Our upcoming election is between Bonobos and a Chimp

I recently read a mind-popping piece in the Atlantic by Melvin Konner about the evolution of early humans and primates.^⁠1 It’s an incredible saga well worth repeating here. I follow up on that by predicting an evolutionary revolution on November 5^th!

Darwin gives us a hint at what Konner is proposing when he wrote that if you want to understand human behavior, look to baboons, not philosophers. That’s in keeping with the long-held notion that our behavior is governed by our genes.

As proof of that, Konner cites field studies showing  that chimpanzees, our near relative, are violent by nature: “Males often coerce and beat females, and would sometimes gang up and attack a chimp from another group.” Recent books like “Demonic Males” drew  “a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy.”

However, the idea that all primates are violent by nature has been upended by research on bonobos, our other closest relative. “No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species.^⁠2

Based on this research, Richard Wrangham, a leading anthropologist on this subject,^⁠3 has upended conventional thinking: he has amassed convincing data that human aggression is largely determined by social learning in our environment – not our genes! He says the die was cast early in our evolution when we discovered how to use fire, extending day into the night. 

“Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions.”

Then, Wrangham uses a variety of animal studies to demonstrate how humans have successfully tamed animal species by human-directed selection over many generations. “For instance, in a fox study begun in Russia in the early 1950s, the pups in each litter least likely to bite when approached by humans were bred forward.” The results were dramatic in progressively lowering aggression.

Next, he applies this knowledge to bonobos, a close relative of Chimps, who separated into their own species 1 to 2 million years ago. Because bonobos were isolated in a remote crook of the Congo River,  they were“protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas. In relative safety, that gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression.”

Wrangham defines “reactive aggression” as attacking another animal that gets too close, as opposed to tolerating contact long enough to allow for a possible friendly interaction.  Over generations, these changes in social structure reduced violence in the same way the Russian experiment tamed foxes.

Over time, in this more trusting environment, female bonobos took over, forming strong coalitions “…that keep a lid on male violence.  Males didn’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence was extremely limited. “ 

Maybe that’s how evolution works for the greater good of the species. 

And it could be happening again, according to Harvard psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker.  In his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” he presents a strong case that “humans are now living in the^⁠4 most peaceful era in the history of our species.”

Interestingly, the history of America coincides with that of the bonobos: We have thrived in relative safety in a stable society since our founding, protected by two oceans that isolated us from much of the chaos and danger plaguing the rest of the world. Under this scenario, as with the bonobos, women have gained power until, on November 5^th, they will be able to overthrow the orange-haired chimp.

I think this is an example of the evolutionary power of natural selection: It’s Mother Nature’s way of saving the world.

xxx

¹ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/

² Ibid

³ Ibid/

⁴ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/steven-pinker-this-is-historys-most-peaceful-time-new-study-not-so-fast/#:~:text=Pinker%20cites%20a%20number%20of,in%20the%20history%20of%20civilization.

We have a choice of two futures, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates – and a stone mason

Waking up in Portsmouth, groggily looking out the third-story window of the Airbnb where we were staying, I couldn’t believe my eyes: pallets of stones were parked in the middle of Court Street – not any stones but beautiful old, rough-cut granite. As a former stone mason for 20 years, I thought I was dreaming.

I immediately walked over to talk to the five masons who were in the process of building a dry-laid granite wall along the edge of the street, some of it already as tall as I am.

They were replacing a wall that once stood here. When they showed me a blueprint of the original structure with each rock numbered, I couldn’t believe it:  they were building this wall by following the numbers to be an exact duplicate of the original wall.  It was like asking an artist to paint by numbers!

It was a slow, laborious process: multi-shaped stones with unique bumps and burrs never fit together exactly in the same way twice. Furthermore, looking carefully at their wall revealed a basic, utilitarian structure typical for that long-ago time and place, unlike what skilled stone craftspeople could build – that is if they were allowed to tap into their creativity.

In that instant, I had an epiphany. 

Requiring these skilled artisans to essentially paint by numbers to recreate a bygone era is a perfect metaphor for what is happening today in our country. We find ourselves with a mile-wide divide between the majority of us who wish to improve our lives by moving forward pitted against a sizable minority of us who want to go back to re-painting by the original numbers.  

This minority is clamoring for what strict constitutionists dream about: that the true meaning of our constitution is contained in the exact text penned by our Founding Fathers. We must follow their original intent in the same manner my mason friends are required to build a duplicate wall following the numbers inscribed upon the stones.

In reality, that original wall comes from an era that should be dead to us because America, as it was mandated in the Constitution,  disenfranchised most of us: women, minorities, and all those who didn’t own property.  Why would we want to go back to those days any more than these masons want to go back to build the same wall over again?

This topic –  being “plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world”^⁠1–  is the subject of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, “The Message.” 

