Archive for the ‘humanism’ Category
On Palestine, settler colonialism, humanism, and the universe
I was always a bookish kid so it wasn’t surprising that my mother, who very much encouraged me in this, bought me a big book to read one Christmas, when I was ten or eleven years old. I knew it was my mum, she was the one who encouraged all that, packing the house with books and getting us, my two older siblings and I, out to the library in the next suburb every fortnight or so.
This book, though, has a special place in my memory, though I can’t recall the precise title or the author, and the book itself sadly disappeared from my belongings, along with almost everything else, a lifetime ago. It was a history of the ‘American West’, and it included two chapters, titled something like ‘Blood in the mountains’ and ‘Blood on the prairie’. The emotional impact of these chapters on me was profound, and lasting. Nowadays we describe this ‘land-clearing’, or more accurately ‘people-clearing’, process euphemistically as settler colonialism, and of course it happened here in Australia. The story is generally told this way – ‘we came, we saw, we conquered, and we improved the lot of the vanquished, or at least of those who survived’, though I’m pretty sure that the author of the book I read presented no such silver lining, to his credit.
All of the above is preliminary to a reflection on Israel-Palestine, another version of settler colonialism, which has been ongoing, really since the 19th century. But in more recent times we’ve wised up a little to the injustice of it all, and we can’t use the excuse that United Staters and Australians have used – that it was all in the past, that we know better now than to call indigenous peoples ‘savages’. We even like to have their artwork on our walls.
So I can be holier than thou about the Palestinian situation?
Actually, it’s simpler than that. It’s just like that old book about the West, it’s about siding with the victims. I also like to use the ‘no free will’ argument – we didn’t get to choose the culture or ethnicity we were born into. Or the species, for that matter. Would I have preferred to be a bonobo? Not really… but then, there’s the sex…
The fact is, being born Palestinian in the contested region of Palestine-Israel in the 20th or 21st century is one piece of bad luck among many (Rohingyas in Burma, Congolese under Leopold II’s ‘Free State’, Chinese under Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, Ukrainians under Stalin and his Holodomor). Then again, luck isn’t the word – it’s about brutality, selfishness, indifference to suffering, all the negative elements of humanity.
But now, more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, with global communications prying into every corner of the globe, we can’t so easily hide the cruelty, the arrogance, the blatant injustice of what the perpetrators avoid describing as settler colonialism, that quaint descriptor.
I’m writing this because, due to the choice, by a reading group I’m a member of, of a novel by an Australian author of Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was recently ‘disinvited’ to Adelaide Writers’ Week, probably the nation’s premier writers’ festival, for reasons unknown to me. This action prompted a boycott by so many other writers that the event had to be cancelled, an unprecedented situation in the event’s history, as far as I’m aware. I should say that a terroristic attack in the area of Bondi Beach in December last year (2025), carried out by members of an anti-semitic organisation called Islamic State, in which 15 people were killed, appears to have influenced the Writers’ Week Committee’s decision.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline, told a story of young Palestinian-Australian intellectuals struggling to get the message of the plight of their people heard by the media and academia in Australia. As an ‘oldie’, I found all the talk about Whatsapp, Insta Tiles, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, flipbooks, app interfaces and such to be exasperating. I found the Moslem or Arabic cultural and religious references – Allahu Akbar, Bismallah, Salafi, Wallahi, intifada, iftar, koshari, fajr and so on – a little more interesting, but, insofar as they’re religious, not so much. Frankly, I find all religious beliefs to be just plain silly, especially given what we now know of our universe and our evolutionary history, though I make some effort to recognise that they’re bound up with heavy cultural identity and such. I’m just glad, or lucky, not to have been brought up in such a heavy culture. No free will and all that.
Having said that, the novel has refocused my attention on the Israel-Palestine horror-show, and that above-mentioned term, ‘settler colonialism’. The first book I read on the issue was The Case for Palestine, by an Australian lawyer, Paul Heywood-Smith, which introduced me to Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the buying of land in the region by wealthy Jews, and the pressuring of governments, notably the British government, to accept a more or less exclusively Jewish homeland in Palestine. For Palestinians, this has been a horror story, of displacement, cruelty and, especially in the early years of this displacement, up to and including the Nakba, international indifference. The land of Palestine, the land of Caanan, was multicultural for millennia. What has happened to it has been, from a humanist perspective, a catastrophe, resulting in hatreds and enmities that seem eternal. A friend of mine used to call it the problem of ‘heavy culture’, and as a person who doesn’t particularly identify with a nation (though a ‘sovereign citizen’ I most certainly am not), and enjoys the multiculturalism – and the remoteness – of the country I inhabit – I tend to agree. This morning I sat around a table conversing with two Columbians, two Chinese and an Australian, and in earlier conversation groups with Japanese, Sri Lankans, Koreans, Mexicans and Taiwanese, mostly recent arrivals, and I could feel in their faces, voices and movements that they were happy to be here – perhaps even relieved. I’m possibly being a little starry-eyed, but this is the sort of country I always want to live in.
And yet, I’m still drawn to the world’s horror-zones – Palestine, the USA, China, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine and the like – mostly hoping for good news rather than wallowing in shadenfreude. I think it’s just identifying with the human under stressful conditions, and hoping for happy endings, or just signs of improvement…
Anyway, I’m now reading with great interest The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, which gives a rich and broad account of this tragedy from something of an insider’s perspective, as his family have for generations been part of Palestine’s intellectual elite. I don’t suppose the book has a happy ending, but what could such an ending look like? A sudden, or gradual respect for those who can trace their ancestry in the region back thousands of years? But then, why would that ancestry make them more respectable than others? I presume that my ancestry goes back tens of thousands of years, as does everyone else’s, and if they stayed much of that time in one region, that hardly makes them more worthy than those who chose or were forced to move around. And of course for 90% of that ancestry there were no countries, though there were emerging languages and cultures, no doubt with relations between them varying from very warm to very cold….
