The Scope of Patriarchy

Between the rise of explicit, celebratory, toxic masculinity online, the buy-in of the Republican party to a MAGA version of the same, and then the Epstein nightmare, it certainly makes sense that I’m seeing a lot of posts trying to get people to see that our root problem is patriarchy. I only take issue with how the posts conflate misogyny with all of patriarchy.  Misogyny is definitely an outcome of patriarchy, but conflating the two under-reports the patriarchal values which infect us all.

I am not surprised by the reduction of patriarchy to misogyny in these posts.  Whenever we learn something, the meaning we ascribe to it can only be framed within our own experiences.  One unfortunate outcome is that we tend to select discrete parts of complex concepts to frame the whole meaning of the concept.  We unconsciously cherry-pick the components that speak to us and dismiss the rest.  We do that especially if other aspects of the concept are inconvenient for us.

Patriarchy goes far beyond the literal label, father-rule, or the misogyny which we correctly infer from the label.  It encompasses the entire range of assumptions, values, and beliefs resulting from agricultural/herding civilizations that emerged independently in three separate locations on Earth around 10k years ago. 

Though we were running around for at least 100,000 years before civilization as gatherers (and only secondarily as hunters – reporting such societies as “hunter-gatherers” is an example of patriarchal bias), we won’t ever be able to know the precise shape of cultures before civilization, though anthropology and myth give us lots of clues. 

From those sources, we know that applying any “…archy” term (oligarchy, monarchy, patriarchy, matriarchy) to non-civilization peoples belies the conceptual gap created by civilization.  Anthropologists who have researched among the few contemporary societies not directly changed by civilization have asked how they configure authority.  What they usually get is a need to explain what they mean in terms more familiar to those people. Then the answers don’t address the question in the way it was meant.  There are gendered roles, though they’re usually quite flexible and they’re different from group to group.  There is almost always respect for seniority – age and experience.  The root for conceptualizing hierarchy exists, but no one’s ‘in charge’. They simply don’t have the concept for that. 

Similarly, the view of property common to civilization is always more strident and thorough than the sense of possession that anthropologists find in non-civilized groups.  The Yanomamo and the ‘San peoples, for instance, have things that belong to individuals, but the number of things is normatively limited, modest, and is insured only by norms, not by rules. Most things are assumed to be in common.  There is no legalism to set specific boundaries.  Again, the root of the property concept exists, but the concept itself does not.

We can never be absolutely sure why patriarchy was the outcome of civilization , but I think our own, individual experiences can provide clues.  For instance, many of us have gathered berries outdoors on hikes or camping trips.  If you’ve ever done so, I imagine that you had no feelings one way or the other about the birds who were eating berries as well.  In fact, you likely enjoyed their songs and admired their beauty, and perhaps even shared a sense of bonhomie in enjoying the same benefit of nature as they were.  Compare that to growing berry-beds in our gardens.  Think of the effort in clearing the ground, setting up the bed, hand-planting dozens of plant-starts, watering, then weeks and weeks of weeding and fostering the plants.  How do we feel when birds descend and start eating the berries?  If you’ve had this experience, you know the immediate reaction. It’s entirely different from gathering.  We grew those berries, we worked at them. Those are our berries.  To the birds, eating the berries is exactly the same as it was in our gathering situation, but we tend not even to ascribe that sameness to their motivations.  Our berries don’t belong to those animals who are trying to steal them. 

I suspect this is the key transition, the felt change from mutuality to property, from an anarchic absence of concern about control to desire to control and thus dominate.  It is the space between absence of archy and having archies.

Farming and herding require specific, extended labor that is unnatural to our evolved physiology.  We switched to it because people perceived that it provided benefits, though in retrospect, we can see that they were dubious ones when compared to the price exacted (Yuval Noah Harari does a great job detailing this in Sapiens). The work immediately inflates our possessiveness, which becomes the concept of private property and our assumption of its ‘natural’ importance. 

Farming changes our relationship with the biota of our food more broadly.  We no longer are within the system, but are altering elements to match our desires.  We bend parts of nature to our will.  The elements we bend are no longer agents of their own, spiritual equals in a larger web of life.  Now they are resources, objects that we manipulate to suit our purposes.  This is another prompt to inspire the concepts of hierarchy and domination. 

If we are above nature, then there is hierarchy, an order of power and relative importance. We are lords over nature, not just members of the club.  One clue that this was the path we followed is that our myths changed.  In the more ancient ones, we are surrounded by spirits and gods.  They live around and among us with relatively incidental interactions.  With civilization, they become a few interventionist gods - and then one big god -  whose primary concern is people and who are above all of us in a pecking order.

Domination is applied to crops and herd-animals.  We see this again in the early civilization forms of myth: God made all of it for us. Our naming of it labels each animal and plant as object, as belonging to us.^[1]  

Treating the other living beings in the world as objects to be used or destroyed at our whim rather than subjects of their own, perceiving of ourselves as categorically more important is pretty awful.  Yet most of us go around taking entirely for granted that this patriarchal interpretation is natural and true.  It is not.  It is a cultural construction of one form of human organization.  We are blind to it inasmuch as it favors us.  It is much easier to become aware of it as an arbitrary construction when it is used against us.

