Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  As well as being individually shy or bold, certain animals seem, like people, to have recognizably social personalities. In the tank room at the Marine Biological Association laboratory in Plymouth, England, researchers have measured the sociability of small-spotted cat sharks by exploring how they chose to keep safe when they were less than a year old and at risk from bigger fish. The bold ones rested on top of one another, forming shark fraternities; the shy ones did their best to camouflage themselves, matching their skin color to the color of the gravel at the bottom of the tank. In the experimental pools at the Bimini Sharklab in the Bahamas, researchers found similar levels of clubbability in the lemon shark. Like the cat sharks, the lemon sharks had to meet a pretty low bar to be deemed sociable: they just had to follow another shark for a few seconds, and with people, even I can manage that. But these tiny differences were of huge import. The friendlier lemon sharks were less likely to be killed but more likely to catch parasites and diseases from their shark friends. Where you sit on the shy-bold continuum is a matter of life and death.

  A hard-line evolutionary biologist would insist that shyness among humans is a similarly adaptive trait, a fossil behavior from our prehistoric past. Human shyness, the psychologist Jeffrey Kahn has argued, evolved out of the same percentages game of boldness and timidity played by our ancestors, and especially out of the need for a social ranking system that would reconcile beta males and females to being at the bottom of the tribal hierarchy, reducing the chances of conflict.6

  There is indeed some evidence of inherited shyness among the higher primates. As long ago as the 1970s the American animal behaviorist Stephen Suomi, working at the Poolesville Animal Center in Maryland, observed that about 15 percent of rhesus monkeys were shy, showing an increased heart rate and a rise in blood cortisol, an adrenal stress hormone, in tense situations. By testing blood and reassigning shy infant monkeys to more outgoing mothers with no effect, Suomi showed that the shy trait was inherited. Around the same time, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan was conducting experiments which suggested that the same percentage of human babies were born shy. Being fearful, they reacted to stressful events, such as balloons popping or a man dressed as a clown, with the same higher blood cortisol and quicker heartbeat.

  Kagan’s studies of temperament suggest that we have a fixed emotional range, that even as babies we have some basic, immovable core of a personality. Many parents know this intuitively, insisting that their children were easygoing and extroverted, or anxious and introverted, from the day they entered the world. If shyness is hereditary, then most likely it has an evolutionary gain, and some ancestral part of our brains clings to the memory of the benefit it brings.

  And yet . . . something in me balks at seeing my shyness as similar to that of a cautious salamander larva or a Rocky Mountain elk that runs away when you chase it with a hockey stick. Many scientists think animals are good subjects for investigating personality because they let them deploy neat experimental methods that would never work with actual persons and that allow character traits to be identified before social and cultural influences arrive to muddy the picture. But isn’t the muddied picture the truer one? Nature, especially human nature, is messily multifarious; humans are more than just fears and instincts. Our shyness is unique in that we alone are gifted, and burdened, with self-consciousness. We are meaning-making animals, compelled to reflect on and tell stories about our lives. Our shyness is intimately tied up with the ways we think and talk about it and the connotations we attach to it.

  This, after all, is what makes shyness so baffling to the more literal-minded among the unshy: it appears to make no rational sense. Thinking about your shyness can make it worse, just as being aware that you are blushing makes you blush more. Shyness is a longing for connection with others which foils that longing through the circular, self-fulfilling thoughts at which humans excel. We are the only animals to construct these self-propelling cycles of meta-thought, feelings that feed on and nourish themselves.

  The seventeenth-century English writer, physician, and polymath Sir Thomas Browne reflected often on this irrational aspect of shyness. He suffered from what he called, variously, bashfulness or pudor rusticus (rustic shame). His formidable skills of scientific logic and self-dissection seemed unable to dispel it. His modesty, wrote his friend John Whitefoot, rector of Heigham, near Norwich, manifested itself in “a natural habitual blush” with no obvious cause. Those who knew him first by the “briskness of his writings” were astonished, according to Whitefoot, to encounter the “gravity and sobriety of his aspect and conversation, so free from loquacity.”7

  But Browne’s shyness was uneven, as shyness so often is. He had a lifelong sense of himself as melancholy and reclusive, but he deliberately sought out company to allay these tendencies, and his quiet affability and sympathetic ear seem to have made him well loved as both friend and doctor. One contemporary said of a portrait of Browne, made when he was given a knighthood in 1671, that it purveyed a “most amiable sweetness of aspect, grave without Dulness, thoughtfull without sourness; and with a most engaging Blush of Modesty suffused over his Countenance.”8 This modesty and civility, a charming by-product of his shyness, infuses his writings, even Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), an exhaustive encyclopedia of “vulgar errors,” of deluded popular beliefs of his day, which he deflates with gentle reason and dry humor.

