a bonobo humanity?

Mother Russia calls you to make the ultimate sacrifice!

Soviet Russia became renowned – not exactly the right word – for its five year plans, of which there were twelve, starting in the early 1920s. There was a lot of fanfare about all this death-laden slave labour, first proposed by Leon Trotsky but taken up with great bellicosity by Stalin. It would miraculously transform poor old backward agrarian Russia into the envy of Europe, a region all the Soviet leaders envied: 

The Five-Year Plans… aimed to accelerate the tempo of the whole economy.’The Five-Year-Plan in Four!’ was their slogan. The Plans reconfigured time itself along a series of strategic targets on the path towards a Communist utopia. In this sense they built upon the age-old striving of the Russian people for a higher form of existence that lay at the heart of their religious consciousness, particularly their belief in the possibility of a utopia on Russian soil. The creation of belief in the Soviet system required the replacement of religious ends with secular objectives tangible enough to motivate the people but meaningful in ways to satisfy the eschatological endeavour of the Russian collective psyche. By hailing the achievements of the Five-Year Plans, propaganda aimed to foster the belief that the utopia was imminent, that it could be reached by one last collective effort… but the utopia was never reached (Figes, p220). 

As is the habit of utopias. But speaking of such plans, Mr Pudding’s special military operation in Ukraine, envisioned as a sort of quick kill-and-grab affair, might now, after four and a half years, be worth analysing as one. AI (never lies) – quoting Wikipedia, to be fair – tells me that the Russian war dead is now around 500,000, with overall casualties approaching 1.5 million. Ukrainian losses, according to The Economist, stand at around 60,000 to 100,000 killed and 400,000 wounded. That’s overall something like a 5 to 1 ratio, and Russia has roughly four times the population of Ukraine. Not sure how meaningful any of that is, especially as the outcome of this war will not be about numbers, though of course those numbers will say everything about needless suffering. 

In any case Mr Pudding’s plan back in February 2022 was clearly for something  quick, deadly and incisive. How could it all have gone so catastrophically wrong? Could it still be turned into a Five-Year Plan? If so, time is fast running out. 

More importantly, how could he have done this in the first place? Is there any good reason for any nation to invade or declare war on, or topple the leadership of, any other nation? 

But those are different questions from each other. And of course, ‘nations’ don’t decide to do such things, their leaders do, and those decisions are mostly to do with self-promotion – though not always. Frump, who promised ‘no foreign wars’ in the run-up to one of the elections he participated in, has declared war on Iran, I’ve no idea why except that it seems to have been as a distraction from his domestic problems. 

In any case, Ukraine isn’t a real nation, don’t forget. But the trouble with that claim is that it can be made against any nation that has ever existed, or has claimed to exist. We invented nations, in the modern sense, through modern, or relatively ancient, warfare, mostly. In the piece of land now known as Australia, it was easier than it was in the lands now known as New Zealand. It took some time in the land now known as the USA, and Russia’s history is full of land-grabs, some more successful than others, over centuries. Ukraine was indeed once thought of as an indivisible part of Russia – but so what? The same might be said of Poland, Estonia or Finland – something the beady-eyed Mr Pudding is well aware of. The trouble for him is that democracies are generally kinder, if nothing else, than dictatorships. And they’re more likely to support each other. NATO is an alliance of democratic countries – some more democratic than others, clearly, but the alliance generally exerts pressure on its member states to maintain or improve their democratic credentials, and this can have economic as well as defence benefits. Compare Russia’s alliances. China is eternally self-regarding, North Korea is a tragedy inside a bad joke, and the former Soviet states are never quite sure of their independence, never fully trusting of the Kremlin. 

The invasion of Ukraine has surely turned into something of a disaster for Mr Pudding. Orlando Figes’ history shows that sacrificing humans for wars and for Five-Year Plans and such has been a regular feature of the long Russian despotism, but that has rarely stopped its despots from piling suffering upon suffering. And they have rarely suffered for their crimes. Consider Stalin, surely the worst of a bad lot, and thoroughly idolised at his death. 

