council of clan mothers in an imagined post-civilization culture; diorama from Afterculture (redrawn by AI to make the image crisper and more legible — right click to open full size in a new window)
Lyle Fass has recently written a series of articles lamenting the staggering incompetence and destructiveness of patriarchal societies (which almost all societies in the entire history of our civilization have seemingly been), and wishing we might instead live in a matriarchal one, with the men under control (for a change) to at least minimize the damage of their behaviour. Examples of his recent writing:
Bring Me the Matriarchy
When Men Are No Longer the Chosen Ones
A few key excerpts from the first of these articles:
Human beings have found endless ways to brutalize each other. Race, class, caste, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationality, all of it matters, all of it has blood on it. But women sit underneath almost every one of those systems like the original field of control, the first territory men learned to occupy and govern and sanctify and punish. If you can control the people who give birth, you can control lineage, inheritance, labor, legitimacy, domestic life, religion, property, sex, family structure, the future itself. That is the whole game…
The history of women is the history of men building legal, religious, cultural, and domestic systems to manage the most obvious fact on earth, which is that women can create more humans. More humans means more workers, more heirs, more soldiers, more believers, more bodies for the machine. Men looked at that power and did not respond with reverence. They responded with enclosure. They wrapped it in purity codes, modesty codes, obedience codes, marriage codes, inheritance laws, veils, shame, scripture, custom, threat, and force. They called it civilization…
There is a lot of misandry in the air right now. I understand it completely. I am not scandalized by women being angry. I am amazed they are not angrier. If you spent thousands of years being used, controlled, legislated, sanctified into submission, beaten, blamed, traded, diminished, erased, interrupted, underpaid, overworked, fetishized, and told to smile through it, you too might arrive at a fairly dim view of men as a class. I am a man, and I support the matriarchy.
Lyle’s writing brought to mind the astonishing story of how a ferociously hierarchical and brutal patriarchal baboon tribe that Robert Sapolsky had studied for years was utterly transformed when the top-ranking males raided a poisoned waste dump and all died of tuberculosis. Suddenly the tribe, in which females now outnumbered the remaining males 2:1, became a largely peaceful, egalitarian, generous, low-stress, thriving matriarchal society. Robert noticed that wandering males from other tribes adapted to the tribe’s new order. And 20 years later that tribe’s remarkable matriarchal culture continues to prevail and thrive.
OK, you might say, but if Robert’s baboons were already dealing with chronic stress due to incessant human encroachment and interference, how did the loss of the high-ranking males produce a society with much lower levels of stress (as measured by blood samples of the baboons)?
I don’t know. We can’t know what it’s like to be a baboon. Perhaps with a newly disproportionate number of females in the troop, the remaining troop members conditioned more peaceful behaviour in each other, and that led to lower levels of self-induced stress. Or perhaps the troop was already feeling population stresses due to the high number of baboons in the troop relative their environment’s carrying capacity, and the die-off reduced those stresses.
Much has been written on the topic of human “matriarchal” societies, though most of it refers mainly to matrilineal (property, status and names are inherited along female rather than male lineage) societies, rather than “matriarchal” societies in the sense of being women-‘dominant’. Even in societies where women have truly equal rights, authority and opportunities (and there are vanishingly few of them, despite a lot of false posturing), it would seem that these societies are egalitarian and consensus-seeking, rather than ones where women demonstrably outrank men and exert disproportionate power.
What seems to distinguish the societies where women are most respected and truly equal in power and authority, interestingly, is that women are most often held up as the models for all members to study, emulate and aspire to be like. So, where in our societies being “manly” is a desirable trait, as is being “wealthy”, “famous”, “successful”, “aggressive” and other traits, there are some (just a few) societies where members aspire to be like their eldest, most intelligent and most knowledgable women, and to model that behaviour for others in the society, regardless of gender.
