Monday, 20 May 2019

Humans, Humanity, and Human Rights - Chapter 1 (F)

This project commenced with a conceptual outline, published on Saturday 1st December, 2018, at: https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2018/12/humans-humanity-and-human-rights.html
I’ve decided I’ll post each chapter in its first, raw state, and you, Dear Reader, can see if my later research (probably long after I've finished this first version, in my retirement, should I be fortunate enough to actually get to retire) led to any change. (You can also think about the points I am making.) 
I've come up with an initial structure of the book (no guarantees it won't change), and will add the links to each chapter in the latest installment as they are published. Owing to the size of each chapter, I will have to publish this using the sub-chapters. Links below, and also here.

*****

Chapter One – Introduction to Concepts, and On Early Humans

F.  Our genetic neighbours, gatherer-hunters, and being humane


OK, so I have mentioned “moving out of Africa”.
J.C. Peters writes, in “History that Changed the World” (pub. Odyssea Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-90-825063-5-8 [Amazon] [1] ):
“Around 70,000 years ago, humans began to spreads outside of Africa, to Europe, Asia and beyond.
There they encountered other hominins, who had evolved from the Homo erectus that had left Africa some 1.5 million years earlier.”
In the context of this book, I am not interested in the arguments/”discussions” about when this happened, nor by which route it happened, as the mechanics around its commencement.
To set the scene for this a little, a high school teacher began a lesson by showing a photo of several species of herbivores (I think zebras and a horned critter- possibly impala?) peacefully grazing together . . . and then commented that the species we could see we in competition for resources, and that eventually one of the species would “drive the other out” (or some similar phrasing).
It was quite incongruent with the peacefulness of the scene, but, more to the point now, illustrated that academic language does not necessarily mesh well with common understanding of terms (which is a failing of the academic world now being - partly – addressed by projects such as “The Conversation” newspaper [2] . . . a dash of common sense and some swallowing of intellectual hubris/arrogance wouldn’t hurt either, but that also applies to many other areas of life, including a wide range of professions such as the one I work in J ).
Thus, the various pressures that drove early modern humans out of Africa were not necessarily physically violent – and, when such physical confrontations did occur, it is quite likely that they were based on bluff and intimidation, rather than just going straight into causing as much harm as is possible.
On that, keep in mind:
·         the Guardian article I referred to in the previous sub-chapter, that leadership was about “more than bullying” [3] ;
·         that there is quite a bit of evidence that humans are hard wired against causing actual harm – militaries spend a great deal of effort overcoming this, as is discussed by Paul K Chappell [4] (e.g., pp 63 – 65 AND PP. 168 – 178 of “The Cosmic Ocean” [5] )and is fairly well summarised in an online video by “Lindybeige” (Nikolas Lloyd) called “Shooting to kill - how many men can do this?” [6] ; and
·         the term “ritualised aggression” [7] .
So, even if physical harm did not occur, it is quite possible (actually, I would go as far as “quite likely”) that some harm did occur – we understand quite well these days that fear and trauma cause harm, and even dedicate a significant amount of resources to finding a ”cure” [8] .
From Paul K. Chappell’s section on fear of human aggression (pp. 210 – 217) in “The Cosmic Ocean”:
“. . . around 98% of people have a phobia of human aggression. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman calls this the universal human phobia.”
“What is more psychologically traumatizing, falling off you bike and breaking your leg, or a group of attackers holding you down and breaking your leg with a baseball bat?”
(I’ve often thought that, when we hear people advocating toughness, including carrying weapons, we’re not hearing that person as such, we’re actually hearing their trauma speak through them.)
So, considering that pressures are not necessarily physically violent, but that we’re also likely to try to avoid aggression, what could have been at play when humans started moving out of Africa?
Well, that could – speculatively – have included:
1.       simple human curiosity –what is over that next hill?;
2.       increased contact and possibly a perception of pressure;
3.       a quest for more land / resources; or
4.       an individual’s / small group’s quest for more power.
On that second point, an article on aggression in chimpanzees noted that “attacks were more common at sites with many males and high population densities” [9] . The effect of overpopulation / crowding is, in my opinion, one of the most seriously under-acknowledged issues in the modern world.
The cluelessness – that’s both my word and my opinion – that I’ve seen on this includes:
·         town planner’s blithely advocating for increased urban densities with no consideration or even awareness of the problems that perceived lack of personal space / privacy can occur – especially when trying to import views on this from one culture to another;
·         misattribution of causation to other secondary effects of crowding / overpopulation [10] ;
·         a false and pervasive assumption that overcrowding has to be extreme (e.g., at those levels found in institutions [11] ) before it causes problems;
·         a false equivalence between public and private open space (i.e., parks vs. one’s own backyard); and
·         a simple lack of research because academics are, on this issue – and I’m letting my frustration run rampant here, a pack of idiots.
Despite that last dot point, there is some work that can be drawn on [12]. As an example, the following excerpt from student essay (“The Real Root of All Evil? Overpopulation!”) is from https://www.deltacollege.edu/student-life/student-media/delta-winds/1999-table-contents/real-root-all-evil-overpopulation:
