Beings of Good Cheer

...In a time when it is easy to believe that the individual is totally powerless and reality bewilderingly complex, if not ultimately inaccessible, it is heartening to think that in two weekend sessions one might become 100 percent responsible for everything in one's life, a ]'HE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER, 1980 17 life in which "Reality is simple, clear, black and white" and in which "What is is and what ain't ain't...

...Shklar distinguishes between those attacks on hypocrisy upon which any society depends, since they call attention to the discrepancies between its professed values and its actual practice, and the attacks of those who, as the sole instructors of their own hyperactive and tyrannical ~onsciences, make sincerity (really, their passion for moral domination) their central virtue...

...The result in society is a mixture of anarchy and convention that "makes the interpIay between hypocrisy and antihypocrisy extremely intense...

...As Norman Cousins has summarized their position in a Saturday Review article, "They believe that the placebo is powerful not because it 'fools' the body but because it translates the will to live into a physical reality...

...How all this can happen may not be clear to the non-jogger, who may have to bracket jogging with the placebo as one of those agencies that ought not produce the effect that it mysteriously does...

...A true pessimist, one might imagine, now needs himself to be bound in triple brass if he, is to keep his low expectations...

...And like Tiger, Stevenson is an ironic optimist, well aware of how exploitable is the human capacity for optimism...

...They may (as they have been doing for some time) shift their energies to the pursuit of the truth about the pursuit of the truth...

...Nor is there any reason to believe that "proven" quick success guarantees the durability of an optimism-raising program...

...Conceivably, then, Carnegie might improve their morale to the point where they will be able to employ his techniques in selling themselves more effectively to us, so that Carnegie will indeed have come home to roost...

...In Running and Being: The Total Experience, Dr...

...But there may be more than this in the Russians' attraction to Carnegie...

...Perhaps not many...

...In a postscript to the book, he writes that "Soviet-backed Vietnamese expansionism, if left unchecked, may well trigger a Third World War...

...His very impulse to get along with other people (which once could be seen as an expression of the sociability without which optimism could have no roots) would be a sign of his self-abnegating hypocrisy...

...the descendants of Jean Dixon and Sybil Leek will likely be in business long after the last jogger has retired to Geritol and shuffleboard...

...Shklar's final judgment is that the society in which we live "is superior to its known a l t e r n a t i v e s . . , and could hardly survive without hypocrisy...

...fanatically, hubristically, and idolatrously opposed to important elements in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so that its Alceste-like inclination is to see that tradition as a crippling structure of bad faith...

...What one expects from the Russians is something like Pravda's recent attack on that ethos as it is displayed in California, a "classic textbook example" of the "moral and social bankruptcy of bourgeois society" at the end of the twentieth century...

...For the present, the most that can be done is to care for the survivors of the holocaust and try to understand why Cambodia died...

...But all this is to assume that the antihypocrites are absolutely without resources once there is serious doubt about the possibility of an intransigent pursuit of the truth...

...Mrs...

...Of course, for many researchers in the field this is far too negative a statement...

...It is a literal hunt, a conquest...

...In The American Idea of Success, Richard Huber identifies Carnegie's big book as the founding document of the personality ethic, as distinguished from (if retaining connections with) the earlier character and mind-power ethics...

...rather, they suggest a pessimistic version of what was once called "true success," which might be defined as a strategy, just as unacceptable to Marx as to Carnegie, for making do without any worldly success whatever...

...community is healthier for having overcome apparently terminal diseases...

...fictions of childhood...

...Certainly it is conceivable that in such explosive circumstances we might have to place the highest priority on getting along with one another, so that something like Carnegieism will be indispensable if the roots of optimism are not to be cut away from their sustaining soil...

...Indeed, the placebo is one of the most dramatic indications that optimism has the biological roots that Tiger claims for it, and as might be expected, the placebo gets a good deal of attention in his book...

...All that optimism and confidence, that absdnce of alienation, can be, even now, a bracing experience, if only briefly...

...with the evidence of his own experience...

...A cynic might nevertheless suspect that converts must be produced in a two-weekend" crash program because of the likelihood that the conversion would not otherwise survive the process designed to produce it...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980...

