I just want to point out this is more or less what was called conservatism for a long time, before it got more radical. If you look up e.g. Edmund Burke’s works, you find precisely the attitude that civilization is worth preserving, yet it is something so fragile, so brittle, radical changes could easily break it. So the basic idea was to argue with the progressivist idea that history has a built-in course, going from less civilized to more civilized, and we will never become less civilized than today, so the only choice is how fast we progress for more, Burke and other early conservatives proposed more of an open-ended view of history where civilization can be easily broken. Or, a cyclical view, like empires raise and fall. Part of the reason why they considered civilization so brittle was that they believed in original sin making it difficult for human minds to resists temptations towards destructive actions, like destructive competition. An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today. To quote Burke: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
This moderate view characterized conservatism for a long time, for example, National Review’s 1957 takedown of Ayn Rand was in this Burkean spirit.
However throughout the 20th century, conservatism has all but disappeared from Europe and and it turned into something quite radical in America. Far more than a civilization-preserving school of ideas, it became something more radical—just look at National Review now and compare it with this 1957 article. I don’t really know the details what happened (I guess the religious right awakened, amongst others), but it seems conservatism in its original form have pretty much disappeared from both continents.
Today, this view would be more characterized as moderate e.g. David Brooks seems to be one of the folks who still stick to this civilization-preserval philosophy.
My point is, you probably need to find people who self-identify as moderates and test it on them. e.g. moderatepolitics.reddit.com
and and it turned into something quite radical in America.
What on earth are you talking about? Take a typical left-wing position from ~50 years ago (or heck ~10 years ago). Transport it to today, and it would be considered unacceptably radically right-wing. Hence the reason left-wing polititians constantly have their positions “evolve”.
For example, the parent said:
[When I was a standard leftist,] I used to think that anyone who was against of homosexuality was evil
That is, nearly the whole political spectrum from as recently as ~15 years ago is now considered “evil” by ‘mainstream’ leftists.
Look, policies are the least important part of political identities. Personality, tone, mood, attitude, and so on, people’s general disposition are the defining features and in this sense yes the Michele Malkin types today are far, far more radical than the Whitaker Chambers types back then.
It is a huge mistake to focus on policies when understanding political identities. Something entirely personal, such as parenting styles are far, far more predictive. A policy is something that can be debated to pieces. It is far too pragmatic. People can come up with all kinds of clever justifications. But if a person tells me their gut reaction when they see a parent discipline a child with a light slap and I know pretty much everything I need to know about their political disposition and attitude, philosophy, approach to society and life in general, views of human nature and so on, so everything that really drives these things. Or, another example, the gut reaction they have to a hunter boasting with a trophy. This pretty much tells everything.
But if a person tells me their gut reaction when they see a parent discipline a child with a light slap and I know pretty much everything I need to know about their political disposition and attitude, philosophy, approach to society and life in general, views of human nature and so on, so everything that really drives these things. Or, another example, the gut reaction they have to a hunter boasting with a trophy.
And in both your examples, what today comes across as the “conservative” reaction was the standard reaction of everybody except parts of the far left ~50 years ago.
Okay, that’s true… but you cannot deny the tone changed, became more, how to put it, aggressive or paranoid? Compare Chambers in the article vs. Ann Coulter or Malkin.
Compare Chambers in the article vs. Ann Coulter or Malkin.
That’s not a valid comparison. Coulter and Malkin are people whose success is basically measured by how much outrage can they generate, so they generate a lot.
An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today.
This is pretty much my view on many things relating to progress and danger, but I don’t think it’s necessarily “conservative”. I see the general principle behind chesterton’s fence, but I think civilization itself as terrifyingly novel.
So, I’m not gonna place my “every practice this point is probably okay since nothing terrible has happened yet” Chesterton’s-Fence anywhere near civilization. If you’ve gotta put your C-Fence somewhere, I think you should put it in the ancestral environment.
It’s all terrifyingly novel, we’re rapidly hurtling towards space, we’re in the 21st century mesosphere and people who make this argument for “traditional values” keep trying to stick the C-Fence into the 15-20th century stratosphere, whereas they aught to stick in into the paleolithic/neolithic ground because that’s the only place we’ve ever actually been stable as a species. Hunter gatherers did not care about homosexuality to use OPs example, many didn’t even have marriage, and one day suddenly we suddenly picked up pen and paper and built a rocket ship and now people want to arbitrarily stick the C-fence at some random point after takeoff which generally corresponds to whatever values were in vogue in the brief interval before they were born.
