Archive for the ‘culture’ Category
Women in charge? One day…?
To start with – ‘Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression’ – Nelson Mandela
A few years ago I read Australian author Jess Scully’s book Glimpses of Utopia, which looked at hot spots in the world where positive developments were happening, often within otherwise chaotic or brutal situations and regimes. It wasn’t an overtly feminist work, but it was clear that women were behind most of the good stuff. Unfortunately I loaned the book out and it never returned, as happens, so I’m not sure if she wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women working together to try to reduce the suffering and set an example of peaceful co-existence, or if I read about it elsewhere. …
In any case, Israeli and Palestinian women are still marching and advocating for peace. I’ve written, of course, about the Palestinian situation many times, and ever since, as a child, I read about the slaughter and betrayal of the native people of the so-called ‘new world’ – new, that is, to the European colonists of what is now called North America, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the issue of what is now euphemistically called ‘settler colonialism’. But of course, it has happened, time and time again, here in Australia, and in New Zealand, and throughout the Americas. David Reich, in his ground-breaking and comprehensive book Who we are and how we got here, provides genetic evidence of the rapid spread into Europe of the Yamnaya people and culture from about 5,000 years ago. Intermixing was commonplace and the genetics tend to dispel all notions of hereditary purity, whether in individuals such as the reigning British monarch, or in broader ethnicities, such as the Celts or the Goths or the Jews. A lot of this intermixing was the result of rape and pillage, which can sometimes be identified through complex genomic analysis, and we can consider this with regard to the concept of miscegenation, once frowned upon, but now virtually dismissed as an issue, at least in the so-called developed world.
Women will be at the forefront of this intermixing, whether sexual or otherwise, because they’re more attuned to collaboration than males in general, but we need to socially acknowledge and facilitate female leadership as much more of a priority than ever before. Think of the fact that we’re now living in a world in which some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including if not especially the USA, are now nuclear-weaponised. Russia and China, both of which are more or less unstable oligarchies/dictatorships, have very sizeable nuclear weapons stockpiles, and other not-quite-reliable countries, such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel, belong to the nuclear fraternity. All of these countries, of course, are led by males and their male advisors and lapdogs, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable. What will it take, to recognise that female leadership and unity is pretty much the sine qua non of future human survival.
Observe the more brutal aspects of male leadership today. Here’s the latest Wikipedia data on the Putin war on Ukraine:
The casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas,[1] and between 1,274,000 and 2 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to June 2026.
Obviously there have been more casualties to October 26, and every expert analyst I’ve listened to has argued that Putin has virtually no chance of winning, even if he orders full-scale mobilisation. Then there’s the nuclear option, and this really worries me.
This is just about one male who clearly doesn’t care about the suffering he causes, to his own people and others. And then there is Trump, with his regime’s international and domestic attacks upon innocent people. The world is crying out for more female leadership – collective female leadership – but it would only be likely to happen in those countries already on their way to female equality, and there are precious few of them. I like to think Australia is one, but my country has virtually no leverage on the world stage. What will it take to bring about anything close to a bonobo humanity? Will we have to be brought to the precipice? Are we there yet?
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia: real ideas for a fairer world, 2020
https://www.vitalvoices.org/barefootwalk/
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
women and the future
8,000 years ago….
My previous post reminded me of some pieces I wrote (about a year ago), which I’ll reference below. I’m quite proud of these pieces – it seems indignation can bring out the best…
By the way, what happened to evolutionary psychology? To judge from Ryan Ellsworth’s efforts, it was a questionable enterprise, especially in trying to cement patriarchy into our biology. I would guess that it was never a ‘field’ that attracted female intellectuals. Here’s a passage from Ellsworth in his critique of a book by Susan Block called The Bonobo Way, which I criticised (his critique, not the book) in my earlier piece. Obviously I’m still fuming!
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
One has to read this passage a couple of times to let it sink in. Or at least I did – smarter people might’ve recognised the bullshit straight away. It’s there in the first two sentences (okay, the second sentence takes up most of the passage). The first sentence states as fact that there are ‘human sex differences in sexual desire’. So that must be why it’s okay to call men ‘studs’ and women ‘sluts’, or as Ellsworth puts it, we must recognise the fact that ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men’. And it would seem to follow that if they have such desires they should be ostracised and shamed. Ellsworth even tries to argue that to suggest that women might have such pluralist desires is sexist because it (sort of) turns them into men, stripping them of their identity as caring mothers or potentially caring mothers, which is their evolutionary role.
Evolutionary psychology doesn’t seem to have lasted long, which I think is a good thing. It seemed to be wanting to find an evolutionary explanation for what many might find to be shifting social-psychological phenomena, and I don’t think that works. For example, in the WEIRD world we’ve shifted from larger families to smaller, often single-parent families, and family roles have changed. Marriage isn’t so essential to the reproductive process as it was, and of course it only came into being relatively recently, and as for monogamy, we have no idea whether that was practiced by humans, say 200,000 years ago. None of this has to do with evolution in a Darwinian sense – we often describe society as having ‘evolved’ in the last couple of centuries, but this nothing to do with the Darwinian concept.
So, back to monogamy. It’s seen as the norm for we humans, especially when it comes to bringing up children. And yet, neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, and clearly they manage to reproduce, and their offspring are just as well-adjusted as their parents. So when and why did we or our ancestors become so, and will we ever cease to be so? Ellsworth claimed in his essay that there have never been any successful or lasting matriarchal societies, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and of course it would not be of interest to him to mention the controversial but undeniably thought-provoking finds at Çatalhöyük suggesting plenty of goddess-worship. As I’ve often pointed out, the double male god-worship that constitutes Christianity was both born of and a template for thousands of years of patriarchy, still championed by the Catholic Church, so it’s intriguing to wonder about the society around Çatalhöyük, a mere 9,000 years ago. Believing in females with godly powers just doesn’t fit with a male-dominated society, and even those who argue against evidence that the undoubtedly remarkable society that created Çatalhöyük was matriarchal tend to argue for gender egalitarianism, which is remarkable in itself (though I’ve read anthropological studies on some Australian Aboriginal societies that have come to similar conclusions).
