Out of Our Minds
Page 14
Palaeolithic hunters, as we have seen, carved female figures, in which it is tempting to see representations of a primeval Earth Mother. But they could have been talismans, or accessories in birthing rituals, or fertility offerings, or dildos. Early agrarian societies, on the other hand, clearly honoured female deities; in many surviving cases, depictions of goddesses display remarkably consistent features.
In what can fairly be called one of the earliest excavated urban sites, Çatalhüyük in Anatolia, a truly magnificent female, with pregnant belly, pendulous breasts, and steatopygous hips, sits naked except for a fillet or diadem on a leopard throne. Her hands rest on great cats’ heads, while their tails curl around her shoulders. Similar images of a ‘mistress of animals’ survive from all over the Near East. At Tarxien in Malta, one of the world’s earliest stone temples housed a similar embodiment of divine motherhood, attended by smaller female figures nicknamed ‘sleeping beauties’ by archaeologists. Mesopotamian texts of the second millennium bce hailed a goddess as ‘the mother-womb, the creatrix of men’.58 Early thinkers do not seem to endorse Nietzsche’s notorious view that ‘woman was God’s second mistake’.59
A single universal cult seems inherently improbable; but the evidence of a widespread way of understanding and venerating womanhood is incontrovertible. Even in cultures that had no known connections with each other, the same stylized, big-hipped body (familiar in today’s art world to those who know the work of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero) appears in Native American and Australian aboriginal art. Goddess-archaeology has stimulated two influential but insecure theories: first, that men suppressed the goddess cult when they seized control of religion many thousands of years ago; second, that Christianity appropriated what survived of the goddess tradition and incorporated it in the cult of the Virgin.
However implausible those theories seem, men are likely to be responsible for the idea that women are inferior. It seems counterintuitive. Women can do almost everything men can do. Except at the margins, where there are men more physically powerful than any women, they can do it all, on average, equally well. For their role in reproducing the species most men are strictly superfluous. Women are literally more precious, because a society can dispense with most of its men and still reproduce: that is why men are more commonly used as fodder for war. It has always been easy to take or mistake women as sacred because of the way their bodies echo the rhythms of the heavens. In the earliest kind of sexual economic specialization that assigned men mainly to hunting, women mainly to gathering, women’s work was probably more productive in terms of calorific value per unit of energy expended. Yet the idea we now call sexism, which, in its extreme form, is the doctrine that women are inherently inferior, simply by virtue of being women, seems ineradicable in some minds. How did it start?
Three clues seem indicative: a shift to patrilineal from matrilineal descent systems (inheriting status from your father rather than mother); rapid rises in birth rates, which might tie women to child-rearing and eliminate them from competition for other roles; and art depicting them with servile status. Pouting, languid bronze dancing girls of the Indus valley of the second millennium bce are among the first. The one thing about female subordination on which everybody seems to agree is that men are responsible for it. A wife, says the Egyptian Book of Instructions, ‘is a profitable field. Do not contend with her at law and keep her from gaining control.’60 Eve and Pandora – both responsible, in their respective cultures, for all the ills of the world – are even more minatory: dallying with the devil in Eve’s case, dog-headed and dishonest in Pandora’s.61 Sexism is one thing, misogyny another; but the latter probably sprang from the former, or at least may share common origins.
The earliest evidence of the idea of marriage as a contract in which the state is a partner or enforcer also comes from the second millennium bce: an extremely detailed summary of what were evidently already long-standing traditions in the Code of Hammurabi. Marriage is defined as a relationship solemnized by written contract, dissolvable by either party in cases of infertility, desertion, and what nowadays we should call irretrievable breakdown. ‘If a woman so hates her husband’, the code enjoins, ‘that she says, “You may not have me”, the city council shall investigate … and if she is not at fault … she may take her dowry and return to her father’s house.’ Adultery by either sex is punishable by death.62 This does not mean, of course, that before then no one formalized sexual partnerships.
Considered from one point of view, marriage is not an idea but an evolutionary mechanism: a species like ours, which is heavily information-dependent, has to devote plenty of time to nurturing and instructing its young. Unlike most other primate females, women typically raise more than one infant at a time. We therefore need long-term alliances between parents who collaborate in propagating the species and transmitting accumulated knowledge to the next generation. The functions of child-rearing are shared in various ways from place to place and time to time; but the ‘nuclear family’ – the couple specialized in bringing up its own children – has existed since the time of Homo erectus. Sex lives do not need the involvement of anyone outside the couple normally concerned; and no amount of solemnity guarantees partnerships against breakdown. Perhaps, however, as a side effect of the idea of the state, or partly in response to the complementarity of male and female roles in agrarian societies, the professionals who wrote the earliest surviving law codes seem to have devised a new idea: of marriage as more than a private arrangement, demanding the enforceable commitment of the contracting individuals and, in some sense, the assent of society. Laws now addressed problems that unenforceable contracts might leave dangling: what happens, for instance, if sexual partners disagree about the status of their relationship or their mutual obligations, or if they renounce responsibility for their children, or if the relationship ends or changes when a third or subsequent partner is introduced or substituted?