...I note that 43 years after it was a bestseller in America, Dale Carnegie's How To Make Friends And Influence People has been serialized, as edited by Russian censors, in a Soviet magazine for managers...

...He made many of us feel good about ourselves, all of a piece, and surely the Russians, tormented as they seem to be by the gap between public rhetoric and private fact, have the same need to feel good about themselves...

...In this perspective, the gap between doctor and witch doctor is narrowed.', in fact, Cousins ends his article.with an account of the fruitful cooperation between Dr...

...Nevertheless, the institution of anti-hypocrisy has had behind it from its beginning a moralistic and optimistic rationale: the Enlightenment's dauntless pursuit of the truth, "the highest of human obligations," says Mrs...

...This is not to say that all means are of equal value humanistically or socially...

...indeed, they remind one, as Tiger himself does, that on occasion pessimism may be our only salvation...

...The search for truth is predatory," he says...

...During the past two decades there has been no lack of indications that the human capacity for optimism is, as Tiger says, as basic as the capacity for sex...

...What amazes and heartens him is what amazes and heartens Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay "Aes Triplex": that, as the latter puts it, a man's heart can be so "bound with triple brass" that he can "stop his ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind...

...The pursuit of the truth, it THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 19 and the structure of reality, who do not know--who dare not know--that what they take to be reality is a culturally imposed fiction...

...California was the habitat of showmen, and showmen, he observed, "are ringing the cash registers...

...Shklar's anti'hypocrite may be a very precarious one...

...He had come a long way from that "heightened sensitivity," that "gift for hope and romantic readiness" with which he had endowed his Jay Gatsby, and which, in spite of his early premonitions of disaster, had once been characteristics of himself as well...

...In both cases the optimism and energy generated lack normal communal support and tend to wither on the vine...

...Shklar points out, that in proportion as one congratulates oneself on the integrity of these responses one risks becoming simply another kind of hypocrite, whose self-made hell is the intolerable burden of the faults of other people...

...What is important is that one can find in Tiger all of Carnegie's basic assumptions plus one, which if it is present in Carnegie is so far behind the scene that it can almost be ignored...

...Traditionally, however, tragedy has been optimistic in its celebration of victory in defeat, of the worth of the human effort, and in its expectation of a payoff that more than compensates for immediate loss...

...The pace of his masterwork is just right for an age that wants quick conversion experiences (the title of Lowell Thomas's introduction is "A Short Cut to Success...

...In this he was in accord with Lionel Tiger's recent book, Optimism: The Biology of Hope...

...It expresses our distaste for such success as may come from a self-transcending subordination to duty or from the hard and long-practiced asceticism of tile character ethic...

...H e r e , in fact, we are in the clear and bracing world of the jogger...

...From Alceste's Puritan point of view, of course, it is just as intolerable that such escapist means should be used to such sorry ends as it is to let sick people believe that their placebos are authentic medicine lest the truth keep them from being cured...

...Carnegie is the sort of writer who by virtue of becoming part of the ethos of his time makes himself too accessible to his critics...

...George Sheehan, who can be almost as mystical as Blake, says: "We begin in the body and end in the Vision," and he also says that "this run, this day, may begin in delight and end in wisdom...

...At the same time, as we know, this smorgasbord of magic persons, places, programs, and objects has to be understood in relation to a pervasive condition of anxiety and low morale that results from one kind of alienation or another, from a lack of social cohesiveness, or from the inability of people to agree on desirable futures or to believe strongly in the possibility of any future whatever...

...Tragedy," writes Joseph Wood Krutch, "is essentially an expression, not of despair but of triumph over despair and of confidence in the value of human life...

...Schweitzer and his African witch-doctor colleagues...

...In other words, we may be discovering (as the Russians may be discovering) that there was a humanizing strain in Carnegie all along, that part of his function was to ameliorate and socialize, even if by means of naive hypocrisies, what would otherwise have been a dehumanizing condition of competitiveness...

...It is possible to believe that some joggers begin their avocation doggedly and skeptically, having been deceived by too many promises of salvation...

...Perhaps those Soviets who have hopefully imported Carnegie are seeking a way out of their given situation...