Another concept that emerges is conquest, which is domination plus xenophobia plus competition. Groups free of civilization tend to have a sense of competition and even have war, but competition is applied and understood in limited ways.  Also, humans seem to be naturally xenophobic: us vs. them is found even in non-civilized groups and likely way further back, since our simian cousins have it as well.  Also, we fight to conquer the pests of our fields and herds, and winning at that became taken for granted as good.  So how is that different from doing the same with other people, since we interpret them as not really human in the same way we are?  Isn’t that natural and good as well?  Civilization thus transformed occasional and limited competition for resources into systematic, ideological racism and imperialism.  That the conquerors were meant to be conquerors and the conquered their slaves became as natural as subduing pests and having a god who is lord over all people (and who clearly favors us over them). 

We came to take for granted that these concepts are the right and good order of things to apply within our own societies as well.  Surely, since hierarchy is the natural order of things, some people within the society are better than others. Free competition, which essentially promotes conquest, determines merit and place. Someone who can protect us from outsiders and also beat everyone else up in our group must surely be whom god intended as the natural leader.  The person who cannot figure out how to work in, through, or around the conditions we’ve created must surely be meant to be at the bottom of society.  Whether its warriors who become an aristocracy, priests who become a theocracy, or merchants who become the winners in a capitalist economy, the same rules of property hierarchy, dominance, and conquest are assumed to be the unchangeable, natural order of life.  The winners are better people, perhaps even categorically more human than the losers. 

Then, of course, hierarchy as the natural order of things must be applied to the obvious difference between women and men. The obvious, natural differences practically demand a hierarchical determination of one as better than the other, one more human and one less.  How did men win out in this situation? Why is it that misogyny rather than misandry arose from application of patriarchal values?  Why did it become obvious to the people of pre-industrial, agricultural societies (women and men alike) that men mattered more?

Why it resolved as it did (again, in three separate regions of the world independently) is more mysterious than some of the other changes, likely because it derives from a complex combination of separate elements interpreted within the framework of the new values:

1. Heavy-labor in pre-industrial, plow farming happens to favor men’s physiological strengths. Plus, thanks to the year-round calories available from agriculture, women in their fertile years (also the most productive working years), were pregnant or nursing most of the time. The work that women got as their role was equally time-consuming and important in the end, but was private – domestic - which intersects with the next element.

2. Gathering and even stick-agriculture are communal and relatively nomadic life-ways.  Plow agriculture, with its private property, quickly resolves into private family homes ensconced within permanent settlements. Even when the farming is on communal fields, the home situation is a version of what we take for granted, the family living separate from other families. Women quickly become interpreted as naturally domestic, men as naturally public.(ref: https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/agriculture-gender-roles-norms-society/).  It’s not sure how much limiting women drives segregation into family dwellings or how much living in family dwellings drives limiting women.  It is likely a mutually reinforcing spiral.

3. Similar to the labor of farming, the labor of pre-industrial warfare favors male physiology and temperament.  Even in pre-agricultural societies and agricultural ones that condoned female warriors, the vast majority of fighters in all but one that have ever been recorded were men.  The conquerors are men.  They determine the laws and other social outcomes because they become the ones with the most perceived merit – lords and kings, eventually.  Their position in terms of resources determines the outcome not only for other men in social classes, but the role of all women vis a vis all men. 

4. All these other factors promote and enable the inflation of men’s profound anxiety about reproduction.   A naturally evolved, deep concern of being male in social creatures is that the offspring upon which he is expected to expend his resources are genetically his own.  Like all evolved features that humans keep from pre-human ancestors, this instinctive concern gets translated into a complex version mapped onto many other aspects of distinctly human capabilities and structures.  But the concern itself is so primitive that it suffuses consciousness more than being a specifically held belief.  It is akin to their anxiety about castration/emasculation, or women's fear of rape, or everyone’s fear of death.

Paternity is pretty assured in small, gathering societies.  Everyone knows and shares information with everyone else.  In fact, everyone is not so distantly related anyway, so even if a child is not the father’s, it’s surely close enough to allay some of the innate concern.  But as soon as we are in larger, less related, and more diffuse communities, the anxiety becomes constant and relatively severe.  How does any man know for sure that a baby is really his?  The only ways to guarantee it are the various means of limiting women’s access to other men.  Since all the other elements combine to give men power to determine those limitations, norms and laws made it happen.  But even doing everything men can to shut women away and assure that marriage is to virgin girls does not allay the deep anxiety. ^[2]

The result in patriarchy is to render women as innately untrustworthy. Myth shows us the transition in terms that point to male reproductive anxiety sharply:  Pandora changes.  Where she was originally the first-woman Earth mother, whose jar gives all good things to the world, she becomes in civilization a devious, overly curious minx who opens her box, defying explicit orders, which lets all evil into the world.  She also becomes Eve, equally curious and law-breaking, doing what she was forbidden to do, committing the original sin.  The metaphors are so obvious as to be practically literal.

