>Understanding Human Ignorance< >>>>> Chapter Two >>>>> The Failure of Patriarchy

For most of the 200,000 years of human existence, human beings were hunter-gatherers, apparently living in rather egalitarian arrangements that featured a considerable amount of gender equity.  Conventionally, scholars of and speculators about prehistory have maintained that men did the hunting and women the gathering, but there very well have been much hunting and gathering performed by members of both genders.  Competition for sources of food and water logically would have induced violent encounters, although calm consideration may have led some clear thinkers to work out mutually agreeable sharing of resources.  In any case, the capacity for destruction was less, given rudimentary weapons and the lack of empires or nations for which to exalt and assert prerogatives.

Matters changed considerably with the appearance of civilizations, with all of their incivility.  First militarists and governmental leaders in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China;  then those from among the Hittites, Chaldeans, and Assyrians established armies and coveted territorial expanses.

 

Then, too, did the Greek city-states fight with each other and with the Persians;  and the Roman legions aggressively sought and largely obtained land rimming and ranging far inland from the Mediterranean and as far northward as the British Isles.  Thereafter came all manner of violent competition for territorial control engendered by the ambitions of Goths, Lombards, and Huns;  Pepin and Charlemagne;  allies of and agitators for the papacy, including those who claimed to rule a Holy Roman Empire;  and aristocratic holders of fiefs, including those with ambitions to be monarchs and those who would in France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, Scandinavia, and Russia realize that ambition.  As the impulse toward nationhood proceeded in Europe, governmental leaders of the Chinese dynasties;  the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman caliphs and sultans;  the leaders of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai in Africa;  the rulers of Mesoamerica and of Peru;  and Mauryan, Gupta, Mughal leaders in India asserted right to territory obtained through violence.  And through the passes of Central Asia stormed some of history’s most fearsome practitioners of violence:  Scythians, Mongols, Turks.

 

Violent territorial conquest and authoritarian rule were largely the endeavors of males.  Those queens and empresses who gained power managed to find a place in the patriarchal systems apparent throughout the globe.  When male physical prowess, by no means superior in many an individual circumstance but on average greater among the male of the species, was put to work in behalf of bureaucratic states, empires, and kingdoms, violence became a norm of life for humankind.  With a premium on physical strength and aggressive behavior, males asserted themselves and patriarchy became a defining feature of human existence.  The primacy of male military and political leadership abided throughout the short lifetime of humankind on the globe (remembering the billions of years that passed after the Big Bang and earth’s formation before the appearance of homo sapiens, civilization, empire, and nation) until women finally asserted their right to prerogatives formerly claimed by men in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

 

The crudeness of humanity throughout 60 centuries of putative civilizations was the work of males:

Patriarchy pervaded life among the Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and throughout the continents of Africa, North America, South America, Asia, and Europe.  Males in the main promulgated the tenets, told the tales, and conceived the ideas undergirding Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxies, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism;  among the major belief and ideational systems, only Daoism gave evidence to sensitivity toward women and conveyed antipathy toward qualities of violence and domination that had come to define patriarchy.  And in the Protestant Reformation, much went unreformed, including the patriarchal propensity toward violence and domination.

 

Not until 1968, to assert a date of focus for a remarkable transition, did the undermining of patriarchy begin.  Not until the juncture of history represented by this very year of 2019 going on 2020 are women gaining momentum as a social, cultural, and political force.

 

Understanding human ignorance saliently includes grasp of the harmful nature of patriarchal systems, so that even the promising cultural developments and religious quests that began in the context of patriarchy must be reinterpreted from a feminist perspective.

 

Men have led humankind poorly during the period of human infancy.

 

As humanity matures, women will lead the way.