I have been enjoying the recent book by Frans de Waal called Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist (Norton, 2022). I find that de Waal has many wise observations about the subject of sexuality and gender. After finishing the book, I am inclined to think that you should only listen to someone's opinion on the nature of human gender if that person is a primatologist. This blog entry, possibly the first of several, is not about gender per se.
In the third chapter of the book, de Waal anchors the chapter on the fact that he was one of six brothers who had no sisters. He discusses some of the physiological differences between males and females. Most of the way through the chapter, however, he suddenly gets on the topic of his student days, when he was part of revolutionary student organizations that protested against authority and hierarchy. The student leaders claimed that they could overthrow the power structure and found an egalitarian society.
Meanwhile, de Waal was studying a colony of chimpanzees in the Burger's Zoo. There, he observed dominance hierarchies. As he writes, "In the evenings, I'd listen to bohemian-looking ideologues holding forth on the evil of hierarchies, while during the days, I'd observe power plays in the chimpanzee colony. This alternation induced a serious dilemma due to the contradictory messages. ... In the end, I found behavior to be so much more convincing than words that I placed my trust in the chimps." (76).
As for the revolutionaries, "Despite all their talk of equality, my fellow revolutionaries exhibited a distinct hierarchy, with a few driven young men at the top." (77) de Waal concludes, "We collectively suffered an egalitarian delusion. We engaged in fiercely democratic rhetoric, yet our actual behavior told a different story." (78)
de Waal then recounts that he was later hired into the Psychology Department at Emory University. He describes a fundamental problem faced by psychologists: they belong to the very group of organisms they are trying to study. "This explains why psychology textbooks read almost like ideological tracts. Between the lines, we gather that racism is deplorable, sexism is wrong, aggression is / to be eliminated, and hierarchies are archaic." (78-79)
He quickly adds, "For me, this was a shock, not because I necessarily believe the opposite, but because such opinions interfere with science. ... Every time I received a psychology textbook from a publisher, I made a point of checking the index for entries on power and dominance. Most of the time, these terms were not even listed, as if they didn’t apply to the social behavior of Homo sapiens." (79)
de Waal found Machiavelli's The Prince very informative of the behavior he was observing among the chimpanzees. He concludes, "The egalitarian delusion of the social sciences is all the more astounding since we all work at a university, which is one huge power structure." (79)
This studious act of ignoring the status hierarchy we are part of can be seen in texts on evolutionary psychology. The textbook by David Buss strongly features status and dominance hierarchies, while the textbook by Workman and Reader ignores them, as I wrote in June of 2022. I like de Waal's treatment of this topic, because he is keenly aware of the limits of social dominance. Still, it is easy to see why one might want to ignore status hierarchies, despite their centrality to human behavior. de Waal himself admits that conservative politicians mischaracterized the nature of the Alpha Male in his book Chimpanzee Politics. He became famous in the 1990s precisely because his discussion on dominance was distorted.
