by Joe Moran
Shrinking Violets
SHRINKING VIOLETS
The Secret Life of Shyness
JOE MORAN
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Henry Weldon Barnes of the Class of 1882, Yale College.
First published in the United States by
Yale University Press in 2017.
© Joe Moran, 2016, 2017. First published in the English language in a different form by Profile Books.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948565
ISBN 978-0-300-22282-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my grandmother
Ellen Evaskitas, née Roberts (1917–1958)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
A Tentative History
CHAPTER 2
This Odd State of Mind
CHAPTER 3
How Embarrassing
CHAPTER 4
Tongue-Tied
CHAPTER 5
Stage Fright
CHAPTER 6
Shy Art
CHAPTER 7
The War against Shyness
CHAPTER 8
The New Ice Age
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
1
A Tentative History
Shyness eludes definition. Is it a sign of morbid self-preoccupation or of rare depth of feeling? As innate as temperament or as contrived as a persona? An affliction to be cured or an idiosyncrasy to be celebrated? Often seen simply as a wish to withdraw from the company of others, shyness can also amount to an undue interest in others, a desire for human connection that defeats itself through anxiety or uncertainty. For me, shyness has less to do with simple timidity or fear than a kind of social deafness, a tin ear for nonverbal cues, a sense that I have failed to grasp some invisible thread that holds communal life together. It feels like coming late to a party when everyone else is about three beers in and having fluent exchanges on some agreed theme as if by magic.
All my life I have been trying to make algorithmic what other people seem to find natural. I still cannot dial a new phone number without having written down, like a call center worker with a corporate script, what I am going to say when the person I am ringing picks up. (It should be a liberation for a shy person to be made invisible by the telephone receiver, like the Wizard of Oz throwing his voice from behind a screen, but somehow it isn’t.) I keep a notebook of things to say to people in case I run out of small talk—and however full the notebook gets, it never seems to stop me from running out. At parties I no longer look intently at bookshelves or refrigerator magnets as I used to, but have cultivated a cryptic smile, which, I hope, suggests I am benignly amused by the human comedy unfolding before me and unfazed by not being part of it.
The real problem comes with informality, in casual encounters when conversations are meant to form artlessly, as if out of thin air. At work this happens at places like the photocopier, that office-life equivalent of the traditional parish pump, where gossip is exchanged and alliances are cemented, or in corridors, which officially provide direct access to somewhere else but unofficially provide for chance meetings and lingerings. It is in these liminal spaces that I come unstuck, never knowing whether I am supposed to stop and say hello or for how long. I might pause and greet two colleagues deep in conversation and, while they carry on talking, wonder when to interject a word. Eventually, having simply smiled and nodded, I slope off and leave them to it.
The evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar once worked out that there is a natural limit of four on the size of conversational groups. If the group gets any bigger, no one can retain the attention of all its members, and it splits into smaller units.1 I have found the Dunbar rule to be pretty infallible over the years, but knowing about the problem never makes it easier to solve. When a conversational group subdivides, I attempt to join one of the subgroups but hear the other one in my head, unable to tune out. I end up joining neither and become stranded between two sets of people oblivious to each other and to me. I am often in a circle of people that closes up suddenly like a rugby scrum and leaves me standing outside it, as its constituent parts forget I am there and absentmindedly nudge me out of the loop.
Coming up with the right words, or at least adequate words in some semblance of order, is hard enough. But words are not even the first language of Homo sapiens. We have more discrete facial muscles than any other animal: even when our palates and larynxes were not developed enough for us to do more than grunt, squeal, and whimper like other apes, we could move our lips, cheeks, and brows to convey what we were thinking. We came to recognize the crow’s-feet that form at the sides of the eyes when we smile as a sign of pleasure and appeasement. We learned to dispense laughter, that placating music that no other animal makes and which the shy find it so hard to fake.
Alongside this wordless language of gesture, expression, and vocal grunt, humans have evolved a complex and ever-evolving etiquette of tactility. I have watched on nervously as, over the course of my adult life, hugging has been transformed from a marginal pursuit into a constant of social life, along with the proliferation of such variants as French cheek-kissing and that “bro hug” in which the shaken hand becomes a vertical handclasp pulled forward until the two huggers bump shoulders. Hugging has always felt to me like an odd mix of the natural and the artful: natural because bodily contact is the first, endorphin-releasing language we learn as babies and share with other apes, and artful because it has to be silently synchronized with the other person—unlike a handshake, which can be offered and accepted asynchronously.
For the truly socially inept, even handshakes can be tricky. As a young man, I used to botch them all the time, offering the wrong hand (being left-handed didn’t help) or grabbing the other person’s fingers instead of the palm. And then, just as I had completed my long internship in the art of the handshake, it was losing currency, and I had to hastily re-skill in hugging, or at least allow myself to be hugged while managing a sort of bear-claw hold with my arms hanging limply down my huggee’s back. Hugging me is like trying to cuddle a scarecrow.
