A WARNING TO THE INTREPID! - The Chilling Effect of Corporate Social Media Censorship and the Matriarchal State

Recently I found myself apparently guilty of 'hate speech' in one of my own administered Facebook Groups (as if its members were not all known to me and sophisticated adults). It was, of course, nothing of the kind (see below). I have had similar experiences with the comments allowed (or rather not allowed) on The Guardian and Financial Times. Others have had similar experiences here on Blogger. In my most recent case, this was expressed as a threat to the very existence of the Group. Nothing happened of course, the 'offending' item simply disappeared, murdered by either an algorithm or some young under-paid dim-wit in some back office but the threat got me thinking about the 'chilling effect' on freedom of speech from such implied threats. 

 

Perhaps the 'West' may not be a patriarchal authoritarian 'tyranny' like China or Russia (at least as they are seen in our popular mythology) but is instead becoming a manipulative matriarchal variant. Perhaps it is deviously in the process of becoming more totalitarian by stealth than its 'evil' (apparently) rivals. Instead of having clear rules with clear punishments (which I can deal with) we have the mauvaise foi of desperate attempts to tell us we are all free (which is only a half truth at the best of times) and then exert social control through hints and passive aggression, weak threats and subtle pressures to effect behaviour change. In psychological terms we have the worst of the traditionalist masculine in one bloc replaced by the worst of the traditionalist feminine in the the other. 

 

Our authorities seem to be too weak to control us directly. They do it through pressure exerted through corporate mummies and institutional set-ups. Daddy is a coward so Mummy has to be brought in to exert discipline over the kids (that's us, folks!). Like good little children in a conservative household, we are shamed into compliance or made guilty after the fact or (if we are to have any fun or freedom or learning experience) we have to become devious law and rule breakers hoping to get away with a bit of naughtiness and not get caught. It is not only our behaviour and language that is controlled in this way within a rather weird liberal/progressive pseudo-theocracy but increasingly our thoughts (something the 'tyrannies' actually do not tend to tamper with). 

 

We have to be right thinkers in order to ensure right speech and right behaviour because Daddy (the State) is too weak and cowardly to wield the whip and impose good behaviour let alone good speech on us. In the eyes of our political culture we are not adults but children who have to be frightened, cajoled, rewarded and lied to in order to ensure that we do not go wild and ask all the questions that developing children should be asking about authority and our environment. Our punishments are generally light - exile, isolation, exclusion - rather than the Gulag. Everybody just takes it on the chin not realising that they are frogs slowly being boiled on the hob. The Western State is the ultimate bad parent no less than the Eastern tyranny - in our case, the absent father who relies on the corporate mother to bring up the children.

 

In fact, there was probably no immediate danger to the Facebook Group in question although I am sure there are people (including the usual suspects in the psy-ops fraternity) who would love to close the Group down. What was happening was a 'warning' designed to weaken the force of inconvenient debate and to confirm that our freedom existed on sufferance and not by right. The Group in question consistently challenges the given narratives about events in the bloodlands to the East whose mismanagement threatens us all with nuclear immolation. In fact, much of that debate has, in any case, shifted to Telegram which, of course, Keir Starmer wants to close down as a 'progressive' (God help us!). Perhaps he thinks Number Ten is a walk in if only he can appear more conservative and authoritarian than the failed and confused Conservatives. Depressingly, he may be right. Most voters seem terrified of real freedom.

 

Perhaps I should suggest caution in particular uses of emotional but still non-harmful language and let the algorithms train us like a dog owner trains its hound but I am disinclined to give way.  If my Group members are courageous enough to defy the imposed narratives about (say) the 'War' as other Groups' members in my territory are courageous enough to defy given narratives about politicised science and art, diversity and even equality or gender and identity, because they think for themselves in reasoned and intelligent ways, then I am 'd----d' if I am going to act like Mummy's proxy. I would rather kill off the Groups entirely when that day comes, stick to Telegram until they destroy that too, cultivate my garden and wait for the whole system to implode as all sclerotic cultures eventually do. I am old enough not to care over much if Western civilisation collapses under the weight of its own malice and ineptitude.

 

As I say, there was no hate in the relevant comment. It simply made the point that I opposed conscription by any Government under all but the most extreme circumstances and possibly not then. I made it clear that I would be personally protective of anyone evading conscription if at all possible no matter which country they came from. Facebook may simply have taken exception to a standard and rather mild British expletive (never forget that Facebook comes out of an American psychological and cultural bubble) which was directed at State entities and certainly not at individuals or identity groups. It was a mild expletive found elsewhere on Facebook without effect so perhaps suspicions should be roused about another agenda. To be fair, the algorithms do not seem to be very bright (although in saying that perhaps that I am demonstrating hate speech towards algorithms!). AI is unlikely to improve things since the people who are programming AI are the people trying to control our mental mapping.

