this is important: bonobos and humans
Wolf Alice – the right stuff
I’ve been listening to the music and watching the videos of Wolf Alice recently – I’ve just discovered them, mea culpa. Just a fantastic band. They often sing about emotional stuff, emotional confusion, as in the song Blush, which is accompanied by a video that adds gender to the confusion, and an extra dose of sadness to the word ‘happy’, which is the song’s refrain.
I won’t pretend to analyse the song, but it’s one of a number of influences lately that have made me think of humanity’s gender issues – issues that don’t seem to be shared by our closest rellies. Tormenting issues.
My novel In Elizabeth dealt with adolescent and later teen issues in a working-class town, mostly in a light-hearted way. But the fact is, it was a period of torment – though sometimes I felt a sort of enlightenment, or superiority, in thinking of things, indulging in feelings, that I sensed were ‘beyond the pale’.
I described my first sex (but what exactly is ‘sex’, is it feelings or acts? The first erection, the first masturbation, the first awareness of the exciting/disturbing physicality of your own body, the first physical attraction to another?) – so here I’m talking about my first act of putting my penis into the vagina of a girl, an act which, I’m not sure, was probably illegal according to the laws of the time, and even of today. It was my 16th birthday, and the girl was a year below me at school, so either 14 or 15, but not a virgin, as she told me. I was beyond words overwhelmed by the occasion, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Only a few weeks before I’d spotted her in a school corridor, chatting to girlfriends. Her movements, her smile, her grace mesmerised me, and I recall thinking of a young horse, a filly, free and unself-conscious, untamed, perfect. For days I could barely think of anything else and I kept seeking her out in the school grounds….
So I described my obsession to a school friend, and when I pointed her out, he told me he knew her, her name was Edwina, her family were friends with his, and he suggested ‘putting in a good word to her’ about me. That sounded ridiculous, and I agreed. A couple of days later he came back to me. Edwina said yes, she would be my girlfriend.
The joyful impulses of youth. I described this in my novel, and I described the massive impact of Bowie on me as a 16 year-old, and my youthful questioning of sexuality and gender. I didn’t happen to mention that the boy who got me together with Edwina (very briefly) was very pretty, and I had delicious fantasies about him. Not that I avoided homosexuality – I wrote of some boy-boy cuddles and fantasies, which at least one reader told me she found ‘a bit shocking’.
To be honest, I’m shocked, dismayed, and above all disappointed, that people are shocked. Which seems code for disapproval.
The whole male-female gender stuff is still very much a minefield, and a battlefield. As someone in his 70th year on the planet, I’m hoping I can think about it ‘objectively’, if that word means anything.
The issue is important because for centuries upon centuries we’ve lived in a patriarchal world. I’ve read a lot of history, and much of it has been about men behaving badly. And I mean really really badly. And there are still large regions of the world in which females are automatically considered to be inferior, meaning their lives are heavily circumscribed vis-à-vis men. So gender matters muchly.
So what is it? What do we mean by it? And what does it mean to a bird, a cat or a bonobo?
Bonobos are female-dominant. In order to be so, they must clearly be aware of their gender, though they have no knowledge of the word ‘gender’ – they’re never confused by language like we can be. So they’re driven, or affected, by instinct, to be supportive of their own gender. They know who’s male and who’s female, though there may be degrees of maleness and femaleness, as Frans de Waal pointed out in the case of Donna, the female chimp who hung out with the males and never became pregnant (she finally became the dominant chimp in her troupe – or rather in the Lincoln Park zoo enclosure where she lived – but would this have happened in the wild?)
It’s difficult enough to understand how and why bonobos became female-dominant in a period of one or two million years (a pretty wide margin of error) since their separation from chimps, without trying to understand our broadly patriarchal system, which is clearly undergoing change, not only in the WEIRD world. Still, it’s a fascinating topic, which I feel the need to focus on more exclusively, without being distracted by Trumpism or the possibly coming European holocaust, should Putin be pushed to the brink, or the possible slaughter of Taiwanese people under Xi – and other horrorshow issues.
