Bureaucratization v. The Eroticization of Mutual Aid Buoyed by 'The Bonobo Way' to Extend 'Baseline Communism'
A Playful and Provocative Piece for World Bonobo Day
A note from the author: As with a previous essay for Waywards, I adopted a house style here, mixing Chicago style citations (for texts with page numbers) — via endnotes rather than footnotes for those sources with pages since this post does not contain separate pages — with journalistic attribution and hyperlinks to sources available online. Thanks and credit to this Flickr user for the photo of the bonobo that accompanies this post.
Are you celebrating on February 14? I don’t mean to ask if you have plans for Valentine’s Day, though that’s great if you do. Rather, I’m wondering whether you intend to celebrate World Bonobo Day, and I’m wondering why it’s not celebrated more widely. It too takes place on 2/14. Started by the good people at The Bonobo Project, World Bonobo Day helps raise awareness about the bonobo, an endangered species of apes that, like chimpanzees, share some 98 percent or more of our DNA.
Remaining bonobos can be found in the wild in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are also bonobo sanctuaries like the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, in Des Moines, Iowa, where Kanzi, 40, the legendary bonobo who’s made music with Paul McCartney, roasted marshmallows by an open fire and communicated with humans using a lexigram now lives. Kanzi is the coolest, no question, and his original artwork consisting of blue, green and orange colors along with red fingerprints on a pink background can be purchased from the Ape Initiative for a cool $150.
It’s worth considering an offer of support to organizations like the Ape Initiative. You’re also welcome to help out other organizations working to save the endangered Pan paniscus — as bonobos are formally known — including Bonobo Conservation in the UK, Bonobo Aid in The Netherlands and the Washington-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative, an international organization working to protect wild bonobos and the rain forest they call home.
Those organizations have emphasized how imperative it is to protect bonobos, whose endangerment is exacerbated by the bushmeat hunting that targets them in the DRC. But we need to do so in a non-punitive way with respect and concern for local human populations struggling to survive. That approach, and a related practice of mutual aid, is aligned, I believe, with what Susan Block calls “The Bonobo Way”1 (or TBW, the acronym I use throughout this essay).
I have my own thoughts on how best to think about, enact and promote TBW, which we’ll get to later. Suffice it to state here that saving and learning from the bonobos is essential because the bonobo-style promotion of “peace through pleasure,” to borrow the wording from the subtitle of Block’s book referenced above, might just lead to knowledge that allows us to save ourselves and the rest of the planet from the institutionalized, destructive tendencies of human nature run amok at the expense of our primordial primate sensibilities.
What I’d like to suggest is that TBW can augment what I previously referred to — but admittedly did not explicate in significant detail — as the “eroticization of mutual aid,” which, as I’ll argue here, might aid in displacing the bureaucracy and the violence it manages and (barely) masks by extending what David Graeber and David Wengrow called “baseline communism.”2 The ensuing argument is intended to be playful yet provocative. The approach seems apropos given the subject matter. As Block reminds us, “That’s the Bonobo Way. Play.”3 She also wrote recently, on the eve of the new year, that “we could resolve to “Go Bonobos” in 2022! We could resolve to fight, work and—especially—play for the sake of peace through pleasure in all kinds of weather.” The intent here is to begin doing just that. Thus, I do not purport to possess authoritative expertise or to put forward a blueprint for any of us to follow. Rather, I want to expound upon the possibilities that could be realized by releasing our “inner bonobo,”4 as Block terms it, while simultaneously rethinking what that entails, how best to do it and what might be accomplished should we continue to learn from and refine TBW.
There’s No Bureaucracy among Bonobos
Before exploring the wild world of bonobo-related ideas, we should spell out the problem bureaucracy presents to human beings. Prior his death in September 2020, the anthropologist David Graeber wrote about our “era of total bureaucratization,” characterized by endless administrative procedures, rules people are compelled to follow less they face the violence needed to maintain countless stipulations, a ton of digital paperwork, an “alliance of finance and corporate bureaucrats” and the concomitant culture it wrought throughout the rest of the social world, a related “culture of evaluation” pervasive among the professional-managerial classes, and an emphasis on “efficiency” minus participatory consideration and determination of “what the efficiency is actually for.”5 “The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years,” according to Graeber, “is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.”6
He also challenged the common sense assumption that the supposed “free market” offers a humane alternative to bureaucratization. As Graeber wryly remarked,
Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away. Free-market liberalism of the nineteenth century corresponded with the invention of the modern police and private detective agencies, and gradually, with the notion that those police had at least ultimate jurisdiction over virtually every aspect of urban life, from the regulation of street peddlers to noise levels at private parties, or even to the resolution of bitter fights with crazy uncles or college roommates.7
Historically, we can see “that political policies that favor ‘the market’ have always meant even more people in offices to administer things,” as well as “an increase of the range and density of social relations that are ultimately regulated by the threat of violence.”8 Conversion of ever greater facets of the world into commodities produced under oft-authoritarian work environments wherein few are typically permitted meaningful say over workplace decisions (especially those that impact them), the emphasis on realizing corporate profit through sale of those commodities on the market and the marketing that induces us to equate purchases we struggle to afford with happiness and well-being — all of that has been coeval with intensified bureaucratization and with the violence (e.g. police, jails, prisons), or threat thereof, presupposed as necessary to protect (notably lacking) human happiness and well-being. As Graeber put it, if “bureaucratization of daily life means the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations,” and “impersonal rules and regulations, in turn, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat” — not to mention routine deployment — “of force.”9 Be it on playgrounds, at K-12 schools, on college campuses, in libraries or at beaches and parks, policing, “security” personnel and technologies and surveillance have all become pervasive, almost omnipresent, whereas half a century ago that “presence would have been considered scandalous, or simply weird.”10
But how did bureaucracy begin to exert a stranglehold on humanity to begin with? Writing with co-author David Wengrow, Graeber claimed it’s now rather clear “that bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to problems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity.”11 The commonplace assumption that increasing complexity and scale of society requires bureaucratic administrative management ultimately backed by human harm is just not borne out by the historical record, as Graeber and Wengrow endeavored to show. They proceeded to explain, as part of their effort to provide a new paradigm for grasping human history, the following:
Our emerging archaelogical understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. The earliest clear evidence of this appears in a series of tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East, dating over 1,000 years after the Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk was founded (at around 7400 BC), but still more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city.12
In addition to trying to dispel the myth that size and complexity demand bureaucratic management and all it entails, they also stressed how such modes of domination develop alongside human practices of care and concern. They give the example of the Late Neolithic community of ~150 people (circa 6200 BC or thereabouts) at Tell Sabi Abyad, located in what’s now a valley in the Syrian province of Raqqa. The remains of the community were preserved in part because of a fire that destroyed the village and baked its mud walls. According to Graeber and Wengrow’s take on uncovered evidence, Tell Sabi Abyad residents seem to have used “geometric tokens made of clay” to maintain centralized storage facilities and accompanying administrative archives.13 But, as they also note: “Careful scheduling and mutual aid would have been vital for the successful completion of an annual round of productive activities, while evidence of obsidian, metals and exotic pigments indicates that villagers also interacted regularly with outsiders, no doubt through intermarriage as well as travel and trade.”14
Mutual aid, the practice of cooperation and assistance often without the expectation of receiving something directly in return — but also often with the understanding that others will assist you when you need help without expecting you to offer anything in exchange — appears to undergird and make possible our social relations. Even relations of domination seem dependent upon the exploitation or co-optation of mutual aid, as well as maybe the ideological justification arrived at by extolling the ever-present — if mutilated, distorted or perverted — mutual aid comprising the base of our sociality.
