Being a human being—in the sense of being born to the human species—must be defined also in terms of becoming a human being… a baby is only potentially a human being, and must grow into humanness in the society and the culture, the family. ABRAHAM H. MASLOW, Motivation and Personality
AS BEINGS who emerged from and are formed by the elements of the Earth, our very existence is absolutely dependent on air and sunlight to kindle our metabolic furnaces, water to facilitate and give form to life’s processes, and soil to provide the atoms and molecules that enable cells to grow, replace themselves and reproduce. These foundations of all life are enriched and maintained by the totality of life’s diverse forms. Together these factors set the real bottom line, the needs that must be met for us to live. Our bodies reflect the importance of those needs with fine-tuned physiological alarms that impel us to obtain air, water, soil and energy when they are needed. Our ability to grow and flourish is directly related to the quantity and quality of these fundamental requirements.
But human beings do not live by bread alone. The distinguished psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out that fulfilling our basic physiological requirements is our most urgent need and dominates our thinking and behaviour. When air, water, food and warmth are in adequate supply, however, they fade from our thoughts; then another constellation of needs emerges that is just as crucial to our well-being:
What happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge… and when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge… basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.
Notwithstanding that many of us who share this planet do not have bread in our bellies, when these “higher order” needs are met, we are able to reach our full potential; both our physical and our psychic health and well-being depend on this set of basic needs.
… as an animal [a person] must breathe, eat, excrete, sleep, maintain adequate health, and procreate. These basic needs constitute the minimum biological conditions which must be satisfied by any human group if its members are to survive. These physiological or biogenic needs and their functioning interrelations constitute the innate nature of man.
ASHLEY MONTAGU, The Direction of Human Development
We are social beings—herd animals who depend on each other at every stage of our lives. Like many other animals, we are born unable to care for ourselves; we need a long period of care from our parents so that we can grow and learn in safety. As each of us develops, we need companions to define and extend our sense of self, and a community in which we find opportunities for a mate, for rewarding activity and for conviviality. These needs are absolute, inalienable, and where they are not met we suffer, even perish. Like the caribou that wanders too far from the herd, we cannot thrive in isolation from our kind. From the very beginning of life each one of us is shaped for and by close relationships with other human beings.
In every human society one overwhelming need directs the development of every individual. According to Ashley Montagu, for an adequate healthy development,
the human infant requires, beyond all else, a great deal of tender loving care. Health at a very minimum is the ability to love, to work, to play, and to think soundly… The infant’s need for love is critical, and its satisfaction necessary if the infant is to grow and develop as a healthy human being.
Numerous studies indicate that love is an essential part of a child’s upbringing from birth; it helps the individual to thrive, while it teaches the qualities necessary for belonging to a wider community. Being loved teaches us how to love, how to imagine and feel for another person’s existence, how to share and cooperate. Without these skills, how long could any group of humans survive together? In its purest form, the bond between parent and infant illustrates love’s remarkable property of reciprocity. The joy of unconditional parental love is fully returned by the object of that love.
This mutual attraction may be built into the very structure of all matter in the universe. Love may in truth make the world go round—or at least hold it together.
As energy from the natal cauldron of the Big Bang 15 billion years ago filled the ever-expanding universe, the newly formed particles that would eventually coalesce into atoms felt a mutual attraction even as they rushed away from each other. A body with mass tugs at any other body with mass. When protons and electrons appeared, this attraction based on mass was greatly amplified by the pull of opposite electric charges. Throughout the universe, however imperceptibly, all matter feels drawn together.
Galaxies suddenly appeared a billion years after the Big Bang. Long after our own Milky Way galaxy and our sun had evolved, hydrogen had transformed itself into living matter, in the form of cells, on Earth. A membrane demarcates a cell from its surroundings, forming a barrier that allows materials to be concentrated within the cell and enables metabolism to take place. Even though a membrane separates life from its environment, membranes have such a strong affinity for each other that when two cells are brought close together they fuse, and the cytoplasmic contents of both cells are combined into one. Viruses, bacteria and protozoans, such as the amoeba and paramecium, fuse in the act of genetic recombination. All flora and fauna endowed with sexual cycles are drawn together in that wondrous act of biological reproduction.
In trees and plants one may trace the vestiges of amity and love… The vine embraces the elm, and other plants cling to the vine. So that things which have no powers of sense to perceive anything else, seem strongly to feel the advantages of union.
But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? Yet even in this, there appears to be the desire of union. Thus the lodestone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature.
DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
When we observe the care with which a mud dauber prepares a mud enclosure, inserts a paralyzed victim as food and deposits an egg, can we be so anthropocentric as to deny this the name of love? How else could we interpret the male sea horse’s protective act of accepting babies into his pouch, the months-long incubation of an emperor penguin’s egg on the feet of its vigilant parent or the epic journey of Pacific salmon returning to their natal stream to mate and die in the creation of the next generation? If these are innate actions dictated by genetically encoded instructions, all the more reason to conclude that love in its many manifestations is fashioned into the very blueprint of life.
In experiments that would be frowned on today, H.F. Harlow and M.K. Harlow performed classic experiments with baby monkeys that had been taken away from their mothers shortly after birth. When given a choice between a wire form in which food was offered and a soft, terry-cloth-covered figure that had no food, the babies preferred the surrogate cloth form, to which they could cling, even though the wire figure was their source of food. Although well fed and cared for physically, the monkeys exhibited abnormal behaviour when they grew up, including a complete lack of interest in raising young. Thus, experiments with primates reveal both the powerful need for love—where the merest hint of a loving parent was chosen in preference to food—as well as the tragic, persistent consequences of deprivation. In a universe designed according to the principles of mutual attraction, cooperation and coherence—Erasmus’s “law of love”—we humans, who are even more highly socialized than monkeys, have a fundamental need to love and be loved. As Ashley Montagu observes:
… the biological basis of love lies in the organism’s ever-present need to feel secure. The basis of all social life has its roots in this integral of all the basic needs which is expressed as the need for security, and the only way in which this need can be satisfied is by love… The emotional need for love is as definite and compelling as the need for food… in order that he [man] may function satisfactorily on the social plane, the most fundamental of the basic social needs must be satisfied in an emotionally adequate manner for personal security and equilibrium.
