Archive for the ‘family’ Category
we are family? bonobo care, monogamy or not, the magniloquence of humanity, etc
a single mother, benefits assured
So in this post I want to look at how monogamy is doing in the WEIRD world, inter alia. As Henrich and others point out, marriage became thoroughly regularised (and economically exploited) by the Church in the millennium or more during which it held sway in Western Europe. Its marriage and family programme (MFP) ‘legitimised’ children (at least among the upper classes, where legitimacy mattered), reduced kinship ties (which helped to weaken dynastic forces that might challenge the Church’s power) and, perhaps inadvertently, encouraged marital ties based on elective affinities or that fuzzily pleasant concept or sensation known as love.
So in the modern WEIRD world we may marry whomever we like as soon as achieving legal adulthood, and then repent at leisure and divorce without fault, or we can reproduce without marrying and receive much the same supports for our offspring as married couples do. And during the past few decades in particular, couplings and combinations, short-term or long-term, and regardless of gender, have been experiencing less censure and opposition. There is no sense, pace some ultra-conservative circles, that our society is falling apart due to these changes. Capital enterprises continue to flourish, per capita GDP continues to rise (as does the temperature), and the WEIRD world continues to work and party hard, while occasionally fretting about its collective future.
With the rise of WEIRD feminism, there can be excesses, both in the positive and negative direction, and combined with the religious hangover (‘your body is a temple’), even sexual dialogue – the first level of sexual intercourse – has become fraught. Even so, the situation is an improvement on that of previous generations, when coercive intercourse, date rape and such were part of a history that women have only recently been able to talk about. So the WEIRD situation re sexual power, politics, language and intercourse (in the general sense) is very much in flux, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
How that flux will affect the monogamy we currently still accept as the norm is hard to predict. The most common argument in its favour has long been about the raising of children. The conservative view that a child needs both a father and a mother isn’t ridiculous, in spite of the fact that many modern children have thrived on less (and sometimes more), but it seems to me that the most successful upbringing for a child would involve what we call ‘support networks’, a rather bloodless, bureaucratic term for a combo of loving and caring elders and peers. You might guess from this the bonoboesque direction in which I’m heading.
Given what I’ve learned about bonobos over the years, I’m hardly surprised that childcare by bonobo non-parents is a normal part of bonobo life. An online article, linked below, describing research from the University of Oregon, bears this out. Here are some quotes:
“After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies,” said Klaree Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. “They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior.”
“It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos,” White said. “It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive.”
Initially, Boose observed that all juvenile bonobos, ages 3-7, were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3. As they entered adolescence, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favour of other behaviours.
“Handling behaviour picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense,” Boose said. “They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They’d move across the enclosure, where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviours with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors.”
Boose also found a hormonal link to her observations. Elevated levels of oxytocin — associated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activities — were common in urine samples collected after infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, increased oxytocin may reflect how the body reinforces caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants.
Note that this is described as a very female thing. It isn’t clear from the article as to whether any adolescent carers of these infants were male, but I wishfully think they might have been. And I might draw from my own experience here. My mother gave birth to the last child of the family, extraordinarily enough, on my eighth birthday. This odd factoid had a seemingly profound maternal effect on me. I was fascinated by this baby, and more than happy to be his principal baby sitter, lullaby singer and rocker of the cradle. During the first year or so of his life, I doted on him, much to the relief and evident pleasure of my mother.
Whether or not bonobo males play much of a role in the raising of children, human males are doing a bit more of it in the WEIRD world, doubtless to the detriment of their testosterone levels. Here’s an interesting quote from ten years ago:
A record 8% of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over 1% in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data.
Of course the number of single mother households would be much higher and also rising. But it takes a village to raise a child – or, in the WEIRD world, a community, compleat with childcare services, kindergartens, Play School, Sesame Street and the like (the impact of disembodied social media on our culture – which we’re only just beginning to come to terms with – has been profound, and clearly not entirely beneficial). The ‘village’ that WEIRD children are currently exposed to seems in many ways to be a blooming, buzzing confusion, and yet they’re navigating it, for better or worse. The worry, at present, is that real physical contact is in danger of being replaced by gaming, texting and other forms of interaction that lack the throb and breath of that animal nature we seem at pains to deny. The term ‘remote learning’ is indicative, and of course there is more – online trading, virtual care services, artificial intelligence, the cloud, all of these developments seem to have swamped our reality in just a decade or so. In that sense, a bonobo humanity seems to be receding beyond the horizon.
