Posts Tagged ‘history’
What’s with those Tierra del Fuegans?
Members of the Selk’nam people of Tierra del Fuego, with a slave trader, in 1889
We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
I once read an article arguing for changing the name of Darwin, the fascinating town at the top end of the Northern Territory, because, the argument went, Charles Darwin was too much of a racist to allow a town to be named after him. After all, he referred to Australia’s Aboriginal population, and other indigenous populations he encountered, as ‘savages’, and this was an ongoing insult to the considerable Aboriginal population of that northern town.
Fair enough, thought I, but what about all the other European-Australian place names, some referring to capital cities, prominent rivers, and whole states? The term ‘savage’ was used by Europeans to refer to indigenous populations everywhere, according to the widespread belief, up until the late 19th century, that ‘civilisation’ only occurred in Britain, Europe and some parts of Asia. If savagery and civilisation weren’t entirely dichotomous, they might represent a sliding scale, with savages having to climb up that scale, an incline largely opposed to their inclinations, in a process known as assimilation. The concept is far from dead in 2024.
But in 1824, 1844 and 1864 it was the bog-standard view. So why the fuss about the naming of Darwin (aka Larrakia)? I soon discovered that the author of the above-mentioned article (posted in Online Opinion, an Australian website run by a former right-wing politician) was a creationist. I’d been there before – a prominent creationist had taken me to task for writing favourably on Darwin – wasn’t I aware that he was an out-and-out racist? What about his writing on the Tierra del Fuegans? As if this somehow told against Darwin’s theories of species’ origins and for the creationist story.
So, having recently read The voyage of the Beagle, I’m a little more informed about the matter, but not much. My impression was that he met a small handful of the native inhabitants of this most southerly region of the South American continent, and was taken aback by their poverty of tools, clothing, language and such. There were also three natives of the region on board the Beagle, a fact about which I was confused, but it’s well explained in Josie Glausiusz’ excellent online essay ‘Savages and Cannibals’, linked below. Glausiusz, like myself, made light of Darwin’s dismissive account of ‘savages’ in her first reading of The Beagle, as typical of his time, and surely also his class, but a later reading caused rather more discomfort. I too preferred to focus on the positive, liberal aspects of Darwin’s observations, and I particularly noted a passage, also quoted in Glausiusz’ essay, describing his horror at the colonists’ extremely brutal treatment of the native inhabitants :
“Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?”
The passage, and the atrocities, brought to mind a childhood reading that had quite an impact – a big book that my mother bought for me one Christmas, a USA book called ‘The History of the West’ or something similar. It told, in great detail, the battles, the treaties and the many betrayals that were a part of the Anglo-European sweep westward to grab land from the ‘Indians’. The Sioux nation, the Cherokees, the Apaches – Geronimo, Cochise, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse – all came to life in my head, just as they were beaten, humiliated and/or slaughtered. It was an unforgettable bit of bedroom trauma for me.
But getting back to Darwin, even in his later Descent of Man he regularly used the term ‘savage’, and, as mentioned, some were considered more savage than others. Interestingly, his brief comments on Australian Aboriginals were generally complimentary, and he reserved his disdain for the fledgling nation’s ex-convicts, without appearing to have the slightest cognisance that they didn’t come from his massively privileged background. How many of Darwin’s class were ever sent to the Antipodes?
This idea of a kind of sliding scale from savagery to civilisation – a sort of guided evolution – began to fall apart, it seems to me, with the advent of a new form of social analysis, namely anthropology. The term was first used in the late 16th century, and was given something of a boost during the 18th century Enlightenment period. Immanuel Kant actually gave classes on anthropology, and wrote a treatise on the subject, without, of course, having done any work in the field. But it was a start, and through the 19th century, anthropology and sociology became increasingly recognised terms, and human culture became a serious object of study. Of course it still had, and in many cases still has, its biases, with the ‘superior’ culture analysing and defining the ‘inferior’ one, but the very richness and complexity of the cultures under analysis, and what anthropologists and other analysts have learned about their evolution in connection to particular environments, such as those found in Australia over the past 50-60 thousand years, has rendered the concept of ‘savagery’ both obsolete and ridiculous.
So Darwin, it seems, was a little slow to recognise these developments, and it’s likely that the exclusivity of his class upbringing didn’t help. I note too that this clubbishness was quite sexist as well as racist – ‘man’ is always the go-to term, as in The Descent of Man, but also in countless references to human evolution in The Origin. In his many examples of breeders and experimenters with plants and animals in the early chapters of The Origin, no women are mentioned. Perhaps they were all men, but I’m doubtful.
Which brings me back to the Tierra del Fuegans, and their supposed killing and devouring of their old women (though only ‘in times of dearth’, but it seems these times were quite common). Why not their old men too? Clearly, Darwin didn’t witness such behaviour, but newspaper accounts from the 1850s and 1860s (some from Australian papers) tend to confirm the difficulties faced by the inhabitants of the region, as well as ‘civilised’ visitors’. Here are some choice examples:
From Lyttelton Times (NZ), 1852 – ‘A Party of Missionaries starved to death’.
The ill-fated party landed on Picton Island towards the conclusion of the year 1850. From the first they seem to have been annoyed in some measure by the natives, and to have been hunted backwards and forwards from the little island to what may be called the mainland of Terra del Fuego [The article goes on to describe their desperate and vain attempts to remain alive].
From New York Times, 1855
On the 19th of November [1854], we first saw any of the natives, men and three women having landed from a canoe. We had just finished our boat and were ready for starting. The Indians having first received what could be spared to them of our clothes, etc., retired; and afterward returned with bludgeons, and insisted upon stripping us. Three attacked the Captain, and three the seaman, who having disabled two of them fled to the boat in which the boy already was. Unfortunately the captain received a blow which must have instantly killed him. The boy received two arrows in his jacket, but escaped unhurt….
After remaining some days, indeed several days, we ventured along the coast in our boat. At the end of about six weeks, we found the provisions all expended, and subsisted on such shellfish as we could gather among the rocks. After subsisting for some time in this way, a native canoe again hove in sight; being then quite destitute of any means of subsisting for a month at least, except raw shellfish, we gave ourselves up to the Indians, and having nothing to excite their cupidity, they behaved very kindly to us, and with them we have remained up to this present time, having never once seen a vessel…
From The Empire [Sydney], 1858
… when amidst excessive heat, a calm came on, and the ship lay perfectly quiescent in the water with her sails hanging listlessly to the mast, several canoes got alongside, and, as I have just said, flocked around us in moderate numbers. It was evident that many of them, if not all, had never seen a ship or strangers like us before…. I knew that, according to past accounts obtained from Jemmy Button, the natives were more numerous here than from whence we had come, and, also, that those on the north side were considerably more ferocious… Two of the oldest, with their hair all plastered over with some white substance, kept incessantly chattering ; and, indeed, they talked so fast and so loud, that they foamed at their mouths like the froth of an angry sea on a beach.
The stories go on, about astonished but sometimes murderous natives, in a region that clearly seems to have been a battleground for survival, between inhabitants and newcomers, but also among the inhabitants themselves, whose subsistence existence was dictated by their environment – though their language skills seem to have been impressive.
In any case I’ve found nothing to corroborate Darwin’s story about barbecuing old women – it’s more than likely an old husband’s tale. I might return to this issue – I’d like to learn much more about Tierra del Fuego’s inhabitants in the 21st century.
References
https://www.whatisemerging.com/opinions/savages-and-cannibals
Lies, lies, lies and democracy
what the….?
Imagine a political situation in which only women are allowed to vie for elected positions in government, whether local, state or federal. Further than that, only females over the age of eighteen are permitted to vote for these women. Certainly a delightful futuristic dream, IMHO. Surely the best form of democracy ever developed.
Some would say, however, that such a system is not democratic. And yet, I regularly read about the ancient Athenians as the ‘inventors of democracy’, and US political pundits and historians continually claim that the USA is the first modern democracy. These porkies are so unpalatable, I really should turn vegetarian.
So let’s face the facts (once again, for I’ve been here more than once before). In ancient Athens, only a small percentage of the male population had any say in the city-state’s government, as was also the case during the Roman republic, as Livy’s History of Rome relates.
The word demos means people, or the commonalty of a state. Let there be no mistake. And women are also people, if I’m not mistaken. It therefore follows, as night follows day, that no political system is democratic that does not permit women to be candidates for elected office, or to vote for candidates. Personally, though, I’d accept a political system that prohibits men from participating, as a very worthwhile experiment.