Love shapes us even before birth. Secure in the equilibrium of the womb, a fetus is exquisitely attuned to the physiological, physical and psychological state of its mother. In turn, its growth and development within the womb affects the sequence of hormone-controlled changes in the mother’s body during the pregnancy. Mother and child are entwined in a collaboration. According to Ashley Montagu:
… the fetus is capable of responding to sound as well as to pressure, and the beating of its own heart at about 140 beats a minute, together with the beating of its mother’s heart at a frequency of 70, provides it with a syncopated world of sound. Laved by the amniotic fluid to the symphonic beat of two hearts, the fetus is already in tune with the deepest rhythms of existence. The dance of life has already begun.
From its beginning to its final faltering steps, that dance continues to be deeply interactive. After birth, breast-feeding continues the intimate connection between mother and baby. At the baby’s cry, even at a distance, the mother’s breasts “let down” their milk. And like the love it fosters and expresses, the benefits of nursing are reciprocal. The act of sucking not only provides nourishment and stimulates the baby’s oral regions, it also activates the alimentary, endocrine, nervous, genitourinary and respiratory systems in the infant. At the same time, the infant’s touch induces maternal contractions of the uterus, helping it to regain its normal size and shape and reducing afterpains and bleeding from the uterine lining. No doubt the skin contact and nursing together induce the release of endorphins to create a state of well-being and happiness in both mother and child. Alfred Adler believes that this state is responsible for the continuation of the species:
The first act of a new-born child—drinking from the mother’s breast—is co-operation, and is as pleasant for the mother as for the child… We probably owe to the sense of maternal contact the largest part of human social feeling, and along with it the essential continuance of human civilization.
Love is the defining gift that confers health and humanity on each new human; it is the gift that passes on endlessly, given and given again by each generation to the next. In the words of Ashley Montagu:
By being loved the power is released in the infant to love others. This is a critically important lesson that, as human beings, we need to understand and learn: that the cultivation of the growth and development of love in the child should be its natural birthright.
When we first meet a new love, we often talk of there being a “chemistry” that draws us together. Research is now showing that this is more than just an expression—it is a scientific truth: our bodies are having their own love affair, despite what we think our hearts feel or our intellects need. Love naturally stimulates myriad biochemical pathways in our bodies, delivering chemicals that give us the feeling of love in all its manifestations, from the exhilaration of being “madly in love” to the contentment and comfortable familiarity of long-term relationships.
Scientists now think there are three stages of love, each defined by a different cocktail of brain chemicals that influence our emotions and actions. The first stage is best described as lust. In this phase, the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen do the talking, with a chaser of “feel-good” endorphins. This powerful drive for sex is evolution’s way of motivating individuals to sustain a population, but hot sex with multiple partners does not necessarily a good society make. Rather, there ideally needs to be relationships between individuals that are sustained long enough to complete parenting duties, at least for a while. Thus, we enter stage two of love: the arena of romantic love.
In love’s second phase, there is intense attraction, sometimes called obsessive love, between people. We can’t sleep or eat, butterflies set up shop in our stomachs, our palms sweat and at times it feels as if we navigate our days in a haze of love-struck distraction. Here we begin to refine the feelings of lust. We enter emotional terrain where our body delivers a new mix of chemicals, meted out to create the heady bliss of love.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher and her colleagues gave brain scans to people who declared they were “madly in love.” When shown pictures of the subject of their passion, the parts of the brain associated with pleasure—those rich with receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine—lit up.
In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks…
DR. HELEN FISHER, quoted in “Love: The Chemical Reaction”
Romantic love exhilarates us because brain chemicals kick in a feedback of motivation and reward. When dopamine levels are high, we focus in on the stimuli that make us feel good. We are highly motivated to gain our “reward”—in this case, the elated feelings we have when with our love. During the phase of romantic love, dopamine delivers extreme pleasure, while norepinephrine and serotonin provide the excitement—thus the racing heart and the sweaty palms. This hormonal triumvirate is controlled by phenylethylamine, or PEA, which facilitates our infatuation. In its chemical structure, PEA is similar to amphetamines; it is a natural upper that fuels this intense period of love. We crave these chemicals and the feelings they deliver; we feel “high” when in love. But, as with most drugs, our body can build up a tolerance and we want more and more. Herein lies the rub. We’d all be love junkies—forever seeking the elusive high (read: having a series of short relationships to fuel our unquenchable desire)—if it weren’t for the fact that long-lasting relationships eventually morph into a third phase of love where there is yet another shift in brain chemistry. (Some relationships, of course, never make it to stage three, which happens about two to four years into the partnership. At this point, intense, passionate love can wane somewhat as the haze of infatuation lifts and you begin to see your partner in a new, more rational, light.)
So when the honeymoon is over, what then? In the third stage of love, dopamine is no longer in the driver’s seat. Instead, the “cuddle chemical,” oxytocin, takes the wheel. Oxytocin is a hormone associated with attachment and bonding. It enhances our connection to others and makes us feel calm, comfortable and secure. Both partners release oxytocin during sex, thus intensifying their attachment. Oxytocin also bonds parent to child. It is released when a mother nurses her baby and also when we hug those we love most. Oxytocin is nature’s “glue” hormone that seals our emotional bonds and helps us stay together.
A study of prairie voles demonstrates the powerful role of oxytocin and another hormone, vasopressin, in social bonding. Prairie voles are one of the 3 per cent of mammal species that are monogamous. (Humans are generally not considered part of this exclusive club.) Before mating, prairie voles interact freely with males and females. Eventually, a vole selects a partner, and during an intense period of mating, oxytocin and vasopressin are released. Forevermore, the male is indifferent to all other females and aggressively guards his mate. The couple grooms each other for hours on end. When pups are born, both parents are affectionate and attentive. It is the rush of hormones that sealed their partnership for life. In further studies where vasopressin and oxytocin were blocked, the voles’ interactions became fleeting, and no long-term attachment resulted.
