The city… is the source of violence, or the product of violence?
Lewis Mumford’s The City in History says that the city acquired a propensity for a particularly harsh kind of violence with unlimited expansion due to the emergence of kings. Smith’s The Aztecs details the violence of the Aztec Triple Alliance and how it embarked on never ending conquest to feed its populace with food and its gods with human sacrificial victims. Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade claims that the “Kurgan wave”, a roving band of patriarchal Semitic nomads, swept over the Levant, decimating “peaceful” Neolithic cultures that engaged in goddess worship. Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess that the seeming natural transition of languages into written form brings with it a change in cognition, instilling patriarchal, abstract, monotheistic, warrior values that overturned the previous matriarchal, visual, polytheistic, goddess-worshipping values.
These authors, and many today, appear to be intimately concerned with such “patriarchal” violence, particularly that of the iron age which led to the wholesale destruction of Bronze Age cities in the so-called “Catastrophe”. And yet, none of these authors can account for the origin of this wave of patriarchal violence. In fact they are hardly serious in seeking its origins. Why?
Let’s look at the other side of the debate: authors who deny an origin of patriarchal violence. For this we will go back to the 19th century.
In Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ Ancient City, the author claims that the “agnatic” male-dominated household is the first family unit. Sir Henry Maine said the same thing in Ancient Law, and much of H. Clay Trumbull’s anthropology in The Threshold Covenant assumes that the originary temple was a singular family unit. These were common viewpoints in 19th century Europe for many reasons. Perhaps the primary reason was political: socialism threatened to release land from private ownership into collective or government ownership. Naturally, anyone with a stake in capitalistic enterprise sought to defend land and property ownership, and they often turned to ancient law to bolster their case. Maine, de Coulanges, and Trumbull are such authorities: they held that private property, if it not exactly originary, was a natural extension of the nuclear family at the beginning of society. So, one could use these authors’ research to defend the notion that socialism contradicted the very idea of society itself.
Did these authors acknowledge “patriarchal” violence? Yes and no. Nobody could deny the collossal destructive power of cities, of Napoleon and Clausewitz, but these authors chalked such power up to the steady, inevitable march of civilization. They acknowledged the horrors of state-sponsored warfare, but this was balanced against the benefits of that progress: the rapid expansion of enterprise, advancement of culture, maritime innovations, science, etc. Without such progress, we could not read them.
In short, patrilineal propaganda claims violence is a necessary byproduct of civilizational advancement.
Compare this with Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, Margeret Mead, and to some extent Richard Wrangham, who are all too eager to blame partiarchy for creating “systems of violence.” Where do these systems come from? “From our animal nature.” Since patriarchal systems are “hierarchical,” they can tap into this “animalistic” violence. Matriarchal systems, being less “hierarchical” (and having no cities, no “phallic structures”), supposedly circumvent aggression, leading to a more peaceful society.
In short, matrilineal propaganda claims violence comes from animals and matrilineal institutions can prevent it ways patriarchal ones cannot.
In the modern era, I’ve come across exactly one anthropologist who has taken a balanced view on this issue: Jack Goody. Goody’s kinship books are so good and so unbiased that they 1) are nearly impossible to read and 2) might as well not exist. This is the simple reality of mass media. If you don’t toe a line of propaganda for the left or the right, for the matriarchy or for the patriarchy, mass media doesn’t know how to sort you, which bucket to go in. Your ideas are bucket-less. You’re the sand that wasn’t used for the sand castle. Your tree may fall in the woods but mass media makes sure nobody is around to hear it.
So far, Goody appears to be one of these uncategorizable types, which makes him great. His strain goes back to the late 19th century Scottish Enlightenment. Authors like Robertson Smith, John McLennan, and James Frazer, as well as Americans like Lewis Morgan, wrote far better kinship studies than those of Maine, de Coulanges, and Trumbull. For all the criticism of these Scottish kinship scholars, they at least understood one thing: matrilineal descent preceded patrilineal descent everywhere. You can evaluate their claims yourself in just two books: Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society and John McLennan’s The Patriarchal Theory.
All these authors were knee-deep in the Darwinist thinking of the day, which saw cultures as species, with various traits gradually transitioning in form. Frazer’s Golden Bough is the apex of such “cultural Darwinism”: every book of his 12-volume series takes on a major theme, such as the corn harvest, tracing the earliest versions of these rituals to those on display in the Christian churches of the author’s day. I don’t believe Frazer wrote The Golden Bough to disparage Christianity, nor was his Folklore in the Old Testament an attempt to undermine the Bible. All Frazer’s anthropology, literary critique, and mythological explorations are simply how he understood the sciences: he compared the forms between cultures and religions and traced how they gradually “evolved” from one to the other.