 

Be aware that all the big social media sites except perhaps Truth Social and Twitter (and this last is looking uncertain after the latest CEO appointment) are running scared at the moment as the European Union and the British Government are intending or undertaking major legislative campaigns to 'control' what information we can have access to. This is not such a problem in the US with its First Amendment although those freedoms are also under constant lawfare pressure from 'liberals' and the Federal State. There is a tinge of Emergency Powers legislation lurking in the anterooms of some of these campaigns since we seem to be positioned in a 'phoney war' situation that could turn into a shooting war at any instance without any of us having much of a say in the matter any more than we did in 1914 or 1939. 

 

Elites know that there is substantial doubt about where we are heading and a lot of resistance to the narrative that they wish to promote. The mainstream media, of course, are broadly on side with that narrative as they were on, say, Vietnam for the bulk of that war. This time around, social media provides an alternative narrative that almost certainly reflects social reality - society in general is quite simply more indifferent to claims about Ukraine and Russia than people like Ben Wallace and Tom Tugendhat would like. There are larger oppositional minorities at this stage in the context between our empires than at the equivalent stage of (say) the Vietnam imbroglio.

 

The evident fear in the system is that populations could switch from a large majority for the elite narrative to a large majority against it (which is exactly what happened in the Vietnam War in the US) and so destabilise a system that was put in position in stages over some seventy years to benefit large-scale capital and a self-reinforcing political caste and which is now failing abysmally in terms of both cultural governance and economic stability. Controlling social media and encrypted communications like Whats App, Telegram and Signal are becoming of vital importance to established political elites as Starmer's outburst in the Commons has indicated.

 

That switch in sentiment in the Vietnam War, in a country where free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, took place in barely nine months and changed history without benefit of social media so we can see why they are rattled in the White House, Brussels and Whitehall. The existing system in the UK and Europe has a great deal at stake in using any weapon at its disposal to ensure that it does not lose control of power or policy, citing in an exaggerated way both disinformation and particular and real but still often marginal forms of abuse as excuses for increased social control of the free social media. 

 

Instead of Daddy moving on on the abuses directly (after all, it is a bit rich for the British State to claim moral guardianship after its sustained failure to deal with care home child abuse or widespread fraud), the legal framework is created to frighten Mummy into doing the job for it. Major platforms have to be complicit in this because they are businesses and not public services. The legislative and regulatory power of existing elites is sufficient to seriously affect their profitability and a recession may well be on the way. They have no option in the game of survival.

 

Certainly, as Mick Lynch pointed out today, the working population and even the lower middle classes are getting much poorer even as the asset rich get richer and while large corporations make ever-increasing profits on high inflation and war booty. Algorithms too are just defensive blunt instruments that can be designed to be 'conservative' (in fact, 'conservatism' is the cultural liberal agenda and the 'progressive' business-friendly politics that got us into the mess we are in in the first place) and defensive of corporate interests.

 

In short, you cannot take your freedom of expression for granted nor your ownership of your invested information on social platforms nor that arbitrary power will not be exercised to exclude you from a platform if you cannot behave along prescribed lines. If I get censored again (I do not intend to be deliberately provocative but I will never hide my honest opinon reasonably expressed), then you know it is political.

Should I Apologise For This Posting? Sex & Power in the Modern World

One of the weirder aspects of our current culture is the ritual abasement of alleged wrong-doers, usually in the form of a forced apology on the advice of 'PR consultants'. My interest relates to something Jordan Peterson has raised. I am not an enormous fan of his total vision which is, in my opinion, flawed in several respects - the stoicism, the concentration on judaeo-christian values, Jungian archetypes and an over-deterministic biologism create the very model of an ideology, a trait that he claims to abhor in others. Or am I unjust and that these traits are those of his followers who have managed to miss his point about ideology? Wherever his new-found popularity leads, he is a reasoned debater with a thoughtful stance on life and he undoubtedly has insights on gender relations which are 'controversial' but none the less on the right side of the game.

His thesis (which is most observable at the point where a new cultural hegemony emerges and displaces another) is that politics is an expression of personality traits. Because sexual difference results in the emphasis of different personality traits (so much, so scientific) in the genders, shifts in the power between genders mean that the personality traits associated with the rising gender began to be valued and then affect discourse and practice under the new order and at the expense of the falling gender.

The narrative of psychopathy (where psychopathy is culturally widened to include a lot of normal male behaviour that does no harm) being 'bad' and empathy (even where an excess of empathy can be as harmful as full-on sociopathy in terms of adequate social functioning) is just one signifier of a cultural change that can be traced to a recent shift of values from the falling masculine to the rising feminine. This has been happening with gathering pace over the last three decades or so, reaching its crescendo in aggressive reaction of now-hegemonic liberals to the insurgency of democratic populism.

