Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

He took a train to Calistoga, where Larkyns was working at the Yellow Jacket Ranch. Once at the ranch, Muybridge strode up to the front door and summoned Larkyns. When Larkyns arrived, Muybridge stated in matter-of-fact fashion: “Good evening, major, my name is Muybridge,” at which time he raised his Smith & Wesson No. 2 six-shooter and shot Larkyns one inch below his left nipple. Larkyns grabbed his wound, ran through the house to his friends outside, and collapsed and died. A witness to the scene disarmed Muybridge and took him to the parlor, where Muybridge apologized to the women present for the “interruption.”

At Muybridge’s highly publicized trial, which produced an acquittal, several witnesses spoke of the changes the stagecoach accident had produced in his character. After the accident, he seemed like a different man—eccentric, remote, aloof, and cold. His speech and manner of dress were odd. He did not clean himself regularly. He cared little for social outings. He had difficulties keeping track of the contracts that financed his photography. And he demonstrated little or no modesty, no embarrassment at his eccentricities.

What does embarrassment have to do with incivility, remoteness, and murder? To find answers to these questions, I trained my eye in the frame-by-frame view of human social life inspired by Darwin and pioneered by Muybridge himself in his still photography. I slowed down the blur of two-second snippets of embarrassment and studied its fleeting elements—gaze shifts, head movements down, coy, compressed smiles, neck exposures, and glancing touches of the face. At the time I began my research, the display of embarrassment was thought to be a sign of confusion and thwarted intention. My research told a different story, about how these elements of embarrassment are the visible signals of an evolved force that brings people together during conflict and after breeches of the social contract, when relations are adrift, and aggressive inclinations perilously on the rise. This subtle display is a sign of our respect for others, our appreciation of their view of things, and our commitment to the moral and social order. I found that facial displays of embarrassment are evolved signals whose rudiments are observed in other species, and that the study of this seemingly inconsequential emotion offers a porthole onto the ethical brain, which in Muybridge’s case had been destroyed in northeastern Texas over 140 years ago.

SLOW WORLD, FRAME BY FRAME

 

When Muybridge returned to California in 1866, brain damaged and a different man, he was swept up in a period of radical change. Space and time and the ordinary rhythms of human exchange were being annihilated by the new technologies, the steam engine, the railroad, the factory, and photography. Muybridge became a photographer of this modernization, this deconstruction of human social life.

Muybridge is best-known for his studies of animals in motion, an obsession that began with his photos of Leland Stanford’s horses on his farm in Palo Alto. In a frenzied eighteen months at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge shot over 100,000 photos, capturing the frame-by-frame elements of people, often nude, walking, running, doing flips, jumping, throwing discs, descending stairs, and pouring water. He shot nude women throwing balls and feeding dogs, a legless boy getting into and out of a chair, cripples walking, and near-nude men doing rifle drills, laying bricks, and throwing seventy-five-pound rocks. The subjects’ faces are typically turned away. They are lonely forms removed from the warm surround of other people.

In this frame-by-frame world, Muybridge revealed truths previously inaccessible to the human eye, truths about whether horses’ hooves are all aloft when galloping, about the coordination of arms and legs during a simple stroll, about how the arms thrust backward after throwing a heavy object. Slow-motion scenes in film are similarly revelatory. In one scene in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Robert De Niro, as the 1940s middleweight Jake LaMotta, first realizes his desire for a young teen while staring at her feet, splashing in a pool, foot by immersing foot, in hypnotic slow motion. On the ropes in a bloody championship fight, LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson dwell in intimate eye contact in a few slow-moving frames, realizing respect amid violence, through their swollen eyes, misshapen heads, and the stroboscopic blur of their punches.

For Darwin, the frame-by-frame world revealed how human facial expression traces back to the expressions of our primate relatives, and the selection pressures that have produced the human emotional repertoire. It is this frame-by-frame world to which Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, developing the Facial Action Coding System.