But suppose a child is orphaned or abused? When, through malevolence or circumstance, the early bond between parent and child is damaged, the psychological repercussions are profound. Such a person may end up with marital problems, personality disorders, neuroses, or difficulty in parenting. A love-thwarted child spends its life searching for that safe, secure relationship and absolutely loving heart which is its birthright. As an adult, missing cues that might lead to just such a relationship, it judges people harshly, trusts no one, and becomes exiled and alone. A child that’s unsafe, or rejected, or deprived of affection, feels anxious, becomes obsessively clingy, and doesn’t take many chances. Assuming that it will be spurned, that it is the sort of person one could only reject, it may try to be self sufficient and disinherit love, not risk asking anyone ever to truly care. Such a child becomes afflicted with itself, and needs no other accuser, no other lynch mob. It feels as if it has been caught red-handed in the midst of a felony—its life. Is there no salvation for such a damaged child? Studies show that even one continuously sympathetic caregiver in childhood can make the difference between a seriously disturbed adult or someone who is nearly invincible. Ideally, there would be a parent whom the child perceives as its partisan, apologist, patron, devotee, grubstaker, well-wisher, and admirer rolled into one. But the minimum is one reliable guardian angel—not necessarily a parent, just someone who is always there, cheering in the dugout, steadfast through both strikeouts and home runs.
Cornell psychologist Cindy Hazan and her colleagues have gone so far as to chart the direct parallels between the many stages of childhood attachment and adult romantic love. What they found is that childhood experiences do trigger, and sometimes garble or distort, the love relationships made later. But nothing is cast in stone. As the child grows, it forges new attachments and some of these may dilute bad childhood experiences. This is an important conclusion, because it suggests that abused children—who are, essentially, loving disabled—may still be helped later in life. As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it’s a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell—of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up-sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets. Some arrive pathologically disheartened by a childhood filled with hazard, molestation, and reproach. Mutilés de guerre, they are invisibly handicapped, veterans of a war they didn’t even know they were fighting. What battlefield could be more fierce, what enemy more dear?
*Darwin writes that the facial expressions adults use when they feel grief seem to be the result of two warring emotions: wanting to scream like an abandoned child, and trying not to let that scream out.
THE LOVING IMPAIRED
DISABLING LOVE
Among the many handicaps that can befall human beings, few are sadder than the inability to feel love. Because we imagine love to be wholly psychological, we don’t even have a word for people who are biologically unable to love. But there are some unlucky souls who, through trauma to part of the brain, cannot feel emotion. For this minority of misfits, there are no telethons, no acronyms, no government agencies. We sometimes think of loving as a luxury, little more than a high-thrill hobby like bungee jumping. So why lament its absence? Veterans of bad breakups and torturous affairs might even envy people who aren’t vexed by love.
Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, reports a curious case, in which a man we’ll call John had been living a normal life as accountant, husband, and father. At thirty-five, John had a benign tumor removed from the front of his brain. The operation was a success, but soon afterward his personality changed dramatically. He divorced his wife, became involved with a prostitute, acted irresponsibly at work, lost one job after another, became penniless—all without feeling anything, not even bewilderment or concern. It was his brother who finally sought medical help for him after a decade of worry.
Using magnetic resonance imaging to peer inside John’s brain, Damasio found that the ventromedial region of the frontal cortex was damaged. This injury had most likely occurred during the tumor operation, and it leads us to a small portion of gray matter between the eyebrows, which seems to be a factory for emotions. At this crossroads in the brain, we find incoming sensory information and outgoing messages to the autonomic nervous system that controls the involuntary workings of the body: heartbeat, breathing, sweating, pupil dilation, and blood pressure. Sweaty palms, racing pulse, and labored breathing, as well as other sensations, often combine to signal that an emotion is taking place. If you’re scuba diving at night for the first time and become separated from your dive buddy, the emotion might be fear of death. If you meet someone special whom you’re desperate to know better, the emotion might be fear of acting stupid and being rejected. In effect, this region of the brain acts like a city in the jungle, connecting the dark interior of our lives to the civilized strain of the outside world.