For our country to move forward, Coates says, we must reject the notion that words have only one meaning: They are not paint-by-numbers, set in stone, “gray, automatic, and square.”  Instead, Coates says we need to  embrace a new vision filled “with angle, color, and curve.”^⁠2

Similarly, our constitution is not a dead relic set in stone, written for the benefit of a few wealthy white men. That connotation reeks today like a dead whale beached on a prehistoric sand bar. It’s wrong and morally repugnant.  Our constitution is not a dead whale but a living document designed to adapt to our changing societal needs.

Coates warns us that mass media confuses us by painting history and politics as an impenetrable web too difficult to understand. He says they are guilty of “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”^⁠3 

The truth is self-evident if we just open our eyes.

 

On November 5^th, we can either vote to return to that old, dead society or join Kamala in forging a new, vibrant society of opportunity where we can all pursue our dreams in a fair society where everyone has a voice.

xxx

¹ Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message (pp. 18-19). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

² Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message (pp. 44-45)

³ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message.html

Tales of Resilience:

 

 

Psychological resilience is that rare quality that enables some survivors to prosper after devastating trauma or misfortune, millstones that would sink most people.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, is a living example of such resilience, the details of which he shared during their recent convention: “A Black man, from South Carolina, raised by a single mother — that was me.”  But despite a dreadful childhood: “When our power was cut off, when there was nothing in the fridge, when we lost our home to a con man, I never lost hope.”^⁠1

Despite the obstacles, he always had the ability to reach out fearlessly, defying all the odds. For instance, as a teenager, he reached out to Congressman James Clyburn, somehow persuading him to attend Jaime’s induction into the National Honor Society, thereby forging what would become a lifelong friendship. When he got accepted at Yale but had no money to attend, he had the gumption to reach out so convincingly to a member of his church the individual not only gave him the money he needed but also a summer internship.

Harrison’s story vividly reminded me of Gail Sheehy, a writer of my generation and the author of the best-selling book Passages, which traced how we all go through “somewhat predictable, somewhat manageable phases and points of crisis”  in our lives. One typical stage is emotional turmoil at midlife.

When on an assignment to write about Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s genocidal reign, Sheehy was facing her own midlife crisis: the last thing she expected to find was a daughter. But that’s what happened when she forged an instant attachment with an eleven-year-old refugee named Mohm, who had suffered immensely during the genocide: she had survived by eating roots in the jungle after witnessing the slaughter of her grandparents, her parents, and every one of her siblings. 

But like Harrison, Mohm was bold and spunky, a testament to the power of the human spirit to prevail against unimaginable odds. When Sheehy visited a refugee camp, most of the children retreated to the shadows, wearing blank expressions. But she spotted one little girl who had “hungry eyes, darting behind bamboo fences… following me like a deer through the forest.”^⁠2 

Soon after, when that little girl was introduced to Sheehy, they bonded instantly. At the end of their brief encounter, the girl asked Sheehy to take her with her to a free country. In essence, Mohm adopted Sheehy, not the other way around.

Of course, Sheehy’s best seller was not just about adopting a daughter. It was about the stages everyone goes through in the course of their lives, which can’t be done in a vacuum. Inevitably, she was talking about her generation, which also happens to be mine. Sheehy was able to resolve her own midlife turmoil by taking dramatic action. In her case, she learned to attend to the needs of others by adopting Mohm.

 I would like to close by switching the topic from individual psychology to society as a whole. When we widen the lens in this way, we see our country, like a person, has also moved through stages since its birth. Looking at it this way, we can explain the extreme polarization we face today as a result of collective anomie at midlife. No longer are we a brash young country pumped up with testosterone like an out-of-control gang of adolescent boys primed to dominate and plunder. Like Gail Sheehy, we are now searching for a sense of community and ways to better take care of each other.

Sheehy wrote that “the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never imagined at a younger age,’’^⁠3 During my own midlife turmoil, I was able to cartwheel back to graduate school and become a psychotherapist specializing in helping folks with PTSD.

And, just in time for our presidential election this year, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have cartwheeled onto the scene to lead us toward a more gentle, kind, and hopeful future.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/22/jaime-harrison-inspirational-grandparents/

² https://www.vogue.com/article/gail-sheehy-book-daring-my-passages-a-memoir

³ https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/25/books/mohm-pat-in-america.html

Photo credit: Apple tree in  my neighbor's abandoned orchard

Meditating on a Bitter Dock

 

Standing as a sentinel at the foot of my drive, I took this photograph of a bitter dock, a common weed in NH. The Bitter Dock is foreign to our state and, like many other immigrants, is considered to be an invasive pest; however, in the more-than-human world, it is held in high esteem by both birds and animals, who hanker after its seeds.

At first glance, my photograph only captures a moment, as Claude Monet set out to do with his paintings. But his work has become more than that: Revealing a depth revered by people all over the world.^⁠1

In terms of my own life, my bitter dock picture is equally profound.

When I took this shot, I meant only to document the bitter dock’s colorful autumn garb. But the longer I looked at it, the more memories it brought back, starting when I was a little boy of six. That’s when the loggers came to clear-cut the majestic stand of white pines adjacent to my home, changing the whole ecology of my personal landscape.

