[forwarded from Carrol Cox]
Mark Jones wrote:
> I think the whole thrust of the paper is to show how forms of co-operation
> and altruism can emerge in a grounded way, out of the evolutionary logic
> itself, ie as *necessary* adaptations which optimise survivability of the
> genotype (the "selfish genes"). This is much better than just an appeal to
> good behaviour!
I suppose it is always 'nice' to have the results of historical analysis
confirmed so to speak by biologically grounded story telling. There still
seems
to me the risk of a metaphysical individualism in this line of argument
however
-- as is reflected by the very focus on the concept of "altruism," an
utterly
unhistorical concept, even, one might say, an oxymoron. Consider the history
of
the word -- a *very* short history indeed:
[a. Fr. *altruisme* formed by Comte on It. *altrui* (Fr. *autrui) of or
to
others, what is another's, somebody else, f. L. *alteri huic* 'to this
other,'
the dative afterwards passing into a general oblique case. See -ism.
*Altruisme*
was apparently suggested by the Fr. law-phrase *l'autrui*, standing
according to
Littre for *le bien, let droit d'autrui*. Introd. into Eng. by the
translators
and expounders of Comte.] Devotion to the welfare of others, regard for
others,
as a principle of action; opposed to egoism or selfishness.
1853. Lewes *Comte's Philos. Sc.* I. xxi. 224 Dispositions influenced by
the
purely egoistic impulses we call popularly 'bad,' and apply the term 'good'
to
those in which altruism predominates. 1865 Mill in *Westm. Rev.* July, To
make
altruism (a word of his [Comte's] coining predominate over egoism. 1871
Farrar
*Witn. Hist. iv. 144 Is altruism a sweeter, or better word than charity?
1876____*Marlb. Serm. xvi. 157 A good and wise modern philosopher summed up
the
law and duty of life in Altruism--*Vive pour autrui*--'Live for others.'
1877 C.
Row *Bampt. Lect. (1881) 106 The religion of humanity, whose great moral
principle is altruism. 1879 George Eliot *Theophr. Such viii. 147 The bear
was
surprised at the badger's want of altruism.
In short, Altruism is part of the basic bourgeois illusion of the abstractly
free individual existing prior to and independently of social relations.
Capitalism posed the insoluable problem of how, if one begins with the
isolated
("dotlike" in the *Grundrisse*) individual, can one ever reach "society"?
And as
Margaret Thatcher recognized, you can't: Just as, if you *begin* with the
isolated mind the question of the external world becomes insoluable. The
question of the "origins" of altruism is a false question, and arguments for
"biological" answers to this false questions are merely reassertions of
bourgeois individualism.
What we know, independently of any specific grounding in biology, is that
wherever and whenever we find ourselves, we are always already caught up,
imseparably, in a complex or ensemble of social relations, and that
independently of that complex we simply, as humans, have no existence. The
ideologists of capitalism having somehow to acknowledge that in all human
activity cooperation is given and competition ("egoism") an aberration, must
invent such gimmicks as "altruism," "rational self-interest," etc. etc. etc.
in
order to "explain" the high proportion of reality within the never-never
land of
capitalist ideology. Marxists ought to be aware of the irrelevance of such
concepts. (Probably capitalism itself is an aberration. To borrow a metaphor
from Gould on evolution, if we were able to play the tape of human history
over
and over again, only in a vanishingly small number of those replayings would
capitalism ever make an appearance. That capitalism is an aberration,
however,
does not make it any more vulnerable to destruction; the metaphor of cancer,
often impossible to cure, comes to mind.)
The place to look for the "origins" of male supremacy and male-supremacist
ideology, then, are neither in our genes nor in the feudal or neolithic or
paleolithic past. Only at a very high level of generality (of little
analytic or
political use) is "male supremacy" the same "thing" in 1000 b.c.e.
or 500 or 1500 or 2000 c.e. The illusion that it is is the individualist
illusion (technically termed methodological individualism). Man beats woman
1000
b.c.e. Man beats woman 2000 c.e.
The propositions look the same but they, literally, belong to different
worlds.
