Book Review: Becoming Wild
Oct. 31st, 2023 01:48 pmHere’s the premise of Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace: although many human beings believe that wild animals are driven largely by instinct, in fact many animals, particularly social animals, have to learn almost everything they will need to know to survive, just as humans do. Moreover, what an animal learns is dependent not only on its species, but the culture of its particular family or clan: some chimpanzee groups crack nuts with rocks and some don’t, some orcas hunt only mammals and others hunt only fish, and so forth and so on.
Safina also notes that among social animals, a sense of “us” and “them” is basically universal. What isn’t universal is conflict based on this categorization: “us” and “them” doesn’t have to lead to “us versus them.” Although humans, wolves, and chimpanzees spend a lot of time fighting other creatures of their own kind over things like territorial rights, elephants and orcas and bonobos just avoid the groups that they dislike. Those Orcas who eat That Thing We Don’t Eat are weirdos and we don’t talk to them, but when we meet by accident, we don’t fight about it; we just go in opposite directions.
I feel like a lot of human visions of conflict resolution involve widening the frame of who we see as “us,” ideally until it includes all of humanity and maybe some of the more intelligent animals too (easier to see an orca as “us” than Donald Trump, tbh)... but given that every social animal on earth has a concept of us vs. them, maybe this is simply too big an ask. Like, literally, maybe most people are not capable of sustaining this conception outside of moments of ecstatic spiritual experience.
And also, maybe most of us don’t want to, deep down inside. I haven’t seen this framing often recently, but in my early LJ days I remember a good deal of discussion about how the only people you were “allowed to hate” are Nazis and pedophiles. Okay, first of all, it’s amazing how wide those words can stretch when there’s someone you just really really really want to be allowed to hate, like Those Shippers who ship the Wrong Ship - but also, what a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances.
In any case, the human and orca situations aren’t truly analogous. All the orcas have apparently agreed to Orca Truce, no matter how repulsive the salmon-eating orcas may find those weirdo orcas who peel seals with their teeth. (Seals! Those Other Orcas eat cute little seals, who are mammals like us! Don’t talk to those seal-eating orcas, children. Some of these orca groups who never fight each other have also refused to interbreed for literally tens of thousands of years.) Humans have not achieved Human Truce. And maybe “They are Them and THAT’S FINE, we don’t need to fight about it” is even harder for the average human to cope with than “all humans are Us, really”?
***
On a lighter note, one of my ongoing projects has been a matriarchal fantasy world. It was Carl Safina’s earlier book Beyond Words, actually, that suggested to me that rather than remake the wheel, I could just model this society off one of the female-dominated animals societies, orcas or elephants or bonobos… Okay, maybe not bonobos. That would be so many sex scenes.
All of these species, as noted in the above paragraphs, don’t have wars. And I’ve been contemplating, one, is this even a human society if they don’t have wars - are you at some point simply elephantomorphizing your human-shaped characters, if you will?
Which is not perhaps a bad thing! But, two, am I interested in writing it if no one is marching off to war? At Beth & Becca’s wedding, I was chatting with someone about my books, and she teased me that Briarley is a fairytale retelling set in World War II, and A Garter as a Lesser Gift is an Arthurian retelling set in World War II, hmmm, suspicious, and I insisted that no, I write lots of things that aren’t World War II!
At which point![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blotthis piped up cheerfully, “Yeah, Aster has books about other wars too!”
BUSTED. I mean, I do write non-war books! I have multiple books in which there are no wars at all! (It occurs to me that the no-war books all have female main characters.) But yes. I do go back and back and back to war.
Safina also notes that among social animals, a sense of “us” and “them” is basically universal. What isn’t universal is conflict based on this categorization: “us” and “them” doesn’t have to lead to “us versus them.” Although humans, wolves, and chimpanzees spend a lot of time fighting other creatures of their own kind over things like territorial rights, elephants and orcas and bonobos just avoid the groups that they dislike. Those Orcas who eat That Thing We Don’t Eat are weirdos and we don’t talk to them, but when we meet by accident, we don’t fight about it; we just go in opposite directions.
I feel like a lot of human visions of conflict resolution involve widening the frame of who we see as “us,” ideally until it includes all of humanity and maybe some of the more intelligent animals too (easier to see an orca as “us” than Donald Trump, tbh)... but given that every social animal on earth has a concept of us vs. them, maybe this is simply too big an ask. Like, literally, maybe most people are not capable of sustaining this conception outside of moments of ecstatic spiritual experience.
And also, maybe most of us don’t want to, deep down inside. I haven’t seen this framing often recently, but in my early LJ days I remember a good deal of discussion about how the only people you were “allowed to hate” are Nazis and pedophiles. Okay, first of all, it’s amazing how wide those words can stretch when there’s someone you just really really really want to be allowed to hate, like Those Shippers who ship the Wrong Ship - but also, what a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances.
In any case, the human and orca situations aren’t truly analogous. All the orcas have apparently agreed to Orca Truce, no matter how repulsive the salmon-eating orcas may find those weirdo orcas who peel seals with their teeth. (Seals! Those Other Orcas eat cute little seals, who are mammals like us! Don’t talk to those seal-eating orcas, children. Some of these orca groups who never fight each other have also refused to interbreed for literally tens of thousands of years.) Humans have not achieved Human Truce. And maybe “They are Them and THAT’S FINE, we don’t need to fight about it” is even harder for the average human to cope with than “all humans are Us, really”?
***
On a lighter note, one of my ongoing projects has been a matriarchal fantasy world. It was Carl Safina’s earlier book Beyond Words, actually, that suggested to me that rather than remake the wheel, I could just model this society off one of the female-dominated animals societies, orcas or elephants or bonobos… Okay, maybe not bonobos. That would be so many sex scenes.
All of these species, as noted in the above paragraphs, don’t have wars. And I’ve been contemplating, one, is this even a human society if they don’t have wars - are you at some point simply elephantomorphizing your human-shaped characters, if you will?
Which is not perhaps a bad thing! But, two, am I interested in writing it if no one is marching off to war? At Beth & Becca’s wedding, I was chatting with someone about my books, and she teased me that Briarley is a fairytale retelling set in World War II, and A Garter as a Lesser Gift is an Arthurian retelling set in World War II, hmmm, suspicious, and I insisted that no, I write lots of things that aren’t World War II!
At which point
blotthis piped up cheerfully, “Yeah, Aster has books about other wars too!” BUSTED. I mean, I do write non-war books! I have multiple books in which there are no wars at all! (It occurs to me that the no-war books all have female main characters.) But yes. I do go back and back and back to war.
