Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about our primate relatives and what their social structure says about what human beings are capable of being.  

Way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote posts about Bonobos and Chimpanzees (7/30/08) and about Peacemaking among Primates (a book by Frans de Waal) in a post entitled Peace on Earth  (12/24/08).  These bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest animal relatives.

In many ways the behaviors of chimps and bonobos couldn’t be more different.  In a very broad generality, chimpanzees are hierarchical, patriarchal, competitive, and violent, whereas bonobos tend to be more egalitarian, matriarchal, cooperative, and much less violent.  In books like Our Inner Ape (another book by Frans de Waal) they represent opposing tendencies that humans have--people perhaps are a bit of both.  But is there any behavior that both species have in common?

Here’s one.  Both chimps and bonobos are what’s called fission-fusion species.  Baboons, orangutans, and spider monkeys are as well--and so are humans.  What this means is that populations combine and separate.    Often during the day they split up and travel in little groups and at night they all get back together.  This is especially common among the chimps and bonobos.  To quote Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre, “The most fluid societies of any nonhuman primate are found among chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), humanity's nearest living relatives.”

The point is that chimps, bonobos, and humans are all tribal animals.  There is a bigger ‘parent group’ (which I will refer to as the tribe) and smaller subgroups (which I’ve heard called clans or bands).  Again, quoting Couzin and Laidre: “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence, characterized by dynamically shifting social groupings at multiple levels. At the highest tier in hunter-gatherer societies is the ethno-linguistic group or ‘tribe’, formed by several local ‘bands’ that fuse together when resources like water are clustered during dry seasons. Bands themselves, which are made up of around 30 individuals, break up into smaller foraging parties during daily forays out from a base camp. While some individuals remain at the camp to watch over youngsters and tend the old or injured, the foraging parties gather edible plant material and hunt animals, afterward bringing the bounty back to a central place for sharing and redistribution.”

We are tribal animals.  We belong in tribes.  “...99% of human was spent…” in tribes and our closest animal relatives live in fission-fusion tribes.  It’s in our biology.  So current human civilization is an anomaly.  And we are constantly trying to reform into tribes.

Conservative Republicans know this--at least at a gut level.  Their loyalty is to their tribe--and they see themselves besieged by those who don’t fit: pinkos, queers, Muslims, and Mexicans.

I think small towns and villages are our tribes--and in the cities, neighborhoods.  There was a story about the Portuguese population of East Cambridge (MA) several decades ago, that if a kid misbehaved several blocks away, his mother would know about it (via a phone call) before he got a chance to get home.  The pluses and minuses of villages, towns, and neighborhoods was that most folks knew one another.  This was a problems if you didn’t fit in--if you were too liberal or radical or queer or whatever.  But a big problem with big cities is that few people know each other and that gives many folks the liberty to be anonymously rude or worse.  You can much more easily mistreat someone you are not likely to see again.

I think intentional communities are part of what I will call the re-tribalization movement.  Even at large communities like Twin Oaks, or Dancing Rabbit, or Ganas,  I feel more at home since as I walk around I realize that I know most of the people I walk by.  Since being in community, I often feel bewildered by walking city streets and realizing that I don’t know any of the people I see.  It feels wrong somehow.

And, in larger communities, I see smaller subgroupings happening--which some of us (ironically given the info I have above) call ‘finding our tribe’.  I think these subgroups are reenacting our history of clans and bands within a tribe.  This fissioning and fusing is in our genes.

What else can we learn from primates?  I’ve talked a lot about bonobos and chimpanzees.  In my next post I want to focus on a study done with baboons.

Quote of the Day:  “...why is gossip necessary? Far from being mere small talk, gossip serves myriad vital functions within our fission–fusion societies, both at the individual level and at the group level. Gossip can facilitate social cohesion in the face of repeated separations, reminding individuals of the bonds they have with distant others. And it can also allow information to percolate through the group about the trustworthiness of each member, enabling listeners to keep track of others despite limited first-hand observation. Gossip, therefore, and maybe even language more generally, may have evolved specifically as an adaptation to the highly fission–fusion-oriented societies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”  - Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre

Thank You Power

I’m currently working in a bookshop (part time, mostly to have a little spending money).  I’m not sure how good an idea it is; it’s a little like hiring a kid to work at a toyshop.  There are so many books and so little time.