...Ideas are floated, seized, tried out, amended, and dropped in more rapid succession than used to be the case," writes Bryan Wilson, a British student of millennial sects...

...Ford was himself a showinan who, like Carnegie, had learned how to make the cash registers ring, and the Russians seem always to have been impressed with this kind of showmanship insofar as it represented a maximum exploitation of the material means of production...

...The proper heroes for the optimism of desperation are Dostoevsky's underground Man and Alceste of Moli~re's "The Misanthrope," who express the spirit of anti-hypocrisy...

...Nor, like the Soviets in their salad days, did he have any crippling doubt about the nature of reality and its benevolent disposition toward well-disposed human beings...

...The greatest tragedies incline us to entertain visions of desirable futures: Reason and order are better for having been tested against passion and will...

...The-fact that literary intellectuals were almost unanimous in their hostility to the former seems not to have bothered him at all...

...It is difficult in a short space to do justice to Mrs...

...Theenterprises of Charles Manson and the Reverend Jim Jones generated a great deal of energy-galvanizing optimism...

...If Carnegie had any doubts about California, he kept them to himself...

...In these words there is no faith in quick success (which Fitzgerald at this point in his career had had and lost...

...Nor is it surprising that, having found society.'s institutions too impure to commit themselves to but having lost faith in their traditional adversary role, they discover in themselves and indulge a playboy's capacity for cultural freeloading...

...Thus we have the familiar adversary culture, the legacy of Alceste (and, one might add, of Shakespeare's Iago and Timon), in which every social fabric is a conspiracy of insincerity: an anti-placebo culture in which by now est converts and Sandstone sybarites are as much at home as Sartre and novelists like Thomas Pynchon, E.L...

...Understandably, then, the demoralized sons of Alceste have often argued that what Americans lack above all is a tragic sense, by which they genei'ally mean a sense that life is indeed essentially a cheat, that its conditions are those of defeat, and that the highest and grimmest wisdom is to be found in the recognition of our common victimization...

...A.nti-hypocrites have always felt at home attacking fictions...

...Erhard, on the other hand, must supply optimism to people inclined to believe that society, if not civilization itself, is the enemy, that commitment to its programs is incompatible with personal integrity and fulfillment...

...If that is the case, the Russians have managed to disguise the hankering by presenting their Carnegie in humanitarian terms: as an aid to the manager's obligation to supervise people so as not "to leave in his wake a series of mutilated human lives...

...With its employment of a relatively simple psychology as a means to the surefire and even magical development of the l a t e n t potential of the personality, the personality ethic is a proper introduction to the human potential movement, although most human potential people, bemused as they are with the magic of an equally simplistic psychology, would probably consider it scandalously mercenary and hypocritical...

...Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...Shklar points out, liberal governments have only magnified the gap between promise and performance, so that "liberalism is accused of hypocrisy more frequently by its friends than its enemies...

...We have such a brain that "neither the consciousness of mortality nor a cold sense of human frailty depresses our belief in desirable futures," and, if this were not so, civilization and culture would be impossible...

...Shklar, "upon which all human improvement depends...

...Here is wher6 Carnegie had a great advantage over Werner Erhard...

...This is Tiger's assumption that in a strictly realistic perspective there is no basis for optimism whatever...

...In this view, the important thing is not whether the strategies produce results but the wickedness of their being practiced at all...

...been allowed free rein...

...No doubt, in the process of succeeding many became anything but models ot[ humanistic integrity, and so made themselves fat targets for cultural malcontents and literary intellectuals (who have all too often been anything but clear in their crwn minds about the nature of true success...

...He remains, therefore, a confused and confusing personality who is unable to salvage from the demise of his country the moral clarity which the world needs and which he, as the spokesman for his tortured people, could offer...

...Ironically, as Mrs...

...But this is tragedy only as we have come to demand it, largely as a validation of our refusal to be beguiled by those optimistic impulses that are so important to Stevenson, Carnegie, and Tiger...

...It is not surprising that in this exigency some anti-hypocrites find a substitute for optimistic visions of the future not in pastoral enclaves of total honesty but in literary images of the occult, the fantastic, the absurd, the obscene, and the pornographic...

...began to seem, did not have a future after all, and, in proportion as this appeared to be the case, the drama of the engagement of anti-hypocrites with hypocrites tended to become an end in itself...

