A Natural History of Love (25 page)

To the hunter-gatherers, these “virtues” are not carefully appraised ethics or options, or even preferences, but instinctive strategies for survival. They make it possible to coexist in a small closed society that would crumble without them. Even though we have evolved from bands of hunter-gatherers, and retain their instincts and traits, those virtues don’t help us as much now in the sprawling societies we’ve invented. But we still cherish them. Living among the Ik, contrary to everything he expected to find, Turnbull was first saddened, then angered and horrified to conclude that love of one’s children, parents, and spouse, “far from being basic human qualities” are merely “superficial luxuries we can afford in times of plenty.” For the Ik had become truly monstrous. They had lost their ability to love.

Once upon a time, the Ik had been prosperous hunters. But when the Ugandan government forbade them to hunt in the Kidepo National Park, which was part of their homeland, the Ik had no choice but to frantically attempt to forage and farm in the neighboring mountains, which were parched and lunarlike. The mountains were so fissured and barren that one couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards without stumbling into a ravine several hundred feet deep. But there was nowhere else to go. After only three generations of drought and starvation, the Ik became hostile, selfish, mean. They had abandoned love along with other so-called virtues because they could not afford them. It was simple economics. Every waking second—squatting at their toilet, performing sex (a rare act), eating—was spent scanning the horizon for possible meals:

On one occasion I saw two youths on a ridge high up on Kalimon masturbating each other. It showed some degree of conviviality, but not much, for there was no affection in their mutuality; each was gazing in a different direction, looking for signs of food….

Competition for scraps of food was constant, sadistic, conniving, and cruel. The most basic social currency became worthless. People greeted family, tribe members, or strangers alike with the imperative “Give me food” or “Give me tobacco.” Schadenfreude became the highest form of humor; the Ik would hurt, deprive, or in some way cause misfortune to others—even their own child—then roll around laughing about it. One of their favorite pastimes was to lie convincingly to or successfully exploit another. Pulling off that con was a rich delight, but even more pleasure came from then telling the victim he or she had been duped and watching the pain it caused. The old were not fed, because that was considered a waste of food; they were left to die painfully and alone. Indeed, “It was rather commonplace, during the second year’s drought, to see the very young prying open the mouths of the very old and pulling out food they had been chewing and had not had time to swallow.” The young were turned out of the house at the age of three, and expected to look after themselves by joining an
ad hoc
band of children.

People felt no loyalty or emotion toward relatives, even immediate family. If children died, the parents were thought to be lucky. Turnbull tells of the time he saw a new mother set her baby down on the ground and go about her business, only to discover later that a leopard had carried it off. This thrilled everyone, including the mother, because it meant that she didn’t have to continue nursing, but it also suggested that an animal was nearby that they might be able to kill more easily, since it was bound to be sleepy and sedated from eating the baby. This indeed turned out to be the case, and they tracked the leopard, killed, and cooked it, “child and all.”

Anyone who found food ate it fast and in secret. The word for “want” was the same as the word for “need.” People wanted only what they needed; and if they wanted to help someone, it was only because they needed to. All rituals had been abandoned. Rituals required feasts, and no food could be wasted. Perhaps most eerie was that the Ik no longer even made eye contact with one another. If they sat together, idly whittling wood to splinters, they watched the action of one another’s hands, but not the face. If their eyes met by chance, they looked away in embarrassment. They dared not show or feel any interest in one another as people.

“It was hard to detect emotion anywhere,” Turnbull writes, because all compassionate feelings had been replaced by self-interest:

I had seen no evidence of family life such as is found almost everywhere else in the world. I had seen no sign of love, with its willingness to sacrifice, its willingness to accept that we are not complete wholes by ourselves, but need to be joined to others. I had seen little that I could even call affection…. There simply was no room, in the life of these people, for such luxuries as family and sentiment and love. So close to the verge of starvation, such luxuries could mean death…. It was all quite impersonal…. Children are useless appendages, like old parents. Anyone who cannot take care of himself is a burden and a hazard to the survival of others.

With a despair vast as Africa, Turnbull left the Ik and traveled back to civilization. When he returned a year later, after a flood season that had produced many plants, he discovered to his horror that, despite the abundant crops now rotting in the fields, the Ik had not changed. It was too late. Lovelessness had taken root and spread like a virulent weed, crowding almost all else out. The family did not matter anymore, neither emotionally nor economically. Neither did friendship nor respect for life. His grief over the Ik includes the pessimistic conclusion that they made the same sort of choice we all might make, if we were faced with their hardships.

The Ik saga is chilling. If love can vanish so quickly from the life of a tribe, then surely love is not a necessity but a luxury, maybe even an invention. This could be an awful truth. Awful because of the doubts it raises about the ruggedness of love. Awful because of how quickly love vanished among the Ik, for whom love became silly and dangerous, a spillage of energy. Love did not conquer all. Like a complicated melody no one had sung for a while, it was lost forever.

What can the plight of the Ik teach us? Are there parallels in western society, where the old are shut away in nursing homes and the young in day-care centers, where cooperation has been replaced by self-interest, when we speak wistfully of the extended family, and friends are disposable? Can it be that the values we treasure most are not inherently human values but a by-product of one form of survival strategy called Society? In the two preceding examples, we’ve seen love destroyed by a blow to the head and love surrendered to adaptive evolution. In both cases, love was lost through a great trauma to the nervous system, and that should make us think hard about the hidden evils of child abuse, mass starvation, and malnutrition. For example, few are asking what will happen to the IQ and sanity of the children of Somalia,
if they live
. Malnutrition has been associated with poor brain development, and an absence of nurturing with lawlessness. Love provides an insulation from the harshness of the world. What the Ik show us is how human beings look with their raw nerves exposed and love amputated.

