Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (44 page)

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Other values come from unique events, or epiphanies, sudden and clear visions of truth. Watching a hero in action, understanding a previously hidden pattern, or grasping a vision of the future can have the quality of an epiphany. A businessman named Cabell Brand discovered the War on Poverty while watching a segment of the
Today
show, and immediately he began to work toward employment and rights for the poor.
²⁴Many high-testosterone people begin as delinquents and end up as responsible adults. Sometimes they "see the light" and make changes in the way they live. Terry Banks saw the light when she was at the penitentiary. After her release, she got her GED, went to college, worked hard, and made the dean's list. She quit getting into fights unless she had to help a friend.

Still other values come from role models. Many heroic people have had important figures in their backgrounds who served as models for them. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired John Lewis, as Mohandas Gandhi had inspired King. Lewis followed the examples of King and Gandhi, protesting injustice with nonviolent passive resistance. He went to jail frequently and endured many beatings in and out of jail. Lewis is a heroic altruist with a highly developed moral conscience and many traits, including fearlessness, intensity of focus, and an affinity for action, that make it all but certain that when he was a young man he would have had a higher-than-average level of testosterone.

On March 7, 1965, "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama, Lewis, standing in for King, who had to cancel at the last minute, was leading six hundred people in a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge when an army of state troopers, local policemen, and members of the sheriff's posse attacked. A burly trooper clubbed Lewis, knocking him down with one blow and knocking him out with another. When Lewis woke up, he was lying on the bridge choking on tear gas fumes. Feeling "strangely calm" despite his pain, he managed to get up and walk to Brown's Chapel Church, where volunteer doctors were tending the wounded. Lewis postponed getting treatment for his injuries. "I wanted to do what I could to help with all this chaos. I was so much in the moment. . . . " He helped calm the crowd and organize a mass meeting, he gave a speech, and then he saw the doctors. They sent him to the Good Samaritan Hospital to be treated for a fractured skull and a severe concussion. Three days later, the doctors told him he

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needed to see some specialists in Boston for further treatment. He ignored the advice and went back to work.

The
New York Times
reported Lewis's speech in which he asked why President Lyndon Johnson could send troops to Vietnam but not to Selma, Alabama. That report and live television coverage of Bloody Sunday marked a turning point for the Alabama civil rights movement. The next day, the Justice Department decided to send FBI agents to find out if law-enforcement agencies had used "unnecessary force" in Selma.
²⁵

Lewis lived to have a successful political career, and now he jokes about having been in jail more times than anyone else in the United States House of Representatives. His wiry physique has left him, along with most of his hair, but his passionate commitment to justice and his focus on the task at hand remain. Before he picked King as a model for a life of heroic altruism, Lewis's basic character was set. Strong, loving parents reared him and nurtured the traits that enabled him to respond to King's message. Like most good people, Lewis developed a moral conscience early. He absorbed his core values day-by-day from the people he loved and who loved him.

Conscience and values can exist independently of testosterone. When they are present in a high-testosterone person, however, they provide direction and guidance to the focus, energy, and fearlessness of testosterone. To understand heroic altruism, we need to know how values, motives, and testosterone work together.

The core values people grow up with, including their moral conscience, point them toward helping or not helping. Values can promote thoughtful and deliberate altruism. Testosterone promotes spontaneity and impulsiveness, with a focus that disregards danger. Altruistic values and testosterone together produce an impressive mix of direction and drive. Testosterone can help a person who wants to do the right thing do it, especially when the right thing is difficult or dangerous. Core values have much to do with whether a high-testosterone individual will be a hero, a criminal, or both.

Positive Reinforcement

Based on his study of antisocial personalities, David Lykken has some ideas about how parents can be effective in instilling prosocial core val-

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ues in fearless children. He thinks "the hero and the psychopath are twigs on the same genetic branch." He says:

My theory of primary psychopathy . . . is that (at least some) primary psychopaths were born at the low end of the normal distribution of genetic fearfulness. Because most parents, teachers, and other socializing agents rely heavily on punishment in socializing kids, and because a relatively fearless youngster does not react well to punishment, many such kids do not develop an effective conscience, do not develop normal empathy, altruism, and responsibility. But they do well out on the street where their relative fearlessness makes them admired, a leader of the gang, and so on.

