Posts Tagged ‘male violence’
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.
A bonobo world and other impossibilities 25: women and warfare (2)
The following is re-posted and was first written on this blog in January 2019, but I’m doing this under a new title (with some changes) because it clearly belongs in this series.
humans, bonobos, coalitions and care
Shortly before I started writing the first part of this article, I read a sad and disturbing piece in a recent New Scientist, about an Iron Age citadel in modern Iran, called Hasanlu. Its tragic fate reminded me of the smaller scale tragedies that Goodall and others recount in chimpanzee societies, in which one group can systematically slaughter another.
Hasanlu was brutally attacked and destroyed at the end of the ninth century BCE, and amazingly, the massacred people at the site remained untouched until uncovered by archeologists only a few decades ago. One archeologist, Mary Voigt, who worked the site in 1970, has described her reaction:
I come from a long line line of undertakers. Dead people are not scary to me. But when I dug that site I had screaming nightmares.
Voigt’s first discovery was of a small child ‘just lying on the pavement’, with a spear point and an empty quiver lying nearby. In her words:
The unusual thing about the site is all this action is going on and you can read it directly: somebody runs across the courtyard, kills the little kid, dumps their quiver because it’s out of ammunition. If you keep going, there are arrow points embedded in the wall.
Voigt soon found more bodies, all women, on the collapsed roof of a stable:
They were in an elite part of the city yet none of them had any jewellery. Maybe they had been stripped or maybe they were servants. Who knows? But they were certainly herded back there and systematically killed. Its very vivid. Too vivid.
Subsequent studies found that they died from cranial trauma, their skulls smashed by a blunt instrument. And research found many other atrocities at the site. Headless or handless skeletons, skeletons grasping abdomens or necks, a child’s skull with a blade sticking out of it. All providing proof of a frenzy of violence against the inhabitants. There is still much uncertainty as to the perpetrators, but for our purposes, it’s the old story; one group or clan, perhaps cruelly powerful in the past, being ‘over-killed’, in an attempt at obliteration, by a newly powerful, equally cruel group or clan.
Interestingly, while writing this on January 4 2019, I also read about another massacre, exactly ten years ago, on January 4-5 2009. The densely populated district of Zeitoun in Gaza City was attacked by Israeli forces and 48 people, mostly members of the same family, and mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed, and a number of homes were razed to the ground. This was part of the 2008-9 ‘Gaza War’, known by the Arab population as the Gaza Massacre, and by the Israelis as Operation Cast Lead. The whole conflict resulted in approximately 1200-1400 Palestinian deaths. Thirteen Israelis died, four by friendly fire. And of course I could pick out dozens of other pieces of sickening brutality going on in various benighted parts of the world today.
Attempts by one group of people to obliterate another, whether through careful planning or the frenzy of the moment, have been a part of human history, and they’re ongoing. They are traceable as far back, at least, as the ancestry we share with chimpanzees.
But we’re not chimps, or bonobos. A fascinating documentary about those apes has highlighted many similarities between them and us, some not noted before, but also some essential differences. They can hunt with spears, they can use water as a tool, they can copy humans, and collaborate with them, to solve problems. Yet they’re generally much more impulsive creatures than humans – they easily forget what they’ve learned, and they don’t pass on information or knowledge to each other in any systematic way. Some chimp or bonobo communities learn some tricks while others learn other completely different tricks – and not all members of the community learn them. Humans learn from each other instinctively and largely ‘uncomprehendingly’, as in the learning of language. They just do it, and everyone does it, barring genetic defects or other disabilities.
So it’s possible, just maybe, that we can learn from bonobos, and kick the bad habits we share with chimps, despite the long ancestry of our brutality.
Frans De Waal is probably the most high-profile and respected bonobo researcher. Here’s some of what he has to say:
The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations–and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.
Bonobo sex and society, Scientific American, 2006.
Now, I’m a bit reluctant to emphasise sex too much here (though I’m all for it myself), but there appears to be a direct relationship in bonobo society between sexual behaviour and many positives, including one-on-one bonding, coalitions and care and concern for more or less all members of the group. My reluctance is probably due to the fact that sexual repression is far more common in human societies worldwide than sexual permissiveness, or promiscuity – terms that are generally used pejoratively. And maybe I still have a hankering for a Freudian theory I learned about in my youth – that sexual sublimation is the basis of human creativity. You can’t paint too many masterpieces or come up with too many brilliant scientific theories when you’re constantly bonking or mutually masturbating. Having said that, we’re currently living in societies where the arts and sciences are flourishing like never before, while a large chunk of our internet time (though far from the 70% occasionally claimed) is spent watching porn. Maybe some people can walk, or rather wank, and chew over a few ideas at the same (and for some it amounts to the same thing).