But let’s look at some facts. The USA held its first national election from December 1788 to January 1789. At the time, the new nation consisted of only 13 states, mostly hugging the Atlantic coast. I won’t get into the complex issue of state laws here, I’ll just focus on the federal scene. Only a small proportion of the adult male population was eligible to vote in 1788-9, and of course voting has never been mandatory in the US, so the number of votes counted amounted to a few tens of thousands out of a population of some three million (over half a million of whom were slaves).
But even without considering the missing female vote (which completely disqualifies the vote as democratic), the US claims about being the first modern democratic nation are complete bullshit. Modern democracy has proceeded in a series of baby steps, a step-wise widening of the franchise since Magna Carta in 1215, and did not become complete – if it ever really has – with the vote for women, native populations and ethnic minorities in the 20th century. Also, every vote must have an equal value – no gerrymandering, no ‘electoral colleges’ or any other processes which devalue the vote for some compared to others.
So, just on the women’s vote alone, leaving all the other vital issues aside, New Zealand was the first in 1893, but perversely, that nation didn’t allow women to become candidates until 1919. South Australia, where I live, was the first state anywhere in the world to give women the vote and the right to stand for election, in 1895. Australia changed its laws to allow women to vote and to stand for election in 1902, the first nation in the world to do so. However, not all women were included – indigenous women (and of course men) did not have that right until the 1960s. In fact the more we look at the history of women’s suffrage (and suffrage in general), the more complicated it becomes. The word ‘suffrage’ itself sounds odd, but etymologically it has nothing to do with suffering (never mind Olympe de Gouges). It goes back to Latin, suffragium, meaning something like a voting tablet but also the right to use it. Wikipedia is again magnificently comprehensive on the topic, letting us know that universal suffrage was experimented with in the Corsican Republic of 1755-69 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The French Jacobin constitution of 1793 sought to enact universal male suffrage (never mind Olympe de Gouges, encore) but it was scuttled in all the turbulence.
But let me return to the USA and its hollow claims. Women were given the vote there in 1920, two years after its neighbour, Canada. Voting rights for native Americans have been complexified by, for example, claims that they have their own ‘nations’ and governing systems, and by claims that their rights should be determined on a state-by-state basis, but the landmark federal legislation known as the 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to ‘prohibit racial discrimination in voting’, theoretically clearing the way for native and African Americans to vote. Of course, such racial discrimination has continued, as well as attempts, some successful, to water down the Act’s provisions, but generally it is regarded as the most successful piece of anti-discrimination legislation in US history. Even so, conservative states have constantly battled to restrict voting by minorities. So democracy in the USA has long been tenuous and incomplete, as it still is, with gerrymandering, suppression and the infamous electoral college.
Another bugbear I have with the good ole USA though, and I’ve written about it before, is their breast-beating about being the first modern democracy and their lies about gaining their freedom from ‘the British king’, as if poor sickly old George III was ruling the Old Dart and its colonies with an iron fist. In fact he was non compos mentis during the American Revolutionary War and in any case Britain was then governed by the Tory Party under Lord North, their Prime Minister, and had been a constitutional monarchy, with a Bill of Rights and a parliament, since 1689. Of course the franchise was minuscule, much like that at the ascension of George Washington a century later. Baby steps.
And then there is the lie at the very beginning of their revered Constitution. ‘We the People’ was patently dishonest – they should have written ‘We the Men’…
Democracy – a much abused term. And then came Trump…
References
https://academic.oup.com/book/6972/chapter-abstract/151255043?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm
Olympe de Gouges, The declaration of the rights of woman, 1791
do bonobos have families – and should humans have them?
‘We all belong… to an MAC – a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from 15 to 25 assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents – everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers’.
Susila, in Island, by Aldous Huxley, 1962
Bonobo mum with adopted child
I’ve mentioned how, in childhood, I perused a book called Children of the Dream, which looked at a different way of rearing children, in which they had a variety of adults and older kids to learn from, and they could gravitate towards some and away from others according to their inclinations. I was hungry for ideas like this as I felt trapped in an embattled family situation and yearned for both freedom and some kind of instruction or sponsorship that would promote my development in the most positive way. I was five when our smallish nuclear family (2 adults, 3 kids) moved from Scotland to the other side of the globe, so I had no experience of an extended family. And we lived together within a brick construction divided into compartments for eating, watching TV, sleeping and reading, washing our clothes, washing ourselves and defecating, surrounded by some land on which we could grow grass, various plants, or nothing much.
Twenty-five or so years later, I learned about bonobos, our closest living relatives, equally with chimpanzees. The lifestyles of these two other types of ape provided a fascinating contrast, while both types provided an equally fascinating contrast with H sapiens.
Returning to my childhood, I gradually learned that, outside of my family, which was female-dominant, the human world was dominated by the males. They were the headmasters, the bosses, the political leaders and so forth. We kids were, rather suddenly, sent to Sunday school where we were taught about our Father who was in heaven, but also everywhere else, who made us and made the world and loved us and watched over us constantly, and whose son died for our sins on a wooden cross long ago. None of this made any sense to me, and it seemed of a part with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, only the adults who told us these stories took it all so seriously that I felt no inclination to question them. I was a timid child, but also skeptical before I knew the word.
Much later, I came to wonder more about this religious double act of the Father and Son, and about the Church as it existed before the Protestant Reformation, with its history of male Popes, and its male Cardinals, male Archbishops, male Bishops and male Priests. And of course I learned about the history of male political leaders, generals, dictators, monarchs and emperors, and the tiny sprinkling of females among them, and it all stuck me as very odd and sad. And a bit stupid. And then, again, bonobos.
We are, of course, the only mammals who build our own structures for our nuclear families to live in. In doing so we have in a sense, ‘naturalised’ the nuclear family. And this happened not so long ago in the history of H Sapiens, which goes back to around 315,000 years ago according to the findings from Jebel Irhoud in present-day Morocco.
The term ‘housing’ isn’t so easy to define. If we think of purpose-built structures for living in, what about termite mounds or bee-hives? And before these human structures we imagine cave dwelling, but just how many caves are there dotted about the place? It’s likely that our first domiciles combined natural shelter and human ingenuity, using wood, bones, skins and such. Fireplaces would probably have featured. But it surely wasn’t just families in the modern sense that built or used these sites. Think again of bonobos:
Bonobos live in fission-fusion social groups where a large community of individuals separate into smaller groups, or parties, of variable size and composition. These “unit-groups” range from lone individuals to groups of 20 or more bonobos (Badrian et al. 1984; White 1988, 1996).
The size of human groups would have evolved over time – not too big, not too small, and quite likely having flexible fission-fusion lifestyles for much of human history. This also reduces inbreeding, as even chimps/bonobos have come to realise (unlike the Habsburgs).
What I’m really getting at, though, is when did we, as kids, come to recognise and acknowledge that we had one father, one mother, and the odd sibling? And that we belonged to this grouping, were in effect ‘owned’ by it? In spite of the great service the internet has provided for us over the past few decades, I can’t find any clear answer to this question – unsurprisingly, I suppose. Neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, but of course they live in ‘troops’, with the mother as principal care-giver, but with plenty of other adults or adolescents to help out, siblings or no. This is especially the case in bonobo society, which can, at a stretch, be seen as one big Mutual Adoption Club. The difference of course is that the bonobo way developed naturally, it simply evolved, whereas the ways of the Kibbutzim and Huxley’s MAC have a seemingly top-down artificiality about them. Interestingly, we’re having the same problem with our own gender issues, with a ‘natural’ understanding, based on neurology and the study of history, not to mention a multitude of writings such as Woolf’s A room of one’s own and Beauvoir’s The second sex, that women have been intellectually undervalued for millennia, together with a more artificial quota system for women/girls in STEM, or women in government. In any case, with the gradual receding of patriarchal religious systems (very gradual in some places), and obvious successes of women in science, business and politics, as well as the much more publicised behaviour of men behaving badly, re warfare, political machinations, capitalist exploitation and the like, it seems inevitable, to me at least, that we will gradually, in a two steps forward, one step back fashion, evolve into a female-dominant human culture (remembering that that there’s no gender equality among any of the social mammals – gender inequality isn’t just the norm, it’s universal). It seems to me unproblematic that the gender that brings humans into the world should be the ones in charge – with a little help from their friends.