All talk of Jungian archetypes here is so much displacement although it is a useful poetic tool for describing what is happening. For actual causes, we have to turn back to a brute materialism. The bottom line lies not only in that women are now voters conscious of being voters as women (though this is exaggerated in its effects) but in the far more important fact that most purchasing decisions for most consumer goods, especially repeat purchases, under late liberal capitalism, are made by women,  Women also take an important role in many male purchasing decisions. Male-dominated corporations have recognised this. They have realised that the huge increase in educated women allows them to tap into this economy more effectively and that single women are also very likely to throw their energies into their work as expression of meaning far more than most men for whom the work is likely to be 'just a job'.

New centres of power have emerged in the corporate sector for women - notably human resources and marketing - just at that point when a particular form of education has introduced an ideology of empowerment for women (feminism). Peterson himself points out in addition that men have withdrawn from the universities and media relative to women so that we can see how the high ground of culture, combined with the entry of women into politics, has created a new female cultural domination where the next stage is a demand for 'gender equality' - which really means a demand that educated middle class women dominate the institutions that hire them in such numbers.

These are just facts on the ground. Economic change has not only shifted political power increasingly towards women (even if this is not yet fully equalised) but it has shifted cultural power in such a way this cultural change is working at a faster pace than the political change that will follow. In general men are giving up on politics but also on culture, the universities and the media where culture is manufactured. The fact of democracy is their last bastion against the possibility of total manipulation by a new administrative elite made up of educated women and the male elements in the 'capitalist' and 'managerial' classes who understand the profit in this revolution or who simply go with the flow of history. The dislike of democracy in liberal circles lately is perhaps a recognition of democracy's 'last fortress status' against ideology.

It is as a result of all this that the personality traits associated with women are becoming culturally dominant. Peterson's concerns are not that these personality traits are not good (rather they are just facts on the ground that come with any increase in power for women) but that we are replacing one imbalanced cultural arrangement with another (male personality trait dominance with female personality trait dominance), that this is creating the potential for the same sort of violent tensions that the first imbalance did - and that this has triggered a populist revolt which also happens to appeal to many 'conservative' women.

For this is an important point, the educated middle class feminism of the new world is deeply presumptuous in its claim to represent all women much as many men are linked by interest and sentiment to the new world of empowered middle class women. This is not a line that separates one gender from another in reality but one that separates two types of personality trait with different expressions in men and women (and which inter-mix with many other traits and histories which ultimately result in all individuals being unique even if they insist on then recombining into tribes and ideologies).

These thoughts were initially triggered by an article in the most recent British Psychological Society's Digest, "Flowers, Apologies, Food or Sex? Men's and Women's Views on The Most Effective Ways To Make Up". This article has one line that tells us that there may be a connection between general female personality traits (though we must make the central point here that these are general traits that differ considerably between women and may be part of the personality type of many men as well) and the emergence of female cultural power in the West - "... women thought their partner apologising or crying would be more a more effective way for their partner to make up than did the men."

Now, observe what happens in a scandal today and then compare it with 50 years - the insistence on apologies and the showing of remorse. The male instinct is that when something is done that is wrong, then apologies and emotion are relatively irrelevant - what is necessary is change in actual behaviour and restitution or recompense with what the wronged person wants (usually sexual relations in the case of men apparently, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is just a desire and there is no question of anything other than consent).

The female instinct is to ignore all that and demand an emotional submission and a change in language (which is symbolic for an expected if unverifiable change in thought). Showing emotion while using submissive language is a near-guarantor that the change of heart is 'sincere'. What the man thinks is important to most women whereas what the woman thinks is less important than what she does to most men. One trait finds security in knowing other minds (which can tend to household totalitarianism) whereas the other trait finds security in 'obedience' and 'compliance'. Again, this is not necessarily reflective what women and men actually do or think but is only what 'gender norms' imply as personality traits become dominant or submissive in society.

If some women might find a sexual act to be a demeaning as a means of recompense, bluntly many men consider a forced apology to be equally demeaning. In both cases, if freely given out of love and respect, there is no issue but if forced out of an imbalance of power or some form of household act of terror (such as 'not speaking'), then there is broadly an equivalence of distaste for what is being forced on the 'loser'. Sexual coercion for women and psychological coercion for men are pretty equivalent in terms of their damage to personal autonomy. The wife-beater and the persistent nag are actually perfectly equivalent when one takes into account of the nature of the victim of the act. Our society tends to recognise the first as problematic (which it is) yet willfully ignore the second as equally problematic.

The female instinct is encapsulated in the Catholic confessional where absolution comes from a verbal formula and then a 'change of heart' yet public policy at the same period of male 'dominance' through the institution of clerical power in society was rarely interested in such things. The paradox of priestly male dominance is that this interlocutor with God is, in effect, a eunuch - cruelly one might say, like many urban liberal middle class males. 'Patriarchal culture' co-existed with 'matriarchal culture' (a fact conveniently forgotten by feminists) but was not formally ideological or totalitarian (although matriarchal culture could be totalitarian within the household as patriarchal culture could be within the court). Male culture just wanted material compensation and simple submission to superior power by dint of language and acts without emotion. The formal act of obeisance is not an apology but something else.