And yet, it’s complicated. Bonobos are noted for sharing, and for closeness (to put it euphemistically). Humans are, I think, getting better at the sharing part, but not so much the closeness. The internet, for example, is a massive shared resource, with the potential to educate, entertain and enrich us beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations, without our ever having to rub our skin against another human for the best (or worst) part of a lifetime.
And speaking of skin, it’s something we’ve evolved to keep covered – for protection, for decoration, for privacy. Sometimes just for conformity. We’re the clothed ape, and few of us want to be thought of as less than that. All of this has more or less impelled us to develop a noli me tangere sensibility that has fuelled and been fuelled by religion – our bodies as temples must never be desecrated, and we alone can determine whether worship or desecration has occurred. And so, unlike bonobos with their close comforts, we’ve become more or less severe guardians of these decorated temples, proudly isolated, opened only to the most select of select of select few.
Perhaps this is all to the good? One of the first intellectuals I was exposed to as a youth was Sigmund Freud, with his concepts of polymorphous perversity and sublimation, and as a randy adolescent I took this to mean that we’re more filled with sexual thoughts and easily sexually stimulated in our youth, but as we mature our sexual impulses are harnessed and channelled into creative arty-sciencey endeavours. And was left to wonder whether I really wanted to grow up. Anyway, maybe we needed all this sublimation to uncover the secrets of the universe, to create marvels of engineering, wondrous art forms and financial empires (not to mention WMDs, mass slavery and the Cambodian and Congolese killing fields). What does love, or a bout of the touchy-feelies, have to do with it?
It’s a conundrum, and yet, I just can’t get those bonobo exemplars out of my mind…
References
https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-bonobos-finds-day-care-pays-babysitters
bonobos and humans – immanence and transcendence?
the struggle against scumbaggery
Canto: So, having heard recently that Indonesia is passing laws to criminalise sex outside of marriage, and that Uganda is passing laws to criminalise anyone who identifies as homosexual, I’m feeling a touch of despair about the future bonobo society with human characteristics that I intended to impose upon the globe in the next few weeks.
Jacinta: Well it’s interesting to note that Indonesia is a predominantly Moslem country, and Uganda is overwhelmingly Christian, but there’s no doubt that religious ideology is behind both of these developments.
Canto: Yes, the WEIRD world, which neither of these countries belong to, is becoming increasingly secular, so much so that S should be fitted into the acronym – a world of WEIRDS, perhaps? So I suppose I should limit my ambition to the WEIRDS of the world. But that not’s what I want to talk about today, though it is related, sort of. Remember Ferdinand Mount’s The subversive family, an attempt to argue that the family unit, and so monogamy, has always been the norm, and has managed to subvert all attempts to replace or diminish it? I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately, and wondering about the unknown history of Homo sapiens and their antecedents, and their socio-sexual relations and child-rearing, given that our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimps, are quite different from each other in these traits.
Jacinta: Yes, and neither of them are monogamous. It’s interesting, but hardly surprising, that we’re inordinately interested in the human side of the divide between us and the so-called HC-LCA (the Human-Chimpanzee Last Common Ancestor), but not so much in the chimp-bonobo side.
Canto: Well of course, and even with that inordinate interest we’re very far from working out our human ancestry going back any more than two million years or so, let alone their socio-sexual arrangements. Anyway we’re not as monogamous as we pretend to be, and no amount of government regulation, or religious devotion, is going to change that.
Jacinta: But it’s interesting that we hold to a monogamous child-rearing ideal, and I’m wondering if that’s always been the case, or how long it has been, or whether there’s a worthwhile alternative, as arguably suggested by our bonobo heroines.
Canto: Well I know that single parent families are on the rise in Australia, and no doubt throughout the WEIRDS world, and any stigma associated with this is waning, but I’m not sure that this is exactly a movement in the direction of human bonoboism. It seems to me that the key to bonobos’ attraction is a kind of multiple-parenting system – not so compartmentalised. Sharing the love.
Jacinta: Bonobo and chimp dads likely don’t know for sure who their kids are – I just can’t imagine that being okay for humans any time soon, or even longer than soon.
Canto: Good point, though it’d be great if we could nurture and delight in kids just for being kids, rather than our kids. And I can well imagine that being the case when we lived together in caves rather than wee domestic units. It takes me back to the kibbutzim idea that I learned about as a teenager, after years of feeling trapped in my parents’ loveless marriage. Communal parenting…
Jacinta: But without the socialism? Or the Jewishness for that matter…
Canto: Well most kibbutzim today are secular, and they’re still very much with us – well not exactly with us, as they’re on the other side of the world, but I’m not sure about the socialism. Is bonobo society socialist?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the thing. Kibbutzim are, I presume, rules-based, top-down forms of communal living, whereas bonobo society just happened, a relaxed, happy-seeming culture, with females bonding and looking out for each other and their offspring in a way that the males, over time, acceded to. Nothing forced or regulated about it. I’m done, frankly, with labels like socialism and capitalism. I mean, we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, the key to our success if you like, and you can call that socialism I suppose. And we’re more thoroughly capitalist than any other species, capitalising on a massive number of other living resources to survive and thrive, not just through pure consumption but domestication and other manipulative practices.
