Why Americans are F***-ed in the head over race

The history of the US has generated persistent racial derangement. It has been far more of a case of structures generating racism than of racism generating structures.

Source.

People have a pretty good understanding of their own continental ancestry. People are also relatively accurate at picking out other people’s continental ancestry.

This is not surprising. There was not much mixing of lineages across continents until relatively recently, at least outside continental border regions. This was due to the limitations of technology: specifically very limited transport capacitie. Moreover, thousands of years of separate genetic lineages, with genetic bottlenecks creating relatively small founder populations for various continents, meant that there are fuzzy-boundary, but relatively clear, patterns of physical markers of continental ancestry.

So, a folk concept of race based on continental ancestry has some, relatively straightforward, patterns of physical-markers to work off. Hence the history of skin-tone descriptors of race. With race becoming to be understood as being continental, or some significant sub-continental region, ancestry. (Medieval Europeans had a rather different concept of race, one much more language based — so it made sense for a C14th commentator to talk of Scotland being one nation with two races: highlanders and lowlanders as thy spoke different languages.)

The US in particular has a long history of obsessing over race because continental origin coincided with fundamentally different roles in colonial society (the settlers, the dispossessed and the enslaved). Different roles that persisted into the country created by the American Revolution.

Slavery, settlement and racism

As continents produce neither single cultures per continent nor single breeding populations per continent, analytically, remarkably little follows from physical markers of continental ancestry being relatively clear. But as physical markers of continental ancestry are collectively visually relatively clear, they can, very easily, have social meanings attached to them. Which, of course, has happened repeatedly. Especially when one region has systematically enslaved people from region(s) with different general patterns of physical markers. Or when folk from one continent have populated another. We can call these the slavery effect and the settlement effect.

Both have proved to be powerful generators of racism: attaching normative ranking to continental (or region thereof) origin. That is, positive social meaning to one’s own group and (especially) pejorative social meaning to those with a different continental origin (and so a different social role).

A third generator of racism has been imperialism: domination of a state created by one continental origin group over folk with differing continental origins. This has been a rather stronger generator of elite or theoretical racism than more general racism, as imperialism is mostly an elite activity. (A 2018 study found that the UK and Portugal, the two surveyed countries with the longest histories of colonialism, had generally the lowest levels of racism among the surveyed European countries.) Though all racism, and race talk, starts off as an elite discourse.

The fourth generator of racism has been ethnicised religion. The classic version of this being racialised Jew-hatred.

None of these factors are sufficient in themselves to generate racism. The Romans were mass-enslaving imperialists who settled new areas and tended to dislike Jews. Racism was not a feature of their culture.

For the Romans were not a xenophobic culture regarding descent. Folk of any origin could become Roman citizens, including ex-slaves. Their slaves could be of any origin. Their society and their thought did not structurally differentiate by continental origin.

Moreover, Romans traditionally were not moral universalists. So, they did not have to generate some generalised story about why some folk were slaves. Slaves were simply losers and if they were freed, and became Roman citizens, then they became winners. Folk would put that they were freedmen (i.e., ex-slaves) on their tombstones, as that showed how much of a winner they had become.

Islam and racism

The first significant discourse grading people as cognitively deficient, based on physical markers of continental origin, came out of Islam. Islam being an imperial, evangelising monotheist (so morally universalist) religious civilisation that systematically enslaved people to their north (including Europeans, notably Slavs) and people to their south (Sub-Saharan Africans).

Folk of such origins were repeatedly characterised by Islamic writers as being cognitively deficient. Often either due to too little sun (Northern Europeans) or too much sun (Sub-Saharan Africans). So, in Chapter Three of his Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations), geographer Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) wrote:

The rest of this category, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples.

(The English word slave likely derives from Slav.)

The patterns of castrating male slaves, and of incorporating the children of Muslim fathers into the umma, the Muslim community, meant that centuries of mass slavery failed to generate an ex-slave underclass within Islamic lands. But there are still linguistic traces of these centuries of mass slaving: abd in Arabic can both refer to slave (as in Abdullah, slave of Allah) and to Sub-Saharan African.

Christianity and racism

The Americas were subject to imperialism and mass settlement from Christian Europe. Added to this imperialism and settlement, millions of slaves were imported from Africa. This made continental origins socially salient in the Americas and did so from within a morally universalising religious perspective Christianity). This was a situation made for racism to develop. Which it duly did.

Hence the confused interaction between Christianity and racism. On one hand, the Gospel of Love applies to everyone. Indeed, from the earliest days of Christian European settlement of the Americas, there were devout Christians who spoke and agitated on behalf of the moral status of the inhabitants of the Americas as children of God.

An early, and important, manifestation of this was the 1537 Papal Encyclical Sublimus Dei declaring that the inhabitants of the discovered lands, even if they did not know Christ, were children of God with natural rights and could not be enslaved. In the words of Pope Paul III:

… the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

This did not bar owning slaves someone else had enslaved. As African rulers were more than happy to take care of that stage of the process, Sublimus Dei had little effect on the Atlantic slave trade. 

The moral claims and reasoning of the Papal Encyclical were, however, in rather direct contrast with Sharia, which is entirely fine with enslaving non-Muslims who have not submitted to rule by Sharia (i.e. by Muslims), including sexually exploiting captured women. The last being endorsed no less than 15 times in the Quran and by the example (sira) and the acts and sayings (hadith) of the Prophet. A principle of Sharia is that the marriage of any woman captured by a Muslim man is automatically annulled by the act of capture.

The Anglosphere abolitionist movement in the C18th and C19th had strong Christian roots. As did the US civil rights movement of the mid C20th.

On the other hand, Christianity is a morally universalist religion. Like Islam, it required some justifying story about why you were systematically enslaving the children of God from Africa. It required some justifying story about why you were dispossessing the children of God in the Americas. 

Christian moral universalism later also required some justifying story why you were systematically denying the descendants of slaves political and other civil rights. These were never going to be good stories about the dispossessed, the enslaved, and the excluded. There were plenty of people who were racist, not despite being Christian, but because they were Christian.

Enlightenment thought, which was also morally universalising, had much the same confused interaction with race and racism as Christianity. On one hand, the scientific impulse to categorise could be, and was, mobilised to propagate racist ideas. On the other hand, seeing the world as a shared globe inhabited by a single human species, along with a sense of expanding human capacities, made slavery morally problematic on a scale never seen before. Hence the rise of the abolitionist movements.

As for the settlement effect, so long as the Amerindians were being dispossessed (and feared) by the settlers from Europe, the structural reasons to be racist against them remained strong. After they were subjugated and shoved into reserves, the underlying structural motives to be racist against them lost strength. The effortless virtue, and pleasures of contempt, that bigotry provides may linger, but the general social retreat from, and anathematising, of racism has further weakened what was already a form of racism in structural retreat. As the eminent political career of Herbert Hoover’s Amerindian Vice President, Charles Curtis, demonstrated.

