Original Sin

“Meanwhile, for the first time in the history of life, the sex act had been accomplished by force in an atmosphere of hostility and fear and violence. The first tenuous mental connections had begun to be laid down between sex and ruthlessness on one side, and sex and suffering on the other. We had taken the first step along the tortuous road that led to the sex war, to sadomasochism, and ultimately to the whole contemporary snarl-up, to prostitution, prudery, Casanova, John Knox, Marie Stopes, white slavery, women’s liberation, Playboy magazine, crimes passionels, censorship, strip clubs, alimony, pornography, and a dozen different brands of mania.

“This was the fall of man, it had nothing to do with apples.” Elaine Morgan, “The Descent of Woman” Chapter 4, “Aggression”

It is difficult today, knowing what we know today about animal behaviors, to understand how Ms. Morgan could have written this chapter. Ms. Morgan is generally a reasonable and compassionate observer of the human condition, but in this chapter she comes very close to something which could be called FemiNazi hate rhetoric. The thesis she advances and the chapter in general are worthy of discussion here, as she discussed similar theses advanced in “The Naked Ape” and other similar books in her work. This book which follows the traditional approach of political philosophers of deducing political principles from an hypothetical “State of Nature” must take such books as “The Descent of Man”, “The Naked Ape” and other similar works which attempt to describe how that “State of Nature” shaped human nature into account.

In the section of this book on the Social Contract the idea was advanced that government, religion, and the state were cultural and political adaptations to allow an organism evolved as a hunter-gatherer to adapt to and live in an artificial high technology, high population density environment which it had created. This transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture and manufacture was remembered in the cultural memory of humanity in myths about an early paradise such as the Garden of Eden in the Bible. According to the ideas in this book the Fall was only incidentally related to Sex and was not actually a Fall at all.

Ms. Morgan follows Biblical Moralists in considering sex the primary element of the Fall and the Fall to be the origin of all that is morally wrong in human society. She produces an elegant theorem to support this fundamentally religious and moralistic thesis. In this sense she is one of the ‘seminal’ theologians of the Church of Secular Humanism of the Shining Path of Political Correctness.

Ms. Morgan wrote her book in 1972 and we knew a great deal less about primate society and behaviors at that time. Knowing less about animal behavior at that time there were a great many assumptions about animal behavior which have subsequently been proven false, and many of those assumptions seem to reflect a general cultural belief in Biblical Original Sin. It was assumed that animals did not make war, that they did not steal, that they did not enslave other animals, that rape never occurred and so forth and so on. Indeed a sort of human centered ideal of moral perfection was projected onto animals in a perfect state of nature before the Fall which seems to reflect a kind of religious belief in the sinful nature of humanity. This kind of moralistic assumption about human nature well documented with quotes from scientists at the time underlie most of Ms. Morgan’s thesis in this chapter. Ms. Morgan was well aware of the tendency to project human conventions on animals.

It is very probable that in light of more recent discoveries Ms. Morgan has long ago decided that the line of reasoning she advances in this chapter is false and untenable in view of the facts. The general intelligence and thoughtfulness of her book in makes that conclusion inevitable, but it is still useful here to discuss this chapter both where she was right and where she was wrong.

This chapter of Ms. Morgan’s book is odd because it begins quite properly by suggesting an emotional basis in male vanity for much of what was being written at the time about human aggression. She suggests that the fantasy is attractive to peaceful men who would never commit a violent act in their lives.

Ms. Morgan then goes on to demonstrate that common sense and a little practical observation will put the lie to such statements.

Ms. Morgan goes on to point out in discussing war that animals have been observed behaving in such a manner.

So far, so good. Ms. Morgan has shown a sensitive insight into human nature, she has debunked the idea flattering to male vanity that inside every bookworm lurks a savage predator yearning to escape and has attributed the occasional excesses of human aggression such as war to something going terribly wrong in the interface between our programmed behaviors and our environment.

All that is necessary is to state that we live in an environment as unnatural and artificial compared to that in which we evolved as the baboons on Monkey Hill and the occasional violent aberrations which occur in human society are satisfactorily and rationally explained. When you look at this picture, you are truly impressed with how wonderfully culture has allowed us to adapt to our new environment. Considering the challenges which have been posed to the naked ape we have done wonderfully well in creating cultural mechanism which keep such outbreaks of insane violence to a minimum, and clearly adolescent utopian criticisms of these sophisticated cultural mechanisms which make such an adaptation possible is extremely dangerous.

