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Literacy and Patriarchy


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Ok, but we know about First Nations societies and others because contact was recent. Sumerian not as much, we have to rely on cultural artifacts...

Yes, I realize that. Speaking of Sumeria, you realize that was not a hunter/gatherer society but an agricultural one, right? Which is precisely my point, we have artifacts from Sumeria and a little bit of historical insight, but by definition, that means that that society was advanced enough to leave such evidence, meaning it had specialization, hierarchy, laws, etc. The only evidence we generally have to study ancient hunter-gatherer cultures are skeletons (which almost universally show an abundance of skeletal damage due to violence, in both male and female specimens), primitive tools (arrowheads, etc), and cave drawings. In some cases we also can analyze the DNA of preserved specimens.

The overall point I am making is simple... people idealize ancient hunter-gatherer societies as some kind of egalitarian communes where equality reigned supreme, whether between different individuals or between men and women. But there is no available evidence to support this. What little we can extrapolate from DNA evidence suggests that early human tribal groups behaved much like primate groups... a single or a few alpha males got all the women by fighting off the other males, and the women had little say in the matter.

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Mohawks (Haudenosaunee) were an agricultural society, and matriarchal.

They had no steel, no domesticated animals, no stone buildings. Agriculture may have been used to supplement their diet but they were fundamentally a hunter gatherer society. Edited by TimG
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They had no steel, no domesticated animals, no stone buildings. Agriculture may have been used to supplement their diet but they were fundamentally a hunter gatherer society.

None of the things you mentioned are required for a society to be considered agricultural. To be an agricultural civilization you need only one thing... agriculture (unsurprisingly). The Mohawks were a farming people.

Steel, in particular, originated millenia later than the rise of agricultural civilizations. Dogs were domesticated long before the rise of agriculture. And the construction material for buildings has varied widely from area to area depending on the prevalence of materials.

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None of the things you mentioned are required for a society to be considered agricultural. To be an agricultural civilization you need only one thing... agriculture (unsurprisingly). The Mohawks were a farming people.

I was thinking of the definition in the context of this thread which implies permanent settlements and centralized rule. Mohawks bands were still largely autonomous and semi-nomadic groups (they moved to different camps in the winter).

I think the distinction is important because centralized rule allows greater specialization which leads to greater technological advancement. This is why mass societies overwhelmed hunter gatherers whenever they interacted. But another distinction we need to make is agriculture is not one of the attributes that separates hunter gatherers from mass societies.

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http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/17/shlain-alphabet-goddess/

I love that quote "nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse". In other words, when it comes to new pervasive technologies, you win a few you lose a few. McLuhan had his laws of media, addressed by the question:

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

That would be the "win a few" part. The article is thought-provoking and seems to signal that hierarchies will crumble thanks to new media. I don't disagree with that conjecture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects

Interesting article on a subject that badly needs to be discussed today. Because the last time American and western culture in general, took a look in the mirror at itself was at least 40 years ago, when many social scientists and observers started noticing that the rapid increases in wealth, technology applications, production and energy use, were not showing any improvements in polling data on happiness and the general sense of wellbeing. As we got richer, most people were feeling more anxious and unsatisfied with life, and trying to understand why!

As well, it was certainly realized....even before there was a clear understanding of climate change that the world of the early 70's - with half the population it has today, was destroying ecosystems, causing extinctions, and using up resources at unsustainable rates. The feminist writers and academics of the 60's and 70's, certainly noticed that...for the last 5000 years, what we call civilization had been constructed on a foundation of male values - competition, aggression, exploitation and much later - individualism, but to the exclusion of female values of cooperation, collectivism and peacemaking or appeasement....as a side issue, it's interesting to note that most of the antonyms of aggression are disparaging terms - complaisant, impotent, timid, weak etc....tells you something about what modern 'civilized' culture really values! Certainly isn't those Christian virtues that get an occasional mention on Sunday!

