Philosophy & Magical Thinking

The philosopher R. G Collingwood took magic seriously as something that was inappropriately judged in scientific terms. It was best judged alongside art as a craft with ends in view that involved the arousing of emotion. He was deriving his notion of magic from the anthropology of his day but what he was trying to say in the round was that magical thinking and practice were not 'primitive'. It was just another way of seeing the world and engaging with it that was perfectly functional within its own cultural frame of reference. It is on emotion that he is most interesting:

" ... although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite another way than amusement [which Collingwood associates with Art]. Emotions aroused by magical acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for the practical life of the people concerned that this should not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely because they have been so designed that it shall not happen. The contrary is what happens: these emotions are focused and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical life." [R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford, 1938, p.67]

This is interesting because we see this contrast all the time in observing people in their relations with significant others. We also note what happens when emotion is stunted and people are trapped in an addiction to emotional states (the weekly marital argument, the addiction to the state of love, anger at the same thing every time without moving forward).

High emotions seem best directed as either catharsis (an explosion that rewires the brain or moves a person on from one state to another) or channeled, within a context often ritualised in all but obvious name, in order to let the emotion change the world in which the person lives by permitting the conditions for action or change.

One model changes the person (or forces behavioural change on the target of the emotion which may, of course, be mere bullying) and the other transforms the social and cultural, possibly material (but the jury is out on that one) world in which the person has to survive. Both are evolutionarily honed on organism survival. The explosion of emotion forces change in the world in others or in oneself while the sublimation or channeling of emotions manipulates others or one's sub-conscious into desired outcomes.

From this perspective, magic (the channeling process) is as efficacious in its way as doing art, experiencing art or undertaking psychotherapy or religious practice and more effective than science in some contexts (changing the social and cultural conditions we live in) while less effective than science in others (changing the material conditions in which we live).

Science-based politics always fails because magic-based politics will always beat it in an open struggle for hearts and minds as much as magic-based construction will see buildings fall and planes drop out of the sky. Magic will certainly not allow a man to fly despite the claims of yogis and certainly not with the efficiency of modern technologists but it will allow him to cope with, manage or exploit the social and cultural changes created by a world in which people can fly by other means.

Collingwood is not advocating that magic is real insofar as some claim that it can change material reality - there is still no evidence for this and unlikely to be any evidence at any time soon. Magic is only real insofar as it affects psychological reality which is, in fact, the reality that most accords with the really lived lives of most people in the world. Most people use technology and take it for granted but few understand it. It may as well be magical for all the actual comprehension of the science behind it.

At the outer reaches of physics and cosmology, science goes so far beyond perceived reality that its reality looks a lot more magical (although ultimately based on logic, mathematics and observational experiments) than magic does to the mind who has not simply decided to 'believe' in science (a most reasonable belief but still, for most people, a matter of faith rather than knowledge).

Magical thinking is anti-thinking from the inside outwards, constructing reality from the self, the consciousness that is embedded in material reality and is capable of flying shaman-like at any time it wishes. This is opposed to scientific thinking which is reasoning of the outwards world undertaken inwardly.

Eventually scientific thinking ends up following its own logic into mysteries that bend reality and magical thinking ends up following its own logic into realities that bend if not materiality, then society and its workings on materiality.

Science gives us the tools but magic enables us to use the tools by triggering our emotional commitment to a purpose for which the tools have a use. The magical process is an operation on 'morale' - one's own and that of others as manipulation. It is why propaganda, PR and the totalitarian cultural forms of late capitalism are 'magical'.

It is also why magical operations can construct true selves (despite the post-modern nonsense that there are no selves because rational thinking says there are no selves) that flourish regardless of social norms, far more effectively that psychotherapy's attempt to adapt the individual to society and creating a working norm that is healthy within that framework.

The shaman is often indistinguishable from the modern psychopath but his context makes him different. Our 'normal' magical rituals often have a social context that removes their efficacy because the total system disrespects the mobilising power of emotion except as manipulation from above (which has incidentally 'conceptualised' and commercialised art, its sibling, out of existence).

When the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia can buy Da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' for $450m simply to establish his modernising credentials and shock his culture into compliance with a new ideology, then art is effectively dead and magical thinking rules.

Magical operations are all around us, operating every day in our lives. The late Marxist attempt to theorise rationally about these operations in nonsense terms such as 'objectification' and 'commodification' utterly misses the point that rational, political manipulation of emotional content must always result in a logical dark magic to maintain emotional balance. Populism's rise was inherent in the manipulations of late liberal capitalism and predictable.

Earlier Marxists would not have used this language but they would have understood the point better ... the decadence of Marxism as it got captured by the middle classes is one of the tragedies of our time. Early Marxists would have seen each magical operation in society as a thesis calling forth by its very nature its own antithesis. Successful magical operations incorporate their own antithesis into their workings to that synthesis is part of what the operation is intended to effect.

A true magician would have understood Newton's "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" to be as applicable to his world as that of the physicist - a lesson not understood by the dark master magician Adolf Hitler and certainly not understood by contemporary pseudo-scientific materialists who take no account of a huge swathe of matter that is ignored because it cannot yet be weighed - the magical minds of men and women.

The human mind is essentially magical. Rationalist liberals hate this and want our minds to be scientific but, if they were, we would not then be human. Just as the fact of a rough 15% of the population (like me) being completely irreligious does not remove the fact of the species being, on balance, religious in its spiritual or communitarian senses (horrified as I am by what this means) so only a minority of humans are purely rational actors and there is no earthly reason why they should expect to rule over others who think in different and equally efficacious ways.

Indeed, just as the fanatically religious and the atheist, the asexual and the polyamorous, have more adjustment problems with social reality than the general majority of humanity, so the radical rationalism of futurist technologists and the lifestyle magicians are faced with the same near-outsider status. Fortunately, most people are sufficiently rational to have faith in science and sufficiently magical to run their own lives effectively in the world the scientists have made.

Anyone who wants to understand themselves and the world and to know how to manipulate the reality created by the rationalists has to learn to become a magician. This does not mean dressing up in a dark cloak and leaping naked on the Seal of Solomon shouting the names of 10,000 demons. That's just fun but probably a bit of a waste of time magically speaking.

