Celebrity trivia is only natural, some would have us believe. Humans have an innate urge to gossip and there’s no better subject than the great and good. Hello! and OK! are the modern woman’s way of gossiping within a mass society, just as her ancestors did in their smaller hunter-gatherer groups.
In fact a good deal of respectable opinion does support this view, at least at root. Gossip is seen by many evolutionary theorists as an adaptation, a feature of the human condition. As social beings our lives are built on trust. Reputation is vital and there are few better ways to assess the reputation of others than by discussing them in their absence. Gossip serves us by keeping us abreast of who is and who isn’t trustworthy.
But of course gossip often exceeds the useful and fair, and veers into the gratuitous. This can also have informational benefits. Excessive gossiping indicates lack of integrity. It’s a fair bet that anyone who always has muck to rake does so behind the back of supposed confidants. People who win the shabby name of ‘gossip’ send a signal to others not to trust them.
In other respects however gratuitous gossip is clearly a vice. Dishing dirt for its own sake is degrading to all concerned. That dished out by the women’s weeklies certainly falls into this category – pure tittle-tattle. Celebrities are venerated and spat upon in rotation, often within the same editions – build them up just to knock them down.
Even if there was a trace of honesty or sincerity in these ‘stories’ their use in the evolutionary sense would be nil. There is no social connection between the subject of the gossip and the audience, bar the gossip itself. The average office worker of London or Los Angeles will never meet Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. There is nothing to be gained from a deeper understanding of their relationship or their sincerity as individuals. This is not beneficial gossip, the sort that might help us better understand those we actually encounter.
While the readership of OK! And Hello! is almost exclusively female, a similar case can be found in such men’s magazines as Penthouse and Asian Babes. Once again criticism is frequently deflected using the ‘natural’ excuse. I recall one of Britain’s leading pornographers justifying his products along these lines: Sex is natural, people want sex, and porn is just sex.
As with gossip there is some truth here. It’s certainly true that sexual desire is something natural and that this natural desire creates the market for porn. However, desire is pretty much the limit of the connection. The alluring gaze of a naked woman really isn’t the same on a page as in the flesh. It might send similar signals and provoke similar reactions in the viewer, but that’s the end of it. It is not the prelude to love or sex or procreation, it’s just a wind-up.
While human nature is undeniable the reflexive use of ‘natural’ is usually just a means of excusing a behaviour. The key is to cherry-pick those aspects that suit your argument and ignore everything else. Pete Stringfellow once justified his legendary womanising in this way. It was, he explained, simply a man’s nature to stroll casually from female to female, like a male lion servicing the savannah.
But of all animals, why did he pick the lion? There are a multitude of different reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom. Some species pair bond, some lead solitary lives, some have multiple partners. Some of our closest relatives live perpetually two minutes from an orgy. To varying degrees all of these behaviours can be found in different humans – so who can say which is our nature?
Like pornographers and gossip magazine publishers (interestingly enough, one and the same in the Daily Express owner Richard Desmond) Stringfellow was only interested in those aspects of nature that suited his argument. He simply picked the animal he wanted to be. He didn’t fancy the monogamy of a swan but even he would blanch at the promiscuousness of the bonobo. Lions were the goldilocks option, appropriately enough.
The diversity of nature provides a wide spectrum of behaviours which we can transform into our own ‘nature’ should it suit our view of humanity. Warring chimps and rapist dolphins for the pessimists, vegetarian gorillas and meerkat cooperatives for the hopeful. Whatever your view of human nature there will always be some analogue in the natural world. Whether the comparison is an appropriate one is quite another matter.
Tuesday 27 November 2007
Saturday 3 November 2007
New racism, old uses
Global inequality demands explanation. Regardless of political outlook, we all have some theory of why the world is so materially imbalanced – some explanation for the profound differences in wealth between different lands and people.
Not long ago biological explanations were quite acceptable. Those who conquered and carved up the nineteenth century felt free to claim it was their racial destiny to do so. Bolstered by a dire misreading of Darwin, Europeans imagined it was their biological superiority that underwrote their global dominance. Verbal accounts of European ministers, officers and troops are shamelessly racist, deep into the twentieth century. Empire was clearly a God-given right, the natural dominion of the superior over the inferior. There was a moral obligation to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of ‘lesser’ peoples, to save them from themselves.
