Posts Tagged ‘society’
are Australian Aboriginal societies egalitarian?
In years gone by I’ve heard talk of hunter-gatherer societies in terms of the males out in the field competing with each other in bringing down the biggest game, and increasing their status thereby, while the women gathered their nuts and berries collectively while gossiping about the menfolk. Or something along those lines. I’ve also heard talk that ‘hunter-gatherer’ is an obsolete term – this from fellow Australians, who point out that fish and seafood, for example, both from rivers and the sea, was an essential part of Aboriginal diets, and that generally their ways of obtaining food were too diverse and complex to be so categorised.
Of course, what interests me about the term is whether there was a more or less clear division of labour in Aboriginal society, along gender lines. And for that matter, was Aboriginal society ever One Thing, bearing in mind that, according to AI (never lies), there were over 250 Aboriginal languages and 800 dialects at the time of white colonisation.
All this is really about patriarchy, matriarchy, or whether there can be (or has been) a general ‘equal but different’ social structure in human society. I’ve noted that of all the social primates, leaving aside H sapiens, none are egalitarian. They’re hierarchical, and mostly male dominant. AI tells me that only bonobos, ring-tail lemurs, mouse lemurs and some macaques swing the other way. That’s why I prefer to promote matriarchy rather than egalitarianism, or even ‘feminism’. But of course referring to other primates gets me nowhere in my quest, because we humans believe that we’re so far, far above and beyond other primates that comparisons really are odorous.
Unfortunately, between chimps/bonobos and H sapiens – the gap in time being filled by extinct species – H neanderthalensis, the Denisovans (scientific designation still under dispute), H rudolfensis, H floresiensis, H erectus, H habilis, H heidelbergensis, H naledi, H antecessor, and then Australopithecus africanus, A anamensis, A afarensis, A garhi, A sediba, and then Paranthropus boisei, P aethiopicus, P robustus, to name a few, and who knows how many more will be identified, mis-identified, merged or split in the future – that gap in time is somewhere between 8 and 6 million years, plenty of time for us to mysteriously develop our super-smart superiority. And of course, in respect of every one of these aforementioned species, and the more to be discovered, this question of matriarchy, patriarchy or ‘equal but different’ is currently without answer, and probably always will be. It’s exhausting just to think about.
So getting back to pre-colonial Australia and its Aboriginal societies, which is a complicated enough subject in itself, it seems that ‘separate but equal’ seems mostly true, though it doesn’t mean entirely separate, obviously, nor entirely equal. I’m far from being particularly knowledgeable in this field, but I know that many groups have separate ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’, not just in terms of activity but in terms of group knowledge and history of country.
It just occurred to me to check for patrilocality in Aboriginal societies, because I visited the Tiwi Islands a few years ago and was told, in a public talk given there by an Islander, that this was their practice. It seems that most Aboriginal societies practised patrilocality, and they made the most of that practice, with men’s knowledge focussing on ‘country’ and history, while women brought kinship and trade connections between groups, but the variations to this practice were complex and multifactorial. When I think of the many female Aboriginal activists that I’ve been made aware of over the past fifty years, I can’t help but feel that Aboriginal women in general haven’t been backward in coming forward regarding their rights and their treatment, both within white society and their own. So I would conclude, more or less hesitantly, that women were generally treated as equal but different in Aboriginal societies.
The reference is to a work I’ve only just discovered, which gives more than a few glimpses of the complexities involved.
Reference
octopuses r n t us
I watched a video yesterday on those amazing sea creatures and was reminded of a couple of books I read a few years ago by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, and Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousness. Yes, again it’s about being engrossed and then more or less forgetting everything, so this time I won’t go on about myself and focus solely on octopuses. There are around 300 species of these shape-and-colour-shifting cephalopods, ranging in size from the Giant Pacific (the largest ever found weighing at about 270 kgs) to the Octopus wolfi (less than a gram). Which makes me wonder, how smart could such a mini-octopus be…?
Octopuses have been living in our oceans for some 300 million years, pre-dating the dinosaurs. They are invertebrates, i.e no backbone, but they do have hard beaky bits, the only part that can’t shape-shift. They’re famously solitary, living in home-made rock shelters, or shells or crevices – in fact in all sorts of innovative hideaways, and they’re not very long-lived at all, for all their smarts. The Giant Pacific lasts about five years at most, others not so much. Basically, they live to breed, then they die – males and females alike. Talk about a mind-blowing orgasm. This is called semelparity, which contrasts with iteroparous us. There are sex-based differences though, in this senescence. The females guard their eggs for a while, wasting away and generally dying just as the eggs hatch. This wasting process is similar in both sexes (though sometimes the male is killed by the female), and is brought about by secretions of the optic gland, ‘an endocrine gland located near the optic lobes, between the brain and eyes’, according to AI, which doesn’t lie. Anyway, this death-on-giving-birth system ensures, if that’s the word, that every new-born octopus is an orphan. Nothing is learned from their parents. They have to rely on their own smarts.
So what’s most interesting about them, surely, is the stuff that makes them think, from the get-go. It’s not a brain, in the mammalian or birdian sense, it’s a kind of decentralised nervous system. They do have a brain, of sorts, but they have eight other ‘arm-brains’. So each arm works separately but they must also be co-ordinated for the creature to get anywhere. Hard to work all that out, but then they’ve had 300 million years to do it. As to how many neurons they have, you can imagine, with the vast difference in species sizes, that it varies considerably. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about the same number as a dog, two-thirds of which are in the arms, the rest in the head. Nine brains, sort of. It has the largest brain-to-body mass of any invertebrate, unsurprisingly. They’re very visual, and can distinguish human faces, and even make friends with them, sort of. The award-winning documentary ‘My octopus teacher’ apparently demonstrates this (I haven’t seen it, but I will, and I’ve watched a documentary on the documentary, and even that was an emotional experience).