Russia is a long-term tragedy, from a humanistic perspective. Millions of people have died there as a result of its leaders’ ‘experiments in power’. The same has occurred in China, under Mao in particular. And such individuals are not only never brought to justice, they’re fêted as heroes. This is why the battle most be fought, not only for democracy, but openness. I’ve not read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, but when I look at the societies and political entities around me, those that avoid anything cultish and highlight skepticism and humanism are the ones that attract my attention. Ukraine, I think, is trying to build such a society, and needs all the help we can give it. 

Reference

Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war

I’m just finishing The Last Earth: a Palestinian story, by Ramzy Baroud, having recently read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and Escape from Manus, by Javet Ealom: three very different books, but all about people who have been made to suffer because they were born into an ethnicity that was/is being persecuted by other ethnicities – to over-simplify the situation, probably quite a lot, in the case of the Palestinians.

Is there something wrong with me for being drawn to such depressing material (I’ve gotten teary a couple of times while reading The Last Earth)? I can’t really answer that, but I think a lot of us are rather morbidly attracted to other people’s tragedies or messes, like the mess that Frump is making in the USA, the mess that Mr Pudding has made in Ukraine and the mess he now finds himself in in Putinland, and the long-standing tragedy of Palestine. Schadenfreude is a long word, but still not long enough to effectively capture the obsessive interest we have, or at least I have, in this seemingly interminable crisis in one of the oldest human habitations in our world.

So, I’m thinking of writing a series of pieces about the region, and my focus will be generally on the oppressed, rather than the oppressors. I want to begin with the year 1948, and sometimes I will move forward from there, sometimes backward. It’s all largely for my own education.

So, why was 1948 such a vital year in the history of this region? On May 14 of that year –

the National Council, established to oversee the political needs of the Jewish community in Palestine, voted to accept the final text of the Declaration [of the Establishment of the State of Israel].

So, Israel was established as a State in 1948, in the region formerly, and currently, known as Palestine. At the time, and for a few decades before, the Jewish population of the region was increasing. This matter is of course essential to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. I read somewhere that the Jewish population in the Palestine region at the end of the 19th century amounted to about 6% of the total population, but I can’t recall the source. Wikipedia provides this information:

The Ottoman census of 1878 indicated the following demographics for the three districts that best approximated what later became Mandatory Palestine; that is, the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, the Nablus Sanjak, and the Acre Sanjak. In addition, some scholars estimate approximately 5,000-10,000 additional foreign-born Jews at this time.

According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy,^[113] the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs.

The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world’s Jewish population.^[114] From 1882 to 1904, the Jewish population in Palestine doubled due primarily to the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe as part of the Zionist Aliyah.^[97]

I’m not sure if this is helpful, but it is clear that there was a major influx of Jewish people into the Palestinian region, starting around the above-mentioned period. The term ‘Aliyah’ refers to the immigration of Jews from the diaspora into the land of Israel/Palestine, the land of the ‘chosen people’, as their religion would have it. And I would have to state my position here clearly, that I’ve never considered religious belief as a justification for anything, and I’ve never considered the Bible as anything like a historically accurate text.

The above-mentioned increase in the Jewish population in Palestine around the end of the 19th century was, I believe, an effect of the growing Zionist movement, led by Theodor Herzl among others. They sought, and lobbied governments about, a homeland more or less exclusively for the Jewish community – preferably in their Holy Land, but the region around modern Uganda was seriously touted for a while. They focussed mostly on the British government, which before the World Wars was the most powerful government on the planet – them were the days.

It was also a period of richesse for many Jews, who were buying up land in the Palestine region – which was part of the Ottoman Empire at that time. It must be said that anti-Semitism was a commonplace in the WEIRD world throughout this period. It went back, of course, to the old Jesus-killer claims of almost 2000 years before, and was exacerbated more recently by Jewish business and commercial success.