Of course such views are far from dead, often lurking only inches below the surface of more politically correct verbiage. Now however it simply doesn’t do to attribute inequality to biology. Since science disproved such explanations, and Nazism discredited them, different reasons have had to be found to justify global inequality. The current rendering is that it is the culture of the poor that holds them back, in this great meritocratic game of life. While different races may be endowed with the same capabilities biologically, some social groups remain culturally stunted: Tribal loyalty, voodoo, medieval Islamism, ingrained respect for demagogues, Gansta Rap – these are the new acceptable reasons to blame the poor for being poor.
This new claim of western culturally supremacy is justified using the very same tautology employed by the old-school racists: The west must be best because the west has won. Nothing more needed. If it isn’t the case that non-Europeans are biologically inferior then they must be culturally inadequate – how else would they have come out of things so badly?
Before accepting this conclusion however a vital question has to be asked – was the competition a fair one? Firstly, did each competitor have an equal start, or did external factors favour the chances of some parties? Secondly, whatever the game, some rules of conduct must apply. Few would accept the victory of a football team that resorted to using firearms on the pitch or took to kidnapping and torturing its opponents, whatever the final score.
Unless the great game of life is simply a slugging match there must be some rules of play. Bullying and forming alliances with tyrants must be ruled-out before one can justly claim that merit won the day. Indeed this surely is the concept of superiority the new supremacists would like to claim for the west. While many quietly admire the ‘order’ brought to society by fascism, generally such tactics are scorned. The ‘might is right’ of Rome and Nuremberg is not the path to honourable victory, victory on merit. The patriotism that puffs western chests is the thought that success came from superior planning and a superior moral outlook, rather than rape and pillage.
Regarding head-starts there is little doubt. Prehistorically, each human group simply did not start out with equal external opportunities. As Jared Diamond spells out in Guns Germs and Steel the geographical location each race found itself in 11,000 years ago varied massively in terms of opportunity for growth, sharing of technology and eventual dominance and exploitation of other peoples. Climate, crops, livestock, the very shape and axis-orientation of the different continents – such factors biased the world in the favour of the humans of Eurasia, rather than Africa and the Americas.
And once the ball was rolling in Europe’s favour other factors followed in turn. The first mass societies of Eurasia experienced the first mass epidemics of disease. Although devastating at the time, surviving generations had far greater immunity to such disorders. More than guns and bayonets, this was the most lethal weapon in the white-man’s arsenal. Mere contact with the invaders was enough to devastate the populations of the Americas, and any other isolated populations they encountered.
And of course technology begets technology. Once you have steel you are that much closer to steam, and bayonets, and bombers – should you choose. A small head start can quickly be consolidated, particularly if its advantages are ruthlessly seized.
Which brings us to the second test of fairness: Did the west play by the rules? Did it win on merit? By any meaningful standard, clearly not. To this day every attempt by poorer nations to compete fairly has been met with an iron fist. Every effort has been made to smash democracy and self-determination in the developing world. From Saud to Saddam, Somoza to Suharto, the west has maintained its dominance through brutality, not cunning.
It would be hard to find firmer proof than the treatment afforded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah during his state visit last week. The very same British government that blames Islam for the state of the world then bows and scrapes before this Wahhabist autocrat, and arms his regime to the teeth. As Iran discovered in 1953, the last thing the west wants is democracy near its oilfields.
Global inequality is perfectly explicable without recourse to biological or cultural inadequacy. The claim of cultural inadequacy is just a means for supposed progressives to support old style imperialism. The main factors that ensure western dominance today are the same as in the nineteenth century – military superiority and alliance with the most brutal elements within client states. The west is not so much standing proud on the winner’s podium as scrabbling up a greasy pole, only staying on top by kicking the heads of those below. It is not superior culture but clinically applied barbarism that keeps western capital in control of the world.
