world if all could agree on the path to get there? What can or should be done
about those who do not agree with the majority on the path?
I read another piece by Eric Black a while back that focused on an aspect of
another piece on the effect of the gender gap in elections by New York Times
columnist Thomas Edsall (we like Edsall; thereās a link in Blackās piece).
Black focused more on Edsallās use of quotes from chimpanzee experts focusing
on the alpha male.
https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2018/07/do-chimps-explain-americas-gender-chasm
As an old anthropology major, it struck a chord with me. Teasing out behaviors
of one great ape species closely related to us like chimps is instructive and I
liked it as far as Black and Edsall took it, but one canāt stop with one or two
species.
Some commenters brought in gorillas, I brought in bonobos, but neglected to add
orangutans who split off our line even earlier with their resource polygamy
where the roving alpha male swings through his territory raping female orangs
as he goes, all to address the human gender gap in our politics today. Some guy
wanted to chuck the whole notion, as if we could somehow escape who and what we
are, so I pointed him to a book by Frans de Waal called, Chimpanzee Politics:
power and sex among apes.
You really have to look at the whole of life and how it evolved into the
teeming mass of species interacting on Earth today. If you donāt, you are just
one more individual, male or female, of a species of Earthās great apes who
just exist, relatively alone or in their groups for one purpose or another
often dictated by some alpha male or female or coalition of some or all.
I thought I would bring this here and see what happens. The thread title is
sort of a play on that of a book, How Monkeys See the World, by Seyforth and
Cheney. They dealt with quite a few species, including macaques who live in
fairly large matrilineal groups, and they dealt a little with us, Homo sapiens,
of course; you canāt sell a book on Earth that interests all without us in it
somewheres.
I had a dream before waking up a few days back one morning to write a āHi
Johnā post. I was canoeing, paddling my swamped boat on a river away from a
very large crocodile looking to eat me; someone honked a horn in the school
parking lot next to my house and I woke up before the feast. Iād seen a public
TV documentary on the Gorongosa that must have touched some memories of worry
of being eaten by great white sharks while SCUBA diving in the Eastern Pacific;
or maybe we all have those fears of being eaten alive by some predator that
haunt us night and day.
This American sees the world as not yet completely trashed and destroyed by our
species of great ape, but getting close to unsalvageable. Weāre like those
crocs or sharks bearing down on our prey, but different in that we can destroy
the most vulnerable life on Earth, different in realizing that we and our our
progeny depend on that life, on taking what we need to live and no more.
In time, weāll go extinct, but not before driving many more species to
extinction. I wish another horn would wake me and the rest of us from this as
if it was a bad dream, wide awake and wise in a better world, a better us; but
our seemingly instinctive drive to dominate and destroy may be too strong.
Weāre just not that great and in spite of the name we give ourselves, Homo
sapiens sapiens, we donāt really seem all that sagacious these days. Oh, some
alpha male or female will step up and pretend to know the way, but again
demonstrate a complete ignorance of our situation. It looks pretty hopeless for
all that is happening in spite of a few folks pointing out how far weāve come
(think Steven Pinkerās Enlightenment Now), but what if we really tried?
I bet thereās money in it. Maybe not enough to deal with the increasing numbers
of fires and floods on Earth, but it seems like we were making a start before
Trump was elected. The economy was shifting to something sustainable with the
majority of countries, superpowers or wannabes or however you characterize them
(āshithole countries,ā anyone?,) buying in. So why Trump? Why Brexit? Why
Putinās Russia?
So why canāt we get to our Nirvana, beatitude or whatever state of bliss your
culture or religion prefers? Iāll tell you why. We have not formed the alpha
majority coalitions of apes who will take us there. We get the coalitions
threatening Armageddon to steer us to some hellish stalemate. We get little
else.
At one time the world thought America might show the way, as in āthe great
experiment,ā and many went along with us in the struggle to emulate our system
globally or find a way to peace, first through a League of Nations, sabotaged
by President Wilson when he would not accept āyesā for an answer in a
compromise with Republicans, then an attempt at world federalism in forming the
United Nations that has not quite failed yet, perhaps for similar reasons as
the LN failed (we, et al., would not participate and make it work).
Every day is Judgement Day for some, but election days on Tuesdays in November
when Congress and the White House are up for grabs are pretty important days
for Americans. Lots of horns tooting and evangelicals talking about and waiting
for Gabriel to blow his (Probably happened already and was drowned out, folks;
you missed it. Gospel ship sailed without you. Been left behind with the rest
of us great apes who ponder such stuff or other stuff. Sorry. You were not
really Christian after all, I guess. Jews? Muslims? Or any of the āhands off,
let God decide crowdā?).
We decide. The alpha coalition. We have not yet coalesced, but it is coming in
spite of those stuck in the primordial ooze of democracy or of other forms of
governing. Those in America and all her friends, frenemies, and honest to God
nemeses here and abroad, may all join the alpha coalition to save life on Earth
for, if not nirvana, then a safe and happy life wherever they are when the dust
settles.
Vote. Vote out the Trumps, the Putins, the Netenyahoos, Khameneis (maybe just
Iranian leaders who are okay with the theocracy of āsupreme leadersā like him)
and the like. Read DemocracyNow, Breitbart, National Review, The Nation,
anything and everything else you like on the WWW or more antiquated
communications tech (TV and radio), but decide where and with whom you stand
and vote.
Thatās what we do as Americans. We see the world as we wish it to be, and vote
in that world in by proxy. Whether what we see has much to do with what is
really possible determines how effective our coalitions will be. Enough saw
Trump-world in 2016 with help from his Russian friends that sidetracked many
efforts at alternative worlds, to bring us where weāre at.
We can work back to something that can work, but not before we stand together
and clean up the train wreck of 2016 to clear our way.
Blow your horn or not, but please donāt make me write another āHi Johnā post
(coming no doubt to explain a quote from something above in a JG post used in
some fallacious statement).
Some folks will always fall back to triggering primeval fears of predation to
motivate you in their direction, but just blow your horns when that happens
because they are usually the economic version of those once very real predators
in our evolutionary past, before we learned to be safe through advancing
ourselves beyond their reach.
Blow your horns and vote them away on November 8, 2018, and weāll start
cleaning up the mess they made of things.
Sent from my iPhone