As for the compartmented nuclear family thing – who knows? Change is a constant, and we now accept same-sex marriages, no-fault divorce, single parentage and the like, all in the last few decades. Our society has also become more child-focussed, just as we’ve reduced family sizes. No more corporal punishment in schools (too late for me, sadly), no more ‘bastards’, and more government assistance in terms of subsidies, childcare centres, maternity leave and so on. The concept of family itself has been altered and extended, and evolution is a never-ending story…
References
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz (note especially the subsections ‘children’ and ‘child rearing’)
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-female-wild-bonobos-infants-social.html
on US jingoism and nationalist dishonesty – plus ça change…
should be billions more people in this pic
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any nation, at least in the WEIRD world, that’s as jingoistic as the USA. Now whether nationalism is a good thing is always arguable. I take the view that, while nobody gets to choose the nation of their birth, so that it’s a matter neither of shame nor of pride, it’s more than reasonable to be interested in that nation above others (assuming that you still live in your birth nation), because you want it to be as good as can be, for yourself and your peers. Whether you call that nationalism or patriotism or whatever is of no great interest to me. And if you espouse humanist values you will be concerned also about the quality of life in other nations, any of which you could’ve been born and brought up in. But clearly we have more opportunity to improve things in our own nation than in others.
And here’s the obvious thing. Every nation can be improved, in terms of its governance, its laws, its quality of life, its fairness, its health and welfare and so on. And considering that social evolution is a never-ending story, we need our social structures and our governance systems to keep up, to evolve, if not in tandem with, at least not far behind the tides of change.
So, back to the USA. I’ve spent too much time in the past few years, really since the advent of Trump and the meaningless MAGA slogan, listening to US pundits, mostly liberal, bemoaning the fate of their country. But the fact is, I very very rarely hear talk of reform. nor do I hear much in the way of reflection as to why someone so utterly incapable of governance of any kind could have won the favour of so many United Staters, even if they’ve always been in a minority, albeit a vociferous one (and thus seeming to be more numerous than they are).
I was born in Scotland and have lived in Australia since the age of five. Scotland has long had a testy relationship with the country south of the border, with which it is united, sort of, under the UK, but it has its own government headed by a First Minister, as opposed to England’s Prime Minister. What’s the difference between a First Minister and a Prime Minister, you ask? Good question, for which I have no answer, but they’re both based on the principle of primus inter pares, as the leader of the governing party. That party has been elected by the voters, and it has decided upon its leadership by an internal vote of its elected representatives. The party can replace its leader at any time via a vote of no-confidence by those same elected representatives.
This system, which, mutatis mutandis, also pertains in Australia, bears little comparison with the US Presidential system, in which one individual, almost always male, is pitted against other, in a kind of ‘I alone can fix it’ contest of patriotic manliness. The USA, to its detriment, doesn’t have a multi-party system, so its two sole parties tend to duke it out man-o-man-like, in a profoundly adversarial way, which appears to get more block-headed over time. It’s also the case that anyone can run for President, whether or not they’ve had any political experience, or any but the most basic level of education, or know anything of their nation’s history. It certainly helps, though, to have lots and lots of money, or to know how to get it, because campaigning for President, and getting the ‘right’ backing by the ‘right’ people, is hugely about finance. And it’s highly relevant to the politics of the USA that the gap between the rich and the poor there is far greater than what we find in Australia, which of course makes it more plutocratic than it is ever likely to admit.
It’s clear that the US political system has become much more adversarial in recent times, and the advent of social media ‘bubbles’ is at least partly to blame. This has become a problem more generally in the WEIRD world and I’m not sure how to address it, though I’m sure that it needs to be addressed. The problem is greater in the USA, however, due to a number of factors. One is its sub-standard basic public education system, which, together with its comparative lack of a social welfare safety net, its abysmal minimum wage rates and inadequate healthcare provision, leaves millions feeling disenfranchised and ‘left behind’. How else can we explain the religious-style hero worship of an ignorant narcissist who did virtually nothing while holding the office of national President (an office which he ‘won’ in spite of losing the popular vote by almost 3 million).
But the original aim of this essay wasn’t to criticise its system – though while I’m at it I’ll mention that the USA has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, and the longest prison sentences, as well as huge rates of firearm deaths, as Wikipedia relates:
More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included.
My aim was to criticise the USA’s image of itself as some kind of model to the world. Of course, nations tend to lie about their own history, so it’s up to other nations to confront them with those lies. Just recently, I heard yet again a US political commentator claiming, in passing, that the War of Independence and the subsequent drawing up of the US Constitution were all about ‘the people’ rising up against a ‘tyrant king’. This reference to George III – a constitutional monarch who was more or less non compos mentis during this time, is risible. The colonists of that part of the ‘New World’ were rising up against a bullying and exploiting nation. Many of those colonists had recently fled that nation, for various reasons, but often related to their ‘puritan’ values. Powerful nations have bullied and exploited smaller nations, subject nations and their neighbours for thousands of years, and as the USA has become a powerful nation, it has bullied Pacific peoples in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as the peoples of Indo-China, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also engaged in the bullying of allied nations, which again shows that there’s nothing exceptional about the USA.
Of course, the ‘New World’ wasn’t new at all, in terms of population. It was for some time understood that the Clovis culture had migrated to the Americas between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have pushed human habitation back another several thousand years. The War of Independence and the subsequent US Constitution and the election of Washington as the colony’s first President, hailed today by United Staters as marking the beginning of modern democracy, was but one of many baby steps, albeit an important one, towards full democracy anywhere in the modern world. Less than 1.8% of the population voted, and eligibility, based on property ownership, varied widely between states. So it was hardly any better than the British system of the time, upon which it was largely based. Of course women couldn’t vote, nor of course could slaves, who formed the backbone of the colony’s economy. As for the First Nation peoples, the following decades brought nothing but dispossession and devastation, and, as in Australia, they’ve received little in the way of compensation since.
So, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and ‘the leader of the free world’ are still terms I hear gushing from the lips of US pundits, often accompanied by those glazed expressions suggestive of having learnt a kindergarten mantra. Better to try just a bit harder to accept that there’s no ‘greatest’ and no ‘leader’, just a lot of more or less flawed nations with more or less flawed political and social systems that need regular analysis and upgrading and repair. We can all do better, and maybe that’s what we’re here for. Or at least we can imagine that’s the case.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788–89_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/whats-the-earliest-evidence-of-humans-in-the-americas
homosexuality, hypocrisy, violence and bonobos
not quite, but I’m getting the t-shirt anyway
A few months back I read The picture of Dorian Gray for a reading group, and the book irked me, to say the least, with its effete Oxbridge elitism, its occasionally crass descriptions of women, and its obsession with sin, which I prefer to believe had already become an outmoded concept in Wilde’s time. I like to identify as a working-class high-school drop out with a chip on his shoulder, a type who finds aristocratic poseurs highly expendable, and my scorn was hardly likely to diminish on learning that Wilde, a tragically broken man at the end of his short life, turned to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, that richly resplendent monument to sexual hypocrisy, for reasons unknown, but presumably having something to do with eternity. Did he actually believe in a heavenly afterlife, in which forgiven sinners would be supplied with translucent wings while having their genitals erased? Heaven really does sound like a place where nothing ever happens, at least nothing the old, pre-dead or at least pre-disgraced Wilde would’ve had much interest in. Of course lions would lie down with lambs – boredom is a universal trait.
Of course, it’s impossible to transport yourself to a world of ‘typical’ 19th century values. Human society, at least in the WEIRD world, has been rapidly transforming in the past few centuries, unlike bonobo society, which was surely as female-dominated and sexually active in the 1500s as it is now. Atheism was hardly recognised as a word in Shakespeare’s time, and nobody would’ve admitted to holding such a belief. Homosexuality, however, under a variety of names, has been a feature of life in virtually all cultures since history has been written, and of course before. Simon Sebag Montifiore, in his BIG book The world: a family history, provides some orifice-opening examples (sans illustrations, unfortunately). Yet even in pre-medieval times, in non-Christian regions, homosexuality, particularly among men, appears to have been looked upon with disdain if not contempt, presumably due to the warrior expectations surrounding the gender. Think chimpanzees.
