The Way of Power Politics is the Way of the Chimpanzee
Humanity needs a new playbook. Traditional texts can help us, but we have to read them critically. And knowledge of history is key.
Will Smith’s Outburst at the Oscars brought the issue into focus.
Watching last night’s Oscar show I got to thinking about humanity’s propensity for aggression. I’m referring specifically to Will Smith’s violent reaction to Chris Rock’s tasteless joke about Jada Pinket-Smith’s alopecia.
I was watching the ceremony with my husband, and he commented that Will Smith looked depressed during and after his outburst.
Isn’t everyone a little depressed right now? We are two years into a global pandemic, democracy seems doomed, and now a megalomaniac has started an aggressive war and seems intent on world domination or even nuclear destruction.
Watching Smith’s halfhearted apology for his physical aggression, I felt like he knew, on some level, that what he did was not exemplary behaviour in this age of societal polarization and a possible backsliding into fascism and global conflict.
He knew it, but he didn’t own it. He didn’t apologize to Rock. Perhaps he will rethink his actions once he has more time to reflect.
It seemed more than a little out of character for him.
And it’s out of character for the progressive movement of humanity. Maybe it’s time to let go of physical aggression, even when we are sorely provoked.
Humanity has had a good run with aggression. Aggression has got us a lot of things we wanted: power, wealth, pleasure, if not joy.
It has built civilization. Our history as a species is filled with triumphs resulting from aggression. It is arguably encoded in our genes.
Ancient cities were built with forced labour. Empires thrived with trade and slavery. Wars captured us more and more territory. With territory comes booty: the glittering, shiny gold and gems that make us feel special.
With slavery comes leisure and sexual decadence.
I might as well say that the age of aggression has been the age of the ego.
Every new generation finds a new lens through which to view history: mythical, political, economic, psychological.
Let’s go back to the bible.
The bible, both the Hebrew or Jewish part and the Christian part, tells the story of civilization using a symbolic mythology in a compelling and vivid way.
According to the first book of the bible, the story of civilization goes something like this: first God creates the cosmos, then He creates life, then He chooses one life form to dominate the newly-created world. The life form, man, is given a partner, woman, and a nice garden to live in. The man and woman walk around naked, joyously naming the other animals and eating fruit from the trees of the garden.
It is unclear whether they are also having sex, but why not, if you’re naked anyway?
The first couple, Adam and Eve, have only one rule to follow: do not eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is in the centre of the garden. There is another powerful tree in the garden, but, interestingly, the man and woman are not forbidden to eat from this tree, which would, if eaten, give them eternal life.
Maybe God didn’t care about that one unless His innocent creations gained forbidden knowledge, but the text is silent on that point, as it is on many points that the twenty-first-century reader might like to raise (like, who are the giants who mated with human women a few hundred years later and caused them to give birth to“heroes of old, men of renown”- apparently someone about three thousand years ago decided that no one was allowed to know any more details on this and the rest of this story has been lost).
Anyway, all is not well in paradise, even before the “sons of God” arrive on the scene. There is a sneaky presence amongst God’s animate creations: the serpent. Later traditions associate this snake with Satan, God’s eternal adversary, but the book of Genesis simply describes him as “more subtle than any beast of the field that the Lord God had made,” as the King James translation of 1611 so poetically puts it.
The snake is just a trouble maker in the original story, not the devil incarnate. He tells Eve that she shouldn’t listen to God when He tells her that she will die if she eats the forbidden fruit. Being inexperienced like a child (she is, after all, no more than a few weeks old at this point), Eve not only eats the fruit of knowledge, but also gives it to her husband, Adam, who willingly goes along with the disobedience and eats it with her, to devastating results: “The eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked.”
Gulp. Cue the record scratching.
Childhood is over. No more free fruit. Punishment must ensue. The first humans are ordered out of the Garden of Eden and a cherub (angel) with a flaming sword stands guard at the entrance to the garden in case they try to sneak back in for a fruit snack.
From here on in, humanity must plant seeds and grow bread (no more orchards full of fruit trees) from the “sweat of [its] brow” (again, I am quoting the King James version for its incredible poetry). Agriculture is born. And agriculture leads directly to…murder.
