I'd like to add some detail here to Lorenzo's excellent landscape painting, from my little corner of the world.
My wife is a novelist who knows and mentors many young women writers, so my home is usually swamped with books and galleys and manuscripts, if not the actual authors themselves.
Now of course I don't know the full life stories of all these young women, but for the most part they are attractive, reasonably well-off and well-educated, with decent jobs from supportive families etc, and are living here in California in perhaps the time of the greatest sexual equality in history, with tremendous freedom and opportunity, and yet—just about their entire corpus is a litany of misery and complaint, usually in a few basic flavors: screeds against the patriarchy and/or overheated Handmaiden fantasies about evil men; complaints about exes and their sins, which could probably go in a bookstore aisle labeled BAD BOYFRIENDS; then personal odysseys usually about multiple sex partners and/or multiple nervous breakdowns and/or multiple shrinks and their medications, all of it told in the same mode of Look at Me, I'm a Stunning & Brave Victim of malevolent maleness and the evil world men have created.
My feeling is that young women in our age of total liberation can't quite handle all the freedom they've been given, and now that Victim ideology/morality is the only game in town, many of them (ironically often the most privileged) have developed a weird autoimmune disease where they need to have constant public tantrums to show how anxious and miserable they are, which allows them to pose as righteous victims and bask in whatever attention this provides—while also relieving them of the burdens of autonomy and responsibility. (Or maybe Anne Sexton said it better: "My need is more desperate!")
Is it possible maybe that the dreaded patriarchy was even more beneficial to women than it was to men??
In the Anglosphere, and the West generally, the patriarchy delivered one important thing - women and children first.
When they agitated to get careers the men resisted because they understood careers were rare. Men had jobs. Most jobs are drudgery. They insisted. And now they are wage slaves like the men. Perhaps this represents the failure of patriarchy. It couldn't endure female ambition.
The future is testosterone, in no uncertain terms. The daughters of your anxious novelists will live in brutal conditions given what is coming.
One of the biggest lies of our age is that women who stay home and raise kids are "oppressed" or "unfulfilled" while women who get jobs in things like sales and marketing or HR etc are "free and liberated" etc...this is a great triumph of corporate propaganda and shows how the market state (or market god) eventually dissolves all the roots that make a society possible.
Feminism doesn't sell liberty, it sells a lifestyle as you say. Handbags, shoes, brunch whenever you like.
But the videos on Tik Tok are mounting up. The forty-somethings who missed the boat because of careers they now question. It is uncomfortable watching intelligent, articulate women realize on camera they have been conned. They of course made those decisions, and some are heartless about that. But I do feel sorry for them, knowing they will never be mothers and for what? To increase shareholder value?
But it is past time we worked out a way to circumvent the mainstream media and their distortions and really put the feminists on the spot. They have enjoyed decades of protection for their bad ideas. Where is the female emancipation you promised? Why the record numbers on antidepressants? Why are so many of them not mothers? What are you doing?
as u may have said before, all these illusions around personal liberation and fulfillment (aka the Self as God) will come crashing down the moment the $ runs out.
Most Americans have no idea how much of their existence is predicated on the dollar being the global reserve currency, and when that ends (which i don't think is soonish, but inevitable by mid-century), we will all be digging through rubble, social and personal.
It would be nice just once to hear a woman say, "Some guy, covered on grease, fixed my car, while working in an auto repair barn without air-conditioning. I don't even know what was wrong with the car, which, btw, is air-conditioned. I turn on a tap, and water comes out. I flush the toilet, and it goes away. Flick a switch, the lights come on. All this is built and maintained by men, because we women, by and large, do not want to do it. None---and I mean none---of my female friends or associates aspire to be garage mechanics."
I ran a small and unprofitable wood shop for 20 years, bought lots of very heavy duty old woodworking equipment...got to know Los Angeles area "gear heads." Never met a woman who rhapsodized about, say, old Oliver-brand band saws or jointers.
I have never seen a real, bona fide, female auto mechanic.
But women who partake in "male" activities are (from what I have seen) very popular.
For one, often they are the only woman in a group or five or ten. Secondly, they are tremendous relief from the usual.
"It would be nice just once...." Well I'm no fan of feminism but such things do occasionally happen (and are on the up I think...I hope). Here is femininist Kathleen Stock reviewing Caitlin Moran's appalling book What About Men?..."it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former......most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.
.......Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less...... To treat ‘feminine traits’ as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that..... In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden" https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
And to be fair, how many of us "self centered" males manage to also compliment our ladies when they cook the meals, do the laundry and other cleaning, nurse our children (biologically and medically), and may even hop on the riding mower if they are unhappy that we have not done so already with a timing of their preference? They still expect us to maintain said mower and do the other household repairs, etc., but the goal is a common appreciation of each other's contribution - absent the wokeness and mental/ moral distortions that Lorenzo is examining here today.
Agree with much of this having got kicked out of the Longhouse for my insistence on due process and rational argument during the MeToo hysteria. Excellent insights here on the mess we're in, but I differ on the origins and impetus of patriarchy.
