Love Hurts

[ermadog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Conclusion of my grand opus on the ancient bunk.


Ain't Gonna Study War No More

It is only when power begins to shift to the males in patrilineal
societies, especially when they begin to formalize male power such as in
the bigman societies or in the caste societies, that the denigration of
women begins in earnest. Even in these societies, however, women retain
and use to their advantage well-defined forms of power. "[The Chipewyan]
live almost entirely on fish, moose, and caribou: fish and game provide 90
percent of their diet. The area they inhabit contains almost no
vegetation.  The women are not permitted to hunt with the men; they hunt
only if the men are absent and they are hungry. Nevertheless, the women
work extremely hard at unpleasant tasks: they process all the food and all
the skins the men bring back to camp. This involves cutting, boning, and
drying -- over open fires where smoke continually rises into their faces
-- of fish and game, and treating the pelts.

Despite their contribution to the life of the tribe, Chipewyan women have
low status within it, both individually and symbolically. Women are
excluded from all activities considered male, and from the major male
pursuit, a mystical concept of knowledge that is also power. Chipewyan men
believe in animal beings who reveal only to men a knowledge that is power.
The revelation comes in dreams, and although there are female "deities"
who confer this knowledge/power. no woman can receive it. Male
knowledge/power gives them control in all important areas -- hunting,
healing, sorcery, and sports (races and gambling). They also receive, with
the knowledge/power, a resistance to physical degeneration with aging.
(This belief may be the consequence of an actual difference in appearance
between men and women:  men have a great deal of leisure; when they do
work, they exert themselves physically in the open air, hunting. The women
are almost always involved in preserving food, breathingin all day for
weeks at a time the smoke of drying fires; or in giving birth, suck, and
care to children.)

Among the Chipewyan, as in most hunting societies, activity is
intermittent, seasonal, dependent on the times the animals run. Thus in
most groups it is seen as subject to magical control, and a hunter who
experiences a run of bad luck may stop hunting for a month or more. Men
are frequently at home in these societies. In somethey care for the
children;  in others they visit and gossip, dance or gamble. Chipewyan men
gather herbs and gamble. Chipewyan women rebel against their inferiority
and blame the men for idleness or a shortage of meat. They complain and
put pressure on the men to go hunting, but also blame them when they fail.
And women can threaten to destroy men. Simply by touching them, a woman
can ruin a man's store of medicinal plants or destroy the potency of his
rifle. When she is menstruating she can, by stepping over something,
destroy its power or luck.

Whatever happens on the hunt, Chipewyan men attribute the results to their
power. If the hunt is successful, the men's faith in their power/knowledge
is reaffirmed, and the women's belief that they must pressure men is
reinforced. If it is a failure, men assert that these things are mystical,
impervious to women's urgings and defiant of men's strong physical effort.
Women are reinforced in their doubt of the men's vaunted power/knowledge."

Thorstein Veblen reported a similar division of labour/denigration of
women in the opening pages of his classic _The Theory of the Leisure
Class_, 1899. "So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but must
send his woman to perform that baser ofice."

Hunting and war routinely place men in a kind of danger not shared as
regularly by women. As with the Chipewyan, much of the ceremony and ritual
of the male-oriented societies devolved around regulation of the magic of
hunting and war. Much of this magic must have involved the purposefull
shaping of the psychology of war. We can see this in Deut. 24:10. Here,
the military encampment of the still-wandering Israelites is designated
holy.  A long list of rules are laid down describing how to maintain the
holiness of the camp. Among them, for instance, we find that a man having
a "night emission" is unclean and must go out of the camp and purify
himself.

More interesting, however, is the list at Deut. 20:5-7 (see also Deut.
24:5) of exemptions allowed for military service. As with other twice-told
stories in the Bible, this list can be found in several versions. Such
exemptions include: any man who has planted a new vineyard, and not yet
eaten from it; any man who has built a house and has not yet dedicated it;
any man who has been married for less than a year or is still childless;
and, perhaps most astonishing given the bloodthirsty nature of the
Conquest stories, any man who is faint of heart may go home.