So, an important development in the Jewish push for a homeland was the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a brief letter to the Jewish zillionnaire Lord Rothschild, quoted here in full:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

All of which reads as polite, civilised and well-meaning, at least to me, but recall that, only 20 or so years before, the number of Jews in Palestine was around 6% of the total population, though that percentage was very much on the rise. It might be drawing a long bow, but I’m reminded of White Australia and the concept of Terra Nullius, which ignored the people – ‘savages’ as they were more or less universally described by the whites – who had been living there for some 65,000 years, according to the most recent data. And the problem with this seemingly benign document is that it doesn’t refer to any consultation with the non-Jewish Palestinian people, who had been making their home there for thousands of years. That is what places this ‘plan’ in the category of ‘settler colonialism’, which describes the ‘white’ or European settlements in Australia, New Zealand and all the Americas, at great cost to the much earlier inhabitants  of those lands.

So how did the 1917 Balfour declaration lead to the 1948 ‘establishment of the state of Israel? I suspect the Holocaust had much to do with it.

I think it was the last year of primary school, when I was 11 or 12 years old, that we had as a set text The Diary of Anne Frank. It was a devastating experience for me. Decades later I travelled in Europe, and my partner and I rented a flat in Amsterdam for a few days, very close to the Anne Frank museum. I declined a suggestion that we visit it, because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to cope with it emotionally. A couple of weeks later I was flanant les rues in Paris, as you do, with my camera at the ready, and I came upon this memorial:

Below this plaque there were placed fresh bunches of flowers, and on the plaque, as you might just see, was a long list of names, and above them an inscription, which I will roughly translate:

Arrested by the Vichy government, complicit with the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France from 1942 to 1944 and murdered at Auschwitz because they were born as Jews.

More than 500 of these children were living in the quatrieme arrondisement. Among them, 101 little ones never had the chance to attend a school.

Passerby, read their name, your memory is their only sepulchre.

The holocaust was an event that we should never allow ourselves to forget, that surely goes without saying. And the Jewish community has made great efforts to remind us of this horror. It may seem churlish to point this out, but there have been large-scale slaughters that have received far less attention. These have been dubbed ‘silent genocides’, such as have occurred, and are ongoing, in  Rwanda and the territory now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There was also the Holodomor in Ukraine under Stalin, and the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’ famine under Mao. Statistics for these man-made genocidal disasters have been difficult to tabulate, of course, but the very preventable Chinese famine, in the most recent estimates, caused 30 to 46 million deaths. The estimated figures for the Holocaust are six million Jews, and about 5 million others deemed unworthy by the Nazi regime. Again, it’s virtually impossible to be precise about these numbers.

The war in Europe, and its immediate aftermath, had a devastating effect on Palestine, but in the decades immediately preceding that war the region was already being transformed at an unprecedented rate. That’s what I’ll focus on in my next post.

References

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#Zionist_Aliyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2024

I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book On Revolution, with an occasional irritation – well, not so occasional – I’m trying to suppress. For example, in the very first paragraph of the first chapter, she writes:

Modern revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the [term written in ancient Greek], the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis. We cannot equate them with Plato’s [longer ancient Greek term], the quasi-natural transformation of one form of government into another, or with Polybius’s [very long ancient Greek term], the appointed recurring cycle into which human affairs are bound by reason of their always being driven to extremes.

So mutatio rerum (that’s Latin) means a change in events/systems, as in ‘my, how things have changed’, whereas the Greek terms are more or less explained by Arendt’s subsequent words. In any case what this small section of the first para tells me is that I might be in for a rough ride.

So Arendt goes on to try to define ‘revolutions’ as distinct from, say, uprisings or coups d’etat, all of which, it seems to me, becomes overly technical and abstruse, as well as overly burdened with references to men and male pronouns – scores to a page – so it’s very likely that I won’t have the stomach to read too much further, though I recognise of course that, as a woman, she’s a pioneer in this field.

