on civilisation, savages, clothing, sex and bonobos
I’m a great admirer of Charles Darwin. I’ve read On the Origin of Species three times now. I’ve read his Voyage of the Beagle, and a number of biographies – Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Janet Browne’s two-volume work, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, and Charles Darwin, the Power of Place, as well as Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle and David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Not that I’m showing off or anything…. I also have a copy of The Indelible Stamp – four volumes in one, the Voyage, the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression of the Emotions. I’m currently about a third of the way through The Descent of Man, but…
In spite of all that I know about this driven, timid, well-born, sensitive, fatherly, loyal, reclusive, internationally-connected, obsessive genius, his revolutionary impact on biological science, and the Victorian-era context of his life, I still find myself wincing at his regular use of the word ‘savage’ to refer to certain types of human, especially in The Descent. It is of course, a very much discarded term today, and I’m quite aware that I wouldn’t have winced had I been reading the book in the late 19th century.
So I’ve been thinking about what exactly made certain humans ‘savages’ in the minds of your typical Victorian gentleman. And to me, the primary feature of the ‘savage’ was clothing, or the lack thereof.
Think of clothing in upper-class Victorian society. Top hats, frock coats, or great-coats in winter, waistcoats and ties or cravats, stiff-collared shirts, high-waisted trousers, sometimes with suspenders, and of course a good solid pair of boots. Certainly their clothing had to be of a quality that distinguished them from their servants, of which Darwin had many over the years.
And then, I almost forgot, there also existed another, generally lower class of Victorian, known mostly as ladies, though courser terms were sometimes used. Their clothing was more layered and complex, involving corsets and crinolines, petticoats, bustles, bows, furbelows and lace trimmings, and finished off with jewellery of various kinds – necklaces, brooches, medallions and such, all of which required servants for dressing and maintenance. Surprisingly enough, these ladies and gentlemen sometimes produced children, which generally required something like an archaeological excavation on the part of the male. Then again, a more plausible explanation is that these children were carried to upper class couples by storks.
So, imagine how shocked some of these more adventurous, voyaging gentlemen would have been on encountering the inhabitants of darkest Africa, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand, and the many scattered islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, and finding that their inhabitants were almost as unclothed as – animals! Wild animals, even.
I haven’t done much voyaging and exploring outside of books. When I first learned of native Americans I pictured many feathers, in head-dresses and skirt-like garments, with muscular bodies naked apart from dots and dashes of paint, or woad or whatever. I also pictured – and saw on our TV screen – skilled horse-riders, bow-and-arrow sharp-shooters, strong and silent types, with cool, unsmiling expressions. They never seemed to have anything to smile about, to be sure.
It was also clear that these various peoples had their own languages, rituals, and skills, tools and inventions adapted to survival and thriving in an environment they’d become familiar with over thousands of years. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the Aboriginal people he encounters in Australia:
They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.
Of course Darwin couldn’t help but make comparisons with his own ‘civilisation’. Some could speak English and make astute observations, but they were a bit weak on housing and land cultivation. He presumably wasn’t aware that when the first fleet of convicts and guards tried to cultivate the land at Sidney Cove they were seriously unsuccessful, the soils being nowhere near as fertile as those in England, and totally unsuitable for English-style crops. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet, and a slow general understanding that they needed to adapt to vastly different environmental conditions, prevented catastrophic loss of life. Nor did he recognise that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Australia’s native population was an intelligent and hard-earned adaptation to local conditions over tens of thousands of years.
So, Darwin described these natives as ‘partly clothed’. What does this mean? The earliest photographic images were taken decades after the beginning of white settlement, but women were generally depicted bare-breasted, unlike the highly civilised women of today, and men’s genitalia were hidden under pouches tied with strings. Was this always the case, before civilised whities caught a glimpse? We’ll never know. It does seem that the taste for decoration, expressed largely in clothing by my culture, was also a part of native cultures, through face and body painting, especially for ceremonial occasions.
And with all this near-nakedness, what about sex? Well, it’d be way too time-consuming and effortful to look into the sex lives of all the peoples that Darwin and the Victorians would deem to be savages, so why not focus on the land that recently came to be known as Australia? Well, unsurprisingly, given the vastness of the continent, the huge variety of its landscapes and environments, the large number of language and cultural groups living in isolation from each other, the story is one of diversity and complexity – not a free-for-all, but not standard Victorian monogamy either.
It’s been claimed, and I think proven, by anthropologists and historians that Australia has been inhabited for some 50,000 years by these native peoples. What wouldn’t we give to travel back all those years to see what those early arrivals were up to. For that matter, what was human life like in the region of Kent 50,000 years ago? Presumably colder than down south, with very different megafauna to deal with. And the reason why things changed so much in the north, in Europe, especially in the last five to ten thousand years, is explained, at least partly, by books such as Who we are and how we got here, by David Reich, and The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Waves of interaction, often brutal, from the east, brought not only rape and pillage, but new weaponry and skills, technology and tactics – and whole new approaches to culture, with, in the last thousand years or more, eastern Confucian patriarchy and middle eastern Islamic patriarchy reinforcing western Catholic patriarchy, forces which women, at least in the last century or so, have just begun to fight off.
And so to bonobos, those fabulous but insufficiently appreciated close relatives of ours, unhampered by clothing or religion, unjudged by puritanical ideologies, unwed but far from unloved. Judged by human standards, bonobos are paedophiles, sluts, studs, poofs, lezzos, straights, queers, nymphos, ambisexuals and all the rest, yet the only threat to their community is humanity….
What more needs to be said?