The fundamental unit that fosters and strengthens parental love is the family. It is an extraordinarily diverse human grouping, varying from the nuclear family of recent years in the West to the large extended families common in many parts of Africa to the collective kibbutzim of Israel. Polygamy, polyandry, the authority of the wife’s brother, the power of the mother-in-law—whatever the shape of the family, one measure of its success is the happiness of its members. Sociologists have long known that there is no correlation between happiness and social class, per capita consumption or personal income. Instead happiness depends, apparently, on intimate human relationships. One consistent finding is that there is a much higher percentage of happy people among married couples than among those who have never been married, while divorced people are less happy than either of the other two groups. It seems that our “ever-present need to feel secure,” which is satisfied by love, is as crucial to happiness among adults as it is among babies. Love is attraction, connection, coherence; it is a place to belong, a series of intersecting circles that extend out from each individual to include everyone else in varying degrees of closeness.
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
JOHN DONNE, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Each of us is an expression of both our internal genetic makeup and the external experiences that create our life story. Each of us is part of a group, as well as being a unique individual: we are, you might say, both nature and nurture interacting, and it is often hard to disentangle the two. For example, I was born and raised in Canada, but my physical features reflect my pure Japanese genetic makeup. During World War II, my physical resemblance to the Japanese enemy made it difficult for people to remember that Japanese-Canadians had not inherited an allegiance to the country of their genetic origins. The consequent upheaval in my life—evacuation from Vancouver, incarceration in remote camps in the Rocky Mountains and subsequent expulsion from British Columbia—shaped my personality and behaviour, illustrating the interaction of heredity and environment. Each of us has unique experiences that reflect our differences in gender, religion, ethnicity or socioeconomic background, and the sum of those experiences moulds us into the kind of adult we become. The challenge is to create the kind of society in which our potential can blossom to the fullest extent. And in Montagu’s opinion, that kind of society depends on raising healthy children:
The child is the forerunner of humanity—forerunner in the sense that the child is the possessor of all those traits that, when healthily developed, lead to a healthy and fulfilled human being, and thus to a healthy and fulfilled humanity.
For Montagu, a healthy human being requires much more than satisfaction of physiological needs in childhood. He lists the following psychic needs of a growing young child that must be fulfilled to ensure full development of a child’s potential:
1. The need for love
2. Friendship
3. Sensitivity
4. The need to think soundly
5. The need to know
6. The need to learn
7. The need to work
8. The need to organize
9. Curiosity
10. The sense of wonder
11. Playfulness
12. Imagination
13. Creativity
14. Openmindedness
15. Flexibility
16. Experimental-mindedness
17. Explorativeness
18. Resiliency
19. The sense of humour
20. Joyfulness
21. Laughter and tears
22. Optimism
24. Compassionate intelligence
25. Dance
26. Song
The extent to which families and their communities can fulfill those needs is the measure of their collective richness and vigour as a society. Beyond the essential bond between parent and child, human beings need to interact with others of their species. We are profoundly social animals, not atomized individuals moving freely and separately from all else. We derive our history, identity, purpose and ways of thinking from the social grouping in which we are born and raised and on which we depend.
Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependent of creatures. On everything that has formed you you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery… a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.
ANDRE GIDE, The Journals of Andre Gide
With the first kiss of a mother’s lips, the first gentle whisper from a father, a tentative snuggle from a sibling, love works its way into our central core. Within a newborn’s tiny brain, chemistry is afire, forging new neural pathways as the infant’s senses of sound and smell and touch relay a flood of information from its new world.
The brain grows at an astonishing rate when we are young. We know, for instance, that young children can learn languages much more readily than adults. The rational brain is learning and absorbing, but so is the emotional brain. Developing infants need to bond with others, to feel security, compassion and love. The role of touch is paramount in human development. Without it, we lack the emotional nourishment we need to thrive, and perhaps, even to survive.
Our body’s largest organ—our skin—is primed for touch. Skin is riddled with nerves, touch receptors with which we feel hot and cold, pain and pleasure, tingles and tickles. We know from studies of primates and other animals that touch is central to proper emotional, psychological and physical development. In one study with monkeys, mothers were separated from their infants by a glass partition. In one group, the mother and child could still see, smell and hear one another, but they could not touch. The conditions were the same for a second group except that the pair could touch one another through holes cut in the partition. The babies who could not touch their mothers cried and paced, whereas the babies who could touch did not show serious behavioural problems. When reunited, the babies that had been deprived of touch clung obsessively to their mothers and failed to develop the level of independence and confidence shown by the other monkeys.
A parent’s touch may not only comfort and please its offspring, but new studies show that touch actually modifies brain development. Like human parents, rat parents have different parenting styles, with some being more attentive than others. Michael Meaney of McGill University demonstrated that differences in maternal care can make physical changes in the brain and determine how rats cope with stressful situations.
Meaney found the offspring of rats that spent more time licking and grooming their pups were better able to deal with stress later in life. The higher the incidence of grooming, the lower the levels of stress hormones produced by the pups. This meant that pups raised by particularly attentive mothers were calmer during stressful times later in life, and they also showed a greater capacity for learning. Overall health improved as well, since long-term exposure to high levels of stress hormones can contribute to chronic problems such as heart disease or diabetes.
The stimulation provided by licking actually triggered a change in the DNA chemistry in certain genes in the baby rats. As the mother licked and groomed her pups, she essentially “flipped a switch,” turning on genes that reduced the amount of hormones released during periods of stress. More licking resulted in more receptors in the pups’ brains that regulate the production of stress hormones.
