A good but flawed analysis of patriarchy, polygamy, and monogamy

Some patriarchal societies developed monogamy; others developed polygamy. Both types of patriarchy differ from primitive promiscuity, which incidentally seems to have been more popular in warmer climates.

These reservations aside, one can overlook some of the flaws of “The Garbage Generation,” a book about why patriarchy of some kind is necessary to civilization.
http://www.fisheaters.com/garbagegeneration.html

The Code of Hammurabi [continues Dr. Lerner] marks the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power. It reflects a class society in which women’s status depended on the male family head’s social status and property. The wife of an impoverished burgher could by a change of his status, without her volition or action, be turned from a respectable woman into a debt slave or a prostitute. On the other hand, a married woman’s sexual behavior, such as adultery or an unmarried woman’s loss of chastity, could declass her in a way in which no man could be declassed by his sexual activity.

Her status depended upon his status. Therefore she was motivated to make him achieve high status. And the success of the system in generating male overachievers who create wealth, social stability and progress–all beneficial to women–proves the arrangement to be desirable. Women would not have accepted it unless its benefits were greater than those offered by matriarchy. The wife of an impoverished burgher could have been de-classed by her husband’s behavior, but she chose to be his wife because through marriage her status and income were more likely to be raised than lowered. This is the way the patriarchal system works, and it benefits everyone. It gives men motivation, makes them productive and thus helps their wives and children. It puts sex to work as a motivator, focusing on long-term (family) arrangements rather than on short term sexuality–promiscuity, the first law of matriarchy. “Society asks so little of women,” says Betty Friedan. But that little must include the chastity and loyalty which makes patriarchal fatherhood and legitimate children possible.

It would be interesting to work out the differences with (e.g.) Chinese and Hindu royal polygamy. Possibly polygamy (limited to the very rich) is a survival from transitional times between matriarchy and patriarchy.

Marxist roots of Boas’ malfeasance

The Emotional Influence of Marxism on Franz Boas

1.Introduction

Franz Boas was a professional anthropologist who recruited, organized, and managed the efforts of many other scientists.

It is not controversial to state that Franz Boas was a Marxist, that Boas published untrue findings (e.g. his cranial plasticity work), that Boas led the group which perpetrated Mead’s fraud, and that Boas suppressed Turney-High’s book “Primitive Warfare.”

However, it is controversial to make allegations such as “Boas was consumed by hatred,” or “Boas was criminally insane,” or “Boas knew he was lying but did it anyway.”

It is possible, in principle, to establish a standard of ethical conduct and to do extensive research on past persons, such as Boas, to establish that their wrongdoing was (beyond a reasonable doubt) criminal. However, the present work only offers an introduction to Boas’ malfeasance, suitable to frame the theory that Boas’ Marxism was the key factor in his deceptions.

2. Cranial Plasticity

In the 12 November 2002 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited,” Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz wrote that Boas’ cranial plasticity claims were untrue. Their conclusion is as follows:

Finally, we address the issue of why Boas published such
seemingly erroneous conclusions. Although it might seem an
insurmountable task to dissect Boas’ motives or convictions for
pursuing such a study, we can examine Boas’ mindset as revealed
in his publications from the time period. Some 10 years before
the immigrant study, Boas was one of the most (if not the most)
statistical and quantitatively oriented anthropologists, as seen in
publications from the period predating the immigrant study
(41–44). In the final report presented to congress, Boas’ statistical
fluency tends to disappear, perhaps in the face of such a
large data set and the lack of proper statistical tests. For the
period in which this study was published, the results were
presented in a manner making the data look as convincing as
possible. We also must consider the attitude of Boas toward the
scientific racism of the day. Evidence of Boas’ disdain for the
often typological and racist ideas in anthropology have been
reviewed previously (45) and are evident also in his later
publications (46–48). Boas’ motives for the immigrant study
could have been entwined in his view that the racist and
typological nature of early anthropology should end, and his
argument for dramatic changes in head form would provide
evidence sufficient to cull the typological thinking. We make no
claim that Boas made deceptive or ill-contrived conclusions. In
Fig. 1 it is evident that there are differences between Americanand
European-born samples. What we do claim is that when his
data are subjected to a modern analysis, they do not support his
statements about environmental influence on cranial form.

