a bonobo humanity?

Canto: I want to talk about patriarchy, it’s weighing on my mind more and more.

Jacinta: Go on. And by the way, since we’ll obviously be talking about males and females and difference here, I notice that this blog is currently getting quite a few hits on a previous post, What do we currently know about the differences between male and female brains in humans?, and I think there’s information I’d want to add to that post, based on more recent research.

Canto: Go on.

Jacinta: Well what the research found, and it doesn’t in any way contradict the above-mentioned post, is that there are no categorical differences between the male and female brain, only statistical differences. It’s a nice thing to emphasise, that human brains are a kind of mozaic of ‘male’ and ‘female’ traits, with a very broad spectrum of possibilities. It essentially means that, unlike with genitalia, which, with a few statistically insignificant exceptions, can be used to identify maleness or femaleness, you wouldn’t, even with a lifetime’s neurological experience behind you, be able to say categorically that an individual was male or female based on an examination of the person’s brain alone.

Canto: But there might in some cases be a high probability.

Jacinta: Oh yes, maybe 80% in some cases, but that wouldn’t pass muster in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt and all that. That would require a 99.9% probability or more. Think DNA ‘fingerprinting’. So, in all that was written in the previous post, the words ‘on average’, a statistical reference, should be kept in mind.

Canto: Right. And that term was used in the post, but perhaps not enough. But now let’s look at some other stats. According to IFL science, males commit some 85% of homicides, 91% of same-sex homicides, and 97% of same-sex homicides in which the victim and the perp aren’t known to each other (that’s to say, in which the likely motive was ideological)…

Jacinta: Or business-related, as in hired hit-men and the like…

Canto: It’s a stark but probably not surprising set of statistics. The IFL science post from which I got this data went on to provide an explanation, of sorts, in evolutionary psychology, through concept such as ‘precarious manhood’, clearly embedded in a patriarchal society which appears to be taken for granted. The notoriously macho Yanomamo people of South America are cited as an example, because the more men they kill the more their status rises. This is claimed as evidence that the quest for dominance is pretty well universal among males…

Jacinta: Well I can see a clear problem there.

Canto: Good.

Jacinta: And it relates very much to what I’ve been saying about male (and female) brains. Just as they vary over a very wide spectrum, so males themselves vary in the same way. So how can the quest for dominance be universal among males when males themselves are so various in their brain wiring and function?

Canto: Excellent point, and so let me leave this evolutionary psychology stuff aside, at least for the time being, and get back to patriarchy. There are many reasons that have converged to make western society less violent over the centuries, but I strongly believe that a ‘drop’ in patriarchy and a rise in gender egalitarianism has been one of the major civilising factors – possibly the major one.

Jacinta: So you have a solution for the world: patriarchy bad, matriarchy good?

Canto: Matriarchy probably better, but that wouldn’t make for such a good bumper sticker.

Jacinta: Seriously, I think you may be right. And it might actually be safer to challenge certain societies – Arabic, African and Indian societies for example – on their patriarchy than on their religion. It might actually be their soft spot, because if they react violently to a criticism of patriarchal violence they’ve lost the argument, haven’t they?

Canto: They probably wouldn’t care about losing the argument, as long as they kept their patriarchy.

does your boss look like this?

Jacinta: I would challenge the women in those societies, too. Nowadays, in the interests of multiculturalism, we’re asked to respect the hijab, and we get soft interviews with women who almost invariably say it’s their choice to wear it, and when asked why they choose to wear it they almost invariably say something about modesty. And that’s where the tough questioning should come in, but it never does.

Canto: Such as?

Jacinta: Such as, Does your husband (or father, or son) wear a hijab? If not, is that because modesty isn’t a male virtue? And if not, why not?

Canto: I’ve no idea what they’d say. Maybe they’d say that in their culture women dress differently from men, just as they do in western culture. You don’t see many western men going about in frocks, or hot-pants.

Jacinta: Well… you don’t see that many women going about in hot-pants actually. And not even frocks except on special occasions. Trousers and a top, that’s probably the most common everyday dress for both sexes. But we’ll get back to that, imagine I’m trying to pin them down on this modesty question. I think maybe they’d have to admit that modesty is regarded as a feminine virtue in their culture.

