Category: News and reviews

Shamanic residues in medieval Europe: a review of Ginzburg’s Ecstasies

 

In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989, tr. Raymond Rosenthal 1991, University of Chicago Press), Carlo Ginzburg argues that the practices of medieval witches in Europe, as testified to in the documentary evidence compiled by their persecutors, can best be understood in the light of shamanistic belief systems inherited or borrowed in ancient times from the central Asian steppe.

The work is certainly a tour de force, with an extraordinary breadth of reference, and it brings many interesting elements to light which on the whole support the author’s thesis. Nevertheless, there seem to me to be a number of problems of methodology and certainly a great deal of material (some of it, admittedly, unavailable to him) which Ginzburg does not employ and which deserve further consideration in a more complete reconstruction of the historical links between the phenomena in question. In this review I will therefore try to summarize Ginsburg’s argument as I see it, whilst attempting at the same time to suggest further avenues of research or alternative understandings.

The principal difficulty Ginzburg encounters, it seems to me, is a failure properly to delimit what he sees as the “shamanic” elements from other pagan traditions. The book lacks a framework interpreting the place of properly shamanic elements in ancient religion, whether it be Greek or Celtic. That Celtic religion and certain Greek and Roman ecstatic cults may owe a lot to shamanic precursors is easy to acknowledge, but these cults and others then took on a life of their own which is certainly more directly relevant to the phenomena we encounter in medieval Europe. This layer is absent or assumed away in Ginzburg’s account, making to my mind for a considerable amount of speculation and confusion.

This is evident for example in his account of the reconstructed prototype of the shamanic journey to the “world of the dead”. This concept is indeed reminiscent of the somewhat sinister reinterpretation of the underworld in Greek religion and may represent an Indo-European type (borrowed into Christianity in medieval times only as the notion of purgatory); but it is certainly far removed from the understanding which would have characterized, and still characterizes to this day, nomadic shamanism in central Asia. The same is true of blood sacrifices, which cross-culturally characterize organized religion, but not shamanic practice. The same is true of sexual specialization in the ritual context. Many elements present in the strata uncovered by Ginzburg are therefore more suggestive of survivals of Indo-European religion (that is, of the religion of settled agricultural societies) than of shamanism as such. This would have benefited from clarification and greater rigor.

Ginzburg’s treatment of the role of psychoactive substances in medieval witchcraft appears as much of an afterthought, as a result of which he forgoes a number of interesting lines of enquiry. Drawing substantially on Eliade, he certainly sees the witches’ flight as a phenomenon experienced in a state of shamanic ecstasy, but there is little on how this state might have been induced and what there is draws heavily on Wasson’s identification of the soma with Amanita muscaria and on the disputed theory that the Eleusinian mysteries were fuelled by consumption of ergot. There is plenty else which may seem more persuasive, from the likely use of anticholinergic plants such as Atropa belladonna to the well-known affinity of witches for toads, snakes, serpents and spiders, all of which are known to have psychoactive components in their venoms and were gaily thrown into the cauldron as part of the witches’ brew. In Slovenia, it appears, live salamanders are used to this day in the process of fabricating a psychoactive eau de vie. This rather obvious connection is inexplicably neglected, even as Ginzburg himself furnishes important evidence in support such as the likely derivation of Italian rospo, toad, from Lat. haruspex, a type of sorcerer.

The picture Ginzburg paints implies a great deal of accommodation of traditional practices by the church up until the threshold of the Renaissance. These were of course, at times, given a superficial Christian dress; but it seems that they also often remained anchored within a pre-Christian (or para-Christian) worldview. The Celtic cult of Epona therefore persisted in various guises, as did Greco-Roman cults of Diana/Artemis and Hera, fused by the Inquisitors into the figure of “Herodias”. The cult of Isis, absorbed into that of the Madonna, might also be mentioned. The reasons for the apparent change in attitude on the part of the church at the time of the persecutions are not evoked; doubtless one should interpret these developments, however, as a reaction to the threat of loss of temporal power by the church due to the same encroachments of modernity – the Italian renaissance in particular – which later led to the protestant reformation. Ginzburg does not make the point, but the reasons why the traditional beliefs would have remained vibrant are not hard to identify: Christianity was unconcerned with worldly health and well-being, leaving many popular needs unsatisfied. Small wonder that mediums, soothsayers and healers occupied a fundamental spiritual niche in society (they have never ceased to do so to this day). The challenges of uncertain harvests and the ravages of the plague also necessitated intermediation with cosmic forces which the organized church could not offer. It is highly unlikely that this was ever even conceived of as a problem until the church sought to leverage its spiritual power behind the consolidation of its temporal influence and the enterprise of the crusades.

Ginzburg sets considerable store by the widespread mythological theme of lameness or loss of one shoe on the part of figures considered to occupy a shamanic vocation. This part of his reasoning is convincing, but surprisingly he has no interpretation of its actual meaning. It is, however, difficult to resist the hypothesis that the wearing of a single shoe symbolized the position of the shaman-priest as a walker or intercessor between worlds.