Since you cite a Wikipedia entry for further reference, I'll post the one on Patriarchy if anyone cares to explore further. In general, there is no clear example of family and social organization we term patriarchy before 5000 years ago. The first example cited is disputed by some...but that's hairsplitting, since it's clear that patriarchies arose and spread forth conquering and changing the core values of neighbouring tribes from at least 4000 years ago. The Wiki article also cites "James DeMeo" as a source...which it shouldn't, since his historical theory on the rise of patriarchy, he called "Saharasia" is viewed today as a gross over-simplification of a much more complicated historical process.

The reason why there was clearly NO patriarchal early hunter-gatherer societies (I'm talking to you - Boges) is because modern anthropologists are in general agreement that our basic fundamental understanding of paternity - that each child has one and only one father, was a historically recent development! This fact also deep-sixes some pseudosciences like evolutionary psychology, which tries to find evolutionary biological explanations for modern cultural behaviours. Anyway, studies of the few, last remaining hunter-gatherer family groups that were largely uncontaminated by western explorers, evangelists and exploiters - in the Amazon Valley until relatively recently, showed that they mostly had what is called a "partible" theory of paternity...meaning that it was believed that every man who had sex with a woman prior to giving birth, was a father of the child. The actual father of the child was of little concern in societies that were rigorously collective - sharing food, work, ritual life, and child-rearing duties. In the typical pre-modern Amazon tribe, the mother who gave birth to the child was not saddled with near 100% of the childcare responsibilities....as a typical mother in a nuclear family is today! That point needs to be made clear and underlined - that the family structure of immediate return hunter-gatherers, later more advanced hunter-gatherers and the non-livestock raising early horticultural societies were all also organized around collective family groups. Needless to say, it is difficult or near impossible to return to collective living in modern technological societies...Frederich Engels tried it, after being greatly influenced by the work of early American anthropologist - Louis Henry Morgan.

But, the collectivization plans failed among nations that tried to apply Marx and Engels version, and only seemed to have some success among religious sects that were already heading towards a collectivist way of thinking. But, regardless of all the crap about failures of socialism that's regurgitated on a continuous basis by fans of capitalism, it's important to know where we started from! Because, any and all behaviours we are really 'hardwired' for, and that are not adaptive behaviours that have come as a response to cultural pressures, are going to be the ones that were valued by original modern humans and their ancestors...NOT the values we have been inculcated with for the last 5000 years!

Now, I have to go back and separate out the other possible founding principles of patriarchy, since I wrote more to explain them than I originally planned. So,

One: A theory of paternity.

There can't be a motive for men to try to take possession of the women they desire, and set up a system where they, and only they have exclusive access to fathering children, if the men don't understand the basic principles to begin with!

Two: Agriculture which includes livestock-raising.

In very recent archaeological research, in Asia Minor and the Middle East, it's been realized that the rise of the Age of Agriculture, was not a sudden historical demarcation from the past, but part of a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to full time farming which took place over thousands of years. Biologists researching the domestication of grains - towards non-shattering varieties that could be harvested, started seeing evidence that rye grains were being hybridized as long as 18,000 years ago. The prevailing belief among anthropologists is that hunter-gatherers in this area during the Pleistocene...an era of cold and rapidly changing weather extremes, would not have allowed any tribal group to live in one place and farm...even if they wanted to. The first plantings were along hillsides and mountainsides..which confused anthropologists at first....wondering why they didn't plant in river-valleys...but it now appears that the seeding was done by hunter-gatherers who would return weeks later to see what was growing at various elevations.

It's not until the beginning of the Holocene, with its stable weather, that we see large population increases, and a gradual transition away from migratory living to settled farming communities. The declines in health after agriculture attributed to poorer diet and backbreaking work, are likely the root of Garden of Eden folklore about living in a paradise that was abandoned.