All of this is what you might call humanist chatter. As I like to say, there are no real countries, we made them all up, mostly by people saying ‘this is our land exclusively and if you argue we’ll fight you and, if necessary, kill you, and by the way I think that land over there is ours too…’, etc, etc. But all of these people will die, and countries will disappear, and humans too, but the land will endure for longer, though not in its current form, for it too will transform, as it has in the past, and… to speculate further is a bit beyond me.
Where am I going with all this? I’m not sure, except that to say that a particular piece of land belongs to a particular culture is always questionable to say the least. We have become more international, more culturally fluid, more multicultural as they say, and this is bound to continue, so the key is to get people to stop fighting over what was never theirs to begin with, and to recognise that their project should be to mutually thrive, learn about and enjoy the land, the planet, the universe that we rather miraculously find ourselves being tangled up in.
Reference
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 2020
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
the 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
Why are bonobos female dominant? Culture or genetics?
I was going to entitle this post ‘How did bonobos become female dominant?’, but that assumes that they weren’t always so. To assume makes an ass out of u and me, and I don’t care about u, but I have my pride. And speaking of pride, lions live in those groups (of up to forty, but usually much smaller) and malely dominate, even though the women bring home most of the bacon, chevaline (well, zebra), venison, rattus and the occasional long pork, if they’re lucky.
The point is, we wouldn’t consider this a product of leonine (okay, lion) culture. It’s just what lions – male and female – are genetically programmed to do, just as marmosets, magpies (Australian) and macaroni penguins are programmed to be monogamous (more or less). But considering that separating genetic and cultural evolution in humans is a tricky business, the same would surely go for our closest living relatives. We’re generally convinced that the male dominance in most human history is cultural. I’ve often read the claim that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in many parts of the world from about 11,000 years ago resulted in a more patriarchal society, with the concept of property, including women, becoming essential to power and dominance. This seems plausible enough, though I would assume that the first claims to property relied primarily on brute strength. Male muscularity is different from that of females, and, more importantly, they’re not hampered by pregnancies and child-rearing. And whereas hunter-gatherers (and it now seems the distinction between these lifestyles is by no means cut and dried) tend to migrate along with food resources, some concept of land ownership, based on kinship over time, clearly developed with an agricultural lifestyle. Again, such a fixed lifestyle would have essentially created the notion of ‘domesticity’, which became associated with the female world. And it seems also have encouraged a degree of polygyny as a sign of male social status. And as we left all this behind, in the WEIRD world so fulsomely described in Joseph Henrich’s book, we’re starting to leave patriarchy behind, though way too slowly for my liking.
So, let’s get back to bonobos. I was struck by an observation I read a while ago in some otherwise forgotten piece on bonobos. Female bonobos are smaller than male bonobos to much the same degree as in chimps and humans, but slightly less so. Considering that the split between bonobos and chimps occurred only between one and two million years ago (and I’d love that margin of error to be narrowed somehow), any reduction in this sexual dimorphism seems significant – and surely genetic. But then genes are modified by environment, and by the behaviour that environment encourages or necessitates. Here’s what I found on a Q&A forum called Worldbuilding:
Bonobos have less dimorphism because they all feed close together and females can almost always protect each other. Male A tries to monopolize female A and gets driven off by female B, C, and D.
Hmmm. There’s something in this, but not quite enough. Why wouldn’t the males bond together to monopolise a particular female? In non-euphemistic human terms this is called pack rape, and it does seem to be confined to humans, though coercive sex, on an individual level, is quite common in other species, and for obvious anatomical reasons it’s always the male who coerces.
This leads to the reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, that for females to have control in the sexual arena – at least in the mammalian world – requires co-operation. And that requires bonding, arguably over and above the bonding associated with ‘girl power’ in WEIRD humans. So here’s how the Max Planck Society explains it:
To clarify why same-sex sexual behavior is so important specifically for female bonobos, we collected behavioral and hormonal data for over a year from all adult members of a habituated bonobo community at the long-term LuiKotale field site in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to our focus on sexual interactions, we identified preferred partners for other social activities such as giving support in conflicts. We also collected urine to measure the hormone oxytocin, which is released in the body in other species after friendly social interactions, including sex, and helps to promote cooperation.
We found that in competitive situations, females preferred to have sex with other females rather than with males. After sex, females often remained closer to each other than did mixed sex pairs, and females had measurable increases in urinary oxytocin following sex with females, but not following sex with males. Among same-sex and opposite-sex pairs, individuals who had more sex also supported each other more often in conflicts, but the majority of these coalitions were formed among females. “It may be that a greater motivation for cooperation among females, mediated physiologically by oxytocin, is the key to understanding how females attain high dominance ranks in bonobo society,” explained co-lead author Martin Surbeck, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University.
Now, I know I’ve written about the peptide hormone oxytocin before, somewhere, and suffice to say its role in behaviour and its relation to the general endocrine and neurotransmission systems are extremely complex. Having said that, there will doubtless be strong similarities for its role in humans and in bonobos. And, reflecting on the above quote, what came first, the oxytocin release, or the bonding? Should we encourage more oxytocin doses, or more female-female sex? Doing both sounds like a fine idea.
