ORIGIN OF SHYNESS III
Suppose a new highway penetrated into one of the world's last regions
of full wilderness and on it one day a naked human child was found
wandering alone. Suppose the child was found to be mute and acutely
shy. And suppose the expedition sent to locate the parents found a
small hunter-gather band who communicated with each other without
words, using only and hand signals and limited vocal sounds.
Wouldn't scientists conclude that these people were remnants from
humanity's long lost past, from the time before complex spoken
language began? And if they did, wouldn't the scientific community
rush to study them and get their territory protected? Despite our poor
record in the past, you would hope we would do it right this time and
protect this remnant of early stone-age man.
Yet when we find people among us who are like that, who are shy and
have difficulty talking, lack social skills and sometimes appear to lack
even a social instinct, we say they have disorders that must be cured.
We've been doing this for a long time, but we haven't found any cures,
or even discovered the causes for conditions like autism, social phobia,
Asperger's syndrome, selective mutism or simple introversion. Still,
without knowing why these conditions exist, we go on funding efforts
to eliminate them, or at least eliminate their effects.
Throughout modern western culture shy children are exhorted not to
be shy. Shyness is seen as a weakness incompatible with our
aggressive society. But shy people remain stubbornly difficult to
change.
Yes, I'll say it again - I think shyness has an ancient origin.
Shyness and a solitary disposition are common throughout nature.
Tigers, leopards, deer, moose, bears, foxes, badgers and skunks, mink
and weasels, cougars, gibbons and orangutans, are all shy and solitary.
Though we attach no value to shyness, after 100 million years of
mammalian evolution, twenty million years of primate evolution, and
seven million years of hominid evolution, the shy instinct remains
common even in us. According to psychologists, one quarter of the
world's human population – 1.7 billion people – are introverts.
Temple Grandin, the autistic animal behavior scientist, has suggested
that autism is the original mind-set of mammals, that the social mind is
something that developed afterward. For example, the only social cat,
the African lion, is also the most recently evolved cat, only a few
hundred thousands of years old (like Homo Sapiens). The shy solitary
cats like the leopard, the tiger and the cougar are much older.
I don't deny that a human child can become shy or timid through
physical and mental abuse, but the evidence is clear that most shyness
is genetic. Why is civilization so resistant to the idea that within the
current 6.8 billion mass of humanity there should be people from the
past who lack complex social instincts? Why is there such an aversion
to accepting shyness as natural?
Copyright - Alan Conrad
2009
Copyright - Alan Conrad
2009