High Tide in Tucson (8 page)

In a similar feat of circular thinking, paleoanthropologists of the sixties and seventies presumed that human evolution was greatly influenced by pair bonding and a division of labor by gender. Evidence for this was the fact that skeletal remains of early hominids showed a marked size difference between males (larger) and females (smaller). These remains consisted only of fragments, never whole skeletons. They had been sorted into male and female with difficulty, frequently on the basis of nothing but their size!

Not only the answers we find but the very questions we ask, as scientists, are bathed in unconscious motives.
The Mismeasure of Man
, by Stephen Jay Gould, exposes the myriad ways science has been used throughout history to prove the superiority of Caucasian males, which happens to match the description of the scientists who did the work in question. Their work was earnest, painstaking, and dazzlingly blind to its own biases. European science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presumed intel
ligence and human worthiness were things contained in the head, and set itself like a dog on a bone to measuring skulls. Thousands upon thousands of skulls: male and female, Cauca-sian and Asian, Hottentot and Huron. Skulls of professionals were pitted against those of clerks and laborers. The results are a testament to science's deep roots in creative interpretation and selective oversight: the expected winners
always
came out on top. The measurements were unconsciously bent, again and again, to make it so. Just as Dr. Wilson forgot to notice that half of all modern female “gatherers” were out “hunting,” a nineteenth-century physician named Samuel George Morton conducted his world-renowned work on the essential character of human races without encumbering himself with contradictory evidence. Of the Greenland Eskimo he wrote, “Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood,” and of the Chinese, “So versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another.” Armed with these foregone conclusions, he compared the brain sizes of these and other races in his enormous skull collection with those of Caucasians, by filling the cranial cavities with mustard seed or lead BB shot, then pouring it back into a graduated cylinder and reading the volume. Steven Jay Gould has carefully examined Morton's data, wondering how such a respected scientist arrived at a clear ranking of skull sizes (Caucasians largest, followed by so-called Mongolians and American Indians, then Africans) that cannot now be found to exist. Gould believes Morton didn't consciously fudge his data, but did it in dozens of unconscious ways, from selectively firing his assistants to failing to notice the relationship between skull size and body size in all races, and ultimately, by looking hard for what he needed to see. “Plausible
scenarios are easy to construct,” Gould writes. “Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large [African] skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb.”

It's nearly a vignette of black comedy to imagine Dr. Morton hunched over his skulls, with a racket of BB's rolling over his worktable and mustard seed crunching under his feet, as he labors to make the numbers of his science match the equations fixed in his heart. But in truth it's a horrific moment of history, for the data from his somber skullduggery were used to justify generations of genocide and slavery.

In this century, the biological determinists have laid down skulls and taken up testing. In 1912, when racism in America swelled on a rising tide of immigration, the U.S. Public Health Service hired psychologist H. H. Goddard to help screen out the imagined menace of inferior minds that were poised to contaminate the (equally imagined) pellucid American gene pool. Goddard, who invented the term “moron,” created his own test for mental deficiency. Gould's
Mismeasure of Man
gives a remarkable account of how Goddard's test questions were fired at immigrants as they stepped bewildered and exhausted off the boat at Ellis Island. (Many had never before held a pencil, and had no possible frame of reference for understanding what was being asked of them.) Goddard arrived at these staggering results: 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians, 80 percent of Hungarians, and 79 percent of Italians were diagnosed as morons. At the time, no one paused to wonder how any nation could be carrying out its sundry business with four-fifths of its citizens punching in below the mental age of twelve; ethnic quotas on U.S. immigration were in place within the decade.

The explosive publication in 1994 of a book called
The Bell Curve
was an attempt to prove, yet again, the intellectual superiority of Caucasians. Written just in time to catch a new current of racism, the book drips with statistics and academic language, but its emotional heart seems bent on justifying the subordinate status of people of color in the U.S. Authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray have made extravagant claims linking IQ and race, frequently basing them on the work of researchers who received grants from the Pioneer Fund, a bluntly pro-white organization that has long denounced school desegregation and advocated sterilization to eliminate so-called genetically unfit individuals or races from society. It's a case of science with the fingerprints of “motive” all over it.

No matter that
The Bell Curve
is made of very tired stuff, not much different from mismeasuring skulls; the book was taken seriously enough to capture the cover of
Newsweek
, tie up the headlines and news roundups, and sell like a house afire. The authors proved one thing, without a doubt: the privileged have not yet tired of hearing how righteously they came by their place at the table.

