White Bluffs Spokesman

Why We Behave
Like Human Beings
By GEORGE DORSEY, Ph. D., LL. D.

To Fear

A NURSE bathes a child each day. At first tickling its feet or pinching its nose. A habit grows up, functioning like an instinct on reflex arcs. The mere sight of the nurse calls out a gurgle or a rage. If the nurse wears a blue dress habitually, the blue dress is enough. If the baby knows only one blue dress and that blue dress always means tickle or pinch, any blue dress becomes enough for gurgle or a fit.

We come to hate everything associated with our early hates; afraid of everything associated with early fears. The random fears and rages come to be attached to new objects not contemplated in the original scheme of kill-or-cure emotional reinforcement. They become specific. The baby is not naturally afraid of lightning; it is afraid of a sudden crash.

Our emotions are conditioned in the same nursery in which our growing body learns its first steps. As the movements of motor mechanism become habits and so function on smooth-running reflex arcs, the emotions themselves become organized: the live-or-die glands and the autonomic nerves learn special modes of behavior. They take on habits, learn new responses, acquire new friends, new foes, new fears. The mouth waters under certain conditions. Fear is called out under certain conditions. Certain persons, things, situations, call out tantrums, cries, rages; others are sources of attachment, loves.

Practice makes perfect—hates and fears as well as tennis players and card sharps.

The function of emotion is quick action and a long memory. If I am the victim of a $100 counterfeit bill to oblige a stranger who needs change, I am not likely to oblige the next stranger requiring change. I might even "take it out on him." We do such things. The horse buyer knows that a horse which has had the mange does not forget it: It is tied in. He strokes the flank of a prospective purchase. Lip quivers: that horse had the mange.

Love, fear, and hate start out together; they grow up together. Meanwhile, the reflex which enables the new born to support its body by its hands soon disappears; the human mother does not hang her baby on a limb to dry, nor does the infant have to cling to her while she climbs a tree. The primitive hate and fear types of behavior would also disappear if they were not at once set to work.

The adjusting mechanism learns only too blindly. Until we ourselves are blind. Having eyes, we see not what there is but what we think we see. We see with a body that by nature has a huge capacity to hate that which threatens us, to fear that which endangers us, to love that which protects and feeds and tickles us. Our ancestors had to have a fear-response to the new, the unexpected, the sudden, and the strange.

There is no reason why we should jump, turn pale, sweat, gasp for breath, close our eyes and open our mouths, and feel creepy every time we hear thunder or backfire, or are left alone in the dark, or confront a novel and strange idea. Nor should the same emotion that makes us fear the novel and the strange impel us to hate reason—even though reason interfere with our routine behavior, including attitudes, desires, ideals, ambitions, and loves. We do not get jealous of reason or want to fight it; but we do get so enraged at a book that we throw it in the fire, so mad at an opinion that we would like to crucify the man who expresses it.

The haunting fear in Dickens' day seems to have been poverty; the supreme dread, the almshouse. What is our haunting fear, our supreme dread? Have we progressed very far?

With "pep" we can make decisions, use our heads; but when the visceral nerves take charge, decisions are made for us—we are as human as iron filings around a magnet or famished hogs around a swill barrel. A man in a "towering rage" is more physically fit for murder than one in cold blood—that is what a towering rage is for, prepare the body for action with adrenin. Hate is biologically useful. Do we save it up for the hateful occasions and get the work out of it it can do, or squander it right and left?

Our bottled emotions find curious outlets: giggles, tears, laughter, shame, remorse, rage, grief, love, fear, as the case may be; and take us to fights, dances, games, theater, speculation, futile argument, Monte Carlo, or the count of Monte Cristo; or they may end in hysteria, phobias, manias.

The big question for each one of us individually is whether our acquired repertoire of specific loves, fears, and hates will suffice to keep us on good terms with ourselves and at peace with the world. Many a man loses his job because his viscera have never been educated nor his emotions trained. Note, too, that under stress of strong rage or fear, activity in the digestive system closes down, predisposing to intestinal disorders including bacterial toxins and consequently to other far-reaching organic changes. Love on the contrary hastens food digestion and heightens metabolism. Love is far more tonic than rage or fear.