Posts Tagged ‘violence’
bonobos and me: a personal exploration
Yes, it’s me, why not?
So yes, like everyone, I was born into a patriarchal society, but it’s always complicated. The first society we start with and have to negotiate is family. We were more nuclear than most nuclear families (don’t worry, I’m not talking about radiation and fallout), because we left my native Scotland for Australia when I was five, leaving behind all grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on, never to be seen again, at least by me.
We came via ‘assisted passage’, as skilled migrants. My mother was the skilled one. South Australia was in need of nurses, and my mother heeded the call. She was always the decision-maker. I don’t know how she did it with three young kids, my older brother and sister and myself, but she took up a job as a nursing sister, and then as an assistant matron of a hospital in Gawler, and later still as a nursing teacher/lecturer. My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. It wasn’t a happy marriage – my mother did a lot of shouting, and I always worried that my father, who’d been an amateur boxer in his youth and was impressively muscle-bound, would lose it and go for her, but that never happened, though he’d sometimes threaten – ‘I’ll put your head through that wall’ was a favourite line of his. My mother, though, did occasionally throw things at him, including a pot of something, soup I think, from the kitchen. I don’t know if it was hot or cold.
I was always embarrassed and shamed by these noisy rants. People walking by could surely hear them. And as I got older, the thought of running away from home would seem more and more enticing. The transition from primary to high school was another trauma. The school’s headmaster was a rabid authoritarian who chilled the atmosphere whenever he showed up or spoke into the PA systems installed in every classroom. He haunted the school corridors in black ceremonial robes, which earned him the nickname ‘batman’, and I came quickly to despise him for his self-importance and ridiculously fearsome temper. He picked me out for a couple of dressing-downs, because he knew that I had the top IQ score for entry into the school, which was streamed into classes by those scores, and I wasn’t living up to my ‘potential’. By this time, at around fourteen, my anti-authoritarianism was at its height, and my school results were declining, as I took pleasure in reading everything but the prescribed texts.
Of course it was also that time of life when sex was rearing up its enflamed head. I would make a list in my mind of the prettiest kids in my school or elsewhere, male or female. I took pride in thinking in these ambisexual terms. I played with the thought that some girls would be better off as boys, and vice versa. I imagined kissing boys, just because I knew it was ‘wrong’. And once, when attending a wrestling match, of all things, with a friend, I got an erection from watching his handsome profile as he intently watched the muscle-bound ogres in the ring. Again, this didn’t make me feel ashamed or confused, it made me feel somehow superior and aesthetically enlightened. However, as the boys became hairier and less pretty young men, I gave up on bisexuality, rather sadly and wonderingly.
I’ve written in my novel In Elizabeth about my first sex, on my 16th birthday, granted to me by my girlfriend of a few weeks, who was experienced in these matters, so she told me, though a year or so my junior. It was short, furtive and uneventful, and it seemed to me that kissing her beautiful face was much more of a thrill. But what happened shortly after this event had much more to do with our primate cousins.
Due to all the domestic strife I was spending much of my spare time away from home, hanging out with other kids, mostly older, at the parks around the local shopping centre. I wasn’t exactly accepted by these kids, but I hung around the fringes, feeling vaguely despised because I knew nothing about car engines and other esoterica. I was an obsessive reader of Thomas Hardy novels at the time, but somehow I didn’t think…
However, my new girlfriend was very interested in these boys, some of whom she vaguely knew, and she wanted me to introduce her… Of course I agreed, though I knew, I just knew, that this would be disastrous.
So we duly arrived at the park one early evening, and I could see that the sight of Edwina, my putative girlfriend, caused some arousal. One of the lads, gigantically proportioned compared to me, and a solid thick-thighed defender in the local soccer team which I also played for, began to niggle and jab at me, which then led to a kind of long, one-sided wrestling match which, of course, left everyone amused except myself. And so ended the beginning of my sex life.
So alpha maledom was never within my purview. And looking back at that scene, I can’t help but think of chimpanzees – very basic (with apologies to chimps). I would ever be the subordinate male, wishing and hoping but never really expecting. I should also point out that, from age five to fifteen, I was the smallest kid in my class, male or female. Size does matter, they say.
Of course, I’d never heard of bonobos back then. I first heard of them on the ABC radio ‘Science Show’ when I was around thirty years old. The male journalist ended his report saying something like ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’. They’ve been a kind of leitmotif for me ever since.
I’m rereading Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood, recognising that the book is principally addressed to women, which perhaps disappointed me first time around, as a far-from-alpha male who never made aggressive advances towards a woman (and certainly not towards men!), and whose more or less pathetic advances were likely repudiated due to their pusillanimity. And I can also admit to rejecting advances of women I was attracted to, due to performance anxiety. At least one of those rejections, I felt, was one of the dumbest and costliest of my life. But who knows…
So I don’t know where I’m going with all this, except to say that the battle of the sexes needs to continue, and women need to win. I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes, because I see matriarchy as a far better solution – which of course doesn’t need to disadvantage men, if only they could see what might be in their best interest. The wars going on at present are thoroughly male, as wars tend to be, and feminism seems currently to be struggling, not just in the USA. Female political leadership, spotty though it is, is coming to be taken for granted, as it’s nowhere near commonplace enough to seriously challenge patriarchy. I worry that something truly disastrous may have to happen before we find ourselves taking that positive turn in any big way.
Bonobos managed to take that turn, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been born of disaster. It even may have been born of plenty. We really don’t know quite how, and it’s probably the big question we should be asking. The USA, for example, should be the land of plenty – which it likes to advertise itself to be. For some it is, of course – the rich-poor gap is massive there. Its per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the developed world. Its name for itself – the United States – is a sick joke..
But of course I’m veering off-topic. Bonobos present us with a true society, with no-one left behind unless they’re overly violent, and then they can be forgiven. And they don’t make war with their neighbours, for no good reason. We need to keep focussing on the example they set. I know I’ll keep being inspired.
Reference
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
How’s Burma/Myanmar doing?
Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh
As an impoverished elder I only get to travel though reading, and it’s also safer. Currently I’ve been re-reading Thant Myint-U’s The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, which I first read in 2021, and now I’m reading it again for the first time, if you know what I mean. I vaguely recall the place being something of a hot mess, with the very distinguished author ending on a hopeful ‘things can only get better’ note. It was all about generals ruling things – never a good sign – and a worry about China – always a bad sign. Still, the author was optimistic, because… why not?
I must say my renewed interest in the situation there is likely to do with the book Escape from Manus by the Burmese Rohingyan refugee Jaivet Ealom. I’m interested in finding out how thing are going, genocidally, for these Moslem people in the south-west coastal region of that predominantly Buddhist country. I’m not hopeful.
So, before we get to the Rohingyas, and the Arakanese (it’s quite confusing, and Arakan is now called Rakhine, bordered by the Arakan mountains to the east), Burma in general still seems a mess, and as far as I’m aware it’s quite an artificial country – but aren’t they all? Who created the borders of the sub-Saharan African countries? Of Afghanistan, with its Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and such? Or the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen of Iraq?
But getting back to the topic – Burma or Myanmar? They’re both quite ancient terms, used more or less interchangeably, perhaps within different contexts, but Myanmar recently has been associated with the stink of the military dictatorship, which has continually suppressed democratic movements, and even governments, so I prefer to follow Thant Myint-U’s lead in calling it Burma. Whatever, with a population around twice that of Australia, it continues to be the least developed country in the region. It was a British colony from the early-mid 19th century, and attained independence in 1948. I would say that, before British colonisation, it wasn’t so much a country, in our modern sense, as a region, containing many ethnic, language and religious cultures, as was Australia and the Americas before the arrival of the palefaces.