The intensities of slavery

Slavery and its aftermath proved to be a different matter to self-justifying antipathy to Amerindians, who always had a certain warrior vigour going for them. As sociologist Orlando Paterson has brilliantly analysed, slavery does much more then reduce people to property, it imposes on the slave a form of social death. They have no social standing, no family standing nor heritage to be acknowledged. Slavery is profoundly stigmatising and dishonouring, as it deprives the slave of the capacity to have honour or any status that casts doubt on being a slave.

The slave States of the US operated one of the most closed slave systems in history. It became legally hard to manumit a slave and the stigmatising dishonour of slavery was not excised by freedom. A process of stigmatisation greatly helped by the slaves being of a different continental origin than the settlers. The generalised theories that justified slavery could not allow space for some moral transformation from not being a slave anymore.

Roman slavery, not having that justificatory burden, and not being divided by continental ancestry, was far more open. Hence ex-slaves could become citizens and would even boast of how far they had come from their former slave status.

In much of the Americas, an intermediary mulatto or mixed race (i.e. mixed continental origins) identity grew up. Such folk served useful intermediary roles between a small settler elite and large slave or indigenous population. This did not happen in the slave South of the US, as the political importance of voting, and the scale of European settlement, worked against a mixed-race identity emerging.

There was no particularly useful social role that a mixed-race group could fulfil that was not already being filled by folk of European ancestry. Moreover, if ex-slaves and their descendants began voting in any numbers, they could begin to wield political power. Which was both politically threatening and an affront to the justifications for slavery. The result was the “one-drop” rule, whereby any African ancestry identified your slave origins, with all the associated stigmas and exclusions.

These structures served the divide-and-dominate politics of the plantation elite. Before the Civil War, the plantation elite used a range of mechanisms to repress poor “whites”, the masterless men, who had no stake in the slave system but who traded and socialised with the slaves. After the Civil War, and the failure of Reconstruction, the plantation elite used the same range of mechanisms to repress the ex-slaves and their descendants. They simply racialised the operation of exactly the same repressive mechanisms that had operated against the masterless men before the Civil War into what became known as Jim Crow. The former masterless men were now on the “right” side of the exclusions, and were thereby incorporated into the Southern system.

As African-Americans migrated to the industrialising cities, a version of such divide-and-dominate strategies turned out to be congenial to, and adaptable by, urban elites. Public policy was wielded to generate increasing residential segregation, as such segregation makes divide-and-dominate tactics far more effective.

A note in Richard Rothstein’s revelatory The Color of Law, sets out the path of residential segregation. Residential segregation that was driven by public policy. Including intensifying under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:

…in 1880, the neighborhood (block) on which the typical African-American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African-American lived was 75 percent black.

At all stages, such divide-and-dominate politics only worked because people bought into the political framings and discourses that legitimated them. Far more of our thinking and decision-making is unconscious than we realise. Social selection processes work on information and feedback: but not necessarily fully conscious, or sufficiently critically examined, information and feedback.

Weakening racism

The experience of the Second World War, both the mass mobilisation for a common purpose and the horrors of Nazi imperialism and racism, as well as the pressures of the Cold War, increased, both domestically and internationally, the embarrassment that American racism generated. At the same time, the continuing fail in transport and communication costs made it easier for marginal groups to organise, as did increased urbanisation and suburbanisation.

So, the structural supports for divide-and-dominate racism weakened. The civil rights movement, and particularly Martin Luther King, brilliantly played up the moral embarrassment of racial exclusion. Both the Christian moral embarrassment and the American-ideals moral embarrassment. With mass communications making it easier to reach people for persuasive effect.

Hence the successes of the civil rights movement and the retreat of racism from being pervasive within American society to being a moral shame. Though, as Glenn Loury makes clear in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, complex patterns of stigma have been rather more stubbornly persistent.

From this history, we can see that structural racism (or analogues such as systemic racism) is generally not a useful term. For it has been far more the case that structures generate and mobilise racism than that racism generates structures. Nor are such structures a necessary part of the social system. They are more about bending the social system in a particular direction.

After the civil rights movement

Which brings us to the graph at the top of this post and its odd pattern whereby “white” (i.e. Euro-American) Democrats were very much more likely to say that they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006, but “black” (African-American) and Hispanic Democrats were apparently somewhat less likely to say they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006.

If someone knows more people they regard as racist than someone else, that can be because (1) they are more likely to meet racists; (2) they are better at identifying racism; (3) they are more expansive in their characterising of racism; or (4) some combination thereof.

So, taking the 2006 results in the graph above, it could be that Euro-American Democrats were more likely to meet racists than Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. Or that they are better at identifying them than Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or that they have a more expansive definition of racism than do Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or some combination of the above.

If we move to the 2015 results, Euro-American Democrats were far more likely to believe they knew a racist than were African-American Democrats, Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. They were also the only group who increased their likelihood of knowing a racist since 2006, and did so dramatically. By contrast, both African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats became, if anything, less likely to believe they knew a racist. (The shifts were not statistically significant but do accord with long term patterns of declining racism.)

The most plausible read of this data is that racism has declined somewhat in the US (in accordance with long-term trends) but Euro-American Democrats have acquired dramatically more expansive definition(s) of racism. (Unless they are registering dramatically increased anti-white racism — we can reasonably give that low probability.)

So, by 2015, Euro-American Democrats apparently lived in a US of significantly more racists among the people they interacted with, while African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats did not.

If fluctuations in racism are largely driven by changes in structural factors, as history strongly suggests, that suggests a change in structural factors that is particularly affecting Euro-American Democrats, but not other folk. Something that is making race much more salient to them.

An obvious factor is the massive increase, since around 2010, in the use of racial terms by US elite media. As Democrats have far more confidence in elite media than do Republicans (a long-term tendency that increased dramatically from 2015), the dramatic upsurge in the media’s use of racial terms could be accounting for much of the “more people know a racist” effect.

Especially as there clearly has been an expansion of what counts, within elite race talk, as racism. Partly because our concept of a phenomena tends to expand as the prevalence of that phenomena shrinks. There has been, for example, a creeping expansion of what is labelled as harm in Psychology. But there has also been an expansion of the concept of racism due to the expanding influence of intersectionality and critical race theory. Especially in the education of increasing numbers of younger journalists.

Is there a structural reason for this increased focus on race? One is fairly obvious: the value of anti-racism as a status play. The more intense one’s opposition to racism, the greater the moral prestige in being ostentatiously anti-racist and, conversely, the greater the moral shame from failing to appropriately oppose racism. So, a status-play purity spiral gets set up. One that can be used to lever folk out of jobs. The bottom-up (but still elite) prestige play then becomes a dominance play. In a situation of elite over-production, such status-plays are a very useful weapon in struggles over opportunities and resources.

Ostentatious anti-racism can make one reluctant to admit that racism has declined or to give credence to other factors in explaining social dynamics. One becomes invested in continuing to ascribe social meanings to race. The surge in hate crime hoaxes fits in with this.

Function does not require intent

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible… 

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerolology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.