The term is thrown around in many ways for many purposes, which is fine since language does that, but etymologically and most fundamentally for an understanding of human behavior, patriarchy is about fatherhood and who "owns" children. The biological reality for almost all human history was that men couldn't know who their children were unless they strictly controlled a woman (or women if they could afford a harem). Theories abound, but I find it plausible that paternity became important with the advent of agriculture because settling in one place requires possessions and property that could be handed down. Abrahamic religions are deeply rooted in pastoral farming, and can be understood as codifying the dominant role of the father or patriarch.
It's interesting to me that the discovery of paternity in human (versus almost all other species including our primate cousins) societies is rarely discussed as the revolutionary factor it was.
The creation of the social relationship of fatherhood is why we have marriage. I define patriarchy as the presumption that authority is male. So, while fatherhood is very much a building block of patriarchy, you have fatherhood without patriarchy.
On the aspects of property and heredity, you might want to extend back to the mid or late Neolithic domestication of animals, even before agricultural settlements(??). On your paternity element, the book The Ancient City explores the early religious views that made the father (cum patriarch) the life and death priest/controller over the family [extended in turn to the clan, tribe, and city-state leadership.] Women were essentially the property of their father or husband. Changing that social development or posture would have required altering a long established religious and worship pattern - perhaps even defying the god(s).
Societies varied quite considerably on how patriarchal they were. Pharaonic Egypt was considerably less patriarchal than Mesopotamian civilisation, for instance.
There's an odd twist where we've decided that to be a successful woman she must be indistinguishable from a successful man. But we aren't wired the same. So they go into these careers and redesign them to their own culture. But that's not really who they are.
As a woman, I agree. Shows a distinct lack of imagination and smacks more of agenda than of concern for half the population's wellbeing. I wonder how much of this is due to media and academic conditioning? How successful women are portrayed as domineering and narcissistic masculine characters, albeit in uncomfortable shoes.
Feminism, in practice, seems to have little to do with offering women equal rights and opportunities to choose from options and more to do with keeping us exhausted and dissatisfied. And with bringing to power the more unfortunate feminine characteristics like cliques over teams which are, as you've noted, necessary for our current cancel culture to exist.
I'm grateful that I live in a country where honour killings aren't culturally condoned and I can't be stoned to death for showing my ankles. That much we've accomplished as a society and that's not nothing. But beyond that, I can't say feminism has done me many favours. Having it all just meant having two full-time jobs and being more than a bit pissed off about that sometimes.
This captures what's going on in academia so perfectly. A friend, who is also a female professor, was telling me about a mentorship training at her university, where everyone had to list qualities of a good leader. The clique of wokies ripped into her for listing "hard-working" (because that's setting a bad example about work-life balance!), while their lists were full of emotional demands she thought were overstepping and borderline creepy. This is going to get so much worse as older men retire.
"Norms stabilise our expectations about each other in a way that makes cooperation much more resilient." Upon rereading that, it occurred to me you may want to add some of this to your exploration of the benefits of order provided by governments (even totalitarian ones). Governments end up cementing many moral positions and norms (and instinctual characteristics) into rules and laws. Not all such laws are well aligned with our Judeo-Christian heritage, and may in fact reduce incentives to cooperate [as the variance in levels of economic prosperity across the globe show]. You have already mentioned Stringham's Private Governance where some norms operate even outside of legal strictures. [I have not yet read that book but I did buy it based on your mention of it :-) ]
Stringham is a great read. Like many libertarians, he does not the advantages of state order sufficiently seriously, but most of the book is a revelation as he teases out ordering principles that operate without direct state action. And it was real penny drop moment when he discussed how private policing bundles public goods with territory and I thought “but that is what states do” and realised that public goods have a scope problem that states solve via territoriality.
But I entirely agree that the way states create an institutional commons is crucial. The difference in capacities between state and non-state societies is stark. If you want some scary data on how important states are for basic order, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
Another aspect of this essay and much of the "worshipping" series is the extension of homo erectus characteristics evolving into the modern age. While I agree with many of the hypotheses concerning possible/ probable evolved psychological features, unless you were using data from other archeological studies [that you did not happen to reference explicitly] we must remember just how tenuous some of these assertions are. Reasonable - yes; proven -- well ... ?
I came across a You Tube video the other day about Neanderthals and evidence from their DNA that they typically had higher levels of testosterone than modern males, and thus would have been even more aggressive [even if more wary of and less skilled at fighting homo sapiens?]. Given the vagaries of genetic changes, it may or may not follow that homo erectus had the same or greater levels of such male acting hormones?
I view Homo erectus as the evolutionary ground from which we evolve, but agree we need to be careful making any inferences therefrom. Homo sapiens behave significantly differently from early on — for example displaying relatively soon after emergence evidence of gift or exchange networks (it is hard archaeologically to tell the difference).
