Recently, two Canadian high school students did a remarkable thing. It was remarkable enough to generate a large amount of comment in the blogosphere. According to the original news item in the Halifax Chronicle Herald [1], a grade 9 student “arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.” Anyone who has attended high school knows the usual outcome of such situations. But in this case, it was different. Two senior students, Travis Price and David Shepherd, were disgusted by this crude bullying. “It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” David explained. The two students bought 75 pink tank-tops and, rallying students through the internet, persuaded half the student body to wear them, or to supply their own. When the bullies next came to school, they were confronted by an ocean of pink solidarity. “The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”
The protest rapidly spread to thirty other Nova Scotia schools, then across the rest of Canada. High schools are no longer isolated, self-contained, stratified, and despotic mini-societies. Social networking media like Facebook and MySpace are enabling rapid, fluid and democratic communication, not only between students in the same school, but linking them to every other school in the world.
There have been a lot of complaints about Facebook, and similar networks, from school authorities. They are always expressing their grave concern over some new menace. Typically, school authorities complain that social networking will be used for “cyberbullying”. Hmm. Well a century of real high school bullying never seemed to elicit any grave concern from educators. Why so much alarm about putative “bullying” on the internet? The old fashioned bully with fists is more of a common-sense danger. It turns out, of course, that the incidents that actually triggered school administrations’ ire were invariably cases of teachers or vice principals being criticized or made fun of by students on Facebook…. or having their teaching skills subjected to comparative analysis by students. Social networking is, I suspect, distrusted and denounced by those in authority for the same reason that they previously hated the spread of the written word and the printing press. The pink protest demonstrates that the internet and social networking are powerful tools for the evolution of justice and civility.
Travis and David’s actions may be a recapitulation of one of the most significant steps in human evolution, one which should be understood by anyone hoping to move the world in a progressive direction, towards democratic institutions, tolerant social customs, and respect for human rights.
We are primates, descended from a line of proto-human primates, and closely related to chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. A lot of analogies and conclusions about human society and psychology have been made from the observation of the social interactions of other primates. A generation ago, observers of primate behaviour discovered astonishing amounts of violence, bullying, murder, rape, among our close evolutionary relatives. They saw clearly hierarchical power structures dominated by “alpha males”. Many people concluded that bullying, violence, and tyrannical government were innate aspects of human behaviour. This view appealed to the rich and powerful, who are always happy to have it confirmed that their position is “natural”. But the comparisons soon came under critical scrutiny. Observation of human communities show that they usually have nothing like the kind of violence observed among chimpanzees. Human beings may engage in warfare with neighbouring tribes, or distant countries, and that warfare can become horrifyingly violent. In some dictatorships, aristocracies have managed to inflict horrendous atrocities on their subjects. But the ordinary human community, on average, is strikingly less violent than any chimpanzee troupe. All our observations of hunting and gathering societies — a pattern of human politics that persisted through most of human history, and still has some practitioners — have shown that they have relatively egalitarian decision-making, and are not characterized by extreme internal violence. [2] When humans know each other and live together on a relatively equal basis, they do not attack each other nearly as frequently as chimpanzees do. Human violence occurs largely between societies, or between castes and ethno-religious clusters that exclude each other from their definition of community, while chimpanzee violence is a constant incidence of rage and violence within a community. People in modern urban civilizations may, or may not, have effective egalitarian politics, but rape and violent assaults are not normal among them. These activities are rare, disturbing, and troubling to us. We do not expect to be beaten every other day, even in the most oppressive and violent cultures.
So why are human communities much less violent, at least within social groups? There are some ways in which humans are noticeably different from their hominid ancestors and from other living primates. For example, humans have much less physical dimorphism between genders, and they have abstract language. These two particular differences have attracted the attention of paleo-anthropologists who are puzzling over the relative internal peacefulness of human societies. The argument goes roughly like this:
Sometime, probably fairly late in the evolution of our species, we developed the skill of communicating through abstract symbolic language. This seems to have had the side effect of enabling all sorts of other new and distinctive abilities. The human toolkit underwent extremely slow evolution for a long period, then suddenly blossomed into a wide range of sophisticated implements. At the same time, symbolic articles, such as decorative beads, requiring patient work to make but serving no immediately practical purpose appeared. Very quickly, elaborate visual arts, musical instruments, and other evidence of symbolic behaviour multiplies in the archaeological record. Human beings seem to be “fully modern” in their culture forty thousand years ago, and a tantalizing trail of evidence suggests that the initial outburst of rapid cultural elaboration occurred somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand years ago. I suspect that the acquisition of abstract language was the key component in this “package deal”.
Some scientists [3] have looked at this and come to the conclusion that the development of more subtle means of communication indirectly triggered a reduction of internal violence and a reduction of gender dimorphism. While primates without language skills were sometimes able to combine to counter the harm done by violent alphas, the acquisition of abstract language allowed weaker members of the human tribe to compare evidence, plan confrontations, co-ordinate strategies, and combine effectively against the violence of alphas. In other words, instead of sitting still and watching the most violent alpha males brutalize, rape and murder the weak, they got together on their internet and agreed to wear pink shirts. Even among non-human primates, there are attempts to curb bullying behaviour. Among the highly stratified chimpanzees, low status males, or females, may band together to limit the power of aggressive alpha-males.[4] However, these impromptu alliances against the dominant have to occur spontaneously, in favourable circumstances. The dominant chimpanzee’s aggression has no such limitations. Without the crucial skill of language to plan ahead, the rebels have poor chances of succeeding.
The theoretical implication is that we went through a long period in which we weeded out the worst of our bullies, probably at first by ambushing and killing them, then ultimately needing only social sanctions and customary norms to control them. During that period, the mating advantage of a bigger male body was lessened, and males and females came much closer to being the same size. (The average size difference between males and females is noticeable to us, but compared to the dimorphism of chimps, it is trivial).
As I said in my first meditation, the control of bullies is one of the main problems that a society faces. Each human community can either maximize or neglect the skills necessary to deal with bullies. One of the crucial factors is how children are taught to handle bullies, and what the circumstances of their education lead them to expect. Tragically, we design special social environments for our young in which tyranny, intimidation, and arbitrary force run rampant. Millions of children go to school with the certain knowledge that they will be physically assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, and that there will be no social solidarity coming to their defense. Such children are likely to grow up ready to serve as drones in an atavistic, caste-ridden, and conformist society.
Empires and dictatorships are built on this practice. The public schools of England’s Imperial days were nightmarish dystopias in which class distinctions were re-enforced by swaggering bullying and abject, fawning submission of the weak to the strong.[5] In grimmer societies, the violence was administered directly by the teachers. In his discussion of the ancient Roman grammaticus, Gregory Aldrete [6] writes: “The two main characteristics of this phase of schooling were endless amounts of memorization reinforced by brutal beatings whenever a student failed to perform properly. The teacher had a wide range of punishments available… The ultimate punishment was the catomus, for which the student was stripped naked and stretched out across the backs of two other students, one of whom would grasp his legs, and the other his arms. The unfortunate victim was then savagely flogged with a wooden stick by the teacher.” Not surprisingly, people educated like this found their principle entertainment in watching helpless prisoners being torn apart by lions and crocodiles. They built coliseums to enjoy these “sporting events”. Americans’ apathetic response to crimes of torture, committed in the gulags built by their own President, is not surprising, given the base submission taught in their public schools.
I certainly don’t want Canadian children to grow up that way, and I’m delighted to see evidence that they are not. The pink protest is proof that we can raise children to be free men and women.
“Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on,” one of the two Nova Scotia boys explained. When the victimized student saw the sea of pink solidarity, “it was like a big weight had been lifted off his shoulder.” No one at the school would reveal the student’s name to reporters. Quite rightly, they understood that it would re-victimize him to do so.
These Nova Scotia high school students have independently discovered the first, and most important step in the development of a civilized, democratic society. They have learned that they can and must stand up to the bullies, and defeat them — not by matching them in brute force, but by using their brains. They have learned that an unjust social order does not exist by any cosmic necessity, but only by acquiescence.
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notes:
[1] Fairclough, Ian — “I’ve stood around too long”. Halifax Chronicle Herald, Sept.23, 2007
[2] Among them are Richard Wrangham and Christopher Boehm.
[3] Knauft, Bruce M. — “Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution” Current Anthropology 32:391–428 is a comprehensive overview of the evidence and its interpretations.
[4] Uehara, S., M. Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, K. Hosaka, and M. Hamai — “The fate of defeated alpha male chimpanzees
in relation to their social networks”
Goodall, Jane — “Unusual violence in the overthrow of an alpha male chimpanzee at Gombe.” in:Topics in Primatology, Vol. 1.
Human Origins, T. Nishida, et. al (eds.), University of Tokyo Press. 1992 pp. 131–142.
Nishida, T. — “Alpha status and agonistic alliance in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii)”
Primates, 24: 318–336
[5] Well described in George Orwell’s memoir, “Such, Such Were the Joys”, reprinted in The collected essays, journalism
and letters of George Orwell , vol.4. Penguin Books 1970.
[6] Aldrette, Gregory S.- Daily Life in the Roman City. Greenwood Press 2004. p.64
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