I’ve spoken of this issue before but we see a fresh study, Children’s Personalities Linked to Their Chemical Response to Stress, that indicates:
Is your kid a “dove” — cautious and submissive when confronting new environments, or perhaps you have a “hawk” — bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings?
These basic temperamental patterns are linked to opposite hormonal responses to stress — differences that may provide children with advantages for navigating threatening environments, researchers report in a study published online July 8, 2011, in Development and Psychopathology.
This is to say that cautious human beings may survive better, even prosper better, in some circumstances while bolder and more assertive human beings may do better in other circumstances. It really is little different than saying that some human beings are better at developing and using their brains and some at developing and using their biceps and some can develop and use their ears and fingers so well as to become accomplished pianists. There are some who have more than one major talent and I’ve known some who can operate in more than one hormonal or emotional realm — cautious until they make a decision and then fearlessly focused on action from that point.
I’m not saying this research and analysis is trivial or useless, only noting they’re researching us and, in this case, confirming St. Paul’s observation that we have our own particular natures, some to preach and some to lead communities and some to heal and so forth. Human beings aren’t uniform products and there is every reason to believe our race wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors had been such.
I’ll return to the article:
The researchers also documented the dove or hawk tendencies of the toddlers in a variety of unfamiliar situations. Children who showed dovish tendencies were vigilant and submissive in the face of novelty. The toddlers clung to their mothers, cried, or froze when encountering new surroundings. Hawks used bold, aggressive, and dominating strategies for coping with challenge. They fearlessly explored unknown objects and new environments.
What is that sound in that cave: a treasure of water in a desert region or an irritable predator about to emerge?
This article actually deals with the production of cortisol in the two populations of children when both are exposed to the stress of violent parental arguments at home. The conclusion was stated by co-author of the study, Melissa Sturge-Apple, as “When it comes to healthy psychological behavior, one size does not fit all.”
We’re different from each other. We are differently sized but we also have different mixtures of various human traits. We move in different ways and move towards different goals or desiderata of various sorts. We form a seemingly chaotic body of humanity, a flock composed of goats and even bison and elks and not just sheep.
What a mess. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, our own tendencies to various vices and virtues — which are often different developments in different contexts of the same human attributes.
It’s not that we’re individuals milling about. Nor does the traditional, Pauline, idea cover this entire complex mess. We can be said to be members of the Body of Christ, body of humanity if you prefer, but that’s only a hint of a greater richness which I hope to be starting to comment upon in the near future. But I’ll go a little further in my hints than St. Paul did.
As St. Paul told us: We’re members of bodies, human communities, including the ultimate community which is the Body of Christ. We aren’t just individuals milling around and forming accidental attachments. In the context of this article, we can imagine these toddlers, perhaps ten years down the road, having self-organized groupings in which the doves and hawks play different roles. They have different relationships with each other, with parents, with friends outside the original group, with community leaders, with ministers or other religious leaders. Those relationships involve a complex set of forms, some being repulsions and others being attractions. Some of those relationships might have the form of quark attractions, weak and non-disruptive near by but growing so strong as the entities draw apart that only destruction of the system or one or more entities can break the relationships. (Technically, in this last case, it would have to be an environment heated to an extreme state, perhaps by a brutal war or social revolution. In that case, a lot of relationships would be disrupted and a lot of entities destroyed.)
I have a vague vision of a human race as complex entities, each a whole unto its self, but each connected to other human beings by these relationships of a more complex sort than can be verbalized in traditional vocabularies. This opens up possibilities of an historically-aware development of a rich and insightful language as fully qualitative as the languages of traditional literature and philosophy and psychology. In the past, our ancestors — not so aware historically as are we — couldn’t work so deliberately in fields of science or business or literature or music or technological innovation. Concepts entered our efforts of self-understanding in a slow way, over generations.
There are problems with this goal I’m setting.
First, we modern human beings are in a period of decay only a short few centuries after developing an intense historical awareness on the part of a good percentage of the population of the West. Serious multi-volume biographies, and one-volume abridgments of those same serious books, were read by well-educated insurance brokers and high school teachers and clergymen and — at least in my mother’s family — machinists. It’s likely not true that many modern men and women have enough historical awareness to participate in the process I’m trying to initiate.
Second, I’m proposing a way of enrichening our understanding of the world and of our own selves which requires a sophisticated understanding of modern knowledge of our physical universe including knowledge of life on earth. That understanding is rare and not likely to increase any time soon as we probably will shortly enter a period of economic and political instability — and maybe serious hardships.
Third, the actual movement towards a newer understanding of our world, of created being in all realms, will be powered by imagination, or it won’t happen at all, at least not in a viable or attractive form. The modern imagination seems to be in worse shape than the modern mind.
And so it is that I’ll end with an emphasis of one speculation I’m raising and also with a strong warning.
As for the speculation: I’ll point out that the major claim I’m making here is that we who write or speak or think about social and moral and political issues should start looking at the relationships between human beings with a goal of enrichening our words and thoughts by opening our eyes to the possibility of various sorts of relationships, or equivalently — forces. Some of those forces are repulsive between certain types of human beings, at least under some circumstances. For example, children who are doves might avoid relationships with hawks under peaceful circumstances but might seek those relationships in a violent world where our own warlords can help protect us against Viking and Mongolian invaders. Other forces might be undetectable nearby but might be strongly attractive if distance is increased, as is true of quarks inside of neutrons and protons. One case where they might be true is families where relationships between siblings might be casual under most circumstances but might be very strong if a totalitarian government tries to pull their family apart. More of that sort of analysis later, though maybe not for months.
As for the warning: I’m heading down a path of enrichening our ways of thinking and talking about a complex world which is home to complex human creatures with constrained but significant moral freedom. I’m not trying to reduce human beings to creatures who can be studied and potentially controlled by the methods of the modern positive sciences. I’m trying to abstract from the modern knowledge about physical forces and to use those more abstract bodies of knowledge to develop richer understandings of human created being with beings and other concrete entities which share this realm of created being with neutrons and stars and interstellar magnetic fields.
Any true and meaningful discussion of human beings has to take the overall form of moral narratives, biographies and “true fictions” and histories at various scales of human life and over various realms of human life. Yet, we must remember those narratives are far truer and more meaningful if we can speak more accurately of the creatures which are the moral actors in those narratives, if we can speak more accurately of the ways in which they relate, if we can speak more accurately of the ways in which they can move along both the physical and the abstract paths they choose to travel or are forced to travel.