In the end, the combination of patriarchal root-values, domesticity, different work, male empowerment, and male anxiety add up to misogyny.

A vital aspect of patriarchy is how deeply engrained the whole thing became in a relatively short time. Patriarchy did not take long to become what was assumed as naturally, eternally, and universally true. This is because pre-civilization peoples did not have writing to present permanent records of their values and assumptions to compete against the rapid changes of civilization.  Civilization dd not have literacy for nearly 8,000 years.  In oral cultures, it only takes a few generations for all the narratives to shift.  Pre-literate societies live in a kind of eternal now.  Their stories usually assert that they have always lived in this way and in this place.  People were essentially ahistoric in terms of change, perspective, or evidence.

The power of the first agricultural revolution in determining human ideas is hard to overestimate.  For instance, misogyny persists even though the industrial revolution altered work so that women were at no actual disadvantage in productivity or warfare. The following chemical and medical revolutions led to effective, mass birth control, as well.  The reasons that the misogyny developed in the first place are gone, but the misogyny is not.   However, the changes have made it so that we are challenging misogyny rather than having even its victims believe in it as natural and desirable. 

The persistence of patriarchy comes partially from the literacy it gave us.  It is the opposite phenomenon from the pre-literate situation.  In a pre-literate society, life-ways, assumptions, and values free-float to however people are living in a given generation and tradition morphs to match what is being experienced now.  In a literate society, values become relatively fixed.  We are historic, literal, and legalistic, which has all kinds of advantages, but also makes us stubbornly conservative.  We don’t alter just because the situation alters.  We can rely upon tradition as a fixed, elaborated justification of what is normal and natural.  What was encoded in our scriptures (written myths), narratives, laws, and biased histories for around 2,500 years, has been the patriarchal order.  That is awfully hard to dislodge. 

It can be done.  It requires critical thinking in combination with the very same tools of literacy that limit us, plus a sophisticated understanding of history and historiography. Even with these tools, it is impossible to know how long it will take to get rid of patriarchy and undo all its damage, or even if we can.

A major part of the problem in overcoming patriarchy is that we are all ensconced.  Recognizing and working to get rid of any one part will be ineffective, because it does not address the whole thing.  For instance, feminists thinks of themselves as agents of resistance against patriarchy.  In part, it is true, inasmuch as they commit to resist misogyny.  But they likely still believe a lot of patriarchal things without seeing them at all. 

For instance:  Do you own a house/property and will you eventually sell it and realize financial benefit?  That’s patriarchal. Do you believe that you should realize not only compensation for your efforts, but also profit from the labor of people who work for you rather than returning the full value of their labor to them? That’s patriarchal.  Would you move to a different neighborhood so your children don’t have to go to school with ‘them’ but instead with people who are more like ‘us?’  Patriarchal for sure.  Do you buy meat and cheese from grocery stores that was produced on factory farms?  Sorry, patriarchal.  You’re probably saying, “But those are different!”  or “Those aren’t as important!”  I especially get a lot of “How dare you conflate my issue with animal rights!” 

However, as soon as your immediate reaction is past, think it through: Until we all understand and treat not only all other people, but also all other living beings as equal subjects and agents, we are polluted by patriarchy.  Universal moral principles cannot be effective if applied selectively according to our personal prejudices and conveniences. Patriarchy will only lose if we tackle all of it.

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^[1] The Torah/Bible contains a sophisticated understanding of how language and concepts work with one another – the label, the word, and then the written word particularly, are agents of fixing in place what was in free motion before

^[2] To be fair, men’s anxiety about paternity is not baseless paranoia.  Studies using DNA testing have shown a range in different countries and years between one and twenty-three percent of children are not the biological children of their father (ref.: https://www.sciencefocus.com/qanda/men-discovering-their-children-arent-theirs-biologically).  Even understanding that the highest percentages come from studies where fathers were specifically requesting paternity testing, we could settle on an average figure discarding the value of the outliers and get to around 5%.  With a one out of twenty chance that a man could spend his whole life caring, fostering, paying for a child that is not his without his knowledge or consent, we can hardly dismiss the concern.  Understanding this as a real concern is largely a matter of how we construct our ideas based upon who we are ourselves.  As a woman, you might say, “What’s the big deal?  Who cares if it’s yours genetically?  Isn’t that up to me anyway?” But that’s because you’re the sex where your parenthood of your children is never in question.  It’s not in your evolved internal map to care.  The use of your life resources is guaranteed to be either for your own genetic offspring or, if not, only by your will and consent.  Consider the outrage you feel about the Handmaid’s Tale, that anger you have which is deeper than the reasoned elements of the oppression in the situation - that's more analogous to the feeling men have about paternity.  I am not trying to excuse misogyny at all.  It’s simply to say that the concern is a real one.  I suspect that if every baby was automatically genetically tested for paternity in our society, elements of misogyny would diminish simply because it would eliminate the anxiety, returning us to a frame much more like what we had before civilization.