[lbo-talk] Butler

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Fri Jun 6 10:01:14 PDT 2008


On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> Chris Doss:
>
> > More broadly, I'm getting very annoyed at assertions
>
> > that "so and so idea is the result of capitalist
> > relations."
>
> So who says that? Citations, please.
>
> What Carrol is saying is precisely the opposite.
> Carrol says that human activity is *always* embedded
> in a social matrix. As such, the distinction between
> "nature" and "society" cannot be clearly made.

As I understand it Carrol is also saying that the homo sapien social matrix is a biological emergent. The modern human species is always-already in a social matrix and underwent speciation from others in the human family already within a particular kind of primate society. Those primate societies varied but many current evolutionary hypotheses of human transformation propose that sociality is critical and provided positive feedback for species transformation. The increase in brain size was just one effect of this transformation from within human sociality.

One hypothesis that coincides with this view is "the social intelligence hypothesis." Another hypothesis is Owen C. Lovejoy's hypothesis of the feedback loops between sociality, bipedalism, childhood length, increased intelligence, etc., a theory that actually matches some of Engels wild speculations of the primacy of bipedalism over brain-size in human development. It is Lovejoy's hypothesis that sociality, bipedalism, and childhood length propelled each other in the course of human primate evolution. In this sense sociality is "biological."

It is also a good hypothesis that the "malleability" and "fluidity" of our sexual desire is also biological.

***
>CB: biological heterosexuality

Doug writes: Why is it so important to you to defend this concept? What's at stake? ***

I am not sure about the category "heterosexuality". There is sex between males and females, sex between females and females, and sex between males and males. It is all biological. It is all also social. But the biological/social is a false opposition as far as I am concerned.

But I have a question for both CB and Doug. The fact that Bonobos engage in a lot of same-sex sex and Chimpanzees engage in relatively little same-sex sex seems to point to the different biological difference in the societies of these two sub-species. Am I wrong here? And if I am not wrong, is it significant to societies of modern humans? We after all are close cousins to the higher primates and I would think that there would be some significance.

The real problem is that we don't exactly know and may never know what that significance is. Any pretense to knowledge in these areas is just that. All that we have are good and bad guesses.

It seems to be a good guess that sexual desire of the human female for the human male is "biological" and vice-versa. And also same-sex desire is also biological. What is wrong with this assumption?

Why fear the category "biological", any more than the category "chemical", "physical", or "mental"?

Jerry



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