We can see this if we take as our contrasting example a world relatively
near to
us and which some of us might think we understand. From Stephanie Coontz
****
As Mary Ryan has commented, inequality in colonial society 'was not the
peculiar stigma of womanhood, but rather a social expectation for both
sexes.'
All persons in colonial society were 'inferior' to someone else, and all
faced
prohibitions and restrictions on their activity. As late as the 1770s a Tory
propaganda paly summed up the relative lack of distinction between the
restrictions on women and the restrictions on men in such a society. The
vehicle
for the author's sentiments is a Loyalist woman, who berates her husband for
his
participation in rebel politics. Unable to best his wife's political
arguments,
the husband tells her that her words are unseemly: 'Consider, my Dear,
you're a
Woman of Fashion, 'Tis really indecent to be in such Passion; Mind thy
Household
Affairs, teach thy Children to read, and never, Dear, with Politics, trouble
thy
Head.' The wife does not challenge this evaluation of her proper concerns,
but
retorts, with the obvious approval of the author: '. . .Dost thou think
thyself,
Deary, a *Cromwel* or *Monck*? Dost thou think that wise nature meant thy
shallow Pate, to digest the important Affairs of a State?'
Hierarchical relations between husband and wife were necessary for
maintaining order in the household, the church, and the state. Prohibitions
against women's assuming certain roles were based more on this necessity for
order than on a consistent belief in female incapacity. John Cotton's
frequently
quoted contention that 'a woman is more subject to error than a man' was
justified by a peculiarly eclectic list of arguments against a woman
propounding
questions in church: 'For under pretense of questioning for learning's sake,
she
might so propound her question as to teach her teachers; or if not so, yet
to
open a door to some of her own weak and erroneous apprehensions, or at least
soon exceed the bounds of womanly modesty.'
The subordinatio of women in colonial society, then, was viewed as a
social
rather than a biological imperative. Benjamin Wadsworth cautioned the wife:
Yea, though possibly thou hast greater abilities of mind than
he has, wast of some high birth, and he of a more mean
Extract, or didst bring more Estate at Marriage than he
did; yet since he is thy Husband, God has made him thy
Head, and set him above thee, and made it thy duty to
love and reverence him.
Similarly, Benjamin Colman felt no embarassment about remarking to his
daughter
Jane that, were it not for 'the necessary and useful Restraints of your Sex.
. .
.I have no reason to think but that your Genious in Writing would have
excell'd
mine."
Being female in colonial America involved 'Restraints' rather than
incapacities. Women were not expected to 'know' their place; they were
expected
to *learn* it. The emphasis on learning in colonial writings attests that
women's nature was not considered innately subordinate. There is, indeed,
little
evidence that colonial women *felt* innately subordinate, for their
submission
frequently had to be imposed by the courts. In 1663, for example, a Virginia
jury found it necessary to order both a female servant and her master
ducked,
she for incorrigible impudence and he for inadequately governing his
household.
John Demos, examining interventions by the Plymouth Colony court in domestic
matters, found equal numbers of males and females charged with abusive
behavior
toward the opposite sex, and detected 'no evidence at all of habitual
patterns
of deference in relations between the sexes.' A similar conclusion must be
drawn
from Spruill's survey of southern court cases. This is not, of course, to
romanticize the imposition of female submission, which precisely because it
was
not internalized might be achieved through extreme brutality.
*******
Pause to reflect. In an *actual* patriarchy (and that is what is being
described
here by Coontz) a male might be beaten for *not* beating his wife. At least
he
could be ducked for not beating a young woman servant. I don't know (perhaps
some historians on this list do) whether there was more or less brutality
towards women in 1750 than in 2000. I do know that such brutality had a
totally
different *content* in the two periods. (We are beginning to see here why
"male
violence" is, as a statement about males, of no analytic interest. That
would be
the case only if we saw male supremacy as simply [simply!] the sum of the
actions of the totality of males -- that is, only if Margaret Thatcher were
right and "Society [did] not exist, only individuals.") Coontz continues:
****
The stability of the colonial social order depended upon regular
patterns of
hierarchy and deference. Woman's subordination was required by her social
role
as wife and mother in a household which was 'a little commonwealth,' a model
for
the hierarchy necessary in society at large. But this meant that a woman who
for
one reason or another assumed the social role of household head was not
prohibited by her sex from exercising the prerogatives of that position.