It simply means isolating the will from the world and applying it to what you want rather than what other people have told you that you must want and then finding the techniques that tap into the enabling (usually emotional) sub-conscious, stripping away layers of social patterning in order to find out what is under there, how it can relate most effectively to 'reality' and then bending self and reality through will to create a new functional reality within oneself or as a re-patterning one's relationship with others.

The supernatural does not need to exist to make magic work but its pretend existence itself can become a tool or weapon in the process of self and social construction. But bear in mind that you are always up against 6 billion or so other natural magicians, all creating their own reality out of the material to hand. Some of those will be your enemy (snowflakes, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists are mine) because their reality must place constraints on yours.

In practice, all magical thinking is struggle for social and personal survival in which the dangers are obvious - you lose or, worse, you win, and don't stop there but try to go beyond survival to domination. And that is where every action having its own reaction comes in. The Wiccans have it right with 'Do What Thou Wilt an Harm No One' since 'bad magic' (as one A. Hitler found it) will come back to bite you because of the eventual opposition it creates. To live long and prosper, there is only ever 'white magic' ...

On Monogamy - Part 2

This is the second of two ruminations derived from a reading of a 2008 academic paper by Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, 'Monogamy and Polygyny in Greece, Rome and World History' [Princeton Stanford Working Papers in Classics, available online]. The views and conclusions are mine and not his.

In the first of this two-parter we questioned what was 'normal' about monogamy and drew what might be a political conclusion that its global dominance is associated with the cultural dominance of the West as a hybridisation of Roman property relations and Christian morality. This hybrid ideology gained its strength not from patriarchy but from a similar hybridisation of patriarchal and matriarchal value systems. The protection of women and slaves, otherwise unprotected within Roman social structures, resulted in a generalised model for sexual social organisation that owed something to biological pair-bonding (i.e. it was not wholly to be considered 'unnatural') but was originally and primarily a means of organising particular property relations and a particular social order under conditions of resource scarcity and so competition.

The price for this 'normality' was three-fold: it repressed 'alpha' sexuality in general (both male and female); it has progressively stopped humans from negotiating alternative strategies as it extended its reach across Western society and then across the world; and it increasingly destabilised the socio-sexual structures of other cultures offering alternative models as Western technology brought with it Western ideology. Zones that have resisted the Western model - the radical Islamic model of polygamy or the Chinese model of consensual concubinage - are under pressure from the presumption that a rigid monogamy is the only form by which humans can be sexually organised, to the extent that serial sexual monogamy and hidden polygyny and polyandry ('cheating') are regarded as preferable to the institutionalisation of any possible consensual non-monogamy fitted to our times.

A case study for this process lies in the early British conquest and control of India where the early (male) traders adapted readily to local sexual customs, sometimes operating a dual sexual system in two geographically distant locations. The discovery of a different sexual culture resulted in the transfer of 'tantric' ideas in a fairly impure form to the West where they were to play a slow-burning role in the eventual sexual liberation of Westerners but the socio-sexual model employed by the traders (deemed exploitative by modern theoreticians, although probably far more subtle in its dynamics when one considers the state of the English working class more generally) was to collapse as soon as women from the West arrived, as well as missionaries and state servants.

The replacement of rule by traders under the East India Company with administrators imbued with Christian ethic under the Raj represented the replacement of free-booting libertarian entrepreneurial capitalism with authoritarian administrators, driving the system from exploitative growth through empire to sclerosis and then collapse. The liberation of India from colonial rule did not see a consequent socio-sexual liberation in reaction to the previous masters because the socio-sexual mores of the West were associated with modernisation. Modernisation was a core aim of the first generations of nationalist politicians regardless of Ghandhian sentimentality. Even the traditionalists had developed their traditionalism in a conservative reaction to the West that accepted more of its values than they realised. It is both paradoxical and logical that the 9/11 fanatics contained a high number of engineers and technical experts and no actual mullahs.

Hindu nationalism has a rather 'Victorian' and puritanical view of sexuality (of which monogamy is a part) that is now part and parcel of the self image of nearly all the modernised rivals of the West. I would put a high bet on the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia having socio-sexual reform high on his own modernisation agenda within the Kingdom. The concubinage system exists outside the Communist mainland only amongst elite trader Chinese. Social order seems to require if not monogamy, then the tightening of whatever traditional rules there are to command and control sexual relations.

Only in the West has the monogamous system begun to break down at the margins - but only at the margins - despite the widespread media coverage of polyamory. It is said, for example, that only 5% at most of Americans are consciously polyamorous. The question remains whether the monogamy of classical antiquity as interpreted by the heirs of Abraham is 'natural' or not, even though it is certainly now 'normal'. This brings us back to Scheidel's paper since he asks two questions - what is the reason for the variation in the incidence of polygamy and monogamy and what drove the social imposition of near-universal monogamy when individuals with a high level of resource and status might have chosen otherwise? I am less interested here in the academic debate about the answers to the questions than with expanding the academic debate into the 'real world' by asking on what basis do we privilege monogamy and whether monogamy is the absolute and only means of organising the post-modern world.

Scheidel notes the argument that polygyny (polygyny is many women for one man as polyandry is many men for women whereas polygamy is the legitimation of the first) is actually (in economic terms) beneficial to women in very unequal societies (which most societies are). Sharing a wealthy husband or provider with other women may be economically far more beneficial than being 'stuck with' a single poor husband. Not only that - we add - but household duties and the demanding business surrounding child-rearing are shared, birthing is arguably safer and interpersonal tensions with the male conceivably lessened (though perhaps increased with other nearby women).

By pulling women into the orbit of the wealthiest, the women who remained behind got to trade up to desirable males where monogamy was the only resource-realistic option, leaving the least desirable males unable to reproduce. It is thus 'beta' men who are harmed by polygyny according to this model and the more so as inequality increases. Scheidel concludes that polygyny 'tends to reinforce male inequality by matching reproductive inequality with resource inequality'. The question then becomes one of equality but only from a male perspective - and, as so often before the current age, the perspective of women is simply abandoned.

In traditional societies, before the amelioration of the conditions of women and slaves with the adaptation to Roman pagan culture of Christianity, what has been read as exploitative of women turns out paradoxically to be advantageous to women but damaging to beta males (as opposed to alpha males). The issue here is mass male demand for equality rather than female exploitation (despite the propaganda of communitarians) since all women were exploited in traditional societies by modern standards (as were all men by the resource-rich alphas).

