Posts Tagged ‘Gaia Vince’
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