Certain elements which presumably survived into Greco-Roman, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic religion nevertheless do seem specifically to evoke themes found in central Asian and Siberian shamanism but which are not, according to current understanding, thought of as shamanic universals. The use of animal mounts or the metamorphosis into animal form in order to undertake the shamanic journey is the most persuasive of these, as it is distinct from the more auxiliary role of spirit animals in the New World traditions. A further interesting commonality is the widespread notion identified by Ginzburg in Eurasian traditions that the spirits can resurrect animals and people from their bones, which recalls Harner’s account of ecstatic dismemberment as characterizing the shamanic vocation (and may offer a bridge to animal or even human sacrifice). Other themes found in the European witch cults and in shamanism more generally are shamanic election with the concomitant inability to refuse the vocation and the ministry of depossession as well as intervention in climatic phenomena and psychopomp activity. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, practised a form of sweat lodge in which hemp seeds were thrown on the hot rocks; certain archeological discoveries seem to support this account. Lastly, the use of the drum to induce ecstasy seems to be attested in Ginzburg’s sources, though it is far from clear how material an element it was.

Ginzburg, then, has done enough to convince us that elements of nomadic shamanistic beliefs persisted into the folk traditions of medieval Europe, although it is not entirely clear how the thinks that this has happened (in the book, the notion that there may actually exist a parallel reality the substance of which explains structural convergences cross-culturally is not even entertained; at best he allows that this may be explained by the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious). That we may be less historically estranged from these traditions than we thought we were may be an abiding legacy of his work. It nevertheless is at best suggestive, leaving much unsaid. Despite his impressive scholarship, it seems certain that there is ample evidence yet to be considered in order to give a more complete account of medieval European folk religion and its immediate and more distant antecedents.

The twin errors of “Sex at Dusk”

For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.

What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.

The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.

This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.

The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.

I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.

Note

* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).

PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…

Proof of Heaven?

pohOn a recent trip to Germany, I picked up a copy of Eben Alexander’s bestselling book Proof of Heaven, an account of what he claims was a near-death experience which he underwent while in coma. It turns out the book has been more than controversial: he has not only been roundly criticized by materialists (masquerading as scientists) but also (surprise, surprise) by a bunch of Christian fundamentalist zealots, disturbed that the picture Alexander paints of the afterlife does not fully accord with their biblicist preconceptions.

This is a book which certainly has its faults. Trivially, it is not a proof of anything: Alexander’s experience cannot be repeated nor can it be falsified; it can only be taken on trust. Hence the precipitation to impugn his character. I find these attempts (which will cost you $1.99 just to read) unconvincing and beside the point. Alexader’s experiences, in so far as they are laid out in the book, are of limited intrinsic interest and scope – what is of interest is the fact that he had them, and not, beyond some general features, what they were. He had to make a book out of it, and accordingly most of the book is more of a dramatic retelling of the facts surrounding his falling into coma and emerging from it, rather than what he experienced when he was there. Apart from the fact that the end is preannounced, he makes a fair job of it: it is quite readable, and this is hardly a flaw. Towards the end of the book, he starts unfortunately to belabor endlessly his rather simple message, and this becomes irritating. But so much for the literary critique.

What Alexander describes is hardly surprising to anyone with a knowledge of the literature on near-death experiences (what he elsewhere calls “non-local consciousness”) and on reincarnation. If the purpose is to get a feel for what these experiences look like, other sources would offer a much better comparative overview. Indeed, Alexander’s own account is rather obviously colored by his cultural and religious environment; this is perhaps inevitable but underlines that a cross-cultural approach would be more scientifically interesting.

Alexander goes to inadequate lengths to avoid giving the impression that what was surprising to him necessarily should be to anyone else. I did not find his account surprising in the least. Nor do I lay much importance by the question of whether his neo-cortex was or was not incapacitated throughout the experience. I do not at all see why this should be critical and I believe experiences that multitudes of people have had under the influence of entheogenic substances – or for that matter in dreams, shamanic journeys or waking reality – have plenty in common with his own. This hardly invalidates his experience, rather the reverse. I do not think there is any “scientific” explanation for the content, or even fact, of any of these other experiences either. All such “explanations” fall well short of capturing the subjective intensity of the experiences in question.

Ultimately, I see little reason why someone disinclined to believe in the possibility of consciousness existing apart from the brain, and not knowing him personally, would be swayed by Alexander’s account. Nevertheless, I certainly wish him well in trying to move mentalities in that direction. His story, in isolation, is hardly the dynamite for the materialist worldview which he makes it out to be.

Its true power, which he does not mention at all, lies elsewhere. Even if it features pastors and prayer groups, even if he is moved to tears by the eucharist, it still does not accord with the primitive, brutalist worldview of Christian (or any other) fundamentalists. Imagine this: God is unconditional love. Yes, you read that right: unconditional. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian or Jew, it doesn’t matter if you believe in a salvation history or do good works, you are loved unconditionally.

That sort of puts a spanner in the business model of all those whose value proposition depends on helping you negotiate God’s favor in the afterlife.

And on this key point, anyone whatsoever who has ever had any genuine spiritual experience – including those who would rather avoid the term of God like me – knows that Alexander is absolutely right.

I guess it’s just a technicality that this is not a proof of heaven.

The neuroscience of fear

Continuing my interest in the neuroscience of emotion, I recently finished reading neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s book “The Emotional Brain”(*). This is a quick review and synopsis, in particular of those points relevant to psychotherapy.

LeDoux is one of the best known figures in the field, alongside Antonio Damasio, whose work I have also delved into, but found rather indigestible. Although I found Ledoux more readable than Damasio, I have two major gripes with the book. The main one is the title: there is not a lot in the book about emotions in general; Ledoux rapidly zeroes in on the single emotion of fear, which is his area of specialism. On this subject he is relatively enlightening, but it wasn’t what I expected or hoped for. In addition, some of the statements he does make about emotions in general, even if they may apply to fear are not obviously true of all emotions.