Adam and Eve “know”each other (they ate from the tree of knowldedge, after all) and Eve gives birth to a son, Cain. Then they have another son, Abel. The two boys grow up. Apparently the first parents also have daughters, but girls are somehow not worth mentioning unless there is a specific reason (like she is the mother of all humanity and is formed from the first man’s rib, for example). Yes, sexism seems to have emerged very early on in human society.
Anyway, there are two brothers and sibling rivalry inevitably results. Cain secretly murders Abel out of jealousy- God apparently liked Abel’s sacrifice of a sheep better than Cain’s sacrifice of some sheaves of wheat. The text does not explain why He prefers one sacrifice over the other.
Yes, God seems to have created us in order to receive our unquestioning obedience, and, failing that, our sacrifices of agricultural products.
Power in its many forms manifests soon after creation: first the power of commanding obedience, then the power of knowledge, then the power to punish and require sacrifices after disobedience and the illegitimate acquisition of knowledge.
What the first book of the bible teaches us is that hierarchies are important and that a chain of command must be followed. God is at the top of the hierarchy, angels are next, male humans are below angels (who are always male), and female humans are next, if they are important enough to name or mention. All other beings are below humans.
How our Chimpanzee/Bonobo genetic heritage plays into the story of violence
It’s a simple formula. It’s the chimpanzee way. All great apes are hierarchical, with one dominant male ape at the top of the chain. Every other ape must obey the dominant ape, or suffer the consequences: violence, either physical or sexual (or both).
This is the way of chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, and many other primate species.
Except for bonobos. For them, the hierarchy is reversed; there is a dominant female. And she and her sisters manage the aggression of the males by having sex several times a day. By being sex-mad, actually. Everyone has sex with everyone else, including the babies (such encounters are non-penetrative). Male-on-male, female-on-female, adult-on-child.
For some reason, it works and nobody is traumatized unless they are in a non-natural environment like a human science experiment (in that situation, the adult males will anally rape smaller males if that is the only sexual option available).
Bonobos subjected to rape exhibit the same symptoms of trauma as human victims of sexual and physical violence.
The rise of civilization is encoded in mythology, history, and biology.
Back to the bible’s summary of the rise of human civilization. Cain kills Abel and denies all knowledge of his brother’s fate. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he asks God who demands to know why the human population is down by one before he even has had a chance to smite someone.
What is Cain’s punishment for committing the first unsanctioned murder? Banishment from human society. Cain must leave his family and strike out on his own. Conveniently, he has a wife to take along with him (presumably one of Adam and Eve’s daughters whose births the text fails to mention). So Cain takes his sister-wife far away to the land of Nod, where he builds…are you ready?
The first cities.
The first murderer is the builder of the first city. The first urban environment exists because of fratricide. And it’s not just cities that Cain originates. He also originates the first human professions after farming: metalworking, music, and tentmaking.
In other words, Cain is the originator of civilization. And civilization is bad. It makes God sorry that He ever created human beings. Soon the cities grow out of control and human aggression is out of control. People fight, maim, and murder each other in every city.
Something must be done. Humanity must be destroyed. How? A massive flood that will cleanse the earth.
Only one man, and by extension his family, is good enough to survive. That man is Noah. God tells him how to build a boat and instructs him to put a pair of every land and air animal on earth onto the boat before the torrential rains begin. Everyone else will be wiped out except for Noah, his wife (unnamed), his sons (Ham, Shem, and Japheth), and his sons’ wives (also not named, like most females).
The family survives and the waters of the flood recede. Then agriculture starts again.
Noah plants a vineyard. He makes wine and gets drunk. He passes out naked in his tent. His son Ham sees this and tells the other two brothers. They cover their father’s naked body, but are careful not to look at it. Ham, however, had seen his father naked, and needed to be punished.
Isn’t it amazing how nakedness and disobedience are so closely linked in the bible?
What is Ham’s punishment? Slavery. He and his descendants are enslaved forever for the sin of seeing the patriarch naked. For “uncovering the nakedness” of the chimpanzee father.
Human slavery is apparently as inevitable as murder, drunkenness, and sexism.
If you’re at the bottom of the human hierarchy or chain of being, it’s probably your own fault. If you’re a woman, it was Eve’s fault. Shut up and bear your childbirth pains. It’s your genetic heritage.
Simple. Chimpanzee logic. Might is right. If you obey God, you get to live to be six hundred years old. Then God decided to limit the human lifespan to 120 years except for certain of his special, chosen people.
