Books
What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes
Jonathan Marks. University of California Press. Paperback
Marks’s answer to the finding that humans share 98 percent of so of their DNA with chimps is that it doesn’t mean much more than we already knew and certainly not what some read into it. It confirms that millions of year ago (7 million is the generally accepted estimate) humans and chimps had a common ancestor. More generally, since all life-forms are built up of DNA, it confirms Darwin’s view that all those that exist and have existed on Earth evolved from a single original form. On the other hand, it does not mean that humans are 98 percent chimpanzee (any more than the fact that we share 35 percent of our DNA with daffodils means that we are 35 percent daffodil) and that therefore the study of chimpanzee behaviour is relevant to the study of human behaviour. As Marks puts it succinctly, “you can’t get at human nature from chimpanzees. They’re not human.” We are not naked apes, but clothed humans; which makes all the difference.
Marks goes for those who think that genes are the most important factor in human behaviour (the Social Darwinists and the eugenicists in the past and the behavioural geneticists, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists today), making the simple, but often ignored, point that we don’t actually know how any gene works. We know that genes produce proteins for the cells that constitute the body but not yet how this translates into a person’s physical attributes let alone (if it does) into any mental traits. What we know at the moment is that certain defects in certain genes result in certain abnormal conditions (such as cystic fibrosis), but not how a non-defective gene produces a normal condition.
This is why, Marks insists, when someone makes a claim to have discovered a gene for something, for instance homosexuality, they can’t just point to statistical correlations or even similar brain structures, they would need to produce a verifiable and verified causal explanation of precisely how the gene in question translates into the particular behaviour pattern. As he puts it, “what is widespread is not necessarily innate” and “genetic conclusions require genetic data”:
“The fact that something is consistently observed does not imply that it has a genetic cause. We know that. If you want to argue about science and about genetics, you need controlled data and genetic data.”
He warns modern geneticists about the dangers of making claims that go well beyond the existing (genetic) evidence, by pointing to the dominant view amongst geneticists in the 1920s which was racist and justified the forced sterilisation of “mental defectives” (not just in Nazi Germany but in America and even in Sweden). They were wrong and the practical consequences were disastrous. Seeing that we don’t yet know how normal genes translate into physical attributes, modern geneticists should, he suggests, show a little more humility before propagating their speculations about human behaviour being genetically determined as if it were an established scientific fact.
Marks is also good on the myth of race. “Race”, he says, “turns out to be an optical illusion”:
“[W]e can, of course, make comparisons between groups of people and study their differences. The problem is invariably what meaning to assign to those differences. If we know that there are gradients, not boundaries; that human variation is patterned locally, not transcontinentally; that the extremes are not the purest representatives of anything, but simply the most divergent; that populations are invariably mixed with their neighbors, and in the last half-millennium with people from far away; and that clustering populations into larger units is a cultural act that values some differences as important and submerges others – then race evaporates as a natural unit.”
We have to record, however, that in the last five of the book’s twelve chapters Marks embraces some strange positions, such as defending the right of a North American Indian tribe to veto research on a 9,000-year old skeleton found on their former tribal territory as this conflicted with their “spiritual” values (much as the Mediaeval Church had “spiritual” reasons for frowning on the dissection of human bodies). Similarly, he defends the refusal of certain indigenous people in other parts of the world to have their DNA recorded. Here, if it true, they may have a legitimate point about it being patented and used by others to make money, but this is a distortion due to the existence of capitalism. In principle, there is nothing wrong with recording the DNA of peoples who have been relatively isolated from the rest of humanity.
ALB
Guevarian Ideology
Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution.
Edited by David Deutschmann. Ocean Press. £15.95
The reader comprises speeches and articles that trace the development and implementation of Guevara’s theories from 1956 to a time shortly before his death in October 1967. The book falls into four sections covering the period prior to the Cuban Revolution, Guevara’s work in the Cuban government, international issues and selected letters.
Guevara’s ideology combined romanticism with elitism. He passionately believed that an enlightened conspiratorial minority could establish ‘socialism’ and use political power to free the ideas of the uneducated masses – a theory where mass political consciousness emerges after a revolution initiated by a small minority or vanguard. In this struggle, the vanguard is the “the catalysing agent that create[d] the subjective conditions necessary for victory” as well as the “generator of revolutionary consciousness.”