Those practices of mutual aid are thus akin to what Graeber and Wengrow call “‘baseline’ communism,” which they claimed applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s need sare great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply.”15 Elsewhere, in relation, Graeber advised thinking “of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism,” adding: “Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.” In other words, extend the baseline. I’m suggesting we can do that better through the eroticization of mutual aid buoyed by TBW.
Just as there is no known or confirmed and recorded instance of bonobos killing other bonobos in the wild in the several decades worth of fieldwork and observation,16 we also have, to my knowledge, no evidence of bureaucracy among bonobos. That’s probably obvious and self-explanatory. But it’s worth considering whether eroticizing at least certain aspects of mutual aid, and in conjunction adopting aspects of TBW, might help us humans get free from the web of violence, the structural disparities actively impeding the good life and the bureaucratic methods for regulating all of that.
Part of the rationale for that intimation stems from what Graeber and Wengrow observed about the emergence of bureaucracy. They noted the difficult in escaping
the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity — but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and there that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.17
As Graeber and Wengrow pointed out, “the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it,’” is what “allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.”18 Not only that, but the equality bureaucracy is supposed to facilitate can come to serve an ideological function, ostensibly justifying the morass used to maintain formally equal relations while overlooking or shifting our gaze away from the increasing impersonal treatment of individuals as substitutable cogs in a machine. As Graeber and Wengrow stated, it’s “possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening,”19 even as bureaucratic tools enabled the opposite. Indeed, “the danger of such accounting procedures” associated with bureaucracy has to do with how “they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangement, even those founded on arbitrary violence (e.g. ‘conquest’), an air of even-handedness and equity. That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny.”20
Digging deeper, Graeber and Wengrow also explained that “establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok.”21 When systems of formal equality cropped up, they made “people (as well as things) interchangeable,” at least in some sense, “which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity. But there’s no reason to believe that impersonal systems were originally, or are necessarily, stupid.”22
Now previously, Graeber had argued “that situations created by violence—particularly structural violence,” which he took to “mean forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm—invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures.”23 Yet, “it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid,” he added, “or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid—though they do do that—but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.”24 He believed the critique could throw light on the omnipresence of bureaucracy as well as our inattentiveness to it today.
The plot thickens. Systematized imposition of equality in such a way that renders social relations impersonal as well forcefully rule-bound totally undermines the value embodied in the practice of that Marxian notion, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”25 Graeber and Wengrow associated the practice with the “baseline communism” they claimed “could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability” essential to all societies26 Insofar as bureaucracy demands impersonal application of rules inattentive to individual needs and abilities, it thwarts or distorts our communal nature. That in itself bespeaks a certain stupidity. But based on the above, it might emerge from innocence and good intentions aimed at treating everyone fairly and not wanting undue privileges and social power to concentrate in fewer hands. Still, the expansion of bureaucracy then, following Graeber (as cited in the previous paragraph), comes part and parcel with the institutional structure of socially significant disparities, elided, we can speculate, by the institutionalized formal equality arguably at the genesis of bureaucratic regimes and by the mutual aid needed for and inherent in the bureaucratic systems engendered to protect “some kind of system of equivalence run amok.”
That partly explains the mutually reciprocal relationships between the presupposed equality and fairness of market exchange, the bureaucratic management Graeber noted so often accompanies it, and the physical violence he noted always underlies it.
Graeber and Wengrow went so far as to suggest that our “most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships,” is “turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery” — domination that goes down “precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable — in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”27 That form of freedom Graeber and Wengrow alluded to seems inseparable from the mutual aid required for human survival and for our complex social existence, which is why I disagree with a comment made by John Vervaeke, who in a recent public Q&A said that for him, “freedom is not an intrinsic good,”28 and “freedom is at best an instrumental good.”29 If Graeber and Wengrow are right, “the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships” is an intrinsic social good; it’s intrinsic to the common good that emerges from our social relations, especially when we’re free to constitute, reconstitute and cultivate them in the absence of a punitive order that shackles the imagination. The incarceration of imagination at odds with human freedom results from the unwavering application of impersonal, standardized rules — a tendency ingrained by our corporate and penal institutions and one I’ve been as guilty of adhering to as most everyone in society. The rules tend to be antithetical to creative problem solving and valuation of authentic individuality. Bureaucracy also begets “lopsided structures of imagination” that Graeber once argued are reliable effects of structural violence,30 given how those structures enable strata of a given population not to have to imagine what those without the same degrees of privilege or social power want, need and desire even as the subordinate parts of the population who make the privilege of others possible do have to constantly consider others wishes so as not to fall victim to the violence upholding social stratification (the established structures of violence).
Eroticization of Mutual Aid Incompatible with Bureaucracy
How and why, then, can eroticizing mutual aid help us overcome bureaucracy so as to live freer and better together? Well, Eros, our life-affirming instincts and their expression, appears anything but impersonal. Erotic relating is deeply personal and intimately interpersonal. Most mutual aid is too. Provided it’s premised upon that seminal principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,” how could it not be? The mutual aid assumed by “baseline communism” necessarily attends to the particular needs of every person, though of course a number of our wants, needs and desires are shared across the species. The more erotic the nature of our mutual aid, however, the more attuned it is to every individual’s wants and sincerest wishes. This is one reason why Eros and pleasure are so intertwined. Providing another maximal pleasure implies intimate knowledge unbeknownst to the impersonal treatment of individuals popularized by bureaucrats — be they the police Graeber claimed function as “bureaucrats with weapons,”31 or the correctional officers who are expected not to give a damn about the unmet needs or aspirations of prisoners known mainly just by numbers on the inside. Prison is perhaps the institution in which bureaucracy and the violence of physical control are most mutually reinforcing and insidiously normalized, as we’ll get into below.
