Culture is an emergent phenomenon (I)

The practicalities of human reproduction mean that patriarchy can be functional in ways that matriarchy would not be.

Note on usage: sex is biology—i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce; sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex; gender is the cultural manifestation of sex. (Part two of this post is here.)

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While human societies vary wildly in how gender-egalitarian they are, there are no matriarchal human societies. Matriarchal families exist, but not matriarchal human societies.

On the contrary, until recently, all human societies were, to at least some degree, patriarchal. That is, authority in human societies was presumptively male. How presumptively male has varied wildly, but that has been the general pattern.

The question is, why? A famous answer was given by anthropologist Sherry Ortner in her much-cited 1974 article Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?.

Dr Ortner gives a cultural answer to the question of why patriarchy is so prevalent. Due to the role of women in human reproduction, human societies universally associate women more with nature, men more with culture and, as human societies rate culture higher than nature, they rate men higher than women.

There is something to this: not very much, but something. The role of motherhood—which is highly physiological, being based on pregnancy and breast-feeding—varies much less among human societies than does fatherhood.

Indeed, fatherhood—in the sense of the adult male who is a continuing presence, authority and (typically) provider in a child’s life—is entirely socially created. Yes, biological paternity is absolutely a thing but it has no automatic social consequences or standing.

Statue of Maa Durga at a workshop in Mumbai during Navratri 2019, Sonika Agarwal, Unsplash.

Precisely because female mammals have mammaries to feed their babies, the overwhelming majority of male mammals play no parenting role in the life of their offspring. Due to the need to impart hunting skills, exceptions tend to be predator species, such as wolves.

Even among Homo sapiens, it can take considerable social support and pressure to sustain the social role of father—as contemporary societies have found. Hence, it is not remotely surprising that fatherhood as a social role varies much more widely among human cultures than motherhood does. In very unusual examples—such as the Mosuo—this can extend to fatherhood not being recognised as a social role at all, being replaced by uncle-hood, by support from a mother’s brother(s).

If one is going to make generalisations about human societies, it pays to be careful about what mechanisms are in play and why. What we call culture is the interaction of a range of evolved mechanisms and adaptations. It is something of a misunderstanding to say human culture evolved as an adaptation. What evolved were a series of mechanisms from which human cultures emerge and which then sustain human cultures.

It is clearly true that human cultures are subject to processes of social evolution. Both in how they evolve internally and whether they are able to sustain themselves—particularly in competition with other cultures.

Nevertheless, as everything social emerges from the biological, culture is an emergent phenomena, resting on various evolved mechanisms whose operation in any specific society is going to be particular and path-dependent. It is therefore somewhat analytically fraught to reason from culture to consequences in any generalised way.

It is generally much sounder to reason from constraints to culture, as the evolved mechanisms from which culture arises, and which cultures use, respond to constraints. While culture is persistent—which is an advantage, as it enables expectations to be more robustly convergent within a culture and grounds the transfers of skills and life-strategies—if constraints change, so do cultures.

This is very far from arguing that culture as no explanatory value: culture can matter hugely to social actions and outcomes. People from different cultures, faced with the same set of possibilities and payoffs, can make different decisions.

Emergent phenomenon can absolutely have profound causal significance. Nevertheless, culture uses evolved mechanisms that respond to constraints and our analysis should reflect that.

Where gathering information has a cost, attention is a scarce resource and cognitive capacity is limited, fast-and-frugal heuristics—ways of doing things: aka habits, routines, prejudices, customs, etc.,—are often going to be an advantage, and so be selected for. Indeed, culture can be understood as an evolved series of life-strategies sharing such heuristics. If you are looking for commonalities across human cultures, what is required to successfully raise our biologically-expensive children is going to be a key source of such commonalities.

Emerging culture

We are a bipedal species that lacks claws or rending teeth yet evolved as tool-using predators.¹ Our shoulders developed for us to become the best throwers in the biosphere. Our physiognomy developed for us to be one of the best marathon-running species in the biosphere while being comparatively indifferent sprinters. Thus we could run down, and exhaust, our prey and then kill it by throwing a spear at it.

We also developed tools to dig up tubers. We developed the use of fire to protect us at night, and make animal and plant food easier to digest, widening what we could use as food and decreasing our need to physiologically invest in digestion.

Such tool-using foraging requires a lot of learning. Our bipedal pelvises limit the size of infant heads. So, more and more brain growth occurred after birth. Our babies became remarkably helpless and we ended up with the most biologically-expensive children in the biosphere. It took almost 20 years to train such a child to forager-subsistence adulthood, to where they foraged as much nutrition as they consumed.

A tool-using subsistence pattern—with the biosphere’s most biologically expensive children—required the development of highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. The basic pattern of all human societies arose: the transfer of risks away from child-rearing and of resources to child-rearing. Any analysis of human sex roles—and of the evolution of human culture—has to start with this basic, and universal, human pattern.

This means risks were mostly transferred to, and resources transferred from, men operating in teams. If and when women hunted larger animals, they typically either had no children, their children were adults, or someone else was looking after their children.

This pattern has been replicated across the millennia for all activities that could not be done with bubs in tow. This included close-concentration activities such as writing. Female writers have been either childless (Sappho, Jane Austen), their children were adults (Anna Komnene), or someone else was looking after their children (Christine de Pizan).