References
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, The descent of man
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures, an amateur commentary: lectures 3 & 4
In his third lecture, Bregman brings up the Fabian movement in Britain, whose most well-known members today were G B Shaw and H G Wells. It was named after a famous Roman statesman and military commander, Fabius (full name Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus), whose delaying tactics against Hannibal of Carthage strengthened Rome at a time of crisis. So the Fabians favoured gradual, piecemeal tactics to improve society – reform as opposed to revolution. Here’s Bregman’s opening remarks:
It begins with a tax system that is fair, simple, and based on the principle that work and wealth should play by the same rules.
Bregman’s issue here is definitely my own. Money made from money (Trump is a classic example, but there are many many others) is more ‘protected’ from the tax system than money made by work. So, Bregman asks, what do we do to encourage, if not enforce, a fairer tax system and a sense of social justice? I for one, would want to bring to the attention of the super-wealthy that their wealth isn’t as ‘deserved’ as they like to think it is – but what a task that would be!
The Fabians emerged from and split off from a broader, Quaker-inspired movement of moral reform in the late 19th century, feeling that political reform was the vital issue, and that this reform needed to be gradual and rational, bringing the majority of the people with it, if possible. Unsurprisingly, the movement held great appeal for many of the intellectuals of the day. They produced essays in pamphlet form, focussing on brevity and conciseness, with elegant packaging, and which invited those interested to attend conferences and debates on relevant issues. The movement became fashionable, in effect. It turned economics into a near-popular topic and was a major force in the formation of the British Labour Party. The movement spawned a very radical tax system, which reached such proportions that, in the 1960s, bands such as the Beatles and the Stones complained about being impoverished. Poor things! Unfortunately, since those days, the rich have had it much easier to retain and increase their wealth, as a range of schemes and tactics have emerged to protect private capital, including whole companies created to do just that.
Anyway, this Fabian movement managed to become ‘cool’, and increasingly successful into the 20th century. Education and healthcare were a major focus, as well as limits to working hours and extra pay for overtime. Women’s rights became an issue, as did the progressive taxation system that George Harrison maundered on about – until he found a tax haven, no doubt. In fact, it was into the 1970s that things began to change, and Bregman blames it on the neo-liberal movement, which began around the 50s and included some well-known names, particularly Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. This was of course about a minimal state and maximal markets – the rule of self-interest.
So, when the 70s brought increased unemployment, a drop in economic growth and an inflationary surge, the neo-liberal strategies of small governments and big, untethered markets began to sound enticing. It became the centrist approach for a time, gaining acceptance not only from conservatives such as Thatcher and Reagan, but also from supposedly centre-left figures such as Clinton and Blair. But over time – and Bregman is surely right on this – the price was a widening rich-poor gap, a reduced sense of community, an untameable capitalist class, ecological problems and the like. He claims that neoliberalism is dead, and we are searching for, in need of, new ideas and approaches, a ‘conspiracy of decency’.
So, towards the end of this third lecture Bregman claims that this conspiracy is at hand. I’m not sure that I agree, but he might be talking about something like a universal basic income, which I’ve written about before:
Imagine a state that embraces this role fully, where the brightest minds don’t waste their time polishing power points at McKinsey, but build high-speed rail, or cure entire classes of disease. Imagine the massive profits from AI, technology rooted in decades of government-funded research, flowing into a national wealth fund that paid every citizen a monthly dividend.
Yes, all this is nice to imagine, and we may well be working towards a world of greater leisure, but the forces of greed and empowerment over others don’t seem to be reducing….
So to Bregman’s final lecture, which he calls ‘fighting for humanity in the age of the machine’. He began, rather startlingly for me, with the free will issue, which I’ve come to terms with, mostly in the last decade or so, through reading, first Sam Harris, but particularly Robert Sapolsky’s massive work Behave, and its follow-up, Determined. Yet unlike Bregman, accepting our deterministic world hasn’t particularly traumatised me – probably because those works simply confirmed me in my ‘suspicions’, which were much more than suspicions.
I was a little startled, too, to learn that after a traumatic ‘loss of Christian faith’ period, Bregman found a hero worth worshipping in Bertrand Russell, that first Reith Lecturer, and a towering figure in philosophy and ethics, whose writings I’ve always enjoyed but have read too little of – time to correct that…. ah, time, time. Interestingly, he too experienced youthful crises – life-threatening ones, it seems – regarding free will and religious faith. These were issues that troubled my own youth, though they were certainly not existential crises.
Bregman quotes the simplest observation/advice from Russell, ‘love is wise, hatred is foolish’. This, of course, goes with the ‘no free will’ view. Understanding that people are what they are due to all sorts of determining factors may not enable you to love them, but it certainly makes it feel foolish to hate them, and I’ve often, in recent times, checked myself with this commonplace insight.
When Russell presented his Reith lectures in 1948, the world had been convulsed by two massive wars and was facing the spectre of possible nuclear annihilation. We’ve gotten used to living with this possibility after many decades, in which nuclear arsenals have expanded, but have never since been called upon. According to Bregman, though, we’re now facing another threat, a rather more amorphous one, in the rapid development of AI. Who knows where that will lead us, how much a benefit, how much a threat?
When, next, Bregman speaks of the five questions posed by religion, my mind drifts to the five essential questions formulated by Kant which I learned years ago. Or maybe they were four.
- Who/What am I?
- What do/can I know?
- What should I do?
- What can I hope for?
These questions, with some slight variants, seem existentially fundamental. And Bregman’s answers, or my takeaway from them, are fairly vital to me.