Sparks and Jantz carefully avoid claiming that Boas knew the truth and intentionally lied, or that Boas was deranged with hatred, or that Boas was delusional due to criminal insanity. They do mention that Boas’ thinking was colored by “disdain.” They suggest that his conclusions are not supported by modern statistics, but that they were not ill-contrived at the time, thus leaving open the possibility that perhaps Boas was competent for his era, but that the data was mangled by his crude statistical methods — which was no fault, because he was using the best methods available at the time.

By means of his cranial plasticity finding, Boas claimed to have shown that race did not exist. I think the most probable explanation is that Boas felt that Marxism would be advanced if everyone believed that race did not exist, and Marxism was Boas’ only moral principle.

3. Mead’s fraudulent “Coming of Age in Samoa”

Margaret Mead was supported in her famous fraud, “Coming of Age in Somoa,” by Boas’ community of professional anthropologists. According to Derek Freeman, Boas advised Mead to resolve issues of nature versus nurture; unquestionably, Boas was in a position to mislead Mead, or to recruit Mead to knowingly mislead others. To prove that Boas had a direct role in designing the deception would require evidence beyond the scope of this article, but it would be very difficult to argue that the activities of Boas’ anthropology community did not constitute organized Marxist propaganda.

Mead was tactfully and privately challenged by Derek Freeman, who was promptly excluded by the professional anthropology community. This is a notable example of a Marxist community avowing dedication to truth but attempting to suppress truths believed to be potentially damaging to Marxism. Nonetheless, Freeman published his debunking of Mead,”Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth,” in 1983.

I think the most probable explanation of Mead’s fraud is that Boas’ Marxist group needed a propaganda attack on Western sexual ethics. If Mead had failed, I suspect Boas’ group would have continued to publish hoaxes until something worked.

4. Turney-High’s “Primitive Warfare”

Traditional Western wisdom has long held that humans have an inherent propensity for violence; traditional Western culture makes a virtue of this by teaching that humans 08have a duty to defend themselves. Boas professed that non-Western humans are not naturally violent, and that the history of Western violence was uniquely evil.

Harry Turney-High published Primitive Warfare in 1949, detailing the fact that all human groups have engaged in violence. Since this contradicted Boas’ claim that Westerners are more violent than normal humans, Boas and his community suppressed discussion of the book in academia.

I think the most probable explanation is that Boas wanted Westerners to despise their ancestors, to feel undeserved guilt, and to reject traditional morality. To this end, I think Boas was willing to suppress any unpleasant truths.

5. Boas’ One-Sided Pseudoscholarship

A scholar is expected to value truth more highly than personal feelings, and to weigh all relevant evidence. Boas pursued the opposite strategy. He ignored any disputes with opposing viewpoints, except when he cited rivals in order to insult them and to dismiss their ideas. However, he warmly promoted the work of anthropologists within his clique. While some amount of ego-fuelled ranting is common in academia, Boas’ discourse was remarkably slanted. Anyone inside the clique could do no wrong; anyone outside the clique could do nothing right.

I think the most probable explanation was that Boas felt that his Marxist agenda would be best advanced by suppressing competing points of view.

6. The Most Economical Explanation of Boas’ Deceptions

In 1843, Karl Marx began a wide-scale cultural war against traditional Western ethics and religion by writing the essay “On the Jewish Question.” If I had a skilled German translator, I might be able to illuminate some of the more obscure idioms and truly read Marx in context.

The essay presents some major ambiguities in translation. For example, Marx was ethnically Jewish, but raised to be Christian. In the context of Bauer, who wrote of Jews as having only relgious identity, Marx writes:

The critique of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. The summary, therefore, is as follows:

We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.