All of this makes me wonder again about early humans and their ancestors, Australopithecus and the like, especially considering that bonobos are clearly matriarchal and chimps are clearly patriarchal. Of course, size matters, pace bonobos, and it has recently been found in a study published last year that both A. afarensis and A. africanus, and especially the former, were more sexually dimorphic than present-day humans. But size matters less in the modern WEIRD world, where brute strength is of decreasing importance. I suppose these days we should be looking more at brain size, or rather brain complexity, and I very much doubt if we found any real difference there, which is doubtless why nobody much studies gender-based brain complexity, whether in dogs, cats or humans (I did once have a university friend who seriously asserted that men were naturally more intelligent – and she spoke of neurological complexity – than women; but she was young, and I let it pass, probably due to shock).
Generally, though, I feel optimistic about the greater empowerment of women in the future (the future is long, and I’m getting old, so I’m not worried about being proved wrong). This in spite of Trump and Putin and the Ayatollahs and the Sudanese and so many other African and Middle Eastern nations/regions. We describe them as living in the past for a reason. And Australia, far from the madding crowd of backward-facing nations, with more and more women in government, both nationally and in my home state, can and hopefully will set a small example that exhausted and disillusioned humanists elsewhere might take notice of…
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
the language apes – how we differ from bonobos etc
It seems that language is what separates us from every other species, and what has enabled us to dominate our planet. I suppose that’s stating the obvious, but how this language feature of ours evolved isn’t so obvious, as we can’t examine the brains of our more recent hominin ancestors, or listen to them talk, if they could, to connect all the dots. All we have to go on is an increasingly detailed knowledge of the neurological correlates to human language, and similar brain regions in chimps and bonobos. It’s an enormously complicated subject for the brain of a near 70-year-old ignoramus to dive into, so let’s do it.
What is ‘theory of mind’? It’s the ability to attribute mental states to others. We can do this with dogs and cats and other creatures we’re familiar with, in a vague way, but our fellow humans communicate this – not always accurately or honestly of course – with language. Certainly language is a tool that gives us an incalculably enormous advantage over other species, and we have created many thousands of them – languages, that is. It helps that we have brains some three times the size of our closest living relatives, but size isn’t everything, as we know, for example, from corvids and other smart species.
So we’ve been studying certain areas of the brain, such as Broca’s area, involved in language production, and Wernicke’s area (language reception) for many decades, and have found similar regions in other primates, though there are important differences. The human Broca’s area is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere, and there are similar but different enlargements for the left Wernicke’s area. The same asymmetry exists for their smaller, less developed analogues in other primates. Interestingly, left-handed types, like myself, have less asymmetry (or I’d prefer to say, more symmetry) than right-handers.
Sadly, we can’t study the brains of Neanderthals or any other extinct hominid in close relation to H sapiens to determine whether they had anything like our language skills, or indeed whether the first members of our species had them. According to AI (never lies), gathering info from such sources as the Australian Museum, Reddit, Wikipedia, Science Daily and Discover Magazine, ‘complex’ language (as opposed to complex language) was in operation among humans from 200,000 to 50,000 years ago, so it’s all a bit vague.
Exploring the issue by way of brain processes is more than problematic because I can’t see how we’ll ever have evidence outside of modern H sapiens, but what about the physical structures required to produce speech? There’s a difference, at least in my mind, between speech and language in that speech doesn’t necessarily involve grammar, it just starts with vocalisations representing objects, states (fear, pleasure, anger, warning etc). To produce these requires particular ‘hardware’. Here’s AI again:
The ability to speak required specialized “hardware” that differs significantly from other primates:
- Lowered Larynx: In humans, the larynx (voice box) is positioned lower in the throat, creating a larger space (the pharynx) that allows for a wider range of resonant sounds.
- Tongue and Mouth: Unlike other mammals, the human tongue is thick, muscular, and almost circular, allowing it to move vertically and horizontally to shape complex sounds like vowels.
- Breath Control: Humans evolved finer control over the muscles used for breathing, which is necessary to sustain the long exhalations needed for sentences.
The third item mixes hardware with neural developments, no doubt, but our current and perhaps permanent inability to trace these developments back in time is teasingly frustrating.
One interesting finding has to do with the FOXP2 gene, aka ‘the speech gene’, which we share with Neanderthals. It’s so named because it encodes the FOXP2 protein (Foxhead box protein P2), which is found in many vertebrates, and is associated with vocalisation, including birdsong and echo-location.
References
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/09/speech-gene-foxp2-huntingtons-wysocka.html
David Bowie and little old me
I’m now around the age that David Bowie was when he died. I heard it on the radio when I was in bed that January morning in 2016. I wept. He was a fundamental part of my life – certainly of my youth. I’m writing about him now because I’m re-reading Simon Critchley’s book about him, published in 2014. It was given (or loaned?!) to me by a friend a couple of years back, and I somehow read it rather cursorily, finding it a bit pretentious in places (Heidegger’s Dassein and other metaphysical stuff has never been interesting or particularly comprehensible to dumb me), but effective in Critchley’s love for and obsession with the artist, who certainly obsessed me, particularly from the early 70s into the 80s. He was uniquely indecipherable, catchy but unable to be caught.
Take for example, ‘Changes’, from the (ironically titled?) Hunky Dory album. So easy to sing in the shower and such, but lyrically a torment of sorts ‘…so I turned myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker – I’m much too fast to take that test’. There is pride here, but also confusion, uncertainty, innocence, doubt – in short, a sort of vulnerable complexity in turning to face the strange. Listening to this sort of stuff as a teenager, this lyrical skirmishing, was somehow rewarding, or at least reassuring – ‘you’re not alone!’