So, in the non-human primate world, size generally matters, and males are mostly bigger than females. Gorillas and orangutans are at the extreme end of this dimorphism. Interesting in the case of orangutans, as they’re solitary, so there’s no obvious need for gender-based dominance – but then, if you’re going to rape a female, it pays to be as big and strong as possible. But of course, the term ‘rape’ is never used when referring to non-human primates. Forced copulation is the preferred term.
But ‘forced copulation’ isn’t just a euphemism. It’s done to produce offspring, and humans don’t have sex, be it via rape or love or anything in between, just to produce children. And why do orangutans have sex? Do they know they’re doing it to produce children? Does a dog – male or female – rub its genital area intensely on your leg to produce offspring? Silly question. These activities are ‘evolutionary by-products’ – we are stimulated to have sex in order to reproduce, but that stimulation being in itself pleasurable, we just do it regardless, often without a partner. And often, as with bonobos, to promote fellow-feeling – you rub my front and I’ll rub yours. Humans often do it for similar reasons, but not enough, I think. After all, we can mutually masturbate and reflect on the nature of dark matter/energy. We contain multitudes.
I’m generally intrigued, and often disturbed, by the difference between human sexual practices and those of other species. Again we are probably the only species that knows that sex leads to pregnancy. We’re also the only clothed species, and these two facts seem connected. Is there anywhere on this planet where public nudity (above a certain tender age) is not a crime? Clothing and civilisation go hand in hand, and most people are relieved that this so. After all, we’re not animals…
But seriously, civilisation demands clothing. Indeed, we might argue that the greater our level of civilisation, the more vast and varied our vestments should be. Charles Darwin, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, used the word ‘savage’ rather a lot in The descent of man, and it seems clear to me that he could see one coming by her lack of anything resembling a petticoat.
So, enough of the cheap shots. I’m intrigued, and inspired by the fact, and surely this is a fact, that bonobos have used sex to become female dominant, while humans have used violence to become male dominant.
There, I’ve come out with it. I’ve avoided being direct about it till now, in fact I’m not even sure that I was clearly aware of this before writing it. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, but that’s how it happened. So, if we deliberately create, or try to create, a female dominant society, will it have a bonoboesque result? Are we currently trying to create such a society, or is it just happening, like evolution? The WEIRD world is certainly more ‘permissive’ than it used to be – with the inevitable frustrating conservative backlash, which means we need to recognise that the future is long, frustratingly long for us mortals, especially the oldies. And of course there are plenty of ultra-conservative females in powerful positions throughout our world, as well as women who are skeptical of any difference that greater female empowerment would make. Usually they point to one or two female politicians, or bosses, or mothers, who weren’t much chop. That’s a ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ argument, IMHO.
Obviously I’m not going to be around to experience a female-dominant WEIRD world, and neither is anyone now living. It may never happen, but I think it should, for the sake of humanity and life on this planet. The trouble-makers today are the leaders of Russia, the USA, China, Iran, Israel, Sudan and North Korea, to name a prominent few. Of course they’re all male, and they’d all expect their successors to be male for all eternity, but that won’t happen, at least we know that much.
So, Wolf Alice isn’t an all-female band, but at least they’re not an all-male one, and there’s no doubt that their sole female member, Ellie Rowsell, is also their most prominent member, for a number of reasons. Their song The Sofa, in contrast to Blush, the song I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, seems to me to be happy and life-affirming, and the accompanying video of males, females and kids engaging in fun, skillful, weird and wonderful activities as a backdrop to a floating or rolling sofa occupied by the band members in turn, but mostly by Rowsell, the singer (and intellectual beauty queen), is – well, it’s just nice, in a bonobo sort of way. Here are some of the lyrics:
Hope I can accept the wild thing in me, hope nobody comes to tame her, And she can be free.Sick of second-guessing my behaviour, And what I want to be. Just let me lie here on the sofa…
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I feel kind of lucky right now and I’m not ashamed to sayI can be happy, I can be sadI can be a bitch when I get madI wanna settle down, or to fall in loveBut sometimes, I just want to fuckI love my life, I love my lifeSometimes, I just want to…
Bonobos don’t have sofas, but I like to think to think they have a similar mind-set, if in a more simplified form. Emotionally labile at times, excitable, sexual, and, given their precarious position in the Congo, hoping to maintain their freedom, the threats to which they’re perhaps dimly aware of. .
