Archive for the ‘future’ Category
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
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
matriarchy needs work – please consider
dreams dreams dreams
We’ve surely all heard that patriarchy began with agriculture, but I don’t think there’s any solid evidence for this. The Australian Aboriginal societies weren’t agricultural, but according to many early anthropologists and white commentators they were profoundly, even brutally patriarchal. Take this description:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …”
George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878
Just about all of these early descriptions are from men, so I’m a wee bit skeptical here too (and for a very different description, see below)
My interest in this topic – I mean the origins of patriarchy – goes back to the chimp-bonobo contrast. What brought about this patriarchal-matriarchal divide on opposite banks of the Congo River between one and two million years ago? If it was essentially an environmental divide, with the bonobos benefitting from an abundant, largely frugivorous food supply, could it be that Aboriginal societies, divided by more than 200 different languages, might also be divided by more or less fruitful environments, where gathering was more or less key and hunting more or less incidental, leading to different cultural norms? Aboriginal people have been generally defined as nomadic, but they also had their own tribal lands and sacred places, the nomadism simply referring to a lack of fixed dwellings.
Some, perhaps most, anthropologists have found that Aboriginal culture is generally divided upon gender lines:
Diana Bell in her book “Daughters of the Dreaming” reported, after spending many years living with Aborigines in Central Australia, that there was no patriarchy or matriarchy but “Under the Law, men and women have distinctive roles to play but each has access to certain checks and balances which ensure that neither sex can enjoy an unrivalled supremacy over the other. Underlying male and female practice is a common purpose and a shared belief in the Dreamtime experience; both have sacred boards, both know songs and paint designs that encode the knowledge of the dreaming.” This was not as predicted by Gimbutas but is [a] more gender balanced society.
Some rituals are performed by both men and women. She tells of how men, grateful for being shown a woman’s dance, promptly return the favour by painting up their own boards and bodies and showing the women one of their own dances. In these dances they were exchanging ritual knowledge of the country and its Dreaming painted on their bodies and their boards and spelt out by the patterns their pounding feet make upon the earth. At one point the women picked up the male boards displayed and danced with them while the men called out approvingly “they are your dreamings now”. But this does not mean that there is not secret knowledge, private to each gender. In such displays, something is always held back, kept for people of the same gender.
Jani Farrell Roberts, Aboriginal women and Gimbutas, c 2000
If this is a reasonably accurate account of pre-colonial Aboriginal practice, we may be looking at societies that can’t be easily pigeon-holed as patriarchal or otherwise, which is difficult for me, as I’ve tended to argue that gender equality is kind of unnatural, like measuring the two genders on a balance of scales or a see-saw. The scales will either tip in favour of patriarchy or matriarchy, so we need to go for matriarchy as the more humane approach, based, just for starters, on all we know about history.
And bonobos.
As to history, most of it is about men, because it’s overwhelmingly been men who’ve started and fought in wars that have transformed human society. Let’s mention a few instigators, as well as slaughterers via policy – Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Pope Urban II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Leo Victor (Leopold II of Belgium), Timur….
There’s plenty others, no doubt, but why make ourselves sick? How about the women warriors and presiders over slaughter?
Let’s see – Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, Fu Hao, Cleopatra, Isabella of Castille, Wu Zhao, uh, Margaret Thatcher…
It’s a struggle to find anyone who caused human suffering on anything like the level of the males. Maybe they just weren’t given enough power, but I doubt that. Whatever the case, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that 99% of the human slaughter that has occurred throughout history has been at the hands of only one gender.
Having said that, humanity doesn’t seem to be getting the message, what with Xi, Putin, Trump, Kim Jung Un and co. Planetrulers.com claimed that there were 57 dictators worldwide in 2022, all of them male (though they really should have included Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s dictatorial Prime Minister .
So the history is bleak, as is much of the present, and the worst of it is that this can drive a sense of fatalism, or ‘what’s the use’-ism, so…
What can we do? Of course, the internet has the answer, sort of. We certainly have no option but to take the long view, and work work work, even if it’s just talking, arguing, making the obvious points. Sometimes even to women – I’ve written, ages ago that Margaret McMillan, the prolific and highly regarded Canadian historian, on giving a Q and A after a talk about the history of war, was asked whether more women in leadership might make a difference to that tendency towards warfare that has so characterised our history. Sadly, she rattled off the usual extremely dumb response – sorry Margaret but I get so tired of it – that this and that female leader was just as bad as the men. Of course! That’s because it’s not at all about individual men and women – it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. It’s bonoboism versus chimpism. It’s about changing the overall structure of society. And that is, of course, Very Big. A very big task. A very necessary task, though, in my humble opinion. Not because we won’t survive without matriarchy – I have no idea whether we will or not – but because we, and the environment we so dominate, will be so much better off without patriarchy. That’s something I’m entirely convinced about.
