Posts Tagged ‘monogamy’
are monogamy and the nuclear family natural or conventional? Conundrums…
The human species is monogamous – isn’t it? Isn’t the bonding of a male and a female to produce a large or small brood the typical mode of human being? And yet our closest living relatives aren’t monogamous, and as to our more recent ancestors and their relatives – who knows?
A couple of years ago I read Joseph Henrich’s fascinating book The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous – a serious ethnographic work in spite of the title. So, ‘WEIRD’ stands for the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic regions of the world, so just think about whether your region fits the pattern. I have to admit, my region does, though the ‘particularly prosperous’ bit makes me feel like a bit of a failure.
But it’s the ‘psychologically peculiar’ stuff that most interests me. On page 156 of his book Henrich presents data from ‘the Ethnographic Atlas, an anthropological database of over 1200 societies (ethnolinguistic groups) that captures life prior to industrialisation.’ He doesn’t date ‘industrialisation’, but let’s say prior to the eighteenth century. He describes five kinship traits typical of WEIRD societies, and the degree to which these traits existed in earlier times.
- Bilateral descent – relatedness is traced (roughly) equally through both parents – 28%
- Little or no marriage to cousins or other relatives – 25%
- Monogamous marriage – people are permitted to have only one spouse at a time – 15%
- Nuclear families – domestic life is organised around married couples and their children – 8%
- Neolocal residence – newly married couples set up a separate household – 5%
It’s important to take these findings in, as we tend to consider current norms as more or less eternal. And it would be impossible for me to summarise Henrich’s analysis in his 500+ page book, but one factor that forcibly struck me was the impact of the Church (as the Catholic Church was known since its inception in the fourth century CE until the Reformation in the sixteenth century) in laying the foundations of Western European WEIRDness, and that of its colonies in the Americas and here in Australia. Here’s how Henrich puts it:
… between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intensive kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church – hereinafter the Western Church or just the Church. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs [aka friendships] rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations.
So, monogamous male-female relations and nuclear families were pushed by the Church quite relentlessly for centuries, and this has had a massive impact, which most people, including myself, have had little awareness of. Henrich and his team (I’m assuming he had a whole team working on this massive project) produced a summary of the changes that have occurred from the fourth century onwards, mostly at the behest of the Church. He calls it the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). I’m going to copy the whole thing out here, if only for my own sake, because it’s quite mind-bending, and some of the most fascinating historical material I’ve ever read: They are ‘prohibitions and declarations on marriage from the Church and secular rulers’, with the years given in bold:
305-6 – Synod of Elvira (Granada, Spain) decrees that any man who takes the sister of his dead wife as his new wife (sororate marriage) should abstain from Communion for five years. Those marrying their daughters-in-law should abstain from Communion until near death.
315 – Synod of Neocaesarea (Turkey) forbids marrying the wife of one’s brother (levirate marriage) and possible sororate marriage.
325 – Council of Nicaea (Turkey) prohibits marrying the sister of one’s dead wife as well as Jews, pagans and heretics.
339 – The Roman Emperor Constantius prohibits uncle-niece marriages, in accordance with Christian sentiments, and imposes the death penalty on violators.
384/7 – The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius reaffirms prohibitions against sororate and levirate marriages and bans first cousin marriage. In 409, the Western emperor Honorius softens the law by allowing dispensations. It is not clear how long this persisted in the West. The dissolving Western Empire makes continued enforcement unlikely.
396 – The Eastern Roman Emperor Arcadius (a Christian) again prohibits first cousin marriage, but without the harsh penalties. In 400 or 404, however, he changes his mind, making cousin marriage legal in the Eastern Empire.
506 – Synod of Agde (France, Visigoth Kingdom) prohibits first and second cousin marriage, and marriage to a brother’s widow, wife’s sister, stepmother, uncle’s widow, uncle’s daughter, or any kinswoman. These are defined as incest.
517 – Synod of Epaone (France or Switzerland, Burgundian Kingdom) decrees that unions with first and second cousins are incestuous and henceforth forbidden, although existing unions are not dissolved. The synod also forbids marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law, and aunts by marriage. Many subsequent synods in the area of what would become the Carolingian Empire refer to this synod for incest regulations.
527/31 – Second synod of Toledo (Spain) prescribes excommunication for all engaged in incestuous marriages. The number of years of excommunication should equal the number of years of the marriage. This is affirmed by synods in 535, 692 and 743.
538 – First documented letter between a Frankish king and the pope is about incest (marriage to the wife of a deceased brother). The pope disapproves, but he leaves decisions about Penance to the bishops.
589 – Reccared I, the Visigothic King (Spain), decrees the dissolution of incestuous marriages, punishing offenders with exile, and the transfer of their property to their children.
596 – The Frankish King Childebert II decrees the death penalty for marriage to one’s stepmother but leaves the punishment of other incest violations to the bishops. If the convicted resists the Church’s punishment, his property will be seized and redistributed to his relatives (creating incentives to report violators).
627 – Synod of Clichy implements the same punishment and enforcement procedures as those decreed by King Childebert II in 596. A systematic collection of incest legislation is compiled around this time and becomes part of the Collectio vetus Gallica, the collection of canons from Gaul.
643 – Lombard laws of Rothari forbid marriage to one’s stepmother, stepdaughter and sister-in-law.
*692 – At the synod of Trullo (Turkey), the Eastern Church finally forbids marriage to one’s first cousins and corresponding affinal kin. This prohibits a father and a son marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters, and two brothers marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters.
721 – Roman Synod (Italy) prohibits marriage to one’s brother’s wife, niece, grandchild, stepmother, stepdaughter, cousin, godmother, and all kinfolk, including anyone ever married to any blood relative. In 726, Pope Gregory II specifies that for missionary purposes the prohibitions are up to first cousins, but for others the prohibitions extend to all known relatives. His successor, Gregory III, clarifies this prohibition such that marriages of third cousins are allowed but marriages to all affinal kin with the prohibited degree are not. These decisions are widely disseminated.
*741 – Under the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the prohibitions in the Eastern Church are increased to include marriage of second cousins and, slightly later, second cousins once removed. The penalty for cousin marriage becomes whipping.
743 – Roman synod under Pope Zacharias orders Christians to refrain from marrying cousins, nieces, and other kinfolk. Such incest is punishable by excommunication and, if necessary, anathema [cursed by God].
755 – The Synod of Verneuil (France), convened under the Frankish King Pepin, commands that marriages be performed publicly.
756 – Synod of Verbier (France) prohibits the marriage of third cousins and closer and decrees existing marriages between second cousins are to be ended. Those married to third cousins need only do Penance.
757 – Synod of Compiegne (France) rules that existing marriages of second cousins or closer must be nullified. The Frankish King, Pepin, threatens secular punishments for any who disagree.
796 – Synod of Friuli (Italy) directs attention to prenuptual investigations into potentially incestuous marriages and prohibits clandestine unions. The synod prescribes a waiting time before marriage during which neighbours and elders can examine whether a blood relationship exists that would prohibit marriage. The decree also stipulates that although infidelity by the wife is a legitimate reason for divorce, remarriage is impossible as long as both spouses live. Charlemagne puts his secular authority behind these rulings in 802.
802 – Charlemagne’s capitulary insists that nobody should attempt to marry until the bishops and priests, together with the elders, have investigated the blood relations of the prospective spouses.