So, vive les bonobos, and thank you Wolf Alice, you’re good.
Okay, so this is a chimp, but you get the idea…
On Revolution: interesting topic, problematic treatment (pour moi)
Hannah Arendt, undeniably admirable, but quite difficult
Okay so I’m continuing with Hannah Arendt for the time being. In ‘The social question, chapter 2 of On Revolution, Arendt expatiates for a while on hypocrisy, a term I’m pretty sure I’ve never used in the 1000-plus pieces on this blog, or elsewhere. It might be that I’ve never understood what it means, or more likely I’ve never felt the need for the word.
According to Arendt, ‘Hypocrisy is the vice through which corruption becomes manifest’. I’m pretty sure I don’t know what this means, even after thinking about it for a moment, or an hour. I probably just use other language. I know for example that the Trump administration’s attempts to censure and ban liberal comedians and commentators, while ignoring or promoting conservative (or more precisely pro-Trump) media, and then using language about ‘public duty’ and ‘preventing harm’, are examples of hypocrisy. So, very well, I contradict myself, and so I’ll look at Arendt’s statement again, and ask, Is hypocrisy the only, or principal vice through which corruption becomes manifest?
Well, maybe it’s true, at least with a certain type of vice – and we must scrutinise the term ‘vice’, the other important term in the sentence. Come to think of it, that’s another term I can’t remember ever using. What is a vice? Smoking? To some maybe. Killing people? Maybe not if it’s a Hitler or Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler. Anyway, common usage tells me that gambling and ‘philandering’ are vices, but not invading other countries. Words can be evasive when you try to pin them down (and only then, funnily enough).
So I’v gotten into the third chapter of Arendt’s book and I’ve decided to give up – sorry Hannah, RIP. Much of this is in a foreign language to me, though the topics she focuses on – the French Revolution and how and why it went so pear-shaped, the American War of Independence (as I would definitely prefer to call it) and how it, unsurprisingly, leaned so much on British constitutional elements – as well as the writers she names and quotes – Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Hume and Locke – are all of interest, and make me want to return to these men, especially as explicated by historians or other specialists (preferably women) whose aim is to clarify and contextualise.
So it’s time to return to bonobos and sexuality, methinks.
Reference
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963
On Hannah Arendt and revolution
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
old time Christianity in the new country
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).
On Stephen Miller, Adolph Hitler and immigration
a best-seller in its time
Upon reading ‘Mein Kampf’, one of the shortest of Carlo Rovelli’s short essays in There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, I was immediately reminded of Stephen Miller, who apparently serves as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and Homeland Security Advisor in the current US administration. The fact that Miller is an Ashkenazi Jew just adds what one might call spice to the connection.
Let me explain. When Rovelli decided to read Mein Kampf (My Struggle) he expected a lot of breast-thumping about the ‘master race’ and the need to keep it ‘pure’, but to his surprise, he found the most prominent feature of the book was fear. To quote Rovelli:
For me this came as a revelation that allowed me to grasp something about the mindset of the political right that I had always struggled to understand. A main source of the emotions that give power to the right, and above all to the far right, is not the feeling of being strong. It is, on the contrary, the fear of being weak.