Guevara was essentially a guerrilla leader engaged in a war of national liberation. He believed that only violent revolution, waged in the countryside, could end colonial exploitation and introduce ‘socialism’ into Latin America. Urban areas were to remain essentially passive being vulnerable to betrayal and superior military force. The basis of this struggle was the peasantry, but his attitude is ambivalent, fearing that peasant ignorance, isolation and hunger for land makes them unreliable and in need of direction from “revolutionary intellectuals.”
In the second section on the ‘Cuba Years 1959-65’, we gain an insight into the difficulties of ‘Democratic Centralism’ and the organisation of the state-run capitalism that followed the Cuban insurrection. The economy is based on commodity production where imports are dependent on maximising exports at competitive market prices. As with the rest of Latin America the central problem is the “one crop economy,” with Cuba “slaves to sugarcane.” His speeches call for diversification and increased output prompting the introduction of ‘emulation,’ involving setting factory and individual output targets to maximise industrial output. His theories were greatly influenced by Lenin, who is quoted throughout his works. In the article entitled, ‘On the Budgetary Finance System’ Guevara uses a quotation from Lenin in an attempt to explain how state capitalism is a step towards an eventual ‘socialist’ society, necessitating the introduction of capitalist accounting methods, price setting, money, factory profit, bonuses and formal contracts with monetary penalties.
But increasing output means greater incentives and this conflicts with Guevara’s image of ‘socialist morality’ where work and achieving output targets is the workers moral obligation, his “social duty.” Cuba, he claims, is ‘on the road’ to ‘socialism’ while the transition to ‘communism’ a distant vision in the future. At the same time he is compelled to accept that trading with world capitalism necessarily imposed severe limitations on his action, in short acknowledging that the economic conditions dictate the country’s direction. National defence, nationalisation, industrialisation, agrarian reform and the development of foreign trade, particularly with Russia, are all urgent issues that have to be addressed if Cuba is to survive.
In the years following the Cuban Revolution his speeches impart increasing frustration as the vanguard attempts to impose ‘socialism’ on the ignorant masses that neither understood nor wanted it. In passionate speeches to students, cadres and trade unionists he repeatedly stresses the need for education to strive for the ‘socialist ideal’ and eradicate the bad habits from the “previous epoch.”
The third part of the book is a collection of Guevara’s speeches and articles on international issues. Not unexpectedly, the rhetoric is anti-Americanism and anti-colonialist and the message to the people of Latin America is to follow Cuba’s example and create “many Vietnams” to expel US imperialism and achieve economic independence. Other speeches demand fairness in trade and an end to dumping, price fixing, foreign debt and foreign bases – in fact all the things you might expect from a leader struggling to administer capitalism in an underdeveloped country surrounded by a hostile world.
A book of limited historical interest carrying a bankrupt anachronistic prescription for violent revolution to be orchestrated by a vanguard and leading inevitably to state-controlled capitalism.
ST
Film
On the Revolutionary Road
The Motorcycle Diaries
It’s become a common practice to give directors grammatical ownership of a film regardless of how much input they have. So we have Hitchcock’s The Birds, Anderson’s If, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, as well as Polanski’s Macbeth and Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. Directors, like managers, are important to some extent, but most people know that when the boss is off the firm runs just as well, if not better. The practice of elevating the director to a position of supreme importance relegates to inconsequential roles the hundreds of other workers involved in a production. To make a film without a director would be difficult; to make one without engineers, musicians, caterers and cleaners would be impossible.
Such hierarchical structures have dominated society for so long that they appear natural and permanent, and revolutionary action has succeeded only to replace one hierarchy with another. Struggles for communism become struggles for fairer capitalism, as the experience of Latin America shows. Its turbulent recent history has produced a gallery of memorable radicals, but in terms of cult status there are few to compare with Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries, of which the director Walter Salles was one of the many workers involved in its making, concerns the early life of one of the 20th century’s most charismatic rebels and whose image has become one of its most enduring icons.
Set in 1952, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado take off on a 1939 Norton for a tour of South America intending to bring medical relief (they are both doctors) to the needy, and sexual relief to their own needy libidos. But the exuberance and exhilaration of single young men high-tailing it around foreign countries is balanced by the need to do good beyond the remit of the Hippocratic oath which we see developing in the 23-year-old Guevara as the journey progresses. As the real Che explained in On Revolutionary Medicine: ‘I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease+I began to realise that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous+I wanted to help those people.’