My first encounter – in 1973 I was 16 and, for a time, had a ‘good job’ as an accounts clerk at a factory making plastic tubing. So I had the money to buy a record album – my first. I looked hard at this album cover of a blonde-haired, effeminate-looking male, dwarfed by a brown urban landscape. The title, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, sounded deliciously audacious to me. Surely this would be absolute shite or revelatory. Then again maybe neither. I was able to play it there in a little booth to myself. I played the whole album. And, of course, I bought it.
I’d already been introduced to musical wordsmiths – Dylan and Cohen in particular – and was experimenting with writing myself, exploring who I was and what I could be. The fact that I had no musical ability whatsoever made music unbridgeably, magically superior.
So I played Ziggy to death and my next three purchases were Hunky Dory, Space Oddity and Lou Reed’s Bowie-produced Transformer album. I lost my job in the failing plastics factory and hung out at home alone, admiring my made-up face in the mirror, and my legs in my mother’s stockings. I felt, or tried to feel, a sense of transcendent, transexual superiority. I went out for walks in my sister’s floral jacket and was honked by passing cars – an edgy sort of thrill.
And so it went – Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Pin-ups, and I was ‘officially’ an adult, and various misadventures meant I lost all my records, together with home and family. I shared houses with students, wrote endlessly about my misadventures and my fascination with writers – Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Frisch – and, after a strange, perhaps perverse period of listening only to ‘classical music’, especially Schubert, I caught up, through others’ collections, with Bowie’s continuing oeuvre – Lodger, Scary Monsters, Station to Station, Low. All interesting stuff, but of course the intensity of my teenage attachment was gone. His likely drug-induced flirtations with fascism were disconcerting, and I’d frankly lost interest in what he was up to by the nineties.
Now, in my seventieth year, it’s time for a catch-up, and a rethink, especially in light of my ‘no free will’ understanding, which has been something of a pre-occupation in recent times. For the fact that there’s no such thing as free will doesn’t simplify matters – au contraire. The complexity of what has made us who we are is pretty well unfathomable. But a recognition of that complexity should help us to treat even Hitler and Stalin and Putin and Trump as, if you like, ‘products’. In Bowie’s fascinating case, he was obviously a precocious musical talent, absolutely obsessed with expressing himself to the world, to explore its, and his, complexity – sexually, politically and existentially, and not necessarily in that order. I don’t really know much about his family background – he grew up in Brixton, which I believe isn’t the most fashionable suburb, and his mother was a sometime Oswald Mosley fan, and I’m imagining his flirtations with fascism might’ve been a hat-tip to a troublesome mother-son connection. My own background took me nowhere near right-wing politics, and that fact, and the realisation that it could’ve been quite different, helps me to sympathise with someone like him and his more existential concerns, which I do share – at least to some degree. I’m probably a bit more complacent, or perhaps resigned, than he was. And I’ve never been much tempted by drugs, other than the odd youthful booze overdose and some very minor flirting with dope.
One thing I’ve read about him, quite recently, was that he was an avid reader, as I most certainly am, though the what of the reading is of the essence. Much of Bowie’s reading might have had a desperation about it – who will love a lad insane? One might guess from some of his music that he wanted or needed to be a lad insane, but not too insane and not too much of a lad. My own reading, too, is about establishing, confirming, extending identity, and I suppose that’s what all reading, or information-gathering, is about.
Anyway, my interest in Bowie has been renewed, and I’ll be enjoying, if that’s the word, his later work and its connection with what’s familiar to me, as well as seeing that old stuff in a new light – the crazy piano stuff on the title track of Aladdin Sane, for example…
Reference
Bowie, by Simon Critchley, 2014
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
What’s with those Tierra del Fuegans?
Members of the Selk’nam people of Tierra del Fuego, with a slave trader, in 1889
We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
I once read an article arguing for changing the name of Darwin, the fascinating town at the top end of the Northern Territory, because, the argument went, Charles Darwin was too much of a racist to allow a town to be named after him. After all, he referred to Australia’s Aboriginal population, and other indigenous populations he encountered, as ‘savages’, and this was an ongoing insult to the considerable Aboriginal population of that northern town.
Fair enough, thought I, but what about all the other European-Australian place names, some referring to capital cities, prominent rivers, and whole states? The term ‘savage’ was used by Europeans to refer to indigenous populations everywhere, according to the widespread belief, up until the late 19th century, that ‘civilisation’ only occurred in Britain, Europe and some parts of Asia. If savagery and civilisation weren’t entirely dichotomous, they might represent a sliding scale, with savages having to climb up that scale, an incline largely opposed to their inclinations, in a process known as assimilation. The concept is far from dead in 2024.
But in 1824, 1844 and 1864 it was the bog-standard view. So why the fuss about the naming of Darwin (aka Larrakia)? I soon discovered that the author of the above-mentioned article (posted in Online Opinion, an Australian website run by a former right-wing politician) was a creationist. I’d been there before – a prominent creationist had taken me to task for writing favourably on Darwin – wasn’t I aware that he was an out-and-out racist? What about his writing on the Tierra del Fuegans? As if this somehow told against Darwin’s theories of species’ origins and for the creationist story.
So, having recently read The voyage of the Beagle, I’m a little more informed about the matter, but not much. My impression was that he met a small handful of the native inhabitants of this most southerly region of the South American continent, and was taken aback by their poverty of tools, clothing, language and such. There were also three natives of the region on board the Beagle, a fact about which I was confused, but it’s well explained in Josie Glausiusz’ excellent online essay ‘Savages and Cannibals’, linked below. Glausiusz, like myself, made light of Darwin’s dismissive account of ‘savages’ in her first reading of The Beagle, as typical of his time, and surely also his class, but a later reading caused rather more discomfort. I too preferred to focus on the positive, liberal aspects of Darwin’s observations, and I particularly noted a passage, also quoted in Glausiusz’ essay, describing his horror at the colonists’ extremely brutal treatment of the native inhabitants :
“Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?”