The other reason for increased focus on race is less obvious, but has a longer historical pedigree. Overt racism might have become embarrassing, but the advantages to urban elites of divide-and-dominate politics has never gone away, so social selection pressures will continue to favour such politics. The more divided residents, workers and citizens are on racial grounds, the less elites have to deal with competing (against them) claims on resources. Symbolic race-identity politics are way cheaper for elites than politics that delivers good government. That is as true today in urban US as it was in the Antebellum or Jim Crow South. Hence racially-divided US cities are (by developed democracy standards) comparatively ill-governed, just as the Antebellum and Jim Crow South were in their time.

If anti-racism can be turned into a racialised divide-and-dominate strategy, as clearly it can, then all the better for opportunity-hoarding elites. Especially for elites facing intensified internal competition for resources and opportunities.

Intersectionality and critical race theory are very much elite products, coming out of places such as Harvard Law School. Nor do they have to be originally developed as divide-and-dominate mechanisms for social selection pressures to adapt them into divide-and-dominate mechanisms.

Moral concern easily becomes status plays. Status plays are naturally divisive. Moral dominion easily becomes social dominion. Such feedback loops provide much for social selection processes to work on.

Such outlooks and patterns of action do not have appear to their active proponents to be divide-and-dominate politics in order to function as such. Remembering that such framings and discourses work much better if folk can be convinced to go along with them, while social selection processes do not have to be entirely conscious. Especially as the prime mechanisms for self-deception are by manipulating salience. Particularly moral salience.

One cannot force oneself to believe what one doesn’t believe. We can, however, use focus on, for example, image-self-protection, to block paying attention to awkward facts or considerations. This is especially easy to do with highly moralised concerns and self-images. Both because of their emotional power and because it is inherent in moral claims that they be normative trumps. That one has an ostentatious image of oneself as being not-oppressive does not guarantee that one is not buying into politics that are, in fact, oppressive or self-serving.

Coverage by elite media of deaths in police custody, or at the hands of police, is particularly revealing. There is a general problem of police training and accountability in the US. One that varies far more by jurisdiction than it does by race (whether of police or civilian protagonist). If media had reported these things accurately, then a broad coalition could have been built up to improve police training and accountability.

Instead, by intensely and selectively racialising their coverage, the “racist cops” narrative was firmly established by elite media. Turning this into a specifically African-American-and-police problem rather than a general accountability-to-the-citizenry problem and allowing those propagating, and those accepting, the narrative to thereby parade their ostentatious anti-racism. A way easier, and more immediate, social and cognitive reward than doing the hard work of increasing police training and accountability. Hence “defund the police”: a simplistic but convenient symbolic politics that was way easier to pander to than improved police training and accountability.

Revitalising divide-and-dominate

Even better, one of the key mechanisms for divide-and-dominate has been to fail to provide effective policing in African-American urban communities (as measured by homicide clearance rates), thereby generating much higher homicide rates in those communities. (In rural US, Euro-Americans and African-Americans have identical homicide rates.) These differential levels of violence do more to racially divide US cities than any other factor.

The “racist cops” media narrative, and activism, so congenial to moralised self-image, and their associated status plays, has increased the level of violence in those localities and so increased the most racially divisive element in US cities. If one was seeking to revitalise divide-and-dominate politics, it would be hard to do better.

A recent study found that the more educated you were, the more politically progressive you were, and the more you trusted the media, the less well informed you were on police shootings. (But the more conveniently you believed, as far as divide-and-dominate politics went.)

Social intent does not entail social function. Social function does not entail social intent.

Elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. Elite race talk has, historically, been racist. Indeed, racist discourses have always started off as elite theories. But anti-racist race talk works just as well as a divide-and-dominate mechanism, provided one continues to ascribe social meanings to race and do so in pejorative ways. Which, of course, is what all the talk about whiteness, white supremacy, white racism, etc. does.

It is still a case of structures generating the assigning of divisive social meanings to race, far more than the reverse, seeking to bend the social system to their benefit. Even doing so within ostentatiously anti-racist rhetoric and moral framings.

What is that French saying? plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing …

(An earlier version was posted on Medium.)

Being sensible about Patriarchy

Just because something is used propagandistically does not mean it is not a thing.

Patriarchy is authority being presumptively male. The more presumptively male authority is, the more patriarchal the society is. At its simplest, authority is competence + deference. The wider and more significant the realm of presumed male competence, and of expected deference to the same, the more presumptively male authority is.

That an area of life is presumptively male does not, of itself, generate patriarchy. Having presumptive sex roles is not patriarchal. The addition of expected deference is crucial. For without such expected deference, there is no authority, just things folk generally do.

To understand patriarchy, we need to start with the basics of sex and gender.

Sex
Sex is determined by what gametes your body is structured to produce. If it is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes you are male. If it is structured to produce large, sessile (immobile) gametes, you are female. This is so whether or not viable gametes are produced.

If your body is structured to produce both, you are both male and female. If your body is structured to produce neither, you are neuter. (As distinct from being deliberately stripped of the ability to produce gametes, which is being neutered.)

If your body has elements of both male and female sexual structuring, then your sex can be somewhat indeterminate (i.e., intersex), but normally your body will favour one type of structuring over the other. Such mixed cases do not mean that sex is not binary. It just means that a (very small) proportion of folk do not have bodies that are entirely on one side of the border between sex-typical biological structures.

[Sex is binary at the level of reproductive function, due to there being only two gametes, but, in humans, is bimodal rather than binary at the level of bodies.]

We cannot do sex-reassignment or sex-change surgery. We cannot shift the structuring of your body to produce different gametes. We can only do gender-reassignment surgery that changes the visible physical manifestations of biological sex. Hence hormonal supplements are needed by trans folk, as we cannot change your body to change the pattern of hormones it produces.

Children
Homo sapiens are mammals. Female mammals have mammary glands so that when the child emerges, their immediate food source is on-tap.

In most mammal species, that means the male plays no role in raising children, as the female is already committed (via the mammary glands) to feeding the children. This is the cad strategy for reproduction. The more the children have to be taught how to feed, and the longer they have to be fed before they can feed themselves, the more likely some male involvement in the feeding of the offspring is (the dad strategy).

Male provision is not to be confused with mate-guarding. Mate-guarding is about taking possession of the fertility of a female for one’s own use, excluding other males. It implies nothing regarding the care of children. Most mate-guarding mammal species have cad-strategy males. They are just possessive cads.

In contemporary foraging societies, on average, children do not “break even” in producing and consuming calories until about the age of 20. So, a Homo sapien child, on average, has likely represented about a 20 year-feeding-protection-and-instruction investment. This was not possible without provisioning males.

In contemporary foraging societies, men provide a majority of calories to the group, an overwhelming majority of the protein to the group and almost completely dominate provision of calories and protein consumed by post-weaning children. The only evolutionary stable way to get males to invest that much effort in provisioning children is having them feed the children that are presumptively theirs. That is, to go beyond biological paternity and create the social role of father. Especially given the level of teaching required to get Homo sapien children able to fend for themselves.

