The People (in the legal sense) don't need the wronged party's consent in order to proceed with criminal charges, but it's such a pain in the ass that prosecutors usually don't bother if the victim isn't on board. (Especially in the case of married couples, where the battered spouse can't be forced to testify.)
Without language, none of this would be so commonplace. Women would not be indoctrinated to submit. Men could not organize to treat women as commodities and rewards.
... so, your solution to crazy people hurting each other because their bronze age crazy book full of crazy tells them it's okay is to eliminate *all language*?
No, the genie is out of the bottle. How would go about eliminating language? Even if you could, the repercussions would be mind boggling. You might as well shoot us all now.
Non-reproductive sex. I think non-reproductive sex is a mechanism by which women can maintain a social bond with satellite males. And the size of the testes implies sperm competition and many partners per woman. Compare with gorillas: Male gorillas are fiercely territorial over mates, groups consist of one alpha male and several females. The females don't shop around. The testes and penis in gorillas are so small as to be nigh invisible. At least I've never seen a gorillas penis or testes.
That works (sort-of) for bonobos, but breaks down terribly for chimpanzees who are no less horrible than us humans at pretty much everything. (And their testes-to-body mass ratio is even higher than ours.)
-- Steve's thinking that a civilization of technologically-advanced chimps would never have survived their version of a cold war. (Sorry, Cornelius.)
Are gangs of male chimps dividing up the female chimps between themselves and beating up and/or killing females who stray and mate with other males? As with warblers, fidelity can be tested genetically. Normally, when fidelity is near 100%, testes are small.
Well, they're not dividing up the female chimps admittedly. They are beating the shit out of each other though; they also have been observed to commit coordinated political assassinations and live from the avails of prostitution. Chimpanzee bands do have an alpha-beta heirarchy, but it's a much less stable one than for gorillas. (Hence the exaggerated testicles.)
-- Steve read a good book by the former head primatologist of the Arnhem Zoo recently covering the parallels and skews between human behaviours and that of other primates. Title and authour upon request, at least once he's back at home and can check them.
Sweet. So we have what sounds like maiming and killing of competitors, some hierarchy, and trading sex for favors. I was not aware that male chimps were aroused by non-estrus females. I thought cohesion was maintained by the exchange of other favors, such as mutual grooming and proximity to an individual whose rank is higher than those tormenting you.
But, as you said, no dividing up the female chimps between the males. Are the males permanent fixtures in a group, or is there a rotation every few years, like in rhesus monkeys?
If I remember correctly, it's the females who rotate... males from other bands are frequently killed on-sight. I'm not certain if there's non-estrus mating or not but it wouldn't surprise me. Cohesion is maintained by the exchange of grooming and the like, but power groups form; in the book I cite above a new alpha male got separated from his backers one night and a younger male rival and the former alpha cornered him and beat him until his scrotum ruptured (bursting the testes, of course) before zoo staff could intervene. The blows were specifically targeted to immasculate, too. Really cold, calculating stuff.
The young male then became alpha, backed by the old alpha... but that was unstable too.
-- Steve will never look at Ham the same way again.
OK, that's not very stable social environment for the females and their offspring... If all outside males get killed on sight, then recruitment in the male hierarchy is from within the group, thus: sons and nephews? Not too hot for genetic diversity. So for the sake of genetic diversity, the females must disperse to other groups, away from the sisters and aunties who would help raising the offspring (kin selection).
OK, it's workable -- selection pressures would favor: violent males with leadership skills, males that discouraged females from dispersing, and females who disperse anyway. And females that do not discriminate against unrelated/new female members and their offspring.
Now that I've finally found that book again, it's Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal. (ISBN 1-57322-312-3).
From my off-the-brain-cuff recollection, the males tried to retain females but competition among females tended to drive off young rivals at adolescence. That, however, is far from certain in my recollection... it's been a year since I read it.
-- Steve thinks it'd be worth a re-read soon.
PS: dammit, I can't find it from a quick check of the index... but I know that the book alleges an (unconfirmed) incidence of sex-for-money prostitution in a monkey study too. (Resulting from, believe it or not, an opportunistic bank heist of the "currency" the experimenters were using.)