Robert’s baboons seem to suggest that it is certainly possible for matriarchies and low-stress, egalitarian societies to emerge. So why don’t they? Is there something in male human nature that drives the males of our species to aggregate and arrogate more than an equal or fair share of wealth, power and fame, persistently enough to eventually acquire it (and hence, since power corrupts, abuse it), as happens in ‘normal’ baboon troops and almost all human societies that we know about?
We can’t know the answer to this question, but the baboon study kind of reinforces a hypothesis that I’ve had as long as I’ve been studying human and animal behaviour. That hypothesis is that under conditions of severe stress, animals behave very differently from how they behave in conditions of peace and abundance.
That’s been studied for generations, and I wrote about it most recently last fall:
Much animal research (eg by Edward Hall in The Hidden Dimension) demonstrates that in situations of great stress, when the animals instinctively understand that they are living in unsustainably overcrowded, ecologically degraded, and unnatural high-stress conditions, with “not enough to go around”, their behaviour quickly and dramatically changes.
With rats, which are normally surprisingly unselfish, even empathetic, when this happens they start to turn on each other. The alphas start to hoard food and attack others, while the lower-caste rats cower, retreat into solitude, and, if the situation gets bad enough, eat their own young. This behaviour continues and grows until the symptoms that caused the extreme imbalance have been alleviated. This is an automatic, chemical (mostly adreno-cortical) response to situations of extreme scarcity or precarity. It is nature’s way of restoring balance to populations that are so far out of whack with the available resources (food, space, warmth etc) that more moderate and gradual balancing mechanisms are inadequate.
My hypothesis is further that the key difference between us and most other animals is our brain’s unique capacity to imagine a million more stressful things that could possibly happen, than any other creature. Combine that with the fact that we must by now surely instinctively sense that 8.2B (headed soon for 10B) humans living in the pressure-cooker prosthetic world of human civilization when cheap, affordable, irreplaceable resources essential for our survival are rapidly running out even as we’re increasing the rate at which we’re using them, is a recipe for disaster.
Our current behaviour, I would suggest, is the behaviour of a species gone mad by stress and fear. And, I would suggest, in high-stress situations, that in humans, our biological conditioning is such that men react differently to that stress than women. We’re just chemically ‘wired’ differently.
Perhaps it’s the testosterone, and perhaps it’s just outward behaviour rather than how our bodies are internalizing stress, but men seem to get stressed more quickly and react more aggressively than women. So when that stress becomes chronic instead of just acute and short-term, it may be that men are just not as well adapted to modern life where chronic stresses are the norm. And hence it may be that men are just not as competent at dealing with chronic stresses as women are.
Perhaps men (and other male primates) have been conditioned to deal with the acute stresses of the moment, while women (and female primates), having most of the burden of chronically-stressful child-rearing, have been temperamentally conditioned to deal better with chronic stresses in general.
We are, I fear, now plunging into an era of chaos and collapse, an era which will likely last centuries, not decades. And that means high levels of chronic stress will be the norm. Would we be better off, then, if men would get out of the way and let women run things for the next few centuries?
My guess is that it wouldn’t hurt. I recall watching that debacle-of-a-debate between Trump and Hilary Clinton, two horrible, well-entrenched members of the Epstein Class circling each other like vultures. When I asked people afterwards who (if anyone) ‘won’ that notorious debate, the answers seemed to fall largely along gender lines. Each gender perhaps ‘recognized’ and empathized with their gender’s instinctive reaction to stress in the behaviour of the debater of that gender.
No matter what you may think about those particular war-mongering, elitist, corporation-coddling individuals, it seems pretty clear that the temperament exhibited by Hilary Clinton will be better-suited to dealing with accelerating chaos and collapse than that of the current execrable US president, even setting his advanced senility aside.
But I would suggest that the probability of that temperament, and the gender that more often exhibits it, prevailing in the decades and centuries to come is remote. As Lyle points out, the suppression and oppression of women has been going on for millennia.
Our tragic species does not appear likely to change its spots anytime soon.
