Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (42 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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Page 180
through tricky air currents, made several passes before putting Moseley in position for a perfect landing on the counterbalance. When he reached the man he'd come to save, Moseley told him, "Your boss sent me to get you. He said you can go home early today."
5
Matt Moseley's testosterone level is higher than average, but not extremely high. He is a good-looking, nice guy with lots of down-home wit and charm. Carmen Burns interviewed him on
Peachtree Morning
, a local television show, after the rescue and told him that a lot of young women wanted to know if he was available. He said he had to say he had a steady girlfriend, because if he didn't, his girlfriend would see to it that he became available immediately. Moseley is the kind of all-American hero who makes everybody feel wonderful.
Another kind of hero, one that is familiar to moviegoers, is more complicated, a mixture of good and bad. A reoccurring theme in Hollywood movies, including
The Dirty Dozen
and
The Assassin,
is the criminal turned hero. The premise of these movies is that under the right circumstances criminal audacity and derring-do can be transformed into selfless bravery and heroism.
Mitchell Murray, a twenty-year-old Georgia man, is a real-life example of a criminal turned hero. On April 29, 1999, Murray, a convicted car thief who was trained as a volunteer firefighter while in prison, was out on parole. He was staying with his grandmother, and was outside at two in the morning having a cigarette because she doesn't allow smoking in her house. That's when he heard shouting and saw his neighbor, clothes in flames, fleeing from his house. He was calling for someone to help his family trapped inside, and Murray rushed to help. When burglar bars kept him from getting into the burning house, he ran back home to wake his eighteen-year-old brother, and together the brothers found a way inside.
At the back of the house above a stone wall there was a boarded-up window that had no burglar bars. The brothers broke through it, and Murray climbed into a smoke-filled bedroom. He was able to get four members of the family, the mother and three daughters, out through the window to his brother, who lowered them to the ground. Murray came close to saving another sister, but an explosion blew the girl from his arms and knocked him to the floor. Before he could find her again, policemen pulled him from the fire and forcibly restrained him from going back into the house.
6
 
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Murray was modest about the rescue when he talked to reporters and to Noel Fannin. He was sad about not having been able to save the fourth sister and said he'd just done what God and circumstance put him in the right place to do, the same thing he thought anyone would have done. He never decided to go into the house. He did what he had to do without thinking about it. He heard the girls screaming and just went in. Murray agreed to give Fannin a saliva sample for her research project, and as she expected, his testosterone level was high.
Murray, who'd been having trouble finding regular work when he was on parole, spent the last few dollars he had on a doll he gave to one of the little girls he'd rescued from the fire.
7
After that he told Fannin he'd probably be back in jail within a year, then he disappeared and his parole was revoked. As he predicted, he was soon back in jail.
Rebecca Strong has no criminal record, but she is like Mitchell Murray in several ways: she is high in testosterone, she does what needs to be done without hesitating, and she has a soft spot for children. Rebecca was one of the student researchers on the movie crew project described in Chapter 6. Now she works with abused children and is committed to doing as much as she can to help them. Rebecca doesn't look tough, but she is. She is outgoing and bold, sometimes to the point of daring. Considering her interests, her testosterone level, and her personality, it is not surprising that she has put herself in potentially risky situations on more than one occasion to prevent children from being hurt. When she goes to the aid of children, she does it without making a conscious choice.
In 1994, Rebecca was a student, and she was recovering from a sledding accident that had broken her neck. She was walking through Central City Park in Atlanta during her lunch break. The park was crowded, and she heard someone say, "Did you see that man dragging that baby?" Rebecca looked around and saw a man, about six feet five inches tall and muscular, pulling a baby boy along by one hand. The baby, not much over a year old, could not walk fast enough to keep up with his long-legged father, and was alternately off the ground or dragging, whimpering with pain and distress. Immediately Rebecca moved toward the man and the baby, aware as she did so that she was putting herself into a precarious situation, especially so because her doctor had just removed the halo brace she had been wearing to protect her injured neck.
She caught up with the man, and walking along beside him she said,
 
