A Natural History of Love (48 page)

This tale, which clearly touched a chord in the hearts and spleens of many, was made into not one but two popular movies. Even crimes that break moral laws, insult the legal system, and send shivers down the erect spine of bourgeois society, seem less craven when explained by love. Like truth, love is a rock-solid defense. Subconsciously, we picture love as a powerful geyser which builds up inside a person and has to vent its fury somewhere, be it for good or evil. We also realize that lovers need to prove their love, graphically, absolutely, with gestures that sometimes get out of hand and can become a soul-consuming end in themselves. We’re fascinated by passionate extremes and don’t always think they’re deplorable. It’s exciting to watch someone explore the body in a new way, to challenge old styles and ideas, and reinvent love. Breaking taboos, or just watching others break them, can be a positive, ennobling thrill. After all, every great work of art is a crime of passion.

ALTRUISM

One day a few years ago, on the isle of Jersey, a young couple took their infant son to the zoo. The boy seemed especially enchanted by the large, brawny gorillas, so his parents lifted him onto the wall of the enclosure for a better look. To their horror, the boy suddenly slipped over the side and fell down into the midst of the animals. A huge silverback—the dominant male—ran over to the baby and sat between him and the rest of the gorillas, and there he stayed, protecting the baby, until a keeper could be called.

Why did the senior gorilla protect the human child? Was it an act of altruism? Why do people sometimes risk their own lives to save the lives of strangers? Of all the varieties of love, altruism is perhaps the hardest to understand. It seems contrary to the self-interest that drives us all. Our first instinct is to stay alive, and our second to make sure our kin survive. Why help hungry and homeless strangers? Why save other species? Why sacrifice one’s life for one’s comrades in wartime? Altruism impresses us. We admire the trait. We teach our children that it is a good and noble feeling. But we’re puzzled by it all the same. It just doesn’t seem to make sense in the brutal economy of life. We keep thinking there must be some secret motive, some hidden gain. A behaviorist would argue that the gorilla didn’t save the baby because it felt anything like compassion. As top male, the gorilla acted automatically. It was hard-wired to protect young primates, and when it saw one in danger—even a weird-looking, hairless one—it soberly plunked itself down as a living shield.

Some animals appear to be altruistic because we don’t fully understand their motives. They’re actually involved in a subtle form of commerce, an exchange of services or favors, called by scientists “reciprocal altruism.” On the coast of Patagonia, some years ago, I watched mother and baby right whales pausing in a nursery bay on their way to the rich feeding grounds of Antarctica. Males knew they’d find females there, and frequently came into the bay to mate. Working together, a group of three or four males would trap and rape a female. The female would try to avoid mating by rolling onto her back with her vulva in the air, though of course this meant that her blowhole was underwater and she couldn’t breathe. The males would surround her—one on either side and one underneath—so that when she rolled over to breathe one of them would have access to her vulva. It took several males to make sure that even one male could mate, because the female would bolt if she wasn’t trapped. Why did the males cooperate? Probably for two reasons: first, it may be that males join forces with related males, so that the family’s genes will survive, regardless of which male gets to sire the offspring. Second, because it encourages the exchange of favors—one day Fred makes sure Barney gets to mate; the next day Barney makes sure Fred does. When we buy a round-trip ticket, we have the full journey in mind, the outbound and the return. Reciprocal altruism is a round-trip ticket, the second half of which is momentarily hidden.

What of humans? We are virtuosos of favor-swapping, we love the old quid pro quo, the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours, the one-hand-washes-the-other. In smug moments, we label this a virtue—”cooperation”—which we praise as a holy act of goodness, trust, and decency. Psychologists don’t like us to feel smug for very long about it. They usually explain it either as hedonism (we perform altruistic acts because they make us feel good, and it’s the pleasure we crave) or an attempt by the ego-damaged to raise their sense of self-worth. The minute one imagines oneself in the victim’s predicament, and moves to save him, it becomes an act of self-love.

That may be true. But if indeed we are cooperative by nature, it’s an ancient skill, the genes for which got passed along because they gave the more cooperative among us a better chance to survive. The urge to help people in distress is partially learned—some families and cultures prize it more than others—but it’s also deeply rooted in biology. As children grow, they automatically discover compassion. Around the age of two, they start to feel sympathy when they see someone in trouble, and they try to help. Add to this cooperative spirit a preference for the known over the unknown—people prefer what’s familiar, are frightened of what’s new—and you can see how warfare between so-called enemies might evolve as a sort of evolutionary twitch. Cross-cultural studies show that people prefer their family first; in-laws second; neighbors third; also people who remind them of family members, in-laws, or neighbors. Alien faces scare them, and they can be convinced by despots to regard them as subhuman.

