Becoming Human

Tag: sex

  • The end of the emotional plague

    In these confused times, I’m calling it.

    I think European culture has reached a point where touch, sex and intimacy are sufficiently unrepressed amongst the younger generation that either there is no more emotional plague or Reich’s model will prove to have been incomplete.

    Highly likely the latter, and we will need a Jung to Reich’s Freud.

    Libidinal repression is no longer a quantitative phenomenon. It is now a qualitative phenomenon.

    This opens fascinating new vistas, should we get to explore them.

  • The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects

    In this article, I suggest that the tendency on the part of men to endow female romantic partners with redemptive force, reflected in Jung’s notion of Anima, derives from a failure of socialization in puberty. Although culturally sanctioned, this misconstrues the potency of erotic relationships to reshape the psyche, substituting the confined ego project of redemption for the more open-ended one of spiritual emancipation; it also undermines erotic polarity and as such is largely self-defeating.
    (more…)

  • Telling The Truth

    [poet-badge]

     

    Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.

    I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.

    Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.

    It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.

    There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.

    It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.

    In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.

    There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.

    Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.

  • Monogamy and personal growth

    As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

    This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

    The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

    We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

    We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those  dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

    I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

    That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

    The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

    Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
    foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

    Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

    Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

    We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous.  We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

    Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

    The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

  • Mating in Captivity – A Review

    I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.

    I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.

    Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”

    Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.

    At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.

  • Cycles of sexual history

    I was just listening to an episode of Chris Ryan’s excellent podcast, Tangentially Speaking, in which he talks with Tony Perrottet, who is a historian and travel writer one of whose main themes is sexual practices in times past. By the way, let me in passing rave about the podcast. Ever since leaving Cambridge I have felt deprived of the kind of intelligent and wide-ranging conversation committed to understanding and to changing the world which characterizes undergraduate life there. The podcast is like a window on a lost world which one day I hope to rediscover…

    Anyway, in the discussion the theme comes up of whether the sexual mores of past civilizations were more liberated than our own and whether perhaps there is some cyclicality involved.  The most abrupt transition they discuss is that between a supposedly libertine 18th century and the Victorian 19th, epitomized by the difference in attitudes between the puritanical Charles Darwin and his paternal grandfather Erasmus, a social progressive and supposedly an avowed libertine (though this appears incidental to his biography).

    Is this a correct characterization and, if so, what forces are at work?

    I believe this characterization has the potential to be very misleading. The periods in question certainly were characterized by different attitudes to sex, which may have involved sex with more partners or in a wider range of styles, at least in certain strata of society, but leaping to qualify this as more liberated or less repressed is, I think, mistaken.

    These styles of sexuality, at least the 18th century aristocratic one which may in large part anyway be accessible to us only through the vehicle of myth, are in many ways reminiscent of things to be found in today’s swinging and BDSM communities. In my opinion, it is problematic to qualify sexuality in these communities as, on the whole, less repressed; to do so rests on a misconception of sexuality which Ryan’s account invites us to reconsider, since it is clear throughout the pages of Sex at Dawn that sexuality plays in human evolutionary biology a social role.

    What Sex at Dawn shows us is that this social role remains programmed into our biology and that, therefore, sex in forms which seem superficially to resemble the forms it took in the past are continually sought after. Ryan makes the point that many pornographic memes are likely to be remnants of this collective memory (many of course are not). However, reenacting orgies a la Eyes Wide Shut, where absolutely nothing other than lust drives the proceedings, may well, for a time, be liberating because one dimension of the social taboos on sexuality is momentarily lifted, but it is lifted at the cost of repressing the social dimension of sexuality to which monogamous institutions and their mythology give at least some expression. It is therefore hard to qualify one set of values and practices as more or less repressed than the other, though it is psychodynamically and therefore sociohistorically unsurprising that there may be an oscillation between the two.

    The French revolution vectored egalitarian notions which were opposed to the corruption and decadence of the Ancien Regime. The revolutionaries were scarcely prudes, but partook of a widespread indignation at a ruling class which dissipated its sexuality in debauchery and nonetheless repressed the peasantry with great violence (evidence, if ever it were needed, that they were not really sexually liberated, because truly sexually liberated people, like their bonobo cousins, are by default peaceful and loving). The fate of women in this society (whose willing participation, lest I should need to recall this, is required for gratifying heterosexual sex) was a particular concern. Any romanticism regarding a supposedly lost Eden seems to me deeply misplaced.

