by Frans de Waal

For many years, anthropologists and biologists have been comparing the aggression of animals with human warfare. It started with Konrad Lorenz in the 1960s, and remains a popular endeavor. We have an aggressive instinct that leads to warfare, hence war will always be with us. This message was a bit hard to accept from Lorenz, an Austrian who served in the German army during WWII, but the debate continues as seen in the video above featuring interviews with Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, and myself.

Part of the problem is that modern warfare seems to have little to do with the raw aggressive instinct. Modern warfare rests on a tight hierarchical structure of many parties, not all of which are driven by aggression. In fact, most are just following orders. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in the capital. When I look at a marching army, I don’t see aggression in action. I see the herd instinct: thousands of men in lock-step, willing to obey superiors.

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage? Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, we lack similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) from before the agricultural revolution. Even the walls of Jericho — considered one of the first pieces of evidence of warfare and famous for having come tumbling down in the Old Testament — may have served mainly as protection against mudflows.

Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Before this, about 70,000 years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction living in scattered small bands. A study of mitochondrial DNA by genographer Doron Behar suggests: “Tiny bands of early humans developed in isolation from each other for as much as half of our entire history as a species.” These are hardly the sort of conditions to promote continuous warfare. My guess is that for our ancestors war was always a possibility, but that they followed the pattern of present-day hunter-gatherers, who do exactly the opposite of what Churchill surmised: they alternate long stretches of peace and harmony with brief interludes of violent confrontation.

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

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Justin E. H. Smith

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Books consulted for this essay:

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. 8th Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Maurice Godelier, Les métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris, Fayard, 2004.

Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. London, 1871.

Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Same-Sex Marriage and Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal. An Argument About Homosexuality. Vintage, 1996.

Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000, Routledge, 2004.

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I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

That is, I believe that we are right to decide to make same-sex unions equal before the law, but that it is not up to us to decide that the primary meaning of 'marriage' will cease to be 'basic unit of kinship, involving the monogamous pair-bonding of a male and a female'. This meaning will remain primary not only because other-sex couples are, as everyone agrees, statistically more common than same-sex couples, but because there is a fairly rigid system of organization in societies throughout the world that continues to be based on a presumption of gender dimorphism, and that continues to take cross-gender pairings as the elementary units of social reality. This is not what I want (I personally couldn't be less interested in 'defending' traditional marriage, though as it happens I don't think it's going to need defending), but rather what I believe to be the case.

I also believe that the movement for marriage equality misunderstands its contingency and ignores the historical forces that brought it into being. One of the triggers of my coming-out as a skeptic occurred a few months ago, when I happened to be speaking with a group of acquaintances who are also outspoken defenders of marriage equality. When quite unexpectedly the topic of first-cousin marriage came up, they began snickering like little boys: like little boys I might add, who in the not so distant past found mirth in every occurrence of the word 'gay'. This caused me to note that there is a certain selectiveness in what counts among educated Western liberals as 'doing the right thing' (a phrase we hear so often, and have heard most recently in connection with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina).

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By Usha Alexander

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

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In the small villages surrounding Mount Marapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

I was riding the 2/3 to Brooklyn the first couple of days I was back, when I saw this guy in a baggy pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and these kinda shoes I’d never seen before. They wrapped around each toe, exposing the toes basically, through the thin skin of the shoe. Years ago, I remember reading a children’s encyclopedia on Surrealist Art, where I saw a charcoal drawing of an empty pair of boots with laces whose burnished, buffeted folds drew further and further down to reveal toes. There was something spectral and scary about the catch in the mind, which confused shoe for feet, with the after-image of the even grosser idea that the skin of one’s feet might someday serve as the boots of another. These bizarre shoe-things with toes brought all that to mind and more. The mind understood sandals, it understood shoes, but these things were total genre busters – like the Sporks of footwear. They were somehow unseemly, uncanny, desirable. I had to have ‘em!

I got online and found myself bang in the middle of a cultural revolution, where running is the leitmotif for a responsible and contemporary lifestyle. As many readers will already know, recent studies have suggested that human form emerges as a result of endurance running, whereby our distant ancestors ran and walk their prey to exhaustion and ultimate death. While we humans can easily be outclassed in a sprint and overwhelmed in a full frontal attack at close quarters, our intellect and genius for tracking was able to manifest a potentially overwhelming evolutionary advantage at long distances and over longer periods of time. Also relevant are recent pop-anthropological studies of Meso-American tribes who can still be observed running and hunting over long distances barefoot, perhaps evidence that we humans truly are born to run.

While there’s a small and growing sub-culture of barefoot runners these days, there’s also the view that this is a sure track to contracting Hepatitis C. This is because enough people have it, and enough of them are urinating out and about the city, so it is only a matter of time and chance for the moment when you have a cut on the palm of your foot, which becomes infected. But even in rural and remote regions of the world, walking or running barefoot can be a high-risk activity, exposing the body to hookworm, podoconiosis, and other neglected tropical diseases. Seen from this perspective, the shoe is a prophylactic, protecting the body from the diseases that may be locked into the loam of the earth. The goal of further design and innovation in shoes, therefore, should be to afford the flexibility and sensation of going bareback, while still ensuring that users enjoy safe sports.

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Blame the Victims and Make Them Feel Guilty – Part 2

Part 1 of “Blame the Victims and Make Them Feel Guilty” can be found HERE.

{Synopsis of Part 1}

Benedict XVI, Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, visited the United States in April of 2008. He addressed the sexual abuse of children in the American Catholic Church, but never once, in his public homily at The Nationals Stadium in Washington, D. C., did he say or indicate that the abuse was committed by members of the clergy and religious congregations.