Cutting these massive trees opened up a clear view of the sky, inviting in a smorgasbord of sunshine-seeking species, including bitter docks and high-bush blueberries. After a few years, my mother and I were able to go there berry-picking, gaining access to the land through the same gap in the stonewall where the bitter dock now guards my driveway.

It was a different time.

When those white pines were harvested around 1950, timber had monetary value, while land in rural NH had virtually none. A few years later, this allowed my father to buy the land under the trees for the princely sum of one hundred dollars—land that soon would become mine.

Over the years, mixed hardwoods grew back where the pines once stood, gradually shading out the blueberry bushes and restricting the bitter dock to a roadside plant. For the last fifty years, I have shared this land with the maples, oaks, and birches, cutting their wood to feed my woodstove. I am aware that, as a human being, I am so much more of an ecological threat than my little bitter dock plant could ever be.

While many consider this little plant to be a pesky weed, for me, it represents a higher truth. It reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon, a wordless talk he gave to his disciples by holding up a white flower.^⁠2 Only one person understood his message, signaling his approval by smiling.

Within Buddhism, the Flower Sermon signifies the direct transmission of wisdom without words; it is based on first-hand experience rather than rational creeds, intellectualism, or analysis.^⁠3 

The photo I took of this bitter dock is my wordless transmission of t his truth: It represents the primordial cycles of nature, grounded in my real-life experience during the short span of my 78 years on Earth.

I honor this wordless transmission by smiling.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/interactive/2024/claude-monet-impression-sunrise/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f010

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon

³ http://www.davidlai.me/2017/02/09/flower-sermon/

1968: What a Year It was!

A Photo I took in 1966 outside Nhr Trang

As the Democratic Convention unfurled this week in Chicago, everyone is comparing it to the 1968 convention in that same city. But for those who lived through it, the convention was but one example of how crazy 1968 was: It wasn’t just Chicago: the whole year was a house on fire, exploding with unprecedented chaos. 

Here’s how I remember it. 

I was a returning Vietnam vet, getting out of the service on February 3, 1968, the bloodiest year of that seemingly endless war.  Four days earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched the infamous Tet Offensive in Nha Trang, a place in Vietnam I knew well. 

Tet, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end of that meat-grinder of a conflict, sacrificing the lives of 58,000 young Americans, while Vietnam, counting civilians, lost a staggering three million^⁠1. Tet was a turning point, prompting CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,”^⁠2  to finally confirm that Vietnam was an unwinnable debacle. 

As if to buttress that claim, the photograph that won the 1968  Pulitzer Prize, graphically depicted a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong prisoner. A quote by an Army major during Tet aptly summarized the damage we were doing to  that small, third-world nation: Referring to a town he and his troops were trying to retake:  “We had to destroy it to save it.”^⁠3

Then, the My Lai massacre happened on March 16. US ground troops from Charlie Company rampaged through the hamlet of My Lai

killing more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, from infants to the elderly.

The Vietnam War caused a degree of polarization drawfing anything we are seeing today, including upending the presidential election. A virtual unknown, Eugene McCarthy, came within 230 votes of defeating Lyndon Johnson in NH. 

I happened to be watching Johnson give his address on March 31 when he unexpectedly – and shockingly – announced his decision not to seek reelection because of poor polling numbers.

 That starkly contrasts with President Biden, who had to be forced by his fellow Democrats to stand down. I’ve always had a soft spot for Johnson. He thought getting involved in a land war in Asia was folly but was talked into it to avoid being accused of being soft on communism.

There is this touching story, probably apocryphal, that he went down to the operations room in the White House at 4 AM each day to see how many of ‘my boys’ had been killed that day. The weight of Vietnam weighed him down, resulting in his premature death, a broken man.

On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis by James Earl Ray, sparking riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many others. Early in the morning of June, on the night of the California Primary, RFK was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, apparently angered at several pro-Isreali speeches Kennedy had made during the campaign.

On August 26, Mayor Richard Daley opened the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Demonstrations were initially peaceful but became increasingly violent over the next two days. By most accounts, on Wednesday evening, Chicago police took action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and sent at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175.

On October 3, George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, running an independent campaign for president, named retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay as his running mate. 

When the general was asked about his position on the use of nuclear weapons, he responded: "I think most military men think it's just another weapon in the arsenal... I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.” When Trump was president, like LeMay, he failed to understand why we couldn’t use our atomic weapons.

The Democratic convention will be over by the time you read this. While there are parallels with the 1968 convention, this one should be peaceful and healing for the party and the country.

The biggest danger is how to handle Gaza. If President Biden fails to rein in Netanyahu and demand a ceasefire, he may ignite a regional war in the Middle East, which would be disastrous for Israelis, Palestinians, and the Democrat’s chances of winning in November.

xxx

¹ https://study.com/academy/lesson/casualties-of-the-vietnam-war-causes-statistics.html#:~:text=The%20Vietnam%20War%20began%20in,of%20200%2C000%20South%20Vietnamese%20soldiers.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite

³ This 1968 timeline is where I got much of my information:

https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html