    When we look at classical antiquity we also need to be very careful. Greece and Rome were highly stratified, developed agrarian societies in which, by definition, sexuality no longer played the role it played in primitive societies but was taken up into the mesh of power and property relations upon which such societies were built. Bacchalian orgies were then no more than what they are now: a way to let off steam. The very need to let off steam is perfect evidence of the degree of repression from which natural sexuality suffered at that time.

    It seems to me that countless males around the planet are still trapped in this primary patriarchal perversion when they evaluate sexual practices and norms. They display a preference for patriarchal practices and are deaf and blind to the sexual voice of the feminine, which in its turn seeks exasperated refuge in romantic fantasy. In none of these supposedly “liberated” periods did women enjoy anything like an equal voice alongside men in determining the expression of sexuality.

    Men have still not ridden themselves of the idea that giving women such a voice would mean behaving in a way which was much less sexually gratifying. They seek to rebuild patriarchal sexual empires, in necessary opposition to an equally powerful social force pulling in the other direction. The primary social neurosis in all of this is the system of property and the violence which it does to our egalitarian tribal nature. In Ancient Greece that had been going on for thousands of years already; it is intrinsically unlikely we should look to such a society for clues as to how to live a more gratifying social life.

    I venture to suggest, therefore, that we really are going through a period of transformation which is qualitatively different from what has happened before. I am under no illusion that it will result in a utopia or that it is irreversible, but it is important to see that this phase of sexual history is different from what has gone before for one simple reason. In the past, elevation of the feminine has implied more “repressed” sexual practices and elevation of the masculine, sexual practices which were more “liberated”. But the patriarchy invented sexual repression, even if it dislikes some of its consequences. As it has lost the power to defend its erstwhile islands of “sexual freedom” (brothels, geishas and similar institutions, based on objectivization of women in a state more or less close to slavery), its manifesto has become increasingly opposed to its basic interests. As feminism has made inroads into this system, it starts to reach the point where it can reclaim the primal right from which women have been excluded: their right to an authentic feminine sexuality.

    This wave of deconstruction of sexual mores is therefore, using terms admittedly very grossly, led by women/the feminine and mistrusted by entitled males. In this lies the hope that it is really different from the past.

     

  • Smartphonitis

    I just read this article on WebMD which discusses the endemic compulsive use of smartphones in modern society, its possible reasons, consequences, and how to deal with it. Here is a summary sentence: “the smartphone, more than any other gadget, steals from us the opportunity to maintain our attention, to engage in contemplation and reflection, or even to be alone with our thoughts.”

    I believe this is true and it is a matter about which we should be concerned. Yet the question of why this compulsion arises is not satisfactorily answered in the article, though it gives a few clues. Therefore I would like to put forward an alternative explanation. (more…)

  • Somatic climatology

    In a previous post, I discussed John Sarno’s ideas on the psychological etiology of pain and other pathologies. In this context I would like to add some further hypotheses on how emotional repression affects the body and the felt sense.

    The repression of emotions from consciousness does not merely prevent their expression in the neocortex. Emotions are naturally linked to the much more ancient endocrine system, which affects the body by means of hormones produced in the glands and vectored through the bloodstream and ultimately the extracellular matrix. The nervous and endocrine systems are interdependent, with response coordinated by the hypothalamus in the brain. The repression of emotions is a process which affects both the nervous system and certain key endocrine functions related to the evolutionarily adaptive response to the emotion in question. However, the body’s natural response to these locked emotions is not altogether disabled – they continue to produce effects in parts of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems as well as in parts of the endocrine system. The key point to understand is therefore that repression from consciousness is not equivalent to complete somatic disactivation. Repression by the ego is an imperfect dam, around which the stored emotions must find routes in order to maintain homeostasis. Because these routes do not provide for a full discharge of the emotions, however, the body is under constant tension.

    We may consider that the primary emotional response is the alloplastic one – the one which is directed to changing the situation at the origin of the emotions being felt – and that it is this alloplastic response which is suppressed (if we are anything like our bonobo cousins, the repressed instinct may frequently be to have sex; this response does not change the external situation as such but rather its social expression, and could be termed mesoplastic or socioplastic). In its place, an autoplastic response is favored – the organism tries to change itself.

    The inappropriate and sustained nervous and endocrine response to repressed emotions is what gives rise to the pathologies discussed, and it is important to realize that this is not just a “trick of the mind” but rather that it takes place on a biochemical level which, while not fully autonomous, enjoys a degree of autonomy from the conscious functions which we tend to think of when we use the term “mind”. In reality, of course, it is our terminology and its intrinsic duality which is at fault, because the bodymind operates as an integrated system in which certain material may be withheld from consciousness, but the vast majority is unavailable to consciousness in the first place.