But, even after full time farming begins, it's still thousands of more years before we see a transition from matrilocal & matrilineal family organization, towards one organized and controlled by men only! This is why many anthropologists believe that the addition of livestock herding and raising was an essential ingredient to patriarchy. Because, among horticultural societies...and we had many here in the New World prior to the European conquests...the women did much and could do much of the work of planting and harvesting food. It's once animals are added, that we have communities where the men are primarily responsible for managing and protecting their herds, that we have communities where men can have a monopoly over most of the food produced and how it is distributed! But, even with livestock, they didn't all necessarily become patriarchal

Three: Violence and warfare

After populations continued to grow to levels where there could be conflicts over land and resources, we come to a time when warfare can become a common preoccupation. Even among warrior cultures, that highly esteem valour in battle, we don't necessarily have patriarchies; but by this time all of the ingredients are in place to remove women from power and influence within their communities. The original patriarchies of the Old World displaced and supplanted the gods and goddesses and the basic cultural values of towns and villages they conquered - one example being the Harappan cities of the Indus Valley, which, after their last Indo-Aryan invasion, went from matrilocal family structure (where men moved in with their wive's families) to patriarchies...as they are today...where the bride is married off at a young age to her husband's family and her...often hostile in-laws.

Put all these ingredients together, and then maybe add this latest one noted by the linguists - that a transition to literate culture became part of the process leading to patriarchy. Because...well, first of all, it has to be noted that up until very modern times, very few people in any literate society could actually read and write themselves! Reading and writing was the domain of a powerful elite group of men in the society....like the scribes mentioned in the Bible.

Whatever caused the rise of patriarchy and prevailing religious and philosophical cultures that entrench it...this should be seem as a great historical error on the path of civilization....and not something to be valued or held on to, because patriarchy has not only been a devastating cultural adaptation for women, it has also made the lives of most men one of misery and deprivation! And if we keep on with our patriarchal values of warfaring and aggressive competition for available resources, there won't be a human race on this planet for more than a few more generations anyway!

Edited by WIP
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Yes, I realize that. Speaking of Sumeria, you realize that was not a hunter/gatherer society but an agricultural one, right?

Yes, I mean whatever tribes they replaced in Mesopotamia.

The only evidence we generally have to study ancient hunter-gatherer cultures are skeletons (which almost universally show an abundance of skeletal damage due to violence, in both male and female specimens), primitive tools (arrowheads, etc), and cave drawings. In some cases we also can analyze the DNA of preserved specimens.

There are some crude idols, too. They will show female gods, worship of birth-giving and so on.

The overall point I am making is simple... people idealize ancient hunter-gatherer societies as some kind of egalitarian communes where equality reigned supreme, whether between different individuals or between men and women.

Nobody with a brain does that. Those same societies were brutal to live in, rife with violence and dependent on the whims of nature to provide food. The same research that tell us that these societies were gender-equal also tells us that they were war-like.

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Mohawks (Haudenosaunee) were an agricultural society, and matriarchal.

.

Matriarchal doesn't surprise me, but didn't they hunt and fish too ? I read an account of the 18th century famine that related the fact that the Mohawks weren't as affected because they still could do these things.

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As far as I know, no evidence exists to substantiate this claim. Early hunter-gatherer type societies existed largely before the invention of writing or any kind of historical records. There is no reason to assume that just because history did not record it (since history didn't exist yet), that those societies were not also full of "gender imbalance". In fact, in almost any species that exhibits sexual dimorphism, as humans do, the larger/stronger/more important gender generally dominates the other gender. It is likely that in early societies, before the rise of law, hierarchy, and writing, that men simply took whatever women they wanted by force, and the only thing that stopped them would be more powerful men that wanted those same women for themselves.

And the few isolated hunter-gatherer cultures that have lingered into modern times and were able to be studied, are, by definition, extreme exceptions to the rule. Something was extremely unique about their culture that left them in this prehistoric state until modern times, and therefore, their cultures are likely also highly atypical in other ways. Therefore any modern hunter/gather society studied by explorers in the last millennium are not counter-examples to my previous paragraph.

Sexual dimorphism does not explain male domination, regardless of how much it is trotted out as an answer to the question of why we have built a civilization around male domination and denial of female influence.

