War, Sex and Broken Narratives About Our Ancestors

Is life really all about the status and reproduction of the individual?

Petty & Selfish Genetics My Oh My!

Much of the popular scientific rhetoric around human evolutionary behavior and biology, might be deeply flawed (or at the very least, incomplete) and is probably warping your own sense of what being a human being is all about. Modern narratives around evolutionary biology, are just that: narratives or story arcs about the world and our place in it.

These days, if it comes from people who are “biologists” or “anthropologists”, and it uses “the accepted scientific verbiage”, it must be true…We often forget the horrendous acts of ignorance carried out by these fields over the years. It’s not easy to parse out the truth from the false, and this is especially the case when we exist in a time and place, where what constitutes truth itself is undecided (remember this because it will come up later).

It often creates dismay in my heart, when I encounter stories about The Ancestors, rooted in dogmatic power structures, meant to diminish the innate dignity of the human animal. As someone who loves studying anthropology, I encounter these feelings a lot because the widely accepted narratives about our past, often get steeped in a highly materialistic worldview, devoid of a deeper animating spirit or a lived experience of The Ancestors themselves.

When we are told by the reigning powers of modern “reason” that life emerges out of selfish individualistic greedy little genetics that are exclusively interested in individual reproduction, we are being told a story.

And when we are told by extension, that because we are built by those genes in a world devoid of an essential spirit, we are destined to compete and destroy one another for the limited resources that exist...we are being given the meaning of life.

This notion of life puts you in a universe where you are here for yourself and by yourself, for everyone is trying to take from you, and the only way to survive is to take from them in kind.

This idea of life leaves us with three main themes:

1. Selfishness & Individualism

2. Competition & Winning

3. Stealing & Extraction of Resources

*Special note...I want to make it clear that I am not by any means anti-science. Science as a methodology is useful as hell. Nor do I make reference to all scientists or scientific theories…

I repeat: these are the core pillars of popular modern scientific discourse on the origins of life. Pretty bleak is it not? Neo-Darwinism at its best.

Although presented as it were indisputable fact, it is actually just the modern myth of life on this planet. A set of metaphysical ideas about how the world works, and in fact, there are many well-respected scientists who disagree with this narrative and present viable alternatives for how evolution occurs.

Furthermore, I find it interesting that it is difficult to find tribal or indigenous cultures that hold this perspective about the world. However, let’s note that these are core values of modern civilization.

We know how that is turning out. Spoiler alert: not well.

Sonic Battle Magic

Recently, I shared a podcast I love, called The Emerald, created by Joshua Schrei, on an online forum in which I am a moderator. It instigated a very cordial back and forth with a a very intelligent and thoughtful gentleman, which is appreciated deeply in a time where internet debates can become digital battlefields.

The episode I posted is called “War and Ritual Ecstasy”. I will not go deeply into describing the episode, but here is brief description from Josh himself.

"The horrors of war have been part of the human story since the beginning. While there have been differences in how different cultures have done it, war is so widespread that it is impossible to see it as anything other than a primal human drive that fulfills some type of deep somatic need. What is that somatic need? It is easy to chalk war up to a base and 'primitive' aggression or to cold, calculated policy objectives. But an increasing number of scholars and thinkers are finding something else when they examine the roots of war — war involves many of the same protocols and therefore serves much of the same purpose that traditional ecstatic ritual once served. Both traditionally involve group syncopation, drumming, invocation, consciousness alteration, all built around a ritual enactment within a dedicated time and space that leads participants towards a sacrificial catharsis that follows a mythic narrative. So war becomes a way of fulfilling the human need for ritual intensity." - Joshua Schrei

-Listen to War and Ritual Ecstasy on The Emerald-

Although The Emerald touches on scientific discoveries, and encompasses a vast scope overall in regards to what makes it’s way into an episode; it is in my view fundamentally a piece of sonic art, made in the spirit of the true artist: to create magic and to make a new way forward.

Said another way, it is meant to be engaged as art and is not scientific discourse. In my sense of it, he creates podcasts that are essentially incantations and enhancements, meant to re-weave the human mind and heart back into an animate universe. This particular podcast was meant to do just that, to war.

He shares an animist sense of why we war. A ritual sense of why we war. It is a great episode.

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And the gentleman in question found he could not take the episode seriously, and so in response he shared a podcast about why we war, he felt was closer to the mark. The piece of content he shared was an episode from The Art of Manliness entitled, “Why We Fight”.

“Why We Fight” Linked Below

https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/podcast-916-why-we-fight/

Both episodes agree on central theme: to war seems to be a part of human nature, done for irrational reasons other than the commonly stated ones.

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Yet, in stark contrast to The Emerald, this was a very “scientific, linear and rational” take on war, not just in how it was presented (which was pretty boring to me personally), but also because it was rooted deeply in the Neo-Darwinian ideas about the world.

It’s interesting to me that I share a podcast about mythology and storytelling and receive one about science and Darwinism, but, I digress. This comes back to the idea I shared earlier in the article about what the nature of truth even is remains undecided.

The episode concluded that:

Human beings primarily war so that men can gain status, resources and power over other men, which then impresses women. This then let’s them have sex with more women and thus reproduce more. So basically we obliterate each other for sex and status. This is asserted to be the case because “we are animals”. The author asserts our ancestors evolved this way, and that’s why we do it too.

The speaker claims this dynamic emerged because of our polygamous primate nature where tribal members of the same tribe would compete with other members to gain a “status advantage” over one another and thus hoard all the women.

It was honestly painful to listen to, and it’s hard to remember that a lot of people think this way. Furthermore, we are also told that we war because of “tribalism”, and that we seek to belong. Though this point seemed to be emphasized less.