Ms. Morgan does not reach this obvious conclusion. She seems to assume that our modern society in which population density is a hundred or a thousand times greater than what would have occurred in nature, in which natural kinship organization has been destroyed and replaced with the nuclear family, in which the means of gathering a living is more time consuming and artificial than nature, does not have any potential to become pathological if not carefully hedged in with the cultural safeguards we took millenia to evolve.

Ms. Morgan takes a sudden u-turn and engages in an elegant thought experiment to prove that while humans are not generally more aggressive than other primates, when it comes to sex human males are programmed wrong. There is no need for such an hypothesis. Ms. Morgan herself presents the circumstances in nature when environmental factors mess with programmed behaviors to produce aberrant behaviors in individuals of any given species. In the absence of any need for such an hypothesis, there is no need to advance one so Occam’s Razor dictates.

Ms. Morgan advances her hypothesis on the idea that having sex in the missionary position is the only way in which a human female could be successfully impregnated. Having sex in this position is so traumatic to the female that she resists it as though she were being murdered, and therefore only males wired wrong could successfully impregnate females. Thus we are all descended from males wired with more than the natural capacity to commit rape and mayhem on our fellow beings.

One of the tragedies of this argument is that Ms. Morgan ties it to the aquatic theory of human origins. Some people objecting to this particular line of reasoning may be tempted to reject that thesis simply because this one is offensive to them.

More recent discoveries make the link between the aquatic origins of humanity and having sex face to face untenable, or possibly it should be said rediscoveries. Nonetheless these facts were not generally known at the time Ms. Morgan wrote her book.

So the Bonobo is extremely sexually promiscuous and has sex in a huge variety of positions including face to face. How does the Bonobo relate to us developmentally?

The Bonobo has replaced the Chimpanzee as being the closest living human relative and the one most likely to resemble the pre-human ancestor of great apes and hominids.

It is not hairless like aquatic mammals, but it is already engaging in face to face sexual behaviors. We may therefore dismiss the linkage between face to face sexual encounters and the aquatic hypotheses of human origins.

Ms. Morgan’s thesis does not just depend upon face to face sex being the only way in which the prehistoric male could impregnate the female it requires that only the ‘missionary’ position could allow successful impregnation. The trauma of being forced to lay helpless on her back is essential to Ms. Morgan’s thesis.

There are a couple of common sense objections to this. Ms. Morgan suggested that observing daily interaction of regular people would put the lie to the myth of man being the most ruthless and bloodthirsty of predators.

As a Retired Staff Sergeant from the Army I have had a remarkable opportunity to make first hand anthropological observations in this particular area. I have spent hundreds, probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours in girlie bars outside Army and Navy bases around the world making highly attentive observations about the degree of flexibility which the female of the species may demonstrate in simulated sexual behaviors.

Based upon my extensive fieldwork in this area I find that Ms. Morgan requires a lack of flexibility on the part of the female of the species which is extremely implausible. You may accept my assurances as a true expert in the field, the female of the species is really remarkably physically flexible in this area. It is probably a historical fact that the average sailor or soldier since Ancient Greece at least has possessed a more accurate knowledge of human physical possibilities in this area than most academics writing over the same period.

There is another objection to Ms. Morgan’s thesis that during the Pleistocene the missionary position became the only position in which it was physically possible for the prehistoric ancestor of the human male to impregnate the prehistoric ancestor of the human female. This lies in the origin of the name for this position, the missionary position, itself. It is called the ‘missionary’ position because it was introduced by Christian missionaries to various peoples around the world during the colonial period. Far from being the only position in which impregnation was physically possible since the Pleistocene, it was unknown to large parts of the species and unused by them up to a couple of hundred years ago.

So much for Ms. Morgan’s sympathetic portrait of the human male who was forced by cruel and brutal evolution to become a rapist by nature. This early portrait of the demonic male did not end here. It has found new support in the literature of popular science in a book entitled “Demonic Males” by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Houghton Mifflin Company 1966. This book is a much more recent recapitulation of current evidence about warfare, rape and violence in animal species. The authors of this book apparently faced a terrifying choice, they could appear to be portraying aggression and rape as the product of evolution, and therefore natural, and therefore good, or they could write their book in a manner designed to dull the darts of outraged Feminazism by portraying men as evil monsters and a matriarchal civilization as the utopian answer to humanities problems. It is quite likely that if they did not choose the second course they felt that they would never get published and therefore in order to get their thoughts on the evolutionary origins of rape and aggression published they apparently chose the second course. Witness the title of their book.