Anyway, since 1948, there has been very little in the way of peace and tranquility in the region/country, and the military under a series of blokes has been notoriously dominant in its politics. This no doubt has much to do with the near-impossibility of moulding together such a congeries of peoples without a firm, manly and generally oppressive hand – or so the military think. Which brings me to the ups and downs of its most well-known citizen, the now 80-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, currently serving an interminable sentence, apparently under house arrest for the time being, but things can always change at the whim of the military. Her global reputation has been tarnished in recent decades due to her attitude towards the Rohingya people, whom she refuses to recognise as Rohingya, or as a real Burmese ethnicity. It all seems to be about Buddhist-Islamic tensions. Sadly, her oddly inhumane response to this issue has lost her quite a few supporters in the west, but her treatment at the hands of the military, which continues to undermine democratic movements – the latest coup occurring in 2021 – has been unremittingly harsh. From Wikipedia:
According to reports published on Democratic Voice of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was moved to an undisclosed location from house arrest around October 2025. In December 2025, Aung San Suu Kyi’s son, Kim Aris, stated that nobody had heard from Aung directly since 2023, only being given second-hand information from the junta. As a result, he stated that he feared that she was dead.
On 17 April 2026, Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence was reduced to 22.5 years as part of a general wave of amnesties and commutations by Min Aung Hlaing’s Union Government of Myanmar during Thingyan [Burmese New Year]. On 30 April, the military government reduced her sentence by one-sixth and commuted it to house arrest; she will continue to serve the remaining 18 years and 9 months of her sentence at a designated residence. A photo of her was also broadcast by state media for the first time in years.
Not that a photo proves anything. However, a tiny commutation of such a ridiculous sentence for an 80-year-old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize proves a great deal about Burma’s current regime.
Burma is a country of serious and widespread poverty, and income inequality due to successive corrupt military governments, and going back to the days of the British Empire. You could, of course, say that it’s more a region than a country, largely created by the British, but then all countries are human inventions, something we forget, what with all the palaver about passports and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants, and sovereignty and the like.
Today, Burma is fake-democratic, as an election held earlier this year was won by the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a front for the all powerful and all corrupt military (heavily backed by China), which had seized power four years before, sending 3-4 million people packing, both within and outside its borders. It’s a terrible mess, in which scum has risen to the top and poverty and despair abounds.
And what about the Rohingyas? A huge proportion of them are now in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in flimsy makeshift dwellings subjected to powerful monsoon storms, though some half a million remain in Burma, where they have no status whatsoever. Many try to escape by sea, to parts unknown, to escape the violence visited upon them by the Buddhist majority. And in general the region – I mean the whole of Burma/Myanmar – has become so benighted and dangerous that many international aid organisations have given up on it.
References
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/myanmar-election-won-by-military-backed-usdp-party/106290376
https://www.unrefugees.org/news/rohingya-refugee-crisis-explained/
more on bonobos, sex and ‘evolutionary psychology’
don’t worry, bonobo-human males can still be tough guys…
So, back to the essay by Ryan Ellsworth, which bears the mocking title, ‘Dr. Strangeape, or How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonobo‘.
As for loving the bonobo, an animal I’ve written about many times, I’m reminded of when I first learned about these creatures, on ABC radio’s Science Show back in the eighties. The reporter finished the segment semi-facetiously saying ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’ I’ve never quite been the same since.
And going back further in my history, to my childhood and teen years, feeling trapped by my parents’ loveless and somewhat toxic marriage, I read, or at least skimmed, Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, which told of a more open system of child-rearing in which, or so I imagined, one could choose one’s own parental figures and protectors, within some kind of ‘open field’ of role models and playmates. A sense of entrapment and yearning…
The point I’m making here is that, for me, bonobos are a touchstone, just as the potential of the kibbutzim was a touchstone in my youth. And however one thinks of agriculturalism, the development of enclosed nuclear families behind walls of ownership, has proven disastrous for some as well as being a boon for others, in terms of inheritance, both genetic and material.
But let’s return to Ellsworth’s critique. Take this intriguing passage:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
Eh what? As to women having reputations to protect, I’m reminded of the women who were stoned to death for adultery in early Judaeo-Christian days, while the men received little more than a finger-wag. That would surely have made a difference to women’s overt behaviour. That ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity equal to men’ says nothing about the actual desires of women – surely an individual thing – and everything about societal pressures within patriarchy. And Ellsworth’s claim here that suggesting females might be as interested in sexual variety as males is sexist because males have been doing it (with impunity) for generations – and so this is the ‘natural’ pattern for males but not for females – is, to me, a mind-bogglingly sexist argument. He has surely got to be kidding.
So before I go on with this analysis, let’s be clear about something. The reason that bonobos are something of an inspiration – for me at least – is that they are female dominant, and they are less violent than chimps. The sex thing is, for me, the cherry on top, while I also recognise that the sexual activity – mostly mutual masturbation – and the reduction in violence, and greater empathy, are intimately connected.
And they’re our closest living relatives, so we can learn, by studying how they came to differ from chimps, and trying to understand how humans came to be so chimpishly patriarchal, lessons for our future.
While things are changing, we live in an extremely patriarchal society. There are some 195 nations recognised currently, and 18 of them have a female head of state. That’s less than 10%, and this is likely a record for female leadership. Another source of power is wealth, a much murkier issue, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to claim that 99% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of men. A world ‘turned upside down’ in terms of these figures, however delicious to contemplate, isn’t going to happen in the lifetimes of any of our great-great-great-great grandchildren. But that’s only a couple of hundred years, at most. Who knows how many thousands of years it took for patriarchy to become the human norm?
We can look, though, at so-called hunter-gatherer societies. I say ‘so-called’ because I’ve been told that this is now a much-contested term. Writers and researchers such as Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have focussed on Australian Aboriginals’ understanding and treatment of their land to provide a much more nuanced picture of their lifestyle, though this has become politically contested here to a tedious degree. It may also be reasonable to assume that the blanket term ‘Aboriginal culture’ is too facile, given their multitude of language groups, and the variety of environments upon which they depended. In any case there is a standard view that ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’ were/are separate but complementary. And hunter-gatherer groups or tribes in Africa, some still extant, are generally regarded as egalitarian, suggesting that this was the norm for all humans before what we term ‘civilisation’, the building of civil structures, both material and in terms of operational hierarchy.
Okay, back again to Ellsworth. He argues that Block ignores or downplays the political side of bonobo sex:
If Block had examined the political side of sex, it would have become clear that among bonobos sex is a mechanism of achieving and maintaining status, and a means of social manipulation wielded mainly by females. Most noncopulatory sexual behavior in bonobos takes the form of genito-genital rubbing between adult females, with subordinate females using their sexual receptivity to curry favor from higher-ranking females, most often in the context of feeding. Note that selection pressures for variety and quantity of reproductive partners are not the same as those for nonconceptive sexual activity such as genito-genital rubbing, as female bonobos display discriminative mate choice around the time of ovulation.
Ellsworth seems to ignore that bonobos also engage in this sexual activity for pleasure, just as humans do in the post-contraceptive, post-Catholic WEIRD world. And I’m not ignoring the fact that bonobo females engage in all that genito-genital rubbing to create bonds within the female community which, inter alia, keeps uppity males in their place. And, yes, females display discriminative mate choice, not only for themselves but also for their offspring, as Martin Surbeck cutely describes in a New Scientist article:
If your mum gets too involved in your love life, spare a thought for bonobos. Females of these great apes, which are closely related to chimpanzees, help their sons with hook-ups, guard the young lovers while they mate, and even haul rival males off females mid-sex.
