“When I was a boy” is a phrase older people often used when, well, I was a boy. It morphed into a sarcastic joke that eventually served to quiet the complaints of the elderly about the latest generation. Quieted, but never completely extinguished those complaints.
So I will not be deterred! And here goes: When I was a boy, attending senior year of high school and then 4 years of college, my education was universal. In other words, works of literature and art, the study of politics and history all aimed to teach a universal understanding of human nature1. We have five thousand years of history, of good and evil, to consider, there’s no reason to believe the human heart will change or that there is more than one. We see the same human heart everywhere and at all times because life is always constrained by the same insurmountable obstacles of resources, mortality and time; time as in past, present and future, with all the memories, dreams, nightmares and reflections.
This was the consensus from Homer and the Bible, from the first histories of Herodotus and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, from the first economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith. The constancy of the human heart was the foundation stone of human flourishing and its demise. Understood from every angle, in every nuance, we built human societies upon its strengths and weaknesses. But the knowledge and wisdom of the heart turned to hubris; we took it for granted. Then in the latter half of the 19th century this consensus started to crack, and then, finally, broke.
First came the political economists, Rousseau with his Noble Savage, then Marx and Hegel. Unfair and unjust, life would be put right by new hearts in new men created by new systems. The human heart was pushed out of the way; there’s more important work going on here! The human heart thought of as a reflection of the world it’s thrown into; change our material world and thereby change the human heart. The 20th Century is a monument to this herculean task.
Then when the general population showed zero interest in these great new ideas and social systems, the sociologists came, asking why were these stubborn human beings so damned human? Why did the man making table legs not want to own the factory? Why did the family with a cow not want to share it with strangers? If they could be lifted out of their poverty for just a moment, and torn away from mass culture and their idiot blood relations, wouldn’t they see the light? If we market our ideas more persuasively they will believe them and become the new men we must have. It was only a matter of time, comrade!
The sociologists were followed in short order by the psychologists. Inside the peoples’ heads is the key to their hearts. We’ll crawl through the dusty webs of their brain’s HVAC ductwork and get to the source of their anti-modern ‘feelings’. If we could help them over their angst about sex, they’ll join our crusade, no doubt.
All along the philosophers have done the yeoman’s work of trying to discover new pathways through, around, over and under the human heart. Heidegger, the German genius and believer of Nazi Aaryan superiority, wrote a mountain of words about time; brilliant and useless. He died when his time came. His words still appeal to a brave, lost soul who thinks they might hold the key to some passageway out of our tragic lives to nirvana; there’s always a few rumpled copies on university bookstore shelves.
The first wave of psychologists, led by Freud, faltered and in their stead came the social psychologists. They were also keen to understand the human heart, or mind as they call it. But instead of relying solely on therapy sessions with individuals or small groups, they surveyed vast numbers of people worldwide and, in many cases, tested them in interesting experiments. Oddly, they discovered what was already well known by people everywhere. For example, aggression is a common trait among the vast majority of males, and a very small minority of females.
Were their surveys correct? In every country on Earth, the incarcerated are ~ 95% male and ~ 5% female. Yes, the surveys are correct, or they are as close to correct as human knowledge can be. But how is this possible? Enter more recently the evolutionary biologist/psychologists/behavioralists. They have more titles than you can remember; it’s almost as if they don’t want others to know what they study and what they conclude? They have remarkable ideas of how our hearts, sorry our brains, evolved over millions of years. They scratch their beards in wonderment to realize that lobsters have the same chemical processes in their brains that we do. They see real similarities between us and our primate cousins still living in trees. The behavior of males to each other and to females, the behavior of females to each other and to males, is all strikingly familiar at a base level. They study hunter-gatherer tribes wherever they can be found; the more remote and untouched the better because there’s still a little inkling of hope for the noble savage, man uncorrupted by modern life. Sad then to discover that one in seven men in these tribes dies of murder.
As time passes the image comes into focus; the hunter-gatherer, the farmer, the herdsman, the behavioral changes as we evolved, how we reduced our aggression and impulsivity, and increased our cooperation. Some of them return to the ancient texts, seeking other signals of our long evolution. They check the hallway and softly close their office door:
“What do you think we’re onto here,” they whisper to each other.
“Yeah, it’s like we’re looking at human nature””
“Right? The human heart, as it ever was!”
“Well, let’s not get carried away!”
I thanked my mentor Herbert Barrows by making dinner for him after graduation. Professor Barrows was a graduate of Harvard, an enlisted man in the US Army, 1943-46, a longtime professor of literature at U of M, and the editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 1st Edition, and, most importantly, an incredibly generous man. I owe him heaps of gratitude for everything I absorbed at Michigan and later learned. See his gift to the University here.