This idea that natural equals good is quite popular with the Church of Secular Humanism of the Shining Path of Political Correctness. It allows for the consequent idea that man-made is evil. This justifies the most extreme positions on environmental issues and a constant moral condemnation of everything they see around them allowing them an infinite source of personal gratification through a sense of moral superiority to everyone else. If that were true then education would be unnecessary. Just letting children run wild and grow up naturally would be the best course and all the screaming for additional education spending would be unjustified. Since they are ideologically tied to the idea that natural is good and man-made is bad, the idea that something they dislike might occur as the result of natural processes is offensive to them, no matter how true it may be.

The idea that natural is always good is antithetical to the idea that humans can accumulate wisdom or that Civilization can exist. If natural is the be all and end all of good, then any changes human wisdom and experience make in it cannot be good. The idea that education, science, and experience can improve a persons life implies that natural is not always good. Sometimes you have to improve on nature.

Indeed the implicit purpose of the Social Contract, the only reason it exists is to improve on Nature, and this includes outlawing certain behaviors which occur in nature but which are not good in terms of the Social Contract. The Social Contract creates the State to regulate interactions between Citizens to ensure that the terms of that Contract are not violated. Rape is the violation of one Citizen by another and an infringement of the Social Contract which is enacted as a guarantor of peace between Citizens. It can as natural as the sunrise, that still does not make it good or acceptable in Social Contract terms. Ditto for all other forms our uncontrolled or anti-social aggression. Social Contract theorists have no problem saying that sometimes natural is bad.

The book is reminiscent of “The Bell Curve” in its last chapter. TBC went through the entire book advancing the case for a genetically determined aristocracy based on the habitability of IQ and then in the last chapter traipsed merrily off through the tulips into lala land with a utopian fantasy about returning to the good old days when society did not select so strongly for merit/IQ and IQ was more evenly distributed through the social classes.

This book follows a similar course. It presents a fairly useful description of current knowledge in the field covering the occurrence of rape and aggression in species from flies to ducks to primates and discussing how in some species it may have been a survival mechanism and other species selected against it. Then in the last chapter it goes traipsing merrily off into lala land proposing that somehow a matriarchal society or at least a matriotic as opposed to patriotic society would solve all the worlds problems if only women would unite at the ballot box.

The problem is, as the major body of their work demonstrates, that evolution does not work that way. They suggest in the last chapter though they have no evidence of it that somehow the bloodthirsty aggression of Hyenas struggle for dominance and group-gang behaviors is nicer than the similar male pattern of Chimpanzees. They base this on the idea that since female reproduction is the goal of female hyenas dominance struggle and male reproduction is the goal of male dominance struggles that somehow magically a species which has chosen dominance struggle as its strategy for reproductive success will be nicer if it is female than male.

Evolution doesn’t work that way. Evolution mindlessly selects for proximate causes that promote an end result, not intelligently for the end result.

The authors of “Demonic Males” are aware of this, but they apply this standard selectively based on the sex being discussed. If the individual discussed is male the rule applies. If the individual discussed is female she is magically exempt. If two species have chosen to specialize in the same proximate cause for reproductive success, dominance struggle, then that is what they will struggle for. Reproductive success is the ‘goal’ of evolution but dominance is the goal of the individual organism involved in the struggle. If hyenas had the brains of humans they would be just as nasty or even nastier.

They suggest Bonobo society as a sort of model for human society. Let us see, one of the admirable traits of Bonobo society as described by them is it overwhelming nepotism. In Bonobo society is it not what you can do, it is not even who you know, that determines your status. It is who your mother is. Is this a perfect model for human society, where rank and class are based not on merit, not on any concept of equal rights, but entirely on the chance of what family you are born into?