...S t e i n e r makes one wonder about the consequences for Western civilization if it cannot learn to be satisfied with a moral equivalent for this kind of predation...

...Pessimism and nihilism became the only authentic responses, the problem being, as Mrs...

...I t is a useful warning, but it is unlikely to be heeded in the West until the myths about the war in Vietnam are dispelled...

...Perhaps the editors of Pravda should have remembered that over 50 years ago their predecessors championed, against considerable opposition, the publication of Henry Ford's My Life and Work...

...It is obvious that est works for some people, just as the Carnegie courses, Toastmasters, fencing, encounter sessions, therapeutic touching, and voodoo work for some people...

...Glen Turner, who hoped to be elected president in 1980 and to whom Life once devoted eleven pages, seems to have gone the way of the Edsel...

...But in this condition--if we remember the preoccupation with disillusionment in Melville, Twain, Stephen Crane, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Steinbeck, O'Neill, and Sinclair Lewis--they could not have been more American...

...This spirit is the subject of Judith Shklar's brilliant essay, "Let Us Not 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 Be Hypocritical" (Daedalus, Summer, 1979), in which Alceste, who absolutely refuses to falsify his heart's affections, "is the archetype of the moral oppressor...

...Nevertheless, Carnegie deserves to be read at least once, even by those who know all about him without having read him, and now is as good a time as any...

...Sihanouk himself is enslaved to these myths, even as he refutes them...

...No one could be more inauthentic (or less likely to survive in an encounter session ) than Carnegie Man...

...His assumption was that to succeed in any environment you had to believe that success was both possible and worthwhile, that, in short, you had to be optimistic about your chances for success, and that we all have a fund of optimism that can be drawn on if the right techniques are applied...

...This possibility is especially disturbing, in Steiner's view, because of the obsessive nature of the pursuit that has been clear from 'its start in Greece...

...The speed with which optimistic programs replace one another is itself demoralizing...

...What we have in est then, and in so many of the morale-raising programs of the past two decades, is an optimism of desperation which has as its object the survival of the more or less narcissistic individual rather than the survival of a society or nation or culture...

...It would never have occurred to him to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald's belief that behind all great careers is "the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of the struggle...

...Voodoo will probably outlast est as a means of inspiring its devotees with images of desirable futures...

...II The fact is that Carnegie made a lot of money with his books and his self-improvement courses because they work...

...Perhaps their, interest in Ford and Carnegie should be interpreted as a hankering after something they were denied: a capitalist phase in which the desire to make it big through the manipulation of other people would have John t...

...Now the optimistic hypocrites are those who naively believe that there is no gap between the structure of their lives I n such a culture the biological roots of optimism may seem to be suffering a very dry season...

...spirit is tess absolute for having been tested against flesh...

...Erazim Koh~ik, writing in a recent New Oxford Review, notes that the mainspring of historical Marxism was the alliance of moral idealism and national aspirations...

...To learn from her why this judgment is anything but the naive Carnegieism that it might superficially resemble is to learn truths about this society that it is dangerous to ignore...

...The pursuit of truth against hypocrisy and bad faith, "be it at the cost of good sense, of social utility, of economic benefit, of life itself," may not be supported by a law of progress after all, in which case the occupation of Mrs...

...Was there ever a time when the human need to feel optimistic about the future and to feel good about one's place and efforts in the total scheme of things was so catered to...

...Optimists nurtured in these conditions tend themselves to be bound in triple brass...

...As the late Jean-Paul Sartre said of his own brand of existentialism, "there is no doctrine more optimistic since man's destiny is within himself...

...As a result of them countless people have overcome their self-doubts, have been able to organize their energies, and have gone on to achieve success previously undreamt of...

...In fact, the human potential movement is everywhere informed by the conviction, once the exclusive property of an avant-garde, that society is a tissue of lies, evasions, and hypocrisies, that the only attitude warranted about its future is a pessimistic one, that authentic life lies elsewhere, and that the very painfulness of that life may itself be a sign of its authenticity...

...All too often it has been "Reprinted in The Listener, J a n u a r y 12, 1978...