The sociologist Susie Scott suggests that the shy are conducting an “unintentional breaching experiment.”2 In this kind of ethnographic exercise a researcher examines people’s reactions to the breaking of social norms that are normally taken for granted. The researcher might, for instance, cut ahead in a queue without explanation or, on a crowded train, approach random strangers and ask them to give up their seats for no reason. (On the whole, it is better if this researcher does not suffer from shyness.) The behavior of shy people, Scott argues, can be similarly jarring. Their body language shouts discomfort. Their silence unnerves. They lack the split-second timing that allows those deep in discussion to perform like riffing musicians; instead, while mentally scrolling through all the different ways in which the conversation might fai
l, they miss the beat, and the discussion moves on. So their interventions are rare and erratic, and their words carry too much weight or disrupt the dialogic rhythm. Shy people unsettle others because they unsettle the tacit conventions of social life.
It must have been my bafflement at these conventions that stirred my scholarly and writerly interest in the taken-for-granted rituals of daily life. Shyness turns you into an onlooker, a close reader of the signs and wonders of the social world. Eventually I came to see that this was also the best way of assuaging the self-preoccupation that comes with shyness. I could convert my personal interest in shyness into anthropological curiosity and explore it as a participant-observer, a field biologist of the shy. I learned that shyness has many faces. People who at first seemed to be models of social deftness turned out, from other angles, to be no such thing. The most unlikely people confessed to me that they were shy. I had thought I was surrounded by virtuosos of social rules, delivering word-perfect performances, while I alone was fluffing my lines. I came to see that everyone was struggling to learn these rules that were never written down, although some of us were the class dunces, learning them more slow-wittedly and unwillingly than most.
Shyness is not a rare mutation that sets an unfortunate few of us off from the mass of tribal humankind. Some form of it seems to be common not just in humans but in other animals. Many creatures, when they feel threatened or fearful, adopt conserving or vegetative states that are meant to be self-protective but which may also render them defenseless. The Virginia opossum affects a sham death, or thanatosis, the origin of the phrase “playing possum.” Birds and rodents adopt avoidance postures, such as turning the head away or feigning sleep. When toads sense danger, they do not hop away, as would be more sensible, but shrink and shut their eyes and burrow into soft ground with their hind legs, in the same way that embarrassed people cringe and curl in on themselves in order to take up less space in the world.
Some animals seem so enigmatic that they positively invite anthropocentric ascriptions of shyness. The silent solitariness of albatrosses at sea has long made them seem mysterious to sailors, although the specific breed known as Diomedea cauta, or shy albatross, was named thus in 1841 by the English naturalist John Gould, when he saw it off the south coast of Tasmania, on the dubious grounds that it did not follow boats, like other albatrosses, and was hard for him to shoot.
For the seamen who explored the cold waters of the north, the shyness of seals was proverbial. They looked so knowing, with their huge-eyed and bewhiskered faces popping up teasingly out of the sea. In 1856, in Sketches and Tales of the Shetland Islands, Eliza Edmonston wrote that Shetland fishermen admired the native seals for “their shyness, their great strength, and the singular intelligence of their aspect,” which made them seem like “fallen spirits in metempsychosis, enduring in the form of seals a mitigated punishment.” In one version of this myth, seals were angels who sided with Satan, were cast out from heaven with him, and fell into the sea. And so, while the fishermen killed the seals for their skins, they did so with misgivings, believing them to be “powerful to injure, and malevolent to revenge.”3 The inscrutability of seals probably inspired the Northern Isles legend of the selkie, the seal that could shed its skin on land and take human form, but which would gaze longingly at the sea and one day return to it, without saying good-bye to its heartbroken human lover.
The Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen had a more systematic explanation for seal shyness, informed by his encounter with the theories of Charles Darwin while studying zoology at the University of Oslo in the early 1880s. When making the first crossing of Greenland in 1888, he noted that the bladder-nosed seal was much shyer than when he had first joined the Norwegian seal-hunting expeditions as a student a few years earlier, when the sealers simply clubbed them where they lay. Now they had to use rifles, because the seals, having figured out that ships with crow’s nests and swarms of boats around them spelled danger, had taken to the water or retreated inland. Nansen was puzzled by the fact that the younger and older seals were equally shy, which meant either that the parents had taught their children to be shy or that, in less than a decade, heredity had achieved the same result “by the mere weeding out of the lazier and less cautious among the flock.”4
The serious scientific study of this kind of evolved shyness in animals began with the domestic dog. One pioneer was Helen Mahut, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who had seen her father, mother, and brother burned alive by the Nazis in a village schoolhouse and had watched a German soldier crush a baby’s head against a wall. Having witnessed such horrific acts, she became interested in the immutable aspects of personality and drifted toward the behavioral sciences. In the mid-1950s, at Mc-Gill University in Montréal, she began experimenting on dogs by inflating balloons and opening umbrellas in front of them and scaring them with slithering mechanical snakes and Halloween masks. The most fearful were the working dogs, such as corgis, collies, and German shepherds; the boldest were the boxers and terriers.5
Just as Darwin saw that pigeon fanciers had created an accelerated form of evolution by breeding multiple variations from the same common rock pigeon, so Mahut thought that dog breeds showed how a trait like shyness could be inherited. Over the past century and a half this has happened more systematically as the kennel clubs established in Britain and the United States have imposed strict breed standards. An expert dog breeder is supposed to be able to breed out any trace of shyness along with other undesirable traits, such as a shallow ribcage or badly arched toes. An animal behaviorist, meanwhile, might do the opposite, showing the importance of heredity in personality by breeding shyness into dogs. In a laboratory at the University of Arkansas in the early 1960s a group of scientists, led by Roscoe Dykman and Oddist Murphree, established the Arkansas line of nervous pointers from a very shy pair. When people approached them, these nervous pointers became wide-eyed and rigid, their backs arched, and their flank muscles trembled. The scientists were Pavlovians who thought they could condition the dogs to stop being so neurotic. They failed. The pointers never got used to people, however much they were stroked and cosseted, and they developed severe, stress-related mange.
The artificial selection of dogs began about forty thousand years ago, when humans domesticated gray wolves to create Canis lupus familiaris. It seems likely that they selected the wolves that were bold enough to befriend us but timid enough to know their rightful place in the human-dog hierarchy. If you yell at a dog, it cowers, not out of fear or remorse but because over thousands of years it has evolved this as a trick to avert our hostility. Working dogs, in particular, as Helen Mahut found, have to be compliant. Despite the myth spread by Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild that Arctic huskies are all alpha-male wannabe-wolves, they are, in fact, biddable and shy.
Once dismissed as anthropomorphic pseudo-science, the study of animal personality is now a flourishing field. An early researcher was Andy Sih of the University of California, Davis, who in the early 1990s began studying the behavior of salamander larvae in streams. Some of the larval salamanders, he noted, were quite intrepid. They ate more and grew faster than their shyer counterparts, and this helped them in small streams, which might dry up in late summer before the shyer larvae had eaten enough plankton to become air-breathing grown-ups. But because the bolder larvae just bumbled around, they were also more likely to be gobbled up by their predators, green sunfish. In a phenomenon that evolutionary biologists call fluctuating selection, the shy and bold larvae thrived in different situations—which may explain why natural selection prefers a range of personalities in the same species.
In the study of animal personality this range became known as the shy-bold continuum. At one end animals are aggressive, adventurous, and risk-taking; at the other they are fearful, unadventurous, and risk-averse. The shy-bold continuum has been found in more than a hundred species, and, since distantly related creatures exhibit it, it may exist in all animals, including humans.
Life for most animals is a trade-off between eating or being eaten, between looking for a mate and fleeing from danger, and they manage this trade-off between success and survival in all kinds of inventive ways. Among male field crickets, for instance, louder and longer singing attracts females, but it also attracts predators—so those with the longest trills are slower to break cover, offsetting the greater risk of long singing with greater shyness.
Animal scientists have deployed ingenious methods to study the shy-bold continuum. If you lie low in the frozen tundra on Possession Island in the southern Indian Ocean and push an inflatable plastic toy cow toward a nesting albatross with a carbon-fiber pole, as the seabird ecologist Samantha Patrick has done, the bold albatrosses will clack their bills and grumble, and the shy ones pretend not to have seen it. The bold albatrosses turn out to be better at foraging for food; the shy ones make more uxorious partners and attentive parents.
Just as humans can be rendered shy or bold in particular settings, so local contexts seem to shift the axis of shyness and boldness in animals. In Banff, Alberta, a tourist town in the Rocky Mountains, the elk have become abnormally bold. These elk “townies,” as locals call them, started arriving in Banff in the 1990s, probably escaping from wolves. Signs were erected all around the town warning that the elk were dangerous, especially during the rutting season, when they were known to flatten car tires, punch holes in radiators, and smash windshields. Rob Found, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, began measuring the shyness or boldness of the Banff elk with a basic “flight response” measure: how quickly they ran away when he chased them for ten minutes apiece with a hockey stick with a rustling trash bag attached to it. He had cameras trained on old bicycle frames, traffic triangles, and other flotsam salvaged from rubbish dumps, to see if the elk were bold enough to approach these objects; if they did, they triggered the cameras and left behind a sample of their hair on some sticky tape. Found concluded that the elk herd did not act as one, as most people thought, but that individual elks fit along a gradient from bold to shy and that a few bold ones could lead the shy astray.