Who are we? The planet’s greatest co-operators. That, after all, is how we created AI, and nuclear weapons, and vaccines, and nations and governments and education systems and science and civilisations. Of course, with the growth of complexity came the development of hierarchies. And yet… I’ve read in the past that with the development of agriculture came fixed hierarchies, ownership of property and so on, but I doubt it was that straightforward. Hierarchies exist in chimp and bonobo societies, which we can observe directly, but the hierarchies of the earliest humans and their direct ancestors don’t leave traces. It’s likely that farming, and what we call ‘civilisation’, consolidated those hierarchies, sometimes to a socially destructive extent, as Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest people in the world. Above all, this civilisation has had a massive impact on the planet itself, altering its atmosphere, wiping out many other species, and reducing its ‘size’, from our perspective, from that of our whole world, to a tiny speck in a galaxy that is itself a tiny speck in the universe as we know it.
And now, AI. This might be part of the fifth question to add to the four I gave above, but it’s definitely a ‘we’ question. Where are we going? Is AI the end of the road, the last of our inventions? Here’s Bregman’s summary of the bad news:
Literacy and numeracy rates are plummeting, teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts and anxiety are rising, face-to-face socialising is collapsing, as we retreat indoors, eyes glued to the screens, and solitude is becoming the hallmark of our age
This isn’t just opinion. The statistics provide confirmation. And this has happened before the rise of AI, which can hardly be expected to improve the situation. The online platforms tend to reward extreme views rather than ‘bland’ centrists ones, and Bregman quotes from a study in Nature:
Those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are most actively involved in online political engagement.
This of course gives a skewed view of what the majority, who quickly grow tired of engaging with extremists and their violent reactions, are thinking. And when the most rational people start to give up, real danger ensues.
On this problem, Bregman tries something surprising, to me at least. The temperance movement was a reaction to the widespread abuse of alcohol – and its encouragement by profiteers – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And the loudest voices against this abuse belonged to women, many of the same women who demanded the vote. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why. Alcoholism was largely, though certainly not entirely, a male problem, leading to violence, abuse and family neglect.
Today the addiction is to computer games and other internet distractions, and with AI become normalised on top of this trend, the outcome is hard to predict, and even harder to be optimistic about. AI, as Bregman says, is a ‘supercharging’ technology, but we barely know what that means, and how it will affect current lifestyles. Current polls reveal a growing pessimism about the technological future.
But of course Bregman ends on a positive note, or tries to. What matters, he says, is not what people believe, but what they do. As the spectre of AI descends upon us, people need to act to protect the common interest, the human interest, which as we know is also the interests of the vast web of life from which we have sprung. AI is not, of course, like climate change, or alcoholism, it raises different questions which we need to be alert to, such as ownership, power, inclusivity versus exclusivity, and a close monitoring of effects. The common good is, of course, paramount. This is a difficult task – as Kierkegaard cleverly said, and which Bregman reminds us of – ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’. And this applies not only to our own lives, but our collective cultural lives. We must be alert to the mistakes we will inevitably make, and correct them as quickly as possible, to minimise damage. The future is ours to create, so we must be careful, and wise, and in the most important sense, loving.
Reference
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
the little life of just another reader
Reading and writing have been my mainstays, FWIW, and worth is the word, they seem to, or seek to, plug the many holes in my ego. Reading, of course takes me away to many places, and back to many times, that I can’t access physically. I’ve always been too poor to do much extensive travelling, and too timid to actually meet and converse with interesting people, so I converse, sort of, with books. Sometimes having terrible, exhausting arguments with them, other times brought to tears.
I limit myself to six books at a time, though usually one, or maybe two, grab my attention to the detriment of others, sort of. At the moment it’s the second volume of Janet Browne’s totalling gripping biography of Charles Darwin, The power of place. What a fascinating, admirable, complex character he is, how richly brought to life by Browne’s writings and researches. At the moment I’m reading of his new-found fascination with orchids and their pollination. It seems that he developed this interest partly to take his mind off the endless controversies surrounding his Origin of species, but, not surprisingly, he soon found that their pollination by particular insects supported what came to be known as co-evolution, a whole new field of evolutionary studies.
And yet, reading about this extraordinary and complex bloke (his Descent of Man is on my six-book list, somewhat neglected at the moment), who is still vilified today, and not just by creationists, I still get annoyed at all his upper-class advantages. Not his fault of course, but connections handed him his trip on the Beagle, his marriage to a member of the super-rich Wedgewood family, his university education at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and so forth. At least his life provides a good argument against libertarianism.
So the other four books on the six-book list are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (I have a policy of making at least one book a work of fiction) and Lost connections by Johann Hari – these two books I’m completely ignoring at present, for no good reason – and the other two books, which I’ve brought with me to my exile in the Adelaide Hills, Kingdom of fear by Hunter S Thompson (apparently the ‘S’ is necessary when referring to him) and Shattered lands by Sam Dalrymple.
I bought Shattered Lands the other day at Shakespeare’s Books here in Blackwood, because I couldn’t resist the bookshop’s name, and once inside, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t buy. I also assumed, correctly, that Sam was the son or close relative of William Dalrymple, a writer often recommended to me by a friend, but whom I’ve never read. So I was influenced but didn’t want to be too influenced. Another influence on the purchase was Anna Reid’s Borderland, so informative about a land exotic to me, Ukraine. Shattered Lands promised to tell stories about a world equally exotic, in time rather than place – the British Raj.