Prior to addressing how learning from bonobos can help displace bureaucracy and enhance the erotic aspects of mutual aid, we should first expound upon the notion of mutual aid as it has historically been understand vis-à-vis evolutionary theory. In his 2013 book, “The Bonobo and the Atheist,” primatologist Frans de Waal explained the once-prevalent, “cynical outlook on human and animal nature,” which downplayed our “altruistic impulse” and viewed kindness “as a charada and morality as a thin veneer over a cauldron of nasty tendencies” — a perspective the author claimed could “be traced back to Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog.’”32 After Huxley read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, he let the early evolutionary theorist know he was down to publicly defend his ideas,33 but Huxley had a particular way of understanding and presenting Darwinian theory. Huxley, who self-identified as “agnostic”34 interestingly enough also stated that doctrines “of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in the world” seemed to him “vastly nearer the truth than the ‘liberal’ popular illusions that babies are all born good.”35 Darwin’s Bulldog doubled down. “The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects,” Huxley claimed, “is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”36 In other words, what we deem good, right and just is actually antithetical to worldly survival, according to Huxley’s version of Darwinism. Given Huxley’s perspective, de Waal wrote,
Darwin desperately needed a defender against his public defender [Thomas Huxley]. He got one in the form of Kropotkin, a first-rate naturalist. Whereas Huxley was a city boy with little firsthand knowledge of noncadaverous animals, Kropotkin had traveled around Siberia and noticed how rarely animal encounters fit the gladiatorial style hyped by Huxley, who imagined a ‘continuous free fight.’ Kropotkin had noticed frequent cooperation between members of the same species. Huddling together in the cold or collectively standing up to predators—such as wild horses against wolves—was critical for survival. Kropotkin emphasized these themes in his 1902 book Mutual Aid, which was explicitly directed against ‘infidels’ such as Huxley, who misinterpreted Darwin. True, Kropotkin went overboard in the other direction, cherry-picking examples of animal solidarity to support his political views, yet he was right to protest Huxley’s depiction of nature, which was poorly informed by reality.37
I was pleasantly surprised to encounter de Waal’s reference to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Whether Kropotkin was guilty of “cherry-picking examples” depends on how one defines “cherry-picking,” but if the case studies in Mutual Aid sufficiently illustrate across various species and among us humans the repeated display and importance of cooperative tendencies to survival, then it seems to me the examples serve a legitimate explanatory function. In their introduction to the 2021 PM Press edition of Mutual Aid, David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić added that Kropotkin’s book-length rejoinder to Huxley demonstrated “cooperation is just as decisive a factor in natural selection than competition,” and they noted the Russian anarcho-communist did indeed present “findings in a larger political context,” revealing how “the reigning version of Darwinian science” reflected the taken-for-granted beliefs associated with class society and expanding industrial capitalism. Such socioeconomic arrangements presuppose competing against neighbors for wages in the labor market and pitting firms against each other to outcompete other enterprises by privileging profits are markers of success in the survival of the fittest. The worldview ignores how that system of organization, a “very bad way of organizing communism,” as Graeber put it, always relies upon cooperative relations. To be sure, Darwin himself speculated “that morality grew straight out of animal social instincts, saying that ‘it would be absurd to speak of these instincts as having been developed from selfishness.’”38
It behooves us here to clarify how we humans have eroticized mutual aid to our (mutual) benefit before. To do so we can look back in the past and to another species, but not to the bonobos in this case. Rather, the Neanderthals. Per de Waal, the now-extinct species were long-depicted as hunched over beings without intellect or compassion, “running in and out of caves dragging their wives behind them by their hair.”39 Yet, de Waal added the old “stereotype that they are dumb brutes never made much sense, given that their brain size exceeded ours.”40 Noting early on that modern humans have Neanderthal DNA, de Waal later went on to explain the following:
When early humans traveled out of Africa, they encountered close relatives who had already spent a quarter million years up north. These relatives were far better adapted to the freezing cold. Instead of us conquering them, as the story goes, we may have befriended the northerners. Men must have thought Neanderthal women were hot, women must have fancied Neanderthal men, and the other way around, because it is estimated that up to 4 percent of the DNA of non-African members of our species stems from Neanderthals. The crossbreeding probably boosted our immune system.41 (p. 56)
For their part, Graeber and Wengrow also revisited the early modern human expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, where our ancestors met similar-yet-different species, like Neanderthals and Denisonvans, “and these various groups interbred” (p. 82; see also endnote), and it’s only after the extinction of the other populations that something like a single human species emerged.
A recent episode of WNYC’s “On the Media” detailed how those ancient, oft-maligned human-adjacent hominids have been unfairly disparaged by popular culture. One of the hosts of the show, Brooke Gladstone, did a genetic test to find out how much Neanderthal DNA she carried, according to her co-host Annalee Newitz, who mentioned Brooke was somewhat disappointed when she discovered she was only two and a half percent Neanderthal at best. When I provided a saliva sample for a 23andme test in 2021, I learned that Neanderthal ancestry accounts for about two percent of my DNA. That puts me in the 95th percentile of 23andme customers, as you can see.
So I’ve got that going for me.
On the WNYC program, Newitz also explained that the Neanderthals are
kind of our sisters and kind of our mothers. What I mean is that they share a common ancestor with Homosapiens and...how to put this delicately? They also exchanged genetic material with our fathers. [University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropology professor John Hawks] says that Africa was once teeming with different types of early humans, and all of them were interacting with each other.
Of course, “interacting” is in part a euphemistic way of referring to sexual intercourse. Our ancestors, it appears, ensured survival not just by struggling alongside similar species like Neanderthals. They did so also by taking that mutual aid to another erotic level, copulating with the concomitant species, our erstwhile relatable companions that existed for some 350,000 years, about 10 times longer than we Homo sapiens have graced the planet. All the inaccurate cultural connotations notwithstanding, Neanderthal ancestry, as alluded to above, is nothing to snuff at. Before dying off as a separately identifiable being about 40,000 years, they “buried their dead, were skilled toolmakers, kept fires going, and took care of the infirm just like early humans.”42 It appears they engaged in abstract thinking and symbolic behavior, such as creating art. They probably performed rituals, perhaps as part of a spiritual practice or observance. And they loved — each other and those libidinous early persons from which we more directly descend. Select neanderthals in the fossil record show evidence of dwarfism, limb paralysis and inability to chew seemingly made it into adulthood,43 suggesting further emphasis on intimate Neanderthalian mutual aid. At one site in present-day Iraq, researchers found remnants from ~45,000 years ago of a Neanderthal who lived to be about 50 with an arm amputated, with vision loss and other injuries, corroborating an ethic of care among those beings once widely believed to be brutish.
An example of mutual aid in modern human history cited by Graeber and Wengrow resonates with themes I touched on in a recent essay, “Eros and Freedom in Planet Waves,” especially as regards insights from depth psychology and psychoanalysis. The authors quoted an excerpt from a 1649 text written by Father Ragueneau, describing the concept of Ondinnonk, the manifestation of the soul’s secret desire through dreams, as understood and practiced by the indigenous American Wendat (Huron) society.
Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed … They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases and even death.44
As the co-authors quoting the text bring to the reader’s attention, the Wendat practice, which also involved concerted effort unpacking each other’s dreams, was described by Ragueneau “precisely 250 years before the appearance of the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an event which, like Einstein's theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought.”45 The emphasis on the soul’s desire emanating from the unconscious and its saliency for all involved is also reminiscent of the notion of “collective unconscious” developed by Freud’s contemporary Carl Jung. I explained in that “Eros and Freedom in Planet Waves” essay that George Katsiaficas, for one believes, the “collective unconscious” to be the source of our erotic desires for intimacy and human freedom, and Jung before him encouraged “investigation of motifs in the field of dreams”46 — that is, exploration of the manifestations of archetypes, which he took to be the contents of the collective unconscious. Yet, there were notable differences between the Iroquian practice of “Dream-guessing” and Freudian (or Jungian) psychoanalysis, as the Wendat/Huron method “was often carried out by groups, and realizing the desires of the dreamer, either literally or symbolically could involve mobilizing an entire community.”47
What we have is a case of widespread communal mutual aid par excellence oriented toward fulfilling unique individual needs and desires, albeit needs or desires determined rather circuitously and in a somewhat obligatory fashion that could pose problems if adapted to present-day contexts rife with authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the “Dream-guessing” of the Wendat circa the 17th century demonstrates the possibility of eroticizing mutual aid in ways that extend baseline communism, encouraging individual satisfaction and social cohesion. The attentiveness of communal practice to personal desires and the collective commitment to realizing them militates against the control of impersonal bureaucratic authority. We might do well to put similar effort into fulfilling each other’s desires, which brings us back to TBW.