A more fortunate child may have a skillful parent or parent surrogate who relies on positive reinforcement, who develops a warm, rewarding relationship with the child that the child values, and who manages to establish in the child a socialized self-concept'you are such a good boy, helpful, courageous, truthful, strong, smart,' and so onand who guides the child into activities where his relative fearlessness is an advantage but which are licit, and admirable, such as sports, acting, competitions, and so on. Even a relatively fearless child will work to avoid losing things that he values, such as that admirable self-concept, that warm relationship, the approval of people he admires. And such a youngster can grow up to be the kind of person one would want to have around when danger threatens, a cop, a soldier, a football hero, an explorer, an astronaut, etc.
²⁶

All children need loving guidance, and it is hard to overstate this need, especially when it comes to high-testosterone children, who have a greater-than-usual potential for heroism or delinquency. Although Lykken hasn't studied testosterone, research shows that bold and fearless children are likely to be high in testosterone.
²⁷That makes his advice about child rearing especially important to parents with high-testosterone boys and girls.

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9
The Taming of Testosterone

Ares at Olympus

Ares was the Greek god of war. He could as well have been the god of testosterone. He lived on Mount Olympus with the other gods. He gave men the ferocity they needed to slay dragons, kill lions, father children, fight wars, and lay waste to the windy plains of Troy. Times have changed since Ares was young. Mount Olympus has been developed, its palaces converted to condos, its forests cut, its animals caged, its gods neglected. The world is more sophisticated, and the old warriors are hard to find. The Maasai have switched from lion hunting to the tourist trade. The Pequot Indians make money in their gambling casinos in Connecticut. Village gossip spreads through computer networks on the World Wide Web. People make their living from each other rather than from nature. Ares has traveled widely, but now he is back at Olympus. He lives among junked cars in the clear-cut stubble of the mountain forest, buying liquor from an encroaching mall, harassing goddesses wherever he finds them. He still enjoys life. He is a joker, and he sends random doses of high testosterone to middle-class children, to make life challenging for their parents and teachers.

Ancient and Modern Times

Ares and the other gods did not always live at Olympus. The Greeks believed that before the gods there were four great beings: earth, space, love, and the abyss, and before that there was nothing. Anthropologists

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believe that about four million years ago, the apelike ancestors of human beings began to stand and walk upright. A hundred thousand years ago, humanlike beings were on the scene. Forty to sixty thousand years ago, the beginnings of modern speech appeared. Skeletal remains from that time indicate that the throat and base of the skull were developing in a way that would produce the vocal sounds we use today.
¹No other creature, including our cousin Neanderthal, developed this vocal ability, which is probably one reason Neanderthal is extinct. Our voices made language possible, and language supported the growth of intelligence, philosophy, science, and modern civilization. Human beings emerged along with Ares and the other gods, companions in a forty-thousand-year journey to modern times.

As human beings found their voice and expanded their knowledge and intelligence, two important things happened: the population grew, and culture became more varied. Both of these affected the impact of testosterone.

World population grew slowly at first, but at an increasing rate. Forty thousand years ago, there were fewer than a million people on earth, living in groups of twenty-five to thirty people each.
²Today there are more than six billion people, more than have lived in all of human history put together. When the population gets large, effects add up. People live in nations, cities, and other large groups. If one or two people out of a hundred in caveman times were unruly, violent, oversexed, suffering from ''testosterone poisoning," or otherwise hard to control, they could not cause much trouble. The others in the group could handle them. But when one or two out of a hundred becomes one or two thousand out of a hundred thousand in a city, or one or two million out of a hundred million in a nation, the trouble starts. With this much testosterone, things operate on a new scale. People who are high in testosterone come together to join the same clubs, enter the same occupations, listen to the same radio talk shows, and support the same political candidates. They influence each other. Their special interests affect the overall tone of society. They begin to shape foreign and domestic policy.

This can cause problems. More men means more men who are high in testosterone. But there is another factor: culture modifies the effects of testosterone. Many cultures have developed in various parts of

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