I’ve mentioned the hypocrisy of the Church, so thoroughly exposed in recent decades, with its all-male ‘celibate’ clergy and its bizarre and unworkable public attitude to sex, contraception, abortion and the limited role of women within its profoundly hierarchical structure. It’s frustrating to see how unwilling it is to reform itself, but heartening to note how little political clout it has in the WEIRD world compared to previous centuries, and how Christianity in general is fading quite rapidly, outside of the USA. It appears to be making headway, though in a small way, in some Asian countries, I think largely because it offers community – a microcosm of mutual support in troubled and often dangerous times. And many of these new Christian groups are more supportive of gender differences, alternative lifestyles and the like. These are the green shoots I like to see – though I might just be imagining them – that might be harbingers of a bonobo world, a world in which the word ‘queer’, in sexual terms, will have become meaningless.
Of course there’s much to be pessimistic about. Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan…. The Wisevoter website lists 32 countries that are currently in ‘conflict’, though history tells us that it seems to have always been thus, and indeed it was even worse ‘back then’. In the more internally peaceful WEIRD world I inhabit, a lot of the citizenry’s violent inclinations have found expression in social media platforms, which would seem to involve words rather than deeds, but nonetheless create self-contained but relational spaces of self-righteousness which militate against bonoboesque caring, sharing and becalming. The concern is that these social media bubbles of discontent and rage may become over-heated and burst into real violence against the physical embodiments of largely fantasised ‘evil’, as in replacement theory, vaccination mind control, an international Jewish conspiracy, etc etc. We may need to examine, culturally and perhaps governmentally, the algorithms that tend to spread and reinforce toxic misinformation, as evidence is brought more clearly to light about real and present damage. It seems that there may be a connection between the seemingly harmless creation of certain mathematical sequences (algorithms) and the strange forms of belief that imprison the susceptible. But then, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, and humans are always free to refuse an education in critical thinking.
I’ve used the word ‘free’ in that last sentence, but we’re not free. Something in the strange beliefs that organisations like the Church have imposed on us for millennia – that it’s a sin to enjoy sex outside of an aptly named concept called ‘wedlock’, and that children born outside of that concept are not legitimate human beings, and a variety of other sex-related ‘sins’ – won favour in the neural networks inside our heads, imprinted from generation to generation, at least until the rise of the sciences, and our demotion, more recently still, to the status of a primate among other primates, albeit a fascinatingly and frighteningly successful one.
For those of us who accept this demotion, or, more accurately, accept that our status has been revised and made more meaningful, embedded as it has become with the stuff of all living things within the biosphere that sustains them, the behaviour of our closest kin, chimps and bonobos, as well as other intelligent, social beings far from our line of development, such as cetaceans, some avian species, elephants, bats and rats, might offer lessons for us in community and sustainability. But, in my humble opinion, bonobos most of all, for, I think, obvious reasons.
Our strong genetic links with bonobos means that, as fellow primates, we can look each other in the eye and feel a depth of connection. Their sexual behaviour and family dynamics are clearly more relatable to us than, say, dolphins, so that we’re keen to close the gap in knowledge about how our ancestry connects with theirs. Exactly how and why – and when – did they become female dominant? Can we uncover female dominance in any of our own ancestors or cousins? (It should be pointed out – for those who would favour male-female equality rather than the dominance of one sex, that such equality rarely if ever exists in the world of social mammals). And, considering how dangerous male violence and militarism has become in the world of nuclear weaponry, the example of a bonobo social world of mutual care, limited exploitation and empathy is surely needful as we tackle problems we have created for ourselves and other creatures due to our rapacity. In some ways, in the WEIRD world, we’re becoming just a little bit more like bonobos, but we need to go further in that direction, with all our amazing knowledge and inventiveness.
Any how, vive les bonobos.
References
The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 1891
The world: a family history, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
origins of human patriarchy, and where we may go from here
The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world … The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx
In a sense we [Beauvoir & Sartre] both lacked a real family, and we had elevated this contingency into a principle.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
I’m not a historian, or an anthropologist, or a palaeontologist, or a primatologist, though I’ve taken in many shreds of those subjects, all of which might help to illuminate the mystery of patriarchy, the default state of the vast majority of human cultures throughout the period of H sapiens existence – as far as we’re able to tell. Of course, we’ve been around for some 300,000 years, according to the most recent findings, but we don’t really know much about our socio-sexual relations beyond the last 10,000 years – or 20,000 at the outside. And there are so many mysteries – the beginning of human language, for example, which I imagine as originating in a complexifying amalgam of gesture and sound. And the beginnings of the notion of possession and property, which, in terms of male possession of females, can be seen in gorillas, lions (though the females do the hunting, and are no shrinking violets), chimps, baboons and, arguably, orangutans (which are largely solitary). Female dominant species include elephants and orcas (and of course bonobos), some of the smartest and most communally successful species on the planet.
How did H sapiens, and H neanderthalensis, organise themselves socio-sexually, say 50,000 years ago? I mention Neanderthals because I’m nearing the end of Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinarily rich and detailed book on the subject, which makes little or no mention, even speculatively, on gender roles. What I did find was a great deal of focus on lithics and tool-making, which we tend to associate with males, though I see no reason why females would not be engaged in this activity in earlier times.
A blog piece I’ve discovered (linked below) argues that the size difference between male and female humans has been diminishing over the millennia. This has certainly been the case in the WEIRD world over the past few decades, when every human and her dog has become overweight (he wrote while downing another chardonnay with his pizza). This piece also argues for different roles (but not necessarily in a hierarchical sense) for the sexes based on consistently different teeth wear at numerous Neanderthal sites over thousands of years across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
Travel forward to the historical period – the period starting with the development and dissemination of writing – and we encounter a god-besotted world. Some of the first inscriptions we find are the names of gods, and it’s also notable that these early gods – Anu (Sumerian), Ra (Egyptian), Marduk (Babylonian), Brahma (Hindustani) and Zeus (Greek), were male. There were of course female gods, and ‘households’ of gods, but the principal deity was male, an indication that patriarchy was well established throughout the literate world a few millennia ago. It was also a world full of warfare, violence and mind-boggling cruelty, both within and between ‘states’. If you require evidence, read the first hundred pages or so of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s massive work The World: a family history. It should silence the critics of Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis, but it probably won’t. And with the odd notable exception, the warfare and slaughter was carried out by males. It’s interesting to remind myself that while all the horrors of Shalmaneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Ying Zheng, Sulla, Caesar and countless other warlords were being perpetrated, bonobos were doing their merry thing south of the Congo River, far from that madding crowd. And just north of that river, chimps were doing their small share of squabbling and killing.
Getting back to religion, the European success of the Roman Empire, and its eventual ‘capture’ by Christian monotheism, marked the beginning of the WEIRD world, according to Joseph Henrich. As he points out, the Catholic Church, which over time created a five-tiered male hierarchy of popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, was essentially the Christian Church, or simply the Church, from the fourth century CE to the reformation of the 16th century. During that time, Henrich persuasively argues, the Church transformed the world over which it held sway in subtle but significant ways, often to enrich and further empower itself. The key to that transformation was the Church’s marriage and family program (MFP). To be clear, this wasn’t a program drawn up by a Church Committee some time in the fourth century. There was nothing pre-meditated about it, and the result was in no way predicted, but it arguably set the foundations for the WEIRD values espoused today.
One key to all this was to break down the generally inward-facing kinship relationships of pre-Christian Eurasia. Before the Church’s interventions, linguistic and ethnic groups generally behaved in decidedly unWEIRD ways, but ways that are still found in regions dotted around the globe. Henrich provides an open-ended list:
- People lived enmeshed in kin-based organisations within tribal groups or networks. Extended family households were part of larger kin-groups (clans, houses, lineages, etc), some of which were called sippen (Germanic) or septs (Celtic).
- Inheritance and postmarital residence had patrilineal biases; people often lived in extended patrilineal households, and wives often moved to live with their husbands’ kinfolk.
- Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory. Even when individual ownership existed, kinfolk often retained inheritance rights such that lands couldn’t be sold or otherwise transferred without the consent of relatives.
- Large kin-based organisations provided individuals with both their legal and their social identities. Disputes within kin-groups were adjudicated internally, according to custom. Corporate responsibility meant that intentionality sometimes played little role in assigning punishments or levying fines for disputes between kin-groups.
- Kin-based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security. These organisations cared for sick, injured, and poor members, as well as the elderly.
- Arranged marriages with relatives were customary, as were marriage payments like dowry or bride price (where the groom or his family pays for the bride).
- Polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. In many communities, men could pair with only one ‘primary’ wife, typically someone of roughly equal status, but could then add secondary wives, usually of lower social status
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, pp 162-3
Henrich then presents a table of Church decrees, beginning in the fourth century and becoming more extreme as it increased its power, outlawing as incest marriage even up to sixth cousins, as well as with in-laws (sororate and levirate marriage). Marriage with non-Christians was also proscribed, and the Church enforced its own role as mandatory for officiating at marriages, ‘Christenings’ and the like. In fact the term ‘in-law’ derives from Canon Law as it was used to ‘officially’ order human relationships. These increasingly strict laws could sometimes be bent or broken through the payment of ‘Indulgences’, but it’s clear that many Church leaders came to believe their own propaganda, which they would back up with whatever scriptural passages they could find.
The power of Church laws, which determined the very legitimacy of human lives, was brought home to me as an adolescent reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles, in which Tess Durbeyfield, a simple country girl of Wessex, is impregnated by Alex d’Urberville, an upper-class rake, and is refused permission to christen the dying child, born ‘out of wedlock’, so that she has to bury the boy herself, beyond church grounds – just the start of Tess’s ordeals. I remember feeling both shattered by Tess’s sufferings and contemptuous of the behaviour of Christians and the absurd concept of ‘illegitimacy’. By Hardy’s time, England had become decidedly anti-Catholic, but the Church had done its work in determining the very bona fides of human existence, work which has only been undone in recent times, thanks to pioneering humanists like Thomas Hardy.
It’s probably reasonable to assume that the Church’s aim in all this was to extend its power, and that the development of ‘love’ based marriage, or a union based on common interests, was an unintended consequence. Certainly the Church’s proscriptions released individuals from earlier kin-based responsibilities, and left them free to choose partners based on mutual attraction. It also widened individuals’ sense of allegiance from kinship groups to like-minded political, social, work-based and even sporting associations.
Another unintended consequence was the lessening of patriarchal control, via patrilineal kinship relations – somewhat ironic given the highly patriarchal nature of the Church. The choosing of partners on the basis of mutual interests smacked – shock, horror – of gender equality. This has led, ultimately, but really inevitably, to the choosing of partners of the same gender. And the reduced power of the Catholic Church – even amongst avowed Catholics, strangely enough, at least in moral issues – has led to a world of ‘cultural Catholics’ or ‘cafeteria Catholics’, who seem to be only in it for the pomp and circumstance, or a certain degree of camaraderie.
It seems weird that the WEIRD world, which is becoming weirder with its acceptance of or creation of a broadening range of sexual sub-types – agender, cisgender, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, gender nonconforming, and transgender – might owe its origins to the Church, but somehow it seems fitting to me. Meanwhile, priestly paedophilia seems to have been largely a consequence of that Church’s own bizarre and inhuman anti-sex restrictions on its trained messengers of the Holy Spirit. It has been weakened by the ensuing scandals – another small blow to patriarchy. Patriarchy didn’t of course originate with the Church, nor can its defeat, if that ever comes, be sheeted home to its capitalising edicts. The WEIRD world’s intelligentsia, and increasingly its leadership, has been freed from the narrow confines of religion and patriarchy into a more accurate understanding of humanity, its origins in the biosphere, and its capacities. But I admit to being impatient with the pace of change. If we don’t see a larger and more dominant role for the female of the species, and soon, the future looks grim.
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2020
The WEIRDest people in the world, Joseph Henrich, 2020
language origins: some reflections
smartmouth
Jacinta: So a number of readings and listenings lately have caused us to think about how the advent of language would have brought about something of a revolution in human society – or any other society, here or on any other planet out there.
Canto: Yes, we heard about orangutan kiss-squeaks on a New Scientist podcast the other day, and we’re currently reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinary book Kindred, a thoroughly comprehensive account of Neanderthal culture, which we’ve clearly learned so much more about in recent decades. She hasn’t really mentioned language as yet (we’re a little over halfway through), but the complexity and sophistication she describes really brings the subject to mind. And of course there are cetacean and bird communications, inter alia.
Jacinta: So how do we define a language?
Canto: Yeah, we need to define it in such a way that other creatures can’t have it, haha.
Jacinta: Obviously it evolved in a piece-meal way, hence the term proto-language. And since you mentioned orangutans, here’s a quote from a 2021 research paper on the subject:
Critically, bar humans, orangutans are the only known great ape to produce consonant-like and vowel-like calls combined into syllable-like combinations, therefore, presenting a privileged hominid model for this study.
And what was the study, you ask? Well, quoting from the abstract:
… we assessed information loss in proto-consonants and proto-vowels in human pre-linguistic ancestors as proxied by orangutan consonant-like and vowel-like calls that compose syllable-like combinations. We played back and re-recorded calls at increasing distances across a structurally complex habitat (i.e. adverse to sound transmission). Consonant-like and vowel-like calls degraded acoustically over distance, but no information loss was detected regarding three distinct classes of information (viz. individual ID, context and population ID). Our results refute prevailing mathematical predictions and herald a turning point in language evolution theory and heuristics.
Canto: So, big claim. So these were orangutan calls. I thought they were solitary creatures?
Jacinta: Well they can’t be too solitary, for ‘the world must be orangutan’d’, to paraphrase Shakespeare. And interestingly, orangutans are the most tree-dwelling of all the great apes (including us of course). And that means a ‘structurally complex habitat’, methinks.
Canto: So here’s an even more recent piece (December 2022) from ScienceDaily:
Orangutans’ tree-dwelling nature means they use their mouth, lips and jaw as a ‘fifth hand’, unlike ground-dwelling African apes. Their sophisticated use of their mouths, mean orangutans communicate using a rich variety of consonant sounds.
Which is interesting in that they’re less close to us genetically than the African apes. So this research, from the University of Warwick, focused a lot on consonants, which until recently seemed quintessentially human productions. Researchers often wondered where these consonants came from, since African apes didn’t produce them. Their ‘discovery’ in orangutans has led, among other things, to a rethinking re our arboreal past.
Jacinta: Yes, there’s been a lot of focus recently on vowel and consonant formation, and the physicality of those formations, the muscles and structures involved.
Canto: Well in this article, Dr Adriano Lameira, a professor of psychology who has long been interested in language production, and has been studying orangutans in their natural habitat for 18 years, notes that their arboreal lifestyle and feeding habits have enabled, or in a sense forced, them to use their mouths as an extra appendage or tool. Here’s how Lameira puts it:
It is because of this limitation, that orangutans have developed greater control over their lips, tongue and jaw and can use their mouths as a fifth hand to hold food and manoeuvre tools. Orangutans are known for peeling an orange with just their lips so their fine oral neuro-motoric control is far superior to that of African apes, and it has evolved to be an integral part of their biology.
Jacinta: So they might be able to make more consonantal sounds, which adds to their repertoire perhaps, but that’s a long way from what humans do, putting strings of sounds together to make meaningful ‘statements’. You know, grammar and syntax.
Canto: Yes, well, that’s definitely going to the next level. But getting back to those kiss-squeaks I mentioned at the top, before we get onto grammar, we need to understand how we can make all the sounds, consonantal and vowel, fricative, plosive and all the rest. I’ve found the research mentioned in the New Scientist podcast just the other day, which compares orangutan sounds to human beatboxing (which up till now I’ve known nothing about, but I’m learning). Dr Lameira was also involved in this research, So I’ll quote him:
“It could be possible that early human language resembled something that sounded more like beatboxing, before evolution organised language into the consonant — vowel structure that we know today.”
Jacinta: Well that’s not uninteresting, and no doubt might fit somewhere in the origins of human speech, the details of which still remain very much a mystery. Presumably it will involve the development of distinctive sounds and the instruments and the musculature required to make them, as well as genes and neural networks – though that might be a technical term. Neural developments, anyway. Apparently there are ‘continuity theories’, favouring gradual development, probably over millennia, and ‘discontinuity theories’, arguing for a sudden breakthrough – but I would certainly favour the former, though it might have been primarily gestural, or a complex mixture of gestural and oral.
Canto: You’d think that gestural, or sign language – which we know can be extremely complex – would develop after bipedalism, or with it, and both would’ve evolved gradually. And, as we’re learning with Neanderthals, the development of a more intensive sociality could’ve really jump-started language processes.