The need for provisioning males for the raising of children gave a powerful incentive for women to adopt and follow norms regulating their sexual behaviour so as to encourage such male commitment. This is interactive. The stronger the restrictive sexual norms, the stronger male provisioning is likely to be. The weaker the restrictive sexual norms, the weaker male provisioning is likely to be. A common cross-cultural pattern is for men to be willing to use violence to enforce fidelity norms, as their social standing, including their identity as a father, is at stake. Another common cross-cultural pattern is for women expressing aggression towards another woman to cast doubt on her adherence to fidelity norms.

A very common cross-cultural pattern is for a man’s mother to be concerned with policing the behaviour of his wife (or wives). She has an obvious interest in ensuring that their children are indeed (biologically) her son’s and in the protecting the reputation of her son. Remembering that propriety is, in this context, fidelity + reputation. Or, at least, preserving the presumption of fidelity.

All known foraging societies recognise the social role of father. A small number of (farming) societies do not have the social role of father. Instead, men invest in their sister’s children. As a genetic replication strategy, given one shares less genes with a niece or a nephew than with a son or a daughter, unclehood is inferior to fatherhood — provided males can be reasonably confident about the paternity of children.

The above patterns are the result of us being the big-brain ape and so the cultural ape. We are the fattest ape, as our energy-hog brains (our brains consume about a fifth to a quarter of our calorie intake) require a certain base level of energy to function. Hence we have more fat reserves than other apes. Women’s body naturally have significantly higher fat content than men’s bodies, as women regularly support two brains (the extra energy-hog brain being supported either in their womb, or via lactation).

Our brains need time to grow after birth, due to constraints on the size of a baby head’s able to emerge through pelvis (aggravated by bipedalism requiring narrower hips for physical stability). Hence how helpless our infants are, as far more of their development is after birth. They have to be fed and then taught. We have the fattest infants in the biosphere. Being the cultural ape, we have to learn to be effective occupiers of human niches by a mixture of being taught, observation and participation.

Risk and roles
Across this lengthy process of raising Homo sapien children, risks needed to be, where possible, transferred away from the care of children. Especially as if a mother died, her young children were also likely to die. This created human sex roles—sex roles being the behavioural expression of sex—that generally involved very different patterns of acquiring subsistence by males and females, hence quite different skill patterns.

In foraging societies, men would engage in the more dangerous forms of subsistence (hunting larger animals, getting honey). Women would engage in the less dangerous forms of subsistence that you could do while minding the kids (gathering plants, hunting small, relatively immobile, animals such as lizards).

A lot of the gathered plants would require significant processing, as plants (being immobile) evolve ways to discourage consumption of their flesh. This need for more processing of plant food tended to skew calorie and nutrient contribution in foraging societies to the energy-dense, highly bio-available nutrients in the food provided by men.

Men tend to form teams, because that is how they provided for, and protected, their women and children. Women tend to form cliques, as intimate emotional connections provided support for the long haul of motherhood. One can see this pattern in almost any schoolyard.

A complication is that the more disagreeable and less neurotic girls (“tomboys”) may gravitate towards team play. The more agreeable and more neurotic boys (“sissies”) may gravitate towards cliques.

Some cultures had explicit roles for “manly” women and “womanly” men. Generally, however, a male who attempted to adopt female patterns was rejecting the risks that males were expected to shoulder. This was not a way to be respected.

Gender
Being the cultural species, Homo sapiens do not only have sex roles. We also have narratives and expectations about sex. Hence, we have gender: the cultural expression of sex. To a large degree, the categories of man and woman are socially created.

Those who are same-sex attracted, or who are tomboys or sissies, are gender-dysphoric. They are somewhat alienated from standard expectations about sex. Trans folk are sex-dysphoria. They are alienated from the sexual structuring of their bodies.

Being sex-dysphoric is likely to also imply wishing to fit into the behavioural and cultural expectations of the other sex. Being gender-dysphoric does not imply alienation from the sexual structuring of one’s own body. Conflating sex-and-gender is a great way to engage in muddy, even disastrous, thinking.

The absence of matriarchal societies
While it is certainly true that families, and even groups, can have matriarchs, no known human society has been matriarchal. The requirement of men to take on higher-risk roles in order to support the raising of biologically-expensive children has meant that authority could not be presumptively female across a society. Hence the absence of matriarchal societies. Matriarchal families and figures are, however, entirely possible.

The non-universality of patriarchy
The absence of matriarchal societies does not remotely mean that all human societies are patriarchal in any strong sense. It is entirely possible to have a human society where male and female authority co-exists. That is, authority is not presumptively male across the society, so it is somewhat gender-egalitarian. Such societies are more common within particular patterns of subsistence, though a majority of societies known to the ethnographic record have been patriarchal. For instance, around 88% of traditional societies only had male political leaders (though political leadership is not the only manifestation of authority in societies). Nevertheless, even among generally patriarchal societies, the extent and intensity of the presumption of male authority has varied greatly.

There are relatively gender-egalitarian foraging and horticultural (hoe-farming) societies. If a society does not create the social role of fatherhood, then it is also likely to be relatively gender-egalitarian, as inheritance will be female-line and the connections of men to the next generation will be via their sisters. In many societies, men treasure the sister’s son relationship — they are males of the next generation a man is unambiguously related to.

Patterns of leverage
What determines how patriarchal a society is — i.e., how strongly authority is presumptively male in the society — is the relative social leverage of men and women. Women always have the leverage of sex and fertility. Men have whatever leverage comes from not being tied to the day-to-day care of children.

Any asset in a society that cannot be effectively managed while minding children, will be a presumptively male asset. Hence, while women have been very important for the transmission of culture, men have tended to dominate the creation of culture. Cultural narratives have thus tended to predominantly reinforce and validate male concerns. Hence also women have tended to be associated with nature (given their role in reproduction and child-rearing), men with the creation of culture. Such creation of culture is often conceived as a struggle for order against the more chaotic or resistant elements of nature.

The classic assets increasing male leverage are pastoralism (i.e., animal herds) and plough farming. In such societies, the predominant productive asset will be a male asset. This has been universally true in pastoralist societies. It is usually true in plough farming societies, with a few exceptions. One exception was Pharaonic Egypt, as land was re-allocated after every Nile flood. It was effectively Pharaoh’s asset rather than an asset of village males. Another is if the society does not recognise the social relationship of fatherhood, such as the in Mosuo of China. As there is no social role of fatherhood, land is passed down matrilineally and is not a male asset. (Men still do the ploughing.)

If the main productive asset in a society is presumptively male, this makes women largely dependant on male provision. This generates patterns of presumptive male authority, though the degree to which it does so can vary widely.

In low-population-density societies where the men are likely to be away, traditions of armed women are likely to develop so as to be able to defend hearth and home. This raises the leverage (and status) of women. In steppe societies, for example, while men owned the animal herds, women owned the dwellings; the yurts or gers.

Any pattern of periodic male absence tends to increase the status of women, as women will have to manage things in the absence of men. We can see this pattern operating in steppe societies, in Celtic and Germanic Europe, in Sparta (where men lived in the barracks for much of their life), in Rome (where elite men were often away in the service of Respublica) and in medieval Latin Christendom. This is generally an elite pattern, but elites disproportionately set social norms.