From adolescence in the eighties on I had high hopes for the end of patriarchy. I saw the faults of male power, corruption, false pride, banality and stupid violence and believed women could make things better when they were in charge. I'm conflict avoidant and should have become sceptical after having been thrown out of a shared flat for having one dick too many, but I kept on hoping. Bad mistake.
"...we are the equal most proactively ... aggressive primate. Yet, we are the least reactively aggressive primate." Perhaps part of that is that we realize we are now the apex hunter and thus going up against one of us is going to be more of a challenge than killing some other large animal. So also of course the need for several beta males to successfully attack a single alpha male.
"The hypothesis is that, as we evolved from Homo erectus, teams of beta males ... systematically killed off the alpha males. Because the two forms of aggression use different brain circuits, we used our proactive aggression to systematically select against reactive aggression, murdering our way to niceness." And "systematically killing" is used in the next paragraph, too. I am reacting to your use of the word "murdering" in one sentence and not the others. Why not say the alphas were "executed" or
"assassinated" ?? We consider murder as morally sanctioned, whereas some forms of killing are "justified". It would not have met our modern criteria for legal due process, but the mutual decision to kill an overbearing alpha (for justified or not so justified reasons) might have involved some measure of moral or "semi-norm" "semi-legal" assessment prior to the life ending action. Depending on context, it might not have been "murder" as we use the term?
Hmmm. Worth thinking about. It does seem that, for example, manorialism and centuries of capital punishment for murder in Europe might well have “trimmed the tail” of extreme aggression in European populations.
My memory is a sieve but read an article on how wars came about.
War in large scale in agricultural societies requires a few number of highly aggressive men (warriors) and a large number of passive men (farmers) to support the aggressive ones.
The hypothesis as I recall is that as we shifted from small horticulture to large agriculture and towards more kingship political systems, people who were too aggressive towards the leadership were systematically killed off.
(This was actually Stalin's approach to the Purges. If you killed off enough trouble makers, eventually you'd breed a true Communist Man. As one article pointed out, it might have worked if he had a few hundred or thousand years to do so. In, say, the Ancient Persian Empire you had those thousands.)
Thus you find the very passive approach that's actually common among Fars and Chinese. Don't raise your head, the king will cut it off.
hhhmmmm! While your core hypothesis was a time frame predating Europe by many millennia, it seems that the European "tail" or other trimmed tails have regrown through out history. Perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage to some pronounced level of aggression in aiding both genetic and cultural evolution? If the "team" cannot be formed up out of appreciation for the benefits of mutual cooperation, maybe it can be formed from fear of the alpha? Even a governmental alpha?? An order producing state entity.
Selecting against reactive aggression does not select against proactive aggression. Given the advantages of drilled over un-drilled armies, all that capital punishment may well have made for being better at organised violence. The way merely trained, but no conventional warfare military experience, Anglo-American forces went right through lots-of-recent-conventional-warfare-experience, Iraqi forces in 1991 was striking.
It took me about 4 re-readings of your last sentence to extract what I think you meant. :-)
Viz, that the wealthy Anglo-American forces were well trained in preparation for facing a possible Soviet army, but had had no meaningful conventional warfare experience since 1975 and Vietnam. So they were in good shape for proactively initiated warfare.
In contrast, the Iraqi army was not wealthy enough to have been deeply trained, have the latest or superior weaponry, etc., but they did have recent experience fighting Iran's army. And their culture was tuned to being reactively aggressive.
Do I understand you correctly here?
I suspect this example is less a reflection of evolved or inherited proactive vs. reactive aggression than evidence that superior leadership, weapons, training, and morale will likely win out. And strictly speaking, we were not proactively aggressive enough to achieve "nation building", if we give being proactive the benefit of deeper rational analysis than emotional reactivity.
For this particular dichotomy, perhaps these recent culturally evolved observations are really just along for the ride with longer term genetic cleansing, per your other reference on fighting and competition within patrilineal clan linages creating a real or imaginary Y chromosome "bottleneck" about 5000 years BP. [I could not fully comprehend that whole very long article :-( ]
My point was a high-trust (low reactive aggression) culture troops, who were well trained in taking-initiative warfare (proactive aggression), performed much better than an army with lots of recent experience in conventional warfare but were a low trust culture (at least outside the kin group). If capital punishment mainly eliminates high reactive aggression folk, it may even help the capacity for proactive aggression.
Under the patriarchy (rule of ‘fathers’ - not simply men) a shirt like that would never have been tolerated - by other men, especially in such a setting. The contradiction is that the policing of other men’s behaviour is now left to women, who use nurture/shame models rather than codes of order and honour among men. Women need the structure and order of society that men used to provide. In its absence women step in. In the 60s the pill was celebrated far more by young men than by women, who really only wanted contraception within the social structure of committed monogamy but the pill eroded those structures so women have had to adapt and become like men. But it’s not in our nature to be men. No ‘side’ is to blame. When the balance of polarity between our complementary natures is out of whack, and at their extremes when the feminine is dominant everything falls apart and when the masculine is too dominant it becomes an intolerable cruel fascism. There is no equality. Nor should that be our aim. It’s utter misanthropy.