Let us consider this concept in terms of human rights behaviors. A female knows beyond any doubt if a child is hers. No male in any species in the world ever possesses this kind absolute assurance that he is the parent of a child. The nepotistic instinct is therefore inherently stronger in the female than in the male. A male might realistically favor the reproduction of his own genes if he favors others who show similarities to him even though he does not know that they are related to him. After all he doesn’t know in any real sense that ‘his’ sons are related to him. A Matriotic society would be strongly driven by female instincts to be entirely nepotistic. The idea of equal rights would be absolutely alien to it. Social status and legal right would be directly related to your mothers place in the social hierarchy. Since biologically throughout history males have always had more doubts about whether they were protecting their offspring or someone else’s offspring the nepotistic drive or instinct is inherently weaker in the males, and this weakness will be directly proportional to the doubt that species behavior creates about the parenthood of any particular child by a particular male. Primate females in the species most closely related to human, bonobo and chimpanzee are notoriously promiscuous sexually. The doubt involved about the parenting of any given child is enormous. Evolved ability to recognize kinship marking in offspring not positively known to be theirs would facilitate the survival of those members of the group most similar to them and thus most likely to be related to them. Direct nepotism would be replaced with a general affection for others in whom they saw themselves. This sloppiness of aim in kinship relations would be more easily educated into a general respect for the rights of other than the direct nepotistic mechanisms of the female. It follows that human males are instinctively more capable of comprehending equal rights psychology and averse to strict systems of hereditary merit and social status than females. The matriotic system proposed by the authors of this book would lead to a caste society more strict and inflexible than that of the Hindus. Far from eliminating racism and kinship grouping as the basis on group vs. group competition, it would make it the only and the constant basis for such competition. While the competition might in some instances be less violent, untouchables would be untouchables forever and without hope.

In the terms of the principles on which the US is based, there are things about Bonobo society as dark and evil as anything in Chimpanzee or Gorilla society. (This is also true of Zuni Society as described in chapter 8 of Ruth Benedict’s “Patterns of Culture”) A human female who defended her sons social status as the Bonobo females do would be evil in human terms. She would make an excellent villain on a daytime soap opera. (Ms. Morgan describes beaver society in which the female beats the male into submission before mating with him with equal respect and love. It is amazing how all the literature in this field takes such an obvious double standard with regard to animal behavior. When it is the female physically abusing the male and beating him into submission it is an admirable, morally superior animal species. When males treat females this way it is demonic and evil.)

In Bonobo society a hierarchy exists based on the physical threat and ability of a combined and coordinated group of females to beat individual males into submission when they get out of line. This power is exercised nepotistically with shameless favoritism. It is rarely carried to the point of actual serious physical harm or injury because it is obvious that a group of 7 or 8 females can beat one male senseless and males are too smart to not realize this. It is sugarcoated with frequent sexual reconciliation behaviors, but it is just as ruthless as anything in Chimpanzee and Gorilla society in terms of fundamental violation of dignity and human rights. Can you imagine a Bonobo ever saying “Give me Liberty or Give me Death”? The fundamental principle on which Bonobo society is grounded is that it is better to be a slave and live than to fight for freedom and possibly die. That is if you want to project human values on animal societies.

Patriotism is identified as original sin in this book, and some chimerical fantasy called matriotism is created whole cloth out of the authors imagination as a possible substitute for it. The fact is that the evolutionary mechanism which causes human males to fight and die out of loyalty to something larger than themselves can produce both ‘good’ or ‘evil’ results depending on what environmental cues elicit this behavior. Human society is complex and this produces difficulty in discerning the right cues, or the right ideals to be loyal to. Despite this difficulty, the behavior itself is quite rightly, traditionally, identified as among the noblest elements of human nature. There are ideals and principles worthy of this kind of loyalty and passionate devotion.

Finally, they suggest if human females were to combine in hierarchical groups like Bonobo females then everything would be magically hunky dory. The problem with this is that human females are as far removed from Bonobo females by evolution as human males are from Bonobo males. Human females have been selecting ‘demonic’ males for millions of years according to this book. The idea that the female of a ‘demonic’ species will behave like Bonobo suddenly overnight is absurd in terms of real science. The idea that if they combined to acquire power like that of the Bonobo female hierarchy they would use the power in the same restrained manner is equally absurd.

As they note in their discussion of aggression in the Demonic males, they are programmed to seek status and do so, because that is what feels right. This, they say, is the cause of wars and international aggression. Similarly the females of ‘demonic’ species are programmed to seek certain things. Female gorillas mate with the most infanticidal male they can find to protect their own infants from being killed. Female lions mate with the lion which has just killed their young. Female chimpanzees mate with the most successful status seeker in the Chimpanzee group. If female gorillas were to select a leader at the ballot box, they would select the male which struck the deepest chord with them.

The male gorilla running for office who acted the most like a successful infanticide without quite openly ripping babies open with his teeth on national television would be consistently elected to office. Just as human females selected Clinton, a strongly status driven male animal who apparently followed a program of systematically abusing the powers of his office to force sexual favors from women, and remained unflaggingly loyal to him even after public revelations left no rational doubt of this fact.