This fear is explicit in Mein Kampf; this feeling of inferiority, this sense of being surrounded by imminent danger. The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them. The reason for preferring combat to collaboration is that we fear the strength of others. The reason why we close ourselves into an identity, a group, a Volk, is to create a gang stronger than the other gangs in a relentlessly dog-eat-dog world. Hitler depicts a savage world in which the enemy is everywhere, danger is everywhere, and the only desperate hope of avoiding succumbing to it is to band together into a group and prevail.
This is an interesting and quite cogent diagnosis of Hitler’s malaise, and it’s also interesting that Hitler targeted Jews as the strongest of the ‘gangs’ he felt the need to deal with. Which brings me back to Miller. The story goes that one of his favourite books is Le Camp des Saints by Jean Raspail, which, according to AI (never lies), ‘is a fictional account that depicts the destruction of Western civilization through massive immigration from the Third World to France’.
This is particularly interesting as I remember reading some years ago about the Ashkenazi Jews being described, by such academic worthies as Steven Pinker, who is Jewish, as a group very much over-represented in IQ levels, intellectual achievements and the like, implying a kind of natural ‘mastery’, something in the genes perhaps. You can see where this might be going, one wouldn’t want such mastery to be diluted by interbreeding…
Miller is undoubtedly having his own struggle with immigrants and impurities. AI (never lies) again:
Stephen Miller, a key architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, is driven by a restrictive ideology focused on “100 per cent Americanism,” white nationalist talking points, and a desire to significantly reduce both legal and illegal immigration. His hardline views are rooted in a belief that high levels of immigration threaten the cultural, social, and linguistic cohesion of the United States.
I took this photo in Paris nearly 10 years ago. The inscription says: Arrested by the police of the Vichy government, complicit with the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944, and murdered at Auschwitz because they were born Jews. More than 500 of these children lived here in the 4th arrondisement. Among them, 101 little ones never had the chance to attend school. In passing, read their names, your memory is their only sepulchre.
References
Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2018
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-dark-ideology-behind-stephen
Carlo Rovelli, humanist extraordinaire, and Lucretius, ditto
Lucretius, apparently
I was, for a time, a member of the South Australian humanists, basically a meet-up group, but also a branch of the national organisation, the title of which I can’t remember, mea culpa. I might also claim to be a prominent member, as I gave three talks to the group, the first on free will (on which I’ve since changed my position), the second on the decline of religion in Australia, and the third on the birth and growth of international organisations. I write this purely to big-note myself, as nobody else will.
I believe that humanist group is no longer with us, but of course humanism lives on in many hearts and minds. I’ve been very much reminded of this as I read a collection of essays by the philosophical physicist Carlo Rovelli, with the grand and charming title, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness. And I must say, to my shame, that I only got the book via a ‘Dirty Santa’ game last Christmas. I filched the book from someone, as part of the rules of the game, largely to show off about how bookish I am (I also filched another book, to become the sole owner of the only book gifts available).
Strangely I knew the name, probably through my various researches for my writing, but I chanced to search my little library and found a slender Rovelli volume, Seven brief lessons on physics, which I can’t for the life of me remember buying, and have surely never opened – mea maxima culpa. So now I have two Rovelli essay collections to read, and they truly are gems, resurrecting my humanist interests as well as, if it’s not the same thing, making me want to be a better person, at last!
The most recent essay I’ve read, ‘De rerum natura’, rather excited me in anticipation, and I must tell a story about it, which I suspect I’ve written before, but never mind.
