Archive for the ‘history’ Category
are monogamy and the nuclear family natural or conventional? Conundrums…
The human species is monogamous – isn’t it? Isn’t the bonding of a male and a female to produce a large or small brood the typical mode of human being? And yet our closest living relatives aren’t monogamous, and as to our more recent ancestors and their relatives – who knows?
A couple of years ago I read Joseph Henrich’s fascinating book The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous – a serious ethnographic work in spite of the title. So, ‘WEIRD’ stands for the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic regions of the world, so just think about whether your region fits the pattern. I have to admit, my region does, though the ‘particularly prosperous’ bit makes me feel like a bit of a failure.
But it’s the ‘psychologically peculiar’ stuff that most interests me. On page 156 of his book Henrich presents data from ‘the Ethnographic Atlas, an anthropological database of over 1200 societies (ethnolinguistic groups) that captures life prior to industrialisation.’ He doesn’t date ‘industrialisation’, but let’s say prior to the eighteenth century. He describes five kinship traits typical of WEIRD societies, and the degree to which these traits existed in earlier times.
- Bilateral descent – relatedness is traced (roughly) equally through both parents – 28%
- Little or no marriage to cousins or other relatives – 25%
- Monogamous marriage – people are permitted to have only one spouse at a time – 15%
- Nuclear families – domestic life is organised around married couples and their children – 8%
- Neolocal residence – newly married couples set up a separate household – 5%
It’s important to take these findings in, as we tend to consider current norms as more or less eternal. And it would be impossible for me to summarise Henrich’s analysis in his 500+ page book, but one factor that forcibly struck me was the impact of the Church (as the Catholic Church was known since its inception in the fourth century CE until the Reformation in the sixteenth century) in laying the foundations of Western European WEIRDness, and that of its colonies in the Americas and here in Australia. Here’s how Henrich puts it:
… between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intensive kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church – hereinafter the Western Church or just the Church. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs [aka friendships] rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations.
So, monogamous male-female relations and nuclear families were pushed by the Church quite relentlessly for centuries, and this has had a massive impact, which most people, including myself, have had little awareness of. Henrich and his team (I’m assuming he had a whole team working on this massive project) produced a summary of the changes that have occurred from the fourth century onwards, mostly at the behest of the Church. He calls it the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). I’m going to copy the whole thing out here, if only for my own sake, because it’s quite mind-bending, and some of the most fascinating historical material I’ve ever read: They are ‘prohibitions and declarations on marriage from the Church and secular rulers’, with the years given in bold:
305-6 – Synod of Elvira (Granada, Spain) decrees that any man who takes the sister of his dead wife as his new wife (sororate marriage) should abstain from Communion for five years. Those marrying their daughters-in-law should abstain from Communion until near death.
315 – Synod of Neocaesarea (Turkey) forbids marrying the wife of one’s brother (levirate marriage) and possible sororate marriage.
325 – Council of Nicaea (Turkey) prohibits marrying the sister of one’s dead wife as well as Jews, pagans and heretics.
339 – The Roman Emperor Constantius prohibits uncle-niece marriages, in accordance with Christian sentiments, and imposes the death penalty on violators.
384/7 – The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius reaffirms prohibitions against sororate and levirate marriages and bans first cousin marriage. In 409, the Western emperor Honorius softens the law by allowing dispensations. It is not clear how long this persisted in the West. The dissolving Western Empire makes continued enforcement unlikely.
396 – The Eastern Roman Emperor Arcadius (a Christian) again prohibits first cousin marriage, but without the harsh penalties. In 400 or 404, however, he changes his mind, making cousin marriage legal in the Eastern Empire.
506 – Synod of Agde (France, Visigoth Kingdom) prohibits first and second cousin marriage, and marriage to a brother’s widow, wife’s sister, stepmother, uncle’s widow, uncle’s daughter, or any kinswoman. These are defined as incest.
517 – Synod of Epaone (France or Switzerland, Burgundian Kingdom) decrees that unions with first and second cousins are incestuous and henceforth forbidden, although existing unions are not dissolved. The synod also forbids marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law, and aunts by marriage. Many subsequent synods in the area of what would become the Carolingian Empire refer to this synod for incest regulations.
