"Creating Freedom: The Lottery Of Birth" (2013): Not All Documentaries Are Created Equal, colon A Rope Of Sand

 "Creating Freedom: The Lottery Of Birth" (2013)
Directed by Raoul Martinez & Joshua van Praag

I downloaded this documentary after IMDb'ing Steven Pinker to see if he was in anything I hadn't already seen. I found Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth and saw that Daniel Dennett was also interviewed for the film. Too bad they're only featured for about three or four minutes in the doc just to say that humans are tribal and have evolved to trust their parents (and by extension, authority figures in general). Beyond that, there's little reason to give this documentary your time. Curiously, and despite the title, the real implications of the lottery of birth is scarcely explored. No, we do not choose the time, place, and to whom we are born. But the documentary makes only a passing reference to this rather obvious (though seldom recognized) fact before moving on to how none of this would matter if we were only able to overcome those nefarious social systems put in place to prevent us from being truly free... WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

If you already know a little about the human animal through the writings of smart people, this does not offer much in the way of anything new. The narration is a little over the top, and vaguely conspiratorial at times, what with references to shadowy Elites meeting in secret boardrooms trying to figure out why people are so hard to control in a democracy. The interviews with prominent scientists and other authors serve only to create a tenuous link between what we can reasonably say about what humans are actually like and the filmmaker's outlandish narrative about how society is organized to limit your freedom (as though there is such an attainable thing in the first place).

If you're interested in the brain, read something like Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, or even something with a narrower scope like Michael Gazzaniga's Who's In Charge?. For the psychology of the self, check out Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion. And to learn more about how and why individuals slip easily into roles they otherwise would never imagine they could (Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Ghraib, etc), pick up Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. These are just a few titles off the top of my head, and could probably name a few more if I put in the effort, but these books are a good place for the uninitiated to start as any.

(Still) Currently Reading: "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Evolutionary feminists would remove our inhibitions about examining animal behavior as a technique for thinking about human behavior. They would insist that people can think about the evolutionary pressures that elicit rape, for example, or other forms of violence, without necessitating any absurd pronouncement that because rape is "natural" it is in any way forgivable. After all, no one considers the case of the black widow spider, who kills and eats her male counterpart after mating, to mean that murder and cannibalism are okay. Any behaviors can still be studied as biological phenomena, regardless of how unpleasant they are.

Despite the admirable intentions of those who believe that patriarchy is solely a cultural invention, there is too much contrary evidence. Patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide, and its origins are detectable in the social lives of chimpanzees. It serves the reproductive purposes of the men who maintain the system. Patriarchy comes from biology in the sense that it emerges from men's temperaments, out of their evolutionarily derived efforts to control women and at the same time have solidarity with fellow men in competition against outsiders. But evolutionary forces have surely shaped women, too, in minds as in bodies, in ways that both defy and contribute to the patriarchal system. If all women followed Lysistrata's injunctions and refused their husbands, they could indeed effect change. But they don't. Patriarchy has its ultimate origins in male violence, but it doesn't come from man alone, and it has its sources in the evolutionary interests of both sexes.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

So. Much. Win.  

Currently Reading: "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Very few animals live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce the risks of inbreeding by moving to neighbouring groups to mate. And only two animal species are known to do so with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighbouring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviours is known only among chimpanzees and humans.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has a passing interest in anthropology and primates, and I am not quoting this as some kind of revelation here (this particular book was published in 1996, after all). I just feel the idea of our shared common ancestry with chimps bears endless repeating. Our closest living relatives engage in some of the same types of ugly behaviour that we do, such as organized warfare and procuring sex through violence (i.e. rape). However, the significance of this basic observation is either unknown to or ignored by some social theorists and Über-liberal blank slaters, who prefer to think that the evils of war and rape are human inventions that we may rid ourselves of if they weren't simultaneously being conjured up and glorified/legitimized/perpetuated by male culture. 

I'm mainly referring to the more radical elements of feminist theory here about how male violence is purely a social construct. Such a claim seems ludicrous on its face in light of the available evidence of our biological evolutionary heritage. Males especially are apparently predisposed toward violence. Of course, this requires that something resembling a 'human nature' exists in some form, an idea that is thoroughly rejected in some academic circles. 

The knee jerk reaction to claiming that violence is part of human nature is that this is somehow meant to be taken as an endorsement for it. While it may be that rape is a natural phenomenon (chimps do it, and I'm not sure any sane person could argue they are operating within the confines of some form of "rape culture"), it does not necessarily follow that this is behaviour is desirable. It is not an appeal to nature. It is merely an attempt to explain the world using available evidence. It sucks that dudes do bad things, but that doesn't give us license to make stuff up about why it happens.

This is not to say that culture cannot exacerbate or mitigate these nasty types of behaviour. I think this is quite clearly the case. It is just that culture is not solely responsible form them, as is sometimes claimed. To illustrate this point, anyone who asks a question such as "how do children learn to aggress?" has it all backwards. The real question should be "how do children learn not to aggress?" Setting our thoughts straight about the how and why of human violence (which almost always perpetrated by males) will allow us to be more effective when it comes to creating the kinds of social conditions we desire. We didn't invent bro culture recently, we evolved it long ago.

The evolution of violence as an adaptive strategy for achieving certain goals has far more explanatory power than social constructivist theory when it comes to why people behave badly in spite of having 'learned' not to. Culture can only go so far, and some individuals will always find a way to break our hearts. Admittedly, this is a rather tragic view of human nature, but it seems the most accurate one.