    The same objection has to be raised in respect of a focus on pathological syndromes only. In fact, the repressed response does not produce candidate pathologies only, but directly influences the biochemical environment of the body, proprioception, and our mental somatic map. It is not only pain, allergy or disturbed bowel function which may be provoked by emotional circumstances, but more generally also our level of somatic energy, our self-perception and our sense of wellness: aspects which we may think of as an innate part of our personality, but in reality are no more so than these other more obvious disturbances.

    This raises, from my perspective, the interesting question of how an undisturbed individual would experience the body and embodiment. If it was not immediately obvious to me that my pain had emotional causes, it was even less obvious that the same was true for my general sense of self, for my general sense of inhabiting the body I inhabit. If this experience can also be altered by an awareness of its etiology, then interesting times lie ahead.

    I wish all my readers a happy 2013!

  • Property, debt and the money supply

    I have just finished reading David Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5000 Years“. It is somewhat relevant to our topic here, and in any case it is interesting, so let me summarize it and give a brief review.

    In the first part of the book, Graeber, who is an anthropologist, takes to task the traditional notion of economics whereby cash was invented to reduce the transaction costs inherent in a system of barter. I am not sure how original his thesis is, but it is persuasive. In a nutshell, Graeber says that we know very well this is not true. In fact, the ability of cash to serve as a general means of engaging in daily economic transactions is no earlier than the 19th century and even postdates Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Apparently he knew this very well. Graeber says that Smith’s notion of the relationship between salaried worker and capitalist employer is not descriptive at all, but prescriptive, indeed utopian. In traditional societies, and Graeber quotes many examples, cash, when it exists, serves ceremonial, not transactional purposes. Rather, everyday transactions are carried out on credit.

    Credit may mean a number of things. It may simply be a general expectation of reciprocity over time, which indeed may not even presuppose a predisposition to think in terms of personal or kin benefit at all (as per E.O.Wilson’s theory of multilevel selection). I have argued elsewhere that the role of emotions and empathy, and more particularly of shame, is to be understood against this background. On the other hand, in more complex societies, especially against the backdrop of taxation, as well as the standardization of weights and measures, credit becomes a matter of accounting records and ultimately transferable bearer instruments. Credit in this case can be standardized in terms of a commodity unit of account, even if the commodity itself is not exchanged. Official tables of correspondance between one commodity and another can also be promulgated by state authorities. Graeber argues that this antedates coinage, and a fortiori the general use of coinage, by a considerable margin. Thus the story of money is the story of debt.

    This account occupies the first four chapters. As of chapter five, the book for me starts to come apart. In that chapter, Graeber attempts a moral philosophy of debt, but is clearly out of his depth in doing so. There are interesting elements in relation to slavery in chapters six and seven, but the point Graeber is trying to make is never clear. The rest of the book attempts a world history of money, and is disappointing. There is an omnipresent ideological underpinning to what Graeber says, and a disappointing lack of critical distance vis-a-vis the international financial economy. Regardless of its origins, one would have wanted an account which assessed its strengths and weaknesses in terms of serving the well-being of the human race today. Possibly even some thought-through proposals for change. Graeber is a long way from rising to this challenge; so much so that one is left wondering what the point in fact was of the analysis of slavery and of the moral nature of debt which he belabors.

    That the book was going to fail in any such enterprise was for me obvious already from the title. Why 5000 years? Graeber argues that everything started, or at least starting going wrong, with the first agrarian empires. It is not at all clear why the fact of empire (however it is defined) is relevant. Humankind has been organizing itself into agriculturally based communities for at least twice this period. Such communities enabled community size to exceed the tribal unit for which our brain seems preprogrammed (known as Dunbar’s number). Once this happened, hierarchy and specialization became possible, property become a key issue, and it was no longer possible to keep track of a network of implied reciprocal obligations. There is every reason to date the development of formal credit systems, guaranteed by a central authority, to this date, rather than arbitrarily to begin at the dawn of written records.

    Why does Graeber make what seems such an obvious mistake? In one sense, it is not of particular importance to his thesis. But there is, I think, a deeper reason. Graeber seeks to promulgate a romantic notion of the “human economy” in primitive societies (although he protests he does not). A “human economy” is an “economic system primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction and rearranging of human beings”. Logically, one supposes that “human economies” evolved, under the force of state formation (“empires”), into credit economies. Ignoring the fact that the purpose of the latter is hardly, per se, “the accumulation of wealth”, what type of society would be expected to be characterized by a “human economy”?

    Graeber does not answer this question, but the examples he gives concern both hunter-gatherer and sedentary populations. And therein lies the rub, for these are organized on fundamentally different principles, and their economic systems reflect this.