To tell the truth, I find the willingness to see bonobos as any kind of female model somewhat lacking. They’re ‘jokingly’ referred to as the scandalous primate, and their revolutionary nature is underplayed. Yet their relatively comfortable, largely frugivorous lifestyle in the southern Congo region, where their only real threat is humanity, reflects in miniature the comforts of the WEIRD world, with its hazards of overspending at the supermarket, lazing too long at the beach, or pokies, cocktail bars and ‘Lust-Skin Lounges’ for the true thrill-seekers.
Of course, we got to our ascendant position today through the explorations, calculations and inventions produced by our brains, and the super-brains of our cities, corporations and universities. What can we learn from a bunch of gangly, hairy mutual masturbators dangling about in the Congolese rainforest? Well, we brains and super-brains can still learn a bit more about sharing and caring – as any study of our own history can tell us – and we can certainly learn to stop being so dumb and fucked-up about sexuality, gender and power. Learning lessons from bonobos doesn’t mean getting hairier and improving our brachiation skills, but, well, eating less meat would be a start, given what we know about the environmental damage our current diet is causing. And that’s just one of many lessons we can learn. For me, of course, the most important lesson is the role played by females. How ridiculously long did it take for us – I mean we male humans who have been in control of almost all human societies since those societies came into being – to recognise and admit that females are our equal in every intellectual sphere? This is still unacknowledged in some parts. And although we call this the WEIRD world, the Industrial part of that acronym has lost its machismo essence, a loss Susan Faludi has sensitively analysed in her book Stiffed: the betrayal of the modern man – though I think ‘betrayal’ is the wrong word. After all, men were never promised or guaranteed to be breadwinners and heads of households, they took or were given the role through social evolution, and it’s being taken from them, gradually, through the same process.
Finally, getting back to the question in the title, the answer, for Pan paniscus as surely as for Homo sapiens, is culture, which can affect gene expression (epigenetics), which can ultimately affect genetics. I suspect that the slight diminution in the sexual dimorphism between male and female bonobos, over a relatively short period of time, evolutionarily speaking, might, if they’re left to their own devices (which is unlikely, frankly), lead to a size reversal and a world of male sexual servitude. Vive les bonobos, I’d like to be one, for the next few million years!
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, 2021
Susan Faludi, Stiffed, 1999
on blogging: a personal view
I have a feeling – I haven’t researched this – that the heyday of blogging is over. Even I rarely read blogs these days, and I’m a committed blogger, and have been since the mid 2000s. I tend to read books and science magazines, and some online news sites, and I listen to podcasts and watch videos – news, historical, academic, etc.
I should read more blogs. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. Even out of self-interest – reading and commenting on other blogs will drive traffic to my own, as all the advisers say. Perhaps one of the problems is that there aren’t too many blogs like mine – they tend to be personal interest or lifestyle blogs, at least going by those bloggers who ‘like’ my blog, which which gives me the distinct impression that those ‘likers’ are just trying to drive traffic to their blogs, as advised. But the thing is, I like to think of myself as a real writer, whatever that is. Or a public intellectual, ditto.
However, I’ve never been published in a real newspaper, apart from one article 25 years ago in the Adelaide Review (the only article I’ve ever submitted to a newspaper), which led to my only published novel, In Elizabeth. But I’ve never really seen myself as a fiction writer. I’m essentially a diarist turned blogger – and that transition from diary writing to blogging was transformational, because with blogging I was able to imagine that I had a readership. It’s a kind of private fantasy of being a public intellectual.
I’ve always been inspired by my reading, thinking ‘I could do that”. Two very different writers, among many others, inspired me to keep a diary from the early 1980s, to reflect on my own experiences and the world I found myself in: Franz Kafka and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s influence, I think, has been more lasting, not in terms of what he actually wrote, but his focus on the wider world, though it was Kafka that was the most immediate influence back in those youthful days, when I was still a little more self-obsessed.
Interestingly, though, writing about the world is a self-interested project in many ways. It’s less painful, and less dangerous. I once read that the philosopher and essayist Bertrand Russell, who had attempted suicide a couple of times in his twenties, was asked about those days and how he survived them. ‘I stopped thinking about myself and thought about the world’, he responded.
I seem to recall that Montaigne wrote something like ‘I write not to find out what I think about a topic, but to create that thinking.’ I strongly identify with that sentiment. It really describes my life’s work, such as it is. Considering that, from all outside perspectives, I’m deemed a failure, with a patchy work record, a life mostly spent below the poverty line and virtually no readership as a writer, I’m objective enough and well-read enough to realise that my writing stands up pretty well against those who make a living from their works. Maybe that’s what prevents me from ever feeling suicidal.
Writing about the world is intrinsically rewarding because it’s a lifelong learning project. Uninformed opinions are of little value, so I’ve been able to take advantage of the internet – which is surely the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge since the invention of writing – to embark on this lifelong learning at very little cost. I left school quite young, with no qualifications to speak of, and spent the next few years – actually decades – in and out of dead-end jobs while being both attracted and repelled by the idea of further academic study. At first I imagined myself as a legend in my lunch-time – the smartest person I knew without academic qualifications of any kind. And of course I could cite my journals as proof. These were the pre-internet days of course, so the only feedback I got was from the odd friend to whom I read or showed some piece of interest. My greatest failing, as a person rather than a writer, is my introversion. I’m perhaps too self-reliant, too unwilling or unable to join communities. The presence of others rather overwhelms me. I recall reading, in a Saul Bellow novel, of the Yiddish term trepverter – meaning the responses to conversations you only think of after the moment has passed. For me, this trepverter experience takes up much of my time, because the responses are lengthy, even never-ending. It’s a common thing, of course, Chekhov claimed that the best conversations we have are with ourselves, and Adam Smith used to haunt the Edinburgh streets in his day, arguing with himself on points of economics and probably much more trivial matters. How many people I’ve seen drifting along kerbsides, shouting and gesticulating at some invisible, tormenting adversary.
