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.