The Bonobo and the Atheist (A Personal Review)
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.
— Emily Dickinson
This is not a completely objective review. Few are, truth be told. I’m on record as an admirer of Frans de Waal, though I’m also on record disagreeing with some of his conclusions about the evolution of human sexuality. In fact, it was the disagreement that led me to admire the man as much as his work. I’ll explain.
When we were nearing the end of writing Sex at Dawn, Cacilda and I decided fairness required us to offer to send passages from the manuscript to a few authors and researchers with whom we disagreed, but whose work was integral to our argument—none of whom we knew personally. We wanted to give them a chance to tell us where we were mistaken or perhaps being unfair in our assessment of their views. We only made this offer to a few people, most of whom either never got back to us or politely declined. (One was offended, claiming it was somehow "intellectually dishonest" to have made the offer.)
Only Frans de Waal was willing to take a look, so I sent him the material. After a few days, he responded, asking if we’d considered this paper or that book that might enrich our discussion a bit. We had, and the conversation went back and forth a few times—always respectful and without a trace of ego on his part.
Keep in mind that this was a world-famous scientist with half a dozen published books and scores, if not hundreds, of scientific papers taking the time to correspond with someone he’d never heard of and who was suggesting he was wrong about important things. After half a dozen exchanges, he wrote, “Who knows? You may be right. In any case, you clearly have an exciting book on your hands, whether people agree with it or not: these are issues that will need debating over and over before we will arrive at a resolution.” Cringing inside, I asked if I could quote him publicly saying this, and he replied, “Sure, you can use it as a blurb, if you like.”
You write to a famous scientist telling him you think he’s wrong about something and he ends up helping you promote your book. That’s the sort of guy Frans de Waal is.
Now, I know this sounds more like a love letter than a book review, but full disclosure is important and—in this case—illuminates the book in question: The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Is there a clearer case of an alpha male going out of his way to help a low-status, unrelated male with little to offer in exchange, and a potential competitor, to boot?
According to the prevailing view of human interaction—the one de Waal challenges in this book, such an exchange shouldn’t exist. He quotes Micael Ghiselin, an American biologist whose stark assessment is often cited in the literature:
“No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for co-operation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation … Given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain [a person] from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering—his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a "hypocrite" bleed.”
This assumption of psychopathy as the cold heart of human nature is central to most of the literature of evolutionary psychology (see, for a very recent example, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and/or this stinging critique). Indeed, the assumption that our uncivilized animal nature is our “original sin” and that only institutions of authority can keep us from raping and pillaging each other into oblivion has fueled the propaganda of power courtesans cheering on colonialism, slavery, and forced conversion ever since Hobbes famously declared that human existence before the state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
So this is no small question that de Waal proposes to answer: Are we good to each other because religions force us to be, or are religions merely institutionalized expressions of our innate desire to be good to each other?
In arguing for the latter position, de Waal cites a growing literature (of studies focused on both human and non-human primates) showing that “our first impulse is to trust and assist; only secondarily do we weigh the option of not doing so, for which we need reasons.”
Still, this is not another anti-religion book in the tradition of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. De Waal's argument is far more subtle and inclusive. He agrees with Einstein that religious belief is “preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life.” In fact, De Waal ultimately asserts that “The whole purpose of God is … to keep us on the same straight and narrow that we’d been following ever since we lived in small bands.”
God isn’t dead; He's just beside the point.
I found The Bonobo and the Atheist to strike just the right chord. Frans de Waal isn’t telling religious people that they’re wrong to love their fellow humans (and non-humans) because God tells them to. He’s just explaining why the rest of us feel the same way, whether God speaks to us or not.
Published on June 19, 2013 by Christopher Ryan in Sex at Dawn
What Rick Santorum Doesn’t Know About Sex
In a recent appearance in New Hampshire, he summarized his thoughts on the subject, saying, “God made man and woman, and men and women come together to have a union to produce children, which keeps civilization going and provides the best environment for children to be raised.” While this may seem a common-sense understanding of the function and purpose of sexuality, it doesn’t apply to human beings.
The female of most mammals only has sex when she is ovulating. Otherwise, no go. But the sexuality of human beings—and our closest primate relations, bonobos and chimps—is utterly different. We and our chimp and bonobo cousins typically have sex hundreds—if not thousands—of times per birth, with or without contraception.
Santorum has argued that contraception is morally wrong because, “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” But human beings happily experience, witness, imagine, and lament a cornicopia of erotic encounters that couldn’t possibly result in conception. Leaving aside the many “perversions” happily practiced by humans the world over, the human female is available even for Vatican-approved missionary position intercourse—at least theoretically—when she’s menstruating, already pregnant, post-menopausal, or otherwise precluded from conceiving. Is this, too, an abomination? Even Santorum and his wife, who have had more children than most couples, have certainly had a lot more non-reproductive than reproductive sex over the years.
It’s the nature of the human beast. For Homo sapiens, sex is primarily about establishing and maintaining relationships—relationships often characterized by love, or at least affection. Reproduction is a by-product of human sexual behavior, not its primary purpose.
Another way in which we differ from most mammals is in our complex, multi-male social networks. The gorillas mentioned earlier are polygynous, with one dominant silverback mating with several females (perhaps more akin to Romney’s religious beliefs than to Santorum’s). The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in isolated nuclear family units in the treetops of Southeast Asia, while humans, chimps, and bonobos all live in complex social groups with multiple males in attendance. Of the hundreds of species of primates, there are precisely no monogamous species living in multi-male groups—except humans, if you buy scientific or religious arguments for the naturalness of human monogamy.
Although the nuclear family has been promoted like a soft-drink in recent decades, it’s clear that we are the most social species on the planet, interacting with and depending upon each other in ways that extend far beyond Mom, Dad, and Junior. We intermingle in ways no other creature could imagine—or tolerate. We do not raise our children in isolated treetops. We drop them off at school, where they satisfy their instinctive hunger for community, under the protection of adults whose names we’ll never know. When sick, we take them to doctors we’ve never met in hospitals built and maintained by utter strangers.
If you still doubt that humans are deeply social creatures, consider that our greatest punishment is solitary confinement. Anyone who’s experienced it will tell you that any human companionship—even that of murderers, rapists, and Washington lobbyists—is better than isolation. Sartre got it wrong: Hell is the absence of other people.
Santorum is inadvertently correct that sex “keeps civilization going.” But he’s wrong to credit only heterosexual reproductive sex. Sex of all kinds comes naturally to our species, and most of it has little to do with reproduction, and a great deal to do with loving one another. Sex and love hold communities—not just families—together. And in the end, it is our communities, as much as our families, we ask to raise our children, protect us from disaster, and offer us some measure of comfort in our final days.
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Twitter: @chrisryanphd Facebook: Sex at Dawn
Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/84414
Created Jan 6 2012
Published on Psychology Today
