Fifty thousand years back
humanity made the wrong choice in the mode of production. From that day the
social, political, cultural and intellectual life process in general moved in
the wrong predatory direction. (Refer Marx’s remarks in the first part of the
essay) The evils that afflict the modern society can be traced to that
day. The society of gatherers was mainly
dependent on females collecting food material (80% of the food consumed by the
family) from nature. The society was
peaceful, contented and affluent. Anthropologist
Marshal Sahlin writes in his essay ‘The Original Affluent Society’:-“Bushmen
who live in the Kalahari Desert enjoy a thing of natural plenty in the realm of
every day useful things, apart from food and water … they had no sense of
possessions.” Patricio Draper (Prof. of Anthropology New Mexico, University)
writes in his essay in the Book ‘Toward an Anthropology of Woman’, “ The point to be developed at some length is
that in the hunting and gathering
context, women have a great deal of autonomy and influence. Some of the contexts in which the
evolutionarism is expressed will be described and certain features of the
foraging life which promotes egalitarianism will be expressed… A similar degree
of mobility for both sexes, the lack of rigidity in-sex-typing of many
activities including domestic chores and aspects of child socialization, the
cultural sanction against physical expression of aggression, the small
group size…”
Thus writes the
anthropologist Peter Gray, ‘During the twentieth century, anthropologists
discovered and studied dozens of different hunter gatherer societies, in
various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern
influences. Wherever they were found- in
Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles-these
societies had many characteristics in common.
The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children)
per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to
follow the available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in
neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these
societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with
warlike groups of people who were not hunter gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant
cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive
childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual
decision-making. Their core value, which
underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals’.
Again Peter Gray wrote, ‘If
just one anthropologist had reported all this, we might assume that he or she
was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren’t really there, or
was a liar. But many anthropologists, of
all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have
told the same general story. There are
some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures
are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are
the same. One anthropologist after
another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy,
indulgent treatment of children, cooperation and sharing in the hunter-gatherer
culture that he or she studied. When you
read about “warlike primitive tribes,”
or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures
with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band
hunter-gatherers’. (How hunter-gatherers
maintained their egalitarian ways.)
Human beings are what they
are because of their brains which is a product of the culture of the hunter-gatherer
society. Our brain development came to a stop when the hunter-gatherer society
was replaced by hunter society fifty thousand years ago. Scientists say that research shows that
within the last twenty thousand years we lost about 20 percent of our brain
cells.
In spite of the research done
by Robin Dunbar and his colleagues, exactly why we developed such large brains
is a disputed subject. To quote from the book ‘Evolution and human behaviour’ written
by John Cartwright, ‘The rapid growth of the human brain, which for about 1.5
million years remained at about 750 cm3 and then in the past 0.5
million years doubled to its present volume, has led some, such as Geoff Miller
(1996), to suggest that a runaway sexual selection process must have been at work’
(Chapter: The Evolution of Brain Size).
When John Cartwright wrote the words ‘disputed
subject’, the book FEMALE BRAIN had not been written and thinkers had not made
a deep study of the original Mahabharata known as JAYA containing one twelfth
the size of the present Mahabharata. Both the books give sufficient evidence to
prove that ‘sexual selection’ is the cause of human brain development. Dunbar’s research also indirectly points at
sexual selection because in forming big societies females play an important
role. Males generally prefer solitary living (Orang Outang, lions), harem
building (Gorilla) and forming groups with males only (Chimpanzee, the Greek
warriors who were generally homo-sexual).
Louann Brizendine, M.D. writes in the book THE FEMALE BRAIN, “This means that women
are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of
emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and a half times the brain space
devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and
aggression”. ‘……….Men also have larger processors in the core of the most
primitive area of the brain, which registers fear and triggers aggression- the
amygdale. This is why some men can go
from zero to a fistfight in a matter of seconds, while many women will try
anything to defuse conflict ’.
‘Women’s tendency to defuse
conflicts was responsible for stopping male’s fights for women’s sexual favour
7 million years ago. In the case of other great apes, this type of role was not
played by their women folk. About 3.6 million years ago, human species in the
phase of Australopithecus Afarenses only among the great apes had their teeth
changed in shape to less- intimidating ones because of their non-use in male
fights for the sexual favour of women folk. As male -fights played no role in women’s
sexual choice; men resorted to carrying presents of gathered fruits to women.
Thus bio-pedalism occurred in the human species (Lovejoy)’.