527/31 – Second synod of Toledo (Spain) prescribes excommunication for all engaged in incestuous marriages. The number of years of excommunication should equal the number of years of the marriage. This is affirmed by synods in 535, 692 and 743.
538 – First documented letter between a Frankish king and the pope is about incest (marriage to the wife of a deceased brother). The pope disapproves, but he leaves decisions about Penance to the bishops.
589 – Reccared I, the Visigothic King (Spain), decrees the dissolution of incestuous marriages, punishing offenders with exile, and the transfer of their property to their children.
596 – The Frankish King Childebert II decrees the death penalty for marriage to one’s stepmother but leaves the punishment of other incest violations to the bishops. If the convicted resists the Church’s punishment, his property will be seized and redistributed to his relatives (creating incentives to report violators).
627 – Synod of Clichy implements the same punishment and enforcement procedures as those decreed by King Childebert II in 596. A systematic collection of incest legislation is compiled around this time and becomes part of the Collectio vetus Gallica, the collection of canons from Gaul.
643 – Lombard laws of Rothari forbid marriage to one’s stepmother, stepdaughter and sister-in-law.
*692 – At the synod of Trullo (Turkey), the Eastern Church finally forbids marriage to one’s first cousins and corresponding affinal kin. This prohibits a father and a son marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters, and two brothers marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters.
721 – Roman Synod (Italy) prohibits marriage to one’s brother’s wife, niece, grandchild, stepmother, stepdaughter, cousin, godmother, and all kinfolk, including anyone ever married to any blood relative. In 726, Pope Gregory II specifies that for missionary purposes the prohibitions are up to first cousins, but for others the prohibitions extend to all known relatives. His successor, Gregory III, clarifies this prohibition such that marriages of third cousins are allowed but marriages to all affinal kin with the prohibited degree are not. These decisions are widely disseminated.
*741 – Under the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the prohibitions in the Eastern Church are increased to include marriage of second cousins and, slightly later, second cousins once removed. The penalty for cousin marriage becomes whipping.
743 – Roman synod under Pope Zacharias orders Christians to refrain from marrying cousins, nieces, and other kinfolk. Such incest is punishable by excommunication and, if necessary, anathema [cursed by God].
755 – The Synod of Verneuil (France), convened under the Frankish King Pepin, commands that marriages be performed publicly.
756 – Synod of Verbier (France) prohibits the marriage of third cousins and closer and decrees existing marriages between second cousins are to be ended. Those married to third cousins need only do Penance.
757 – Synod of Compiegne (France) rules that existing marriages of second cousins or closer must be nullified. The Frankish King, Pepin, threatens secular punishments for any who disagree.
796 – Synod of Friuli (Italy) directs attention to prenuptual investigations into potentially incestuous marriages and prohibits clandestine unions. The synod prescribes a waiting time before marriage during which neighbours and elders can examine whether a blood relationship exists that would prohibit marriage. The decree also stipulates that although infidelity by the wife is a legitimate reason for divorce, remarriage is impossible as long as both spouses live. Charlemagne puts his secular authority behind these rulings in 802.
802 – Charlemagne’s capitulary insists that nobody should attempt to marry until the bishops and priests, together with the elders, have investigated the blood relations of the prospective spouses.
874 – Synod of Douci (France) urges subjects to refrain from marrying third cousins. To strengthen the ruling, the synod makes the children of incestuous unions ineligible for succession to an estate.
909 – Synod of Trosle (France) clarifies and affirms the Synod of Douci, deeming that children born in an incestuous marriage are ineligible to inherit property or titles.
948 – Synod of Ingelheim (Germany) prohibits marriage with all kin as far back as memory goes.
1003 – At the Synod of Deidenhofen (Germany), Emperor Heinrich II (St Henry the Exuberant) substantially widens the incest ban to include sixth cousins. He may have done this to weaken his political rivals.
