"The bride came sailing down the long dining room, wheat-colored hair beautifully coifed ... cheeks pink with pleasure ... The white satin, clinging to flanks and breasts like creamy skin, rose demurely to cover her throat. She moved in a cloud of white lace. This blend of white chastity and crude fleshy allure was devastating."
- Herman Wouk, Winds of War
Have you ever watched the judges viewing the five-gaited class at a horse show, or attended a bench show for salukis? An untrained eye can see a general difference and assign broad values: but not expert judges - they discern each little line and angle of body and synthesize all these characteristics quickly on a score sheet.
Few of us are expert animal watchers or judges, with one exception: our own species. There is no other animal more engrossing to human beings than ourselves. We're so good that all we need is a flash of a glance and we can tell paragraphs about an individual human. We spend most of our waking hours exercising and refining our skills of human evaluation. You don't see much written about this, because we are orally oriented and think of most communication in terms of words. There is also an egalitarian undertow that discourages us from judging people by things they can't help - weak chins, flat chests, voice quality, crow's feet around the eyes, thin lips, height, and so forth. But we still do internally or even unconsciously. Every time we come into social situations our status-stats are gunning their engines to process all the information; it is so automatic we are hardly conscious of it. We are not alone in this behavior - aardvarks are excellent aardvark watchers, sparrows are great at watching sparrows, crocs at croc watching. As a matter of fact, much of an organism's time is devoted to dealing with his own kind.
But there is a difference between this almost involuntary communication and our ability to identify and sort out what is happening. A good judge at a dog show or an animal breeder has to go beyond this gut-level, involuntary "like" or "dislike" and begin to analyze why one animal looks different from another. Most novelists are artists in this regard, and good novelists possess a special insight into people's subtle signaling because they must be able to recognize it, abstract it, and verbalize it. It is because of this refined ability that I have used excerpts from various authors to illustrate our values about social organs. Cartoonists also can be especially talented people-watchers; and there are many other professions which develop field ethologists at watching people. Psychologists and psychiatrists are the highest refinement of the art.
The reason behind the threat role of male genitals and beards is not apparent simply by looking at human beings. But that role does fit into an organismic pattern, from which amateur and professional people watchers may perhaps profit. In this way science can assist art, because the identification of different body characters is important in human evaluation. Communication can be enhanced if we know why these characters affect us the way they do.
The biological why is just taking reason back one more level from the immediate why. One can react to large chins without knowing it. He can react to them and know it is the large chin that he is reacting to. He can react to chins with the experience of an analyst who would understand the status significance of human chins. He could also react to the chin and realize it is a status symbol derived from our evolutionary heritage of exaggerated primate weaponry. These are different levels of understanding of chin signals, and the evolutionary perspective can add dimension to the artist's picture.
Without this historical perspective, the image is two-dimensional - a gesture without origin or heritage. Knowing something about the process of neoteny, one is impressed with the similar esthetics of touching the soft skin of a child with love and stroking the smooth skin of a lovely girl. There is an added depth to the emotion.
A cartoonist must observe different signals and their associated behavior, then eliminate the extraneous lines and reconstruct a purely stylized picture. Comic books and cartoons should be interesting for physical anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, and other professional people watchers. A cartoonist has to be able to show surprise, doubt, vindictive anger, outrage, lust and all other forms of human visual signals that will be recognized as such by all, even the very young. Try drawing some of these emotions if you don't think it is an art! There's no scientific analysis that the cartoonist performs, nor a key to which he can refer; it is truly an act of art - of being a human ethologist - a good people watcher.
A novelist has to describe what is going on, both superficially and in the minds of his characters. One can get by without being able to describe such things as the lifting of one brow, the tight-lipped resolve, the sunken watery eyes of a mourner, and all the other visual clues which help us build the image in our own mind; but a storyteller without this perception is severely limited. His characters become faceless puppets who spout dialogue at one another. What a person says is perhaps the least interesting way to perceive him and live inside his skin.
Actors and actresses must also excel at professional people watching. To avoid falling into overacting a stereotype, one must be able to give the subtle but readable clues of character by his motions, carriage, the set of his face. One can act a homosexual or a business magnate without limp wrists or belligerent cigar-puffing - just by shifting the tone of voice, the position of the eyelids, the smoothness of movement, and the carriage of the head. To put yourself into a role requires some previous knowledge of how such a person would react, not only in words but in little eye twitches, whether to flex one's jaw muscles or not, and so on, and the believability of one's performance will, all else being equal, be equivalent to his artistic ability and experience at people watching.
