Of Mice And Men And Sacred Work

In the 20th century, however, psychologists began to adore these pink-tailed creatures as test subjects for their studies on one particular subject: human behavior. Today, because of how rodents react to various stimuli in scientific research, the world has adopted a certain view of what makes a human being tick. In fact, many public and private organizations have often implemented policies to guide human activity because of what scientists observed in their precious vermin. So if you feel like a lab rat being manipulated in an absurd experiment, you now know why.

Have you ever felt like a mouse running through a maze? It certainly is a common feeling among members of human society at one time or another. In our rodent-like existence, we are often spinning that hamster wheel, trying to win the rat race, or feeling like someone’s guinea pig. There was even a bestseller in 1998 titled, “Who Moved My Cheese?” which used this man/mouse connection to create a self-help allegory for business success. But are we really better if we find the cheddar? We can only hope the cheese in question isn’t bait in a snapping trap.

Of course, this kind of metaphor isn’t surprising when we consider the fact that scientists throughout modern history have been using laboratory rodents to gain insight into the human condition. Early on, they found out that the genetic, biological, and behavioral characteristics of rodents closely resemble those of humans, and their ease of handling and quick breeding made them ideal specimens for most scientific research into the many disorders of mankind.

Thing is, though, we might actually learn something about ourselves in the observation of mice.

Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia

Perhaps the most ambitious and well-known behavioral experiment with mice was conducted between 1968 and 1970 by American ethologist John B. Calhoun, who created a massive mouse “utopia” to record the social pathology of living in a structured society. He had been doing such experiments since the 1950s with Norway rats, but this was his biggest attempt yet. He constructed a mouse city called “Universe 25” that had enough square footage for over 3800 albino house mice to live comfortably. The population started with four breeding pairs that were lab-raised and resistant to communicable disease. All their needs were met: food, water, shelter of various kinds, and protection from the elements and predators.

Everything was fine until the population reached less than a quarter of what the enclosure could sustain. After 300 days or so, there was an inexplicable breakdown of societal norms which caused a noticeable slowing in population growth (which eventually peaked at 2200 before plummeting to zero). During the intermediate stage, mice began crowding together in large groups when there was plenty of free space to spread out more efficiently and comfortably. Male mice formed gangs that randomly attacked or killed one another for no apparent reason. Female mice became inattentive mothers, often abandoning or killing their young. In some cases, fetuses died and were simply absorbed into the mother’s body.

As the situation worsened, Calhoun solemnly noted: “Their spirit has died…” Insanity ensued and the population dropped. Pansexualism, cannibalism, and self-focused detachment became the norm. Male mice began obsessively mating with nearby mice of both genders, which was sometimes nothing more than violent sexual assaults. A small faction of younger mice, dubbed “The Beautiful Ones” (because their sleek coats showed no surface trauma), withdrew from all social interaction and spent their isolation eating, sleeping, and grooming themselves. Then, slowly but surely, all the mice in Universe 25 stopped breeding. Within two years from the start of the experiment, they were all dead.

The conclusions reached from the Universe 25 experiment focused on two main points: the environmental stresses of overpopulation, or more specifically, social density; and the appearance of what Calhoun called Behavioral Sink, a collapse in natural mouse activity due to overcrowding. Eventually these two conclusions led to fears of overpopulation and future human extinction, and had considerable influence on behavioral psychology, governmental initiatives, and social engineering for decades to come. Sadly, however, both Calhoun and the others extracted a deficient theory that missed the bigger issue.

The “Behavioral Sink”

In reality, what Calhoun uncovered was the dangers of creating an earthly utopia where one’s labors and duties are no longer necessary, and where God and His will have no place. To his credit, Calhoun did touch upon the spiritual aspect of his experiment with his observance of Behavioral Sink, but he then failed to fully connect it to the prevailing condition of the fallen world. Perhaps this is more the duty of a theologian than a scientist, and yet even the preeminent psychologist Carl Rogers saw the horrific moral implications of Calhoun’s experiment:

“The resemblance to human behavior is frightening,” Rogers wrote. “In humans, we see poor family relationships, the lack of caring, the complete alienation, the magnetic attraction of overcrowding, the lack of involvement, which is so great that it permits people to watch a long drawn-out murder without so much as calling the police” (Some Social Issues Which Concern Me, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1972).

So at what point does this Behavioral Sink, or moral breakdown, invariably take place? For those laboratory mice, it was soon after they realized they were no longer required to forage for food, build their nests, and raise their young in the image of their purposeful, active parents. By removing the mice’s need to work for their survival, Calhoun disrupted their natural instincts and left a moral vacuum to be filled with unnatural impulses that ultimately destroyed them. As Calhoun rightly concluded but did not pursue further, the confused mice first died a spiritual death, which in turn expedited their eventual physical death.

For men made in the image of God, however, such a two-fold demise is the ultimate spiritual tragedy. The fall into moral chaos is always greater when we lose sight of our God-ordained duty to “work and keep” the earth, which was given to us at the beginning of Creation. God has hard-wired us to be workers and directly connected it to our well-being. When we ignore that sacred obligation to work as commanded by God in the garden of Eden, we soon decline and perish as a society, both spiritually and physically. As Thomas Carlyle wisely saw it, “In idleness there is a perpetual despair.”