So octopuses can be added to the list of smart, even super-smart critters, but there’s something very very different about them, it seems to me. They’re solitary, and this doesn’t seem to be emphasised enough. They’re orphans, effectively. Of course they mate, because it takes two, but they don’t have mates in the Aussie sense.
Think of what this means. They don’t have parents, or siblings, or relatives – at least not that they know of, though the giant Pacific octopus lays tens of thousands of eggs before it drops dead. They don’t have playmates or teachers. Nothing is passed from generation to generation. Nothing is accumulated. They have no society. Remember the apocalyptically imbecilic remark of Margaret Thatcher, ‘there’s no such thing as society’? Maybe she’d mistaken herself for an octopus. For me, it’s due to the society that I live in that I can write on this laptop, or that I can read or write at all. Through my society I’ve learned something about the ancient Egyptians and Minoans, about Plato and Aristotle, about Voltaire and Diderot, Newton and Maxwell, Planck and Einstein. I’ve learned to play and appreciate the skills of soccer, pool and table tennis. I’ve learned of the joys and miseries associated with countless alcoholic beverages, and the odd not quite licit drug. I’ve driven cars, flown in planes, studied at a university, and sampled many other pleasures, as well as pitfalls, that my WEIRD world has provided. All, or most, of this stuff was around before I was born. They were the accumulations of our culture, part of what all we humans plug into. Octopuses, living and dying for hundreds of millions of years, have had none of that. To survive, they’re still doing what they were doing when our ancestors were synapsid tetrapods, likely sharing their oceans. And of course, they may well survive us. But have they had as much fun?
References
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of life, 2017
on neoliberalism, libertarianism and free will
some of the Grates of neoliberalism
Rousseau was wrong, humans are not born free. In fact this statement is pretty well meaningless, since our birth is dependent on the activity of those who conceived us, as well as those who helped our passage into the light of day, or the light of a home or hospital room. As to our parents, their genes and those of their relatives will determine our height and our general physiognomy, which our culture will deem to be attractive, hideous or somewhere in between. That culture and its subcultures will also determine the language we first speak, the food we are given, and the home, be it a mansion or a tent, we find ourselves living in. Our gender too will be determined, in a somewhat mysterious way.
The first few years of our life will be hugely determinative. We might be coddled, we might be thoughtfully raised according to the Montessori method, or we might be neglected or abused. We ourselves will have no say regarding those options. We know that those first few years will be hugely impactful for the rest of our lives. The Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types (among many other things), which I’ve written about previously, identifies five – Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted – which are generally recognised from the age of three, and are ‘observed to be relatively stable throughout life’. The study has been ongoing since the 1970s. As Aristotle is reputed to have said, ‘Give me the child at seven and I will show you the man’. This presumably also includes female men. Whether Aristotle meant that he could mould the child into whatever he wanted, or that the child already had the features of the man, is slightly unclear, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the latter is true.
So where then does individual freedom, so highly valued by so many, come in? What do we make of the libertarianism touted by certain politicians, philosophers and economists? And what, exactly, is ‘neoliberalism’?
I’ll look at the last question first. Neoliberalism is associated with some late 20th century economic theorists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, though it harks back to Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. It isn’t particularly new, or innovative, and it largely ignores the vast constraints (and advantages), mental, physical, cultural, familial, financial and so on, that we are subject to from the very beginnings of our lives. Here’s how Wikipedia jargonises it:
Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
People with a university education – that’s to say, a minority of people – might be able to understand some of these terms. Those who understand none of them have my sympathy, as they will most certainly be neoliberalism’s victims.
A little anecdote from my primary school days. I was one of the smarter students, naturally, and I remember the teacher asking another pupil to spell a not particularly difficult word. I remember the pupil’s name, Andrew Binney, and I’ve often wondered what became of him. Andrew tried, and his efforts caused titters around the room. But you could see he was really trying. The teacher persisted, not in a bullying way, but patiently, offering clues, and the scene went on for an excruciating amount of time, it seemed to me, because it was clear that Andrew just didn’t know. Eventually he too started to titter, and the teacher gave up on him. It wasn’t dyslexia – Andrew was just as clueless in arithmetic, etc. He wasn’t free to be as smart as the other pupils. I would go further and say that nobody is free to be smarter than they are, though many smart people might strive to be smarter than they are, by reading, studying, hobnobbing with other smart people and so on. But that’s what it is to be smart.
Neoliberalism is a lot like libertarianism, and there’s a question about how ‘neo’ it is. The idea seems to be to reduce government influence in all spheres where it might be expected to have an influence – education, healthcare, housing – just about anything to do with human welfare. All of these things should be ‘marketed’, taken care of by the market. And what does this mean exactly? What are markets, and perhaps more importantly, who owns them? Think of the various items and systems we need to sustain a viable modern human life. Homes, schools, food, electricity, communication systems, infrastructure, clean air and water, hospitals and healthcare systems. Most if not all of us have been born into these systems, barely aware of their life-sustaining existence. They are the necessities of a successful, even viable, life in our modern world. They constitute our modern society.
But neoliberals contest this. Take this 1987 quote from a doyenne of neoliberalism:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There’s no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Margaret Thatcher, 1987 interview, quoted in The Invisible Doctrine, George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, 2024, p 62
This is classic neoliberalism. It’s also classically inane. The late British PM would have us believe that she obtained her language, her upper-crust accent, the clothes she wore, the homes she lived in, the food she consumed, the education she obtained, the transport she availed herself of, and any or all of the jobs she worked at, from either herself or her family. This is obviously nonsense. To take just language – if this is solely provided by our families, there would be no possibility of different families speaking the same language. Language is entirely a socio-cultural phenomenon, that we all plug into, first at home, then in our immediate environment, then at school. As to any homes she lived in, her family didn’t build them, they didn’t act as architects, stone-cutters and bricklayers, as well as carpenters, plumbers. electricians and so forth – they plugged in to the wider society to provide these things. Cities, with their roads, bridges, vehicles, public transport systems, parks, entertainment centres, are clearly not the products of individuals and their families, they’re the result of planning on a large social scale. And I could go on, and on and on. I know I’m belabouring the point, but it’s astonishing how many people just don’t get it. How can they be captured by this imbecilic ideology? Qui bono?