I found this book, Thank You Power (by Deborah Norville), in the dollar bin at the store.  There isn’t a lot in it to distinguish it from a lot of similar books.  (I think Brené Brown is one of the better writers in this area and I should review her Spirituality of Imperfection someday.)  But it’s a great reminder of the importance of gratitude, has a bunch of scientific studies that back this (and all sorts of other positive stuff) up, and has some pretty good quotes.

Here’s one about how the best way to be happy is to do things for other people (and there are a lot of studies that show this):  “Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.”  (Gretta Palmer)  The converse of this is that directly pursuing happiness is a sure-fire way not to achieve it.

Another way to achieve happiness is to do meaningful work, especially stuff that inspires you.  The quote for this one is: “If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert.  He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that had rolled under the radiator striving for it as the goal itself.  He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day.”  (W Beran Wolfe)  Pretty true (if you ignore the sexist assumptions in the quote.)  I think, of course, that the best way of all is to do meaningful work that makes a lot of other people happy.

Finally, perhaps the key thing that can really bring happiness is being thankful.  To everyone and for everything.  It’s an important and often neglected practice.  And that’s why I bought this book.  Even though it may not be the best written book I’ve read, gratitude is the main focus of Thank You Power.  

Being grateful, constantly appreciating others and life, changes us.  We can’t be reminded of that too often.

Quote of the Day: “What if… the secret to happiness was within each of us?  What if a lasting sense of completion, an enduring sense of completion, was possible--simply by changing the lens through which we viewed daily life? …

“Here’s the good news: you’ve got the power right now. … That power begins with two words: thank you.” - Deborah Norville

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (by Jack Kornfield) is a book about spiritual development that focuses on the fact that, in spite of whatever insights or bliss states or peak experiences people get from doing the work, in the end your stuff doesn’t change that much.  What seems to change is your relationship with your stuff.

The author claims to have interviewed nearly a hundred experienced practitioners from various Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish paths.  One Buddhist teacher described his slow transformation this way: “If my life was like a crowded garage where I kept bumping into the furniture and judging myself, it’s now like I’ve moved into an airplane hangar with the doors left open.  I’ve got the old stuff there, but it doesn’t limit me like before.”

It’s a useful spiritual read, full of people’s experiences and teaching stories, but what interested me was the title.  It reminded me of a Doonesbury comic from the seventies (and this is from memory) where a member of the Walden commune was being asked to do the dishes.  She asked why the men didn’t have to do the dishes and the older woman asking her pointed out that the men did do the dishes, but this time it was her turn.  As the younger woman walked away, she muttered something about “After the revolution...” and the older woman said, “After the revolution, we’ll still need to do the dishes.”

After the ecstasy, the laundry.  After the revolution, the dishes.  I have two takeaways from this:

The first is the simple fact that no matter what transformation we go through, we still will have to do the work.  In fact, the work is just part of the process and the most revolutionary thing we can do is to make sure that the work is being done by everybody, more or less equally.

The second is to question the place of laundry and dishes in a future sustainable culture.  After the Great Turning (to use Joanna Macy’s term), will we still do laundry and dishes?  We are, after all, the only animals to wear clothes and eat off of plates.

However, except in some tropical paradise, I can’t imagine that very many people will be able to go naked (especially in colder climates) and live off of fruits and berries.  But will we clean our clothes and dishes (and bodies) in the river?  Will we have a sci-fi future where we use sonic devices for our cleaning?  As Niels Bohr is supposed to have pointed out, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.”

In any case, no matter what happens, there will still be work to do.   What the work is, isn’t as clear but clearly we will still need people to do it.

Quote of the Day:  “To sustain spiritual life, we need each other’s eyes and hearts as surely as we need help creating food and shelter.  This reflection and encouragement is no small thing. …

“The experience of being truly seen and honored by another reminds us of who we are.  We cannot underestimate the importance of the awakening we bring to one another.”  - Jack Kornfield

Strategy

I spent several years occasionally wondering about strategy.  How do we get from here to there?  I hadn’t heard any compelling strategies on the Left or from the New Age folks.  Unlike analysis or vision, it seemed a mystery to me.