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"Excuse me, sir, but did you know that holding your baby that way could injure his shoulder?" The man answered Rebecca in obscene and abusive language, but she continued talking as calmly and reasonably as she could. She told him, "Lifting him by one arm could dislocate his shoulder now or cause him to have arthritis later on."
Rebecca knew the man was on the edge of violence, and that if he hit her, her neck could pop, leaving her dead or paralyzed. She backed away, but just a little bit. Her knees were shaking so much she was afraid they would collapse underneath her, but she didn't give up. She said, "It would really be better if you picked up your baby."
The man continued cursing her, but then he picked up his baby and walked away.
Rebecca most often goes to the rescue when children are in trouble, but she also helps adults. Once she pulled a severely injured truck driver out of his wrecked cab. A man who was rubbernecking at a safe distance refused to help. He told Rebecca he saw a stream of something blowing out the back of the cab, and he was afraid it might be gas and it might explode. After Rebecca pulled the truck driver to safety, she sat with him for forty-five minutes until an ambulance came and then visited him several times in the hospital.
Varieties of Heroic Altruism
People like Wiest, Moseley, Murray, and Strong are just plain tough. Heroic altruism is risky; it involves power, force and gumption. Heroic altruism is a special event, a spectacular response to a crisis or an emergency, and it testifies to the fact that high-testosterone people can make important contributions to the modern world.
Although heroes share a willingness to step forward, take a chance, and act, not all heroes are the same, and they don't all have the same motivation. They can be motivated by love and compassion, by ethical, patriotic, or religious ideals, by fondness of adventure, by an absence of nonheroic options, or by several things at once. Altruism can be impulsive or deliberate. It can be a one-time thing or a prolonged effort. People show up at emergencies to help others threatened by fire, accident, and natural disaster. Soldiers throw themselves onto hand grenades to save their comrades. A third of the Medal of Honor winners in World War II
 
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died when they threw themselves onto hand grenades or other explosives, sacrificing their lives to save their fellows.
8
Volunteers teach school in war zones and work in refugee camps around the world. Brave people with varying motives helped slaves escape along the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, worked in leper colonies when leprosy was thought to be highly contagious, and risked their lives and careers to fight for civil rights.
9
Psychologist Perry London reported that some of the people who rescued Jews in Europe during World War II were motivated by both altruism and a liking for excitement.
10
One rescuer from the Netherlands had a hobby of racing motorcycles, especially over narrow boards across deep ditches. He and his friends would sabotage German trucks by putting sugar in the gas tanks just for the fun of it, not as part of any organized program. Later, he talked about his wartime activities as great adventures, and he seemed unconcerned about danger.
Another study of motives and altruism involved people who rescued Jews during World War II. These people fell into two groups, with differing moral priorities.
11
A sense of right and wrong motivated those in the first group; they didn't like to see people treated unjustly. Sympathy motivated those in the second group; they didn't like to see people suffer. The first group was concerned with justice, and the second with care. The first group included more men and the second more women.
These two groups are very similar to the two groups psychologist Carol Gilligan describes when she writes about moral thinking.
12
Gilligan believes there are two basic frames of reference for morality. One, more common among men, is similar to what David Bakan calls agency, which we studied in firefighters and which has to do with independence, autonomy, and justice. The other, more common among women, is similar to what Bakan calls communion and has to do with relationships, connection, and compassion. If testosterone works with Gilligan's moral frames of reference as it works with agency and communion in firefighting and EMT work, it might translate a concern with independence, autonomy, and justice or a concern with relationships, connection, and compassion into action.
Gilligan has studied the differences between boys and girls in how they relate to others. She says that even as children, boys are concerned more with autonomy and girls more with connection. She tells the
 