The best cosmeticians probably rival cartoonists in having to know what precise facial features are important and how altering them can change the person's signal. An eye cosmetician who is good at the art must know the whole of people's faces and how they affect other people. Through facial makeup, the jawline can be exaggerated, the cheekbones made more prominent, and, most important, the texture of the face can be modeled to revert to a more childlike appearance.
Plastic surgeons capitalize on the cosmetic trade, by removal of a lens of skin to lighten up an area or pad it with silicone to make it look fuller. The nose can be shortened, cheekbones made a little more prominent, and bags under the eyes removed. People will react differently to you, and this in turn alters your image of yourself. So, a personality change has really taken place just as surely as if the surgeon had gotten into your cerebrum and incised or grafted parts.
The rest of us can go through life reacting to these signals at a gut level, never knowing why we feel this or that way about our first impressions or about acquaintances, but I would subscribe to the assumption that the more we understand about what is happening around us, the richer our lives become. At the very least our new understanding satisfies a part of our snoopy nature - a need which we all share - a need to inquire and wonder about things, especially ourselves and our fellows.
Even to us amateur people watching artists, the social processes are more interesting if one can rationally identify the signals he is responding to - even though it may in no way affect one's responses. Witnessing a fashion change from shoulder pads to rounded shoulders or a change in the Hollywood ideal from a high forehead to a low one and being able to comprehend how this interrelated with the changes in the social processes of youth adulation gives it less of a black-box aura. And knowing the evolutionary processes of neoteny that are taking place within our species right now gives our lives a broader meaning and dimension.
By people watching I don't mean just watching others; there is an art in watching oneself. The questions, "Why do I dress a certain way, deodorize, shave, or grow a beard," have psychological, cultural, and biological levels of answers, and it is worth more than fun to ask and see if you can find some rational answers.
Whoever you are, you have all sorts of interesting social organs that differ from mine, and you perform all sorts of organic manipulations to change your social image. Most of these affect your social status, some your closely related sexual attraction. Both men and women continue their seductive ornamentation after marriage (not only for their spouses) because sexual seductiveness is a status symbol.
But I don't want to deny our anti-status acts. As a matter of fact, we go out of our way to hide our status from one another. We place verbal taboos on being a social climber and look down our noses at someone who pushes too hard. Much of our dress and grooming is to remove the blatant signals of threat which our distant ancestors have bequeathed us. Most of these modifications, I feel, are to help us get along better with others. However, the subtle signals of status are still there.
Our descenting, degreasing, and dehairing capitalize on the less aggressive response of others to the juveniles we are mimicking. This behavior normally gives the young a semi-sheltered status from the full brunt of adult competition. By reducing one's natural symbols of maturity it is possible to receive a response nearer that received by the immature, easing to some degree the stresses of adult interaction. In spite of the increased rewards of social facilitation and cooperation, there are still advantages in being one up - no, let's say .01 up! Thus the offensive organic threat signals are replaced by considerably altered but more dilute guises. Like our natural status clues, some adornment gives us class identity (e.g., waffle-stompers or a tweed jacket) while others give us personal status (e.g., an original sweater or a genuine elephant's tail-hair bracelet).
We are a very social organism, so people-watching is serious business with us - but it is also a great deal of fun. A judge at a dog show would enjoy himself more and have a greater appreciation of a particular breed if he is aware of its history, the historical why of its peculiar variations of behavioral and physical characteristics. The same is true about watchers of people.
Until now I have tried not to attach my own judgment of good and bad to our differences in social organs and the behavior they produce. Now I would like to try.
Biophilosophers who are concerned with environmental and population problems look at man as having evolved for one kind of life, yet now forced to live another for which he is not well adapted. I think the same principle applies to so called "human values".
Within the ancestral, tightly knit group, the social organs were garnishes on intimate personal relations. Social organs and appearances were important but only secondarily so. This is not true today. Our transient mobility and superficiality has put a priority on outward appearances in our values.
This superficiality has caused Western society to rely more and more on courtship potential as a clue to our self-worth. For the most part this has been a bad thing.
During no other time in life are the differences in social stature as susceptible to change than during the early courtship period. As status greatly influences the likelihood of courtship, one's potential mate reflects on one=s status.