Additionally, the blurb suggests a book which is highly readable, but I did not find this to be really the case. It’s fairly readable, but has a tendency, especially in the later chapters, to get lost in detail. I would say it is not ideally pitched to the non-specialist reader (though likely at the same time to be oversimplified for a specialist), and does not belong to the best in science writing. Having been written in 1998, it is of course also somewhat dated by now, though I have not come across anything more recent.

LeDoux argues convincingly – but it is not very surprising – that there is no single “emotional system” in the brain, but we have to look at each emotion separately. As i said, he focuses on fear, which presumably is one of the easier emotions to study because it has a much longer evolutionary history than some of the “higher” emotions like love and joy which seem more particularly to relate to human experience. It is quite hard to read any conclusions across from fear to these other emotions.

LeDoux argues that we typically have little reliable insight into the factors which trigger our emotions, but a great tendency to make up stories about them and to believe in these stories. Indeed, we are unreliable in our reports of our emotional states as such. Emotions, unlike cognition, are intrinsically linked to the body and prompt bodily response; they evolved as “behavioral and physiological specializations” (p.40). The characteristic “feel” of emotions  reflect their different physiological signatures.

Emotions operate below the level of consciousness. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of “emotional priming” whereby the response to an explicit stimulus is influenced by a preceding stimulus the duration of which is too short for it to be captured in conscious memory (p.59). Mere exposure is sufficient; there is no need for any logical connection between the two stimuli.

The study of fear has, of course, a particular relevance to psychotherapy and some of LeDoux’s arguments bear consideration in this context, as he himself notes, though does little to develop. LeDoux argues that fear, and comparable emotions, are registered in the amygdala from where they govern programmed physiological reactions; at the same time there is a feedback loop to cognition which passes via the hippocampus. This latter circuit is obviously much more developed in humans than in lower mammals, but in all species it is notably asymmetric: the hippocampus, which is where new memories are created, has the equivalent of a broadband connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, but the available bandwidth is much less in the opposite direction. This, LeDoux argues, makes it difficult to reprogram the association made in the hippocampus between certain remembered events and the fear response. This sounds plausible, and may reflect experimental observations on the persistence of conditioned fear responses in rodents as well as the observed difficulties of therapy, but it is no more than suggestive of the conclusion which LeDoux draws.

Fear conditioning is the process which “turns meaningless stimuli into warning signs” (p.141). Some stimuli are preprogrammed: “laboratory-bred rats who have never seen a cat will freeze if they encounter one” (p.143). But most, of course, are learned. The simultaneous presence of two stimuli of which only one, the “unconditioned stimulus” (US) is intrinsically unpleasant is sufficient to form a link between them, on the basis of which the second or conditioned stimulus (CS) is subsequently sufficient to evoke the fear response, regardless of its intrinsic link to the US. This link is highly persistent and may indeed be impossible to forget completely even if, subsequently, no link between the stimuli is observed for a protracted period. The best that can be done is to extinguish it by presenting the CS repeatedly in the absence of the US, but there is always the risk of recurrence if relevant circumstances, such as re-exposure to the unconditioned stimulus, or simply a high level of ambient unrelated stress, arise. A CS may be almost anything: a place, a gesture, an expression, a tone of voice… Of course, the atomicity of these candidate stimuli is hard to determine : is being in exactly the same place necessary to evoke the conditioned response, or is it sufficient that a place bear some resemblance and, if so, in what respects?

In stressful situations, memory formation by the hippocampus is impaired. This would imply that traumatic events might not leave a memory trace, but still result in fear conditioning. In such cases, there may be no way to “reverse-engineer” the event out of the conditioned reaction. This has the clear implication that going after memories of traumatic events may be a fruitless strategy, and that resolution of trauma might happen without those underlying events ever being recalled, even if they occurred past the stage of childhood amnesia. However, the stress hormone cortisol has the opposite effect on the amygdala. Thus it is “completely possible that one might have poor conscious memory of a traumatic experience, but at the same time form very powerful implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p.245). At the same time, recreating the emotional state conditioned does facilitate recall of explicit memories (p.212).

LeDoux’s analysis of conditioning and memory therefore sheds some light on problems encountered in therapy and on effective therapeutic strategies. I learnt something from  this book, but I suspect that a general book on recent contributions of neuroscience to psychotherapy might have gotten me more rapidly to my goal.

———————————————–

(*) References are to the 1999 paperback edition published by Orion books.

Playing the Game: What Pick-Up Artists Do and Don’t Know about Human Nature

In recent months I have been renewing my acquaintance with some of the work of those writers and coaches which aim to help men get on dates with women, often known as “pick-up artists” or PUAs. When I first encountered the PUA subculture, about ten years ago, most of the writings were underground, self-published and reviewed only on similarly underground internet forums. Each of the big names had their admirers and detractors, and there was quite a personality cult around each of them and rivalry between them.

The scene started to grab public attention with the publication in 2005 of Neil Strauss‘s semi-autobiographical The Game. Strauss, then a journalist, initially entered the PUA world with the objective of writing about it, but got more sucked in than he expected. He now runs a dating school, Stylelife Academy, though he has also continued his writing career. I was introduced to Strauss through Chris Ryan‘s podcast Tangentially Speaking, and got curious enough to buy the book, which is not entirely a training manual and in fact quite a good read, not without some worthwhile philosophical reflections on the experiences which turned him from being an average guy (“AFC” or Average Frustrated Chump in the lingo) into a guy who could date celebrities with ease. I later went on to study some of the material in his sequel Rules of the Game, and some of the online courses of the Stylelife Academy, before discovering another coach, Nick Savoy of LoveSystems, author of the dating guide Magic Bullets. Savoy, a Harvard MBA graduate, took over from Strauss’s mentor, known by his pseudonym Mystery, and is probably the most prominent exponent of the field today.