I first started looking at this in this blog, back at the beginning of my blog with a post on Creating Social Change (7/2/08).  Here I looked at analysis, vision, and strategy and related strategy to the motto:  “Agitate, educate, organize.”  I pointed out that the Left had been pretty good with the agitating but hadn’t done so well with the educating and organizing and began exploring possibilities around this.

Later, in my post on The Great Turning (11/15/09), I pointed out Joanna Macy’s Three Dimensions of the Great Turning:  "1. Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings; 2. Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives; and 3. A Shift in Consciousness."   I connected it with the ‘agitate, educate, organize’ slogan.  As I said then: “I related the 'Actions to slow damage' to Agitating, the 'creation of structural alternatives' to Organizing, and the 'Shift in Consciousness' to Educating.”

Joanna Macy’s message is that we need to do all three of these and each of them supports the others.  When I talked about this with Gil, an organizer that I work with in the Point A project, he came up with the idea of abbreviating this strategy as ACT:  Agitation (or activism), Creation, and Teaching.  He pointed out that we have been doing all three in Point A: we have an activist within the group doing anti-gentrification work, Gil and I (and others) have been working to create a new community, and, periodically, a group comes up from Virginia to do educational work--doing workshops to teach folks about living communally.  (For more on Point A, see my post entitled Point A, 1/31/15.)

This is why I personally see my work with creating new communities as social change work.    I’ve twice mentioned that I see intentional communities as laboratories for social change (in my posts called Beginning Again, 12/21/12, and Old 400th, 3/1/15).  My belief is that we can try things out in communities and find out what works and what doesn’t.  The working communities can be models for the world we want to build.  In the ACT model, this is only one step in the process.  There also needs to be agitations and actions to hold back all the horrendous things that are happening, to allow us the time to find out what works, and as we do find out what works, we need to be able to spread the word through teaching and education.

It’s not easy, but this is the best social change thinking that I’ve been able to come up with.  And, while I haven’t done a lot of agitation/activism, I am grateful for those who do, and I realize that I am not only doing community creation work, but some educational/teaching work as well, both through this blog and through my constant conversations with folks about community and particularly communities as social change laboratories.

What is the social change work that you do?

Quote of the Day:  “...look at how this Great Turning is gaining momentum today, through the choices of countless individuals and groups.  We can see that it’s happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing.  These are: 1) actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings; 2) analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives; and 3) a fundamental shift in worldview and values.  Many of us are engaged in all three, each of which is necessary to the creation of a sustainable civilization.” - Joanna Macy

Vision

There are many different visions of what the world should look like.  I think that one of the best sources of possible visions are utopian fiction.  (For more on this see my posts on Why read Utopian Fiction? , 7/12/08,  and An Annotated Utopia, 7/14/08.)   I wrote a personal bit on why vision moves me in my post on Vision, Dissonance, Determination (1/8/10).

But my biggest piece on vision was my series on Simplicity, Equality, Community, and Sustainability, starting with the post SECS (9/22/08) and running through my post on Pulling it together (12/1/08).  (All of this is collected in my second zine, entitled ‘What I Believe.’)  This is my vision of the future I’d like to see: Simple, Egalitarian, Communal, and Sustainable.

But, in some ways both analysis and vision are relatively simple.  You pay attention to what’s going on and you figure out the future you’d like to see.  For me, strategy was the trickiest part.  And strategy is what I’d like to explore next.

Quote of the Day:  “She looked slowly around.  She saw …(sic) a river, little no account buildings, strange structures like long-legged birds with sails that turned in the wind, a few large terracotta and yellow buildings, and one blue dome, irregular buildings, none bigger than a supermarket of her day…  A few lumpy free-form structures overrun with green vines.  No skyscrapers, no spaceports, no traffic jam in the sky.  ‘You sure we went in the right direction?  Into the future?’

“‘This is my future, yes! …’

“‘You live in a village, you said.  Way out in the sticks.  Like if we went to a city, it’d be…(sic) more modern?’

