Will “The Last Hottentot” hold us back? (1948)

From the October 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the many problems that hinder the workers from understanding Socialism the problem of how it is possible to establish Socialism, in face of the “backwardness” of sections of the world’s population, occupies a prominent place. It really springs from the same patronising root as the complacent idea, “Of course I can understand but the poor mutt next door hasn’t the mental capacity to do so.” The strange part of it is that, lumped in with this “backward” section, are peoples responsible for many of mankind’s most brilliant achievements during the last two thousand years or so, some of which were accomplished when the people of these islands were running about unclothed and with painted bodies; of such are the Egyptian, the Arab, the Turk and the people of India and China. The place of “honour,” amongst the “backward” sections, is occupied by the negro, and yet it is just the negro who explodes the fiction of racial grades of mental capacity. Let us take one or two outstanding examples of this.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, a West African negro slave, organised the slave revolt at Haiti in 1797 and revealed himself to be one of the foremost generals of his time, defeating an army consisting of 20,000 of Napoleon’s veteran troops, expelling the French, British and Spaniards from Haiti, and inaugurating a period of peace and prosperity on the island. His “cultured” Western opponents, unable to upset the negro regime, eventually invited him on board a man-of-war for a conference, under a solemn promise of immunity, but, when they had got him on board, put him in chains, and he died in captivity.

Booker T. Washington was an American negro slave boy who had no chance of learning the simple elements of reading arid writing until he was fifteen, after the Emancipation Act of 1864, and even then he only learnt from other negroes in voluntary classes; yet he became an accomplished writer of English and a lecturer on many subjects. In the opening lines of his book “Up From Slavery” he wrote that he did not know when he was born or where, but he had a strong suspicion that he was born at some time somewhere!

Within the space of a century, in spite of the multitude of disabilities suffered by the negroes in America after the abolition of slavery, they have produced front rank workers in the fields of industry, science, art and literature. The Maoris of New Zealand, and other “backward races,” reveal similar mental capacity when they are drawn within the social orbit of modern nations. While walking along one of London’s main streets, during the early part of the year, the writer saw a group of young men and women from West Africa who were in London attending a conference. The girls, who had typical African faces, were slender, beautiful and charmingly dressed—obvious products of advanced culture, no different from their Western sisters except in colour and vivacity. Comparing them with the pictures of West African women in travel books was like comparing a chic Parisian woman with a hardworking peasant woman of the provinces. It was obvious that the social circumstances of these African girls were not those of a backward community, and it was this that made all the difference.

There is no fundamental difference in mental capacity between any sections of the world’s population; there are only differences in the quantity and diversity of the information acquired, which depends upon the particular social circumstances. Take a group of babies from anywhere on earth, even from the Hottentots and Bushmen of Africa, put them in circumstances where they can acquire the requisite knowledge and they will rival the best the West can produce in achievement in different directions. Go into any main street in a thickly populated area and you will see crowds of people, all of whom can run, jump, sing and so on. Here and there some will run better, jump better, sing belter, but all are capable of doing these things if they are physically sound. So it is with thinking. All over the world there is a general average mental capacity which, given the opportunity, can quite competently acquire modern culture—and the elements of Socialism. The opportunity lies in the existence of social conditions favourable to the development of Socialist ideas.

The full span of human life is only a tiny fraction of the span, of organic life on this planet. In the womb of time it took millions of years for the earliest organism to develop into the human organism; in the womb of its mother months are sufficient for the embryo to pass through similar phases to develop into a child. From childhood to manhood the boy or girl can absorb the achievement of his own particular section of mankind. In the advanced nations they absorb what is advanced, as the miner’s or cotton-operative’s daughter or son, who has passed through a university, has proved; in the backward nations they absorb what is suitable to the way they live, much of which is outside the mental horizon of advanced nations. A Hottentot or a Bushman, armed with his few simple tools and weapons and his bush craft, can live in the African bush; a white man can only live there if he transports modern equipment and leans on the native. Transport a Hottentot baby, just after birth, to the centre of London, rear him in a family like other London children and he will grow up like them in mental culture. Transport a London baby, just after birth, to a Hottentot family and he will grow up like them in mental culture. The Hottentot only becomes what he is today because of his primitive surroundings, and traditions associated with those surroundings. A child born anywhere on earth is born with a brain of the average capacity of mankind. How the physical and mental capacities develop afterwards depends upon social circumstances; alter the social circumstances and the mental development is different. In other words the capacity is similar but the acquirements are different. All the basic discoveries of mankind which made civilisation possible, fire, tools and weapons, pottery, metal-working, agriculture, writing and so forth, were made by sections of mankind which, according to present standards, would be regarded as backward.