The interest of alpha males and of both alpha and beta females is in polygyny but that of beta males is in monogamy under traditionalism. This is not only a matter of reproductive (genetics and survival) effectiveness but of economic production because the high resource household with many women is in itself more economically productive because of the concentration of female labour on certain pursuits (weaving or field labour, for example) which, though classed today as exploitative, also created a surplus that ensured that the women themselves were better clothed and fed with more potential for disposable income and luxuries.

If the thesis is true, then we should expect monogamy to grow with male equality. If you like, socialism is monogamous so long as it is a male socialism. But socialism is not required. Recent research suggests that inequality and equality are to be equated with peace and war respectively rather than economic development per se. It is just that war creates rapid economic development.  Economic development brings not so much equality but creates the ability for a household to survive securely without requiring the maximum input of women to create the conditions for their own security.

At a certain level of development, regardless of inequality in general, sufficient people are so equally secure that a woman (of the middling sort and then within the employed working class) can feel secure to the degree that they can create a household in which they can have sufficient 'matriarchal' power under monogamous conditions. At this point it might be said that the balance of power relations changes again so that the middling sort of woman is advantaged at the expense of the alpha woman and the marginal woman (who may include a substantial number of persons) in a model designed to benefit the beta male. The rise of 'matriarchal' power within the household, however, then reduces the alleged patriarchal power within the household to create what may become either a partnership or a contest for power.

The alpha system remains patriarchal but the benefits for alpha women have gone to be replaced by an exploitative and unregulated hidden polygyny of mistresses and sex workers who the matriarchal middling sort despise and exclude from power even further. Monogamy, initially designed for the mass of males, ends up a shared power, unsatisfactory to both in the long run, between beta males and middling females, alpha males stay alpha but switch for formal polygamy to informal polygyny or kow-tow to the new order and the polygynous actors amongst women switch from high status within polygamy to low status marginals.

The balance has shifted - the potential for commanding the household of one male in a 'partnership' (or even female dominance in driving the male to work harder for her and her children's security) begins to compete with and exceed the attractions of competing with other females in a resource-rich household. If greater power can be had in a monogamous household, why share power in Hugh Hefner's mansion. The matriarchal household is the great unwritten story of both peasant and industrialised society albeit that, power being what it is, truly matriarchal households (unhappy or cowed men) compete as models with true partnerships ('happy households') and truly patriarchal households (unhappy or cowed women).

This analysis is mine not Scheidel's but the issue of power is extensively explored by Scheidel because it seems that female power in traditional societies tended to be directed towards exploiting polygamy rather than seeking monogamy although what we mean by this power needs teasing out because the woman's kin structure is involved in the negotiation - power in traditional societies is often inherently collective.  Otherwise, the high resource male has power and the low resource male does not which is really not so different from modern society.

What has changed in recent decades has been the direct rather than indirect (socially contained) empowerment of women over time which is work in progress. It is arguable that changing economic conditions encourages women to choose polygamy at one level, then monogamy at the next and perhaps monogamy (as partnership or dominance) or polyamory (as partnership) at the level above that in terms of economic access to resources and self development. It is often the mass of non-alpha males who have difficulty with each stage - being largely left out in traditional societies, trapped within models subverted by Christianity from being to their initial benefit in modern societies and now insecure in post-modern societies where monogamy entraps the male more than the female where children are part of the issue. Scheidel appears to conclude that the very wealthy are not exhibiting polygyny to historic levels in modern societies and making this a reason to doubt some of the theorising. In fact a cursory reading of literature and observation tell us that there is still a correlation between having resources and being able to manage multiple relationships without household disruption - the French institution of the mistress is a case in point.

Males may have been forced to operate in secret by the new Judaeo-Christian moral dispensation (we have seen previously how Judaic communitarianism adopted monogamous models under Christian influence) but the secrecy is now rather one of 'turning a blind eye' and 'don't ask, don't tell' adopted by modern women when faced with the probability that resource-rich males are managing a quasi-separate household or modern men find their economically dependent wives getting a lover to satisfy sexual or emotional needs.

The picture is only muddied further by the resource issue - resources are now such and expectations of freedom are such that many people are having relationships they cannot technically afford and under conditions where the socially legitimising codes that permitted the rich to have such relationships have not filtered down into the beta level. This suggests that, when resources were scarce and freedoms were limited, male and female desire was thwarted amidst much human misery. Today, the desire may not be thwarted but the inherited Judaeo-Christian code of conduct means that households get over-extended and then can snap into divorce and, under conditions of serial monogamy, into an only slightly more acceptable successor monogamy where the cycle is just as likely to repeat itself again as not.

Where resources are significant and freedom considerable, there is going to be a return to forms of informal polygamy of which polyamory is a developing element and, as conservative communitarians recognise with horror, social freedom and increasing prosperity are seeing precisely the increase in informal polygyny and polyandry (and homosexual variants) that they fear. The period between repressive modernity and full post-modernity (which is still a way off) has seen an era of increased resources but not enough for full freedom but within a very strict communitarian expectation that creates shame and perhaps guilt. The net result is a different type of misery expressed not as the deathly misery of entrapment within a household from which there is no escape but periodic crises as one partner or the other 'strays' or 'cheats' (note the Judaeo-Christian cultural origins of the terminology) and then is either forced into a crisis that may destroy the household or is brought to heel like a dog with the 'third party' simply jettisoned like Hagar at the demand of Sarah.

Looked at in this way, we may be (in the very heart of the liberal West though things are not changing very far from that heart) at a point of transition as significant as that of the 1960s and 1970s when both increased resources and expectations of freedom created the dialectical tensions between monogamous traditionalism and 'true nature' (which is just the will to 'do what thou wilt'). Communitarian culture's instinctive prejudice must be against 'doing what thou wilt' because of its disruption of a framework of codes and regulations (like not eating pork) whose original purpose has long since been forgotten and now is simply sign and symbol of 'belonging' - a form of anxiety-relieving beholden-ness to the collectivity of others who are beholden to you.

This transition, scarcely started, is perhaps towards a society where resources really are sufficient to enable increasing numbers to have the freedom (both as men and women) once enjoyed by alpha males and where those expectations of freedom are bound up with new forms that permit freedom within social stability. Our current instabilities have nothing to do with 'moral breakdown' and everything to do with elite incompetence. Ideologically, this means the slow collapse of both the Roman and the Judaeo-Christian assumptions that society must be structured along certain lines. Many, probably the majority, will continue to do so for at least the bulk of their lives for the foreseeable future but there is now no necessity for everyone to do so.