What you will find if you investigate any non-patriarchal society, like the one Tim G cites - the Mohawks, are societies where women are more collectively organized for their own safety and wellbeing than the men are. So in brief, in a Mohawk long house, which was usually organized around a grandmother, had a daughter with an abusive or lazy husband, he would get kicked out and have to live in one of a few long houses for bachelors and unmarried men, regardless of how big or tough he was. He would have an army of women beating on him, if he tried to force his way. So in this respect, when some anthropologists look for primate origins of our behaviours, they should be taking a greater look at Bonobos - who exhibit similar behaviour, than the typical exhibit of Chimpanzees as the progenitors of male aggression.

I was thinking of the definition in the context of this thread which implies permanent settlements and centralized rule. Mohawks bands were still largely autonomous and semi-nomadic groups (they moved to different camps in the winter).

I think the distinction is important because centralized rule allows greater specialization which leads to greater technological advancement. This is why mass societies overwhelmed hunter gatherers whenever they interacted. But another distinction we need to make is agriculture is not one of the attributes that separates hunter gatherers from mass societies.

Most of the "overwhelming" was a simple matter of being more violent and aggressive than most matrilocal societies. There have been historical exceptions, such as the Berbers and Tuaregs of North and Saharan Africa, where many tribes held on to their matrilineal and matrilocal values in spite of the violence they were faced with by invading Arabs and the imposition of Islamic cultural values on them. Many, if not most of them, tended to take what they considered of value from foreign cultures...including foreign religion...and adapt it to values they considered important.

Certainly settled and increasingly larger villages and early cities, could lend themselves towards becoming hierarchical, patriarchal societies....but not necessarily as a rule! Because all we have to do is contrast the Harappan city states of the Indus Valley, such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, with Sumeria and ancient Egypt. Not much can be clearly known of those cities in what is today - Pakistan, except that they were well planned...including streets and water and waste removal systems. As well, the first building of Mohenjo Daro, shows all of the houses in the city were built according to an identical floor plan. So the city would have looked like a collection of matchbox mud-brick houses with few other types of buildings except for public baths. There were no temples or palaces, nothing to indicate a source of government or overt control of the city. It looked like an overgrown beehive, because of its uniformity, and the only traces of hierarchy that can be discerned by archaeologists are in personal adornment. The people wore little, if any clothing, but some statues indicate that some men and women wore more jewelry and had more elaborately styled and decorated hair than others. Other than that, they were all living in identical houses...almost certainly organized around a clan mother...similar to the traditional Mohawk family grouping, and radically different than the way of life in Mesopotamia.

So, what we end up with, are lots of factors that have to be put together to get us where we are today....but did not necessarily have to happen this way!

Edited by WIP
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Most of the "overwhelming" was a simple matter of being more violent and aggressive than most matrilocal societies.

That does not really change my point. When faced with aggressive neighbors you can either change in ways that allows you to repel them or be overwhelmed. Prior to the days of mass communication patriarchy and centralization were the best defense against aggressors (in part because it made it much more efficient to build and supply an army). If it was possible to remain a locally autonomous and egalitarian society and repell invaders we would have seen examples of such societies survive.

BTW: a matriarchy is no better than a patriarchy. the social ideal is egalitarianism.

Edited by TimG
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Matriarchal doesn't surprise me, but didn't they hunt and fish too ? I read an account of the 18th century famine that related the fact that the Mohawks weren't as affected because they still could do these things.

Yes of course, and agricultural, so not solely hunter-gatherer.

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Show me the "research" that tells us that these societies were "gender-equal", please.

There's a lot of information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_roles_among_the_indigenous_peoples_of_North_America

Please don't assume I have some agenda to elevate these societies to a superior (or for that matter) inferior position. I'm simply interested in the effects of extreme specialization on gender relations.

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Thanks for the link. However, as I previously stated, I am specifically interested in information about ancient peoples that are the precursors to the civilizations that later developed, rather than the unique isolated cultures which remained technologically undeveloped. I do not consider these outliers to be an adequate proxy for useful information about ancient peoples in Europe, Asia, and Africa that later formed the civilizations now described as "patriarchal".