Damasio hooked John up to a machine similar to a lie detector, and presented him with a barrage of emotionally charged slides, sounds, and questions. Some were violent, some pornographic, some unethical. John had no response to any of them. A field of flowers registered no differently than a murder.
When I learned of this study, I thought immediately of the film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Suffocating, ferocious, poignant, its musical and visual melodies stay with one for some time. In the film’s futuristic megacity that Los Angeles has decayed into, the streets are dripping with split water mains, pools of grease, and waves of blowing newspapers. Overhead, electronic billboards fill the sky with visual racket. In Chinatown, the press and stench of people and smoke and sin rival any hell anyone has ever imagined. Civilization has stopped evolving. Society is a corpse watching itself putrefy and decay. None of them realize they’re decaying, but when they kiss their bones rub. The streets are full of fluids that belong inside bodies. The streets swarm with the unknowingly embalmed. Anything can be bought or sold. People live there because they have something to hide or mischief to make, and so many throats are cut daily that an industry of knife sharpeners has arisen.
Harrison Ford plays a down-and-dirty police assassin, who has been sent into this underworld to locate humanoid robots that have escaped from the offworld and come to earth to find their inventor. The humanoids have learned they are programmed to die at a specified point and, though savage, bloodthirsty, and maniacal, they also think, form attachments, and don’t want to die. They need to know how long their lifespan will be. They need to confront their cold-blooded creator. In a large sense, Blade Runner is a movie about the terrifying quest for one’s humanity and soul, about facing one’s creator with hard questions about love, death, good, and evil.
How do Harrison Ford and other bounty hunters recognize the humanoids? By testing likely suspects, asking them a list of loaded questions in a monotone. Only human beings struggle with issues of compassion or morality or social responsibility. During this exam, Ford monitors the size of their pupils for involuntary clues. The autonomic nervous system makes the pupils swell when a human being faces (or even imagines) such piercing emotions as horror, sex, or violence. To be human is to be emotional, to have a body that is regularly ransacked by emotions of many kinds, including love. To lose all that is to lose the cauldron of one’s humanity, which is why John’s brother—in a typically human way—worried over the fate of his loved one.
THE HORROR OF THE IK
Trauma takes many forms. It can be as obvious as a blow to the head, or as subtle as long-term damage to a child’s self-esteem. If love is a natural, even essential human emotion, an automatic response to family that is crucial in child rearing, then it should be impossible to obliterate it in whole populations, right? One of the most curious accounts of the loving disabled was reported by anthropologist Colin Turnbull.
In the 1970s, Turnbull spent two years living with the Ik (pronounced Eek), a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in a remote, desolate mountain region of Uganda. He knew little about them beforehand, except that there were only two thousand of them left, and the odd fact that their language was more similar to classical Middle-Kingdom Egyptian than to any living language. Indeed, they were not his first or even second choice for research. But he settled happily among them, because it’s easier for an anthropologist to observe the workings of a society that is both small and isolated. He brought with him some expectations, based on anthropology’s understanding of how hunter-gatherer societies work. Usually the women gather the roots, berries, and other vegetables that are a crucial part of everyone’s diet, while the men go off on hunting parties from which they may or may not return with meat. Although the hunt figures magically in the life of the tribe, because it’s fraught with danger and excitement as berry-picking is not, the women’s foraging is regarded as equally important because it provides most of the daily food. Cooperation is vital for all, both in hunting and foraging. Depending as they do on the land for sustenance, such tribes usually have a deep mystical relationship with their environment. They display the sorts of qualities we treasure most in ourselves: hospitality, generosity, affection, honesty, and charity. In fact, these mean so much to us that we call them “virtues,” and if asked to define the highest hallmarks of being human, we would refer to them, perhaps adding compassion, kindness, and reason.
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?