During courtship, people live in a private world dominated by "feelers" toward courtship. Theoretically, such feelers should cease after mating. But they do not. Due to long courtship periods and a growing uncertainty about status outside ancestral folk society, we continue to employ those same courtship feelers all our lives. In fact, our courtship potential has become the major key to our social state even after mating.
In the Soviet Union, women take a much more active role in initiating courtship than do their Western counterparts. After living there for several weeks and growing accustomed to the continual bombardment of eye pings, it was quite an emotional letdown for me to land in Tokyo and return to Fairbanks, being ignored by the opposite sex.
In the last several hundred years our reliance on courtship potential as a reinforcement of our social state has grown out of all proportion. There have been numerous detrimental aspects:
(1) The overemphasis of appearances. The dominance of a "courtship potential" status system places a heavy social burden on the ugly and beautiful alike. The ugly live in a world where the inner qualities seldom get a proper showing. The beautiful people, on the other hand, live in an artificial world, where the motivations of friends and lovers can be quite shallow. This overemphasis on appearance has created a preoccupation with "makeup", plastic surgery, voice development, posture, and all the other outside polish, with little emphasis on the inner ones.
(2) The overemphasis on youth. As the young have the greatest courtship potential, we give them unwarranted reverence. Likewise, once noble symbols of age have become repugnant. Gray hair, balding, and coarse skin create a fear well prior to the fear of approaching senility. They herald the decline of courtship potential.
(3) The breakdown of the mating bond. The heavy reliance on appearance has been devastating to courtship. In a folk society where people's inner persons are almost as well known as their outer ones, a brief courtship may be appropriate. But today mating bonds are fundamentally based on face values. Most are destined to rupture, probably more so than the growing divorce rate illustrates. The search for identity, through signals from the opposite sex creates the pathologies of the unsatisfied lover who is forever in the quest. We share some of that, in varying degrees, and I would guess that the growing reluctance of many young people to make formal mating commitments stems from our social state being so intimately connected to courtship potential. We are justifiably guarding ourselves from a probable hurt. The failure to subdue courtship feelers after mating has surely eroded the mating bond, and with this failure goes many enjoyments of growing old with someone familiar and loved. All this, for the promise of the brief infatuation of early courtship.
(4) The overemphasis on sexual performance. As sexual attraction and competency play a part in courtship performance, they have become exaggerated in the superficial parts of our lives. Advertisements lure us toward sexual happiness with toothpaste and shampoo. Books on esoterica and "little known facts" of copulation are always best sellers. It is seldom said that the best of all is with someone you trust and love deeply.
Sex in Western societies is overplayed, because, I would guess, it is growing less satisfying. Because copulatory satisfactions go beyond outside influences and depend heavily on the inner state, one must feel truly free and trusting for them to provide full satisfaction. In our world of "outside" satisfactions, society is shifting toward the other prostitute end of the scale.
(5) The loss of personal intimacy. One wonders if what we now think of as intimate is not just a washed-out shadow of the real potential of human intimacy. We have grown so accustomed to looking for and seeing mainly outsides, that insides are no longer very accessible. Not only are we losing our ability to see beyond the shell, we are developing our ability to build ever thicker shells. I think most of us know this intuitively, but our organized attempts to counteract it through encounter groups, or personal attempts at candidness, are on the whole ineffectual.
It is indeed a tragedy that social organs stand in the way of values about the real inner person - but they do. We are not only very unequal in social organs, but outside differences produce unequal inside differences. Maybe we should not struggle to suppress this fact, but rather begin to make some outward acknowledgment of its existence. We have faked equality for a long time, yet know and conceal deep down all the intricate rules of our unequal animal signals of physique, visage and color.
We are far from being objective, rational creatures, on a march toward social order. We do not rear our children just from instruction booklets, but from the deep animal attraction - that beautiful anguish one feels towards a fragile, sleeping child. Nor do we choose our mates for the most part, through any cognitive design of kindred spirits, but by that electric lust called love for the opposite sex which so viscerally depends on the animal person. I would contend that the major segment of personal hurt, at least in Western societies today, comes directly or indirectly from our animal persons, our patterns of social organs. These are: the traumas of reaching for adulthood, of courtship and peer stature, of loneliness, of divorce, the anguish of growing old and of being old, and many others. Yet, of all the many things we know about human beings, we know least about the biology of our social appearance. The reason for this is that our vested interests are too vested. We can even acknowledge behavioral differences for one can change behavior, but we cannot acknowledge the social effects of receding chins, high cheekbones, or coarse skin; they are all too permanent - something we had no role in making, but for which we must bear the important repercussions.