Interesting to note that it’s their sons’ sex lives that concerns them, not their daughters’. Shades of the old patriarchy?
But Ellsworth, I think, downplays the pleasure-bonding aspects of bonobo sexuality in favour of the political – a typically male bias. Both are important, but it’s surely better to mix your politics with wankery than warfare, another reason for considering bonobos as an archetype and exploring why humans went the way of patriarchy – and extreme patriarchy at that. Anyhoo, let’s consider this passage:
….. maybe in some respects bonobos are similar to humans in sexual behavior, but not in the ways that Block intends to convey, and the differences are far greater than the similarities. If we do wish to focus on similarities, the most apparent and basic of all is that in both species sexual behavior is not a public good, but a commodity.
Again Ellsworth is keen to focus on the political over the pleasurable, making a false either/or distinction. But he doesn’t speculate anywhere in the essay about why bonobo females became dominant – he’s too interested in claiming why they cannot in any way be seen as a model for humanity. The essay pushes this argument with monotonous regularity, combined with ridicule. Frans de Waal, on the other hand, offers this, in Bonobo, the forgotten ape:
Bonobo society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ careers. The rich forest habitat of the bonobo evidently permits such an organisation. Our ancestors, however, adapted to a much harsher environment.
Frans de Waal, Bonobo, the forgotten ape, p 135
This more plentiful and relaxed environment is worth speculating on in our post-industrial age – at least in the WEIRD world. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in my own youth I worked in several factories – Simpson-Pope, Wilkins Servis, Atco Structures, Tubemakers of Australia, and Griffin Press. They have all since closed down – not, I hope because of me. They’ve become obsolete, or mechanised, or shipped offshore. Hard, physical labour is becoming rarer in our modern society, in which brain work is much more valued. The rich, post-industrial habitat of WEIRD human society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females can control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ and daughters’ careers.
Interestingly, it’s been found that bonobo males engage in lots of fighting for hierarchical positions and the attention of the females – just not in as deadly a way as chimps.
And meanwhile, there’s that sex thing….
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997
https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimps-might-not-be-so-mellow-after-all
homosexuality, hypocrisy, violence and bonobos
not quite, but I’m getting the t-shirt anyway
A few months back I read The picture of Dorian Gray for a reading group, and the book irked me, to say the least, with its effete Oxbridge elitism, its occasionally crass descriptions of women, and its obsession with sin, which I prefer to believe had already become an outmoded concept in Wilde’s time. I like to identify as a working-class high-school drop out with a chip on his shoulder, a type who finds aristocratic poseurs highly expendable, and my scorn was hardly likely to diminish on learning that Wilde, a tragically broken man at the end of his short life, turned to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, that richly resplendent monument to sexual hypocrisy, for reasons unknown, but presumably having something to do with eternity. Did he actually believe in a heavenly afterlife, in which forgiven sinners would be supplied with translucent wings while having their genitals erased? Heaven really does sound like a place where nothing ever happens, at least nothing the old, pre-dead or at least pre-disgraced Wilde would’ve had much interest in. Of course lions would lie down with lambs – boredom is a universal trait.
Of course, it’s impossible to transport yourself to a world of ‘typical’ 19th century values. Human society, at least in the WEIRD world, has been rapidly transforming in the past few centuries, unlike bonobo society, which was surely as female-dominated and sexually active in the 1500s as it is now. Atheism was hardly recognised as a word in Shakespeare’s time, and nobody would’ve admitted to holding such a belief. Homosexuality, however, under a variety of names, has been a feature of life in virtually all cultures since history has been written, and of course before. Simon Sebag Montifiore, in his BIG book The world: a family history, provides some orifice-opening examples (sans illustrations, unfortunately). Yet even in pre-medieval times, in non-Christian regions, homosexuality, particularly among men, appears to have been looked upon with disdain if not contempt, presumably due to the warrior expectations surrounding the gender. Think chimpanzees.
I’ve mentioned the hypocrisy of the Church, so thoroughly exposed in recent decades, with its all-male ‘celibate’ clergy and its bizarre and unworkable public attitude to sex, contraception, abortion and the limited role of women within its profoundly hierarchical structure. It’s frustrating to see how unwilling it is to reform itself, but heartening to note how little political clout it has in the WEIRD world compared to previous centuries, and how Christianity in general is fading quite rapidly, outside of the USA. It appears to be making headway, though in a small way, in some Asian countries, I think largely because it offers community – a microcosm of mutual support in troubled and often dangerous times. And many of these new Christian groups are more supportive of gender differences, alternative lifestyles and the like. These are the green shoots I like to see – though I might just be imagining them – that might be harbingers of a bonobo world, a world in which the word ‘queer’, in sexual terms, will have become meaningless.
Of course there’s much to be pessimistic about. Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan…. The Wisevoter website lists 32 countries that are currently in ‘conflict’, though history tells us that it seems to have always been thus, and indeed it was even worse ‘back then’. In the more internally peaceful WEIRD world I inhabit, a lot of the citizenry’s violent inclinations have found expression in social media platforms, which would seem to involve words rather than deeds, but nonetheless create self-contained but relational spaces of self-righteousness which militate against bonoboesque caring, sharing and becalming. The concern is that these social media bubbles of discontent and rage may become over-heated and burst into real violence against the physical embodiments of largely fantasised ‘evil’, as in replacement theory, vaccination mind control, an international Jewish conspiracy, etc etc. We may need to examine, culturally and perhaps governmentally, the algorithms that tend to spread and reinforce toxic misinformation, as evidence is brought more clearly to light about real and present damage. It seems that there may be a connection between the seemingly harmless creation of certain mathematical sequences (algorithms) and the strange forms of belief that imprison the susceptible. But then, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, and humans are always free to refuse an education in critical thinking.
I’ve used the word ‘free’ in that last sentence, but we’re not free. Something in the strange beliefs that organisations like the Church have imposed on us for millennia – that it’s a sin to enjoy sex outside of an aptly named concept called ‘wedlock’, and that children born outside of that concept are not legitimate human beings, and a variety of other sex-related ‘sins’ – won favour in the neural networks inside our heads, imprinted from generation to generation, at least until the rise of the sciences, and our demotion, more recently still, to the status of a primate among other primates, albeit a fascinatingly and frighteningly successful one.
For those of us who accept this demotion, or, more accurately, accept that our status has been revised and made more meaningful, embedded as it has become with the stuff of all living things within the biosphere that sustains them, the behaviour of our closest kin, chimps and bonobos, as well as other intelligent, social beings far from our line of development, such as cetaceans, some avian species, elephants, bats and rats, might offer lessons for us in community and sustainability. But, in my humble opinion, bonobos most of all, for, I think, obvious reasons.
Our strong genetic links with bonobos means that, as fellow primates, we can look each other in the eye and feel a depth of connection. Their sexual behaviour and family dynamics are clearly more relatable to us than, say, dolphins, so that we’re keen to close the gap in knowledge about how our ancestry connects with theirs. Exactly how and why – and when – did they become female dominant? Can we uncover female dominance in any of our own ancestors or cousins? (It should be pointed out – for those who would favour male-female equality rather than the dominance of one sex, that such equality rarely if ever exists in the world of social mammals). And, considering how dangerous male violence and militarism has become in the world of nuclear weaponry, the example of a bonobo social world of mutual care, limited exploitation and empathy is surely needful as we tackle problems we have created for ourselves and other creatures due to our rapacity. In some ways, in the WEIRD world, we’re becoming just a little bit more like bonobos, but we need to go further in that direction, with all our amazing knowledge and inventiveness.
Any how, vive les bonobos.