“The harmful psychological effects of overcrowding due to overpopulation were made clear to me in a biology class. I read about an experiment where two rats were put into a cage and allowed to reproduce freely. At first they got along fine. That soon changed. The number of rats multiplied but they remained in the original cage. As their numbers increased, they started to exhibit anti-social behavior. The outcome of overcrowding is the same with humans. The less space people have to live in, the harder it is for them to get along. As people compete, not only for space but also for food, water and air, the more hostile their behavior becomes. Crime, and a lack of respect for other people, becomes more common as personal space is reduced. Violence is more prevalent in highly populated areas, as are other forms of criminal behavior. This is probably due to aggression and anxiety brought on by a lack of personal space.”
On a similar note, and similarly from an “informal” source, from an article titled “What's the Psychological Impact of Overpopulation? Here's a Horrific Experiment”:
“In 1972, eight mice were placed in a utopia. Full of food, water, bedding, and space for 3000 mice. Within three years there were no survivors.”
The stages described are particularly interesting, and the articles points towards the work in the 1940s and 1960s of Dr John B. Calhoun [13] , who coined the term “behavioural sink” [14] (“Calhoun's work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general”), and whose work contributed to “the development of Edward T. Hall’s [15] 1966 proxemics [16] theories”.
This is, to me, self-evident: people need adequate personal space for psychological health and wellbeing [17] – they also need intimacy from trusted people, but anyone making that response to this point is raising an irrelevancy, and should be chastised for detracting from the point.
The need for personal space is not only physical, it is psychological – hence the right to freedom of thought.
Every child arguing with their sibling over this issue knows it too, and, although they struggled to cater for this, Victorian era town planners did what they could with public green spaces [18] .
Conscious awareness of the need for adequate space is not a modern issue. From a “Science Abbey” series article titled “Overpopulation: The World’s Most Serious Problem – Part I” [19] :
“Urban overcrowding was an issue as far back as the sixth century BCE. In ancient China the revered philosopher Confucius advised the government to control the balance between land and the rural population with forced migration.”
So . . . hoping off my soap box (another Victorian era reference [20] J ) and going back to the bright, shiny, just-out-of-the-evolution-box humans, well, let me remind you of the possible causes for drifting out of Africa that I was speculating about:
1.       simple human curiosity –what is over that next hill?;
2.       increased contact and possibly a perception of pressure;
3.       a quest for more land / resources; or
4.       an individual’s / small group’s quest for more power.
I have the impression that the second point, and to a lesser extent the third, are generally considered to be the main reasons for this gradual move by most people. To refine that a little, the concept of “fission-fusion” dynamics and aggression [21] (i.e., groups splintering into smaller groups, which then make different combinations) refines this a little, but as a whole it is still similar to the interconnected characteristics of a gas that we describe as temperature and pressure: as the molecules of the gas vibrate faster they bump into each other more, and also as the pressure increases the molecules bump into each other more. If the molecules of gas had their way, the collisions would drive them further apart.
This is a little simplistic, though.
One of the aspects I liked about Jean M Auel’s Earth’s Children series is that it – to some extent - illustrates the role that simple human curiosity had in the spread of humanity.
The other aspect is the quest for power – the prelude to building empires, not fully manifested yet as ways of supporting large groups had not been developed, but still there in a nascent sense. At this stage of our evolution, I consider this fourth point effectively a race between the majority of humans working out the benefits of rejecting aggressive leaders and choosing collaboration / cooperation and the minority of humans working out how to effectively dominate other people.
We could have benefitted from a time machine dropping an explanation of economic, social and cultural rights into the laps of those early people perhaps (assuming it could be translated, of course), or the skills to manage increased population. As an example of that, consider the following from https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2007-07-01-voa12/343044.html
“ . . . the stability of populous countries like the United States and Japan serves to show that overpopulation can be successfully managed. . . .  Whether instability is worsened by overpopulation or uneven distribution of natural resources, most experts warn that countries with high population growth and not enough resources to provide for their people are likely to breed unrest locally and export it abroad.”
Better alternatives existed, but we had not developed that knowledge at that time, and probably needed to undergo additional development ourselves before we could. We were gatherer-hunters, and could recognise when resources were being overloaded: the choice was move elsewhere, or fight and possibly lose some of our most valuable resources – people.
So the various pressures from bumping into each other and from uncontrolled aggression led to us expanding out of Africa.


[2] See https://theconversation.com/au, which is the original site.
[5] Pub. Prospecta Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-63226-009-3
[12] There has been some, flawed thought it is  - for example, see http://theipti.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/covariance.pdf, which does not clearly allow for poverty, personal living space, etc.




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