In my early twenties I was at a party at a friend’s house, a fairly raucous affair, with painfully loud music and painfully attractive women, and I found myself overwhelmed and wilting. My friend noticed and made some effort to revive me, but I told him I was in a dull mood and should go home. He suggested instead that I spend some time in his spare room, away from the noise, where there was a sofa bed and ‘lots of books’. He knew me well. So, shutting the door to the beats of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello et al, I perused a plethora of texts before more or less randomly selecting Lucretius. De Rerum Natura is generally translated as On the nature of things, or On the nature of the universe, though there may be other variants. It was written in the first century BCE, and, believe me, it’s an extraordinary work, which cuts through the centuries between then and now like a knife through air. After the first few pages I found myself laughing with incredulity. Though from the beginning he addresses the great goddess Venus, it didn’t strike me as a religious text, it was too full of the life of the nature around him, animate and inanimate, and the atoms this natural world was all made from. Yes, this was an early atomic theory, first posited by Democritus and Epicurus, though long before subatomic particles, quantum states, electromagnetism and field theory,
I was certainly bedazzled by this 2,000 year old claim about atoms, but other speculations seemed fascinatingly ‘modern’:
… if things were made out of nothing, any species could spring from any source and nothing would require seed. Men could arise from the sea and scaly fish from the earth, and birds could be hatched out of the sky… The same fruits would not grow constantly on the same trees, but they would keep changing: any tree might bear any fruit. If each species were not composed of its own generative bodies, why should each be born always of the same kind of mother? Actually, since each is formed out of specific seeds, it is born and emerges into the sunlit world only from a place where there exists the right material, the right kind of atoms. This is why everything cannot be born of everything, but a specific power of generation inheres in specific objects.
This is the very sniffter of an intuition about the origin of individual species, which went through me, as a young man, like a very mild and titillating electric shock. The passage, and others like it, appear in the first few pages of De Rerum Natura, and it may well be that I didn’t get much further on that night, given the circumstances, but they made a deep impression. Our thoughts, or those of the best of us, have been plumbing the depths of what’s what in terms of what we are, and everything living – and non-living – around us, for 2 thousand, or 20 thousand, or even 200 thousand years. Our sharing of these thoughts no doubt began with the development of language, and then writing, which boosted us to become the dominant species we now are.
So I note that I’ve got a copy of On the nature of the Universe on my bookshelves, but I likely haven’t read past Book One of six books. Time to make amends. Life begins at 69! Which reminds me – vive les bonobos!
References
Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2022
Carlo Rovelli, Seven brief lessons on physics, 2014
Lucretius, On the nature of the universe, trans by R E Latham, 1994
on power and sexploitation: the Epstein files
a young woman who deserved so much better
What was I thinking about writing about? Oh yes, the Epstein thingy. I’ve been avoiding it, partly because I have, I think, a rather permissive attitude to sexuality (I blame bonobos), even though my own sex life has been largely a disastrous nullity, and in my seventieth year it’s not likely to improve.
But the Epstein matter isn’t about a kind of open-hearted – ‘let’s get it on so that we can be more of an all-for-one, one-for-all’ – society, which is, of course, the Musketeerian motto of bonoboism. It’s pretty well all about exploitation and power.
So let me for the purpose of this essay divide power relations into two forms – the power of males over females, and the power of the rich over the poor. In the WEIRD world, it seems to me, the power of males over females is slowly diminishing, but the power of the rich over the poor is growing faster than ever before. And the wealth of males is of course growing much faster than that of females. That’s to say, in the world of the super-rich, men like to have it all, and their quantum of wantum doesn’t vary much in its exponential increase.
We’re the financial apes, though of course there are many other distinguishing features, good and bad – the clothed apes, the language apes, the nationalistic apes, the nucleonic apes, the mass-murdering apes, the astronautical apes, and of course the most populous apes by far. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but what might ground us, as they keep us in touch with the rest of the animal world, are our sexual urges.
But these urges have long been a problem for us, or maybe not that long, maybe since the dawn of religion and its various tabus. How long ago was that? 15,000 years ago? 300,000? At some stage monogamy was born – a ‘this is my sole sexual partner’ notion, which somehow transmogrified into ‘I own this female’, or something similar. And attitudes to sex changed, perhaps long before the advent of clothing. Sex, or sexual play, could only be an adult thing – which rather undermines the notion of play.