Today, because we know about the critical role human touch plays in proper development, newborn babies often share a room with their mothers, we teach infant massage and parents are encouraged to carry babies close to the body in baby slings. Numerous studies clearly demonstrate that human development is enhanced by touch. Babies who are touched are alert, aware, active and engaged.
So great is our need for touch that touch therapy is becoming standard in neonatal care and is particularly helpful in the nurturing of premature babies. “Kangaroo Mother Care,” for example, was developed in Colombia by pediatrician Edgar Rey. The idea of KMC is simple—preterm infants are held skin-to-skin on their mother’s, or another caregiver’s, bare chest. At first, KMC was developed in response to a shortage of incubators, but it is now clear that “human incubators” help children thrive. In the tiniest of infants, Kangaroo Care helps stabilize temperature, breathing and heart rates. These cuddled babies sleep longer, gain more weight, cry less often and are alert for longer periods. The constant contact calms the children, enhances the mother-infant bond and usually results in an earlier discharge.
Touch can bond child to parent, but, of course, it is a reciprocal exchange. We know that oxytocin surges when mothers give birth, nurse and care for their infants, but mammalian fathers can also experience hormonal fluctuations. Biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards studied Djungarian hamsters, a species with particularly attentive fathers (unlike most mammals). These hamster dads are very involved in birth, from pulling babies from the birth canal to opening the baby’s airways. As they do so, their estrogen and cortisol levels increase. If these hormones are suppressed, the males show decreased paternal involvement in the days following birth.
Wynne-Edwards also found that hormone changes can happen in other mammals, including humans. In one study, men about to become fathers for the first time were found to have lower levels of testosterone and cortisol and higher levels of estrogen (specifically estradiol) than men in the general population. Estradiol is a hormone that influences maternal behaviour.
The language of love is written without conscious thought in our bodies. Triggered by touch, but also by swirls of other sensory information that bathes us, our bodies respond automatically, binding us to others through shared experience. As we interact with our children, we are teaching what it means to be loved. When these experiences are inhibited, we are all the poorer for it.
Growing up without love has terrible repercussions for physical and social well-being. As Maslow notes:
It is agreed by practically all therapists that when we trace a neurosis back to its beginnings we shall find with great frequency a deprivation of love in the early years. Several semi-experimental studies have confirmed this in infants and babies to such a point that radical deprivation of love is considered dangerous even to the life of the infant. That is to say, the deprivation of love leads to illness.
Unfortunately, humanity’s capacity for love is counterbalanced by an awesome and awful capacity for brutality. When we see what happens to the victims of brutality, we realize the critical importance of love and its most likely source, the family. Scientific exploration of the effects of deprivation on young animals, such as the experiment described earlier, offends public sensibility—for good reason—today. But children in war-torn countries around the world have been subject to severe deprivation, and scientists have been able to study those children.
After the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on December 25, 1989, we learned of the terrible plight of children institutionalized in Romania. Intent on increasing Romania’s population, Ceausescu had created a generation of unwanted children who were often abandoned to the state. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children were in institutions at the time of Ceausescu’s fall. Overcrowded and understaffed, most institutions provided little more than subsistence levels of food, clothing and shelter.
Among the seven hundred residential institutions for children, one type, the leagane, was for children who were not orphans but were abandoned or left for long periods by their parents. Scientists who examined them found rows of cots in huge dormitory rooms for the children, and staff members so harried they had no time to toilet train children or teach them to dress or brush their teeth. The children were left alone for long periods and were not picked up when they cried or held when they were fed. As a result, the children were considerably underdeveloped in gross motor coordination, fine motor skills, social skills and language development. About 65 per cent of the children three years old and younger exhibited abnormalities in cell and tissue structure and activity resulting from malnutrition.
The prognosis for children deprived of human contact so early and for so long is very poor: scientists are now demonstrating that stimulation by adults is critical in the very earliest period of a child’s life:
… the neurological foundations for rational thinking, problem solving and general reasoning appear to be largely established by age 1… some researchers say the number of words an infant hears each day is the single most important predictor of later intelligence, school success and social competence… the words have to come from an attentive, engaged human being.
Exile from the human family does more than delay or prevent development—it can cause illness, as Maslow also noted, and even death. One study found that in Romania before Ceausescu’s fall, up to 35 per cent of institutionalized children died every year.
But human beings have remarkable resilience if they are drawn back into the circle of care and their crucial needs are satisfied. One orphanage for severely handicapped children in Babeni, Romania, housed 170 children, all of them deemed “irrecuperable” and therefore cruelly neglected. The institution had no pharmacists, dietitians, psychologists, social workers, physical or occupational therapists, or educational specialists. Although there was adequate food and water, children had such minimal contact with adults that 75 per cent of them didn’t know their own name or age and few were toilet trained. Their basic needs for food and water, air and warmth were satisfied, but they lacked human contact—they lacked creative, attentive love. When basic hygiene, bathing, physical therapy, nutritional improvement, greater human contact and psychological counselling were introduced, there was striking improvement within a month.
The physical and psychic consequences of institutional care became obvious when the plight of Romanian children was publicized and started a rash of adoptions. In 1991 alone, 7328 Romanian children were adopted, 2450 by Americans. Of sixty-five American adoptees examined in detail, only ten were judged “physically healthy and developmentally normal,” while the rest exhibited “clinical or laboratory findings of serious medical, developmental or behavioural disorders.” Scientists found that 53 per cent carried hepatitis B, 33 per cent had intestinal parasites, and many were shorter than normal or exhibited decreased gross motor activity, retarded speech, temper tantrums, gaze aversion or shyness. Clearly, servicing only basic physical needs while failing to provide social contact had profound developmental repercussions. Fortunately, according to scientists, “it appears that many respond well to a loving family environment, improved nutrition and medical and developmental intervention.”
But overcoming the trauma of these terrible early experiences isn’t always easy. Since 1990, Americans have adopted about 9000 children from orphanages in Eastern Europe and Russia, and many have serious problems that don’t seem to be easily resolved. According to an article by Sarah Jay in the New York Times:
A child could be hyperactive or aggressive, refuse to make eye contact and have temper tantrums, speech and language problems, attention deficits and extreme sensitivities to touch. The child also might not be able to form emotional bonds.