I’d ask everyone to just think about this, just for starters.
References
http://www.witch.plus.com/7day-extracts/aboriginal-women.html
Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, 1983
the gender agenda, and other positives
It’s New Year resolution time, which I try not to pay much attention to, and yet… I’m thinking of/resolving to focus on the biggest issue that bugs me, rather than trying to expand my understanding every-which way (corals, dark matter, Milankovich cycles, the cryosphere…), and that’s our culture and politics, in the broadest sense, including our existence as primates, mammals, forms of life. Dominators of the biosphere.
So that’s why gender is important to me, because one gender, in the sexually reproducing world, nurtures and brings forth life from her own body, and so, it reasonably follows, has a greater regard for life than the other. Yet, reasonable though this observation might be, it often meets with resistance, sometimes mounting to hostility, from members of the other gender. In the case of Aristotle – and no doubt his idea was formed from the ancient Greek zeitgeist – it was the male’s seed that produced the next generation, the female being nothing more than the incubator.
I’m interested in exploring why humanity came to be, by and large, patriarchal, and how we can be less so – much much less so, because I’m deeply convinced that this is our best path to the future. A long and winding road, I suspect.
I’ve retitled this blog a few times, but it has been called ‘A bonobo humanity?’ for some time now. I’ve wondered occasionally about changing the title again, as people have looked quizzical, or chuckled, and even sneered. For those who know at least something about bonobos, the general impression I’ve felt has been – ‘yes, cute, but really what has this got to do with us?’
So yes, bonobos are hairy, more or less ugly (to us), forest-dwelling, sex-obsessed frugivores who will never express themselves in a complex language, never invent a complex device, never play a musical instrument or wonder where those twinkling lights in the night sky came from. They have nothing to teach us.
And yet, we study them, just as we study other primates, and mammals, and our own human history, and so on and so forth. To learn about, and to learn from. And in the process, we’ve discovered, as we have with so many species we’ve turned our attention to – complexity. Remember the term ‘bird-brain’? Those brains in those tiny heads that enable their owners to build complicated nests of all kinds, to communicate all sorts of tuneful messages to their kin, to use humans to crack nuts for them, to fashion tools from twigs to spear tasty morsels for themselves and their chicks?
Yes, we’re smart to have uncovered these smarts in other species, which has helped us to respect the cleverness and complexity of life itself, its amazing development from the earliest archaea or whatever. But the neurological developments that led to H sapiens, the massively dominant species on this planet, in destructive as well as productive terms, are of the greatest interest. How is it that this most complex species, which has divided its billions of specimens into hundreds of nations, can allow individuals like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Xinping (and many other repugnant characters) to wield power over millions of their obvious intellectual and pro-social superiors? Why is one gender, the more pro-social of the two, given so much less power than the other? I like to think that the situation is changing, but if this is so, it’s at such a heart-rendingly slow pace that it really is painful to bear.
Even so, I tend towards optimism. We’re programmed to survive, not just individually – no species survives individually – but by working out what’s best for us all. And I do mean all, and that’s an endless learning process.
What I’m doing here, in this first post for the new year, is trying to work out how to put my queer shoulder to the wheel. I’m being inspired by writers such as Frans de Waal, Cat Bohannon and Rutger Bregman, by positive texts such as Glimpses of Utopia by Jess Scully and The Future We Choose (as yet unread!) by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, and by the work of all those in the field, protecting wildlife, providing education, supporting effective solutions, promoting hope and thoughtfulness. But enough of this sludge, it’s 2025, let’s see what we can do!
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of utopia, 2020
Frans de Waal, Different, 2022
Rutger Bregman, Humankind:a hopeful history, 2020
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, The future we choose, 2020
touching on women, the principal carriers of bonobo humanity
that book again…
So I feel I’ve been skating around the edge of the bonobo world lately, not getting the message across, and not even quite sure what the message is. Clearly their sexual openness is sort of intimidating to many humans, but it’s also clear that this openness is profoundly connected to their culture of greater caring and sharing than exists in chimp culture, or our own. It slightly annoys me when commentators suggest we should look past the sexual activity to the bonding and helping and mutuality that goes on, as if we (very literally) buttoned-up humans can have one without the other, but having said that, I too am nervous about focussing on frottage, outside of Max Ernst.
So now I’m going to focus a bit more on the sexual side, and not just in reference to bonobos. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book Why is sex fun? (though I was pretty sure I knew the answer). Erogenous zones are hypersensitive, even more so when stimulated by another – like tickling, only different somehow. And with concealed ovulation, adult humans, like bonobos and dolphins, are sexually receptive for most of the time. This isn’t the case with chimps, so for bonobos this is an intriguing case of relatively recent evolution. Diamond’s book didn’t speculate too much, but looked at two extant theories:
“Many-fathers” theory says that concealed ovulation allows women to have sex with many men and create paternity confusion, which then decreases the chances of infanticide. “Daddy-at-home” theory says that women entice men to be around, provide and protect, by allowing them to have sex regularly. By combining both, we reach the conclusion that concealed ovulation arose at a time when our ancestors were promiscuous to avoid infanticide (“many fathers theory”) but once concealed ovulation evolved, the women chose monogamous relationships with more dependable cave-men (“daddy-at-home theory”).