Great analysis. This also explains why the feminized cultures of the West (currently) struggle in the face of the old school, patriarchy of Islam. But weirdly, the feminized Western cultures' long term plan is to absorb Islamic immigrants and then use the social norming of the feminized longhouse to grind them down to a nub as well. And since the leaders of the long house don't care about polities, borders, or time spans, they think, on a long enough timeline with enough Western male simps and betas to fight for them in endless wars, they will dominate the Muslim cultures anyway. Might take 500 years or 50 years they don't care. Islam will bend the knee...
"Progressivism screws things up due to its pathological relationship to information. It sets an imagined future — so without reality tests — as its benchmark for action; treats past and present as realms of sin, discounting the only sources of information we actually have; and acts as if it owns morality, so blocking, and being very intolerant of, dissenting views."
Replace "progressivism" with "christianity" or "islam" and the statement still holds at least as true. Very little has better earned the description of "an intolerant, imperial propriety" than these religions. Yet they have always been highly male-dominated and patriarchal. Does this not undermine the thesis just a bit?
Yes and no. Christianity treated law as human and permitted the political its own sphere of action. It believed in truth, treated the world as the direct creation of God, so trumped Scripture. We got the development of science and Parliamentarianism under Christianity.
I love when people dump Christianity and Islam together as 'these are horrible.'
Christianity has had horrible times. I'll give it that. But the essential message of Christianity and Islam could not be more pronounced. Islam supports lying (tafiq) whereas it is abhorrent in Christianity. Murder is a sin in Christianity, it is a holy action in Islam. Christianity supports the doctrine of 'Consent of the maiden.' 'Do you take this man to be your...' 'I will.'
In Islam, a man decides who the woman marries, period dot, there is no choice on her part nor in Divorce.
(This, btw, is the most common form in ALL major traditional social groups world-wide EXCEPT Judeo-Christianity.)
The best moment to highlight that is what happened when the authorities came for Jesus vs Mohammed.
Jesus told his followers to deny him and gave himself up for our sins. He knew he was going to be tortured but was willing to sacrifice himself to save others. (And our souls if you're a Believer.)
Mohammed had his followers hold them off while he escaped out the back (literally) on a camel and became a bandit chief.
Jesus told us 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'
Mohammed said 'In the end of times the very rocks and trees will cry out 'Here is a Jew, a descendant of apes and pigs, come and kill him sons of Allah!''
I was struck with how the Iraqi Army retook Mosul from ISIS by effectively the same way they did their late Iran-Iraq War offensives. Plan, limited offensive, stop; plan, limited offensive, stop …. Having read Kenneth Pollack’s PhD thesis was helpful. (It became ‘Armies of Sand’.) It was the first time I read a cultural analysis that was not just analytical silly putty. (I have an analytical hole, I will shape “culture” to fit and stick it in.)
The 1991 Gulf War also really showed up that the IDF is just a Western army that gets more experience.
What we learned from DS was that training is to morale as 3:1. (As morale is to the physical as 3:1. Thus training gives a 9:1 advantage and that's somewhat born out even in Iraq and Afghanistan in infantry to infantry combat.)
What we're learning from Ukraine, hopefully, is that there is also a benefit to mass firepower. We'd sort of forgotten that doing nothing but COIN.
And infantry has a whole new bugaboo to deal with. First it was cannons. Then repeating rifles. Then machine guns. Then those damned aeroplanes and land cruisers. Damn them to hell! (WWII doughboy shaking his fist at the sky.)
Now it's dang drones.
(Sorry, forgot this was public! My bad!)
I can honestly say I'm glad I'm long out of the Army infantry. Because the next even near peer war infantry is going to be the worst possible spot to be. (As it always has been. But more so.)
I'd like to add some detail here to Lorenzo's excellent landscape painting, from my little corner of the world.
My wife is a novelist who knows and mentors many young women writers, so my home is usually swamped with books and galleys and manuscripts, if not the actual authors themselves.
Now of course I don't know the full life stories of all these young women, but for the most part they are attractive, reasonably well-off and well-educated, with decent jobs from supportive families etc, and are living here in California in perhaps the time of the greatest sexual equality in history, with tremendous freedom and opportunity, and yet—just about their entire corpus is a litany of misery and complaint, usually in a few basic flavors: screeds against the patriarchy and/or overheated Handmaiden fantasies about evil men; complaints about exes and their sins, which could probably go in a bookstore aisle labeled BAD BOYFRIENDS; then personal odysseys usually about multiple sex partners and/or multiple nervous breakdowns and/or multiple shrinks and their medications, all of it told in the same mode of Look at Me, I'm a Stunning & Brave Victim of malevolent maleness and the evil world men have created.
My feeling is that young women in our age of total liberation can't quite handle all the freedom they've been given, and now that Victim ideology/morality is the only game in town, many of them (ironically often the most privileged) have developed a weird autoimmune disease where they need to have constant public tantrums to show how anxious and miserable they are, which allows them to pose as righteous victims and bask in whatever attention this provides—while also relieving them of the burdens of autonomy and responsibility. (Or maybe Anne Sexton said it better: "My need is more desperate!")