Regarding marriage, obviously there’s a lot of variance, but it’s a generalization that at least some people who aren’t me make, and I know it’s at least true for the Mbuti and the Piraha.
Of course, we’d have to first define the practice first. I’d say that marriage in the broadest sense of the word means that there’s some sort of extensive activity (whether legal or ritual) which signifies that people who have romantic or sexual relations of some sort are in some way bonded, which remains in effect until death unless actively nullified.
I bet your average hunter-gatherer wouldn’t really know what homosexuality is, let alone be against it, since bands are small and it’s a minority phenomenon, but as far as I can tell there’s plenty of cultures where it isn’t taboo.
Given the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of cleanly delineating modern hunter-gatherers from agriculturists, it’s not exactly an open-and-shut case where broad generalizations can be made and the anthropologists doing the reporting are a pretty politically leftist bunch, but I think given the information we have to work with my general impression is reasonable.
One of my pet theories is that a huge part of it reduces to gender roles. And if you look at it this way, the difference between a hunter-gatherer and a 19th century farmer (especially if we consider the farmer being on the chaotic American Frontier and not e.g. in the far more orderly German villages) is not very big. He is considered a fighter (defending the family with guns), he does heavy-lifting kind of work, and there is a sense of communal tribalism, “we don’t like outsiders much around here”. While his wife focuses on reproduction and finger-skill type jobs, like milking cows—roughly equivalent to the ancestral environment.
Let’s stick to the homosexuality example. In Ancient Rome, the concept does not exist. Rather they see sexuality as such in dominance / submission lines, and they simply consider the adult citizen man should be the dominant (penetrating party) and everybody else—women, boys, slaves—the penetrated / submissive. This attitude carries actually far into the 20th century, maybe even today. While the “official” definition of homosexuality includes both parties, it seems the generic homophobic instincts are far more focused on submissive behavior not being suitable for men. 90% of homophobic instincts are all about basically men who don’t behave dominantly enough being called sissy. It has surprisingly little to do with actual sexual partner choice preferences. In a typical high school ANY sign of weakness, submission, whining etc. gets a boy called a sissy and then some smartass remarks you surely like to suck dick (again understood as being submissive in a sexual context) and shit hits the fan from that on, usually you have to fight to prove you are not sissy and so on.
So, apparently, it is generally a don’t-be-a-sissy type of male-dominance machismo that is driving homohobia, and it is only by accident, largely by the classic human biases of thinking by association where it becomes something like not allowing gay marriage—the typical line of association being roughly like: sissy men are yuck → gay are yuck → don’t “give in to” yuck people. Again—NOT a line of reasoning, but an association, connotation bias at work, things that sound like the same thing treated as the same thing.
Now, ask yourself, the generally sissy-men-are-yuck feeling can’t be very ancestral? If you are fighting mammoths, you may be okay with having technically, literally homosexual comrades, but you probably don’t want “sissy”, “typical gay stereotype” ones. By logical thinking, you can say “gays of the bear subculture would be excellent at fighting mammoths” but again these things don’t work by logical thinking but by association biases.
In short, I would say, modern conservative instincts are pretty ancestral (and gender based), my point is more like you are far too optimistic about the sanity waterline, or about on what high level in the cognitive apparatus these things are decided. It is not a System-2 “what is marriage?” kind of thing but closer to a System-1 “sissy men are yuck” kind of thing. It is very primitive. (I am not saying conservatives are unusually primitive: everybody is. You see the same associations amongst liberals: homophobes → “rednecks” → low socioeconomic status so their anti-homophobia often being “poor rural working class guys are yuck” “homophoboes or racists are the kind of people who can hardly use a fork to eat and they are yucky” sort of similar instincts).
But that entire realm of thinking doesn’t even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins. My impression is that pressure towards masculinity varies greatly from culture to culture, and ours (by “ours” I mean most people who participates in the global economy instead of subsistence hunting/gathering/farming) is one in which it is particularly strong.
Now, I’m not one to carelessly opine that these things are cultural constructs. I think there’s a fair case that humans are predisposed to one set of behaviors when they find themselves in a precarious, hierarchical, high-scarcity situations, and a second set of behaviors when faced with secure, egalitarian, resource abundant situations.
