Will the Real Human Being Please Stand Up?

Riane Eisler

What does it mean to be human? Is there really something terribly wrong with us? Or is the story about “human nature” we get from our education-both formal and informal-skewed toward a particular way of relating?

Our first inventions, we are told, were weapons, and the first human groups were organized by men to more effectively kill both animals and members of other human groups. Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on Arthur C. Clark's book) begins with a scene showing a hominid creature suddenly realizing that a large bone can be used as a weapon to kill another member of his species. The “innocent” cartoon (we think nothing of showing it to children) of a brutal caveman carrying a large club in one hand dragging a woman around by her hair with the other has this same message. Not only that, in a few “amusing” strokes it tells us that sex and male violence have always gone together, that this is just “the way it is.”

Although this story of an inevitably flawed humanity is still embedded in prevailing religious and scientific narratives about “original sin” and “selfish genes”-which also present male dominance as justified by either God or evolution-scholars from many disciplines tell us a different story of our cultural origins.

In this story, the invention of tools does not begin with the discovery that we can use bones, stones, or sticks to kill one another. It begins much earlier, with the use of sticks and stones to dig up roots (which chimpanzees do) and continues with the fashioning of ways to carry food other than with bare hands (rudimentary vegetable slings and baskets) and of mortars and other tools to soften foods.

In this story, the evolution of hominid, and then human, culture also follows more than one path. We have alternatives. We can organize relations in ways that reward violence and domination. But, as some of our earliest art suggests, we can also recognize our essential interconnection with one another and the rest of the living world.

The Two Chimps

In most nature documentaries, as well as in a huge body of sociobiological literature, we are led to believe that we are prisoners of our “unfortunate” evolutionary heritage. Just look at other primates, we are told, and you see why men are violent and women are subordinate to them.

But that’s actually not what we see if we look at our species' two closest primate relatives: the common chimpanzees and the so-called pygmy chimpanzees or bonobos. The DNA of bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) and common chimpanzees (who are actually no larger) is basically the same. Moreover, it is not very different from that of our own species. However, observations of both these species in the wild indicate that there are marked differences between the behaviors and social organizations of bonobos and common chimps.

In many ways, bonobo chimpanzees prefigure much of what we find in humans. They have what primatologists call a more gracile (or slender) build, longer legs that stretch while walking, a smaller head, smaller ears, a thinner neck, a more open face, and thinner eyebrow ridges than most other apes. Of particular interest is that-also like humans but unlike most other species-bonobos have sex not just for reproduction but purely for pleasure, and even beyond this, pleasure-bonding.

In fact, this sharing of pleasure through the sharing of food as well as through sexual relations is a striking aspect of bonobo social organization. Just as striking is that even though theirs is not a violence-free social organization, their society is held together, far more so than among common chimps, by the exchange of mutual benefits characteristic of partnership relations. To maintain social cohesion and order, this species, so closely related to us, relies primarily on the sharing of pleasure-and not on the fear of pain (or violence) required to maintain rigid rankings of domination.

Equally striking is that, even though males are not dominated by females, in bonobo society females-particularly older females-wield a great deal of power. Moreover, it is through the association of females in groups that bonobo females seem to have avoided the kind of predatory sexual behavior that has been observed among common chimps, where males have been seen to force sexual relations on females.

In short, the bonobo chimpanzees rely more on bonds based on pleasure and the sharing of benefits than on rankings based on fear and force.

this article copyright 2001 Riane Eisler
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
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