Canto: Well said. But I still have a soft spot for the kibbutz idea, without Yom Kippur or Christmas, a thoroughly sciencey, sexy, smiley celebration of smart, sassy, sisterly communal living…
Jacinta: Not quite the bonobo world though, is it? Sounds more like dropping out. The original kibbutzim were based on land, and agriculture. And what would the bonobo world be without its forest lands and their simple resources? The world of WEIRDS wants so much more, a kind of eternal transcendence. To be more, to have more, to make more, to do more, to live more, as if it’s more satisfying to never be satisfied.
Canto: Hmmm. Thought-provoking, but I just wanted to focus on monogamy and child-rearing, and now you’ve given me a headache. I’m wondering though – because it niggles at the back of my mind, if the bonobo world would really work for us. Our success, if you want to call it that, is due to our endless ambition – caused presumably by those big brains of ours. To paraphrase Marx, those big brains have made us want to not just understand the world, but to change it. And boy have we ever fucking changed it.
Jacinta: Yeah, just ask those aurochs and quaggas and moas and dodos and passenger pigeons… oh but – we can’t.
Canto: Not to mention the millions of humans we slaughtered in wars, worked to death in mines and factories, and fucked to death for our entertainment, but then again, what a piece of work is a man, in apprehension how like a god! But a woman – maybe a woman is more than just a quintessence of dust. And if she is, maybe that little soupçon is just what humanity needs to flavour its thinking about the biosphere and its endless exploitation.
Jacinta: Yes well, don’t put all the responsibility onto us mate. And yet – we need plenty of adventurous spirit as well as a sense of ‘nobody left behind’ to navigate ourselves out of self-created disasters such as global warming, toxic work environments (both physical and mental), and species depletion. And I’m not saying this from some simplistic perspective of male traits admixed with female ones.
Canto: No because we’re already getting mixed up, in a good way. The WEIRDS are taking over the world – have taken over the world…
Jacinta: Yes, China is so western now, and so democratic…
Canto: Well, that’s actually half true. The term ‘western’ is surely the weakest link in the WEIRDS chain. I mean China’s difficult to analyse with its vast population, which means tons of poverty as well as tons of richesse. It has urbanised very rapidly, yet its rural and mostly poor population is still greater than the entire population of most countries. But if you take the rapidly educating and enriching and industrialising urban elites, you’ve got a pretty strong candidate for something equivalent to WEIRDness.
Jacinta: And then of course there’s the urban poor. But you’re right, the term ‘western’ has never made a lot of sense to me. EIRDS perhaps?
Canto: Not the most cromulent of acronyms. RIDES is at least a word, but… I think we’re stuck with WEIRD/S for the foreseeable. Anyway, I think we need to unshackle ourselves from patriarchal religion – I know the WEIRD world largely has, but I’m impatient. Doing so I think will enable more women to be part of the solutions to the problems we face, and the problems other species face because of us.
Jacinta: China and Japan are pretty secular these days, but how many female leaders have they had in the last century or so?
Canto: Yes it’s taking its time – China has now achieved female literacy and education levels that are pretty well equivalent to those of males, but perhaps education isn’t entirely equivalent to empowerment.
Jacinta: Under Xi’s dictatorship female empowerment has clearly gone backwards. Hopefully he’ll be dead soon, but he’s probably already trying to ensure another macho thug succeeds him. Women have absolutely zero power in today’s China. As for Japan, they were ranked 110th in the world for gender equality in 2019, and the sexism there is really stark, in spite of 70% of women being in the workforce. You’ll remember our semi-serious piece about bonobos not wearing stupid shoes, meaning stilettos? There was a ruckus just a few years ago (2019) about that fucked-up footwear, which went semi-viral worldwide, as reported in The Guardian:
Meanwhile, even something as apparently straightforward as being allowed to wear whatever shoes you like continues to prove tricky. In response to the #KuToo petition [the hash-tag puns on ‘shoes’ and ‘pain’], Japan’s minister of labour, Takumi Nemoto, told parliament that requiring high heels in the workplace was perfectly acceptable – sparking further outrage at the government of Shinzo Abe, whose “Womenomics” policy is supposedly attempting to bring more women into the workforce.