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story of two four-year-old children playing together. The girl said, "Let's play next-door neighbors." The boy said, "I want to play pirates." After they argued a bit, the girl said, ''Okay, then you can be the pirate who lives next door." The girl wanted connection, and the boy wanted autonomy. Gilligan believes this boy-girl difference develops into an adult difference in morality. She believes women's interest in connection leads them to value caring for others, whereas men's interest in autonomy leads them to value impersonal justice.
The difference between men and women in their need for agency and communion is a classic theme in literature and mythology. Aeneas, driven by masculine values, fled westward at the end of the Trojan War. Following a message from a dream, he headed for the Tiber River, where he would found the city of Rome. During his travels he visited Carthage, where he fell in love with the beautiful Dido. She wanted him to stay with her at Carthage, but the god of war found him and made him move on. He continued to the banks of the Tiber River, fought battles and married a woman there, and founded Illium, which became Rome. Later, seeking his father in the underworld, he met Dido again. She had killed herself when he left Carthage. Aeneas was grief stricken; he had not wanted to hurt her. He left Carthage because he thought he had to. Many men, like Aeneas, see themselves in conflict with the demands of the world.
Most men are not as single-minded as Aeneas. They try to bring love and autonomy together. My great-grandfather, John Quincy Adams Dabbs, served as a private throughout the Civil War, working as a cannon loader. He gained a bit of glory when he took command and rallied his company after the officers were killed at Antietam, but apparently he had no grand vision of himself as a military leader. He was willing to do what needed to be done, and he wanted to get home alive. He was not on any heroic journey from Troy to Rome; he was homesick. From Camp Taylor, Virginia, in the winter of 1864, caught between his duty and the pull of home, he wrote to his beloved wife, Elizabeth Euphrasia Hoole: "My Darling I dreamed about you the other night and that I felt you all over. You was as round and plump as a butter ball. My bowels is not very well. I think cold has fall on them."
13
I suspect that John Quincy had less testosterone than Aeneas, and the gods of macho morality demanded less of him. His drive toward war
 
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was tempered by love; nevertheless, he did his duty as he saw it. To him, serving in the army was a matter of doing his share. It was much like paying taxes.
The Altruism Tax
Paying tax is another way of thinking about altruism. Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, writes about economics and decision making; he says altruism is like a tax that everybody pays to keep society running smoothly. I think our cat, Ivy, had an animal's grasp of this human concept, as she seemed to understand the reciprocal nature of altruism. She'd been a stray cat, and appreciated the nice life she had with us. Soon after we took Ivy in, Mary came home from the grocery store to find her waiting in the driveway. She led Mary to our front steps, where she had lined up a dead bird, a dead chipmunk, and a dead snake across the bottom step. She had paid her tax and made sure Mary knew it. Later Ivy brought live snakes into the house for us. It took us a long time to convince her that we wanted her to be a freeloader.
If everyone adds a little altruism to the communal pot, help gets spread around approximately where it is needed. Costs and benefits usually turn out more or less right when it comes to the kind of everyday altruism that brings pleasure and comfort to everyone's life. Heroic altruism is different: the tax is higher, and testosterone makes it easier to pay. Most people would prefer not to trade their lives for a posthumous medal, but some people do it. Testosterone makes people willing to face danger and narrows their focus to the task at hand, enabling high-testosterone people to help others without thinking about how much it will cost them. Every helpful action carries a cost. The cost may be small, as in the effort needed to visit a sick friend. It may be large, as when the German athlete Lutz Long helped the American Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics by pointing out an error in Owens's technique, and Owens, with his technique improved, went on to beat Long and win a gold medal.
14
The tax is highest when it costs a life, as when a soldier sacrifices himself for his comrades. Altruistic people either do not recognize the cost, or they do not care about it and want to help anyway.
Herbert Simon has a theory that explains why so many people behave altruistically and ignore the cost to themselves.
15
He was not

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