Then again, is there today a ‘field’ that studies revolutions? Do we have revolutions, apart from revolutionary ‘diets’ or ‘technologies’ or ‘fashions’ these days? Arendt refers to the American revolution and the French revolution, and no doubt in later pages she’ll look at the Russian or Bolshevik revolution, but it seems to me highly unlikely that a bloody, physical, warfare-type revolution will happen in the future, within the WEIRD world, and it’s interesting to reflect on that fact, if fact it is.

There has of course been the occasional coup, or elimination of the leadership, almost entirely emanating from the US and its CIA. For example, Mohammed Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, a democracy-leaning, reforming nationalist, was deposed in 1953 in a coup organised by US and British intelligence operatives. Mossadegh was intending to nationalise his country’s oil stocks, which the Brits had spent a great deal of money in extracting. Other CIA-backed coups have occurred in Chile and various Central American countries, but of course these had nothing to do with revolution. As far as I know (and I don’t know much), the only time ‘revolution’ has been used in a military sense in my lifetime was for the Cuban revolution of 1958-59, which ended the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The ‘revolution’ in this case, and in general, doesn’t involve the ‘bottom’ becoming the new ‘top’, because the bottom are always too powerless. It’s those excluded from the top, but perhaps close to the top, close enough to observe the top’s corruption, or simply close enough to feel they can do a much better job, generally in terms of the class they belong to.

Okay, I’ve just recalled the tragedy, particularly for women, of the Iranian revolution of 1979, resulting in the fall of a despotic but modernising Shah and the installation of the ‘Ayatollas’, ultra-religious Islamists whose attitudes towards women, and treatment of them, makes me forget that I’m supposed to hold humanist values – and that freedom of the will is a myth.

So, returning to Arendt, and the meaning of revolution. To me, it just means an abrupt change in political systems, usually, but not necessarily always, brought about violently. Early on, she makes comparisons between the French and the American revolutions which make me wonder about the usefulness of the term. After all, the American thing is also called the American War of Independence, which is how I think of it. Notoriously, the French affair ‘ate its own people’, not to mention many who were unfortunate enough to be born into the ancien regime, or even to have worked for them or been supported by them. The eventually-to-be United States was an ocean away from its ancien regime. Just as importantly, the soon-to-be United Staters didn’t have any thoughts of starting from year zero, with a new calendar and… well, a whole new, yet-to-be-thought-out world, about which it might be death to disagree. They clearly had their own elites, slave-owners to a man, and they exploited the British Constitution, fragmentary as it was, to build something of their own – unfortunately a Constitutional Presidency, with insufficient checks and balances, to put it mildly. They also had the mercurial and brilliant Thomas Paine, whose career, and especially his early life, I’ll reserve for another post, as he’s fast becoming a hero of mine.

I’m writing this partly as an antidote to Arendt’s barely comprehensible second chapter, which I’m perhaps too lazy get my head around, but as she often refers to Rousseau, a writer I’m very familiar with (I once considered calling my blog The reveries of a solitary wanker in his honour), I feel the need to persist.

So while Arendt persists in comparing what I see as two vastly different events, in France and the future USA, she does make these remarks which I think are key, though not, I think, in the way she intends:

In Rousseau’s construction [of the general will] the nation need not wait for an enemy to threaten its borders in order to rise ‘like one man’ and to bring about the union sacrée; the oneness of the nation is guaranteed in so far as each citizen carries within himself the common enemy as well as the general interest which the common enemy brings into existence; for the common enemy is the particular interest or the particular will of each man.

Wow, looks like I’ll have to read The Social Contract again to see if I agree with Arendt’s interpretation here. Would this be a worthwhile exercise?