Male dominance strategy was more interested in brute power relations rather than (primarily) control of culture even if Power did control culture through the court. Instead of a celebrity apologising for an abusive act in order to placate female consumers of entertainment products and then be obliged to show emotional regret in order to continue to be able to work, the traditional  'male' response would be to bring that person to justice for a crime but ignore the act if it was not a crime. This latter stance is, of course, now unacceptable - a wrong act is now deemed wrong, whether a crime or not, in a return to a modern version of clerical moralism. Shame (and guilt) are policing methods that are embedded in the community because they have been imposed from outside by the agents of the dominant culture.

The community itself rarely polices these issues today. It has become a matter of public discourse through newspapers, broadcasters and social media. Since the funeral of Princess Diana and Blair's calculated use of emotion to appeal to feminine and media sentiment, emotional responses to events have been manufactured from above as weapons or tools in cultural warfare by ideologically-motivated groups. The vigils surrounding the death of Jo Cox, MP were a perfect example of such manipulation, closer to Goebbels' distasteful (even to Hitler) manipulation of the killing of Horst Wessel than to any reasoned consideration of what to do about rare cases of lone fascist fanatics.

Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' series has several excellent satires on this culture of manipulation but he still looks at it from within his own class, blaming the lumpen mass for its reactions and weakness rather than investigating the ideological manipulation of emotion in a competition between factions within elite groups. All elite groups now engage in this use of emotion as communications tool or weapon and not just the cultural Left. The cultural Left is perhaps simply more adept at it because they have an ideological framework for it.

Ignoring a wrong is, of course, unforgivable (perfectly reasonably) for women where the structures of power have not created the means for 'bringing to justice'. This may be the core of the problem here. After all, many solutions to alleged female abuse would require a legal system that was so intrusive on normal male behaviour (in order to catch truly errant male conduct) that men would live under a regime similar to that of 'The Handmaid's Tale' but under female domination. What is required is a balance of interest between the genders that lets individuals flourish as they are and has rules on lack of consent and bullying but creates a grey air of private life where individuals are allowed to congregate with those that are like them without wider community intrusion. The new warrior liberalism is like the old conservative authoritarianism in that it constantly expands its territory to fill a vacuum, like any empire. It is, in this respect, culturally oppressive even as it raises issues that must be raised - especially regarding the ignorant behaviour of some men to some women.

Western society resolved this in the past through somewhat hypocritical 'codes' outside the law, using shame (or guilt) but these are no longer possible and in any case were oppressive towards those women who were not 'inside the code system' by choice or lack of resources. The Irish Catholic Church's treatment of women 'outside the codes' is a lesson in pure evil. We have not found the way forward yet but it probably lies in 'values paganism' re-instituting 'codes' that permit autonomy and free speech, rewards those who show respect to others in the context of an ideology of self respect and punishes all forms of coercion (ideally, including unlawful state coercion).

We are moving here towards wanting a culture of 'good manners' for private life within a framework of law that punishes severely evidenced wrong-doing (essentially any form of unlawful coercion of the individual). Needless to say, this must include tools for the gathering of evidence and strong and impartial law enforcement. The DPP's recent behaviour in relation to alleged male rape trials was a moral disgrace but women are right to want a debate on the boundaries that dictate the correct behaviour between men and women - a debate which, if undertaken openly and reasonably, might come up with some uncomfortable conclusions for both genders as to their conduct 'in the field' and the necessity for creating social rather than legal solutions to the problem of consent.

This strategic difference between a society in which either male or female personality traits shift from private life to public policy and dominate the whole is fascinating. The shift to female personality trait dominance explains our new cultural elite's determined drive for apologies and that industry of PR people who trot out the need to apologise (rather than make restitution and be subject to material containment) in order to 'salvage' reputation. The person who apologises then has to go into the wilderness and claw their way back if they can (without any real attempt at justice), perhaps on their knees in penance for crimes that may or may not have been evidenced. The new argument that the 'victim' must be believed throws out of the window not only certain standards of jurisprudence but disallows both malice and false recollection in good faith. And yet we all know that, just as some claims are false, other claims are true and cannot be proven so that a moral injustice has been done when nothing can be done.

Social change is thus not effected by a reasoned consideration of how to change laws and regulations to deal with moral injustice but by 'exemplars' - much as medieval Churchmen dealt in exemplars to guide their flock. Regulation and law try to follow, usually finding that things are a lot more complicated than the ideologists think. Alleged wrong-doers are judged not by judges in accordance with the law but by a sort of Salem-like community of social media and mainstream media witches who are uninterested in investigation of the actual truth of claims or with context. This is dark stuff.