Much of this is less than relevant to today’s WEIRD human world with its contraceptives and prophylactics, but ‘permissive’ sex has still to overcome the barriers of religion, and, for women, discrimination.
In any case Diamond completely missed the possible role of sex in bringing people together, in creating alliances, and the kind of overall cultural harmony that appears to subsist in bonobo society. This cultural harmony, which transcends the mother-child bond or the supposedly ideal development known as the nuclear family, has been the main attractant for me vis-a-vis bonobos, because I was brought up in what is called, by cliché, a ‘toxic family situation’, bearing in mind Tolstoy’s clever dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This situation was most salient for me in the late sixties and early seventies, the ‘hippy era’, when free love was touted, along with the death of the nuclear family. The hope that this idea gave me in my teen years was almost unbearably painful, but it all fizzled out. I didn’t learn about the bonobo lifestyle until more than a decade later, in the mid to late 80s, but that was rather too late, and a whole species out of reach…
But that’s just my personal situation. Bonobos still offer an example for our species in general, as we socially evolve, very slowly and in piecemeal fashion, out of patriarchy. But what exactly is this example, if it isn’t sexually modulated empathy, which is so far from a species that is so compartmentalised, un-neighbourly, sexually repressed, competitive, materialistic and personally hubristic as ours?
Of course, the hope surely lies with the greater empowerment of the human female, who, by and large, hasn’t quite the intensity of the above-mentioned traits than the male. Or am I just pissing in the wind? Of course, there are outrageous and apparently obnoxious females on the political scene, especially in the USA, when a lot of reportage focuses on the outrageous and obnoxious. But I believe, and fervently hope, that women are better at operating co-operatively and below the radar. For example, I’ve written before about Arab and Israeli women getting together to lobby against injustice and to promote sexual freedom, amongst other things (okay, sexual freedom is probably low on their list of priorities right now), a particularly difficult task considering the status of women in Moslem cultures, and their apparently feverish fear of homosexuality, especially among the lower classes. The Haifa Women’s Coalition, for example, based in that coastal northern Israeli city, suffers from the sorts of cultural tensions no bonobo would ever have to deal with, such as a concern about being dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, and a fear of backlash re ‘abnormal’ sexual preferences. Sigh, if we could only just give in to and celebrate sharing our basic primate primacy.
I could go on about the backlash against female empowerment in China, Russia, Burma, the Middle East, etc etc, the product of power politics that I like to hope are ultimately ephemeral – given a 1000+ year time-line for a bonobo humanity – which reminds me, I need to save my pennies to be cryopreserved – I really really want to see that future.
Meanwhile, I’ve noted, rather belatedly, that others have been discovering and basing some writings on bonobos, one way or another. Two recent examples, The bonobo gene: why men can be so dumb, is apparently a light-hearted account by an Aussie TV sports producer, Steve Marshall, of toxic masculinity and the male appendage. It’s clearly not about science (what could this bonobo gene be?), but anything that mocks the jocks can’t be a bad thing. More intriguing to me, though, is The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, by Diane Rosenfeld, which sounds like it’s tactfully avoiding the sexual stuff. We’ll see – I’m definitely going to grab myself a copy.
Taking the long view on a future bonobo humanity is of course the only way to stay hopeful. In spite of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine-Russia, in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Burundi and so on, the human world is far less overtly violent than it was centuries and millennia ago. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s rather too whirlwind a world history (The World: a family history), amongst countless others, will tell you that. Even with a nuclear holocaust currently hanging over us (I recently encountered someone who fervently favours a nuclear strike – and strong male leadership – to stop Putin), and our slowness in handling the global warming crisis, I can’t seriously envisage a future human wipeout. The fact is, it often takes shocks at our own cruelty and stupidity to bring about anything like bonoboesque reform. It took two World Wars and all the barbarity they entailed to get us to become more global in our concerns, to take more seriously the concept of universal human rights and united nations, though these are still not taken seriously enough. Worse before it gets better? I can only hope not.