Neither of your statements in this thread, here or below, actually answer the question that you begged, which is how language is what causes women to become indoctrinated to submit or allows men to organize to submit to women. At best, you're saying that language is just a more sophisticated tool than hooting and grunting and rape.
But since language is a tool for a host of other things that humans do (such as establishing family bonds, negotiating with competitors, conveying information about evolutionary explanations for psychology) which they could do to a less sophisticated degree without language, I don't think you have any standing to say that language is what allows indoctrination. I submit (heh) that indoctrination is a goal, and language is a tool by which it is accomplished.
That was five pages of speculations presented as results. 8-/
The author tilts continuously at those who claim evolution stopped at the Pleistocene but fails to demonstrate that he comprehends the mechanism of evolution. Where he gives us the quip that evolution can be rapid, say 450 years for a new trait, he completely ignores the conditions necessary to achieve this feat. Viz: small isolated populations with a high incidence of _expressed_ rare traits (inbred population) with conditions that favor those new traits (usually by killing off everyone else). You don't need to be in the middle of an Ice Age to live in a small, isolated and inbred population that's getting wiped out by the Black Death of Sleeping Sickness. Any twit knows this, God knows why he chose to ignore it. The popularity of living in small, isolated and inbred extended families went out with the invention of cheap and rapid travel, such as the canals and rail ways. Good luck evolving now, suckers.
As he goes on railing against flawed and wishful thinking he gives us his bias: he depicts promiscuity as a primitive and pair-bonding as advanced. This stinks of Victorian Chain Of Being systematics, as applied to sociology. Not only do we not have fossil evidence of Australopithecine mating strategies, we don't have fossil evidence of what our common humman/chimp ancestor's mating strategies were either. All we have are end-results, a cultural bias and a lot of speculation.
The rate of cultural evolution is in no way comparable to genetic evolution. New culture is spread virally. Classically, new genes are not caught, they are spread very slowly and risk random extinction unless selective forces kills off most everyone else. Due to the speed at which culture can change across populations, the evolution of culture is more wild than the innate behaviour to which it is anchored. The author of the article, while shooting down the biases of Pop EP has failed to show that he has a better grasp on how evolution and cultural change works.
Again in the Coda on page 5, the author shows bias in lauding our big brains. Thing is, it is more likely that our brains are big because of chance and because childbirth-mortality isn't significantly impacting our population viability (like the appendix) than the author's implied claim of the brain growing in response to a need. Evolution does not grow stuff to meet demand. Random mutations throws stuff on and death chops off all the bits that get too much in the way and random factors may or may not keep the rest. There is no made-to-order brain. But there is made-to-order mind. That is why we are here trying to understand how we came to be part of a global community in which wife-beaters are tolerated.
I agree with your submission, to whit: that indoctrination is a goal, and language is a tool by which it is accomplished. I also agree that language is a more sophisticated tool than hooting and grunting and rape. What I submit is that while the goals of indoctrination, subjugation and rape have always been present to some degree in human populations, it took the tool of language to tip the scales in favor of the indoctrination, subjugation and rape strategy.
It's like, we always caught fish when we could, but with the advent of the tool of fishing boats and factory ships we were able to make a career out of fishing. This was not very beneficial to the fish.
(I'll come back and address your longer post -- there's an awful lot of good stuff in it, and I need time to look at it and think about it.)
My point here is merely this: Language is a tool for *lots* of things that humans want to do. One of the things that some humans want to do is control, indoctrinate, and subjugate other humans. I grant that language permits the transmission of cultural ideas that promote subjugation.
But there are lots of other things that humans want to do! Humans want to understand their place in the universe, for example, and give themselves a sense of meaning by asking the question "why are we here"? Humans want to understand that causes and nature of diseases, because they suffer when their loved ones die, and they want to prevent it. Humans want to be remembered after they die by the people that they loved. Humans want to love and be loved!