Anyway, blogging remains my destiny. I tried my hand at podcasting, even vodcasting, but I feel I’m not the most spontaneous thinker, and my voice catches in my throat due to my bronchiectasis – another reason for avoiding others. Yet I love the company of others, in an abstract sort of way. Or perhaps I should say, I like others, more than I like company – though I have had great experience in company with others. But mostly I feel constrained in company, which makes me dislike my public self. That’s why I like reading – it puts me in an idealised company with the writer. I must admit though, that after my novel was published, and also as a member of the local humanist society, I gave a few public talks or lectures, which I enjoyed immensely – I relish nothing more than being the centre of attention. So it’s an odd combo of shyness and self-confidence that often leaves me scratching my own head.
This also makes my message an odd one. I’m an advocate of community, and the example of community-orientated bonobos, who’s also something of a loner, awkward with small-talk, wanting to meet people, afraid of being overwhelmed by them. Or of being disappointed.
Here’s an example. Back in the eighties, I read a book called Melanie. It was a collection of diary writings of a young girl who committed suicide, at age 18 as I remember. It was full of light and dark thoughts about family, friends, school and so forth. She came across as witty, perceptive, mostly a ‘normal’ teenager, but with this dark side that seemed incomprehensible to herself. Needless to say, it was an intimate, emotional and impactful reading experience. I later showed the book to a housemate, a student of literature, and his response shocked me. He dismissed it out of hand, as essentially childish, and was particularly annoyed that the girl should have a readership simply because she had suicided. He also protested, rather too much, I felt, about suicide itself, which I found revealing. He found such acts to be both cowardly and selfish.
I didn’t argue with him, though there was no doubt a lot of trepverter going on in my head afterwards. For the record, I find suicides can’t be easily generalised, motives are multifactorial, and our control over our own actions are often more questionable than they seem. In any case human sympathy should be in abundant supply, especially for the young.
So sometimes it feels safer to confide in an abstract readership, even a non-existent one. I’ll blog on, one post after another.
a bonobo world? 9 – humanism, bonoboism, doggism and science
a caring and sharing bonoboist society – and these are all females, except maybe the kiddy
In Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari writes rather disparagingly of humanism. Here he goes:
It would accordingly be far more accurate to view modern history as the process of formulating a deal between science and one particular religion, namely humanism. Modern society believes in humanist dogmas not in order to question those dogmas but rather in order to implement them.¹
And so on.
So what exactly is humanism? I should probably make the fuck-nose sign here, but let me write about my personal interaction with the concept. Of course I’d heard of humanism but hadn’t really given it much thought before entering university in my 30th year, in spite of having read a few philosophy books etc. At uni I fell in with a few eager-beavers with whom I entered into D&Ms on politics, ethics and the meaning of life. One day in the midst of an intense session, one interlocutor pulled back, gazed at me with furrowed brow and said ‘You’re such a humanist’. I could only shrug and I truly didn’t know whether he was insulting or commending me. Montaigne-like, I was ever drawn to matters pertaining to myself, especially when others appeared to express an interest. I’d noticed, in my regular browsing at the uni bookshop, a book with the title On Antihumanism or Towards Antihumanism or something similar. This was the mid-80s and post-modernism was unfortunately still thriving. It seemed the book was treading that path – Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ tweaked to ‘death of the human’, opposition to any anthropological defining of the Homo sapiens category, muddied with much Foucauldian, Derridean and Lacanian rhetoric.
So I began to feel much sympathy for humanism, and I was drawn particularly by two negatives: it wasn’t religious and it wasn’t nationalistic.
So, religion – and what does Harari mean when he says that humanism is a religion and a dogma? Well, it seems nothing more than the bleeding obvious: that humanism replaces worship of gods with blind worship of humanity. Now, I admit that there’s an element of truth in that. Witness, again Deutsch’s The beginning of infinity (and no amount of mathematising can can obscure the connection between infinitude and godliness) and Bronowski’s heaven-bent Ascent of Man. In fact I recall, during my period of membership in a humanist organisation (I’m rarely a joiner of such groups and it rarely lasts for long), an attempt to create a kind of humanist church with cheery singalongs and happy clapping. It all sounded naff as taffy to me.
But my own take on humanism was that it involved the realisation that we humans were on our own, and reliant on each other, for better or worse. And that we were one species, and as such needed to take collective responsibility for our damages and to build on our strengths. I also thought it was bleeding obvious that we were above all self-concerned, even self-obsessed. This strikes me as nothing more or less than a biological fact. Bonobos are the compassionate apes, so they say, but the compassion ends mostly – perhaps not entirely – with their own species. You might call this bonoboism, and it makes a lot of biological sense. My pet dog goes apeshit on spotting another dog during our walks, it never fails. She wants to get close, to sniff, to fight, to fuck, who knows? You might call this doggism, but it’s not doggy dogma. It’s funny – humans have interfered with dogs phenotypically for centuries – flattened faces, lengthened legs, bent backs, tufty tails and much nasty neotenising, but dogs never cease to recognise their own polymorphous kind. Of course they have a nose for that kind of thing, but it’s the sight of their fellow beasties that sets them off. I wonder what the science says?
Anyway humanism. Of course, we don’t have to be invested in our own species. I recently heard an interview with a softly spoken, very reasonable-sounding gentleman who is dedicated to the extinction of Homo sapiens, reckoning that the species has done far more harm than good. He’d done his bit, not by knocking off his neighbours, but by getting himself desexed. Only 7.8 billion more to go – ok, maybe only half that number, but then with sperm banks… it’s all so hard.