Marriage is a surprisingly robust institution. In most societies the power to control it has been keenly contested – especially, in the modern West, between Church and state. But the rationale that underlies it is problematical, except for people with religious convictions, who could, if they so wished, solemnize their unions according to their beliefs without reference to the secular world. It is hard to see why the state should privilege some sexual unions over others. State involvement in marriage is maintained in the modern world more, perhaps, by the inertia of tradition than by any abiding usefulness.
The subordination of women, some feminists suppose, was a meta-principle that governed other thinking – a master idea that went on shaping the patriarchies in which most people lived. But in many times and places women have been complicit in their own formal subjection, preferring, like one of the rival heroines of G. B. Shaw’s feminist masterpiece, Major Barbara, to deploy informal power through their menfolk. Apron strings can dangle male puppets. Sexually differentiated roles suit societies in which children are a major resource, demanding a specialized, typically female labour force to breed them and nurture them. Nowadays, where children’s economic value is slight – where their labour is outlawed, for instance, or their minds or bodies are too immature for efficiency, or where, as in most of the West today, they cost parents vast sums in care and nurture and education – women are not called on to produce them in large numbers. As with inanimate commodities, the law of supply and demand kicks in; supply of children slackens with demand. Hence men can divert women into other kinds of production. The liberation of women for what was formerly men’s work in industrial and post-industrial society seems, in practice, to have suited men rather well and landed women with even more responsibility than previously. As women do more and work harder, men’s relative contribution to household and family falls, and their leisure and egoism increase. Feminism is still searching for a formula that is fair to women and genuinely makes the best of their talents.63
Fruits of Leisure: Moral Thinking
The leisure clas
s that thought up laws, defined the state, invented new notions of rulership, and assigned women and couples new roles and responsibilities obviously had time for less urgent speculations, such as we might classify as philosophical or religious. We can begin with three related notions, traceable to the second millennium bce, all of which situate individuals in speculation about the cosmos: the ideas of fate, of immortality, and of eternal reward and punishment.
Take fate first. Common experience suggests that some events at least are predetermined in the sense that they are bound to happen sometime. Though we may retain limited power to expedite or delay some of them, decay, death, the round of the seasons, and other recurring rhythms of life are genuinely inescapable. Problems arise, which cannot have escaped the attention of thinkers in any age: how are inevitable changes related to one another? Does a single cause ordain them? (Most cultures answer, ‘Yes’, and call it fate or some equivalent name.) Where does the power come from that makes action irreversible? What are its limits? Does it control everything, or are some possibilities open to human endeavour, or left to chance? Can we conquer destiny, or at least temporarily master it or induce it to suspend its operations?
Broadly speaking, human nature rebels against fate. We want to curb it or deny it altogether: otherwise, we have little incentive for the constructive undertakings that seem typically human. Experience, on the other hand, is discouraging.
Among the earliest evidence are myths of heroes’ struggles against fate. The Sumerian god Marduk, for instance, wrested from heaven the tablets on which history was inscribed in advance. The story is doubly interesting: it shows not only that fate, in the earliest known relevant myth, is the subject of a cosmic power struggle, but also that the power of fate is distinct from that of the gods. The same tension is a marked feature of ancient Greek myths, in which Zeus contends with the Fates, sometimes controlling them but more often submitting. In Egypt, early texts were buoyant with belief that destiny is manipulable but the conviction soon faded. In about the seventeenth century bce, Egyptians became pessimistic about individuals’ freedom to shape lives. ‘One thing is the word man says, another is what fate does.’ Or again: ‘Fate and fortune are carved on man with the stylus of the god.’ A Middle Kingdom maxim said, ‘Cast not thy heart in pursuit of riches, for there is no ignoring fate or fortune. Invest no emotion in worldly achievements, for every man’s hour must come.’64
The idea of fate cannot change the world on its own. But fatalism can, by deterring action. Claims that some cultures are more prone to fatalism than others often emerge in the course of efforts to explain different development rates. That ‘oriental fatalism’ retarded Muslim civilization was, for instance, a theme of what some scholars now call the Orientalist school of Western writings on Islam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The young Winston Churchill, who, in this respect, perfectly reflected the spirit of what he read on the subject as much as the evidence of what he observed, traced the ‘Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property’ he detected among Muslims to ‘fearful fatalistic apathy … wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.’65 Westerners’ revulsion from supposed oriental passivity seems to have been the result of a genuine misunderstanding of the Muslim concept of ‘the Decree of God’. This philosophical device exempts God, when he so wills, from constraint by the laws of science or logic. It does not mean that people forgo their divinely conferred gift of free will. Inshallah is no more to be taken literally in Islam than in Christendom, where no one treats seriously the habit of inserting the proverbial Deo volente into expressions of hope.66
Fatalism makes sense in a conception of time – probably false but widely espoused – in which every event is a cause and effect: an eternal braid makes everything, however transitory it seems, part of an everlasting pattern. This context helps to explain the popularity among ancient elites of a further idea: that of immortality. The Great Pyramid of Cheops, which exhibits it on a gigantic scale, is still the largest man-made structure and one of the most punctiliously planned. It contains about two million stones that weigh up to fifty tons each on a base so nearly perfectly square that the greatest error in the length of a side is less than 0.0001 inches. The pyramid’s orientation on a north–south axis varies by less than a tenth of one degree. It still makes an impression of spiritual strength or – on susceptible minds – of magical energy as it shimmers in the desert haze: a mountain in a plain; colossal masonry amid sands; precision tooling with nothing sharper than copper. In its day, smooth, gleaming limestone sheathed the whole edifice, under a shining peak, probably of gold, at the summit.