What are called backward races are not backward in mental capacity; they live in circumstances that are primitive compared with the circumstances of highly developed nations. While they remain outside the orbit of modern production, or only serve it from outside, they remain tied to primitive ways and traditions. Once they become absorbed into capitalist civilisation, that is to say, once they take part in building up capitalism on their own account, then they cut the cord that ties them to the past. The negro in America has done this, Japan has done it, Russia, China and India are doing it now. Japan became a first class modern nation and Russia is on the threshold of a similar condition. Everywhere native populations are stirring restlessly, struggling to cast off the shackles of the past in order to enter into the heritage of today; and it is being accomplished at a pace that increases in speed as time passes. One nation learns from another and the backward learn from the forward, borrowing not only capitalist methods and ideas, but also the aspirations of the working class that is subjected by Capitalism. What took the Western nations centuries to accomplish the East is accomplishing in decades. The old protest, that Socialism must wait upon the intellectual development of the backward nations, is losing power as the world is being transformed into one level of development and Socialist ideas are penetrating everywhere. In the last half-century vast areas of the East and West have made tremendous strides along the capitalist road, and the rate of progress multiplies; in thirty years Russia has developed from a ramshackle semi-feudal empire into a first class world power, India is undergoing the birth-pangs of a capitalist state which will transform its primitive village economy and obliterate the traditions associated with this economy, the same may be said for Burma, as well as other of the, until recently, “backward” areas.

One thing is clear. The main resources of the world are now contained within the boundaries of nations that are either highly developed capitalistically or are on the verge of becoming so. Even the primitive agricultural communities of India will soon be overwhelmed as India gets upon its capitalist feet. There is, therefore, nothing to hold back the inhabitants of these advanced nations from uniting in a world Socialist commonwealth. In such circumstances what would be their attitude towards groups that might have lagged behind? Quite obviously it would be one of helpfulness; supplying these backward groups with everything they needed, physically and mentally, to bring them up to the general level as participants in the new world social order; and the assistance would be given free, with a generous regard for the traditions and feelings of those who had not yet cast off the cramping heritage of the past.

No, it is not “backward nations” that are clogging the footsteps of social progress but lack of understanding amongst worker’s of the “advanced nations,” and part of this lack of understanding is comprised in the patronising view that some are endowed with a mental superiority that marks them out as the chosen people. All human kind are similar parts of one mental piece, and when they get the opportunity they show that it is so.

There are no fundamental mental barriers to the acquisition of knowledge essential to the establishment of Socialism. What are apparently mental barriers are in reality social ones. These are fast disappearing as the social system that has made possible the production and safeguarding of sufficient means of existence to provide comfort for the whole of the world’s population draws all the inhabitants of the earth into its orbit.

Gilmac.

Life and Times: Trump v the Binman (2024)

The Life and Times column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently, at enormous risk to himself, a binman rescued a family and their dog from a burning house in the West Midlands. He had a cup of tea in Greggs and then carried on with his job.

How does this tie in with Donald Trump? Well, a recent Guardian article by George Monbiot pointed to the theory among psychologists that human beings can be broadly divided into two groups -‘extrinsics’ and ‘intrinsics’. What they mean by ‘extrinsics’ are Trump types – people attached to ‘prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth’. They are a group that tends to ‘objectify and exploit other people’, to be rude and aggressive, to ‘have little interest in cooperation or community’, to dismiss social needs and care of the environment, and at the same time to be likely to exhibit ‘frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour’.‘Intrinsics’ on the other hand are ‘inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance’, open to change and reasoned argument and ‘protective of other people and the living world’.

