planet of the apes

I apologize for my absence yesterday. I was playing in back-to-back finals for the recreational netball and beach volleyball leagues I’ve been playing in, and was a bit knackered at the end of the day. You may not be familiar with netball, but I’m told it was invented years ago when basketball was considered too rough for women. So it’s like basketball, but with a number of modifications to make it easier for weak and soft people. Of course, I don’t agree that basketball is too rough for women, but as I consider myself weak and soft I’m quite happy to have found netball. For example, one modification is that a defender has to stand 3 feet back from a shooter. When I played basketball, the one thing I could do was hit shots if nobody was threatening me with any harm or humiliation, so netball is perfect for me. Some people have tried to call me a good netball player, but I prefer to think of myself as a poor basketball player who has discovered the sport version of the Land of Misfit Toys.

There’s a useful analogy here; that thinking of yourself only in terms of your traits misses a big part of the picture. There’s so much political show-off talk about “character,” but I think a healthier way to think about your personality is in terms of what situations you respond to well or not so well. This actually is the meta-lesson of social psychology, so it’s hardly a unique insight. But it has important implications. For example, doctors are so keen to prescribe anti-depressants. I’ve heard figures of something like 25% of the population is depressed. In a society that thinks in terms of traits and character, depression is the result of the individual. But if 25% of society is depressed, isn’t it more likely that the problem is with the conditions we live under rather than the people themselves?

We often laugh at pets because their behaviour seems so silly in a human context. My cat will often use the litter box, then do scraping motions in the air that are totally non-functional. When he’s out in the dirt, though, he does the same scraping motions and they make a lot more sense, they cover his urine with dirt. But we are no more in our natural environment than he is. Much of our instinctive behaviour evolved to deal with the problems presented by environments like the African savannah. For example, I’d argue that we get so worked up about things like insults because expulsion from our tribemates meant death. Try living without a group in an environment like the Australian outback for a few days, and find out just how reliant we really are on others. So we evolved in a context where rejection really was a life or death matter, and now we react to rejection that way. For example, people often get really angry and aggressive on the road if their driving is insulted (i.e., road rage). This, to me, is no different than the cat scraping uselessly into the air – we have a certain repertoire of responses that don’t really fit well with the modern situation because they weren’t designed for this situation. We’re probably better off taking the meaningless insult, and getting on with more important things. But this “character” thing we’re talking about, ironically enough, is portrayed as doing stuff like standing up for your honour by fighting with fists. Ultimately, we’re all just monkeys in cages of our own devising.