I think that any situation where individuals compete for dominance, the strongest individuals (which tends to be whoever has the most androgen exposure) tend to rise to the top, and that’s when you get strong cultural or selection pressure towards masculinity. Taken to the extreme, this produces gorillas and lions and hyenas. When largely removed, this produces bonobos and all the other animals without marked dimorphism or aggression. I think humans are somewhere in between, and our culture and behavior shifts according to circumstance.
But many hunter gatherers (especially those living in resource abundant areas) didn’t compete for dominance in that sense. Competing for dominance is not something humans must do, it’s only something that humans are forced into when resources are scarce. And your own example illustrated that while disgust instincts are ancestral, the objects of disgust is a matter of cultural conditioning.
But that entire realm of thinking doesn’t even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins.
Some hunter-gatherers would strongly disagree To put it harshly, wombs are always scarce resources and it is likely the evolution of human intelligence can be reduced to guys competing for women. (EDSC model). Another excellent resource is http://www.warandgender.com/ (the book), arguing how war and gender mutually create each other, and the root cause is probably competing for women.
(To the people helpfully downvoting the whole thread, they are probably feminists: for example War and Gender is a feminist book. You get exactly the same sort of theories from the better feminist sources, as at the end of the day there is no such thing as different truths, thus the difference largely being the tone of abhorrence vs. grudging acceptance.)
Argumenting with hunter-gatherers is always a bit iffy, though, as current HG cannot be typical HG: there must be a special reason they stayed HG while everybody else moved on, this making them atypical. Perhaps The Yanimamö are a better example than most HG as their special feature seems to be mainly remoteness.
At any rate, womb-competition is pretty much an inescapable fact of huge human brain sizes. It means difficult and dangerous childbirth, and it means long and time-sinky mothering, and it means males having harems is a reproductive advantage when and if they can pull it off.
I admit I don’t know the final answer, if there is one. I.e. how to explain the difference between e.g. the Yanomamö and Hazda people for example. Perhaps these instincts for competing for women are culturally suppressed. Perhaps I am wrong and it is not an instinct, although it makes perfect sense in evolutionary logic. Perhaps Hazda type people are more K-selected, i.e. fathers focusing more on fathering than on trying to build harems, fewer offspring, but higher quality. There is probably some mystery to unweil here which was not done yet. Perhaps it is a patriarchy vs. matriarchy thing, perhaps in matrilineal socities K-selected high fathering investment instead of harem-building gives more reproductive advantage.
Also note that this seems like there was such a thing as cultural differences already at the HG level, such as the Yanomamö and Hazda people. To get raw biology, if there is such a thing, we would have to go back even more.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
That’s partly the point—the fact that there’s variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with “chesterton’s fence” aren’t particularly stable in the first place. I’d also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they’re experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.
Downvoters probably just people who don’t want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I’m a feminist myself, there’s no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it’s just that politics in general is toxic.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group’s males won’t tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.
With bonobos, territory doesn’t matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn’t to say there is no mating aggression, just that it’s way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.
Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don’t get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.
So as far as evolution goes, I think what “prevents” it is the lack of scarcity. As for what “prevents” it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we’ve each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.
Hm, this sounds like a pretty solid evidence for the food-competition (scarcity) hypothesis. However the evidences for the mating-competition hypothesis are also fairly strong. Not sure if non-primates matter, but animals like deer or reindeer are walking knee deep in food ( grass) and the mating competition, antler fights, is pretty strong. What I find particularly convincing is humans having abnormally large maternal investments (huge baby head → dangerous birth, slow infant development → lots of mothering investment) which would suggest one hell of a mating competition. But it could also be used as an evidence of fathering investment and monogamy. I don’t really know how to construct at least a thought experiment to split the two without having an influence from culture. After all, if big heads are part of my hypothesis, i.e. intelligence is, intelligence pretty much means something akin to a culture must be there. Culture is probably way older than the archeological evidence for it—just the old versions lacking in artifacts. While lack of evidence is an evidence for lack, probably in case of archeology it is not true—it is a highly inefficient thing. For example, from much more recent history, Gaels were considered to be culturally inferior to Romans because they did not build roads and bridges. Turned out they did, but they made them out of wood, not stone, and that is far harder to find and evidence through archeology.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
What is this “gays of the bear subculture” you speak of?