1023 – Synod of Seligenstadt (Germany) likewise forbids cousin marriage to sixth cousins. Bishop Burchard of Worms’s Decretum also extends the definition of incestuous marriages to include sixth cousins.
1059 – At the Synod of Rome, Pope Nicholas II forbids marriage to sixth cousins or as far back as relatives can be traced. His successor, Pope Alexander II, likewise decrees that marriages to sixth cousins or closer relatives are forbidden. The Kingdom of Dalmatia gets a temporary dispensation, forbidding marriages only out to fourth cousins.
1063 – Synod of Rome forbids marriages up to sixth cousins.
1072 – Synod of Rouen (France) forbids non-Christian marriages and decrees a priestly inquiry into all those about to wed.
1075 – Synod of London (England) forbids marriages up to sixth cousins, including affinal kin.
1101 – In Ireland, the Synod of Cashel introduces the incest prohibitions of the Catholic Church.
1102 – Synod of London nullifies existing marriages between sixth cousins (and closer) and decrees that third parties who knew of marriages between relatives are implicated in the crime of incest.
1123 – The First Lateran Council (Italy) condemns unions between blood relatives (without specifying the relatedness) and declares that those who contracted an incestuous marriage will be deprived of hereditary rights.
1140 – Decretum of Gratian: marriages of up to sixth cousins are forbidden.
*1166 – Synod of Constantinople (Turkey) reinforces the earlier Eastern Church’s prohibitions on cousin marriages (second cousins once removed and closer), and tightens enforcement.
1176 – The Bishop of Paris, Odo, helps introduce ‘the bans of marriage’ – that is, the public notice of impending marriages in front of the congregation.
1200 – Synod of London requires publication of the ‘bans of marriage’, and decrees that marriages be conducted publicly. Kin marriages are forbidden, though the degree of kinship is not specified.
1215 – Fourth Lateran Council (Italy) reduces marriage prohibitions to third-degree cousins and all closer blood relatives and affines. All prior rulings are also formalised and integrated into a constitution of canons. This brings prenuptual investigations and marriage bans into a formal legislative and legal framework.
1917 – Pope Benedict XV loosens restrictions further, prohibiting only marriage to second cousins and all closer blood and affinal relatives.
1983 – Pope John Paul II further loosens incest restrictions, allowing second cousins and more distant relatives to marry.
All this is presented in just under four pages of Henrich’s book, and in the book’s Appendix a more expansive 6.5 page version is given. Of course it can never be known how strictly these provisions and restrictions were adhered to, but their very existence, and the many Synods devoted to them, testify to the ambition and power of the Church in Europe for over a thousand years. Its influence impacts upon our attitude to love, marriage and sexual relationships even today. Thankfully, bonobos were spared, obviously due to their complete non-existence in the Christian mind throughout this era. But for European humans these restrictions became more stringent, and more enforceable, as the power of the Church grew. It’s worth noting that the term ‘in-law’ comes from Church canon law. Your brother-in-law is like your brother – treat him nicely, but definitely no hanky-panky.
So, were the restrictions effectively policed? Actually, the Church had something of a business going in granting dispensations – for a price. It goes along with their granting of ‘indulgences’ of course. In the early days – the days of tribalism – enforcement must have been difficult, but over time the uniformity of religious belief strengthened the Church’s power. Henrich presents this fascinating case:
… though popes and bishops strategically picked their battles, these policies were sometimes imposed on kings, nobles and other aristocrats. In the 11th century, for example, when the Duke of Normandy married a distant cousin from Flanders, the pope promptly excommunicated them both. To get their excommunications lifted, or risk anathema, each constructed a beautiful abbey for the Church. The pope’s power is impressive here, since this duke was no delicate flower; he would later become William the Conqueror.
So, this was the Church’s Marriage and Family Programme (MFP) and it impacted heavily on kin terminology throughout Europe, an impact that slowly radiated outward from the Church’s main power bases (northern Scotland – where I was born – being one of the last cards to fall).