The Bonobo Way: A Primer
To be sure, sex is an activity thoroughly integrated into and permeating relations among bonobos. As Block explained, bonobos have sex “in a dazzling array of ways,”48 intimating possibilities for humans who might want to follow their lead and proceed along TBW. She continued,
Bonobos are all about erotic intimacy, and the females’ big pink vulvas are rotated forward, allowing them to have sex face-to-face. They often look deeply into each other’s eyes while in the so-called missionary position or ‘female superior,’ not to mention while hanging from a branch with one hand and holding one’s sweetheart by the other.49
Although not out of the ordinary in many adult bedrooms, the “female superior” position as practiced by humans, also known colloquially as “cowgirl,” or “reverse cowgirl” when performed with the woman facing the other direction, her rhythmically moving behind in perfect view of the man lying supine, unlocks limitless potential for mutual pleasure. The position empowers the person on top as she controls access to her own personal pleasure, synchronously wielding and inducing pleasure for the guy beneath and within her, who if consensually desired, can help direct the action and provide instructions to his partner atop him. In those instances, she’s obliged by her own volition to experience the euphoria involved in voluntarily devoting herself to honoring Eros and fulfilling his wishes. The eroticization of mutual aid need not mean sexual intercourse, but as any careful study of bonobos makes abundantly obvious, the sexual sphere is one in which Eros can be found and in which mutual aid can culminate in transgressive, transformative climax.
In line with what de Waal termed the “altruism-feels-good hypothesis,” human beings, as animals, like bonobos, “rely on each other, need each other, and therefore take pleasure in helping and sharing,”50 arguably enacted most immediately and transcendentally in sexual union. Of all extant apes, great and otherwise, bonobos intuitively comprehend and embody this knowledge to the fullest extent imaginable. “Even if becoming a primate sexologist was never my goal,” de Waal waxed reflectively, “it was an inevitable consequence. I have seen them do it in all positions one can imagine, and even in some that we find hard to imagine (such as upside down, hanging by their feet).”51 The range of “bonobo sex activities is more impressive,” as Block put it, “than the original Kama Sutra or the menu at Dennis Hof’s Bunny Ranch: massage, body-licking, cunnilingus, fellatio, masturbation, tickling, gentio-genital rubbing, penis-fencing, testicle play, rump-rubbing, group sex, incest, inter-generational sex, mixing food with sex (‘eating while eating’), breast and nipple play, erotic grooming, foot play, ear-tonguing, anal play, genitla play with inanimate objects utilized as ‘sex toys,’ extensive eye-gazing and lots of long, deep, soulful French kissing.”52 Sex and food are staples among bonbos too. If a bonobo offers up his banana, it wouldn’t be odd for him to receive a ‘blowjob’ (oral sex performed on his penis) in return. “For those of you currently trying to visualize a bonobo blowjob (BJ),” Block wrote and I couldn’t resist repeating, “it involves a lot more licking than sucking and not much deep-throating. No facials have been reported as of press time.”53
Not every expression of bonobo love and bliss need or ought to be emulated by humans, but we would be remiss not to learn from at least a little of the sexual pedagogy proffered by our primate cousins. In their own way (TBW, as it were), their instruction echoes aspects, sans classroom, of the prophetical pedagogical tradition described by Cornel West, who champions a kind of education that can “unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on.” That West in no way had TBW in mind when he made that statement also in no way detracts from the carnal knowledge bonobos teach us how to bestow upon and co-create with each other. West likened the Socratic teaching he described to the shaping of a “critical sensibility,” and in the same vein we might consider what latent erotic sensibilities we can unleash as we learn how to harmonize with one another and “put these lessons through a human social filter.”54
The admixture of approaches to sex in the bonobo world also deserves attention. “In a veritable Bonobo Sutra of positions, Pan paniscus partake in various kinds of erotic activities with multiple partners, some of it seemingly ‘casual,’ but much of it extremely passionate and deeply intimate.”55 Now, casual sex of the sort that predomiantes in our social media age leaves a lot to be desired and is understandably unappealing to many. Superficial swiping through potential hook-ups on Tinder and a dearth or total absence of interest in sexual partners as people and human beings, along with a reluctance or inability to truly ‘make love’ with another when having intercourse, hardly reflects the promise of TBW. For de Waal, the exceedingly salient “point about bonobo sex is how utterly casual it is, and how well integrated with social life”56 bonobo sexual relations tend to be.
Is the casualness of bonobo sex something for humans to emulate? I don’t want to weigh in too heavily here. I’m still trying to figure all this out. But the mutually affording “casual” nature of bonobo intercourse and sexual stimulation seems to me to form the bedrock of, or upon which, intensely profound interrelating and bodily conjoining can occur. In this way, what’s “casual” underlies and almost belies what’s deep, abiding, nourishing and conducive to peaceful, pleasure-filled and erotically-charged consociation. Were that to infuse and percolate throughout human sexual praxis, the prospects for far more meaningful erotic encounters and for indefinitely protracted baseline communism could conceivably abound. “Tantric sex, neotantra and other forms of ‘sacred sexuality’ are quite popular among certain soul-searching, body-stretching humans these days,” Block wrote, adding: “Bonobos might not know a chakra from a mantra (though bonobos like Kanzi could probably learn), but their ‘spiritual,’ soulful nature shines through their eyes and actions in a way that is obvious to anyone but a dogmatic clergyman who insists that ‘animals’ don’t have souls.”57 The various techniques for getting in touch with what’s sacred through sex are resplendent methods for relating that “most bonobos do pretty naturally.”58 Philosophies attuned to channeling “sexual energy to achieve spiritual enlightenment, personal growth and oneness with all of life,” are, Block contends, “in some ways, a similar path to the Bonobo Way, a.k.a., the Tao of Bonobo.”59
It’s worth acknowledging that de Waal would temper some of the “bonobo-inspired wishful thinking,” and that he doesn’t “believe their free love would necessarily suit us.”60 Block’s riposte to that statement in her book prompts us to wonder whether he’s ever “had the eye-opening pleasure of attending a Lifestyles convention.”61 She goes on to note that we humans “are nothing if not diverse in our sexuality,” before claiming there are those of us who “can keep our natural desires for erotic novelty, variety and community under control more easily than others and live happily monogamous marriages,”62 whereas others suffer crippling ailments as a result of repressing Eros.
