A Gene for Infidelity?
Last January I wrote about the link between creativity and promiscuity.
I’ve just picked up this month’s copy of the Mensa Magazine, published by British Mensa and there’s an interesting article by Dr. Desmond Morris entitled “Why brilliant men betray their wives.” Desmond is a national institution in Britain. A zoologist, ethnologist and surrealist painter, he always used to be on television and gained considerable notoriety for his book The Naked Ape that tried to explain human behavior by analogy with apes.
In his latest article Desmond follows some of the same reasoning that I did in my article: many intensely creative people also enjoy risk taking. He just talks about males, but I think that the same principles apply equally to many intensely creative and successful women, who also enjoy taking extreme risks.
Every act of creation demands that we see, feel or think differently about something. Desmond says that every piece of innovation or creativity is an act of rebellion. I only half agree with that: the truly creative person is busily establishing a new level of order. The creative rebel is a stereotype that’s not born out by experimental work on genius and creativity. The creative or innovative act is one of making new connections and in a sense it is also a moment of risk-taking, for the new technique, formula or invention may fail. We recently discussed the way in which resilience is a key to creativity: to keep going in the face of failure or adversity. Even the most highly creative are not every single day: I have known many Nobel Prize winners and award winning artists, and they all have their off days.
Desmond’s article highlights the multiple extra-marital affairs of Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell.
He argues that it is the innate compulsion to take risks that leads both to creative brilliance and an inability to remain with just one partner. He pursues the idea that our distant hunting ancestors required a new personality trait: bravery. The successful needed to take risks and be courageous. Desmond then again excludes women from his equation, saying that their reproductive contributions to the tribe made them too important to risk on the hunt. He now fast-forwards to the present, saying that the offspring of the adventurous males could either engage in physical risk-taking or explore new ideas. And that their curiosity leads them to explore not just ideas but novel sexual experiences. Once a “conquest” has been made, the risk-taking adventurer moves on to a new target.
It is certainly true that men are far more likely to die in accidents than are women, but it’s a bit of a stretch to attribute all of that to risk-taking. What about the male difficulties with multi-tasking and to resist peer pressure, to say nothing of much higher rates of substance abuse?
And yes, fame, power and wealth can be powerful aphrodisiacs. But to reduce immoral, dangerous and disrespectful behavior to a risk-taking gene from our distant ancestors seems to me to a wild extrapolation based on a very selective use of a small amount of information.
Because infidelity surely has many more strands to it that just a genetic “itch.” Many highly successful people are enormously narcissistic and so fail to take into account the damage that their infidelity might do to their spouse and children.
Seeing sex as no more than a branch of gymnastics is also off the mark. Even a casual encounter will likely contain emotional, subtle and even spiritual components. If a relationship is failing because those are all missing, it is no surprise if a spouse investigates divorce and other options. But that is not risk taking: it is fulfilling a need that is not being met by the current partner.
Clarity of Communication
One of the major reasons for the failure of relationships or of businesses is a failure to communicate clearly. There are also powerful reasons for thinking that much ill health is rooted in “blockages:” inadequate communication between your body, your mind, your emotions, subtle systems and spirituality.
Any communication consists of ten essential components:
- The integrity and mental state of the sender
- The intent of the sender
- The expectation of the sender
- The information
- The medium
- The context
- The receiver
- The mental state of the receiver
- The reaction or response of the receiver
- The meta-text and meta-communication of the exchange
Naturally, in a healthy communication, everyone involved takes turns being the sender and the receiver, and this interaction between you creates the overall message. I must be very clear that I’m not just talking about verbal communication, but also physical and intimate interactions, business and family discourses.
I’d also like to take the whole notion of communication a step further: meaningful communication needs for us to be consciously aware of the interaction, and we should see it not just as an exchange of information, but of energy. A charismatic individual may communicate a lot more than mere words and his or her impact may last long after the words have been forgotten. On the other hand, there is actually a technical term – phatic communion – for empty language that is purely used for social lubrication: “How are you?” “You’re welcome,” “Have a nice day.”
It really is important to be aware of all of these components of communication. A problem in any one of them can make a mess of any attempt for people to connect. Too often I see people think only of the sender, the message and the recipient, without realizing that it is the other aspects of communication that are the keys to success or failure. This is often very important in therapy: people may ruminate on something said to them, when they should be considering the context of whatever was said.
Meta-text and meta-communication refer to the whole spectrum of other components of our interactions that stretch beyond the message itself. These include the types of language that we use as well as prosodic cues. And if people are in close proximity, body language and gesture. You may well know that it is possible to tell a great deal about someone’s intentions by studying changes in the tone of their facial muscles, changes in the color of their skin and the directions I which they move their eyes when speaking. How we use certain words to fill in our communication can be as important as the main body of a communication. Something that we do all the time is to try to understand the underlying meaning or meta-text, that is often quite different form the actual words being spoken.
Whether dealing with an individual in therapy or a business that wants to perform better, there is a series of critical questions that will uncover communication problems:
- Do you have any communication problems?
- Who is responsible for it?
- Is there a disconnection between the mental state of any message sender and the message itself?
- Does the sender have a clear purpose in communicating?
- Are people able to understand the sender? (T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) was said to have one of the largest vocabularies at the University of Oxford. So large that many people didn’t have a clue what he was talking about!)
- Is information being communicated appropriately?
- Is the environment conducive to communication?
- What is interfering with communication?
- How long has this been a problem?
- Why has the problem not been solved?
If there is a communication problem, consider starting from scratch:
- Any communication contains information and energy: are they both clear and pure?
- Is there congruence between what is being communicated and the intent of the communicator?
- Is there a culture of integrity in communications?
- Are people striving for the greater good or personal aggrandizement?
- What people, policies or procedures are interfering with communication?
- How are communications becoming degraded?
- What and who’s emotions are interfering with the informatyion and the energy of any communications?
- What might lead to the misunderstanding of a message?
- What systems are in place to ensure that communications are being received and understood correctly?
- What system of questioning is in place?
Once we understand each of the phases of communication, and that it is a dynamic exchange of energy and not just information transfer. And that ANY message or communication is subject to degradation, and that there are ways to check for and correct it, you are well on your way to abolishing many of the problems that can wreck relationships, capsize companies and ruin a therapeutic alliance.
“Once a human being has arrived on this earth, communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him.”
— Virginia Satir (American Family Therapist, 1916-1988)
“Skill in the art of communication is crucial to a leader’s success. He can accomplish nothing unless he can communicate effectively.”
— Norman Allen (American Playwright, Recipient of a Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play)
“A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.”
–Robert M. Hutchins (American Educator, and, from 1929-1945, President of the University of Chicago, 1899-1977)