In any case I’m torn between continuing with Arendt’s book, knowing that she was a pioneering female political philosopher, and focussing on more comprehensible stuff, like Rovelli, Lucretius, the political horror shows of the day, or maybe, bonobos…

References

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963

https://www.britannica.com/event/Iranian-Revolution

St Andrews Anglican Church, Walkerville, South Australia

When did Australia become a country? It wasn’t in 1788, when the first flag, a British flag, was unfurled over the land. And it wasn’t 60,000 or so years earlier, when the first humans stepped onto this land, for they of course had no concept of countries, or nations, in the modern sense – though I note that many forward-thinking Aboriginals have employed this modern notion to promote their diversity (‘we are 250 nations’), their languages and even their ‘finders keepers’ rights. 

The official view, and that of AI (never lies), is that –

Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901. when 6 British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. This process is known as Federation, where the colonies became states under a new federal constitution.

So we’re a 125-year young country, unlike Britain, the national age of which is doubtless a matter of controversy, but certainly it’s many many times older than Australia. Other countries too, but not too many of them, can, or like to, date their age to more than a millennium. Still, the concept is new, considering the 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens. 

I was thinking along these lines while wandering lonely as a cloud through the inner-city suburb of Adelaide that I’ve recently come to reside in. It certainly isn’t one of the poorer neighbourhoods, and there are some rather glamorous, not to say ostentatious piles within strolling distance. It occurred to me, though, that many of them seemed to copy semi-gothic styles while obviously being of relatively recent construction, while others, particularly churches and municipal buildings, were more authentically 19th century – probably among the first structures built in the area, and the only ones not demolished and replaced by the nouveau riche. I was interested enough in one of these buildings, a church, to have a closer look. It’s pictured above. A plaque attached to the building provides interesting detail:

St Andrew’s Anglican Church of Walkerville is among the most significant churches in South Australia. The building’s Victorian Academic Gothic appearance is of exceptional aesthetic value and is the result of three distinctive construction periods. Designed by architect E A Hamilton, the sanctuary and transepts were built in 1857. Architect J H Grainger designed the current nave, while architects Messrs Grainger & Naish designed the replacement tower. These works occurred between 1877-1879. The Tower was fitted with six imported bells, which were installed in 1886. The bells were cast by the well-known company Whitechapel Bell Foundry – the same foundry that created ‘Big Ben’, which is located in the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster in London. St Andrew’s Anglican Church was entered into the South Australian Heritage Register as a State Heritage Place in 2006. 

So very British, or even Scottish, as St Andrew is the patron saint of that country, if it is a country. I’m not sure if this is a typical example of late 19th century British architecture, or if it has a more colonial feel due to the local materials used in its construction, but it certainly stands out from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. And it’s anachronistic in another important way. 

Adelaide has been called ‘the city of churches’, surely for a century or more. The term isn’t used so often these days, as many of the churches have since been repurposed, sometimes as dance venues, or as community gathering places of various kinds. Others have been left to stand as monuments to history, or Heritage Places, as the above plaque puts it. I don’t know if St Andrew’s Anglican Church still functions as a religious meeting place – I’ll have to come by on a Sunday morning to check it out, but I looked around the site enough to feel that its busiest days are definitely over. 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics conducts a census every 5 years. The next one will be later this year. The census question on religion has ‘remained fundamentally the same in structure for over 100 years, appearing in every national census since 1911’, according to AI (never lies). This gives a fair amount of reliability to the data. In recent decades Australians have been abandoning Christianity with unseemly haste (according to some). Around 38.9 % of the population reported having ‘no religion’ in 2021, up from 30.1% just five years earlier. In those same two censuses, professed Christians were at 43.9%, compared to 52.1% in 2016. A very pacific, almost nondescript, reduction, it seems to me in terms of its effect on the populace. I should point out that in the 1911 census, the Christian percentage was around 96. The new results will not be released until next year. My guess is that the percentage will be well under 40. We’re all going to hell, it seems – and I’ve heard that’s not a place where nothing ever happens.