    Graeber says of this type of economy that “some are quite humane, others extraordinarily brutal”. Since, however, it is his own argument that the means of exchange relates directly to the exercise of violence, he should be more attentive to this distinction. In fact, what he misses is quite as basic as what Smith misses also. In the sedentary populations, property and intra-group violence have already arisen; and both credit and currency are used in a way which intrinsically recognizes and reinforces this, whatever their form and regardless of the keeping of written records. Graeber is blind to this because he accepts uncritically the monogamy myth, failing to see it as a primal form of violence, and this despite the rich variety in the sexual organization of the societies he mentions. He fails to see that monogamy is an outgrowth of property systems and not intrinsic to the human condition.

    This matters, because human economies, according to his own definition, are about “organizing” human beings. Later, this means slaves. Before this, it means women in reproductive age. It is because property rights are already asserted by men over women that “human economies” have anything to ceremonially exchange. Absent this feature, the notion has no sense or raison d’etre.

    Strangely enough, Graeber describes at length in his book rituals of exchange witnessed amongst Australian aborigines, whose social organization remained (or more probably returned to) one of hunter-gatherers. These economies therefore have a reasonable claim to incarnate principles which arose prior to “human economies”. And guess what: attitudes to sex are much more relaxed; indeed, sexual exchange plays a key part in the overall ritual of economic exchange between the tribal groups. In fact barter occurs in primitive societies only in an inter-group setting, and always within an overall context of socialization between the groups.

    Rather than an inspiration for an economic theory truer to mankind’s basic nature, the “human economy” therefore seems to me to mark the beginning of where things went wrong. It would be hugely naive to appeal to such a model as a solution for the world’s economic woes.

    Things certainly got for a long time worse before they started to get better. This, however, is no indictment of credit or currency as such. The behavioral assumptions of classical economics have been under attack for decades, and Graeber does contribute something. We are still lacking a better model. But the models of classical economies are perfectly good for most of the purposes to which they are put, and distinctly better than any guide to practical action which might emerge from Graeber’s views. We do not have to believe the myth of homo economicus, and we certainly do not have to accept the distribution of wealth and opportunity which history has bequeathed us. We can acknowledge the embedded violence in the economic system as it exists, and still use the science to improve the happiness of human beings – which is its foremost goal.

     

  • Better food, worse sex?

    I have just completed Jared Diamond’s at times fascinating account of how the economic geography of today’s world came into play. Predictably, the major culprit (or hero if you will)  is the same agricultural revolution which Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn blame for the human race’s unnatural fate of sexless monogamy, in turn both blamed by Reich for giving rise to endemic neurosis and feted by Freud as a precondition of civilization. This inevitably raises the question of whether it is actually possible for the human race to buck this secular trend and live a natural existence of any sort under by now fundamentally transformed social conditions.

    Mystics often float the idea that our species is engaged in a spiritual evolution. It is quite hard for me to buy into this notion. Evolution in any case is not a one-way street: organisms also get simpler to adapt to their environment, not only more complicated. Indeed, both Diamond and Ryan document instances of this happening in our own species. We tend to assume we in the West are smarter than hunter-gatherers, but it turns out that the opposite applies. Intelligence is much more predictive of the chances of passing on ones genes in primitive societies than it is in post-industrial ones, and in keeping with this, the average native of Papua New Guinea is more intelligent than the average Englishman. He also has a larger penis and significantly higher sperm count.

    It seems to me that we basically live in a state of alienation which we have some idea now how we got into, but no idea how to get out of. Not only is the Enlightenment myth of constant progress dead, but we perhaps have to get used to the idea that we have regressed instead. And even if we do believe that human societies are getting fairer, less violent and generally less neurotic, then clearly there has at least been a period, presumably until fairly recently, when the contrary was the case. Moreover, Freud’s Faustian bargain might even have been acceptable if it was only about sex. But if the cost of adapting to modern civilization is in fact a large loss of enjoyment in life and atrophy of both body and spirit, then might we not really be better off abandoning much of what we have built and starting over?

    I do not have an answer to this question other than to observe it is not an obvious or even well-defined option. The myth of the Golden Age is omnipresent in our collective memory and wildly opposing views on the quality of prehistoric life pitted philosophers in the iconoclastic, naturalist tradition of Rousseau and later Nietzsche against the likes of Burke, Hobbes and Voltaire. The so called “paleolithic diet” is a controversial attempt to restore an analogous nutritional environment to the one that existed in hunter-gatherer times, and the barefoot movement shares similar aims. But primitivism, it seems, whilst it can be a source of inspiration in trying to uncover some of the ways in which modern life does not serve our health and happiness, can hardly be an agenda.