References
The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 1891
The world: a family history, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
bonobos, an outlier in the primate world, and yet…
any excuse for a nice bonobo pic
In trying to develop a bonobo world with human characteristics, or perhaps more realistically a human world with bonobo characteristics, I suspect it’s best not to start by disparaging the male (human) brain as ‘unevolved’ or distinctly inferior to that of the female – something I heard in an interview with a male psychotherapist recently. Firstly, it make no sense to say that a brain, or a human, or a dog, a dolphin or a donkey is ‘unevolved’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, which is about ongoing change to most effectively adapt to a changing environment. And this includes social environments. The Andamanese, a tiny population living on scattered islands in the Bay of Bengal from about 25,000 years ago, and driven almost to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries by the introduction of measles, influenza, pneumonia, and alcohol, have recovered somewhat and preserve their simple lifestyle via extreme hostility to interlopers, and are no more unevolved than were the ancient Hominins who once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. It’s true, of course, that evolution can be competitive, and some species – or sub-species or cultures – can win out over others, but to describe this as due to being ‘more evolved’ rather over-simplifies matters. Each species evolves to survive and thrive in its own niche, and may thrive in that way for an eon, but may be swept away by another invasive species, or by relatively sudden climate change, or by very sudden events such as meteor showers or volcanic eruptions.
In the same interview, the psychotherapist described the male brain, including his own, as sick and in some sense mentally unbalanced compared to the female brain. And you can go onto YouTube and other sources to find dozens of mini-lectures and expert opinions on the male versus the female brain.
However, it might surprise people to know that there is no categorical difference between the male and female brain, at least not in the sense there is, usually, between a male and female body. Put another way, if a neurologist with decades of experience was given a disembodied brain and asked about its sex, she wouldn’t be able to say, categorically, whether it was male or female. There are statistical differences – males have, on average, more ‘grey matter’ (individual neurons) while females have more ‘white matter’ (myelinated axons connecting neurons) – but there is great diversity within this frame, which should hardly surprise us. Our brains develop within the womb, subject to the diet and environmental conditions of our mothers, and genetic and epigenetic factors have their role to play. In early childhood neural connections multiply rapidly in response to a multitude of more or less unique conditioning factors, and new connections continue to be made well into adulthood, resulting in more than eight billion tediously unique noggins clashing and combining in tediously unique ways.
So, to me, it’s behaviour that we need to start with. Of course I’m interested in the nervous system and the endocrine system of bonobos, but that’s because I’m first and foremost taken by their behaviour. I’m encouraged by what I see as changes in male behaviour in the WEIRD world, but then I was told recently that male violence against women is actually increasing. Of course these things are hard to measure as not all violence is reported, and the very concept of violence may be disputed, but a quick look at figures for Australia, which surely qualifies as a WEIRD nation, suggests that my sense of things is right:
Experiences of partner violence in the 12 months before the survey (last 12 months) remained relatively stable for both men and women between 2005 and 2016. However, between 2016 and 2021–22 the proportion of women who experienced partner violence decreased from 1.7% in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021–22.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Australian Government)
Whatever one might think of these figures, there’s little evidence of an increase in male violence (against females), at least here, in this teeny WEIRD nation. So maybe it’s places like Australia, and New Zealand, far from some of the major global threats, slowly building a multi-ethnic culture (largely proof against the massive social divisions stifling the divided ‘USA’), an oasis of 26 million compared to the bonobo oasis of maybe 20 thousand, a region that still likes to think of itself as ‘young and free’, and prepared to experiment with our politics and culture, maybe it’s here that bonobo-style caring-and-sharing behaviour can start to make some headway (but of course even as I write this it strikes me as ridiculous).
The trouble, of course, is that it’s hard to focus on such a possible future without sex rearing its not-so-ugly head. In human culture we’re obsessed with beauty (both male and female) in a positive way (though bad luck if you happen not to be physically attractive), and obsessed with sex in a much more confused but largely negative way (‘licentiousness’, a very human term, is generally condemned in all societies). Do bonobos distinguish between each other in terms of ‘good looks’? If not, when did we, or our ancestors start to do so? There has of course been much talk of ‘sexual selection’ in anthropology, going back to Darwin, but in bonobo society, where female-female sex predominates but sex, generally in the form of mutual masturbation, occurs among and between all age groups and genders, sexual selection (for breeding purposes) would only occasionally operate. And after all, masturbation is about one’s own erogenous zones, which, like being tickled, are best aroused by another, no matter what they look like. Think of a dog masturbating on your leg.
One might argue that religion has a lot to answer for, in so firmly linking sex to shame and transgression, while another might argue, along with Freud, that sexual sublimation was a necessary prerequisite for human civilisation. I’m still trying to work out my own view on this, but I’d surmise that the link between sex and shame existed in humans long before the Abrahamic religions took it to extremes. And unfortunately, much of the online material on our history of sex and shame contains a lot of bollocks, so I’ve reached a dead end there.
So here’s some guesswork. It may have started with the wearing of minimal clothing to protect the reproductive parts, both from damage and from gawkers – out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps this was initiated by females, but more likely (in the case of female genitalia) by males. On this topic I’ve often read claims that pre-agricultural or non-agricultural societies were less patriarchal, and I’ve even adopted that view myself, but I suspect the difference was only in degree, not in kind.
As to patriarchy itself, consider this. Bonobos and chimps split from each other 2 million years ago, at most. From that time on, bonobos survived and thrived in a relatively circumscribed, densely forested region south of the Congo. Chimps on the other hand are more numerous and wide-ranging (with more varied habitats), and are currently divided into four sub-species, from the west to the east of sub-Saharan Africa, and their number in the wild, though hard to determine with any precision, is generally estimated as about ten times that of bonobos. And all chimps are patriarchal.
The dating of the CHLCA (the last chimpanzee-human common ancestor, and note that bonobos are excluded from this reference) has been a subject of ongoing debate and analysis. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
The chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA) is the last common ancestor shared by the extant Homo (human) and Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) genera of Hominini. Estimates of the divergence date vary widely from thirteen to five million years ago.
Obviously, this was before the chimp-bonobo divergence, and considering speculation by anthropologists that bonobo ‘female power’ might be linked to a more frugivorous diet and less of a hunting-killing lifestyle (due to their restriction to an area rich in fruits, nuts, seeds and small game), it seems likely that the CHLCA was already more patriarchally inclined. Consider also that the genus Homo sapiens, long believed to date to no more than 200,000 years ago, and arising in eastern sub-Saharan Africa, has recently been dated to over 300,000 years from remains found in faraway Morocco. That suggests the traversing of vast regions, and a diet much richer in meat than that of bonobos. So, while the hunter-gatherer term has been passionately disputed by some, it’s generally accepted – and it makes sense to me – that there was some division of labour, as implied by the term, and that it would likely be largely gender-based. So, our history, and our ancestry, has been almost entirely patriarchal.
However, this doesn’t define our future. Patriarchy is breaking down in the WEIRD world, albeit slowly. And there are, depressingly, many forces in opposition to female empowerment, especially in the non-WEIRD world. I’ll focus on that in my next post.
bonobos, chimps, humans, testosterone and the future, again…
What kind of societies did our primate ancestors live in? Could they have been more egalitarian than the ones we have now?
Angela Saini
hormones follow social evolution?
So I wrote a piece a few months ago on this topic, and my most recent piece starts to revisit the issue. Human males, at least in the WEIRD world, are experiencing reduced testosterone levels, which in terms of general health, is apparently a bad thing. Females on the other hand, already have testosterone levels at between a tenth and a twentieth those of males. What does this mean, for their health, and their behaviour? And what about testosterone levels of male and female bonobos and chimps, our equally closest living relatives, whose behaviour is so strikingly different from each other, and from us? To paraphrase Sabine Hossenfelder, ‘that’s what I’m going to write about today’. Or maybe not!
