The illusion of comedy?

[Halfglass]

There is a species of chimps (Bolo? chimps) I saw a program on the other night. This species, unlike any other ape, walks upright for long distances (to carry food) and has sex for fun (even when the females aren't in heat). They also do an odd thing, when they encounter natural wonders (at least to them) like a waterfall, they shout and clamor and dance--all the while mesmerized by the thing...they "worship" it. They also do something one might imagine an early hominid doing. When there's danger, or when there MIGHT be danger, each member will use certain sounds to let the rest know that they haven't determined whats happening yet. When it turns out to be a harmless gazelle, they have an "all clear" signal. -------------------------------------------------------------Now follow me on this one...A joke, as told by a human, works because we're led down a path of logic by the teller of the joke to sense the outcome. When the outcome isn't the same as the one we were expecting, but still logically attaches itself to the ending of the story/joke, we laugh. Laughter is contagious--just like the warning of an approaching lion would have to be, in order for the whole troop of hominids to understand the "all clear--what we thought was a lion was only a gazelle! Yay!"(laughter...)----------------------------------------------------------------------------------When it comes down to it, intellectualism may be the biggest encumbrance to western humanity's failure to enter the shaman's world or mindset. People seeking answers through psychedelics (it seems to me--and I'm guilty too don't get me wrong) are consistently returning from the experience having never really taken a backflip into the abstract and remain unwilling to except that their underlying self is a very different thing than they'd like it to be.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(One day, when humans are gone, the chimps will invent religion and one of their priests, for all his preaching on the evils of the old Bolo's way of having sex for fun, and being secretly afraid of intimacy himself, must at some point lay hold of an issue of "Playchimp" and retire to his quarters for a putty-slinging inevitability.)-------------------------------------------What am I saying? Oh yeah. The Unknown (death or purpose) may very well not include what our sense of self can imagine--if we continue to disallow mystery. And for real "answers" (this is what we're about here right?) we might have to shed MOST of ourselves. But nobody is really looking into that. We can talk about Mckenna's time theories, but who is going in to the psychedelic and reporting what THEY are finding out about time (I have experienced "proof" for myself that time is not real--really!--but that's another story).-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Jimmy Hendrix said "Have you ever been experienced?" I'm saying: "Have you really allowed yourself to be shattered--and allowed yourself to understand that many of the broken pieces are you, but not necessarily important to the unflinching TRUTH?"

[ March 24, 2003, 01:56 PM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[Hazz]

I think you raise a good point about the fact that alot of what we do and say, is programmed into us and we don't recognize it. (You might want to post this at Ayahuasca.com, they'd probably get into this over there.)

[Halfglass]

LOL. It's cool. By writing it down I concentrate it for future conversations and such, whatever the response here.

[ April 10, 2003, 08:49 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[daniel]

I think the apes you are referring to are the Bonobos. Years ago, I reviewed a book, "Demonic Males: Apes and the origins of human violence," all about the bonobos and the chimps, for The Washington Post.

Here is that review:

Men, Monkeys And Mayhem
By Daniel Pinchbeck
Sunday, November 17, 1996

DEMONIC MALES: Apes and
the Origins of Human Violence
By Richard Wrangham and Dale
Peterson
Houghton Mifflin. 350 pp. $24.95

Wars, genocides, rapes and riots are the unhappy legacy of human history, activities seemingly coded into human nature itself. Can anything interrupt this seemingly endless cycle of victims and victimizers?

According to Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, evolutionary biologists and the authors of Demonic Males, the answer to that question lies several million years in the past, when humans distinguished themselves from their nearest primate relatives, taking their tentative first steps out of the African jungle on the way to language, culture and the atomic bomb.

As Demonic Males reveals, human beings and chimpanzees are more than just country cousins. The DNA of humans is 99 percent identical to that of chimpanzees. We are, in fact, related more closely to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. According to the authors, chimpanzees and other ape species that seem to have changed little in 10 or even 15 million years can be viewed as "time machines," taking us back to the origins of behavior that we now consider uniquely human.

It was only 20 years ago when researchers learned that one aspect of this shared behavior is the proclivity of adult male chimps to attack, maim and kill other adult male chimpanzees whom they discover near their territory. Like gangsters during Prohibition or bounty hunters in the Wild West, male chimpanzees will organize raiding parties to seek out isolated members of other chimpanzee bands and then move in for the kill.