Anyway, we have monuments, and memories, and works in the form of scriptures and biblical exegeses, for the historically and nostalgically inclined. More importantly, the loss of Christian religion hasn’t brought with it a loss of humanity or general well-being. We’re creating our own purpose in life, a complex process which involves far more than the survival and thriving of our own species. With greater knowledge comes greater responsibility – how can we manage it, without getting too serious?  

don’t worry, be happy

Gutsick Gibbon, also known as Erica – I don’t know her last name – is a very smart primatologist and palaeontologist (I don’t know if that’s the right descriptor) who, because I think she comes from a religious background, spends much of her time debunking such strange, largely US entities as Young Earth Creationists (YEC indeed), some of whom, like Robert Carter, seem otherwise highly intelligent and sort of reasonable. But of course they have to back up their claims with very dodgy science. In this case it’s about our genetic relationship with chimps (and bonobos, remember?). But zoom out from that issue and realise that the YECs believe the world (by which they must mean the universe) is a few thousand years old, and presumably that all astrophysics and cosmology is bunkum (and can apparently be ignored) because their very male god ‘did it’, and it’s sacrilegious to ask why, and you’ll realise just how powerful religious indoctrination can be, in the midst of a society – admittedly very large and multi-facetted – that can boast of some of the best astrophysical research on the planet. 

What’s more astonishing to me is that this belief system is held by vast numbers of United Staters, as Wikipedia tells us:

A 2017 Gallup creationism survey found that 38 percent of adults in the United States held the view that “God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so” when asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings, which Gallup noted was the lowest level in 35 years.

Of course a lot depends on how you frame the question, as well as how representative the survey is. A ‘similar’ Gallup question was asked in 2019, with 40% holding the ‘God – about 10,000 years ago’ view. I remain somewhat skeptical – in order to maintain a semblance of sanity. But then, the majority of US voters chose a loud and proud ignoramus to be their President, twice. Ok, actually it was a slight minority in 2016.

So I think there are two main reasons for US backwardness in its understanding of the real world – with millions of exceptions among the population of course. One is that it became a haven for religious (Christian) zealotry from back in the days of the Puritans, and large swathes of the population have maintained that fundamentalism. The other is that the massive gap between rich and poor in the country, greater than that of any other country in the WEIRD world, is also, unsurprisingly, an educational gap. So huge numbers of families will have ensured that their children received ‘proper’ religious education, uncontaminated by godless naturalism, while others would have received barely any education, certainly nothing on a tertiary level. And their current administration is doing everything to ensure the continuation, and widening, of the educational and financial gap. 

The whole situation seems sad and sickening to me, and while I feel glad that I don’t live there, I feel vaguely guilty about that gladness, and hope that those in the country who want to improve the situation will win out, in my lifetime. So I watch the situation from afar, hoping that the ‘goodies’ will win, but also frustrated at the ‘how have the mighty fallen’ attitude of so many liberals in the country who never look elsewhere in the world for guidance. 

So it seems I’ve moved away from the USA’s religious obsessions to the broader issue of its obsession with its place in the world, which has always had more than a touch of religious zealotry about it. Even the ‘no kings’ slogan harks back to the ‘monarchy’ that Americans claim to have revolted against back in the 1770s  – as if ‘mad King George’ was ruling Britain at the time. Britain was simply trying to hold onto its colony, out of pure self-interest. Powerful countries have always dominated their neighbours and more or less imagined enemies. Think of the USA and The Philippines back in 1900, and its self-interested actions in Nicaragua, Chile, Iran, Vietnam and Iraq. What the USA is experiencing now is something hard to put a name to, when so many of its citizens vote against their self-interest in favour of a self-obsessed, inhumane driveler whose obnoxiousness is his most salient feature, to me at least. It’s hard to have much respect for a nation that does this to itself.