Where medicine cannot help, Guevara offers money, moral support and brutal honesty. On behalf of dispossessed peasants he throws stones and hurls abuse. For the sick of the leper colony where he briefly works, he swims the river that separates them from the healthy whilst battling against currents and his own asthma. This is Che the champion of the downtrodden, the challenger of injustice, the idol in the making. Consequently, the film itself is fertilised with the concerns of its hero and a message begins to form. This becomes clear at the end when a montage of South America’s working and peasant class is displayed in a vividness only monochrome can achieve. These people are still with us, the film seems to say. There is still work to be done.
Fortunately the film has no anachronisms which refer to Guevara’s later status or appearance; no scenes with him in a department store plumping for the beret or trying on a pair of Cuban heels. Joy and misery are lucidly brought to life in a film that can be enjoyed even if you are one of the few people who has never heard of Che Guevara.
There are as few things to say about the cult of Guevara as there are about the cult of the director. Both reinforce the notion that socio-cultural events are made only by powerful individuals rather than by the thousands of workers who truly make history. Perhaps it is time we donned our berets, put on our army boots and proclaimed in sonorous tones: ‘Workers of the film industry – unite!’
NW
Television
Time Commanders, BBC2, Sunday 7.45pm
There’s no doubt that the rapid development of computer graphic imaging has done wonders for livening up history documentaries that used to rely on bearded men lyricising over lumps of masonry in a field. By filling in all the visual blanks it has opened up a fascinating subject to a generation of new enthusiasts who find archaeology a bore and Tony Robinson terminally aggravating. But even with CGI there’s a limit to how gripping you can make an Iron Age settlement or an Egyptian temple complex. Now, perhaps inevitably, comes the adrenalin-fuelled rush of a real time video game crossover where teams of men (well, it’s a man thing) take on the roles of ancient generals and refight famous battles on a huge computer screen.
In the first series Eddie Mair, normally lugubrious even on the radio, looked positively tragic as he watched suburban Essex car salesmen pretending to be world-conquering military leaders and throwing away their virtual armies in clueless abandon. In the second series Richard Hammond bounds around like a boy scout cheering on all the corking good fun and offering pointlessly inane advice like “don’t let them get you in the flank!”, while two dour bona-fide experts sit upstairs and witter grumpily about everything the ‘generals’ are doing wrong. Occasionally they even win, but even so it rarely seems that they have much idea what they are doing. To anyone who imagines that historical battles were gigantic chessgames played out by masterminds this game reflects the truer historical picture, which is that battles were usually ugly and confusing messes presided over by frequently incompetent generals who were there by virtue of birth rather than merit.
The popularity of this show can scarcely have anything to do with any widespread knowledge of or interest in the history behind these battles or of the times in which they occurred. The vicarious thrill of being a general in charge of mass slaughter is perhaps bound to appeal to individuals who have no real power in society and whose only realistic experience of battle would ever be as cannon-food. Yet the concept is surprisingly repulsive. All through history soldiers like these were ‘spent’ like so much disposable currency on the whim of human beings behaving like gods in the interests of wealth and power. For all their clockwork clone appearance these virtual soldiers are real enough as representations of historical but nameless human beings whose cruel lives and terrible deaths are being played out for our amusement. And as the graphics improve and the mutilation and gore acquire better and more prurient detail, the savagery of power and powerlessness becomes ever more poignant, and the pity of war ever more pitiable.
What really sticks in the craw and what this show inadvertently emphasizes is the thought that everything that holds meaning and value in our lives is actually meaningless and valueless to our rulers. Indeed the computer graphic algorithms reinforce this in a way since they simply create one virtual soldier and then make multiple identical copies to form the virtual armies. One can’t escape the feeling that the owning class of the world must see us in largely the same way, as essentially wealth-producing bacteria without names, faces, rights or identity, cultured on their slides in order to grow them new wealth, and to be disposed of whenever we become unproductive. What is even more chilling is the idea that we ourselves might even adopt in some sense their view of us, certainly enough to fight all the savage battles of the future on their behalf. No wonder socialists oppose all wars.
PJS