In speaking of this to my once-wife, Sarah, she looked up William Dalrymple, and I was shocked but not surprised. Get this, from Wikipedia:
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and “almost Edwardian”. Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
I, too, was born in Scotland. My father was an unskilled labourer, and sometime amateur boxer, the last of a number of male children to a Dundee shipwright – a reasonably classy occupation. That’s all I know of that side of the family, and I’ve never been much interested in tracing ancestry. My mother was a Stewart, and her father, a coal-miner, was Daniel Stewart, hence I’m named Stewart Daniel Henderson. The Stewarts came over the channel with William the Bastard in 1066. They were Stewards then, but changed ‘d’ to ‘t’ when given swathes of land in Scotland for helping William to slaughter the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Then, when one branch of the ever-branching Stewart family looked like becoming Kings of Scotland they changed their name to Stuart, further removing them from the Stench of Stewardship. And those Stuarts went on to…
To cut a long story short, with a bit of trimming and tweaking, I could’ve/should’ve/would’ve been the current monarch of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and life just isn’t fair.
So, where was I? Kingdom of fear is the first book by this author I’ve read, and likely the last. I suppose I chose it because the reading group I’m with have dealt with Ken Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest and Kerouac’s on the road, and I though I’d continue a bit with the hobo libertarian stuff of the USA, which is sometimes entertaining, and often food for thought for a non-libertarian such as myself. At least it’s more appealing than right-wing libertarianism, which really is the pits.
Thompson’s political views chime fairly well with my own, though he’s a bit long-winded about it all, and it of course is all set in the gun-toting US of A, which I’ve just about had enough of. At the same time it’s much more familiar to me than the Burmese-Indian and Hindu-Moslem clashes of the 1930s and beyond, which have me constantly referring to maps to locate Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Kanniyakumari and the like. And the Hindu caste system is surely one of humankind’s greatest grotesqueries.
So that’s all. I’m nowhere near the end of any of these books, but I’m generally enjoying where they take me, especially the Darwin stuff. The Indian stuff too, as my history reading has generally had a western bias, understandably enough.
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The power of place, 2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands, 2025
Hunter S Thompson, Kingdom of fear, 2003
world war three – or what?
So, there were only 21 years between the first and second world war, which ended over 80 years ago, and we’re all more civilised now, right? Some more than others of course – there are still plenty of nazis and fascists around. But who are these people?
Don’t get caught up in the nazi anti-Jewish thing, which was terrible of course, but nazism was more about racial elitism and superiority, together with lies about history and some fake previous ‘reich’ or estate or empire that needs to be resurrected. I’m tempted to call today’s efforts in that direction ‘Putinism’, but that might be getting too personal. No doubt an effective name and rallying call will be thought up soon enough – just another repetition of the fascism of old.
It’s unclear as yet whether this new world war has already started, slowly for the rest of the world, not so for Ukraine, and there are many things that could derail its escalation, most notably Putin’s liquidation. Currently, though, 73-year-old Putin is trying hard to give every impression that he’s not finished yet, that he’s just getting started. Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, though not by a large margin. It’s arguable that their military doesn’t have the discipline and training of their opposites, the USA, but that’s hardly a comforting thought. Putin clearly has no conscience with regard to the slaughter of innocents, and has encouraged his minions, and the Russian people in general, to think likewise.
So Russia is currently the epicentre of fascism and totalitarianism, and with the USA currently completely rudderless, western Europe has to shoulder the responsibility of effectively deterring Putin from using the nuclear option, which he’s undoubtedly considering. The problem, of course, is that Russia and the USA together possess 90% of the world’s nukes, leaving NATO (sans the USA) without much bargaining power. Anna Reid’s Borderland, updated from the 90s to cover the Putin era and his full-scale war on Ukraine, gives an indication of just how popular Putin is, and how catching his contempt for ‘the west’ has been, in Russia. It’s a bit similar to the popularity of Trump among the USA’s vast ‘left behind’. It’s hard, though, for anyone with the most basic humanist principles, to understand how such events as the Bucha massacre can be casually dismissed, or more likely, denied. It’s particularly difficult, I suppose, for someone of my own background, so far from such brutality, so cushioned against anything like this horror.
I would highly recommend Reid’s book, which has sometime brought tears to my eyes, sometimes enraged me, and often made me feel a strange mixture of good luck and a kind of ridiculous envy that I’ve never been remotely tested by the kinds of experiences that so many Ukrainians have gone through over the past twenty years or so, whatever their first language might have been. In Australia we struggle to find differences between east and west in this incredibly massive continent, with an area about 12 times that of Ukraine and only two-thirds or so of its population (which has declined since the war due to slaughter and emigration), and we would also struggle to find crises within our borders – though there are the occasional piddling anti-immigration protests, and a few days ago I encountered a few people protesting on the steps of our state parliament (in South Australia) – Cambodians protesting against Thai aggression – a border dispute that I know very little about, but it makes me wonder…
Border disputes are all about what part of some disputed land is ‘yours’ or ‘mine’. Having read Anna Reid’s book about the ‘disputed’ territory that is Ukraine, with its predominantly Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west (to put it very simplistically), I’ve now embarked on another book, Shattered Lands, by Sam Dalrymple, which deals with the old British Raj and its partitioning, no doubt involving border disputes aplenty – not, though, including the Thai-Cambodian dispute, but likely the Thai-Burmese border to the west.