874 – Synod of Douci (France) urges subjects to refrain from marrying third cousins. To strengthen the ruling, the synod makes the children of incestuous unions ineligible for succession to an estate.
909 – Synod of Trosle (France) clarifies and affirms the Synod of Douci, deeming that children born in an incestuous marriage are ineligible to inherit property or titles.
948 – Synod of Ingelheim (Germany) prohibits marriage with all kin as far back as memory goes.
1003 – At the Synod of Deidenhofen (Germany), Emperor Heinrich II (St Henry the Exuberant) substantially widens the incest ban to include sixth cousins. He may have done this to weaken his political rivals.
1023 – Synod of Seligenstadt (Germany) likewise forbids cousin marriage to sixth cousins. Bishop Burchard of Worms’s Decretum also extends the definition of incestuous marriages to include sixth cousins.
1059 – At the Synod of Rome, Pope Nicholas II forbids marriage to sixth cousins or as far back as relatives can be traced. His successor, Pope Alexander II, likewise decrees that marriages to sixth cousins or closer relatives are forbidden. The Kingdom of Dalmatia gets a temporary dispensation, forbidding marriages only out to fourth cousins.
1063 – Synod of Rome forbids marriages up to sixth cousins.
1072 – Synod of Rouen (France) forbids non-Christian marriages and decrees a priestly inquiry into all those about to wed.
1075 – Synod of London (England) forbids marriages up to sixth cousins, including affinal kin.
1101 – In Ireland, the Synod of Cashel introduces the incest prohibitions of the Catholic Church.
1102 – Synod of London nullifies existing marriages between sixth cousins (and closer) and decrees that third parties who knew of marriages between relatives are implicated in the crime of incest.
1123 – The First Lateran Council (Italy) condemns unions between blood relatives (without specifying the relatedness) and declares that those who contracted an incestuous marriage will be deprived of hereditary rights.
1140 – Decretum of Gratian: marriages of up to sixth cousins are forbidden.
*1166 – Synod of Constantinople (Turkey) reinforces the earlier Eastern Church’s prohibitions on cousin marriages (second cousins once removed and closer), and tightens enforcement.
1176 – The Bishop of Paris, Odo, helps introduce ‘the bans of marriage’ – that is, the public notice of impending marriages in front of the congregation.
1200 – Synod of London requires publication of the ‘bans of marriage’, and decrees that marriages be conducted publicly. Kin marriages are forbidden, though the degree of kinship is not specified.
1215 – Fourth Lateran Council (Italy) reduces marriage prohibitions to third-degree cousins and all closer blood relatives and affines. All prior rulings are also formalised and integrated into a constitution of canons. This brings prenuptual investigations and marriage bans into a formal legislative and legal framework.
1917 – Pope Benedict XV loosens restrictions further, prohibiting only marriage to second cousins and all closer blood and affinal relatives.
1983 – Pope John Paul II further loosens incest restrictions, allowing second cousins and more distant relatives to marry.
All this is presented in just under four pages of Henrich’s book, and in the book’s Appendix a more expansive 6.5 page version is given. Of course it can never be known how strictly these provisions and restrictions were adhered to, but their very existence, and the many Synods devoted to them, testify to the ambition and power of the Church in Europe for over a thousand years. Its influence impacts upon our attitude to love, marriage and sexual relationships even today. Thankfully, bonobos were spared, obviously due to their complete non-existence in the Christian mind throughout this era. But for European humans these restrictions became more stringent, and more enforceable, as the power of the Church grew. It’s worth noting that the term ‘in-law’ comes from Church canon law. Your brother-in-law is like your brother – treat him nicely, but definitely no hanky-panky.
So, were the restrictions effectively policed? Actually, the Church had something of a business going in granting dispensations – for a price. It goes along with their granting of ‘indulgences’ of course. In the early days – the days of tribalism – enforcement must have been difficult, but over time the uniformity of religious belief strengthened the Church’s power. Henrich presents this fascinating case:
… though popes and bishops strategically picked their battles, these policies were sometimes imposed on kings, nobles and other aristocrats. In the 11th century, for example, when the Duke of Normandy married a distant cousin from Flanders, the pope promptly excommunicated them both. To get their excommunications lifted, or risk anathema, each constructed a beautiful abbey for the Church. The pope’s power is impressive here, since this duke was no delicate flower; he would later become William the Conqueror.
So, this was the Church’s Marriage and Family Programme (MFP) and it impacted heavily on kin terminology throughout Europe, an impact that slowly radiated outward from the Church’s main power bases (northern Scotland – where I was born – being one of the last cards to fall).
It’s worth reflecting on how accidental all this was. Had the Emperor Constantine not been converted to Christianity by his Greek mother, Helena (or so the story goes), or had the Emperor Julian, who was quite the intellectual, not been murdered while in the process of ditching the new religion and re-establishing the old gods only a generation or so after Constantine, the whole of European society, the whole of the current WEIRD world, might have turned out differently. Imagine no Catholic Church, no Dark Ages, and an intellectual flowering almost a thousand years before our 15th century ‘renaissance’. The Romans were no slouches in the field of scientific enquiry after all, though there had certainly been a decline since the days of Epicurus and Lucretius.
So the big unanswerable question here is just how European society would have been structured, on the family and kinship level, and in countless other ways, had Christianity not supervened in such a super-dramatic way. Only the Shadow knows…
And, frankly, I haven’t even begun to unravel the history of monogamy itself – why one person would couple with another to raise children. Our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, don’t raise children that way – yet they do raise children, quite successfully. Something to explore in future posts.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Random House 2003 [first published 1776-1789]
tracing the history of patriarchy…
before pants were invented…
I’ve been wondering what to write next, whether I should limit myself to gender and feminist issues or to go wherever my very flighty mind takes me – to neutrinos, say, or dark matter and dark energy, all of which fascinates me but which I feel I should leave to experts, but what am I expert in? – this blog used to be called ‘An autodidact meets a dilettante’, and I wrote it in dialogue form, to satisfy my masculine and feminine personae, but then I decided, sort of, to focus more on feminism and the possibility of female supremacy, but I’ve never been able to keep to the script. And so…
Yesterday I was all set to have a go at particle physics, but I was at a friend’s house and she got me watching a video from a regular vodcaster (I think that’s the term), whose videos go under the title ‘Breaking Down Patriarchy’. Of course she knew that I’d be interested, and while watching I thought to myself, yes, I should stick to this topic – because it’s kind of endless and inexhaustible.
The presenter is a United Stater (not her fault) named Amy McPhie Allebest, and although it seems she is a Mormon, or was at least brought up as such and still retains her Christianity if not that particular take on Christianity, she presents the case against patriarchy in a highly intelligent, reasoned and humane way. In fact her calm approach sets a fine example for a ‘bonafide’ humanist like me (I was a member of the South Australian Humanists for years, and gave a number of talks to the group, including one on the rapid decline of Christianity in Australia), as I sometimes get a bit nasty – for example in recent pieces criticising an ‘evolutionary psychologist’ and his take on the evolution of human patriarchy and its supposed naturalness.