  In his first published work, Religio Medici (1643), a declaration of his complex Christian faith intended to refute the common accusation that doctors were atheists, Browne confesses to the potentially heretical feeling of shyness about being a corpse. “I am naturally bashfull; nor hath conversation, age, or travell, been able to effront, or enharden me,” he writes. “Yet I have one part of modesty, which I have seldome discovered in another . . . I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof.” Death so disfigures us that our loved ones can suddenly “stand afraid and start at us . . . This very conceite hath in a tempest disposed, and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abysse of waters; wherein I had perished unseene, unpityed, without wondring eyes.”9

  Browne’s shame at the thought of being a corpse remained a refrain in his writing. “To be knav’d out of our graves,” he writes in Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial (1658), “to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones tuned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragicall abominations, escaped in burning burials.”10 As Browne must have known, there is no rational reason to care what becomes of our bodies when our consciousness—or, as he would have believed, our soul—has left them. No danger can befall a dead body, nor could any social mortification be worse than mortification itself. And yet self-consciousness is such a resilient trait that many of us believe, quite illogically, that it will survive our transition into nonbeing. Perhaps some element of shyness, as our modern-day sociobiologists suggest, makes evolutionary sense. But surely its most human quality is that it often makes no sense at all.

  The historian Theodore Zeldin once proposed an intriguing thought experiment. How different might human history seem, he wondered, if you told it not through the lens of great public events, or the primal struggle for resources such as food, land, and wealth, but through feelings, such as love, fear, frustration, or boredom, and how they made people act? “One way of tackling it might be to write the history of shyness,” he mused. “Nations may be unable to avoid fighting each other because of the myths and paranoias that separate them: shyness is one of the counterparts to these barriers on an individual level.”11

  Zeldin was, by his own account, a shy, studious boy whose “life began in silence.”12 He went on to form a subdiscipline that he called intimate history: writings about ordinary people’s worries and desires, their feelings of fear, happiness, or loneliness. From his base at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, he promoted the art of conversation as a way of breaking down the estrangement of people from one another. He hosted meals at which groups of strangers came together and, with the aid of a speciall
y designed “conversation menu,” laid aside their inhibitions and shared their ideas and feelings. In his Oxford Muse project he encouraged people to write detailed self-portraits to help others understand them more deeply and quickly and inspire better discussions.

  Zeldin’s life’s work has been a triumphant prevailing over his own shyness and a public-spirited urging of others to do the same. But his history of shyness remains unwritten, and no wonder. Shyness is a low-intensity, mundane, chronic, nebulous, and hard-to-define condition. It has none of the pathos of afflictions like madness and melancholia, and none of the drama of major life experiences like love, loss, and grief. It leaves little evidence behind in archives for historians to consult, its sufferers being disinclined to speak or write about it and tending to communicate its effects on them mutely and tangentially. Despite the large number of shy people in real life, they appear in books and films only rarely, perhaps because they are not the natural protagonists who propel narratives along. A history of shyness would have to be a suitably tentative one, assembled from shards and fragments just as a scholar of the ancient world might piece together pottery or papyrus scraps, aware of all the ellipses in the record, the words and feelings of which there is no historical trace.

  “A doom of reticence is upon all our shy confraternity, and we seldom make confidences even to each other,” writes W. Compton Leith in his short work Apologia Diffidentis (1908), the nearest thing we have to a history of shyness.13 W. Compton Leith was the pseudonym of Ormonde Maddock Dalton, a curator at the British Museum and a brilliant scholar whose colossal Byzantine Art and Archaeology (1911) became a standard work. We know little else about him except that he was unmarried and prone to tortured silences in company. In the only extant photograph of him, Walter Stoneman’s 1925 bromide print for the National Portrait Gallery, taken when he was fifty-nine—two years off retirement—a thin-lipped, aquiline, but still gentle face looks out, squinting slightly at the world. Dalton’s professional armor—a dark three-piece suit with a neat handkerchief corner—fails to dispel an impression of helplessness and vulnerability.

  “In their depths are delicate fronded seaweeds and shells tinted with hues of sundawn,” Dalton writes of the shy tribe to which he belonged, “but to see them you must bend low over the surface, which no lightest breath must furrow, or the vision is gone.” The overwrought prose has what used to be called the smell of the lamp about it, from burning the midnight oil, and reads as if its author is forever on the verge of tears. “Man was not made to be the worm of Eden, darkly creeping in the dust,” he declares, “but rather its noblest creature, with the light crowning his head and the winds tossing his hair.”14

  If you can get past the somber blank-verse rhythms, Dalton has an interesting thesis to propose: that shyness is a modern invention. In ancient Greece, where body and mind were “consentient in one grace of motion,” shyness had no habitat in which to thrive. In ancient Rome things began slowly to change. Now closed doors and courts created a sense of secrecy, and gradations of wealth and rank introduced unease into public life. Still, Dalton claims, secrecy and unease did not create what we know as shyness, for Italy is a sunlit, clear-aired land that bred strong heads not compelled by the “onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a flickering light within themselves.”15