But all wars, including world wars, are border disputes, are they not? The second world war was about expanding the German ‘reich’ – to the east, the west, the north, the south and all points between. The first world war was about all sorts of border tensions, with British and French expansionism, the holding struggles of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. And of course there have been many others – North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, the Mexican-American war of the 19th century. And think of China – to quote AINL:
China has historically expanded and currently asserts its borders through a mixture of war, military pressure, and diplomatic agreements, often stemming from long-standing historical claims.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine, 2022
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands: five partitions and the making of modern Asia, 2025
https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/six-causes-world-war-i
Ethnic and national complexities, tragedies and so on
Who would want to be born Jewish in Europe in the 1920s or 1930s, given what we know now? It’s a stupid question, as nobody could have such fore-knowledge, but my recent reading and viewing has brought home to me the terrible luck so many people have suffered from, by being born into particular ethnicities at particular times in particular places. And of course the terrible cruelty humans have inflicted upon each other due simply to conceptions of otherness – as savages, infidels, ragheads, kikes, coons and so on.
I’ve been reading Anna Reid’s fascinating but complex (and painful) book Borderland, which again highlights for me the evanescent and often questionable nature of nationhood, especially in relation to culture. Who are or were the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Swabians, the Galicians, the Assyrians, to name a few? But I should name more – the Romany, the Rohingya, the Kurds, the Uyghurs, the Hazaras, the Basques, the Acadians, the Ainu, truly the list goes on, and on. And they were/are all humans and you and I could’ve been one of them.
Nations seem to me much less real than ethnicities, which give us our language, our rituals, even our expectations. For me it has been easy, born into arguably (or unarguably?) the world’s most dominant language group, at the far western end of Europe, at a time of relative peace and prosperity, in the 1950s. And in fact that peace and prosperity has extended well into the 2020s, both in Britain and Australia, to which I was taken as a child. A prolonged peace and stability that’s been unparalleled throughout human history. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky.
So to Ukraine, and my reading so far has taken me ‘only’ to the horrors of Stalin’s famine of the late 20s and early 30s. It’s hard to read this stuff. A few years ago I was reading a biography of Mao Zedong, but I had to give up on getting to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and its insane man-made horrors. Have we learned effectively? Will we ever do this, or allow this to be done, again? Is it possible that our much more effective surveillance techniques and our greater international communications have spelt the end of such deliberate inhumanity?
All very grand questions, but my principal purpose in reading this book was to understand more about modern Ukraine, its various ethnicities, its levels of Russification and/or Europeanisation, from the starting perspective of a more or less complete ignoramus. I have of course views on the repulsive Russian dictator and the uselessness of the USA’s ‘position’, if it can be called that, and of the determination of the majority of Ukrainians to be fully independent, but these are simply the general views of a very distant observer.
Ukrainians were more than between a rock and a hard place, in the mid-20th century. The brutalities of the Soviets and the Nazis, really not so long ago, were totalising, and involved millions, young and old, slaughtered for nothing but their supposed otherness. Ukraine and Poland were essentially at the epicentre of this manufactured zealotry and hatred. Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, in Ukrainian, was a massacre I’d heard tell of, but I’d never thought to locate it in space. It took place in a ravine in Kiev, in late September 1941, a machine-gun slaughter of over 33,000 Jews, told to assemble nearby for resettlement. In the aftermath up to 150,000 Jews, Soviets, Roma people and other ‘undesirables’ were murdered.
There are so many other stories. Crimea has long been a contested, messed-up region. My first knowledge of it was likely typical for those of my background – Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, doing her best to save the lives of the victims of – what war, or battle exactly?
The Crimean war of the 1850s was fought between Russia under Tzar Nicholas I, and later his son, Alexander II, and the Ottoman Empire and its allies, including Britain. And what was the point of this war? Well, there were the usual broad issues re the East-West balance of power, with the Ottomans in decline, and Russians’ seemingly interminable desire to extend their borders and influence westwards. But what of the inhabitants of Crimea? This odd-shaped peninsula hangs down from the south of Ukraine into the Black Sea, and was once a Tatar stronghold. Its biggest town is Sevastopol in the south. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, rather unexpectedly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean population, overwhelmingly Russian, were somewhat nonplussed, it seems. Much has happened since then, of course, including the supposed annexation of the region by Russia under Putin in 2014. Its current position is undecided, pending the outcome of the war.
But let me return to the Tatars – for it seems to me that, for most people, their ethnicity is more important than their nationality – though sometimes these are the same. Who were they? That’s a very long story. Wikipedia begins with this:
Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: qırımtatarlar, къырымтатарлар), or simply Crimeans (qırımlılar, къырымлылар), are an Eastern European Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea.[9] Their ethnogenesis lasted thousands of years in Crimea and the northern regions along the coast of the Black Sea, uniting Mediterranean populations with those of the Eurasian Steppe.
I’ve removed the many links for ease of reading. So clearly they’re ancient inhabitants of the region, predating any notion of Ukraine or even Russia. They were the predominant culture, in fact, for millennia, along the northern coast of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and beyond, until the 20th century.
All of this makes me think of ‘real countries’ versus ‘real ethnicities’. It seems evident enough, at least to me, that countries are a human invention – they’re not real in the sense that cultures are real. We could say, of course, that cultures are human inventions, but nobody ever set out to invent a culture. They are a shared set of practices that people grow up within, just like bonobo culture. Nations, though, are political entities, and the best of them accept that many cultures reside within their borders – borders often born of warfare, colonisation, imperialism and the like. This is important, as cultures are more ‘real’ than nations, and more ancient. Think of Australian Aboriginal culture, or cultures. So, to me, nations – these new-fangled phenomena – need to be aware of and respectful of their history, and the cultures that form them. In Australia’s case it’s not just the ancient Aboriginal culture but the much later ones – British, of course, and then western European, and then south-east Asian, and now, African, Asian, Middle Eastern and so on.