There are videos around, depicting what life might be like in the future if human apes suddenly disappeared. All very verdant and lush and lovely, but they don’t dare to visualise forward for more than a few decades. How about a couple of million years hence? Not so long, geologically speaking. We’ve been a most unusual apex predator, but there’s no reason not to assume that an even more unusual and rapacious predator will evolve. So I wouldn’t give up on our species just yet.
Still, I’ll never feel entirely comfortable with identifying as a humanist. I just don’t like isms much, they make me reach for my water pistol.
Anyway, returning to Harari, what’s to be made of humanism’s apparent deal with science? His argument is that science is really not so much about knowledge as about power. The power to produce more answers, and more stuff. To win the race against hunger, you find ways to produce more foodstuff. To reclaim land, you find ways to produce more foodstuff using less land. To reduce toxic or climate-affecting emissions, you find, or produce, new forms of energy with fewer nasty emissions. Yes, there will be vested interests blocking production and denying problems, but science will always find a way, and we’ll always go that way, eventually. Or so the deal has it.
Of course, Harari is right. I don’t happen to agree with his definition of humanism, but that’s really a minor issue. To me, it’s a deal science makes with a certain kind of self-confident optimism. A ‘we will overcome’ jingoism, for our species. And I must say, I have mixed feelings about all this, because my view of science has a personal element, for I have something of an unrequited love affair with science. I think she’s brilliant, sexy and endlessly enthralling. To me, she’s the gift that keeps on giving. Through her machinations, unknown unknowns shift into known unknowns or unknown knowns, and in the future more unknown unknowns will begin to be known, and yet we won’t quite know what we don’t know about them, even if we know what we don’t know. And really, I don’t even know whether I know what I’m saying.
So science, with its how questions, is a quest to give us more power, over life, the universe and everything, for knowledge is power. But we’re not going to stop travelling down that road. As many have pointed out, to have the power to create something you need to know how it works, from photosynthesis to viruses to intelligence or consciousness. And we’re working on all this stuff, for better or worse.
Are we working on creating a more compassionate society, a bonobo society or something like? Sort of – and many are passionate about this. But I’m not sure we even know what society is, let alone how to make it better.
- Y N Harari, Homo Deus, p 231
References
Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari, 2016
The beginning of infinity, by David Deutsch, 2012
reading matters 1
The universe within by Neil Turok (theoretical physicist extraordinaire)
Content hints
– Massey Lectures, magic that works, the ancient Greeks, David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, James Clerk Maxwell, quantum mechanics, entanglement, expanding and contracting universes, the square root of minus one, mathematical science in Africa, Paul Dirac, beauty and knowledge, the vitality of uncertainty, Mary Shelley, quantum computing, digital and analogue, Richard Feynman, science and humanity, humility, education, love, collaboration, creativity and thrill-seeking.
random thoughts on human rights
Over the years I’ve had arguments and discussions with people, and semi-disputes online, about the status of human rights, and rights in general. Some have been quite dismissive of their ‘mythical’ nature, others like Scott Attran have described them as a crazy, transcendental idea invented by a handful of Enlightenment figures back in the day, and boosted by the reaction to world wars in the 20th century. There have been objections by certain states claiming they don’t give sufficient cognisance to ‘Asian values’, and Moslem countries have argued that they need to be amended in accordance with Shar’ia Law.
The first point I would make is that, granted that rights are a human invention, that doesn’t make them ‘unreal’ or in some sense nugatory. Tables, chairs, buildings, computers, bombs, democracy and totalitarianism are all human inventions, but very real, if not all of equal value. To describe human rights as a form of transcendentalism also doesn’t make sense to me. Certainly if you say ‘God has granted certain inalienable rights…’ you’re using transcendental language, but that language is, I think, superfluous to the idea of rights, which, I would argue, is grounded in both empiricism and pragmatism.
I would also argue, no doubt more controversially, that human rights make little sense if based entirely on the individual. They are principally about human relations, and so imply that each individual is part of a larger social entity, within which they may be accorded ‘freedoms from’ and ‘freedoms to’. Aristotle puts the point well in his Politics:
the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.
It follows that rights must be under the guardianship of states and enshrined in and upheld by their laws. This is vital because individuals often have competing interests, and it’s sometimes the case that particular individuals don’t recognise or understand that there’s a common, social interest beyond their own. This is the difficulty with rights – because we often think of them as my rights or my freedoms, we fail to understand that these rights, though granted in some sense to individuals, must be based on the thriving of the wider social sector, whether we’re referring to village, tribe or state. And it is to these larger social entities – states, or civilisations – that we owe our phenomenal success as a species, for better or worse.
This raises a question of whether the best human rights should flow from the best states, or vice versa. Interestingly, Aristotle and his students collected some 150 constitutions from the world of Greek poleis or city-states in order to devise the best, most ‘thriving’ city-state possible, which of course should have involved comparing the constitutions with the situation on the ground in those city-states. We don’t know if any such comparison was made (it’s very doubtful), but it does suggest that Aristotle thought that the state, via its constitution, was the engine of a thriving citizenry rather than the other way around.
Turning to rights in the modern world, the unfortunate claim by Tom Paine in his Rights of man (1791) that ‘rights are inherently in all the inhabitants’ of a state, has helped to create the confusion about rights being ‘natural’ to humans, like having two legs and a complex prefrontal cortex (the latter being largely the result of living in increasingly complex and organised society). If we’re to take human rights seriously, we need to be honest about their a posteriori nature. They need to be seen as the result of our understanding of how to create an environment that best suits us, as the most socially constructed mammals on the planet. In that respect, we’ve come a long way, not only from Aristotle (who excluded women and slaves from his citizenry), but also from the the late eighteenth century revolutionaries (who executed Olympe de Gouges for daring to even suggest adding women to the rights-owning citizenry of her own nation). Indeed, examining the issue of rights historically should remind us that they need to be updated on the basis of our ongoing advances in knowledge. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by this understanding, should certainly not be fixed in stone.
