CHAPTER SEVEN
LOVE WITH THE PERFECT
STRANGER
Although constrained by marriage vows, and pounced on with ferocity when
discovered, there is what we may discretely call a tendency among males and
females toward a bit of straying.
It is proscribed or frowned on most places, but where among us is there a
man or woman more animated than a stone who has not “lusted after another” in
mind or heart? Or who does not conceal at least one warm memory of a hidden tryst
long ago, or more recently? Or who does not also classify at least some of these
episodes or interludes as love?
Among the classics on our bookshelves, gilt edged and leather bound, are
The Tales of Boccacio, Balzac’s Droll Stories, or more somberly Anna Karinina or
Madame Bovary. Though David and Bathsheba properly suffer for it in the end,
even the Bible would lose much of the color that has held a readership over the
centuries if their story were not there, or if someone had decided long ago that there
really was no theological justification for including the Song of Songs. That of
course for most people is the past. Today we more often flock to movies ranging
from the black and white days of that stiff upper lip, British tear jerker “Brief
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Encounter” to the bucolic straying of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep in “The
Bridges of Madison County” or the merry dalliance of the multiple-academy-awardwinner “Shakespeare in Love.”
Slipping Around in the Bird World
As one might suspect, this dalliance did not go unnoticed by Darwin in the
animal world. Joined by our old friend Mr.Jenner Weir and a new observer, one
Macgillivray, we are taken on quite a tour behind scenes in forest, field, and jungle.
“Having made these preliminary remarks on the discrimination and taste of
birds,” he tells us, “I will give all the facts known to me which bear on the
preference shewn by the female for particular males.”
Thereafter, this particular horde of lore fairly bubbles over out of him.
“It is certain that distinct species of birds occasionally pair in a state of nature
and produce hybrids.” Many instances could be given, he tells us, “thus
Macgillivray relates how a male blackbird and female thrush ‘fell in love with each
other,’ and produced offspring.”
“Several years ago eighteen cases had been recorded of the occurrence in
Great Britain of hybrids between the black grouse and pheasant; but most of these
cases may perhaps be accounted for by solitary birds not finding one of their own
species to pair with. With other birds, as Mr. Jenner Weir has reason to believe,
hybrids are sometimes the result of the casual intercourse of birds building in close
proximity.”
But we must be precise about this. He assures us “these remarks do not apply
to the many recorded instances of tamed or domestic birds, belonging to distinct
species, which have become absolutely fascinated with each other, although living
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with their own species.”
What happens then is a bit disconcerting. What happened to all these birds
“absolutely fascinated” with one another? For it seems that rather than provide us
with the details Darwin has decided to spray the page with the references for us to
presumably search out. “Thus Waterton1919,” he writes, as well as “Waterton,
'Essays on Nat. His.' 2nd series, pp. 42 and 117. See on the wigeon, Loudon's 'Mag.
of Nat. Hist.' vol. ix. p. 616; L. Lloyd, 'Scandinavian Adventures,' vol. i. 1854, p.
452. Dixon, 'Ornamental and Domestic Poultry,' p. 137; Hewitt, in 'Journal of
Horticulture,' Jan. 13, 1863, p. 40; Bechstein, 'Stubenvögel,' 1840, s. 230.”
After all this it is a relief to find Mr. Jenner Weir— who presumably did not
drag strings of formal references along behind him— back in the picture soon
thereafter. His story is of “an analogous case with ducks of two species.” He states
“that out of a flock of twenty-three Canada geese, a female paired with a solitary
Bernicle gander, although so different in appearance and size; and they produced
hybrid offspring.”
Mr.Jenner Weir also knows of “a male wigeon (Mareca penelope), living
with females of the same species,” who has been known “to pair with a pintail duck,
Querquedula acuta.”
Not to be outdone, Darwin tells us that “Lloyd describes the remarkable
attachment between a shield-drake (Tadorna vulpanser) and a common duck. Many
additional instances could be given; and the Rev. E. S. Dixon remarks that ‘those
who have kept many different species of geese together well know what
unaccountable attachments they are frequently forming, and that they are quite as
likely to pair and rear young with individuals of a race (species) apparently the most
alien to themselves as with their own stock.’"