'Justice' is offered as a form of communitarian assault on the errant individual but it is increasingly based not on cool and fair assessment of the equality of the genders in their rights to self discovery and self creation but, in fact, on one simple truth - female voters and consumers can dictate terms to the mostly male elites who run the productive end of capitalism and who probably know their days are numbered. However, let us be clear, when this goes wrong, this is not all women judging some men but some women, the educated liberal middle class elite component of the gender, seeking out some men and judging them as representative of all men. This is no different from a minority of male priests seeking out and judging a few women and making claims about the whole sex - which is what happened 500 years ago, more recently in backwaters like Ireland.

Justice as the rational business of formal complaint to enforcement authorities involving courage on the part of the complainant and then the necessary procedures to judge truth or falsehood on the evidence is abandoned as (in effect) 'patriarchal'. The problem is that 'male' courage is socially created - courageous women obviously exist and most men are cowed by power but it has been historically far harder for women to adopt the risks of a courageous stance. Woman are thus often disadvantaged by the ideology of courage as are all vulnerable people in certain social conditions. Justice is not justice if it is not just and there are justifiable reasons for concern that our legal and regulatory systems lag our understanding of the primacy of networked human autonomy in a culture of equals rather than as a hierarchical structure of competing elites embedded in the past.

Those who feel wronged are probably right that they have to fight to get noticed in a society that ignores them until they get noisy and emotional - child abuse victims are the obvious recent example - but they are playing a flawed game in a flawed system. The real requirement here is to unravel the hierarchical elite-based system and replace it with something that starts with a reasoned understanding of what we are really like and not what ideologists think we should be.

There are reasonable arguments that 'justice' has not caught up with the needs of women but it has also not caught up with the needs of fathers or polyamorists so the problem is more widespread than feminist theorists think - it is a problem of the inappropriate parts of Iron Age ideology and industrial social structures being retained while the appropriate parts have been jettisoned. It is a problem of society not being in tune with the actually existing human condition.

This is a new world that is coming and yet it has now spawned its own resistance because not all women share a belief in the necessary extension of the traits attributed to them (such as the apology and grovel being sufficient) into the public domain (while wishing to retain them in the private domain). These 'conservative' women match in numbers the 'liberal' men who have calculated on moral and pragmatic grounds that 'equality' just means that the old order is dead and that they have to find a place in the new order.

We all chuckle when some liberal metropolitan male supporting the new order gets caught out as an 'abuser' (even if this means little more than some crass language or a blundering touch) just as we have always chuckled when some Southern Baptist Minister gets caught out in 'cheating' but both breeds of men have allowed ideology to conquer the reality of their condition which is as creatures of ideology. Both men are often subject to disproportionate witch hunts as exemplars of wrong-doing within their community. All men become 'rapists' to their critics in one world and all churchmen are hypocrites to their critics in the other world - both propositions are absurd. A better truth is that neither sets of men have the courage to be who they are and yet show the rest of the world respect. They have become stupid because they are cowards, unable to live their lives as the persons that they are because history and ideology have dictated personae that drown their true selves. The same has applied to women stuck in households and then humiliated when they escape release in a love affair.

The point is that the human condition (and society is just the public expression of the human condition) requires respect for all human traits, for difference and for variability (which is incidentally another sound point made by Peterson) This includes many other traits, whether libertarianism or authoritarianism or empathetic or (non socially harmful) psychopathic traits, as much as the traits that tend to show difference between men and women because of their biochemistry and brain structures (a difference which science accepts as partially true without drawing any valuation conclusions in relation to the principle of equality).

Our society is rapidly spinning into another round of disaster to match that when male personality traits dominated over female personality traits. You cannot exterminate the 'other'. The key issue here is a fundamental respect for personal autonomy. Autonomy emerges out of each individual's very particular model of perception, cognition and biochemistry as well as history. The uniqueness of the individual is our starting point. From there, comes respect for others and (which is where brute males fall down but also authoritarian female household matriarchs) consent. Indeed if two people want to do anything, no matter how distasteful to others, in private, or to speak of it (since free speech and struggle between persons through robust persuasion are central to the good society) then it is no one's business but their own.

So back to the apology. There is nothing wrong with the apology as either sincere expression of regret or perhaps as tactical tool to end a fruitless squabble while considering one's position (yet is it ever really healthy to apologise for something that you feel you have no need to apologise for?!). But there is a lot wrong with the public institutionalisation of the apology to meet communitarian needs that have nothing to do with the job in hand and force people into modes of submission which actually change nothing, Indeed, the public apology is often little more than cover for a decision not to resign and not to make recompense. It is not embedded within a culture of honour as in Japan where both apology and resignation are carefully encoded within a shame culture with a long history.

An apology in Western culture is simply a response to an assault, an act of obeisance on feminine lines. All an apology of this sort may do in our culture is to trigger the imposition of yet more oppressive rules and regulations that may benefit a certain type of woman in a certain situation but which may limit the lives and opportunities of other women and degrade relations between the sexes. There is no thinking-through of the problem that was demonstrated by the act that required the apology.

