Saturday, 20 April 2019

On activism


I was listening to a community radio station recently, while going to get the cat litter our cat likes (the local supermarket doesn’t stock it anymore, and results when using what cat litter they do have in stock, have been . . . unsatisfactory – especially with regards to olfactory outcome . . . ). The radio station often has what can be described as specialist human rights programmes. I missed the start of the programme I was listening to, but the speaker (this sounded like a recorded public talk) was addressing the surprising and horrifying history of nazism in Australia. When discussing an event in the 1970s, she described – breathless with passion – how anti-fascists had gone to a suburban house that was (allegedly?) going to become a headquarters of that rightly despised group to demonstrate, but then invaded the house and trashed it – at which point the audience cheered.
I missed the end of the programme as I had arrived at the shop, but I began to wonder.
Let’s assume that the house was going to be used as claimed, and that it was owned by those involved, not rented, perhaps unknowingly: even given that, the actions then, and the reactions now, were major problems – they were, in fact, morally, spiritually, ethically, in every way, WRONG.
My first reaction was that it all sounded immature – like the sort of puerile nonsense on too many high school yards – which is particularly aggravating to those teenagers who are more mature. Those sorts of attitudes can persist, and, as an example, I know of one situation where a taxi driver swore at some passengers, but because one of the young passengers swore back, no action - legal or otherwise -could be taken. The law does not permit or accede to vigilantism, revenge, or getting even in any way – it may make allowances for being human, such as the man who bashed the man he found raping his wife, but it does not do so for immaturity.
Immaturity and limited life experience also restrict choice of action. As an example, I know many people who like, enjoy, and think street marches and demonstrations are a “good thing” - and they can be, there is no question of that, especially given, for instance, the people power that unseated the dictator Marcos in the Philippines, or brought down the Wall in Berlin, or started the Arab Spring (although that went one, maybe two nations too far, given what happened in Syria and Egypt – which is also an indication to study and know these techniques and their limits).
But more importantly, the means shape the end.
The evils of nazism include robbing people of their choice and freedom: imposing another worldview by force not so much repeats, as recycles that error in a slightly different form – but, at its heart, it is still the same error.
Discussion and persuasion and education are the tools for changing people’s hearts, and, noting the great Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s words that “The law may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless”, where that does not work, use discussion and persuasion and education to get fair, just and good laws in place to protect people against the heartlessness of nazism and its adherents and proponents.
All these struggles for a better, fairer, more caring world are connected, and imposing one misguided attempt at a solution to one evil by force harms the other struggles – especially the struggle for peace.
From Paul K Chappell's book “The Art of Waging Peace” (pub. Prospecta Press, reprint 2015, ISBN 978-1632260314 [Amazon]):
“Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that peaceful ends require peaceful means, and if we want to be effective at creating peace in the world, we must first strive to create peace within ourselves.”
The passion of that young woman I heard was undoubted: it was also misguided, or possible naïve or uninformed.
I could speculate about what caused it, perhaps frustration that the world is such a hard place to change, possibly fear that he life would be less because of others hates and fears and sundry flaws, or maybe she simply knew no other way to be or act in this cause, but those are speculations, as I do not know her. The point about knowing no other way to be or act in this cause merits further consideration, and it should also be noted that Dr Martin Luther King Jr. begged US President Johnson for some change, any small change, to give African Americans hope before the wave of race riots in the 1960s, as the situation of African-Americans had become so bereft of any hope.
Before I delve into the point of ways to act, I want to set the scene with a few other sayings.
Let’s begin with more of the great Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
(Note that last part: that they will be judged by their character – this is not a call to “let anything go”.)
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence, add deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
(A very eloquent summation of the problems of violence. One qualification I would add to this is that emotional and psychological violence, as is actively and often deliberately practised by many of the –isms is also violence.)
Next, US President Harry Truman’s response to McCarthyism, probably the most famous right wing version of the “antifa” movement, and very appropriate in view of my concerns above:
“We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.”
Going back to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Now, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was not an advocate for mildness – nor, for that matter, was Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi (who had some serious personal flaws). For a more nuanced view of Dr King and the changes he made in his life, see here (“there is probably no way, even eliminating violence, for Negroes to obtain their rights without upsetting the equanimity of white folks”) and here (“Despite President Lyndon Johnson’s shepherding of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, ending legal apartheid in the United States, King became even more radical as the decade went on. As he put it in 1967: ‘We aren’t merely struggling to integrate a lunch counter now. We’re struggling to get some money to be able to buy a hamburger or a steak when we get to the counter.’ ”).
Paul K. Chappell writes, in “The Art of Waging Peace”:
“If we compare how much the average twenty-five-year-old army officer knows and waging war and how much the average twenty-five-year-old activist knows about waging peace, there is a big difference. Although I admire their deep commitment to waging peace, many activists have not had enough training in the nonviolent methods that lead to positive change. Many activists have not thoroughly studied the brilliant techniques of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others who have so much to teach us. . . . Civil rights leader James Lawson, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” said, “The difficulty with nonviolent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline, and training, and strategizing, and planning, and recruiting.”
As an example of the application of that, the US journalist Webb Miller wrote of the amazing discipline of those applying Gandhi’s techniques (for Ahimsa) in his reports, and again in his autobiography “I Found No Peace” (pub. Decoubertin Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0956431318, [Amazon]). In the chapter “They That Turn the Other Cheek”, Miller writes, of the Dharasana (Salt Works) Satyagraha, which was one of the key events in India’s struggle for independence:
“Mme Naidu . . . exhorted them: “Gandhi’s body is in jail but his soul is with you. India’s prestige is in your hands. You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten but you must not resist; you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows.”
And that is what happened. Miller continues:
“I could detect no signs of wavering or fear, They marched steadily with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape serious injury or death. . . . Several times the leaders nearly lost control of the waiting crowd. They rushed up and down, frantically pleading with and exhorting the intensely excited men to remember Gandhi’s instructions. . . . The leaders managed to calm the crowd.”
In a much smaller scale, when helping to lobby for changes to my home state’s anti-discrimination legislation in the late 90s, we had a network of people writing letters and emails, but we used the contacts we had inside each party room to direct those people on what topics to focus on and, when our contacts said we were verging on irritating those we were seeking to change, when to stop.
Discipline, and understanding and focusing on those who you are seeking to influence (don't preach to the choir!) is utterly crucial.
Remember always as well: the means shape the end – you cannot defeat a violent repression with another violent repression, no matter how well meant.
As a final thought, if you impose a solution without changing people’s hearts, you also risk having to face a backlash a decade or two later, just as activists who only work with one side of politics risks seeing a change of government undo their work at the next election. 