Canto: Presumably Mr Nemoto wasn’t wearing high heels when he said this, so WTF.
Jacinta: At least there was blowback, but not nearly enough. Sigh, the arc of progress is long, but it bends towards beating sense into blokey blokes, ou quelque chose comme ça.
Canto: Transcendence may not be imminent, but it’s eminently desirable, for the benefit and beautification of our immanent being…
References
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1982
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
Click to access shsconf_sschd2023_02001.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/where-are-the-women-at-the-top-of-chinese-politics
a bonobo world 33: they don’t wear stillettos
bonobos, humans, sex, kids, community and work: an interminable conversation 1
just being cosy
Canto: We need to face the sex issue, which is such a problematic one for humans, and far less problematic, it seems, for bonobos.
Jacinta:Yes, they don’t need a Me Too movement, coz the males are already scared of them. I mean the boss females.
Canto: Well it’s not just the males hitting on the females. In bonobo societies, it’s males on males, females on females, old on young, kids on kids, but with a minimum of fuss and bother, it seems to me. And it’s not all the time, I don’t want to exaggerate anything. There are no nymphomaniacs, whatever that means.
Jacinta: A pejorative term. The male equivalents are called studs.
Canto: Well, not always. Sometimes called sex addicts. And paedophiles of course. Suitable cases for treatment. And I remember a group calling themselves ‘sluts on bikes’, seeking to retool the term for their own benefit somehow. I think there’s a lot of confusion or uncertainty out there, about whether an overdeveloped interest in sex is good or bad. And of course there’s a big issue about sexual victims, which doesn’t seem a problem for bonobos.
Jacinta: Not a major problem, but the females appear to keep the males in line, if they go too far. After all much of the sexual stuff is just mutual masturbation.
Canto: Yeah, nowadays, human males – and maybe females – get off on porn, or their own fantasies, wanking in the safe confines of their bedrooms, imagining touchy-feelies rather than experiencing them. It’s quite sad. Bonobos don’t have that problem.
Jacinta: It’s certainly true that there are plenty of sexually unsatisfied human apes around. But maybe if they weren’t so aware of sex – especially the hypersexuality of porn – they wouldn’t be so obsessed with what they’re missing out on. Take orangutans. They’re mostly isolated, and I doubt if they spend much time masturbating…
Canto: Ah but they do spend some time on it. If the Gizmodo website is to be trusted, masturbation has been observed in at least 80 types of male primates, and 50 types of female primates, including orangutans. And I don’t quite trust that male-female disparity.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s odd. And the point is that the crotch area is the most erogenous zone for all mammals, surely – and then some. And it doesn’t require fantasising about sexy other members of your species. Think of the first time you masturbated…
Canto: I really can’t recall the first time….
Jacinta: It’s highly likely you found your pubes rubbing against something, and it felt, well, stimulating, so you rubbed some more. Nothing directly to do with sex, for us or for other mammals. When a dog starts humping your leg, it’s not actually humping, or thinking of humping, presumably.
Canto: So it’s all about chemicals, fireworks in the brain, or something? A dog humps your leg because he’s excited, and humping gets him more excited. But it’s the old chicken and egg – does it start with the humping or the excitement?
Jacinta: Well I suppose the main point for us is that masturbation is natural and common for many species, given the evolution of erogenous zones, especially the zone associated with reproduction. But I’m more interested in another phenomenon – reproduction. In spite of their interest in sex, bonobo females are unable, it seems, to produce more than a few offspring in their lives. According to Wikipedia, the most offspring produced by a human female, that we know of, is 44, 43 of whom survived infancy. That’s a woman in Uganda, whose last child was born in 2016. There are recordings of greater numbers in previous centuries, but they’re insufficiently verified. And this woman, Mariam Nabatanzi, wasn’t just showing off, she had a rare condition that caused hyperovulation. Her births included 3 sets of quadruplets, 4 of triplets and 6 of twins, and she might’ve added to the number but a procedure she underwent in 2019, at age 40, put a stop to it all.
Canto: Elon Musk would’ve been proud of her.
Jacinta: Yeah, well, I wonder if he’s helping pay Ms Nabatanzi’s food bills, though hopefully her unwonted fame would help with that. It’s interesting that both Franz de Waal and Jane Goodall mention, in the beautifully photographed Deutsche Welle documentary referenced below, that the ability of humans to reproduce rapidly compared to other primates has been a vital factor in our dominance of the biosphere, with its positive and negative impacts. De Waal suggests that this high reproductive rate is somehow due to the family structure we’ve developed, with the father helping out the mother, not so much directly as indirectly, as material provider and support. But I think this claim needs more support or more fleshing out.