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That does not really change my point. When faced with aggressive neighbors you can either change in ways that allows you to repel them or be overwhelmed. Prior to the days of mass communication patriarchy and centralization were the best defense against aggressors (in part because it made it much more efficient to build and supply an army). If it was possible to remain a locally autonomous and egalitarian society and repell invaders we would have seen examples of such societies survive.

That was the point I was making earlier! Many, but not all of the barbarian tribes that fanned out from Central Asia...likely because of drought and famine, were largely herding, patriarchal tribal societies that placed high value on fighting and warfare...especially fighting from horseback. Some, like the Germantic tribes that migrated into northern Europe and eventually attacked the Roman Empire, were rigorously egalitarian, in spite of their warrior culture that included a religion that prized valour in battle above all other virtues. But, they were likely the exception to the rule.

The matrilocal (not matriarchal) city-states that were able to resist the invasions, would obviously be forced to become more warlike themselves and coopt the values of the barbarian invaders, even if they resisted and repelled them. And all this of course doesn't make the transition to warring societies a good think! I even came across a recent article last week commenting on a study published in one of the psychology evidence, which finds a great deal of anecdotal evidence that many soldiers in ancient times ended up with the modern psychologically damaging symptoms we call PTSD today.

BTW: a matriarchy is no better than a patriarchy. the social ideal is egalitarianism.

What you refer to as "matriarchy" was egalitarianism! When the original anthropologists like Louis Henry Morgan began writing books about the last of the longhouse-dwelling indians, such as some of the Iroquois Confederacy still hanging on to tradition in the 1840's, they described often and incorrectly as matriarchal, because the houses and homelife was matriarchal in these horticultural societies where the division of powers in general were that the men dealt with affairs outside the home and village life, such as hunting, warfaring, and exploring possible new territories; while the women had their own hierarchy organized around clan mothers who ran life in the longhouses, the farming and division of food supplies, and dealt with disputes or crimes committed within the community.

Worth noting that when it came to larger, political affairs of the tribe, the chiefs could be removed from power by the clan mothers...so, they had a veto power over the chiefs if they really wanted to remove them from office. Needless to say, a female vote or veto, was not something that existed in any JudeoChristian patriarchal society, so during the 19th century and prior, it's not surprising that Europeans often described the Iroquois and other highly organized farming communities as matriarchies....still doesn't make it the apt description though!

The hunter-gatherers are a different story than the horticultural societies and even the settled hunter-gatherers who lived along river valleys and rich coastal areas. Our early ancestors were rigorously egalitarian, without the establishment of either male nor female power structures.

Edited by WIP
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Thanks for the link. However, as I previously stated, I am specifically interested in information about ancient peoples that are the precursors to the civilizations that later developed, rather than the unique isolated cultures which remained technologically undeveloped. I do not consider these outliers to be an adequate proxy for useful information about ancient peoples in Europe, Asia, and Africa that later formed the civilizations now described as "patriarchal".

It's not like it's some great existential mystery that has no answer! If you really want to know, you can find paleo research by archaologists which correlate closely with the ways most "modern" hunter-gatherers in isolated corners of the world had been living up until recent history.

But, why are you insisting that hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon for example, should be greatly different than our distant ancestors in Africa and the Old World? The evidence should indicate that before 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers did not usually face the pressures that modern hunter-gatherers have faced from encroachment and conflicts with landowners and farmers. The traits that correlate broadly across different hunter-gatherer bands around the world in more modern times, should provide a reasonable representation of what early life was for the human race prior to the rise of agriculture and overcrowding.

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The matrilocal (not matriarchal) city-states that were able to resist the invasions, would obviously be forced to become more warlike themselves and coopt the values of the barbarian invaders, even if they resisted and repelled them. And all this of course doesn't make the transition to warring societies a good think!

No, but it does establish that patriarchy is the normal state for pre-industrial societies when groups have to compete for resources. Patriarchy is no longer necessary because fossil fuels have reduced the need for resource competition and mass communication has allowed the emergence of democracies. Edited by TimG
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No, but it does establish that patriarchy is the normal state for pre-industrial societies when groups have to compete for resources. Patriarchy is no longer necessary because fossil fuels have reduced the need for resource competition and mass communication has allowed the emergence of democracies.

