Two thousand and eighteen, September:
A few days after trekking to the summit of Mount Teide, Tenerife, a friend and I went whale-watching with the Atlantic Eco Experience. The boat departed from harbour 4 of the Playa de las Américas, a resort located at the south-west tip of the island, adjacent to Los Cristianos. We were greeted by Antonio, a man with a neat beard, piercings, shades and a cap. Antonio, we later discovered, was a zoologist who’d begun his career watching wolves in Spain. Later, after funding had been cut for the wolf-watching, he’d helped found the Experience.
Antonio led the group to the boat as the pilot raised a yellow flag. He explained that this meant that they were permitted to approach the whales. Many boats, he said, didn’t use the flag at all. He also said that we were here to observe natural behaviour, so we wouldn’t be chasing any animals. We went to the bow of the boat as the pilot steered us out of the harbour, into the channel between Tenerife and La Gomera.
Antonio explained that the water here was very deep, and frequented by twenty-two species of cetaceans. First we passed a fish-farm on which many gulls were perched. The fish farm was being visited by a feeding boat, which meant that it would also be visited by lots of fish, as the feed dissolved in the surrounding water.
We powered past a flock of Cory’s shearwater which floated on the water. The shearwaters had come to Tenerife to breed. Further out, as a motorised viking boat passed, we caught our first glimpse of dorsal fins. I also thought I saw blunt snouts in the distance. Antonio identified the cetaceans as short-finned pilot whales, which are Tenerife residents. They’re deep divers, plunging 800 metres down to catch squid.
He lowered a hydrophone as the viking boat passed. After the loud throb of the motors had faded, we could hear a series of clicks. These were produced by an organ in the pilot whale’s snouts and were not, Antonio said, for communication but for echo location. We stopped our boat’s motor and I saw five or six fins. Antonio explained that this was a mixed pod of males and females which was unusual because normally females and young bonded together away from the males.
We encountered several groups of pilot whales that day. At one point, some of the whales approached the stationary boat very close and a female slapped its tail as it swam. This was a threat or a warning — the whales were no longer comfortable with us — and we let them go. These animals passed very close and I had a good glimpse of shadowy forms, underwater. Antonio had been diving with the pilot whales for documentaries and said the males would approach vertical divers and float vertically as a sort of warning.
The ecological philosopher Rupert Read has recently suggested that we can potentially learn a lot from cetacean communities (Read, 2022, chapter 6). For Read, a better understanding of cetaceans might help us change ourselves so we cope better with climate breakdown. He points to accounts of cetacean selflessness as possible models for human beings. He also believes that recovering a sense of inter-relatedness with other species might be needed to avoid the “mass-suicide/homicide/ecocide” upon which humanity is engaged (Read, 2022, p. 125).
The Heritage of Deep Time
There are some who claim that our current way of living — in vast hierarchies, dominated by a few rich and powerful, mostly male individuals — is ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable.’ This story tends to be bolstered by bad myths about ‘alpha males,’ serotonin and lobsters. Others claim that this way of living is the unfortunate outcome of agriculture and settled, urban civilisations. Only small-scale hunter-gatherer cultures, that story claims, could ever be remotely egalitarian. With settled civilisation, the social ‘pyramid,’ with pharaohs, kings, emperors, etc. at the top became inescapable.
But it seems that during evolution the great apes developed not one but two strategies for social organisation. One of these strategies does indeed centre status and hierarchy, and is especially favoured by males. The primatologist Frans de Waal suggests that the hierarchical mode is partly about defusing aggression and preventing bands from being split by infighting (de Waal, 1986). He thinks that for males it’s also mixed with social bonding. The second strategy is more equal and cooperative and may have arisen when the weaker members of primate groups learned to band together to dominate the strong (Boehm, 2001). Female bonobos, however, seem to have the capacity for selfless cooperation without dominance at all (Nolte & Call, 2021).
These two modes of organisation — hierarchical and cooperative — are also evident in the human deep past. In 2021, the researchers David Graeber & David Wengrow released a monumental work that sought to overturn predominant myths about that past. They pointed to several bodies of archeological evidence that seem to challenge many commonly held assumptions about our ancestors. This evidence included:
Rich burials deep in the Ice Age (25,000 years ago).
‘Sporadic but compelling’ evidence for monumental architecture back to the last glacial maximum (20,000 years ago). This includes mammoth houses and Göbekli Tepe, which was built around 11,000 years B.P.
Seasonal congregations at ‘mini-cities,’ linked to animal herd migration (woolly mammoth, steppe bison, reindeer, or gazelle).