The hope of humanity does not lie in some pie in the sky fantasy about female instinctive mechanisms being better than or superior to those the demonic males of the species. It lies in the fact that both men and women have the capacity of making mature and rational decisions once they learn to not act directly on these basic animal drives. The fact is that females of ’demonic’ species are just as demonic as males. Relying on animal instinct to make political decisions is not the solution to humanities problems regardless of whether those animal instincts are male or female.

Finally, they overlook the simple fact that males of ‘demonic’ species cease being demonic and become benign as soon as a stable social order is established. If indeed humans are selected for ‘demonic’ males and biologically programmed for bloody and brutal status struggles, then the logical conclusion is that the perfect form of government for humans is an absolute monarchy in which the security of the alpha male will be sufficient to ensure his being benign. This is a restatement of Thomas Hobbes version of the state of nature and results in the justification of an absolute sovereign with no limits to his powers.

The Bonobo are not irrelevant to the Human Condition, they help to illuminate it. The society of the Zuni Indians in the Southwest suggest that humans may in some ways be closer to the Bonobo than Chimpanzees. Humans are not as bad as Hobbes, or books like this make them out to be. Still the kind of simpleminded generalization from Bonobo to human that occurs in the last chapter of this book is absurd. The last chapter of this book is a farcical exercise in the worst kind of pseudoscientific thought apparently appended to it like the last chapter of The Bell Curve to make it appear politically correct.

These books in general are religious works. They take the myth of original sin, travel back to a mythical garden of Eden, then make man the source of Original Sin and woman sinless and perfect. Here we find the Church of Secular Humanism of the Shining Path of Political Correctness active in the Hallowed Halls of Academe passing its religious dogmas off as science. Much as Catholicism did in the Middle Ages.

The state of modern knowledge of animal behaviors makes it clear that most, virtually all, of the behaviors we consider morally wrong in human society existed in the animal kingdom and most especially in the animals which are our nearest relatives. This teaches us that natural is not always right. It teaches us that education and training and socialization are necessary to control and restrain these animal behaviors. It voids the idea of Original Sin and the moral fall of mankind.

There are three salient points on the story of the fall as related in the Bible which make it especially worthy of discussion and respect as a teaching story. First is the nature of the Fall itself. Second is the punishment of men. Third is the punishment of women. Let us briefly conclude this section by taking a look at these things.

The Fall occurred when Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In a state of nature, anthropologically speaking, there is no legal system. Many hunter/gatherer societies did not have written or even spoken laws. Children grew up seeing the way their parents behaved, and imitated them. There was only one standard of behavior and no choices. A formal system of law and order and judgment of good and evil did not exist. This is one of the significant changes which occurred in human society from the state of nature to a more population dense society. Judgment of good and evil acquired a formal power structure and external enforcement which was absent in the state of nature. Judges and Kings presided enforcing this standard with gallows and torture. Judgment of Good and Evil became an overt reality and in many ways a great evil.

The transition also changed the work habits of men. They had to work more and longer hours than they did in a state of nature. They had to go from hunting in the wild for a few hours a week to laboring long hours under the hot sun in the fields. The punishment of Adam and his Sons for their sin. In another, psychological sense, this punishment was magnified by original sin, I.e. the judgment of good and evil. By judging their labors to be harsh, they increased the psychological or emotional pain of those labors.

There is apparently an average difference between the skull size of hunter/gatherer peoples and those of agricultural peoples. There is also apparently a skull size difference between children born today and those born a century ago. Brain size has been shown to correlate strongly with size of social groups. It is possible that childbirth became more painful with the increase of population density, as the increased population triggered changes in the phenotypic expression of the genotype increasing average skull size during birth and making childbirth more painful. It is also possible that psychological factors were involved here, women being less intimately familiar with the birthing process and more frightened by it, reacted in greater fear to the pain involved, fought the process more and thus magnified the pain of childbirth. The judgment of good and evil making a natural process more frightening and painful. The extreme pain of childbirth assumed in Western Civilization is not universal in all human societies.

My Great Grandmother Goldman was abducted and raised by the Comanche. Her daughter, my Grandmother Davis bore six children, four of whom lived to adulthood. She always maintained that childbirth was not the painful ordeal which white culture told her it was supposed to be. There is an interesting and striking correlation between the ‘punishments’ inflicted by ‘God’ for original sin, and the more painful elements of the transition from hunter/gatherer to agricultural society which plausibly may have occurred. This is not science, but it does show that the story of the Fall in the Bible may be a good teaching story with real lessons to be learned. Notably, none of these have anything to do with sex. To me, this transition from a relatively low population density tribal people to the society after the Fall is something that happened almost in my living memory.