Anatomy of Love.

If you like Walt Disney movies, you will love Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love. In Uncle Walt's World, bad foxes lead innocent youth astray, crickets give moral advice, and candelabra pontificate on etiquette. In Helen Fisher's world, all sorts of animals display all sorts of wonderful personal traits from longing to loyalty to love. Reading her book is like one of those "True Lite Adventures" in which the kindly deer are attacked by the nasty wolves to the accompaniment of dramatic music and a solemn voice-over. Fisher offers us the music and text.

The basic argument of the book is that whatever you might find in human love behavior, from dalliance to divorce, is a replay of animal ancestry. Whether it is Disney making mice human, or Helen Fisher making humans mousy, it all comes to the same delightful mishmash. The advantage for Disney is that Mirkey Mouse is clearly a cartoon--and the end credits are considerably shorter than the 118 pages of notes, bibliography, and index that give Fisher's effort the gloss of scientific earnestness.

Like a good cartoon, Fisher's book is fun and full of surprises. In the Balkans some men carry handkerchiefs under their armpits as love tokens. The writing is happily jaunty and disjointed: "Infatuation...is a panoply of intense emotions, roller coastering from high to low, hinged on the pendulum a single being...a mosaic of sensations." No wonder infatuation is such a problem ! The interesting question is why anyone would take Fisher's account seriously, yet we are assured by the book jacket that she received the American Anthropological Association's Distinguished Service Award in 1985 and makes numerous radio and TV appearances. E.O. Wilson, the grand guru of sociobiology, blesses her "new explanation of the roots of human marriage, sex, and love." There must be a certain plausibility to this sort of thing in order to get selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Fisher's strategy is virtually invisible to the rapid reader. I call it "the quotation mark displacement dodge." The essential trick is to apply a crucial term in quotation marks. "Bonobos in the San Diego Zoo...always gaze at each other as they 'make love."' An acute reader will note that "make love" is being used out of its normal usage. A rapid reader, however, will scarcely note the little floating quotes. Before anyone knows it, Presto! the marks disappear and we forget that "love" has been displaced. We come to believe that the usage is not "stretched" but literal in very truth.

Fisher says that gorillas have harems. Do they? Male gorillas mate with a stable group of multiple females. Doth multiple mating a harem make? The harems of the great sultans often consisted of over 100 women: wives, kadins (who had the status of wives), concubines, and servants. These women were all subject to the control of the sultan's mother and guarded by eunuchs. A harem, in short, is a complex social, legal, and moral structure defined by delicate distinctions between wives, kadins, authorities, servants, and the like. With all due respect to gorillas, using "harem" to describe both the seraglio and the pack is like confusing bouillabaisse and bananas because both are food.

The sly quote mark is not confined to specific claims, it infects the basic sense of the argument. Fisher wants to explain the mystery of infatuation. As a strict scientist she offers "some 'reasonable' explanations of emotion." Why is "reasonable" in quotation marks? It seems that even Fisher recognizes how much she is stretching the notion of "reason" in these "explanations."

The explanation of infatuation fails both as an explanation at all and as an explanation of infatuation. Fisher tries a series of explanations from the olfactory to the chemistry of phenylethylamine. Do smells and the limbic system explain infatuation? Fisher's actual argument is a tissue of "perhaps," "this is speculative," "it could explain," "probably," "I think it does." I think it does not. Infatuation by Fisher's own description involves a "mysterious" interest in just this one. "My whole world had been transformed. It had a new center and that center was Marilyn," says one of her informants. If infatuation is individualized, then "explanations"-- even explanations--by smell won't do. Unless there is a high individuation among Balkan armpits, infatuation should prove to be generic, not individual.

The peculiarity of human love is very much involved in the fact that Marilyn is the center of my world. Not a female in estrus, but this person, Marilyn, is what I desire. What Fisher blurs and blots is the very peculiar, indeed unique, human characteristic of being a person, a rational agent who can promise love and marriage. Whatever the fidelity of animal attachments, they are not based on promises and the wayward ape who severs a relation is not subject to any moral censure. Which is, of course, the point of the whole thing: no moral censure. It plays very well on "The Donahue Show." The more that one can slide human "value" (note quotes) into the biological background, the less one has to fuss about thought, choice, and (worst of all) guilt.

Fisher appeals to sociobiology, a science doomed to fail at its purported task. Consider the titillating fuzziness of E.O. Wilson's praise: "...explanation of the roots of human marriage" (italics added). What exactly is supposed to be explained? My rapid reader may think that it is marriage that will be explained but it turns out it is the roots of marriage. Does explaining the root system of the rose explain the rose? Of course human marriage is rooted in biology, but marriage is what has flowered by human choice replete with moral lessons, legal sanctions, and, alas, guilt.

Sociobiology may explain the persistence of a practice but it cannot explain the inherent value in the practice. There is an obvious survival value to getting the right sums in mathematics. 2 + 2 = 4 has greater survival value than 2 + 2 = 5. But as one commentator points out, "We can explain why we should have acquired mathematical understanding; but the explanation does not tell what we have acquired. To understand that we must turn to logic and the foundations of mathematics, which are concerned with reasons, not causes .... "

The anatomy of human love hangs on reason's skeleton of morality and law. Fisher lacks any theory of moral meaning. When humans arrive in chapter 13, they are certainly rational but only in technical terms. Morality is good genetic policy. Human individuals and societies may be stupid if they establish bad moral (genetic) policies, but they could not be regarded as evil. Social Darwinists of the last century argued that war was good genetic policy (it cleansed the gene pool); Fisher argues that peace is a better policy for gene persistence. Either way we are discussing practical options, not moral demands.

Much of Fisher's book is a"good read" as one wanders through the stunning variation of animal and hominid behavior. Why is the animal kingdom so fascinating? Fisher would have us believe that it is because animals act like humans (or vice versa). For whatever it is worth, when humans first emerged from the animal kingdom, they thought better of animals than that. Animals were like gods, not like men. What fascinated our ancient ancestors was that animals hunted, mated, and banded in silence. Unlike the gabby new planetary inhabitants who could lie, cheat, and deceive--as well as promise, decree, and praise--animals were ever faithful, ever themselves. "A rose is a rose is a rose." Like gods, animals expressed the "fullness of being ."

Moses marks a radical turn toward the strangely human when he stumbles on a God who talks and hands out moral laws. If anyone is puzzled about the popularity of books like Fisher' s, it is worth remembering that when Moses showed up with the Ten Commandments, everybody else was busy worshiping a Golden Calf.