Ritual structures/artefacts/paintings linked to these mini-cities (think Stonehenge).
Evidence that egalitarian ways of living persisted in urban settlements well after the invention of agriculture.
They conclude that our ancestors experimented with a number of different ‘social possibilities.’ Social structures seem to have differed with season — one modern analogue being Inuit societies, which tends to be hierarchical in summer and egalitarian in winter. Likewise, Ice Age societies shifted
“back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2018).
Egalitarian cities and also regional confederacies seem to be quite common in history. So the question for Graeber and Wengrow was
“…not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2018).
They believed that the problem began with families. This is because while cites were egalitarian, families often were not. They suggest that male dominance, the privileging of age groups and the emergence of domestic servants all began on a domestic scale. These are the kinds “of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence.” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2018). So for Graeber and Wengrow, inequality began at home.
So much about the past. What about today?
The family factor may also be in part responsible for the maintenance of inequality in the 21st century. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff has suggested that the difference between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ thinking in the US and elsewhere has its origins with two distinct parenting styles. One style he terms ‘the strict father,’ the other style the ‘nurturant parent.’ (Lakoff, 2002). The ‘strict father’ mode assumes that people need self-discipline to survive in a harsh world. It favours strong (male) leaders and assumes that dominator hierarchies are natural and inevitable. By contrast, the ‘nurturant parent’ model prioritises mutual cooperation to meet everybody’s needs.
It’s curious how these two distinct parenting styles seem to mirror the two possible modes of social organisation inherited from our ancestors. It’s also notable in terms of the gender difference. In the strict-father mode, women are assumed to have a subordinate place in the family hierarchy (Lakoff, 2002). But in the ‘nurturant parent’ mode, both parents work cooperatively together as equals. So it seems to me that if we want a fairer, more egalitarian world that’s benign for women and vulnerable minorities, then we’re going to have to think about the best ways to cultivate nurturant families.
Because a hallmark of the strict father mode is a belief that the world is a violent and dangerous place. If the world is a violent and dangerous place, then you need strong leaders to protect you from that danger. This helps explain why hard times tend to favour the Strong Man style of leadership. Strong Men feed on terror, fear and resentment. Unfortunately, their accession to power also means the imposition of the strict father style on whole societies, which means that for many people the world actually does become a far more dangerous and unpleasant place. You can see this happening wherever populist demagogues — Erdogan, Bolsinaro, Trump, Putin and the rest —gain a foothold.
This seems to demonstrate the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy, politically speaking: a belief that the world is a violent and unpleasant place will contribute to making the world a violent and unpleasant place.
I think it’s also fair to point to early trauma as in part responsible for the emergence of the strict-father style in adulthood. I’ve lost count of the number of older men with ferocious right-wing views who also speak of the sometimes appalling treatment meted out to them by their father or other caregivers when they were kids. This is not to suggest a simple cause-effect relationship between family history and personal politics (for example, you can also react and become strongly anti-authoritarian in such a situation). But I find it hard to ignore the connection between brutal treatment in childhood and political beliefs about the world. Beating children does seem to inculcate the strict father; Lakoff (2002) points to a Christian conservative child-raising manual which specifically recommends corporal punishment.
The strict father archetype also crops up repeatedly in the history of Western political thought.
Two Leviathans
Hobbes’ Leviathan, a book that’s a founding document of European conservatism, presents a lengthy argument for an extreme version of the strict-father archetype. Written by Thomas Hobbes, it was published in 1651, in the wake of the English Civil War. In the book, Hobbes painted an excessively gloomy picture of human nature. Before the state, Hobbes claimed, life was “nasty, brutish and short” and there was a perpetual war of all against all. This state of endless war justified Hobbes’ theory of absolute monarchical government. In Hobbes’ view, men owed total loyalty to their king, who would rule with discipline and wisdom.
Some background is crucial if we’re to understand why Hobbes argued in this way. The book was written while he was in exile in France in the 1640s. Hobbes had fled England because he was terrified that he’d be persecuted for his Royalist beliefs. In fact, he explicitly stated that fear was one of his prime motivators. And in many respects, the English Civil War was a very destructive and bloody conflict, which divided families and communities against one another. However, the conflict also created openings for new political and social experiments, like the Diggers and the Levellers, and also the Putney Debates. But Hobbes, being a Royalist, was dedicated to the preservation of traditional institutions. For him, the only solution to the chaos was the imposition of strict discipline from above.