...Behind Fitzgerald's words (written to his daughter the year the first paperback edition of Carnegie's book appeared) is his own discovery of the illusion of the American dream, and his own sense that in America.hypocrisy and optimism are inseparably joined...

...Sihanouk probably understands this, but instead of speaking the truth he offers himself as a palliative for the conscience of the Left and as a conciliator in a conflict that has already been settled...

...Indeed, nothing has been so destructive to the necessary optimism of the sons of Alceste as the doubt about the future of the pursuit of truth...

...In such conditions, quick success schemes like those of Glen W. Turner's "Dare To Be Great" in the early f970s or Werner Erhard's more enduring est program are bound to proliferate...

...There is nothing like a rhythmic expenditure of physical energy if one wishes, even in a disheartening world, to feel good about oneself and induce images of desirable futures...

...But there is no way out for Alceste, whose last words are: "I'11 flee this b i t t e r world where vice is king, And seek some spot unpeopled far a p a r t Where I ' l l be frec to have an h o n e s t h e a r t . In this kind of Utopia, optimism and tragedy are equally inconceivable...

...Disguised as modernists, and exuberant with the conviction that to cultivate aesthetic sensibility was to ride the wave of the future, they were once capable of optimistic bursts of energy as they attacked what they took to be the hypocritical fictions-of middle-class society...

...IV Carnegie would have defined hypocrisy differently from Alceste but he did not doubt that it was a bad thing, no more to be encouraged than the study of Latin...

...Let us only remember the rosy expectations that have centered around'scientology, biofeedback, Rolfing, transcendental meditation, macrobiotic foods, encounter therapy, vitamin C, open marriage, faith healing, assertiveness training, Woodstock, psychocybernetics, magic weekends at Esalen or Sandstone, yoga, natural foods, androgyny, LSD, marijuana, comrriunal living, swing: ing, consciousness raising, and oriental holy men...

...Shklar's complex and subtle argument, but one can extract from her essay characteristics of anti-hypocrisy that have become all too familiar in the post-World War II world: its hostility to social, political, moral, and religious conventions, to all established orders, since by their very nature they disguise the enormous gap, not simply between professed values and actual practices, but between professed values and authentic impulses...

...comedy allows no way out of a given situation...

...Most likely, if the Russians could read the uncensored Carnegie he would express their distaste with an official character ethic they are all too familiar with, an ethic that couldn't care less about the latent potential and creaturely demands of their personalities...

...And this, of course, was becoming a cultural recreation for the middle class as well...

...This is a startling development, though it might be less startling if we knew what the censors took out...

...on the contrary, she points out, "the free competition of moral ideas did not reduce either censoriness, politics, or hypocrisy," but enhanced them...

...III The problem with most optimism programs is that they suffer from either an excess of or a disillusionment with communality: Either they require a near total immersion of the self in a charismatic leader (Jones, Manson, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) or they are dedicated to an ideal of near total self-sufficiency...

...How many others who are convinced that he is the summation of all that is evil in American capitalism have 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 themselves read him is hard to say...

...If the human organism in its need to press toward a more desirable future has ways of turning sheer illusion to its advantage it is indeed bound in triple brass...

...The cultural contradictions of capitalism that bother latter-day observers like Daniel Bell and Robert Heilbroner no more bothered him than the cultural contradictions of Marxism bothered the young British literary critic Christopher Caudwell...

...The latter, sensing perhaps t h a t he is only a sugarcoated version of Erich Fromm's marketing personality, tend to write him off as a vulgarization of success strategies that begin with Benjamin Franklin...

...o0oQmoImQ4QIIQQogII~iQmoIQQQ6I0i~QImQQgUQDgi080QQI~iQ6qgQ0IQQQQ0QIB0migI~QQOIi1Q0I0Qg~QQQ~joitq6Q6q~IQQoB~oIDQQQaQii0miIaa9QQgUOO8D0oQiQi000~GIggQ oQ John P. Sisk BEINGS OF GOOD CHEER What the human potential movement could learn from Dale Carnegie...

...This is why both varieties of optimism-generating programs are great producers of disaffected and pessimistic people, who become conservative forces that help keep the extravagances of the remaining optimists in check...