It’s worth reflecting on how accidental all this was. Had the Emperor Constantine not been converted to Christianity by his Greek mother, Helena (or so the story goes), or had the Emperor Julian, who was quite the intellectual, not been murdered while in the process of ditching the new religion and re-establishing the old gods only a generation or so after Constantine, the whole of European society, the whole of the current WEIRD world, might have turned out differently. Imagine no Catholic Church, no Dark Ages, and an intellectual flowering almost a thousand years before our 15th century ‘renaissance’. The Romans were no slouches in the field of scientific enquiry after all, though there had certainly been a decline since the days of Epicurus and Lucretius.
So the big unanswerable question here is just how European society would have been structured, on the family and kinship level, and in countless other ways, had Christianity not supervened in such a super-dramatic way. Only the Shadow knows…
And, frankly, I haven’t even begun to unravel the history of monogamy itself – why one person would couple with another to raise children. Our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, don’t raise children that way – yet they do raise children, quite successfully. Something to explore in future posts.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Random House 2003 [first published 1776-1789]
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution – a bit weird
my mother’s copy
I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and I don’t quite know why, or whether I ever really read it. It was a tedious activity because I mostly had only the vaguest idea of what she was on about, and at times it seemed deliberately obscure. The quotes from classical Greek and Roman, only sometimes translated – didn’t help, nor did the extreme maleness of the language and references – Olympe de Gouges’ headless corpse would be spinning in its grave, if she was ever given one. The book is flooded with male pronouns and references to male predecessors of, commentators on or participants in the two principal revolutions she discusses – the American and the French. Let’s see – Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, Adams, Jefferson, Saint-Juste, Robespierre, Paine, Tocqueville and Marx to name a few (I was excited to find her dropping the name Odysse Barrot at one point. The first woman?!! But no, no, looking her up she turned out to be a male). She did finally, toward the end of the last chapter, give an honourable mention to Rosa Luxemburg – too little too late for me.
The book has been criticised – rightly – for its elitism, which occasionally shone through the murk of its exasperating pedantry. Here’s an example, if I’m able to read her aright:
The most the citizen can hope for [in a two-party system] is to be ‘represented’, whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods – moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former – but no opinion.
On revolution, pp 268-9
The claim that opinions don’t exist outside of public debate is about as preposterous as you can get, and rarely does Arendt write plainly enough for me to detect the absurdity. She seems to be saying that individuals just don’t have the wherewithal to form opinions. And here was me – a bit of an isolated type – thinking I’d been spending much of my time doing just that! Which doesn’t make me particularly clever – even five-year-olds can do it.
So what is the take-away from Arendt’s book? She writes much about the success of the American revolution and the failure of the French, but I’d always thought of the US experience being first a war of independence, and then an attempt to work out a new governmental system which would unite and perhaps incorporate the various systems that the British and European settlers had devised in the century or more before that war. A federal system indeed. The problem with the French revolution, as Arendt certainly realised, but never really spells out in her book, was that there was no agreed-upon replacement plan for its monarchy and its ancien regime. The disagreements, and the power vacuum created by the monarchy’s sudden destruction, led to internecine strife at a level never seen before in Europe, with some believing that everything had to change, including the calendar (which was much easier to deal with than the impoverishment of the people – the true cause of the revolution in the first place). In the following few years, moderates like de Gouges, who proposed a constitutional monarchy, were done away with, leading to the Terror and the execution of Robespierre, and eventually the Napoleonic despotism.
So the French Revolution was a murky, muddled and devastating affair, one that certainly ‘ate its own children’, and I’m not sure that comparing it to the situation a few years earlier in what was to become the USA, where the politically seasoned and not-so-impoverished settlers managed to fight off a common enemy while adopting variants of that enemy’s constitution, is all that helpful.
But that wasn’t so much what irritated me about the book. What most annoyed me was its opacity, and its maleness. It was as if she was trying to be more male than male, in her ‘scholarliness’, her dryness, her emotional distance. It was really quite weird.