The answer is fairly obvious. Success in the developed world is largely measured by wealth, and that means accumulating as much of it as possible. A business person is described as ‘successful’ entirely in terms of that accumulation.
I asked earlier who owns the markets. With the current fashion for limited, non-interventionist government, even on the left – and this has been the case, in the WEIRD world, since at least the late 70s – they have been owned by private enterprises, with profit as their motive. To maximise those profits, people and resources need to be manipulated and massaged to the maximum.
This is the world that Andrew Binney, and others like him, have grown up in. I can’t imagine him standing much of a chance in such a world. We need to do better than this – we owe it to our society, in all its variety.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz
George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, The invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, 2024
on US jingoism and nationalist dishonesty – plus ça change…
should be billions more people in this pic
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any nation, at least in the WEIRD world, that’s as jingoistic as the USA. Now whether nationalism is a good thing is always arguable. I take the view that, while nobody gets to choose the nation of their birth, so that it’s a matter neither of shame nor of pride, it’s more than reasonable to be interested in that nation above others (assuming that you still live in your birth nation), because you want it to be as good as can be, for yourself and your peers. Whether you call that nationalism or patriotism or whatever is of no great interest to me. And if you espouse humanist values you will be concerned also about the quality of life in other nations, any of which you could’ve been born and brought up in. But clearly we have more opportunity to improve things in our own nation than in others.
And here’s the obvious thing. Every nation can be improved, in terms of its governance, its laws, its quality of life, its fairness, its health and welfare and so on. And considering that social evolution is a never-ending story, we need our social structures and our governance systems to keep up, to evolve, if not in tandem with, at least not far behind the tides of change.
So, back to the USA. I’ve spent too much time in the past few years, really since the advent of Trump and the meaningless MAGA slogan, listening to US pundits, mostly liberal, bemoaning the fate of their country. But the fact is, I very very rarely hear talk of reform. nor do I hear much in the way of reflection as to why someone so utterly incapable of governance of any kind could have won the favour of so many United Staters, even if they’ve always been in a minority, albeit a vociferous one (and thus seeming to be more numerous than they are).
I was born in Scotland and have lived in Australia since the age of five. Scotland has long had a testy relationship with the country south of the border, with which it is united, sort of, under the UK, but it has its own government headed by a First Minister, as opposed to England’s Prime Minister. What’s the difference between a First Minister and a Prime Minister, you ask? Good question, for which I have no answer, but they’re both based on the principle of primus inter pares, as the leader of the governing party. That party has been elected by the voters, and it has decided upon its leadership by an internal vote of its elected representatives. The party can replace its leader at any time via a vote of no-confidence by those same elected representatives.
This system, which, mutatis mutandis, also pertains in Australia, bears little comparison with the US Presidential system, in which one individual, almost always male, is pitted against other, in a kind of ‘I alone can fix it’ contest of patriotic manliness. The USA, to its detriment, doesn’t have a multi-party system, so its two sole parties tend to duke it out man-o-man-like, in a profoundly adversarial way, which appears to get more block-headed over time. It’s also the case that anyone can run for President, whether or not they’ve had any political experience, or any but the most basic level of education, or know anything of their nation’s history. It certainly helps, though, to have lots and lots of money, or to know how to get it, because campaigning for President, and getting the ‘right’ backing by the ‘right’ people, is hugely about finance. And it’s highly relevant to the politics of the USA that the gap between the rich and the poor there is far greater than what we find in Australia, which of course makes it more plutocratic than it is ever likely to admit.
It’s clear that the US political system has become much more adversarial in recent times, and the advent of social media ‘bubbles’ is at least partly to blame. This has become a problem more generally in the WEIRD world and I’m not sure how to address it, though I’m sure that it needs to be addressed. The problem is greater in the USA, however, due to a number of factors. One is its sub-standard basic public education system, which, together with its comparative lack of a social welfare safety net, its abysmal minimum wage rates and inadequate healthcare provision, leaves millions feeling disenfranchised and ‘left behind’. How else can we explain the religious-style hero worship of an ignorant narcissist who did virtually nothing while holding the office of national President (an office which he ‘won’ in spite of losing the popular vote by almost 3 million).
But the original aim of this essay wasn’t to criticise its system – though while I’m at it I’ll mention that the USA has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, and the longest prison sentences, as well as huge rates of firearm deaths, as Wikipedia relates:
More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included.
My aim was to criticise the USA’s image of itself as some kind of model to the world. Of course, nations tend to lie about their own history, so it’s up to other nations to confront them with those lies. Just recently, I heard yet again a US political commentator claiming, in passing, that the War of Independence and the subsequent drawing up of the US Constitution were all about ‘the people’ rising up against a ‘tyrant king’. This reference to George III – a constitutional monarch who was more or less non compos mentis during this time, is risible. The colonists of that part of the ‘New World’ were rising up against a bullying and exploiting nation. Many of those colonists had recently fled that nation, for various reasons, but often related to their ‘puritan’ values. Powerful nations have bullied and exploited smaller nations, subject nations and their neighbours for thousands of years, and as the USA has become a powerful nation, it has bullied Pacific peoples in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as the peoples of Indo-China, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also engaged in the bullying of allied nations, which again shows that there’s nothing exceptional about the USA.
Of course, the ‘New World’ wasn’t new at all, in terms of population. It was for some time understood that the Clovis culture had migrated to the Americas between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have pushed human habitation back another several thousand years. The War of Independence and the subsequent US Constitution and the election of Washington as the colony’s first President, hailed today by United Staters as marking the beginning of modern democracy, was but one of many baby steps, albeit an important one, towards full democracy anywhere in the modern world. Less than 1.8% of the population voted, and eligibility, based on property ownership, varied widely between states. So it was hardly any better than the British system of the time, upon which it was largely based. Of course women couldn’t vote, nor of course could slaves, who formed the backbone of the colony’s economy. As for the First Nation peoples, the following decades brought nothing but dispossession and devastation, and, as in Australia, they’ve received little in the way of compensation since.
So, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and ‘the leader of the free world’ are still terms I hear gushing from the lips of US pundits, often accompanied by those glazed expressions suggestive of having learnt a kindergarten mantra. Better to try just a bit harder to accept that there’s no ‘greatest’ and no ‘leader’, just a lot of more or less flawed nations with more or less flawed political and social systems that need regular analysis and upgrading and repair. We can all do better, and maybe that’s what we’re here for. Or at least we can imagine that’s the case.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788–89_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/whats-the-earliest-evidence-of-humans-in-the-americas
on testosterone bullshit and bonobos
testosterone guru – aka the ugliest human on the planet?
I’ve written about testosterone before, here, here, here, here and here (!), but as I’m currently getting just too many ‘testosterone crisis’ pieces on my YouTube feed, I feel the need to return to the fray, with bonobos in mind, of course.
So, there’s nothing particularly wrong about men wanting to boost their testosterone levels, I suppose, but I just think that the focus is wrong. The focus should be on health. If you eat well, exercise daily, sleep effectively (and sleep routines can vary with individuals), and avoid too much stress, your hormone levels will tend to take care of themselves. It’s likely true that testosterone levels have reduced in the WEIRD world in the past few decades, but this doesn’t amount to a crisis. In the same WEIRD world, at least since the sixties, male machismo has become more a focus of derision as female empowerment has become a focus for – well, women. In that period, and especially since the 80s and 90s, physical work has become mechanised, or transferred to non-WEIRD countries – I worked in about five different factories from the 70s to the 90s, all of which have since shut down, as Australia has virtually ceased to be a manufacturing nation.
So men are mostly not doing physical work like they used to. Even so, we’re all living longer. And it’s worth looking at a couple of ‘longevity hotspots’ such as Tuscany, Okinawa, Switzerland, Singapore, and last but not least, here in Australia. Forget looking at the testosterone levels in these regions, look at how they live and the challenges they face. But let me first use a bonobo quote which I may have used before, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Mate competition by males over females is common in many animal species. During mating season male testosterone levels rise, resulting in an increase in aggressive behavior and masculine features. Male bonobos, however, invest much more into friendly relationships with females. Elevated testosterone and aggression levels would collide with this increased tendency towards forming pair-relationships.
It would be interesting to research the apparent fall in testosterone levels in WEIRD nations, to see if there are any links to increased sucking up to women. Or just an increased role in family life, as opposed to the old mostly-absent, hard-working father scenario. Certainly, with the better angels of our nature prevailing, males aren’t dying so much in wars, or limping along in the aftermath, and factories are generally safer or being removed to less affluent parts of the world. I recall reading that, in northern Italy and in Sardinia, the high life expectancy for men is pretty well equal to that for women. Key to this appears to be an active life both physically and socially. Take this blurb from the Visit Italy website, which closely resembles what I’ve learned from an essay on Okinawan society:
Scholars believe that this phenomenon [longevity] is due to a constellation of factors, not only genetic. This is where lifestyle comes into play: a set of practices aimed at a happy, active and inclusive existence. Social relations also seem to be surprisingly decisive when it comes to longevity.
Here people, even when very old, continue to be an integral part of the community and participate in social life. Family ties, in particular, are absolutely solid; there is no room for loneliness or even absolute rest.
Gardening, looking after grandchildren, and cooking are all activities taken very seriously by Sardinian nonni [grandparents], who continue to have as much weight in the family dynamics as their children and grandchildren. Being together and being useful at all ages: could this be one of the secrets to a long life?
Caring and sharing – isn’t this the bonobo way?
And testosterone bullshit goes both ways – it makes you more ‘manly’, whatever that may mean, or it makes you stupid, responding with ‘brute’ violence to situations that require greater (feminine?) nuance. But what makes a person more or less ‘masculine’ according to social norms of masculinity (which are changing, especially in the WEIRD world) involves a huge array of determining factors, including hormone levels of course, but far from confined to them. Focussing more or less solely on testosterone is just dumb male shite.
Humans are evolving, I hope, to become more like bonobos. I’m not against competition and aggression, in its place. I like watching competitive sports, especially soccer, and I’ve enjoyed watching the women’s game progress rapidly in recent years. Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that women’s soccer is just as aggressive but with much less of the biffo and play-acting and referee-confronting that you find in the men. There’s also less crowd violence. It just seems ‘unseemly’ to even imagine crowd violence, which generally involves males, at a women’s soccer tournament. Some interesting psychology to unpick there. Bonobos and chimps don’t play sport of course, but they do come close to it, especially as youngsters, chasing each other to get the ‘ball’, whatever it might be, in quite a rough and tumble way. This kind of competitive rough-and-tumble is a feature of cubs and pups and calves etc in thousands of mammalian species, and is set to continue, encouraged and regulated by watchful adults. It’s neither a male nor a female thing. The manufactured testosterone crisis, on the other hand, seems all about ‘maleness’, a tedious fiction that even some women are buying into. What’s most funny about all those ‘boost your testosterone levels’ videos by men is the way these ‘influencer’ guys are built. Truly, I’d rather be dead than look like that!
In my view they just need to be educated about bonobos. Vive les bonobos! Would that we could all be as happy and sexy and caring and sharing as them!
References
https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/why-people-in-italy-live-longer-reasons
a bonobo world 33: they don’t wear stillettos
anti-shoes, designed by Leanie van der Vyver
Bonobos don’t wear stilettos. Here’s why.
Bonobos don’t wear anything. But that’s not the end of the story.