My point about this discussion of how did most modern societies become patriarchal in the first place, is that we have to go back to beginning of the story...not the way things are just prior to the industrial revolution! The fatalistic narrative that patriarchy is natural and inevitable....just as the aspects that come as baggage with patriarchy: violence, warfare, aggression and hierachical societies, are either modern cultural adaptations/ or natural biological aspects of basic human nature.

Now, today there are still a wide range of advocates for patriarchy as normal/and only differ on whether there should be attempts to preserve patriarchy in the face of pressures from modern industrial society that given many women greater economic power and social status than they enjoyed under most patriarchal agricultural societies.

Going back to the OP; this thread quotes a flimsy premise that the rise and fall of patriarchy is connected with the advent of writing, and I have gone back over the general subject area of paleoanthropology over the last couple of years, and find it at best - a small aspect of the story.

Where we are today, is in a cultural shift that has greatly weakened patriarchy, brought about by economic consequences; mostly in the last half century, the value of the work educated women do has increased, while the value of traditional men's work in industry has gone in decline. The forces of consumer culture encouraged more women in the workplace, and now the religious conservative patriarchs are trying to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle!

But, the JudeoChristian branches of patriarchal religious traditions, which were forced onto most of the world, are still trying to portray patriarchy as the normal condition for civilized society that they are trying to take us all back to. And my main point is that...however we organize society and whatever sort of family arrangements we have in the future, our common origins were NOT as patriarchal societies, and certainly were not monogamous! Monogamy is an obvious recent cultural adaptation...which is most of the reason why it is so hard keeping marriages together over the long term. Most of the reason we strive to do so is because family has been fractured and busted down to nuclear family in modern times. So, if you let your marriage fall apart, and remain single for life, you may have no other close, everyday relationships that are not based on some sort of monetary transaction, and can endure through good times and bad!

But, whether we can go back to the way things REALLY were or not, we should at least have some awareness of how radically different life was for our ancestors through most of the course of human history and development. Patriarchy should be seen as an aberration, and a dangerous development in human society that has built economies based on ecological destruction and exploiting the poorest people in the world as slaves in everything but name, to make a lot of the cheap crap for the more affluent nations. And it's a world still on the verge of nuclear annihilation, that has come back at us with a vengeance, now that America has a president who has either stumbled in/or deliberately created a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia, that could end all life on Earth.

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My point about this discussion of how did most modern societies become patriarchal in the first place, is that we have to go back to beginning of the story...not the way things are just prior to the industrial revolution!

I think it is worth noting that hunter gather societies had clearly defined gender roles and egalitarianism does NOT mean that men and women are identical and should be expected to do the same jobs in exactly the same numbers.

Patriarchy should be seen as an aberration, and a dangerous development in human society that has built economies based on ecological destruction and exploiting the poorest people in the world as slaves in everything but name, to make a lot of the cheap crap for the more affluent nations.

I prefer a more academic view. Patriarchy was a necessary step in evolution. A fish could not have evolved to a modern human without transitioning through many intermediate forms first. These intermediate forms had adaptations which were necessary for them but no longer necessary for modern humans.
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I wonder what it would be like to live life constantly colored by so much pessimism, fear, and hatred for the way things are and have been.

That's probably why most people prefer to live in denial! I would have been a lot more optimistic if there was focus on sticking with real solutions to real problems ..especially on environment issues, instead of tinkering around the edges and hoping the future will be brighter.

Over 30 years ago, Ben Bova - a science fiction writer and the original editor of a science and SF magazine called OMNI, wrote a near future SF story on the subject of global warming, where a group of scientists become aware of dangerous future trends and get together at the UN for a summit with international policymakers to cut the production of human carbon emissions as rapidly as possible. Back in the early 80's, it might have been a plausible plotline, but Bova, like most SF writers seemed to be more atune to science and technical topics than with human nature and how international politics would work. Because the real world results have provided worse information in recent years, with an even greater unwillingness to deal with climate change honestly! And you ask me why I'm a pessimist!