Let’s Draw Some Lines in The Sand

+The Emerald shared a deep mythological and animist sense for why we war based around a somatic need to experience trance states, group synchronicity, catharsis, ritual states and to return to the primal drives that make us hunters in the first place.

+The Art of Manliness basically told us we go to war to have more sex and to represent our own gang on the battlefield of resource exploitation. I am biased here, but how juvenile does this sound?

One is based in popular modern scientific views of the world, and the other in a more indigenous, mythological and animist sense of the world.

I love how the Emerald does not try to present a “complete understanding” of war, because it carries the same humility often expressed in indigenous notions of the world. Whereas the episode “Why We Fight”, presents us with a rationalized theory of everything in the manner so common these days. No room for the mystery.

The total encompassing reasons for all war across all time are probably utterly complex and beyond the scope of a podcast.

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

Which world do you honestly feel we inhabit and what does that say about you?

Both of these narratives are stories, and each say something qualitatively different. The modern mind may rationalize around the Darwinian narrative (more on this later), and if you wanted to do that, then I may reply with a lateral movement in perspective.

Apparently Humans Have Lots of Sex

A deeper dive into the lifeways of tribal cultures is beyond the scope of this article, but let us focus on observations here that offer a differing perspective of this whole story, as it relates to human mating.

1. Tribes display a wide variety of relationship dynamics. Polygamy is but one. Nearly every type of relationship dynamic is seen in tribal life. Claiming evolutionary biology based on one style of relating is simply implausible. If it were the case, wild humans left to their own devices would all display the same way of relating… the way gorillas do for example.

2. Many tribes believe it takes multiple males to impregnate one woman, and freely share one another.

3. Many tribes easily share partners and are more polyamorous. Even some of the most warrior-like societies do this. A great example is the Maasai.

4. Sperm preference in the human animal more readily occurs at the level of the uterus, not tribal society because human penises are specifically shaped to shovel out the sperm of other males.

5. The different "spurts" of a male ejaculation carry different compounds. Some of those are spermicides for the sperm of other males.

6. Gorillas who are polygamous have tiny testicles. In species of primates where many males get sex, the males have larger testicles. Humans have very large testicles compared to body size in the world of primates.

7. And finally, female moaning in primates is associated with group sex/group calls. The moaning calls in more males and arouses them. The same is not seen in species that have little group sex context.

None of this is meant to claim that we are meant to be polyamorous. The point here is that evolution did not make us polygamous, and the idea that the deep instinctive drives for war are based on getting laid is not supported by the non-theoretical obvious observations of living humans in the wild.

Status in humans does exist, but runs much deeper than this, and extends beyond the scope of this article to address. Yet, many intelligent people hear the theories shared in “Why We Fight”, and agree despite the fact that human mating habits do not support it. The deeper question is why?

We evolved in small tribes. In a small tribe of 50 people, does it not seem utterly laughable that one male would be hoarding the females because he had "status" over the other members? What would status even mean in a band of 50 people who share everything and own very little material goods? In a tribal setting, the tribe is everything, not the individual.

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Blasphemy: What if Your Genes Are Actually Communal?

Individualist notions of evolutionary biology are likely wrong, and represent a modern view of the world. A metaphysics of the spirit of our time, which strangely is a world without spirit.

A world without community. A world without conscious ritual. A world without a sense of the divine.

Neo-darwinian evolution is a theory about how evolution works, not a fact. The idea that everything centers around the individual gene is a cosmological worldview that emerged out of our individualistic culture. It is not scientific fact. I do not know what the actual truth is myself, but neither do the Darwinists. It’s a mystery. Let us acknowledge the mystery.

In the article, The Revolution That Rewrote Life’s History By David Quammen, he exposes the notion that evolution is about the individual at all as a fallacy, as he goes on to say in the article:

“The concept of an “individual” continues to defy attempts by biologists and philosophers of science to perfectly define it. Some experts have argued that it’s crucial to have such a definition, because the logic of evolution by natural selection—Darwin’s core principle—depends on the differential survival and reproduction of … individuals. If so, what is an individual? Is a single bacterium an individual? The work of the biologist Lynn Margulis, from 1967 onward, vastly advanced and complicated that question, with her theory of endosymbiosis raising the proposition that all complex creatures, including us humans, are chimerical creatures compounded of bacterial and other genomes.”

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“Is a worker ant, incapable of reproducing itself, living its life to maximize the reproductive output of the queen ant, an individual? Or is the ant colony itself an individual? Is it another “superorganism?”

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How can evolution be about you and your individual genes, when trying to define a singular “you” is utterly undefinable? They seek a definition because they seek to fill in the holes of their story arc, not because they seek fact.

I ask you to reflect on your place in the whole according to this narrative of selfish genes, and why we might find evidence for it in modern civilization but not as much in tribal cultures. I do not have an ax to grind with individualism, and in some instances, I think it can be useful, but we are talking a whole different ball game here. The meaning of life itself….

I say it often, that we cannot look at the last few thousand years of human

story and determine human nature on a grand scale. We do not live in an evolutionary context, but more of one that is akin to a type of captivity.

We see the same type of resource scarcity dynamics in captive wolves, who fight much more over territory and the limited resources of their small enclosures, compared to wild wolves. Scarcity is manufactured by putting up borders, and by owning instead of stewarding.

Modern humans are not representative of tribal humans in a 1-1 ratio or vice versa. This is where The Ancestors can teach us about how to be more innately human. More of the type of human that evolved in a living world of deep connection and immersion...and that yes, at times included war.