These were all, to varying degrees, single-spouse societies in that even an elite man would only have one wife, and a woman one husband. (There is some evidence that the original Indo-Europeans may have operated a single-spouse marriage system.) Celtic and Germanic societies often did, however, permit concubines able to produce legally recognised children. (In Brehon law, for example, it did not matter for your family identity who your mother was, merely who your father was.)

If elite males are required to have only one wife, then that tends to raise the status of women, as the natural thing to do is to have partnership marriages (united by care for their children), with the wife (or sometimes his mother) operating as their husband’s (or son’s) deputy when he is away and helping to manage the household when he is present. This is very much not the pattern in polygynous societies where wives competed for the prospects for their children. This meant that leaving one of the wives in charge in the absence of the husband was a recipe for disaster. (If concubines able to produce legally-recognised children were permitted, this tended to weaken the effect of having only one wife: mistresses are concubines whose children have no inheritance rights.)

Single-spouse marriage societies thus tended to make women managing assets a normal part of the society, even if the main productive assets were presumptively male. This tended to raise the status of women and lessen the degree to which authority was presumptively male. Though the effect was much stronger if there were patterns of male absence. Thus Sparta (where men lived in barracks for much of their life) was noticeably less patriarchal than Athens. Rome was also noticeably less patriarchal than Athens, with Rome become less patriarchal as its empire grew, increasing the pattern of elite male absence and so wifely management of assets.

Being a patrilineal society generates at least some presumption of male authority, as family identity is via the male line. If it is also a kin-group society, that means that family identity and kin structures will be organised around related males. This tends to increase male leverage within the society and the presumption of male authority. Especially if, as was commonly the case, the fertility of women is treated as an asset of their kin-group. (Treating women’s fertility as an asset of their kin group leads to honour killings, which are ways of enforcing commitment to the kin group.) As authority and wealth is typically transferred from father to son in patriarchal societies, such societies tend to be very controlling of female sexuality.

If a society permits polyandry (notably because of resource constraints where key productive assets lose value if divided), this tends to increase the potential leverage of women and to undermine any presumption of male authority. If a society permits polygyny, that tends to undermine the social leverage of women. This is particularly so if the main productive asset is presumptively male, as then the wives of (elite) males will be competing with each other for the prospects for their children, where the favour of the (shared) husband is crucial. Clearly, that will foster a general presumption of male authority.

Though it was true that even in societies that permitted polygamy, single-spouse marriages were the dominant form of marriage, again, elite patterns tended to dominate the generation of presumptions about authority.

Hoe-farming (horticultural) societies meant women having a (much) bigger role in food production than in plough (agricultural) societies, as hoe farming can be done while minding the kids. This permits much higher levels of polygyny (as it reduces the level of provision males have to engage in to support a wife) but also makes women less dependant on male provision. Hoe societies tend to have stronger patterns of female authority than plough societies. The question of the relative level of social leverage can become a complicated one.

In societies where assets are transferred between generations, there can be something of a trade-off between between transmitting genes and transmitting wealth. The stronger the incentive to minimise division of resources among children, the more likely single-spouse marriage systems are, bringing together male investment in high paternity-confidence children and female fidelity to her spouse so as to gain increased investment in her children. If such pressure is sufficiently strong all the way up the social system, polygamy may not be permitted.

The more important investment in the human capital of children, particularly sons, is for their prospects, the more likely it is that single-spouse marriage is going to be selected for. This likely helps explains why highly patriarchal Brahmin and Confucian societies had a wife and (maybe) concubine(s) pattern more than full-blown multiple wives. Indeed, the intense investment in memorisation required to raise a Brahmin child likely explains the rise of the Indian caste (jati) system.

Brahmin law was particularly insistent on male authority. It was, after all, the society that valorised widows burning themselves to death on their husband’s funeral pyre.

How well members of a sex can coordinate with each other also affects social leverage. In polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group, plough-farming societies the ability of women, particularly elite women, to coordinate with each other was often very limited. Conversely, it has tended to be very easy for men in such societies to coordinate with each other, especially if male-only cults develop. Such cults are very common across human societies. Greater male coordination tends to increase male social leverage.

Increases in population density, without a commensurate increase in applied technology, tend to reduce the status of women. As population density increases, there is likely to be less male absence, discouraging the arming of women and reducing the level of women’s management of resources. There is also likely to be more pressure on social niches, encouraging more rigid delineation of sex roles. England was significantly more patriarchal in the C18th than it had been in Saxon times, around a millennium earlier.

Precisely because social leverage matters, history is not simply a pattern of upward improvement in the status of women, but of shifts back and forth.

Raiding and warfare
How raiding and warfare operates in a society also affects social leverage. If raiding and warfare is sufficiently endemic, that generates a premium on male cooperation. That tends to favour patrilineal kin systems, as related males who have grown up together are likely to be more effective in combat operations.

In small-scale societies, especially patrilineal ones where women marry away from their natal kin, endemic raiding and warfare particularly tends to generate male cults as it is important for the men to be able to coordinate planned raids and attack without women warning their relatives. Such male cults often enforce their privacy through ferocious punishments. That increases male social leverage, generating a presumption of male authority and providing a social mechanism to establish and reinforce male authority.

Endemic warfare and raiding can, however, encourage single-spouse marriage systems. Polygyny means that some men are cut out of the local marriage market. If circumstances are such that a premium is put on local social cohesion, then single-spouse marriage systems can be selected for so as to maximise the number of local males with a commitment to the local social order via having their own wife and children. (Note, this does not imply that reducing reproductive variance among men is what is being selected for.) Such pressure for single-spouse marriage for greater social cohesion can also apply to minority religious groups, such as the Alevis.

Shifting social leverage
What is hopefully clear from the above is that patriarchy is not some nefarious male plot. It is a social phenomena driven by the relative social leverage of men and women in a society. The level of patriarchy can thus vary widely between societies. It can also vary in the same society across time, if the underlying social constraints change in ways that shift the leverage between men and women.

That the Christian Church sanctified single-spouse marriage (including no concubines), insisted on the importance of legitimacy (making it very important who your mother was and whether she was married to your father), insisted on female consent being required for marriage, strongly supported female testamentary rights (and the property rights entailed therein) and, in conjunction with manorialism, broke up kin groups, meant that the status of women was significantly higher in Christian Europe than was the case in Islam, Brahmin India or Confucian East Asia. As I have noted previously, feminism was only likely to arise within Latin Christendom-cum-Western civilisation.

Technological change since the emergence of mass-prosperity societies, starting with the development of railways and steamships in the 1820s, has tended to further increase the status of women. The increase in the number of low-physical-risk jobs, the development of domestic technology (reducing the time-and-physical-skill-burden of managing a household), and the development of mass education (reducing the time-and-attention burden of raising kids), as well as shrinking family sizes, have all greatly increased the capacity of women to earn income outside the home. The fall in transport and communication costs has also made it easier for women to coordinate and organise.

