Guess who’s also an animal.
This blog began at Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston Texas. The early posts can be found there. I plan to continue the blog in much the same way here in New Hampshire (see next post on spindle trees).
Over the course of writing the blog, I have comes to structure my posts around what I think of as the three imperatives that all life on this planet organize around.
The imperatives are:
- Eat. I’m not sure I need to provide more information, everyone eats and we all know what eating is. Everything has to eat and everything solves that problem differently.
- Reproduce. Again, we all know what this means.
- Don’t die. Again this is so basic as to not require a discussion, but the desire to live is universal, down to the simplest organisms. If something doesn’t have a burning desire not to die, it will die. The world is full of things that want to eat you. You do not want to be eaten. This really should be the first imperative, because if you’re dead, you can’t do the other two.
The methods each living thing employs to accomplish the three imperatives are endlessly fascinating.
It has become blindingly obvious to me that we share these imperatives. While humanity cannot be reduced to our animal impulses, we also can’t avoid the fact that we are built on an animal framework. Our overwhelming advantage comes about because we can externalize knowledge. Unlike all other life on this planet, we know things that we didn’t learn through direct experience. Our language skills and our ability to work together through time allowed us to create a new world within the world. We do not live in the real world, we live in a world mediated by our stories. But the animal framework keeps popping through.
As this blog continues, I plan to include a new category of posts, The Animal Us; these will examine our own underlying animal framework and explore how this influences the stories we tell ourselves about the world.
This first post in this category covers a lot of ground. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and the pressure has built up!
As a species, we survive by collectively reigning in our most self-defeating impulses. We call this collective project civilization. We create a network of rules and beliefs that render us fit to live with one another.
We are able to do this because humans are collective beings. We are prone to proclamations of individuality, but in practice, we are barely individuals at all; we always think of ourselves in relation to one another.
Not being in constant relation with others is so unusual we have special words people who do so: hermits, anchorites. For the rest of us, we are sons, daughters, managers, husbands, sisters, cousins, wives citizens, grandparents, neighbors, Canadians, vegetarians, Republicans, consumers, voters. All these categories place us in the context of those around us.
Put all the categories and rules together and you have a civilization.
All civilizations create religions.
They also create languages and alcohol, but first, religion.
Most religions consist of an origin story (how we all came to be here) and a bunch of rules for how to live a good life. Religion derives its power by providing a codified path towards a sensed power greater than ourselves. This power is perceived to be the source of goodness and mercy.
Religion isn’t the only path. Most of us sense the possibility of this connection and follow any path presented that seems to take us closer. For some this is nature, for others the arts, others focused concentration.
I have no idea whether there are actual forces beyond ourselves that we are sensing or whether our brains are simply wired to manufacture a sense of the unknowable. What I do know, is that without this yearning, humans would never have survived long enough to wreck such havoc.
Because we must live in relation to one another and because we have a yearning for goodness and mercy, we have been able to constrain one another and ourselves.
We all know exactly what would happen if everyone got free reign. There would be a few strong men and a few cunning men and women who got everything while the rest of us celebrated their glory. Out loud and often.
Religions and codified laws are collective constraints fashioned by us that we all might flourish. But over time, the men who are strong and the men and women who are cunning take control of religion and demand we worship a new hateful god of their own creation that, surprisingly, tells us that those with power deserve it.
So we go back in the soup until we collectively come up with a new way to constrain our own worst impulses.
I am not recommending this system. I’m just pointing out what seems to be the basic thrust of human history.
But what if something has actually shifted.
Throughout humanity’s existence, physical strength pretty much settled things. The stronger guy won, the stronger group won. Initially, this human strength was quite literal. If I am stronger than you, I can make you do what I want. But what we call human progress, has provided avenues to power that aren’t based on individual strength.
Even though physical strength is no longer determinative, the pattern persists that the strong amass at the expense of the weak and the weak find ways to constrain the strong.
There is no reason why must be is so. We could just as easily organize so the weakest got the most help because they needed it. Families operate this way. While kids often compete for mom and dad’s favor, mom and dad usually don’t feed the weaker kid less food and give him fewer gifts. If anything, the family tries to provide extra support so the weak might become stronger.
But we do not operate on this model. We work through competition. We ended up with this system because it suits the strong who know that if we settle things by fighting, they will win. They decided this was the way to go, and because strength wins, we all went along.
This pattern (dominance, expansion, creation of cultural control, co-option of control, dominance, expansion, creation of cultural control) reflects the mating impulses of human primates.
Primates are hierarchical. We live in relation to one another and in most situations, we know who is better at what, who we have to obey and who has to obey us. In the natural world, male mating opportunities improve with success in head to head combat with other males or by other displays of genetic fitness (think of a peacock’s elaborate tail). Females “choose” males who win. There is also a lot of side-business among primates, but that’s on the side. The rules are clear.
Since we are a lot more complicated now, human mating opportunities no longer follow physical strength. Mating opportunities follow new signifiers of power. For the most part, that means money. But the healthy attributes of a strong, vigorous maleness appended to an face women find appealing (strong jaw, noble brow), will still get you laid pretty much everywhere.