Jacinta: Or maybe H sapiens had something going in the brain, or the genes, language-wise or proto-language-wise, that gave them the competitive advantage over Neanderthals? And yet, reading Kindred, I find it hard to believe that Neanderthals didn’t have any language. Anyway, let’s reflect on JuLingo’s video on language origins, in which she argues that language was never a goal in itself (how could it be), but a product of the complexity that went along with bipedalism, hunting, tool-making and greater hominin sociality. That’s to say, social evolution, reflected in neural and genetic changes, as well as subtle anatomical changes for the wider production and reception of sounds, perhaps starting with H ergaster around 1.5 million years ago. H heidelbergensis, with a larger brain size and wider spinal canal, may have taken language or proto-language to another level, and may have been ancestral to H sapiens. It’s all very speculative.
Canto: Yes, I don’t think I’m much qualified to add anything more – and I’m not sure if anyone is, but of course there’s no harm in speculating. Sykes speculates thusly about Neanderthals in Kindred:
Complementary evidence for language comes from the fact Neanderthals seem to have had similar rates of handedness. Tooth micro-scratches and patterns of knapping on cores [for stone tool-making] confirm they were dominated by right-handers, and this is also reflected in asymmetry in one side of their brains. But when we zoom in further to genetics, things get increasingly thorny. The FOXP2 gene is a case in point: humans have a mutation that changed just two amino acids from those in other animals, whether chimps or platypi. FOXP2 is definitely involved with cognitive and physical language capacity in living people, but it isn’t ‘the’ language gene; no such thing exists. Rather it affects multiple aspects of brain and central nervous system development. When it was confirmed that Neanderthals had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it was taken as strong evidence that they could ‘talk’. But another, subtler alteration has been found that happened after we’d split from them. It’s tiny – a single protein – and though the precise anatomical effect isn’t yet known, experiments show it does change how FOXP2 itself works. Small changes like this are fascinating, but we’re far from mapping out any kind of genetic recipe where adding this, or taking away that, would make Neanderthals loquacious or laconic.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, pp 248-9
Jacinta: Yes, these are good points, and could equally apply to early H sapiens, as well as H ergaster and H heidelbergensis. Again we tend to think of language as the full-blown form we learn about in ‘grammar schools’, but most languages today have no written form, and so no fixed grammar – am I right?
Canto: Not sure, but I understand what you’re getting at. The first English grammar book, more like a pamphlet, was published in 1586, when Shakespeare was just starting out as a playwright, and, as with ‘correct’ spelling and pronunciation, would’ve been politically motivated – the King’s English and all.
Jacinta: Queen at that time. Onya Elizabeth. But the grammar, and the rest, would’ve been fixed enough for high and low to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays. And to make conversation pretty fluid.
Canto: Yes, and was handed down pretty naturally, I mean without formal schooling. It’s kids who create new languages – pidgins that become creoles – when necessity necessitates. I read that in a Scientific American magazine back in the early eighties.
Jacinta: Yes, so they had the genes and the neural equipment to form new hybrid languages, more or less unconsciously. So much still to learn about all this…
Canto: And so little time….
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8478518/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221220112426.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230627123117.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-heidelbergensis
Vive les bonobos: what is woke?
wokewash?
So the term ‘woke’, which appears to come from the USA, or has gained much of its popularity there, is a bit of a mystery to me. It seems to be a four-letter version of ‘politically correct’ or PC, if perhaps more extreme. I know that the term PC was much in vogue in the 90s, and I recall reading Pinker, in The better angels of our nature, making the reasonable enough claim that political correctness is the small price we may have to pay for living in a civil society. So, taking that on board, I’m prepared to be accepting of wokeness…
So here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
So given this explanation, and its association with the political left in the USA, it’s no surprise, given the extreme ideological divides there, and to some degree here in Australia, that it has become the right’s new dirtiest word. Criticism of the term has also come from the other side, as some in the African-American community have complained of cultural appropriation. I do find such complaints, which occur not only in regard to language, but also dress, music, cuisine etc, a bit tedious myself. Language, music, food habits and so on tend to spread, adapt and change. They don’t have borders, thankfully.
Wikipedia presents a rich, and quite moving (to me at least) account of the term’s proud history, featuring Leadbelly, the race horrors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its wider usage in recent times. It seems to me that this widening usage, and the slangy tone of the word, helps to unite people in being alert to every kind of oppression everywhere, in terms of race, class, gender and lifestyle. A kind of monitory democracy (see previous post) emanating from the underclass, for the most part. And its allies, sometimes mocked, or self-mocked, as ‘social justice warriors’. The moderately conservative socio-political commentator David Brooks wrote that “to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures”.
So I need to adjust my understanding. it’s not so much about ‘political correctness’, or ‘ideological soundness’, an older term. It’s not so much about watching our own language and ideology and eliminating its elements of prejudice, dismissiveness and mockery. Or about the elite being aware of their privileged status and trying to be more inclusive and ‘generous’. It’s a term born of and owned by the underclass and spreading out to its sympathisers and fellow-travellers.
It’s also a more divisive term than ‘political correctness’, mocked more or less gently by the likes of John Howard in the 90s. That’s because politics itself has become more divisive, not to say toxic, in the USA, the birthplace of the ‘woke’ meme. To the point that legislation is invoked in conservative states to prevent the woke critiques of elitist institutions and practices from gaining traction within the education system and society in general.
One important element of the woke mission, to me, is its critique of ‘American exceptionalism’, about which I’ve written from time to time. The complaint list bears some comparison to the Australian situation, but there are obvious differences. Here are its main issues in regard to race:
a belief that the United States has never been a true democracy; that people of color suffer from systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans experience white privilege; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups, for instance in certain professions or industries, are automatic evidence of discrimination; that U.S. law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of color and so should be defunded, disbanded, or heavily reformed…
In Australia, of course, the ‘people of colour’ are also the original inhabitants, with up to 60,000 years’ knowledge of how to survive and thrive on one of the world’s most inhospitable continents. For many decades before the 1960s there was an active governmental policy of ‘soothing the dying pillow’, a concept still seriously advocated by the likes of Shiva Naipaul on visiting the country in the 1980s, but by then attitudes were changing, and more and more articulate indigenous voices were being heard. Currently, an Aboriginal voice to Federal and State Parliaments through the Australian Constitution is being mooted, and a referendum on the matter will be held later this year. It is more than likely to succeed, which will further enhance the status of our indigenous people. As the Indigenous Desert Alliance puts it:
The Voice will enable Indigenous communities to have a direct line of communication with Government, allowing us to offer practical solutions to the unique challenges we face. This is vital for the voices of Indigenous people living in Australia’s desert regions who represent less than one percent of the Australian population but are looking after one third of the Australian land mass.
In the USA, where woke has gone to die, if the alt-right (and not just them) have their way, the First Nations people have also had a rough time of it from the European colonists of the past few hundred years. The warfare, slaughter and dispossession started early, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. I recall as a young boy reading a history of ‘the wild west’ I received as a Christmas present, and shedding tears at the carnage and betrayal these people experienced over many decades. I was still ignorant at that time about the treatment of Australia’s indigenous peoples.
Needless to say, then, I’m not impressed with the way many people have apparently declared war on ‘woke’ for political purposes. Staying with the USA, a nation that incarcerates more of its own people, per capita, than any other democratic nation, and by a long way, a nation that has the most absurdly lax gun laws in the world, a minimum wage that is less than half that of Australia’s, and considerably greater wealth inequality, as well as a political system screaming out for reform, as I’ve pointed out in many previous posts – that the USA’s conservatives feel that fighting ‘wokism’ is the ‘real issue’ to focus on, is one of many indications of that nation’s apparently permanent ill-health. That’s to say, in the USA there’s plenty to be woke about, but the state of wokeness is probably a sign of good health everywhere. Reading about the history and development of the term, and of the call to Stay Woke, it strikes me as a proud and moving call to recognise injustice and structural inequality, especially in those who suffer from it. So why the negative reaction?
One of the claims of conservatives is that much wokism is mere ‘performative activism’, presumably insincere and self-serving, unless practiced by true sufferers. This would suggest that only victims have the right, or the moral authority, to complain, and not their associates. It’s essentially an ad feminam/hominem argument, and so fails, as it ignores the injustice an sich. Another more general criticism is that of self-righteousness or holier-than-thouism. Again this tends to distract from taking woke criticisms seriously, when in fact structural inequality is everywhere, though the structures may change over time from, say, landed aristocracies and their semi-enslaved tenants, to scions of business heavyweights in their hilltop gated communities and the great unwashed down below.