The most dramatic change, however, has been the legal and technological changes that have given women unilateral control over their fertility. This has decoupled sex and marriage, a huge social shift in itself. But it also meant that women have been able to invest in higher education, greatly increasing their employment as professionals, managers and other high-status jobs. These changes have also greatly increased women’s role in the creation of culture.

Hence we now have the first societies in human history increasingly without presumptive sex roles. This is a dramatic cultural and evolutionary novelty. Needless to say, gender expectations and narratives have been in considerable flux.

These changes also mean that men and women have fairly similar levels of social leverage. As biologist Bobbi S. Low notes:

...men’s value to women is no longer solely or primarily resource value, and women’s value to men is no longer solely or primarily reproductive value.

Women still have the leverage of sex and fertility, but that is strongly age-dependent, is somewhat weakened by the relative availability of sexual outlets and the undermining of the status and value (and so the appeal) of fatherhood.

The presumption of greater maternal involvement in child-raising is a universal human cultural pattern that, while it shows variations among cultures, is substantially driven by biology. It is not a manifestation of patriarchy. Due to the biological processes of pregnancy and lactation, cultural conceptions of motherhood, while they do vary, vary much less than do cultural conceptions of fatherhood, which (unlike biological paternity) is a socially created role.

Apart from some rapidly fading cultural traces, contemporary Western societies do not face the problems of patriarchy. Instead, developed societies face the problems of dealing with a dramatic level of evolutionary novelty. Such as the dramatic fading of presumptive sex roles.

Beating the patriarchy drum may be emotionally satisfying, and have some residual propaganda value, but it is mostly just a giant, self-indulgent, distraction from working through the continuing implications of these dramatic changes and the sea of evolutionary novelty we find ourselves in.

[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, from Medium.]

The social dynamics of violence in scripture

Not only is the logic of belief not necessarily the logic of believers, the use of scripture is itself subject to evolutionary processes.

Charles de Steuben, ‘Bataille de Poitiers en octobre 732', depicting Charles Martel confronting Abdul Rahman Al Gafiqi.

Educator and reform Muslim Irshad Manji and evolutionary biologist and secular Jew Bret Weinstein have a very thoughtful discussion about violence in scriptures and their different manifestation in (historical) Islam and Judaism. To state the obvious, there is a lot of violence in the Quran and there is a lot of violence in the Torah. Yet rabbinical Judaism, following the end of the Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, has a very different history of religious violence than does Islam.

Well, than mainstream Sunni Islam. There are versions of Islam that have very similar trajectories to Rabbinical Judaism due to being historically embedded in very similar social dynamics and circumstances.

From Hebrews to Jews
Priestly Judaism (or, more accurately, the Yahweh worship of the Hebrews) was a violent religion. It was not, however, notably more violent than other religions of its time and place. It was also a religion of the Law of God, of law grounded in revelation, whose scriptures readily sanctified violence against other peoples and religions. (Including apostates within their own people.)

The Jewish lands were conquered by the Romans, also a people of Law, but of law explicitly made by humans. Having Roman law, based on very different presumptions than that of the Talmud, effectively override the Law of God was profoundly offensive to Hebrew sensibilities. This periodically led to violent revolts that the Romans put down with their customary brutal thoroughness.

Eventually, the destruction of the Second Temple saw the sacrificial role of the priests abandoned and the religious scholars, the rabbis, become the interpreters of scripture and the officiators of ritual. It also became clear that the Romans really meant it: they were prepared to deport, massacre, crucify and enslave whatever number of Hebrews were required to end revolts against Roman rule.

So, the rabbis evolved a new approach whereby Diaspora Jews were required to follow the Law of God but that law would be interpreted by carefully trained scholars in such a way as to permit the Jewish communities to survive and prosper as minority communities within gentile-dominated polities. Doing so while recognisably remaining themselves by remaining anchored in a tradition already many centuries old and which saw itself as reaching back to Creation itself.

Consequences
This socially and culturally evolved response to the clash between law grounded in revelation and law explicitly created by humans turned out to have monumental consequences. Christianity, evolving out of Judaism in a very law-concerned Empire, adopted the Roman notion that law, even Church law, was human, while developing its own priesthood.

A few centuries later, Islam adopted law grounded in revelation interpreted by religious scholars. It never developed a priesthood as such.

Meccan Islam took the rabbinical path of how to operate in a polity dominated by non-Muslims. But Muhammad became ruler of Medina, so the head of a polity; a wielder of violence who unified of Arabia by preaching and sword. The archetypal symbol of Muhammad is, after all, his sword. Medinan Islam is a religion of rulership, of dominion.

Sharia, the revelation-grounded system of law which evolved within the Islamic empire, is a system of law with no pre-imperial existence. It is also the only system of law that claims, by its nature, the right to apply to all humans everywhere. For it is the law of the Sovereign of the universe, discovered by trained scholars through the process of fiqh, of Islamic jurisprudence. The key differences in one’s fundamental standing as a human being is between those who have voluntarily submitted to Allah’s sovereignty (Muslims), those who have submitted to the rulership of those who have submitted to Allah’s sovereignty, and so His law, (dhimmis) and those who have failed to so submit.

The clash between the Law of God and human law that convulsed the Hebrew lands of the Roman Empire is a clash whose consequences have reverberated across the entire history of Islam and Christendom and down to our present day. When jihadis kill, they do so in the name of the universal sovereignty of Allah.

Pastoralist origins
Moreover, Islam evolved in a polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group pastoralist society. Actually, that is mostly redundant. Almost every pastoralist society has been polygynous, patrilineal and organised via kin groups.

Pastoral societies are polygynous because there is no reason inherent to pastoralism to evolve compulsory single-spouse marriage for elite males. On the contrary, that animals herds can increase undermines attempting to restrict the number of (usually male) heirs, or to maximise investment in the human capital of one’s offspring. That eliminates two powerful pressures for compulsory single-spouse marriage. While the value of extra connections encourages going for more wives, and more children, and so encourages polygyny.

Pastoralist societies are patrilineal because one cannot look after animal herds while minding children, making herding a male activity with the animals being bequeathed to the next generation of males. (So down the patrilineal line.)

Pastoralist societies are kin-group based as animal herds are mobile, so their protection is better managed through strong personal links (rather than territorial ones) that kin can provide, and provide better if related males are raised together.

Hence the social selection pressures operating on pastoralist societies are for them to be polygynous, to be patrilineal and to have strong kin groups. The mobility such societies train people for encourages them to trade (to broaden their access to goods and services) and to raid (to broaden their access to goods and services). Both trading and raiding can improve male access to (sexual and fertility services) by improving their appeal as marriage partners within the society. Raiding also enables the seizing of women from outside the society. With the latter dispensing with any pesky consent difficulties.

The Norse going-a-Viking were repeating this pattern on the seas, rather than across grasslands. (In the case of the Norse, polygyny operated through concubines, rather than multiple wives.)

There was a significant pastoralist element to Hebrew society, which is why Jewish tribes flourished in Arabia up until the time of Muhammad. Their example, and the commonality in subsistence circumstances, made it much easier for Islam to adopt and adapt the Jewish model.

