In the Grip of a Patriarchal Picture

Bear with me for a minute, cause I'm gonna get all philosophical on ya. I promise it won't hurt.

In philosophy, those of us who've been bit by the Witgenstein bug like to use the phrase "in the grip of a picture" to describe the way human thought and interpretation tends to mold itself to the currently dominant paradigm. The way this works is that, in trying to conceptualize something, you come up with various models or "pictures" that help you manipulate and explore the topic. But after using one particular model for awhile, you become committed to it. It shapes your thinking and your perceptions. You're less likely to notice or take into account data that doesn't fit into your picture (anomalies), and the things you observe that do fit into your picture take on more significance for you. Thus you're "in the grip of a picture." Occasionally the anomolies build up and become so significant that you're sort of forced to abandon your model for a new one that involves less conflict. This is known as a paradigm shift. Some famous examples of paradigm shifts are the Copernican Revolution, the move from a Newtonian view to Relativity in physics, and the Keynesian Revolution in economics. But your worldview has probably undergone a number of paradigm shifts over the course of your life. Do you remember the day when it occurred to you that your parents weren't perfect? Did you experience an "aha" moment that "converted" you to feminism, or a particular political stance, or a particular view of human nature? These are all examples of personal paradigm shifts.

But generally speaking, human cognition seems to follow a conservative pattern- we'll go to great lengths to preserve our paradigm and shore it up rather than undergoing a shift. This is why the phrase "in the grip of a picture" is so compelling. It seems as if the model we're currently committed to has really sort of grasped us and it takes a lot of work to tear ourselves away from it and see things from a different angle. And when there's something at stake socially, we're even less inclined to abandon our picture or acknowledge the anomalies that challenge it. So for the purposes of this post, I'm going to refer to this as "cognitive conservatism."

In a similar vein, humans have a tendency to project. We look at non-human objects and creatures and interpret them in human terms. We personify and anthropomorphize everything from song birds to tornadoes to supernatural beings. One of the "pre-socratic philosophers," Xenophanes, captured this tendency when it comes to the way we conceptualize God/the gods perfectly in this fragment:

the Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark, Thracians, that theirs are grey-eyed and red-haired.

So here we have two human patterns: the tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things and cognitive conservatism. These two human tendencies come together in a tragic-comic way when it comes to the ways we impose hierarchical and patriarchal structures on the animal world. The inimitable Twisty Faster posted on one instance of this today in the tongue-in-cheek All-girl ant species sends shockwaves through ant community. Among other things she points out that, contrary to reporting in the MSM, these ants aren't the only known species to reproduce asexually, and that it's strange that we automatically label the ants as "female" since they cannot mate due to genital degeneration. Why does the MSM report so selectively on asexual reproduction? Because they're in the grip of a picture. It's called patriarchy. The tendency to essentialize and "naturalize" hierarchical relations in our culture by interpreting all kinds of animal behavior in anthropomorphized and hierarchical terms is indicative of both cognitive conservatism and projection.

Other examples of this abound in the study of animal behavior. One of my favorites involves the depiction of primate sexual behavior. For one thing, it's only in recent years that scientists have been openly acknowledging the abundance of "homosexual" mating and pair-bonding behavior in a number of species, including primates. If these animals have been behaving this way all along, why weren't we seeing it and including it in our accounts of them? And my favorite example of selective observation/skewed interpretation involves the sexual behavior of female primates. Most people still believe that primates tend to form social groups comprised of one "alpha male" and his "harem," who all mate with him exclusively and whom he dominates completely through physical force, right? That's the picture you were taught in 8th grade biology class. The thing is, this picture turns out to be completely inaccurate for almost all primates. Even in primates who do form social groups like this, the females are generally very promiscuous. They sneak off and mate with whatever males are lurking around all the time. In fact, recent DNA tests have shown that it's often less likely that an infant in the group will be the offspring of the alpha male than of a peripheral male. This is explained as an evolutionary strategy in which the female can increase the chances that a new male who manages to successfully challenge the "alpha" male will accept her child as his. If she's slept with all of them, then they're more likely to believe that the child is theirs.

So why did it take so many years for scientists to become aware of this whole range of female primate behavior? A couple of things. Science has been a male-dominated field for a long time. And the men who were observing primates were in the grip of a picture in which females were passive objects that the active and dominant males acted on. So whole swaths of female primate behavior were practically invisible to them. Thus the common pop mythology that men have a "biological imperative" to spread their seed as far and wide as possible, while women just want to stay at home and nurture their young and be faithful to one man. Riiight. So as science has changed, and more women have entered the field, more of the female behavior has become visible. Of course, female scientists have also been socialized in a patriarchal culture, so much of their observation and interpretation of animal behavior will conform to the patriarchal picture as well. But as feminism and other ideologies which challenge hierarchical social structures become more influential, it begins to occur to people that our human social structures may not be the immutable "natural" things they've always been portrayed as. So the paradigm gradually shifts and becomes more flexible, and as it does, new phenomena become visible to us and new interpretations of our observations occur to us. Of course this is a very slow process, and not at all the kind of paradigm shift that the Copernican Revolution was. But it is a shift, even if it seems to be agonizingly gradual.

Addendum: in comments, Michael pointed out to me that I didn't explain the duckrabbit illustration I used (the first pic in this post) so here it is. The duckrabbit is often used to demonstrate the way simple paradigm shifts happen. If you look at the picture thinking it's a duck, then you don't even notice it can also look like a rabbit, and vice versa. Because you're "in the grip of the picture" that you're looking at a duck. But once the idea occurs to you that it could be a rabbit, that's how you perceive it, and there seems to be no trace of duck left in it. And you can make it switch back and forth, thus experiencing a simple paradigm shift in your head in real time.