The passage, and the atrocities, brought to mind a childhood reading that had quite an impact – a big book that my mother bought for me one Christmas, a USA book called ‘The History of the West’ or something similar. It told, in great detail, the battles, the treaties and the many betrayals that were a part of the Anglo-European sweep westward to grab land from the ‘Indians’. The Sioux nation, the Cherokees, the Apaches – Geronimo, Cochise, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse – all came to life in my head, just as they were beaten, humiliated and/or slaughtered. It was an unforgettable bit of bedroom trauma for me.
But getting back to Darwin, even in his later Descent of Man he regularly used the term ‘savage’, and, as mentioned, some were considered more savage than others. Interestingly, his brief comments on Australian Aboriginals were generally complimentary, and he reserved his disdain for the fledgling nation’s ex-convicts, without appearing to have the slightest cognisance that they didn’t come from his massively privileged background. How many of Darwin’s class were ever sent to the Antipodes?
This idea of a kind of sliding scale from savagery to civilisation – a sort of guided evolution – began to fall apart, it seems to me, with the advent of a new form of social analysis, namely anthropology. The term was first used in the late 16th century, and was given something of a boost during the 18th century Enlightenment period. Immanuel Kant actually gave classes on anthropology, and wrote a treatise on the subject, without, of course, having done any work in the field. But it was a start, and through the 19th century, anthropology and sociology became increasingly recognised terms, and human culture became a serious object of study. Of course it still had, and in many cases still has, its biases, with the ‘superior’ culture analysing and defining the ‘inferior’ one, but the very richness and complexity of the cultures under analysis, and what anthropologists and other analysts have learned about their evolution in connection to particular environments, such as those found in Australia over the past 50-60 thousand years, has rendered the concept of ‘savagery’ both obsolete and ridiculous.
So Darwin, it seems, was a little slow to recognise these developments, and it’s likely that the exclusivity of his class upbringing didn’t help. I note too that this clubbishness was quite sexist as well as racist – ‘man’ is always the go-to term, as in The Descent of Man, but also in countless references to human evolution in The Origin. In his many examples of breeders and experimenters with plants and animals in the early chapters of The Origin, no women are mentioned. Perhaps they were all men, but I’m doubtful.
Which brings me back to the Tierra del Fuegans, and their supposed killing and devouring of their old women (though only ‘in times of dearth’, but it seems these times were quite common). Why not their old men too? Clearly, Darwin didn’t witness such behaviour, but newspaper accounts from the 1850s and 1860s (some from Australian papers) tend to confirm the difficulties faced by the inhabitants of the region, as well as ‘civilised’ visitors’. Here are some choice examples:
From Lyttelton Times (NZ), 1852 – ‘A Party of Missionaries starved to death’.
The ill-fated party landed on Picton Island towards the conclusion of the year 1850. From the first they seem to have been annoyed in some measure by the natives, and to have been hunted backwards and forwards from the little island to what may be called the mainland of Terra del Fuego [The article goes on to describe their desperate and vain attempts to remain alive].
From New York Times, 1855
On the 19th of November [1854], we first saw any of the natives, men and three women having landed from a canoe. We had just finished our boat and were ready for starting. The Indians having first received what could be spared to them of our clothes, etc., retired; and afterward returned with bludgeons, and insisted upon stripping us. Three attacked the Captain, and three the seaman, who having disabled two of them fled to the boat in which the boy already was. Unfortunately the captain received a blow which must have instantly killed him. The boy received two arrows in his jacket, but escaped unhurt….
After remaining some days, indeed several days, we ventured along the coast in our boat. At the end of about six weeks, we found the provisions all expended, and subsisted on such shellfish as we could gather among the rocks. After subsisting for some time in this way, a native canoe again hove in sight; being then quite destitute of any means of subsisting for a month at least, except raw shellfish, we gave ourselves up to the Indians, and having nothing to excite their cupidity, they behaved very kindly to us, and with them we have remained up to this present time, having never once seen a vessel…
From The Empire [Sydney], 1858
… when amidst excessive heat, a calm came on, and the ship lay perfectly quiescent in the water with her sails hanging listlessly to the mast, several canoes got alongside, and, as I have just said, flocked around us in moderate numbers. It was evident that many of them, if not all, had never seen a ship or strangers like us before…. I knew that, according to past accounts obtained from Jemmy Button, the natives were more numerous here than from whence we had come, and, also, that those on the north side were considerably more ferocious… Two of the oldest, with their hair all plastered over with some white substance, kept incessantly chattering ; and, indeed, they talked so fast and so loud, that they foamed at their mouths like the froth of an angry sea on a beach.
The stories go on, about astonished but sometimes murderous natives, in a region that clearly seems to have been a battleground for survival, between inhabitants and newcomers, but also among the inhabitants themselves, whose subsistence existence was dictated by their environment – though their language skills seem to have been impressive.
In any case I’ve found nothing to corroborate Darwin’s story about barbecuing old women – it’s more than likely an old husband’s tale. I might return to this issue – I’d like to learn much more about Tierra del Fuego’s inhabitants in the 21st century.
References
https://www.whatisemerging.com/opinions/savages-and-cannibals
FWIW, a few thoughts on Hamas v Israel
man-o-man-o-man-o-man-man-o-man
man-o-man-o-man-o-man-o-man
So I wanted to write about the Nobel Peace Prize, and the recent award to Narges Mohammadi, and the reaction to it within the all-male Iranian government, but the advent of a new war has disturbed this peace piece (which mightn’t have been particularly peaceful). So, while still very mindful of this important award, currently I’ll focus on the concepts of Holy War, monoculture, religion and other such bothersome things.
