A History of Men and Women

The behaviour of most animals is motivated by the need to maximise the reproduction of their genes. This means competing for food in order to survive and mate. And it means competing for mating opportunities.

With we humans there is more going on than just these drives. We have ideals about the way life should be lived. We pursue a deeper understanding of our world than can be explained by mere utilitarian advantage.

How did we come to be different? How did we rise above the brute struggle for existence?

Here is a possible explanation, based very loosely on ideas I’ve taken from the work of an Australian biologist name Jeremy Griffith. I think his theories, in places, are seriously flawed, so I’ve adapted ideas from his work very freely.

At some point, some of our ape-like ancestors were living in the fertile Rift Valley of Africa. There was plenty of food and relatively few predators, thus allowing the women to nurture their offspring for a longer time. (The nurturing period of humans is longer than that of any other animal.) This made sense for purely selfish reasons. The offspring carried the mother’s genes, so in caring for them for an extended time she was simply improving the likelihood that they would live and be healthy and spread those genes further.

But the emerging minds of the children knew nothing about genes. They assumed that their mothers loved them because loving each other was the way to behave. They became love-indoctrinated.

And so we became a loving, integrative community. And, liberated from the need to struggle for existence, our intellect developed and we began to look around us and wonder about the world and wander around exploring it.

Inevitably we would have had encounters with predators. At some stage a leopard would have entered our tribe’s territory and eaten one of the babies, or something like that.

Love-indoctrination had taught us that the way to live was to love each other. We would have long forgotten what it was to be aggressive like the leopard. But now we would need to deal with this threat, and also, perhaps, come to some understanding of it. Why, if our society was a loving one (i.e. good), was there destructiveness (i.e. evil) in the rest of nature?

Since women give birth to children and have breasts to feed them milk, it made sense to establish a division of labour along gender lines. The men would go out and protect the group from the leopards, and the women would stay at home and tend to the kids.

But killing, even killing the leopards who would eat the babies, ran counter to our indoctrination in love. In fighting the leopards we would gradually become like what we fought. Love was not a big advantage on the hunt, and aggressiveness was. But deep down we must have felt we were doing something evil, because we were doing something that ran counter to the lesson of love we learned at our mother’s breast.

So we men gradually became more angry and ego-embattled. We knew we had to defend the group, but killing put us at war with ourselves. It made us feel insecure in our sense of our own goodness. We encountered for the first time what we would come to call “sin”.

And when we came back from the hunt, angry and ego-centric, the women couldn’t understand what was happening to us. They didn’t know what killing did to a person. They understood it was necessary, but they couldn’t understand why it would make someone angry and ego-centric. All they could do was to try to soothe away the anger with sex, which seemed to soothe the beast in the men. But women’s inability to understand, and our own inability to explain ourselves, meant that the problem could only continue to grow.

We grew angrier and angrier until we began to fight with other tribes of humans.

And also we began hunting for sport. We no longer hunted just the leopards, but also killed and ate the antelopes, etc., as well. (Our ape ancestors had been mainly vegetarian).

As we became more alienated from the loving integrativeness of our original state, we invented religion. What had simply been the fabric of our life, became something semi-alien to us which we worshipped. At first we worshipped the integrativeness we saw in nature. We worshipped trees and rivers. Sometimes when we felt very insecure about our “sinful” behaviour we worshipped angry expressions from nature, like volcanoes. We felt that nature was angrily condemning us and needed to be appeased. Then later we worshipped human-like gods. At first they were goddesses, as it was natural to identify the loving, integrative principle with the women who had nurtured us in our infancy.

But eventually there was the need to seperate ourselves off from nature in cities and to develop a civilised way of life. This meant coming to a compromise between the warlike masculine spirit and the loving, nurturing female spirit. Were the warlike spirit restrained too much it would have meant oppression for men, as it could only be expressed outwardly or turned inward. Turn it inward too much and men would crumple in depression and self-contempt. But if women were exposed too much to the anger of the men, then they would be oppressed by it, and unable to have the generosity of spirit necessary to nurture the young. Society had to become progressively more patriarchal. The spirit needed to remain alive, and this meant not repressing the warlike spirit as much as women would have done had they retained the power they had in the original matriarchal societies. But society also had to place restraints on the way men could express their anger and their warlike spirit. Women and children needed to be protected from it as much as possible. Eventually, the goddess became a masculine god, a representative of the order that men imposed over the chaos of nature and the feminine. Still a representative of integration, but now integration by force. Force and necessity, given the growing anger in men, and also the growing anger of the uncomprehending women.

The only way out of this horrendous situation was to maintain the fragile structure of society while seeking understanding of the world through science. When we could understand the nature of genes, we could explain what made us different from the other animals and we could at last see clearly what had happened to us.

We now have that knowledge and we no longer need to use aggression to protect ourselves from wild beasts. The warlike spirit has now become largely self-destructive. But we mustn’t turn it inwards against ourselves. This is what happens when we become depressed. And currently depression is a plague which is sweeping the world.

What is needed for the warlike spirit to abate is for its heroic role in the history of the human race to be finally fully appreciated. We went out to do battle with the evil we saw in nature and we became what we fought. We took the sins of the world upon ourselves and suffered self-corruption for the greater good of the human race, itself the pinnacle of nature’s achievements. We were immensely heroic. And so were women in living with us, loving us and soothing us with sex and other comforts, even as it drained the energy they also needed for nurturing the next generation. The human journey has been an immensely heroic one, and yet here we are at its end, the goal of a return to paradise - but now with the advantage of scientific knowledge - in our grasp, and yet we feel we are worthless beings, a blight on the planet.

There are many safe ways we can express what remains of our angry warlike spirit. We can channel it into sport or artistic expression. What we mustn’t do is to turn it on each other or on ourselves.

With the warlike spirit fully understood and men appreciated once more, we men and women can talk honestly to each other about what has been going on in our lives and in our minds. Women have often complained that the men in their lives “won’t let me in” or “won’t talk to me about their feelings”. But this is because we men couldn’t talk about some things for fear of being judged. We already felt low enough about ourselves, we didn’t need the response, “Oh, you men and your egos!” or “But why are you so angry?” It was so much easier to just keep quiet.

But I know what it is to live a life with the warlike spirit bottled up. I’ve lived a very peaceful life, not allowing myself to express the warlike spirit as most men do, either in sport or competing in the business world or in war. Which means that I’ve lived a life at times plagued by fears that I would kill babies, and rape and kill any woman I might get too close to emotionally. Those feelings have died down in my life as I’ve found understanding of myself, but they are a stark reminder that the warlike spirit can only go away through being expressed and/or appreciated. Repression isn’t a healthy option.