But Hebrew society had also incorporated farmers and town dwellers. This gave monolatry (worship of one god) a powerful advantage, as it was a way of unifying farmers, herders and town-dwellers within the same ritual and moral community.

This was particularly advantageous in the Middle East, as it has the most socially permeable ecological boundaries between farming and herding of anywhere in the world. It is the region of the world where farming land and pastureland are most intermingled, both physically and socially, with people shifting from farming to herding and back again, according to circumstances.

This permability likely has a great deal to do with why monotheism is such a distinctive feature of the religious history of the Middle East. Any religious outlook able to unite people across the farming-herding divide had a powerful social selection advantage in the region. Monolatry, and even more monotheism (the claim that there is only one God), was thus adaptively favoured to evolve and prosper in the eco-geographical circumstances of the Middle East.

Islam evolved in a polygynous, patrilineal, kin group, raiding society. Sharia evolved in an imperial polygynous, patrilineal, kin group, raiding society engaged in the most dramatically successful waves of religious conquest in history.

The result is that Sharia not only sanctified polygyny, it also sanctified sexual predation against non-Muslim women. Doing so in the Quran, Hadith and the life of the Prophet, the key sources of Sharia. The 15 references in the Quran to those whom your right hand possess (ma malakat aymanukum) have been canonically taken to permit sex with captured women. Various hadith reinforce this. As does the actions of Muhammad when he ruled Medina, killing the males of defeated tribes and distributing the women and children as slaves to his followers. Hence Sharia holds that the marriage of a woman captured by a Muslim warrior is automatically annulled by the act of capture (obviously, so the captor can have sex with her).

This set up schemata (patterns of belief) and scripts (patterns of action) that have operated across the entire history of Islam, and still have life within mainstream Sunni Islam. Yazidi girls raped by ISIS warriors reported that their rapists cited religious justifications for their acts. Religious justifications that were also reported by the victims of “grooming gangs” in Britain.

A polygynous society, where elite men have extra wives and concubines, generates lower status men who are effectively excluded from the marriage market. One classic response of such societies to this surplus of unattached men is “those people over there have women, take theirs”. A response almost invariably adopted by pastoralist societies and other raiding polygynous societies, such as the Norse. The difference is, Islam sanctified this response. Which had the further advantage of making it much easier to recruit ghazis, holy warriors, to operate on the borders of Islam; to raid infidels and soften the border lands up for the further expansion of Islam. Islam is the only human civilisation explicitly and systematically structured to be violently expansionary: i.e. imperial.

Dominion and practicality
Islam is structured to be an imperial religion of domination. If, however, dominion is not practical, due to being a permanent minority, then such minority versions of Islam are in the same position as post-diaspora Jews: minority followers of the law of God in polities dominated by others. Hence the Ibadis, Ismailis, Alevis and Ahmadi’s generally look very “Jewish” in their behaviour and outlook: concentrating on the cohesion of their communities and avoiding being violent neighbours. (Parsees are an analogous case from outside the Mosaic religions.)

In the right social circumstances, the Quran can turn out to be the basis of much the same social dynamics as the Torah.

The Christian New Testament is considerably less violent in content than the Torah, Tanakh or the Quran. Yet states Christian in religion and culture conquered almost the entire globe. That is because (1) those states competed fiercely, and violently, against each other, evolving to be highly effective states and (2) because imperialism is what states do when they can.

The social dynamics of state competition mattered far more than the relatively pacific content of the Gospels and the Acts.

So, scriptures on their own tell us much less than we might imagine. We have to consider how the use of scriptures evolves in different circumstances, thereby generating various social dynamics. Quite different scriptures can evolve very similar (or at least overlapping) social dynamics.

[Cross-posted from Medium.)

Cousin marriage: it makes a difference which cousin

Cousin marriage in the Middle East works differently than does cousin marriage in South India.

Dr Alice Evans has a wonderful blog post, essay really, on why the situation of women in South India is generally better than that of women in North India. The piece is comprehensively researched and very well reasoned.

I do however, have one quibble. It is with Dr Evans using cousin marriage in the Middle East to argue that cousin marriage in South India is not likely to be a significant explanatory factor in the comparatively better position of women in South India. The trouble with this is that cousin marriage in the Middle East is marriage within the lineage group, so therefore is parallel marriage.

Given that kin groups in the Middle East are patrilineal (male line), women thereby marry male relatives within their own patri-lineage. Such marriages do not add to their kin connections but they also mean that women are not married into a completely different lineage. They are therefore not separated off from their natal kin.

Such parallel marriages mean the women are not further disadvantaged in the way that marrying into a completely different patri-lineage can entail, which is why women in the Middle East are likely to favour cousin marriages. A favouring that might well matter more than expected in such patriarchal societies, as women have long been the marriage intermediaries in those societies. These being societies with a long history of sexual segregation.

In South India, cousin marriages are cross-cousin marriages. That is, given that the kin groups are also patrilineal, they are marriages into a different patri-lineage with which there are already maternal kin connections.

Such cross-cousin marriages mean that, while women are married into a different patri-lineage, their connections with their natal lineages are reinforced. Indeed, it is a sign that those female kin connections are valued.

So women in South India acquire kin connections with such marriage but their natal connections retain significance. This is a stronger intermediary role than parallel-cousin marriage generally provides and gives them two sets of operative and valued kin connections to operate within and through. This puts them in a rather better position than women in North India.

In North India, marriages are often arranged at least two villages away. So women are more thoroughly separated from their natal kin group and more completely dependant on their husband’s kin group and kin connections. It is a way of making the patri-lineage more coherent, likely as an adaptation to North India having a much greater history of invasion. It is, however, done so very much at the expense of women.

Marrying out, marrying in
Parallel (i.e. within kin group) marriages are actually quite unusual in human societies. Normally, kin groups enforce strong taboos against marrying within the kin group. This is typically enforced through strong ritual boundaries requiring differentiation between the spouse with the ritually significant ancestors and the spouse who is an import to the kin group.

Such “ancestor worship” (though it is probably better understood as ancestor ritualisation) is incompatible with monotheism. Adoption of monotheism generally eliminates those ritual boundaries, leading to reasons to marry within the kin group becoming more socially dominant.

Though not so much in the case of Christianity, which is antipathetic to kin groups and has a history of expansively anathematising marriage between relatives, though nowadays much less than it used to. A very good book on this is Michael Mitterauer's, Why Europe?: the Medieval Origins of Its Special Path.

In the case of patri-lineages, marrying within the kin group means that daughters will be breeding warriors for the lineage, not for a different lineage. It also means that property (especially animal herds) remain within the kin group (as any bride price or bride wealth stays within the kin group) and that the genetic and kin-connection cohesion of the kin group will be increased.

South India is not an area where monotheism is strong. So it retains the more normal pattern of kin groups marrying out (of the kin group). In the case of patrilineal groups, that means kin groups trade daughters. (Matrilineal kin groups trade sons.)

In South India, it has been quite common for a man with an older sister to marry one of her daughters (i.e. a niece). Or else, the daughter of one of his mother’s siblings (i.e. a cousin). With the kin-connection consequences noted above. At the very least, they likely operate to facilitate or magnify the causal agents Dr Evans identifies.