In ways that eerily suggest human behavior, life for male chimpanzees is a continual jockeying for status and power. The "alpha male" of any group gets the lion’s share of female attention as well as the grudging respect of his subordinates, who, like Brutus against Caesar, frequently plot for a way to turn the tables. Male chimpanzees also routinely batter females into submission, proving their sexual dominance through violent displays and occasional rapes.

This unpleasant legacy has left its mark on present-day humanity, where male demonism is still honored in the boxing ring as well as the corporate boardroom. Aggressive genetic strategies acquired over millions of years are slow to fade away. In the real world, the authors write, "the tough guy finds himself besieged with female admirers, while the self-effacing friend sadly clutches his glass of Chablis at the fern bar alone." Even the cheering of the masses at sports events or patriotic rallies can be connected to our primate inheritance, demonstrating the individual’s biologically determined readiness to sacrifice or extend himself for the greater social good.

Such male aggression has structured the lives of humans as well as chimpanzees for thousands of generations. Every human society has been patriarchal, with men retaining most of the dominant spots in the hierarchy and using their power to control women and annihilate their enemies. The authors regretfully dismiss the possibility of some
paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era or on a South Seas island, whether matriarchal or truly non-hierarchical and peaceful. Yet they do not believe that this means the future is a closed book. Evolution means continual adaptation and change, and the authors hold a rational faith that "to find a better world we must look not to a romanticized and dishonest dream forever receding into the primitive past, but to a future that rests on a proper understanding of ourselves."

However, it is in a vestige of that primitive past that the authors find what could be the key to a more harmonious human future. Living just across the Zaire River from their near relations, the chimpanzees, can be found the bonobo, a gentler, smarter and in every way better-mannered ape. According to the authors of Demonic Males, bonobos are the Barry Whites of the primate world, dedicating their lives to peace, love and, above all, sex. "Bonobos use sex for much more than making babies," the authors note. "They have sex as a way of making friends. They have sex to calm someone who is tense. They have sex as a way to reconcile after aggression." Like the members of some adventurous free love commune of the 1960s, bonobos have frequent homosexual sex and condone sex between adults and children. When a bonobo group meets a group of unknown bonobos, they generally mate and socialize with them rather than try to kill them.

Wrangham and Peterson theorize that slight changes in food sources and feeding patterns several million years ago allowed the bonobos to stay together in larger communities on their side of the river, unlike
chimpanzees, who must break off into small parties to hunt for their favorite fruit and meat sources. In these larger and more stable groups, female bonobos were able to form permanent social bonds and resist the aggressive urges of the males. Female bonobos evolved to hide their ovulation patterns, which put them more in control of their biological destinies and made it less clear to males when mating would lead to offspring.

The authors of Demonic Males suggest that, as it was with the bonobos, the potential for future human harmony lies in the increasing power of the female, something they see developing in the advanced Western democracies. Their perspective is ultimately an optimistic, feminist and liberal one. It is, of course, equally possible to imagine scientists with a more Machiavellian outlook arguing that our genes were designed to remain selfish, our appetites voracious, and our tendencies violent, but over that pessimistic stance I would choose Wrangham and Peterson’s outlook any day.

[daniel]

Interesting for me to reread this review now, post my shamanic-spiritual shift. Today I would put less emphasis on the genetics, and would not have written the following:

"Every human society has been patriarchal, with men retaining most of the dominant spots in the hierarchy and using their power to control women and annihilate their enemies."

The evidence from Catal Huyuk and elsewhere suggests an earlier epoch of matriarchial goddess-worshipping civilizations.

[sidecross]

McKenna, if alive today, would speak up for a time preceding Catal Huyuk when a mushroom orientated human society prospered. It was a society where male paternal lines of ancestry where either unknown or paid little or no attention too

McKenna would also twinkle about the “ first drug bust”; that it would be the tempting of the forbidden fruit (of knowledge) by a woman.

[Halfglass]

Thanks. Yes it was the bonobo chimp. I agree--by recognizing that some of our behaviors are rooted in generations of conditioning, perhaps we're not a hopeless wonder of nature after all.