Maybe you have read about the vole study that discovered that genetic mutations made all the difference between the lowland little mammals and their otherwise identical relatives in the mountains. The difference was that the lowland males were faithful and the mountain voles were faithless. This mutation was created and enforced by the environment: the faithful voles fared better where they were and the unfaithful ones fared better in a slightly different environment. One can only wonder how genes can change moral values and what our environment is doing to our genes right now. Let alone our values.
It is likely to be economically based in every environment: enough food and shelter to raise a family, whether at the roots of grass, in the crevices of stone, or in the dwellings of humans. At present we are facing a contraction of resources that is likely to severely edit love, those we can afford to care about and share with. It has very little to do with poetry.
But it has everything to do with attachment, which is a mammalian unfolding of connection between mother and child. Two forms work for two kinds of newborn creatures. In one the infant is helpless and must be kept in a nest where one or two parents — sometimes even relatives — bring food and stand sentinel. They are attached to the babies. In the other, the babies can move at birth and because of attachment, they follow their mother or father as they are able. If those procreators are missing, they look for Horton. (Jokes. It’s a storybook about attachment.) Thus we see strings of ducklings and lines of kittens following their mothers.
Not until age three when humans can walk and talk, do they venture away from their caretaker alone, and even so may carry their icons as teddy bears or blankies. By nine a human can stand apart with similar other children and learn to do things that adults do. By adolescence, human young can reproduce and first feel desire, which is often called sex that signals readiness to reproduce. This must be accompanied by reciprocating attachment to the resulting babies by parents or community in order that they may survive.
Among mammalians that have no community, many will die, except that they provide food for those who live. The antelope in the herd can live, but the antelope alone will let the leopard live. A great many human beings today have no community. They die alone without leopards. Quite apart from any pandemic. No one is attached to them. They, in turn, have never attached to anything.
Psychologists, once they discovered attachment, proposed two consequences: if attachment went well in those first years with a mother who took fond care of them, feeding, cleaning, comforting, singing, the baby grew into a stable human being capable of generosity, hard work, and creativity, and everyone around that person benefited.
If attachment didn’t happen quite properly and the baby survived, then the growing human was damaged.
The people most difficult to help are those who were attached uncertainly, with gaps, like Trump whose mother was hospitalized for a year with no affectionate caretaker to substitute. Addicts, the troubled, runaways, the too young, all make mothers who in turn make damaged human beings, liable to hurt others and destroy their own happiness.
We know these cases are not moral failures though the cultures often treat them this way. In the early colonial literature there is a tale of a young woman who came into town raving that she had been obsessed with whether she would go to Hell or not — in those days it was a very real prospect. She cried out to everyone that now she knew she would go to Hell for sure because she had thrown her new baby in the cistern, and it was a great relief to know she was condemned for infanticide!
The townspeople rushed to her house and took the lid off the cistern. Sure enough, the infant was instinctively puppy-paddling in a circle, keeping afloat. The account I read didn’t report what happened to the mother.
We know now that biological instincts of motherhood attachment can be reversed into killing. This is not conscious, rational, or emotional, but more like the psychoactive drugs meant to lift people out of depression but in some cases will press them down into the quicksand of suicide. The internal chemistry of adolescence can sometimes do the same thing, triggered by events or bad interpretation of events, a breaking of the attachment to life. Molecular.
Skillful intervention by those who understand the subtle and unique backfiring of volatile molecules can contain and reverse the crisis with luck and good diagnosis. Often in time the body will right itself, “come to its senses”, and go back to normal. Others will have to intervene and confine the person to prevent damage, in particular to the child.
But this is hampered by horror, fear, and superstition. Giving birth is life-threatening and until modern medicine it often took two wives in sequence to get children to adulthood. Children in a agricultural world were the ultimate product as both labor and connection to those nearby through intermarriage. Fertility had to be maintained, deadly and painful or not.
A flowery coverup about the sanctity and love of motherhood, the unbreakable loyalty and protection of children, was imposed so strongly that it kept simple biological malfunctions from being acknowledged. No one knew about hormones and so on anyway. Today the stories are still sensationalized in the newspapers without really being explained. Women drowning their baby in the bathtub are seen as inexplicable more than evil, but still seem hair-raisingly abnormal. They are extreme tragedies.
A third category of malfunctioning attachment is the insecurely attached child who grows into an adult who cannot settle, cannot trust, spends every effort on his or her own preservation so is diagnosed as “borderline” or “narcissistic.” Because these deficits are often deep in the character scaffolding of the person, they are very hard to change, though persons operating in a haze of “love” —that they believe will heal everything — can get caught up in the attempt, escalating without effect. Again understanding is blocked by romanticism.
There is a fourth kind of attachment that hasn’t been discussed much so far. It is attachment that is based on hatred rather than “love.” That is, mother and child remain close and even intimate but feel and express fear they only control through domination, becoming hate. Trump is again an example. The opposite of love/hate is indifference. More terrifying than hate is the unmoved, uncaring, universe.
These aspects of attachment are biologically based rather than morally based. They are attempts to survive, misguided yearning for existence that usually works wonderfully but, when distorted, can destroy themselves and others. Helping the damaged is dangerous, because they cannot accept help nor dare they look at themselves honestly.
A thing called “spaniel rage” exists in dogs, whose internal structure is surprisingly like those of humans. A formerly docile and affectionate dog, often a golden retriever which is a breed famous for its benign love of humans, suffers some kind of brain glitch and begins to attack people. In the single case we had to contain when I was at animal control, the only remedy was to shoot it, but our autopsy found nothing — no tumor or wound or viral infection like rabies. We did not think of hormones.
I’ve seen film of toddlers with rabies from early days in Chicago. They cry out and reach for nurses carrying milk to them, but when the nurses — wearing thick rubber gloves up to their elbows — come close, the toddlers strike out and scream at them, knocking the milk out of their hands. They probably didn’t live long enough to starve.
This is a very dark post but the worst has always been rare. Until now. We’ll get back to e.e. cummings’ heartfelt intimacy in another post. It really does exist.
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Note: I turned on the scare label at the beginning of this blog mostly to see what would happen. Nothing. Number of viewers were about the same. Russia, China, and Africa -- not deterred.
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