The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind,… the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation.
…

Bauer considers that the ideal, abstract nature of the Jew, his religion, is his entire nature. …

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. … What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

I can easily construct several mutually exclusive interpretations as to what Marx might have meant. When he wrote that “secular” Judaism was merely self-interest, was he leaving room to say that the old religion of the prophets was pure, but that modern Jews have gone astray? Did Marx regard himself as ethnically Jewish? When Marx refers to “the chimerical nationality of the Jew,” does he imply that there is no real Jewish ethnicity, or that Jews have a real ethnicity that is concealed by a mistaken idea? When he wrote “we must emancipate ourselves” he might mean “we as Jews must emancipate Jews from Christian repression,” or “we must emancipate secularized Jews” or he might mean, “we as humans must emancipate all humans from all religions.”

One line is clear. Marx desired to abolish traditional religion. He seems to portray himself as a latter-day Jewish prophet not unlike Isaiah or Jeremiah, castigating the Jews for their flaws but guiding them to amend their lives.

Some critics claim that Marx was illogical and incoherent; they might be right. However, Marx was clever enough to persuade himself of anything, and once Marx had persuaded himself, Marx was more than willing to persuade others. For decades, Marx’s thoughts inspired Westerners to attack their own civilization. Some attackers, such as Freud and Boas, used fraudulent science.

Marx’s war to abolish traditional religion continues today in the form of cultural Marxism. As far as I can tell, Boas’ untrue statements and biased pseudo-scholarship were entirely motivated by a Marxist hatred of Western civilization.

H.G. Wells and M. Sanger versus T. Kaczynski

Totalitarians are dangerous, but they are not as clever as their opponents fear them to be.

H.G. Wells wrote an introduction to Sanger’s Pivot of Civilization, including the passage:
“The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: “We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

H.G. Wells was clever, but not nearly as clever as he thought himself to be.

H.G. Wells did not fathom the tremendously contagious, self-sustaining, spontaneously spreading power of hatred. Humans can hate each other for any reason, or for no reason at all. Seemingly rational, progressive, civilized humans can suddenly generate full-blown hatreds of their fellow humans.

We might very well abolish nationalist governments in order to enjoy a Hobbesian war of All against All, rather than a utopian World Peace.

And even if World Peace were established — even if the frightening masculine culture of Patriarchy were to be abolished — even if we were all forced to be politically correct and vegan — a single super-empowered individual, with the ethics of Kaczynski and a DNA sequencer, could unleash a plague that would throw everything into confusion.

Via Fabius: the Mark Steyn saga of cultural Marxism

Fabius points out that Mark Steyn was just trying to tell the truth about radical Islam when the political correctness hammer went down upon his free speech rights.  If Steyn isn’t criticizing Islam correctly, what is the right way to criticize Islam?  Step One: Don’t live in Canada!

 You can read about it at:http://www.keithmartin.parl.gc.ca/detail.asp?lang=e&type=news&sid=2705 If this page looks as bad to you as it does to me, that’s because wordpress can’t seem to put in paragraph breaks.  It hurts me more than it does you.

   I’m still researching Steyn, but I suspect I’ll manage to find something unpleasant to say about all three parties — Steyn, the Islamists, and the Canadian government.  Festina lente, solvitur ambulando.   
Update 1: Here’s the first two unpleasant things about Steyn:
one) his website advertises a FAQ and Bio, but the links seem to vanish before I can click them.Google is your friend, and googling “mark Steyn” bio gets you what the menu should give you but doesn’t, namely:http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/67/121/ 
two) he writes about musicals, in an incredibly grating, obnoxious vein of twee postmodernism. He is not convicted as a malicious cultural Marxist … yet.  But there is little doubt that he is saturated with the Gramscian cultural rot. 

Devolution: A diverse United States is incapable of fielding a Jeffersonian militia

The culturally Marxist US cannot train an armed force without creating a authoritarian culture.  US police are inevitably authoritarian, even when they aren’t:sodomizing Abner Louima with toilet plungers,executing no-knock warrants with SWAT teams,shooting each other in a suburban street in Buford, Georgia, ortasering uppity college students.This article reviews Fabius’ critiques of Lind’s hopes for a revitalized USA and then kicks the critique up a notch.First we have the review:

Wishing for what we lack is not a tactical doctrine; or rather, it is a doomed one. Why not just ask for ten divisions of multi-lingual MP’s and be done with it?