First caveat – it’s far from being all about testosterone, as regards behaviour or physicality. And I’m interested in changes to behaviour, re humans, rather than changes to testosterone. So I’m looking for clues in bonobos for promoting more of the changes I already see occurring in male human behaviour, partly due to the increasing empowerment of women. It’s likely that testosterone levels, and endocrine changes generally, will follow changes in social behaviour, rather than vice versa. But I’m certainly no expert.
I mentioned in one of my previous pieces that bonobo sexual dimorphism is equal to that of chimps, and of humans. However, I’ve since read that the sexual dimorphism is a wee bit less in bonobos than in chimps and humans (and given that the split between bonobos and chimps is quite recent, in evolutionary terms, that difference might continue to diminish, and even reverse, if both species manage to survive…). Every little bit helps in the power struggle, though it’s likely that female bonding is the real key to bonobos’ female dominance. A key to our human future?
Having said that, let’s still consider testosterone, and its reduction, and what it means for men in the future. Carole Hooven says this in Testosterone:
The consensus of experts is that testosterone’s main job is to support the anatomy, physiology and behaviour that increases a male’s reproductive output – at least in nonhuman animals. And men are no exception – T helps them reproduce, and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition for mates.
So it’s probably true to say that the reduction in T among males, in ‘developed’ nations, over such a short period in evolutionary terms, is more disturbing than exciting. However, male aggression and violence has long been a problem, to say the least. Hooven again:
Men are much more likely than women to be sexually attracted to women, and they are far more physically aggressive than women in every pocket of the earth, at every age. For example, they are responsible for around 70 percent of all traffic fatalities and 98 percent of mass shootings in the United States, and worldwide commit over 95 percent of homicides and the overwhelming majority of violent acts of every kind, including sexual assault.
All of which is hardly new news (though I’ve encountered disbelieving males), and in most mammalian species males are the more aggressive sex, but there are exceptions. Hooven cites the naked mole rat, the meerkat and the spotted hyena as examples of high levels of female aggression, but the role of hormones in these animals’ behaviour is complex and not fully understood. In bonobos, female dominance isn’t achieved in anything like the way male dominance is achieved in chimps. They do it though female solidarity, most often achieved through ‘sexual closeness’, to speak euphemistically.
Surprisingly, while there’s a massive difference between male and female human testosterone levels, this is not the case for bonobos or chimps. Male chimps ‘have on average 397 ng/dl testosterone, which is below the human male average’,
On this basis,I’d like to do everything I can to support female-female bonding. One inspiring story I first heard about years ago is a coalition of Palestinian and Israeli women trying to find a way around the impasse that exists within Israeli-Palestinian lands, where both groups have an in-group approach to the cultural history of the region they share.
These women — both independently and part of nonprofits and organizations — are working to bridge the gap, break down the walls — both literally and metaphorically — and build a world where Israelis and Palestinians aren’t enemies but neighbors and friends.
I suspect that the walls they’re trying to break down are those of macho insistence on the rightness of their ‘ownership’ of the land they inhabit. This insistence, and resultant violence, has resulted in trauma on both sides. Considering this trauma (naturally felt more on the militarily weaker side than the other), and the fact that both sides in the conflict are dominated by belligerent males, women are often reluctant to speak out about the situation, particularly on the Palestinian side. Take this example, from an article linked below:
We struggled to find a Palestinian woman in Gaza to openly speak in fear of retribution from Hamas, the “Palestinian resistance group,” or fundamentalist, militant, and nationalist organization that controls the region.
The same article features Jewish women, brought to Israel as children from persecution in Middle Eastern or African countries, expressing mixed feelings of gratitude and shock on being exposed to apartheid-style conditions in their adopted country, and Palestinian Arab women, dedicated to education and a historical understanding of the complexities of belonging and loss experienced by both sides of the conflict in the region.
All of this has taken me far from what I earlier promised to talk about – the more speculative question of our ancestry. Were those ancestors less or more violent than we are now? Or – was the CHLCA (the last chimp-human common ancestor) more like chimps (and humans) or bonobos?
One of the features most notable in ape and monkey societies – and also in humans – is hierarchy. We don’t notice it so much in our vastly populous society, in which we might be born to ‘unskilled’ labourers, teachers, small business owners, billionaire entrepreneurs or royalty – the gradations are so numerous that it may take us quite a while to know where in the hierarchy we belong, if we ever do – and whether we’re failing or improving in terms of the rung on the ladder we started out on. And there’s no doubt that failure or success can be measured in a much greater variety of ways than ever before, by ourselves or by anyone who chooses to measure us. In any case, the fact that there are people we ‘look up to’ – artists, scientists, parents, activists, monarchs, whatever – is an indication that we strive to better ourselves in an essentially non-egalitarian cultural environment.
But there have been notable changes in that environment in the last 100 years or so – not only with respect to female empowerment, but major transformations due to science and technology, in transport, communications, medicine and industry. We’re living longer, educating ourselves more, and working less hard, in a physical sense. We’re having fewer children, and a greater diversity of sexual relations. Though there are still many who ‘fall through the gaps’, we’ve developed human welfare systems to reduce dire poverty and to enable the intellectually and physically disabled to experience better lives than was previously afforded them. We’ve become generally more sensitive to the web of life from which our species has emerged, and what we owe to it and to the planet whose environment has enabled all living things to survive and more or less thrive. Some of these developments have long roots, but most of their fruits have been recent, though of course far from universal in human societies and nations. Democracies and open societies have proved to be the most healthful and beneficial for their people, and the general tendency has been to grow those societal types, through migration or activism against repressive regimes.
We live in a world of growing prosperity, often compromised by the belligerence and repression of the odd authoritarian national leader. It might seem a mite ridiculous to compare this massive and complex human population with the tiny bonobo world in a small corner of a sadly benighted African country, but I see some utility in the comparison, precisely because I see signs that our best societies are heading in the bonobo direction. Not that we’re getting hairier or more arboreal, but that we’re gradually becoming more caring and socially responsible, less violent and more sexually tolerant and diverse. The circle has expanded, the better angels of our nature are managing to prevail, and like David Deutsch, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, I feel little cause to despair of the human species.
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, 2022
Click to access Surbeck_et_al_2012a.pdf
https://qz.com/1033621/scientists-assumed-that-patriarchy-was-only-natural-bonobos-proved-them-wrong
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080715204745.htm
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2010.1572
inspired by writers’ week, sort of – the internet, violence, testosterone and our future
Hmmm – needs further investigation. Vive les bonobos!
I spent some time at the Adelaide Writers’ Week tents yesterday, and heard a couple of remarks from speakers that exercised me in a negative way, so I thought I might air my grievances and expand on my thinking here. One was a quote taken, I think, from the historian and ‘public intellectual’ Bernard Lewis, on the influence of the internet on modern culture, and the other was a dismissal of the ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis of Steven Pinker.
I know Lewis only as a name, never having read any of his work, and I note that he died in 2018, just a few days shy of his 102nd birthday, so I can’t imagine him being an early adopter of the internet. I put his ‘public intellectual’ status in quotes largely out of jealousy, as I think I yearn to be a public intellectual myself, though I’m not sure. Anyway, from the little I heard of the quote, selected and spoken by Waleed Aly, Lewis was considering the double-edged sword of the internet in something like the manner of Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Massage, only rather more negatively. I do recall dipping into McLuhan’s work decades ago, and finding it a bit over-hyped, and hyper. Anyway that’s enough of McLuhan. The concern being expressed about the internet was really mostly about social media and the ideological balkanisation it appears to foster. There’s some truth to this of course, which is why, without really thinking it through, I’ve been avoiding social media outlets more and more. Facebook lies dormant on my devices, and Twitter has come and gone.