This whole line of inquiry, in which science is invoked to explain how we got where we are, is fatally tainted by what Hume called the “is-ought” problem. This is the philosophical error of confusing what
exists
with its
right
to exist, even though substance and scruples—what
is
and what
ought
—are entirely separate items, apples and oranges. When a mother says, “Boys will be boys,” is she explaining her son's misbehavior, or predicting it, or forgiving it? Similarly, if we're allowed to talk on and on about white students scoring high marks on the Stanford-Binet, it's easy to slip a logical cog into who
ought
to get the better salary. And then there is all the sociobiological lore about male
humans in the primordial social scene carrying on with big sticks, sniffing every wind for a shot at infidelity; after a while, it begins to suggest absolution, a certain now-and-forever slant on masculinity.

There's a simpler way to sum up the “is-ought” problem. A man I know, whenever he hears a story about philandering husbands or conniving wives, pipes up: “Sociobiology could explain it!”

And I intone: “Explain, maybe, but not excuse.”

A creature with a big enough head to make a contract should have the sense to make one it can keep.

 

Of course, “See you later!” does not mean the same thing as “See you in court!” We make contracts on dozens of different levels. Hierarchies of urgency are understood, and so are the intrinsic values of different loyalties. Athletic contests are not marriages, although both are sweated out within bell jars of arbitrary rules. The advantage of sports is that they are quick—you decide what's important, stake your claim, and win or lose, you still go home unscathed. It might not look possible to an anthropologist from Venus, but life here really does last beyond the Super Bowl.

In a book called
The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football
, Mariah Burton Nelson points out that sports are also about distinction, and perhaps that is why they assume such importance in our culture. “Who is better?” she writes. “One inch, one point, or one-hundredth of a second can differentiate winner from loser.” Nelson lists at least six sports in which women and men now compete together at the elite level (dog-sled racing, horse racing, marathon swimming, equestrian events, rifle shooting, and auto racing), and many more recreational
sports in which a wife and husband can typically find themselves evenly matched. And yet, she says, many people continue to rely hard on five games that showcase upper-body strength (football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and hockey) as reassurance of a certain order, gender-wise, in the universe.

Me, I bear in mind that women live seven years longer than men, on average, and figure that's the sport I'll sign up for.

So pick the rules that suit you, but just remember a game is no more than the sum of its parts: a stick, a ball, half an inch, two hundredths of a second. A cubic millimeter of muscle, or skull. A point of IQ. Come to think of it, things not much bigger than ants running into their hole.

All right, then. Back in your den, the game is winding down. Here is what you do: remind yourself that what you've been watching is a rigged arena. It's vastly popular simply because people flopped supine on furniture get to be muscular and sweaty by proxy and, for a short time, contrive their own rules about
what
makes
who
the
best
. Every day will dawn on a different “best,” so the proxy contestants get to hitch their wagon to a new set of stars each time around. This says worlds about human nature, and nothing about real life. Game over, the river flows downhill again, and all the blue-eared pupfish go home to their mates.

You can give him a test, to make sure. “If I weren't around,” you ask casually, “would you go out with my cousin Gloria? We're related—members of the same conference, you might say.”

Your cousin Gloria is a blue-eyed version of Sonia Braga. Your sweetheart, though, is no fool. He gives you a hug and answers, “Don't be ridiculous. She's bowlegged.”

Those are the rules. So what if there is no joy in Mudville, if at your house there's a place for everything, and every tentacle in its place.

The baby-sitter surely thought I was having an affair. Years ago, for a period of three whole months, I would dash in to pick up my daughter after “work” with my cheeks flushed, my heart pounding, my hair damp from a quick shower. I'm loath to admit where I'd really been for that last hour of the afternoon. But it's time to come clean.

I joined a health club.

I went downtown and sweated with the masses. I rode a bike that goes nowhere at the rate of five hundred calories per hour. I even pumped a little iron. I can't deny the place was a lekking ground: guys stalking around the weight room like prairie chickens, nervously eying each other's pectorals. Over by the abdominal machines I heard some of the frankest pickup lines since eighth grade (“You've got real defined deltoids for a girl”). A truck perpetually parked out front had vanity plates
that read:
LFT WTS
. Another one,
PRSS
250, I didn't recognize as a vanity plate until I understood the prestige of bench pressing 250 pounds.