Going back to Scheidel, the inequality/polygyny model (that monogamy increases with equality) might suggest that polygamy encourages social instability because male competition for resources is more intense precisely because it has a socio-sexual element, we note, for young males. Without an authoritarian order with brute force to sustain itself, perhaps younger males are going to be minded to overturn the existing order or to expand outwards to seize what they cannot get at home. The issue would be compounded as polygyny tends to drive attractive younger women to older men since older men are more likely to have more resources than younger men. Scheidel puts this in terms of the possibility of male bargaining with inherent power to equalise outcomes (where, one presumes, women are just chips in the game).

Given the inherent greater power of the resource rich (the rich can reward their retainers with, amongst many other things, women acquired in battle), overturning polygamy can either be done by outfighting the polygamous authority and simply replacing one polygamy with another or threatened to be done so that the polygamous authority starts to change its behaviour to deal with the threat before it occurs. Perhaps monogamy emerges out of a process of bribery of retainers in which most men get just one woman until this becomes a matter of property relations to be formally legitimated. If such a property relation then becomes embedded in the world view of a more egalitarian republican or democratic model of society, then the legitimation gets 'detourned' against the elite at a certain point.

It is the threat that overthrow might be done (so it may be theorised) that drives 'wise' polygamists to redistribute sexual resources whether the women like it or not. Building an army (part of state formation) might be seen as many things but one of them is promising not only land but sexual and work partners and there really are only so many desirable women to go around when the armies grow to sufficient size. All this sounds nice theoretically but the truth is that huge imperial pre-modern states retained their polygynous elite aspects so that does not seem to tie in entirely with the thesis. The story only works if the transfer of resources to beta males expected to die for their polygamous lord means that those grunts are eventually imbued with sufficient reserve collective power to dictate cultural terms to the lord - but this tended never to happen in practice unless you start thinking of smaller Western republican quasi-democratic states such as Athens and Rome (see below).

Warfare for plunder and capture of women is also positively correlated with polygyny so those with power are not going out there to give one woman to one soldier but are rewarding by merit and the incentive to show status is to have many slaves. The stronger warrior is just going to emulate polygyny (we see this in Homer) whereas his grunt is going to be lucky to get a cast-off slave girl. A more sensible approach perhaps is to say (see the article) that both systems (monogamy and polygamy) compete over long periods of time and monogamy simply out-competes polygamy over time.

This competition model does seem to be the only sensible way of explaining why no formally unified and large nation state (as opposed to pre-modern traditionalist empire) ever seems to retain polygamy. The final state of the nation is nearly always a socially imposed monogamy. One argument is that this out-competing model is also evidenced by the West out-competing global competitors and, of course, the latter's subsequent mimicking of Western modernisation. In a sample of 156 states, one researcher, Michael Price, has shown that monogamous states are more populous, less likely to use the death penalty, less authoritarian (politically), less corrupt and richer than polygynous ones. Bear in mind that we are speaking here of stratified polygamy and not consensual post-modern polyamory. Polyandry scarcely figures in the record at all.

So is monogamy central to modernisation or is it accidental? There seem to be no clear answers to this from academics. Monogamy seems to happen as part of modernisation but it is hard to see how monogamy is necessary for modernisation. The best thesis is one that suggests that monogamy encourages male co-operation and reduces conflict (and is less unequal) but whether this is true or meaningful in terms of the actual dynamic of Western state formation and modernisation is debatable. It may be that monogamy was simply part of a package (within an ideology) where other aspects of the package were more important to the process and that the same package that accidentally had some sort of ideological commitment to an appropriate form of polygamy might have served equally well.

All that then may have happened was that the total ideology was successful so that the bits of it that were simply accidental (the junk DNA, if you like) got carried along with it. After all, monogamy was the dominant model from the Fall of Rome to the Reformation and we see no sign of modernisation during that period, a full millennium. And yet it is hard to see how any proto-democratic society could easily have coped with institutional polygyny where reproductive advantage was given so ostentatiously to the rich and powerful. Petty ressentiment from the beta masses alone would have wanted change.

One can imagine, if  polygamy (as opposed to the institution of the King's Mistress) had persisted amongst the Bourbons to the level of the local aristocracy with 'droit de seigneur', that Jacobins would have included monogamy ('a woman for every household' instead of the later 'chicken in every pot') in their list of egalitarian and democratic demands. The point is that politics would always have been what the mass of men wanted in a revolutionary situation and not what equal and informed men and women with reasonable access to resources wanted. Feminists generally, ideologically, wanted a better monogamy (meaning more power for women) rather than more sexual freedom for women - with a few notable exceptions such as Kollontai. If you had argued the point about erotic capital then as now and suggested that women could be advantaged by playing their erotic advantages over men in order to acquire capital in a truly free society, the reaction then as now would be 'quel horreur!'

But from where did Western monogamy originate? Scheidel considers whether it is situated in in the rise of the Greek polis. We might think of relatively weak rulers (the tyrants were never oriental-style potentates with access to vast resources) and elites who depended incidentally on bands of warriors that were quite small and spent most of their time on the land. This link to early democracy matches my point above about what the Jacobins are likely to have done. But this thesis might be a false friend because legitimised authoritarian monogamy is still not general under the city-state system. Modern monogamy seems derived from ancient exemplars - notably Solon in Athens and Rome - which then got endorsed by the dominant ideology that slowly dictated every facet of life in the West to the point where we can scarcely sneeze without it being a Judaeo-Christian sneeze. We see monogamy not as an invention but as a process extending over 2,500 years and taking form slowly in its modern classic form only after many adaptations.

This model is now so associated with what it means to be Western today, that left-liberals are often deeply suspicious of anything that is not monogamous and will have a tendency to a moralism worthy of Origen on sexual matters once a household is created. They prefer serial monogamy (divorce and separation) to polyamory or multiple households, still are aghast at 'cheating' (which they associate with distrust of all elites as psychopaths and cheaters), don't like slightly off-centre sexual expression such as pornography or other forms of 'objectification', are less likely to be impressed by the claims of BDSM to be a reasonable private consensual choice, have preferred gays to want to choose civil partnership and then marriage rather than seek other radical models of property holding and child rearing and are highly critical of political figures like Berlusconi who exhibit polygynous characteristics.