Quite clearly, war is not the natural state of man. War psychology must be
artificially induced.


We All Live in A Yellow Submarine

We may surmise from all of the above that early societies were anything
but the bucolic, pastoral Edens so often posited in dreams of a Golden Age
in the distant past. Any subsistence level economy is bound to be fraught
with anxiety around resource security, an anxiety that is only partly
mitigated by the rules of kin-based sharing and obligation. This
free-floating anxiety would express itself in a constant jockeying for
status, since to status accrues worth and resource access. In turn, to
status accrues obligation to redistribute excess wealth, as in the
potlatch mentioned above. One effect of this distribution is the
strengthening of the corporate identity of the community as a whole.
Recall that the birth order obligations of an individual are to his
kin-based affiliates in his immediate lineage group, clan, or phratry, not
to his tribe as a whole.  Ceremonial feasting provided an important
mechanism through which to reduce social tensions, encourage social
bonding, and forge the corporate identity of the tribe.

"In 1889 Andrew Carnegie, robber baron and philanthropist wrote in his
essay Wealth, on the need for charity: "The problem of our age is the
proper administration of wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still
bind together the rich and the poor in harmonious relationships." ... More
up-to-date though, the writer Mark Dowie in his recently published book
American Foundations, An Investigative History says: "The sad fact is that
a majority of America's 50,000 or so private foundations are mindless
lawyer-ridden tax dodges that accomplish little beyond the transfer of
riches to already wealthy institutions." "Some capitalists do value
private philanthropy because it creates countervailing force against
socialism, others because it quells social unrest." "
-www.worldsocialism.org "Status is gained by mobilizing and distributing
wealth, not by hoarding capital."  -Patricia Kinloch, Health Services
Researcher in Samoa.

In most early societies, special times were set aside for ceremonies which
renewed social bonding amongst the tribe as a whole. In the Canaanite Week
of Atonement, the king went before the chief deity to receive divine grace
on behalf of his entire community. This involved elaborite ritual
cleansing on his part, after which he presented himself as a
representative of the cleansed community in his role of "Son of Man".
After receiving the gift of divine grace, he came back to the community as
"Son of God". - John Grey, _Near Eastern Mythology_, 1969. These two
epithets will be instantly familiar to readers of the Bible.

The role of king throughout the Ancient Near East was to balance the
cosmic order by dispensing the divine grace received each year. We can see
here an idealized development of the spirituality of the potlatch,
attached to an institutionalized kingship.

In the celebration of Samhain, upon which Halloween was developed, we can
see an alternate method of forging social bonds, one which involved the
community itself in the reception of divine energy. At Samhain, the veil
between the worlds is said to be thinnest. On this evening, any member of
the community may pierce the veil and journey to the other side, or
perhaps be visited by figures from the other side. Ordinarily, it is only
the Druids who were adept in the magic required to enter the other world.
Only through serendipitous inadvertence might an ordinary Celt pass over
into the land of faerie - except at Samhain. Even at Samhain, this passing
over is a matter of chance, and not a matter of directed effort on the
part of the individual. It is the thinning of the veil that allows the
ordinary person to partake of the spiritual heritage that is ordinarily
guarded and dispensed by the priests.

It should be evident that none of these great ceremonies of social bonding
would be necessary if the societies of primitive communism were indeed the
egalitarian, democratic entities postulated by enthusiasts of ancient
wisdom.


A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

The bigman phenomenon can still be seen being played out in bars and cafes
and union halls all over the world. It is by this means that the working
class "elects" its own leaders. But there is a very big difference between
the role of these working class heroes, to use John Lennon's phrase, and
the tribal leaders who must conform to the expectations laid down by
mythical ancestors, prescribed in the absolutist language of the Dreamtime
in which they live, and preserved by the daily religious rituals that act
as (2)mnemonic devices.