The story goes on and moves from mythology to history. After a few more generations, people who might have actually existed begin to appear in the story.
Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, King David and King Solomon. The latter presided over an empire, one of many that existed in the ancient world, all of which employed slavery and prostitution.
To summarize the rest of the Christian bible, human civilization grew, empire followed empire, until the Roman Empire upped that game for humanity. Then Jesus was born and unsuccessfully opposed this oppression. He was murdered by the Romans, and in the next generation a guy named Saul, who changed his name to Paul, created a new religion in Jesus’s name known as Christianity.
Three hundred years later, the Roman Catholic church was founded. You probably know the rest.
Fast forward to the twentieth century: the most violent century on human record
As a member of the late Baby Boom generation (I was born in 1960 in Canada), I grew up in a society still ruled by a Christian world view. My mother was given a copy of the bible by the hospital where she gave birth to me in order to help set me on the “right” path. The bible was in easy-to-digest picture format with colour plates of renaissance paintings depicting important biblical moments.
My siblings, born a few years later in a different hospital, were not given this volume.
The unseating of religion in North America had begun. It was the 1960s: the age of Rock ‘n Roll, free love, and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
Things would never be the same again.
The Vietnam War was reported on openly, with graphic footage on the news every night, as a heroic American fight against the evils of communism. Martin Luther King Junior walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and local racists killed as many people as they could who came to their town to protest voting restrictions. Four students protesting the war were shot and killed by the National Guard in 1970, and a majority of Americans polled approved of the action.
Canadians were appalled by the violence they saw reported south of the border. The Canadian government allowed American conscientious objectors to the war in Vietnam to settle in Canada. As a group, they became known as draft dodgers.
Meanwhile, Canada was engaging in secret violence of its own in Christian residential schools for Indigenous children, so we were still chimpanzees; we just had an attitude of moral superiority. The evidence of the violence has only just begun to be brought to light as actual children’s bones buried on the grounds of the residential schools. Survivors tell stories of physical and sexual violence: the same old story.
But that is another story for another time.
The Kent University authorities who called in the National Guard in 1970 to deal with peaceful student protestors were part of a desperate older generation who wanted to hold on to their power, power in large part granted to them because of their willingness to accept violence. The members of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered peaceful protestors in Selma, Alabama were a more extreme wing of this generation who were even more willing to use violence to protect their way of life- a life that included “negroes” knowing their place and not trying to do unacceptable things like vote.
These people are all dead, but their philosophy lives on in pockets of America who cannot fathom not using force to get what they want or to “protect” their turf. People as deluded as the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery, who seem to have missed the memo that killing Black people just for going for a run in a white neighbourhood is no longer a casual pastime to indulge in when you start having paranoid thoughts about possible burglars on your street.
The 1960s changed everything. But not everyone got the message.
But back in the sixties and seventies, the chimpanzee mindset began to be opposed by a new bonobo philosophy. And the bonobos started winning major victories by refusing to engage in or opposing the use of state violence.
“Make love, not war” became the motto of a new generation that eschewed both violence and sexual restraint.
Accordingly, a large portion of the U.S. population was not willing to let the government decide when or with whom they were allowed to have sex or whether they felt like ending a pointless war in Vietnam. The Kent State massacre only led to more and more anti-Vietnam war protests, often involving thousands of people, that eventually led to a forced ceasefire.
I saw a member of that older chimpanzee generation give a speech about the Vietnam war about twenty years ago. He had been invited to speak at the high school where I taught, speaking to a select group of senior students in a special assembly. Intrigued (I had, after all, grown up during that war), I decided to attend even though his speech was during my preparation period. He was a retired general in the Canadian army and had somehow been involved in the American war in Vietnam.
I was more than a little surprised by what he had to say, having absorbed the peaceful philosophy of the 1960s of my childhood. I had assumed that everyone agreed that the war in Vietnam was an illegitimate exercise in unprovoked aggression against a foreign country. In other words, that the U.S. had absolutely no business in being in Vietnam and in forcing its (mostly poor and nonwhite) citizens to do their dirty, violent, colonialist work that ended up destabilizing the entire area. If it hadn’t gotten involved, then the mass killings in both Vietnam and Cambodia wouldn’t have happened.
How wrong I was. This was not a received truth as late as 2002.