My views, of course clash with ‘natural law’ notions of human rights, which tend to be based on the individual an sich, and have claims to be outside of social or temporal considerations.
If we try to think of rights as ‘natural’ or self-evident, rather than something we construct to help us understand what we owe to, and might expect from, the best of civil states, we might well agree with Alasdair McIntyre’s view that there’s nothing natural or self-evident, say, about allowing people, by right, the freedom to express or live by their religious views. Many religious views are notoriously idiosyncratic and sometimes offensive from an outsider’s perspective, and adding the ‘no harm’ principle doesn’t suffice to smooth things over. The jury is very much out as to whether religion is, or has been, a benefit to society, but it’s well known that some religions have, in the past, engaged in human sacrifices. And even today new religions might crop up which may involve practices that the majority would find inimical both to individual and social well-being. And of course the very definition of religion is far from being self-evident. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
However, it makes no attempt to define religion, and in the same Article it claims the right of all to ‘manifest his… belief…in practice and observance’. This, if taken literally, is absurd, as a person might hold a belief that slave-owning is okay, and is given the green light by this Article to ‘manifest that belief in practice.. and observance’. No doubt my criticism doesn’t capture the liberal ‘spirit’ of the Article, but it does highlight an obvious problem. People do act on beliefs, and many actions, based on those beliefs, can be harmful, and subject to criminal prosecution. The law, of course, prosecutes acts, not thoughts, so we know that we’re free to think what we want – we don’t need a ‘right’ to protect this. I won’t try to define religion, but at least it seems to involve both beliefs and actions. Actions will be subject to civil and criminal law, so it might be argued that rights don’t find a place there. Beliefs are private unless and until they’re acted on, in which case they’ll be subject to law. So there’s a question whether rights have a place there also.
The more I look at human rights, the more difficulties I see. Let me take, more or less at random, Article 21 of the UDHR:
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Section 3 here reads like a directive, but I agree that every member of a state should be allowed at least the opportunity to cast a vote for government. In Australia, voting is compulsory for eligible parties, as it is in some 22 countries (though enforced in only 11). It’s questionable whether compulsion accords with human rights and freedoms, but given the socially constructed nature of humanity, voting should definitely be encouraged as a duty, at the very least. The ideal, of course, would be that everybody is aware of what they owe to the state, and their interest in creating and maintaining a state that is beneficial to the whole and so to themselves as a part.
There is no doubt in my mind that participatory democracies make for better states than any alternatives, and if this can be bolstered by human rights language that is fine, though I think that interest and duty (what we owe to ourselves and others) makes more sense as an argument. The ‘Asian values’ objection here (revisited recently by the Chinese oligarchy) is bogus and self-serving, as evidenced by the success of democratic nations such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. There is a tendency in Asian nations to be more collectivist in thinking and behaviour than in many European nations, and especially the USA, but this would make them more attracted to participatory democracy, not less.
Concluding remarks – the more I look at rights, the more questionable I find them. I would rather encourage a neo-Aristotelian way of thinking. We’re now political animals more than ever, in a wider sense than Aristotle saw it, because civilisation itself is political, and civilisation is hardly something we can opt out of. I don’t advocate world government – that was an impossible if admirable ideal – but I certainly advocate intergovernmental co-operation as opposed to zero sum nationalism. We need to make an all-out effort to improve our state structures and understanding between them for the sake of all their members (and the rest of the biosphere).
women and warfare, part 2: humans, bonobos, coalitions and care
Shortly before I started writing the first part of this article, I read a sad and disturbing piece in a recent New Scientist, about an Iron Age citadel in modern Iran, called Hasanlu. Its tragic fate reminded me of the smaller scale tragedies that Goodall and others recount in chimpanzee societies, in which one group can systematically slaughter another.
Hasanlu was brutally attacked and destroyed at the end of the ninth century BCE, and amazingly, the massacred people at the site remained untouched until uncovered by archeologists only a few decades ago. One archeologist, Mary Voigt, who worked the site in 1970, has described her reaction:
I come from a long line line of undertakers. Dead people are not scary to me. But when I dug that site I had screaming nightmares.
Voigt’s first discovery was of a small child ‘just lying on the pavement’, with a spear point and an empty quiver lying nearby. In her words:
The unusual thing about the site is all this action is going on and you can read it directly: somebody runs across the courtyard, kills the little kid, dumps their quiver because it’s out of ammunition. If you keep going, there are arrow points embedded in the wall.
Voigt soon found more bodies, all women, on the collapsed roof of a stable:
They were in an elite part of the city yet none of them had any jewellery. Maybe they had been stripped or maybe they were servants. Who knows? But they were certainly herded back there and systematically killed. Its very vivid. Too vivid.
Subsequent studies found that they died from cranial trauma, their skulls smashed by a blunt instrument. And research found many other atrocities at the site. Headless or handless skeletons, skeletons grasping abdomens or necks, a child’s skull with a blade sticking out of it. All providing proof of a frenzy of violence against the inhabitants. There is still much uncertainty as to the perpetrators, but for our purposes, it’s the old story; one group or clan, perhaps cruelly powerful in the past, being ‘over-killed’, in an attempt at obliteration, by a newly powerful, equally cruel group or clan.
