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Keith
Hudson:
"Now that even language differences between man
and other primates, such as bonobo chimpanzees, are not so sharp as thought
hitherto, what is emerging as probably our only unique characteristic as a
species is man's ability to trade."
My response:
Hmmm. Trade may be
important, but so is language. It may be a matter of degree, but our
command of, and ability to use, language is far greater than that of any other
primate group. We not only use language to communicate
locally (apparently Chimps and Bonobos
also do that to some extent) but also globally and intergenerationally. We
not only communicate verbally, but also musically and artistically.
Perhaps other species do that too, but not nearly as well as we
do.
I wonder about species other than
primates. When I was a student in my early twenties, I spent my
summers working on the log booms in upcoast British Columbia. There was a
continuous din coming from ravens in the nearby woods. They were very
adept at playing tricks on us. If someone left his lunch unguarded near a
boom shack, a couple of ravens would try to distract us, while another would
sneak in behind us and steal the lunch. It didn't take us long to catch
on, but I'd suggest that what the ravens were demonstrating was the ability to
hatch plots and carry them out cooperatively. It must have begun with one
telling the others "Hey guys, see that lunch down there? Here's how we get
it." I also saw several other examples of coordinated group behaviour that
must have depended on conscious communication, but I won't go into that for the
moment. My general conclusion was that the din coming from the woods was
not just random meaningless noise. It was communication.
Perhaps trading over long distances
is something that is unique to us as a species. However, another argument
is now emerging that is far more sinister. It is that, among all species,
we are uniquely destructive. We not only have a longstanding track record
of being very destructive of our environment, we destroy that environment to the
point of making it uninhabitable. This is the argument that Jared Diamond
presents us with in "Collapse" and Ronald Wright in his very pointed "A Short
History of Progress". Yet we not only have the capacity to destroy our
existing environment, we also have the capacity to move onto a new one.
Following this argument, the transition from hunting and gathering to farming
may not have happened because farming represented an easier way of life.
It may have happened because the species that could be hunted had been
destroyed. Perhaps people moved into towns and cities because agricultural
lands, being denuded by overuse, could no longer sustain them.
However, once a large number of people were off the land, it was able to rebound
and provide the surplus that, for a time, could support the cities.
In the cities, we've continued to
move into new environments, but essentially artificial ones we've created, like
the industrial environment of manufacturing age, the services environment and
most recently the high technology environment. All of this has moved
us from localism to globalism and the ability to support huge populations.
However, what we may not be giving sufficient attention to is the finite nature
of the resources we have to work with. While our numbers and capabilities
have grown enormously over the millenia, the resources that this island in space
was endowed with have been greatly reduced since we started using them up
- essentially destroying them - a very long time ago. And we are
now running out of some that are critical to our continuity.
It does make on wonder where we go
next. A couple of high points of my life have been spending a month in the
seedier parts of two very large cities, Moscow with a population of about 14
million and Sao Paulo with a population of about 20 million. Both cities
had grown very rapidly, Moscow largely because of the need for a huge
bureaucracy to operate the command and control economy of the Soviet system and
Sao Paulo largely because of the mechanization of the huge plantations of the
Brazilian countryside. When I was in Moscow in 1995, the need for a huge
bureaucracy had evaporated with the Soviet system and the quality and morality
of life were in severe decline. Sao Paulo in 1997 was
different. The quality of life was not high but its morality still was;
people had a very strong sense of looking after each other. They had
brought that with them from the countryside. Yet given the precariousness
of so huge a population with so little to sustain it, one really had to wonder
how long things could continue as they were. Gangs and mafias had already
formed around the drug trade, and shootouts with the police were
commonplace.
The logical course to take is not
to repeat the mistakes of the past, but it seems that another characteristic
that defines us as a species is that we are unable to do that.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 3:01
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Man's two
worlds
736. Man's two worlds
Now that even
language differences between man and other primates, such as bonobo
chimpanzees, are not so sharp as thought hitherto, what is emerging as
probably our only unique characteristic as a species is man's ability to
trade. Evidence of the trading of ornaments and pigments between normally
antagonistic scavenger/hunter-gatherer groups of early man goes back to at
least 65,000 BC. Future discovery of early sites by archaeologists will
probably push this date back even further.
Trading between groups
probably arose because of the need for genetic intermixing, in order to avoid
excessive concentration of harmful genes in any one group.
In the case
of the other primates it is normally the case that the young post-puberty
males leave the group and become mature adults in small bachelor gangs. These
bachelors then break their way forcibly into other groups in order to be
chosen by the females and thus have sex. This phenomemon is called
matrilocalism -- that is, the females stay in the group in which they
were born and were raised.
In the case of man, the opposite applies. We
are a patrilocal spcies. In almost all societies yet observed, with
very few exceptions in unusual circumstances, it is the females who leave
their family or their group in order to find their future spouse. This has
even emerged today in developed countries where, since the legal equalisation
of women, no longer oppressed as in previous agricultural times, girls are now
forging ahead of boys at school and university in order to find better jobs
and more chance of finding husbands who offer the economic security needed to
raise children.
But back to trading: Why should man have developed
this behaviour while the other primates didn't? It is my guess that, with
larger brains -- more precisely, larger frontal lobes -- man was more
adventurous and capable of fending for himself in the open savannahs of Africa
with very few trees available to be climbed for safety when attacked by
predators. However, because this was a more dangerous habitat than his
predecessors' existence on the margins of the rain forests, then even bachelor
groups would have found this too dangerous.