Meanwhile, I must get hold of that book…
References
homosexuality, hypocrisy, violence and bonobos
not quite, but I’m getting the t-shirt anyway
A few months back I read The picture of Dorian Gray for a reading group, and the book irked me, to say the least, with its effete Oxbridge elitism, its occasionally crass descriptions of women, and its obsession with sin, which I prefer to believe had already become an outmoded concept in Wilde’s time. I like to identify as a working-class high-school drop out with a chip on his shoulder, a type who finds aristocratic poseurs highly expendable, and my scorn was hardly likely to diminish on learning that Wilde, a tragically broken man at the end of his short life, turned to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, that richly resplendent monument to sexual hypocrisy, for reasons unknown, but presumably having something to do with eternity. Did he actually believe in a heavenly afterlife, in which forgiven sinners would be supplied with translucent wings while having their genitals erased? Heaven really does sound like a place where nothing ever happens, at least nothing the old, pre-dead or at least pre-disgraced Wilde would’ve had much interest in. Of course lions would lie down with lambs – boredom is a universal trait.
Of course, it’s impossible to transport yourself to a world of ‘typical’ 19th century values. Human society, at least in the WEIRD world, has been rapidly transforming in the past few centuries, unlike bonobo society, which was surely as female-dominated and sexually active in the 1500s as it is now. Atheism was hardly recognised as a word in Shakespeare’s time, and nobody would’ve admitted to holding such a belief. Homosexuality, however, under a variety of names, has been a feature of life in virtually all cultures since history has been written, and of course before. Simon Sebag Montifiore, in his BIG book The world: a family history, provides some orifice-opening examples (sans illustrations, unfortunately). Yet even in pre-medieval times, in non-Christian regions, homosexuality, particularly among men, appears to have been looked upon with disdain if not contempt, presumably due to the warrior expectations surrounding the gender. Think chimpanzees.
I’ve mentioned the hypocrisy of the Church, so thoroughly exposed in recent decades, with its all-male ‘celibate’ clergy and its bizarre and unworkable public attitude to sex, contraception, abortion and the limited role of women within its profoundly hierarchical structure. It’s frustrating to see how unwilling it is to reform itself, but heartening to note how little political clout it has in the WEIRD world compared to previous centuries, and how Christianity in general is fading quite rapidly, outside of the USA. It appears to be making headway, though in a small way, in some Asian countries, I think largely because it offers community – a microcosm of mutual support in troubled and often dangerous times. And many of these new Christian groups are more supportive of gender differences, alternative lifestyles and the like. These are the green shoots I like to see – though I might just be imagining them – that might be harbingers of a bonobo world, a world in which the word ‘queer’, in sexual terms, will have become meaningless.
Of course there’s much to be pessimistic about. Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan…. The Wisevoter website lists 32 countries that are currently in ‘conflict’, though history tells us that it seems to have always been thus, and indeed it was even worse ‘back then’. In the more internally peaceful WEIRD world I inhabit, a lot of the citizenry’s violent inclinations have found expression in social media platforms, which would seem to involve words rather than deeds, but nonetheless create self-contained but relational spaces of self-righteousness which militate against bonoboesque caring, sharing and becalming. The concern is that these social media bubbles of discontent and rage may become over-heated and burst into real violence against the physical embodiments of largely fantasised ‘evil’, as in replacement theory, vaccination mind control, an international Jewish conspiracy, etc etc. We may need to examine, culturally and perhaps governmentally, the algorithms that tend to spread and reinforce toxic misinformation, as evidence is brought more clearly to light about real and present damage. It seems that there may be a connection between the seemingly harmless creation of certain mathematical sequences (algorithms) and the strange forms of belief that imprison the susceptible. But then, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, and humans are always free to refuse an education in critical thinking.
I’ve used the word ‘free’ in that last sentence, but we’re not free. Something in the strange beliefs that organisations like the Church have imposed on us for millennia – that it’s a sin to enjoy sex outside of an aptly named concept called ‘wedlock’, and that children born outside of that concept are not legitimate human beings, and a variety of other sex-related ‘sins’ – won favour in the neural networks inside our heads, imprinted from generation to generation, at least until the rise of the sciences, and our demotion, more recently still, to the status of a primate among other primates, albeit a fascinatingly and frighteningly successful one.
For those of us who accept this demotion, or, more accurately, accept that our status has been revised and made more meaningful, embedded as it has become with the stuff of all living things within the biosphere that sustains them, the behaviour of our closest kin, chimps and bonobos, as well as other intelligent, social beings far from our line of development, such as cetaceans, some avian species, elephants, bats and rats, might offer lessons for us in community and sustainability. But, in my humble opinion, bonobos most of all, for, I think, obvious reasons.
Our strong genetic links with bonobos means that, as fellow primates, we can look each other in the eye and feel a depth of connection. Their sexual behaviour and family dynamics are clearly more relatable to us than, say, dolphins, so that we’re keen to close the gap in knowledge about how our ancestry connects with theirs. Exactly how and why – and when – did they become female dominant? Can we uncover female dominance in any of our own ancestors or cousins? (It should be pointed out – for those who would favour male-female equality rather than the dominance of one sex, that such equality rarely if ever exists in the world of social mammals). And, considering how dangerous male violence and militarism has become in the world of nuclear weaponry, the example of a bonobo social world of mutual care, limited exploitation and empathy is surely needful as we tackle problems we have created for ourselves and other creatures due to our rapacity. In some ways, in the WEIRD world, we’re becoming just a little bit more like bonobos, but we need to go further in that direction, with all our amazing knowledge and inventiveness.