Women have been profoundly associated with children because they become pregnant, breast-feed and human children are so biologically expensive. Human sex-roles have been profoundly, and persistently, driven by the reality of our biologically expensive children. We are, in many ways, what raising our biologically expensive children led us to become.

None of this precludes the possibility of women as leaders. It did seriously get in the way of any notion of authority as presumptively female.

In the process of suppressing dominance behaviour—as human foraging societies persistently and profoundly do, for it is so antithetical to cooperation—humans developed two other forms of status as currencies of cooperation.

Reverse Dominance Hierarchies

One was prestige, status through conspicuous competence, including risk-taking. This encouraged people to engage in activities that were beneficial to the group.

Mostly it encouraged men, especially young men, to do so. The risk-taking—and obsessive skill and knowledge development—that generates prestige is much easier if you do not have bubs in tow.

Prestige has therefore had a strong tendency to be male-dominated. Having a form of status that was persistently male-dominated rather precluded authority from being presumptively female.

There was persistent selection—amongst the male expression of genes—for effective team work. This included a focus on being functional, on demonstrating capacity and reliability. Part of the reason men “rag” each other is precisely to test trustworthiness—if I say something outrageous, will you still support me? If I put you under pressure, will you fold?

Accepting a hierarchy of competence is a survival plus, as is being able to manage a wide enough range of connections to have and maintain an effective team, and to repair connections to keep the team functional through ups and downs. It also meant that there was a benefit to cultivating connections with men of lower status—they could still be useful on your team: especially if they accepted the team leadership.

This all reinforces status through conspicuous competence and risk-taking, including via teams. To make the transfer of risks away from child-rearing, and of resources to child-rearing, work.

We developed normative capacity as a way of anchoring cooperation via robust, shared expectations. We also developed the other form of status, propriety—status through conforming to the norms and expectations of the group.

Propriety tends to be enforced through stigma—shaming and shunning folk who engage in norm-breaking behaviour that harms the operation and coherence of the group. Engaging in such shaming and shunning can display your commitment to the group, its norms and expectations. Status from signalling normative reliability—and perhaps some fearfulness about being singled out—helps motivate enforcement of norms, lessening the free rider problem in norm enforcement.

Because women are the physically weaker sex—recurrently with bubs in tow—they tend to seek connections that are emotionally resilient. Women tend to value the protective conformity of propriety and are prone to engaging in shaming and shunning behaviour. Not least because it is a much safer form of aggression for the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, as it can be presented—including to women themselves—as simply moral concern, as simply social concern.

Women tend to see connections in terms of emotional investment, tend to be quite restrictive in who they are willing to emotionally invest in, be reluctant to re-invest in frayed connections and be concerned to not have anyone stand out too much. This is protective in various ways, but gets in the way of cultural achievement, and can be dysfunctional for teams and performance hierarchies, including for those formalised teams we call organisations and institutions.

Where, with men, connection is typically concerned with wider functionality, with women, connection is more about what is protectively supportive. Men—the physically stronger sex not with bubs in tow—end up being more focused on wider coordination and outward effectiveness. It is hardly surprising that human societies have such a persistent tendency to presume that authority is male.

We also developed language and, given the need to package and assess information, self-consciousness. We developed concepts of the divine—a realm of authority to be respected and placated—and notions of the sacred—of those things against which trade-offs are to be resisted, reinforced via ritual. These provided mechanisms for dealing with the problems of self-consciousness, and with complexity, via ways of further anchoring shared expectations and identity.

Prestige, propriety (including stigma), language, norms, self-consciousness, divine authority, a sense of the sacred, rituals, the need to train and socialise our biologically expensive children: these are the mechanisms that culture mobilises and from which culture develops. If one is going to successfully analyse the role of culture, it helps greatly to have a strong sense that culture is an emergent phenomenon and why the mechanisms evolved that culture emerges from and uses.

Moreover, while these mechanisms are general, their manifestations are particular. Societies deal with different patterns of constraints and generate different histories. Hence cultures vary widely in their conceptions of fatherhood and in how patriarchal, and how gender-egalitarian, they are.

Nevertheless, the general pattern of transferring risks away from child-rearing and resources to child-rearing is a universal one, due to us being a tool-using species with such biologically expensive children requiring cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. That is the level of universality which ensures that there are no matriarchal societies and that human societies have been so persistently, though variably, patriarchal.

The physically stronger, team-work sex, more focused on exterior opportunities and threats, will tend to dominate the public sphere, and so authority. Especially if they need men-only spaces where they can coordinate warfare so that either (1) women married-in from another group do not warn their male relatives and/or males (2) married-in from another group can bond. This makes it even easier to maintain, or extend, male dominance.

The old saw men insult each other, and don’t really mean it, and women compliment each other, and don’t really mean it, notices something real. The brute needs of human reproduction, of having the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere, get us to some presumption that authority is male without any reference to culture, conceptions of culture, conceptions of nature, or putative culture/nature hierarchies. Everything social emerges from the biological, so—particularly when dealing with universal, or near universal, patterns—grounding analysis in our evolved biology, and the mechanisms (adaptations) it equipped us with, is good analytical practice.

Having established a framework of analysis, the next post examines Sherry Ortner’s thesis in more detail.

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1. Regular readers will notice continuing themes, but I do not want to assume any reader of this post has read past ones and my thinking remains a work in progress. Moreover, setting out your premises is a good discipline, while hitting familiar themes provides reminders for readers.