‘That our mental instincts
haven’t changed in millions of years may explain why women, worldwide, look for
the same ideal qualities in a long-term mate, according to the evolutionary
psychologist David buss. For over five
years, Buss studied the mate preferences of more than ten thousand individuals
in thirty-seven cultures around the world-from West Germans and Taiwanese to
Mbuti Pygmies and Aleut Eskimos. He
discovered that, in every culture, women are less concerned with a potential
husband’s visual appeal and more interested in his material resources and
social status…….. Nevertheless, he found that, in all thirty-seven cultures,
females value these qualities in a mate much more than males do, regardless of
the females own assets and earning capacity’.
In the Mahabharata, we come across
many episodes where women want progeny from carrying and sharing males
(Yogis). Sulabha, a famous intellectual, adept in Samkhya philosophy,
approached Janaka for sexual favours. Ganga
approached the family of the saint kings of Santanu
for marriage purpose. Madhabi shunned kings and approached Rishi Galab to be her life mate.
Madayanti,
the wife of the famous Veda -mentioned king Sudas,
established sexual relations with Rishi
Vasista with the consent of her husband. Rishi Dirghatama became the father of king Vali’s children Anga, Banga, Kalinga, Brahma and Sumha with Vali’s consent. There was no
sexual jealousy among the males in that society. R. S.
Sarma writes in his book ‘Rethinking
India’s past’ (Chapter- Rethinking the Past) that a sexually – free Aryan
society still exists in India in Ladakh
area. To quote him ‘A case of the presence of an Aryan tribe in Ladakh valley
in Kashmir has been reported in the Times of India in Patna on 11 March
2006’. It refers to an Aryan tribe living in three
villages in the valley and suggests that they practiced agriculture. They are presented as fair people with good
eyes and noses. Though their colour is
not mentioned they seem to be white-skinned. They practiced polyandry and
polygamy and kissed one another openly.
They are Buddhists by religion.
Under modern protests they gave up polyandry and open kissing’. The Nair
society in Kerala, till recently, was matricentric in character. Nair
women preferred to have children from Nambudri
Brahmins rather than from their Nair
warrior husbands.
The Hunter Gatherer period of
human history was the golden period of human development. It is better to call it ‘The Gatherer Period’ as man was not the
hunter but the hunted in that period. Predatory animals stopped hunting human beings
when the discovery of fire and the formation of big- band men –women mixed societies
of more than 100 individuals made human- hunting difficult for predatory
animals. Whatever meat was available in that period was not because of hunting
but scavenging. Fifty thousand years ago
when man improved the killer apparatus,
the hunter society came into being.
The Gatherers who were mainly from the women folk lost their importance. They started choosing hunters, who were
having high status in their societies, as their sex –mates.
When man had reached the
stage of Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) in the Pliocene era, the male -
female body dimorphism was 1.7: 1, but,
unlike Bonbons and Chimpanzees, the canine teeth of human- beings showed no
male - female dimorphism. This was
because of sexual selection. Initially
human society was not like Chimpanzee
society but Bonbo (Dwarf Chimpanzee) society, peaceful and women
–dominated. In Bonbo society, women
chose their sexual partners indiscriminately.
In the case of Human females, they chose their sexual partners amongst
those who did not fight each other. Till to day, it is not the females who are
responsible for our wars, but, our males.
The female brain has
tremendous unique aptitudes – outstanding verbal agility, the ability to
connect deeply in friendship, a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone
of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to DEFUSE CONFLICT.
(What makes us women?: THE FEMALE BRAIN by Louann Brizendine, M.D.? )
‘If you can read faces and
voices, you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, more
aggressive male is going to do. And
since you’re smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off
attacks from a ticked off caveman-or cavemen…...If you’re girl, you’ve been
programmed to make sure you keep social harmony’.
The Birth Of
The Female Brain: THE FEMALE BRAIN.
A Socialist society must be a Matricentric society. Matricentricism
is a word coined by the great thinker Erich Fromm. It is different from
matriarchy. Like Patriarchy, Matriarchy
leads to domination of the females in society.
In a matricentric society men and women enjoy equal power. Matricentricism works only at the cultural
level. All the members of society have love for
others. They give importance to the caring and sharing attitude. Thus
wrote Fritjof Capra in the book ‘Uncommon Wisdom’. ‘It seems that at the very basis of our
health problems lies a profound cultural imbalance, the overemphasis on yang, or masculine, values and
attitudes. I have found this cultural
imbalance to form a consistent background to all problems of individual,
social, and ecological health. Whenever
I explore a health problem in depth and try to get to the roots of things I find myself coming back to this imbalance
in our value system’.
