Archive for the ‘The Monkey Agenda’ Category
Who-whom
I was reading the other day about the phenomenon of the ‘bow shock wave’: that is, when the bossman enters the room, the way his spear-carriers deploy so as to make his entrance both secure and highly visible. It is an ancient power technique, and I found myself wondering whether new gophers are explicitly taught [...]
Noble chimps
The primatologist Frans de Waal asserts that forest chimpanzees are just as intelligent as humans in social interaction. As with us, leaders generally lead by putting on a big show and engaging in a lot of intrigue; but the scope for variation is vast. One troop he observed had two different leaders, a laid-back male [...]
Economic Man can be dissed
Some Harvard scientists tested patience (that is, the capacity to defer gratification) in chimpanzees. They turned out to be four times more likely to wait for the bigger payoff (that is, four times more patient, or perhaps, in Weberian terms, four times more Protestant-capitalist).
Another surprise was that chimpanzees were hopeless at the Ultimatum Game, [...]
Dissing our hindbrains
Why do people get so irritable in check-outs and at shop counters? Answer: mixed messages. Since we do not demonstrate relative status by mounting one another in public like the forest chimps, we have developed other markers for social power. I show that I am a bigger beast than you in three ways: by renaming [...]
The spinning animal
H. G. Wells thought that education would save the world. Not a chance. The main function of education is to supply impressive vocabulary for our primate hierarchy games.
In its concern with knowing if and how we can obtain true knowledge of the world, philosophy makes the fatal assumption that the human mind is some sort [...]
The uses of memory
What we call memory is not constructed from the world inwards, but from our operational necessities outward. What happened last Tuesday is whatever I need to have happened in order for me to achieve my personal aims, especially the goal – unknown to the animals – of self-exculpation. This is aided by the fact that, [...]
Social intelligence
The fashionable commendation of ‘social intelligence’ forgets to ask how such intelligence can be employed. It is a tool, for good or evil. The opposite of the socially-blind, autist-spectrum individual may be the master manipulator.
The simplest reason why profound learning and advanced social skills are rarely found in the same person is an [...]
WWKD?
The other day I was reading a whodunit set in North Carolina, and one of the characters sported a WWJD tiepin. The New Yorker character had to have it explained to him as ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ Apparently this abbreviation is very common in the Red States. We urban secular sophisticates, however, ought to take [...]
MyMirror, MyMirror on MyWall
The 2009 Award for Narcissism Promotion goes to a mayor of Frankfurt-am-Main for christening the newest mall on the Zeil shopping street ‘MyZeil’. Like every other shopping mall on the planet, of course, MyZeil contains the same retail outlets as any other shopping mall; this provokes the question of just why people make cooing noises [...]
Beer-mats and quasars
Some people are interested in things that are ‘out there’ and purely for their own sake, whether quasars or beer-mats. Most, however, are interested in things solely for what they can do for us in the game of monkey politics. Nerds may yearn to be like the Plastics, moving effortlessly through the social jungle and [...]