Bonobos aren’t bipedal, though they have spurts of bipedalism. Their feet aren’t built for long-term bipedalism, of the kind we have evolved. It’s mostly to do with the big toe. Humans and our ancestors became bipedal after moving out of trees and into savannahs. This along with our hands, the opposable thumb and so forth, helped us in hunting, as we were able to handle and manipulate weaponry, and to outstrip our prey in long-distance running. Losing our body hair and being able to sweat to keep our body temperature down – sweat is about boundary layers, something like evaporative air-conditioning – was also an adaptation to our new hunting lifestyle, as, perhaps was language or proto-language, which would’ve helped us to form groups and bring down a feast of big prey. Goodbye mammoths – too bad we didn’t evolve early enough to sample brontosaurus burgers.
So I imagine we developed solid pads of skin on our soles and heels as we scrambled over scree and bounced through brambles during hunts and childhood play. I experienced a bit of that in my own childhood, in the paths and fields of early Elizabeth (the town was the same age as myself). My heels were hardened in those early barefoot years as they were never to be again.
I suppose it was settlement that softened our feet and led to the idea of covering them for those increasingly rare outings into thorny bushland, or even just out in the fields, for the female and young male gatherers. The first shoes we know of, dating back only 10,000 years, were made of bark. These were, of course, utilitarian. We’re still a while away from stilettos, the ultimate non-utilitarian symbols.
The oldest leather shoes yet found date to c5,500 years ago. We can’t be sure of how old ‘shoes’ were – the first may just have been makeshift coverings, more or less painted on, or bound around and then tossed aside. Clearly they would’ve been more commonly used as we moved to a ‘softer’ more cindoor, village life, and would have become more decorative and status-laden – though, interestingly, gods and heroes were invariably depicted barefoot by the ancient Greeks. The Romans used chiral (left and right) sandals in their armies (though standard chiral footwear is a modern phenomenon), and generally considered it a sign of civilised behaviour to wear shoes regularly, possibly the first people to do so, even if only among the upper class. So it was around this time, a couple of thousand years ago, that shoemaking became a profession.
Fast forward to the 15th century, and the first elevated shoes, designed to keep tender feet above the ordure of urban streets, became popular. These were originally in the form of overshoes or pattens. They protected not only the feet but the decorative, thin-soled poulains, with their long pointy toes, which were de rigueur for the fashionable of both sexes.
These original high-heels, then, were practical and clunky. Made from wood, their noisiness was an issue – mentioned in Shakespeare and Jane Austen – and they were mostly banned in church. More refined high heels were used by the upper classes, aka the well-heeled, especially royalty. Catherine de Medici and England’s Mary 1 wore them to look taller, and France’s Louis XIV banned the wearing of red high heels for everyone except those of his court.
The mass-production of footwear began in the nineteenth century, and so shoes for all sorts of specific purposes became a thing. And so we come to the notorious (for some) stiletto heel.
Named after the much more practical stiletto dagger, the stiletto heel, or shoe, invented by the usual moronic continental fashion types, has come in and out of style over the past century. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on stilettos has a section on their benefits and disadvantages, with about five or six times more verbiage devoted to the benefits than the disadvantages. I’d love to meet the person who wrote it – while armed with a stiletto. Much of the benefit – according to this expert, lies in postural improvement, a claim completely contradicted by the disadvantages section, unsurprisingly:
All high heels counter the natural functionality of the foot, sometimes causing skeletal and muscular problems if users wear them excessively; such shoes are a common cause of venous complaints such as pain, fatigue, and heavy-feeling legs, and have been found to provoke venous hypertension in the lower limbs.
No mention of the fact that they instantly lower the wearer’s IQ by several points, unfortunately. Where is science when you need it?
Some of the benefits mentioned are risible – e.g. ‘they express your style and make you feel good’. As would going barefoot or wearing clodhoppers, if that’s your style. Another claim is that you can use the heels as a weapon to defend yourself. I mean, wtf? So you ask your assailant to wait while you unstrap your shoe and limpingly lunge at him? Or do you kick him in the nuts while keeping your balance on a square centimetre of padded metal? I’d like to see that.
Another apparent benefit is that they make you look femme fatale tough. I wonder that the military hasn’t considered them as essential for female personnel. While I admit that, in US-style or James Bondage-type movies, the black-leather-clad heroine-villain in matching stilettos and revolver does give me the proverbial kick in the fantasies, the plethora of YouTube videos showing absurdly-heeled models and other victims stumbling on stages and catwalks, their ankles twisted to right angles, provides a thrill of schadenfreude I could do without. A finer thrill, for me, would be to watch vids of the guilty fashion designers being tortured to within an inch of their lives by their own creations.
But let me go on. Our Wikipedia expert writes that the stilettoed look ‘boosts women’s self-confidence and that in turn makes them more likely to get promoted at work’. Now there’s a workplace I’d pay good money not to belong to. The expert goes on to point out the well-attested, but essentially shameful fact that tall people are more likely to get elected to leadership positions. In other words, had Donald Trump been a foot shorter, hundreds of thousands of US lives would surely have been saved in 2020. I should also feel relieved that, as a shorty myself, I’m automatically absolved from any leadership responsibilities.
So why was this claptrap allowed on Wikipedia? It seems that the website, so fabulously rigorous in fields such as maths, physics and biochemistry, has decided to slacken off when it comes to ‘popular culture’, which is both understandable and frustrating. The fact is that stilettos are way more decorative than functional, as is women’s role in the business world, by and large.
I admit that my views on clothing and footwear are heavily influenced by the years of my impressionable youth in the sixties and early seventies, when men sported long, flowing locks, multicoloured shirts and pants, and women mostly the same, though I loved to spot the odd tweedy female in short back and sides, and kickarse Doc Martens. There’s no accounting for taste.
Bonobo females are statistically smaller than males, in much the same proportion as human females. And yet they dominate. There’s nothing more to say.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiletto_heel
a bonobo world 32: bonobos and us
female-dominated society (male version)
So let me look at the role of the adult female in the bonobo world. Why do they tend to be the bosses, in spite of being smaller on average than the males, and how did this come to be? If we can trace this, maybe we can find out how to live in a more female-dominated, peaceful, integrated and – yes maybe a more loving, even sexy community.