Canto: Ah, and then you’d go for the killer blow, saying ‘isn’t this because modesty is a self-effacing virtue, whereas the male virtues would be more about confidence and assertiveness? And which of these virtues would you associate with power?’

Jacinta: Yes, that’d kill them stone dead.

Canto: Well, actually you don’t go for the killer blow, you soften them up with Socratic manoeuvrings.

Jacinta: Ah. Well, Socrates I’m sure that self-confidence and assertiveness are more associated with power than modesty.

Canto: And modesty, that tends to more associated with a desire not to wield power – to be, or to seem to be, lacking in power?

Jacinta: Yes, that is certainly true, Socrates.

Canto: So it would follow, would it not, that those who don’t wear the hijab, namely the males, would be assertive and dominant within such a culture, and the hijab-wearers would be more submissive, and rather dominated? For to be modest is surely not to be dominant.

Jacinta: Surely it isn’t.

Canto: And yet, research tells us that both females – the hijab-wearers in this culture – and males are both a mosaic of various traits, some of which have been traditionally associated with maleness, some with femaleness, though perhaps not with good reason.

Jacinta: Yes, that’s what the research clearly shows. And yet there’s this problem, even in our somewhat less patriarchal society, of male violence against women, both domestic and general. Is this just because of the statistical differences between male and female brains – not only in connectivity between neurons and between specific regions in the brain, but the flow of hormones and neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and testosterone and dopamine?

Canto: Well, yes, now we’re getting into very tricky territory.

Jacinta: Yes, like ‘I wasn’t responsible for killing her, it was my brain that was responsible – I can’t help the dangerous cocktail of chemicals that is my brain’.

Canto: Yes, but the fact is, for the vast majority of us, those chemicals are ‘in check’, they don’t cause us to harm others or ourselves, in fact they’re essential to our living socially constructive, civilised lives. And it seems that the feedback from the wider society regulates the circulation and effect of those chemicals. If you live in a society which rewards you for denouncing someone as a witch, or which more or less sanctions pack rape – and such societies or sub-cultures do exist, though hopefully they’re diminishing – then many will act accordingly. And many societies, as we know, sanction or reward the two genders differently.

Jacinta: Well, that’s interesting, and it raises another question – the extent to which the culture we live in, or the family we grow up in, affects the actual physiology of our brains. So, ‘my culture/my family made my brain make me do it’.

Canto: Well, we can’t get away from that. What we want is something like the universal declaration of human rights having real impact, so that these universal values are actually imposed at the level of the brain.

Jacinta: Brainwashing? And are they universal values?

Canto: They’re useful ones for our flourishing, that’s enough. Ok forget the word ‘impose’, but they should be encouraged and rewarded, and we should ask people to look critically, through education, at whether there are any effective alternatives – such as shari’a law, or any other cultural laws or customary behaviours.

Jacinta: Individual flourishing, or is there some other possibly better sort of flourishing?

Canto: No I’m actually talking about a broad social, human flourishing, imposing limits within which individuals can thrive, as members. And those useful values deal pretty well with patriarchy, in that they show that both the Catholic Church and whole religions such as Islam are violating those values by discriminating in terms of gender.

Jacinta: But the UDHR has freedom of religion as one of its values.

Canto: It’s not perfect.

Jacinta: Some values are more valuable than others?

Canto: Well actually yes. And, getting back to what we know about human brains, and what they tell us about diversity within each gender, any cultural or religious practice which delimits that diversity is a curtailment of self-expression, freedom and flourishing.

Jacinta: Fine words, but get this. This diversity within genders you talk about is based on one study. How many brains were examined in this study, and more importantly, from which cultural backgrounds were they drawn? Could it be that brains taken from subjects who inhabited cultures that had imposed strict gender divisions for generations would show considerably less diversity? Then it becomes a chicken-and-egg issue.

Canto: Good point, and unfortunately the details of the research are behind a paywall, but there’s been a lot of reporting on it, for example here, here and here. Some 1400 brains were studied, and there was a connected study of behavioural traits among 5500 individuals, and ages ranged from 13 to 85, but I couldn’t find anything on the cultural backgrounds of the subjects. The research was done from Tel Aviv University, using existing datasets of MRI images. I’m not sure what can be derived from that.

Jacinta: Well OK, I don’t think we’ve quite solved the patriarchy problem or even sufficiently addressed it here, but it was a start. Time to finish.