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Friday, 19 April 2019

On leadership

Having finally weakened (my concerns still stand, however) and bought an electronic reading "device" (No [Brand] Names here, by golly), I have to admit to enjoying its portability, and the lower price of books. I've bought a few, and doubled my wish list (winning a lottery wouldn't necessarily help - I think I may wind up needing several lifetimes for my ultimate reading list 😀 ), and am slowly working out how best to give references to e-books, as opposed to hard copy books (my reference here to Masha Gesson's book is to a physical book, but to Mary Ann  Glendon's book is to an e-book).

I'm now reading - as usual - several books at once, in a mix of physical and electronic versions, and would like to give brief comments on several - comments that I may, when I complete reading the books, change.
  • Webb Miller's autobiographical "I Found No Peace" (pub. Decoubertin Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0956431318 [PS - Dear Amazon, e-books have ISBNs: please list them! Then I will start linking to your e-books rather than the more expensive, less saleable hard copies . . . ] [Amazon] ), which gives insight into the paternalistic/colonialist attitudes of many in the first half of the twentieth century,  as well as what life was like for many people only a century ago (in a quest to read more of Miller's journalism, I've also bought "The Mammoth Book of Journalism", by Jon E. Lewis [pub. Robinson, 2011], but haven't delved into that properly yet);
  • Robert  McNamara's book / apologia "In Retrospect" (pub. Random House, 1996, ISBN 978-0679767497), which so far is showing elitism, organisational ability, confirms the mistakes I've read of elsewhere and adds a few new ones, and gives some insights into the characters of all those involved (although few are coming out of it with a particularly good image as yet - although I must admit my impressions are also being shaped by my knowledge of people and events from other sources). The attempt to provide a "no holds barred" honesty is pretty good, but I'm still thinking about how well it does that . . . ;
  • I've now been able to buy another of Paul K Chappell's books - this one "The Art of Waging Peace" (pub. Prospecta Press, reprint 2015, ISBN 978-1632260314 [Amazon] ) - and am looking forward to getting and studying all that series, eventually;
  • "The Biggest Estate on Earth" , by Bill Gammage (pub. Allen & Unwin, reprint 2012, ISBN 978-1743311325 [Amazon] ) - I am hoping this will enable me to expand my comments about Australia's indigenous heritage in my "Humans, Humanity and Human Rights" project - mainly in Chapter 1 (A);
  • I am also expecting the following books will contribute to that project (and possibly, when I can buy them, Yuvah Noah Harari's work, referring as it does to a "cognitive revolution 50,000 years ago): 
  • Steven  Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (pub. Penguin, 2012, ISBN-10: 0141034645 [Amazon] ), and already referenced through video lectures by Mr Pinker and online articles; 
  • J. C. Peters' "History That Changed the World" (pub. Odyssea Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-9082506358 [Amazon] ); 
  • "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Timothy  Snyder (pub. Vintage Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1847924889 [Amazon] ), and have found the chapter on "anticipatory obedience" stunning.
    "The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. . . . In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought."
    (p. 18 - if I've worked the e-reader correctly . . . and I think I've just found how to identify potential quotes - about six books too late . . . SIGH . . . )
    I think the details of that are arguable, but the point about not anticipating what "the boss" wants when that is evil is important.
On "the boss", however, the book that has moved me write this post is Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America" (pub. Random House, New York, 2018, ISBN 9780399589836 [Amazon] ).

On page ix of that book is epigraph from Franklin D Roosevelt:
"The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That's the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership."
That quote, and:
  • Roosevelt's citation of a teacher of his (Endicott Peabody), comment "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising towards the heights - then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilisation itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend";
  • a comment by Reinhold Niebuhr (who also wrote the "Serenity Prayer") "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary"; and
  • the drawing of parallels between current events in the USA and past events - including the 1948 US Presidential elections that returned Truman (a figure who is admirable in many ways - except for the damage done by some of his or his administration's [as he famously said, the buck stopped with him] Cold War actions, such as backing off on human rights [see Glendon's book] and the reprehensible political decision to hide the work of the UNWCC,  . . . but then again, Truman did stand up to the massively damaging [especially to the UN] McCarthyism, the acolytes of which included Richard Nixon and Robert F Kennedy [despite his later human rights work, Bobby Kennedy has been described as "essentially a cop on the beat at heart", and that does provide insight into some of his behaviour);
have me both hooked on the book, and also quite thoughtful about leaders in the world now . . .

More, no doubt, to come 😀
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Wednesday, 17 April 2019

Improved health care for gender diverse people in my home state

The field of human rights has a number of key documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

In terms of health, for example, Article 25 (1) of the UDHR states:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
In addition, there are a range of covenants / treaties and other commitments that build on the UDHR. As an example, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated:
  • Understanding health as a human right creates a legal obligation on states to ensure access to timely, acceptable, and affordable health care of appropriate quality as well as to providing for the underlying determinants of health, such as safe and potable water, sanitation, food, housing, health-related information and education, and gender equality.
  • A States’ obligation to support the right to health – including through the allocation of “maximum available resources” to progressively realise this goal - is reviewed through various international human rights mechanisms, such as the Universal Periodic  - Review, or the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In many cases, the right to health has been adopted into domestic law or Constitutional law.
  • A rights-based approach to health requires that health policy and programmes must prioritize the needs of those furthest behind first towards greater equity, a principle that has been echoed in the recently adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Universal Health Coverage.
  • The right to health must be enjoyed without discrimination on the grounds of race, age, ethnicity or any other status. Non-discrimination and equality requires states to take steps to redress any discriminatory law, practice or policy.
. . . 

The right to health (Article 12) was defined in General Comment 14 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – a committee of Independent Experts, responsible for overseeing adherence to the Covenant. (4) The right includes the following core components:
Availability
Refers to the need for a sufficient quantity of functioning public health and health care facilities, goods and services, as well as programmes for all. Availability can be measured through the analysis of disaggregated data to different and multiple stratifiers including by age, sex, location and socio-economic status and qualitative surveys to understand coverage gaps and health workforce coverage
Accessibility
Requires that health facilities, goods, and services must be accessible to everyone. Accessibility has four overlapping dimensions:
  • non-discrimination
  • physical accessibility
  • economical accessibility (affordability)
  • information accessibility.
Assessing accessibility may require analysis of barriers – physical financial or otherwise – that exist, and how they may affect the most vulnerable, and call for the establishment or application of clear norms and standards in both law and policy to address these barriers, as well as robust monitoring systems of health-related information and whether this information is reaching all populations.
More generally, human rights as applicable to sexual orientation and gender identity have been stated in the Yogyakarta  Principles of 2006 and their extension in 2017.

From those, some selected Principles relating to health care are:
Principle 1 - The Right to the Universal Enjoyment of Human Rights
States shall . . .
A. Embody the principles of the universality, interrelatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of all human rights in their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation and ensure the practical realisation of the universal enjoyment of all human rights;
. . .
C. Undertake programmes of education and awareness to promote and enhance the full enjoyment of all human rights by all persons, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity;
D. Integrate within State policy and decision-making a pluralistic approach that recognises and affirms the interrelatedness and indivisibility of all aspects of human identity including sexual orientation and gender identity.
and
Principle 17 - The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health
Everyone has the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Sexual and reproductive health is a fundamental aspect of this right.
States shall:
A. Take all necessary legislative, administrative and other measures to ensure enjoyment of the right to the highest attainable standard of health, without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity;
B. Take all necessary legislative, administrative and other measures to ensure that all persons have access to healthcare facilities, goods and services, including in relation to sexual and reproductive health, and to their own medical records, without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity;
C. Ensure that healthcare facilities, goods and services are designed to improve the health status of, and respond to the needs of, all persons without discrimination on the basis of, and taking into account, sexual orientation and gender identity, and that medical records in this respect are treated with confidentiality;
. . .
E. Ensure that all persons are informed and empowered to make their own decisions regarding medical treatment and care, on the basis of genuinely informed consent, without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity;
F. Ensure that all sexual and reproductive health, education, prevention, care and treatment programmes and services respect the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities, and are equally available to all without discrimination;
G. Facilitate access by those seeking body modifications related to gender reassignment to competent, non-discriminatory treatment, care and support;
H. Ensure that all health service providers treat clients and their partners without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, including with regard to recognition as next of kin;
I. Adopt the policies, and programmes of education and training, necessary to enable persons working in the healthcare sector to deliver the highest attainable standard of healthcare to all persons, with full respect for each person’s sexual orientation and gender identity.
J. Protect all persons from discrimination, violence and other harm on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics in healthcare settings;
K. Ensure access to the highest attainable standard of gender affirming healthcare, on the basis of an individual’s free, prior and informed consent;
Moving on from the national and international level to that of my home state, we have a Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. That doesn't mention access to health care specifically, but Section 5 - Human rights in this Charter in addition to other rights and freedoms states:
A right or freedom not included in this Charter that arises or is recognised under any other law (including international law, the common law, the Constitution of the Commonwealth and a law of the Commonwealth) must not be taken to be abrogated or limited only because the right or freedom is not included in this Charter or is only partly included.
So, all told, having waded through all that, I think it is fairly clear that there is a good case that state governments are obliged to make proper provision for health care of gender diverse people.

It is therefore pleasing and appropriate that my home state's government - the most progressive in Australia - is supporting access to health care for gender diverse people by opening two new specialist multi-disciplinary clinics, one in a major regional centre.


However, in addition to providing access to appropriate health care in other areas of the state and making sure discrimination and ignorance are removed from all health services, there are some other matters that need to be worked on still, and TransGender Victoria is the appropriate place to find out more on that.
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Humans, Humanity, and Human Rights - Chapter 1 (E)

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

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


To remind you, Dear Reader: I am, in this chapter, considering that era when humans first came into existence, evolving from a series of ancestors who had themselves diverged from the ancestors of modern primates – or, perhaps more accurately, we developed differently to primates, but from a common ancestor.
So, is it possible to use what we know about primates to try to gain some insight into what early humans were like?
Well, although we have good evidence of the physical changes to both lines of evolution, I don’t consider that we necessarily know all the changes that occurred.
In fact, I’m not sure how well we can say we understand our genetic neighbours now, and part of that is due to what is our, at times, flawed thinking.
To illustrate that, let’s begin by considering that, a couple of centuries ago, there was a widely accepted myth referred to as “the noble savage” [1] , where, to simplify, people living less technologically advanced lifestyles were assumed to be better people. They weren’t necessarily (people are people – largely), although they may have been more in harmony with nature (not always, whoever, as shown by some cultures use of “slash and burn” forms of agriculture [2] ).
Along a similar line, albeit possibly in response to a blind myth that “primitive” animals, including primates, were unthinking, unfeeling, selfish and savage, when humans began studying primates more objectively in the 60s and 70s [3] , there was a time when we, humans, thought that “noble savage” myth also seemed to fit our genetic neighbours, but we now know better – I could write “characters are characters – largely”, but the situation is more complex than that, and the attempts to raise chimpanzees in human environments showed that, amongst other outcomes, there are differences between us and our genetic neighbours.
More importantly, our understanding and knowledge now is deeper and more nuanced. As one example, I recall one documentary showing a chimpanzee mother mourning her dead infant. We now have an awareness of the richness of interactions within primate groups.
I will come back to that shortly, but there are a couple of other points I wish to cover.
Firstly, the undue optimism of those who made the attempts to co-raise chimpanzees. Why did they do that? Were they naïve, lacking in objectivity, blinded by an attractive (to them) thesis? Did they fail to notice early warning signs of problems? Did they not think about the limits of what they were learning? [4]
Next, I want to consider animals more broadly, and some of the things we’ve learned about the other species we share this planet with. We underrate animals, partly, I suspect, because of too simplistic science, but now science has shown us things such as:
·         same sex relationships in the animal kingdom [5] ;
·         that fish may have self-awareness, based on what is termed “the mirror test”. The media article on that [6] includes:
“The mirror tests whether a non-human animal can identify a mark on their body by looking in a mirror, while touching their body, not the mirror . . . Until now only apes, elephants, dolphins and northern hemisphere species of magpie have passed the test . . . The fish study opens a debate about whether the test is an appropriate gauge of animal awareness and whether we underestimate the ability of animals that do not pass this test”;
·         bees can perform arithmetic [7] .
Less scientifically, anyone who has had and care about a pet knows they have a personality, and are capable of kindness and less salubrious emotions, including jealousy. I consider we are better at living with our pets when we recognise [8] and work with their individuality [9] .
I’d like to go back to primates. We have, as I mentioned, an increased and more nuanced understanding of their group dynamics. On that, an interesting perspective on the political side of animal behaviour has been published by the Guardian [10] , summed up as
“decades of studying primates has convinced me that animal politics are not so different from our own – and even in the wild, leadership is about much more than being a bully”
The article reports that those who rose to the top through bullying and aggression were likely to be brought undone, and the leaders who lasted notably had empathy.
Hmm . . . maybe there is some capacity to learn from our neighbours . . . J
We can’t be simplistic about that, however: nuance is all, and stereotypes are always a problem that blinds our perceptions and restricts our thinking.
I consider that it would be quite possible, however, based particularly on the article from the 12th March, 2019 Guardian, that early humans would also have functioned best in situations that were, at the very least, empathic (a feature highlighted in that article), and quite possibly conditions that we modern humans would describe as “humane”. (As the article mentioned, although he often struts, the 45th President of the USA [POTUS45 – i.e., Trump] seems to lack the empathy and willingness to get in-between warring parties that is required to be successful in the primate world.)
What about learning from modern gatherer-hunters?
Well, I’ve already touched on this, but to repeat the point, gatherer-hunters in the modern era have had millennia of evolution and development, including, for most groups, contact with other, more technologically advanced civilisations. There is quite a bit of evidence [11] of trading in the ancient world (for instance, rock from one part of Australia has been found as tools in distant parts of Australia [12] ), so truly isolated tribes are a rarity, and - to protect those tribes from modern diseases - they are kept as close to free of contact as is possible. The other side of that is that we possibly don’t know all that accurately how well they represent early humans – most probably they don’t represent the shiny new, just-out-of-the-evolution box I’m considering, but humans who have gone through the trauma, forced and willing evolution, and change from experiencing living (are you the same as you were a few decades ago? I’m not – partly I’m wiser {I hope], but I’ve also been quite battered by life experiences, so I am probably half a dozen steps forwards on the better human scale, six steps back) that came with moving out of Africa and learning how to survive in a particular area, possibly with pressures and competition from other tribes nearby (as I write that, I am thinking of the descriptions in the “North America's Forgotten Past” / “First North Americans” [13] series of written by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear [14]. . . Also, I should point out that I don’t think primates have evolved as much as we have: our capacity to adapt [i.e., change] and to do so at a much-faster-than-evolution speed is one of the features that sets us apart from other animals [15] ).
We have descriptions of some tribes at what is generally described as “first contact” from a few centuries ago, but those are so biased by social and religious prejudice as to be close to utterly useless, in my opinion.
On the other hand, Amy Chua [Ref. 8] writes about political tribes and the influence that unacknowledged tribalism is having on humans.
It’s all a bit unclear, isn’t it?
So, what do I actually think?
Well, I’d like to propose two points.
Firstly, what I could (very) loosely lump together under “nastiness” started somewhere - whether that was carried over as we evolved, or came later. Possibly that “nastiness” started through competition between groups for resources, or as a result of individuals questing after power and dominance. In any case, after that point, we had to learn, possibly through noticing that dysfunctional groups didn’t do so well,
(1)    that nastiness was nasty, and
(2)    therefore it should be stopped.
Responding to those two lessons requires social (and political) evolution – and human rights. Those rights could perhaps be considered as a quest for “second generation” (economic, social and cultural) rights – but, as all generations of rights are “interrelated, interdependent and indivisible”, the sense of a quest for individual rights / freedom as well as group benefits equally applies.
The second point is that, for all the similarities, it is important to remember that there are differences between us and our genetic neighbours – including our capacity for more advanced thought. (I wrote about this online in a review of an article a few years ago: you can find a copy in Appendix A.) Thus, we have a greater capacity to overcome genetic predispositions more quickly than evolution would act in our neighbours (the primates) – i.e., we can learn more quickly; they also learn, but more slowly.
That, ultimately, comes with a responsibility: what are we doing with our abilities?

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Noble_savage&oldid=884303755 (although I am referring to this more in the concept that link describes as “sentimentalism”, or “nature’s gentleman”),   https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-55316,   and   https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Noble_savage&oldid=1986043.
[4] I mentioned that I have a degree. Well, whatever it is J , it has allowed me to work in the field of wastewater treatment (that’s only on the nose when something’s wrong), and something I teach younger engineers (oops) is that, with new treatment processes, what is unknown is probably largely the “bad” aspects; I also teach them to look at a range of limits associated with such processes.
[8] On that, one of the reasons I refuse to say things like “I like kids” is because, in my experience, those who do reduce children to a generic cipher, rather than recognising the individual strengths and weaknesses that need to be nurtured or tended to in the wide and rich variety of humanity that is constituted in “small humans”.
[9] There has been some work on pets and personality (for instance, https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/Pages/171101d.aspx,   https://www.dogstardaily.com/training/puppy-personality-development,   and   https://www.backyardchickencoops.com.au/blogs/learning-centre/pet-chicken-behaviour-personality-pecking-order), but what particularly interests me on that is the development of personality in rescued battery hens –see https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/little-miss-sunshine-rescued-battery-hen-intelligent/, for example. The rescued battery hens will need some extra care, naturally (see http://www.henrescue.org/battery-hen-care), but can become excellent pets – such as in this instance: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/how-battery-hens-rescued-slaughter-14110899.





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