Apes Like Us
It's the middle of winter as I write this. If you're like me, this is the time of year when you get tired of thinking. Bored with all the usual manufactured crises that the media push in your face. Contemplating the eternal mysteries makes your mind go blank. Well, you're in luck, because it's Easy Answers Time here on the web! Read on and we'll dust off enough tired sexist stereotypes, trite New Age nostrums and bad science to reassure you that the world does indeed conform to all your oldest prejudices, and that turning off your brain is perfectly safe.
It all begins in Africa (mandatory truism numero uno), where our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees, live. We know they're our closest relatives because scientists have examined their DNA with incredibly intricate and expensive equipment and told us that this is true. What's more, these chimpanzees act just like us: they spend huge amounts of time jockeying for position in the dominance hierarchy of the group (in other words, "playing politics"), are known to carry on wars and practice extreme violence against their own kind, use tools in an ingenious way, and generally act like good ol' male chauvinist pigs. Just like us.
Oops, guess I gave myself away on that one, ha-ha! The "us" that they act just like happens to be only the 50% or so of "us" who are male. Chimp females are not quite so much like human females, since they have a definite estrus period, a narrow window of time during each month when they are receptive to sexual overtures and send out the necessary pheromones to invite said overtures from chimpanzee males. There actually turns out to be a better role model for the human female in another species, our other closest evolutionary relatives, the bonobos (also known, not very accurately, as "pygmy chimpanzees").
The bonobos are hip these days, they're definitely in, kewl, phat, etc. They also
are pretty endangered, being far less numerous than the chimpanzees. Ignored
for many decades, they have recently been adjudged to be just as related to
us, in terms of DNA similarity, as the chimpanzees. What makes the bonobos
different from "us" behaviorally is that they're relatively peaceable. When
two bonobos are faced with a conflict situation, their most common response
is to call time out and have sex with each other. Not for them the chest
beating and foliage uprooting displays of the chimp! The bonobos seem to
resort to sex as a way of saying, "We still like each other, even if we
disagree, right?" They also are equal opportunity lovers in terms of having
sex with the opposite or same sex, same age or younger or older, etc. The
"dominance hierarchy" in bonobo society is generally the core group of
females who have been with the group for a long while, another difference
from chimps, and the politics practiced seem to be gentler and subtler versus
the "claw your way to the top" mode of the chimps. Bonobo females are also
quick to pull together and fight off any single male who threatens one of
them. Sisterhood is powerful, right on! The females also have a much longer
period of sexual receptivity during each month (not as continuous as that of
human females, but much closer to it than to that of the unfortunate chimp
females).
Demonic Males and Grass Huts
Looking at these two close evolutionary cousins of ours, it becomes obvious that our human DNA got scrambled somewhere along the line. Human males have all the tendencies of the male chimp, while human females favor the proclivities of the bonobo female. See, no wonder we can't get along! (I told you that we'd be confirming your oldest prejudices here, right?) In addition, as many human females suspect, human males have done a darn good job of trying to force-fit their chimp model on the whole of human society. Camille Paglia said that if women ruled human society we'd all still be in grass huts. Perhaps an exaggeration, but the pace of "progress" would no doubt be a lot slower without the driver of male obsession with power politics. Let's face it, 90% of the "advances" of civilization occurred in order to serve the interests of the top 10% of male power elites (feel free to use 80% and 20% or whatever other numbers make you happy). On occasion the rest of society has benefited too, but it's rarely been a simple benefit that did not also involve painful trade-offs.
If we look at a number of the proscriptions and commandments of "holy writ" religions which have arisen as part of civilization, we see how well they serve the needs of human males in maintaining their chimp model, and how well they discourage any behaviors that would allow females to assert their bonobo model. Monogamy? Keep females as isolated from each other socially as possible. Hatred of homosexuality? Remove the major social glue that females could use to maintain a core group with solidarity. Male gangs (whether street gangs, crime syndicates, corporations or governments)? Preemptive strike against females banding together to drive off males.
One problem with this view of how civilization came about (I know, I promised you Easy Answers, but this is just a brief digression), is that it assumes most of the behaviors were instituted "by" one sex "against" the other. Or, in other words, that males are mostly worrying about what females might do and vice versa. Looking at our chimp-like males, however, we can see that a major preoccupation behind all the politics is fear of their own violence. Even more specifically, we can detect that 90% of males (use your favorite percentages etc.) are scared shitless of being stomped on by the other 10% of males who not only are capable of violence but who really really enjoy violence (the so-called "demonic males", as one recent book title terms them). So one of the major motivators of civilization is not only to keep females from banding together and getting power but also to hide the average males from any dangerous confrontations with the demonic males lurking in their midst. Seen from this vantage point, the male obsession with Rules is a way of trying to sneakily depersonalize confrontations with the demonic males ("now if it were up to me, sure, but the rules say..."), the male obsession with Gadgets and technology is a way of giving the 98 pound weakling some protection against the demonic males, the male lionization of Sports and contests is a way of placating the demonic males by heaping them with honors, etc.
Of course, the existence of demonic males doesn't mean the other males are
not capable of violence (heck, it doesn't mean that females aren't capable
of violence either, especially when the females are in a group and their
prized bonobo-like consensus is threatened). Prolonged isolation with the cranky and
disempowered seems to bring out the bully in all of us, which is why violence and
other abuse seem to cluster in nuclear families, schools, prisons, nursing
homes and other shuttered worlds of that sort. Perhaps a bonobo female-inspired
society would not institutionalize such claustrophobic social situations. But even
without the demonic males, human males might have "prevailed" and come up with
Civilization As We Know It...eventually. Although here in the middle of winter,
doesn't life in a grass hut someplace a bit more tropical sound like a pretty liveable
alternative?