What made Cheops want a monument of such numbing proportions in so original a shape? Nowadays we tend to suppose that artistic freedom is essential for great art. For most of history the opposite has been true. In most societies monumental achievements need the outrageous power and monstrous egotism of tyrants or oppressive elites to spark effort and mobilize resources. An inscription on a capstone made for a later pharaoh sums up the pyramid’s purpose: ‘May the face of the king be opened so that he may see the Lord of Heaven when he crosses the sky! May he cause the king to shine as a god, lord of eternity and indestructible!’ Again, ‘O King Unis’, says a pyramid text of the twenty-fifth century bce, ‘thou hast not departed dead. Thou hast departed living.’67 A form of idealism inspired and shaped most monumental building in remote antiquity: a desire to mirror and reach a transcendent and perfect world.
To the builders of the pyramids, death was the most important thing in life: Herodotus reports that Egyptians displayed coffins at dinner parties to remind revellers of eternity. The reason why pharaohs’ tombs survive, while their palaces have perished, is that they built solidly for eternity, without wasting effort on flimsy dwellings for this transitory life. A pyramid hoisted its occupant heavenward, out of the imperfect, corruptible realm toward the unblemished, unchanging domain of the stars and the sun. No one who has seen a pyramid outlined in the westering light could fail to associate the sight with the words an immortalized pharaoh addressed to the sun: ‘I have laid down for myself this sunshine of yours as a stairway under my feet.’68
Like the pharaohs, devisers of early ideas about an afterlife generally seem to have assumed that it would be, in some ways at least, a prolongation of this life. But the assumption proved questionable. Early grave goods, as we have seen, included cherished possessions and useful kit: tools of stone and bone, gifts of ochre, and strings of bone beads. Gravediggers expected the next world to replicate this one. A new idea of the afterlife emerged at an uncertain date: another world, called into existence to redress the imbalances of ours. Ancient Egyptian sources exemplify the shift: most of the Egyptian elite seem to have changed their attitude to the afterlife in the late third millennium bce, between the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. Old Kingdom tombs are antechambers to a future for which this world is a practical training; for the dead of the Middle Kingdom the lives they led were moral, not practical, opportunities to prepare for the next life; their tombs were places of interrogation. On painted walls gods weigh the souls of the dead. Typically, jackal-headed Anubis, god of the underworld, supervises the scales: the deceased’s heart lies in one scale; in the other is a feather. Balance is impossible except for a heart unweighted with evil. In accounts of the trials of the dead in the courts of the gods, the examined soul typically abjures a long list of sins of sacrilege, sexual perversion, and the abuse of power against the weak. Then the good deeds appear: obedience to human laws and divine will and acts of mercy: offerings for the gods and the ghosts, bread for the hungry, clothing for the naked, ‘and a ferry for him who was marooned’.69 New life awaits successful examinees in the company of Osiris, the sometime ruler of the cosmos. For those who fail, the punishment is extinction. Similar notions, albeit less graphically expressed, appear in proverbs. ‘More acceptable’, as one of them says, ‘is the character of the man just o
f heart than the ox of the evildoer.’70
The idea of eternal reward and punishment is so appealing that it has cropped up independently in most major religions ever since. It is probably one of the ideas the Greeks got from the Egyptians, though they preferred to trace the teaching back to Orpheus – the legendary prophet whose sublime music gave him power over nature. The same idea provided ancient Hebrews with a convenient solution to the problem of how an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow injustice in this world: it would all come right in the end. Taoists in the same period – the first millennium bce – imagined an afterworld elaborately compartmentalized, according to the virtues and vices of the soul, between torture and reward. Today, tourists on the Yangtze River can gawk at the gory sculptures of Fengdu ‘Ghost City’ where the scenes of the torture of the dead – sawn, clubbed, dangled from meathooks, and plunged in boiling vats – now gratify rather than terrify. For early Buddhists and Hindus, too, present wrong could be redressed beyond this world. The most amazing result of the idea of divine justice is that it has had so little result. Materialists have often claimed that political elites thought it up as a means of social control: using the threat of otherworldly retribution to supplement the feeble power of the states, and deploying hope to induce social responsibility and fear to cow dissent. If that is how the idea started, it seems to have been an almost total failure.71