Society must be defended!

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

DavidTC: Your claim was that there is a *biological* basis for some sexual division of some labor.

A *biological* basis would mean it would be *the same* over time. That would mean there was some type of jobs that women kept gravitating to, and another type of jobs that men did. Throughout history.

The main “job” allocated to women on some biological basis would be the job of bearing children, rather often further associated with care of childbearing women up to and especially including childbirth; with nursing, feeding, and initially educating children; and with related “jobs” within the so-called “domestic arts.” My paleoanthropologist friend – who, incidentally, at the time was committed to a feminist interpretation of the facts, designating women or among primates females the principal role of passing on everything we think of as “culture” – likened the modern forms of this social as well as economic division as having descended in a more or less direct and unbroken lineage from savannah life typified by preservation of main gathering areas occupied by women and children, frequented only periodically by men (or mature males) who spent or were believed to spend most of the year roaming.

That in some societies or major civilizations this job or set of jobs is “unpaid labor,” or labor paid for by other means than monetary (“money” as we know it not being a universal characteristic of human social life), or more than a job but a lifelong identity passed on generation by generation, points to what I called the plasticity of the labor concept. (I’m setting aside the peculiar usage in English that uses the same word for the act of giving birth that it gives for paid employment, but it’s interesting in this context.)

To my mind “the lower classes at the start of the industrial revolution” do not constitute a “major civilization.” They represent a socio-economic group during a particular epoch of one major civilization.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

@davidtc

“Before that, everyone did everything, as far as anyone can tell.”

I hate to have to be the first person to inform you of this, but there are certain things that women can do that men can’t do, and vice versa, as almost everyone or every adult can tell. Furthermore, many of these certain things that either men, but not women, can do, or that women, but not men, can do, are things that men and women have taken very seriously in diverse or rather in all historical and so-called pre-historical settings. These things taken very seriously are not only “built in” biologically, they are the basis of human biology, the things without which there would be no human bios at all.

You seem to consider yourself a scientifically very well-informed individual. No doubt you are quite well-informed in your areas of study, probably far better informed than I am. You operate, however, according to certain presumptions, logical as well as terminological ones, that make discussion difficult. For instance, I have nowhere made any mention of genetically determined predispositions or of evolutionary psychology. To whatever extent notions of genetically effectuated evolutionary psychology are relevant, the fact that they are “contested” is un-illuminating. The question would be whether they bore upon the main argument in any useful way, contestably or not. As far as I can tell, genetics and evolutionary psychology are at most only indirectly relevant, if that, to the main question under discussion. Genetic and theoretical evolutionary-psychological changes might follow as effects, not causes, or possibly serve as evidence, not premises.

You also persist in relying on an inappropriate and insufficient narrow definition of “labor.” That at some point in the history of the species some very small social groups of human beings may in general, in theory, have required everyone to do almost everything would be irrelevant to the argument, and wouldn’t help to explain the “human universals” – their origins or their functions, concerning precisely those questions that the “almost” leaves out – as observed above. To declare that those human universals on the other side of “almost” are somehow unimportant or merely arbitrary is, aside from being absurd, to beg the question.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

@davidtc

That you do not understand why your point “a)” is begging the question is why this discussion is so difficult. This entire discussion or sidebar discussion is over the question as to whether some “structure” or “structuring principle” – inherent in biology as “life on Earth” – has survived (or must survive) “over the millennia” in some observably important way.

As for b and c: Genes and memory do not pass on the conditions for life on Earth. The conditions for and of life on Earth happen to allow for the passing on of human memories and of human genes within the evolving human genome, among other genomes.

If human beings and their genome as we know them were erased from the planet, but some successor species evolved, capable among other things of formulating good and bad ideas and discussing them sociably, it might develop many of the features we identify as human – including something resembling gender roles – without ever “remembering” anything about the vanished species, or receiving any direct inheritance from the human genome or from what might be identified as the uniquely human portion of it. The race of intelligent lemurs or sentient jellyfish might end up dividing, roughly, on average, in relation to biologically discreetly identifiable genders, into masculine super-lemurs and feminine super-lemurs – Mr. and Mrs. Super-Lemur to you – or into roaming aggressive status-seeking jellyfish and domestic cooperative baby-jellyfish-tending jellyfish without ever once having been touched by one of the vanished race of homo sapiens. It not only might develop in this way. It might necessarily develop in this way or approximately this way, according to a “gendered” “structure.”