(The Big Sur
Dialogues ).
In the past, there were two
societies which were totally matricentric.
One was that of Israel in the pre-Biblical age. The other was the society of pre-Vedic India.
In these societies, religion had no role. We have clear evidence regarding the
pre-Vedic Indian society. The Mahabharata in its earliest form JAYA contains a lot of information. Regarding
Matricentricism and the Israel society Murray Bookchin writes in his book. ‘The
Ecology of Freedom’: ‘The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy’. In any case, some ten thousand years ago, in
an area between the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean, nomadic bands of
hunter-gatherers began to develop a crude system of horticulture and settle
down in small villages, where they engaged in mixed farming………The development
of horticulture, or gardening, was probably initiated by women. Evidence for this belief comes from studies
of mythology and from existing preliterate communities based on a hoe-gardening
technology. In this remote period of
transition, when a sense of belonging to a relatively fixed social community increasingly replaced a nomadic outlook,
social life began to acquire entirely new unitary qualities that (to borrow a
term devised by Erich Fromm) can best be called matricentric. By using these terms, I do not wish to imply
that women exercised any form of institutional sovereignty over men or achieved
a commanding status in the management of society. I merely mean that the community, in
separating itself from a certain degree of dependence on game and migratory
animals, began to shift its social imagery from the male hunter to the female
food-gatherer, from the predator to the procreator, from the camp fire to the
domestic hearth, from cultural traits associated with the father to those
associated with the mother. The change in emphasis is primarily cultural,
“Certainly ‘home and mother’ are written over every phase of Neolithic
agriculture,” observes Lewis Mumford, “and not least over the new village
centers, at least identifiable in the foundations of houses and graves,” ……..Today,
one would want to replace some of Mumford’s words, such as his sweeping use of
“agriculture”, which men were to extend beyond woman’s discovery of gardening
into the mass production of food and animals.
We would want to confine “home and mother” to early phases of the
Neolithic rather than “every phase”. ……….
“……………If
anything, women’s stature in inscribing her sensibilities and her hands on the
beginning of human history has grown rather than diminished. It was she who, unlike any other living
creature, made the sharing of food a consistent communal activity and even a
hospitable one that embraced the stranger, hence fostering sharing as a
uniquely human desideratum. Birds and
mammals, to be sure, feed their young and exhibit extraordinary protectiveness
on their behalf. Among mammals, females
provide and produce of their bodies in the form of milk and warmth. But only woman was to make sharing a
universally social phenomenon to the point where her young-as siblings, then
male and female adults, and finally parents-became sharers irrespective of
their sex and age. It is she who turned
sharing into a hallowed communal imperative, not merely an episodic or marginal
feature”.
‘Finally,
we cannot ignore the fact that women’s foraging activities helped awaken in
humanity an innate sense of place, of oikos.
Her nurturing sensibility helped create
not only the origins of society but literally the roots of civilization-a
terrain the male has arrogantly claimed for himself. Here “stake in civilization” was different
from that of the predatory male: it was more domestic, more pacifying, and more
caring. Her sensibility ran deeper and
was laden with more hope than the male’s, for she embodied in her very physical
being mythology’s ancient message of a lost “golden age” and a fecund
nature. Yet ironically she has been with
us all the time with a special genius and mystery; one whose potentialities
have been brutally diminished but ever present as a voice of conscience in the
bloody cauldron that men have claimed for their “civilization.”…………. ‘In the
remains of early Neolithic villages, we often sense the existence of what was
once a clearly peaceful society, strewn with symbols of the fecundity of life
and the bounty of nature. Although there
is evidence of weapons, defensive palisades, and protective ditches, early
horticulturists seem to have emphasized peaceful arts and sedentary
pursuits. Judging from the building
sites and graves, there is little evidence, if any, that social inequality
existed within these communities or that warfare marked the relationships
between them’.
The
crucial role in human evolution was played by women’s choice of caring and
sharing males as sexual partners. That
this type of choice was prevalent in ancient India can be affirmed from the
numerous episodes in the Mahabharata. Probably
this type of society developed and continued in Israel also. That the most
intelligent men and women of the ancient
world lived in matricentric pre-Vedic India can be proved from the fact that
the elite of the Mohenjodaro – Harappa society were free from any conception of
God and any type of violence. There were no kings or priests in that society
(archeology and the Mahabharata).