The argument goes, as one Breaking Down Patriarchy video points out, that the ancestral development of bipedalism altered the configuration of the lower limbs and pelvis, including the birth canal, so that offspring tended to be born at an earlier and more vulnerable stage of life, requiring more maternal care. And more paternal care? Of course, mothers did the breast-feeding, but child-minding and protecting could have been shared – as happens with bonobos. In fact bonobos aren’t monogamous at all, so it tends to be all in for the child-rearing. So again I raise the question – when, if ever, did we become ‘naturally’ monogamous?
Meanwhile, there was hunting, and gathering. It had long been thought that there was a fairly strict division of labour, on gender lines, but this is now being questioned, as well as the issue of which activity brought more nutrients to the group. On this question, a documentary, referenced below, provides striking data. Men and women in neolithic China, and in Malta at a similar period, were ‘of equal status’ – they ate the same foods, and, whether or not hunting was all-male and gathering was all-female (it’s unlikely), the usual claim that the hunting was more ‘important’, both in terms of the nutrients and of the status it provided, is now being debunked. It’s worth noting that my bonobo mates ate a mostly frugivorous diet, with absolutely no ill effects as far as I’m aware. Their ‘hunting’ was opportunistic – if some small animal or rodent happened by, it would be chased and seized, by either gender, and shared. Claims that hunting conferred greater status for men, as in the hunter-gatherers of Namibia, have been more or less debunked, unsurprisingly, considering that most of the food consumed wasn’t obtained through hunting.
This documentary, ‘Gender Revolution: The real role of ancient women’, also raises questions about ancient cave art, which often depicts tasty mammals. Early discoverers of these works ‘naturally’ assumed the artists were male, a typically 19th century view (for good measure the doco-makers cited Chaz Darwin’s typically Victorian view that men have evolved to be smarter than women). We can probably never be sure who created this art (examination of accompanying handprints doesn’t really answer the question, though I was fascinated by the fact that the female hand narrows toward the wrist more than the male hand – in my case, it’s true!), but it certainly isn’t safe to assume they were all men. Again, assumptions that neolithic and earlier hunters were men is based on a much later patriarchal society that kept women in domesticity and valued their ‘softness’ and physical weakness. It may be that we’ll never be certain about the status of women in the varied, scattered neolithic and bronze age societies. Bones from a bronze age site in China have revealed that the women’s diet was deficient in particular nutrients, suggesting separation and status imbalance, as well as an increase in sexual dimorphism. Bronze age sites in Europe have revealed a similar diet imbalance based on gender. The bronze age, dating from around 4,000 years ago was a period of much more elaborate burials, especially for males. Male corpses are always found at the centre of family burials, indicating their centrality and status in life.
Different climatic conditions seem to have affected different gender-based behaviour, tasks and diet. A period of climatic stabilisation marked the beginning of the Holocene, some 11,700 years ago, and the beginning of stable agriculture and animal husbandry. But this leads to struggles for the best agricultural land, the best herds, and so on. So, the story goes, the age of warfare begins, and to a large extent it still continues.
Another feature of this period of stabilisation as opposed to mobility was that women began to give birth more frequently, becoming, to a greater degree, ‘perpetual mothers’, increasingly domesticised. Reducing breast-feeding periods, thanks to the development of specialised meals such as porridges for children, led to increased post-natal fertility and more children – and more suffering and death for mothers. Common-marriage systems came into being, as fathers sought to maintain control of their children – essentially their property – into the next generation.
Patrilocality has also become a proven feature of bronze age societies. This prevented inbreeding, and is also a feature of bonobo and chimp societies. It’s been argued that this is another blow to female independence and status, as they have to establish themselves in a new group, presumably with more or less zero status to start with, and yet this still doesn’t prevent bonobo females from being dominant. I’ve watched a video which followed one of these young females as she nervously sought to be accepted by these bonobo strangers, but it didn’t really address the issue – presumably, once accepted by the females, she was able to contribute to their group domination of the males. The simple answer seems to be that sisterhood is powerful… and the males are just too egotistical to form similar brotherly bonds…?
It’s intriguing, and worth pursuing….
References
a wee piece on monogamy
So, back to the question of monogamy. Is Homo sapiens a monogamous species? If they are, how long have they been so? We know that neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous (it’s very rare in primates generally), and we know very little – almost nothing – of the social lives of those extinct species that fill in the gaps between ourselves and Pan paniscus. Nor do we know anything much about the social lives of our own species going back 50,000 years and more. A fairly standard view, it seems to me, is that the rise of agriculture and the stable settlements that were part of this change promoted monogamous ‘ownership’ just as it promoted land ownership. But, as Joseph Henrich argues in The weirdest people in the world, powerful or large-scale landowners could also become large-scale people-owners too, in terms of wives and slaves. Polygyny was an elitist cultural thing, even if it has faint links with our gorilla ancestors.
So it’s fair to say that monogamy is more a cultural than a natural phenomenon, and so subject to variation. We can see this cultural effect in terms of our obsession with lineage and inheritance, generally along male lines. A culturally created patriarchal monogamy, with various exceptions, increasingly in the modern WEIRD world.
The general acceptance of monogamous norms puts pressure on individuals, as well as affecting their worldview, as they may, often unconsciously, take on the concept of a ‘right partner’, especially for breeding purposes. This goes along with ‘hearth and home’, much like the nest-building of most avian species.
I’m trying not to write this from an anti-monogamy perspective – frankly I’m not sure where I stand on the topic. Laissez faire might be the best description. Nowadays, again in the WEIRD world, we’re more conscious about how we’ve come to arrange things – nuclear families, home-making, and their alternatives, single parents, kibbutzim, two mums, two dads, and so forth, and we can even question the hearth and home arrangements, given our knowledge of bonobos in particular, with their broader supportive communities. Could it be that earlier human communities, those of Homo erectus and their immediate ancestors, were also more communal, in terms of sexual activity and child-rearing? Less possessive and jealous? Will we ever know?
And is our greater consciousness about monogamy having the effect of making us less monogamous? Bucking the trend? Is this really the best way to raise children? Of course it’s still generally seen as the norm, and the best – single-parent homes are ‘broken monogamies’, half-families. But we’re constantly evolving, learning new ways, considering other species – bonobos again. Their kids are so well-adjusted (funny expression, that).
We’re stuck in our own time, and history can’t teach us the future. Keeping options open is surely a key to survival so let’s not condemn other ways, let’s keep on searching and admiring, not just the best in human efforts, glimpses of utopia, but in those of other species….
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0140175079900010
Joseph Henrich, The weirdest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
limerence and bonobos
You know I’ve never met anyone quite like she before
Temptation, New Order
How can I even try, I can never win…
You’ve got to hide your love away, The Beatles
I’m reading Alexis Wright’s dauntingly long book Praiseworthy for a book group, and I was stopped short by this passage:
… in the all-twisting, all-turning immersion of limerence, skyrocketing in an out-of-proportion infatuation that would never be consummated.