...As George Steiner puts it in the first annual Bronowsk-i Lecture,* "for the first time in man's history there is a new and total challenge to the ideal of the hunt after pure, absolute truth...

...He obviously thought of himself as standing at the end of a long line of congenial optimists from whom he liked to quote when he could catch them in useful moments: Confucius, Lao-Tse, Mustapha Kemal, Franklin, Emerson, Longfellow, Lincoln, William James, Harry Overstreet, Eldred Hubbard, Lowell Thomas...

...In those grim depression years he may have been as important to national morale as Hollywood musical comedies...

...Perhaps Carnegie can help them recapture the pristine Marxist vision in which such a gap is unthinkable...

...Comedy, writes Eugene Ionesco with modern comedy in mind, "is a.feeling of absurdity and seems more hopeless than tragedy...

...If Alceste ever managed to find it he might have to take up jogging to keep from being bored to death...

...Mrs...

...It may be necessary for the sincerest of men to agree, in the interests of survival, on boundaries or off-limit zones--to pretend, in other words, to be content with less than the ultimate trutla...

...Even our gullibility "may reveal our human capability to draw on unusual reserves of energy and skill...

...Carnegie never doubted that moral idealism and national aspiration could go together, any more than he doubted his capacity to give advice to married people...

...After all, they are ~n the same fix that we are: Their days of moral clarity and firmness of purpose are behind them...

...Professor Tiger is surely right: The means of actualizing the human capacity for optimism are fortunately infinite~ and all optimism is galvanizing...

...It is appropriate, but probably not very important, that Tiger looks as radiantly optimistic on the wrapper of his book as Carnegie did on his...

...It is comedy, especially now, that is likely to be pessimistic, however socially indispensable it may be because of its expression of the impulse to tolerate and civilize...

...He had come back, in fact, to that pneumatic mattress upon which the disillusioned Gatsby was floating when he was murdered_9 F i t z g e r a l d ' s constant theme, the discovery of illusion, was subsequently proven out in the lives of those American Communists who, in spite of their gifts for hope and romantic readiness, have been left floating on their own pneumatic mattresses --so that Gatsby's death-ship becomes in a post-modernist symbolism a true ship of fools...

...That is why reading Carnegie today is like revisiting the pastora...

...But as modernism gave way to postmodernism this faith was revealed to be bad faith after all, itself only a fiction...

...The poet Blake was no jogger, but he knew that "Energy is eternal delight...

...In this view the ideal tragedy is "Death of a Salesman," interpreted as a play about an Everyman figure who in the nature of things is utterly without resources and utterly immune to the most powerful placebos...

...Doctorow, and Robert Coover...

...but it is impossible to believe that practicing joggers are anything but optimistic...

...The whole point to est Conversion is optimistic existence on one's own terms, society's terms having been judged hypocritical and imprisoning...

...He once taught a course in fiction writing at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Letters, but it surely never occurred to him that he was writing fiction when he wrote his big book...

...Sfince 1936, when How To Win FHends And Influence Pe;ople first appeared, millions of Americans have either read Carnegie or taken his self-improvement courses or both...

...Steiner fills us with apprehension about the real nature of that Utopia the vision of which compels the Western commitment to absolute thought...

...If anyone is a symbol of the ethos of a bourgeois, profitoriented society it is Carnegie, whom Sinclair Lewis called the Bard of Babbittry...

...In short, when one is talking about incitements to optimism an unqualified skepticism is out of order...

...Carnegie, as one might have expected, was not much bothered by such possibilities...

...In much the same way, once American Marxist attackers of the spirit of Carnegieism had lost confidence in the Marxist vision of the future there was not much left for them but a compulsive (often nihilistic) engagement with the hypocrisies of middle-class society...

...He, as well as those who caught fire from him, never doubted that they were in the American grain, and that society not only applauded their efforts but was there to reinforce their optimism...

...It was thus possible for anti-hypocrites to engage intransigently and optimistically with hypocrites in a melodrama of triumph...

...But the hopes of a truth-pursuing liberalism have not been realized...

...Making optimistic symbols and anticipating optimistic outcomes of undecided situations are as much a part of human nature--of the human biology--as are the shape of the body, the growth of children, and zest for sexual pleasure," he says...