One begins to feel Darwin is taking this out of a large satchel of notes,
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somewhat chagrined to find himself forced to use only a tiny portion of what he has
collected from his gossiping mates of the bird-watchers’ world.
“I will give only one other case. Mr. Hewitt states that a wild duck, reared in
captivity ‘after breeding a couple of seasons with her own mallard, at once shook
him off on my placing a male Pintail on the water. It was evidently a case of love at
first sight, for she swam about the new-comer caressingly, though he appeared
evidently alarmed and averse to her overtures of affection. From that hour she forgot
her old partner. Winter passed by, and the next spring the Pintail seemed to have
become a convert to her blandishments, for they nested and produced seven or eight
young ones.’"
What might account for this tendency not only to find love with the perfect
stranger, but also to shuck the old mate for him or her? But what might also account
for fidelity? Darwin is ready with a further array of Sandwalk mullings about the
bird world.
“We know that dovecot pigeons do not willingly associate with the variously
coloured fancy breeds.” Nor do “albino birds commonly get partners in marriage;
and the black ravens of the Feroe Islands chase away their piebald brethren. But this
dislike of a sudden change would not preclude their appreciating slight changes, any
more than it does in the case of man.”
He concludes that “with respect to taste, which depends on many elements,
but partly on habit and partly on a love of novelty, there seems no improbability in
animals admiring for a very long period the same general style of ornamentation or
other attractions, and yet appreciating slight changes in colours, form, or sound.”
The Promiscuous and the Proper
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This speculation is only the warm up. For now he must range on to look at
our species. Here his takeoff point is the discussion of whether or not the earliest
human society was communist, with communal marriage — that is, all the males
and females swapping around and sharing one another.
It is a curiosity of history worth noting that while Darwin the wealthy
country gentleman was ruminating as follows, perhaps on the Sandwalk, only 16
miles away in grinding poverty, in the worst section of Soho in London, lived the
most notorious trouble-maker of the age, Karl Marx. They died a year apart from
one another, Darwin in 1882 and Marx in 1883. The interesting part of it here was
that, unknown to each other, the two were likely almost simultaneously pondering
the implications of these radical ideas of whether our social beginnings were in
communism and “promiscuity”— as is more Darwin’s than Marx’s or Engels’
concern.
How do we know they were excited by the same sources at roughly the same
time? Because in the notes to these remarks Darwin refers to Bachoven and
Morgan as his sources. The two had first gained serious scientific attention for the
case they made for the earliest societies being based on matriarchies, with women
ruling, rather than patriarchies. (Actually, the data showed neither, but more of an
equality of the sexes.) Marx’s partner Friedrich Engels discovered the same sources
about this time, and fired up by the implications of such enticing ideas for the spread
of modern communism began working on a book about it with Marx’s input.
“Although the manner of development of the marriage-tie is an obscure
subject,” Darwin opines, he must disagree with the ideas of Bachoven, Morgan and
others “on the former prevalence of almost promiscuous intercourse.” For himself
personally, “I cannot believe that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in
times past.”
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“Man, as I have attempted to shew, is certainly descended from some
ape-like creature. With the existing Quadrumana, as far as their habits are known,
the males of some species are monogamous, but live during only a part of the year
with the females. Several kinds, for example some of the Indian and American
monkeys, are strictly monogamous, and associate all the year round with their
wives. Others are polygamous, for example the gorilla and several American
species, and each family lives separate.”
He is trying to be fair about the matter, but his part of the argument is clear:
he is standing up for monogamy. In keeping with the postmodernist cynicism so
popular during the 20th century, it would be easy, if not indeed routine, to say that
Darwin here is merely a captive of his own loyalties and the proper upper class
British expectancy. But while this may shade the argument somewhat, it is also
evident he is sincerely and honestly trying to get at what really happened. And he
simply finds unacceptable the lockstep ideas of wholesale ancient promiscuity or
communal marriage of the early anthropologists such as Morgan— who lacked
Darwin’s own enormous knowledge of the range of behavior for both prehumans
and the human species.