Language, as a tool, facilitates all the "power-dominance-subjugation-control" stuff exactly as it facilitates all the "cooperate-preserve-heal-ennoble" stuff. Language is just a tool.
Your original post, the one that caused me to read this thread and feel it necessary to comment, attributes the goal to the tool. The tool is not the problem. The goal is the problem.
(Also- depends on what you mean by "beneficial" to the fish. Certainly unsustainable fishing practices are extraordinarily bad for fish populations because they destroy them by reducing them to below the reproductive thresh-hold. But other fishery practices are beneficial for the fish in that it removes large adult competitors and makes room for young fish to grow and reproduce; still other domestication-type fishery practices, i.e. fish farms, all but guarantee that catfish will be around as a species as long as humans want to eat catfish. "beneficial" to "fish" is a weird concept to try and work with; do we need to understand what fish want? Or when we say beneficial to the fish, are we applying a normative claim that what fish ought to have done to them is what 'naturally' gets done to them? Or do we really just mean good for fish insofar as fish are important to us?)
Starting with the fish. 8-) I don't know if you are aware of a study released recently about the selective pressures our commercial fishery and sport hunting activities has had on wild populations? Contrary to other evolutionary pressures that have selected for larger animals (fish and bighorn rams), our exploitative activities have resulted in populations of smaller rams and cod that breed smaller and earlier. We are not merely removing big ripe individuals and allowing the peewees to stretch out and become the next generation of big ripe individuals all the sooner. No. We are weeding out the genetic predisposition of populations to grow big ripe individuals. This is in part what I meant by our use of better tools not being beneficial to the fish. The other aspect is mainly the reductions of fish stocks to the point that they may never recover to anything resembling their former abundance.
Domestic pets and farm animals do benefit from our activities in that their distribution and numbers follow ours. With so many individuals worldwide, cattle are much more likely to continue to be a part of the biosphere than are, say, spix macaws, amur leopards, white rhinos and Tasmanian devils. So when I say a species benefits, I mean that it persists in large numbers. I don't mean it has an improved standard of living.
I agree that language is a tool with lots of applications and that language is not the problem, it is how it is applied as a "power-dominance-subjugation-control" enabler that is the problem. We got ourselves into this mess using language (cemented in the "bronze age crazy book full of crazy" the Weasel King likes to rub our collective noses in) and we will have to use language to get ourselves out. So the question remains: what was the social structure of human herds prior to handing the keys of the kingdom over to the rape cartel and what model best balances our diverse social/antisocial tendencies? I think we should change goals away from our "bronze age" model, but to which goal?
I think by prelingual human they were referring to other members of the Homo genus, which could be considered human too. Creation of stone tools was the defining factor for the first member of the Homo genus, Homo habilis.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the point is that there is no evidence of abuse of mates in the animal kingdom. Spousal abuse, misogyny, and gender discrimination are unique to humans.
At least, I think that's what the commenter was trying to get at.
It's a hard issue. Christians tend to hold that their marriages are not so much a civil contract as a religious sacrament, and revoking that is as dire a step as un-baptizing someone or recalling a minister's ordination. It's not that it can't be done, but that you really need to make sure that you've tried to make it work. Jesus, who was not ascribed with strong views of abortion or homosexuality, did go out of his way to condemn the prevalence of divorce, so I've got to give some sort of props to Saddleback for treating it as an issue that Christians must take seriously.
Of course, a pattern of abuse is as unforgivable as adultery or abandonment, and shame on the conservative American church system for ignoring that the standards of Christian behavior has been revealed to be higher than it was understood to be in the first century. We know that slavery is intolerable today and you don't get a free pass just because Jesus said that you merely have to be a morally responsible slaveholder. But even if you hold wives to the Scriptural view that they need to submit to their husbands, I cannot fathom why you can't read the rest of the sentence, which calls on husbands to love their wives as much as Jesus loves the Church. And, doi, Jesus doesn't beat the Church even if she does burn the roast, y'know?
but if you're speaking to an indoctrinated slave of Xtianity, sometimes you HAVE to drag the Devil into it to make them see the TRUE definition of Evil.