So, while I agree cross-cousin marriage is not enough on its own to explain the better position of women in South India compared to North India, I would still argue that it helps to improve the situation of women in South India. Since parallel-cousin marriage in the Middle East is not a good analogy to cross-cousin marriage in South India, cousin marriage in the Middle East is not a good counter-argument against cousin marriage in South India having some significance for the relatively higher status of women compared to North India.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]

Lorenzo M Warby

An accidental small businessman who reads a lot and thinks about what he reads, sometimes productively. Currently writing a book on marriage.

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The Wild West as natural experiment

In the American West, both Euro-American and Chinese-American societies had a shortage of women: but that had very different consequences for women.

Annie Oakley in the 1880s.

Thanks to the Christian sanctification of single-spouse marriage, its insistence that a woman’s consent was required for a valid marriage, and the disappearance (under the pressure of Christianity and manorialism) of kin groups from Europe (apart from the Celtic and Balkan fringes, where manorialism did not reach), women had much higher status in Euro-American society than was the pattern in polygynous societies with kin groups, such as Islam (which permitted multiple wives) and China (which permitted multiple concubines).

In polygynous societies, particularly ones where men controlled the productive assets, and so wives were dependant on the incomes of their husbands, the wives (and concubines) of an elite male competed with each other for the prospects for their children. (Mistresses are concubines within a single-spouse marital system whose children therefore have no inheritance rights.)

In kin-group societies, particularly patrilineal kin-group societies, the fertility of women was an asset of their kin group. So, women tended to be married off early, to maximise the value of their fertility and to minimise the chance of something unfortunate happening. Frequently to significantly older men. Especially as it often took time for men to get together the assets and social standing to make them good (multiple) marriage prospects.

By contrast, in Christian society, an elite man would only have one wife, the joint parent of his heir and other legitimate children. She did not have to share that status of her husband with any other woman. It was thus common for even elite European Christian men to leave their wife in charge when they travelled. (Not something that was sensible for a husband with multiple wives to do.) 

A Christian wife, including of an elite male, was typically responsible for managing the household. Women having publicly acknowledged control of significant resources was a normal part of social dynamics. Both the Latin (Catholic) and Greek (Orthodox) Church held that a woman’s consent was required for marriage, with the lack of kin groups giving that consent greater weight.

In the American Wild West in the later part of the C19th, it being a frontier society, there was a shortage of women. This was true among both settlers of European origins and those of Chinese origins. The consequences for the women of this shortage, however, differed dramatically between the two cultures.

In Euro-American society in the West, married women tended to be treated with considerable deference. There was prostitution, but it was run by women. The prostitutes often made good incomes and pioneered social freedoms that contemporary American and Western women take for granted. The madams were often successful businesspeople: frequently, one of the most successful business people in their town. (Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States is a useful source for this social history.)

Western States pioneered votes for women, explicitly in the hope of attracting more women to their State. (The main argument against votes for women was that they would vote for Prohibition: which, of course, turned out to be true.)

In other words, in Euro-American frontier society, the women reaped the benefits of their scarcity premium.

The picture in polygynous-with-kin-groups (i.e. clans) Chinese society in the American West was very different. There, elite Chinese men mate-hoarded, regularly having a wife and concubines. The remaining women were largely forced into prostitution, controlled by the tongs or triads (which are substitute clans). So, in Chinese-American society in the American West, the scarcity premium of women was largely harvested by men.

As the natural experiment of the American Wild West demonstrated, what marriage system a culture had, whether it was polygynous or had a single-spouse marriage system, and whether it was based on kin groups (particularly patrilineal ones) or not, had quite dramatic effects on the status and prospects for women.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]

Why secularism has Christian origins

Secularism is not a concept that other religions or civilisations developed independently.

Source.

The notion of the secular as a public realm not structured by religion is a product of European Christian civilisation. 

Islam did not develop it, as sovereignty is held by Allah and Sharia represents the rules of Allah found by fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and grounded in revelation. The religious scholars, the ulema, skilled in fiqh, determined the law via religious rulings (fatwa). Rulers, as Muslims, submitted to the sovereignty of Allah. They appointed qadis (judges) who applied the rulings of the religious scholars. Rulers could only legitimately issue laws in the silences of Sharia — essentially, administrative law. Such decrees were their kanun.

“Hindu” civilisation did not develop such a concept, as its legal system was also based on revelation. Law grounded in revelation was adjudicated and administered by Brahmins.

Other societies did not develop it, as ritualisation emanated out from the rituals of hearth, home and clan in a common epistemic realm. Including the hearth, home and clan of the ruler. There was no law-giving religious authorities nor a concept of separate epistemic realms.

Christianity is a scriptural and congregational religion. With a very clear notion of religious authority. From Late Antiquity onwards, Christianity developed a highly structured religious hierarchy. But the authority of customary law, or the capacity of rulers, or other bodies, to issue law was not challenged even when Christian doctrine was invoked to change or direct the content of such laws. Even canon law, however much it might reference revelation, was not directly based on revelation, but was issued by a human institution (the Church) and subject to revision by it.

Christianity grew up in the law-ruled Roman Empire: it did not need to develop its own structure of laws. Muhammad founded a conquest state, hence Islam not only has an inbuilt legal structure, it has an inbuilt imperial legal structure. Sharia had no pre-imperial existence.

In the medieval disputes between Pope and Emperor, such as the Investiture Controversy, there was a very clear sense that both had authority, the question was the boundaries and relations between them.

Once the denominational unity of Latin Christendom was shattered by the Reformation, people acknowledging different religious authorities had to be grappled with. The destructive nature of the European Wars of Religion led to the explicitly secular project of naturalising political theory, of changing the grounding question of political thought from the relationship of God, man and society to the relationship of man, society and the world. Changing that key question was the project of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers.

This Enlightenment shift was to take an existing distinction within Christian thought and society and develop it further. But it was a shift that built on explicitly, and distinctively, Christian roots.

Moreover, it was a shift entirely internal to the dynamics of European societies. Thus, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth granted freedom of religion in 1573. Even the new Constitution of the United States, barring the federal government from establishing any religion, was reacting to European legacies and dilemmas in the context of federating colonies with different established religions.

In the settler colonies, the European settlers brought their religion with them. Indeed, protecting and fostering their religious identity was frequently a motivation for such settlement. In the non-settler colonies, the European administration was such a thin layer, that local religions were largely left alone, except as required to maintain public order. The British campaigns against thuggee and of various colonial powers in India against suttee were very much about maintaining a certain level of public order.

Missionary activity was sometimes fostered, sometimes hindered, but never a prime concern of the colonial administrations. Though it was occasionally an excuse for imperial expansion. Religious norms certainly entered into imperial law, but as a reflection of the norms in their domestic laws. Imperial laws tended to be slightly more secular than the laws “back home” precisely because of the religious diversity and differring religious patterns of the societies they administered compared to what was the case “back home”.

The constraints of imperial administration interacted with the dynamics generated from within European societies. But that was the general pattern of European imperialism.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]