Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The owner of the field captured the wild-eyed boy and took him home. The boy, soon to be named Victor, prowled restlessly on all fours. He refused to wear clothes. He defecated in public and rejected all food except acorns and potatoes. His communication was restricted to grunts, howls, and cackles. He was unresponsive to the human voice and language but would turn quickly at the sounds of nuts being cracked. He never smiled, cried, touched, or met the gaze of other humans.

Eventually, Jean Itard, a twenty-six-year-old doctor from the Paris Deaf-Mute Institute, took Victor—the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”—into his custody, and devoted five years to teaching Victor language and the intricacies of human ways. There were telling successes: Victor did learn to wear clothes, sleep in beds, eat at a table, and take baths. Most notably, he came to feel affection for Jean Itard.

There were telling failures. In spite of the intensive instruction, Victor only learned a few words. He never learned to get along with others (at a dinner party at a wealthy socialite’s home, designed to show off his progress, he wolfed down his food, stuffed desserts into his pockets, stripped to his underwear, and leaped through the trees like a monkey). Victor resembled the other thirty-five documented cases of feral children: They do not develop language, morals, or manners; they remain largely unresponsive to humans; they fail to fold into cooperative relations with other people; they show no sexual interest; and they lack self-awareness. The first great love is what Victor never felt, that between parent or caretaker and child. This love enables what it means to be human; it turns on our tendency toward jen.

Philosophers (to some extent), poets (to a greater extent), and novelists (to an even greater extent) have long recognized that the love between parent and child is the foundation of human mind, character, and culture. It would take a maverick intellectual, John Bowlby, integrating the latest in evolutionist thinking and the musings of Freud, to spur the scientific study of parent-child love. Given the profound vulnerability of human offspring, Bowlby theorized, evolution has designed an “attachment system”: biologically based patterns of behavior and feeling that bind caretaker and vulnerable infant to one another, in devoted, skin-to-skin, voice-to-voice, eye-to-eye contact. When Bowlby’s collaborator Mary Ainsworth did early observational research in Uganda on the attachment behaviors of young infants there, she documented familial universals: only in the presence of their mothers, Ugandan infants showed specific kinds of crying, smiling, and endearing vocalizations, clapping and lifting the arms when the mother approached, burying the face in the mother’s lap, hugging, kissing, and clinging to the mother, and distress vocalizations when the mother moved away. Just as reliable are the attachment behaviors of caretakers: skin-to-skin, chest-to-chest contact, cradling, massaging touch, playful coos and sighs, eye contact, “motherese,” soft-toned songs at night, joint smiling and antiphonal laughter.

Mammals just aren’t mammals when deprived of the love between caretaker and offspring. In Harry Harlow’s well-known research, rhesus monkeys raised in isolation, deprived of contact with parents (and peers), grew up to be the wild boys of Aveyron of their group: profoundly fearful, inept in forming relationships with peers, as likely to attack potential sexual partners as court them; attempting to copulate with same-sex peers. Elephants in some areas of Africa develop without their loving parents, who have been slaughtered for the ivory in their tusks. These adolescent elephants show pathological forms of aggression, looking like the worst of our sociopaths, killing rhinoceroses for sport, for example.