But Australia is unique (as of course are all nations) – we’ve never been a conquering nation – at least not since we took the best land from the earlier inhabitants. And for all sorts of reasons we’re a lucky country – reading about the sad history and the present sufferings of Ukrainians really brings this home to me. Since we became this invented entity called a nation (a very short time ago) we’ve never been invaded, though Japanese air-raids on Darwin in 1942 killed over 200 people. Nowadays I have the occasional Japanese student, and we certainly don’t have to worry about avoiding ‘the war’.
Not sure where I’m going with all this except to note that we didn’t get to choose our culture, heavy or light, ancient or recent, dominant or persecuted. Ukraine is faction-ridden, as are most nations, and there has long been something of an east-west divide, but it’s clearly moving towards the west, for obvious reasons. Putin can’t last much longer, which doesn’t of course mean that things will improve (in Russia) with his absence, and with Trump the USA has sunk further, surely, than it could ever sink again. But the embattled Ukrainians have become global heroes through the course of this invasion, and may need to tough it out until the demise of these dodderers, and then some. I can only wish them well.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
revisiting bronchiectasis
A couple of days ago I had a minor operation on what the specialist (pulmonologist) described as a partially collapsed lung, which sounded rather serious. It certainly impressed others when I mentioned it. I was diagnosed with bronchiectasis more than a decade ago, and I wrote about it at the time, but I can’t be bothered looking it up so I’ll start again.
Bronchiectasis is – at least I thought it was – a kind of damage to the walls of the many tiny airways in the lungs. Those airways become loose and distended, creating cul-de-sacs which collect bacteria. Think of it as a kind of bend in a creek which collects stagnant, smelly water. Not flushing properly. So the affected part of the lung carries a high bacterial load which means a lot of sputum is produced and the victim tends to have a lot of bacterial infections. I also cough a lot, especially in the mornings.
But – and this I think is new to me – bronchiectasis is also an auto-immune disease – and there’s apparently an effective treatment in the offing. I had an interview with the pulmonologist a few days before my op, and he told me he’d just come back from a conference in Tokyo, as you do, at which this treatment was touted. He didn’t go into detail, so I looked it up.
Pulmonary macrophages, neutrophils and Brinsupri, the trademark name for brensocatib, the first ever FDA approved treatment (in August 2025) for non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis (NCFBE)…
A PubMed article published in September has this to say in its abstract:
Bronchiectasis is a chronic airway disease marked by irreversible bronchial dilation, persistent cough, and recurrent infections. Its pathogenesis is explained by the “vicious cycle hypothesis,” which involves impaired mucociliary clearance, neutrophil activation, and tissue damage from neutrophil serine proteinases (NSPs). In August 2025, the FDA approved Brensocatib, a selective dipeptidyl peptidase-1 (DPP-1) inhibitor, as the first disease-modifying therapy for bronchiectasis. By blocking NSP activation, Brensocatib reduces inflammation and exacerbation. WILLOW and ASPEN trials demonstrated significant improvements in exacerbation rates, lung function decline, and exacerbation-free survival, establishing a novel therapeutic paradigm for this previously undertreated condition.
So bronchiectasis is an auto-immune disease, in which the over-active production of neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cells, causes ‘unnecessary’ inflammation – or more specifically, the overproduction of NSPs by those neutrophils.
So how to write about this without getting too technical and confusing myself? So there’s clearly a type of bronchiectasis associated with cystic fibrosis, which I’m tempted to explore, but maybe another time. For the rest I’ll obviously be relying on professional sources, referenced below. My type of bronchiectasis is characterised by ‘permanent airway damage, mucus build-up, and frequent chest infections’. This new medication ‘targets one of the causes of inflammation in bronchiectasis, rather than just treating the symptoms’. It inhibits DPP1 (dipeptidyl peptidase 1), an enzyme, or protein, which activates these NSPs – sometimes too much. Over-activity damages lung tissue. So the blocking of this enzyme reduces the inflammation and the damage.
So an obviously interesting question for me is – why do some people get this over-active response by the DPP1 enzymes? Well, here’s what AINL (artificial intelligence never lies) says on this very topic:
An “over-active response” by Dipeptidyl Peptidase 1 (DPP1) enzymes is not typically a result of the enzyme itself being overactive, but rather a reflection of underlyingchronic inflammatory diseases that lead to excessive neutrophil activity and the release of mature, active DPP1. The enzyme itself is often present in high amounts in the sputum and airways of affected patients, correlating with disease severity.
References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41180673/
Brensocatib: Is this breakthrough a Game-Changer for Bronchiectasis?
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/296961-treatment#aw2aab6b6b1aa?form=fpf
Home
the highs and lows of determinism
The other day I was in a cafe in the inner suburbs here, eating lunch, reading, wondering what to write about next, when in walked a tall dark stranger. She was dressed in black slacks and a black puff-sleeve top over a white shirt – very corporate to my mind. Though I didn’t see her face as she walked to the counter I could see by her hands she was African, most likely. She was very very slim and well over six feet tall. Striking, to put it mildly. I thought of the Masai people, but a quick bit of research brings up the Dinka and the Nuer of South Sudan. I couldn’t stop gawking, and was rewarded as she turned and walked right by me to take up a seat at the back of the cafe. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, and was surely the world’s most beautiful woman (I’ve observed quite a few of those).