A friend of mine - a devout evangelical Christian - was abused by her spouse for 20 years and said nothing because she firmly believed she had to forgive everything and turn the other cheek. When she finally had enough, she was told in counseling by her pastor that she was lacking in forgiveness, while no reproach was made at her husband. She finally wised up and got a divorce. And changed churches.
There is still a great deal of pressure on women to be submissive, even when they are not conservative or Christian. I heard a teenager tell me she didn't fight back when she was raped because she "didn't want to make a fuss". I read an article by a woman who had a man burst into her apartment and rape her, and she couldn't throw him out or fight back because she didn't want to be rude. Abuse is unacceptable. Rape is unacceptable. A man can rape his own wife. No means no. The real motive for change here will be when the courts and the lawmakers start standing up and against domestic violence and violence against women. When a man gets more jailtime for rape than for stealing a car, we'll have done something right. The idea that a woman can fight back is still new to many women. When I told the teenager she could, and should fight back, that this was a situation in which she damn well should make a fuss, she was surprised. No one had ever told her this before. It was just something you had to put up with, no matter how much it upsets you. This attitude of martyrdom and self-suffering extends far outside Christianity, it is the consequence of women being second-class citizens (and sometimes less) since the dawn of recorded memory. No one, man, woman or child should suffer abuse, and no one should encourage, support or belittle abuse in any way.
Canada doesn't do it differently, but the particularly bitter people of my acquaintance phrase it this way: "Rape is legal, unless the particulars of the case sufficiently offend a white man". And they maintain this in the case of Canada, the USA, Great Britain, and, indeed, everywhere else in the western world, with the explicit statement that everywhere else is worse.
And, really, I can't mount an intelligent argument against that. Which, if you've been reading me for a while, should tell you something.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 06:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 07:02 pm (UTC)Might makes right
Date: 2009-02-03 06:43 pm (UTC)Just so I'm clear on this.
Date: 2009-02-03 06:48 pm (UTC)Re: Just so I'm clear on this.
Date: 2009-02-03 06:57 pm (UTC)Pandora's box
Date: 2009-02-03 06:58 pm (UTC)Re: Pandora's box
Date: 2009-02-03 07:04 pm (UTC)Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 07:32 pm (UTC)Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 08:59 pm (UTC)-- Steve's thinking that a civilization of technologically-advanced chimps would never have survived their version of a cold war. (Sorry, Cornelius.)
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 09:27 pm (UTC)Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 09:51 pm (UTC)-- Steve read a good book by the former head primatologist of the Arnhem Zoo recently covering the parallels and skews between human behaviours and that of other primates. Title and authour upon request, at least once he's back at home and can check them.
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 10:43 pm (UTC)But, as you said, no dividing up the female chimps between the males. Are the males permanent fixtures in a group, or is there a rotation every few years, like in rhesus monkeys?
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 10:57 pm (UTC)The young male then became alpha, backed by the old alpha... but that was unstable too.
-- Steve will never look at Ham the same way again.
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 11:23 pm (UTC)OK, it's workable -- selection pressures would favor:
violent males with leadership skills,
males that discouraged females from dispersing,
and females who disperse anyway.
And females that do not discriminate against unrelated/new female members and their offspring.
How does that fit the pattern you remember?
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-04 02:45 am (UTC)From my off-the-brain-cuff recollection, the males tried to retain females but competition among females tended to drive off young rivals at adolescence. That, however, is far from certain in my recollection... it's been a year since I read it.
-- Steve thinks it'd be worth a re-read soon.
PS: dammit, I can't find it from a quick check of the index... but I know that the book alleges an (unconfirmed) incidence of sex-for-money prostitution in a monkey study too. (Resulting from, believe it or not, an opportunistic bank heist of the "currency" the experimenters were using.)
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-03 11:32 pm (UTC)males that discouraged females from dispersing _or_ encouraged females to stay
Re: Carrot, not stick
Date: 2009-02-04 02:43 am (UTC)Fallacy 1:
Analysis of Pleistocene Adaptive Problems Yields Clues to the Mind’s Design
Neither of your statements in this thread, here or below, actually answer the question that you begged, which is how language is what causes women to become indoctrinated to submit or allows men to organize to submit to women. At best, you're saying that language is just a more sophisticated tool than hooting and grunting and rape.