Victor Groze, who studied 399 families of Romanian adoptees, estimated that a fifth of the children are what he calls “resilient rascals” who have overcome their pasts and are thriving; three-fifths are what he calls “wounded wonders” who have made vast strides but continue to lag behind their peers, and another fifth are “challenge children” who have shown little improvement and are almost unmanageable.
Today, years after their adoption, the impact of depriving these children of human touch and meaningful contact is apparent. Once again, the attachment hormones—oxytocin and vasopressin—play a role. A study of Romanian orphans adopted by families in Milwaukee found many of the children still exhibited behaviours associated with early neglect, including a lack of attachment to their main caregivers, which was demonstrated by their willingness to seek comfort from unfamiliar adults, even when an adoptive parent was present. The researchers found that children who had experienced early neglect had below- normal levels of vasopressin. As a result of early social deprivation, the release of this critical “cuddle chemical” was inhibited. Sadly, the opportunity to lay the neurological pathways—or, as author Anthony Walsh calls them, the brain’s “love trails”—that help secure our relationships were lost.
Of course, moving to loving, supportive and stable homes has gone a long way to improving the emotional, psychological and physical health of these children. Love can still have an impact. Children thrived physically when adopted out—their IQS improved as well, as did their ability to express positive emotions—but still, the lack of early contact, bonding and love has left an indelible mark.
Educator Lucy LeMare followed the development of 36 Romanian orphans adopted by families in British Columbia. The children had spent anywhere from eight months to four years in orphanages before being adopted. From her work LeMare learned that one of the most important determinants in whether a child would have behavioural difficulties (such as attention deficit or hyperactivity) was the length of time the orphans had been institutionalized. Of the Romanian orphans in LeMare’s study group, 43 per cent exhibited these behavioural challenges, compared with only 5 per cent of Canadian-born children and 16 per cent of Romanian orphans who had spent less than four months in an institution. Other studies have produced similar results. Although most children from the orphanages show developmental delays and emotional and behavioural challenges, it was the children who were adopted later (and so spent at least eight months in care) that experienced the greatest challenges.
The security and self-confidence that are provided by a healthy family and that are so necessary for developing a child’s self-esteem are amplified by the support of the community in which a family lives. During war, it is difficult for adults to buffer their children against the insecurity that is so damaging to their well-being. In Croatia, civil strife created more than a hundred thousand refugees, many of them displaced children, and often the youngest were separated from their parents. Some 35 per cent of first-grade-aged children in camps had been separated from their mothers.
When elementary school children are separated from their families, they exhibit loss of or increase in appetite, sleep disturbances and nightmares, loss of interest in school, difficulties with concentration and memory, irritability, fears, problems in communication, psychosomatic complaints, absence of feeling, rage, unremitting sadness, adjustment disorders or major depression. As one researcher concluded:
Trusting a close adult is a very important source of support for a child. Being aware that parents were not able to protect him or her reinforces the traumatic experience of a child exposed to the terror of war… the best predictor of positive outcomes for the child who survives an intensive stress is the ability of important adults around him, primarily parents, to cope with the traumatic event.
Prehistoric man was, on the whole, a more peaceful, cooperative, un-warlike, unaggressive creature than we are, and we of the civilized world have gradually become more and more disoperative, more aggressive and hostile, and less and less cooperative where it most matters, that is, in human relations. The meaning we have put into the term “savage” is more correctly applicable to ourselves.
ASHLEY MONTAGU, The Direction of Human Development
War is a social, economic and ecological disaster. It is totally unsustainable and must be opposed by all who are concerned about meeting the real needs of all people and future generations. The effect of war is most immediate for those who are killed or maimed or made homeless, but the social and ecological consequences reverberate for generations. Among the children who survive, we still don’t know the full extent of the psychic damage they have suffered or the degree to which their problems are transmitted to successive generations. War is the ultimate atrocity that dehumanizes victor and vanquished alike; divorcing children from parents, separating families, smashing communities, it deprives its victims of their basic need for love and security in the company of their fellow beings.
Human beings are among the most social of the primates. For 99 per cent of human existence, we have lived in small family groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. We have depended on family and tribal aggregates for the skills and experience to defend ourselves against predators, marauders and calamity, to capture prey, to gather food, to collect resources for the community. We have gathered together for reaffirmation of place, people and important stages in life, thereby inculcating a sense of belonging, an identity and a worldview. Social groupings have provided other benefits, such as access to mates and long-term relationships and sharing of music, stories, art and recreation.
For most of human existence, we were local, tribal people, perhaps encountering a couple of hundred people and travelling no more than a few hundred kilometres in a lifetime. We didn’t have to worry about what tribes on the other side of a lake, mountain or ocean were doing. Nature seemed vast and endlessly self- renewing, and if we were able to degrade resources with fire or tools, we would move elsewhere. But now we have moved across the planet, and the collective impact of all humans on earth is reverberating throughout the biosphere. We have to consider the sum of the effects that our species have created through fishing, logging, polluting, damming, developing and so on, and it’s not easy because we have never operated that way. So, negotiations such as the ones that took place at the Earth Summit in Rio and the climate conference in Kyoto were frustratingly difficult and slow.
Throughout history, people have depended heavily on their main survival trait—a curious and inventive mind endowed with a prodigious memory and forethought. From earliest times, people assessed the potential consequences of their actions based on what they already knew from past experiences. Like a chess player planning moves, their minds flashed back and forth from past to future to present, as no other species had ever been able to do.