Ordinary people give their loyalty to people whose very existence
epitomizes qualities recognized as valuable, necessary, and admirable. In
this, they follow their own judgement. I'm talking about election on a
very basic level, here. I'm talking about the guy that everyone
congregates around in the bar, at the union hall, in the lunchroom. The
guy that everyone listens to, and whose opinion everyone wants to know.
The guy whose opinion will determine whether a good crowd will show up at
the demonstration or meeting called by the union leadership. This is
democracy at its basic level - the "voting with your feet" kind of
democracy recognized by Lenin when the Russian troups decided to go home
from the war in 1917.

In private email, it seems that the point Joe Freemen was trying to make
about Stalin is that leaders don't kill people, people kill people. As I
understand it, Joseph Stalin became one of those heroes of the people as a
result of his prodigeous efforts in organizing food delivery during the
famine years of the early revolutionary period. He was a take charge kind
of guy and he delivered food to starving people. In so doing, he gained a
tremendous moral power, which he was then able to parlay into more formal,
political power. (What he did with that is NOT the topic of this
discussion. Whether he started out seeking personal power right from the
start is also not part of this discussion. The point is that he received
that power as an affirmation of his value to ordinary people.)

Coerced social bonding, on the other hand, is a hallmark of populist
politics of the extreme right wing. An example can be seen in _Ordinary
Men_, Christopher R. Browning, 1992, a discussion of the formation and
functioning of Reserve Police Battalion 101, responsible for massacres of
Jewish civilians in Poland. This particular battalian had been recruited
from amongst a population of "ordinary men", hence the title of the book.
These were men of no particular political convictions, no mean feat in
Germany at this time. They consistently failed to turn out at the polls in
large numbers, and joined no political organizations. They were told they
would be doing "home guard" type of work, which conjures up in my mind an
image of sandbag fillers combating a flood.

Their training was typical boot camp training, designed to break down
individuality and instill group bonding. They were taken away for training
in a country whose language they did not speak, thus throwing themselves
upon each other for company and support, and their days were filled with
the usual monotonous physical training that brutalizes the higher
faculties in a military setting. Their indoctrination was remarkably free
from political training; and they were deliberately kept in the dark about
the details of their mission. The "briefings" were filled instead with
moral exhortations to "high ideals" - above all self-sacrifice in the
service of the Fatherland. They were exhorted to steel themselves for the
difficult tasks ahead. The true nature of their mission was sprung on them
as a surprise: they were trucked out in the middle of the night, under
cover of darkness, mustered at dawn, and given their orders.

So strong were the bonds instilled in training that few questioned the
orders. Instead, approximately 40% actively sought to shirk their duties
under cover of a show of compliance. Some began shirking from day one;
others only gradually discovered that they had no stomach for the task.
Another 40% grimly went about their work with the attitude "it's a tough
job, but somebody's got to do it, so let's get it over with and stop
bitching". The other 20% came to enjoy their work. In many instances, they
were given a choice of opting out. There is one description of a Major
Wilhelm Trapp crying plaintively over the orders he was transmitting; but,
in his command, only one person opted out.

Why? In 1959, an investigation was conducted. In the transcripts of those
interviews, the overwhelming majority of shirkers stated that their number
one feeling about those times was one of shame - not for what they'd done,
but for "letting down their comrades". You would think that, after all the
post-war revelations of the crimes of the Nazis, these men would be eager
to claim the mantle of hero: "I couldn't do what they wanted".

Most of us who grew up with tales of George Orwell, the Nazis, and the
Evil Empire, tend to think of totalitarianism as a rigid social order
imposed from above by means of thought control and police. In fact,
however, it is often a matter of social bonding and consensus artificially
molded at a grass roots level. If social conformity can be induced through
appeals to brotherhood, it is felt, the whole enterprise can be passed off
as an excercise in noble spirituality, which is in itself posited as an
absolute good. This religious overtone puts dissenters automatically
beyond the pale of human existence, leaving them vulnerable to vigilantism
and witchhunts.  This principle, unfortunately, is once again at work in
the renewed equation of patriotism with religious duty in America today.

Joan Cameron

(1) soteriology (n) a belief that a mangod came to earth on a mission of
mercy to humankind, died (or was grieviously wounded), rose from the dead,
and ascended into heaven (usually to judge the souls of mortals).

(2) mnemonic device (n) memory aid, works through associative memory



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