Sadly, the nations that are setting an example to the world in terms of the health and happiness of their people – Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden – don’t make nearly so much noise about themselves as the USA (Israel is also up there, but I find it hard to believe that the Palestinians in their midst, in a region that was multi-ethnic for millennia before it was so named, had a say in the matter). The key, unsurprisingly, is community support, which many United Staters deride as ‘socialism’. Perhaps they think their happiness is a ruse? 

Meanwhile, the USA is hogging the limelight, as it faces the consequences of a vast underclass of left-behind, conspiracy-prone, saviour-obsessed, manipulable worshippers of the rich-and-getting-richer, each of whom, like Trump, are lapping up the adulation and the increased power being bestowed upon them. I’m left wondering which is worse, the heavy-handed, generally patriarchal total control of Putinland and the Chinese Testosterone Party, or the USA’s current abandonment of decent healthcare, education and social security, supported by many of its own victims as well as the usual neoliberal crowd. 

Fortunately for me, I live in multicultural Australia, which is managing ok, for now…  

References

I Killed this Creationist Argument. (video, Gutsick Gibbon)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world

Casting around for something new to write about – which is only occasionally a problem – I’ve found, more or less by accident, an online essay published back in 2015 in Evolutionary Psychology, which is a review of a book by Susan Block, The bonobo way: the evolution of peace through pleasure. I’ve never heard of the book, but it sounds promising. However, this reviewer, Ryan Ellsworth, is clearly not a fan. You get a sense of this early on: 

In The Bonobo Way, Block advises that recognizing and tuning in to our “inner bonobo” can bring positive consequences such as improvement in one’s sex life, interpersonal relationships, and mental health. While not a scholarly book by any measure, it demands some treatment, for, like Sex at Dawn, it bears on the public’s understanding of bonobos, humans, and the science that informs this understanding.

So we get some sense that Ellsworth is going to give the author of ‘this muddled book’, as he calls it, ‘The Treatment’, courtesy of Science. He goes on to say that he’s going to teach Block, and us, some lessons. First, he challenges two basic assumptions she makes:

that 1) bonobos and humans are sufficiently similar for one species to hold useful lessons for the other; and/or 2) that bonobos surpass humans in the aforementioned qualities…

The aforementioned qualities are these:

Block urges that the time is ripe to “learn as much as we can from [bonobos] about our noblest and kinkiest characteristics, our capacity for peace (even world peace) through pleasure, more satisfying relationships, better communication, hotter sex and deeper love”.

True, this does sound like hippy fun stuff, and I would want to qualify it in various ways. but the first assumption is a reasonable one to me. There are no species on the planet more similar to us than chimps and bonobos – if we can’t learn from these species we can hardly learn from any others, and I’m no great fan of human exceptionalism. My focus on bonobos, though, has been less about sex per se, and more about matriarchy – which of course is the key to different attitudes to sex and sexuality. Our patriarchal societies, battened down by all the major religions that have dominated much of humanity for millennia, and which the WEIRD world is only just beginning to squirm its way out of, are I feel, slowly eking out their final days, and monogamy too – not practised by either of our two closest relatives, is not quite as strong, particularly in the WEIRD world, as it once was. We have to take the long view, but it will surely be helped by noting the success story of bonobo society, currently being assisted by human protections in that tragic mess of a human state, the former ‘Belgian’ Congo (actually the then personal fiefdom and killing field of Leo Victor, by provenance Leopold II of Belgium). 

Ellsworth, I think, misses the point completely while engaging in what I would describe as scientific gobbledegook:

Recognition of our relationship to other apes doesn’t necessitate that we are like them in any particular respect. Phylogenetic distance alone does not provide sufficient grounds for arguing that species are similar for any trait; nor that they should be dissimilar on some trait in question. The utility of comparative genomics and phylogenetics in biology depends upon our comprehension of evolutionary processes, and they do not lend themselves easily to facile postulations of expected phenotypic similarities based solely on genetic similitude.