I have no particular desire for a lifestyle involving the dating of endless streams of beautiful women – well no more than the next guy anyway 😉 – but the material attracted me nonetheless. Savoy, Strauss and others have gathered together material which can have a considerable impact on ones self-confidence, self-image, and life. Although the stress remains on dating, they are also aware of this wider dimension, without which the whole enterprise really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whilst some of the criticism has been predictable (claims that the material teaches men to manipulate women), the PUAs strongly defend their corner. This is material, they say, to make men into better men and therefore is good for women and men alike. Whilst individual cases may vary, on the whole this claim seems to me justified. A dating coach does not offer a complete program of personal self-transformation, but he certainly may help men to overcome one of their major self-esteem issues. And that is definitely a step in the right direction, as this article by a traveller on the PUA path shows.

The infant science of dating for men, it seems to me, has as much of the potential for self-transformation which Daniele Bolelli, in his poetic and provocative book The Way of the Warrior, ascribes to the martial arts. Bolelli argues that the martial arts offer a way for us to confront our fear of physical force being used against us, and, by means of this concrete channel, also a host of other, less tangible fears. The argument may be a little overstated, but it is clear that the dating arts, i.e. the art of erotic encounter, addresses another core fear which dominates the psyche of many men: that of being unattractive, rejected and abandoned by women. Facing your fears and the lies about yourself which you have absorbed is always a path to personal growth. Certainly, the PUA path, at least as currently articulated, also plays into other male fantasies of multiple, uncommitted sexual relationships and endless youth, and may, if reports are to be believed, enable those fantasies to be extended almost indefinitely; but that is no more a reason to reject this body of knowledge and the discipline that might attend it than the testosterone-soaked glorification of violence in certain martial arts circles is a reason to reject the martial arts themselves.

Unlike the martial arts, however, the dating arts are in their infancy, and they have not been founded by figures who have surpassed their ego and are merely in the service of mankind. At least, their founding fathers make no such lofty claim. The dating arts are more at the stage of trial and error of what works in the field, with only a limited degree of codification.

The lack of codification and of serious cross-cultural study are to be expected in the infancy of a science, and may indeed to a degree be inevitable. Indeed, even the martial arts have no universal fighting techniques, despite what some may claim: opponents adapt and so must your strategy. This is true many times over in the dating world, which, even if there is a biological layer, is quintessentially cultural. A student of the dating arts would do better to follow the Taoist philosophy of Jeet Kune Do founder Bruce Lee, rather than the Confucian and Shinto precepts underlying many classical martial arts. Learning is useful but only if it is internalized and put at the service of a personal goal: only, indeed, if once learnt it is forgotten. The techniques of dating artistry are doubtless best used as scaffolding, not as a temple. As Lee said, “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot”.

But my purpose here is not to review the PUAs’ materials and approaches. Nor is it to do more than suggest that readers might find them, even if they remain rudimentary, a useful component on their path of personal growth – they are worth exploring for this reason alone. However, I want to look at this phenomenon firstly as a source of evidence as to sexual and social bonding behaviour patterns which we manifest, but are unaware of. In principle, the PUAs and their many acolytes are sitting on a ton of experimental data which, unfortunately, no one in academia seems so far to be taking seriously and investigating.

This evidence of course is weakly structured and heavily framed in terms of certain underlying assumptions which act as axioms within the systems and are therefore not falsifiable. Whilst most of society has preferred to ignore the PUA phenomenon or has ploughed into it in terms of the usual old-feminist male stereotypes, a few observant authors have noted that the account given by the PUAs of evolutionary biology, and which underlies their systems, is oversimplified and wrong in a number of particulars (see for instance here). This begs the question of how not only the techniques, but the whole philosophy of the dating systems might change if they were brought better into line with not only our dominant forms of social conditioning, an American version of which they reflect reasonably well, but also our actual biological nature.

Thus in chapter 3 of Magic Bullets, Savoy treats us to a very Dawkinian account of natural selection, effectively ignoring the fact – although he acknowledges it elsewhere – that individuals do not survive well in groups which have perished. Rage as many evolutionary psychologists might, there is overwhelming evidence that human behaviour is cooperative. The biological basis of mate selection is unlikely to be antagonistic to this trait.

For the purposes of this article, let’s ask the following question: how would Savoy’s theories of attraction fare if our underlying biology is not akin to Dawkin’s caricature, but more accurately portrayed in Sex at Dawn, including perhaps my own thoughts regarding ancestral mate selection? Indeed, society does not operate even remotely on the cutthroat basis that Savoy proposes, certainly not now and probably not in the remote past either. Men and women may be bad at meeting each other, but eventually they end up doing that and nearly everyone gets a slice of the evolutionary pie. They may not get the slice they would have wished for, but their genes do not die out. That genes, at any point in human history, have died out in significant numbers because of failure to mate (other than as a result of death) lacks, as far as I am aware, any evidence in its support. So there is a process of preference at work, which eventually results in sexual selection of genes, but it is not of the cutthroat nature Savoy portrays.

The same can be said of the idea that the father plays a significant role in raising and protecting offspring and that the extent to which he successfully acquits himself of this role predicts the procreative success of his progeny. In agricultural societies, it may be that this factor contributes to the ultimate social status of progeny, and the ultimate destiny of their genetic traits, but not their immediate reproductive success. In hunter-gatherer societies, and hence in our underlying biology, this factor is probably not relevant at all. In other words, mate selection is, to a large extent, learned behavior.