There are so many perhaps unanswerable questions – when did ‘civilisation’ begin? Did this supposed civilisation load us with endless sexual tabus? Yes, maybe, and it also gave us agriculture and cities and writing and more sophisticated weapons and a whole variety of artful activities. Perhaps, if we’d gone more the way of bonobos, we’d have been so absorbed in sexual fun that we’d never have stopped to contemplate the Meaning of Life, and the Creation of the World.
However, it seems that the super-rich, and their families, many of whom, like the offspring of monarchs and so-called ‘robber barons’, come under the category of the idle rich, are drawn to a bonoboesque lifestyle, if a rather more patriarchal and one-sided version of it. And, given our generally hypocritical public attitude towards sex, the victims tend to suffer as much as, or more than, the perpetrators when all is exposed. Virginia Giuffre’s suicide here in Australia last year is a tragic example.
It’s amusing, though, from this distance, to note how the so-called MAGA conservatives, with their generally negative thinking about abortion, feminism and anything resembling sexual licence, have been so keen to hide the sexual licence on steroids that are the Epstein files. But to be fair, the MAGA people are divided on the issue – those in power and in government are definitely in favour of suppression, while the rest are confused, to put it generously. Then again, if you take the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ seriously, confusion must be a fundamental aspect of your identity.
So where and how is this all going to end? It’s hard to imagine that the rich and very powerful are going to allow the mid-term elections, destined to result in a large non-conservative majority in Congress, to cause any more damage vis-à-vis the Epstein files than they already have. They will surely find a solution, and I’m sure they’re working on it right now, or have already worked it all out more or less to perfection. We will have to wait and see.
On a couple of repulsive dictators, mostly
So in my old age I’m finding that the world is going to pot. Under the circumstances I’m lucky to be living in Australia.
Of course the world is much more than China, or the USA, or Russia (in population order), but these are the potty countries I’m referring to – or to be fairer and more accurate, the countries with the pottiest leaders – that I know of.
China has Xi Jingping, the first of the scumbags – not necessarily in order of scumbuggery. He’s in a battle of sorts with his military leaders, apparently because they’re not being warmongering enough. The USA has Trump – need I say more? And Putin – it’s now more or less official – has failed in his brief military operation against Ukraine, with a loss of men, or drone fodder, coming up to 2 million. Not that psychopaths care about such numbers.
Of these three horrific scenarios, the one I’m probably least willing to look at is the Trump shite. So… well let’s, look at Putinland. I’ve been watching The military show on Youtube, which can get quite technical at times, but they generally present a scenario of Russian failure. This is of course what I want to hear, but I’m also quite skeptical. The Russians surely aren’t this stupid. I’m surprised that Putin has miscalculated so badly, but I just can’t see him giving up after having invested so much in this invasion. And yet… if he had something more substantial to throw at the Ukrainians, leaving aside the nuclear option, he surely would have used it by now. And surely, even Putin’s position must be less secure after such devastating losses.
So… I’ve been watching more of The military show, which presents the devastation being wrought upon Kiev – so maybe they’re not being so one-sided, though it’s clear this is no Russian propaganda show, to put it mildly. I just hope their stuff is accurate. Recently they’ve presented ‘the most dramatic naval upset in modern history’, no less – that being the destruction of Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Ukraine, as even I knew, has long been a massive wheat and corn exporter to many NATO states, as well as China and other rather powerful countries. When the war started, those exports were reduced by almost 50%, and things were looking very grim for the country’s ability to fund its defences. However Ukraine and its allies appear to have outsmarted and out-manoeuvred the Russians, using mines, artillery and missiles – a ‘defensive triangle’ (watch The military show for details), and then developing its unmanned drone defence/attack systems with a rapidity that has apparently astonished the military world. They seem to be underwater drones, or not, pardon my ignorance, and they were designed to attack en masse. A second iteration of these drones, far more powerful than the first, has been launched successfully, and Ukraine’s exports have more or less completely recovered. And much of this response happened within the first year or so of the war! They’ve described it as ‘one of the most successful blockade-breaking operations in modern history’. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s been much competition – I’m such a spoiler.
