Posts Tagged ‘humanity’
the gender agenda, and other positives
It’s New Year resolution time, which I try not to pay much attention to, and yet… I’m thinking of/resolving to focus on the biggest issue that bugs me, rather than trying to expand my understanding every-which way (corals, dark matter, Milankovich cycles, the cryosphere…), and that’s our culture and politics, in the broadest sense, including our existence as primates, mammals, forms of life. Dominators of the biosphere.
So that’s why gender is important to me, because one gender, in the sexually reproducing world, nurtures and brings forth life from her own body, and so, it reasonably follows, has a greater regard for life than the other. Yet, reasonable though this observation might be, it often meets with resistance, sometimes mounting to hostility, from members of the other gender. In the case of Aristotle – and no doubt his idea was formed from the ancient Greek zeitgeist – it was the male’s seed that produced the next generation, the female being nothing more than the incubator.
I’m interested in exploring why humanity came to be, by and large, patriarchal, and how we can be less so – much much less so, because I’m deeply convinced that this is our best path to the future. A long and winding road, I suspect.
I’ve retitled this blog a few times, but it has been called ‘A bonobo humanity?’ for some time now. I’ve wondered occasionally about changing the title again, as people have looked quizzical, or chuckled, and even sneered. For those who know at least something about bonobos, the general impression I’ve felt has been – ‘yes, cute, but really what has this got to do with us?’
So yes, bonobos are hairy, more or less ugly (to us), forest-dwelling, sex-obsessed frugivores who will never express themselves in a complex language, never invent a complex device, never play a musical instrument or wonder where those twinkling lights in the night sky came from. They have nothing to teach us.
And yet, we study them, just as we study other primates, and mammals, and our own human history, and so on and so forth. To learn about, and to learn from. And in the process, we’ve discovered, as we have with so many species we’ve turned our attention to – complexity. Remember the term ‘bird-brain’? Those brains in those tiny heads that enable their owners to build complicated nests of all kinds, to communicate all sorts of tuneful messages to their kin, to use humans to crack nuts for them, to fashion tools from twigs to spear tasty morsels for themselves and their chicks?
Yes, we’re smart to have uncovered these smarts in other species, which has helped us to respect the cleverness and complexity of life itself, its amazing development from the earliest archaea or whatever. But the neurological developments that led to H sapiens, the massively dominant species on this planet, in destructive as well as productive terms, are of the greatest interest. How is it that this most complex species, which has divided its billions of specimens into hundreds of nations, can allow individuals like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Xinping (and many other repugnant characters) to wield power over millions of their obvious intellectual and pro-social superiors? Why is one gender, the more pro-social of the two, given so much less power than the other? I like to think that the situation is changing, but if this is so, it’s at such a heart-rendingly slow pace that it really is painful to bear.
Even so, I tend towards optimism. We’re programmed to survive, not just individually – no species survives individually – but by working out what’s best for us all. And I do mean all, and that’s an endless learning process.
What I’m doing here, in this first post for the new year, is trying to work out how to put my queer shoulder to the wheel. I’m being inspired by writers such as Frans de Waal, Cat Bohannon and Rutger Bregman, by positive texts such as Glimpses of Utopia by Jess Scully and The Future We Choose (as yet unread!) by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, and by the work of all those in the field, protecting wildlife, providing education, supporting effective solutions, promoting hope and thoughtfulness. But enough of this sludge, it’s 2025, let’s see what we can do!
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of utopia, 2020
Frans de Waal, Different, 2022
Rutger Bregman, Humankind:a hopeful history, 2020
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, The future we choose, 2020
we are family? bonobo care, monogamy or not, the magniloquence of humanity, etc
a single mother, benefits assured
So in this post I want to look at how monogamy is doing in the WEIRD world, inter alia. As Henrich and others point out, marriage became thoroughly regularised (and economically exploited) by the Church in the millennium or more during which it held sway in Western Europe. Its marriage and family programme (MFP) ‘legitimised’ children (at least among the upper classes, where legitimacy mattered), reduced kinship ties (which helped to weaken dynastic forces that might challenge the Church’s power) and, perhaps inadvertently, encouraged marital ties based on elective affinities or that fuzzily pleasant concept or sensation known as love.
So in the modern WEIRD world we may marry whomever we like as soon as achieving legal adulthood, and then repent at leisure and divorce without fault, or we can reproduce without marrying and receive much the same supports for our offspring as married couples do. And during the past few decades in particular, couplings and combinations, short-term or long-term, and regardless of gender, have been experiencing less censure and opposition. There is no sense, pace some ultra-conservative circles, that our society is falling apart due to these changes. Capital enterprises continue to flourish, per capita GDP continues to rise (as does the temperature), and the WEIRD world continues to work and party hard, while occasionally fretting about its collective future.
