Book Review: Becoming Wild

[osprey_archer]

Here’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 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.

Comments

[asakiyume]

What a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances. --Whoa, I shivered.

One thing about your reading so widely from old books, and also books for younger audiences, you've seen how wide the scope of [English-language] written fiction can extend. There's basically no often-touted rule about what a story needs to have that some item in your reading list hasn't broken--and been nominated for a prize, or been very popular, etc. So, for instance, stories don't need to have war or even conflict. But as you say... would you want to write it?

I've been thinking about this recently. There are all kinds of visions we could have for a better world--but is that what I want to write? I think: no, it isn't. Not because I don't want a better world, but simply because if I'm telling a story, that's a different thing from daydreaming about a utopia. Again: for me. Some people could do it!

It seems to me that part of what you like to write is people in (usually emotional) extremis. And man, that's pretty compelling to read, too.

... Yeah, no conclusions, just musing.

[osprey_archer]

There are undoubtedly individual exceptions, but I think humans, as a whole, enjoy feeling hatred when they can convince themselves that it is justified. It brings a certain crystalline clarity with it. And it's easy to see through other people's justifications, but our own don't feel like justifications at all, just like stone cold truth.

Oh, yes, someone could definitely write a fascinating book about a human society modeled on orca society. Or, hell, leave out the humans entirely and just write about the orcas. No need for war when you have to protect the babies from the leopard sharks! I'd love to read it, but is it what I want to write? No. All my ideas in this fantasy world involve wars or revolutions and don't fit with a matriarchal society based on elephants/orcas/bonobos/any other animal that doesn't fight over territorial boundaries.

Of course, as it is a fantasy novel, you could borrow certain orca elements - families are led by the oldest female, and the basic family structure is not nuclear family of bonded pair + kids but Mom + her kids + her daughters' kids - and also have them go to war over territory... Which they might well begin to do after developing agriculture, even if in Ye Olden Days that wasn't how they solved problems? Just spitballing...

It seems to me that part of what you like to write is people in (usually emotional) extremis.

Yes, I think this is very true. And of course you don't need war for that, either! Sometimes you are in emotional extremis because you are in junior high and your best friend is MOVING AWAY and she didn't TELL you.

[sovay]

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”

I see it used. The license and encouragement and the desire is the only thing that makes sense of a lot of accelerating human behavior to me.

[osprey_archer]

Insofar as the internet has moved on from "the only people you're allowed to hate are Nazis and pedophiles," it's moved in the direction of adding more and more kinds of people to the "allowed to hate" list, as far as I can see. Not that this is in any way Internet-specific, of course. There have always been people looking for license and encouragement to hate the people they want to hate, and always people willing to give that license and encouragement: the forms change but the basic impulse remains the same.

[luzula]

That sounds like an interesting book!

I regularly reread Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness for thinky thoughts about humanity and war and in-groups and out-groups.

[osprey_archer]

Safina is a fantastic writer. He's very good at writing about animals so you can experience them as personalities, which I think a lot of people nowadays only do in the context of their own pets, which is so different from experiencing an animal as a free-living creature with its own social context.

[skygiants]

lol, I am reading Left Hand of Darkness for the first time now and was going to chime in about the question of War And Its Inevitability -- it feels like a significant sub-percentage of science fiction is about this very question, can one imagine a kind of humanity that Doesn't Do War, and what circumstances would it take to create it? But it does feel like always got to have a human who does know what war is in there to highlight by contrast.

[osprey_archer]

This reminds me of C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, in which an Earth human lands on a Mars inhabited by three different intelligent species, and he spends a lot of time trying to work out Who Is Oppressing Whom before finally realizing that this question is just not relevant on this planet. No war here, just three species doing their own thing and getting along basically okay.

As Safina makes clear, there are real intelligent earth species right now who also follow this path. So that makes it easier to imagine an intelligent species that Doesn't Do War... but can that intelligent species also be humanity, more or less as we know it? An open question.

[superborb]

Huh, I wonder why the orcas haven't speciated if there's no gene flow between the groups! Are there are intermediate groups that breed with both groups? Or is it just that 10000 years isn't enough for speciation...

[osprey_archer]

This is something Safina discusses! The answer is that perhaps they have, but human scientists are reluctant to admit it because "their cultures kept these orcas so separate that they speciated" doesn't fit very well with the general image of how speciation is supposed to happen.

[superborb]

Hmm hmm!! Because you hear about things like birds speciating due to the kinds of foods they eat, so it would seem a classic reason for speciation! Even if they didn't want to call it culture, it seems that would be enough of a difference.

[blotthis]

THIS WOULD. RULE. THIS WOULD BE SO SOS OSOSOSOS INTERETSTING

[osprey_archer]

I have spent some time thinking about, like, a Star Trek episode where Our Heroes meet the Orca Aliens, where the two different ethnicities of alien simply have nothing to do with each other under any circumstances. Our Heroes feel real uncomfortable about it, because it seems kinda racist, but also the Orca Aliens are not oppressing each other or having wars about it or really suffering from it in any way, so... maybe Our Heroes just gotta roll with it?

[blotthis]

YES! oh this is great. this feels like a really good short story, at the very least. yum yum yum ideological differences. really unfold the differences in Our Heroes too--this is such a cool idea

[blotthis]

a;lkfjdsa;lfjdsal i did not mean to tar you in this way. it's, though, as you say, at least partially true. turns something over in my mind about war ALWAYS happening. i. hm. i definitely don't have enough history for this, but something something peace something something outsourced wars something something. hmm. no, hm. thats within the context of empire, which is of course my own context but isn't all contexts.

i admit i am not PERSONALLY the most interested in which humans within a matriarchal society don't have wars, as if the thing we were missing all this time was the guidance of women. i would have trouble believing it of vanilla humans. but something that was materially / genetically different, or that lied about what wars look like, or that had that outsider, like lhod... idk. there's more wiggle room there in my brain for that thought experiment. but that's all to say that i think you dont need to make it one in which people dont march off to war--i think that's a very human interest to have, and a very human experience regardless of leadership, and i would definitely be interested.

[osprey_archer]

If there's one constant through-line I've found in reading history it is that we, as a species, have a lot of wars. It's just what we do, over and over and over again, to the point that it begins to seem miraculous that we've actually survived 80 years post-nuclear bomb without blowing ourselves up. Apparently the threat of total annihilation AND ONLY THAT can force us to keep a lid on ourselves. At least for a while.

I do think that a world in which humanity is a female-dominated species might actually be a change of such magnitude that the characters are, in fact, no longer vanilla human? This may be the specific result of the whole "what if we based human society on orcas?" thought experiment, of course. You can't base a whole society on a different species and expect the characters not to feel at least a little bit like a different species.

Maybe wolves would be a better base species. They don't seem to lean into the gender inequality the way that human societies so often do, and they fight other packs all the time, so you could have all the wars you want.

[blotthis]

I do think that a world in which humanity is a female-dominated species might actually be a change of such magnitude that the characters are, in fact, no longer vanilla human? this is an interesting thought....... still having something of a kneejerk response to the idea that being male-dominated is inherent to "vanilla human"-ness, less as historical and more as gender essential, but historically, there's something to it... does go back to the orca question of can cultural differences cause speciation............... hm!!!!!!!!!!!! HM!!!!!!!!! you've definitely got me thinking