Essentially, the early humans were carrying out what would now be called a “cost-benefit” analysis, weighing the potential benefits against the long-term costs. Accumulated tribal knowledge was brought to bear on important decisions through elaborate ceremony and ritual, which reinforced the ties between members of the community. These days we give lip service to carrying out cost-benefit analyses, but increasingly, as the consequences of what we do collectively as a species have become more far-reaching, the repercussions can no longer be predicted. And the definitions of “cost” and “benefit” have changed. Whereas in the past the most important factor was the long-term survival or well-being of the family or group, today decisions are made based on the implications for a company, job, market share or profit. So we assess costs and benefits within a very different framework of values, ignoring, for example, the health of the community or ecosystem. We have gotten out of the habit of thinking about the things that really matter to us, or perhaps we have a perverted sense of what really matters. Instead of thinking of different bits and pieces of our lives, we must think in a more complete way. John Robinson and Caroline Van Bers have suggested some ways to get a more complete picture of our well-being:
Human societies are not the only groups that forge bonds and use strategies such as touch therapy to support their community. Other animals, particularly primates, show complex social behaviours that strengthen relationships. Baboons, for instance, show their affection and affirm social bonds through grooming. When they groom, levels of stress hormones, the glucocorticoids, decline. Like humans, baboons turn to one another in times of stress. After a death in their community, they broaden and strengthen their grooming networks, reaching out to others for comfort. As they groom, the levels of stress hormones, which increased with the trauma, begin to fall and eventually normalize. Chimpanzees exhibit similar behaviour and will console a victim after a fight, with hugs, pats on the back or bouts of grooming.
Many non-primate species show sympathy towards one another as well. By paying attention to the needs of individuals and reinforcing social bonds, they strengthen the community. Sperm whales will surround an injured member of their pod, for instance, and false killer whales have stayed with a critically injured member of the pod for days, moving on only when the individual died. Most animals pay only a passing interest in dead members of their own species, but elephants exhibit what could be construed as mourning. They pay particular attention to the skulls, ivory and bones of dead elephants, even those long deceased. Elephants have been seen to gently rock pieces of ivory back and forth with their feet and will also pick up ivory and carry it around in their trunks.
Play is another way to bond with family and community. Wild apes, for instance, may use humour to strengthen social bonds and to ease the transition when new individuals join their group. Like humans, orangutans, gorillas and chimps laugh when tickled and use smiles and vocalizations that seem to suggest play and humour.
Although we may struggle with the concept of ecological sustainability, all humans can understand the idea of social well-being. We are able to assess our personal well-being without much trouble. It depends on how we feel about our prosperity, the place we live, our families and friends, our physical health, and a range of other conditions. Similarly, we can usually assess the well-being of our neighbourhood or our community using indicators that are almost intuitive—community vitality, absence of conflict, healthy trees and streams, and so on…
The need for community and its rituals is an ancient need. It has been built into the human psyche over thousands of generations and hundreds of thousands of years. If it is frustrated, we feel “alienated” and fall prey to psychiatric and psychosomatic ills.
ANTHONY STEVENS, “A Basic Need”
The threats to community are from more than warfare; we are in the grip of a mindset called modernity that views whatever is modern and recent as the best. Conversely, in this mindset, whatever is ancient or traditional is seen as primitive and less desirable. Overwhelmed by the incredible changes brought about by technology and materialism, we have accepted a widespread belief that somehow human beings today are different from people in the past; because we have more information, have travelled more and are better educated than all our predecessors, then surely our thoughts and needs are more sophisticated, on a different plane from those of all preceding generations. As we cut the ties to our ancestors we find ourselves helpless in a world of dizzying change, cut off from memory and forethought. Without context, information becomes meaningless; without perspective, events cannot be evaluated; without connections in time and space, we are lonely and lost.
The placenta must be buried with ceremony in the compound with the witch-doctor present. As the navel cord ties an unborn child to the womb, so does the buried cord tie the child to the land, to the sacred Earth of the tribe, to the Great Mother Earth. If the child ever leaves the place, he will come home again because the tug of this cord will always pull him toward his own.
When I go home… I shall speak these words: “My belly is this day reunited with the belly of my Great Mother, Earth!”
PRINCE MODUPE, I Was a Savage
Rituals are a public affirmation of meaning, value, connection. They tie people to each other, to their ancestors and to their place in the world together. Anthony Stevens points out that while industrialized nations have achieved extraordinary levels of wealth, consumer goods and amenities, more and more people yearn for community and rituals that bind them together. This desire intensifies as family breakdown becomes more common, and adults and children alike suffer the consequences.
FOR THOUSANDS of years, small communities of people ensured relative tranquillity while providing for the social needs of their members. The explosive rate at which our species has been converted to an urban creature has been accompanied by a deterioration of the social fabric that held people together. The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented shift from predominantly rural community living to big city living. In cities, distanced from nature and the primary means of production like agriculture, fishing, logging and even manufacturing, we accept that it is the economy that provides our needs. Technology has enabled us to travel rapidly and communicate over vast distances, while television, computers and portable entertainment devices sever the shared activities with neighbours and communities. Consumerism has taken the place of citizenship as the chief way we contribute to the health of our society. Economic rather than social goals drive government and corporate policies. The resulting high levels of unemployment produce stress, illness, and family and community breakdown. Stable communities and neighbourhoods are a prerequisite for happiness, for productive and rewarding lives, for a crucial sense of security and belonging. They are a bottom line for the health and happiness of human beings. It is not economics that creates community but love, compassion and cooperation. Those qualities exist in individuals and are expressed between people. And they cannot be fully expressed in isolation, without context, cut off from their place in time and space, their source in the natural world.
The stability of family—whatever its form—within a community provides an environment within which a child develops curiosity, responsibility and inventiveness. Ecological degradation—deforestation, topsoil loss, pollution, climate change and so on—destabilizes society by eroding the underpinnings of sustainability. This consequence was graphically illustrated in 1992, when all commercial fishing of northern cod in the Canadian province of Newfoundland was suspended. Overnight, forty thousand jobs were lost as the foundation of that society for five centuries vanished. All across Canada, towns boomed as forests were clearcut around them, only to crash when the trees were gone. The coast of British Columbia is dotted with villages that once supported fishing fleets and canneries but were abandoned as salmon populations declined. Ecological health is essential for full community health.