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, p25
Limerence? I had to look it up. As a lifetime writer and therefore amateur wordsmith, I’m always surprised and a little shocked, at my age, to be confronted by something new in the field. But the shock was even greater on learning the meaning:
Limerence is a state of intense romantic infatuation or obsession with someone else. People experiencing limerence may have intrusive thoughts, feel melancholic, or have tragic concerns for the person they are infatuated with. They may also constantly obsess about whether their feelings are reciprocated
This definition comes from a ‘generative AI’ website, which is pretty hilarious, but I digress. The word was coined by a psychologist, of course, and to me it has huge resonance, both personal and intellectual. In fact I once wrote a novel, Sextet, never published, in which I tried to make comic play of what I might now call ‘polymorphous limerence’, an infatuation with a number of women, each of which might be the ‘one true one’, or not. The central character is ‘bowled over’ by not just one but a number of impressive young women, and feels more or less unworthy of them all. Being tongue-tied and hapless before each of them, but having more faith in his writing than his speech, he decides to send hand-written letters to six potential paramours (a concept completely spoiled by the startlingly swift onset of the internet). Whittling the number down to a mere six is a major task in itself, but anyhow it all falls apart in a tragicomic way (I can’t even remember how it ended).
There’s no doubt though, that I was playing with a theme that has ever fascinated me, the powerful myth of ‘true love’ that’s at the heart of monogamy (well, apart from the arranged/forced marriage type). Which brings me to bonobos.
I’ve often speculated fruitlessly about human monogamy and its origins, considering that neither bonobos nor chimps practice it. Indeed monogamy is a strangely arbitrary ‘system’ of species-furtherance, practised by many bird species, eschewed by many others (though the most recent bird research reveals that their sex and breeding practices are every bit as complex and nefarious as ours). Amongst primates, about 30% of species are monogamous, up from between 3 and 5 percent in the whole mammalian world (10% according to other sites). It’s speculated that human monogamy began with H erectus about two million years ago, but who knows? There’s also a distinction between social and genetic monogamy – but all this is taking me far from the very human concept of limerence, and its apparent absence in our closest living relatives, who certainly seem to be full of fellow-feeling. It seems that concepts of possession, or possessiveness, are key here. Ownership and jealousy play their part, promoted by social expectations, as well as yin-yang perfect fits, and of course for those who are partnerless, loneliness, in a human world that is so much more internal than external compared to other primates (but then I’ve never been a bonobo – maybe next time?).
There’s not much in the way of isolation in bonobo communities. Everyone tends to rub shoulders, euphemistically speaking, with everyone else, so hiding your love away is hardly an option. Also, the plague-paradise of internal thought, so unique to humans among the primates, and perhaps among all living beings, and so much intertwined with language, the language of desire, hope, anxiety, despair, longing and – limerence – is what has brought about our transcendence as a species. Not only the negatives, if such they are, but the positives – the transformative ruminations of Newton, Einstein and Darwin, among so many others (some of them even female). Limerence might be an unfortunate by-product of all that busy neural thought-language activity – but hey, it has often produced great music, and for that humanity will ever be grateful. A limerence shared is a limerence halved, maybe!
References
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, 2022
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7416880/
Why some birds mate for life – and why some play the field (and the trees, ponds and rooftops)
More musings on bonobos, families and the riddle of humanity
ring-tailed lemurs are female dominant and beautiful – just saying
So, returning to bonobos and how they’ve managed to become female dominant, and how they might teach humans by example. In an article from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from just over a decade ago, it was explained in these terms, at least when it comes to conflict:
It is not female alliances that help females win conflicts. The context of the conflict does not seem to be relevant for its outcome either. Instead, the attractiveness of females plays an important role. If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
So that’s it, our next female aspirant to political leadership needs to be good-looking, with plenty of sexual swellings. Such swellings would need to be on display at political rallies (which, happily or sadly, don’t really exist in Australia).
But unfortunately, human society isn’t quite that simple – and nor is bonobo society, methinks, though the influence of sexual swellings among naked apes would surely be greater than among clothed ones. And we human males tend not to be attracted to females primarily because of signs of their fecundity, though it can be argued that physical attractiveness and being within a certain age bracket are common factors, with fecundity hiding slyly behind them.
It’s interesting to consider sexual differences between bonobos and humans. Bonobos are definitely not monogamous, and neither are their close cousins the chimps. We humans like to think we’re ‘naturally’ monogamous, but are we? Were Neanderthals? Australopithecines? And how does monogamy relate to male dominance, if at all? It’s worth noting that we’re by no means certain of how humans lived even in the recent past, in evolutionary terms – say, a mere 10,000 years ago. The term ‘hunter-gatherer’, which to many has suggested a clear delineation, with males as the hunters, has been very much in dispute in recent times (see references), and one might reasonably suspect that participation in either activity would depend on the food available in the region, just as is the case with bonobos, whose diet is mostly vegetarian with the addition of small game animals, easily hunted by either gender, and this has been cited as a contributing factor to bonobo female dominance.
In her book The Patriarchs, Angela Saini considers a number of historical examples, some clear-cut, others more murky, of female empowerment in the past. And much of this has to do with class and heritage:
The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. There have been queens, empresses, female pharaohs, and powerful women warriors for as long as humans have kept records. In the last two centuries, women have reigned as monarchs over Britain for longer than men have. Women have kept slaves and servants, and still do. There are cultures that prioritise mothers, in which children aren’t even seen to belong to the same households as their fathers.
However, there is no female equivalent to the sexual enslavement, or concubinage, practised in the past by alpha males in a number of human societies. This is highlighted in Joseph Henrich’s landmark work, The Weirdest People in the World, especially in chapter 8, ‘ WEIRD monogamy’, which begins with a quote from a 16th century Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, describing Aztec society:
For three or four years the Sacrament of Matrimony was not administered, except to those who were educated in the house of God. All other Indians lived with as many women as they cared to have. Some had 200 women and others less, each one as many as suited him. Since the lords and chiefs stole all the women for themselves, an ordinary Indian could scarcely find a woman when he wished to marry. The Franciscans sought to uproot this evil; but they had no way of doing so because the lords had most of the women and refused to give them up. Neither petitions nor threats nor arguments, nor any other means which the Friars resorted to were sufficient to induce the Indians to relinquish their women, and, after doing so, enter marriage with only one, as the law of the church demands… This state of affairs continued until, after 5 or 6 years, it pleased the Lord that some Indians of their own accord began to abandon polygamy and content themselves with only one woman, marrying her as the church required… The Friars did not find it easy to have the Indians renounce polygamy. This was very hard to achieve because it was hard for the Indians to quit the ancient carnal custom that so greatly flattered sensuality.
It’s interesting to note here the assumption that monogamy is a less ‘sensual’ or ‘carnal’ practice than polygamy. Bonobos are generally regarded as sensual, even sex-obsessed, but their relations can’t be easily described in a ‘mono’ or ‘poly’ sort of way, because there’s no clear sense of ‘ownership’ of others, though there is plenty of bonding, mediated by sexual-sensual activity, and there is also a degree of hierarchy. We too, will aways have that, as particular individuals emerge as ‘leadership material’, but this can be as much a problem as a benefit. The political meme, ‘strong and wrong beats weak and right’, is so often only fully understood in hindsight.
When I think of a bonobo-style human society, this notion of non-ownership, even as regards children, comes prominently to mind. The compartmentalisation of modern WEIRD society into nuclear family units seems particularly problematic for me, and personal, as I was a five-year-old child of immigrant parents, taken from Britain to Australia on the other side of the world, with no further contact with broader family relations, and neighbours who were barely seen or heard. It’s often claimed that this separation into individual family units, physically separated in a built environment, began with agriculture, with the separation between those units growing with further developments – industrialisation, migration, the Church edicts forbidding marriage between cousins to the nth degree (as Henrich describes in his book). The real story, though, is doubtless even more complex.