Most of that rings true, though I’d question whether everyone who maintains monogamous sexual relations with one partner is necessarily keeping erotic urges under control; some, I would suggest, find ways to fulfill erotic desires through pair bonding, which then provides the impetus for low-key eroticization of a web of social relations. Among species known for polyamrous relations with a lack of pair bonding, the fact that a number of males could be the father of a newborn can encourage communal care for children. Species that gravitate toward monogamous pair bonding that involving long-standing, partially exclusive commitment have a way of protecting their young and ensuring their survival. “Universally, human males share resources with mothers and offspring,” de Waal reminded us, “and help out with child care, which is virtually unheard of in bonobos and chimpanzees.”63 Be it communally or in conventional (or unconventional) nuclear families, cooperative care for our progeny until they reach adulthood appears paramount, if also compatible with our own adaptation of TBW. Moreover, the well-being that polyamory provides many people also finds its analogue in pair-bonded partnerships that anticipate, prefigure and convey to those involved how to live, love, care for, caress and please other people as part of a thoroughgoing exercise in eroticized mutual aid extending throughout and cultivating a sensual version of the “beloved community,” to borrow a concept popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. and philosopher Josiah Royce before him.
Aggression and TBW
Now, all this is not to suggest that bonobos are immune to conflict or that humans who embrace TBW will eradicate the aggressive tendencies within our species. About 15 years ago, Ian Parker wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which he challenged the image of bonobos as sexually liberated peaceful creatures. He documented how the apes have been seen hunting antelope, violently attacking and then ravenously eating the would-be food source. He also cited a reported incident of “a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo whose penis had been bitten off by a female,” which sounds horrific, cruel and assuredly anathema to producing peace by way of pleasure. It is worth noting, though, as the late man of science Carl Sagan and his partner Ann Druyan did in their 1992 book, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” that our primate brethren “have certain traits that render them conventionally ineligible for the local zoo,”64 and that, we may speculate, can under certain conditions of confinement cause them to act abnormally in ways they otherwise would not. The same could be said for human beings. Phallus chomping, we can conclude based on several decades of primatological fieldwork focused on bonobos in the DRC, is the extreme exception to the norm of penile pleasure.
In “The Bonobo and the Atheist,” de Waal addressed Parker’s bonobo criticism and cynicism. “That bonobos can be aggressive is no doubt,” he stated matter-of-factly. “We know of fierce group attacks, mostly by females against males.”65 To the point, bonobos “engage in ‘sex for peace’ precisely because they have plenty of conflicts.”66 He quotes the Japanese primatologist Takeshi Furuichi, the only researcher who (at the time of publication) had extensively studied both bonobos and chimpanzees in the wild and concluded, “With bonobos everything is peaceful. When I see bonobos they seem to be enjoying their lives.’”67 When a group of bonobos encounters another group, or when a single bonobo meets up with another bonobo who is not a close connection, the initial contact can be utterly “unfriendly,” de Waal wrote, “but soon after a confrontation has begun, females have been seen rushing to the other side to copulate with males or mount other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into socializing.”68 Erotic sensibilities stoke amorous sociability and vice versa.
Early on in his studies, de Waal also
witnessed a minor squabble over a cardboard box, in which a male and female [bonobo] ran around and pummeled each other, when all of a sudden their fight was over and they were making love! This seemed odd: I was used to chimpanzees, who don’t switch so easily from anger to sex. I thought that it was a coincidence, or that I had missed something that would explain the change of heart, but it turned out that what I had seen was perfectly normal for these Kama Sutra primates. I learned this only years later, however, after I had begun working with them.69
As if additional evidence were needed to demonstrate the viability of the bonobo method for erotic conflict resolution, de Waal also relayed what happened when keepers of an ape sanctuary near Kinasha in Africa’s DRC decided to merge two previously separate bonobo groups. It’s “well known at zoos that chimpanzee strangers need to be kept apart at all cost until they have become acquainted,” de Waal explained, “otherwise one may be facing a bloodbath. The bonobos at the sanctuary, however, produced an orgy instead. They mixed freely, turning potential enemies into friends.”70 This tendency is a major reason why bonobos are regarded as the original “make love, not war” hominid.
The sentiment offers reason to believe TBW could work to undo the concentrated capacity for direct physical violence that, as established above, appears to buttress unnecessary social hierarchies among human beings and seems to entreat bureaucratic administration to step in and manage or indifferently hold together the ensuing mess of society. Were we to develop different capacities amongst ourselves concordant with TBW, we could just maybe overcome awful conditions of alienation, what Graeber equated with our subjective experiences “of living inside such lopsided structures of imagination—the warping and shattering of imagination”71 stemming from hierarchical division of humanity into people who need not concern themselves with the wants of others and persons coerced into empathizing with and satisfying the whims of those who couldn’t care less about them. Bonobo-like behavior no doubt displaces such subjectivity in favor of shared experiences at the under-explored edges of elation, eviscerating alienation with mutual aid, pushing past our heretofore demarcated parameters of pleasure.
But to be clear, aggression isn’t absent among bonobos; it’s properly channeled. Other apes do this to lesser degrees. Framing the phenomenon in implicitly dialectical terms, de Waal wrote,
Chimpanzee males hunt together, form coalitions against political rivals, and collectively defend a territory against hostile neighbors, yet at the same time they vie for status and compete for females. This tension between bonding and rivalry is very familiar to human males on sports teams and in corporations. Men intensely compete among themselves while still realizing that they need each other to prevent their team from going under. In You Just Don’t Understand, the linguist Deborah Tannen reports how men use conflict to negotiate status, and actually enjoy sparring with friends. When things have gotten heated, they make up with a joke or apology. Businessman, for example, will shout and bully at a meeting, only to take a restroom break during which they joke and laugh it all off.72
Granted, much of that business takes place in a socioeconomic context rife with exploitation and domination, but de Waal’s point (and Tannen’s) is still well taken. Aggressive impulses can co-exist with and even complement conciliation. For good reason, there is much ado about the “Bonobo Sisterhood,”73 the female solidarity that defines bonobo life. But there is also ample reason to bring the focus back to the boys if we wish to understand how humanity stands to benefit from TBW. To do so, de Waal offered another springboard for subsequent deep dives when he wrote the following:
This fuzzy line between conflict and cooperation is not always understood by women (for whom a friend and a rival are totally different things), but it is second nature to me since I grew up in a family of six boys and no girls. In fact, my interest in how chimpanzees reconcile after fights came about partly because I refused to view aggression as inherently evil, which was the prevailing opinion when I began my studies. Aggressive behavior was even labeled ‘asocial.’ I failed to follow this. I saw scuffles and fights as a way of negotiating relationships, and would call them destructive only if inhibitions were lacking or if no one attempted a repair afterwards. Chimpanzee males get along most of the time and are indeed much better than females in reducing tensions through a long grooming session with their greatest rival. Holding grudges is not a male thing.74
I’m not so sure that women distinguish friends and rivals with greater acuity than men. If a generalization in this area has any merit, it might be that women and men tend to use different behaviors to express anger and dissatisfaction with those they remain friendly with. Regardless, whether we see male aggression in humans as more socioculturally conditioned or instinctually driven, it’s hard not to see it. Expansive bureaucracy uninterested in individual flourishing and accompanied by structural violence sustained by the periodic use of direct and sometimes immense human harm might even be attributed to it in part.