Source:http://www.defense-and-society.org/fcs/fabius_iraq_series_2006_part_IV.htm

 The “strategic corporal” seems to me an especially unlikely concept.“Fourth Generation war demands not only the strategic corporal, but the moral corporal as well, enlisted Marines who think about every action they take in terms of its moral effects.” (FMFM 1-A page 8  )This seems implausible given the age, experience, and training of the average US Marine corporal, now or in any likely future. … All wargame scenarios have easy solutions if one can conjure up sufficient resources. FMFM 1-A aspires to a US Marine Corps with the training and attributes of our elite Special Ops units.With an army of such men we could pacify Iraq. Equally so, with the Battlestar Galactica or Starship Enterprise the Germans could have won WWII.

Source:http://www.defense-and-society.org/fcs/thoughts_on_fmfm_1-a.htm

Several recent articles on the DNI website describe programs to improve the training of UStroops, in the hope that we can win by fielding troops in which – to caricature it – each NCO andofficer has the skills of Green Beret….Wilcox wants to start language training in 3rd grade at American schools, so our expeditionaryforces in far-off lands can manipulate their media and play psy-ops….If only Wilcox would propose ways to reform our schools, so that our children learned to speakand read English. Next he could work on math and history. If successful, these reforms wouldhelp America far more than any conceivable military reforms….The development of SWAT teams throughout America offers a cautionary example. SWATteams are better trained than any likely militia. Yet the large number of lawsuits alleging (andoften proving) excessive force suggests severe limitations to the use of deadly force byGovernment agents, both in terms of financial liability and public tolerance….they might act as a centrifugal force,putting armed troops in the hands of those not loyal to the State. …Militia under tight central control gain in effectiveness but perhaps move us closer to a policestate….Worse, many years have passed since building patriotism was an important goal in mostAmerican schools, or a vital force in the overwhelming majority of American homes. Let’s notkid ourselves that patriotism arises autonomously, magically in every soldiers’ hearts…. Once a soldier kills for a dollar, unconnected to a national army, an invisiblebut real line has been crossed….Both the rise of mercenary units from our own armies and the creation of militia are large stepstoward the decline of the State…