Is it possible maybe that the dreaded patriarchy was even more beneficial to women than it was to men??
My god your poor life, California and a female progressive tribe cosplaying victimhood in your living room. Good luck to you.
In the Anglosphere, and the West generally, the patriarchy delivered one important thing - women and children first.
When they agitated to get careers the men resisted because they understood careers were rare. Men had jobs. Most jobs are drudgery. They insisted. And now they are wage slaves like the men. Perhaps this represents the failure of patriarchy. It couldn't endure female ambition.
The future is testosterone, in no uncertain terms. The daughters of your anxious novelists will live in brutal conditions given what is coming.
One of the biggest lies of our age is that women who stay home and raise kids are "oppressed" or "unfulfilled" while women who get jobs in things like sales and marketing or HR etc are "free and liberated" etc...this is a great triumph of corporate propaganda and shows how the market state (or market god) eventually dissolves all the roots that make a society possible.
Feminism doesn't sell liberty, it sells a lifestyle as you say. Handbags, shoes, brunch whenever you like.
But the videos on Tik Tok are mounting up. The forty-somethings who missed the boat because of careers they now question. It is uncomfortable watching intelligent, articulate women realize on camera they have been conned. They of course made those decisions, and some are heartless about that. But I do feel sorry for them, knowing they will never be mothers and for what? To increase shareholder value?
But it is past time we worked out a way to circumvent the mainstream media and their distortions and really put the feminists on the spot. They have enjoyed decades of protection for their bad ideas. Where is the female emancipation you promised? Why the record numbers on antidepressants? Why are so many of them not mothers? What are you doing?
as u may have said before, all these illusions around personal liberation and fulfillment (aka the Self as God) will come crashing down the moment the $ runs out.
Most Americans have no idea how much of their existence is predicated on the dollar being the global reserve currency, and when that ends (which i don't think is soonish, but inevitable by mid-century), we will all be digging through rubble, social and personal.
I think it will be sooner. As to our fat lives, yes. All this is a product of affluence.
Interesting post.
It would be nice just once to hear a woman say, "Some guy, covered on grease, fixed my car, while working in an auto repair barn without air-conditioning. I don't even know what was wrong with the car, which, btw, is air-conditioned. I turn on a tap, and water comes out. I flush the toilet, and it goes away. Flick a switch, the lights come on. All this is built and maintained by men, because we women, by and large, do not want to do it. None---and I mean none---of my female friends or associates aspire to be garage mechanics."
We exist. We aren’t popular but we exist 😀
I ran a small and unprofitable wood shop for 20 years, bought lots of very heavy duty old woodworking equipment...got to know Los Angeles area "gear heads." Never met a woman who rhapsodized about, say, old Oliver-brand band saws or jointers.
I have never seen a real, bona fide, female auto mechanic.
But women who partake in "male" activities are (from what I have seen) very popular.
For one, often they are the only woman in a group or five or ten. Secondly, they are tremendous relief from the usual.
I wouldn’t say I partake. I’m not talented in that way. I respect people who can do things with their hands. Real things in the real world.
"It would be nice just once...." Well I'm no fan of feminism but such things do occasionally happen (and are on the up I think...I hope). Here is femininist Kathleen Stock reviewing Caitlin Moran's appalling book What About Men?..."it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former......most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.
.......Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less...... To treat ‘feminine traits’ as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that..... In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden" https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
Hope springs eternal....
Kathleen Stock has prospered outside academe because she is a fine writer, has a good brain and is not afraid to use it.
The writer Camille Paglia has been screaming that for years, much to the longhouse's dismay.
And to be fair, how many of us "self centered" males manage to also compliment our ladies when they cook the meals, do the laundry and other cleaning, nurse our children (biologically and medically), and may even hop on the riding mower if they are unhappy that we have not done so already with a timing of their preference? They still expect us to maintain said mower and do the other household repairs, etc., but the goal is a common appreciation of each other's contribution - absent the wokeness and mental/ moral distortions that Lorenzo is examining here today.
Agree with much of this having got kicked out of the Longhouse for my insistence on due process and rational argument during the MeToo hysteria. Excellent insights here on the mess we're in, but I differ on the origins and impetus of patriarchy.
The term is thrown around in many ways for many purposes, which is fine since language does that, but etymologically and most fundamentally for an understanding of human behavior, patriarchy is about fatherhood and who "owns" children. The biological reality for almost all human history was that men couldn't know who their children were unless they strictly controlled a woman (or women if they could afford a harem). Theories abound, but I find it plausible that paternity became important with the advent of agriculture because settling in one place requires possessions and property that could be handed down. Abrahamic religions are deeply rooted in pastoral farming, and can be understood as codifying the dominant role of the father or patriarch.
It's interesting to me that the discovery of paternity in human (versus almost all other species including our primate cousins) societies is rarely discussed as the revolutionary factor it was.