Any how, vive les bonobos.
References
The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 1891
The world: a family history, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
nuclear fusion 3 – developing technologies
something to do with laser confinement fusion energy
Ways of producing nuclear fusion:
- High-temperature superconductors (HTS) for magnetic confinement fusion.
HTS is all about producing more powerful magnets, in order to effectively confine super-hot (100 million degrees Celsius) plasma. Traditional electrically conducting materials such as copper will lose conductivity and become resistant at high temperatures, causing them to over-heat. To eliminate electrical resistance from potential superconducting materials, they need to be cooled to -269 Celsius. I’m trying to get my head around this, so I’m following the demo in the Royal Institution lecture linked below. A small but powerful magnet was dropped into a hollow copper tube, held vertically. It finally emerged from the bottom, but not at the pace of gravity. It’s all about the peculiar relationship between magnetism and electricity. The magnet creates a moving magnetic field inside the copper tube, inducing an electrical current, which, somehow, creates its own magnetic field in opposition to the field from the magnet, pushing back… (somehow I feel I should’ve done a Canto and Jacinta on this one!)
So, as the demonstrator tells us, we can vary the electrical resistance of metals, for example by increasing or reducing their temperature, as described above. Warming the copper tube increases its resistance, cooling it will decrease its resistance. A further demonstration with the same magnet and a very much cooled copper tube (-196 Celsius) showed that the magnet took longer to move down the tube. I don’t really understand how that proves decreased resistance, but then I’m no physicist… But the demonstrator explains:
So with the reduction in the resistance of the copper, those currents are able to form and flow more easily, and therefore they have a stronger magnetic field, opposing the falling magnetic field of the magnet [my emphasis].
So that clarifies things a bit. And the aim is to remove all electrical resistance, if possible. This can’t be done with most metals, including copper. And so – superconductors. There are apparently, high-temperature superconductors and low-temperature superconductors, the latter being the ones that need to be cooled down to -269 Celsius. So the demonstrator proceeds to demonstrate the effect of a dose of liquid nitrogen on a potential HTS, described rather vaguely as a ‘ small chip of super[lux??]’. I’ve tried looking up what he meant here (the captions didn’t help), but have come up empty. I’m guessing that he’s simply doused the same ‘small but powerful’ magnet. Anyway, the doused chip sits in a polystyrene cup which is sitting on a circular magnetic track. The supercooling is designed to turn it into a HTS, presumably. The aim is to repel the field from the magnetic track ‘by setting up its own internal currents’ in balanced opposition. The chip has to be doused a couple of times with the liquid nitrogen to get it to the right temperature, but the demonstrator soon has the cup with its ‘chip’ riding on the magnetic rail like a wee whited coaltruck, back and forth with a fingerpush.
Presumably the chip will have to be kept at this temperature to maintain this internal current. It will regain its electrical resistance upon warming up to a certain point. The second demonstrator shows us a HTS tape, which, when cooled down to 20 degrees Kelvin (that’s less than -250 celsius), will carry five times its normal electric current, with no resistance. Wound into a tight coil, the material, which is super-thin, will have a much higher energy or current density, which can be used to generate a strong magnetic field. The more material in the coil, the greater the current density, until the magnetic field is strong enough to safely confine the plasma from nuclear fusion. A scaled-up version of this type of coil is used at ITER. They require far less energy to cool them down too. Tokamak Energy is using these coils, combined with a spherical ‘cored apple’ tokamak shape, which apparently makes more effective use of the magnetic field. Altogether, a more efficient design – they hope. Developed in he UK, it’s being used also by the STEP plant (ST for Spherical Tokamak).
2. Laser fusion with diode pumps
Laser fusion is the next technology Windridge discusses. So how do lasers work? From memory, LASER stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but that don’t tell me much. Anyway it’s all about diode pumps. Wikipedia gives this elaboration:
A diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is a solid-state laser made by pumping a solid gain medium, for example, a ruby or a neodymium-doped YAG crystal, with a laser diode
I think I’ll stick with Windridge’s description. We see some images, first of a pink rod of ruby crystal, the ‘lasing material’, wrapped round by a coil of incandescent lighting, which sends a flash of light into the crystal, exciting its atoms and somehow generating photons, all of the same wavelength. The ruby and the coil are enclosed in a capsule, and the generated photons bounce back and forth between mirrors at either end of the capsule, triggering the release of more photons in a build-up of energy. Finally, a beam of energy emerges ‘through a partially reflective mirror at one end’. How this creates fusion energy, I’ve no idea. I vaguely get the sense of pumping but…
Here’s a useful definition of a diode from a website called Fluke:
A diode is a semiconductor device that essentially acts as a one-way switch for current. It allows current to flow easily in one direction, but severely restricts current from flowing in the opposite direction.