They can also be very po-faced about sexuality in general, demanding careful definitions of orientation, lodging these orientations in identities and the language of rights and expecting a form of right behaviour, right words and right thought as the price of freedom. Non-religious political conservatives have a tendency now to remain in the world of informal polygynies, 'don't ask, don't tell' and 'turning a blind eye'. The current hysteria about a Tory Minister allegedly watching pornography ten years ago on an office computer has the liberal elite in full war cry on what should really be at best a private matter and, at worst, a minor infringement of office conduct undertaken well before any statute of limitation. What Damien Green did is really the business only of the pettifoggers of a human resources departments with no humanity or sense of time. That the Left hungry for power is in alliance with authoritarian police officers to bring him down tells you a great deal about the topsy-turvy world of the modern British Left.

The Solon reforms in Athens (a classic case of authoritarian provision of social order) in the early sixth century BC defined the monogamous conjugal family as 'the sole legitimate family form', barring male procreation outside marriage as illegitimate. What we have here, of course, is a link with property relations and the pre-emption of disputes inimical to order. It is order that matters here and not sexual conduct. It is certainly not a God-thing. One historian of the era looks at it from another perspective - removing bastards from legitimacy also reduced the scale of aristocratic pretension by reducing the numbers of aristocrats available to one household viz. the property relation is a reduction of the property claims of one class by reducing their household. However, it is also clear, as we noted above, that not all Hellenes subscribed to this 'wheeze'. The monogamous state par excellence - Rome - is the one we really have to contend with and it is Rome that eventually dictated terms on this matter to the West. Rome remains the dead weight on freedom whether it be as the grounding of the Church or as the grounding of the European Union.

Scheidel suggests that Rome might fit the model whereby monogamy mitigated sexual competition in a quasi-egalitarian context with elites needing to mobilise military participation. Possibly, but this is my suggestion, it was a matter of ensuring large numbers of males on smallholdings with a woman per household to maintain and organise the estate while the husband was at war but similar polities have also remained polygynous (although no State in antiquity ever matched Rome's ability to throw manpower into the maw of war). Rome was an acquisitive machine for mass murder that was to make a cult of death in the circuses worthy of the Aztecs.

Political participation in itself does not (at this early stage) predict monogamy. In fact, slavery masks polygyny because while the matron wife was free as partner in the household, it would be naive not to expect female slaves to have had the same sexual and household role as sister wives in formally polygamous households elsewhere. In other words, monogamy was a socio-political form but not necessarily a psycho-sexual one. The women in hidden Roman polygynous households were simply demoted (other than the wife as chief household administrator) and so were more oppressed and exploited than the women in outwardly polygamous households. Roman monogamy also introduced a serial aspect to the case - divorce was easy and so serial monogamy might be said to have mimicked polygyny simply by making it function more in time than in space. Modern divorce reproduces an aspect of this.

The overall message here is probably that monogamy was initially indeed just a wheeze to smooth the process of mobilising beta men into state service or providing some semblance of order by ensuring the form of equality without the substance - and how familiar is such a wheeze today! The wheeze, as so often, became an ideology - one that neatly covered the actual polygynous behaviour of the elite because it was presented as a moral ideal rather than a moral necessity and so worn lightly.

This ideology, based on an elite's formal representation in a context of state service and ambition (to cover for a gross process of 'global' acquisition) became hybridised with a somewhat sex-negative desert religion that had been Hellenised. The republican moral ideal became transmuted through a transfer of power into a religion purporting to protect women and slaves. From Augustus presenting a monogamous model and despite the polygynous and polyandrous (gay) proclivities of decadent Emperors, republican moral value merged with Judaeo-Christianity to create a moral necessity, a straight-jacket for elites and an endorsement of the necessary habits of the middling sort.

Every time a barbarian people came into contact with the hybridised ideology of the war machine, acceptance of that ideology became a condition for acceptance as tributary or (in the Middle Ages) acceptance as equal. Modernisation in the pre-modern era included total adoption of the ideology with both its sex-negativity and its formal monogamous structures combined and enforced on the middling sort and on elites alike. Informal polygyny, the more exploitative version compared with formal polygamy, was allowed for elites (for the masses until various 'reformations'), making use of variants of the 'blind eye', of which the French 'maitresse' and the 'courtesan' systems may be taken as the type.

Elites thus still got maximal nookie while the masses were increasingly denied even serial monogamy except on terms of guilt or shame and then only with women who were now outcasts rather than merely slaves or would be made outcasts if they 'transgressed'. It was not so much patriarchy that repressed women as the very religion that purported to defend them - or rather it picked and chose who it defended and it defended the women who were to make monogamy an effective tool for household but not political or social or economic power. The consequent socio-sexual ideology was thus not merely embedded in Western culture, it then intensified under successive reformations (from the Middle Ages onwards) and then became part of the self-image of the middling sort as they struggled to build prosperity in households under industrialisation.

Sexual repression and the hybrid patriarchal-matriarchal household reached its apogee in the twentieth century from which it then faced the threat of sexual liberation (which resulted in a surge of serial monogamy) and increased prosperity which, with contraception, liberated women from the obligations and many of the risks inherent in the model. Men had had the choice of compliance either through faith or in misery or as hidden polygyny and homosexuality through deviance and secrecy. Now they had the choice of transparency but while homosexuals were slowly liberated, many heterosexuals remained trapped in the ideology while others began to develop new ideas and forms of sexuality.

And that is where we are now - in a world where monogamy is the habitual norm and a much kinder place than it was fifty years ago and where formal polygamy is, in itself, out of time and place and no longer automatically the better bet for most women. However, social pressures for acceptance of monogamy in its legitimated form make dissent from within the institution a very dangerous matter indeed with highly emotional responses, bitterness, divorce and sometimes appalling effects on children because there is no ideological room for compromise.

What the better bet for men and women is today is not clear (especially as monogamy has become so much kinder) because increasingly the simple categories of men and women, married and unmarried, are collapsing into new categories based on personal psychologies so that a certain type of man and a certain type of woman have more in common with each other than either does with another type of man or woman. Today, increased resources for the middling sort and freedom from social action allows sentimental and emotional choices to drive new sexual relations and so social forms (albeit still restricted by legal habits derived from the old hybrid ideology).