I personally couldn't bench press a fully loaded steam iron. I didn't join the health club to lose weight, or to meet the young Adonis who admired my (dubiously defined) deltoids. I am content with my lot in life, save for one irksome affliction: I am what's known in comic-book jargon as the ninety-eight-pound weakling. I finally tipped the scales into three digits my last year of high school, but “weakling” I've remained, pretty much since birth. In polite terminology I'm cerebral; the muscles between my ears are what I get by on. The last great body in my family was my Grandfather Henry. He wore muscle shirts in the days when they were known as BVDs, under his cotton work shirt, and his bronze tan stopped midbiceps. He got those biceps by hauling floor joists and hammering up roof beams every day of his life, including his last. How he would have guffawed to see a roomful of nearly naked bankers and attorneys, pale as plucked geese, heads down, eyes fixed on a horizon beyond the water cooler, pedaling like bats out of hell on bolted-down bicycles. I expect he'd offer us all a job. If we'd pay our thirty dollars a month to
him
, we could come out to the construction site and run up and down ladders bringing him nails. That's why I'm embarrassed about all this. I'm afraid I share his opinion of unproductive sweat.

Actually, he'd be more amazed than scornful. His idea of fun was watching Ed Sullivan or snoozing in a recliner, or ideally, both at once. Why work like a maniac on your day off? To keep your heart and lungs in shape. Of course. But I haven't noticed any vanity plates that say
GD LNGS
. The operative word here is vanity.

Standards of beauty in every era are things that advertise, usually falsely: “I'm rich and I don't have to work.” How could you be a useful farmhand, or even an efficient clerk-typist, if you have long, painted fingernails? Four-inch high heels, like the bound feet of Chinese aristocrats, suggest you don't have to do
anything
efficiently, except maybe put up your tootsies on an ottoman and eat bonbons. (And I'll point out here that aristocratic
men
wore the first high heels.) In my grandmother's day, women of all classes lived in dread of getting a tan, since that betrayed a field worker's station in life. But now that the field hand's station is occupied by the office worker, a tan, I suppose, advertises that Florida and Maui are within your reach. Fat is another peculiar cultural flip-flop: in places where food is scarce, beauty is three inches of subcutaneous fat deep. But here and now, jobs are sedentary and calories are relatively cheap, while the luxury of time to work them off is very dear. It still gives me pause to see an ad for a weight-loss program that boldly enlists: “First ten pounds come off free!” But that is about the size of it, in this strange food-drenched land of ours. After those first ten, it gets expensive.

As a writer I could probably do my job fine with no deltoids at all, or biceps or triceps, so long as you left me those vermicelli-sized muscles that lift the fingers to the keyboard. (My vermicellis are
very
well defined.) So when I've writ my piece, off I should merrily go to build a body that says I don't really have a financial obligation to sit here in video-terminal bondage.

Well, yes. But to tell the truth, the leisure body and even the
GD LNGS
are not really what I was after when I signed up at Pecs-R-Us. What I craved, and long for still, is to be
strong
. I've never been strong. In childhood, team sports were my most reliable source of humiliation. I've been knocked breathless to the
ground by softballs, basketballs, volleyballs, and once, during a wildly out-of-hand game of Red Rover, a sneaker. In every case I knew my teammates were counting on me for a volley or a double play or anyhow something more than clutching my stomach and rolling upon the grass. By the time I reached junior high I wasn't even the last one picked anymore. I'd slunk away long before they got to the bottom of the barrel.

Even now, the great mortification of my life is that visitors to my home sometimes screw the mustard and pickle jar lids back on so tightly
I can't get them open!
(The visitors probably think they are just closing them enough to keep the bugs out.) Sure, I can use a pipe wrench, but it's embarrassing. Once, my front gate stuck, and for several days I could only leave home by clambering furtively through the bougainvilleas and over the garden wall. When a young man knocked on my door to deliver flowers one sunny morning, I threw my arms around him. He thought that was pretty emotional, for florists' mums. He had no idea he'd just casually pushed open the Berlin Wall.

My inspiration down at the health club was a woman firefighter who could have knocked down my garden gate with a karate chop. I still dream about her triceps. But I've mostly gotten over my brief fit of muscle envy. Oh, I still make my ongoing, creative stabs at body building: I do “girl pushups,” and some of the low-impact things from Jane Fonda's pregnant-lady workout book, even if I'm not. I love to run, because it always seems like there's a chance you might actually get somewhere, so I'll sometimes cover a familiar mile or so of our country road after I see my daughter onto the school bus. (The driver confessed that for weeks he thought I was chasing him; he never stopped.) And finally, my friends have given me an official item of exercise equipment that looks like a glob of blue putty, which you're sup
posed to squeeze a million times daily to improve your grip. That's my current program. The so-called noncompetitive atmosphere of the health club whipped me, hands down. Realistically, I've always known I was born to be a “before” picture. So I won't be seen driving around with plates that boast:
PRSS 250
.

Maybe:
OPN JRS
.