It seems that the key here is to produce photons of a particular wavelength. Windridge compares a diode pump with a flash lamp or incandescent bulb. While the flash lamp produces this wide range of energies or wavelengths, but a more targeted, precisely defined energy level is all that is required to excite the crystal photons, meaning it can be done with less waste of heat-energy. Diode lasers are many times more efficient than the NIF laser, for example – nearly 40 times more efficient (the NIF laser uses flash lamps). Remember, NIF (the National Ignition Facility) made headlines some months ago by getting more energy out of their fusion experiment than they put into targeting and ‘igniting’ the fusion pellet, but critics noted that the energy needed to drive the laser was orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced. The diode pump may, if found to be workable, reduce those orders of magnitude considerably.
So, although I don’t quite understand all the details, to put it mildly. I do get a strong sense that progress is being made. We seem to have gone beyond proof of concept, and are entering the engineering phase, and it looks like the next couple of decades will some exciting results. Tritium breeding and handling (it’s extremely rare and radioactive) is a big issue, and new materials science will be required to deal with high-energy neutrons and the damage they cause. Producing and testing such materials will be a high priority, but the pay-off can hardly be calculated. High-temperature superconductors are a relatively new development, and perhaps more breakthroughs can be made there. With more money being poured in, there will be more jobs for smart people – can-do problem solvers.
So, after watching this video a couple of times and trying with limited success to understand the science, but understanding enough to be aware of the viability of something that once would have seemed the most impossible of dreams – replicating the vast power of the stars – I read many of the comments, and was dismayed by the high level of negativity. An almost ferocious naysaying. I could respond with Kafka’s ‘genius doesn’t complain, but runs straight against the wind’, or ‘We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard’, by that Kennedy bloke. It was just a little less than a century ago that Hubble provided convincing evidence that other galaxies existed. Two centuries ago we knew nothing of atoms or genes or space-time. The progress we’ve made science since then is – well, astronomical. Of course, new breakthroughs tend to create new problems, and I can imagine science-fiction scenarios in which our play with fusion ends up in our going up in a sunburst of glory – ‘Out, brief candle!’
We shall see. I hope I can live so long…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode-pumped_solid-state_laser
https://www.fluke.com/en-au/learn/blog/electrical/what-is-a-diode
a glut of greed – on high gas prices and who’s to blame
Crisis? What crisis….?
So Australia’s industry minister Ed Husic has come out with a claim that I’ve heard from renewable energy journalists more than once before in recent times – that the gas industry is pocketing record profits while households suffer from record power costs. So what exactly is happening and how can it be fixed?
Husic’s remarks were blunt enough: ‘This is not a shortage of supply problem; this is a glut of greed problem that has to be basically short circuited and common sense prevail.” As I reported before, gas companies are more interested in exporting their product overseas, at great profit, than selling it domestically. All the major news outlets are reporting much the same thing – the political right, under conservative leader Dutton, is blaming the overly-rapid shift to renewables (he wants to open up more gas fields), and gas companies are playing the victim role.
The ACCC has been complaining for some time that there isn’t an effective mechanism to prevent gas companies from selling to the highest bidder, at the expense of the local market. There are, of course, worldwide gas shortages, causing the value of the commodity to shoot to record highs. The Financial Review reported on the situation back in July:
The ACCC says prices for east coast domestic gas that will be delivered in 2023 have rocketed to an average of $16 per gigajoule from $8 per gigajoule. Exporters have also dramatically widened the spread of prices offered to domestic buyers from between $7 and $8, to between $7 and as much as $25. This is despite the fact that the estimated forward cost of production is steady at just over $5.
The government clearly has little control over gas exporters – ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ aren’t really cutting it, and domestic costs are affecting businesses as well as households, adding to the many woes of local manufacturing. So I’ve turned to the ever-reliable Renew Economy website in the hope of hearing about plausible solutions. Their journalist Bruce Robertson, of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, is arguing for a gas reservation policy:
Such a policy on new and existing gas fields means gas companies must sell a portion of their gas into the domestic market – rather than putting it all out for export – with an immediate downward effect on prices. Similar to the reservation policy in place for over a decade in Western Australia, the east coast gas reservation policy could be set at $7 a gigajoule (GJ), a price allowing gas companies to achieve a profit over and above a return on investment. In turn, energy consumers would see their electricity bills cut.
It sounds like magic – like, if it’s that easy why wasn’t it done ages ago? The reason Robertson appears to be putting forward is price-fixing and the unwillingness of east coast governments, and the federal government, to deal with it:
In Australia, gas prices are fixed by a cartel of producers on the east coast… – Shell, Origin, Santos, Woodside and Exxon. For decades they have set the price above international parity prices.