Canto: Yes, it seems to fly in the face of what we know about bonobo culture, where the mother seems to be helped out by other females, and males, in a tight-knit community. Or is this an exaggeration? I recall reading that this community care, or extended family care, occurs in corvids as well. I don’t know how many chicks the average crow gives birth to in a lifetime. Anyway, it seems that the long intervals between births in chimps and bonobos is more psychological, or cultural if you like, than physiological. The mothers do much of the caring and feeding, and it’s exhausting. Humans have bottle-feeding for instance, and anyone can be in charge of that. I did it for my little brother when I was a kid, and even learned to change nappies. Human mothers are sometimes back at work weeks or even days after giving birth.
Jacinta: Which would require other carers. Maybe we’re not so selfish as we think. But then again, in the WEIRD world we’re having fewer children, and as other regions become more well-off they’re having fewer children too.
Canto: Except for Elon Musk.
Jacinta: Crows generally lay a clutch of 2-7 eggs every nesting season – that’s one clutch every year. About 40 percent of all the corvid species are co-operative breeders, a much bigger percentage than other bird species. Crows’ lifespans can vary wildly – some can live for more than twenty years, and of course it’s hard to say how many offspring they produce in a lifetime, never mind how many of their chicks survive to adulthood. But returning to humans and bonobos, both species make a habit of having sex for fun, though with bonobos it’s more of a standard thing – they don’t have killjoy religious figures or ’empowered’ celibates spoiling the party.
Canto: We’re certainly a long way from public sex. Even nudist colonies now seem a distant memory, and they were about as sexy as an old fart’s farts.
Jacinta: Well, that’s a bit rough. We’re just so much more diverse than bonobos, you can’t compare. Everything from lifetime vows of celibacy to sex dungeons, about which I know nothing.
Canto: We’ll explore them, no doubt. But of course bonobos, when they’re not eating and sleeping, have a lot of time for play. They’re not trying to create the next exciting technology or to quantise gravity or to become the richest entrepreneur in the jungle or to take over their neighbours’ territory or whatever. All play, even sexual play, and no work can be a bit mind-numbing perhaps. A bit of your old Freudian sublimation isn’t such a bad thing.
Jacinta: How about getting AI to do all the smart stuff and we just play?
Canto: Ahh, now you’re talking about the future, beyond where we’ll be, unless those longevity diets really kick in…
References
https://gizmodo.com/9-animals-that-masturbate-other-than-humans-1723592357
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_children
a bonobo world 34: bonobo and human families
bonobos – family into community
In her brief, largely autobiographical book The heartache of motherhood, Joyce Nicholson captures many of the problems of married life and motherhood in the fifties and sixties, just before second-wave feminism became a thing. A mother of four, she sums up her experience:
In my case I wanted my first two children and managed well with them. Three I found difficult. Four were a disaster.
I’ve met at least one young woman recently who plans to have four children, but they’re few and far between. Women are choosing to ‘settle down’ into some sort of monogamous relationship, with children, rather later these days, and the current average number of children in today’s Australian family is between 1.8 and 1.9, so even having two is a bit too many for Australia’s human apes.
Other primates fare better – if that’s the word – in terms of birth, but keeping them alive is another matter. It’s a jungle out there. Bonobos average 5 or 6 births in a lifetime, about five years apart, and starting at about 13 years of age. Pregnancies last about eight months. Mothers have principal care of infants for the first six years or so, but of course bonobos are highly social beasts, unseparated by walls, so others are always there to help out. Bonobo females are sexually receptive all year round, and engage in face-to-face copulation (aka fucking, etc) regularly, whereas this attitude is very rare in chimps. In both bonobos and chimps several hundred copulations are required – if that’s the word – for each conception, whereas for human apes many zillions of copulations may be undertaken, and often are, with no intention to conceive. Nice work if you can get it.
Ah, but I was writing about families. Bonobos don’t separate into nuclear families of the modern human type (the provenance of this family type is a subject of intense debate, which I’ll explore later). That’s to say, they’re not monogamous like many species of birds and most humans. Both male and female bonobos tend to partner up indiscriminately and often briefly, regardless of sex or age.
These days, in more affluent societies, we’re pretty demanding about what we want. Not too many kids, if any, and all of them as perfect as money can buy and science can create. As well as a long, very long, and fulfilling work-life balanced life, for all sexes.
