We?

What Do You Mean, “We”?



The internet has made it possible to realize how alike we really are in our individuality; there is no interest or sexual fetish that is not shared by a substantial percentage of the world’s population (meaning by “substantial percentage” more than, say, ten or fifteen people), and sooner or later most of them will put up a website or a YouTube video.

I remain astounded, still, with all my “just visiting this planet” bafflement, at how much we underestimate our diversity. We are more alike than we are different, but as with the minimal divergences in the genetic map, it is the differences that make all the difference.

So even though I want to recommend unreservedly Sam Garrett’s translation of Geert Mak’s In Europe: A Journey Through the Twentieth Century as the one book to give a new generation of Americans an overall perspective on the Europe of 1900-1999, I am aware that I am reading the book with a prior awareness of what happened, and how much better Mak’s stories are than the boring versions of history that appeared in the books I had to suffer through. So anyone born since 1980 who comes to the book with different prior experiences and interests may not get a thing out of it.

Mak summarizes vast currents of history and sums them up with trenchant descriptions and pithy anecdotes. And for those of us who are no longer able to sum up how we got to the twenty-first century that has been relentlessly morphing out from under us for the past eight years, Mak’s narrative ties together quite nicely the strands of the increasingly distant past.

He also provides a lovely overview of travels on a continent that has, as I say, been altering as relentlessly in the twenty-first century as in any decade of the previous century. His book, which took several years to appear in English, is based on historical recollections sparked by successive journeys Mak undertook in 1999 from one end of Europe to the other. And his summaries do a better job than an academic history could of reproducing how the past survives in the memories of those who learned the tales from their own relatives as well as from textbooks.

Garrett’s translation, as I’m sure the reviewers noted last year, suffers from occasional Dutch-to-English blunders (“Aken” where “Aachen” was meant) and typographical errors (“1943” for “1934”), and I would almost be willing to lay bets that none of these have been corrected in the American paperback edition scheduled for publication in ten days.

The book reminds me (I had meant to type “us” but for once my Freudian-slippery fingers got it right) of what it took for Europeans to learn to think as well as say “us” and mean “Europeans” as a cooperative whole. It also reminds me of what a slippery term “we” is and how difficult it is to know whether you are part of my “we” even when we both think we share a common language and common assumptions about reality.

So maybe nobody who reads this will find any reason at all why Mak is remotely worth reading. I think he’s a good storyteller and he gets almost all of his facts right, which is more than I can say for a good many recent writers of history.

Why Social Animals Ought to Share More Information

Why Social Animals Ought to Share More Information


Unlike, say, physicists, professors studying primate behavior, get to continue to study their subject at academic conferences. (Well, knowing the ways of other professional conferences, there may well be instruments somewhere on the premises, but the physicists don’t get to do research at the same moment that they are arguing in seminars.)

Frans de Waal likes to cite the behavior of academics when discussing his thesis that we not only are descended from apes, we are apes. But because de Waal, whose website is www.ourinnerape.com, insists that “far from being a figment of the imagination, our morality is a product of the same selection process that shaped our competitive and aggressive side,” he insists that we are hybrid apes, with all the genetic equipment we need to be as altruistic or as nasty as we wanna be.

In other words, we are behaviorally a lot like the recently produced hybrids of chimpanzees and bonobos who “walk upright with remarkable ease and strike everyone by their gentility and sensitivity.”

De Waal (and here I am quoting at random from the latter pages of his latest popular book Our Inner Ape) has a great deal to say about the “whiffs of ideology” that taint models of human society and of studies of primate behavior alike. For the sake of brevity, he falls back on a single shorthand of social behavior in which personalities run the gamut from hierarchy-enhancing to hierarchy-attenuating (I misremembered the latter as hierarchy-avoiding, which is probably significant). The collisions between HE’s and HA’s is a sufficient explanation for a great deal of human history and primate history as well (once observers of primate social intelligence have recorded enough generations of social encounter to write a history). The assertion that neither human nor animal societies would function without that particular type of conflict is one that de Waal makes quite happily.

I can’t help but think that it would be useful for de Waal and his fellow (visiting) Emory professor Salman Rushdie to discuss the function of metaphor…not least because the primates being studied at de Waal’s Living Links research center at Emory University seem, if I recall the story correctly, not only to have gone beyond simple association of a picture with a thing, but to tell tales of their dreams and desires in which the visual symbols are used in a manner that approaches metaphor. (When a relationship between events is lacking in the symbol language they’ve been taught, they bridge the gap with a couple of symbols that suggest the idea they’re trying to formulate.)

In other words, once again everything you know is wrong, either because it was wrong to start with or because it has been supplanted by recent information.