It does seem, well, a little unseemly, that Australia, the world’s largest LNG exporter, is having to pay such exorbitant prices for domestic usage – though, in fact, other countries are suffering more. Locally though, South Australia, where I live, is particularly hard hit. Unlike the eastern states, coal plays no part in our energy mix – it’s all gas and renewables, with wind and solar playing a substantial part, more so than in the eastern states. And yet… Sophie Horvath reported in Renew Economy back in May:
A draft report from the SA Productivity Commission finds that despite the state’s solar and wind delivering some of Australia’s lowest wholesale spot prices, prices faced by the state’s consumers were around 20% higher than consumers in New South Wales. And it warns that without the rapid implementation of market and policy reforms, the situation for consumers will only get worse as more and more renewable energy capacity is added.
This sounds, on the face of it, as if SA’s take-up of renewables has backfired, but the situation is rather more complex, as Horvath explains. One problem is variable demand, which ‘produces challenges for the grid’, and another, highlighted by the SA Productivity Commission, is the ‘various market flaws that are stopping the benefits of renewables being passed through to consumers’.
So what are these market flaws? And what are ‘wholesale spot prices’ and why are they so different from the costs to suckers like us? Here’s an excerpt from a ‘Fact Sheet’ from the Australian Energy Market Commission about how the spot market works:
The National Electricity Market (NEM) facilitates the exchange of electricity between generators and retailers. All electricity supplied to the market is sold at the ‘spot’ price…. The NEM operates as a market where generators are paid for the electricity they produce and retailers pay for the electricity their customers consume. The electricity market works as a ‘spot’ market, where power supply and demand is matched instantaneously. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) co-ordinates this process.
The physical and financial markets for electricity are interlinked. Complex information technology systems underpin the operation of the NEM. The systems balance supply with demand in real time, select which generators are dispatched, determine the spot price, and in doing so, facilitate the financial settlement of the physical market. And all this is done to deliver electricity safely.
So far, this bureaucratic lingo doesn’t inspire confidence. Complex systems synchronise and balance everything, both financially and powerfully, ensuring our safety. Praise the lord. This Fact Sheet, from early in 2017, goes on for three and a bit pages, and I’m trying to understand it. Maybe Ed Kusic is too.
Meanwhile, back in South Australia, it was reported a few months ago that…
Tens of thousands of SA households are set to be hit with increased electricity bills after the energy industry watchdog made the ‘difficult decision’ to increase benchmark prices by hundreds of dollars a year.
So why indeed was this decision so ‘difficult’? The Australian Energy Regulator (AER – there are a headachy number of acronyms in this business), which sets the Default Market Offer (DMO) – a price cap on the charge to customers who, shockingly, don’t bother to shop around for a better deal – has increased the cap due to an 11.8% increase in wholesale electricity costs ‘driven by unplanned power plant outages and the ongoing war in Ukraine’. The fact that SA experienced massive power outages in the last 24 hours due to extreme weather conditions won’t help the situation. The Chair of the AER, Clare Savage, advises shopping around for cheaper deals rather than just accepting the DMO. The AEC (groan) also recommends shopping around, and even haggling for a better deal from retailers. The state government, in response to criticism from the opposition, emphasises focusing on the long-term and the ongoing shift to renewables. State energy minister Tom Koutsantonis expresses his faith – “Our government will reactivate investment in renewables as a hedge against price shocks on fossil fuels”.
Great – I can’t wait.
References
SA renewables surge bringing down energy prices, but consumers miss out
a bonobo world? an outlier, but also a possibility: 1
bonobo togetherness – who are the girls and who are the boys?
I’ve decided to focus on this very broad topic, and to write a book. Here’s my first (and in parts my second) draught
Introduction – a slow-burning inspiration.
In these few introductory pages, I’ll be writing a little about myself, after which I’ll (try to) leave me behind. At least as a topic. Of course, I’m on every page, as is Max Tegmark in Our Mathematical Universe, or David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity, or Johann Noah Harari in Homo Deus, or any writer of any other book of ideas, but in this opening I want to admit the lifelong passion I have for the set of ideas, or really feelings, I wish to explore here. They’re vital feelings, and big ideas, though they may come out as inchoate, or incoherent, in the telling. I probably feel most passionate about them because they seem so knocked about and pushed aside by the world I find myself in – though that world is always in flux and there are moments of inspiration.
