Friends

I've been reading--and rereading--Sex at Dawn, which is a remarkable and thought-provoking book.  The authors suggest--prove! in my opinion--that humans are not naturally pair-bonded, but instead relate sexually and emotionally to several partners.  Within a hunter-gatherer group, the men would have sex with many of the women, and the women with many of the men.  The men might also have sex (make love) with each other, even though it produces no offspring, because the individuals in the group survive only if the group survives, and bonding the group together--including same-gender bonding--becomes imperative.  So gayness makes clear evolutionary sense.  The oxytocin released during the act of sex ties the community closer together.

But these communities seem never to have exceeded 150 people (The Dunbar number)

Now we try to run vast societies with millions of members, and we stretch the emotional bonds appropriate for 150 people beyond their capacity, and we wonder why our lives are "nasty and brutish".  We wonder that crime exists, and selfish, greedy elites, and hate-filled Christianist communities.

I have no idea what the solution is (we're here, now, with cities of millions of inhabitants) but it seems to me that love is a key ingredient.  Love thy neighbour as thyself, He said.  Yet, I fear that our societies will become only more atomised, more lonely and more selfish and that the ruling ideologies and theologies promote the vile nonsense that selfishness is rational, that greed is good, and that loyalty is for spaniels.

Meanwhile, we aid and assist this process of progressive anomie and irrelevance every time we say "he's just a friend".  Celebrate love, mes amis.  Don't believe or accept the Abrahamic piffle that love--physical and sexual--is wrong.

We are programmed to love one another.