If the ability to love is something that can be so destroyed, then it has a physical reality, it is matter. Where does love reside in the body? When W. H. Auden writes of the mystery

Where love is strengthened, hope restored,
In hearts by chemical accord

he’s poking fun at romantic love, and reminding us of the organic chemistry of mutual attraction. Throughout history, people have located love in the heart, probably because of its loud, safe, regular, comforting beat—that maternal two-step babies follow from before birth. We can find the heart as the seat of love and other important emotions in the ancient Egyptian language.
Ab
, the hieroglyph for heart, was a dancing figure. The heart quickens at the sight or thought of a loved one. Having no idea where love grows, we suppose it must be the noisiest and most rambunctious part of us, that gabby inmate of our ribs. But isn’t it odd that many people think fondly of one of their internal organs? The image of the heart adorns greeting cards, blood banks, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and paintings of the Crucifixion. A real heart, viewed during open-heart surgery, seems a poor symbol for so much emotion. “In my heart of hearts,” we say, making a
matryoshka
doll of it: in the innermost cave in the labyrinth of my feelings. The heart is vital to being alive, the unstated logic runs, and so is love. Furthermore, love seems so tyrannical and opinionated, it must have one source—if not a god or goddess, or Wizard of Oz-like character issuing edicts, then a single factory of cells, an undiscovered organ. Does love happen in the brain? In the hormones? Are pheromones love’s messengers? What biological mechanism allows us to feel love? And, for that matter, how did love begin?

BRAIN-STEM SONATA: THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE

Because humans give birth to so few young, nearly every infant has to live to adulthood. If love had not evolved as a binding force between mother and child, and between men and women, we would not have endured. A mother puts up with a lot of pain to give birth, and risks her own life, health, freedom, and leisure to look after a baby. Love makes it feel worthwhile. However, a baby is born with much of its brain still developing—in fact, most of a baby’s neuronal pathways develop
after
birth. How they develop depends on what happens in the first few years of the baby’s life, during which time it learns the fine art of being human, including how to give and receive love. More and more evidence supports the conclusion that what a child learns during those early years programs it emotionally for the rest of its life.

Psychophysiologist Gary Lynch has found that deeply emotional events stimulate the brain cells more than usual. Those neurons then become sensitized to similar events. Whenever the experience is repeated, the neurons become more and more responsive. This happens because with each repetition of the experience an enzyme signals more receptors to become available at the synapse, which in turn allows in more and more information. This would explain why “practice makes perfect,” and why one can learn a foreign language, or how to perform dentistry, if one applies oneself long enough. Children learn languages fast and easily when they’re very young, while adults find the same task nearly impossible. This is also true of emotional vocabulary and grammar. As Anthony Walsh wisely remarks,

The information communicated to children during the critical early years of life regarding their self-worth and lovableness contributes strongly to their later evaluations of their own worthiness or un-worthiness. One study of self-esteem showed that early parental nurturance completely overshadowed all other factors examined in explaining levels of self-esteem among college students. If love is so tremendously important to us throughout the lifespan, it is imperative that the brain’s “love trails” be well and truly trodden during this period. Deeply etched love trails in the brain will strongly predispose the infant in later life to respond to the world with caring, compassion, and confidence.

Why is this so important? Because “later communications, even if they are positive, will tend to be relayed along the same negative track as though some mischievous switchman were stationed at a crucial neurological junction ready to derail any train of pleasurable thought or feeling.” To love, one needs to have been loved. Unloved children often grow into adults for whom love is a foreign land, and sometimes their fate can be even more calamitous than that. Without love, a person can sink through the quicksand of depression. Without love, a person can wither and die. The lovability message is delivered in many forms other than verbally, including touching and caressing, which is one reason that breastfeeding should be encouraged if at all possible. Hugging a child, giving it enough reassuring touches, is so crucial to its development that untouched children don’t grow as tall, and they often have lower IQs, learning disabilities, and many allergies and immune system disorders. At the most basic level, they assume that mother will not protect them, that they are disposable, so there is no use wasting energy by continuing to grow. Infants reason with their bodies; they can only feel. So if they are not touched, they naturally assume they have been abandoned, or will be shortly, and they don’t feel safe in the world. Studies done with rats, monkeys, and humans show clearly that those that are stroked and loved develop normally, and those that aren’t become stunted physically and psychologically. Even well-fed babies can suffer from a syndrome called “failure to thrive” if they aren’t being lovingly handled. A nursing baby will sometimes stop and wait for his mother to cuddle him, soothe him, talk to him, before he starts sucking again. To prevail, a child must feel valuable and loved, and much of that information comes from cuddling, kissing, and close body contact.
^*

When we rack our brains to fathom the existence of evil in the world, we should keep in mind the role that lovelessness plays. Our instincts can teach us only what is normal and life-affirming for our species. They can’t prevent us from acting in ways that will produce neurotic or even criminal behavior in our children. Many studies highlight the connection between crime and lack of love, and show that criminals tend to issue from love-deprived childhoods. When a child’s experiences of love have been negative, abusive, and rejecting, he or she will have difficulty forming friendships and romantic relationships later on; in effect the “switchman” will misread the signals and send them down the only love tracks he can find, the ones built on pessimism, rejection, pain, and lack of trust. Love will not be associated with pleasure; and it may even trigger frustration, rage, violence. A Harvard study of ninety-four men, observed over a thirty-five-year period, found simply that those who had been happy children were happy adults, and those who were unhappy children were unhappy adults. Add to that the ever-increasing evidence of the high correlation between child abuse and criminal behavior. As Ashley Montagu observes: