Take, for another example, a poet I happen to be very fond of, Chaucer, and read the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. You will be amazed at the amount of pure character drawing which comes through simply in the very accurate descriptions of the physique of each of the personages in the poem. It is an extraordinary example of how much can be done with a minimum of psychological analysis but a maximum of setting forth of the physical differences between people. We have a very good idea of who these people are simply because there has been an admirably vivid description of their outward characteristics.
Sheldon’s tri-polar system is also interesting inasmuch as it corresponds very closely with the tri-polar system which we find in the religious tradition of India. (In the Christian system we have much more of a dichotomy between the way of Martha and the way of Mary, the way of action and the way of contemplation, although even within the Christian system it has been recognized that the way of Martha probably has more than one aspect to it.) One can read the full development of Indian psycho-theological theory in the Bhagavad Gita. Human beings are divided into three main classes: those who worship by means of devotion and practise what is called bhakti yoga or devotional worship; those whose worship is predominantly in the field of action, in performing duty in a selfless way, and who practise karma yoga; and those who worship through contemplation or through knowledge, the practitioners of jnana yoga. These correspond closely to the Sheldonian three poles. The extreme endomorph would inevitably be led towards the practice of emotional devotion; the mesomorph would be led towards a path of action dictated by duty; and the extreme ectomorph would be led towards the life of introversion and contemplation.
Here we may remark on a very curious thing, that insofar as the psychiatrists have recognized these kinds of temperamental differences they have recognized only a dichotomy. Jung’s insistence, for example, on the difference between the introvert and extrovert is a division into two. He failed completely to see that there are two very different kinds of extrovert: there is the driving extrovert, who wishes to dominate either things or people—the Sheldonian mesomorph; and there is the emotional, kindly extrovert—the Sheldonian endomorph—who wants to spill the emotional beans and to bring everybody into his confidence, to be on good terms with everybody. These two kinds of extrovert are as different from each other as both are from the introvert—the Sheldonian ectomorph—who does not want any of those things.
The tendency at the present time to underplay the importance of genetic factors generally is related to certain political and philosophical doctrines. Orthodox Marxism, for example, is based upon the idea of environmental determinism, and it does not like the idea of congenital differences. In this country, possibly because of a wrongly interpreted view of democracy, it is felt that too much stress upon the congenital and unchangeable differences between people is somehow undemocratic—and also very depressing. I remember years ago my brother telling me that he had been asked by one of the slick magazines to write an article on genetics. He wrote the article, and I am glad to say he was paid for it, but the editor said that he was sorry, that he couldn’t use it because the conclusions in regard to the ingrained and inborn genetic differences between people would be found too depressing by readers.
Unfortunately the nature of nature is that it is not particularly democratic in the Napoleonic sense of the word—where he said that what he was doing was opening the careers to talents. It is interesting that the Russians, in spite of the fact that Lysenko is allowed to go around saying that he can turn barley into wheat, which he certainly cannot, have decided that for the sake of finding men and women capable of exercising efficient leadership they must make a careful selection of genetically highly endowed people. We see that Russian education, as it has developed now, is essentially an aristocratic education concentrating on the people with the highest IQ and the greatest drive and not making much effort to impose a veneer of universal education on everybody.
The universal education, in fact, stops fairly soon, but there is a most intensive education of the upper crust for the sake of creating an efficient oligarchy. It is a curious thing to find that, although Marxist theory is opposed to stressing genetic factors in man, the demands of practical life in a Marxist country have made it necessary for the Russians to devote more attention to the highly endowed than is being given at the present time in the democratic countries. But this kind of aristocracy or, more accurately, meritocracy—a word which has been used recently in Britain by anthropologists, who speak about its gradual emergence there—will certainly develop everywhere as technological societies demand it. We will have stratified societies based mainly upon the different capacities of people to pass examinations and go through more and more specialized and intensive forms of training.
These have been more or less factual discussions; we must pass now to the other end of the bridge. What are the consequences in the world of values and the world of thought of the enormous genetic variability among human beings? One consequence of the fact of variability is that liberty is a very precious thing. After all, if we were all the same, as Helvétius, Pelagius, or Watson in his early days believed, then there would be no point in liberty; what would be good for one would be good for all. It is human variability—the fact that one man’s meat is another man’s poison—that imposes upon us the duty of preserving individual liberty and of encouraging tolerance, of preventing majorities from repressing minorities, of permitting people to have a certain measure of self-determination in their lives.
In the religious tradition, inherited variability has been expressed in the doctrine that individual human souls are of infinite value, although this has not prevented the organized churches from trying to dragoon the faithful into a single pattern. We always have this tension between the fact of genetic variability and the fact that society does on the whole like to create a single manageable pattern of human life. The problem, as usual, is to make the best of both worlds, to find out how we can have a stable and viable society which yet gives scope to the enormous variations which, as a matter of empirical fact, do exist among human beings.
The extent to which societies have imposed patterns upon their extremely unlike individuals has varied greatly at different times in history and at different levels of culture. In the more primitive cultures, where societies are small and bound by very tight traditions, the pressure to conform is naturally very high. Anyone who reads the literature of anthropology must be astounded by the fantastic nature of some of the traditions to which men have had to conform. The advantage of a large and complex society such as ours is that it does permit the variability of human beings to express itself in a great many ways; there does not have to be the kind of intense conformity which we find in small primitive societies. Even so, in every society there is always a drive for conformity which is imposed from without by law and tradition and which individuals impose upon themselves from within by trying to imitate what the society regards as the ideal type.
I recommend in this context a very valuable book by the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier, which was published about fifty years ago, called Bovarysme. The name is derived from the heroine of Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary, in which this unfortunate young woman was always trying to be what in fact she was not. Gaultier generalizes this and says we all have a tendency to try to be what we are not, to be what the society in which we are brought up thinks is desirable. He says that everybody has a ‘Bovaric angle’. That of some people is fairly narrow; what they intrinsically are by heredity is not too different from what they try to make themselves by imitation. But some people have Bovaric angles of 90 degrees, and some even of 180, and are trying to be exactly the opposite of what by nature they are. The results are generally disastrous.
Nevertheless, one of the mechanisms by which society gets people to conform is to set up an ideal and rely on individuals to imitate it voluntarily. (It is not for nothing that what is probably the most influential and most widely read book of Christian devotion is called The Imitation of Christ.) Unfortunately, as we see only too clearly from the study of juvenile delinquency, the ideal imitated by many of us is not the highest ideal. There is imitation of Al Capone, unfortunately, and imitation of the young tough who goes around beating up people; there is imitation of rock-and-roll performers; and so on and so forth. The process is always present in any society, and it always has to be present. What we have to discover is some method of making the best of the social drive towards conformity while at the same
