ratios toward higher, loftier values. Touch has been made more fragile by cultural forces that prevent people from coming into contact with one another. The leg massage (the real purpose of the pedicure) and all of our touch rituals (pickup basketball, haircuts, handshakes, rough-and-tumble play, pats on the back) trigger activation in the orbitofrontal cortex and the release of opioids and oxytocin. They trigger the activation of the vagus nerve, the nerve bundle in the body devoted to trust and social connection, which, when activated, indeed feels like humming vibrations in your back. And if we had precise enough measures, we probably would find that that incidental leg massage, not described in the ad for the pedicure, shifted the stress regions of Natalie’s nervous system—HPA axis activity—to more peaceful settings, and amplified her physiology of trust and goodwill, perhaps, one might hope, in a permanent way.
10
Love
ON A COLD February weekend, my wife, Mollie, and I and our daughters, then 7 and 5, made the two-hour trip to Año Nuevo State Park, near Monterey, California. Our aim was to weather the winter storms to view the natural spectacle of migrating elephant seals on their way from Baja to Alaska. We were going in the spirit of Charles Darwin, seeking to study the social patterns of other species to glean insights about our own.
Gale-force winds prevailed. Whipping sheets of sand prickled the young families who gamely trudged on through swirling sand dunes. Failing to appreciate the youthful attention spans of half her audience, our park ranger guide droned on about alpha males, harems, mating rituals, ululations, gestation cycles, and migratory patterns. As we marched on, heads down, eyes shielded by hoodies, children burst into tears, soothing lollipops—last acts of desperate bribery—dropped into the sand.
At last we arrived at a little hill, a purchase, where we were to lie quietly to watch the beached elephant seals gathered below. We lay prostrate on the cool sand in a layer of warm air below the gusts, steadying our binoculars and cameras upon the elephant seals. The enormous 4,500-pound alpha male, heavier than the average SUV, guarded dozens of the females in his harem, each roughly a fourth his size. Occasionally the alpha male would galumph over to a female and flop on top of her. She was lost to view under the rippling gyrations of his fat. At the sight of this burst of passion, other males, poised on the periphery of the harem, would make their move, flopping toward nearby females. Such an intrusion proved more attention-worthy to the alpha male than the paramour below; in the only alacrity he was capable of, he would charge, blubber rolling, toward the intruder. Within ten feet of contact the alpha male would rise up, with weird trunklike snout, and ululate as loud as a corn thrasher. This pattern of rest, attempt at copulation, intrusion, and confrontation went on endlessly. No cuddling, no play, no frolicking, no snout-to-snout nuzzling or mutual gaze in sight.
Our guide rounded us up and led us down a path to the rolling Pacific Ocean to see whether we might spot baby elephant seals, born just a couple of months ago in Baja. Tiny elephant seals at play in the surf would rescue the falling spirits of my daughters. Instead, near the final dune we were to climb, off to the side of our driftwood-marked path, lay a dead baby elephant seal. Our guide explained: “On occasion the male elephant seal, following an ancient evolutionary instinct, will accidentally try to mate with a baby, often to dire ends.” For the rest of the tour, my daughters clung to me, heads buried in my shoulders.
At the end of the tour, after a few polite questions, tips, and halfhearted “thank yous,” we returned to our overstuffed Subaru. Natalie and Serafina sat in their car seats, solemn and quiet. I could feel them trying to map words their parents had used ju
st prior to this misadventure (“family,” “kind of like husbands and wives,” “new babies,” “love”) onto the raw spectacle of elephant seal reproduction. What a flawed endeavor it is to map a concept in the English language (“love,” “family,” “husbands and wives”) onto the immense variety of reproductive arrangements in nature or, for that matter, the complexities and nuances of love.