The gist of his speech was that the American government’s involvement in Southeast Asia was perfectly legitimate and that the military should have been able to complete their mission. The only thing that had (unfairly) stopped them was the unacceptable interference by way of mass peace protests.
That’s right; this ageing silverback was still pissed that he and his military cronies had not been allowed to destroy the “enemy” (the Vietcong, and, by extension, the Vietnamese people) the way they wanted to and that the populace should have just let the experts deal with the issue in their own way by continuing to bomb the country into complete submission until they “won.”
He was not kidding. I was rendered so speechless by his talk that I went back to class unable to process my overwhelmed emotions. I never spoke to anyone about this speech. Most of my colleagues had not gone to the special assembly and I couldn’t think of a way to incorporate what he had said into any of my lesson plans. So I just forgot about it.
It was just so weird to see an aging chimpanzee beat his chest and declare, 47 years after the end of the war that he should have been allowed to finish the fight without interference from the taxpaying public. It was still unacceptable to him that the hippies had won a battle against his generation.
I’m pretty sure he’s dead now too. I would look him up if I could remember his name.
The Chimps are having one last gasp. And we can’t let them win.
Now, twenty years later, I find myself thinking about that retired general. My life has changed immeasurably. I have retired from teaching. Society has lived through two years of a global pandemic. Another terrible war has broken out, instigated by a fascist oligarch and North American society is divided in a way arguably not seen since the sixties’ ideological divide between the “Give Peace a Chance” Woodstock generation and their parents, the World War II old guard.
And now we are faced with the possible end of civilization. The world is vastly overpopulated and overheated. Soon there will be no more room for landfill sites or cemeteries.
Nuclear bombs are back on the table thanks to a desperate would-be global dictator who can’t accept that he and his kind have had their day.
And he is willing to blow up the entire world to get his way.
It’s God flooding the entire world except for one obedient family. It’s Yahweh smiting Sodom and Gomorrah for not following His laws.
It’s a very old story that just keeps on being repeated. It’s told in the bible, it’s told in history books, and it’s lamented in many a work of literature, from Homer to Shakespeare to George Orwell. Allegorical examinations of human violence are depicted in movies like The Hunger Games.
We just don’t heed their warnings. We can’t seem to access our better natures. We still look to strongmen for the strength we do not feel.
And who is stronger? Who has more joy? The ageing chimpanzee at the end of his power days, left bleeding in the jungle after a fight with a younger rival?
Or the playful bonobo hanging out in the trees with his troupe, eating fruit and diffusing his aggression with endless lovemaking?
The bonobo is nearly extinct. We might be next unless we can channel some of their gentleness and cooperation.
Excellent walk through Biblical history with close attention paid to the explanations behind the mythology. One thing I wondered as a kid is whether God ever regretted his promise to never destroy the world in a flood again because Humanity 2.0 wasn't much of an improvement over the Biblical version. The Cognitive Revolution, when our brains suddenly leapfrogged over other species' brains, had a lot to do with it.
Look, I'll still lay fault at God's feet. Okay, he was really new at this world-building thing. Then again, if humanity is so awful and he can't kill us, why couldn't he step in and tweak us a bit to make us less brutal?
In fact, that's just what has happened...despite all evidence to the contrary, we actually are evolving more toward peace, but there are always some blips in the radar and they *can* be pretty fatal ones if we're not careful.
Although honestly, when I saw the replay of the Chris 'n' Will show, I saw eight year old boys rather than chimpanzees.
Then again, if chimps could speak they'd probably trash-talk each others' wives and then punch each others' lights out.
I consider one thing about our latest End of Days: We lived through the '80s, which was a dangerous time to be alive, and esp dangerous from the nuclear standpoint. We got through it. Today, I'm not at all sure a) Vladdy Putin is crazy enough to use nukes and b) Whether anyone would follow his orders if the was.
Vladdy's an old man and, as you point out, increasingly irrelevant, and he may be suffering from dementia or some other brain disorder, rather a lot like his most witless acolyte, and while The Big V may feel he has nothing to lose, the people around him are probably not yet willing to die, esp. over a country like Ukraine, and have families back home with children and grandchildren they'd like to pass the torch to. Maybe *they* can "Make Russia Great Again". ;P
And oh yeah...don't forget the Jackson State (Mississippi) killings just eleven days after Kent State...police killed two college students and injured 12 others at an all-black college.