But that is a minor part of the internet for me. Its advantages far outweigh the distractions of clickbait sites, and I personally consider it the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge at least since the invention of writing – and far more consequential than Gutenberg’s invention. For example, just in the past few months, without stepping outside my home, I’ve watched a lecture series from Yale University on the history of Russia, from the Kievan Rus to 1917 and the end of Tzardom; another lecture series – an Introduction to Neurology, from MIT, and a number of lengthy lectures from the Royal Institution, on palaeontology and on epigenetics, for example. I’ve subscribed to Brilliant.org and have completed 115 of their lessons on everyday science, and I’m boning up on the basics with Professor Dave’s Introduction to Mathematics series. Meanwhile, over the years I’ve observed Wikipedia growing in stature to become the first and best go-to site for learning about historical figures and events, as well as complex scientific subjects. And full scientific papers on just about every possible subject are becoming increasingly available online. I now have access to the greatest library in human history, which leaves me, at times, with a confused feeling – sometimes a dwarf, sometimes a titan. Bliss at this time it is to be alive, but to be young… I recall watching a video (online of course) about how a young African boy was able to build a wind turbine via online instructions, and so bring cheap electricity to his village. .. In short, the internet is an instrument – as is writing and the printing press. It can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, positive or negative. It’s up to us.
Second little irritant. I heard a brief segment of an onstage discussion between the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer and a writer unknown to me, Samantha Rose Hill, author of a study on Hannah Arendt, about whether they viewed the future positively or negatively. Singer described himself as essentially an optimist, and spoke of his ‘expanding circle’ thesis. He also referred to Pinker’s The better angels of our nature, a book with which he was in broad agreement. The female writer, in her turn, said that she was definitely not in agreement with Pinker, after which I petulantly switched off.
I read The better angels of our nature, probably not long after it was published in 2011, and Pinker’s follow-up book, Enlightenment now, in 2018 or 2019. Right now I can say that I can’t recall a single sentence from either book, which is also the case for the hundreds of other books that have been consumed by the gaping maw of my mind. I might also say that I’ve written more than 800 pieces on this blog, and I’d be hard put to remember a line or two from any of them. In fact I’m sometimes moved to read an old blog piece – somebody has to – and find it amazing that I once knew so much on a topic about which I now know nothing.
But I digress. I don’t have to dig up my copy of Better angels to confirm my agreement with Pinker’s thesis. He wasn’t putting forward an argument that we’d become less violent as a species. He didn’t need to, because it was so obviously true, as anyone who reads a lot of history – as I do – knows full well. The real key to Pinker’s book lies in its sub-title, Why violence has declined. It seems to me that nobody in their right mind – or, I mean, nobody with an informed mind – would argue that the human world, a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or, taking advantage of the knowledge provided to us from ancient DNA, 10,000 years ago, was more peaceful than it is today, on a per capita basis. The question is why.
Of course it’s impossible to keep track of the daily violent acts among a current global population of 8 billion, and to compare them to those of say, the year 1600, when the population has been estimated at about a half billion. And, yes, we’re now capable of, and have committed, acts of extreme, impersonal violence via nuclear weapons, but anybody who has read of the gruesome events of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Scottish slaughters of England’s Edward I (a recent read for me), the centuries-long witch-hunts of Europe, and many other brutal engagements, as well as the public hangings, burnings, decapitations and tortures that were commonplace worldwide in earlier centuries, would surely not want to be transported back in a time machine without a cloak of invisibility or the support of a very powerful overlord – supernatural by preference.
Pinker’s book seeks to answer his own question with data and the possible/probable causal linkages, while recognising the complexity of isolating and independently weighing causes and correlations (he returns to this theme in his latest book Rationality, especially in the chapter entitled ‘Correlation and Causation’), including the spread of democracy, the growth of globalism and internationalism, the developing concepts of human rights, feminism, international monitoring agencies, and improved, less dangerous technologies re industry, medicine and transport, to name a few. Deaths can be no less violent, that’s to say violating, for being slow and accidental, after all.
Note that I snuck ‘feminism’ in there. Unsurprisingly, that’s the factor that most engages me. In the WEIRD world, thanks largely to Simone de Beauvoir (ok, a bit of flagrant heroine-worship there), feminism has been on the rise for several decades. During the same period, in the same regions of the world, male testosterone levels have been dropping. I would rest my case there, but I hear Mr Pinker tsk-tsking in the background. Seriously, the rise of feminism is surely one of a multiplicity of factors leading to a situation that medical researchers describe as ‘alarming’ – I’m not sure why.
Of course, testosterone is an important hormone, especially for men. On this medical website, Dr Kevin Pantalone, an endocrinologist, points out that, for males, testosterone helps maintain and develop:
- Sex organs, genitalia and reproductive function.
- A sense of well-being.
- Muscle mass.
- Bone health.
- Red blood cell count.
So, questions arise. Why are testosterone levels dropping (pace feminism), and is the drop significant enough to seriously compromise WEIRD men’s health? Well, according to the same website, different figures are given for what counts as a low testosterone level – 250 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl), according to Dr Pantalone, and 300 ng/dl according to the American Urology Association. We’re not there yet, on average, but we’re inching closer, apparently.
So why the drop, apart from feminism? Some suggested factors include obesity (elevated BMI), reduced physical activity (however, endurance activities such as long-distance running and cycling have been shown to lower testosterone levels)., poor diet (but ‘several studies indicate that low-fat diets may lead to slightly lower testosterone levels‘), chronic and excessive alcohol consumption, lack of sleep (e.g. sleep apnea), and environmental toxins such as EDC (endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which sounds a bit vague).
That’s it. It all seems a bit thin to me – apart from the obesity bit. One factor they don’t mention, probably due to our overly polite society – or is it ‘wokeness?’ – is the serious drop in recent decades, and perhaps even centuries, of good old raping and pillaging. Nothing better for boosting ye olde testosterone, surely?
Seriously, would it be a terrible thing if male testosterone levels were reduced to those of females? And what about my darling bonobos?
So, human males typically have testosterone levels ranging from 265 to 923 ng/dl, while females range from 15 to 70 ng/dl. That’s a big big difference. Which raises the question – if females have such low testosterone levels, what about their bone health, muscle mass and sense of well-being? I suppose this is where we get into the finer details of endocrinology and evolution, but my uneducated guess would be that, over time, the endocrine systems of male and female humans have diverged somewhat, perhaps in response to different activities between the sexes. One way of getting more information about this – and this rather excites me, I have to say – is to look at the endocrine systems of largely female-dominated bonobos and compare them to those of chimpanzees. So that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post. I can’t wait.
References
Stephen Pinker, The better angels of our nature, 2011
Stephen Pinker,Enlightenment now, 2018
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33741447/
still bitten by the bonobo bug…
Having written quite a few essays on a future bonoboesque world, I’ve found myself in possession of a whole book on our Pan paniscus relatives for the first time. All that I’ve gleaned about these fellow apes until now has been from the vasty depths of the internet, a gift that will doubtless keep on giving. My benefactor apologised for her gift to me, describing it as a coffee-table book, perhaps more pictorial than informative, but I’ve already learned much that’s new to me from the first few pages. For example, I knew from my basic research that bonobos were first identified as a distinct species in the late 1920s or early 1930s – I could never get the date straight, perhaps because I’d read conflicting accounts. De Waal presents a more comprehensive and interesting story, which involves, among other things, an ape called Mafuka, the most popular resident, or inmate, of Amsterdam Zoo between 2011 and 2016, later identified as a bonobo. The zoo now features a statue of Mafuka.
