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Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad March 24, 2006 I’ll Shut Up — Right After This Bonobo – it’s not an ice cream flavor John Darling Maybe it’s the darkness of their tiny apartment or the fact you know they’re all going to the death camps, but you’re immediately pulled into “The Diary of Anne Frank” at OSF. You’re breathing with them. You hope they get through each little aggravation they have with each other, but you know its insignificance in the face of the predator that hangs over them — a 60-foot high beast, waiting, like a cat in a woodpile, for the mouse to make a wrong move. Which is how Francis Weller describes it the day before, in his workshop here, “Facing the Predator.” But this shadowy, menacing figure is not something in the newspaper. It’s the question of evil and presence of evil in the world (the human world) as a psychological phenomenon we all have in, around and with us at all times, something we can try to grapple with alone, but can only defeat in community — and, over many centuries, we’ve lost community and are just now trying to learn to get it back. At the same time, I’m reviewing this book by local author Kelpie Wilson, about bonobos. If you haven’t Googled bonobo, you must. It’s not an Italian dessert. It’s a primate, like us, and we share 98 percent of genetic makeup with them, but we don’t share the main things that make bonobos the most talked about species on the planet. What they’ve mastered that we haven’t is that they make love, not war. Literally. Even though they are just apes and live in the Congo jungle and have all the same conflicts that come up with chimps and humans. But chimps and humans bite and kill each other and the latter go to all the trouble to build bombs and death camps to do it. Bonobos don’t. To handle the predator that haunts primates, they use the innate trait or skill or gift of sex. Although this bonobo stuff is doubtless a lot of fun and would launch a thousand good jokes on late-night TV, its deeper meaning is what it shows for peace and a feminine-based political structure, two things we don’t have as we stumble and grope our way toward the end of the world as we know it. If, using their inherent instincts, wits and behavioral tools, the bononbos found their way to peace, community, contentment, sustainability and actually having a nice day, day after day, then we, who are so much smarter, should be able to learn something here. So, we’re talking on and on about these fun bonobos and surfing their Web sites and positing this beside the un-fun Nazi and predator stuff we’ve been immersed in the last several days and the computer starts being pre-menstrual and I start to pull the plug to reboot the system and Ann snaps, no don’t do that, it screws up the computer and I feel she’s being mean, so I go pout and read and ignore her but all these eons-old bonobo skills are right here in the forefront of our minds, so instead of us arguing and being right for days, she tries them out, stroking my hair, rubbing her cheek against me and, lo, wonder! Guess what? It works. Whatever defenses I was building are dissipated instantly and we break into ape-like grinning, hooting and grooming behaviors. We try to remember what we’re upset about and we can’t even recall it, instead laughing at this mad behavior loop, conditioned into us over millennia — that we should withdraw into isolation and identify with ego boundaries, offenses, revenge and make up solemn, mad names for these inefficient behaviors: oh, the predator! The shadow! The superego! Oh, the violence in the human heart! Well, it’s not here in the human heart. It’s just a program we picked up somewhere and it’s not working. We need to pull the plug and reboot. Along with the bad software about violence, we’ve got bad software about learning. If something doesn’t work, like the fear between Arabs and the West, then get a bigger hammer. We can outsmart it and overpower it. Well, we can’t. In actuality, we would rather make love than war. And we would rather live in troops, tribes or communities, like the bonobos, than in the lonely boxes where our fear puts us. And I watch the Nazi burst into Anne Frank’s hideout and strut around, sending them off to be exterminated and just marvel at all the money, time and energy we hairless primates have wasted because we don’t yet get it that if we were hugging and rubbing each other, we’d have a lot more food, space, money ... and happiness. --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.