Reference
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution 1963
On Revolution: interesting topic, problematic treatment (pour moi)
Hannah Arendt, undeniably admirable, but quite difficult
Okay so I’m continuing with Hannah Arendt for the time being. In ‘The social question, chapter 2 of On Revolution, Arendt expatiates for a while on hypocrisy, a term I’m pretty sure I’ve never used in the 1000-plus pieces on this blog, or elsewhere. It might be that I’ve never understood what it means, or more likely I’ve never felt the need for the word.
According to Arendt, ‘Hypocrisy is the vice through which corruption becomes manifest’. I’m pretty sure I don’t know what this means, even after thinking about it for a moment, or an hour. I probably just use other language. I know for example that the Trump administration’s attempts to censure and ban liberal comedians and commentators, while ignoring or promoting conservative (or more precisely pro-Trump) media, and then using language about ‘public duty’ and ‘preventing harm’, are examples of hypocrisy. So, very well, I contradict myself, and so I’ll look at Arendt’s statement again, and ask, Is hypocrisy the only, or principal vice through which corruption becomes manifest?
Well, maybe it’s true, at least with a certain type of vice – and we must scrutinise the term ‘vice’, the other important term in the sentence. Come to think of it, that’s another term I can’t remember ever using. What is a vice? Smoking? To some maybe. Killing people? Maybe not if it’s a Hitler or Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler. Anyway, common usage tells me that gambling and ‘philandering’ are vices, but not invading other countries. Words can be evasive when you try to pin them down (and only then, funnily enough).
So I’v gotten into the third chapter of Arendt’s book and I’ve decided to give up – sorry Hannah, RIP. Much of this is in a foreign language to me, though the topics she focuses on – the French Revolution and how and why it went so pear-shaped, the American War of Independence (as I would definitely prefer to call it) and how it, unsurprisingly, leaned so much on British constitutional elements – as well as the writers she names and quotes – Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Hume and Locke – are all of interest, and make me want to return to these men, especially as explicated by historians or other specialists (preferably women) whose aim is to clarify and contextualise.
So it’s time to return to bonobos and sexuality, methinks.
Reference
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963
on civilisation, savages, clothing, sex and bonobos
I’m a great admirer of Charles Darwin. I’ve read On the Origin of Species three times now. I’ve read his Voyage of the Beagle, and a number of biographies – Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Janet Browne’s two-volume work, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, and Charles Darwin, the Power of Place, as well as Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle and David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Not that I’m showing off or anything…. I also have a copy of The Indelible Stamp – four volumes in one, the Voyage, the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression of the Emotions. I’m currently about a third of the way through The Descent of Man, but…
In spite of all that I know about this driven, timid, well-born, sensitive, fatherly, loyal, reclusive, internationally-connected, obsessive genius, his revolutionary impact on biological science, and the Victorian-era context of his life, I still find myself wincing at his regular use of the word ‘savage’ to refer to certain types of human, especially in The Descent. It is of course, a very much discarded term today, and I’m quite aware that I wouldn’t have winced had I been reading the book in the late 19th century.
So I’ve been thinking about what exactly made certain humans ‘savages’ in the minds of your typical Victorian gentleman. And to me, the primary feature of the ‘savage’ was clothing, or the lack thereof.
Think of clothing in upper-class Victorian society. Top hats, frock coats, or great-coats in winter, waistcoats and ties or cravats, stiff-collared shirts, high-waisted trousers, sometimes with suspenders, and of course a good solid pair of boots. Certainly their clothing had to be of a quality that distinguished them from their servants, of which Darwin had many over the years.
And then, I almost forgot, there also existed another, generally lower class of Victorian, known mostly as ladies, though courser terms were sometimes used. Their clothing was more layered and complex, involving corsets and crinolines, petticoats, bustles, bows, furbelows and lace trimmings, and finished off with jewellery of various kinds – necklaces, brooches, medallions and such, all of which required servants for dressing and maintenance. Surprisingly enough, these ladies and gentlemen sometimes produced children, which generally required something like an archaeological excavation on the part of the male. Then again, a more plausible explanation is that these children were carried to upper class couples by storks.