The USA’s anti-woke movement, which unsurprisingly holds sway among the wealthy and established elites, is seeking to take legislative action against such developments as ‘critical race theory’, which presumably seeks to enlighten young students on the slave trade and other injustices, in the way that my ‘Wild West’ book enlightened me about the dispossession of native Americans and the attempted suppression of their culture. Their idea, in keeping with US jingoism, is that everything has turned out for the better in the best nation ever to have existed in the multiverse.
However, having said that, I do bristle against some of the more extreme examples of wokeness. I’ve written previously about the obsession with the ‘horrors’ of blackface – a person darkening/blackening their skin to impersonate someone, perhaps a hero of theirs, with different levels of melanin and tyrosinase (see below). I’ve also been taken to task by a very woke-to-woke teenager for using the word ‘nigger’ in a second order way, and many years ago I was told that, as a male, I couldn’t be a feminist. Perhaps some females still think that way. To me, these are minor aberrations that I refuse to take seriously. More disturbing, of course, is the hypocrisy of various capitalist enterprises using woke ‘virtue signalling’ while continuing with exploitative practices to maximise shareholder profits. What needs to be highlighted in criticising these enterprises is their practises rather than their signalling.
Unfortunately, anti-wokeism seems to be eclipsing wokeism in the popularity stakes at present. We need to recognise that issues around political correctness are far less important than issues of real disadvantage, exploitation and ethnic discrimination. That makes woke a favourite four-letter word for me, going into the future.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
https://bonobohumanity.blog/category/us-exceptionalism/
https://www.bridgew.edu/stories/2023/united-states-treatment-native-americans
some thoughts on blackface, racism and (maybe) cultural appropriation
vive les bonobos – monitory democracy
I’ve been reading John Keane’s very lively and up-to-date The shortest history of democracy with great pleasure, and especially his final chapter, ‘Monitory Democracy’, which has really spurred my thinking on contemporary politics, and ‘how we are to live’, from a personal as well as a more ‘rise above yourself and grasp the world’ perspective.
First, the personal. I’ve been more or less obsessively anti-authoritarian since my youth. I recall even in primary school staring out the window as the teacher droned on, watching a tiny bird flapping its wings in a blur just above a hibiscus bush, and wondering what law of nature forced me to be cooped up there among strangers, learning stuff which I could just as well learn at home, when the fancy took me. Some of the first of my anti-authoritarian thoughts. I was nevertheless a more or less ‘straight A student’ through primary and the first year or so of high school, and then things went downhill fast, as relations with my authoritarian mother, the head of our household, became extremely frosty, and I became passively resistant to my teachers, who seemed to me either brutes or bores, and sometimes both. My greatest loathing was reserved for the headmaster, nicknamed Batler – a combination of Batman and Hitler – due to to his predilection for haunting the corridors in a flowing black academic gown, hoping to pounce on miscreant victims. He caned me once for not doing my homework. It took another 20 years for caning to be banned in schools, but I could’ve told authorities long before that ‘enlightened’ decision that such beatings had zero correctional effects, certainly in my case.
Talking about my case, everyone was on it, parents and teachers, while I derived a strange naughty pleasure in wagging school and reading my brother’s academic textbooks in the green fields close to our house. It was a house full of books, my saving grace, with a library just down the road. I neglected school-work more or less completely, which exacerbated relations at home. My final day at school was quite dramatic. I was lounging in a corridor study area with a friend when Batler descended upon us, his wings like a shield of steel. He started questioning me on my activities, but I didn’t say much in response, and the fact that I was chewing gum at the time seemed to peeve him somewhat, as he decided in his wisdom to try another corrective, slapping my face with full force, and sending my gum across the corridor space. He then ordered me to see him after school for further punitive measures. This was good, as it allowed my last act at that school to be one of disobedience.
So I left school at fifteen, with a chip on my shoulder which somehow only strengthened my love of literature and knowledge. And it also intensified, to an almost pathological degree, my hatred of authoritarianism of all kinds. Ironically, my mother, who, I knew, felt that my father’s relative weakness vis-a-vis herself had rubbed off on me – ‘you’re just like your father’ was her favourite insult – started putting in my way material about the great careers that could be had in the military. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
The point of all these unreliable memories is that I tend to look at the world of politics not so much as the battle between left and right, or socialism and capitalism, but between authoritarianism (often but not always associated with the political right) and its opposite, however defined. Which brings me back to monitory democracy. And feminism. And bonobos.
Keane’s book, as mentioned, was a sparkling and inspiring read, which reminded me of Jess Scully’s Glimpses of Utopia, another road map for the future (though of course more utopian). The only slight disappointment was that feminism barely rated a mention. Of course it hardly needed to be said that the forces that disrupted or militated against electoral democracy in Germany, Italy, Japan, China and South America in the first half of the 20th century were overwhelmingly male, but I think more needs to be said about women as victims of the past and makers of the future.
The term ‘monitory democracy’ was new to me, but the idea is plain enough. Electoral democracy is insufficient protection for ‘the people’, it needs to be monitored and scrutinised – and not just government in the narrow sense, but all the institutions and systems that make for an open and civil society – financial systems, the law, the business community, the police, health and welfare organisations, the military, the lot. We need to guard against control of any of those institutions by a walled-in, self-selected and mostly male ‘elite’. And beware of terms like ‘unelected swill’ – there are plenty of individuals who, like myself, have no inclination to take on the responsibilities of government, but are nonetheless deeply concerned about how others use or abuse the power accorded them. Women, in particular, know what it’s like to find themselves in a toxic work environment, and – like sniffer dogs – would be quicker than most to detect its source.
There are plenty of sectors I know of that are insufficiently monitored, to the detriment of the general public. I myself tried to make a complaint about the police over a very serious matter, but got absolutely nowhere, and was told by a prominent lawyer that their internal complaints system was a joke, and the external Office for Public Integrity not much better. Recently there was a Royal Commission into the Australian banking system, which found plenty of wrong-doing, costing more than $100 million to customers, but apart from a couple of resignations at the head of NAB, no consequences ensued. Of course this was nothing compared to the subprime lending and other dodgy practices that led to the 2007-8 worldwide recession. The lack of accountability for that disaster seems almost as shocking as the disaster itself. Only one banker, an executive of Credit Suisse, experienced jail time. Currently, a Royal Commission into the former Liberal government’s disastrous Robodebt scheme is underway. We can only wait and see, but often the wait is far too long – justice delayed is justice denied.
Monitoring organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the IPCC, GlobalSecurity.org and a variety of fair trade organisations and truth and reconciliation-style commissions have cropped up in recent decades, as well as organisations promoting the more promising half of the world’s human population, such as AWID (The Association for Women’s Rights in Development), ActionAid, the Alliance for Feminist Movements, among others, taking issues beyond the somewhat tired left-right ideological divides, and focussing more on fairness and human rights.
In some ways these non-aligned watchdog and promotional organisations have crept up on us, but they’re evidence of our recognition of the complexity of national and international issues of poverty, identity, freedom and rights. And of the global nature of the problems we face – climate change, habitat loss, over-population, cultural differences, the continued threat and reality of warfare, to name a few.
Many of these watchdog organisations are anathema to states, whether democratic or authoritarian. Here in Australia the UNHCR and other organisations have castigated us for our treatment of ‘boat people’ desperate for a new life in a safe place. Successive governments have tended to blow off these criticisms with unseemly arrogance. The United States and many other powerful nations have high-handedly refused to be signatories to the International Criminal Court, though (or because) they’re often the greatest abusers of International law. The US is also bellicose about any other nations joining the ‘nuclear club’, while ceaselessly adding to and rendering more deadly its own nuclear arsenal. The USA’s Pentagon has never passed an audit in its history, but this is symptomatic of highly hierarchical and authoritarian organisations, such as the police and the military, worldwide. They’re also the most male-dominated of course.
In the bonobo world the females are, if only slightly, the smaller sex, but they prove beautifully that size isn’t everything. The size difference between male and female bonobos appears to be reducing, due presumably to social evolution, just as in humans, male testosterone levels are dropping. I see that as a good sign, if it’s not too much of a health hazard (the findings I read about came from one of the Scandinavian countries – I doubt if the same thing is happening in Sudan). Female empowerment has come a little way rather than a long way, but as with monitory democracy, it’s fast given the long timeline of F sapiens. Of course individual timelines – and I’m thinking entirely of myself here – are minuscule in comparison, and time is running out for me. I’m generally an optimist, though sometimes a disappointed one, and I’m optimistic about the human future in spite of all the fuck-ups, the fuckwits, the setbacks and the delusions of grandeur that will inevitably clutter our journey into that unknowable place. Which brings me to another exhilarating book, Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene…
References
John Keane, The shortest history of democracy, 2022
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia, 2020
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
inspired by writers’ week, sort of – the internet, violence, testosterone and our future
Hmmm – needs further investigation. Vive les bonobos!