The idea that we need some sort of top-down solution is still with us, and might have profound implications for the future. In their 2020 book, Joel Mann and Geoff Wainright raised the spectre of a 21st century Climate Leviathan. This is a possible reaction by the global elite to climate breakdown. They suggest that in a likely period of global chaos, this elite will likely want to act to stabilise their wealth and privilege (Wainwright & Mann, 2020, p. 13). With increased global instability, these elites are likely to try to wall themselves off from the rest of us. So the Climate Leviathan is “adaptation projects to allow capitalist elites to stabilise their position amidst planetary crisis.” (Wainright & Mann, 2020, p. 14). Such solutions are likely to be authoritarian ones.
That’s one possibility for the future. A second discussed by Mann & Wainright is a mass reaction against such consolidating projects — what they call the “Climate Behemoth.” They write that Behemoth provides at least two mass-based responses to Leviathan, “reactionary populism and revolutionary anti-state democracy.” (Wainwright & Mann, p.44). To an extent, the Behemoth already is with us. The nationalist populism of the last decade or so can be seen as very much a rebellion against a deeply resented political order. Think about the emotions — including resentment, nostalgia, xenophobia and fear — that fuelled Brexit and Trump. Those emotions were often levelled against the globalised, neoliberal order.
A third broad possibility is anti-capitalist and is dubbed “Climate Mao.” Wainwright & Mann define this as a kind of “authoritarian territorial sovereignty.” (p. 31). They think the most likely future is that in which “the waning, US-led liberal capitalist bloc will collaborate with China to create a planetary regime that, in light of political and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defence of a human future for which it volunteers itself as a first and last line of defence.” (p. 31). This combination of Climate Leviathan and Climate Mao seems to be a way of imposing a version of the strict father model on a global scale. The bulk of populations will be disciplined in order to meet the needs of a small global elite. Wainright and Mann admit that this future is “bleak.”
But there is a forth possibility, which the authors name ‘Climate X.’ They describe Climate X as a world that has defeated “the emergent Climate Leviathan and its compulsion toward planetary sovereignty,” while “also transcending capitalism.” (p. 173). They admit that this might be a “tall order.” Yet climate X might be where the best hope for a humane political future lies.
My own wish is for a future that is as benign as possible, for as many people as possible, given what are likely to be very tough environmental conditions. I’m reasonably undogmatic about the specific political pathway towards this goal — although obviously avoiding Climate Leviathan and the basically fascist version of Behemoth seems essential.
Still, a very real and present danger is that climate breakdown may well catalyse new versions of the ‘strict-father’ model. We can perhaps see foreshadowings of this sort of outcome with the frankly chilling contemporary re-emergence of new ‘Gileads’ where women’s reproductive rights are restricted to facilitate population growth. And Matthew Todd reminds us that in such a harsh future, “we will have no gay rights, no feminism, no respect for trans people, no attempt at fairness and justice for people of colour.” (Todd, 2019, p. 70). So this unpleasant outcome must be avoided at all costs.
It’s not just about us
2018:
After whale-watching, the boat drove to a bay where scantily-clad people were living an almost feral lifestyle in the cliffs. Antonio wished that they wouldn’t because it frightened away seabirds that should have been breeding. He mentioned that their company had employed lawyers to take legal action against the Tenerife government for not enforcing environmental regulations.
After Antonio’s talk we had some time to reflect on the whale-watching experience. One gets an eerie feeling when in proximity to cetaceans. It’s similar to the feeling I’ve had when observing gorillas or chimpanzees. It’s a visceral awareness of other keen, probing, acute minds. This is a shock in a human-dominated world. The sensation reminds me of Lauren Eiseley’s comment that one does not meet oneself until one “catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
Right now, that reflection does not seem to be an especially flattering one. We’re a rather self-obsessed species that seems often more preoccupied with political infighting than with the effects that our activities are having on the world about us. It really is not just about Homo sapiens. It never was.
So I wish for a future where our cooperative, nurturant side wins. Where we become less self-centred, mendacious and cruel. Where we rediscover our deep connectedness with other species, and the living Earth. This future may seem currently far-fetched, but it seems that there’s little choice but to aim for it.
History, especially recent history, has seen far too much of the strict father.
References
Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.
De Waal, F. (1986). The Integration of Dominance and Social Bonding in Primates. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 61(4), pp. 459-479. URL = <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/415144>
Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Lakoff, G. (2002) Moral politics: how liberal and conservatives think. University of Chicago Press.
Nolte, S. & Call, J. (2021). Targeted helping and cooperation in zoo-living chimpanzees and bonobos. R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Mar 10;8(3):201688. URL =<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33959333/>
Todd, M. (2919). The climate emergency and the end of diversity. In The Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin., pp. 69—72/.
Wainright, J. & Mann, G. (2020). Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso Books.