The “INCEL” subculture that rose to prominence in online forums (e.g. 4chan, 8chan/8kun) and has made headlines as a result of mass shootings represents another example of unfulfilled, (sometimes violently) misdirected (predominantly male) urges. Block addressed it in a May 2020 article. A woman coined the term for “involuntary celibates,” before, Block claimed, “it was coopted to foster hate, blame and misogyny by bitter refugees from the ‘men’s rights’ and pick-up artist cultures.” I’d qualify that slightly. I’m not sure all who’ve since self-identified as INCEL or everyone who’s since adopted the label has done so in hateful ways. But Block is right to question the designation of INCEL violence as terrorism which, she notes in the article, happened recently in Canada. “The only thing that will reduce incel crime is to make systemic changes in our incel-riddled society,” she wrote, “to reverse the course of the American Way of War for Profit that brings us barbequed dead for Memorial Day and even more dead in the Coronapocalypse, and to follow the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure, sharing resources, female empowerment, male well-being and general sex-positive values.” I’m reluctant to use the language of “crime,” for reasons I allude to below. But otherwise, I concur with Block when she remarks that reversing course and following TBW “means treating people’s need for sex and love as legitimate as their need for food and shelter. Even though love and sex are not as critical as food and shelter on an everyday basis, they are essential to human well-being.” I’d go further and suggest that love and sex are also what help make us human, and of course the latter (i.e. procreation) quite literally produces human beings. But INCELs could well be converted into romantic partners, and we could enhance our humanity and our love for people comprising humankind by adapting those time-tested bonobo practices for keeping the peace to our social contexts. “There are no INCELs in Bonoboville,” Block told me emphatically and convincingly when I interviewed her for another article.
An ethic of play commensurate with TBW points toward an avenue outside this quagmire of painful sexual frustration boiling over into needless additional harm. An anecdote shared by de Waal regarding footage shown to him of bonobos playing around Wamba in the DRC throws light on the titillating trek we might take. Isabel Behnck, a Chilean primatologist, showed him “a game between a male and female from an outside group, in which the female followed the male and grasped his testicles while both of them ran around and around a tree, again without any obvious tension. A bit of a playful character herself, Isabel joked that this is where the expression ‘holding him by the balls’ must derive from.”75 Erotic forms of play indicate outlets for excess energy, even arenas for careful aggression, that culminate in intimate connections and possibly ejaculatory climax, as opposed to bloodshed or vitriolic social media diatribes. Games like the testicle grasping enjoyed by the bonobos Behnck and then de Waal observed also hint at how women can wield erotic power wisely and purposively through play to promote peace.
In addition, Block wrote about how TBW transforms “violent, potentially destructive urges into consensual, non-lethal erotic play.”76 Although bonobos ever kill other bonobos, “they’re not above a fight and they combine various forms of roughhousing with sex,” demonstrating “that (consensual) pain and pleasure can be next-door neighbors. They just have to be managed.”77 In contrast to bureaucratic management backed by the threat and routine meting out of human harm, and paradoxically predicated upon libidinal liberation circumventing the sexual repression running rampant in human society, a type of “erotic discipline appears essential to keeping the peace in Bonobville.”78
For reasons we need not dwell on here, I’ve been wary of dominant-submissive sexual fetishes, at least those of the overt and excessively performative kind. Some of that has to do with my deep-seated anti-authoritarian sympathies that have me skeptical about enacted domination and the restrictive subordination that follows from it. Some of that is probably just personal preference. And even I can readily admit agreed upon degrees of assertiveness, even elements of aggression, in the realm of sex can offer ostensibly instinctual gratifications in lieu of institutionalized modes of domination. Ironically enough, passion-filled aggressive sex under the right conditions can certainly engender the kind of carnal knowledge conducive to strengthening social bonds in lieu of acts of carnage incessantly glorified in corners of the web and carried out for lack of authentic intimate experience. A scarcity of orifices for discharging the potent, vigorous dimensions of Eros breeds aggression, but an abundance of erogenous zones to enter and enjoy could all but abolish involuntary celibacy and the volatile anguish that sometimes accompanies it. Slightly parting ways with Block, I’ll also add that the eroticization of mutual aid buoyed by TBW in such fashion could help steel ourselves. The exaltation of non-violence aside, eroticizing mutual aid could solidify bonds in social movements, in righteous rebellions against oppressive and repressive authority and in communities and neighborhoods when collective self-defense becomes necessary. Like the bonobo females often seen banding together to put a stop to truly predatory violence, sensual interrelating surely translates well into efforts to protect and defend each other from state-backed bureaucratic violence and all the wanton vigilantism showing little-to-no regard for the many walks of human life.
Bonobos Don’t Imprison (and Humans Shouldn’t Either)
In his 2013 book, de Waal explains how “the literature customarily calls bonobos ‘very affectionate,’ while in fact referring to behavior that, if conducted in the human public sphere, would promptly get you arrested.”79 Therein lies part of the problem and, in my view, a major obstacle to TBW. I’m not only referring here to the prohibition on erotic interaction in public, though I’d encourage us all to be far less censorious when it comes to sensuous expression. I’m also posing the bureaucracy behind what could get one “arrested” here as a problem.
To her credit, Block has admonished social spending on prisons, called out the systemic sadism in policing and criticized the reactionary explosion in the American prison-industrial complex (PIC).80 But here we arrive at another major point of departure. By elaborating a different view I hope to persuade Block and others who gravitate toward her bonoboian ideas to continue refine and enrich those ideas and humanity’s prospects for paving TBW. While Block has called the PIC “appallingly overcrowded, even with all the pandemic-related releases,” I beseech her and other bonobo enthusiasts to reject the criminal punishment system in its entirety and the practices of imprisonment altogether. Incarceration is not and cannot be found anywhere along TBW if that way is to truly reflect relevant insights from bonobo living and loving. Bonobos don’t kill each other, but they also don’t extricate one another from the communities in which they’re embedded only to lock their fellow bonobos up in cages. Block argued that both George Bush and Dick Cheney “should be in prison” for orchestrating the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war on Iraq was one of the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century to date, but the retributive justice Block invokes by legitimizing the hell hole of prison seems to fly in the face of the restorative and transformative justice often embraced by those most consistently brutalized by the reigning punitive paradigm purporting to right wrongs.
In another piece and in reference to Donald Trump, Block wrote we should “send him to prison,” only to then acknowledge “America needs much deeper, radical and systemic changes to combat the racist cult of death that has ruled this land since white Europeans began looting it and enslaving their fellow human beings for their personal economic benefit and nonconsensual sadistic pleasure over 500 years ago.” Her acknowledgement is on point, but her validation of prison, even as a holding site for authoritarians, fascists and/or proto-fascists, sure saps the erotic energy out of the room. Who decides who qualifies as fascist or authoritarian is always an issue, although the bigger issue is any justification for the affront to humanity that the prison bureaucracy historically and inevitably reproduces.
To put it bluntly, prison does not and cannot aid in the “radical and systemic changes” Block and I both agree are needed. It’s a cruel, sadism-laden, alienation-upholding institution standing in direct, dehumanizing opposition to those changes. Block maintains the struggle for justice must be “a peaceful fight,” but as someone who’s taught in a prison,81 who’s visited an incarcerated sibling before,82 who’s regularly corresponded with human beings behind bars, who’s written about the horrors of prison as well as the awesome beauty of prisoner solidarity and resistance to penal authority, I must beg to differ with those swayed by what I call, “carceral hegemony,” the culturally generated popular assumptions about the normalcy of the prison system and its taken-for-granted utility. Prison in any form ain’t peaceful. It’s anything but. And it’s anything but part of TBW I wish to endorse. Incarceration violently estranges us from our neighbors, and it often keeps people held captive from partaking in the pleasurable acts of sexual affirmation so dear to bonobos and so equally integral, we might argue, to our humanity. Not for nothing has prison been lambasted as a necrophilic place that produces death, be it civic death depriving people of participation in political self-determination, “social death, as prisoners are isolated from loved ones in the free world and, upon release, often experience substantive emotional rupture and alienation from family and friends,”83 or premature physiological death.