War, terrorism, discrimination, injustice and poverty mitigate against that social stability that is so important. Chronically high levels of unemployment, such as those found in the Atlantic provinces in Canada, on American Indian reservations or in Australian aboriginal communities today, result in despair, alcoholism, illness, even death. The need for meaningful employment is critical to the well-being not only of family but of community. Besides the economic benefits to government and individuals, there are compelling reasons to seek full employment as a social goal.
An economy was once created to serve people and their communities. Today economic rationalists contend that people must sacrifice and give up social services for the economy. As we reflect on our fundamental needs as social animals, it is clear that families and communities assured of biodiversity, full employment, justice and security constitute the real non-negotiable starting point in the delineation of a sustainable future.
The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not… a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work great wonders… The men who discovered for us the law of love were greater scientists than any of our modern scientists… The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.
MAHATMA GANDHI, quoted in P. Crean and P. Kome, eds.,
Peace, A Dream Unfolding
From family to neighbourhood, from neighbourhood to nation, out into the commonwealth of our species—the connection seems to attenuate as it becomes more inclusive. But as we explore the continuum of relationships in any human life we start to see that the circle of inclusion extends further still; the “continent” of which we are each a part encompasses the Earth.
The “law of love” is as fundamental, and as universal, as any other physical law. It is written everywhere we look, and it maps our intimate connection with the rest of the living world.
Think of where we have been all this time on Earth. For almost our entire existence we have lived completely immersed in the natural world, dependent on it for every aspect of our existence. Moving through the landscape around us, led by the seasons, we lived lightly on the land and were sustained by its biological plenitude.
If the richness of plant and animal diversity in today’s Africa is any indication of past abundance (and fossil remains corroborate this abundance), our original ancestors were surrounded by a staggering array of animal and plant forms. We emerged from and were completely bound up in the matrix of life-forms that shared our surroundings. They were more than just our genetic kin and potential prey, they were our companions, sharing the clear night skies and constantly announcing their presence with their calls. To this day hunter-gatherer societies treat the sources of their food with respect and sympathy: !Kung hunters in the Kalahari fast before the hunt to make themselves worthy of their task. After a kill they thank the animal for the gift of life and then carry the carcass back to the camp for a ritual sharing. Food was a gift of the flesh of other beings that had to be properly acknowledged. According to Ivaluardjuk, an Inuit man:
The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.
The evolutionary context of human history makes it plausible that the human genome—the dna blueprint that makes us what we are—has over time acquired a genetically programmed need to be in the company of other species. Edward O. Wilson has coined the term “biophilia” (based on the Greek words for “life” and “love”) for this need. He defines biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes.” It leads to an “emotional affiliation of human beings to other living things… Multiple strands of emotional response are woven into symbols composing a large part of culture.”
Elders, poets and philosophers in all cultures, including our own, have expressed a similar sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, of mutual compassion and common interest with the rest of the living world—a relationship that can only be described as love. Its source is “fellow-feeling”: the knowledge that we are, like all other forms of life, children of the Earth, members of the same family.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter—such health, such cheer, they afford forever!… Shall I not have intelligence with the Earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
In urban environments, our genetically programmed need to be with other species is usually thwarted, leaving us yearning. These days, biophilia has to be satisfied with sadly diminished opportunities—gardening, pets, visits to zoos. It is not an accident, Wilson says, that more people visit zoos than attend all major sports events combined. The pull of biophilia can be so compelling that even something as simple as a room with a view seems to make a real difference. At a state prison in southern Michigan, for instance, prisoners whose rooms had windows facing farmland and forest had 24 per cent fewer medical visits than those prisoners with rooms facing an interior courtyard.
Meaningful interaction with other living things can help us heal. In one study, researchers followed seventy-one new pet owners and compared them with petless people. Within a month, pet owners showed a decrease in health problems. Pets, particularly dogs, are used in many therapy programs to provide comfort and companionship to people in hospitals, nursing homes, schools and community centres.
We can find healing in the garden, too. Mental well-being is enhanced by horticultural therapy, and gardens are becoming an integral part of the healing therapies at schools, nursing homes, hospitals, prisons and more. Writer Oliver Sacks recounts the importance of a garden to his personal healing after a serious leg injury, when, after spending almost a month in a room without a view, he was taken into the garden:
This was a great joy—to be out in the air… A pure and intense joy, a blessing, to feel the sun on my face and the wind in my hair, to hear birds, to see, touch, and fondle the living plants. Some essential connection and communion with nature was re-established after the horrible isolation and alienation I had known. Some part of me came alive, when I was taken into the garden…
OLIVER SACKS, A Leg to Stand On
Clearly, all of these examples show that interactions with living things do make a difference, but it is also critically important that we engage with the wild in the world as well. Wilderness experiences are not solely the domain of adventure travel and high-adrenalin sports—something as simple as a walk in a local park or a rest on the banks of a creek can go a long way to provide respite, restoration and reconnection. For example, I have attended meditation sessions for terminal cancer patients, people who have ridden a roller coaster of hope and despair after chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. They attested to the healing and soothing effects of nature. They told me that living with their illness allowed them to “truly live” for the first time, and almost all of them made reference to the importance of “being in nature,” whether walking in the woods, strolling a beach or resting on a farm or at the cottage.
The truth is that we have never conquered the world, never understood it; we only think we have control. We do not even know why we respond in a certain way to other organisms, and need them in diverse ways so deeply.
EDWARD O. WILSON, Biophilia
Watch children respond to a wasp or butterfly. Infants seem drawn to an insect’s movement and colour, often reaching out to touch it. They exhibit neither fear nor disgust, only fascination. Yet by the time they enter kindergarten, enchantment with nature has often been replaced with revulsion as many children recoil in fear or loathing at the sight of a beetle or fly. By teaching children to fear nature, we increase our estrangement and fail to satisfy our inborn biophilic needs. We sever the connections, the love that infuses our actions with compassion for our fellow beings. It is sad that extreme crises such as a nervous breakdown, a severe injury, loneliness or death are needed to bring us back to the healing comfort of home.