So what I do want to emphasise is ‘female-centredness’ (rather than ‘matriarchy’ which is too narrow a term). I do think that a more female-centred society would be more sensual – women are more touchy-feely. I often see my female students walking arm in arm in their friendship, which rarely happens with the males, no matter their country of origin (I teach international students). Women are highly represented in the caring professions – though the fact that we no longer think of the ‘default’ nurse as female is a positive – and they tend to come together well for the best purposes, as for example the Women Wage Peace movement which brings Israeli and Palestinian women together in a more or less apolitical push to promote greater accord in their brutalised region.
Women’s tendency to ‘get along’ and work in teams needs to be harnessed and empowered. There are, of course, obstructionist elements to be overcome – in particular some of the major religions, such as Catholic Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which date back centuries or millennia and tend to congeal or ‘eternalise’ the patriarchal social mores and power structures of those distant times. However, there’s no doubt that Christianity, as the most western religion, is in permanent decline, and other religions will continue to feel the heat of our spectacular scientific developments – including our better understanding of other species and their evolved and unwritten moral codes.
The major religions tend to take male supremacy for granted as the natural order of things, but Melvin Konner, in his book Women after all, has summarised an impressive array of bird and mammal species which turn the tables on our assumptions about male hunters and female nurturers. Jacanas, hyenas, cassowaries, montane voles, El Abra pygmy swordtails (a species of fish) and rats, these are just a few of the creatures that clearly defy patriarchal stereotypes. In many fish and bird species, the females physically outweigh the males, and there’s no sense that, in the overwhelming majority of bird species – whose recently-discovered smarts I’ve written about and will continue to write about – one gender bosses the other.
Turning back to human societies, there are essentially three types of relations for continuing the species – monogamy, polyandry and polygyny. One might think that polyandry – where women can have a harem of males to bed with – would be the optimum arrangement for a female-centred society, but in fact all three arrangements can be turned to (or against) the advantage of females. Unsurprisingly, polygyny (polyandry’s opposite) is more commonly practiced in human society, both historically and at present, but in such societies, women often have a ‘career open to talents’, where they and their offspring may have high status due to their manipulative (in the best sense of the word) smarts. In any case, what I envisage for the future is a fluidity of relations, in which children are cared for by males and females regardless of parentage. This brings me back to bonobos, who develop female coalitions to keep the larger males in line. Males are uncertain of who their offspring is in a polyamorous community, but unlike in a chimp community, they can’t get away with infanticide, because the females are in control in a variety of ways. In fact, evolution has worked its magic in bonobo society in such a way that the males are more concerned to nurture offspring than to attack them. And it’s notable that, in modern human societies, this has also become the trend. The ‘feminine’ side of males is increasingly extolled, and the deference shown to females is increasing, despite the occasional throwback like Trump-Putin. It will take a long time, even in ‘advanced’ western societies, but I think the trend is clear. We will, or should, become more like bonobos, because we need to. We don’t need to use sex necessarily, because we have something that bonobos lack – language. And women are very good at language, at least so has been my experience. Talk is a valuable tool against aggression and dysfunction; think of the talking cure, peace talks, being talked down from somewhere or talked out of something. Talk is often beyond cheap, it can be priceless in its benefits. We need to empower the voices of women more and more.
This not a ‘fatalism lite’ argument; there’s nothing natural or evolutionarily binding about this trend. We have to make it happen. This includes, perhaps first off, fighting against the argument that patriarchy is in some sense a better, or more natural system. That involves examining the evidence. Konner has done a great job of attempting to summarise evidence from human societies around the world and throughout history – in a sense carrying on from Aristotle thousands of years ago when he tried to gather together the constitutions of the Greek city-states, to see which might be most effective, and so to better shape the Athenian constitution. A small-scale, synchronic plan by our standards, but by the standards of the time a breath-taking step forward in the attempt not just to understand his world, but to improve it.
References
Melvin Konner, Women after all, 2015
New Scientist, ‘The horror of Hasanlu’ September 15 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath, 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitoun_incident