Winners and losers

If this theory is valid – and it does seem to correspond very much to the reality we see around us – how is it that different groups of human beings can be so different? How is it that Donald Trump can seem so manifestly uncaring about anyone other than himself while a binman can risk his life to save the lives of others who are complete strangers? Monbiot points out that, according to the theory, we are not born with either of these tendencies but rather pick them up from the environment – personal, social and political – in which we are nurtured. So ‘if people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values’. In the same way, if they live in an environment ‘in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end’.

This would seem to account for the widespread support enjoyed by an openly ‘bully’ politician like Trump, who divides humans into ‘winners and losers’, among not just some of the wealthy in the US but also among some of the poorest, most insecure and disadvantaged members of that society. Such people will blame their plight and vent their anger and frustration either on those they see as slightly better off than themselves or on those even worse off than themselves who they see as somehow spongeing off society by claiming ‘welfare’. And they will be particularly hostile towards the ‘intrinsics’, those behaving in a kind, cooperative way, labelling them as ‘woke’ or ‘snowflakes’ or the like. Monbiot suggests that, in the US in particular, this mentality has been engendered by ‘toxic myths about failure and success’ and the importance given to the idea that wealth needs to be acquired at any cost, solely by individual endeavour and without concern for other people or for social or environmental consequences (the so-called ‘American Dream’).

The same kind of mentality is of course widely found, if perhaps in a less overt and brutal way, in other countries too, subject as they are to the competitive ethic and the ‘sink or swim’ imperative of capitalism. In fact, everywhere we look, the system we live under pressures workers (ie, those who form the vast majority of all populations) to ‘get on’, to make money, to compete against others and, if necessary, to blame others if they fail to do that satisfactorily.

In trouble

Yet, as this column has often pointed out and is demonstrated by such acts as the rescue by the binman, people are on the whole powerfully inclined not to behave in selfish, self-seeking ways but to assist, support and be cooperative with their fellow humans where and when necessary. Such interactions are absolutely intrinsic to everyday life, be it in such everyday acts as giving others right of way in traffic, making contributions to and organising food banks, doing simple favours for others, but also in helping others who suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves ‘in trouble’. The fact is that we, as humans, will usually choose to help others in a worse situation than ourselves, if only because it makes us feel better about ourselves and, as has been shown by scientific research, gives us higher levels of well-being. Such examples of help and cooperation without the prospect of material gain or advantage abound but are taken for granted and are rarely reported or commented on precisely because they are so numerous, so common and such a perpetual feature of everyday life. Of course, human beings are also capable of the most horrendous antisocial acts, which may involve selfishness and brutality, but these are not the norm. This is so much the case that, when they happen, they stand out, leading to the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ scenario whereby we seem to be constantly bombarded by ‘bad news’.

Ultra-social

This says something about how human beings, though their behaviour is extremely flexible, are fundamentally ‘ultra-social’ creatures, who, given the opportunity, are only too ready to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless influenced into doing otherwise by circumstances or deeply embedded conditioning. This is the default, that, despite contrary ideas common in the past, is now widely accepted by those qualified in the subject of human behaviour. Of course, as exemplified by the Trump cult in the US, where the conditions of society push many people into behaving in unkind, uncooperative ways and in seeking to maximise their own self-interest, there is still a long way to go. Yet in a society organised in an entirely different way from the current capitalist one, it is clear that people will not have the slightest problem in behaving as ‘intrinsics’, ie, in operating in a harmonious and cooperative way most if not all of the time. In such a society, a socialist one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the natural human tendency to share and cooperate will surely be its guiding principle.

Howard Moss

Letter: Naked bonobos? (2007)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naked bonobos?

Dear Editors

I agree with much of “Bonobo Fides” (Pathfinders, January), but I would like to take issue on a few significant points.The author follows the sources on which he relies in placing too much emphasis on the power of the “combined females” as a deterrent to male violence. Bonobos of both genders keep the peace mainly by using friendly activities – grooming, play and sharing food as well as frequent sex – to soothe the tensions that might lead to violence. (They don’t “run off into the bushes,” by the way, but have sex in plain view of others. Here the author is mixing up bonobos with humans.) It also helps that with bonobos, unlike chimps, the males can’t tell which females are ovulating, so they are unable to compete to sire offspring.