Biophilia provides us with a conceptual framework through which human behaviour can be examined and evolutionary mechanisms suggested. It is a new story, which includes us in the living world around us, restoring us to our long-lost family. Studies that support the biophilia hypothesis are accumulating. For example, architecture professor Roger S. Ulrich reports that
a consistent finding in well over 100 studies of recreation experiences in wilderness and urban natural areas has been that stress mitigation is one of the most important verbally expressed perceived benefits.
It appears to be scientifically verifiable that human beings have a profound need for an intimate bond with the natural world, leading to the suggestion that
the degradation of this human dependence on nature brings the increased likelihood of a deprived and diminished existence… Much of the human search for a coherent and fulfilling existence is intimately dependent upon our relationship to nature.
Love, as we know from our own experience, is formative: it shapes the giver as it affects the receiver, because it forms a union between the two. The beloved child learns from that experience that he or she is loveable, enabling the child to love others. Biophilia teaches us the same lesson, according to Wilson:
The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves… Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
Psychologists have generally emulated reductionist science, concentrating on an individual psyche with little regard to the environment in which a person exists. Reductionism focuses on isolating, separating and controlling fragments of nature and has been a powerful way of knowing, providing profound insights into the properties and behaviour of that bit of nature. But in focusing, we lose sight of the context, rhythms, patterns and cycles within which that part belongs. It is thus a terribly limited way of knowing. Of course, relationships with other human beings are a critical part of psychoanalysis, but the other biological creatures in our surroundings, the chemical and physical circumstances where we live, work and play, also affect us immensely. Ecopsychology is a long overdue attempt to widen our scope to include environmental determinants of our psychic makeup and health. When we forget that we are embedded in the natural world, we also forget that what we do to our surroundings we are doing to ourselves. Ecopsychology is an attempt to reconnect us with our natural home and to remedy some of the harm caused by our exile in the modern city. Ecopsychologists argue that because we are separated from nature we risk our emotional health. Instead of trying to adjust to the existing social order and accept the status quo, they argue that for true mental health we must challenge the norm and take into account that the needs of both Earth and humans are interdependent and interconnected. As Anita Barrows has pointed out:
It is only by a construct of the Western mind that we believe ourselves living in an “inside” bounded by our own skin, with everyone and everything else on the outside. The place where transitional phenomena occur… might be understood in this new paradigm of the self, to be the permeable membrane that suggests or delineates but does not divide us from the medium in which we exist.
If we continue to think of ourselves as separate from our surroundings, we will not be sensitive to the consequences of what we are doing, so we can’t see that our path is potentially suicidal. If we do not see ourselves as part of the natural world and become further detached, we risk a greater sense of loneliness, a lack of meaning, purpose and sense of belonging. Without experiences in nature, we develop ignorance and apathy. Thus, for example, our eyes and noses may inform us that city air is no longer the colourless, odourless, tasteless, invisible gas defined in physics texts, yet we seem unaware that there may be a link between air pollution and the rising number of children with asthma.
Our schism from nature is reinforced by the way we construct our habitat. Most of humanity in the industrialized world and a rapidly increasing number in the developing nations live in cities where town planners, architects and engineers dictate the nature of our surroundings.
In the urban environment that is today’s most common human habitat, science and technology perpetuate the illusion of dominance and shape the way we see the world. Cities manifest a way of thinking that reflects mechanical or technological models based on standardization, simplicity, linearity, predictability, efficiency and production. As Vine Deloria points out, this mindset is mirrored in the kind of habitat we have created:
Wilderness transformed into city streets, subways, giant buildings, and factories resulted in the complete substitution of the real world for the artificial world of the urban man… Surrounded by an artificial universe when the warning signals are not the shape of the sky, the cry of the animals, the changing of the seasons, but the simple flashing of the traffic light and the wail of the ambulance and police car, urban people have no idea what the natural universe is like.
The place where we spend most of our lives moulds our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings. A human-engineered habitat of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild. We can see how much life and values have changed from our origins by looking at the remaining pockets of indigenous people who still manage to live traditionally as our ancestors did for most of human existence. In the words of Paul Shephard:
Their way of life is the one to which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation in the first creation.
To Shepard, the fundamental human relationship that shapes the person-to-be remains the child-mother bond. But once we are secure in that bond, our surroundings influence us powerfully.
Shepard also suggests that unless we actually experience nature at very specific intervals in childhood, we fail to trigger the emotional bonding with the wild world that affects the way we treat it as adults. Consequently, we lack the constraints against developing materialist, nihilist and other ecologically destructive attitudes, and we become
careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating enemies, having everything now and new, despising old age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, being swamped in the repeated images of American history. They are the signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climates where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems—private nightmares expanded to a social level.
Clearly, we need a change in direction that leads us to a greater awareness of our connection to—indeed, our inseparability from—nature. As delegates at a 1990 psychology conference at Harvard concluded, “If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction.”
To heal our planet and ourselves, we need to move away from “pathological individualism,” as ecopsychologist Sarah Conn calls it. After all, she explains, “we don’t live on the Earth; we live in it.” We must begin to see ourselves as part of our environment, not separate from it. Our identity goes beyond flesh, blood and our actions and thoughts. Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us. If those connections of belonging, to the Earth and to each other, are not there, we must forge them, reconnecting people and nature so that they both can heal.
Built into the fundamental properties of matter is mutual attraction that could be thought of as the basis of love. For human beings, love, beginning with the bond between mother and infant, is the humanizing force that confers health in body and mind. Receiving love releases the capacity for love and compassion that is a critical part of living together as social beings. That love extends beyond those of our own species—we have an innate affinity for other life-forms. If we are to deliberately plot a sustainable future, the opportunity for each of us to experience love, family and other species must be a fundamental component.