So, hats off to Ukraine, in a situation in which the US ‘superpower’ under Frump has been mostly less than helpful, and NATO seemingly bound up by a less than helpful bureaucratic structure. Meanwhile, how is Mr Pudding faring after all these years of anti-Ukraine warfare – arguably starting in February 2014? Well, it seems that, though he’s nowhere near winning, he’s also nowhere near giving up. In fact, it seems he can’t give up after all his rhetoric and all his losses. This just can’t be all for nothing. And that of course is a dangerous situation indeed, because there is only the nuclear option. He can’t win otherwise, he can’t go on forever, but then, how can the nuclear option be a win? It won’t of course, so the whole thing becomes a monument to stubborn stupidity which can only end with the end of Putin. It’s truly tragic for the Ukrainian people, and the Russian people too.
So let’s look at China, which I’ve not really been focussing on (nor Russia really, for why focus on god-awful governments that are far away and you can’t do anything about? Hmmm). One website called China Update has the headline ‘Total Annihilation’, just in case people aren’t paying attention.
So apparently a couple of the top military figures of the country have been arrested by China’s dictator, Xi, and what with other brutalist changes, the military leadership ‘group’ has now been reduced from seven to two – but effectively one. Meanwhile a long-term anti-corruption drive, aka Bullshit Incorporated, has been fuelled by Xi’s paranoia and hubris, and has left ‘command chains fractured and experienced leaders sidelined’, which has supposedly degraded the country’s capacity to ‘conduct complex operations, particularly against Taiwan’. That sounds promising for Taiwan, but my impression over the years has been that Xi really really really wants to attack Taiwan and kill people there, and to do it yesterday. The reports I’m hearing about the situation, though, are confusing and conflicting. He likes ‘anti-corruption’ purges apparently, and he has, over time, trimmed down the political and the military leadership, the latter to just two. All of which can only make one laugh, or cry, at the Orwellian newspeak. We mock the North Korean title for its country – the Korean Democratic Republic – but surely the Chinese government, or leadership, calling its country ‘communist’, is even more risible, considering that communism is meant to be about collective control and sharing of government, labour, resources, etc. On that definition, China must surely be about the least communist nation on the planet, and more than 1.3 billion more Chinese people are being hoodwinked than North Korean people. And surely a large proportion of them know they’re being hoodwinked, but – what can they do? If you’ve lived such a lie all your life, that lie just becomes the reality.
So the number of party members who have been removed or disciplined for corruption during Xi’s rule has increased year on year, and it would be impossible to tell whether this purge has been fair given the lack of oversight of of what is essentially a dictatorship. And according to the video referenced below, Xi has managed to concentrate more power in his own hands, at least militarily, than any previous Chinese dictator of the ‘communist’ era (or at least since Mao, the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever known). He has also presided over a massive increase in military expenditure, with obviously ominous connotations. I mean, what could this ballooning expenditure be for?
I worry for Taiwan, which was experimenting with participatory democracy, according to Jess Scully’s hopeful Glimpses of Utopia.
References
David Bowie and little old me
I’m now around the age that David Bowie was when he died. I heard it on the radio when I was in bed that January morning in 2016. I wept. He was a fundamental part of my life – certainly of my youth. I’m writing about him now because I’m re-reading Simon Critchley’s book about him, published in 2014. It was given (or loaned?!) to me by a friend a couple of years back, and I somehow read it rather cursorily, finding it a bit pretentious in places (Heidegger’s Dassein and other metaphysical stuff has never been interesting or particularly comprehensible to dumb me), but effective in Critchley’s love for and obsession with the artist, who certainly obsessed me, particularly from the early 70s into the 80s. He was uniquely indecipherable, catchy but unable to be caught.