Going back and forth, as was his way, but steadily driving toward one view
more than the other, Darwin moves on for a look at the question in terms of what
tribal life in his own time might suggest.
“Although savages are now extremely licentious, and although communal
marriages may formerly have largely prevailed, yet many tribes practise some form
of marriage, but of a far more lax nature than that of civilised nations. Polygamy, as
just stated, is almost universally followed by the leading men in every tribe.
Nevertheless there are tribes, standing almost at the bottom of the scale, which are
strictly monogamous.”
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To illustrate, he gives the case of the Veddahs of Ceylon. “They have a
saying, ‘that death alone can separate husband and wife.’ An intelligent Kandyan
chief, of course a polygamist, ‘was perfectly scandalised at the utter barbarism of
living with only one wife, and never parting until separated by death.’ It was, he
said, ‘just like the Wanderoo monkey.’"
Messing Around with the Deep Past
And so Darwin does his best, but in the end confronts the difficulty at present
of knowing exactly what happened way back then because of the mess that has been
made of the deep past by many generations of male scholars. How so? And how
did they do this? By plastering over what increasingly seem to be the facts of our
cultural origins with the broad bold brush of male expectancies and stereotypes.
It is an involved story, too long to go into here in detail, but the essential
irony is this. It was a case of the existence of the prehistoric cultural emergence of
the “love track” that was buried during the early formation of the very same
paradigm that during what many of us hope may be its death throes also succeeded
in burying Darwin’s perception of and theory of the “love track” in our time.
In other words, there is this much bigger thing going on in our lives, which
we can only occasionally detect at work, which dangles and moves about many of
us like puppets on its strings. The Man, The Establishment, The System, The
Military-Industrial Complex, The Principalities and Powers, The Over-Riding
Paradigm— over the years, always with the connotation “you can’t buck the system,
et cetera,” these are a few of the things it’s been called.
Perception of the existence of something of this nature was the stock in trade
for the founders of sociology and political science as well as psychoanalysts such as
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Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich. There were accurate perceptions of its vast
hidden power throughout both the 19th and the 20th centuries. But along with the
heresy of Darwin’s interest in love and his otherwise “soft side,” these insights were
routinely shoved into what might be called the Black Hole of Paradigm until the
arrival of a book that was hailed by anthropologist Ashley Montagu as “the most
important since Darwin’s Origin of Species.” Rapidly circling the globe in
English and 17 other languages, this was The Chalice and the Blade, in which
cultural evolution theorist Riane Eisler revealed the dynamics of our captivity by
paradigm in terms of a spell-binding study of 25,000 years of our cultural evolution.
What emerged was a new view of the story of ourselves as puppets, the strings, and
the hidden “puppet master” in terms of a 5,000-year-old conflict between the
“dominator” and “partnership” ways of life.
Within this arresting new perspective, what we are often looking at in this
book is a striking correlation between the two. In other words, what Darwin is
probing within his vast collection of what on the surface seems to be only a
charming or horrifying collection of animal tales is actually his roundabout way of
trying to get at the nature of the same task for human evolution that Eisler deals with
in our time. In Descent he was writing of his discovery and articulation of the
roots, workings, importance, ethos, and scientific expression of the “love track” that
also lies at the core of the peaceful “partnership” way. By contrast, Origin is his
earlier powerful articulation and scientific expression of the violence and essential
brutality of the “dominator” way and ethos.
“At a very early period, before man attained to his present rank in the scale,
many of his conditions would be different from what now obtains amongst
savages,” he comments— and then begins to bow out of the problem of messing
around with the deep past without the data of the thousands of studies by modern
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scientists and scholars of all types that Eisler later brought together in her book.
Though he himself wavered between the dominator paradigm of Origin and
the partnership alternative long hidden within Descent in trying to understand and
explain the workings of evolution, it is interesting to see how often his basic honesty
pointed him in what are not simply feminist, but embracing us all, male and female
alike, more truly humanist directions.
“At this early period,” he conjectures, we would not “have partially lost one
of the strongest of all instincts, common to all the lower animals, namely the love of
their young offspring; and consequently they would not have practised female
infanticide.”
“Nor would women be valued merely as useful slaves or beasts of burden,”
he observed.
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