Interestingly, while writing this on January 4 2019, I also read about another massacre, exactly ten years ago, on January 4-5 2009. The densely populated district of Zeitoun in Gaza City was attacked by Israeli forces and 48 people, mostly members of the same family, and mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed, and a number of homes were razed to the ground. This was part of the 2008-9 ‘Gaza War’, known by the Arab population as the Gaza Massacre, and by the Israelis as Operation Cast Lead. The whole conflict resulted in approximately 1200-1400 Palestinian deaths. Thirteen Israelis died, four by friendly fire. And of course I could pick out dozens of other pieces of sickening brutality going on in various benighted parts of the world today.
Attempts by one group of people to obliterate another, whether through careful planning or the frenzy of the moment, have been a part of human history, and they’re ongoing. They are traceable as far back, at least, as the ancestry we share with chimpanzees.
But we’re not chimps, or bonobos. A fascinating documentary about those apes has highlighted many similarities between them and us, some not noted before, but also some essential differences. They can hunt with spears, they can use water as a tool, they can copy humans, and collaborate with them, to solve problems. Yet they’re generally much more impulsive creatures than humans – they easily forget what they’ve learned, and they don’t pass on information or knowledge to each other in any systematic way. Some chimp or bonobo communities learn some tricks while others learn other completely different tricks – and not all members of the community learn them. Humans learn from each other instinctively and largely ‘uncomprehendingly’, as in the learning of language. They just do it, and everyone does it, barring genetic defects or other disabilities.
So it’s possible, just maybe, that we can learn from bonobos, and kick the bad habits we share with chimps, despite the long ancestry of our brutality.
Frans De Waal is probably the most high-profile and respected bonobo researcher. Here’s some of what he has to say:
The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations–and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.
Bonobo sex and society, Scientific American, 2006.
Now, I’m a bit reluctant to emphasise sex too much here (though I’m all for it myself), but there appears to be a direct relationship in bonobo society between sexual behaviour and many positives, including one-on-one bonding, coalitions and care and concern for more or less all members of the group. My reluctance is probably due to the fact that sexual repression is far more common in human societies worldwide than sexual permissiveness, or promiscuity – terms that are generally used pejoratively. And maybe I still have a hankering for a Freudian theory I learned about in my youth – that sexual sublimation is the basis of human creativity. You can’t paint too many masterpieces or come up with too many brilliant scientific theories when you’re constantly bonking or mutually masturbating. Having said that, we’re currently living in societies where the arts and sciences are flourishing like never before, while a large chunk of our internet time (though far from the 70% occasionally claimed) is spent watching porn. Maybe some people can walk, or rather wank, and chew over a few ideas at the same (and for some it amounts to the same thing).
So what I do want to emphasise is ‘female-centredness’ (rather than ‘matriarchy’ which is too narrow a term). I do think that a more female-centred society would be more sensual – women are more touchy-feely. I often see my female students walking arm in arm in their friendship, which rarely happens with the males, no matter their country of origin (I teach international students). Women are highly represented in the caring professions – though the fact that we no longer think of the ‘default’ nurse as female is a positive – and they tend to come together well for the best purposes, as for example the Women Wage Peace movement which brings Israeli and Palestinian women together in a more or less apolitical push to promote greater accord in their brutalised region.
Women’s tendency to ‘get along’ and work in teams needs to be harnessed and empowered. There are, of course, obstructionist elements to be overcome – in particular some of the major religions, such as Catholic Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which date back centuries or millennia and tend to congeal or ‘eternalise’ the patriarchal social mores and power structures of those distant times. However, there’s no doubt that Christianity, as the most western religion, is in permanent decline, and other religions will continue to feel the heat of our spectacular scientific developments – including our better understanding of other species and their evolved and unwritten moral codes.
The major religions tend to take male supremacy for granted as the natural order of things, but Melvin Konner, in his book Women after all, has summarised an impressive array of bird and mammal species which turn the tables on our assumptions about male hunters and female nurturers. Jacanas, hyenas, cassowaries, montane voles, El Abra pygmy swordtails (a species of fish) and rats, these are just a few of the creatures that clearly defy patriarchal stereotypes. In many fish and bird species, the females physically outweigh the males, and there’s no sense that, in the overwhelming majority of bird species – whose recently-discovered smarts I’ve written about and will continue to write about – one gender bosses the other.
Turning back to human societies, there are essentially three types of relations for continuing the species – monogamy, polyandry and polygyny. One might think that polyandry – where women can have a harem of males to bed with – would be the optimum arrangement for a female-centred society, but in fact all three arrangements can be turned to (or against) the advantage of females. Unsurprisingly, polygyny (polyandry’s opposite) is more commonly practiced in human society, both historically and at present, but in such societies, women often have a ‘career open to talents’, where they and their offspring may have high status due to their manipulative (in the best sense of the word) smarts. In any case, what I envisage for the future is a fluidity of relations, in which children are cared for by males and females regardless of parentage. This brings me back to bonobos, who develop female coalitions to keep the larger males in line. Males are uncertain of who their offspring is in a polyamorous community, but unlike in a chimp community, they can’t get away with infanticide, because the females are in control in a variety of ways. In fact, evolution has worked its magic in bonobo society in such a way that the males are more concerned to nurture offspring than to attack them. And it’s notable that, in modern human societies, this has also become the trend. The ‘feminine’ side of males is increasingly extolled, and the deference shown to females is increasing, despite the occasional throwback like Trump-Putin. It will take a long time, even in ‘advanced’ western societies, but I think the trend is clear. We will, or should, become more like bonobos, because we need to. We don’t need to use sex necessarily, because we have something that bonobos lack – language. And women are very good at language, at least so has been my experience. Talk is a valuable tool against aggression and dysfunction; think of the talking cure, peace talks, being talked down from somewhere or talked out of something. Talk is often beyond cheap, it can be priceless in its benefits. We need to empower the voices of women more and more.