We should have more considered explanations to hand, more justice (evidence-based dealing with claims), more resignations, better laws and better law enforcement and fewer apologies and far fewer restrictions on free speech and normal human interaction. We should have more honour and good manners. We should pre-empt the bitter onslaught of an insane social media-driven witch hunt with better education on consent and respect. Our entire culture is in danger of becoming supine before just one personality trait and just one ideology (feminism) just as, in the 1930s, it became supine before another personality trait and another ideology (fascism).

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.

On Monogamy - Part I

This is the first 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.

Monogamy is 'normal', begging the question of what it is we mean by 'normal' - for us, for society, for a particular society and so forth. 'Normal' means fitting a 'norm', a standard which occasions no comment, that just is as it is. A norm contains no absolute moral worth in itself since slavery was once normal and female genital mutilation is normal today in some societies. The question underlying the question is how something becomes 'normal' in society and whether it accords with our own natures ... or what would be normal to us if we were in command of the social and the social was not in command of us.

Monogamy presents an interesting test case in deciding whether what is normal is imposed or natural. An academic paper by Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, published in June 2008, triggered thoughts since it opens with a question about the normality or peculiarity of Greco-Roman monogamy which, in turn, is interesting to me because it is Greco-Roman monogamy that has set the standard for the Christian world which, in turn, has created many of the unthinking norms of our own culture.

By monogamy here, we mean a social rule that permits only one wife (we have to assume here male dominance whose normality is another question for another time) with no cohabitation with concubines - in other words, the association of an exclusive sexual relationship within a household. It is perhaps not a problem of sexuality (since it does not preclude extra-marital sex outside the home) so much as a problem of property (who has access to it as sexual or just household management partner). The Greco-Roman approach to property provides us with another set of norms that have underpinned Western culture, including capitalism, ever since.

Scheidel notes that genetic monogamy (mutually exclusive mating between two partners) is fairly rare in the animal kingdom and that social monogamy (mutually exclusive pair bonding which is not necessarily connected to reproduction) is common amongst birds but atypical amongst mammals of which we humans, of course, are a species. Humans appear to be unusual - even amongst primates in being monogamous (in effect, a partly social construction) and (he avers) "only mildly polygynous in "genetic" and "social" terms'".

The mildly appears to be an extrapolation from claims about sexual dimorphism and male-female variability in reproductive success which we can take as read. But the reading of that evidence suggests that mildly polygynous does not mean not polygynous and that might be read as either that most people are occasionally interested in two or more partners at the same time or some (a relatively few) males are always interested in two or more partners. This gives us a picture of a free 'natural' society in which most people lived in monogamous states but enabled people in monogamous states either to be temporarily non-monogamous or people to be fully polygamous. The rise of polyamory in itself within conditions of relative social freedom implies the reality of these possibilities although polyamorists still find themselves faced with enormous stigma and social barriers to contend with.

Scheidel's analysis of social conditions perhaps confirms that the polyamorous trend in a post-Christian free society fits with a situation where, historically, most bonding and mating arrangements are monogamous but where societies generally accept polygyny in both its generic and social forms. We might say that most humans most of the time (outside the West) are not rigid in having one system for all but provide flexibility in accordance with the underlying structure of human biological preference. 93% of societies have some form of socially accepted polygyny (polyandry is entirely another matter). Convenience, preference and resource limitations might tend most to monogamy but there is no barrier across the bulk of humanity to multiple relationships in principle, especially amongst elite groups and as 'concurrent concubinage'.

Now, the key element is '-gyny'. The vast bulk of historic social forms are related to multiple partners for males and not for females and may be read in two ways - either that, in general, men and women do not want multiple relationships and are more tolerant of sharing space with other women (which is interesting but unclear and which we may explore in the next posting) or that men simply are so dominant in most social situations that they can impose these social standards and that women are their 'victims' which is probably the 'normal' narrative of most women in the contemporary West. We can read the process of shifting from polygyny in all its forms (including concurrent concubinage) either as the progressive liberation of women from male oppression or as the progressive imposition and cultural enslavement of men to a feminised society. I suggest that both processes have operated in tandem.

The problem with the simple ideological interpretation that monogamy is a liberation of at least half humanity from the other half (or, less charitably, that it is one half's victory in a cultural power struggle over the other half) is that the current stage of human history is unusually free of socially imposed restrictions on sexual conduct. It has become very clear that there are as many women, possibly more, who want sexual relationships classed as polyamorous (that is, the freedom to love more than one person) as there are men. The conclusion may be that women are as mildly polyandrous as men are mildly polygamous and that it is probably true that most women are occasionally interested in two or more partners at some stage while some (a relatively few) females are always interested in two or more partners. In other words that, in a totally free society, and although there may be differences in approach to specific situations, there may be more similarity between men and women in this regard than social norms have permitted.

What we are suggesting here is that we should not entirely confuse polygyny with patriarchy. Nevertheless, what Scheidel does point out is the correlation of matriarchy with monogamy and patriarchy with polygyny. At first sight, this suggests that the link with patriarchy is to be seen in terms of female liberation and female exploitation but this may not be quite what it seems because we have to think about who are the mothers and who are the fathers who rule and how they relate to others of their gender. I would contend that gender here is of less importance than the fact of ruling - it is power that matters.