My readings around the Israel-Palestine situation include The case for Palestine, by the Australian lawyer Paul Heywood-Smith, Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel, by the US author Max Blumenthal, and Tears for Tarshiha, by Olfat Mahmoud, a Palestinian woman whose family were forced to flee their homeland due to the 1948 Nakba or “Catastrophe”. Mahmoud was born in a Lebanese refugee camp, which she barely survived, and went on to found the Palestinian Women’s Humanitarian Organisation (PWHO). My general view of the situation is that, as history often shows, the oppressed, if given the opportunity, become the oppressors, and the cycle may continue indefinitely without key interventions.
Obviously this is a horrific attack, and many innocent people have died. And though it can be described as a surprise attack, it is also hardly surprising given the many provocations from what most experts describe as the most extremist Israeli government since the country’s formation.
This will be, for me, both a fact-finding and an opinion piece. So, first, what is Hamas, who funds it and where does it fit among the various Palestinian liberation movements and opponents of the Israeli regime?
Hamas is the controlling force or government of the Gaza Strip, a tiny territory in the south-west corner of Israel – though not belonging to Israel. It shares an eleven-kilometre border with Egypt to the south and extends about 40 kilometres northwards along the Eastern Mediterranean. Hamas was elected to power there in 2006, the last election held in the region, in which it defeated Fatah, essentially a remnant of the PLO. The so-called Palestinian State consists of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (governed by Fatah), which are separated by almost 100 kilometres of Israeli territory. Most of the two million Gaza Strip people are Sunni Muslims, with a minority of Palestinian Christians. ‘Hamas’ is an Arabic acronym which essentially means ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’. It was founded in 1987 as the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, based in Egypt. Although it has moderated its demands over the years, Hamas has never accepted the legitimacy of the Israeli state. It receives some financial and military support from Iran (which supplies up to $100 million annually to Palestinian terrorist/liberation organisations, according to CNN), and some protection from Turkey.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clearly about an intolerance exacerbated by the creation of a state that always planned to be exclusionist. One hears egregious comments from both sides – I once worked with an Arab-Israeli teacher who considered the holocaust ‘hugely overblown’, and of course there are Haredi Jews, increasing in number, whose views have more than a whiff of insanity about them (from a WEIRD perspective). The tragedy of it all is that the region, anciently known as Canaan, was once home to a multi-ethnic, multilingual, god-saturated community that shared deities in the way that we share cuisines.
I’ve dealt elsewhere with the development of Judaic monotheism and the deadly ‘promised land’ mythology; what I’d like to focus on here is the women. Both orthodox Judaism and Islam are ultra-patriarchal, profoundly rejecting, indeed fleeing from WEIRD developments and its gradual opening up to the idea of women as possible movers and shakers in the world. And the war-like situation that has persisted in the region for decades has hardly been conducive to female empowerment. Even so, the only movement for reconciliation in the region seems unsurprisingly to be coming from women, though this is difficult especially for Palestinian women, who fear retribution from Hamas – which can be quite horrific.
Women will, of course, be thrust back further into the shadows by these recent events – events which were entirely foreseeable, not of course in detail, but in a more general sense, with so many of the most reasonable, tolerant and long-suffering Palestinians giving up and quitting the place. And while this most recent event seems particularly gruesome, and must certainly be condemned, it should be noted that the United Nations’ Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has kept figures – to the best of its ability – on “the number of Palestinians and Israelis who were killed or injured since 2008 in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) and Israel in the context of the occupation and conflict”. According to OCHA, from the beginning of 2008 to September 19 2023, Palestinian fatalities number 6,407, while Israeli fatalities number 308. There’s no doubt that, as the Israeli government prepares to retaliate, this massive imbalance will continue well into the future.
As I come to the end of reading Joseph Henrich’s extraordinary book The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, I note that the WEIRDness Henrich analyses is largely absent from Middle Eastern countries. Henrich’s book barely touches on feminism, but the better-late-than-never rise of female empowerment in the 20th century is undoubtedly a feature of the WEIRD phenomenon, and this rise has certainly influenced women in non-WEIRD, proto-WEIRD or ‘suppressed’ WEIRD regions (I think of those I’ve met who identify as Persian rather than Iranian, for example). And as to whether Israel ‘qualifies’ as a WEIRD nation, that question is beyond my pay grade (which is zero). My guess, though, is that it’s a rough amalgam of WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures and tendencies, and not exactly my ideal holiday location.
On the positive side, Women Wage Peace (WWP), ‘the largest grassroots peace movement in Israel today’, launched a partnership last year with Women of the Sun (WOS), a Palestinian women’s peace movement founded in 2021. Such initiatives are likely to be eclipsed for a while, with payback rising to the top of the agenda. Everyone is holding their breath, it seems, about how Israel’s far-right government will respond. The unevenness of the death toll caused by Palestinian-Israeli hostilities, mentioned above, amounts to more than 20 Palestinians for every Israeli, and the ill-treatment of this essentially manufactured underclass has worsened in recent times. We don’t currently know the full death toll from the Hamas attack, but we’re all pretty certain that there will be more death and destruction to come. Here’s how one news outlet, Vox, described Netanyahu’s new government earlier this year:
The policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly sworn-in governing coalition brought out 80,000 protesters over the weekend in Tel Aviv. The protesters were largely focused on the government’s proposals to overhaul the judicial system, which could weaken the country’s democracy and separation of powers. But the effects of the policies on the 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the 5.2 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories will be catastrophic, building upon years of policies that Israeli human rights organizations say constitute crimes against humanity.