Two months later, George Weigel, Catholic theologian, public intellectual, and official biographer of Pope John Paul II, gave an interview on Book TV's “In Depth,” aired on C-SPAN 2.

“I was not so much disappointed with Weigel, as bewildered by his complete lack of understanding the nature and consequences of child sex abuse; he does not understand what is involved in treating victims of child sex crimes; and he doesn't have any semblance of insight into the psychology of the perpetrators of child sex crimes.”

Weigel failed to see that what he calls, “grave errors of judgment,” and “irresponsibility” on the part of many bishops “…are really manifestations of criminal behavior, psychopathy, behavioral and mental disorders, narcissism, selfishness, a sociopath's belief that rules don't apply to them, sinful disregard for the spiritual well being of the faithful, sinful failure as shepherds who should protect their flock from harm, and pure self interest.”

He goes on to say, with little subtlety, that victims of clergy sex abuse are crippling the Catholic Church in America, driving it toward bankruptcy, and will bring about the end of all catholic education, hospitals, and social programs in the United States. The victims may very well end up burdening the U. S. tax payers with huge social costs or may cause national social programs to reduce services.

George Weigel doesn't stop there. He burdens the victims with more guilt, because they are helping their undeserving attorneys get rich. He would like victims to feel guilty about using the U. S. civil tort justice system, in order to get compensation for their losses. He says the victims are using an unfair justice system that doesn't work because citizen juries (the conscience of the court) do not work. He suggests that it is typical for millions of dollars to be awarded for frivolous claims, and cites a complete untruth and fabrication to support his view.

Weigel makes a not-too-veiled and sickening proposal that some victims may not be worth the money, and shouldn't get a monetary damage award, if society determines that they are so damaged they can't be 'fixed' by a monetary judgment.

I did not say this in Part 1, but I say it here: Weigel seemed to me to prefer that the Church efforts, particularly financial, to help victims should be reserved for those who still love the Church. In my view, this is offering help only to those who pass a loyalty test, and discards those so ravaged by the clergy that they lost their faith in the Church and in their religion. The most severely injured get the least help – maybe none.

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David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Crafted out of transcripts of a five day-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace on the tail end of the publicity tour for Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest, the book reveals facets of the beloved author that have never before been seen publicly. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

I want to tell you one thing I imagine about the creation of this book. Tell me if it's right or wrong. As the listener probably knows by now, this book is made out of transcripts of tapes you recorded while you were on the road with David Foster Wallace for five days during his publicity tour for his big novel in '96 Infinite Jest.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

It sounds like it. You didn't end up writing the article that these notes were for, a Rolling Stone profile. That got canceled. So you had these laying around, I presume, stored somewhere. I would imagine, after David Foster Wallace's untimely death in 2008, your mind went immediately to these materials, all this conversation you had with Wallace. I imagine a huge, crushing sense of responsibility. You're thinking, “I've got to do something with themes, but what?” Is that accurate at all?

Well, no — it's interesting, but when I first heard that he had died, like a lot of people, I didn't think it was true. I got an e-mail from a friend, and I assumed it was a prank. Spending time with David, what you have a sense of is just how mentally healthy he was. If you had asked me in the summer of 2008 to name the most healthy, mentally, American writer, I would have without any hesitation, said David Wallace. He just seemed like he'd gone through something when he was younger, but he seemed healed. He seemed like someone who had a wise, funny, sharp way of looking at life, which would tend to make you live longer, not less long. I was shocked. My first response was just tremendous surprise.

You saw this health in him. Is that just from your experience with him in '96, traveling for a few days, getting the first-person encounter, or was that from his work as well?

It was from both. I only knew him for those five days, and in the five days what you read us talking about is just how he'd gone a very hard time when he was in his late twenties, and had found a way to experience the world after that. That was what I had been reading in his work, and what I'd then read in his work afterwards. The person who writes a story like “Good Old Neon”, the person who writes nonfiction like “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again” or “Consider the Lobster”, is not somebody who hasn't had hardships or wouldn't know how to go through it. Somebody who has, in the full way of a life, tested themselves against hardship and come out with a kind of warm comic knowledge. That was one of the things you love about his work. That's one of the things readers always feel: he has seen all the crap stuff, all the hard stuff they've seen, but he's also still incredibly aware, incredibly alive and incredibly funny.

The story you mention, “Good Old Neon” — it's gotten a lot of re-reading in the wake of Wallace's death simply because of the character it describes. There's this character that goes toward an end by his own hand in the story, and it even holds up a character called David Wallace who has avoided that. You think of other stories like “The Depressed Person”, an illustration of this phenomenon of depression that it's now revealed he suffered from himself.

There seems to be so much there than indicates David Wallace understands all these problems and has somehow transcended them. I think of that as a big paradox of his life and how he wound up. Is that the same way you think about it? There's all this understanding, but he ultimately did succumb to the same thing it seemed he had a grasp on.

I did, and when I read “Good Old Neon” when it came out in book form in 2005 — I'm not a crying reader, but that's one of the only short stories I read and cried at the end of, because of this beautiful line when the narrator becomes David and says, “David Wallace emerging from years of literally indescribable war with himself, won with considerably more intellectual firepower than he had in high school in 1982. I felt that.

That's one of the nice things of spending time with someone: I knew what he was talking about. I felt this great sense of power and health in that line. As a reader, I felt that thing of what a life is, which is that someone who is awake and aware — the kinds of people who like to read, the kinds of people who turn to books to find a little bit more about their lives — they've all gone through that kind of internal, internecine conflict. To see him saying that — I hadn't seen him, then, for almost ten years — I felt very warm for him.
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