For this reason, Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy series is, in as far as I’ve read in his works, his highest achievement. Why? Because while Frazer will trace the steps between 2-class and 8-class matrilineal descent (MLD) in Australia, the fact that there’s no clear gradual transition from MLD to patrilineal descent (PLD), and yet there is a transition, doesn’t seem to bother him. He simply leaves the questions unanswered. There’s no Darwinistic transition from local totemism to MLD, and no transition from MLD to PLD. Kinship is not a river gradually changing its flow from the left branch to the right branch. It’s more like a train, shifting from this track to that. One track is MLD, the other is PLD. It cannot ride on both. Yet both tracks can be ridden on concurrently by other trains in the system, as Frazer notes with the Ugandan royal family, which retained a MLD core while the rest of society had already switched to PLD.
The patrilineal propagandists Trumbull, de Coulanges, and Maine could not fathom MLD because they couldn’t fathom the absense of private land property, a core tenet of MLD. Similarly, anthropology today cannot fathom any anthropological notion that is non-gradual. All its tools only measure gradation. So since kinship is not a river, since it doesn’t fit anything, it’s ignored. While matrilineal propagandists appear to have emerged victorious, they can’t fathom any kind of natural switch to patrilineal descent (PLD). Its origin being incomprehensible to these scholars, PLD is simply bad. Combine this with a real history of patrilineal propaganda, and they have made a case that patrilineal descent (PLD) is 1) dominant, 2) evil and 3) incompatible with peace.
Many modern thinkers yearn for a restoration of some kind of “matriarchy”, or what Eisler calls the more egalitarian “partnership models” of matrilineal society. In fact there were no such models on any significant scale. While the women’s husbands in MLD society were treated as foreigners (like Jacob was treated in Laban’s house), the women’s brothers and fathers held the power (like Laban). The men were the warriors, were at least a majority of the elders, and acted as the principle judges. Aside from this delusional view of the past, matriarchal proponents also ignore a set of critical facts at their own peril:
- matrilineal descent (MLD) was a natural switch from an earlier “local” totemism,
- MLD was as violent as it could possibly be (see Feldman’s Cannibalism, Headhunting, and Human Sacrifice in North America for a heap of North American cases, and see of course The Golden Bough‘s The Scapegoat volume for the legacy of human sacrifice within matriarchal society),
- MLD tribes intermarried for mutual protection networks since blood revenge was rampant,
- MLD networks suffered from incessant feuding (see Gluckman’s Custom and Conflict in Africa and Renato Rosalto’s Ilongot Headhunting 1883-1974 for harrowing examples), and
- MLD naturally switches to PLD whenever and however it possibly can.
Utopian “matrilinealists” are as delusional as Christian nationalists, anarcho capitalists, communists, and fans of Galt’s Gulch: the transition has already happened. Kinship cannot be reversed because it is downstream from the aggression kernel.
And so here’s a history of human aggression kernels through the lens of kinship:
- Stone/Totemism – Humans used stones as the first weapons of recursive, object-based aggression, which produced the potential of mimetic, apocalyptic conflict. This threat permeates the first marriage, which might have been attempted between siblings, and thus the abhorrence of incest was born, forcing males to marry out.
- Late Stone/Matrilineal Descent (MLD) – Males marrying out creates matrilineal mesh networks of mutual defense. Blending of ideas, different cuts of rock, produces late stone age weaponry like arrows and spears, which was adequate for enforcing MLD networks.
- Early Metal/Late MLD – Gold’s low melting point made it the first workable metal, but copper’s abundance made it superior, but demanded consolidation of resources to build forges. The addition of tin to make bronze intensifies this need. Metallic products are more difficult for men to transfer back to their home village to give to their heirs (their sisters’ children). They have no incentive to build cities with metal. And yet copper and bronze weapons proliferate, demanding such fortifications. This coincides with the first transition into cities, as seen in the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Iroquois Confederacy.
- Iron/Patrilineal Descent (PLD) – Patrilineal descent begins either with men refusing to leave home and bringing women in (virilocal marriage) or foreign men in matrilocal marriages taking foreign captive wives after war, mating with them, and declaring their new biological children “heirs.” This kinship system feeds into the iron age: iron and heavy infrastructure incentivizes PLD, PLD allows for iron and heavy infrastructure. Men are liberated from having to transfer inheritance back to their sisters’ children back at their distant home (once called their “children”, now called “neices” and “nephews”). Instead, now they give inheritance directly to their biological kin, who are local. Males retain exogamous marriage to retain kinship networks, bringing foreign women in. This is the PLD we see in Rome and Arabia. The patrilineal fortified city is improved upon that of the Aztecs. Israel and China go to the next step with PLD: so long as the marriage partner is an adequately “distant” kin, they are marriageable, further consolidating inheritance, maintaining kinship networks around singular gods, and building super-cities with massive standing armies, armed with Iron Age weapons, which destroy the Bronze Age cities. Egypt never fully recovers.
