Let's all move back to the savanna

Cheryl has a theory about the African savanna that I agree with and that was demonstrated most recently by the infamous Sandra Tsing-Loh 'divorce is good because I'm doing it' article. This is how it goes: Once upon a time, man was his ancestor--a primate living on the savanna. There, he lived in a permanent state of barbarity and violence and committed many heinous crimes which were not criminal then because primates have no concept of crime. Then he stopped being a primate and began living in society, which curbed his violent tendencies by imposing rules and punishments on him. Society was really great! He was no longer living in constant fear for his life, and had time to do something other than kill other men. Farm, for example. Form a conjugal union with a woman to which she actually conceded. Weave baskets and sell them. Write books about the motion of the stars. Makes laws for cities. That kind of thing. Sometimes he had to go to war and some people still committed heinous crimes and broke the laws, but war was part of the civilized way of things and subject to its own rules, and no one celebrated crime or barbaric behavior.

For many centuries, man enjoyed his social and political life and tried to improve it by thinking about justice and happiness, and trying to implement his ideas in the world--sometimes with better, sometimes worse results. One important way he thought about this was by comparing human political behavior to the standard of nature, which was the organization of the world by God (except for the pagans, who didn't so much care about that God) and so the most just standard there was. In nature, every species had a purpose of its own to fulfill, and fulfilling it was justice and his means to happiness. In this view, man and his social world were also part of nature, but not like the other animals--the exact purpose of man was debated, but there was no confusion over whether the purpose of a man was the same as the purpose of a turkey.

Then one day, magazine journalism appeared on the scene. Just kidding, that comes later. One day Darwin appeared on the scene. He proposed a new understanding of natural law, by which he either meant or was taken to mean, 'what the animals do.' In this view of nature, men and turkeys do have the same purpose--to reproduce as many copies of themselves as they can. Suddenly, people who had always been chafing under all the rules that civilization called for began to feel a certain nostalgia for savanna life. The savanna--not the city--was the new natural state, and therefore the good state. Let us look to the savanna to show us how to live well (and procreate more), they decided. What are the chimps up to these days?

Turns out the chimps (and the dogs and the birds and the spiders) were up to a bunch of really weird stuff. Some of them were polygamous, some of them lived in packs and shared everything equally, some of them killed enemies and sexual rivals in bloody competitions. (Some of them also ate their babies and bit off the heads of their mates and generated new limbs when the old ones fell off, but man has decided to hold off on incorporating these behaviors into the human canon of natural conduct.) At the same time as his discovery that animals did barbaric things which some humans were also capable of, man discovered that animals also did some things only people were thought to do. They communicated with each other and nurtured babies, for example. On all essential grounds, they were just like us, except with different plumage. And if that's true, then what's good enough for the turkey is good enough for man. It was uncanny how some animal behaviors overlapped with various human social theories being advanced at the time. THEN came magazine journalism.

The popularizers of science--themselves as susceptible to falling short of excellence as the rest of us--examined the new, more optimistic thinking about the savanna and found justification for nearly every misbehavior in which they would have liked to engage. Hey, forcing women into sex by violent coercion? They do it on the savanna! Leaving the weak members of the herd out to die, or just outright killing and eating them? Done on the savanna! Rule by force, strength, and pointiest teeth? Savanna! Adultery? Pretty much the most popular activity on the savanna! Dishonesty, theft, assault--all natural! We should try it! The rule of law and the pursuit of justice--um have you ever seen turkeys abiding by that? Negative!

The result was the blossoming of a genre of popular writing that justified such arguments as 'men are aggressive and hierarchical,' 'marriage is obsolete,' 'poor people deserve it,' 'the ill and disabled people are weighing society down' (and a whole host of other transparently eugenic claims like the last) by pointing to animals and saying, 'See, it's true on the savanna. Evolution made us this way. It's natural.' Therefore, we should believe, ideal and just. Another recent addition to the savanna enthusiast's oeuvre is neuroscientific research about "brain wiring," which locates the gifts handed down to us from the turkeys even closer than the actual savanna.

The result has been, well, Roissy and his cult of alpha-male aspirants, and also this view

...Men’s genes program them to seek many mates and try to monopolize the reproductive lives of those mates; think of the manners of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints sect’s sprawling compound in Texas, in which the older men ran the younger men off and had as many of the girls--as young as 14--as they wanted.

On the savanna, apparently, everyone is a Mormon. Poor Phillip Weiss is getting left out of the polygamous, pedophilic compound of nature, stuck with a sagging wife whom he leans on to perform such essential tasks for him as "manag[ing his] social calendar," though he would much rather be having sex with poor but hot young women, which he hopes will be easier once he launches his campaign to "encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option." Do try to contain your tears of sympathy.

But lest you think that the savanna fuels only male sexual fantasy, this should set you straight:

As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.

This apparently justifies the author's adultery, because marriage is not practiced on the savanna, and neither is two-parent child-raising. Tsing-Loh was only behaving according to nature when she cheated on her husband, while the rest of us out here in retrograde civilization-land insist on making ourselves miserable by refusing to model our lives on those of gorillas, and believing that the move from living like gorillas to living like humans was a basically positive step and should be sustained.

While we are often quite happy to accept the savanna excuse for bad social and especially sexual behavior, Cheryl points out, we have yet to employ evolution to excuse things like purse-snatching and people-killing. Weird, because the savanna has no problem with these things either. As evidenced by centuries of human behavior, we have evolved just as much predisposition to steal and kill as to commit adultery and feel repulsed by the weak and unattractive. But only the latter two find defenders on savanna grounds. Maybe it's just because our hankering to return to the savanna has not reached its zenith yet, but maybe we still kind of see how man is not exactly a turkey and would not be happier living like one. So we still accept that some human rules and institutions are good or even, some might say, natural, even though none of the plants and animals we know seem to share them.

This is wholly inconsistent. The savanna is a great place, people! Constant, no-strings attached sex for the having (as long as you can get enough food to survive)! All your illicit proclivities--totally acceptable (if you can kill whomever is in your way)! No one to judge your life choices or, equally bad, punish you for them (except, sometimes, by eating you)! Let's go there, but not halfway there--all the way there.

I, for one, am sharpening my teeth as I type.