Our lives, for the most part, are not built on rational, objective decisions. There is a spontaneous element - the world of the heart - where we almost unexplainably place values on people with whom we interact. It is difficult to communicate the depth of detail behind our likes and dislikes in this private world; in fact, we have a tendency to suppress them in favor of commonly agreed upon values of the public world. But our private worlds of people values are a real and important part of us and we should be aware of how they work. That awareness may not always (or ever) influence our actions, but we should not be deceived that many of our prejudices, hates, and sparks of charismatic attraction have an organic side which is part of being a human animal.
It is this world of the private, subjective reality in which social organs function. Most of the important things that will happen to us socially will be in greater part products of social organs. This being so, we cannot confine our values about social organs to negatives. Social organs must form the vital seasoning and color behind our social behavior. If we were all identical in appearance, we would be far less human. Something important would be gone. We must learn to savor, appreciate, and understand where our social organs came from and how they function - and to accept their biological diversity.
Most of us involuntarily abstract the world of people about us into some ad agency=s ideal of humanness, but that is a long way from the real world of runts and skinny stilts, pockmarks and pimples, of buckteeth and bald spots. We are a people divided - divided into squat achondroplastic pygmies and proud Masai warriors, peeled-banana Englishwomen, no-ass Athabascans and hairy Ainus. There is ugliness and beauty, repugnance and grace - not somewhere in a magazine or a book, but right there in our neighbor's yard and down at the corner drugstore. In those trim, tapered wool-worsteds is a penis embedded in wiry, black hair, and concealed beneath the Nepalese silks is a gently, honey-colored breast tipped in delicate lilac pink. What a fantastic species we are, the violent, hard eyes and the forlorn, sad ones, the beaks and button noses, the stale crusty aged and cooing babies. We can't be abstract, it's us - you and me. Many of the reasons for our being here, looking the way we do, and feeling the way we feel are sometimes difficult to deal with, because they are dynamically organic. It isn't like talking about a painting or a new model of automobile - we had no creator or assembly line, we got to be ourselves by an erratic organic route steamy with smells, vibrant with colors, and ground with dirt. There were no pre-market consumer surveys, we came as we were and the only compass to give direction was an organic score card for the race from bleeding, pithy afterbirth to when the young were let go on their own. It was a change so subtle none of the players were ever aware of it; they only felt the hurt, love, and excitement in their own time.
All of this doesn't mean it is impossible to look at the evolution of our social selves analytically; we just can't look at it from above, we must see it from within.
I have pursued my interest in the evolutionary biology of our social organs on the assumption that it can give a deeper meaning to my life. I have written this book in the hope that it will do the same for yours. I cannot honestly say that it has grossly changed the day-to-day actions in my life. I don't think My reactions to others have changed all that dramatically, nor their reactions to me. It is in the "accounting for" that makes all the difference. I suspect you will still react in the same way to a big, brassy voice, square chin, and white-walls, but I hope that down inside there is a little smile - not of smugness, but of the satisfaction of savoring the organics of humanness a little more deeply than you did before.
I think these ideas can help us understand our organic selves. A fleck of gray or a receding forehead, a sprouting of pimples or smelly underarm odors, these begin to take on meaning beyond the immediate condition of changing age; they connect us with ancestors who used these organs with the pride of newly-gained identity. Someone with a long nose or short height is wearing a badge of ancestral social strategy - like an organic coat-of-arms from a distant family tree tattooed into one's soul and skin. Such a badge gives us a deeper tradition of kinship than any of us can trace by oral or written genealogies. For somewhere in our background were our ancestors who possessed a bald pate or were diminutive and had other peculiarities like ourselves; they shared the evolutionary cream of their time and participated more fully in life's processes - or else you wouldn't look the way you do today.
The explanation of why you have those particular social organs, which so immensely affect your life, is somewhat unsatisfying if you only know the immediate genetic answer - "your parents carried these genes here, and . . ." It's like someone who is black asking Why? It isn't good enough to know that you are black because your kinfolk were black. The explanation of the evolutionary why is more satisfying - because you belonged to a distant noble group who once used black skin, as the Scots used their red beards, as status symbols. And that ancient tradition is genetically fixed into your soul. One not only must forever be a part of him immediate tradition of parental, neighbor, and peer relationships - for better or for worse, he must also be an animal with biological heritages that are a part of his life, and he cannot comfortably deny them.