For example, the logic of the relationship between monogamy and matriarchy might be seen immediately in terms of the need for the mother-to-be to remove all competition from the household - the competition is not men but other women so that monogamy is not a strategy to contain or control men (though that is the net result) but a strategy to exclude other women. A dominant woman can demand in the right social circumstances the exclusion of all other women and the exile of the male's sexuality to the margins in return for exclusivity and stability. That offer, made at point A when emotional bonding is high, might be regreted at point B when the male has literally gone through a ritual that socially closes alll doors to his own future needs and desires - in effect, he has been deluded perhaps by his own hormones or social pressure into a form of quasi-enslavement to which he either reconciles himself or around which he is forced to skulk like a dog. In short, matriarchical monogamy is a power play as anti-liberatory as patriarchical polygyny because it structures social norms around the thrusting of other women to one side (into social nothingness as hidden mistresses, lovers, sex workers and so forth) in order that one woman be dominant in the household. Thus women may be said to oppress women through monogamy as much as (it could be argued) women control and contain (and so oppress) men.

To be fair, we should say, of course, that there are parallel oppressions in patriarchical polygyny but resource poverty means that most normal relationships in such societies remain monogamous - the woman, in such societies, might reasonably say that the man can have his concubine or second wife when he can afford it and not before and such a new entrant into a household would be in a pecking order and be expected to wash the dishes. Elite patriarchal polygyny, on the other hand, brings women into a wealthy household and so provides security but their dependence on the male is clear - the women are not truly free but no more, one supposes, than men who are answerable to other men (the condition of most men in most societies) or if a modern high status female decided to have a harem of poorer males in tow.

The latter type has been historically rare to the point of my knowing of no case beyond some notorious super-elite women such as Catherine the Great and a few Empresses but the point here is that the oppression is at all times one of relative power and wealth before it is one of sexual predation. The predation follows on from the disparities of wealth and power just as the casting couch mediates between the desperate desire of a beautiful young woman to be an actress and the hunger for power and sex of an inadequate pot-bellied aging man with capital. I have no doubt that a society of Amazons with high sexual appetites and great wealth in a resource poor society with too many men around who need to eat would soon develop forms of sexual organisation and household that reflected their power albeit one that would have to deal with the problem of pregnancy. We may live in such a society within our lifetimes.

Monogamy thus has its politics - it is both a means by which women contain and control men and out-compete other women and it is a means by which partnerships of bonded humans are formed to create children or security often under conditions of resource scarcity. As an ideology, it emerges from the first whereas, as a practice, it emerges from the second. It is why so often women engaged in the practice and not requiring to contain and control or out-compete can often reject those ideologies of matriarchalism (such as that of catholicism) and feminism that grow out of anxiety and ressentiment.

Polygyny or polyandry or community variants, conversely, are both a means by which men show their dominant status and control of resources and a means by which in a resource-rich culturally free society individuals meet their psychological and emotional needs. Clearly, the situation is complex but the critical element is competition for, control of and access to resources. We can see that a resource rich society (assuming cultural freedom) is always going to tend to have more polyandrous and polygynous forms without such forms ever being dominant - after all, polygyny and polyandry (like polyamory) are extremely emotionally and resource-demanding alternatives to monogamy. If you do not have spare capital, high revenues and more leisure time than average, monogamy is the easy option and polygynous or polyamorous instincts can be satisfied when it all gets too much by 'cheating' (playing the field and then going home when the game is over).

Scheidel, as a classicist, is particularly interested in Greco-Roman monogamy (as we are for different quasi-political reasons). He presents it as at the geographical faultline between the moderately patricentric Indo-European zone and the more patriarchal world of the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia. The point about the Greco-Roman model is that it did not permit the exceptions for rulers and elites permitted to the Eastern world. This is important because the constraint here on polygyny is not economic (see above) but a matter of norms - a norm has appeared that restricts others, interestingly the power elite more than anyone else but implicitly anyone else who might accumulate the resources to engage with it. And it is this that was inherited by the Christians as the model to be imposed on the West for the next two thousand years.

In this regard, Christianity cannot be blamed for the imposition, only for the brutal intensification of the system. Homeric heroes lived polygynous lives but monogamy was firmly established in Greek culture at the beginning of  the historic period and was presented as quintessentially Greek compared to barbarian culture. In this respect, Christianity followed Greek practice rather than the other way around: it may be useful to consider Christianity as a partially Hellenised heresy of Judaism. This Greek practice did not stop concubinage (and certainly did not stop slave exploitation or the hiring of sex workers) but it did draw the line at co-habitation. Rome too appeared to be monogamous from its early origins although it too may have seen concubines of which it culturally disapproved but in separate locations (like the French 'maitresse'). Slave relationships, which may not always have been obviously exploitative, existed and could result in issue which could be recognised by the fathers.