More important, though, for me, is that everything I’ve read so far reminds me of the purpose of my bonobo essays, but also makes me wonder if I haven’t focussed enough on one central feature of bonobo society, probably out of timidity. Here’s how De Waal puts it:
It is impossible to understand the social life of this ape without attention to its sex life: the two are inseparable. Whereas in most other species, sexual behaviour is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it has become an integral of social relationships, and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination: male-male, male-female, female-female, male-juvenile, female-juvenile, and so on. The frequency of sexual contact is also higher than among most other primates.
In our own society, definitely still male-dominated but also with a legacy of religious sexual conservatism, this kind of all-in, semi-masturbatory sexual contact is absolutely beyond the pale. I’m reminded of the Freudian concept of sublimation I learned about as a teen – the eros or sex drive is channelled into other passionate, creative activities, and, voila, human civilisation! And yet, we’re still obsessed with sex, which we’re expected to transmute into sexual fulfilment with a lifelong partner. Meanwhile, the popularity of porn, or what I prefer to call the sex video industry, as well as the world’s oldest profession, indicates that there’s much that’s not quite right about our sex lives.
This raises questions about monogamy, the nuclear family, and even the human concept of love. This is ancient, but nevertheless dangerous territory, so for now I’ll stick with bonobos. As with chimps, female bonobos often, though not always, move to other groups at sexual maturity, a practice known as philopatry. Interestingly, this practice has similarities to exogamous marriage practices, for example among some Australian Aboriginal groups. It’s interesting, then, that female-female bonds tend to be the strongest among bonobos, considering that there’s no kinship involved.
Needless to say, bonobos don’t live in nuclear families, and child-care is a more flexible arrangement than amongst humans, though the mother is naturally the principal carer. And it seems that bonobo mothers have a subtly closer relationship with their sons than their daughters:
the bond between mother and son is of particular significance in bonobo society where the son will maintain his connection with his mother for life and depend upon her for his social standing within the group. For example, the son of the society’s dominant female, the strong matriarch who maintains social order, will rise in the ranks of the group, presumably to ensure the establishment and perpetuation of unaggressive, non-competitive, cooperative male characteristics, both learnt and genetic, within the group.
Considering this point, it would be interesting to research mother-son relations among human single-parent families in the WEIRD world, a situation that has become more common in recent decades. Could it be that, given other support networks, rather than the disadvantages often associated with one-parent families in human societies, males from such backgrounds are of the type that command more respect than other males? Particularly, I would suspect, from females. Of course, it’s hard to generalise about human upbringing, but we might be able to derive lessons from bonobo methods. Bonobo mothers rarely behave punitively towards their sons, and those sons remain attached to their mothers throughout their lives. The sons of high-status females also attain high status within the male hierarchy.
Yet we are far from being able to emulate bonobo matriarchy, as we’re still a very patriarchal society. Research indicates that many women are still attracted to high-status, philandering men. That’s to say, they’ve been ‘trained’ to climb the success ladder through marriage or co-habitation than through personal achievement. They’ve also been trained into the idea of high-status males as dominating other males as well as females. It is of course changing, though too slowly, and with too many backward moves for the more impatient among us. Two macho thugocracies, Russia and China, are currently threatening the movement towards collaboration and inclusivity that we see in female-led democracies such as Taiwan, New Zealand and a number of Scandinavian countries. It may well be that in the aftermath of the massive destruction wrought by these thugocracies, there will come a reckoning, as occurred after the two ‘world wars’ with the creation of the UN and the growth of the human rights movement and international aid organisations, but it is frustrating to contemplate the suffering endured in the meantime, by those unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now of course all this might be seen as presenting a romanticised picture of bonobos (not to mention female humans), which De Waal and other experts warn us against. The difference in aggression between bonobos and chimps is more a matter of degree than of type, perhaps, and these differences can vary with habitat and the availability of resources. And yet we know from our studies of human societies that male-dominated societies are more violent. And male domination has nothing to do with simple numbers, it is rather about how a society is structured, and how that structure is reinforced. For example I’ve written recently about how the decidedly male god of the Abrahamic religions, originally written as YWH or Elohim, emerged from a patriarchal, polygamous society in the Sinai region, with its stories of Jacob and Abraham and their many wives, which was reinforced in its structure by origin myths in which woman was created out of a man’s rib and was principally responsible for the banishment from paradise. The WEIRD world is struggling to disentangle itself from these myths and attitudes, and modern science is its best tool for doing so.
One of the most interesting findings, then, from modern neurology, is that while there are no categorical differences between the male and the female brain in humans, there are significant statistical differences – which might make for a difference in human society as a whole. To explain further: no categorical difference means that, if you were a professional neurologist who had been studying the human brain for decades, and were presented with a completely disembodied but still functional human brain to analyse, you wouldn’t be able to assert categorically that this brain belonged to a male or a female. That’s because the differences among female brains, and among male brains, are substantial – a good reason for promoting gender fluidity. However, statistically, there are also substantial differences between male and female brains, with males having more ‘grey’ material (the neurons) and females having more ‘white’ material (the myelinated connections between neurons), and with males having slightly higher brain volume, in accord with general sexual dimorphism. In a 2017 British study involving some 5,000 subjects, researchers found that:
Adjusting for age, on average… women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests.
This sounds promising, but it’s doubtful that anything too insightful can be made of it, any more than a study of bonobo neurophysiology would provide us with insights into their culture. But, you never know…
References
Frans De Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997.
https://www.humancondition.com/freedom-the-importance-of-nurturing-in-bonobo-society/
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
a bonobo world 37: chimps r us?
human tool use
There are a number of videos, including one by David Attenborough’s Planet Earth team, showing how chimps are able to engage in planned attacks on neighbouring chimp groups in a way that resembles, and is seen as ancestral to, tribal warfare among hominids and humans. The 4-minute Planet Earth vid doesn’t mention whether the attacking chimps are all male – a question of great interest to me – though it does mention an attack on an enemy female, which is unsurprising, considering human warfare. The fact that defeated chimps are sometimes eaten raises the grizzly question about our more recent ancestors, and our human selves. We may never have eaten our human victims alive (though we probably have), but we have subjected them to far more excruciating suffering than any other Earth-bound species could manage.
I’ve often claimed that we’re leaving warfare behind us, especially with the push to female empowerment, but I’m never quite sure if this is just wishful thinking. We should never allow ourselves to be complacent about apparent trends, to assume they’re somehow inevitable. And of course while need to push for such empowerment, we shouldn’t assume that this will produce the desired result, regarding ‘peace, love and understanding’ or anything else. We need to examine the evidence.
That’s why bonobo culture is so intensely interesting. It raises important questions. What exactly is the relationship between the power structure within bonobo groups – power held mostly by females – and their level of in-group aggression? How exactly does this compare with human power structures and human-to human aggression? How do these different power structures relate to hunting practices and diet? We know that the bonobo diet includes less meat than that of chimps, but is this due more to environment (bonobos are more arboreal, for example), or to social structure? Humans, we know, can get by on a vegetarian diet, and we also know that a less meat-heavy diet is more beneficial for the environment. We have also moved far beyond our primate cousins in being able to produce food through cultivation, using, over time, less and less land to produce more and more food. We even have the means, if not the will, to mass-produce artificial meat – ‘you won’t believe it’s not meat’.
