depistemology

Paternity, Patriarchy and Terror V.1.5
11/29/2017

When did humans become conscious of causality in terms of reproduction? I think it is fair to assume that women were aware that intercourse sometimes resulted in pregnancy before men were. But what happened when men began to understand the implications of planting a seed in the ground and reaping the resulting harvest.

Agriculture in general implies a prediction that planting a seed causes a plant to grow. That was a radically adaptive social activity and it appeared in several locations independently between 15,000 and 10,000 BC. Whether that knowledge was derived from human understanding about sex or if we inferred sexual causality from agriculture is an open question.

Women must have been more aware of the causal relationship of sex and reproduction long before men were because they embody the result, men do not. That fact is significant in evolutionary and historical contexts but it is also probably a fundamental factor in forming gender roles and behavior. Are we now experiencing an evolution of those roles?

How much of male behavior is consciously or subconsciously driven by the uncertainties of paternity? All men are the sons of men who have mated successfully whether it was due to trust, love, custom, lust, fidelity, coercion, deception, fear, force or rape. But all women have the reproductive veto of abortion whether it is legal or not. Women are certain of reproductive success, men are not. The fact that patriarchy persists is evidence of a differential effect of two different but interdependent reproductive strategies that has up to now favored male dominance.

Religion and warfare are the means of insecure men to try to control conception yet the final say is still out of their hands whether they outlaw abortion or not. Insecure men seek terror and war as the last option to dominate women and control conception. The oldest profession was the result of men seeking to buy women. War is the oldest story of feckless men seeking to indirectly intimidate women they could not buy. Men go to war to try to enforce a rule of fear while "peaceful" men preach from the pulpit to enforce rules of a paternalistic sexual "morality".

War between cultures has always meant men killing men and raping women. The elite men of both sides of the conflict benefited because they had a parallel interest; the attempted subjugation of women in their own culture to fear by terror. Has this not been true ever since men realized that they indeed had a role in their own reproductive success but they had no sure means of controlling it?

Are we now seeing the end of that reign? Can men imagine and co-create a civilization without patriarchy? To what extent will powerful men now go to retain their patriarchal privilege? None of this is inevitable or the result of biological determinism. We have the human capacity to reflect on the consequences of our actions and imagine alternative actions. We are responsible.