Similarly, Block’s indignation is appreciated, but her advice for bettering justice could better reflect the best of TBW. She called for police to
receive training in how to manage their emotions—including their anger, jealousy, insecurity, sadism and, of course, racism. If they want to express their sadism or sadomasochism, they should learn how to do it in a consensual way (off-duty!), perhaps at DomCon 2020 (where, it happens, I will be Mistress of Ceremonies). There are actually often quite a few off-duty police at these BDSM gatherings; they tend to be the good cops because they know how to separate their sadistic desires from their police work.
First, I’m not necessarily averse to thinking there are some good people who join the ranks of police officers wanting to protect others. No doubt numbers of working class people are attracted to jobs as cops because they want to make livable wages. That in itself epitomizes a public problem because it suggests we socially value the use of violence to arrest people and lock them up more than we do efforts to ensure people have what they need so they aren’t compelled to engage in acts of desperation and survival or attempts to garner neighborhood respect through means the state criminalizes (and in so doing reinforces racism and classism). But as Block’s criticism attests, policing also tends to attract sadists. It’s important to stress that policing — the bureaucratic act of targeting specific individuals and violently kidnapping people from often already disadvantaged areas, thereby further decimating disadvantaged communities — promotes practices of dehumanization even among those who might enter law enforcement academies with the best of intentions. Those who share an abolitionist perspective or advance praxis more revolutionary than mine might disagree, but this is why I’m not totally opposed to encouraging mass defection from those forces of unfreedom, from police squads to COs in prisons and correctional deputies in jails. It’s also why programs for a “just transition” (to borrow the phrase popular among climate justice activists) toward non-punitive services have a certain appeal to me, though we’d probably all want to discern just how pragmatic and effective any such efforts would or would not be. Advocates for projects of that sort would be remiss not to think carefully at every stage how dangerous all interconnected facets of the PIC continue to be.
As well meaning as her gesture seems, I’d also push back against Block’s suggestion that police departments “could also start implementing Campaign Zero’s eight policies to decrease police violence,” even as she adds “more radical police reform is needed.” In her piece, Block mentions Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback exiled from the NFL for taking a knee against racial injustice. Again, it’s worth adding that Kaepernick helped publish the “Abolition for the People” series, bringing together articles by scholars and organizers committed to undoing the PIC and transcending the social order it imposes. In one of those articles, Dylan Rodriguez took to task those eight proposals Block endorsed:
The #8CantWait campaign, widely publicized on social media by the nonprofit organization We the Protestors and its Campaign Zero effort during the early days of the June 2020 global rebellion against anti-Black police violence, exemplifies the foundational fraudulence of this magical ambition. Premised on the untenable, poorly researched, and dangerous notion that adoption of its eight improved “use of force” policies will result in police killing ‘72% fewer people,’ the 8 Can’t Wait agenda attracted immediate and widespread support from celebrities and elected officials, including Oprah Winfrey, Julián Castro, and Ariana Grande. Such endorsements are inseparable from the political logic of the nonprofit industrial complex: The infrastructure of liberal philanthropy commodifies simplistic narratives of reform into tidy sound/text bites that are easily repeated, retweeted, and reposted by public-facing people and organizations. This dynamic not only insults the intelligence of those engaged in serious, collectively accountable forms of struggle against state violence; it also glorifies clout-seeking laziness as a substitute for actual (abolitionist) activism.
Rodriguez goes on to clarify “that many of its proposed policy reforms were incorporated by the most homicidally anti-Black police departments in the United States (including the notorious Chicago PD) well prior to the state-sanctioned killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others.” Inadvertently, perhaps, the #8cantwait proposals reproduce logics of reform that re-legitimize policing and prisons without offering visions of a world where those institutions can be widely repudiated as obsolete, if not also condemned as destructive to humanity’s core. Though he didn’t start out as a self-proclaimed PIC abolitionist, Kaepernick’s critical self-reflection on his own analysis and his resulting “political evolution,” as he explained in his own contribution to the aforementioned series, led him to realize seeking reform would make him “an active participant in reforming, reshaping, and rebranding institutional white supremacy, oppression, and death.” He realized reform not geared toward abolition “preserves, enhances, and further entrenches policing and prisons into the United States’ social order,” bringing him to the conclusion that abolition is needed to bring about “a future beyond anti-Black institutions of social control, violence, and premature death.” Safe to say, I think, the evolution of peace cannot abide the PIC; it needs to be abolished.
Beyond Sexual Stigma: Recuperating Shame and Releasing Your Inner Bonobo
Having waded through those treacherous waters, we can begin to wrap up with final thoughts on how to liberate “your inner bonobo,” which Block believes “is the very best thing you can ever do for yourself, your loved ones and your community. But it can be dangerous. After all, liberation tends to shake—and sometimes break—your cage.”84 That’s precisely what we need to catalyze our social evolution of peace through pleasure, eroticize mutual aid and extend the baseline for a libertarian, libertine communism while bringing bureaucracy to heel. Block entreats us to accept the Bonobo Liberation Challenge (BLC)85 and break free from our inhibitions and surplus of shame that alienates us from our own human being and keeps our “inner bonobo” from shining through to show us the way. As Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a researcher who worked extensively with Kanzi, one said, “bonobos have almost a sixth sense,” “an understanding of their connectedness.”86 In my “Eros and Freedom in Planet Waves” piece, I referred to something like an erotic sixth sense, which is tantamount to the same thing among human beings, I reckon.
Awakening that sense or exciting a germane sensibility can start with a refusal to accept the stigma associated with the erotic among adults. Block summarized our situation:
Despite the great sex-positive strides being made all over the world in the media, social media included, nudity is still censored, while uninformed sexual judgment is rampant, often posing as political discourse. Want to shut someone up? Paint them in sexual terms or, even more effectively, make them out to be sexually ‘deviant.’ Many people and organizations are mired in these judgmental, gawking, squawking, superstitious, paranoid and stultifying attitudes about sex, love and life in general.87
As contrarian feminist Laura Kipnis similarly averred,88 the terrain of sexual politics went from sprouting seeds associating sex with liberation a few decades ago to equating sex with danger. Both tropes are true enough — STDs are, of course, a real concern — but exaggerating the dangers of sex at liberation’s expense has also led, Kipnis has argued, to a return of regressive gender roles and aggrandizement of paternalistic authority that infantilizes (primarily young adult) women, ideologically stripping them of the ability to consent. At its worst, the cultural shift denies women the freedom once considered vital to feminism and to the human liberation feminists have for so long envisaged and struggled to bring about.