And we have not mentioned that the modern institution of serial monogamy is also very ancient. Roman divorce law enabling a succession of wives if that suited the man - so that the law provided a form of patriarchy in simply changing sexual relationships from being lateral in time (the harem) to being vertical with one woman after another. Christianity innovated, almost as a trades union for women and slaves, by making divorce harder and then impossible. Roman men, in effect, found the vertical approach rather easy to have stopped whereas unravelling a harem might have been a lot more difficult, certainly harder for Christians to legislate against. After all, protecting incumbent women conservatively in monogamy would then have been replaced with a strategy of 'firing' lots of women to benefit just one of them under polygamy. I do not believe it has been studied but perhaps Christanity found fertile ground in the West and had more difficulty travelling East because its power to create a mass female base was restricted by its inability to represent all women in principle under patriarchal harem systems whereas it could purport to represent all women under systems of serial monogamy and slave exploitation.

It is thus Christianity that strengthens monogamy to the degree that we now see it today but on this Greco-Roman base, with subsequent wars on barbarian polygamy, divorce and elite concubinage that became central to the Catholic Church's sexual politics (which has never been seen by feminists as particularly progressive in most respects). One might say that male power was systematically endorsed by the Church in return for its sexual containment. This is not the place for cod psycho-analytical theory but the levels of emotional and physical violence that became part of the description of masculinity in the West might or might not have something to do with this 'turn' - while it would be naive to believe that males did not have sexual outlets outside the household, the ideology of sexuality and the household itself became zones of male constraint and emotional silence.

Even today, the norm is that the household is so much 'owned' by the couple (which means, in fact, though not in ideology, by the woman) that it becomes unthinkable for a man to invite a female friend into the home without negotiation on the precise terms of entry.  How many women or men would freely enter a married British household without 'clearing' it first with the woman or man who co-habited ... at a certain point, both husband and wife lose all rights to the most innocent of friendships with the opposite sex under conditions where the household is territorialised as sacred space and yet there is no other space that is not public space or the friend's sacred space. And how many partners would be wary, without reason in most cases, of entering the private space of another person of the opposite gender in return. These codes are not rational but encoded from a particular truth ... the monogamous person has no private space unless they have an agreed space within a space which cannot be accessed except through the coupled space with its rules and taboos.

Jewry followed Christianity much as Christianity followed Hellenism. The West in the last 1,000 years (bar a few radical communitarian experiments and Mormonism) has been resolutely monogamous to this day. Even Mormonism recanted in 1890 and then again in 1904. Today's polyamorous tendency has not actually exhibited itself yet as a movement to change the law to permit consensual polygamy and the few Nordic attempts to recognise Muslim polygamy are really responses to the cultural war between Leftists trying to score points against nativists and populists amd have little to do with any seriously radical or well thought out response to what we are as persons. Monogamy is, in short, the 'norm' in the West (and now not only in the West) and remains the norm despite its lack of normality in history and other societies, the undoubted suffering caused to millions of people 'trapped' within its demands over centuries, the effective death of the Church as moral arbiter across much of the West and the fact that it has declined back into its serial Roman form but with women permitted the same rights as men and despite serial monogamy's often bad effects on children. Indeed, it is so normal that the homosexual community have yearned to enter into that state as civil partners or more.

We might say that monogamy, despite its unnatural (as exclusive) state and oppressions and its undoubted false consciousness, is one of the defining characteristics of the West which has been exported globally as part of the West's contribution to modernisation. Japan legislated against polygamy in 1880, Thailand in 1935, China in 1953 (under Communism which is a form of Western heresy and so ultimately a derivative of Hellenised Christianity), India (for Hindus) in 1955 and Nepal in 1963. That means billions of people shifted into monogamous mode in under 65 years. Whole populations have been 'modernised' into a particular gender relations practice by States with no religious intervention. Only Islam (with secularising exceptions) and Sub-Saharan Africa stand out and both are under immense pressure from modernisers and Christians alike. In the latter zone, something like 20-30% of men are in polygynous unions which might suggest the 'all things being equal' norm that might apply in relatively resource poor and non-free (meaning where women do not have the same choice) societies.

The obvious question is whether the West's new interest in polyamory under conditions where the State does not dictate personal morality and where there are relatively prosperous middle classes (albeit under economic pressure) will reverse this trend eventually. Indeed, it might be that resource pressures on equal young men and women (especially over the costs of a household) might actually encourage polygyny and polyandry. Given a figure for 'natural' polyamorists of around 15% of the population, one might anticipate the emergence of such households who will require legal recognition under conditions of serial polygamy/polyandry - that is, core stable units with partners entering and departing over time until a final stable unit, which may revert to monogamy, emerges over time. Legislating for such a development to cover property relations and child protection while not interfering in private choices may present a challenge for traditionalists and legislators as difficult as past struggles over abortion or gay rights and marriage.

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?