“‘We don’t have big cities--they didn’t work....’”  - Marge Piercy

Analysis

Most of this post is going to be similar what I wrote in my post on Radical Political Theory (7/6/08).  It’s based on the theories of Michael Albert and others (as written in the book, Liberating Theory and as an internet tutorial on ZNet).  They basically combine Marxism, anarchism, feminism, and what they refer to as nationalism (as in Black Nationalism, Puerto Rican Nationalism, etc) into something they sometimes call complementary holism.  (Not a great label as they admit.)  

They start by talking about ‘four spheres of life’ which they believe are politics, economy, kinship (family stuff), and culture or community. They map these onto the major radical theories by saying that anarchism has the best analysis of politics, Marxism has the best analysis of economics, feminism has the best analysis of kinship, relationship, and family life, and ‘nationalism’ has the best cultural analysis.  These folks don’t believe that any one analysis or oppression is primary, but these are all interwoven.

These are basically four aspects of society but they admit that there are also two other extra-social aspects: the environment (about which the ecology movement has the best analysis) and our relations with other societies (and here I think the peace and anti-imperialist movements have the best analysis).

My political analysis is simple.  This society is pretty messed up and is ruining the environment and causing lots of problems for other societies.  For detail, check out what the anarchists, Marxists, feminists, nationalists, radical ecologists, and anti-imperialists have to say.

Quote of the Day:  “What the oppressor often succeeds in doing is simply externalizing his fears, projecting them onto the bodies of women, Asians, gays, disabled folks, whoever seems most ‘other’.

“But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.  He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings…  He fears the immobilization threatened by his own incipient guilt.  He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.” - Cherrie Moraga

Social Alchemy, Social Change, Social Transformation--A Review

I want to start the new year with a look back and make some clarifications.  For people new to this blog, I want to explain what Social Alchemy is, why I write so much about communities, and why I sometimes veer off into things like chemistry and spirituality.

First of all, Social Alchemy, as the title of this post implies, is another way of saying social change or social transformation.  I think that there are lots of problems with this society and believe there are better ways to live.

I’ve joked to people that my hobby is “rebuilding the world from the ground up.”    I started this blog, as I point out at the top of the sidebar, to offer “Some Tools for Creating a World that Works for Everyone”.  I view, as I’ve mentioned several times in this blog, intentional communities as laboratories for social change.  And when you’re thinking about rebuilding the world, looking at everything, from chemistry to spirituality, makes sense.  As it says at the bottom of the sidebar, “It's all connected... it's all connected... it's all connected…”

Much of what I’m going to write from here (in this and in the next few posts) is a rehash of stuff I wrote about early in this blog--some of it, back in 2008 when I started the blog.  (You can also find this stuff in the two zines that I published if you want--see my note at the very top of the sidebar about Bodhisattva Revolutionaries and Social Alchemists.  I still have a few copies available if you’d rather read this stuff in print rather than online.)

So how do we create social change?  How do we transform a society?  I don’t think that there’s any one answer but the most useful framework I know is what I learned from being in the Movement for a New Society in the 1980s.  There we began by looking at Analysis, Vision, and Strategy.

During the 1970s I was involved with a lot of personal growth stuff--including something called Neurolinguistic Programming.  I remember John Grinder at one point saying something like he thought that you could anything if you only could see clearly what was going on, had a very definite picture of what you wanted, and were willing to try many different things.  When I thought about it, I realized this was an example of analysis (analyzing the situation),  vision (picturing what you wanted), and strategy (trying different things).

Recently, I was looking at The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins.  The book is divided into three parts which he labels Head, Heart, and Hands.  Head is an analysis of the situation we find ourselves in, in this case focusing on peak oil and climate change.  The Heart section is subtitled “Why having a positive vision is crucial”.  And the Hands part is focused on the Transition process, ie, their strategy.  Again, analysis, vision, and strategy.

So, this social change process is going to be the focus of my next three posts, one each on Analysis, Vision, and Strategy.

Quote of the Day:  “What does the global justice movement want?  What is our vision, our picture of an ideal society and economy?  When we say ‘Another world is possible,’ what kind of world are we talking about?

“The global justice movement is diverse.  It ranges from union leaders who want to secure a fair share of this economy for its members to old-line Marxists, to anarchists, to indigenous communities struggling to preserve their traditional lands and cultures.  No one picture of the world can describe all the different viewpoints.  No one vision may actually serve this tremendous diversity.”  - Starhawk