You just have to google “bear subculture” to find out. The first hit is to a Wikipedia article on the subject. If you have done this you do not need to ask and if you have not you do not need to be answered. What is your real question?
I just want to point out this is more or less what was called conservatism for a long time, before it got more radical. If you look up e.g. Edmund Burke’s works, you find precisely the attitude that civilization is worth preserving, yet it is something so fragile, so brittle, radical changes could easily break it. So the basic idea was to argue with the progressivist idea that history has a built-in course, going from less civilized to more civilized, and we will never become less civilized than today, so the only choice is how fast we progress for more, Burke and other early conservatives proposed more of an open-ended view of history where civilization can be easily broken. Or, a cyclical view, like empires raise and fall. Part of the reason why they considered civilization so brittle was that they believed in original sin making it difficult for human minds to resists temptations towards destructive actions, like destructive competition. An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today. To quote Burke: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
This moderate view characterized conservatism for a long time, for example, National Review’s 1957 takedown of Ayn Rand was in this Burkean spirit.
However throughout the 20th century, conservatism has all but disappeared from Europe and and it turned into something quite radical in America. Far more than a civilization-preserving school of ideas, it became something more radical—just look at National Review now and compare it with this 1957 article. I don’t really know the details what happened (I guess the religious right awakened, amongst others), but it seems conservatism in its original form have pretty much disappeared from both continents.
Today, this view would be more characterized as moderate e.g. David Brooks seems to be one of the folks who still stick to this civilization-preserval philosophy.
My point is, you probably need to find people who self-identify as moderates and test it on them. e.g. moderatepolitics.reddit.com
What on earth are you talking about? Take a typical left-wing position from ~50 years ago (or heck ~10 years ago). Transport it to today, and it would be considered unacceptably radically right-wing. Hence the reason left-wing polititians constantly have their positions “evolve”.
For example, the parent said:
That is, nearly the whole political spectrum from as recently as ~15 years ago is now considered “evil” by ‘mainstream’ leftists.
Look, policies are the least important part of political identities. Personality, tone, mood, attitude, and so on, people’s general disposition are the defining features and in this sense yes the Michele Malkin types today are far, far more radical than the Whitaker Chambers types back then.
It is a huge mistake to focus on policies when understanding political identities. Something entirely personal, such as parenting styles are far, far more predictive. A policy is something that can be debated to pieces. It is far too pragmatic. People can come up with all kinds of clever justifications. But if a person tells me their gut reaction when they see a parent discipline a child with a light slap and I know pretty much everything I need to know about their political disposition and attitude, philosophy, approach to society and life in general, views of human nature and so on, so everything that really drives these things. Or, another example, the gut reaction they have to a hunter boasting with a trophy. This pretty much tells everything.
And in both your examples, what today comes across as the “conservative” reaction was the standard reaction of everybody except parts of the far left ~50 years ago.
Okay, that’s true… but you cannot deny the tone changed, became more, how to put it, aggressive or paranoid? Compare Chambers in the article vs. Ann Coulter or Malkin.
That’s not a valid comparison. Coulter and Malkin are people whose success is basically measured by how much outrage can they generate, so they generate a lot.
This is pretty much my view on many things relating to progress and danger, but I don’t think it’s necessarily “conservative”. I see the general principle behind chesterton’s fence, but I think civilization itself as terrifyingly novel.
So, I’m not gonna place my “every practice this point is probably okay since nothing terrible has happened yet” Chesterton’s-Fence anywhere near civilization. If you’ve gotta put your C-Fence somewhere, I think you should put it in the ancestral environment.
It’s all terrifyingly novel, we’re rapidly hurtling towards space, we’re in the 21st century mesosphere and people who make this argument for “traditional values” keep trying to stick the C-Fence into the 15-20th century stratosphere, whereas they aught to stick in into the paleolithic/neolithic ground because that’s the only place we’ve ever actually been stable as a species. Hunter gatherers did not care about homosexuality to use OPs example, many didn’t even have marriage, and one day suddenly we suddenly picked up pen and paper and built a rocket ship and now people want to arbitrarily stick the C-fence at some random point after takeoff which generally corresponds to whatever values were in vogue in the brief interval before they were born.
Citation?
Regarding marriage, obviously there’s a lot of variance, but it’s a generalization that at least some people who aren’t me make, and I know it’s at least true for the Mbuti and the Piraha.