Widowed
landholders met with male property-owners to decide community matters, and
there
are scattered instances of such women 'voting' in various town meetings.
Women
could serve as proprietors of a colony, with all the rights thereof. Lady
Deborah Moody nominated the magistrates for the colony she governed in New
Amsterdam, and they were regularly confirmed by higher authorities. In 1702
Elizabeth Muller was one of the proprietors who signed the document
recognizing
Queen Anne's right to rule New Jersey. Only four colonies specifically
disfranchised women during the entire colonial period.
As Ulrich points out, colonial women might exercise considerable
authority
as 'deputy husbands' in a patriarchal family economy. Female household heads
were free to engage in almost any occupation. While only a tiny minority of
women actually worked full time in formal trades, the range of occupations
open
to such women was wider than in the early nineteenth century. Thus we find
women
blacksmiths, butchers, barbers, hunters, attorneys, physicians, sextons,
undertakers, loggers, shipwrights, gunsmiths, pewterers, jailers, retailers,
and
typesetters. Women in the colonies kept taverns, ran ferries, painted
houses,
operated sawmills, gristmills, and printing presses, ground eyeglasses, and
manage livery stables. In Virginia, women weavers were paid at a rate
comparable
to that of men in the same profession. In South Carolina, Eliza Lucas (later
Pinckney) initiated the commercial production of indigo, the basis of blue
dye,
and experimented with the cultivation of silkworms: 'Every kind of work done
by
men was done, at least occasionally, by women.'
To illustrate these general points, we may consider two different
examples
of women's position in colonial America. The journal of Sarah Kemble Knight,
kept during her trip on horseback from Boston to New York in 1704, pointedly
demonstrates the independence that at least some colonial women exercised.
Knight recorded no expressions of surprise at her travels except from her
first
hostess at Billings, who annoyed her by fussing about the dangers for a
woman
'on the Rode so Dreadfull late" and by asking her 'silly questions.' At one
inn,
Knight shared a room with a number of male travelers and remarked only on
the
hardness of her bed. She was gone for five months, leaving her child with
her
mother, but the journal mentions her family only once, noting that she
returned
to find 'my aged and tender mother and my Dear and only Child in good health
with open arms to receive me."
The case of Anne Hutchinson, on the other hand, demonstrates that such
independence could not be exercised outside established channels. Neither
women
nor men were allowed to challenge the social order, but rebellion by a
female
evoked especially harsh responses because it threatened the household
authority
on which larger political hierarchies rested. Yet the Puritan leaders'
persecution of Anne Hutchinson should not be read as evidence of colonial
contempt for women. Hutchinson attracted to her cause some of the most
important
men in the colonies, in addition to the women who gathered for classes in
her
home. At her first examination by the authorities in 1636, she engaged in a
skillful battle of wits with her interlocutors and came out the victor. He
femininity was not enough to convict her. In 1637, however, she rashly
admitted
to a belief in revelation, which allowed the authorities to institute
excommunication proceedings against her. Nevertheless her influence over
others
continued: in 1639 she fomented a rebellion in Rhode Island against the rule
of
William Coddington.
The Puritans who excommunicated Hutchinson had no doubts about her
capabilities. Used in the service of the Purtian order, her spiritual
dedication
would have been praised, as Cotton Mather had celebrated the 'Tutoresses' of
early Christianity. But Hutchinson challenged the hierarchy of all three
interlocked pillars of colonial society: household, church, and community.
As
Hugh Peter charged: 'you have stept out of your place. . .*you have rather
bine
a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a
Subject.'
*****
I urge all interested in this subject to read Coontz's book, which is a
careful
tracing precisely of the gradual dissolution of patriarchal relations in the
United States and their replacement with male supremacist relations
characterizing modern capitalism.
Carrol
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