The current difficulties faced by Palestinians within their own ancestral lands are truly shocking, though of course not unique – think of the Uyghurs in Xi’s China, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the Kurds in Turkiye, Syria and surrounding regions, and so on. It would be impracticable for every ethnicity and/or language group to have its own nation, of course (there are more than 6000 languages currently spoken), but it is a breach of human rights to treat any ethnicity as inferior to any other, as well as being an offence to basic rationality. People of the WEIRD world generally understand that, including (non-Haredi) Israelis, and that helps to explain why so many have been protesting about their own government. This Hamas atrocity – a surprise in its particulars but hardly in the overall scheme of things – will surely escalate decades-long tensions, within the region and well beyond (look out for the US response to this attack upon their 51st state), and men and their weaponry will of course be front and centre.
Vive les bonobos. There are times when I really wouldn’t mind being one.
References
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
https://theconversation.com/why-did-hamas-attack-and-why-now-what-does-it-hope-to-gain-215248
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
J Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, 2020
Women Wage Peace
Australia, religion and the appeal of eternity
The latest Australian census figures are out, and as always I zoom in on religion and our quite rapid abandonment of….
It’s not that I’m against religion exactly, I recognise it as an attempt to understand our world, before science came along. Often to understand it as story. The story of how the world formed, and who formed it. Religions, I notice, are always about personae, doing Very Powerful things. Creating the heavens and the earth, plants and animals, and of course humans. For some kind of moral purpose, which we must constantly try to discern, from the signs and stories of the creators. And some humans are better at pinning down this purpose than others, and they become elevated as intermediaries between the creators, to whom we owe everything, and our benighted selves, tossed on the waves of godly caprice, which only seems like caprice, because the gods have a higher purpose which even the most blessed and spiritual of mortals can only partially comprehend.
Anyway, the census. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), ‘A question on religion has been included in all Australian censuses since 1911. Answering this question has always been optional but is answered by nearly all respondents’. In that first census, over 100 years ago, pretty close to 100% of Australians described themselves as religious – essentially meaning Christian. And things hadn’t changed that much by the 1971 census, when still a vast majority – 87 to 88 percent – described themselves as Christian, and the number of people who dared admit to any other religious belief was virtually zero. But by the seventies, the hodge-podge of regulations that made up the White Australia Policy had been dismantled, so that by this latest census (2021), religious beliefs other than Christianity were being admitted to by just over 10 percent of respondents.
But Christianity has fared particularly badly over the past fifty years, as the graph above shows. I first started paying serious attention to this trend away from Christianity after the 2006 census, and from memory, I gave a talk to the SA Humanist Society after the release of the 2011 census, noting the trend, particularly the fact that the abandonment of Christian belief was accelerating. However, I predicted, at least to myself, that this trend would soon start to ‘plateau’. My reasoning was partly based on the breakdown of Christianity into denominations. Not a complete breakdown, from my very basic research. The ABS broke it down into Catholicism, Anglicanism and Other Christian, and it was very clear that Anglicanism was fading most quickly, and Catholicism most slowly. It seemed to me that Anglicanism, which, unsurprisingly, had been the most practiced Christian religion in the early censuses, had suffered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to its reforms and increasing liberalism (though of course it has its conservative faction). Considering that religion is supposed to be about the eternal values of the creator, unchanging since our creation, rather than about values that simply change with the times – what some call social evolution – it may have caused many Anglicans to lose faith in religion altogether, or even to switch to something more ‘eternal’, such as the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. My prediction was that Anglicanism would continue to lose support until it bottomed out, in the fairly near future, and that Catholicism would also start to level out, what with all those cultural Catholics who built their social lives around the Church. And there was also the popularity of those Big Church evangelicals and Pentecostals, the ‘Charismatics’ that I kept hearing about.
So I was taken by surprise by the 2016 census, which saw the biggest drop in the Anglican religion of any previous census, as well as a more substantial drop in Catholicism than anticipated. The ‘other Christian’ category had also dropped, and the no religion category had risen to just over 30%. These figures upended my expectations completely, so I was more open to what the 2021 census would bring. Even so, a jump from 30% non-religious to 39% in five years is pretty amazing – but rapid change has been the norm in modern times, at least in the WEIRD world. Today we talk in terms of generations – the baby boomers, the millennials, generations X,Y and Z, and it’s all a bit hard to parse. I don’t think the generation of the 1740s would have had much difficulty in dealing with gen 1760, except of course to complain about their youthful foolishness, as Aristotle was wont to do.
So, as you can see from the graph, ‘no religion’ is pretty well certain to replace Christianity as the largest religious category in the next census, while owing to our increasingly multicultural mix, other religions will continue to rise, though not substantially. Interestingly the largest jump in religious presence since the 2016 census is that of the Yazidis, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group from northern Iraq and surrounding regions, fleeing from persecution by the so-called Islamic State. Though it only ‘took off’ in the 12th century, its origins are apparently pre-Islamic and pre-Zoroastrian, later tinged with Sufi and Islamic influences. So, I learn something new every day.
Of course, the cultural make-up of Australia is changing, but slowly. We could do with expanding our immigration program, and behaving in a less hostile and cruel way towards refugees. I’m not religious of course, but bringing into the country a wider variety of religio-cultural groups might tend to water down the influence of the very male Judeo-Christian god that has been worshipped in this country for so long. Even if these new religions have their own patriarchal features, as most do, the divisions between them might tend to dilute the patriarchy of Catholicism, the Christian religion that has always most concerned me. Catholicism began to challenge Anglicanism as the most practiced, or at least believed in, denomination in Australia in the post-war period, though there was always a large Catholic presence, particularly Irish-Catholic, before that. It continues to be the most persistent denomination, but it will clearly never be the politically dominant influence it was in the 1950s. Even so, it’s noticeable that the religiosity of our political leaders, our parliamentarians, in terms of numbers, is greater than the general population – just as the average age of parliamentarians is greater than the general population.
