Ashley Montagu on the Child in Human Nature

In my early twenties, I yielded to my desire to keep making connections with the world. I say yielded because I kept meeting people my age who were convinced they already had all the answers they would need in life. But I never lost my interest in learning things. No doubt, the people I met did not count figuring out new gadgets or learning new ways to make money that were so obviously part of keeping up with their crowd. In general, they were convinced they had what they needed. By 21 or 22, they understood enough of life, the world and human nature. Maybe so (...or maybe not, but that's a long tedious story that is still being played out).

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu explains what happened in my case: I yielded to the best parts of me that were still a child. In his 1981 book, Growing Young, he talks about the useful traits of childhood, the traits that too often disappear in our adult years. He writes:

We have only to watch children to see [those traits] clearly displayed: Curiosity is one of the most important; imaginativeness; playfulness; open-mindedness; willingness to experiment; flexibility; humor; energy; receptiveness to new ideas; honesty; eagerness to learn; and perhaps the most pervasive and the most valuable of all, the need to love. All normal children, unless they have been corrupted by their elders, show these qualities every day of their childhood years. They ask questions endlessly... They watch and they listen. They want to know everything about everything [pg. 2-3].

When people lose these qualities, they do not lose them all at once. Certainly most of these qualities are usually present before age 11. Then adolescence begins to play its role with its peer pressure, sexual issues and growing independence. We don't necessarily get it right. And blending in and locking in becomes more important than continuing to grow as a human being. It's even harder in societies under stress. And of course authoritarian societies have low tolerance for anyone who sticks out. Blending in can be a matter of survival but we're beginning to understand more clearly how authoritarian societies literally undermine physical well-being. One can survive like the way a caged animal survives. Not good. Montague goes on to write:

How many adults retain these qualities into middle age? Few. They tend to stop asking those questions that will elicit information. ... Most adults draw back from the unfamiliar, perhaps because they are reluctant to demonstrate ignorance, perhaps because they have become genuinely indifferent to the interesting experiences of life and consider that absorbing something new into the old patterns is simply too much trouble [pg. 3].

World literature gives many examples of this. Think of Javert, the police inspector in Les Miserables. Despite being, in a sense, a man of principle, he would literally prefer to jump in the river than readjust his thinking or adapt to the times.

Montagu goes on to say that most adults build a shell around themselves. It's a good image. And an ironic one. In Montagu's time, we knew that the adult skull doesn't close and harden until the late twenties. And yet, many people think they have what they need as early as 17 and certainly by 22 or so. Our understanding of the human brain has progressed since Montagu and the picture would have interested him. We know that the brain continues to grow until our late twenties. We know that new brain cells can continue to develop. We know that the brain is capable of growing new synapses well into old age. We know that those who spend the most years learning tend to live longer than others. We also know the more the mind is used, the more it connects up with all its various parts and that connecting up can go on well past middle age.

When I was in college, I remember professors talking about how humans have a long childhood, perhaps the longest in the animal kingdom (at least on land). Terms like neoteny and paedomorphosis were used to explain how we physically hold on to child-like characteristics during our development. The simple fact that our skull takes 25-29 years to finish growing and hardening is a powerful statement of what we are. We are the brain creature. We are the learning animal. We are the two-pound receptacle of the known universe.

Montagu has some illustrations of our permanent juvenile status. Notice how in the monkey and gibbon, the skull of the newborn looks much more like a human skull than the adult form [from pg. 11]:

Now look at the skulls of the chimpanzee and the orangutan:

The fetus and newborn are the most like humans. But the infants, with the exception of the developing jaws, have very human-like skulls. Montagu closes this part of his argument with this illustration of the young chimpanzee and its adult form [from pg. 14]:

It's startling how much the young chimpanzee looks human-like. Our prolonged childhood is only one of the many changes in our evolution that make us human. And we mustn't forget that we spend our lives "learning" to be human. Is there ever time to "be" human. Yes, of course, but particularly when are learning. For the bird, it's flying. For the cat, it's stalking. For the human, it's pulling the world in.

Language and Ernest Becker

One of the purposes of The Closed Stacks Project is simply to talk about people and ideas that have drifted into the background. I thought Ernest Becker might be someone good to start with but I'm not sure he's as forgotten as I thought he was. A quick google brought up a fair number of references here, here and here. In my experience over the last ten years, however, I certainly have not heard his name often—except in conversations with a friend with whom I've been discussing Becker off and on for roughly 25 years.

Both my friend and I have been particularly interested in Becker's ideas about creativity as an honest response to our mortality. But I want to discuss a different though related aspect of Becker's thinking. Let me start with this quote from page 105 of The Denial of Death:

The first thing that seems to emerge clearly about Freud's stance toward reality is that, like many men, he had great trouble yielding. He could submit neither to the world or to other men. He tried to keep a center of gravity within himself...