The creation of the social relationship of fatherhood is why we have marriage. I define patriarchy as the presumption that authority is male. So, while fatherhood is very much a building block of patriarchy, you have fatherhood without patriarchy.
On the aspects of property and heredity, you might want to extend back to the mid or late Neolithic domestication of animals, even before agricultural settlements(??). On your paternity element, the book The Ancient City explores the early religious views that made the father (cum patriarch) the life and death priest/controller over the family [extended in turn to the clan, tribe, and city-state leadership.] Women were essentially the property of their father or husband. Changing that social development or posture would have required altering a long established religious and worship pattern - perhaps even defying the god(s).
Societies varied quite considerably on how patriarchal they were. Pharaonic Egypt was considerably less patriarchal than Mesopotamian civilisation, for instance.
There's an odd twist where we've decided that to be a successful woman she must be indistinguishable from a successful man. But we aren't wired the same. So they go into these careers and redesign them to their own culture. But that's not really who they are.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/rediscovering-the-goddess
One of the oddest features of much of feminism is that it, in effect, sets what men typically aspire to as the standard for women.
As a woman, I agree. Shows a distinct lack of imagination and smacks more of agenda than of concern for half the population's wellbeing. I wonder how much of this is due to media and academic conditioning? How successful women are portrayed as domineering and narcissistic masculine characters, albeit in uncomfortable shoes.
Feminism, in practice, seems to have little to do with offering women equal rights and opportunities to choose from options and more to do with keeping us exhausted and dissatisfied. And with bringing to power the more unfortunate feminine characteristics like cliques over teams which are, as you've noted, necessary for our current cancel culture to exist.
I'm grateful that I live in a country where honour killings aren't culturally condoned and I can't be stoned to death for showing my ankles. That much we've accomplished as a society and that's not nothing. But beyond that, I can't say feminism has done me many favours. Having it all just meant having two full-time jobs and being more than a bit pissed off about that sometimes.
Even leaving aside the moral issues—which are very real—I so don’t want to live in a gender inegalitarian society, I know far too much about them.
100%
This captures what's going on in academia so perfectly. A friend, who is also a female professor, was telling me about a mentorship training at her university, where everyone had to list qualities of a good leader. The clique of wokies ripped into her for listing "hard-working" (because that's setting a bad example about work-life balance!), while their lists were full of emotional demands she thought were overstepping and borderline creepy. This is going to get so much worse as older men retire.
The institutions [universities] are increasingly becoming a failed institutional form.
"Norms stabilise our expectations about each other in a way that makes cooperation much more resilient." Upon rereading that, it occurred to me you may want to add some of this to your exploration of the benefits of order provided by governments (even totalitarian ones). Governments end up cementing many moral positions and norms (and instinctual characteristics) into rules and laws. Not all such laws are well aligned with our Judeo-Christian heritage, and may in fact reduce incentives to cooperate [as the variance in levels of economic prosperity across the globe show]. You have already mentioned Stringham's Private Governance where some norms operate even outside of legal strictures. [I have not yet read that book but I did buy it based on your mention of it :-) ]
Stringham is a great read. Like many libertarians, he does not the advantages of state order sufficiently seriously, but most of the book is a revelation as he teases out ordering principles that operate without direct state action. And it was real penny drop moment when he discussed how private policing bundles public goods with territory and I thought “but that is what states do” and realised that public goods have a scope problem that states solve via territoriality.
But I entirely agree that the way states create an institutional commons is crucial. The difference in capacities between state and non-state societies is stark. If you want some scary data on how important states are for basic order, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
This article is easier to read. https://www.sciencealert.com/neolithic-y-chromosome-bottleneck-warring-patrilineal-clans#
Another aspect of this essay and much of the "worshipping" series is the extension of homo erectus characteristics evolving into the modern age. While I agree with many of the hypotheses concerning possible/ probable evolved psychological features, unless you were using data from other archeological studies [that you did not happen to reference explicitly] we must remember just how tenuous some of these assertions are. Reasonable - yes; proven -- well ... ?
I came across a You Tube video the other day about Neanderthals and evidence from their DNA that they typically had higher levels of testosterone than modern males, and thus would have been even more aggressive [even if more wary of and less skilled at fighting homo sapiens?]. Given the vagaries of genetic changes, it may or may not follow that homo erectus had the same or greater levels of such male acting hormones?
I view Homo erectus as the evolutionary ground from which we evolve, but agree we need to be careful making any inferences therefrom. Homo sapiens behave significantly differently from early on — for example displaying relatively soon after emergence evidence of gift or exchange networks (it is hard archaeologically to tell the difference).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28166905/
What an absolute corker to unpack, I have seen chimps cooperate - no...wait, that was Planet of the Apes.
As you were
From adolescence in the eighties on I had high hopes for the end of patriarchy. I saw the faults of male power, corruption, false pride, banality and stupid violence and believed women could make things better when they were in charge. I'm conflict avoidant and should have become sceptical after having been thrown out of a shared flat for having one dick too many, but I kept on hoping. Bad mistake.