Bonobos may “live largely as vegetarians,” but they do have a taste for meat. “Like chimpanzees, they are ready to grab and eat small antelope infants. They eat flying squirrels and sometimes earthworms” (Demonic Males, p. 216).

Unlike chimps, however, they never eat monkeys. Instead, bonobos play with monkeys as though they were pets. Monkeys are terrified of chimps but show no fear of bonobos. Apparently, this reflects a cultural taboo against killing and eating fellow primates, and such a taboo may be one reason why bonobos rarely attack and never kill one another. (Local humans have a similar taboo against hunting bonobos.)

Would chimps adopt bonobo behaviour in a bonobo environment and vice versa, “given long enough”? I think this is an exaggeration. Bonobos are a distinct species, not a kind of chimpanzee. (“Pygmy chimp” is a misleading term that dates from the time when this  was not yet recognized.) To the extent that bonobo sociality is a product of genetically  determined characteristics like large sexual organs and always being on heat, environmental change can affect it only to a limited degree. Over a period long enough  for evolution to occur the bonobo might lose these characteristics, but then it would no longer be a bonobo!

Especially for socialists, the good news about the bonobo is how close it is to man. We have 98.7 percent of our genes in common with the bonobo. That’s the same figure as for the chimpanzee, but in numerous respects we – and also, according to physical anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, our proto-human ancestors living in Africa 3 to 5 million years ago – are closer to bonobos than to chimps. This applies, for example, to bodily proportions, facial appearance (look at the photos in Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape), posture (bonobos walk upright much of the time, along trails that they make themselves), and of course sexual functioning. In 1967 Desmond Morris gave ammunition to the “human nature” objectors to socialism by “exposing” man as The Naked Ape. It’s not quite so bad if we change that to “the naked bonobo”!

Only a few thousand bonobos are left, all of them in the war-torn Congo. Their extinction would be a tragedy for man too, not least because they are living proof of the positive side of our evolutionary heritage.

Stephen Shenfield (by e-mail)

Pathfinders: Bonobo Fides (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the human genome was first effectively sequenced in April 2003 and the surprise discovery made that humans have only 30,000 genes, scarcely more than other primates, some people were encouraged to suppose that the nagging debate between nature and nurture might be solved once and for all. Humans could not be genetically disposed toward all the multitude of obnoxious acts they committed,  because they had no stock of extra genes with which to be so disposed. The seductive conclusion is that any human behaviour not found among primates must therefore be a simple matter of environment.

Not necessarily. As the developing field of epigenetics has begun to demonstrate, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Combinations of genes can produce phenomena that could not be predicted by analysis of the characteristics of the  individual genes. A piano in the hands of a baboon or a human still has 88 keys, but the baboon will give us a cacophony whereas the human may give us a concerto. The discovery, last month, that humans are more genetically diverse than anyone expected, has done even more to throw the ‘nurturists’ back into turmoil, and given the bio-determinists extra room for manoeuvre.

Reading the language of the genes may help us stamp out certain inherited illnesses for good, but it is debatable whether it can ever say anything meaningful about who we are. Studies of identical twins separated at birth show interesting variations in behaviour, yet the results remain essentially random and open to interpretation, because it is not possible, or ethical, to raise one twin in a strictly controlled and sealed environment.

Why this matters so much is of course to do with humanity’s perception of its own potential for a better world. If men were really savage rapists held under control only by the repressive laws of a coercive hierarchical state, one could hardly expect women to support the socialist case for abolishing such coercive machinery. Similarly, if warlike aggression is built into us, as some anthropologists have claimed, the case for cooperation and common ownership suffers a major and possibly fatal reverse.

