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Saturday, December 6. 2008

Instinct

A while ago my nephew Dan posted a blog on MySpace entitled “What Better Way to Study History.” His thesis being the study of our own bodies will give us a wealth of knowledge about our collective history.

Like me, Dan went off into a variety of tangents, leading me to this interesting consideration: In the second-to-last paragraph of his blog, he stated, “We have long since stopped being animal.” From the text that follows, one would assume he mean we have stopped considering ourselves animal, which is the tack my thought takes on this subject. In fact, I would say we actively try to deny our “animal” instincts, so much so we find ourselves out of balance, not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally as well.

One of the great arguments against evolution, as it pertains to Homo Sapiens-Hominidae-Primates, is that we could not have evolved “from apes” because of our sentient nature, which is not found in any other family of Primates. Indeed, the Hominidae and Pongidae families diverged from one another some five million years ago so the paths in their separate evolutions have taken widely different routes, lending to the argument that we could not have evolved from “apes.”

Yet, chimpanzees, of the Pan genus of the Pongidae family are extraordinarily similar to us. The two families of Primates didn’t diverge in one dramatic moment, but did so in time, gorillas being the first to move away from the Hominidae family, and the Pan and Pongo (orangutans) much later.

In the process of course, the Hominidae family continued its evolution until today, as we are homo sapiens, meaning in Latin, “Wise Humans” — human beings.

The trouble with the argument against an evolutionary relationship between humans and other genus of the Primate Order is that the term “apes” is used generically to encompass every other genus in the Primate Order, when in fact, the word itself conjures, in most individuals, a picture of one of the gorillas, most commonly misrepresented in the old Tarzan movies of the early 20th Century.

However, there never is any empirical scientific data or evidence to support the argument against the two being related, it is purely an emotional argument. And that is the cornerstone of my point. Emotionally, we do not want to see ourselves as tree-sleeping, hairy creatures that throw poop at zoo visitors, so we do our best to deny our primal animal instincts. We do need to eat to survive, drink water, defend ourselves for self-preservation and procreate.

Since becoming sentient beings, we’ve altered what we eat to such a great degree we have developed diseases that are rare, if found at all, in the other families of the Primate Order. Most people rarely drink just water; at the moment I’m having Diet Coke for instance, and our most appropriate self defense instinct is looked upon as cowardice — that instinctual response being to run, leading to the conclusion that by instinct, we are not predators or carnivores. Predation was/is a learned skill, not an instinct.

More common though and supported by laws that are dictated by religious tenet, is the denial of our sexual instincts. It is this denial that causes the most imbalances emotionally and psychologically and most probably physically. This isn’t new of course, Sigmund Freud figured this out over 100 years ago and to this day Freud’s theories on human sexuality and its relationship to the rest of our being are roundly criticized and rejected by many, primarily from religious corners.

Great pressure to deny our sexuality is placed upon us by society to such an extent that even nudity is considered an abomination, having more than one sexual partner is perversion as is engaging in sexual conduct purely for pleasure.

Now these days, many religious people who consider themselves “enlightened” will agree that “God” designed sex to be pleasurable so it is “okay” to derive pleasure from sex. But they stop there because, as religious tenet dictates, the only purpose for sex is procreation and therefore engaging in sex for merely pleasure is sinful. That is the reason prostitution is illegal in all but one of our United States.

The ban on consensual sex between adults for money has nothing to do with health issues (indeed, were it legal it would be much healthier) or even issues of gender equality. In fact, consensual sex between adults for money might be the most egalitarian sexual relationship between the genders: the buyer gets sexual pleasure, the seller a means of financial support, the value of the service decided upon in a free market-type barter.

The low esteem of prostitution has nothing to do with gender politics and everything to do with social indoctrination; one need only read any literature from the Bible forward to understand that. I would even go further — and extend this tangent — and say there would be no gender politics were it not for social indoctrination as dictated by religious tenets.

Back to the main point, the denial of our “animal instincts.” We deny our primarily herbivore instincts and instead eat as carnivorous predators, and our physical health has suffered greatly as a genus, or at least certain segments of our world population. It's no accident that in Japan diseases like diabetes and heart disease are dramatically on the rise as the Japanese increasingly emulate our eating habits.

For self-preservation we are taught to be “warriors” when in fact fear dictates we run from danger. How many of us men in particular brow beat ourselves for feeling fear and maybe even for avoiding confrontation? How many of us go to great lengths to portray ourselves as “tough guys” in order to mask our true natures? This causes us great emotional conflict. Society tells us to be tough guys, but our instinct is to flee, as our ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago.
 Quite opposite of the cultural indoctrination, it is the female gender that is most likely to be aggressive because it is the female of the species that is the primary protector of our young.

Recently I’ve seen the phenomenon of aggression-turned-retreat first hand when in a moment of potentially violent confrontation, fear swept across the other person’s face and he backed down, despite the fact that he is much larger and quite a few years younger. When his display of aggression failed to have the desired effect, he fell into our basic instinct to either run or avoid confrontation. Truth is, my heart was pounding with fear as well, but was overcome by the pent-up rage exploding from my psyche. Usually, I’m the one who runs.

When we deny our sexual natures, we deny what could be the core instinct of our animal being. Sex is pleasurable so we will enjoy procreating; instinctually, we do not engage in sex for procreation, we have sex for pleasure. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t masturbate and more importantly, religious tenets would not ban masturbation and other forms of sexual pleasure. Because of religious indoctrination, we have it backwards, or, more accurately, we are told to approach sex unnaturally, as only for procreation and to deny our instinct to find pleasure in it.

The ramifications of that denial are far too extensive for this post (it’s pretty long already), but it ranges from the simple act of reading and viewing sexual material (pictures, videos, magazine and books) in shame, to some of the most horrific crimes in the annals of society; some of us act out our frustration in extremely violent ways.

Worse yet, some “modern” societies actually do harm, to women and girls in particular, to deny the instinct for sexual pleasure; i.e. clitoral circumcision, to use the polite term. The U.N. calls it what it is: Female Genital Mutilation. In South Asia the violence against women is far more extreme if a girl, once married, is found to be not virginal, or merely perceived to not be virginal.

And that is why I often say, “Religion is the root of all evil.”

Posted by Tim Forkes in Religion and Society at 00:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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