THE MAMMAL SUBSTRATE OF HUMAN
The biological basis of human social structuring grew out of the nature of being mammals. Mammals are the animals that give milk, have fur, and demonstrate behavior that protects babies for a period of time. This gives rise to the phenomenon of attachment, which in pre-humans is lessened if not eliminated when the babies become sexually active and transfer attachment to the partner or their own babies.
Much of human morality is driven by fertility and the survival of individuals or whole categories, sometimes resulting in competition and even violence over food or territory. Humans have had various ways of coping with this kind of morality, but this is the first time we’ve been able to eliminate fertility at will without sterilization or virginity. This has addled our understanding of families, which were previously begun by attachment and fertility. Now we need a new morality to recognize attachments that may not be about the producing of children but are still about survival of both individuals and groups, still arriving at the need for food and territory.
Countries that have strong religious systems that include fertility morality — Hispanic Catholics or Near East Islamics — are strengthened by stable family units. Countries like the US where religious affiliation has scattered, might depend upon government requirements but that’s also long gone for many people. The recording of births, deaths, and marriages is undependable and for a lot of people it is unjustified and even inaccurate since no one registers the unconventional if they can help it. But government records of relationship are relevant in the handling of property and entitlements.
This weakens the economic substructure of family, though we try to reimpose it with measures like maintenance payments from fathers. The ability to identify biological relationships through DNA has worked in the opposite direction. It is no longer possible to escape responsibility by claiming the woman had multiple relationships.
The removal of stigma about being outside expectations has had de-structuring consequences and has loosened family control of its children, as well as thinning the relationships among sibs. Our media stories constantly explore the runaways, the rescues by sibs, the revelations.
If there is no fertility morality, then sex itself can still create attachments, or simply intimacy from closeness like living together. People naturally bond, some transiently and others with intensity. Sometimes society pushes people into groups and couples by using stigma which means economic deprivation and imposed secrecy. But that’s about gone. Now we’re dealing with the results of decisions made in the Fifties when shame was a potent weapon and organizations formed to cope with secret problems. (Florence Crittendan homes, dry-out centers)
In nature, groupings are affected by whether the species is prey (usually feeding on vegetation or sub-mammal life) or predator. Prey tend to be more individual, covert, and family based. Herd species are held together in groups organized around climate and water access. They can afford to be obvious because they form large groups and can run. Predators don’t usually run in big packs but can form hunting groups, even if they are assorted mongrel dogs around settlements.
Humans are both predators and prey. Even the true pre-humans form attachments, which in turn begin to structure groups. Family, extended family, clan, tribe, cultures, classes, nations. Each element of structure depends on the next smaller unit. This is not “hierarchy” but component. The two can overlap, form naturally or be forced.
Mammals cannot form the virtual world that begins with the infant interacting with the caregiver. This is brain-building in the years when neurological pathways are built by connecting the neurons of the baby to match the assumptions of the caregiver. This is an early example of how the form of the identity is a product of the mold of the environment, which is bound to be other humans in close proximity.
Many human problems are really mammal problems that haven’t been recognized or addressed.
Let’s go to specifics. This reflection on how people begin to form social structures is only early thinking on my part. I’ll come back to how groups and relationships form in the future, but it is clear that we need to return to that most early level of baby-identity to understand how a nation can become unstable for lack of dependable elements.
The question now before us in terms of politics is what deep in the brains of the people who stormed the Capitol made them accept such a possibility? Was it a failure of care-giving forty years ago? 1980? This would have been years of expanding merchandized child daycare. Daycare workers are usually a different class (lower) than those who pay for the service so they can augment family income. There are probably studies.
Those who looked at the socio-economic level of the majority of the Capitol invaders (maybe not separated from those several hundred identified as criminal-level rioters) found that they were middle-aged, middle-class and higher, even professionals. This implies college. It might correlate with a philosophical wave that was based on questioning the standing order, maybe through the work of what I keep calling the Algerian French. That is, deconstructionists like Derrida or Foucault.
I don’t see that wave of questioning authority as a subversive plot but as a necessary way of breaking open fossilized and stuck systems, both about sex and about violence. This makes room for new thought and necessary integration of new discoveries. Making room for Newton, who was mostly demonstrable, was one thing. Making room for concepts like deep space, long alternative history based on the testimony of trace evidence or alternative cultures, the dissolving of old religious images due to invading space, and the social wildfire of social media have all been world-exploding, more like Galileo displacing the planet being the center of the universe.
Trump was raised by daycare workers. His ability to attach to others is very weak. His world is highly restricted, no more than Manhattan real estate concrete mafias, which is his template for the world. The New Science means nothing to him because his education stopped short of Newton, much less Einstein. But his walled world is a reassuring playpen to those who have been badly frightened by change, expansion, different, transition. The slick media loves him.
If you have a baby in your hands, hopefully you engage it with happiness and comfort, because you are creating tomorrow’s world. Playing peekaboo is a necessity, but abandonment means the end, death. For baby and for hundreds of thousands of others.