What about self-sacrificing altruism? This can be seen throughout the animal kingdom, especially among insects. Insects are social, too, so it’s tempting to imagine ourselves in their terms. But insects differ from us in one important way: they are closely related to each other, sharing the same gene pool, which they ruthlessly protect. It’s not only in their best interest to work for the common good, they might as well give their all for it. Humans speak lovingly of extended families, but to an ant the whole society is close kin, and it will die rather than allow its genetic line to dry up. Humans, on the other hand, are related in very small, nuclear families which are in glaring competition with one another. Unlike the ants, we must abolish our self-interest to work together, and that’s asking a great deal. It makes altruism all the more remarkable.

Although this book is mainly concerned with romantic love, there are other varieties—parental, altruistic, religious, patriotic, and so on—which are equally intense and powerful expressions of our hunger to love and be loved. Over the years, I’ve been privy to many acts of kindness, some openly heroic, others simply generous-hearted. The two dramas that follow linger in my memory as examples of deeply felt altruistic love.

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN: INTERPLAST

San Pedro Sula sits in the northwest corner of Honduras, between the glyph-covered Mayan stairway at Copan and the coral atolls of the coast. In September, beneath a giant Coca-Cola sign floating like a patron saint on a near hill, the downtown bustles with people keen to run their errands before the hot sticky hours of afternoon cascade into thick humid nights. On a tree-shaded street in the center of town stands San Pedro Sula’s public hospital, a sprawling maze of one-story buildings, porticoes, and courtyards. Its corrugated roofs have grown rusty over the years, and the peeling walls are painted pink and maroon, with a ribbon of green, yellow, and red (the national colors) dancing at eye level. Outdoor benches, overflowing with patients and their families, sit on a checkerboard of yellow and green tiles. People fill the wards, crowd the walkways, and spill into the courtyards. Many of life’s joys and afflictions are on parade: a woman with a machete wound just delivered by a jealous lover slowly enters the eye clinic; a badly burned man, cocooned in gauze, hobbles out of the men’s ward to get some fresh air; a man in a straw hat, holding the elbow of a pregnant woman, guides her toward a sign that says
FARMACIA
; a man and a woman exchange rapid, staccato accusations, while their hands make small slashes in the air; a young mother sits in a corner, nursing a baby, in her eyes the narcotic of her love; twin boys, each with a cleft mouth, race toy trucks along the cement. Here and there a policeman sits on a bench, rifle at his side, guarding a prisoner in a ward. Two parents and a little boy picnic under a cashew tree, its thick branches heavy with curved green nuts. A mango tree offers shade to a Honduran nurse, a pretty curly haired woman in her twenties, who methodically peels an orange until the rind looks like a projection of the world. Though she is shaded and sitting, sweat beads on her face. In Honduras, the sun’s opus grants a lavish array of fruits—mangoes, bananas, papayas, oranges, pineapples, and some of the sweetest grapefruits on earth. But, even sitting still, one is covered in a sticky, humid film. When you move, sweat saturates your clothes. Nonetheless, people often wear long sleeves and trousers; dengue fever, endemic in Honduras, is carried by mosquitoes, and there is no cure for it.

Across the courtyard, in the clinic waiting room, a hundred people sit back-to-back on long train-station benches. All are waiting to see the doctors of Interplast, an organization based in Palo Alto, California, which for the past twenty years has been sending out volunteers to provide reconstructive surgery to needy children in the third world. Donald Laub got the idea for Interplast in 1965, when, as chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University Medical Center, he repaired the cleft lip and palate of a fourteen-year-old boy from Central America. The experience moved him profoundly, and he volunteered more and more time for such operations, finally enlisting the help of colleagues. In 1969, he founded Interplast, to repair children riddled by birth defects, but also to train host-country doctors in the latest techniques, and help them set up burn units. Among the handful of reconstructive groups of this sort, Interplast is one of the largest and best run. It has already changed the lives of 18,000 children with a wide range of deformities. In 1990 alone, Interplast sent medical teams on twenty trips, to Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Nepal, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Western Samoa, and Jamaica. Its surgeons operated on 1,313 patients, provided 15,000 free teaching hours, and donated $3,209,840 worth of surgeries. Five hundred dollars covers the cost of one child’s operation, and as little as $15,000 will finance an entire trip. Most of Interplast’s money comes from individual donors. Despite the generosity of corporations, which provide anesthesia, antibiotics, and other necessities, on occasion the teams have had to cut short their trips and turn children away because they ran out of an essential supply like sutures.