Not long ago biological explanations were quite acceptable. Those who conquered and carved up the nineteenth century felt free to claim it was their racial destiny to do so. Bolstered by a dire misreading of Darwin, Europeans imagined it was their biological superiority that underwrote their global dominance. Verbal accounts of European ministers, officers and troops are shamelessly racist, deep into the twentieth century. Empire was clearly a God-given right, the natural dominion of the superior over the inferior. There was a moral obligation to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of ‘lesser’ peoples, to save them from themselves.
Of course such views are far from dead, often lurking only inches below the surface of more politically correct verbiage. Now however it simply doesn’t do to attribute inequality to biology. Since science disproved such explanations, and Nazism discredited them, different reasons have had to be found to justify global inequality. The current rendering is that it is the culture of the poor that holds them back, in this great meritocratic game of life. While different races may be endowed with the same capabilities biologically, some social groups remain culturally stunted: Tribal loyalty, voodoo, medieval Islamism, ingrained respect for demagogues, Gansta Rap – these are the new acceptable reasons to blame the poor for being poor.
This new claim of western culturally supremacy is justified using the very same tautology employed by the old-school racists: The west must be best because the west has won. Nothing more needed. If it isn’t the case that non-Europeans are biologically inferior then they must be culturally inadequate – how else would they have come out of things so badly?
Before accepting this conclusion however a vital question has to be asked – was the competition a fair one? Firstly, did each competitor have an equal start, or did external factors favour the chances of some parties? Secondly, whatever the game, some rules of conduct must apply. Few would accept the victory of a football team that resorted to using firearms on the pitch or took to kidnapping and torturing its opponents, whatever the final score.
Unless the great game of life is simply a slugging match there must be some rules of play. Bullying and forming alliances with tyrants must be ruled-out before one can justly claim that merit won the day. Indeed this surely is the concept of superiority the new supremacists would like to claim for the west. While many quietly admire the ‘order’ brought to society by fascism, generally such tactics are scorned. The ‘might is right’ of Rome and Nuremberg is not the path to honourable victory, victory on merit. The patriotism that puffs western chests is the thought that success came from superior planning and a superior moral outlook, rather than rape and pillage.
Regarding head-starts there is little doubt. Prehistorically, each human group simply did not start out with equal external opportunities. As Jared Diamond spells out in Guns Germs and Steel the geographical location each race found itself in 11,000 years ago varied massively in terms of opportunity for growth, sharing of technology and eventual dominance and exploitation of other peoples. Climate, crops, livestock, the very shape and axis-orientation of the different continents – such factors biased the world in the favour of the humans of Eurasia, rather than Africa and the Americas.
And once the ball was rolling in Europe’s favour other factors followed in turn. The first mass societies of Eurasia experienced the first mass epidemics of disease. Although devastating at the time, surviving generations had far greater immunity to such disorders. More than guns and bayonets, this was the most lethal weapon in the white-man’s arsenal. Mere contact with the invaders was enough to devastate the populations of the Americas, and any other isolated populations they encountered.
And of course technology begets technology. Once you have steel you are that much closer to steam, and bayonets, and bombers – should you choose. A small head start can quickly be consolidated, particularly if its advantages are ruthlessly seized.
Which brings us to the second test of fairness: Did the west play by the rules? Did it win on merit? By any meaningful standard, clearly not. To this day every attempt by poorer nations to compete fairly has been met with an iron fist. Every effort has been made to smash democracy and self-determination in the developing world. From Saud to Saddam, Somoza to Suharto, the west has maintained its dominance through brutality, not cunning.
It would be hard to find firmer proof than the treatment afforded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah during his state visit last week. The very same British government that blames Islam for the state of the world then bows and scrapes before this Wahhabist autocrat, and arms his regime to the teeth. As Iran discovered in 1953, the last thing the west wants is democracy near its oilfields.
Global inequality is perfectly explicable without recourse to biological or cultural inadequacy. The claim of cultural inadequacy is just a means for supposed progressives to support old style imperialism. The main factors that ensure western dominance today are the same as in the nineteenth century – military superiority and alliance with the most brutal elements within client states. The west is not so much standing proud on the winner’s podium as scrabbling up a greasy pole, only staying on top by kicking the heads of those below. It is not superior culture but clinically applied barbarism that keeps western capital in control of the world.
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