I had to chuckle. I’ll be 70 next July and I’m five foot six at full stretch. And I had to wonder, too. Is being a very tall woman as much of a ‘problem’ as being a small man? Forget sports – low centre of gravity, great height and reach, etc etc. As for being well short of the average, all the way through school I was picked on, generally in a ‘good-natured’ way. I was popular enough, perhaps because I never complained, certainly not to the authorities. Not just because I wanted to be liked, though that was surely part of it, but mostly because I was fully anti-authoritarian. My peers were my mates, or to be avoided (and sometimes to be worshipped from afar); the teachers were mostly just low-lifes.
The real problem with being a short male though, is this strange equation of shortness with some kind of ‘non-seriousness’ especially during youth. Tall boys just aren’t picked on and pushed about the way short boys are, whether or not they’re physically strong. Within reason, that is. If you’re a short weight-lifter who likes to show off his muscles, maybe not, but…
So there’s three occasions forever stuck in my memory. The first two were more or less identical. I was surrounded during break-time outside of our first-floor classroom, lifted and turned upside down, hoisted over the bannister of the stairwell, and jiggled and shaken merrily by a half-dozen or so classmates. I was compos mentis enough to note that the two young gentlemen gripping my legs were our most celebrated athletes, but I still had images of my heart slipping out of my throat and plopping sloppily onto the bottom steps some 20 feet or so below (I’ve never measured it).
How long did these hijinks last? Isn’t it funny how time passes slowly when death’s in the air. But don’t worry the other piece of fun was less deadly. There was a large papier-mâchéd box outside the school library (class project no doubt) designed for putting in book returns, pretty well just the right size for a mini-student like me to be stuffed into. And so they did, leaving my legs to dangle outside the box for anyone to see. So the school bell rang, everyone went back to class, and I waved my legs merrily, waiting to be rescued. But nobody came – of course, nobody used the library in my school. So, after a while I thought of escape, which was quite easy – the box was wired shut and a bit of jiggling and pulling soon freed me….
Reflecting on these memories has upturned more, but the point is clear. Little kids just aren’t taken as seriously as big kids. And if they stay little, they won’t become Presidents or ‘leaders of men’ – or women. Height restrictions in some occupations make sense, I suspect most don’t. And, of course, short people earn less than tall people, on average.
It’s quite tragic – look at Trump (sorry, don’t) – six feet three inches of unadulterated wanker. Robert Reich, one of the USA’s finest political leaders and a true humanist, suffered fatally, so to speak, for being four foot eleven. Of all the dumb criteria for measuring a person’s worth – think of those dwarves – Dopey, Grumpy, Sleazey, whatever, what chance did they have with Snow White?
So I’m wondering how many full-blown libertarians are my size. It’s a silly thing to wonder about, surely, and yet…
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
a closer look at bonobos, enfin
As this blog is called what it is, I’ve decided to read the entire, long, Wikipedia article on bonobos to get a more subtle and comprehensive feel for their society and how it shapes their individuality – though of course I’ll continue to write on completely different subjects. What I’m finding so far is that there are nuances, as you would expect, and as we find in human societies. And of course it would be the same with other social species – a member of the normally less dominant gender will, through proven capabilities or particular personality traits, be given a more prominent role than usual, and leadership of or status within the group is not solely based on gender. Ranking may have a degree of fluidity based on behaviour and alliances. Not all males are subordinate and not all females are bosses. Nevertheless, bonobos are definitely matriarchal – just as chimps are patriarchal, also with some fluidity.
It surprised me when I learned, some years ago, that bonobos have a ‘male philopatric’ society. The term conveys a gender distinction – the male stays ‘at home’ for mating and reproduction, while the female moves to another group for that purpose. This occurs in some human societies too. While visiting the Tiwi Islands just north of Darwin, I was told by our islander guide that he had just ‘lost’ his sister, who had moved to another tribal group to marry, meaning that their connection was permanently broken. His culture actually forbade him to have any more contact with her. So the early Catholic Church prohibitions against first, second, third and fourth cousins marrying, as described in Joseph Henrich’s historical account of the WEIRD world, as well as many long-held cultural traditions of Australasia and elsewhere, likely hark back to our hominid ancestors.
In any case, male philopatry doesn’t seem very matriarchal. There are of course good reasons for philopatry (male or female) in general, as well as good reasons for its opposite, male or female dispersal, which inevitably means that these behaviours, their causes and consequences, are widely disputed. I think I’ll return to this issue in another post.
A particularly interesting feature of bonobo culture, fairly recently recognised, is co-operation between two separate groups, or troupes. This was in the Congo’s Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, which may, I think, represent a space between ‘the wild’ and ‘captivity’, and so may influence behaviour. From Wikipedia:
Over two years of observation, researchers witnessed 95 encounters between the groups. Contrary to expectations, these interactions resembled those within a single group. During these encounters, the bonobos engaged in behaviours such as grooming, food sharing, and collective defense against threats like snakes. Notably, the two groups, while displaying cooperative tendencies, maintained distinct identities, and there was no evidence of interbreeding or a blending of cultures. The cooperation observed was not arbitrary but evolved through individual bonds formed by exchanging favors and gifts. Some bonobos even formed alliances to target a third individual, demonstrating a nuanced social dynamic within the groups.
This contrasts importantly with the deadly clashes between groups of chimpanzees observed by Goodall and others.
Bonobos engage in tongue-kissing, the only non-human creatures observed to do so, at least thus far. And this brings us to sex, a difficult topic to write about, even in a blog nobody reads, given so many cultural and religious tabus swirling around it in human society. So, best just to be descriptive, without making comparisons to H sapiens.