I suspect we’re just at the beginning of ‘the great unravelling’ of the nuclear family, with an increasing number of single mothers, and fathers, and a host of ‘different’ family or group organisations, some of which are barely discernible on the horizon. I firmly believe that humans will survive the crises we create for ourselves (and indeed the whole biosphere), though not without great damage to the most vulnerable. It will require greater internationalism, and greater understanding and sympathy for all the species we’re connected to – that’s to say all species. There are plenty of horrific ‘hotspots’ of violence, warfare and inhumanity, as well as callous indifference to the suffering that our everyday actions – our food consumption, our mining and undermining operations, our general rapacity – are causing to the most vulnerable of our own species and many others. Our dominance should teach us to care more. With great power comes great responsibility. So many great powers in the past have not cared enough about the damage they’ve done, for it isn’t immediate damage to them.
Enough, I’m waxing melancholic. Bonobos are, it seems, happy with what they are, which they might continue to be if humans don’t wipe them out. Humans want to know more, grow more, be more than what they are. The ‘beginning of infinity’ indeed. I too am caught up in that quest, as I’m only human. Is it an upward spiral or a downward one? That is the question.
References
Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: the origins of inequality, 2023
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, 2021
Concerning the future, I suspect things might change…
As we’re just about to have an election in the UK I listened to a vox populi set of interviews, which seemed to take place in traditionally conservative electorates, about who should run the country over the next several years. There were complaints about everything being run down, too many immigrants, too many scandals, they shouldn’t have kicked out Boris Johnson, or they shouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near the Prime Ministership, no they won’t be voting Labour, no the Liberal Democrats are useless, I haven’t decided who I’ll vote for, might not vote at all… And there were plenty of complaints about the general neglect of their particular fraction of London, and plenty of images of abandoned and broken down homes and buildings.
By all accounts, the Tories are set to lose this election big-time, after 14 years of incumbency preceded by 13 years of Labour government. I’ve not been paying too much attention to UK politics, having left the place (Scotland in fact) for the balmy shores of Australia as a five-year-old. I was surprised to learn just this week that voting isn’t compulsory there, which I think is a shame. When a few years ago there was a vote in Scotland regarding national independence, I mentally sided with the ‘no’ vote, as I generally take a ‘together’ view over a ‘separated’ view. But then Brexit happened, which of course was a shambles.
I try to be impartial about politics, but of course I have my hobby horses, e.g. moving towards a bonobo humanity, and that involves change, very much. And the very word ‘conservative’ means wishing to conserve, to preserve, to maintain and so forth. Small government, reduced taxation, minimal involvement. Here in Australia, our former long-standing PM, John Howard liked to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But this, of course, misses the point. Landlines were once an acceptable form of communication – I recall how sophisticated we felt when we had a phone connected in the early sixties – but now we all have ‘smart’ phones, which don’t seem to have made us smarter people. We came to Australia by ship, which now seems quaint. Elly Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, had to work without pay, teaching only male students, and often surreptitiously, because it was widely accepted in the 1910s and 1920s that maths and physics were beyond the ken of women, and that wasn’t so long ago in my time frame (we’ll reach bonobo humanity in about 1000 years). Conservatism generally tends to face backwards, as culture moves forward.
Is it a fear of change? We all fear it, to different degrees. The interviewees were reluctant, mostly, to mention particular issues, though they all seemed to voice a general weariness and dissatisfaction with the current government. Immigration was mentioned a couple of times, and unions once. A different video presented a poll of voters’ main concerns heading into the election, and their dissatisfaction with the current National Health Service (NHS) came out well on top. So, low tax, low government revenue, cuts to the NHS, too bad.
I’ve often thought there’s something wrong or missing about current representative democracies, in which there are two major parties locked in combat for the support of the majority, and I’ve written previously about my issues with adversarial systems in general – for example in the law, in industrial relations, in politics, and even in the media, especially in the US. And with the rise of social media, a sort of bloated juggernaut of disinformation and abuse, the future doesn’t appear to look good for the kind of consensus approach to social issues I’ve always hoped for. The dog-eat-dog world of the USA is no example to follow – a broken system of mutual hatreds. ‘The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation’, according to inequality.org, Quelle surprise.
Could it be that, in the long long view, nation states will be in the rear-view mirror? Currently, complaints about immigration and ‘illegals’ are commonplace, but national borders, passports and visas are a recent phenomenon, and so many of us think we’re living in a ‘thousand-year reich’ or an eternal present. Of course I’ve no idea what the human planet will be like in a thousand years, but there’s nout wrong with speculating. And hoping. My hopeful expectation is that transnational and international activities and lifestyles will grow, and that both the local and the global will become more rather than less important. It will become increasingly clear that centralised control – powerful national government – is failing distant local regions with their specific issues requiring specialised local expertise. At the same time, more effective global communications will bring about better dissemination of knowledge and ideas, with ‘red tape’ being reduced or bypassed. Sounds a bit utopian I know…
And the human world will have become more bonoboesque. Not only with female dominance, but a reduction if not a complete dissolution of monogamy. Our scientific discoveries and enquiries will proceed apace, underlining what can be achieved through teamwork and collaboration as well as friendly rivalry between teams. Adversarial approaches will be greatly watered down, and elected representatives will work together for the best results, always allowing for input from the represented. Dictatorships will be almost a subject of ancient history… well perhaps not quite ancient, but history. Children will indeed be cared for communally, and a thriving and happy sexuality will be normalised. Education will be respected, and those doing the educating will be held in particularly high regard. An overwhelming proportion of leaders, in all areas – decision-making, research, education, group dynamics, sanctioning – will be female, though males will be well-treated, consulted and respected.
And if there are no nations? Freedom of movement and interaction will be greater than it is today, facilitated by increasingly improved telecommunications and transport. Language barriers will be reduced by effective translation algorithms. The mechanisation of food production will continue to advance, and housing will undergo a revolution corresponding to the dissolution of the nuclear family and a preference for more communal living. Diets will change as we focus more effectively, both on health and the biosphere we share with all other species. The human population will stabilise, as will its calorific intake. Inequalities will not, of course, disappear, but they will greatly reduce, as the community will insist on nobody being left behind or forgotten. Education and community participation will be the highest priority, as we know that exclusion will fuel resentment, ultimately leading to violence… But involvement in communal activities will be so highly prized that few would be willing to turn their backs…
Okay, okay, just kidding. In a thousand years, we might survive, but things’ll be much more fucked than they are today. I’m glad I’ll be outta here…
But then again…
References
Wealth Inequality
a touchy but important subject 2: sex, family, and bonobos
sounds good
Do bonobos have families? Apparently not, since they aren’t considered monogamous, and monogamy (even failed or disrupted monogamy) and families go together. Don’t they?
First, let’s look at bonobos and child-rearing. It’s accepted that they’re matriarchal, and non-monogamous, and that humans are, by and large, patriarchal and monogamous. And the human family was surely an emergent ‘property’ of monogamous patriarchy. But before we go into further comparisons, let’s compare bonobos and their non-monogamous cousins, chimps.