Frans de Waal has described bonobo society as a gynecocracy, a pre-feminist term which simply means a society or culture governed by women, without going into detail, for example about matrilineal descent or inheritance. De Waal’s findings, mostly drawn from captive bonobos, have been criticised, but further confirmed by wild studies.
Bonobos are initially hard to distinguish from chimps, from whom they separated, species-wise, 1.5 to 2 million years ago. They’re officially described as more gracile, meaning a little more slender, less robust, but I can’t easily see it myself. What I do notice is their charming middle-parted hairstyle, a la Marcel Proust or Oscar Wilde, which has earned them the title the gay ape. Or should have. Although omnivorous like clothed apes and chimps, they have a more vegetarian diet in practice than the other two, probably because they tend to be more arboreal and inhabit a more restricted area, south of the Congo River. The name bonobo is of course human-created, possibly deriving obscurely from a misspelling of Bolobo, a Congolese town. We don’t know how they refer to themselves.
There’s been a lot of contentious but fascinating debate about the dating of the last common ancestor between clothed apes and the chimp-bonobo line. For a time the consensus seemed to be converging around a date of 6-7 million years ago, but the doubtless contentious work of Madelaine Bohme, published in a book, Ancient bones (2019) pushes the date back by a few million years.
Bonobos weigh on average between 35 and 40 kgs, and, standing, measure about 110cm. The females have prominent boobs compared to other unclothed apes, but nothing a human ape would want to slobber over. Generally they’re more physically divergent than chimps – so you’ve got your plain Janes and your beauty queens, your Adonises and your ghouls. Their bipedalism – or their use of bipedalism – varies with habitat and habituation. In captivity they use it more, as they spend less time in trees.
It’s argued that bonobos are more peaceful than chimps because they live in a more stable, less threatened environment – the threats to them in the wild are entirely due to clothed, and weaponised, apes, against whom they are, of course, entirely defenceless. Chimps, on the contrary, occupy a wider range, and so, like clothed apes, tend to separate into distinct, competitive communities, who fight over resources and territorial ascendancy. The difficulty here is that, due to the dangerous conditions that have pertained in the Congo for many decades due to long-term clashes and survival struggles among clothed apes, bonobo behaviour has been difficult to analyse outside of zoos. But even under captivity, bonobos clearly behave differently and have a different societal structure than their close cousins the chimps. And this is what should get feminists much more excited than they are, IMHO.
So, among the higher primates – humans, bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangutans – bonobos are the only species in which the females have an equal or dominant role in the social organisation. I should perhaps make an exception of orangutans, the most solitary of all the higher primates. For this reason, the question of social hierarchy isn’t so relevant fo this species, though it’s notable that orangutan males are two to three times larger than females. Certainly there’s no question of females being dominant.
The key, it seems, to the more prominent position of females in bonobo society, is female-female bonding, and female alliances. That’s why, I would argue, nothing is more important to the future of human apes than female alliances. It may take time, but I’m hoping we’ll eventually wake up to the essentiality of this phenomenon, for our continued success. The tight social bonding between bonobo females seems to have had a more general socialising effect, something that human apes, who have become increasingly isolated, competitive, covetous and demoralised by new class divisions, would do well to take note of.
In terms of what we need for a more successful, harmonious future, within and beyond our own species, I’m arguing for female prominence rather than dominance (though I do believe we’d be better off with the latter), and I believe we’re inching – with agonising slowness – in that direction, especially in so-called advanced, more science-based societies. Here’s part of Wikipedia’s most up-to-date account of bonobo social behaviour.
Different bonobo communities vary from being gender-balanced to outright matriarchal. At the top of the hierarchy is a coalition of high-ranking females and males typically headed by an old, experienced matriarch who acts as the decision-maker and leader of the group. Female bonobos typically earn their rank through age, rather than physical intimidation, and top-ranking females will protect immigrant females from male harassment. While bonobos are often called matriarchal, this is a trend rather than an objective fact. It is not unheard of for some communities to have a male who decides where the group travels to, and where they feed. However, these male leaders never harass or coerce the females, and they can choose to ignore his suggestions if they feel like it. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. A male derives his status from the status of his mother. The mother–son bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, and although the son of a high ranking female may outrank a lower female, rank plays a less prominent role than in other primate societies. Relationships between different communities are often positive and affiliative, and bonobos are not a territorial species. Bonobos will also share food with others, even unrelated strangers. Bonobos exhibit paedomorphism (retaining infantile physical characteristics and behaviours), which greatly inhibits aggression and enables unfamiliar bonobos to freely mingle and cooperate with each other.
I quote this passage at length because I feel there are various clues here to creating a more effective human society, on a global scale. Let’s be ambitious. Here are some of the clues:
- respect for our elders, and keeping them within the community, rather than shuffling them off to nursing homes. This includes allowing them the right to die, when or if they feel their time has come
- respecting knowledge and experience rather than physical strength or military might. Finding strength in unity of purpose, shared goals and experience in achieving those goals
- recognising over-arching concerns shared by all nations, whether these be nations with officially-drawn (but often artificial) boundaries or nations of cultural identity – the Kurds, the Pashtuns, the Cherokees, the Pitjantjatjara, etc – while recognising, respecting and learning from different cultural perspectives and methodologies.
- respecting experience and knowledge over rank, and so creating a greater communal fluidity, and avoiding the accumulation of resources by a small elite group
- encouraging play and playfulness, youthful exuberance (especially among the no-longer-youthful) and free expression
- being generally more forgiving and less punitive
Are such clues to an improved human society dependent on a more prominent role for females in that society?
Do bears shit in the woods?
20: bonobo and human families, early childhood and free will
ye olde nuclear family, and its enclosures
The bonobo reproduction rate is low, as is ours these days, though for different reasons. Bonobos don’t tend to go all the way, while humans have contraception even for naughty catholics. Muslim scholars seem a little confused about the issue, but are generally more accepting than their catholic counterparts. As to children, humans are rather more possessive about them than bonobos. Bonobo females are largely in charges of the kids, collectively, and paternity is unknown and undisputed. Think about how that would play out in human society, which for millennia has been largely patriarchal, patrilineal and even primogenitive.