Thus one can begin to make rational sense out of some of his irrational acts - to see through the veil of numb, involuntary rites. For we react almost automatically to tight-lippedness and teardrop-shaped butts. Our responses to people and their personalities are in part a product of how they look - not just how they have their hair done or nails manicured, but the color of their eyes, the size of their cheekbones, and their height and a lot of other things they can't do much about. It's part of our daily lives we have learned to live with, but most of us have yet to consciously acknowledge it completely - professionals as well as amateurs. I would agree with Bruno Bettelheim, the famous child psychologist, that
. . . no longer can we be satisfied with a life where the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know. Our hearts must know the world of reason, and reason must be guided by an informed heart.
Real inner emotions come across through visual signals more than through words, which is why it is so important to understand the basic reasons why we react and act the way we do to social organs. That, I suppose, is the message of this book. There are volumes and volumes about the principles of the written and oral word - its rhetoric, linguistics, etc. - but in comparison there is virtually nothing written on the important communication avenues of our social organs: eyelid tonus, dilated pupils, the blush, and so on.
The languages of our social organs, such as genital and eye talk, are so emotionally loaded that it is awkward to commit them to analysis (sort of like the recent physiological descriptions of human copulation). In a sense I have been the analyst, the equivalent of the physiologist in the above analogy, for these few hours of your time. But I don't want to leave you with just a discussion of particulars - the bushy brows and pink nipples. For I am like the physiologist describing copulation . . . he doesn't think about epinephrine and sphincter dilations when he is flushed with sexual desire. But his kinship with every man doesn't mean that copulation is less for him - it can be more. The removal of some of the magic, with rational explanations, does remove some of the spiritual wonder, but it is replaced with a deep awe of a different kind.
One of my good friends, having read Masters' and Johnson's description of the physiology of human copulation, became so analytical later that evening that he lost his wonder and rigidity at the same time. So indeed there may be some negatives to the knowledge of our organic functions. Most of our troublesome hangups however, relate in some way or other to these functions, and a better understanding of why we feel these emotions and -react the way we do, even if it is no solution to our hangups, can help us be a little more friendly toward them.
I am plagued with being an easy blusher, for example. Though the knowledge of why it's there and any control I am able to exert on this behavior are virtually independent, it does help relieve a lot of inner anxieties to know what's in the black box called blushing, and roughly why. It is essentially an involuntary happening. And as far as I'm concerned, maintaining a wonder of the unknown doesn't compensate for not understanding what is happening to me. Quite the contrary; it gives me a tremendous awe that some of this is an evolutionary product. We're not necessarily a victim of it, but it is a part of the natural organic quality of life.
In the beginning I said this was a book about taboo things - the mysteries surrounding the organs we use in our body talk. Most of our important taboo systems are regulators of social action, leaning heavily on our biological heritage. The necessity for cooperation makes flagrant displays of status-seeking repugnant. There is a tone of disapproval in the label "social climber", running through Packard's The Status Seekers. The entangling of sex and status produces various blends of sexual taboos. Irrational rejection of urine and genitalia speaks of a tradition of genital and urine signals millions of years old and almost as broad as all mammaldom. We conceal our hairy parts and yet cover our nakedness, which hair was to conceal as well.
I do not mean to tear down those taboos, nor to make delicate things indelicate, nor to confuse one's values of beauty. We can keep our taboos, and should, but it is still fun to call time out, as when we were kids and had to interrupt a game to do something important, to see what the taboos mean. Then we can climb back into our shells and continue with our shell talk and taboo secrets. But, we hope, we will be the richer for that time out.
I wrote this book because somewhere in those pimples, silver flecks, and swinging gait, I feel there was something more than meets the casual eye. We are all deeply involved in the organics of life; the fruity-flower musky odors, the lilacs and magentas, the satiny smoothness, and the whispery hoarseness. In a way this was meant to be an expose designed not to scandalize our self-view, but to provoke a disturbance which would heal into a more pleasant way of seeing ourselves. I will have had some satisfaction if I know that tomorrow, at your customary grooming session, you see something different in the mirror, or reflect for a moment when you squirt your armpits with deodorant, or even on occasion acknowledge the wild-eyed, combat-booted streaker in yourself if you happen on him. Then back to the game of living - time in!