In a broad sense, this is something true of many people and is particularly true of many men born into male-dominated societies. Again, in the broad sense, we see this among business people, athletes, politicians and more specifically, in an extreme form, among people who are narcissistic or sociopathic. But Becker is talking in a narrower sense about something that is acutely felt by many people in the complex era that has existed since the mid-19th century (acutely or not, though, it's always been somewhat conscious in the minds of thoughtful people whether they are found in the East or West).

In the West, we speak of people being self-reliant, self-made or, more broadly, individualistic (ironically, the character of such types is usually sketched rather easily in pulp fiction and popcorn movies—see the typical Clark Gable movie; obviously people who are largely self-created like Freud are considerably more complex). Such descriptions of self-reliance or individualism are at heart delusional; on the other hand, a belief that one can shape reality has some degree of potency—certainly more so than simply yielding to fate or superstition. Certainly what one can be is competent and imaginative. But, in the service of what? Too often it means being in the service of some idea of the self that once again is somewhat delusional. As Becker explains on page 107, it's a common problem when framed in the particulars that all of us, regardless of our self-image, so frequently share:

...what makes the matter of yielding ... so difficult for Freud? The same reason that makes it so for everyman. To yield is to disperse one's shored-up center, let down one's guard, one's character armor, admit one's lack of self-sufficiency. And this shored-up center, this guard, this armor, this supposed self-sufficency are the very things that the entire project of coming-of-age from childhood to manhood is all about. ...the basic task that the person cuts out for himself is the attempt to father himself... The causa-sui passion is an energetic fantasy that covers over the rumbling of man's fundamental creatureliness, or what we an now more pointedly call his hopeless lack of genuine centering on his own energies to assure the victory of his life. ...man can only attempt to do so in his fantasy. ... One suspects at all times that one is fundamentally helpless and impotent, but one must protest against it. The fathers and mothers always cast their shadow. ... To yield is to admit that support has to come from outside oneself and that justification for one's life has to come totally from some self-transcending web in which one consents to be suspended...

A key word in the above quote is near the end: suspects. We're not entirely helpless, nor entirely impotent. But even the most competent, assuming they are honest with themselves, have to be amazed at how often they fail in ways that are quite real. If one is realistic, one can make a difference, but one cannot create oneself anew, one cannot redefine what we are, let alone what a society is. In fact, we are already in the process of dying before we begin to understand the enormity of a series of problems. We can make dents in those problems, we can create a few new things, we can push against what is toward some new arrangement, but we cannot do much beyond that. Perhaps there are exceptions but often we're talking some group dynamic which is where humans are most effective anyway, even if misguided or collectively for reasons not purely related to public rationales. Under stress, a group of scientists can create an atom bomb. With conviction, several generations of a city can create a magnificient cathedral. As individuals, we are biologically self-contained with a flawed but extraordinary brain but we are still fundamentally dependent on others for who we are despite our strong sense of a self.

From our first moments of reaching out in infancy, we increasingly want to transform ourselves into a complete human being. But our transformation depends on what we see and hear. We imitate the language and music of others. We imitate the facial expressions and movements of others. (We even imitate, quite successfully in fact, the behavior of animals.) What others reach for, we reach for. What others desire, we desire. Beyond what we take in from others, when and where does the unique person we see in ourselves emerge—if ever? Make no mistake, creativity is real, even if it is often nothing more than reinventing—and reinvigorating—what others have said and done. Most human beings, however, are content most of the time to become what others are and have been while feeding the illusion of their unique life construction (we are legally, emotionally and humanistically unique in other ways even if we depend on and are sustained by what others have put into us).

The reality, in its harshest form, is that for most of us beyond two or three generations of our relatives and a few friends, our existence barely has an impact even on the local environs where we live our lives. Time is swift and we are forgotten. This is something important to understand—but it is not entirely correct. First, no person outside of ourselves can ever truly know who we are, even if we have written books and left diaries and letters. The complete package of who we are never travels far. A spouse for a few remaining years becomes the most complete vessel of many of us and yet the contents are always incomplete. But it's the wrong way to look at things. All of us, if we can just forget ourselves for a moment, are very old. I am as old as Heraclitus and Socrates. I utter their words. I feel them. I am not one being but thousands who have poured through me. Parts of me are parts of others. And even if my ripples fade out long before those of Heraclitus or Socrates, there are echos sustained and sometimes amplified along with millions of others.

Becker has some powerful things to say but certain kinds of honesty can partially blind us to the subtleties and complexity that is the real world. Neither the West nor the East totally gets it but both have much to teach. We are each of us unique and each of us the same but not in the ways we were so certain was the case. We are mortal and the universe as we know it will not last forever. But there are compensations and there is time, at least some time, to shape what might come.