A different look at the Middle-East

September 28, 2009

WRANGHAM: We tend to think of the problems that have given rise to Al Qaeda,

for example, as being concerned primarily with economic and political conflict,

and obviously those are hugely important. Nevertheless, in order to understand

why it is that particular countries and particular people within those countries

find Osama bin Laden's wild schemes attractive, we have to think in terms of

rather deeper differences among groups and sexes.

Think of it this way: Why is it that Western civilization is threatening to the

people who support the Al Qaeda philosophy? And not just the Al Qaeda fighters

themselves, but more importantly the great masses who are buying the Al Qaeda

t-shirts in the Middle East? It's true that U.S. hegemony over oil and support

for Israel in the Palestine conflict are general economic inequities that are

going to contribute to people's resentment, but there are reasons why those men

in particular resent Westernization.

Men in the Middle East come from a society in which there is polygany — one man

having many wives — and even though polygany can never be very wide-spread

within a society because there aren't enough women, it has the enormous effect

that women marry upwards. Polyganous marriages are always concentrated in the

upper socio-economic strata. This means that in the lower socio-economic strata

you have a lot of men with very few women, and they use the typical systems for

getting wives that are used in polyganous societies, which include gaining

control over women. In a polyganous society, women want to marry into the

polyganous society because that's where all the wealth and the opportunities are

to get good food and survival opportunities for your kids. Consequently, they

allow themselves to be frustrated, to be veiled and put in the burkha, to be

given rules that mean they can only stay inside the house and have to blacken

their windows. They allow themselves to be totally controlled by men.

So in this society you've got a lot of lower-class men, who have very few

reproductive opportunities, who want to control women, and then you introduce

them to this westernization that says, " Women, we will educate you, we will free

you from the burkha, we will give you opportunities to be mobile, to travel, to

flirt, to make your own romantic alliances. " That is a very strong threat to the

men who are already up against it and whose reproductive future depends on

making alliances with other men who are in complete control of their own

daughters. So westernization undermines reproductive strategies of men who are

already desperate.

This means that in order to develop long-term strategies for reducing the degree

of resentment that globalization and westernization are inducing in those

countries, we should think about what we can do to reduce polygany. The

countries where Al Qaeda gets the most support are the most polyganous

countries: the Afghanistans, the Pakistans, the Saudi Arabias, and so on. But if

you take a country like Turkey, which banned polygany in the 1920s, you see very

little support. Single men are dangerous when they face a difficult reproductive

future, and when they are presented with a series of economic changes that

further reduce their economic futures by liberating women from their own

control, then those men become peculiarly open to those wild schemes that Osama

bin Laden presents. And those sorts of dangers are liable simply to continue for

as long as the reproductive inequities continue in the Middle East.

EDGE: What accounts for the controversy surrounding the publication of your book

Demonic Males?

WRANGHAM: Once you use biology to analyze human behavior, it's a bit like going

to a psychiatrist and having somebody help you understand where your behavior is

coming from. It means that you're in a little bit less internal conflict, that

you can understand what you're doing, and you can shape your own behavior

better. But the reaction is not always like that. A lot of people find it

difficult to live with the idea that we've had a natural history of violence.

We've had natural selection in favor of emotions in men that predispose us to

enjoy competition, to enjoy subordinating other men, to enjoy even killing other

men. These are nasty things to accept, and there are people who have written

subsequently to say that it's just inappropriate to write like this, and so they

look for ways to undermine the evidence of sex differences or the uniqueness of

the human species. I think it's because people are very nervous about the idea

that once you see a biological component to our violent behavior, then it may

mean that it is inevitable.

One of the great thrusts of behavioral biology for the last three or four

decades has been that if you change the conditions that an animal is in, then

you change the kind of behavior that is elicited. What the genetic control of

behavior means is not that instincts inevitably pop out regardless of

circumstances; instead, it is that we are created with a series of emotions that

are appropriate for a range of circumstances. The particular set of emotions

that pop out will vary within species, but they will also vary with context, and

once you know them better, then you can arrange the context.

Once you understand and admit that human males in particular have got these

hideous propensities to get carried away with enthusiasm, to have war, rape, or

killing sprees, or to get excited about opportunities to be engaged in violent

interactions, then you can start recognizing it and doing something about it.

It's much better not to have to wait for experience to tell you that it's a good

idea to have a standing army to protect yourself against the neighbors, or that

you need to make sure that women are not exposed to potential rapists. It's much

better to anticipate these things, recognize the problem, and design in advance

to protect.

There's still a huge tendency to downplay or just simplify sex differences in

behavior and emotions. As we start getting a more realistic sense about the way

natural selection has shaped our behavior, we're going to be increasingly aware

of the fact that the ways that men and women respond emotionally to different

contexts can be very different.

One of the dramatic examples is the extent to which men and women get positive

illusions. In general, women tend to have negative illusions about themselves,

meaning that they regard themselves as slightly less skilled or competent than

they really are. On the other hand, men tend to have positive illusions, meaning

they exaggerate their own abilities, compared to the way either others see them

or they perform in tests. These things are certainly changeable. They depend a

lot on power relations. If you put a woman in a dominant power relation, she

tends to get a positive illusion; if you put a man in a subordinate relationship

he tends to get a negative illusion.

Nevertheless these things emerge very predictably — and they're dangerous. If

you have positive illusions then it means that you think you can fight better

than you really can. It looks to me as though natural selection has favored

positive illusions in men, because rather like the long canines on a male baboon

they enable men to fight better against other men who really believe in

themselves. You have to believe in yourself to be able to fight effectively,

because if you don't believe in yourself really well, then others will take

advantage of your lack of confidence and your nervousness. If you understand

something about positive illusions, you can look at an engagement in which

everybody believes they're going to win, and be a little more cynical about it.

You can be a bit more like a lawyer looking at two clients and saying, wait a

minute, neither of you has got a case just quite as good as you think you have.

In the future a more sensitive appreciation for these sorts of emotional

predispositions can help us generate a more refined approach to violence

prevention.

September 28, 2009

Nisargadatta , " toombaru " <lastrain wrote:

>

> WRANGHAM: We tend to think of the problems that have given rise to Al Qaeda,

for example, as being concerned primarily with economic and political conflict,

and obviously those are hugely important. Nevertheless, in order to understand

why it is that particular countries and particular people within those countries

find Osama bin Laden's wild schemes attractive, we have to think in terms of

rather deeper differences among groups and sexes.

>

> Think of it this way: Why is it that Western civilization is threatening to

the people who support the Al Qaeda philosophy? And not just the Al Qaeda

fighters themselves, but more importantly the great masses who are buying the Al

Qaeda t-shirts in the Middle East? It's true that U.S. hegemony over oil and

support for Israel in the Palestine conflict are general economic inequities

that are going to contribute to people's resentment, but there are reasons why

those men in particular resent Westernization.

>

> Men in the Middle East come from a society in which there is polygany — one

man having many wives — and even though polygany can never be very wide-spread