Of course, we’d have to first define the practice first. I’d say that marriage in the broadest sense of the word means that there’s some sort of extensive activity (whether legal or ritual) which signifies that people who have romantic or sexual relations of some sort are in some way bonded, which remains in effect until death unless actively nullified.
I bet your average hunter-gatherer wouldn’t really know what homosexuality is, let alone be against it, since bands are small and it’s a minority phenomenon, but as far as I can tell there’s plenty of cultures where it isn’t taboo.
Given the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of cleanly delineating modern hunter-gatherers from agriculturists, it’s not exactly an open-and-shut case where broad generalizations can be made and the anthropologists doing the reporting are a pretty politically leftist bunch, but I think given the information we have to work with my general impression is reasonable.
One of my pet theories is that a huge part of it reduces to gender roles. And if you look at it this way, the difference between a hunter-gatherer and a 19th century farmer (especially if we consider the farmer being on the chaotic American Frontier and not e.g. in the far more orderly German villages) is not very big. He is considered a fighter (defending the family with guns), he does heavy-lifting kind of work, and there is a sense of communal tribalism, “we don’t like outsiders much around here”. While his wife focuses on reproduction and finger-skill type jobs, like milking cows—roughly equivalent to the ancestral environment.
Let’s stick to the homosexuality example. In Ancient Rome, the concept does not exist. Rather they see sexuality as such in dominance / submission lines, and they simply consider the adult citizen man should be the dominant (penetrating party) and everybody else—women, boys, slaves—the penetrated / submissive. This attitude carries actually far into the 20th century, maybe even today. While the “official” definition of homosexuality includes both parties, it seems the generic homophobic instincts are far more focused on submissive behavior not being suitable for men. 90% of homophobic instincts are all about basically men who don’t behave dominantly enough being called sissy. It has surprisingly little to do with actual sexual partner choice preferences. In a typical high school ANY sign of weakness, submission, whining etc. gets a boy called a sissy and then some smartass remarks you surely like to suck dick (again understood as being submissive in a sexual context) and shit hits the fan from that on, usually you have to fight to prove you are not sissy and so on.
So, apparently, it is generally a don’t-be-a-sissy type of male-dominance machismo that is driving homohobia, and it is only by accident, largely by the classic human biases of thinking by association where it becomes something like not allowing gay marriage—the typical line of association being roughly like: sissy men are yuck → gay are yuck → don’t “give in to” yuck people. Again—NOT a line of reasoning, but an association, connotation bias at work, things that sound like the same thing treated as the same thing.
Now, ask yourself, the generally sissy-men-are-yuck feeling can’t be very ancestral? If you are fighting mammoths, you may be okay with having technically, literally homosexual comrades, but you probably don’t want “sissy”, “typical gay stereotype” ones. By logical thinking, you can say “gays of the bear subculture would be excellent at fighting mammoths” but again these things don’t work by logical thinking but by association biases.
In short, I would say, modern conservative instincts are pretty ancestral (and gender based), my point is more like you are far too optimistic about the sanity waterline, or about on what high level in the cognitive apparatus these things are decided. It is not a System-2 “what is marriage?” kind of thing but closer to a System-1 “sissy men are yuck” kind of thing. It is very primitive. (I am not saying conservatives are unusually primitive: everybody is. You see the same associations amongst liberals: homophobes → “rednecks” → low socioeconomic status so their anti-homophobia often being “poor rural working class guys are yuck” “homophoboes or racists are the kind of people who can hardly use a fork to eat and they are yucky” sort of similar instincts).
But that entire realm of thinking doesn’t even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins. My impression is that pressure towards masculinity varies greatly from culture to culture, and ours (by “ours” I mean most people who participates in the global economy instead of subsistence hunting/gathering/farming) is one in which it is particularly strong.
Height is unimportant in Hazda female mate choice. Practices such as the !kung insulting the meat illustrate active suppression of dominance-seeking instincts. I’d be really surprised if these people value machismo and dominance in the sense you describe.
Now, I’m not one to carelessly opine that these things are cultural constructs. I think there’s a fair case that humans are predisposed to one set of behaviors when they find themselves in a precarious, hierarchical, high-scarcity situations, and a second set of behaviors when faced with secure, egalitarian, resource abundant situations.