This not a ‘fatalism lite’ argument; there’s nothing natural or evolutionarily binding about this trend. We have to make it happen. This includes, perhaps first off, fighting against the argument that patriarchy is in some sense a better, or more natural system. That involves examining the evidence. Konner has done a great job of attempting to summarise evidence from human societies around the world and throughout history – in a sense carrying on from Aristotle thousands of years ago when he tried to gather together the constitutions of the Greek city-states, to see which might be most effective, and so to better shape the Athenian constitution. A small-scale, synchronic plan by our standards, but by the standards of the time a breath-taking step forward in the attempt not just to understand his world, but to improve it.
References
Melvin Konner, Women after all, 2015
New Scientist, ‘The horror of Hasanlu’ September 15 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath, 2013
some thoughts on the importance of nations
America – the most important country in the world (Fareed Zacharia)
There have been many most important countries in the world throughout human history. Usually self-styled. They become important through economic and military success. And they think, everyone of them, that this success gives them moral authority. This is the fundamental error of every powerful state in history, so tedious to relate. The fact is that Americans are no way morally superior to Mexicans, Australians or Koreans, or whoever. Every country, or state, or tribe, is full of individual humans striving equally to thrive – like every other life form.
If you believe, however, that you’re a member of the most important country in the world, that may play on your mind a little. It may move you, just a little, to believe, just a little, that you’re just a little more important than people from less important countries.
What does it mean though, to be more important? Is it about power? We can think of an elephant being a more powerful animal than a squirrel, but does that make her more important?
Maybe importance can be measured by imagining the country, or animal, not existing. If the USA, and all its people, disappeared tomorrow, that would have a much bigger impact than if, say, Fiji and all its people disappeared, and presumably not just because this compares 325 million with less than one million. A better comparison would be between the USA and China or India. Both these countries have more people than the USA but are less important, according to Zacharia.
I’m guessing that Zacharia’s presumably offhand description of US importance has mostly to do with that country’s impact on the world. This surely gets to the nub of the matter. But this surely has no moral dimension. I’m not sure whether Zacharia meant to suggest a moral dimension to the USA’s importance.
My view is that nations are like animals. Large animals tend to leave a larger footprint, metaphorically speaking. The main focus of any animal or nation is to sustain itself, and more. Other nations, or animals, are seen as a means to that end. So nations will see other nations as either exploitable (prey), helpful in the exploitation of others, dangerous (predators), or simply irrelevant. True, there are symbiotic relationships, and exploitation is perhaps a loaded word, but the world of the living goes on living by consuming other living beings. At least, that’s how it has gone on so far.
Important countries consume more. Maybe that’s a negative, but they may do so by being smarter, or by hitting upon some clever and effective ruses before anyone else. So size isn’t everything, though it helps. Also, their cleverness or effectiveness teaches others – their prey as well as interested observers. They make the world wise up, quicken up. Remember the Mongols, an important nation of the past, or Hannibal, an important general.
But I feel I’m being too male, thinking too much on destruction and aggression. The importance of nations today should be, and generally is, based on a different kind of cleverness, ingenuity, innovation. Yet we find this everywhere, as ideas spread more quickly than ever before. A young African boy generates wind energy for his village through internet-based DIY. This is important, and a great leveller.
The internet is still largely American, and so on that basis alone, the USA should rightly view itself as the most important nation in the information age. Or is it simply the English language that has become most important? Science and technology are international, of course, but must be translated into English, if required, for best effect. This has been so for some time – think Mendel’s 1865 paper on the laws of segregation and independent assortment. It didn’t appear in English until 1901, years after Mendel’s death, as a result of some pioneers finally lighting upon it. English is surely an important language.
So what would happen if the USA suddenly disappeared under the waves, with all its people, its weaponry and other technology, its industry? This would be a terrible tragedy, of course, for those loved and loving ones left behind. And yet, in the information age, surprisingly little, if any, of the technology and industry would be lost. The internet would survive, and with it the means for making bombs, multiple examples of beautiful or other people having orgiastic fun for the tutelage of our youth, the Khan Academy’s video lessons on physics, chemistry and assorted other subjects, and an endless variety of examples of dog, cat, bird, elephant, octopus and other cleverness, or silliness. In short, the human world would certainly progress, or continue, more or less unabated, proving that, however important the USA is, it isn’t indispensable.
But surely, if the USA disappeared, another country would take its turn as the most important country in the world. And what then, and which?
That’s a very interesting question. The USA won’t, of course, disappear below the waves, and many if not most Americans firmly believe that their country must remain the most important for a long long time into the future. As did the British in their heyday, and the Romans, and the Egyptians, and the Sumerians, no doubt. And yet, our human world goes on, and seems to progress, with all its rises and declines.
They say that China will be the next most important country. I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. I’m skeptical of it happening as long as China retains its current political form. The age of major military conquest is over, I believe, so conquest will have to be of a different type, a much more subtle type, perhaps more subtle than I’m capable of foreseeing at present. Too many nations have sampled, for too long, the flavour of freedom, participation and dissent to be guiled by China’s top-down, controlling approach to administration. China will become more and more of an outlier. In any case, I don’t see the USA relinquishing its prominent position ‘any time soon’, as the Americans like to say. Ever the optimist, I’m hoping that the USA will bounce back from the Trump debacle with a much-reformed political system (especially with respect to presidential power and accountability), a renewed commitment to international relations, and a chastened sense of its failings and fragility, and the limits of its democracy..
But it’s important, always, to remember that nations are not people, and that people are always more important than nations.