To dismiss this speculation out of hand would be merely, once again, to beg the question in the way that you do when you simply assert that the “structure” (I presume you mean social structures relating to gender roles) has “provably” “changed.” The question isn’t whether the “structure” has changed at all. The question is whether it has changed, or can change, in such a profound way as to constitute a different structure fundamentally, and whether such changes are or would be, in relation to social life, exclusively internally driven – via relatively arbitrary choices – or are in any important sense, and necessarily, externally determined or co-determined or significantly conditioned and constrained, by biological (or ecosystemic) factors that are, at an even higher level of abstraction or wider circumscription, themselves biophysically or “naturally” determined or conditioned.

What makes this discussion somewhat comical is in that list of human universals: The individual observing that obviously that “structure” has survived, and does so apart from any noticeable effort on our part, or need for it, is in the position of trying to explain that the sky is usually blue, water is almost always wet, night is usually darker than day, and the seasons change, to someone who seems, for familiar reasons, to be determined to deny such old-fashioned notions.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

@davidtc Where in the above comment you’re not attributing arguments to me that I have not made, in order to ridicule them, or ignoring the arguments I have made, you’re busily conceding the major elements of the argument I have in fact made, and calling them contradictions – an interesting strategy! If we continue this discussion a bit longer, I expect you to be copying my comments in full and introducing them as your own, in order to embarrass me.

I like this one especially:

What is much more common, and what happened on the Savannah, is that elder *men* and women provide child case while everyone else did their job. (In fact, such a thing long predates us being humans, and is theorized as one of the reasons we live so long past reproductive age compared to other animals.) And everyone goes home to their family.

Once we subtract “elder *men* and women provid[-ing] child care,” who is left to make up “everyone else”?

What an interesting way of contradicting someone else’s argument, contradiction by forceful re-statement and re-presentation. I’d call it original, except that it’s based on duplication, so that might produce confusion.

Oh, wait, there is a major difference between us on this matter of definition: “Providing child care” doesn’t qualify as a “job” or “labor.” After all, as far as we know “elder *men* and women” weren’t punching timeclocks constructed out of twigs and rocks, at least none that survive, so what they were doing can’t be called “labor.” Maybe it was… a hobby!

But thanks for explaining to me that history does not apparently know of super-intelligent jellyfish organized according to mid-20th Century American family ideals. That really clears up some uncertainty on my part.

Thanks also for clearing up how division of labor according to sex has nothing do with sex, how a biological basis for some sexual division of some labor does not reflect a biological basis for some sexual division of some labor, and how a different perceived practical connection to childbearing and -rearing for women than for men, in general, is purely the product of sexism, with no possible necessary or rationally explicable and justifiable effect on the differentiation or roles in any society or social group, whether of primates, early humans, humans since the establishment of agriculture, humans in our own time, or sentient jellyfish.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

@davidtc
Your punctuation emphasized one of at least two possible readings of the phrase “elder men and women provided child care, the one in which the adjective “elder” modified the noun emphasized with asterisks – suggesting “women providing child care were joined by elder men” as opposed to “the elders, both male and female, joined in providing child care.”

I’m not sure where you get this particular sketch. Feel free to provide some references. From my reading even the leading voices favoring the revision of the old standard model agree that sexual division of labor (SDL) in human beings, as defined in the literature somewhat narrowly (for good reason, I’m not making this observation in order to attempt a criticism of their work), was effectively universal by the time of the Upper Paleolithic. There are competing theories about likely gender roles among anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals, with the crux of the discussion having less to do with some notion that that “what women did” and “what men did” was identical, but with the notion that classic hunter-gatherer arrangements (typical of the standard model) may not have been prevalent across different environments (and, if I’m not mistaken in my reading, may have been largely absent among Neanderthals).

This view would somewhat square with the view of my old friend and with the modern philosophers, who both treated gender roles as adaptation to environment, with scarcity or types of scarcity/abundance being the key variable – thus the former’s distinction between savannah and mountain apes, while the philosophers reached similar conclusions without reference, of course, to modern genetics or Darwinian theory. (“Evolutionary psychology” is utterly a red herring in this discussion.)