But since language is a tool for a host of other things that humans do (such as establishing family bonds, negotiating with competitors, conveying information about evolutionary explanations for psychology) which they could do to a less sophisticated degree without language, I don't think you have any standing to say that language is what allows indoctrination. I submit (heh) that indoctrination is a goal, and language is a tool by which it is accomplished.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 03:07 am (UTC)Article on fallacies is itself fallacious
Date: 2009-02-04 02:31 pm (UTC)The author tilts continuously at those who claim evolution stopped at the Pleistocene but fails to demonstrate that he comprehends the mechanism of evolution. Where he gives us the quip that evolution can be rapid, say 450 years for a new trait, he completely ignores the conditions necessary to achieve this feat. Viz: small isolated populations with a high incidence of _expressed_ rare traits (inbred population) with conditions that favor those new traits (usually by killing off everyone else). You don't need to be in the middle of an Ice Age to live in a small, isolated and inbred population that's getting wiped out by the Black Death of Sleeping Sickness. Any twit knows this, God knows why he chose to ignore it. The popularity of living in small, isolated and inbred extended families went out with the invention of cheap and rapid travel, such as the canals and rail ways. Good luck evolving now, suckers.
As he goes on railing against flawed and wishful thinking he gives us his bias: he depicts promiscuity as a primitive and pair-bonding as advanced. This stinks of Victorian Chain Of Being systematics, as applied to sociology. Not only do we not have fossil evidence of Australopithecine mating strategies, we don't have fossil evidence of what our common humman/chimp ancestor's mating strategies were either. All we have are end-results, a cultural bias and a lot of speculation.
The rate of cultural evolution is in no way comparable to genetic evolution. New culture is spread virally. Classically, new genes are not caught, they are spread very slowly and risk random extinction unless selective forces kills off most everyone else. Due to the speed at which culture can change across populations, the evolution of culture is more wild than the innate behaviour to which it is anchored. The author of the article, while shooting down the biases of Pop EP has failed to show that he has a better grasp on how evolution and cultural change works.
Again in the Coda on page 5, the author shows bias in lauding our big brains. Thing is, it is more likely that our brains are big because of chance and because childbirth-mortality isn't significantly impacting our population viability (like the appendix) than the author's implied claim of the brain growing in response to a need. Evolution does not grow stuff to meet demand. Random mutations throws stuff on and death chops off all the bits that get too much in the way and random factors may or may not keep the rest. There is no made-to-order brain. But there is made-to-order mind. That is why we are here trying to understand how we came to be part of a global community in which wife-beaters are tolerated.
Tools
Date: 2009-02-04 02:47 pm (UTC)It's like, we always caught fish when we could, but with the advent of the tool of fishing boats and factory ships we were able to make a career out of fishing. This was not very beneficial to the fish.
Re: Tools
Date: 2009-02-04 08:16 pm (UTC)My point here is merely this:
Language is a tool for *lots* of things that humans want to do. One of the things that some humans want to do is control, indoctrinate, and subjugate other humans. I grant that language permits the transmission of cultural ideas that promote subjugation.
But there are lots of other things that humans want to do! Humans want to understand their place in the universe, for example, and give themselves a sense of meaning by asking the question "why are we here"? Humans want to understand that causes and nature of diseases, because they suffer when their loved ones die, and they want to prevent it. Humans want to be remembered after they die by the people that they loved. Humans want to love and be loved!
Language, as a tool, facilitates all the "power-dominance-subjugation-control" stuff exactly as it facilitates all the "cooperate-preserve-heal-ennoble" stuff. Language is just a tool.
Your original post, the one that caused me to read this thread and feel it necessary to comment, attributes the goal to the tool. The tool is not the problem. The goal is the problem.