But this is really about what individuals want. Or what they require from and of their families, and from the wider society that is expected to support those families, with jobs and services. I suspect people are failing to realise that creating a successful family life – and I prefer the broadest possible definition of family – requires work. Not particularly hard work, but work nonetheless. Or maybe work is too strong a word, maybe a better word is focus. Bonobos seem to manage it quite well.
Having said that, there’s an awful lot of pressure on the modern human family – pressure rarely felt by other primates and social species. For anyone who doubts this, I’d advise them to read Andrew Solomon’s monumental, essential work Far from the tree, which recounts the stories of families who have to deal with deafness, dwarfism, schizophrenia, autism, Down Syndrome, prodigies, homosexuality and severe intellectual and physical disability within their ranks. And it seems there are very few extended families these days that are untouched by such complications. Modern medicine, for example, has created viable human life forms which would never have survived more than a few weeks or months before the twentieth century. Other species, living in the wild – that’s to say, their natural environment – would, after giving birth to a litter of offspring, focus on the most viable, which might be all of them, but if one shows definite signs of what we would call disability, they’d be left behind. In modern human society – at least in the more affluent regions – this would be unthinkable, and probably criminal. And we’re approaching 8 billion human apes. Just how successful do we want to be? And then there’s religion and the supposed sacredness of human, and only human, life. Best not to get started on that one.
But in spite of all the pressures, families continue, for better or worse. We seem to want the species to expand and to thrive, which means making sure that virtually every human ever conceived has a long, rich and fulfilling life, while maintaining biosphere diversity, reducing toxic waste, solving the global warming problem, increasing productivity, and of course reducing stress. There does seem to be a sense that we’re the victims of our own ambition.
Bonobos are nowhere near so ambitious, and they don’t carry the caretaker responsibilities of the planet on their shoulders. Having a smaller brain, and an inability to see the forest for the trees, has distinct advantages. Their inward focus is on providing food and security for themselves and their offspring, and the wider group enveloping them.
For us, that providing involves work, something that we’ve hived off from the rest of our lives. We do it in a different location, which might be just a different room if we’re working from home, but more often somewhere remote from the family we’re providing for – if we have one. And more often than not our work involves us in a hierarchy, of supervisors and less visible managers and unreachable CEOs. The work itself may or may not be fulfilling, but the hierarchical web is always something of a vague threat – ‘will you still pay me tomorrow?’
So there’s always this pressure – to survive, for some, to thrive, for others. Some version of a universal basic income could provide a solution to the survival problem – the currently ludicrous wealth disparities wouldn’t be noticeably reduced by such a dispensation. It’s the thriving problem that’s more intractable, as this is about systemic disadvantage, lack of opportunity, and problems of isolation, community, self-esteem and the like. In Jess Scully’s valuable book, Glimpses of Utopia, she writes of Aboriginal and other indigenous workers and what they value in their environmental work – work which they organise in their own way, the way of their culture. They tend to agree, wholeheartedly, that it is pride in what they are doing. Pride isn’t, of course, a monetary value. It’s qualitative rather than quantitative. It is one of the major factors missing from most hierarchical work situations, and of course it can’t be divvied out to people like the UBI. Scully writes about what might be seen as both supplementary and an alternative to a universal basic income, a form of work or activity that can provide those qualitative values, as well as bringing people together – universal basic services. More on that later.
It is this kind of activity, the kind which actually produces community, which is an extension of family and which blends family into community, that is often its own reward. It may be hierarchical – and we can no more escape hierarchy than bonobos can – but the hierarchy is less rigid and can shift with particular tasks and expertise. We need more of it, and we shouldn’t consider it in opposition to individualism. Individuals have no value without a community to evaluate them. And we humans – more than bonobos or any other apes – are the most socially constructed mammals on the planet.
References
Joyce Nicholson, The heartache of motherhood , 1983
Jess Scully, Glimpses of utopia, 2020
a bonobo world? 6 – cultural dynamism, females, families and inhibitions
the nuclear family – actually modern, not traditional
Most broadly, culture is defined as the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. No culture is static, though it may seem so when looked at from the viewpoint of a more dynamic culture. But why are some cultures more dynamic than others?
The Bronowski comment on taking ‘the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge’ echoes in my head when I reflect on this question. But ‘rational knowledge’ strikes a false note, as there isn’t any knowledge that is irrational. And the most essential thing that any animal, human or otherwise, must know is what to do to survive. Every species that has survived for any length of time has obtained that knowledge, and in a dynamic culture, one faced with external threats and challenges, both cultural and environmental, that knowledge must continue to grow. That’s the key to our ever-changing culture – social evolution rather than the kind of physical adaptations described in The Origin of Species. That is why, for example, we have belatedly come to realise that women deserve as much opportunity, to be educated, to be productive, and to be leaders in any field they choose to enter. It is why Bronowski’s ‘Ascent of Man’ series, with its more or less exclusively male examples of strength and aptitude, seems cringeworthy after only a few decades.