It was in the mid 1980s that I first heard about bonobos on an episode of The Science Show, still running on Australia’s ABC Radio National. I would have been in my late twenties, just beginning an arts degree as a ‘mature-age student’ at Adelaide University. I was living in a chaotic share-house amongst students, student-types, misfits like myself. It had been my life for several years. Due to difficult family circumstances I’d left school at fifteen, and I’d fantasised for a while about being a complete auto-didact, the smartest fellow without a tertiary degree on the planet, or at least on the street, but I was frankly embarrassed at my poverty and my string of unpleasant and failed jobs in factories, offices, restaurants, and briefly, a hospital. My great solace, my way of maintaining pride in myself, was writing. In those pre-computer days I filled up foolscap journals with crabbed writing in blue ink. I wrote about the books I read, the people I met, imitations of favourite writers, and, too often, reflections on the women I came into contact with – admirable, mysterious and ever-unattainable. I still have those journals, mouldering in old boxes, covering 13 years or so before I could buy my first computer.
I was ever a hopeless case when it came to the opposite sex. It wasn’t quite that they all despised or were indifferent to me. I sometimes made female friends but they were never the ones I was attracted to. In fact I rarely made friends, and my obsession with writing didn’t help. As one of my housemates once bluntly told me ‘you’re always living alone no matter how many people you’re sharing with.’
So I wrote about my failures with women and congratulated myself on my literary abilities. I was of course my own worst enemy in these matters. Whenever a woman I was interested in showed signs of repaying that interest, I ran the other way, figuratively and sometimes even literally. There were all sorts of excuses, even some good ones. I was perennially penniless, I had a chronic airways condition – bronchiectasis – that meant my voice would get caught in the ‘wet webs’ as I called them, which made me naturally anxious about my breath, and there were other problems I’d rather not go into. In fact I was intensely shy and self-conscious, but good at putting on an air of intellectual disinterest. This had generally disastrous consequences, as when I encountered a female ex-housemate and told her that now our share-house was all-male. ‘Oh yes, that would suit you perfectly,’ she said with some disdain. I was mortified.
In fact I was obsessed to what I considered an unhealthy degree with women and sex. My fantasies went back to pre-adolescence, when I imagined doing it, whatever it might be, with every attractive girl, and boy, within my purview. Now I assume this was relatively normal, but I’m still not sure. But my thoughts on sexuality and gender went further. I recall – and all memories are unreliable, as they share most of the same neural processes as our imaginations – standing during assembly with my classmates, looking up and down the class line, assessing their attractiveness and overall likeability. It occurred to me that the most ‘interesting’ boys were girlish and the most interesting girls were boyish. I remember being struck by the thought and how smart I was to think it. I returned to this thought again and again.
Before I ever had a girlfriend (and yes I did have one or two) I imagined an ideal, embodied by one of the pretty ones around me, with another brain inserted, more or less like my own. Someone funny, thought-provoking, inspiring, freewheeling, exhaustingly fascinating – and yes, I really did think of myself that way. And yet – I did worry that I might not be able to hold onto such a scintillating prize. And that set me thinking – such an extraordinary girl couldn’t be mine, or anyone’s. She would own herself. To maintain her interest in me, I’d have to be constantly proving myself worthy, which might be a thrilling challenge, and a great motivator. But what if I had to share her? My adolescent answer was – so be it. The key, if I found her so valuable, so inspiring, would be not to lose her. Not to be cut off from her. To prove myself so valuable that she wouldn’t want to lose me either, while seeking out others.
I won’t pretend that they were so clear-cut, but these were certainly the sorts of ideas swirling around in my head when I thought about love, desire and relationships as a youngster, and they hadn’t changed much – perhaps due to little actual experience – when I listened to the scientist extolling the lifestyle and virtues of our bonobo cousins many years later. I still remember the warm tones of his signing off – ‘Long live bonobos – I want to be one!’
So the following is an exploration of a world that seems worthy of study both for itself and for ourselves. We’re now the overwelmingly dominant species on the planet, and this is having strange contrasting effects, of hubris and despair. It’s also the case that we’re not one thing – our species is composed of cultures that seem to have little connection with each other, and multiculturalism is seen as having enriching as well as disastrous consequences. In such complex and dynamic circumstances, what do bonobos really have to teach us? The following is an attempt to answer that question in the most positive light.
reading matters 2
The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch (quantum physicist and philosopher, as nerdy as he looks)
Content hints
- science as explanations with most reach, conjecture as origin of knowledge, fallibilism, the solubility of problems, the open-endedness of explanation, inspiration is human but perspiration can be automated, all explanations give birth to new problems, emergent phenomena provide clues about other emergent phenomena, the jump to universality as systems converge and cross-fertilise, AI and the essential problem of creativity, don’t be afraid of infinity and the unlimited growth of knowledge, optimism is the needful option, better Athens than Sparta any day, there is a multiverse, the Copenhagen interpretation and positivism as bad philosophy, political institutions need to create new options, maybe beauty really is objective, static societies use anti-rational memes (e.g gods) while dynamic societies develop richer, critically valuable ones, creativity has enabled us to transcend biological evolution and to attain new estates of knowledge, Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man and Karl Popper as inspirations, the beginning….