Had I had the right words and temerity (and had they been several years older), I would have reassured my daughters with new studies from the evolutionary biology of reproduction, so sharply summarized in The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and The Ant and the Peacock by Helena Cronin. Elephant seals are a tournament species, where males devote much of their energy and psyche to violent, winner-take-all competitions for large harems. Humans are more on the pair-bonding end of the continuum, closer to the gibbon, the delicate sea horse, certain voles, and many bird species. In the 8,000 pair-bonding species, like humans, the male is less differentiated than the female in terms of size or florid color, and there is less radical variability in the reproductive outcomes of males (in elephant seals such as those that we observed, almost all offspring are sired by the alpha male). Their future boyfriends, still many years away, would not hoard dozens of girlfriends in the lunchroom and fill entire daycares with their offspring. Instead, they would be theirs and only theirs, at least for awhile.
There is more. In humans, the default is for monogamy, and not the harem tendencies of the elephant seals (no need to unsettle their trust in my marriage with a discussion of the universality of serial monogamy). Sure, one can find elephant seal-like arrangements in human history, in particular in the early emergence of civilizations around the world, when powerful kings started to hoard resources and claim harems in the thousands. The Inca sun king Atahualpa kept 1,500 women in “houses of virgins” located throughout his kingdom, chosen for their pristine beauty most typically before the age of eight. The Indian emperor Udayama kept 16,000 consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs. But in early hunter-gatherer culture and in contemporary industrialized cultures, the robust tendency is toward serial monogamy and the intricate challenges of one woman and one man conducting a life together.
Unlike those elephant seals, I would have continued, human males actively contribute to the raising of the offspring. In over 90 percent of mammals, the female is the sole provider of care to offspring; the male doesn’t lift a hand or change a metaphorical diaper. We are different. Human males have the capacity for levels of care for offspring reminiscent of the devotion of the sea horse, the gibbon, and many birds. Tens of thousands of fathers in the United States are primary caretakers, changing diapers, pushing swings, reading Babar and the tongue-twisting wisdom of Dr. Seuss, negotiating sibling conflicts, playing rough-and-tumble, speaking “motherese.”
I would have reminded my daughters that we make friendships. Humans in nonreproductive relations do not flop around like those elephant seals, little cognizant of one another, except in confrontations over mating opportunities. Humans feel deep love for nonkin, in particular for friends. This they would have readily grasped, for they already had folded into devoted friendships. We even feel elevating love for our own kind, humanity, and other species.
Had I had the words or notion, I would have told my daughters that outside of the love they feel for each other (and other kin), there are four great loves in life. There is the love between parent and child, the passion for sexual partners, the enduring devotion for long-term pair-bonders, and the softer but rock-solid love for nonkin, most typically friends and fellow humans.
THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND
On a chilly January morning in 1800, a dirty, naked twelve-year-old boy, scampering around on hands and feet, was spotted digging for potatoes in the fields of the French village of Saint-Sernin. He was an abandoned child, not uncommon during the era. He had survived for years on his own in the forest, scavenging for acorns and hunting small animals, deprived of the warm care of parents.
The owner of the field captured the wild-eyed boy and took him home. The boy, soon to be named Victor, prowled restlessly on all fours. He refused to wear clothes. He defecated in public and rejected all food except acorns and potatoes. His communication was restricted to grunts, howls, and cackles. He was unresponsive to the human voice and language but would turn quickly at the sounds of nuts being cracked. He never smiled, cried, touched, or met the gaze of other humans.
Eventually, Jean Itard, a twenty-six-year-old doctor from the Paris Deaf-Mute Institute, took Victor—the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”—into his custody, and devoted five years to teaching Victor language and the intricacies of human ways. There were telling successes: Victor did learn to wear clothes, sleep in beds, eat at a table, and take baths. Most notably, he came to feel affection for Jean Itard.
There were telling failures. In spite of the intensive instruction, Victor only learned a few words. He never learned to get along with others (at a dinner party at a wealthy socialite’s home, designed to show off his progress, he wolfed down his food, stuffed desserts into his pockets, stripped to his underwear, and leaped through the trees like a monkey). Victor resembled the other thirty-five documented cases of feral children: They do not develop language, morals, or manners; they remain largely unresponsive to humans; they fail to fold into cooperative relations with other people; they show no sexual interest; and they lack self-awareness. The first great love is what Victor never felt, that between parent or caretaker and child. This love enables what it means to be human; it turns on our tendency toward jen.