Some can now choose monogamy deliberately and with full understanding of its purpose - long term bonding, child-rearing, property management. Others can choose to remain single or maintain a non-legitimised or partially legitimised (civil partnership) model. Still others can maintain the secret polygyny of mistresses and sex workers. And yet others are choosing the many variants of polyamory. In other words, sex is no longer a game with necessary winners or losers because of the structures in which choices are embedded. Things have become fluid.

There is no option,of course, to import slaves. No person in principle is obligated either to serve another sexually (though we continue to battle at the margins against sex slavery) or hang around with people they have come to loathe even 'for the sake of the children'. People are now generally unhappy for one of three reasons - they are just unhappy and no one will make them happy except themselves, they are still trapped in the hybrid Roman-Christian ideology and its derivatives or they simply do not have the resources to finance their choices. The last is the real problem for late liberal capitalism which offers rhetorical freedom (just as Rome offered rhetorical morality) but cannot will the means to live that freedom.

In conclusion we can now answer our initial debating questions to some extent. We know how monogamy became privileged although we are still not sure why but we also know that it is not the only means by which human beings can run their affairs and that, while it has many advantages, those advantages are not invariably so for all people or for some people at all times. The question is now whether we can have a society that allows people to choose fairly and without harming others whatever social and sexual (and economic) relations can best serve themselves and protect children.

The Revival of Microcosm and Macrocosm

Each person's biochemistry is as unique as their fingerprint. The interaction of the components of a complex system - hypothalamus and pituitary in the brain and adrenal near the kidneys - controls our reactions to stress and regulates many body processes (digestion, immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality and energy storage and expenditure). Much of how we react to the world - inner bodily comfort, sense of wellness, emotional state, lust and desire and our Will insofar as our Will is also the energy we can apply to a purpose - is managed by a system that links our complex mind (brain) with our body, both of which are only intermittently under our conscious control.

Is this a system that we should try to command through our reason - a rather futile intent on our part since our reason can influence but perhaps not command very much - or should we try to understand it, live with it as it is in general terms and manage it in the best interests both of mind and of body regardless of our conscious wilfulness? If mind and body are not in close accord, surely this system will, indeed must, break down through psychosomatic symptoms or even lead to total bodily or mental breakdown.

Although organic collapse of either body or mind is more than possible regardless of the other, most people most of the time are not well in body or mind because of a failure to bring the non-conscious Will of the body into alignment with the desires and instincts of the mind. To place on top of this the reasoning Will (a functional tool for the acquisition of resources and shaping of things) is almost certainly to over-burden it. We have a balance required here between disease (the collapse of the body) and psychosis (the collapse of the mind), both of which will have effects on the other. It is the inward turning of Reason on to the Body-Mind (not the same process by any means as the application of Reason, the tool, to the Body-Mind, of scientific medicine) that is most likely to disrupt that balance.

Standing between the two, Body and Mind, on the one side is psychosomatic illness - all those petty pains and illnesses that come at times of stress - and, on the other side, neurotic illnesses where the mind works but not very effectively. The calibration of our mind and body is thus a life's work and there can only ever be very personal adaptations of our general human condition. There are no external rules only the guidance of science, probability and possibility. Chance and necessity.

For example, a 'normal' circadian cortisol cycle (early morning rise to a peak in under an hour, then a fall, then a rise in late afternoon for a fall that reaches a trough in the middle of the night) might be disrupted and abnormally flattened by the demands of the social - the demand that one work at peak performance, for example, for eight hours at a stretch. The question is whether we are to try to 'normalise' an imposed new abnormal pattern through the exercise of Will – in other words, adapt to chronic fatigue by willing ourselves into not what we want or need but what the social wants or needs as 'rational' (for itself or others). This question of intervention or adaptation is a political question - a microcosmic version of the macroscosmic questions of intervention and adaptation in (say) international relations. And the microcosm and macrocosm find themselves in the same relation, that of the natural body to the unnaturalness of the social to that of the natural organically developed historical community to the demands of the Liberal (or any) Absolute.

This is where 'Will' is at the heart of things. With each apparent malfunction of 'normality', the person or the community can choose to seek help or find the inner resources to restore functionality or it can embrace the malfunction and propose to become adapted to the 'abnormality'. The 'abnormality' may soon become normal to the person or to the society despite the underlying damage to both mind and body, the psychosomatics and neuroses of statecraft as much as of the single human being . A genetic or minority 'abnormality' might be dysfunctional under conditions of 'normality' but be highly functional under abnormal social conditions. Evolution teaches us that the abnormal may, over a considerable period of time, become 'normal', leaving the previously normal as now abnormal.

We should not be dismissive of the potentiality of the abnormal but the evolutionary value of abnormality is incremental and works over great swathes of time - driving the abnormal into normality, as in the drive for the New Scientific Man or in transhumanist fantasies where minds cannot keep up with technologies, is driving humanity not into transcendence but into dysfunctionality. Instead the abnormal should be allowed to flourish in the now because of its incremental potential in the future and that includes abnormal cultures and communities as much as persons/ Homo Sovieticus is matched in its self-induced psychosis by the Rights agenda of Liberal Internationalist loons. This is why we must have both a general theory of social normality (which observes it at a distance and decides whether it suits the person), one that treats the claims of the social critically, but also a private theory of the self, against the insanity of denying the ever-present Self, where the Self is to be measured against its own and not society’s standards of normality and abnormality as it moves from birth to death. All is flow, nothing is fixed and Reason is a tool and nothing more.

Jealousy

Jealousy is like rage ... a fact of experience. But, like rage, it might also be taken as a signal of an underlying issue relevant to one's dealings with a person who is being emotional. Yet it is not a justification for accepting their emotional world view as yours simply out of fear of their emotion's effects on you. Respect does not mean acceptance of their world view, just acceptance that they have this world view. It is just a fact that must be taken into consideration.

For a strong emotion not to be respected, recognised and even (without compromising oneself) accommodated to the extent that one can is a sign of callousness and even of stupidity but to allow another's strong emotion to dictate terms to you on fundamentals is a sign of weakness on the one side and of bullying on the other. At its worst, low level permanent jealousy, anger or misery become a form of psychic vampirism by which one person becomes increasingly defined by the mental chemistry of another person. Thus can we define the worst of relationships.