Some might say, so what: whether cultural or biological, isn’t the effect the same? Well, learned behavior exhibits much more variety and changes much more quickly, so it is dangerous to assume that it is universal in the way that the PUAs do. But more fundamentally, it seems to me that this formulation is inconsistent with what it is that PUAs actually do in the field and with the whole logical structure of their methodologies. In fact, dating artistry consists of two phases, logically sequential but temporally superimposed. In the first phase, the PUAs try to play off learnt behavior: for example the signals of status which certain behaviors, attributes and accessories convey. These create interest and attraction. However, attraction is not mate selection in the way that the PUAs conceptualize it: it is much more ephemeral. Much of it is about making excuses to ourselves for behaving in the way we are biologically programmed to: that is, promiscuously. This becomes evident in the later stages of seduction, until the social context rears again its head and relationships need labels. So in fact, what the PUAs do is exploit weak spots in female social armoring in order to activate underlying impulses which do correspond to more universal biology, but this biology has little in common with their account of it.

Correcting the assumptions might not necessarily change very much for those who merely want to overcome their shyness with girls and become, in this sense, more in control of their own destiny. For such people, an accurate account of social conditioning and a vague idea of the biological nature which underlies it (such as the actual desire of women for sex) are enough.

But this is just entry level. For those who question whether the goal of having one or more desirable women on ones arm is intrinsically as opposed to merely socially valuable and are more curious about human relationships and their potential, however, a better understanding of the processes may change a lot: it may fundamentally change where you end up and what you get out of it.

Indeed most of us have ambition to graduate beyond a game. Games are fun, up to a certain point; but mating is a key part of our biological makeup and we need to respect its deeper mysteries, because it has a lot to teach us. Indeed, master PUAs may have immense success in the initial stages, but, many, like the tragic example of Mystery in The Game, find it afterwards even more difficult than others to be content with the relationship institutions which society has preordained for them. This is not only, as many would caricaturise it, a reflection of the male desire for multiple partners and sexual variety which, being potentiated, becomes even more difficult to resist. It is also a reflection of the – equally important but frequently ignored – male desire for commitment and depth, within the confines of arrangements which respect this biology. Attracting partners using a discourse which is incompatible with this goal, but rather relies on the dominant social mores, seems in this case to be a recipe for short-term success, but long-term failure.

So how does an ethical non-monogamist, or whatever your favourite label is for someone who has figured out what kind of creature we all are, play this game if it is based on assumptions which he does not share?

Damned if I know. Perhaps one day enough people will have enough field experience with trying to answer this question that someone will be able to write the book about it, and move mankind beyond its erotic infancy. In the meanwhile, it’s an exciting voyage of discovery.

Healing the body

In this post, I want to review two books with a common theme: Bruce Lipton’s 2005 The Biology of Belief and Lissa Rankin’s more recent Mind over Medicine.

Lipton, in his book, sets about demolishing what he himself admits is a straw man: the notion that genes determine disease and its progression. In his view, genes only provide a blueprint for building proteins, and it is the cellular receptor proteins on the membrane which drive gene expression in response to their environment. Few genes are self-expressing.

This hardly seems controversial. Nevertheless, the book is, even if it is not its main intent, a good and very readable laymen’s introduction to the molecular biology of the cell, and worth reading for that reason alone.

The “belief” in the title refers essentially to the ability of the brain to command, whether consciously or unconsciously, the production of neurotransmitters and other signalling proteins which then tell cells what to do. This view, as Lipton acknowledges, is based on the ideas of Candace Pert, whose work Molecules of Emotion I reviewed earlier. Interestingly, Lipton reports that this signalling intelligence was first developed in unicellular amoeba communities, where the signalling compounds are released into the environment and operate between distinct individuals. Multicellular organisms came only later, and took over this system of signalling to regulate the behavior of the community of cells which had now come to be permanently associated in a single individual. Thus cellular intelligence underpins the intelligence of more complex organisms.

Despite its expositional merits, however, Lipton’s book does not get us much closer to an understanding of the actual mechanisms behind the control of cell behavior. For the most part, he relies on somewhat forced analogies from quantum physics, the pertinence of which is far from established. Whilst he seems authoritative in matters of cell biology, what he says about quantum physics is frequently wrong and sometimes breathtakingly so. Essentially his main argument is the same one picked up on by Rankin, which may well be valid but is nevertheless lacking in detail, namely that the body’s self-healing mechanisms are activated by relaxation and disactivated by stress, i.e. by the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

These self-healing mechanisms may be astonishing, and may depend to a significant degree on the variables the authors cite, but they remain quite mysterious in their details. One possibility one might have hoped Lipton would explore, but which he does not, is that there is a macro equivalent of the cellular apoptosis mechanism which leads entire organisms to self-destruct when signals in their environment communicate to them that they no longer play a role in the community. This may be a gross simplification but it would fit with Lipton’s overarching metaphor whereby the human body is, in many ways, merely the cell writ large.

Lipton also prefigures Rankin by taking to task the medical community for overuse of prescription medicines without a proper understanding of their systemic functioning. However he does not, and cannot, establish any principles to determine whether or not the use of pharmaceuticals is appropriate in individual instances and whether the other healing resources of the body have been sufficiently activated and explored. As such, the criticism, even if one may have sympathy for it, seems superficial.