  Whatever Dalton may have thought, the ancient world did know something akin to shyness. “A bashful man will make a sorry beggar,” as Penelope says in Homer’s Odyssey of a vagrant who refuses to come and see her. A starving man cannot afford to be shy, she suggests, which implies that a man who isn’t starving can afford to be shy. Perhaps shyness arose not as a result of our animal fears and instincts but as a corollary of human civilization, at the moment when our primitive fears about finding the next meal, or being someone else’s meal, subsided. This gave us the time and space to be anxious about how others saw us. A pseudo-Hippocratic text translated by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) describes a patient in fourth-century BCE Athens who “through bashfulness, suspicion, and timorousness, will not be seen abroad, ‘loves darkness as life, and cannot endure the light’ . . . He dare not come in company, for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speech, or be sick.”16

  One of history’s first named shy people was the philosopher Zeno of Citium (ca. 335–263 BCE), who, according to Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, disliked being close to others and would always take the end seat of a couch, “thus saving himself at any rate from one half of such inconvenience.” To deter crowds while teaching, he surrounded himself with beggars. His own teacher, Crates, tried to cure Zeno of shyness with an early form of aversion therapy, asking him to carry a pot of lentil soup through the Kerameikos, the potters’ quarter, in Athens. When Zeno tried to hide the pot in his cloak, Crates broke it with his staff and, as Zeno hurried off with soup down his legs, called out, “Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you!”

  Zeno founded the school of Stoicism, a philosophy of self-reliant estrangement from the world and of equanimity in the face of public approval, since status and fame were mere baubles. “Stoicism has qualities which foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty,” writes Dalton in Apologia Diffidentis. “It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun.”17

  The ancients knew all about the nonsensicalness of shyness, the way it ebbed and flowed in peculiar ways, letting its sufferers at times be confident and even courageous. Some of the most eloquent orators in the theaters and courtrooms of the ancient world were afflicted by stage fright. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes, at least according to the partial account by his rival debater Aeschines, trembled before his first meeting with Philip of Macedon at Pella in 346 BCE, and “with all listening so intently, this creature offered an obscene prologue in a voice dead with fright, and after a brief narration of earlier events suddenly fell silent and was at a loss for words, and finally abandoned his speech.” The greatest orator of ancient Rome, Cicero, wrote to the politician Lucius Lucceius, to whom he was too shy to speak, because “a letter has no blushes.” According to Cicero’s essay “On the Orator,” his mentor, the consul Lucius Licinius Crassus, admitted to being “shattered and fainting with fear” before a speech. The first-century Roman Stoic Seneca wrote that “certain even very constant men, when in the public eye, break out in a sweat . . . I know of those whose teeth chatter, whose tongues falter, whose lips quiver.”

  The idea of the cheeks as what Pliny the Elder called the “seat of shame” was so familiar to Romans that the similar-sounding words pudor and rubor, “shame” and “redness,” were often poetically juxtaposed. “Purple shame appeared on her guilty face,” wrote Ovid in his Amores about a bride being gazed on by her husband. The blush, which occurred without warning—pudor means “to strike”—was an affront to the importance the Romans placed on self-mastery. But since it was involuntary and could not be insincere like an apology, the blush was also the signum pudoris, the mark that society imprinted on the face, suggesting that its owner was capable of shame and therefore trustworthy and sane.18

  The ancient philosophers, from Aristotle on, held the belief that shame was excellent in moderation, for a truly shameless person was capable of loathsome behavior and was always in danger of tipping over into the excessive shame of bashfulness. The first-century Greek historian Plutarch wrote an essay usually translated as “On Shyness,” although in fact he used a word of his own coinage, dusôpia, meaning “loss of countenance”—which was, as he described it, the shame felt when we are required to put on a social face that does not marry with our private desires. Plutarch agreed with Aristotle that shyness was fine in small doses but that if left unchecked, it caused an unhealthy self-obsession and the abandonment of “noble ventures.” Thus, he wrote, �
��it is the fate of bashfulness, in fleeing from the smoke of ill-repute, to throw itself into the fire of it.”

  Oddly for a classical scholar, Dalton overlooks all this evidence of sophisticated reflection on shyness in the ancient world. It was in the northern Alps, he speculates, where Roman decorum met barbaric roughness, that “the first ancestor of all the shy, this timid Adam, was born.” Shyness took root after the arrival of Christianity, with its prizing of modesty and monastic retreat. And it flourished after the arrival of modern systems of manners, such as the Provençal code of courtoisie, which created tyrannies of social expectation that overwhelmed the timid. A shy temperament, Dalton writes, is “chilled by this everlasting urbanity . . . this finished science of illusion.” The chief cause of shyness now was the intricate artifice of modern social life, and the main culprit was obvious: “Woman, having curbed the brute man by conventional restraints of outward demeanour, has made human intercourse smooth and seemly, but imposed upon mankind the wearing of unnatural masks.”19

  Dalton has one final, very English explanation for the evolution of shyness: the weather. Considering what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the species, he concludes that all of the “savage world,” the East, and southern Europe have little idea of shyness and that it is mainly in northern Europe that one finds the “haunts of the diffident.” Here the cold, humid air encourages indoor lives and a culture of secrecy and refinement. The required ease of manner emerges only with effort, just as grapes grow there only in greenhouses. The most hopeless cases were to be found among his own people. The Englishman, he notes, “conceals his benevolence by a frigid aloofness of manner, or blurts out friendliness like an indiscretion.”20