- Late Iron/Bilateral Descent – After the introduction of Christianity, Europe realizes it can better fortify cities by forming kinship networks from both the mother’s and father’s sides. Complex property rights and scientific measurement allow estates to be divided in a granular fashion, with complex boundary lines, new roads, and necessary infrastructure. Inheritance can now flow through complex legal channels to males and females alike. The idea of patrilineal and matrilineal descent largely goes away.
- Mass Warfare/Early Corporo-lineal Descent (CLD) – Around the same time, Buddhist and Catholic monasteries experiment with a new kinship system: corporate structures whose members eschew traditional family and reinvent the idea of inheritance and kinship entirely. This is a product of the Christian and Buddhist revelations, whose brotherhoods are no longer biological but spiritual. Resources are siphoned not from kin groups but from 1) the state and 2) members who are free to enter from any corner of the world. The Catholic Church restricts kinship to the 6th cousin, forbids remarriage, the levirate, and divorce, and shuns adoption, which helps to channel inheritance into its coffers. Buddhist temples have a rocky alliance with the patrilineal system of Confucianism which keeps resources local, allowing the building of temple cities, and their scholars rewrite the old, matrilineal totemic myths of China into nonsensical patrilineal myths of people learning martial arts (which people still believe today). Corporo-lineal descent (CLD) rides on the back of a technological revolution: networks of roads and markets, global communication channels, and the creation of the first eotechnic machinery allow for the creation of a new kinship system which is best equipped to handle the next aggression kernel.
- Gunpowder/CLD – The introduction of gunpowder is first for alchemy in Europe, scaring ghosts in China. When we learn it can propel iron balls into people’s chests, warfare changes overnight. The transportation, communication, and financial networks drive the necessary capital and resources into warfare, producing the corporate warfare of the 16th century. William of Orange perfects the regimentation of this “mechanical” mililtary. The military industrial complex is born. As a state and theocratic power, CLD can dominate the local (aristocratic or not) bilateral descent (BLD) systems.
- The Corporation – BLD families grant access to the corporation framework to protect themselves from the overreach of corporate warfare. The private Limited Liability Company is born. Within this CLD framework, Jewish families like the Sulzbergers who own the New York Times, Mormon families like the Marriotts, Christians like Tyson of Tyson Food, Muslim families like the Olayans, and many other families use CLD as a shell to reintroduce a quasi-PLD/BLD kinship back into the economy to ensure the continuity of the family’s inheritance (and often the theology) while still being able to compete on equal footing with less family-oriented corporate networks like governments, banks, etc.
- Atomic/A-lineal Descent (ALD) – After the introduction of nuclear power it becomes clear that corporations and private families are completely at the mercy of governments armed with nukes. A general malaise about family sets in: why bother transferring inheritance if the entire thing can evaporate with one nuke? I’m part of a particular “caste” (a bunch of working class mechanics and soliders) and know this system pretty well: we are raised with no clear idea of what marriage is, no conception of inheritance, no sense of belonging in a town, theology is entirely personal and so, in a sense, it’s pointless. Children are seen as a burden and population control becomes a moral duty, starting with onesself. ALD meshes perfectly with the computer programmer and wandering artist. Mass media atomizes kids and adults and all spirituality and religion is distributed to the point of evaporation, like dumping out a cup of water in the Costco parking lot in July. Without kinship and religion to soak up free-floating recursion, which takes the ugliest linguistic forms on social and mass media, recursion is easily channeled into seemingly “random” violence, where it explodes into unprecedented loftiness, acquiring a religious flavor we’ve never seen before. The manifestoes of maniacs like Kaczynsky, Harris and Klebold, and Audrey Hale show a new kind of religious zeal that seeks to preserve their lofty messages not in the spiritual domain, not in the “Godboxes” as Frazer called them, but in the printed, magnetic, and electronic world of mass media.
There are innumerable ways to tell the story of history. Charles Beard’s Rise of American Civilization is an exceptional example of historical writing, as the author weaves in economics, art, political movements, and other elements of history in a layered fashion. William McNeill’s Pursuit of Power approaches history through machinery, population expansion, financial networks, and warfare. Mumford’s Technics and Civilization is a history of invention, machines, and classes.
This is a history of recursion, the minimum human property, which expands within its symbolc state of language and culture, creating new aggression kernels. When it could explode into apocalypse, it can be channeled into new kinship systems, shifting them drastically and suddenly, producing new symbolic forms that bring about the next aggression kernel. What will come next? And when?