What Block wrote about demonizing those deemed sexually “deviant,” requires further elaboration. The stigma shuts people up, showers them in shame and precludes consensual adult experimentation in eroticizing mutual aid. The stigmatization also sits at the intersection of the punitive politics excoriated above. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant has documented how, over the last few decades, the demonization of sex offenders contributed to “the extension of the penal dragnet”89 coinciding with a rollback in social programs and provisions. By the turn of the millennium, Wacquant argued, the purported “sexual predator” had “acquired a central place in the country’s expansive public culture of vilification of criminals.”90 Portraying “sex offenders as amoral and asocial beings, beastlike and subhuman, is a key constituent of the phenomenon to be dissected,” he wrote, “in that it proves the symbolic oil that lubricates the wheels of the runaway train of penalization.”91 By the 1990s, sex offenders became the analogue to populations rendered superfluous by global capitalism, “a species of moral trash to be disposed of or incinerated, as it were, into the furnace of state punishment stoked by the broiling hostility of the citizenry,”92 he explained. Framed as a fight of good against evil, the cultural dehumanization of those accused of sexual harm has suggested and invoked “an intense desire to extirpate them physically as well as symbolically from the social body so as to maintain the latter’s fictitious moral purity,”93 in Wacquant’s words.
To reiterate what Block made clear,94 we have to ensure TBW, as well as eroticized mutual aid, I’d add, remains for adults only. Following that path, though, should improve social relations all around and help create a better world for kids to inhabit, of course.
But beyond that, what Wacquant brought to light underscores the necessary transformations we need in the realms of justice and perception — changes the sort of sensitivity we see among bonobos might just aid in ushering in if we re-sensitize ourselves. The stigma he documented greases the wheels of the bureaucratic machine, which allows for conceptual creep that has us conflating potentially harmful desires with desires that could repair so much harm.
Block’s work on TBW speaks to the possibility of de-stigmatization through a recuperation or re-appropriation of shame. Drawing on the work of philosopher Georges Bataille, she reminded readers that “shame is also an essential component of the forbidden boundaries that we find so exciting to transgress, tease, crisscross, break and overthrow out the window.”95 Block also cited Katherine Frank’s work on group sex, which foregrounded shame, anxiety, fear, guilt, aggression and the like as surprise aphrodisiacs able to intensify arousal under the right conditions,96 which I’d venture to guess can be intentionally erected (pun intended) and continuously recreated with mutual support.
Block also developed a heterodox 12-step program — in truth, an “Anti-Program Program,” that following or just thinking about “will help you deprogram from all those other programs,”97 if you take the author at her word. It’s designed to aid us all in releasing our “inner bonobo” and finding our way along TBW. She specified three steps as fundamental: “Pleasure heals pain. Doing good feels good. And you can’t fight a war very well if you’re having an orgasm.”98 Indeed, although I’d add a heaping helping of orgasms could aid in the struggle to affirm life and the humanity of others, if it’s all but guaranteed as part of an effort to elongate the already present baseline of communism rendered impotent and flaccid by a bureaucratic social order ready to be to be expelled like globs of premature ejaculate. To borrow a few more words of wisdom borrowed from Block, TBW “can mean different things to different people in different cultures at different ages and stages of life. But we’ve got to start somewhere.”99 To begin, you can try introducing friends to some or all of the following:
The primatological study of bonobos, including accessible work be Frans de Waal and Amy Parish
Block’s bonobo-inspired insights and sexology straight outta Bonoboville
The Bonobo Liberation Challenge
Creative kinds of Eros-instigating play
Kropotkin-style anarchist-socialist ideas of fellow feeling for the sake of creature comfort and survival
The theory and practice of baseline communism that bonobo-inspired know-how could carry beyond previously established bounds
The erotic dimensions of mutual aid we’re only beginning to recollect from our ancestral past and repurpose for our transformative recreation and for the pleasure of posterity
While you’re at it, you can also excite existing friendships and maybe make some new close companions by sharing this essay. Call it a preliminary step along the Bonobo Way. But it’s a way that can only come into being if we aid each other. Block worded some sage advice succinctly, and in closing, it’s worth sharing: “You need others. And believe it or not, others need you, one way or another. Bonobos’ closeness to each other reminds us of how close we too probably are meant to be.”100
Endnotes
1. Susan Block, The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace Through Pleasure (Beverly Hills, CA: Gardner & Daughters, 2014).
2. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 47.
3. Block, The Bonobo Way, 89.
4. Block, The Bonobo Way, 83.
5. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules; On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 35, 39, 41.
6. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 40.
7. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 32.
8. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 32.
9. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 32.
10. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 33.
11. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 420.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 421.
15. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 47.
16. “The most important observation, which has remained unchanged over the last three decades, is that there are no confirmed reports of lethal aggression among bonobos. For chimpanzees, in contrast, we have dozens of cases of adult males killing other males, of males killing infants, of females killing infants, and so on.” See: Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 63.
17. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 425.
18. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 426.
19. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 423.
20. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 423-424.
21. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 425.
22. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 426.
23. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 57.
24. Ibid.
25. As paraphrased in Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 47.
26. Ibid.
27. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 426-427.
28. Starting around 22:50 in the video.
29. Starting around 29:32 in the video.
30. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 94.
31. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 73.
32. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 33-34.
33. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 35-36.
34. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 35.
35. Quoted in de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 36.
36. Quoted in de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 37.
37. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 37-38.
38. Quoted in de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 41.
39. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 55.
40. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 56.
41. Ibid; italics mine.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Quoted in Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 454.
45. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 455.
46. Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Princeton University Press, 1959[1990]), 184.
47. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 455.
48. Block, The Bonobo Way, 16.
49. Ibid.
50. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 51.
51. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 69.
52. Block, The Bonobo Way, 17.
53. Block, The Bonobo Way, 22.
54. Block, The Bonobo Way, 80.
55. Block, The Bonobo Way, 17.
56. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 69.
57. Block, The Bonobo Way, 67-68.
58. Block, The Bonobo Way, 68.
59. Ibid.
60. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 79.
61. Block, The Bonobo Way, 63.
62. Block, The Bonobo Way, 64.
63. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 79.
64. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are (New York: Random House, 1992), 330.
65. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 63.
66. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 64.
67. Quoted in de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 69.
68. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 64.
69. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 69.
70. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 65.
71. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 94.
72. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 79.
73. Block, The Bonobo Way, 37.
74. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 80.
75. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 65.
76. Block, The Bonobo Way, 68.
77. Ibid.
78. Block, The Bonobo Way, 69.
79. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 66.
80. Block, The Bonobo Way, 83.
81. I taught a class in the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, California, in the fall of 2019.
82. My sister and I briefly addressed her prison experience in this co-authored article.
83. Dylan Rodriguez, “‘Social Truth’ and Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003), 75.
84. Block, The Bonobo Way, 83.
85. Block, The Bonobo Way, 74.
86. Quoted in Block, The Bonobo Way, 86.
87. Block, The Bonobo Way, 83-84.
88. Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017).
89. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 209.
90. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 214.
91. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 215.
92. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 225.
93. Ibid.
94. Block, The Bonobo Way, 79.
95. Block, The Bonobo Way, 75.
96. Ibid.
97. Block, The Bonobo Way, 82.
98. Block, The Bonobo Way, 78.
99. Block, The Bonobo Way, 75.
100. Block, The Bonobo Way, 71-72.