This is a column about insights. “Man’s love,” the poet Lord Byron wrote, “is of man’s life a part; it’s woman’s whole existence.” It sounded like a poetic insight, but in fact Byron was wrong on both counts. Plenty of men are fully defined by their relationships and plenty of women aren’t. What’s more, this was as true in Byron’s days as it is in ours.
Why, then, did it sound like an insight 200 years ago, and a silly generalization today?
Two reasons, I suppose. The smaller is that a silly generalization may express a statistical truth and Byron’s does. (A “statistical truth” is something that has no predictive value until it’s projected over hundreds of cases.) The bigger reason is that in Byron’s time the male ideal was to govern one’s emotions and the female ideal was to let emotions govern. Mistaking the ideal for the natural is a common human error.
My Victorian grandmother had a story about how she wasn’t at all scandalized to hear a gentleman make an off-colour remark, but still pretended to faint.
“To show everyone I was well-adjusted.” Grandmother was no dummy.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that different societies are set apart not so much by their nature or temper as by their role models. Some island societies in the Pacific region she studied were aggressive, while others were friendly, yet Professor Mead found their overall disposition similar. It was just that in war-like societies it was the rambunctious alpha-types who ranked high, while in peaceful tribes the ranking individuals were shy and introspective. Aggressive loudmouths were maladjusted.
If Mead’s observation was accurate, culture, vogue, personalities and other variables, some within our control, played as important a role in the way societies developed as our fundamental “nature.” Perhaps making friendliness fashionable was the answer.
“No wonder people are nasty in a world where nice guys finish last,” pundits were saying. “Let nice guys finish first and watch everybody trying to become Mr. Nice Guy.” After a show of force in the 1940s, America was smiling its way to dominance in the 1950s. It then went a step further in the next decade, when doing away with war-toys became a veritable craze.
I had tea with a Dutch couple during that phase in the 1960s. Both schoolteachers, with pre-school boys of their own, they lived in what I could only describe a pacifist bungalow. They weren’t the most entertaining people but were they ever nice! I tried staying awake while they held forth on the virtue of raising children who were never introduced to competitive games, let alone war toys.
“Violence?” The husband pointed to a discoloured spot by the wall. “That’s where the TV set used to be. Banished it.” The wall behind a mantle piece showed evidence of censorship as well. “It was too bad about the pictures. They were family. But they had to go. Uncle Jan is in uniform, and so is Cousin Mark. They fought the Japanese in Dutch Indonesia during the Second World War.”
“Honourable, surely,” I said.
“Oh, Uncle Jan fought the Indonesian Republicans, too, after the war,” he replied. “But it’s not that. It’s uniforms. Guns. War. It’s conditioning kids to be killers. Well, not mine.”
I excused myself. The washroom was in the basement. The toddlers were there, too. You guessed it. The brothers were enthusiastically playing war, pointing pieces of wood at one another and going: Ratatatatah! They were scoring bull’s eyes, too, as far as I could tell.
Would you have had the heart to tell the parents? I didn’t. My family disliked war but weren’t pacifist. “I could be, but for the carnage,” father always said. “Pacifists provoke predators.”
He thought it was a just a quip.
So I went to the library instead (remember, it was the 1960s) to re-read Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. Times change. When the book was published the controversial word in the title would have been “sex.” Today it would be “primitive.”
Would Lord Byron have liked the research Mead conducted among the various tribes of Papua New Guinea? Well, some of it would have confirmed his contention that ““Man’s love is of man’s life a part;” but not that “it’s woman whole existence.” Collecting edibles was more like it.
My own research of primitive people was restricted to fellow students in the first few grades of the old Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest. The famous school that launched pioneers of computer science (John von Neumann) and nuclear technology (Edward Teller) taught me that complete savagery can comfortably coexist with academic excellence. I was a large boy, actually looking for trouble, so few gave me a hard time. They chased small kids trying to avoid it.
“Why are you picking on the new kid?” I asked a bully once. I was spoiling for a fight. “Pick someone your own size, like me.”
“Well, you don’t bug me,” the bully said. “The little runt does. He doesn’t belong in the schoolyard. He’s too little. Just being there, he insults me.”
The year happened to be 1948. Israel came into the schoolyard. I often thought of this conversation.