Don’t try to understand this – it’s completely irrelevant. What we’re concerned about here isn’t biology but cultural praxis. It is the culture of bonobos – and they certainly have a culture – that should inspire us, and make us wonder – how did our culture go so off the rails as to be as patriarchally violent and exploitative of females as it came to be? 

I’ve just pointed out in my previous post re capital punishment that the nations most enamoured of state killing are the most patriarchal – Confucionist China with its massively male-dominated government, and the Islamist governments of the Middle East with their veiled and silenced women. Of course we can’t compare this with chimp and bonobo social practices directly, but we know through long observation that male-dominated chimp society practices and condones infanticide, when alpha males want to breed with particular females. Perhaps ‘condone’ is the wrong word here – the males simply get away with it, to the distress of female mothers. Chimps are also known to engage in warfare, troupe against troupe, even until one troupe is completely wiped out. Bonobos, on the other hand, ease the possibility of conflict with other troupes by food-sharing, and other delightfully friendly and relationship-opening practices. Compare trading in human societies, as opposed to warfare.

Ellsworth points out that Block and others have blamed the rise of agriculture for a ‘masking’ of our naturally promiscuous nature:

Block relates that “prehistoric humans participated in various forms of bonoboesque ‘free love,’ group sex and multi-partner arrangements … for tens of thousands of years before the advent of farming and our current ownership-oriented, property based, paternity-obsessed society” (p. 63). As do Ryan and Jethá [authors of Sex at dawn], Block points the finger at agriculture as the source of stultification of our bonobo-like sexuality, especially for women, but maintains that modern society masks, but has not changed, our promiscuous nature.

It’s certainly true that human society has, for as long as history has been recorded, been hierarchical, ownership-oriented and largely patriarchal. Whether we were more ‘promiscuous’, a rather dodgy term, before that, is unknown. I’d really love to find out though. 

One major difference between human apes and our cousins is the relationship between sex and fertility. Our last common ancestor with chimps/bonobos lived sometime between 6 and 8 million years ago (there’s much debate about the timing), while the bonobo/chimp divide occurred much later, around 1.5 million years ago, with the formation of the Congo River barrier. There are many things I’d love to know about these histories. How and when did our species become fertile pretty well all year round? As I’ve reported in a previous post, the Guinness Book of Records has it that the most children born of one woman is 69. I suspect this is bullshit, but there’s no doubt that the record for human births is way way higher than that for chimps and bonobos. So what’s the explanation? Higher androgen levels may be one factor – these hormones are important for fertility in both males and females, but also for chimps and bonobos so I’m not sure… 

I’ve heard tell that many animals are ‘in season’ or ‘in heat’ – when they can become pregnant – only at certain times in a month, somehow related to women’s menstrual cycle. Whether or not this is true for some mammals, it doesn’t apply to our closest relatives any more than it does to us. However, female sexual swellings appear to be a come-on for males, as this abstract from a 2004 paper, ‘Female sexual swelling size, timing of ovulation, and male behaviour in wild West African chimpanzees’, linked below, more than suggests:

We are able to show that (i) even within the traditionally defined maximum swelling period, further slight increases in swelling size indicate approaching ovulation, and (ii) that male mating interest changes according to the changes in swelling size.

But it gets more complicated: 

Finally, when having the choice between several “maximally” tumescent females, the alpha male prefers the female that is in the fertile phase of her cycle rather than that with the biggest swelling at that time.

Which seems to suggest that something’s going on ‘under the hood’ in terms of hormones and pheromones. How much of this ‘unconscious’ stuff relates to humans? I’ve often experienced ‘lust at first sight’ in my youth, and even beyond, but I doubt if it had to do with a woman’s sexual swellings – surely the last thing on my mind. It had to do with a woman’s face, her smile, the grace of her movements, a clever comment, a way of dressing, much of the stuff that is typically human and sets those chemicals swirling. 

I’ve taken myself a bit far from Ryan Ellsworth’s critique, but these issues are of grand importance to me, so, to be continued…