I’m spending the week finishing If These Fists Could Talk, and one major update is a simplification of the ROBA Hypothesis. I had originally thought that the capacity for reciprocal, object-based aggression (ROBA) produces a sensation of apocalyptic dread, which is resolved via deferral. However, since ROBA is agnostic as to the order of events (the threat of violence might have produced deferral, ala the Originary Hypothesis, but the breakdown of deferral might have also produced violence) it’s presumptive to assume that all deferral is explicitly designed to defer ROBA. In fact, an equally plausible hypothesis would say that all human culture (kinship, language, religion, etc.) was deferential from the beginning. The apocalyptic nature of ROBA might bear down on the minds of all, but so could all the other forms.
Essentially, I’m codifying the agnostic nature of ROBA by reformulating the exclusive human property: exchange.
What all human cultural forms share is a mode of reciprocal exchange. We shouldn’t confuse this with animalistic exchange, which has none of the time horizon that human exchange has. The simplest non-ROBA example of this is food. Animals eat the food they find and leave what they don’t want. Humans have an exchange relationship with food. Ancient societies said to food, “I consecrate you to the god(s), thereby acquiring favor when I consume you with the community.”
Modern society features a morbid twist on this: “I restrict my calories and do a short regular workout, thereby acquiring nutrition and convenience from you.” In this latter example, our relationship with food helps us cope with technological society while ensuring we ingest enough mass media. It’s a parody of the original sacred, but it is nonetheless a relationship.
Consider the exchange nature of kinship. Ancient, matrilineal society says, “The man marries a woman to produce a heir for her clan, and this heir will marry into his clan, and so on forever, weaving a relationship between the two clans for eternity.” Patrilocal society turned this into, “The man marries a woman to produce a male heir for his clan, who will fortify his city, bring himself a wife, produce a male heir, and so on forever, creating the city reaching the sky.”1
Western kinship used to say, “A man marries a woman, both liquiding their capital and combining it together into a shared estate. Their heirs either remain to continue building the physical estate, or they liquidate the estate into capital which is moved to combined in marriage with their partner’s capital. Repeat.” Now, much of modern Western kinship says, “A man marries a woman to build up their party. They produce heirs, trained by their party’s mass media channels, which continues building the party.”
(Both the political sides of the so-called culture war must realize that by inundating their children with their mass media of choice – whether it be Prager U or PBS, Fox News or NPR, both functioning within the same exchange system powered by corporations and advertisers – children naturally grow curious of what else there could be. Once emancipated into adulthood, if they are not inducted into the family’s corporation, the heirs naturally flee away to the tabooed other. Studies show children flipping over to the opposite side of the political aisle in higher percentages. Liberal kids are turning reactionary; conservative kids are turning woke. They are also marring politically similar mates in higher percentages, producing offspring, who move to the other side of the aisle again, etc., forever. The mass media profit hand over fist in this system. If we were to codify Western kinship, it’s this: “men and women intra-marry endogamously within their party and produce children of the opposite party.” This radical new kinship system, to use Straussian terminology, would be a bilateral endogamy with restricted exchange. A generalized exchange system would be possible if there were 3 or more political parties, but this is an increasingly impossible scenario as mass media moves everybody into a mimetically charged polarity that allows for no additional groups.)
Food, kinship, art, religion, language, and all human traits are modes of exchange. ROBA (violence and warfare, peace and deterrence) is also a mode of exchange. I once assumed that ROBA creates the potential for exchange; I’m no longer so confident in this. Any or all of the other forms could also be the origins of exchange.
ROBA is simply the simplest mode of exchange to put into detail: the opponents’ weapons are unknown to each other, therefore both must escalate, and this produces a shared window into the infinite. All modes of exchange serve to produce this same shared window into the infinite. Kinship produces a window of infinite family, food produces a window of infinite health, and sacrifice produces a window of infinite sanctity. Ecologists argue that animals all have these windows to some degree, and for this reason it’s difficult to pin these as uniquely human modes of exchange2.
Contrast this with ROBA, which produces a window of apocalypse. No animal combat can even hope to have such a window.
- The Tower of Babel might have been such a polemic against the patrilineal order in the Fertile Crescent which destroyed the old matrilineal order.
- One is tempted, for instance, to cite monkeys who demand “payment” for stolen items from tourists. These modes of exchange are similar, but mechanically different from the broader, human market economy. And yet to parse these differences requires multiple volumes.
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