Of course, de Waal knows he is defending a hypothesis that is strange to many, and he spends quite a bit of time describing the roller coaster of successive discoveries and overdetermined interpretations through which his discipline has gone, and how much the chimpanzee-bonobo discussion still devolves into a debate between aggressive assertiveness by the proponents of chimpanzee primacy and sweet-tempered intellectual seduction by the bonobo lovers.

Well, not quite, but he comes close to that.

I hadn’t paid much attention to de Waal’s most recent book when it came out in 2005 but was reminded of it by a story in the Emory University magazine (at the URL http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/spring2006/apes.htm ) that also describes the topics of research beyond primatology being carried out at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory’s multidisciplinary research institute (“poised to make landmark discoveries,” a sidebar tells us, in “neuroscience, microbiology and immunology, psychobiology, and visual science”): “Other significant research programs are seeking ways to treat cocaine addiction; interpret brain activity through technical imaging; increase understanding of progressive illnesses such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; unlock the secrets of memory; address vision disorders; and advance knowledge about the links between biology and behavior, such as the effects of sex hormones.”

Since utopyr will inevitably note that this research center obviously studies only national primates, I shall deprive him of the satisfaction of pointing it out first.

I happened to pick up this issue of the magazine, in one of my very infrequent cleaning sprees, a day or two after I had learned that Emory University has organized, at the request of the Dalai Lama, a course of studies in contemporary science for Tibetan monks. At regular intervals, professors from Atlanta universities (Georgia Tech as well as Emory) travel to Dharamsala to present seminars on the basic state of research in the sciences, for the sake of keeping the monks intellectually up to date.

Emory also co-hosts an annual conference in which Tibetan medicine is discussed by contemporary researchers, and, as you will recall, has given the Dalai Lama a faculty appointment through which he will occasionally lecture to Emory students visiting Dharamsala as part of the Asian Studies program.

De Waal’s books are so anecdotal as to make any statistics-loving empiricist weep: as he himself remarks, “’There is the sort of popularization I do in the book, the anecdotal evidence, but the other side is the viable research,’ he says. ‘I think when people read the book, they may not have that impression.’”

Looking at names of the people who recommend de Waal’s books I can’t help but think that once again we see that we see what we want to see even more than what we expect to see (which is one of de Waal’s points about primatologists). And there is a whole host of other research as to why this is so. I gravitate towards de Waal’s ultimate conclusions because I read them in terms of my own wishes and desires.

Answering the magazine interviewer, de Waal observed, ““‘We have an enormous spectrum of behavior, so don’t believe claims that we are inherently nasty, aggressive, selfish, and uncooperative. My argument is that we have the potential to be everything we want to be. Our job is to bring out what we want. Certainly, I would argue that under certain circumstances, we will be aggressive. If you want to reduce human aggression, you must limit the situations in which it arises.’”

Traditional psychologies of many cultures figured this much out already, minus the genetic underpinnings. A contemporary Buddhist master, who was being ridiculed about the saying “Human birth is hard to attain” in light of the explosion of human births and extinction of growing numbers of other species, walked to the window and pointed at the crowds on the sidewalk below, saying, “How many human beings do you see out there?” Suggesting, as the source I prefer never to cite by name said, that “what we regard as among the highest human attainments are the minimal beginning from which to learn how to be human.”

It is hard to override the genetic programs that we cannot overwrite.

But, Franz de Waal tells us, we have all the genetic equipment we need to make this happen. We are both chimpanzees and bonobos, regardless of whether we are both apes and angels.

The question of why we should want to override our genetic programs at all, of course, is the toughie. There has to be a this-worldly payoff or nobody would do it. It is particularly challenging if one does not necessarily share the confidence of the Tibetans that there is all the time in all the worlds to get it right so long as we keep plugging away at it.

In the end, there is probably a great deal of genetically encoded primate curiosity in that “incurable need to understand” that René Daumal ascribes to his fictional Father Sogol in Mount Analogue. And once one has seen, repeatedly, events that simply cannot happen (or more accurately, should not happen in that degree of frequency and precision in the normal lifespan of our particular planet), one has questions to which there are no answers that are not patently absurd.

Otherwise, for motivation I recall two quotations I pasted on the wall and/or door of my college dorm room: “Hell is the incapacity to be other than the person one normally finds oneself being.” and “We are ludicrous creatures. We are comical. Only humor, whether black, cruel, or absurd, can restore our serenity.”

The second quote is from Eugene Ionesco's journals. I hope the translator meant "even if" instead of "whether" but the translator probably rendered Ionesco accurately. Or else I have misremembered the quotation, for I cannot call it up via Google.