Take for example, ‘Changes’, from the (ironically titled?) Hunky Dory album. So easy to sing in the shower and such, but lyrically a torment of sorts ‘…so I turned myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker – I’m much too fast to take that test’. There is pride here, but also confusion, uncertainty, innocence, doubt – in short, a sort of vulnerable complexity in turning to face the strange. Listening to this sort of stuff as a teenager, this lyrical skirmishing, was somehow rewarding, or at least reassuring – ‘you’re not alone!’
My first encounter – in 1973 I was 16 and, for a time, had a ‘good job’ as an accounts clerk at a factory making plastic tubing. So I had the money to buy a record album – my first. I looked hard at this album cover of a blonde-haired, effeminate-looking male, dwarfed by a brown urban landscape. The title, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, sounded deliciously audacious to me. Surely this would be absolute shite or revelatory. Then again maybe neither. I was able to play it there in a little booth to myself. I played the whole album. And, of course, I bought it.
I’d already been introduced to musical wordsmiths – Dylan and Cohen in particular – and was experimenting with writing myself, exploring who I was and what I could be. The fact that I had no musical ability whatsoever made music unbridgeably, magically superior.
So I played Ziggy to death and my next three purchases were Hunky Dory, Space Oddity and Lou Reed’s Bowie-produced Transformer album. I lost my job in the failing plastics factory and hung out at home alone, admiring my made-up face in the mirror, and my legs in my mother’s stockings. I felt, or tried to feel, a sense of transcendent, transexual superiority. I went out for walks in my sister’s floral jacket and was honked by passing cars – an edgy sort of thrill.
And so it went – Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Pin-ups, and I was ‘officially’ an adult, and various misadventures meant I lost all my records, together with home and family. I shared houses with students, wrote endlessly about my misadventures and my fascination with writers – Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Frisch – and, after a strange, perhaps perverse period of listening only to ‘classical music’, especially Schubert, I caught up, through others’ collections, with Bowie’s continuing oeuvre – Lodger, Scary Monsters, Station to Station, Low. All interesting stuff, but of course the intensity of my teenage attachment was gone. His likely drug-induced flirtations with fascism were disconcerting, and I’d frankly lost interest in what he was up to by the nineties.
Now, in my seventieth year, it’s time for a catch-up, and a rethink, especially in light of my ‘no free will’ understanding, which has been something of a pre-occupation in recent times. For the fact that there’s no such thing as free will doesn’t simplify matters – au contraire. The complexity of what has made us who we are is pretty well unfathomable. But a recognition of that complexity should help us to treat even Hitler and Stalin and Putin and Trump as, if you like, ‘products’. In Bowie’s fascinating case, he was obviously a precocious musical talent, absolutely obsessed with expressing himself to the world, to explore its, and his, complexity – sexually, politically and existentially, and not necessarily in that order. I don’t really know much about his family background – he grew up in Brixton, which I believe isn’t the most fashionable suburb, and his mother was a sometime Oswald Mosley fan, and I’m imagining his flirtations with fascism might’ve been a hat-tip to a troublesome mother-son connection. My own background took me nowhere near right-wing politics, and that fact, and the realisation that it could’ve been quite different, helps me to sympathise with someone like him and his more existential concerns, which I do share – at least to some degree. I’m probably a bit more complacent, or perhaps resigned, than he was. And I’ve never been much tempted by drugs, other than the odd youthful booze overdose and some very minor flirting with dope.
One thing I’ve read about him, quite recently, was that he was an avid reader, as I most certainly am, though the what of the reading is of the essence. Much of Bowie’s reading might have had a desperation about it – who will love a lad insane? One might guess from some of his music that he wanted or needed to be a lad insane, but not too insane and not too much of a lad. My own reading, too, is about establishing, confirming, extending identity, and I suppose that’s what all reading, or information-gathering, is about.
Anyway, my interest in Bowie has been renewed, and I’ll be enjoying, if that’s the word, his later work and its connection with what’s familiar to me, as well as seeing that old stuff in a new light – the crazy piano stuff on the title track of Aladdin Sane, for example…
Reference
Bowie, by Simon Critchley, 2014
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate