Even with all the
rain and cool weather we've been experiencing lately it's still warm enough
most days to have my breakfast in the conservatory. Here I sit, between 6 and
7, with my healthy bowl of fruit, cereals and yoghurt and my very unhealthy
industrial strength coffee, and read. This has now become mainly my study
period. I'm reading and taking notes on a series of books which attempt to
explain why we are in the mess we are in.
The latest is
"The Spirit Level" by Wilkinson and Picket. (Why do I keep reading
that as Wilson Pickett - youthful conditioning?) It's a detailed, well
researched and remorseless account of the effects of social inequality (in
Western "developed" societies) on all the indicators of human
well-being: health, longevity, obesity, violence, drug use, crime and
punishment, education, teenage births.... and shows with devastating
consistency that the more unequal a society is the worse it performs on all
these levels. They show conclusively that in more equal societies everyone
benefits, not just the poor.
The USA stands head
and shoulders above all the others in terms of inequality and has a markedly
inferiour quality of life, even compared to the next most unequal - you guessed
it - UK. At the other end are the Scandinavian countries and Japan. Sharing the
second rank of inequality are the other English speaking countries, especially
New Zealand and Australia, but with surprisingly Portugal scoring very high on
inequality as well, so it's not the language which is causing the problem,
unless there is such a thing as an English language social culture.
In discussing the
reasons for this the authors go back to the point in evolution where humans diverged from chimps and
bonobos. Now comes the really fascinating bit which they do not really develop.
There is a remarkable experiment called "The Ultimatum Game" in which
volunteers (or selectees in the case of chimps) are paired but do not meet and
remain anonymous to each other. A known sum of money is given to the
"proposer" who then divides it as he or she pleases with the
"responder". If the responder accepts then both keep their shares,
but if he or she rejects then neither gets anything.
The game is played
once only, so clearly it benefits the responder to accept any offer however
derisory. This is evidently how chimps play the game - self-interest dominates.
However, humans don't - 50/50 is common and the average is between 43 and 48 %.
"At direct cost to ourselves, we come close to sharing equally even with
people we never meet and will never interact with agian.
The authors then go
on to sketch out the typical chimp dominance heirarchy society characterized by
aggression, and the typical egalitarian bonobo society characterised by
sharing. "The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo
resolves power issues with sex" is how the researchers de Waal and Lanting
expressed it.
This seems to me to
offer an answer to a question that has concerned me for some time: what is the
function and purpose of the left/right division in politics? Each side believes
themselves to be right and the other to be wrong and is all too often prepared
to defend that belief with extreme violence - eg Spanish Inquisition, Hitler's
death camps, the Gulag....
What if right wing
tendencies are the natural expression of our chimpanzee inheritance and
left-wing that of our bonobo inheritance?
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