The argument of course goes that man, like the Latin, homo, is simply a generic term for the species, and we (i.e women) should just get over it. The origins of the words woman and female are complex, but surely it’s clear that they are add-ons to the words man and male, afterthoughts like the woman in the Bible created from a man’s rib. In French, the word femme appears to be quite different from homme, but femme means wife as well as woman, the implication being that one’s wife is also one’s woman. No such implication exists for the word homme. The cultural implications of our everyday terminology continue to be impactful, and awareness of these implications is more important, I feel, than artificial changing of the language, helpful though this may be.
Of course, no environment is static either, and animals need to be quick to adapt to new environmental threats. The paleontological record is full of species that failed in this regard. Arguably, we may do so too, if the threat is too overwhelming, but surely nothing is currently in the offing, in spite of some doomsayers. The global warming we’re currently experiencing, for example, is far less threatening to our superabundant species than was the Toba eruption of 70,000 years ago, during the last ice age (though its effects, too, are disputed). Global warming is an existential threat, however, for many other species, already pushed to the brink by deforestation, overfishing and other human activities. Yet many will say that our ingenious species – by which they generally mean the dominant culture within our species – is even better at finding solutions than creating problems. And there are many good news stories, even in relation to those other species that we keep threatening. This is indeed the ray of hope, for our species and for others. It’s my view that, if we succeed in the future, it will be because we have gradually become more compassionate, more inclusive, more frugal and more collaborative, without losing the adventurous, questing, scientific spirit that has made us so successful.
In describing this possible future I’ll strive to be realistic and evidence-based, and that’s where the example of bonobos comes in, for this description of a future humanity fits loosely the bonobo society – without quite the scientific spirit of course. I will not be idealising bonobo society, but there are increasing problems in our culture (and note that I’m always talking about those of ‘western’ or westernised nations – western Europe, the USA, Australia and Canada – but also Japan, Korea and Taiwan) – problems relating to family, work, resources and government – that might benefit from our understanding of cultures, and species, we feel we have transcended, and the bonobo way of life is a prime example of this.
The modern human family is more or less nuclear, indeed like the nucleus inside a cell, though we call it a house, or a home. The walls of the house are like a semi-permeable membrane, with doors and windows through which nutrients and chemicals can be funneled, and of course information about the outside world arrives via books, magazines and, increasingly, electronic devices. Of course, some of these families are more functional and happy than others, and a child’s early fate is a matter of luck in this respect. Extended families – grandparents and cousins who live within walking distance – have become rarer, as have long-term neighbours and lifelong friends, due to the increasing mobility of modern life. In my own case, growing up under a seriously dysfunctional parental situation, and separated by migration from the extended family 15,000 kilometres away, I was grateful for a deeper connection to the outside world resulting from books, of which our home always had an abundance. One book which made a deep impression on me in my early teens was Children of the Dream, by Bruno Bettelheim. Of course, I came to the book with a particular hope that there were better ways of raising children than what I’d experienced, so I was bound to see it in a positive light. Regardless of the reality of the kibbutz experiment, what I found in the book’s descriptions opened up for me other options, including richer, more varied and positive relations with elders as well as peers, and a wider sense of belonging than I was experiencing. Trust, acceptance, and a nurturing of challenge and growth, these were the values that meant most to me, and which I found missing both at home and in the school environment I’d been thrown into. Yet it’s also true, or quite likely, that certain events and experiences in my early life, largely hidden from myself, have made it difficult for me to trust and to connect in positive ways. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a longitudinal study that has been carried out over 50 years now, provides solid evidence of the overwhelming influence of early childhood on subsequent personal development, noting that personality types are established early on in life. My own self-diagnosed type – and the study describes five – is ‘reserved’, bordering on ‘inhibited’. The latter can be a serious problem, which the Japanese describe as hikikimori, roughly translated as ‘acute social withdrawal’, though the problem is hardly confined to Japanese youth. I think, however, I’ve been saved from this acute state by the world of books and ideas, which I love to discuss, when I can bring myself to get out there and do so.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Bruno Bettelheim, Children of the Dream, 1969.
the autodidact story 1: family and authority
When I was young I was somewhat troubled about myself. I was unhappy at home, I hated school, I felt I had no-one to talk to, and my only solace was the ‘rich inner life’ that, much later, I read about in an essay by the philosopher Hilary Putnam. That’s to say, he wrote an essay in which he happened to mention that some outwardly nondescript people might have cultivated a rich inner life, or words to that effect, and this fairly mundane observation was the only thing I took from Putnam’s essay.