As mentioned, the above graph clearly shows that the biggest religious category in the next census will be ‘no religion’. And that category will continue to grow over the next decades, and even the immigrants with their different religious varieties may go the way of the majority.
But us oldies may not, or will not be here to witness what happens. What will these developments mean for the nation? How will it have changed our politico-social landscape after we have passed? That’s the sad thing, life is very addictive, and we don’t want it to stop. We always want to know what happens. No wonder eternal life is so profoundly appealing.
bonobos, religion and feminism
bonobos, promoting the common good
Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus that religion has lost, or is losing, its political clout, and is largely a force of the past with little impact on the future. This is largely true, but more so in WEIRD countries. Catholicism still has a firm grip on many South American and African countries, and I don’t see any Islamic nations Enlightenment in the offing – but you never know.
During the ‘New Atheism’ fervency of a decade and more ago, I became quite engaged in the issues. I’ve never believed in any gods, but I’d avoided really thinking about Christianity’s ascendancy in the UK and Australia (I have dual nationality). The decline of the religion even before New Atheism had made it all quite easy to ignore, but the new polemics excited me enough to read the new texts – The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and assorted others. Perhaps more importantly, I actually read the Bible, and, through my blog, wrote my own exegesis of the gospels and other New Testament writings, compared Jesus to Socrates, and other fun things. It passed the time. And I’m sure the movement hastened the drift away from religion in the WEIRD world.
For these essays, though, I’m thinking of how religions have impacted on the females of our species. Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism, in particular, have had a congealing affect on male and female social roles, especially, it seems, among the poorer classes in the cultures those religions dominate.
There’s a lot that I could say about religions, but in a nutshell they grew, initially, out of a desire to understand and control the world as humans saw it. That’s why, in my view, they’re in competition with science, which grew out of exactly the same desire, but which has turned out to be phenomenally more successful in fulfilling that desire. So religions are in wholesale retreat, especially in the WEIRD world.
Let me elaborate. The world to early human apes was full of mysteries, as it is to bonobos, chimps and other smart creatures, who might take note of such sights as waterfalls, volcanic eruptions, lightning fires, and even, perhaps, slow changes like the growth of a tree from a seedling. Also regular occurrences such as the change from day to night, seasons, the movements of the sun, moon and stars. But human apes would likely go further than a sense of wonder and awe. They would come to wonder what, and why. And lacking any handy explanations they would turn to inventing them – and those whose inventions seemed most convincing, and who seemed most familiar with the forces at play, either through delusion, calculation or conviction, might attain a power of sorts over the group, something seen as innate and special, and perhaps passed down to offspring. The forces and vagaries of wind and water, heat and cold, of food abundance and scarcity, might seem to be manipulable by the powers and spirit of these chosen few, the adumbrations of religious figures, shamans, a priestly caste. And given that, apart from a few notable exceptions – some ancient Greeks and the odd Egyptian and Chinese – science as we know it is a very recent phenomenon, religions held sway for ages, not only explaining and ‘controlling’ the powers of nature, but inventing plausible enough stories for how it all began and who to thank or blame for it all.
If this just-so story about the origins and purpose of religion has some truth to it, then it follows that religion has a conservative element. This is how the world began, these are the forces that created it, and this, that and this is what they want from us, in payment for the life they’ve given us. It’s unchanging, and we need to maintain our roles, eternally. For example, the Judea-Christian origin story has woman as almost an afterthought, man’s helpmeet, shaped from a supernumerary rib. The Islamic creation story is altogether more vague, but both myths took shape within highly patriarchal societies, and served to maintain those societies largely unchanged for centuries, until we began to find better explanations, at an accelerating rate.
Still, we’re left with the legacy of those religions and, for example, their views on leadership. It strikes me that some of the Catholic hierarchy would rather be burned at the stake than allow women to become priests, and I doubt that there are too many female Imams. There are debates of course, about whether restrictions on female leadership roles are cultural or religious, or indeed about whether culture and religion can be separated, but they often work together to maintain a perennial status quo.
Until, of course, they don’t. Modern science has knocked us off our pedestal as the darlings of the gods, and has reframed what used to be our whole world as a tiny planet revolving around a bog-standard star on the outskirts of a fairly nondescript spiral galaxy in one of possibly countless universes. It’s been a bit of a downward spiral for our sense of specialness, and it’s all been quite sudden. We can pat ourselves on the back, though, for having brought ourselves to our senses, and even for launching ourselves into the infinity of progress – a world of particle colliders, tokamaks, theory-of-mind-AI, quantum computers and space tourism and much else beyond the horizon. And yet, the old patriarchy is still largely with us. Men in suits, or in uniforms, leading the military, dominating the business world and manipulating the political arena. There’s no good reason for it – it’s simply tradition, going back to early culture and religion. Some of these cultures seem incorrigible in spite of their new-found WEIRDness. Will Japan, for example, ever transform its male business and political culture? When will we see another Chinese woman in the Politburo? As to Russia’s Putin and his strong man allies – when will this kindergarten club grow up?
With the success and growth of modern science has come great international, and inter-gender, collaboration. I can think of no greater model for our future development. With the current pandemic, too, we’ve seen follow-the-science politicians, many of them women, emerging with the greatest credit. Co-operation among women has always been powerful, but too little recognised. I would like to see more of this co-operation, especially in the service of keeping men in their place. It works for bonobos. I truly feel that a bonobo culture, but with human brainpower, would make the human world more exhilarating, in its compassion, in its sexiness, in its sense of connection with the biosphere and all its delicate mechanisms, than any other cultural change we can make. I actually think it will happen – though sadly not in my lifetime.
a bonobo world 32: bonobos and us
female-dominated society (male version)
So let me look at the role of the adult female in the bonobo world. Why do they tend to be the bosses, in spite of being smaller on average than the males, and how did this come to be? If we can trace this, maybe we can find out how to live in a more female-dominated, peaceful, integrated and – yes maybe a more loving, even sexy community.