(Also- depends on what you mean by "beneficial" to the fish. Certainly unsustainable fishing practices are extraordinarily bad for fish populations because they destroy them by reducing them to below the reproductive thresh-hold. But other fishery practices are beneficial for the fish in that it removes large adult competitors and makes room for young fish to grow and reproduce; still other domestication-type fishery practices, i.e. fish farms, all but guarantee that catfish will be around as a species as long as humans want to eat catfish. "beneficial" to "fish" is a weird concept to try and work with; do we need to understand what fish want? Or when we say beneficial to the fish, are we applying a normative claim that what fish ought to have done to them is what 'naturally' gets done to them? Or do we really just mean good for fish insofar as fish are important to us?)
Re: Tools
Date: 2009-02-04 10:25 pm (UTC)Domestic pets and farm animals do benefit from our activities in that their distribution and numbers follow ours. With so many individuals worldwide, cattle are much more likely to continue to be a part of the biosphere than are, say, spix macaws, amur leopards, white rhinos and Tasmanian devils. So when I say a species benefits, I mean that it persists in large numbers. I don't mean it has an improved standard of living.
I agree that language is a tool with lots of applications and that language is not the problem, it is how it is applied as a "power-dominance-subjugation-control" enabler that is the problem. We got ourselves into this mess using language (cemented in the "bronze age crazy book full of crazy" the Weasel King likes to rub our collective noses in) and we will have to use language to get ourselves out. So the question remains: what was the social structure of human herds prior to handing the keys of the kingdom over to the rape cartel and what model best balances our diverse social/antisocial tendencies? I think we should change goals away from our "bronze age" model, but to which goal?
Re: Pandora's box
Date: 2009-02-03 09:23 pm (UTC)Language is one of the defining features of the human species.
Re: Pandora's box
Date: 2009-02-04 05:50 pm (UTC)Re: Pandora's box
Date: 2009-02-04 07:19 pm (UTC)Re: Just so I'm clear on this.
Date: 2009-02-03 08:02 pm (UTC)At least, I think that's what the commenter was trying to get at.
Re: Just so I'm clear on this.
Date: 2009-02-03 09:01 pm (UTC)Re: Just so I'm clear on this.
Date: 2009-02-05 05:19 am (UTC)And yes, I think that's exactly where commenter was going.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 08:24 pm (UTC)Of course, a pattern of abuse is as unforgivable as adultery or abandonment, and shame on the conservative American church system for ignoring that the standards of Christian behavior has been revealed to be higher than it was understood to be in the first century. We know that slavery is intolerable today and you don't get a free pass just because Jesus said that you merely have to be a morally responsible slaveholder. But even if you hold wives to the Scriptural view that they need to submit to their husbands, I cannot fathom why you can't read the rest of the sentence, which calls on husbands to love their wives as much as Jesus loves the Church. And, doi, Jesus doesn't beat the Church even if she does burn the roast, y'know?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 07:04 pm (UTC)Anyone who tells a person to stay in an abusive relationshiop FOR ANY REASON is a tool of the motherfucking Devil.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 07:44 pm (UTC)of the motherfucking Devil.Simplified it for you.
No need dragging the Devil into it. He's not even that evil.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 11:43 pm (UTC)but if you're speaking to an indoctrinated slave of Xtianity, sometimes you HAVE to drag the Devil into it to make them see the TRUE definition of Evil.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 08:25 pm (UTC)The real motive for change here will be when the courts and the lawmakers start standing up and against domestic violence and violence against women. When a man gets more jailtime for rape than for stealing a car, we'll have done something right.
The idea that a woman can fight back is still new to many women. When I told the teenager she could, and should fight back, that this was a situation in which she damn well should make a fuss, she was surprised. No one had ever told her this before. It was just something you had to put up with, no matter how much it upsets you. This attitude of martyrdom and self-suffering extends far outside Christianity, it is the consequence of women being second-class citizens (and sometimes less) since the dawn of recorded memory. No one, man, woman or child should suffer abuse, and no one should encourage, support or belittle abuse in any way.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 03:10 am (UTC)And, really, I can't mount an intelligent argument against that. Which, if you've been reading me for a while, should tell you something.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-05 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 09:07 pm (UTC)