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I think it is worth noting that hunter gather societies had clearly defined gender roles and egalitarianism does NOT mean that men and women are identical and should be expected to do the same jobs in exactly the same numbers.

If we restrict the definition of hunter-gatherers to the more primitive ones that had fewer innovations and traveled more frequently, these groups are what the anthropologists term - Immediate Return hunter-gatherers. Having to be on the move frequently, made it necessary for these family bands to quickly adapt to changing conditions, because they had to hunt for and gather new food resources more frequently, and had no capabilities to store food of any kind for the long term. By being constantly on the move, a band of hunter-gatherers cannot become rigidly hierarchical, or their very survival is threatened. Many anthropologists studying the last remaining of these groups 50 to 100 years ago, were fascinated by the strategy they called Status Leveling - where even deserved success...like a particularly gifted hunter, would not be allowed to receive any acclaim or brag about how good he was at hunting. It was more important to maintain group cohesion than to allow even the most limited hierarchies to arise.

In general, elders (both male and female) were listened to more intently by younger tribesmen and women, but they still did not have a formal leadership status. If they strongly advised a certain move at a certain time etc., it would be considered important by the group, but it wasn't quite the same as being a true leader and having decision-making power over the group, which became an aspect of life in later more settled hunter-gatherer groups and early horticultural societies.

Even the gender roles we take at face value were not set in stone either. It was generally the men of a group who went on the long hunts, but that had more to do with their freedom from pregnancy and ability to travel longer distances, than with being men. Women tended to learn how to use weapons and hunt and repel invaders (recall that the Amazon River and Valley gets its name from an early explorer who wrote of savage women firing arrows at his boats). The hunting women did would mostly be small game from snaring, while men also did some gathering of plant foods...just not as much as the women of the group. When it came to childrearing, it was noted from studies of the Amazonians and other primitive groups that babies were frequently handed off to both men and women during different times of the day. One anthropologist of the 60's ( I forget the name) noted that the only clear distinguishing factor between the way men and women cared for babies, was that the women were much more interactive with the child, while the man might hold the baby while talking with a group of male friends, and grab some leaves to wipe the baby's butt when necessary, but carry on the conversation with his friends. So the picture of hunter-gatherer life before there was great outside influence on their cultures, are very egalitarian without even a great deal of distinguishing features between the lives and expectations of each gender.

I prefer a more academic view. Patriarchy was a necessary step in evolution. A fish could not have evolved to a modern human without transitioning through many intermediate forms first. These intermediate forms had adaptations which were necessary for them but no longer necessary for modern humans.

Even the first anthropologists like Johan Jacob Bachofen (who wrote his groundbreaking work - Mutterecht) in 1841 noticed that early societies were relatively peaceful, egalitarian, matrilineal and promiscuous (within set limits), still claimed that the rise of agriculture and patriarchy were necessary to make civilization possible. My question would be...even if this were true, was civilization worthwhile in the end?

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Even the gender roles we take at face value were not set in stone either. It was generally the men of a group who went on the long hunts, but that had more to do with their freedom from pregnancy and ability to travel longer distances, than with being men.

Whatever the reason, these groups did not expect women and men to do the same jobs in the same numbers. Allowing exceptions to normal roles does not change the fact that normal roles exist.

My question would be...even if this were true, was civilization worthwhile in the end?

I don't romanticize life before technology. It was difficult, brutal and short. Life is better for the vast majority of people today even with the issues that need resolving.
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I think it is worth noting that hunter gather societies had clearly defined gender roles and egalitarianism does NOT mean that men and women are identical and should be expected to do the same jobs in exactly the same numbers.

No, they still had specialization but power was more equal. Just as: when you introduce the idea of money to trade equality decreases, and when you formalize decision making and rules making into a technology, whoever masters that technology tends to rise in power. We are today in the age of the nerd.

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