This doesn’t mean male bonobos are hostile to kids, as it’s generally a caring and sharing society, and besides, humouring the kids is a good way of winning favours from their mothers and others. Think of how that would be as a kid – you wouldn’t just be able to run to dad when mum’s mad at you, you’d have any number of adults to run to. You’d also have a range of adults to learn from, to identify with, to consider as role models, as well as to play off against each other.
Modern, supposedly advanced human society is very different. We live in separate, securitised houses, in nuclear families – ideally mum, dad and 2⅓ kids – with a garden surrounded by a high fence, if we’re ‘lucky’. The grandparents live across town, or in another country, or a nursing home. Visitors are vetted by smartphone. Of course often it’s a single-parent situation, usually mum, and the odd long- or short-lived boyfriend. She works, so the kids spend a lot of time in day-care, meeting other kids and sharing with them one or two adults, who don’t get too close, wary of being accused of funny business. Rarely are these adults male. Still it’s pretty good, lots of toys and games and things to make and do, all in primary colours, but it’s not every day because it’s too expensive, you (the kid) sometimes get shipped around to aunties or friends or assorted baby-sitters, or you get switched to a new centre, with a whole bunch of strangers, or a kid you really like just disappears. But mostly you’re at home with your stupid brother, until school days arrive and you have to wear a uniform, and mum fusses over you and makes you feel nervous and watchful about whether you look different from the other kids, in a good or bad way. And you learn stuff and you like or hate the teacher and you start competing with the other kids and start thinking about how smart or dumb you are.
Modern human life is pretty regimented. At a certain tender age you go to school where you learn first of all the basics of numeracy and literacy as the first steps toward being civilised. You also learn about rules and regulations, time management and the difference between work and play. Thrown into the school pool of humanity, you’re driven to contemplate and come to terms with variety: fat and skinny, pretty and ugly, noisy and quiet, smart and dumb, friend and enemy and all in between. You learn to make judgments, who to trust, who to avoid, and what to pay attention to. The prefrontal cortex, that amazing human asset, is continuing on its great connective journey, as you negotiate yourself between the formal and the free, between regimentation and independence.
Yet all the research tells us that most of those judgments you make at school, and which you vaguely remember having made, are actually the product of that growth period before the laying down of memories, distorted or otherwise. And that includes your ability to make effective judgments.
In the first few years of life, we form more than a million new neural connections every second. In fact, so many that after this surge of connections comes a period of pruning for order and efficiency. But this early period of development requires stimulation, which comes in infinite varieties of ways, including, of course, the bonobo way (and I don’t mean tree-climbing and chomping on insects), the chimp way (watching adult males battling it out), the Tiwi Islander way or the Netherlands royal family way or whatever. And much of this guided stimulation forms our behaviour for the rest of our lives. And the lack of it can reduce our capacities for a lifetime, in spite of subsequent kindness and care, as the notorious case of the Romanian orphans kept in horrendous states of neglect under the Ceauşescu regime has shown, though interestingly, some 20% of those adopted orphans have grown up showing little or no damage. Stimulation can come from within as well as without, and neglect has many variables.
It stands to reason that we as individuals have little or no control over our development in this crucial period. Which brings me to the issue of free will. Philosophers have traditionally argued for free will on the ‘could have done otherwise’ basis. I could have drunk tea rather than coffee with brekky this morning (though I invariably drink coffee). I could’ve chosen x from the restaurant menu instead of y. So often these trivial examples are given, when it’s screamingly obvious that you don’t get to choose your parents, your genetic inheritance, your early childhood environment, the country or period you were born into, or even the species you were born as (I could’ve snuffed out your brief candle by treading on you in this morning’s walk). Given these restraints on your freedom, restaurant choices surely pale into insignificance.
But let’s stick with humanity. I won’t go into the neurological underpinnings of the argument against free will (as if I could), but if we treat no free will as a given, then the consequences for humanity, vis-à-vis our handling of crime and punishment, are stark, as the neurologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky points out in the penultimate chapter of his book Behave, entitled ‘Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will’. This is a vital issue for me, in terms of a more caring and sharing bonoboesque society, so I’ll reserve it for another essay, or two, or more.
References
InBrief: The Science of Early Childhood Development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst. 2017
The bonobo world: an outlier, but also a possibility: part 1
To say that culture is an important part of our lives doesn’t do the word justice. Culture is not a part of our life. We are a part of it.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh.
I plan to turn the following into a book.
I think it was 1984, some 36 years ago now, that I first heard about bonobos on an episode of The Science Show, still running on Australia’s ABC Radio National. I was living in just another share-house amongst students, student-types, misfits like myself. It had been my life for several years. I wasn’t a student myself, in the formal sense. I was a sometime kitchen-hand with a patchy history of work in factories, offices, restaurants, and, briefly, a hospital. My favourite activity, my daily need in fact, was to write. In those pre-computer days I filled up foolscap journals with crabbed writing in blue ink. I wrote about the things I read, the people I met, imitations of favourite writers, and, too often, elusive, admirable, mysterious and ever-unattainable women. I still have those journals, mouldering in old boxes, covering 15 years or so before I bought my first computer.
I was ever a hopeless case when it came to the opposite sex. It wasn’t quite that they all hated or were indifferent to me. I sometimes made female friends but they were never the ones I was attracted to. In fact I rarely made friends, and my obsession with writing didn’t help. As one of my housemates once bluntly told me ‘you’re always living alone no matter how many people you’re sharing with.’