Some paleoanthropologists, and many Marxists, take the view that war did not exist before the development of agriculture, because the conditions giving rise to war did not exist. It is true to say that there is no hard evidence of war before settled communities began to defend their land from predation, but as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We are not able to point with certainty to 200,000 years of harmonious and peaceful human behaviour and say ‘there, that is our real nature.’ We can only look at this vast period of human activity, twenty times longer than all of recorded history, and say ‘they had no landed property, so it’s hard to see what they could have found to fight about.’

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) democratic elections have recently drawn to a close an appalling civil war that claimed four million lives. Ironically, in the dense forest of DRC, new studies have emerged which have done something to swing the nature-nurture pendulum back in the direction of the nurturists. Chimpanzees, once the lovable rogues of Tarzan films, have lately been receiving a rather bad press, with documentaries concentrating on their brutal behaviour both within and between tribes, including rape, murder and cannibalism. A genetically very close relative and Congolese next-door neighbour is the Bonobo or pygmy chimp, and this primate has always been something of a curiosity. When chimp troops meet, we are told, war and murder are invariably the result. When bonobo troops meet, a love-fest takes place, with the females of one troop running off into the bushes with the males of the other. There is no male hierarchical organisation among bonobos, plenty of casual sex of both hetero and same-sex varieties, and if any male exhibits any rare violent behaviour this is swiftly stamped out by the combined females.

This startling difference in behaviour between the two primates has led some anthropologists to a depressing conclusion. Human females, argue Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in their book Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), need to emulate the bonobo and take a more active political role in order to offset the male killing instinct. This is Thomas Hobbes territory again, and the same assumptions about nasty and brutish male violence which the authors use to argue for greater female political participation can of course also be used to justify the continuation or even extension of state repression.

What was deemed peculiar about the bonobo was that they inhabited the same forest as chimpanzees, albeit in a naturally secluded area which arguably protected them from the nasty and brutish chimps. On the face of it, bonobos seemed to lead a peaceful and communally supportive lifestyle simply because they liked it that way. Now it turns out that not all jungles are equal, and food supply has a lot more to do with it than was previously thought. The bonobo habitat just so happens to contain all the right vegetable nutrients to allow them to live largely as vegetarians and spend very little effort acquiring food. Chimp forests conversely offer much leaner pickings, with low-nutrient vegetation, high tannin content which requires much peeling and shelling, and a competition over resources which necessitates the organisation of meat hunting and aggressive defence of territory. As New Scientist observes: “Put bluntly, bonobos are nice because the environment they live in is nice” (December 2, 06). Not all anthropologists agree, citing the fact that in identical captive environments, bonobos and chimps continue to exhibit different behaviour. Nonetheless, give them long enough, and behaviour is likely to change. It is well known that primates can learn new behaviour and pass it on to descendants, as in the famous case of the Japanese macaques, who all learned to wash potatoes in the sea after watching one juvenile female do it first. In a chimpanzee environment, bonobos would begin to exhibit chimpanzee behaviour, and vice-versa.

The emphasis on the division between the bonobo ‘good guys’ and the chimpanzee ‘bad guys’ does chimpanzees a disservice, however. Little attention has been focussed in the TV documentaries on the fact that supposedly ‘inevitable’ violent behaviour is uncommon among young chimps and even among adult chimps in other locations in the Congo. Indeed, studies undertaken by anthropologists at the University of Saint Andrews in Edinburgh show that, even without ecologically explicable circumstances, there is more variation in chimp behaviour, no less than 39 different cultural patterns, than in any other animal studied in Africa.

The debate about primate behaviour informs the debate about human behaviour, and is not likely to be settled just yet. But humans, in displaying the most amazing array of behaviour patterns found in nature, can take comfort from the fact that, whatever the genes say or don’t say, there is one talent we have developed to a greater degree than any other animal, and which opens the door to a new form of society. Primates can learn to be different, and none better than us.

Paddy Shannon

Political instinct (2023)

From the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

When speaking of the role of instinct in humans, socialists tend to focus on the ‘adapted behaviour’ element which highlights our species flexibility and ability to learn relevant behaviour in a given natural or cultural context. Our long childhood gives the individual behavioural resources and social skills without which he or she could not flourish. Of course, as animals, we have many other instincts such as fight or flight, self-preservation, sexual desire, cooperation and the maternal bond etc and these are not always compatible with each other in certain circumstances. Socialists would like to add the need for meaningful and creative work to this list but for obvious political reasons little research (to my knowledge) has been done on this by biologists who, like other scientists, are restricted in their studies by the ideology that provides their funding.