Yet male aggression, in the domestic sphere, in politics, on the sports field, and in riotous assemblies, is as much a problem as ever. A world turned upside-down, with government, business, the law, science, academia and the military being led by women to the same extent as they are led by men today, that’s the impossible dream scenario that may solve this problem. Or not. But then, bonobos are so like chimps, aren’t they? I mean physically. But socially they’re not. The differences aren’t that great, and it only took a million or two years to produce them.
Of course, that’s where we’re hugely different. The changes we’ve undergone – we of European ancestry – in only the past few thousand years have been astonishing, and they do seem to be accelerating. But in those developments there’s hope. If you’re prepared to believe we can find solutions to anthropogenic global warming, to the loss of species diversity, to our own ageing population, and to the various national and cultural enmities that plague us as a species, then you can surely believe we can move towards a happier, sexier bonobo-type social existence with all the human benefits we can add to it through our extraordinarily imaginative, creative, problem-solving minds. Chimps r us, it may sometimes seem, but with the ascent of woman, bonobos r our future. At least it’s worth a try. I for one would love to be a male in a female-dominant human world. At least I just can’t imagine how it would be worse than the world we’ve made for ourselves.
Reference
Violent chimpanzee attack – Planet Earth – BBC wildlife (video)
A bonobo world 31: are bonobos people?
William Damper’s Aussie disappointment
Apparently, under current US law at least, there is a clear distinction between people, or persons – that’s to say, all human animals – and everything else, with the emphasis on thing. From a legal perspective, bonobos, chimps, rats and lice are things. This of course raises questions about a human embryo or blastula or morula etc, which I won’t explore here.
Clearly bonobos, chimps and our pet birds and animals aren’t things, except in the sense that we’re all things – living things. It’s also clear that many non-human animals do many of the things people do, such as feeling angry, sad, bored, scared, tired, confused etc. With these obvious facts in mind, a US organisation called the Nonhuman Rights Project sought habeas corpus hearings in a New York State court ‘to determine whether Kiko and Tommy, two captive chimpanzees, should be considered legal persons with the fundamental right to bodily liberty’. The chimps, who have different owners, are each kept in conditions which any reasonable person would describe as inhuman – but then, they’re not humans. According to current US law, they’re human possessions, subject no doubt to certain animal welfare laws, but arguably not to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In seeking to strengthen their case, the Nonhuman Rights Project brought together a series of amicus curiae (friends of the court) essays by philosophers and ethicists, published in 2019 in a booklet, Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosopher’s Brief.
All of this should make us wonder what a person actually is, and whether there are degrees of personhood. On this point I want to share an anecdote.
I was walking my young dog in the park, and she was bouncing and darting about friskily in front of me. We passed two women on a park bench, and one of them beamed at me, ‘I bet she’s a girl!’ ‘Yes, she’s a girl’, I smiled. ‘Yeah, they’re always the lively ones,’ she asserted. Being ever a contrarian, as I’ve been told, I wondered about the truth of this assertion, which led to a far more interesting question – was Mulan (the dog) still a girl? A quick calculation, using the human-to-dog years rule-of-thumb, told me that she was now in her early-mid twenties, just that age when it starts to become dodgy, PC-wise, to keep using the girl moniker.
So, this dog was a woman now?
We actually call our pets girls or boys even deep into old age. Isn’t this a form of infantilism? It goes with the word ‘pet’ of course. So what about, say, lions? Do we condescend to confer adulthood on those regal animals? Well, sort of. We use male and female, and of course him and her, and personal names if we’ve thought ones up. But the terms man and woman are only for us.
This is understandable, while at the same time it has the odour of human specialness. I imagine that zookeepers or zoologists who get friendly with wild animals might employ the term girl or boy to refer to them, a term of affection laced with superiority. We just can’t allow them to rise to our level. That’s why, with bonobos, it’s okay, and indeed very fruitful, to learn about them, but to learn from them is a step too far, is it not?
And yet. Gillian Dooley, a research fellow at Flinders University, and Danielle Clode, of the same university’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, recently co-edited The first wave, a collection of writings on Europeans’ early contacts with Aboriginal cultures in Australia. The book’s cover features ‘the first known illustration of the Aboriginal people of Australia, which appeared in a rare 1698 Dutch edition of William Dampier’s 1697 New voyage around the world.’ It was only recently brought to light in the library of the University of Hawaii. The image depicts a confrontation of sorts between Dampier and his crew and the Aborigines, in which the Europeans tried to get them to carry barrels of water, perhaps in exchange for articles of clothing, as one Aborigine is depicted sporting a European jacket. It seems the Aborigines didn’t ‘get it’ and were unwilling to comply. Dampier wrote umbrageously that ‘we were forced to carry our water ourselves’.
The scene beautifully illustrates the European attitude, over many centuries, to the people of what they liked to call ‘the new world’ – which effectively meant the world beyond Eurasia. The term savage, noble or ignoble, was first applied to human apes (of a certain condition), as far as we know, by John Dryden in a 1672 play, though the idea goes back to Montaigne and beyond. Of course it’s perfectly understandable that Europeans of the last few centuries, with their elaborate clothing and appurtenances, their monumental architecture, their complex religious rituals and beliefs, their technological developments and political systems, would mostly see the ‘natives’ as part of the fauna of these exotic new lands. And history tells us that it doesn’t even take a sense of their inferior otherness to turn our fellow humans into beasts of burden or slaves. Aristotle defended slavery and believed that some people were ‘natural slaves’. Athenian soi-disant democracy was entirely dependent on slaves, who vastly outnumbered citizens. Many of the indigenous nations of the Americas had slaves before they themselves were enslaved by the Conquistadors. The feudal system that pervaded Europe for centuries was essentially a slave system. Montaigne was able to retire to his castle and write the essays that inspired me decades ago because he inherited that castle, the productive lands around it, and the people who worked the land. They were his. If he asked them to carry water for him, they would feel obliged to do so.
I imagine that if we travelled back in time and asked Aristotle whether slaves were people, that he would come up with a long complicated discourse to the effect that there were natural slaves who were best suited to be beasts of burden, and that these natural slaves beget more natural slaves, entirely suited to serve their masters – which is essentially the basis of the feudal system. What has, of course, blown all this type of thinking away (though fragments still remain) is modern biology, especially neurophysiology and genetics. Our understanding of human connectedness has been raised by these disciplines, as has our understanding of the connectedness of all species. So we look at ‘first nation’ culture and technology and its adaptation to environment with more enlightened eyes, and we see other species more in terms of family, culture and problem-solving, even if in very different contexts from our own. But the human context is constantly changing. For seventy-odd years now, we’ve built and maintained the weaponry to destroy human and other life on a grand scale. the USA alone has over 6,000 nuclear warheads. Surely there’s nothing more to achieve on the warfare front. Our survival is assured against all comers, except of course, ourselves. The future has to be about making peace, making connections, learning how to do things more cleverly, more supportively, more sustainably for all the life forms we’re connected with.
Which returns me to bonobos. The question, of course, isn’t whether they are people. They’re in many ways like us, as are their chimp cousins. I just happen to think they’re more worth learning from than chimps (though I must say, I always feel guilty about dissing our chimp rellies – they’re not that bad!). They know how to nip violence in the bud, they’re relaxed and open about sex (though not obsessed, either positively or negatively), they keep their menfolk – sorry, males – in line, and in all those things they do better than we human apes. If we can follow bonobos in these ways – and maintain and build on the best of what’s human – our curiosity, out ingenuity, our sympathy, and our extraordinary creative capacity – I think we’ll be around for a long time.
savages – or maybe just greeny nudists – upholding Denmark’s coat of arms