With the rise of WEIRD feminism, there can be excesses, both in the positive and negative direction, and combined with the religious hangover (‘your body is a temple’), even sexual dialogue – the first level of sexual intercourse – has become fraught. Even so, the situation is an improvement on that of previous generations, when coercive intercourse, date rape and such were part of a history that women have only recently been able to talk about. So the WEIRD situation re sexual power, politics, language and intercourse (in the general sense) is very much in flux, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
How that flux will affect the monogamy we currently still accept as the norm is hard to predict. The most common argument in its favour has long been about the raising of children. The conservative view that a child needs both a father and a mother isn’t ridiculous, in spite of the fact that many modern children have thrived on less (and sometimes more), but it seems to me that the most successful upbringing for a child would involve what we call ‘support networks’, a rather bloodless, bureaucratic term for a combo of loving and caring elders and peers. You might guess from this the bonoboesque direction in which I’m heading.
Given what I’ve learned about bonobos over the years, I’m hardly surprised that childcare by bonobo non-parents is a normal part of bonobo life. An online article, linked below, describing research from the University of Oregon, bears this out. Here are some quotes:
“After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies,” said Klaree Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. “They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior.”
“It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos,” White said. “It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive.”
Initially, Boose observed that all juvenile bonobos, ages 3-7, were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3. As they entered adolescence, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favour of other behaviours.
“Handling behaviour picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense,” Boose said. “They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They’d move across the enclosure, where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviours with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors.”
Boose also found a hormonal link to her observations. Elevated levels of oxytocin — associated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activities — were common in urine samples collected after infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, increased oxytocin may reflect how the body reinforces caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants.
Note that this is described as a very female thing. It isn’t clear from the article as to whether any adolescent carers of these infants were male, but I wishfully think they might have been. And I might draw from my own experience here. My mother gave birth to the last child of the family, extraordinarily enough, on my eighth birthday. This odd factoid had a seemingly profound maternal effect on me. I was fascinated by this baby, and more than happy to be his principal baby sitter, lullaby singer and rocker of the cradle. During the first year or so of his life, I doted on him, much to the relief and evident pleasure of my mother.
Whether or not bonobo males play much of a role in the raising of children, human males are doing a bit more of it in the WEIRD world, doubtless to the detriment of their testosterone levels. Here’s an interesting quote from ten years ago:
A record 8% of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over 1% in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data.
Of course the number of single mother households would be much higher and also rising. But it takes a village to raise a child – or, in the WEIRD world, a community, compleat with childcare services, kindergartens, Play School, Sesame Street and the like (the impact of disembodied social media on our culture – which we’re only just beginning to come to terms with – has been profound, and clearly not entirely beneficial). The ‘village’ that WEIRD children are currently exposed to seems in many ways to be a blooming, buzzing confusion, and yet they’re navigating it, for better or worse. The worry, at present, is that real physical contact is in danger of being replaced by gaming, texting and other forms of interaction that lack the throb and breath of that animal nature we seem at pains to deny. The term ‘remote learning’ is indicative, and of course there is more – online trading, virtual care services, artificial intelligence, the cloud, all of these developments seem to have swamped our reality in just a decade or so. In that sense, a bonobo humanity seems to be receding beyond the horizon.
And yet, it’s complicated. Bonobos are noted for sharing, and for closeness (to put it euphemistically). Humans are, I think, getting better at the sharing part, but not so much the closeness. The internet, for example, is a massive shared resource, with the potential to educate, entertain and enrich us beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations, without our ever having to rub our skin against another human for the best (or worst) part of a lifetime.
And speaking of skin, it’s something we’ve evolved to keep covered – for protection, for decoration, for privacy. Sometimes just for conformity. We’re the clothed ape, and few of us want to be thought of as less than that. All of this has more or less impelled us to develop a noli me tangere sensibility that has fuelled and been fuelled by religion – our bodies as temples must never be desecrated, and we alone can determine whether worship or desecration has occurred. And so, unlike bonobos with their close comforts, we’ve become more or less severe guardians of these decorated temples, proudly isolated, opened only to the most select of select of select few.
Perhaps this is all to the good? One of the first intellectuals I was exposed to as a youth was Sigmund Freud, with his concepts of polymorphous perversity and sublimation, and as a randy adolescent I took this to mean that we’re more filled with sexual thoughts and easily sexually stimulated in our youth, but as we mature our sexual impulses are harnessed and channelled into creative arty-sciencey endeavours. And was left to wonder whether I really wanted to grow up. Anyway, maybe we needed all this sublimation to uncover the secrets of the universe, to create marvels of engineering, wondrous art forms and financial empires (not to mention WMDs, mass slavery and the Cambodian and Congolese killing fields). What does love, or a bout of the touchy-feelies, have to do with it?
It’s a conundrum, and yet, I just can’t get those bonobo exemplars out of my mind…
References
https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-bonobos-finds-day-care-pays-babysitters