The old nurture versus nature debate seems to have reached an uneasy truce but it would seem that the majority in society still prefer to believe in genetic determinism as an explanation for human behaviour – which merely serves as the latest incarnation of the ‘human nature’ ideology which readily embraces all of the negative aspects of humanity and none of the positive elements.

If we look closely at the cultural concept of instinct we can see that it excludes learnt behaviour. In our admiration for a sports person we might say that their talent is innate or instinctive which is felt to be somehow superior to those whose prowess is primarily the result of perfecting their craft through practice and the application of technique. Strangely many who suffer from ‘mental illnesses’ seem more content with a diagnosis of a ‘chemical imbalance’ in the brain rather than one that indicates childhood trauma or environmental and social degradation etc. Similarly, the debates concerning gender identity and sexual preference centre on whether gender and/or sexuality is determined by biology at birth or by childhood experiences.

There seems to be a desire to bypass complex sociological and psychological explanations for our behaviour in an attempt to get ‘back to nature’ which is felt to be more authentic and free of intellectual convolution. It’s hard to know if this desire is a result of the use of Ockham’s razor or just plain old anti-intellectualism. There is no denying that endless psychotherapy is a money cow but then so are the drugs produced by big pharma which claim to be remedies for medicalised emotional distress.

There are some who still believe in the concept of evil but socialists do not recognise this as a force in the world. People may be described as evil but this does not tell us why they behave in a way that qualifies them for this distinction. We would look to psychological explanations for such criminality – but then, of course, we run into the contradictions created by criminal law where the killing of individuals for money or jealousy etc. is considered to be murder but dropping bombs on innocent people during wartime is not.

It would seem that, given the right circumstances, many of us can compromise our moral values and behave in ways we would not think possible during our ‘normal’ everyday lives. Where does this overriding power for destruction come from? Some psychologists have theorized that usually dormant instincts are at the heart of this terrible behaviour that we see played out in recent history time and again. We might be able to explain wars in terms of the paranoia and greed of ruling classes but why can millions of ordinary people be seemingly so willing to murder each other at the caprice of such parasites?

The fabric of culture and morality sometimes seems to be a very thin veneer unable to restrain the hatred provoked by propaganda. Some have suggested that this is because of some innate and dormant instinct within humanity that is accumulated because capitalism is unable to provide the basic human need for meaningful work, political equality and social justice. It is reported that many young men happily went off to the First World War because it liberated them from a life of repetitive and meaningless toil. And if you give people hate figures to blame for their unhappiness (the Kaiser or Putin for example) you have a recipe for the mass murder called war.

All of us are initially dumbfounded when confronted by the evidence of the Holocaust; the City of Death called Auschwitz is a continual reminder of what can happen when the forces of hatred, sadism and genocidal madness are unleashed. Political explanations alone are inadequate in the face of such crimes. As soon as we turn from the rational consideration of politics and turn it into an ideological confrontation of faiths we begin to make room for the irrational which, if not checked, can become a full conflagration of madness. Many historians begin their analysis of Nazi Germany by saying how surprising it was that such a cultured and progressive country like Germany could plunge itself into an abyss of cruelty and destruction without considering that it might have been the very capitalist culture that they so admire which provided a fertile context for the growth of death cults like the Nazis.

No historian has given a comprehensive explanation of why the Holocaust happened and we simply don’t know if it was partly, or even mainly, the result of unleashing dormant self-destructive instincts. Human instinctual behaviour is a long way from being thoroughly understood. But what we do know was wonderfully articulated by Vanessa Redgrave in her role as Fania Fenelon in the film Playing for Time when one of her fellow inmates at the death camp condemns all the Nazi guards as ‘monsters’ to which Fenelon replies calmly and sorrowfully: ‘no, they are human beings just like us – that’s the problem’.

Wez