All emotions have this quality either of potentially enhancing dialogue and personal growth or of being agents of control and attempted ownership but jealousy is the most interesting of all. It is the most explicit in its central claim - that X, in some way, has (actually almost certainly unjustifiable) ownership rights over Y. In fact, X can never own Y unless Y permits ownership (at its worst a form of masochism and at its best love). If the ownership is not freely given and that gift sustained on free terms over time but only depends on the fear of the effects on X's biochemistry of the intensity of Y's biochemistry, then the ownership implicit in X's jealousy is simple bullying. Acquiescence is then little better than slavery and may be cowardice or stupidity.

This is why an intense emotion is a major testing ground for a relationship and should strengthen it whereas chronic emotional pressure will either weaken that relationship or turn it into something neurotic and perverted - into the 'autism for two' referred to in 'The Coming Insurrection'. The two sins of emotion in a relationship lie at the two extremes of emotional perversion - not to express emotion strongly on the one hand and to use emotion as a controlling tool of ownership on the other. We all know from observation that struggles for power and dominance in personal relationships are as intense as that of States for energy resources. The fear of the righteous use of emotion - the explosion designed to communicate the otherwise incommunicable - is looked at with fear and loathing in our culture and for good reason.

First, an emotional explosion has to be seen in a context of distrust that the other party will respect the outburst, listen, learn but stand their ground on essentials while conceding ground on inessentials - and be acute enough to understand that the essential is not in the detail and that compromises are possible in many directions and most of the time. Second, our culture is made up of people who fundamentally lack self-esteem, of any pride in themselves, and who live in a world of zero sum games where a relationship is always won or lost like a game of poker rather than developed, expanded or shared like a game of chess.

The typical type in our modern culture has invested so much of themselves in the mirror of the other that they dare not show an emotion that might break that mirror (even if it is just as likely that it would strengthen the relationship), while 'chronic emotion' can be used as a weapon to constrain, hem in and define the other as fenced property. Instead of seeing another relationship (perhaps of simple friendship) added to the whole as an opportunity to redefine and strengthen the primary relationship for the long term, to improve its quality, the 'jealous' reaction would rather pull down the whole pack of cards and walk away. Is this not the case in so many destructive divorces, destroying the lives of children, where one party is simply too proud not to demand all-or-nothing?

The acute emotion of jealousy (or rage) is vital in pre-empting the death grip of convention on a relationship and, if not causing unhappiness, then promoting its decline into formality, role-playing and even the status, sexually and socially, of being a zombie, the sort that can have no conversation beyond house prices, pensions and what each does for a living. Western humanity lives in a permanent state of feeling threatened. The saddest aspect of it all is that we feel most threatened of all by the loss of an 'other half', another malign intervention of Platonic mythology. That fear ends up at the very root of a deathly conformity that leaves us functioning robotically or depending for salvation on secret vices.

The paradox is that our cultural obsession with 'cheating' (not so much in Europe where the matter tends to be dealt with as a form of cultural blindness but certainly in the US) creates the very crisis that it fears. By setting down absurdly 'perfect' relationship standards in the first place, we are driven as a culture into secrecy and fetishism and towards a lack of accountability - indeed anything and everything is done that is possible to avoid a confrontation over meaning in a relationship, one that might involve the expression of positive or negative emotion.

The misery lies not only in any actual loss (though people may have been living a limerent lie for a long time, one that needed to be faced) but in the constant nagging fear of loss and of loneliness. 'Autism for two' raises the stakes by making couple-dom central to the culture in a way that ensures that there can be no intimacy elsewhere. Above all, personal potential may be constantly defined in the terms of another emotional centre, one who casts themselves as successively victim or inadequate when they are neither of these, just different and to be respected as different. New distrust emerges as a result of misplaced past trust, based on an illusion of perfection, whereas a truly sound relationship would have involved a proper dialogue over emotion, under conditions where both parties would trust each other enough to allow truth-telling.

Think on this. How is it even possible that one party 'cheats', that is, is unable, because of our culture, to share with their primary partner the needs and desires that led them elsewhere?  Why are so many women and men frightened of telling the truth to what are, in effect, their best friends if they are, indeed, 'perfect soul-mates' which, of course, they are not. No such thing can exist without compromises that may prove too hard to maintain over long periods of time. The answer is obvious, people 'cheat' not because their primary partners are not soul-mates but because soul-mates are never simply simulacra of the partner and things do change - and should change if we are not to be zombies. No one can take the burden of being a perfect soul mate without subsuming themselves under another and denying all individuality. People 'cheat' because they cannot have a 'perfect soul mate' conversation about not being 'perfect'.

The cultural assessment of all this soon descends into a dim-witted bar room gut sense that a 'cheater' is a slut (if a woman) or weak and inadequate (if a man) but it might equally be said that the 'cheater' is simply a terrified coward in not standing before their primary partner and expressing desires and needs about which there may indeed be an accommodation. Jealousy is not envy but these alleged vices are close and if we look at envy (by, say, one woman of another's looks and attractiveness) we see similar central problems of self esteem and resentment and similar ambiguities over the expression of feeling.

Like jealousy and anger, envy is a fact. To condemn it morally is absurd. A wise person avoids jealous, angry and envious persons if they can but that may not be possible in an existing relationship so it is the contrast between the acute and the chronic that we have to look at. An acute burst of envy sends a signal that seeks reassurance just as an acute burst of anger is the first statement in a negotiation and jealousy is a call for dialogue. Chronic envy or 'ressentiment' is a soul-destroying absurdity, like chronic anger or jealousy. It calls for either an acute moment of catharsis or a fundamental breach.

How many people go through lives of resentment, depression (which is just rage turned inward) or unhappiness and self-doubt because they were unable to ball up their feelings and throw them at their partners as a demand for dialogue? Yes, economic and social entrapment (the fine business of holding things together with a mortgage or having a bunch of relatives who have pre-defined you) may make this difficult but not to do so is to allow oneself to be trapped and defined not only by the other but by all the others behind them. In effect, you will be socialised into chronic misery.

Negative emotion is thus essentially conservative. A person has land-grabbed a bit of social existence and now wants to keep what it has (jealousy) or resents someone else's lucky or more skilled land-grab (envy). Such conservatism is at the root of all that is nasty in politics, society and culture. It is corrosive. But all these emotions have their purpose. We are told that they arose out of evolutionary conditions to ensure that a man did not waste resources in raising others' offspring and a woman had the resources to raise her own but evolutionary biology as justification for jealousy is a cop-out. These are unscientific assumptions but they are widely believed and so become true.

