Dave Hill
BODY LANGUAGE
Sorry to bring this up, but I think I’ve got a problem with mating. The thing is, since taking up with my partner five years ago, she is the only female I’ve managed to impregnate. True, I’ve done it twice, but if I’m to maximise my chances of generating offspring that survive and thrive, I should be putting it about more. And that’s my problem. I don’t want to get any other women pregnant. Is there something wrong with me? Is my male programming faulty?
Before anyone starts wondering if they’re reading some weird hybrid of New Scientist and Loaded, let me reassure you I’m simply reflecting on evolutionary psychology – the new black of science fashion. Its findings have been popularised in books, in television series and by star proselytisers such as the American Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works, and Helena Cronin of the London School of Economics (LSE). Final proof that it has gone big time is the publication of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology. Co-written by Dylan Evans, a research student at the LSE, it’s a beginners’ guide, complete with cartoons. So what’s it all about?
Evolutionary psychology is a combination of cognitive psychology and the evolutionary biology pioneered by Charles Darwin. It claims to explain many aspects of human behaviour, but the area that gets most attention is male-female relations. In other words, sex. It is pivotal to evolutionary psychology that humans’ sexual behaviour is motivated by the drive to reproduce. Both sexes, it is argued, have an interest in mating with a range of partners because doing so increases their chance of passing on their genes via healthy children. But men want to do it more often than women because in the distant past – so distant that the pill hadn’t been invented – the consequences for them were far less awkward than for women.
Evolutionary theory contends that to find out why, we need to travel back a few million years. Hence a cavewoman who laid a flighty, scrawny, short-sighted caveman might end up feeling fat and lousy for nine months, then have to give birth to some feeble specimen who wouldn’t spot an approaching mammoth until it was too late. The caveman, meanwhile, could just pursue someone else. So, the theory goes, men’s and women’s minds evolved in different ways.
>From this, thousands of women might wearily conclude that not a lot has changed. But even my crude summation makes it easy to see how the increasing credibility of evolutionary psychology may have serious implications for those of us concerned with gender justice. For example, if men and women are innately given to different sexual behaviour, where does this leave the feminist contention that such conduct results not from differing biological impulses but from patriarchal, social pressures on women not to practise sexual choice?
And what about its thesis on sexual attraction? Men, it seems, have always been attracted to women whose waist measurement is seven-tenths that of their hips because, deep in our psyches, we believe such women are more fertile. As for women, they go for men with money because that means they’ll be better protected.
On the face of it, such claims provide ammunition for conservative campaigns around such vital gender issues as sexual freedom, family life and the “gender gap” in work and education. So how can evolutionary psychology be a force for progress? Evans says there could be a new “Darwinian feminism” which “faces up” to the fact that women do some things differently for evolutionary reasons and so their best interests may not always be served by struggling for equality with men. “It may be that the desire for more stable families and greater equality in work are not compatible,” he says. “It might be better to have some sort of trade-off so the world of work is organised to suit the different needs of women and men.”
To some, such words will sound similar to those used by the conservative campaigners. Yet they also sound at least superficially consistent with those strands of feminism that argue men and women are indeed different in fundamental ways which should not be diminished.
Germaine Greer is among these “essentialists”. Her last book, The Whole Woman, is constructed largely upon her rejection of the notion of equality in favour of the goal of liberation. “Liberation struggles,” she writes, “are not about assimilation but about asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self- determination.”
Is it impossible to square Greer’s position with the kinds of social initiatives Evans suggests? If not, what happens next? Could the new Darwinians and stalwarts of the “sex war” find they are marching hand in hand? Could the next big idea for this time of sexual turmoil define progress as a struggle not to acknowledge gender likeness but to instigate a more equitable balance of difference?
I would have misgivings: whose political interests would be served? Wouldn’t it turn out to be just another way of justifying sex discrimination? As for evolutionary psychology itself, I can’t see that it tells us much about gender relations in the modern age, even if its science is flawless. But one thing is for certain: it’s not going away.
@More (or less) than a memoir
Ivor Powell
NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS by Desmond Tutu (Rider)
The blurb to No Future Without Forgiveness describes the book as a personal memoir of chairing South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is that. The book traces Desmond Tutu’s experiences of, and thoughts about, the TRC process; it recalls Tutu’s encounters with victims and perpetrators and the leaders of the old and the new South Africa; it records his horror at the revelations that were brought before the commission, and his joy at the moments of transcendent and redemptive humanity that he, the former archbishop, witnessed from the chair.
But it is also a lot more – and maybe less – than just a memoir.
Especially as the TRC progressed from its inception to the publication of its report in late 1998, Tutu (already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate) emerged as a figure of moral authority whose only equal in recent South African history is the former president Nelson Mandela. But if Mandela – in the symbolic and near mythological scheme of things in the great transition – was the constructive spirit of the new South Africa, Tutu was the personification of its conscience.
It is wearing this hat – or should that be mitre? – that Tutu has sat down to record his experiences of the TRC. Throughout, though he wears his own moral authority lightly, he grapples with the big moral issues raised in the commission.
Every thing and every event is passed through the prism of Tutu’s overwhelming concern for moral and, above all, redemptive significance.
Many of the big stories of the TRC testimony are retold in brutal and more-or- less unflinching detail. The murder of Durban activist Griffiths Mxenge by former Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee and three askaris; the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela hearings; the Pebco Three; Steve Biko; the burning of the body of murdered activist Sizwe Kondile while his murderers braaied nearby, to name just a few.
But Tutu seldom dwells on the horror, and when he does it is not for the visceral sake of the horror, but to recall what he touchingly terms “God’s sorrow” at man’s inhumanity to man. For the most part he is happier to recall the moments of forgiveness, those testimonies in which remorse on the part of perpetrators or forgiveness on the part of victims came to the fore.
What it makes for is a book that, though it is not unengaging, is a whole lot worthier than it is either entertaining or insightful. You can accept that he believes a lot of the preachier things he says, for instance that “to forgive is not just to be altruistic, it is the best form of self-interest”. Even so, as mortals, it is hard to avoid a certain impatience with some of the familiar Tutu mantras, like the notion of ubuntu, which he invokes at regular intervals throughout the book.
Ubuntu for Tutu is the central guiding “characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence”. His thesis in No Future Without Forgiveness is above all that the TRC’s reconciliation was about the “restorative justice”, the “healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships” that is implicit in the notion.
So far so good. Only, if he is to avoid being accused of a humanity so resolute it verges on the perverse, he will have to give a better account of phenomena like the Rwanda genocide than to merely acknowledge, sadly, that it happened.
Equally, it is hard to take merely at face value such illustrations of the spirit of ubuntu as the conciliatory attitudes expressed by Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe on independence. And then?
But for all his occasional unworldliness, Tutu has written a book that, in its attempt to find meanings and, even more importantly, conscience in the appalling materials of the TRC can justly be described as important – a document to supplement the giant report over which its author presided.