So I wrote about my failures with women and congratulated myself on my literary abilities. I was of course my own worst enemy vis-a-vis the opposite sex. Whenever a woman I was interested in showed signs of repaying that interest, I ran the other way, figuratively and sometimes even literally. There were all sorts of excuses, even some good ones. I was perennially penniless, I had a chronic chest or airways condition that meant my voice would get caught in the ‘wet webs’ as I called them, and which made me naturally anxious about my breath, and there were other problems I’d rather not go into. In fact I was intensely shy and self-conscious, but good at putting on an air of intellectual disinterestedness. This had generally disastrous consequences, as when I encountered a female ex-housemate and told her that now our share-house was all-male. ‘Oh yes, that would suit you down to the ground,’ she said with some disdain. I was mortified.
In fact I was obsessed to what I felt was an unhealthy degree with women and sex. My fantasies went back to childhood, or adolescence, when I imagined doing it with every attractive girl within my purview. Now I assume this was relatively normal, but I’m still not sure. But my thoughts on sexuality and gender went further. I recall – and all memories are unreliable, as they share most of the same neural processes as our imaginations – standing during assembly in a line with my classmates, looking up and down the line, assessing their attractiveness and overall likeability. It occurred to me that the most ‘interesting’ boys were girlish and the most interesting girls were boyish. I remember being struck by the thought and how smart I was to think it. I returned to this thought again and again.
Before I ever had a girlfriend (and I had few) I imagined an ideal, embodied by one of the pretty ones around me, with another brain inserted, more or less like my own. Someone funny, thought-provoking, inspiring, freewheeling, exhaustingly fascinating – and yes, I really did think of myself that way! And yet – I did worry that I might not be able to hold onto such a scintillating prize. And that set me thinking – such an extraordinary girl couldn’t be mine, or anyone’s. She would own herself. To maintain her interest in me, I’d have to be constantly proving myself worthy, which might be a thrilling challenge, but then – a change is as good as a haircut. What if I had to share her? My adolescent answer was – so be it. The key, if I found her so valuable, so inspiring, would be not to lose her. Not to be cut off from her. To prove myself so valuable that she wouldn’t want to lose me either, while seeking out others.
I won’t pretend that they were so clear-cut, but these were certainly the sorts of ideas swirling around in my head when I thought about love, desire and relationships as a youngster, and they hadn’t changed much – perhaps due to little actual experience – when I listened to the scientist extolling the virtues of our bonobo cousins many years later. I still remember the warm tones of his signing off – ‘Long live bonobos – I want to be one!’
Since then, my thoughts, my reading and my writings have taken a more scientific and historical turn, perhaps as something of an escape from the tribulations and disappointments of the self, and the bonobo world has always been a touchstone. Of course I don’t want to be a bonobo, anymore than the researcher-reporter on the Science Show really would’ve happily exchanged his amazing human brain for that of a rather less intelligent mammal eking out a threatened existence on the banks of the Congo River, but I have no doubt that we can learn from this remarkable species, and that it would be to our great benefit to do so.
thoughts on smoking, cancer and government
Recently I was talking about unhealthy habits to my students – I teach academic English to NESB students – and smoking came up. A student from Saudi Arabia piped up: ‘smoking isn’t unhealthy’.
Now, considering that this same student, a married man aged around thirty, had previously told me that, in ancient times, humans lived to be over 900 years old – ‘it says so in the Bible’ – I wasn’t entirely surprised, and didn’t waste too much time in arguing the point. Actually, I think now he probably mentioned the Bible to show or suggest that Moslems and Judeo-Christians might agree on some things!
Of course, this student was a smoker. Many of my male students are. These students are predominantly Chinese, Vietnamese and Arabic speakers, that’s to say from countries whose governments have acted less forcefully in dealing with smoking than has the Australian government. I myself smoked. albeit lightly, until the age of 24 (a long time ago). Now, having been diagnosed with bronchiectasis, I’m extremely intolerant of cigarette smoke, not to say smokers.
I’m currently ploughing though Siddhartha Mukherjee’s classic Emperor of All Maladies, and have just finished the section on smoking and cancer, and the battle with tobacco companies in libertarianism’s heartland, the USA.
Cigarette smoke contains a number of carcinogens – but what is a carcinogen? It’s basically a product or agent that has a reasonable likelihood of causing cancer, which doesn’t of course mean that it will cause cancer in every instance. You can play Russian roulette with the 60 or more well-established carcinogens in cigarette smoke, and risk-taking young men in particular will continue to do so, but it’s a massive risk, and the dangers increase with age and length and frequency of use. Lung cancer is the most regularly cited outcome, but as the US surgeon-general’s 2010 report shows in vast detail, cancers of the larynx, oral cavity, pharynx, oesophagus, pancreas, bladder, kidney, cervix, stomach and liver can all be induced by this inhaled chemical cocktail. And cancer isn’t the only issue. There is the problem of nicotine addiction, as well as cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, and fertility and foetal developmental effects.
With all this evidence, why do people still smoke, and why don’t governments step in? Drugs with far less devastating effects are illegal, so what gives?
Of course the role governments should play in determining or influencing public health has always been debated, as has the efficacy of banning particular substances and practices. The situation isn’t helped by the facts on the ground, an ad hoc regime in which relatively harmless substances such as marihuana are banned almost worldwide, while proven carcinogens like tobacco, costing millions in treatment, are merely ‘discouraged’ to varying degrees. Similarly, in some countries you have ‘cults’ like falun gong being treated as highly dangerous and criminal while more mainstream ‘cults’ such as christianity, no less or more nonsensical, being given a free ride. None of which promotes faith in government decision-making regarding our physical or psychological health.
Even so, I believe governments should play a role. We pay taxes to government so that it can organise our particular state more effectively for all of its citizens – and that means subsidising education, health and general welfare, to reduce inequalities of opportunity and outcome. Democratic government and an open society helps to reduce government ineptitude, ignorance and corruption. The science and technology sector in particular – a proudly elitist institution – should play a more significant role in government decision-making. But a real weakness of capitalist democracy is that political leaders are too often swayed by business leaders, and the money and influence they bring to the table, than by knowledge leaders. This obeisance paid to business success, with insufficient regard paid to scientific evidence, is possibly the greatest failing of modern political society.