Warby, you are a genius.
"...we are the equal most proactively ... aggressive primate. Yet, we are the least reactively aggressive primate." Perhaps part of that is that we realize we are now the apex hunter and thus going up against one of us is going to be more of a challenge than killing some other large animal. So also of course the need for several beta males to successfully attack a single alpha male.
"The hypothesis is that, as we evolved from Homo erectus, teams of beta males ... systematically killed off the alpha males. Because the two forms of aggression use different brain circuits, we used our proactive aggression to systematically select against reactive aggression, murdering our way to niceness." And "systematically killing" is used in the next paragraph, too. I am reacting to your use of the word "murdering" in one sentence and not the others. Why not say the alphas were "executed" or
"assassinated" ?? We consider murder as morally sanctioned, whereas some forms of killing are "justified". It would not have met our modern criteria for legal due process, but the mutual decision to kill an overbearing alpha (for justified or not so justified reasons) might have involved some measure of moral or "semi-norm" "semi-legal" assessment prior to the life ending action. Depending on context, it might not have been "murder" as we use the term?
"We consider murder as morally sanctioned." I should have said morally restricted.
For some reason, "in the moment" I just could not come up with the negative wording I wanted.
I know that experience …
Hmmm. Worth thinking about. It does seem that, for example, manorialism and centuries of capital punishment for murder in Europe might well have “trimmed the tail” of extreme aggression in European populations.
I think it happened before that.
My memory is a sieve but read an article on how wars came about.
War in large scale in agricultural societies requires a few number of highly aggressive men (warriors) and a large number of passive men (farmers) to support the aggressive ones.
The hypothesis as I recall is that as we shifted from small horticulture to large agriculture and towards more kingship political systems, people who were too aggressive towards the leadership were systematically killed off.
(This was actually Stalin's approach to the Purges. If you killed off enough trouble makers, eventually you'd breed a true Communist Man. As one article pointed out, it might have worked if he had a few hundred or thousand years to do so. In, say, the Ancient Persian Empire you had those thousands.)
Thus you find the very passive approach that's actually common among Fars and Chinese. Don't raise your head, the king will cut it off.
The tail was being trimmed early.
hhhmmmm! While your core hypothesis was a time frame predating Europe by many millennia, it seems that the European "tail" or other trimmed tails have regrown through out history. Perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage to some pronounced level of aggression in aiding both genetic and cultural evolution? If the "team" cannot be formed up out of appreciation for the benefits of mutual cooperation, maybe it can be formed from fear of the alpha? Even a governmental alpha?? An order producing state entity.
Selecting against reactive aggression does not select against proactive aggression. Given the advantages of drilled over un-drilled armies, all that capital punishment may well have made for being better at organised violence. The way merely trained, but no conventional warfare military experience, Anglo-American forces went right through lots-of-recent-conventional-warfare-experience, Iraqi forces in 1991 was striking.
It took me about 4 re-readings of your last sentence to extract what I think you meant. :-)
Viz, that the wealthy Anglo-American forces were well trained in preparation for facing a possible Soviet army, but had had no meaningful conventional warfare experience since 1975 and Vietnam. So they were in good shape for proactively initiated warfare.
In contrast, the Iraqi army was not wealthy enough to have been deeply trained, have the latest or superior weaponry, etc., but they did have recent experience fighting Iran's army. And their culture was tuned to being reactively aggressive.
Do I understand you correctly here?
I suspect this example is less a reflection of evolved or inherited proactive vs. reactive aggression than evidence that superior leadership, weapons, training, and morale will likely win out. And strictly speaking, we were not proactively aggressive enough to achieve "nation building", if we give being proactive the benefit of deeper rational analysis than emotional reactivity.
For this particular dichotomy, perhaps these recent culturally evolved observations are really just along for the ride with longer term genetic cleansing, per your other reference on fighting and competition within patrilineal clan linages creating a real or imaginary Y chromosome "bottleneck" about 5000 years BP. [I could not fully comprehend that whole very long article :-( ]
My point was a high-trust (low reactive aggression) culture troops, who were well trained in taking-initiative warfare (proactive aggression), performed much better than an army with lots of recent experience in conventional warfare but were a low trust culture (at least outside the kin group). If capital punishment mainly eliminates high reactive aggression folk, it may even help the capacity for proactive aggression.
The State is The Patriarchy.
“Matriarchal families are entirely possible and, as the number of fatherless children mount, increasingly common”
The women are marrying the State. The State is their big new boyfriend to beat up the Chump.
….however the State is No Father, but Jailer and Gravedigger.
Gravediggers replaced GoldDiggers. Ergo Matriarchy.
Lol C—- all the way down.
Have a look at Peace Rave in Gaza ladies, the manlets dying under the cars and bushes are your handiwork.
Say hello to your new boyfriend, the post statist patriarchy on the paragliders.
“If you want sympathy it’s in the dictionary between shit and syphilis. “ I heard that growing up, did you? Since we’re equal.