Philosophers (to some extent), poets (to a greater extent), and novelists (to an even greater extent) have long recognized that the love between parent and child is the foundation of human mind, character, and culture. It would take a maverick intellectual, John Bowlby, integrating the latest in evolutionist thinking and the musings of Freud, to spur the scientific study of parent-child love. Given the profound vulnerability of human offspring, Bowlby theorized, evolution has designed an “attachment system”: biologically based patterns of behavior and feeling that bind caretaker and vulnerable infant to one another, in devoted, skin-to-skin, voice-to-voice, eye-to-eye contact. When Bowlby’s collaborator Mary Ainsworth did early observational research in Uganda on the attachment behaviors of young infants there, she documented familial universals: only in the presence of their mothers, Ugandan infants showed specific kinds of crying, smiling, and endearing vocalizations, clapping and lifting the arms when the mother approached, burying the face in the mother’s lap, hugging, kissing, and clinging to the mother, and distress vocalizations when the mother moved away. Just as reliable are the attachment behaviors of caretakers: skin-to-skin, chest-to-chest contact, cradling, massaging touch, playful coos and sighs, eye contact, “motherese,” soft-toned songs at night, joint smiling and antiphonal laughter.
Mammals just aren’t mammals when deprived of the love between caretaker and offspring. In Harry Harlow’s well-known research, rhesus monkeys raised in isolation, deprived of contact with parents (and peers), grew up to be the wild boys of Aveyron of their group: profoundly fearful, inept in forming relationships with peers, as likely to attack potential sexual partners as court them; attempting to copulate with same-sex peers. Elephants in some areas of Africa develop without their loving parents, who have been slaughtered for the ivory in their tusks. These adolescent elephants show pathological forms of aggression, looking like the worst of our sociopaths, killing rhinoceroses for sport, for example.
These early attachment experiences, dozens of human studies show, lay the foundation of the capacity to connect. In the thinking of John Bowlby, these early experiences of love alter our jen ratios or, in Bowlby’s terminology, the individual’s “working model” of intimacy, trust, and the goodness of others, deep, early beliefs that shape our peer relations, work dynamics, ensuing adventures in our own families, and engagement in communities. Individuals who report a secure attachment style feel comfortable with
intimacy and desire to be close to others during times of threat and uncertainty. They were likely raised by parents who were responsive to their early needs and emotions. And as adults, these individuals enjoy healthily high jen ratios. People who report a sense of secure attachment perceive their partners to be a steady source of support and love. They look charitably upon their partner’s criticism, tension, and insensitivity, putting a positive spin upon these struggles of intimate life. And as life progresses, securely attached individuals feel greater satisfaction in their current romantic relationships, they are about half as likely to divorce as other individuals, and they consistently report a greater sense of contentment and meaning in life.
Anxiously attached individuals, by contrast, feel a deep sense of uncertainty about their attachment to others; they feel that others do not give enough and are not reliable sources of intimacy and love. Their parents, research shows, were less responsive and warm and more tense, anxious, and distant in their minute-by-minute interactions. A quick study of a morning in such a house would find a more impoverished vocabulary of attachment behaviors—encouraging touch, warm smiles, brief eye contact, and playful vocalizations—and more sighs of exasperation, remote gazes, and painful touch. These more anxiously attached individuals have greater difficulties in their subsequent bonds—greater dissatisfaction, cynicism, distrust, and criticism. These tendencies suffuse every moment of their intimate relations. When Chris Fraley and Phil Shaver surreptitiously observed romantic partners as they said good-bye in airports, anxiously attached individuals expressed great fear and sadness as their partners headed down the walkway, privately suspecting that this would be the last they would see of their beloved. Anxiously attached individuals are more likely to interpret life events in pessimistic, threatening fashion, which increases the chances of depression. They are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, maladaptive drinking, and substance abuse, in part to reduce their distress and anxiety. They are more likely to have intimate relationships that dissolve in bitterness.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 21