Bonobos aren’t monogamous, and they engage in sexual activity from an early age. It is mostly masturbatory, and indiscriminate, with the possible exception of mothers sexually engaging with adult sons. Heightened sexual activity often occurs when rich food sources are found, in which the masturbatory sex often occurs in large groups, increasing generalised bonding. Female masturbation is helped along by the fact that their clitorises ‘are larger and more externalised than in most mammals’. Well, here, comparison with humans is instructive:
… while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.
All quotes here are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise stated. The most common sexual combo is female-female. Their face-to-face, body-to-body interactions are referred to as genito-genital (G-G) rubbing, which is often accompanied by loud noises, hopefully of pleasure.
So, while female-female masturbation is the most practised sexual behaviour of the species, enhancing bonding against any male threats, male-male masturbation is also a regular thing:
The most common form of male–male mounting is similar to that of a heterosexual mounting: one of the males sits “passively on his back [with] the other male thrusting on him”, with the penises rubbing together because of both males’ erections
Clearly sexual activity is encouraged and valued as the most essential feature of bonobo society, and is practised in a variety of ways – penis-fencing, rump-rubbing, genital massaging, oral sex (among males) and, as mentioned, tongue-kissing. Adult-child sex is more common in males than females, though there’s no penetration. Is this because they’re avoiding pain, or because they know the connection with pregnancy? The general scientific consensus is that non-human species engage in sex based on instinct, hormones and such – that’s to say, more or less unconsciously without being aware of possible or likely consequences. I’m not entirely convinced, especially re our closest relatives, but how can this be tested? In any case, regardless of all this sex play, bonobo birth rates are no higher than those of chimps.
Unsurprisingly bonobo social relations are just as complex as those of chimps, and perhaps also humans, with personal animosities, rivalries and close friendships within and between genders, and the fact that infanticide in bonobo society hasn’t been observed isn’t proof that it hasn’t happened – after all, we’ve only known of the existence of bonobos for a little under a century. Still, bonobos are definitely different, and in what I would call an inspiring way. You could say that sex becomes a feel-good strategy, but also a way of diminishing any sense of male ownership of offspring. As Wikipedia puts it:
The strategy of bonobo females mating with many males may be a counterstrategy to infanticide because it confuses paternity. If male bonobos cannot distinguish their own offspring from others, the incentive for infanticide essentially disappears. This is a reproductive strategy that seems specific to bonobos; infanticide is observed in all other great apes except orangutans. Bonobos engage in sexual activity numerous times a day.
Anyway, enough of sex, let’s explore violence. Chimps, as mentioned, tend to be hostile to those not in their own troupe, and even patrol their own borders, looking for trouble. Very West Side Story. And yet, to my surprise, bonobos, are more violent in general.
In the wild, among males, bonobos are more aggressive than chimpanzees, having higher rates of aggressive acts, about three times as much. Although, male chimpanzees are more likely to be aggressive to a lethal degree than male bonobos which are more likely to engage in more frequent, yet less intense squabbling. There is also more female to male aggression with bonobos than there is with chimpanzees. Female bonobos are also more aggressive than female chimpanzees, in general. Both bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do.
All of this sounds interesting, but ‘aggression’ might be a little more difficult to define than we think. In humans, for example, accusatory or bullying language, or the sharing of images, can be used aggressively without anything physical occurring. It has even been known to cause the victim to commit suicide. We have subtler and often more effective ways to make others suffer, and ‘non-physical’ aggression may have a physical, even deadly, impact. It is also a way of getting around laws prohibiting physical violence.
In any case, surely a major reason for the supposed greater physical aggression of chimps and bonobos, and doubtless other apes, compared to humans, is how we ‘count’ aggression. Is carpet-bombing physical aggression? Nuclear warfare? The wholesale slaughter of the Jews and the Congolese? The massacres of the ‘Crusades’? How can we not count remote, push-button slaughter, or starving people to death behind walls, or burning them to death in buildings, as physical aggression? Methinks there’s need for a rethink.
So let’s turn to something less controversial. Like all the great apes, bonobos pass the self-awareness mirror test, and it’s clear that the variations in their vocalisations have meaning, though whether they rise to the standard of a proto-language is a matter of definition. They also use many meaningful hand gestures.
A famous example of a bonobo being taught to communicate using a keyboard, and to respond effectively to whole sentences, is that of Kanzi:
Kanzi’s vocabulary consisted of more than 500 English words, and he had comprehension of around 3,000 spoken English words… Kanzi is also known for learning by observing people trying to teach his mother; Kanzi started doing the tasks that his mother was taught just by watching, some of which his mother had failed to learn….
Kanzi was also taught how to make simple stone tools, though he found a method of making them in his own bonoboesque way. There seems no doubt that effective rapport between bonobos and humans will benefit both species.
Finally, there’s the ecological importance of bonobos. They’re essentially one of the two apex species of their region, the other being elephants. Both species are frugivorous, and their ecological role is vital:
It is estimated that during its life, each bonobo will ingest and disperse nine tons of seeds, from more than 91 species of lianas, grass, trees and shrubs. These seeds travel for about 24 hours in the bonobo digestive tract, which can transfer them over several kilometers (mean 1.3 km; max: 4.5 km), far from their parents, where they will be deposited intact in their faeces. These dispersed seeds remain viable, germinating better and more quickly than unpassed seeds. For those seeds, diplochory with dung-beetles (Scarabaeidae) improves post-dispersal survival.
Diplochory means two-phase seed dispersal, using more than one vector or carrier.
Anyway, I think that’s more than enough info for one post. The Wikipedia article on bonobos makes for a very solid book chapter, with 178 references, so far. And it ends nicely with informing us all of the annual World Bonobo Day, established in 2017. No prizes should be given for guessing the date!
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2021