World
history teaches us that war- loving societies have not produced good
philosophers, scientists or creative
artists. The two famous Greek cities
were Athens and Sparta. Sparta produced only great warriors. Today Israel is
one of the worst violent states in the world which has embraced aggressive
nationalism of the Hitlerian variety. A
little more than twenty percent of the Nobel laureates in science are Jews. Six million Jews live in America. Eight million Jews live in Israel. American Jew community produced one hundred
twenty six Nobel laureates in science.
Israel Jews can claim only six Nobel laureates in science as their own.
The military mentality of the Jews may have been partially responsible for this
phenomena. Intelligence is a hereditary product. We have
seen, in the case of the peacock’s tail, how sexual selection can exert
powerful force and bring about rapid change that flies in the face of natural
selection. The
credit for uncommon Jew intelligence goes fully to the Jew women folk of the
past matricentric Jew society. They preferred caring and sharing males as
sexual partners. This led to the extra
ordinary growth of intelligence in the Jew society.
Einstein
says in the essay ‘IS THERE A JEWISH
POINT OF VIEW? ‘How strongly
developed this sense of the sanctity of life is in the Jewish people is
admirably illustrated by a little remark which Walter Rathenau once made to me
in conversation: “When a Jew says that
he’s going hunting to amuse himself, he lies.”
The Jewish sense of the sanctity of life could not be more simply
expressed.’
In
India after the Aryans came, the people who built the Sindhu civilization left
their lands and got scattered in many parts of India. Most of the Dravidians
who constituted the Sindhu society went to the South. Later the elite of the
Sindhu civilization became the Brahmin community. The present Tamil Brahmin
society is steeped in superstitions. The caste system and untouchability (A
horrible custom) that plague the whole of India are present in virulent forms
in Tamil society also. Tamil Brahmins
constitute about 0.2 percent of the Indian population, yet they have produced the
three Nobel laureates of India. V. S.
Ramachandran, a great world -level neurologist, Ramanujan, a great genius in the field of Mathematics, Viswanath
Anand, a world champion in the field of chess in the past and many other
world-level scientists and
mathematicians are products of this community.
Next to Tamil Brahmins, the Bengalis also produced some world -level
figures in many fields. Extra -ordinary
persons like the Buddha and Gandhi are India’s great gifts to the world. The presence of extra- ordinary intelligence (both
social and general) in many communities in India is due to the legacy of the
past matricentric societies. Women of the pre-Vedic past, chose caring and
sharing males (Yogies) as their temporary or permanent sexual partners.
The
Sindhu civilization was an egalitarian one.
R. S. Vist, the archeologist who
excavated Dholabira asserted that there is enough evidence regarding the fully
egalitarian nature of Dholabira society. Socialists the world over should make
a deep study of this civilization which gave the highest place of honour to the
philosophers. Even in the Mouryan age, this system of highest status being
given to the philosopher in society continued (Megasthenes and Arthasastra). The
Greek philosophers dreamt of such a society run by philosopher -rulers but
produced a highly in- egalitarian society.
In
an essay of the news paper ‘Orissa Post (24.01.2012)’ named ‘Male Sex Drive,
the root of all evils’ it is written, ‘The
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford) claim that it is actually the male
warrior instinct which has helped men evolve to be aggressive to outsiders
(Philosophical trans-actions of Royal Society ‘B’)…….In contrast, women are
naturally equipped with a tend and befriend attitude, meaning they seek to
resolve conflicts peacefully in order to protect the children, according to the
researchers’.
In
his essay ‘Self as a Political Concept’ (Self-Images, Identity and Nationality):
Ashis Nandy writes ‘Among the hundreds of often non-cumulative studies which I
came across then were certain running themes.
I shall crudely summarize ……I found that a large number of these studies
mentioned that, as compared to the highly competent, the highly creative
showed, if they were men, qualities more associated in the American Society
with femininity……….’
How
important matricentric values are for the development of humanity can be gauzed
from the above two paragraphs.
(To be continued
in Evolutionary
(Science-Directed) Socialism: Part-III)
Bhagwat Prasad Rath,
3rd
Line, Roith Colony,
At/PO/Dist. –
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PIN- 765002,
Odisha.
Phone No.
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No.-08895860598
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