Under the patriarchy (rule of ‘fathers’ - not simply men) a shirt like that would never have been tolerated - by other men, especially in such a setting. The contradiction is that the policing of other men’s behaviour is now left to women, who use nurture/shame models rather than codes of order and honour among men. Women need the structure and order of society that men used to provide. In its absence women step in. In the 60s the pill was celebrated far more by young men than by women, who really only wanted contraception within the social structure of committed monogamy but the pill eroded those structures so women have had to adapt and become like men. But it’s not in our nature to be men. No ‘side’ is to blame. When the balance of polarity between our complementary natures is out of whack, and at their extremes when the feminine is dominant everything falls apart and when the masculine is too dominant it becomes an intolerable cruel fascism. There is no equality. Nor should that be our aim. It’s utter misanthropy.
Great analysis. This also explains why the feminized cultures of the West (currently) struggle in the face of the old school, patriarchy of Islam. But weirdly, the feminized Western cultures' long term plan is to absorb Islamic immigrants and then use the social norming of the feminized longhouse to grind them down to a nub as well. And since the leaders of the long house don't care about polities, borders, or time spans, they think, on a long enough timeline with enough Western male simps and betas to fight for them in endless wars, they will dominate the Muslim cultures anyway. Might take 500 years or 50 years they don't care. Islam will bend the knee...
If your analysis is correct it would still be a vast improvement. Doubt women are going to bury their sons in sand and stone their husbands to death.
"Progressivism screws things up due to its pathological relationship to information. It sets an imagined future — so without reality tests — as its benchmark for action; treats past and present as realms of sin, discounting the only sources of information we actually have; and acts as if it owns morality, so blocking, and being very intolerant of, dissenting views."
Replace "progressivism" with "christianity" or "islam" and the statement still holds at least as true. Very little has better earned the description of "an intolerant, imperial propriety" than these religions. Yet they have always been highly male-dominated and patriarchal. Does this not undermine the thesis just a bit?
Yes and no. Christianity treated law as human and permitted the political its own sphere of action. It believed in truth, treated the world as the direct creation of God, so trumped Scripture. We got the development of science and Parliamentarianism under Christianity.
I love when people dump Christianity and Islam together as 'these are horrible.'
Christianity has had horrible times. I'll give it that. But the essential message of Christianity and Islam could not be more pronounced. Islam supports lying (tafiq) whereas it is abhorrent in Christianity. Murder is a sin in Christianity, it is a holy action in Islam. Christianity supports the doctrine of 'Consent of the maiden.' 'Do you take this man to be your...' 'I will.'
In Islam, a man decides who the woman marries, period dot, there is no choice on her part nor in Divorce.
(This, btw, is the most common form in ALL major traditional social groups world-wide EXCEPT Judeo-Christianity.)
The best moment to highlight that is what happened when the authorities came for Jesus vs Mohammed.
Jesus told his followers to deny him and gave himself up for our sins. He knew he was going to be tortured but was willing to sacrifice himself to save others. (And our souls if you're a Believer.)
Mohammed had his followers hold them off while he escaped out the back (literally) on a camel and became a bandit chief.
Jesus told us 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'
Mohammed said 'In the end of times the very rocks and trees will cry out 'Here is a Jew, a descendant of apes and pigs, come and kill him sons of Allah!''
Yeah, Christianity and Islam are EXACTLY ALIKE!
Quite. I may have a view:
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war
We referred to ourselves as the Saudi's Janissaries in DS.
Well ….
The 1991 Gulf War is my favourite example of I’ll take comprehensive training over mere experience. Especially:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting
I was struck with how the Iraqi Army retook Mosul from ISIS by effectively the same way they did their late Iran-Iraq War offensives. Plan, limited offensive, stop; plan, limited offensive, stop …. Having read Kenneth Pollack’s PhD thesis was helpful. (It became ‘Armies of Sand’.) It was the first time I read a cultural analysis that was not just analytical silly putty. (I have an analytical hole, I will shape “culture” to fit and stick it in.)
The 1991 Gulf War also really showed up that the IDF is just a Western army that gets more experience.
I need to not take a time out doing this.
I'm in the middle of writing the books that I'm serializing on Substack.
I need to capture the writing jag while I have it.
But I really enjoyed the essay. Very well done.
What we learned from DS was that training is to morale as 3:1. (As morale is to the physical as 3:1. Thus training gives a 9:1 advantage and that's somewhat born out even in Iraq and Afghanistan in infantry to infantry combat.)
What we're learning from Ukraine, hopefully, is that there is also a benefit to mass firepower. We'd sort of forgotten that doing nothing but COIN.
And infantry has a whole new bugaboo to deal with. First it was cannons. Then repeating rifles. Then machine guns. Then those damned aeroplanes and land cruisers. Damn them to hell! (WWII doughboy shaking his fist at the sky.)
Now it's dang drones.
(Sorry, forgot this was public! My bad!)
I can honestly say I'm glad I'm long out of the Army infantry. Because the next even near peer war infantry is going to be the worst possible spot to be. (As it always has been. But more so.)