If Lipton’s book is written from the perspective of a medical researcher, Rankin comes at the subject as a practising doctor disillusioned at the lack of holistic attention to health which characterizes the Western medical community. Failure to grasp the holistic nature of the body’s self-healing mechanisms means that many people get poor medical advice and care. Rankin is at her best campaigning for a much greater awareness on the part of medical caregivers of how healing actually takes place (though in this respect she seems to draw heavily on the admirable precedent of Bernie Siegel).

Much of Rankin’s argument centers on the unnoticed efficacy of placebos, a notion she draws from Lipton without, it seems to me, adequate attribution; indeed even some of the examples she cites already appear in The Biology of Belief. Rankin claims to have researched the placebo effect extensively, but at least sometimes she appears to permit misconception of the originality of her research. (A recent article in Scientific American is worth a look for anyone who doubts the strength of the placebo effect).

There are a number of important principles stressed in Rankin’s book which are often absent from other self-help guides directed towards recovering and maintaining health and which are welcome. Her insistence on finding meaning in life as a key contributing factor to wellness rings true, as does her defense of the power of affirmations given the need to override the negative messages which we are usually passing on to our bodies. She is also right in pointing to the value of community, although she passes lightly over important shortcomings of institutions like family and church the drawbacks of which may very well, in many instances, outweigh the benefits, and which are certainly some way short of the ideal. These institutions have quite likely been at the root of many of the health problems people experience. Moreover, even if community may be as important as diet and lifestyle, the recommendation to seek it out is difficult to operationalize if one does not have a healthy form of it to begin with. Rankin probably should also be commended for pointing to the importance of sexual life, but again, there is no clue in the pages of the book as to what might constitute a healthy configuration or even that this is a legitimate and important question to ask.

Unfortunately, for all its admirable qualities, Rankin’s book appears to take far too lightly the difficulty of modifying ones beliefs and actions in order to obtain better health outcomes, a mistake that Lipton avoids, since he is well aware that most of the body’s beliefs are encoded in subconscious scripts. The “diagnosis and prescription” part of the book is the least satisfying one, often asking the reader to answer in a few sentences what many seekers have needed decades to unearth and understand. In this sense, Rankin’s book looks like a typical US cultural artefact which uncritically endorses the errors of the positive thinking fraternity, discussed by me here.

This is disappointing, because Rankin is a much better self-publicist than Lipton and has acquired a significant new media voice which could have been used to promote deeper healing modalities than those she herself is able to offer. This unfortunately means she gives the impression of overextending herself where greater humility might have been in order, and accordingly coming across as superficial. Parts of her own “prescription” for herself read like an awkward list of endorsements of particular personalities, and there is no indication why they should be of value to someone else; they appear to be simply plucked from the air. Making a diagnosis of the factors in ones life which promote illness and writing a prescription to deal with them – even if one accepts this way of speaking – remains a major task and a daunting endeavor.

These criticisms aside, it is clear from both books that a major shift in social consciousness around health and healing is underway and increasingly forcing its way into the mainstream. For those who continue to place undue faith in the mechanistic and simplistic ideas which have hitherto underpinned Western allopathic medicine, either or both books will be very helpful antidotes. We may be still a long way off adequately describing how the body’s self-healing mechanisms work, but there seems no doubt at all that they make a key contribution to health outcomes and, if only for this reason, should be nurtured. In reality, of course, the quest for optimal health only dictates what the spiritual path anyway demands on other counts: a conscious uncovering of reality, and the courage to listen to what we already know.

No Mud, No Lotus – A review

Similarly to Monique Roffey’s book which I reviewed earlier, Maya Yonika’s No Mud, No Lotus recounts her personal journey prior to meeting the well-known sacred sex practitioner Baba Dez Nichols, her experiences at his temple in Sonoma, Arizona and the fall-out from it (link to her blog here; the main website www.ramamaya.com seems to be down at the time of writing).

Most of the book, in fact, is given over to the story of her life before she met Dez, which consists of a difficult childhood and a long subsequent search for her place in the world which is scarred by a series of misadventures, but also a degree of serendipity. Yonika emerges from the book as someone with a remarkable drive to survive and find herself, but nonetheless she seems still in many ways in dialogue with her inner demons. As, for that matter, does Dez. There is also a related film and a long exchange of views on Facebook, in which various practitioners take part, on the subject of whether or not it is ever appropriate for a sexual therapist to have sex with their client (although this is not really the focus of the book).

Maya experiences a lot of the power of sacred sexual healing both for herself and for others, but is left at best ambivalent as to the methods used by Dez. Her path after leaving the temple is not elucidated in any detail in the book, which also does not contain a definitive assessment of her experience. This is left up to the reader.

I would like to start out by quoting something that Dez says in the aforementioned Facebook thread:

“There is a common wound in the feminine experienced by those who have been abandoned, dominated or abused in some way (which is most of us). This wound causes us to lash out at others we perceive to be misusing power (and often misusing our own in the process). As the wound comes near to healing – normally when a masculine energy is willing to brave it out of love for the feminine – a deep battle in the psyche takes place.

“The feminine tests the masculine with everything she has – looking for every imperfection and trying hard to make the projection of abuser fit his face instead of having to reclaim it as part of the dynamic of her own wounding. In women at this stage, often the immature masculine in them attacks the wounded feminine in a man in order to feel some retribution for their inner wound. And in men, the wounded feminine often withdraws and goes into isolation and victimhood.

“In Greek legend there is the story of the archer left behind on an island on the way to Troy because he had a wound that smelled so bad no one could come near. The oracle later declared that someone needed to go back for him as he was required to shoot the winning arrow in the battle.