That’s because we are operating at a level of genetic impulses that we are neither consciously aware of nor steering. We are driven all the time by stuff like this.
Instincts are powerful
For example, I realized that simply seeing food triggers me to eat it. I came to this awareness five minutes into a session of hypnotically eating ripe mulberries off the backyard shrub. At that moment, I was a chimp.
In a world before civilization, food was hard to come by and for a species to survive, it had to have the ability to recognize food and the determination to claim and eat it, sometimes at personal risk. If you see something good, all your instincts tell you to eat it, NOW!!
Understanding this gave me some control over my own eating. If seeing tasty food creates in me an immediate desire to consume it, then I should keep tasty food out of sight lest I gain even more weight.
When I do catch a glimpse of something tempting, I do often give in. I understand that my body, having perceived tasty food right there in front of me, isn’t going to shut up about the food until I eat it. I no longer wish to have long arguments with my body.
We all evolved not to turn down a meal. Some of us, have less of that instinct left than others, but given the general heft of the world these days, I think those who make food have figured out that if they keep it in front of us, they are going to make some money.
Things are changing
Evolution made us to survive and some of the strategies that worked very well before we got so good at surviving are now working against us. We are still trying to outdo one another while the house burns down around us. We have exhausted the evolutionary usefulness of organizing our societies around the male sexual drive.
This isn’t man bashing. I adore men. But not in that particular way; I’m a lesbian. I think the detachment from male/female sexuality gives queers an unusual and sometimes valuable perspective.
Many women turn to gay men for insight into how to hold a man’s sexual interest. Gay men know what turns men on because they are men. So women who want the inside track turn to gay men for advice on appearance, hair, clothing, etc. and they learn to pay great attention to these details because these are they keys to gaining power through controlling men who possess it.
Women structure their lives to appeal to men’s sexual drives. As a lesbian, I can tell you that the effort straight women devote to making themselves more sexually attractive to men occupies more than half their energy. Grooming, dieting, exercising, tongue holding, and cajoling are all methods women use to indirectly control men and gain for themselves the power that men hold directly.
Marriage is one the socially mediated method women use to capture men and use their power for their own purposes.
This is our breeding dynamic. This is coded at a very deep level. You can travel almost anywhere and find a culture in which men hold power and women exercise power through men. We are not obligated to be this way and there are examples of cultures organized differently. But this is the vast majority.
The entire system is organized around the notion that we need to find the strongest and fittest and then respect them. We dress to signify where in the hierarchy we fit, we drive cars that allow others to perceive our status without even seeing us.
I worked on Wall Street for many years and was present for the introduction of the cubicle. When my company moved from the World Trade Center to the newly built World Financial Center across the street, employees not at senior levels were introduced to the cubicle. It was a huge novelty.
Everyone got different types of chairs based on their perceived status. Admins, who had low-walled cubicles adjacent to their boss’s walled office, got armless chairs with small backs. Mid-level employees got chairs with more substantial backs and arms. Senior employees got lavish leather chairs with cushiony seats, arms and huge backs. Since you can’t work at a computer in a chair like that, all senior employees stole their admin’s chairs and told them to order a new one.
The designers of this new office space were much more concerned with honoring perceived status than understanding that basically, we all just sat at computers all day. The designers were acting out of respect for the hierarchy while the senior employees simply didn’t want their backs to go out from working on this poorly adapted chair. We are more and more running into situations like this where the trappings of status impede actual accomplishment.
This is because the acquisition of power is the single most important thing going on at any given moment because, well, sex.
Rush Limbaugh, of all people, explained this to me. He was expounding on the hoax that is climate change and said “They are not going to make me drive some loser car.”
A rant sparked by concerns over climate change, resulted in a shouted resolve never to drive an efficient car or take public transportation because to do so was to become a loser.
If a significant part of your actual self-worth depends on driving a big powerful car, or one that costs a bunch of money so you can display power of another sort, then we have no path to solution of our current problems that stem from our poor stewardship of natural resources.
We must disentangle to survive
These are separate concerns that have become tragically entwined. Sexuality is a biological imperative. We cannot ignore its demands, but we need to understand more clearly the limits of where this imperative should be expressed and where it is not only irrelevant, but harmful.
There are an incredible number of us because that male drive to triumph brought us to this amazing place. We have become so successful that we have crowded out what we need to continue our success.
We can no longer organize our societies to enhance individual reproductive potential at the cost of species survival.
The good news is that I think this is what’s going on. I think we are living through a monumental shift in human history in which we once again run up against the limitations of the world and, once again, find a way around those limitations. I think the solution we are settling on is to separate male power/procreation drivers from decision making. Honestly, both of them will work better apart.
The world is uncomfortable right now. Reorganizing away from male sexual imperatives and towards a more cooperative rather than competitive social structures produces new winners and losers.
The growing pains are real, but worth it, because on the other side lies the way out of our current mess.
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