Intriguingly, the idea of a cuddly-cosy bonobo parental style versus one which is often disrupted by infanticidal impulses from alpha male chimps, needs to be – adjusted, to say the least. According to observations described in a Scientific American article linked below, bonobo parents – that’s to say, mothers – are less likely to intervene when their child is bullied and mistreated by other adults than chimp mothers with their kids. This must be understood in the context of less extreme aggression compared to chimp culture, which has been known to involve infanticide as well as slaughter between chimp troupes.
So why the hands-off bonobo parenting style? More research is no doubt needed, but the article argues for a more protective mothering style among chimps precisely because of the threats both within and beyond the troupe:
one possible explanation is that the constant threat of violence in chimpanzee life could prime chimps to defend other members of their social group, regardless of the situation. In-group bonds are “a really core part” of chimp society… Chimpanzees “can take big risks to protect each other in encounters [with a hostile group]—like leaping over to cover someone who’s being attacked” with their own body.
So, counter-intuitively, bonobo ‘tough love’ might be a product of a more general easy-going, danger-free environment. And as to families, it’s essentially a single-mother situation, with help from others in the troupe, including males. This is especially so with sons, who are philopatric, while daughters disperse to other troupes. Bonobo mothers are generally extremely protective, one might say controlling, of their sons, including encouraging them, even forcing them, to mate with females of the mother’s choosing. All of which makes me wonder about that female-dominated human society which will surely prevail in the millennia to come, if we manage to survive patriarchy.
And if we do, will we become as boringly sexualised as bonobos, while human civilisation crumbles around us? My prediction, FWIW, is – yes and no. After all, today we have pornography as well as astrophysics, palaeontology, biochemistry, quantum computing (almost?) and artificial intelligence – though not all at the same time. And on the sexual side of things, at least in the WEIRD world, we’ve definitely become more permissive, just in the last few decades, and I can’t see such a trend reversing. So some will be more drawn to the sexual side of life, some to the more analytic, and many will have a foot, or other parts of their anatomy, in both camps. It’s all experimentation after all.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520171625.htm
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
the big issue: monogamy, polygyny and bonoboism
I think it’s time we moved in together, raised a family of our own you and me. That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be…
Jacob Brackman/Carly Simon
And if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
When I was a young boy, my Mama said to me, ‘There’s only one girl in the world for you, and she probably lives in Tahiti’
Reckless Eric
glory days
Just the other day, a young woman very close to me was in a quandary about her boyfriend – though ‘quandary’ is too mild a word. She was very upset about what might be a permanent break-up. As part of their intimate chit-chat, he responded, presumably to her love declaration, with this remark: ‘I love you, but I’m not in love with you’.
Of course this response can hardly cover the whole nature of their relationship, but the fact that it was seen as less than satisfactory, indeed jeopardising the relationship’s future, has given me much food for thought – or rather, it has brought to mind issues that have obsessed me for a lifetime, an obsession that helps to explain my excitement at discovering, nearly four decades ago, bonobo culture.
I’m referring here to monogamy, and romantic love, modes of life and feeling that are essentially foreign to my favourite, and very loving, primate cousins.
It’s fascinatingly coincidental that, just as I found myself to be a sounding-board for my young friend, whom I dearly love, I’ve been reading Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, which deals with the cultural processes that broke down kinship connections and marriages (sororate and levirate), including polygynous marriages for elite males, in different global regions. This dissolution of long-standing kinship traditions was effected, not necessarily deliberately, through the edicts of the Church (Catholic) over many centuries in Western Europe, and was replaced by connections, including marriages, based on individual choice, shared interests and psychological compatibility. Other influences in other regions, such as China, had similar kinship-dissolving effects, though intensities have differed.
All of these transformations and modifications, though, have been within male-dominated societies. And, in the history we know most about, from the beginnings of agricultural society, there have been precious few female-dominated ones. And monogamy has been the norm, even if hedged around by clan and kinship expectations. Henrich puts it this way, while incidentally making perhaps the only reference to bonobos in his book:
From among our closest evolutionary relatives – apes and monkeys – guess how many species both live in large groups like Homo sapiens and have only monogamous pair bonding?
That’s right, zero. No group-living primates have the non-cultural equivalent of monogamous marriage. Based on the sex lives of our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, the ancestor we share with these apes was probably highly promiscuous and likely didn’t form pair bonds at all, let alone enduring, monogamous pair bonds. Nevertheless, since we diverged from our ape cousins, our species has evolved a specialised psychological suite – our pair-bonding psychology – that can foster strong emotional bonds between mates that remain stable for long enough to encourage men to invest in their mate’s children. This pair bonding psychology provides the innate anchor for marital institutions. However the nature of this anchor biases marital institutions toward polygynous pair bonding. In contrast, our innate mating psychology doesn’t usually favour widespread polyandrous marriage – that’s one wife with multiple husbands – although there are good evolutionary reasons to expect this to pop up at low frequencies in societies lacking prohibitions against it.
J Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, pp 258-9
Now, I’m a wee bit miffed here that bonobos etc are described as ‘non-cultural’, though of course they don’t have marriage, or language, or religion, quite. But the emergence of patriarchy, or possibly its intensifying as we trace our ancestry back to the CHLCA (chimp-human last common ancestor) is still something of a mystery. Henrich’s analysis really only takes us back several millennia, at the very most. Bonobos are, in a sense, hunter-gatherers, and their diet has never included large game, so the relatively rare hunting events would’ve involved speed and dexterity more than brute strength. Bonobo matriarchy, if that’s what it is, appears to be an outcome of the female-female bonding that arguably comes more naturally to human females than to males.
The concept of property is key here. Think of the commandment – don’t covet your neighbour’s wife, or any other property belonging to him. Property emerged from the depths of time as very much a male thing – and so, polygyny as a status symbol. Henrich has an argument as to why polyandry never became much of a thing:
Our ‘polygyny bias’ arises in part from fundamental asymmetries in human reproductive biology. Over our evolutionary history, the more mates a man had, the greater his reproduction, or what biologists call his ‘fitness’. By contrast, for women, simply having more mates didn’t directly translate into greater reproduction or higher fitness. This is because, unlike men, women necessarily had to carry their own foetuses, nurse their own infants, and care for their toddlers. Given the immense input needed to rear human children compared to other mammals, an aspiring human mother required help, protection, and resources like food, clothing, shelter, and cultural know-how. One way to obtain some of this help was to form a pair bond with the most capable, resourceful, and highest status man she could find by making clear to him that her babies would be his babies. The greater his paternal confidence, the more willing he was to invest time, effort, and energy in providing for her and her children. Unlike his wife, however, our new husband could ‘run in parallel’ by forming additional pair-bonds with other women. While his new wife was pregnant or nursing, he could be ‘working’ on conceiving another child with his second or third wife (and so on, with additional wives).
J Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, p 259
Henrich goes on to argue for the unsustainability of polygyny due to the lack of wives or breeding partners for low-status males in an increasingly hierarchical social system, but I should note here that bonobos have managed to develop a female-dominant culture despite all the issues of mothering, or most of the issues, faced by humans. Of course, they don’t have to worry about clothing, and shelter is less of a problem. ‘Cultural know-how’ is of course matched to species complexity – how to survive and thrive in their particular social world. In a talk given at Harvard, the linguist Daniel Everett defined culture thus (quoting from his own 2016 formulation):
Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values. Culture is only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviour of its members.