However, as I was saying, even the revisionists, in arguing that Middle Paleolithic or Mousterian social groups may have been more cooperative or less gender-segregated in broad terms than seems to have become the universal tendency later on, do not claim – in fact dismiss the claim – that men and women hunting together played the same roles. Adult males and females, they will suggest – see http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/kuhn-and-stiner-2006-whats-a-mother-to-do-the-division-of-labor-among-neandertals-and-modern-humans-in-eurasia.pdf – may have gone out together, but the actual roles they played in hunting large game were likely differentiated, in other words “an” SDL, but not the same as “the” classic SDL. Somewhat more provocatively, Kuhn and Stiner strongly suggest in the linked paper that the classic SDL may explain or be a major part of the explanation for the success of homo sapiens (or modern humans) and the extinction of Neanderthals (considered by some a subspecies of h.s., as you will be aware, but this question is irrelevant for us I think).

Now, we’re not in this comment thread or others in a position to carry on a precise or likely even very interesting discussion of these questions as archaeological or paleo-anthropological questions. The fact remains that the SDL is still generally acknowledged for all human societies known to human history, and its existence is still believed characteristic for human social groups as of “late pre-history.” As for how other, some, or earlier “pre-historic settlements worked” neither you nor I nor your favorite professors nor anyone else knows precisely how they worked. We possess theories of how they worked, but even leading proponents of the alternative hypotheses do not deny the existence of SDL in relation to selection advantages that do not admit of diminution, since they seem to explain why we’re here and not another species.

Finally, for purposes of a broader discussion of the question of the biological structuring or pre-conditioning of gender roles, the definition of SDL used by archaeologists or paleo-anthropologists, or even by primatologists, is not obligatory. How in particular paleolithic human beings arranged their affairs is potentially of interest, but does not and cannot exhaust the subject.

The original statement that I offered in response to Murali, and to which you took exception, was this:

It [the period covered by “never”] would include tens of thousands of years in which human beings existed in approximately their current physiological form, in societies or social groups nearly universally marked by strict sexual division of labor. This division was necessitated, it is thought, by numerous interconnected facts of life, observation of which remind us that we remain members of the “animal kingdom.”

I would amend that statement by adjusting the word “strict.” The SDL appears to be universal for “us” for tens of thousands of years. Its degree and generality of “strictness” varied enough over this period for the fact to be worthy of observation, if to no [edit!] clear effect on my thesis in relation to Murali’s moral philosophy.

The next statement was closer to the core of the the point I was arguing :

Though the necessity has ebbed or is perceived to have ebbed, the biological basis for some sexual division of some labor is still evident even for us, who sometimes act as though we are already living in an age of universal production and re-production of human beings from genetic mixing vats or some other even more biologically remote process.

Please note that “some sexual division of some labor” already pointedly diverges from “sexual division of labor” either as described by social and economic theorists since the 19th Century, or as used by those specifically studying hunter-gatherers or foragers in relation to their distinctive economic practices according to the available evidence.

The claim I made there is not, I believe, actually a very strong claim. Even you eventually concede it, while attempting to dismiss its possible importance out of hand – or in other words while begging the question, which is nothing other than of its significance. Understanding how it may be significant, in relation to moral or social and historical questions, is not something you will find in archaeology textbooks, nor in comment-thread coup-counting.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to DavidTC says:

@davidtc

I think we may be closing in on a clarification of differences that will at least allow us to cordon off the more disagreeably disagreeable areas of our disagreement, although, on the basis of my prior discussions with others wrong on the internet in relation to these issues, like Chris and Stillwater ferinstance, I’m not going to predict a new era of full mutual comprehension, appreciation, peaceful coexistence, and unprecedentedly rich symbolic exchange. Still, I am sure it would be interesting to me, I hope it might be useful for you, and I think it might even be useful and interesting to others.

However, I need to solve some site problems, and need to run an errand. If comments on this post shuts down, as it is likely to do soon, I would consider posting a new post on this subject or sub-topic, which I think touches on several subjects of broader interest. Since setting it up will take some work, I don’t want to bother if a) you’re not interested, and b) you’re not interested in playing at least as nice as you now are: avoiding distractingly personalized declamatory interjections and digressions, operating according to apparent presumption of mutual interest in advancing the inquiry for its own sake without prejudice as to its conclusions or implications – you know, the usual internet standards 😉

Also, you appear to have written another comment that was eaten up or disappeared somehow. I’m not sure how or why, but it’s in my email inbox, but not on the thread. Maybe you trashed it on your own? Or maybe the site trashed it… Do you want me retrieve it? Do you care if I quote it?Report