“I smell such a wound in many communications as we try to heal this collective wound. When real love has appeared in our lives and been deep enough to precipitate that final battle – if we take the lesson from the oracle, the winning arrow can only be fired when we go back to that inner island and brave the stench of the wound we have not (yet) been able to bear.”

This is brilliantly stated and I fully agree with it. At the same time, however, it is one-sided and the context renders it, for me, manipulative. That context, according to the book, is as follows: Dez plucks Maya out of obscurity, catapulting her into the role of his teaching partner despite hardly knowing her and despite her wounded past. She is also asked to offer sexual healing sessions, despite having seemingly little to no training and not having at all achieved a resolution of her own inner conflicts.

Maya has sound intuitions about sexuality, which Dez is portrayed as ignoring. She is certainly projecting on him, but he seems unaware that he is doing the same to her. They squabble in ways that are all too familiar, reenacting the cultural battle of the sexes, with Dez, it seems, unwilling to give any ground. In his role as healer, he seems ego-driven and out of touch with the spiritual heart of sex, as I have described it elsewhere on this blog. He is certainly marked by a considerable degree of attachment to Maya, whilst simultaneously unable to connect with an essential part of her nature.

Perhaps this is not surprising. What Dez and others have invented is not tantra, but a method of sexual healing. It is thus very reduced in scope compared to tantra, lacking in any other meditative practice, and frequently not very therapeutically informed. It may be exactly what some people need, but it is not obvious that many of its practitioners are in a position to make that judgment reliably. This is because it is not really a method, but a transmission; and this transmission, to operate reliably, necessitates a sufficient degree of openness on the part of the receiver – which has to be built progressively – and transcendence of self on the part of the giver. In the case of Maya, and probably in many other cases, it seems to me that Dez places undue reliance on the therapeutic efficacy of methods that are not adapted to many of the situations which they face. She cannot be his Dakini, because they never appear as equals. It seems that, from her, he learns little.

By contrast, a notion of therapy is almost absent in classical tantra, but it does require extensive preparation before devotees are in a position to engage in union in a manner which is spiritually beneficial. Union is certainly not therapy in tantra, or at least not baseline therapy; there is much besides.

Maya intuits that Dez is spiritually unavailable to her because he over-identifies with the role he has created for himself. I am inclined to share that intuition. As a result, she feels that sex loses its power and that she must look elsewhere. This stand-off may appear as a classic struggle between the sexual “natures” of man and woman, and certainly risks reinforcing that stereotype (as did also Roffey’s book), but – given that the notion that our species has been eternally engaged in a game of mutual self-destruction has to be rejected – this would be a naive conclusion. In the end, Maya may be inclined to seek refuge in exclusivity (this is not really clear) and Dez in multeplicity because they are the male and female halves of the same wound. Maya knows that she can love in infinite depth, and so multeplicity seems to her a rejection of profundity; Dez knows that he can love in infinite scope and misses the need for depth. Maya is attentive to his discourse, but reacts defensively because she senses she has another, equally vital discourse, to which he is deaf, and that therefore they cannot meet as Shiva and Shakti, but only on the basis of a subjugation of her feminine essence.

One could dismiss the story on the grounds that a little thought and research should suffice to make clear to any spiritual searcher that what Dez is offering is too limited to achieve a full spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, it does matter, because the need for sexual healing is widespread, and very many vulnerable people are attracted by what is, in essence, a practice which promises far more than it can deliver. This style of sexual healing has a lot in common with mind-altering drugs. At a certain moment in life’s journey, it can be the perfect way to open up to dimensions of existence of which one had been completely unaware. Yet it is valuable only if that is merely the start of a journey and not a substitute for it. The alternative is a state of dependency which may be very destructive.

 

Molecules of Emotion

I first came across Pert’s work due to a fairly throwaway reference in Tom Myers’ manual of movement anatomy, Anatomy Trains. As the biological basis of emotion has long interested me, but I have not previously found anything of real value on the subject, and, undeterred by some negative reviews on Amazon (though overall it is well rated), I decided to take a look.

My first surprise was that the book had been written in 1997! That it took me fifteen years even to hear about it, despite an interest in the subject, is astonishing. That the original research goes back to the 1970’s is even more so.

The book has been criticized as too autobiographical with not enough hard science take-aways. It is true that it is autobiographical, and doubtless I also hoped to understand more of the subject at the end of it than I do, though I did learn quite a bit. However, it is also very well written and, except for the last couple of chapters which disappoint, as hard to put down as a good detective novel. So the entertainment value and the broader insight into how the neuropharmacological research community works more than compensated for this failing, and in fact I do not know if there was, at the time of writing, more to be said on the subject than is contained in the book. I do have a couple of more recent books on similar subjects lined up for reading, so check this space.

Where I would fault the book, however, is its tendancy to wild generalization, containing as it does a wide range of claims about body-mind interactions with no effort to discriminate between them. As such, it is more suggestive than authoritative. Certainly, Pert’s work lends weight to the validity claims of many non-pharmacological therapies. A picture emerges from the book as to why these therapies may be successful, and I have no doubt that broadly she is on the right lines. However, there are so many gaps in explaining how these bodymind linkages work that there is really nothing in the book that counts as an explanation. The only things on which she sheds real light are the action of psychedelics and a treatment for AIDS based on blocking the CCR5 receptor, used by the virus, with a molecule based on an endogenous ligand, which still today is struggling to gain official acceptance. The view that the brain is not merely a neurological but also an endocrine organ is doubtless, by now at least, well established, but even the links she shows between emotions and the immune system, which are persuasive at the conceptual level, are difficult to disentangle. Lastly, Pert’s meanderings into alternative and new age therapies tend more to discredit than buttress her thesis – and I say this as someone with plenty of sympathy for some of these therapies.