He also states in his talk that culture is always changing, and of course he’s talking about human culture. And this raises again the question of bonobo (or cetacean, or corvid) ‘culture’. We see our culture changing generationally – that’s to say, before or very eyes – but only a few centuries ago, as David Deutsch points out in The beginning of infinity, human culture, even in the WEIRD world, was much more static, and, although we don’t have clear evidence, it seems that Australian indigenous culture maintained itself largely unchanged for tens of millennia.
So, the way culture works depends a lot on context, and rapidity of change has much to do with interaction between and across cultures, due not just to immigration but, perhaps more importantly, to the rapid technological connections across the globe that have occurred since the middle of the 20th century,
Let me give you some of my personal story as an example. In the mid-sixties, as a kid of around ten, I was on a backyard swing listening to the radio blasting out, one after another, the five or so songs, all by the Beatles, that were topping the charts, in Australia and the other side of the world, at the time. I was thinking how vital and exciting those songs seemed to me in comparison to the hymns we were asked to sing at Sunday School. Over the next few years, the Beatles exchanged their matching suits and mop haircuts for long, wild hair, colourful eastern silks, beads and ‘love, man’. The ‘hippie generation’ seemed to explode into life. Free love and flower power, vaguely defined, were being spruiked everywhere, and songs referencing revolution – by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Thunderclap Newman, Barry McGuire and others – all gave the impression of a world turning upside-down. Caught up in the zeitgeist, I let my hair grow as long as it could, wore my older sister’s cast-off blouses and jackets, became a massive Bowie fan and reflected obsessively on gender-bending, marriage and monogamy.
The marriage and monogamy issues exercised me most, as my parents, it seemed, had trapped themselves in a loveless marriage which only came to an end shortly after I left home at eighteen. And because my mother was very much the head of our household, and because my sister was as strong-willed as my mother, feminism was also a major theme. We lived in a household full of books, with a library just down the road, so I was able to escape into a less fraught intellectual world. One book that greatly exercised me was Bruno Bettelheim’s The Children of the Dream, about the Jewish kibbutz system. While I was too young to understand much of the analysis, the very fact that there was a radical alternative to my form of upbringing hugely exercised me. I imagined the kibbutz system to be something like bonoboism long before I’d ever heard of those treasured apes.
Also, because our family had moved to Australia from Scotland when I was five, we’d pretty well dispensed with broader kinship connections, making us particularly WEIRD. It was all about ‘elective affinities’, as Goethe put it, and in fact I read his book of that title as a young person, probably due to the WEIRD title, though I found the content rather baffling. I was trying to tease out the differences between sexual attraction, love, and affinity, if they existed. I recall reading, I think in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, of this made-up love obsession which was enough to drive us mad. I had felt it myself of course. How could I feel so intensely about this girl I barely knew? How could a way of walking, a flicker of hands, make me feel that some force had reached into my heart and squeezed it, making me stagger and look round to see if anyone had noticed? And then later I learned of hormones – phenylethylamine and cortisol running wild, triggering the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, toxins of hope and their antidotes – all the result of unbidden thought, or something like…
Then of course, the world must be peopled, and we’ve done an all too brilliant job at that. As Henrich’s research indicates, with the agricultural revolution more or less complete in many parts of the human world around 8,000 years ago, property and its associated prestige led to an increasingly hierarchical, and patriarchal society – mostly monogamous, but then nothing displays male power more than possession of a bevy of the brightest and most beautiful as breeding partners. It’s worth noting just how extreme this ‘sexual prestige’ system became in some parts of the world. Here’s Henrich again:
In the South Pacific at the time of European contact, Tongan chiefs had a few high-ranking wives, who helped solidify alliances with other powerful families, and a few hundred secondary wives. In Africa, Ashante and Zulu kings each had 1000 or more wives. However, these are just the paramount chiefs or kings; there was usually a fleet of lesser elites who maintained smaller harems for themselves. Zande kings, for example each had more than 500 wives, but their chiefs also each maintained about 30 or 40 wives, and sometimes as many as 100. In Asia, things were even more extreme: medieval Khmer kings in Cambodia possessed five elite wives and several thousand secondary wives who were themselves graded into various classes…
J Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, p 261
And so on. However, this kind of extreme, and graded, polygyny was barely sustainable as it led to a multitude of aggrieved, partnerless males at the bottom of the pyramid, ripening for rebellion. The ‘European contact’ Henrich mentions here would’ve added to the pressures on this ultra-polygynous situation. These European colonisers, or conquerors, would’ve been keen to impose the True Religion wherever they went, and with it the proto-WEIRD values of the time. Today, in post-colonial Africa and Asia, there is a fluctuating and often awkward and barely workable mix of WEIRD and clan-based values and lifestyles, which likely contribute to the political instability we often find in these regions.
Meanwhile, in more established WEIRD nations, nothing is static. Only a little over a century ago, no woman could vote in any ‘democratic’ country, of which there were very few in any case. Female political leaders are still rare, though a little less rare in the last fifty years than the previous fifty. Perhaps the biggest change in relatively recent times has been in female education and employment, which is slowly changing the scientific, legal and business landscape. Arguably women, by and large (there are plenty of exceptions), are less interested in hierarchical than collaborative enterprises, and their growing input will lead to a gradual improvement in political decision-making, international relations and less adversarial approaches to business and the law…
And as for monogamy – okay, ‘free love’ hasn’t taken off as I thought it might, but at the same time, things aren’t as they were in the fifties and before. Single parenthood has been on the rise for decades in the WEIRD world, for males as well as for females, and though the supports available aren’t quite as nurturing as those available for bonobos, they’re enough to enable a ‘normal’, stigma-free childhood. The concept of illegitimate children is more or less dead, and maybe one day the notion of illegitimate immigrants will go the same way. Passports and visas are a much more recent phenomenon than many people realise, and they may turn out to be fleeting in the long run, especially with the advent of climate migration in the now foreseeable future. All of this, and a recognition that we’re all in this together as a culpable species, will be better facilitated by a more caring, less combative attitude to our fellows, human and non-human.
Taken all in all, women are the better angels of our human nature. Yes, we’ve moved very very far from our bonobo cousins, and we regularly and even obsessively pat ourselves on the back for that. But all of our best instincts tell us that collaboration, mutual appreciation, and recognition of ourselves in others, including other species, are key, not to just our survival, but to our thriving in a richer, more sustainable environment.
References
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
Bruno Bettelheim,The children of the dream, 1970
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the underground, 1864
Gaia Vince, Nomad century, 2021
bonobos and humans – immanence and transcendence?
the struggle against scumbaggery
Canto: So, having heard recently that Indonesia is passing laws to criminalise sex outside of marriage, and that Uganda is passing laws to criminalise anyone who identifies as homosexual, I’m feeling a touch of despair about the future bonobo society with human characteristics that I intended to impose upon the globe in the next few weeks.
Jacinta: Well it’s interesting to note that Indonesia is a predominantly Moslem country, and Uganda is overwhelmingly Christian, but there’s no doubt that religious ideology is behind both of these developments.
Canto: Yes, the WEIRD world, which neither of these countries belong to, is becoming increasingly secular, so much so that S should be fitted into the acronym – a world of WEIRDS, perhaps? So I suppose I should limit my ambition to the WEIRDS of the world. But that not’s what I want to talk about today, though it is related, sort of. Remember Ferdinand Mount’s The subversive family, an attempt to argue that the family unit, and so monogamy, has always been the norm, and has managed to subvert all attempts to replace or diminish it? I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately, and wondering about the unknown history of Homo sapiens and their antecedents, and their socio-sexual relations and child-rearing, given that our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimps, are quite different from each other in these traits.