The issue is not jealousy at all but being deceived or lied to, yet our culture has created the conditions for continuous deception because of the zero sum game most of its frightened, isolated players are engaged in. The discovered can lose everything and be subject to barracking and intolerable shaming and socially enforced guilt so it is no wonder that he or she lurks in the dark instead of expressing themselves responsibly in the light. The social has constructed its own dark and dreary underworld.

What is more interesting is the psychological truth that, whilst resentment, depression and misery result in the almost complete de-sexualisation of couples as they spend more time together, high emotion will trigger passion and sexual intensity. It might even be argued that a determined compliance with each other (generally, sado-masochistic in that one party is dominant) is tantamount to the slow murder of a relationship by strangulation, whereas a sense of danger and risk, but above all, dialogue, paradoxically maintains the bonds that brought two people together in the first place.

To do all this effectively, however, requires an acceptance that no person can ever be owned, that they are dangerously unknowable free agents and that risk and loss are challenges that enhance life - and, then, since all is paradox, the dead 'autism for two' might well be replaced by an unbreakable bond between persons and misery might be replaced with 'joie'.

Abraham, Hagar and Sarah - Death in the Desert

According to the Bible, Abraham took a slave girl (Hagar) as his concubine and then married her to provide an heir, in agreement with his existing wife Sarah. Hagar produced Ishmael but then Sarah conceived and produced Isaac. Sarah then demanded that Abraham drive out both Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (and so to probable death). Abraham found this difficult and he only did it when he found out that God 'wanted him to do it'. We are creeped out now by people who say that 'God wanted them to do it' but this is the Iron Age Levant.

Many relativistic excuses (mostly post-facto based on the fact that 'it all turned out right in the end') can be made for the behaviour of these persons but this story is at the very root of the mythos of three world religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It has been accepted without thought as representing God's word and so as a fundamentally ethical story. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about this and not say simply that this is just a story that history has made irrelevant. It is a story of great cruelty and we must ask what it came to imply for later humanity.

The first implication of the tale is that sexuality is a practical matter. Production of children, not pleasure, are at the root of the story. This is perhaps the most forgivable aspect of the tale ethically because times were hard and there was a logic to the attitude. A pragmatic ethical polyamory or polygamy may be one logical lesson of this history, yet this is the one rejected by at least two of the Great Religions that derived from it. The story of Hagar understandably permits a more open attitude to concubinage in Islam but both Judaism and Christianity were to adopt a position where Sarah's matriarchal rights were to be privileged over both those of the patriarch himself and the concubine/first wife.  For three thousand years, this has been presented as moral - but is it?

Far from being patrarchalist, Judaeo-Christianity starts its story, the story that then leads to Abraham and Isaac, with a tale of matriarchal struggle and power, of female competition. It tells us straight way that the subsequent three thousand years are the story of the triumph of one woman over another rather than that of a man over women. It undermines from the beginning the claim that Judaeo-Christianity is patriarchal and only patriarchal.

The second implication is the positive denial of emotion, of love, implicit in the story and the cruelty and resentment of the dominant matriarch. Abraham is twice denied his feelings by God - both here in regard to his feelings for Hagar and later in his feelings for Isaac on the sacrificial altar. God rewards the catty older woman over the younger. The 'patriarch' himself seems to have no power himself to bring the two women into line - it is his weakness before female rivalry that is the most noticeable feature of this part of the story.

What is going on here? Levantine man clearly had feelings. He was a human being. It seems that God does not approve of feelings, of emotion coming from within. Such emotion must be subordinated to the abstract - the theory of what is destined, written long after the event - and therein lies the tale. God's law, in the end, appears to suit Sarah as dominant wife and God himself as Authority. Patriarchal authority does not belong to the human patriarch at all - his wishes are ignored and he takes the easy way out. The authority belongs to an abstract and invented entity intended to buttress the power of the matriarch. It is as if the Great Goddess (if she ever existed) has proved a lot less useful than a Great Father because only through the latter can male physical power be re-appropriated for the real head of the household, she who is to be obeyed, though perhaps I take things too far and should not over-interpret the text.

But God does help Sarah to become dominant over Abraham in this matter and then takes Abraham away later to enforce his own direct dominance over him in the matter of Isaac. This is not a tale of patriarchal power at all but a tale of the assertion of priestly power (represented by this invented abstract thing called God) over the male by means of a Godly favoured female, a female given implicit domestic power in order to define the terms of the Law. The feminist analysis of Judaeo-Christianity is thus deeply flawed. It refers to patriarchalism when the Judaeo-Christian tradition is, much as Nietzsche described it, an alliance of weakness, of priests or intellectuals and middle class, property-owning women, designed to tame the free choices (which include sexual and emotional choices) of males and exclude other women.

This may not be a bad thing in itself because it depends where you stand in the game and there is only good or bad in relation to one's stance in that game. A certain form of order triumphed and made its rules stick. It is a contingent set of rules but, whether good or bad, it should still be seen for what it is and not for what it would be convenient for us to think it is in our later age. The Catholic Church, of course, took the Judaic system and went one better by (at least in theory) sexually neutering its priests so that all sexualities in the domestic setting were concentrated on the dominance of a mother advised by eunuchs. Marriage was to transfer the male from libertine to dog and excluded females to be sentenced to be sluts or nuns. Male sexuality and any female (or homosexual) sexual competitors were shunted to one side. God stood for an exclusivity that was prepared to eliminate (metaphorically and socially) its rivals through force of customary law, an elimination performed on Hagar.

And what of Hagar? She did all right in the end, being at the core of a polygamous Islam, but we can relax only if we take at face value that her destiny was one of providence and not, in fact, chance. She and her son could have died out their in the desert and only an 'act of faith' (ho, hum!) says that that was never going to happen.

So, what was the cost of this system of social control designed to bring order to society (for that is what this story is about)? Abraham is weak - he allows his natural feeling for a woman and their child to be thrust aside by the strictures of priestly (God's) and matriarchal law. Natural feeling will be torn from him later (saved only at the last minute) but this first case is not just abandonment, it is also also attempted murder. Let us remember - both Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the desert, in effect, to die. So a weak man and a proud and manipulative woman (with a little help from an ideological construct called God) sentence a weaker woman and a child to death without once questioning the morality of their action. Yet this morality (or lack of morality) is at the very centre of Western culture. Is a murderous callousness at its very heart?