Frans de Waal has described bonobo society as a gynecocracy, a pre-feminist term which simply means a society or culture governed by women, without going into detail, for example about matrilineal descent or inheritance. De Waal’s findings, mostly drawn from captive bonobos, have been criticised, but further confirmed by wild studies.
Bonobos are initially hard to distinguish from chimps, from whom they separated, species-wise, 1.5 to 2 million years ago. They’re officially described as more gracile, meaning a little more slender, less robust, but I can’t easily see it myself. What I do notice is their charming middle-parted hairstyle, a la Marcel Proust or Oscar Wilde, which has earned them the title the gay ape. Or should have. Although omnivorous like clothed apes and chimps, they have a more vegetarian diet in practice than the other two, probably because they tend to be more arboreal and inhabit a more restricted area, south of the Congo River. The name bonobo is of course human-created, possibly deriving obscurely from a misspelling of Bolobo, a Congolese town. We don’t know how they refer to themselves.
There’s been a lot of contentious but fascinating debate about the dating of the last common ancestor between clothed apes and the chimp-bonobo line. For a time the consensus seemed to be converging around a date of 6-7 million years ago, but the doubtless contentious work of Madelaine Bohme, published in a book, Ancient bones (2019) pushes the date back by a few million years.
Bonobos weigh on average between 35 and 40 kgs, and, standing, measure about 110cm. The females have prominent boobs compared to other unclothed apes, but nothing a human ape would want to slobber over. Generally they’re more physically divergent than chimps – so you’ve got your plain Janes and your beauty queens, your Adonises and your ghouls. Their bipedalism – or their use of bipedalism – varies with habitat and habituation. In captivity they use it more, as they spend less time in trees.
It’s argued that bonobos are more peaceful than chimps because they live in a more stable, less threatened environment – the threats to them in the wild are entirely due to clothed, and weaponised, apes, against whom they are, of course, entirely defenceless. Chimps, on the contrary, occupy a wider range, and so, like clothed apes, tend to separate into distinct, competitive communities, who fight over resources and territorial ascendancy. The difficulty here is that, due to the dangerous conditions that have pertained in the Congo for many decades due to long-term clashes and survival struggles among clothed apes, bonobo behaviour has been difficult to analyse outside of zoos. But even under captivity, bonobos clearly behave differently and have a different societal structure than their close cousins the chimps. And this is what should get feminists much more excited than they are, IMHO.
So, among the higher primates – humans, bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangutans – bonobos are the only species in which the females have an equal or dominant role in the social organisation. I should perhaps make an exception of orangutans, the most solitary of all the higher primates. For this reason, the question of social hierarchy isn’t so relevant fo this species, though it’s notable that orangutan males are two to three times larger than females. Certainly there’s no question of females being dominant.
The key, it seems, to the more prominent position of females in bonobo society, is female-female bonding, and female alliances. That’s why, I would argue, nothing is more important to the future of human apes than female alliances. It may take time, but I’m hoping we’ll eventually wake up to the essentiality of this phenomenon, for our continued success. The tight social bonding between bonobo females seems to have had a more general socialising effect, something that human apes, who have become increasingly isolated, competitive, covetous and demoralised by new class divisions, would do well to take note of.
In terms of what we need for a more successful, harmonious future, within and beyond our own species, I’m arguing for female prominence rather than dominance (though I do believe we’d be better off with the latter), and I believe we’re inching – with agonising slowness – in that direction, especially in so-called advanced, more science-based societies. Here’s part of Wikipedia’s most up-to-date account of bonobo social behaviour.
Different bonobo communities vary from being gender-balanced to outright matriarchal. At the top of the hierarchy is a coalition of high-ranking females and males typically headed by an old, experienced matriarch who acts as the decision-maker and leader of the group. Female bonobos typically earn their rank through age, rather than physical intimidation, and top-ranking females will protect immigrant females from male harassment. While bonobos are often called matriarchal, this is a trend rather than an objective fact. It is not unheard of for some communities to have a male who decides where the group travels to, and where they feed. However, these male leaders never harass or coerce the females, and they can choose to ignore his suggestions if they feel like it. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. A male derives his status from the status of his mother. The mother–son bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, and although the son of a high ranking female may outrank a lower female, rank plays a less prominent role than in other primate societies. Relationships between different communities are often positive and affiliative, and bonobos are not a territorial species. Bonobos will also share food with others, even unrelated strangers. Bonobos exhibit paedomorphism (retaining infantile physical characteristics and behaviours), which greatly inhibits aggression and enables unfamiliar bonobos to freely mingle and cooperate with each other.
I quote this passage at length because I feel there are various clues here to creating a more effective human society, on a global scale. Let’s be ambitious. Here are some of the clues:
- respect for our elders, and keeping them within the community, rather than shuffling them off to nursing homes. This includes allowing them the right to die, when or if they feel their time has come
- respecting knowledge and experience rather than physical strength or military might. Finding strength in unity of purpose, shared goals and experience in achieving those goals
- recognising over-arching concerns shared by all nations, whether these be nations with officially-drawn (but often artificial) boundaries or nations of cultural identity – the Kurds, the Pashtuns, the Cherokees, the Pitjantjatjara, etc – while recognising, respecting and learning from different cultural perspectives and methodologies.
- respecting experience and knowledge over rank, and so creating a greater communal fluidity, and avoiding the accumulation of resources by a small elite group
- encouraging play and playfulness, youthful exuberance (especially among the no-longer-youthful) and free expression
- being generally more forgiving and less punitive
Are such clues to an improved human society dependent on a more prominent role for females in that society?
Do bears shit in the woods?