I did take from the book a real sense of the biochemical unity of life. It is extraordinary that the “molecules of emotion” are so widely distributed in nature, with analogues even in plants. Plus she quotes approvingly Reich and Lowen, which is courageous enough, though whether her research actually provides support for the idea of somatically stored emotions is not clear.

Although it is not intended, and does not function, as a textbook, Pert is a relatively unknown but important scientific pioneer and her work deserves to be read for this reason as well as for its broader sociological interest.

Mating in Captivity – A Review

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.

I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.

Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”

Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.

At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.

Sex at Dawn, revisited

Almost exactly two years ago I reviewed Sex at Dawn on this blog. One of the things I predicted was that it would sollicit a massive counterattack on the part of those who found its central tenets too threatening. I am happy to say that this reaction has been a lot more muted than I expected, despite the book’s success. Our species is readier than I thought to look at its image in the mirror.

A lot of the criticism of the book that we have seen in fact does nothing to invalidate its core conclusions – it’s more like sniping from the bushes than all-out warfare. And I do not doubt that some of those who criticise it really think some important ideas are missing, and some of them are right. However, tedious trawling over references misses the central point: there never was any scientifically reasonable account of a monogamous organization in pre-agricultural human societies, and other accounts are much more plausible. Having shown this, Sex at Dawn has, for now, become the standard narrative. The authors don’t have to show beyond all possible doubt that their account of early human sexuality is correct in every detail, because they are not taking on an established scientific theory, they are taking on a cultural narrative which has polluted the science. There never was any monogamy “theory” worthy of the name.

I am therefore unimpressed by and, given that I am a multidisciplinarian, not a narrow specialist, do not intend to read, reviews which purely criticize this or that aspect of what ithe authors say. I invite the critics to correct the account so we can get to a more accurate and plausible story than Ryan and Jetha have managed. I myself can see that there are some phenomena which their theory does not explain (it is after all not a theory of everything). I do not doubt at all that future accounts will differ in many respects from theirs, but they will not differ in respect of the central conclusion – there never will be a robust theory of primitive monogamy.

I also believe that there is quite a volume of evidence which I believe points in a convergent direction and Sex at Dawn does not even review, in particular the evidence from the psychoanalytic tradition and recent work on somatoform disorders. To my mind, Sex at Dawn does not really endeavor to explain those elements of contemporary behavior which some might (and do) cite as evidence in support of primitive monogamy, but had it had this goal, there is plenty more it could have done.

This article for instance sheds light on the (predictably) almost ignored subject in psychiatry of morbid jealousy, and to my mind is highly suggestive of the conclusion that jealousy itself is part of a neurotic complex due to the system of property which has been overlaid on human nature. Definitely, jealousy does have a psychodynamic explanation as the theory of the Oedipus complex implies; in that sense it is “natural”. No one is saying that there is no competition within the cooperative unit of the tribe. But it is expressed in contemporary society in ways, under circumstances and with consequences which would certainly not have arisen in primitive societies. This is extensively discussed in Salovey’s 1991 compilation of essays on the psychology of jealousy and envy which presents plenty of reasons to caution against highly simplistic conclusions about innate human nature based on how jealousy is experienced and expressed in contemporary society.

Essentially, the cooperative tribal unit becomes competitive when resources are scarce – including when scarcity is manufactured. The socially manufactured scarcity of sexual expression and opportunity leads to jealousy very predictably, and replacing it by abundance erodes jealousy even today, as plenty of couples can testify. Simply put, jealousy is a capacity we all have to employ emotional manipulation in order to hoard scarce resources to the detriment of wider social units. Sexual jealousy would have been highly disruptive of primitive tribal societies for the reasons which Ryan and Jetha point out. That it occurs under entirely different circumstances today does not tell us anything relevant at all In fact, in bonobos it seems that sex serves precisely the opposite purpose, namely to elicit sharing of resources such as food where it might otherwise not have occurred. This leads to group cohesion and greater resilience vis a vis external threats.

So Sex at Dawn has done better than I had hoped – it seems there is no longer anyone seriously defending the naturalness of sexual exclusivity as a social institution on the basis of scientific evidence. That means the way is open to investigate a host of issues which until now have been taboo.

Ultimately, I doubt though that paleoanthropology will tell us much more about human nature than it already has. The great appeal of Sex at Dawn is that it makes sense of feelings we may all have, but have been taught to suspect. In this way it  opens a way forward for a much more generous humanity than we have been conditioned to believe possible. The sentiments on which proponents of monogamy base their conclusions have in reality been generated by they themselves, and we are at liberty to construct alternative narratives. I am told I should love only my children, but in fact I love all children. I am told I should desire only my spouse, but in fact desire is much broader. I am told I should be jealous of men who are interested in my spouse, but in fact it has the propensity to create a deep bond with them. And I am told that if I display any of these sentiments there must be something “wrong” with me or my primary relationship, but in fact acknowledging all of this makes both my sense of self and my relationship only stronger.

In fact, all of the inherited narrative (as I shall henceforth call what Ryan and Jetha call the “standard narrative”) seeks to constrain me; I do not recognize myself in it all and see it only as a tool of social control. It would not exist if most did not take the opposite view; but that is proof only of its perfidy, not of its truth.