I had a difficult time with friendship, and still do. On my birthday – I was probably fourteen – I received a card from another boy I knew well. It read ‘to my best friend ever’. I read it with shock. It made me feel somehow ashamed and miserable. I felt that this friend of mine was deluded, and I’d been the cause of his delusion. Perhaps there was some arrogance in this – I felt that my ‘rich inner life’ was almost completely hidden from him, and everyone else, so how could he think he knew me well enough to consider me his BFF? However, when he left for England with his family a few months later I felt more alone than ever.
I’ve never felt seriously suicidal, but I do recall a particular moment, when I thought, ‘this is who I am – a loner. I have to learn to live with it’. I cried myself to sleep, and went on.
Of course, all autobiographies, whether short or long, are mostly lies, beautiful or otherwise, so don’t take any of this too seriously. My parents didn’t get on too well, to put it mildly, and my siblings were – rivals. We lived in one of the most thoroughly working-class regions of Australia, in the newly created town of Elizabeth, built around the manufactory of holden cars, now deceased. My father worked there for a brief time, but he didn’t like working in factories, and I don’t blame him, having worked in quite a few myself. Unfortunately he couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he didn’t do anything much, and my mother was the nagging, harried breadwinner. My relationship with both of them during my teen years could fairly be described as toxic.
We did have books however. Encyclopedias, classics, and surprisingly modern fare, especially in the new feminist line, such as The female eunuch, Patriarchal attitudes, The feminine mystiquue and The second sex. I don’t know where all these books came from, they just always seemed to be there. My mother insisted on getting us to the library regularly, for which I’ll always be grateful, but I rarely saw her reading anything. She had a higher-up job in the nursing profession and when she got home she’d always flip the TV from the ABC to her favourite sit-coms, I love Lucy or The Dick Van Dike show. As for my father, I often wondered if he knew how to read. But these people bestowed upon me their genes, more or less equally, and that was a source of wonder. Was I smart?
We had come to Australia as ten pound migrants, and I had flickering memories of the boat trip – a camel train on the banks of the Suez, being saved from drowning in the ship’s pool, sitting with a group of kids while my mother, seconded as an educator, taught us spelling or something.
Education. I became a teenager in 1969. It was a fantastic time for music, and the culture that came with it. I looked out the window at my brother and his friends and they were all wearing levis and it looked so cool. My older siblings were buying records – the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones, and some now-embarrassing singles like ‘Little Arrows’ by Leapy Lee. Not long afterwards came Dylan and Cohen and I loved all that cool verbiage. Was I smart? I didn’t like school. I couldn’t talk to the teachers like other kids. I didn’t like the inequality, that they might know more than me. I didn’t like being told what to do. I liked to read, to learn stuff in my own way. I didn’t have an imaginary friend exactly, but I was always talking and arguing in my head, and felt the lack of the real thing.
One day I was somehow invited to some kid’s house whose older sister was visiting from university. Did she live in the university? There was a crowd of kids and I could just see glimpses of the girl-woman through arms and legs. She was sitting on a stool as on a pedestal and she was slim and pretty with neat blonde hair and lipstick and a neat plaid skirt and heels, and I was shocked at this first ever sight of a university student. They were supposed to wear jeans and sandals and tie-dyed t-shirts and be beautifully scruffy and hairy. Disappointing.
Anyway, I left school because I was always in trouble for not doing my homework, inter alia, and I had horrible fights with my mother when she wasn’t having horrible fights with my father, and my father had fist fights with me, which wasn’t much fun as he’d been a boxer in his past and I could see him eyeing me for maximum damage with his dukes up. I would stay at friends’ houses here and there, and I got my first job on an assembly line making Wilkins Servis washing machines. The one shown is of course a much earlier model than the ones I tended to stuff up when I worked there.
And so my first experience of formal education was botched, and maybe I should blame myself, I don’t know. I continued to read of course, and to argue with myself. A rich inner life.
I read novels, mostly, in those days. I developed an obsession with Thomas Hardy. This was in my fifteenth year, I think. The Return of the Native was my first, and I think I read every single novel except A Laodicean, which critics said was his worst. I wanted to read it, for completeness, like Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I did read. I also wanted to know why it was considered so bad. I loved Thomas Hardy, he was so kind, it seemed to me, and so sad somehow.
(to be continued)