I spent some time at the Adelaide Writers’ Week tents yesterday, and heard a couple of remarks from speakers that exercised me in a negative way, so I thought I might air my grievances and expand on my thinking here. One was a quote taken, I think, from the historian and ‘public intellectual’ Bernard Lewis, on the influence of the internet on modern culture, and the other was a dismissal of the ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis of Steven Pinker.
I know Lewis only as a name, never having read any of his work, and I note that he died in 2018, just a few days shy of his 102nd birthday, so I can’t imagine him being an early adopter of the internet. I put his ‘public intellectual’ status in quotes largely out of jealousy, as I think I yearn to be a public intellectual myself, though I’m not sure. Anyway, from the little I heard of the quote, selected and spoken by Waleed Aly, Lewis was considering the double-edged sword of the internet in something like the manner of Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Massage, only rather more negatively. I do recall dipping into McLuhan’s work decades ago, and finding it a bit over-hyped, and hyper. Anyway that’s enough of McLuhan. The concern being expressed about the internet was really mostly about social media and the ideological balkanisation it appears to foster. There’s some truth to this of course, which is why, without really thinking it through, I’ve been avoiding social media outlets more and more. Facebook lies dormant on my devices, and Twitter has come and gone.
But that is a minor part of the internet for me. Its advantages far outweigh the distractions of clickbait sites, and I personally consider it the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge at least since the invention of writing – and far more consequential than Gutenberg’s invention. For example, just in the past few months, without stepping outside my home, I’ve watched a lecture series from Yale University on the history of Russia, from the Kievan Rus to 1917 and the end of Tzardom; another lecture series – an Introduction to Neurology, from MIT, and a number of lengthy lectures from the Royal Institution, on palaeontology and on epigenetics, for example. I’ve subscribed to Brilliant.org and have completed 115 of their lessons on everyday science, and I’m boning up on the basics with Professor Dave’s Introduction to Mathematics series. Meanwhile, over the years I’ve observed Wikipedia growing in stature to become the first and best go-to site for learning about historical figures and events, as well as complex scientific subjects. And full scientific papers on just about every possible subject are becoming increasingly available online. I now have access to the greatest library in human history, which leaves me, at times, with a confused feeling – sometimes a dwarf, sometimes a titan. Bliss at this time it is to be alive, but to be young… I recall watching a video (online of course) about how a young African boy was able to build a wind turbine via online instructions, and so bring cheap electricity to his village. .. In short, the internet is an instrument – as is writing and the printing press. It can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, positive or negative. It’s up to us.
Second little irritant. I heard a brief segment of an onstage discussion between the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer and a writer unknown to me, Samantha Rose Hill, author of a study on Hannah Arendt, about whether they viewed the future positively or negatively. Singer described himself as essentially an optimist, and spoke of his ‘expanding circle’ thesis. He also referred to Pinker’s The better angels of our nature, a book with which he was in broad agreement. The female writer, in her turn, said that she was definitely not in agreement with Pinker, after which I petulantly switched off.
I read The better angels of our nature, probably not long after it was published in 2011, and Pinker’s follow-up book, Enlightenment now, in 2018 or 2019. Right now I can say that I can’t recall a single sentence from either book, which is also the case for the hundreds of other books that have been consumed by the gaping maw of my mind. I might also say that I’ve written more than 800 pieces on this blog, and I’d be hard put to remember a line or two from any of them. In fact I’m sometimes moved to read an old blog piece – somebody has to – and find it amazing that I once knew so much on a topic about which I now know nothing.
But I digress. I don’t have to dig up my copy of Better angels to confirm my agreement with Pinker’s thesis. He wasn’t putting forward an argument that we’d become less violent as a species. He didn’t need to, because it was so obviously true, as anyone who reads a lot of history – as I do – knows full well. The real key to Pinker’s book lies in its sub-title, Why violence has declined. It seems to me that nobody in their right mind – or, I mean, nobody with an informed mind – would argue that the human world, a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or, taking advantage of the knowledge provided to us from ancient DNA, 10,000 years ago, was more peaceful than it is today, on a per capita basis. The question is why.
Of course it’s impossible to keep track of the daily violent acts among a current global population of 8 billion, and to compare them to those of say, the year 1600, when the population has been estimated at about a half billion. And, yes, we’re now capable of, and have committed, acts of extreme, impersonal violence via nuclear weapons, but anybody who has read of the gruesome events of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Scottish slaughters of England’s Edward I (a recent read for me), the centuries-long witch-hunts of Europe, and many other brutal engagements, as well as the public hangings, burnings, decapitations and tortures that were commonplace worldwide in earlier centuries, would surely not want to be transported back in a time machine without a cloak of invisibility or the support of a very powerful overlord – supernatural by preference.
Pinker’s book seeks to answer his own question with data and the possible/probable causal linkages, while recognising the complexity of isolating and independently weighing causes and correlations (he returns to this theme in his latest book Rationality, especially in the chapter entitled ‘Correlation and Causation’), including the spread of democracy, the growth of globalism and internationalism, the developing concepts of human rights, feminism, international monitoring agencies, and improved, less dangerous technologies re industry, medicine and transport, to name a few. Deaths can be no less violent, that’s to say violating, for being slow and accidental, after all.
Note that I snuck ‘feminism’ in there. Unsurprisingly, that’s the factor that most engages me. In the WEIRD world, thanks largely to Simone de Beauvoir (ok, a bit of flagrant heroine-worship there), feminism has been on the rise for several decades. During the same period, in the same regions of the world, male testosterone levels have been dropping. I would rest my case there, but I hear Mr Pinker tsk-tsking in the background. Seriously, the rise of feminism is surely one of a multiplicity of factors leading to a situation that medical researchers describe as ‘alarming’ – I’m not sure why.
Of course, testosterone is an important hormone, especially for men. On this medical website, Dr Kevin Pantalone, an endocrinologist, points out that, for males, testosterone helps maintain and develop:
- Sex organs, genitalia and reproductive function.
- A sense of well-being.
- Muscle mass.
- Bone health.
- Red blood cell count.
So, questions arise. Why are testosterone levels dropping (pace feminism), and is the drop significant enough to seriously compromise WEIRD men’s health? Well, according to the same website, different figures are given for what counts as a low testosterone level – 250 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl), according to Dr Pantalone, and 300 ng/dl according to the American Urology Association. We’re not there yet, on average, but we’re inching closer, apparently.
So why the drop, apart from feminism? Some suggested factors include obesity (elevated BMI), reduced physical activity (however, endurance activities such as long-distance running and cycling have been shown to lower testosterone levels)., poor diet (but ‘several studies indicate that low-fat diets may lead to slightly lower testosterone levels‘), chronic and excessive alcohol consumption, lack of sleep (e.g. sleep apnea), and environmental toxins such as EDC (endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which sounds a bit vague).
That’s it. It all seems a bit thin to me – apart from the obesity bit. One factor they don’t mention, probably due to our overly polite society – or is it ‘wokeness?’ – is the serious drop in recent decades, and perhaps even centuries, of good old raping and pillaging. Nothing better for boosting ye olde testosterone, surely?
Seriously, would it be a terrible thing if male testosterone levels were reduced to those of females? And what about my darling bonobos?
So, human males typically have testosterone levels ranging from 265 to 923 ng/dl, while females range from 15 to 70 ng/dl. That’s a big big difference. Which raises the question – if females have such low testosterone levels, what about their bone health, muscle mass and sense of well-being? I suppose this is where we get into the finer details of endocrinology and evolution, but my uneducated guess would be that, over time, the endocrine systems of male and female humans have diverged somewhat, perhaps in response to different activities between the sexes. One way of getting more information about this – and this rather excites me, I have to say – is to look at the endocrine systems of largely female-dominated bonobos and compare them to those of chimpanzees. So that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post. I can’t wait.
References
Stephen Pinker, The better angels of our nature, 2011
Stephen Pinker,Enlightenment now, 2018
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33741447/