But if a mutation occurred
in some groups where the post-puberty girls were more inclined to wander then
these wandering girl-groups, being physically smaller and less strong than
bachelor males would have been in greater peril. Unless, instead, they were
directly exchanged between groups when the groups met occasionally at
territorial boundaries! But what would have happened if there had been -- as
one would normally expect -- a sexual imbalance between the sexes of the two
groups? It is not too much to speculate that other prized goods would have
been used as a "balance of trade" between two groups.
We can still see
the original direct linkage between sex and trade in the form of dowries which
still obtains in many more "primitive" societies, such as in the agricultural
areas of Asia, Africa and South America. Indeed, it is not too much to suppose
that the surge of young Saudi Arabian suicide bombers flowing into Iraq is
primarily caused because millions of young males in Saudi Arabia are totally
without jobs and cannot ever save enough money to buy themselves a wife. Thus
they are easily manipulated into believing that their plight is due to other
causes.
Man, unlike all other primates, lives in two worlds it appears.
Firstly, there is the usual bitter antagonism between adjacent groups, each
defending its territory and mode of economic survival. This survives today in
the form of modern nation-states, each with its own armed forces, and each
with a strictly defined territorial boundary. At the same time, the culture of
trading still runs strong by which the goodies of one country can be exchanged
for the goodies of another.
Yet the temptation to take the goodies of
another country by force is always present. So we have paradoxical behaviours
going on between nation-states with wars very frequent between those without
nuclear bombs. On the one hand, politicians -- often urged on by their
"military-industrial complex" (to use the phrase of President Eisenhower) --
constantly make aggressive noises against politicians in other nations. On the
other hand, many other inhabitatns are quietly trading across their
territorial boundaries.
Thus, at one and the same time, we have the US
Congress and the US Treasury Secretary making aggressive noises about China
while tens of thousands of American firms are investing and setting up
operations in China, and --so far -- hundreds of Chinese firms are investing
and setting up operations in the US. And, be it noted, half the "Chinese"
profits that Congress is shouting about -- at the expense of America, they
suppose -- are, in fact, profits of American firms in China!
I'm
minded of this when reading an account of a CNN broadcast in China on the
occasion of the Global Forum of the world's largest and most powerful firms
meeting in Beijing and hosted by the American magazine Fortune. This is
an entirely different scene from that in the Senate where some Congressmen are
going apoplectic about the Chinese and wanting to raise tariffs against
Chinese-made goods even though ordinary Americans will have to pay
more!
It 's a curious world -- and a dual one as between the militant
nation-state and the trading corporations. Which will win? Without a doubt,
the traders will win. Developed nation-states, becoming increasingly top-heavy
with bureaucrats and too expensive armaments, are all now going bankrupt and
cannot support their inhabitants with the care and welfare that have been
promised. (Nor can developed countries recruit enough young men into their
full-time armies these days.) Nation-states will not collapse totally, of
course, but they are atrophying badly at the moment and have hardly a
promising future unless they develop new and less costly methods of
governance.
Whereas, among commercial corporations, where bankruptcy
is the norm for those that can't cut it, the more successful and adept will
continue to survive. And they are interested in the ordinary customer just as
much as, if not more than, governments are interested in the voter -- that is,
roughly half their people at the present time, but reducing year by year. And
corporations are interested in all potential customers in order to maximise
profits. Unfortunately, not all potential customers can afford the goodies on
offer because nation-states so arrange their taxation schedules so that the
poorest always pay a higher rate of tax than the rich, and the very richest,
of course, can get away tax-free by employing cleverer accountants and lawyers
than governments can afford.
Keith
Hudson
<<<<
CHINA RISING
Beijing -- Following
BBC's Question Time program on China, CNN's celebrated senior
journalist Jim Clancy hosted a roundtable discussion about China's role in the
world called "CNN Connects China Rising" Tuesday in Beijing.
The
program featured a panel of distinguished speakers and a live studio audience
of 120 people, including some of the chiefs of global businesses, heads of
state, and leading thinkers, currently gathering in Beijing for the on-going
Fortune Global Forum.
"By airing the program, CNN deepens its
commitment to examining China's movements on the world stage, its impact on
Asian and neighboring countries," said Rena Golden, senior vice-president of
CNN International.
On the panel were heads of brand-name companies like
Irwin Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, Luc Vandevelde, chairman of
Carrefour, Peggy Yu, founder of Dangdang.com, the largest on-line bookstore,
and Li Shan, CEO of the Bank of China International Holdings. Clay Chandler,
Fortune Magazine Senior Writer, Robert Friedman, International Editor
of Fortune Magazine, Han Sung-Joo, Professor of Korea University, and
Wu Jianmin, President of the China Foreign Affairs University also attended
the roundtable discussion.
Participants debated on various subjects,
ranging from China's economic growth to China's foreign relations. Panelists
agreed that China's rise means more gain for the world, rather than fear.
Their consensus coincided with the result of an on-line poll by the CNN.com.
Answering the question of "Does the world have more to gain or more to fear
from the emergence of China as an economicpower?" 69 percent of voters voted
for "more to gain" while 31 percent voted for "more to fear" at CNN's website,
according to Clancy.
With China set to become the world's largest
economy by mid-century, and with its international influence on the rise, CNN
is airing a unique week of live and special features from Beijing, named "Eye
on China".From May 14 to 22, "Eye on China" will give CNN audiences in more
than 200 countries and regions a comprehensive look inside China, one of the
world's fastest growing economies. The coverage will focus on China's swiftly
evolving role in global politics and business, and the impact of the country's
rapid modernization on its people and culture.
"A team of award-winning
journalists have traveled from the United States and Hong Kong to join
Beijing-based correspondents for the week of "Eye on China" coverage, which
aims to give our viewers a greater understanding of the many complex issues
facing modern China," said Golden.
Xinhuanet -- 17 May
2005
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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