Source:http://www.defense-and-society.org/fcs/pdf/fabius_maximus_militia-1.pdfNext we kick it up a notch:Despite all the macho enculturation and worship of the state, governments are horrible at figuring out which recruits can be trusted.  Consider a line-up of surprisingly normal-seeming white American males: Steven Kazmierczak, Charles Manson, Aldrich Ames, Jonathan Pollard, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, William Calley. All these guys looked normal enough when they walked down the street.  Most everybody trusted these guys, because civilization requires that its inhabitants trust each other simply because they’re in the same civilization.  When trust breaks down, the civilization is either devolving or dying.  I’m a big fan of ethnic diversity, but research like Putnam’s  Bowling Alone shows that ethnic diversity has crippled Americans’ ability to trust each other.  I tend to think the ethnic problems could be resolved if all Americans were more-or-less Christian — but of course “freedom of religion” has been pushed to outrageous extremes by the cultural Marxists.Jefferson wrote that all US citizens ought to be armed, that military skills ought to be a mandatory part of every college curriculum. This will not happen.  Cultural Marxism not only dominates the US, it has been dominating the US for decades, and even before the cultural Marxism kicked in, there was plenty of other corruption weakening Jeffersonian action.Soldiers who have seen better wars, such as Vietnam or Desert Storm, like to believe that the military is so miraculous that it can take disparate punks and forge them together into a team of upstanding citizens who respect diversity but operate as a unified whole.  That can happen sometimes.  The military alone does not produce the effect.  The military draws on a huge amount of economic capital and a huge amount of human capital in order to accomplish that feat.  Both economic and human capital are running low in 2008.And when the transformation of selfish punk into statist citizen goes awry, horrible failures ensue.  The quartet of cops who fired dozens of bullets into an unarmed old man are failures.  The baggage checker who loyally refuses to see anything stupid about arresting a six-month-old baby on terrorism charges is a failure.  The president who blurs the meaning of “terrorist” to justify a pre-existing plan for a war of choice is a failure.Fabius wrote militias present the dichotomy of centralized police state versus decentralized secessionist vigilantes.  In fact, it’s worse than he suspected.  Militarized police and authoritarian culture are not just masculine, macho, openly aggressive, and physically aggressive.  They are also feminine, passive-aggressive, propagandizing, and culturally Marxist.  They’ve got the macho SWAT teams on the male side, and the pill-pushing, head-shrinking more-tolerant-than-thou nanny-statists on the female side.  They can wear blue or pink, but either way they push for an endless expansion of state authority over a society with endlessly eroding freedoms.The problem is not just 4G war.  The problem is not just the decline of the Westphalian nation-state.  The problem is the devolution of our entire civilization.  The military side is just the hardest part to ignore, which is why it’s already getting attention from folks like Van Creveld, Lind, etc.  The slender ground for hope is that the military folks who want to solve the problem have social connections to veterans, civilians, church groups, etc.  The military reformers need to open up all the connections to their social networks and get a large number of people from all walks of life looking at the problems of devolution.  Your scarf-knitting grandmother cannot help you devise a strategy to defeat IEDs, but she might be able to coordinate a letter-writing campaign to stop big corporations from funding homosexual propaganda.  A flabby-assed librarian and his efforts to withhold patron lists from the FBI might be the spearhead of the long, anti-Gramscian march through the institutions that Lind heralded.The US is lucky to have folks like Lind and the late Hackworth acting as critics within the military establishment.  The “long march through the institutions” will require a lot of equally vociferous critics *outside* the military establishment.Sources for my understanding of Jefferson:

“I believe this… the strongest government on earth.  I believeit is the only one where every man, at the call of the laws,would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions ofthe public order as his own personal concern.”

–Thomas Jefferson: 1stInaugural Address, 1801.[Comment: Therefore, if Jefferson's principles are followed, all legal US residents ought to support the anti-illegal alien Minutemen.]

“We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, andmake military instruction a regular part of collegiate education.We can never be safe till this is done. –Thomas Jefferson toJames Monroe, 1813.”I think the truth must now be obvious that our people are toohappy at home to enter into regular service, and that we cannot bedefended but by making every citizen a soldier, as the Greeks andRomans who had no standing armies; and that in doing this allmust be marshaled, classed by their ages, and every serviceascribed to its competent class.

–Thomas Jefferson to John WaylesEppes, 1814.[Comment: evidently Jefferson did not foresee the fact that poor rural whites and the urban underclasses of color would be drawn to service, because they are deprived of property.  This is ironic, because he did foresee that they could be deprived of property.]

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks, and restored to the people.

–Thomas Jefferson.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

– Thomas Jefferson.

Comrades Zinn and Goff

Comrades Zinn and Goff

 

From Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States:

All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors,

 

That is bull.

 

Histories centered on the Founding Fathers teach Americans that every twenty years they ought to overthrow the government, in an individualistic-yet-communitarian effort.

Jason Quinlan : There Can Be No Free Speech in the Private Sector

The latest lesson from the Cultural Marxists is that it’s not enough for them to have unlimited attention for no-talent art, it’s not enough for them to have special privileges to ridicule without being ridiculed. They must also be exempt from any kind of requirement to explain themselves, and they should be reimbursed with ad revenue, at the minimum. So if you pull your advertising business and give them a chance to petition for a reversal of the decision, your offer of a petition is automatically worthless.

Asking a Cultural Marxist to explain if there is any reason why his ridicule of a religion should not be considered hate speech is simply taboo. Failing to give a Cultural Marxist your advertising business is tantamount to shutting down his website.