Jacinta: Yes, and neither of them are monogamous. It’s interesting, but hardly surprising, that we’re inordinately interested in the human side of the divide between us and the so-called HC-LCA (the Human-Chimpanzee Last Common Ancestor), but not so much in the chimp-bonobo side.
Canto: Well of course, and even with that inordinate interest we’re very far from working out our human ancestry going back any more than two million years or so, let alone their socio-sexual arrangements. Anyway we’re not as monogamous as we pretend to be, and no amount of government regulation, or religious devotion, is going to change that.
Jacinta: But it’s interesting that we hold to a monogamous child-rearing ideal, and I’m wondering if that’s always been the case, or how long it has been, or whether there’s a worthwhile alternative, as arguably suggested by our bonobo heroines.
Canto: Well I know that single parent families are on the rise in Australia, and no doubt throughout the WEIRDS world, and any stigma associated with this is waning, but I’m not sure that this is exactly a movement in the direction of human bonoboism. It seems to me that the key to bonobos’ attraction is a kind of multiple-parenting system – not so compartmentalised. Sharing the love.
Jacinta: Bonobo and chimp dads likely don’t know for sure who their kids are – I just can’t imagine that being okay for humans any time soon, or even longer than soon.
Canto: Good point, though it’d be great if we could nurture and delight in kids just for being kids, rather than our kids. And I can well imagine that being the case when we lived together in caves rather than wee domestic units. It takes me back to the kibbutzim idea that I learned about as a teenager, after years of feeling trapped in my parents’ loveless marriage. Communal parenting…
Jacinta: But without the socialism? Or the Jewishness for that matter…
Canto: Well most kibbutzim today are secular, and they’re still very much with us – well not exactly with us, as they’re on the other side of the world, but I’m not sure about the socialism. Is bonobo society socialist?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the thing. Kibbutzim are, I presume, rules-based, top-down forms of communal living, whereas bonobo society just happened, a relaxed, happy-seeming culture, with females bonding and looking out for each other and their offspring in a way that the males, over time, acceded to. Nothing forced or regulated about it. I’m done, frankly, with labels like socialism and capitalism. I mean, we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, the key to our success if you like, and you can call that socialism I suppose. And we’re more thoroughly capitalist than any other species, capitalising on a massive number of other living resources to survive and thrive, not just through pure consumption but domestication and other manipulative practices.
Canto: Well said. But I still have a soft spot for the kibbutz idea, without Yom Kippur or Christmas, a thoroughly sciencey, sexy, smiley celebration of smart, sassy, sisterly communal living…
Jacinta: Not quite the bonobo world though, is it? Sounds more like dropping out. The original kibbutzim were based on land, and agriculture. And what would the bonobo world be without its forest lands and their simple resources? The world of WEIRDS wants so much more, a kind of eternal transcendence. To be more, to have more, to make more, to do more, to live more, as if it’s more satisfying to never be satisfied.
Canto: Hmmm. Thought-provoking, but I just wanted to focus on monogamy and child-rearing, and now you’ve given me a headache. I’m wondering though – because it niggles at the back of my mind, if the bonobo world would really work for us. Our success, if you want to call it that, is due to our endless ambition – caused presumably by those big brains of ours. To paraphrase Marx, those big brains have made us want to not just understand the world, but to change it. And boy have we ever fucking changed it.
Jacinta: Yeah, just ask those aurochs and quaggas and moas and dodos and passenger pigeons… oh but – we can’t.
Canto: Not to mention the millions of humans we slaughtered in wars, worked to death in mines and factories, and fucked to death for our entertainment, but then again, what a piece of work is a man, in apprehension how like a god! But a woman – maybe a woman is more than just a quintessence of dust. And if she is, maybe that little soupçon is just what humanity needs to flavour its thinking about the biosphere and its endless exploitation.
Jacinta: Yes well, don’t put all the responsibility onto us mate. And yet – we need plenty of adventurous spirit as well as a sense of ‘nobody left behind’ to navigate ourselves out of self-created disasters such as global warming, toxic work environments (both physical and mental), and species depletion. And I’m not saying this from some simplistic perspective of male traits admixed with female ones.
Canto: No because we’re already getting mixed up, in a good way. The WEIRDS are taking over the world – have taken over the world…
Jacinta: Yes, China is so western now, and so democratic…
Canto: Well, that’s actually half true. The term ‘western’ is surely the weakest link in the WEIRDS chain. I mean China’s difficult to analyse with its vast population, which means tons of poverty as well as tons of richesse. It has urbanised very rapidly, yet its rural and mostly poor population is still greater than the entire population of most countries. But if you take the rapidly educating and enriching and industrialising urban elites, you’ve got a pretty strong candidate for something equivalent to WEIRDness.
Jacinta: And then of course there’s the urban poor. But you’re right, the term ‘western’ has never made a lot of sense to me. EIRDS perhaps?
Canto: Not the most cromulent of acronyms. RIDES is at least a word, but… I think we’re stuck with WEIRD/S for the foreseeable. Anyway, I think we need to unshackle ourselves from patriarchal religion – I know the WEIRD world largely has, but I’m impatient. Doing so I think will enable more women to be part of the solutions to the problems we face, and the problems other species face because of us.
Jacinta: China and Japan are pretty secular these days, but how many female leaders have they had in the last century or so?
Canto: Yes it’s taking its time – China has now achieved female literacy and education levels that are pretty well equivalent to those of males, but perhaps education isn’t entirely equivalent to empowerment.
Jacinta: Under Xi’s dictatorship female empowerment has clearly gone backwards. Hopefully he’ll be dead soon, but he’s probably already trying to ensure another macho thug succeeds him. Women have absolutely zero power in today’s China. As for Japan, they were ranked 110th in the world for gender equality in 2019, and the sexism there is really stark, in spite of 70% of women being in the workforce. You’ll remember our semi-serious piece about bonobos not wearing stupid shoes, meaning stilettos? There was a ruckus just a few years ago (2019) about that fucked-up footwear, which went semi-viral worldwide, as reported in The Guardian:
Meanwhile, even something as apparently straightforward as being allowed to wear whatever shoes you like continues to prove tricky. In response to the #KuToo petition [the hash-tag puns on ‘shoes’ and ‘pain’], Japan’s minister of labour, Takumi Nemoto, told parliament that requiring high heels in the workplace was perfectly acceptable – sparking further outrage at the government of Shinzo Abe, whose “Womenomics” policy is supposedly attempting to bring more women into the workforce.
Canto: Presumably Mr Nemoto wasn’t wearing high heels when he said this, so WTF.
Jacinta: At least there was blowback, but not nearly enough. Sigh, the arc of progress is long, but it bends towards beating sense into blokey blokes, ou quelque chose comme ça.
Canto: Transcendence may not be imminent, but it’s eminently desirable, for the benefit and beautification of our immanent being…
References
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1982
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
Click to access shsconf_sschd2023_02001.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/where-are-the-women-at-the-top-of-chinese-politics
a bonobo world 33: they don’t wear stillettos