I think that any situation where individuals compete for dominance, the strongest individuals (which tends to be whoever has the most androgen exposure) tend to rise to the top, and that’s when you get strong cultural or selection pressure towards masculinity. Taken to the extreme, this produces gorillas and lions and hyenas. When largely removed, this produces bonobos and all the other animals without marked dimorphism or aggression. I think humans are somewhere in between, and our culture and behavior shifts according to circumstance.
But many hunter gatherers (especially those living in resource abundant areas) didn’t compete for dominance in that sense. Competing for dominance is not something humans must do, it’s only something that humans are forced into when resources are scarce. And your own example illustrated that while disgust instincts are ancestral, the objects of disgust is a matter of cultural conditioning.
Some hunter-gatherers would strongly disagree To put it harshly, wombs are always scarce resources and it is likely the evolution of human intelligence can be reduced to guys competing for women. (EDSC model). Another excellent resource is http://www.warandgender.com/ (the book), arguing how war and gender mutually create each other, and the root cause is probably competing for women.
(To the people helpfully downvoting the whole thread, they are probably feminists: for example War and Gender is a feminist book. You get exactly the same sort of theories from the better feminist sources, as at the end of the day there is no such thing as different truths, thus the difference largely being the tone of abhorrence vs. grudging acceptance.)
Argumenting with hunter-gatherers is always a bit iffy, though, as current HG cannot be typical HG: there must be a special reason they stayed HG while everybody else moved on, this making them atypical. Perhaps The Yanimamö are a better example than most HG as their special feature seems to be mainly remoteness.
At any rate, womb-competition is pretty much an inescapable fact of huge human brain sizes. It means difficult and dangerous childbirth, and it means long and time-sinky mothering, and it means males having harems is a reproductive advantage when and if they can pull it off.
I admit I don’t know the final answer, if there is one. I.e. how to explain the difference between e.g. the Yanomamö and Hazda people for example. Perhaps these instincts for competing for women are culturally suppressed. Perhaps I am wrong and it is not an instinct, although it makes perfect sense in evolutionary logic. Perhaps Hazda type people are more K-selected, i.e. fathers focusing more on fathering than on trying to build harems, fewer offspring, but higher quality. There is probably some mystery to unweil here which was not done yet. Perhaps it is a patriarchy vs. matriarchy thing, perhaps in matrilineal socities K-selected high fathering investment instead of harem-building gives more reproductive advantage.
Also note that this seems like there was such a thing as cultural differences already at the HG level, such as the Yanomamö and Hazda people. To get raw biology, if there is such a thing, we would have to go back even more.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
That’s partly the point—the fact that there’s variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with “chesterton’s fence” aren’t particularly stable in the first place. I’d also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they’re experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.
Downvoters probably just people who don’t want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I’m a feminist myself, there’s no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it’s just that politics in general is toxic.
Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group’s males won’t tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.
With bonobos, territory doesn’t matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn’t to say there is no mating aggression, just that it’s way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.
Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don’t get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.
So as far as evolution goes, I think what “prevents” it is the lack of scarcity. As for what “prevents” it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we’ve each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.
Hm, this sounds like a pretty solid evidence for the food-competition (scarcity) hypothesis. However the evidences for the mating-competition hypothesis are also fairly strong. Not sure if non-primates matter, but animals like deer or reindeer are walking knee deep in food ( grass) and the mating competition, antler fights, is pretty strong. What I find particularly convincing is humans having abnormally large maternal investments (huge baby head → dangerous birth, slow infant development → lots of mothering investment) which would suggest one hell of a mating competition. But it could also be used as an evidence of fathering investment and monogamy. I don’t really know how to construct at least a thought experiment to split the two without having an influence from culture. After all, if big heads are part of my hypothesis, i.e. intelligence is, intelligence pretty much means something akin to a culture must be there. Culture is probably way older than the archeological evidence for it—just the old versions lacking in artifacts. While lack of evidence is an evidence for lack, probably in case of archeology it is not true—it is a highly inefficient thing. For example, from much more recent history, Gaels were considered to be culturally inferior to Romans because they did not build roads and bridges. Turned out they did, but they made them out of wood, not stone, and that is far harder to find and evidence through archeology.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
There are a lot of idealists on the right (and “dark romanticists” on the left) as well, they just focus on different ideals.
What is this “gays of the bear subculture” you speak of?
You just have to google “bear subculture” to find out. The first hit is to a Wikipedia article on the subject. If you have done this you do not need to ask and if you have not you do not need to be answered. What is your real question?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlGclIZV5JQ :-DDD