So, imagine how shocked some of these more adventurous, voyaging gentlemen would have been on encountering the inhabitants of darkest Africa, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand, and the many scattered islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, and finding that their inhabitants were almost as unclothed as – animals! Wild animals, even.
I haven’t done much voyaging and exploring outside of books. When I first learned of native Americans I pictured many feathers, in head-dresses and skirt-like garments, with muscular bodies naked apart from dots and dashes of paint, or woad or whatever. I also pictured – and saw on our TV screen – skilled horse-riders, bow-and-arrow sharp-shooters, strong and silent types, with cool, unsmiling expressions. They never seemed to have anything to smile about, to be sure.
It was also clear that these various peoples had their own languages, rituals, and skills, tools and inventions adapted to survival and thriving in an environment they’d become familiar with over thousands of years. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the Aboriginal people he encounters in Australia:
They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.
Of course Darwin couldn’t help but make comparisons with his own ‘civilisation’. Some could speak English and make astute observations, but they were a bit weak on housing and land cultivation. He presumably wasn’t aware that when the first fleet of convicts and guards tried to cultivate the land at Sidney Cove they were seriously unsuccessful, the soils being nowhere near as fertile as those in England, and totally unsuitable for English-style crops. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet, and a slow general understanding that they needed to adapt to vastly different environmental conditions, prevented catastrophic loss of life. Nor did he recognise that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Australia’s native population was an intelligent and hard-earned adaptation to local conditions over tens of thousands of years.
So, Darwin described these natives as ‘partly clothed’. What does this mean? The earliest photographic images were taken decades after the beginning of white settlement, but women were generally depicted bare-breasted, unlike the highly civilised women of today, and men’s genitalia were hidden under pouches tied with strings. Was this always the case, before civilised whities caught a glimpse? We’ll never know. It does seem that the taste for decoration, expressed largely in clothing by my culture, was also a part of native cultures, through face and body painting, especially for ceremonial occasions.
And with all this near-nakedness, what about sex? Well, it’d be way too time-consuming and effortful to look into the sex lives of all the peoples that Darwin and the Victorians would deem to be savages, so why not focus on the land that recently came to be known as Australia? Well, unsurprisingly, given the vastness of the continent, the huge variety of its landscapes and environments, the large number of language and cultural groups living in isolation from each other, the story is one of diversity and complexity – not a free-for-all, but not standard Victorian monogamy either.
It’s been claimed, and I think proven, by anthropologists and historians that Australia has been inhabited for some 50,000 years by these native peoples. What wouldn’t we give to travel back all those years to see what those early arrivals were up to. For that matter, what was human life like in the region of Kent 50,000 years ago? Presumably colder than down south, with very different megafauna to deal with. And the reason why things changed so much in the north, in Europe, especially in the last five to ten thousand years, is explained, at least partly, by books such as Who we are and how we got here, by David Reich, and The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Waves of interaction, often brutal, from the east, brought not only rape and pillage, but new weaponry and skills, technology and tactics – and whole new approaches to culture, with, in the last thousand years or more, eastern Confucian patriarchy and middle eastern Islamic patriarchy reinforcing western Catholic patriarchy, forces which women, at least in the last century or so, have just begun to fight off.
And so to bonobos, those fabulous but insufficiently appreciated close relatives of ours, unhampered by clothing or religion, unjudged by puritanical ideologies, unwed but far from unloved. Judged by human standards, bonobos are paedophiles, sluts, studs, poofs, lezzos, straights, queers, nymphos, ambisexuals and all the rest, yet the only threat to their community is humanity….
What more needs to be said?
References
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, The descent of man
the little life of just another reader
Reading and writing have been my mainstays, FWIW, and worth is the word, they seem to, or seek to, plug the many holes in my ego. Reading, of course takes me away to many places, and back to many times, that I can’t access physically. I’ve always been too poor to do much extensive travelling, and too timid to actually meet and converse with interesting people, so I converse, sort of, with books. Sometimes having terrible, exhausting arguments with them, other times brought to tears.
I limit myself to six books at a time, though usually one, or maybe two, grab my attention to the detriment of others, sort of. At the moment it’s the second volume of Janet Browne’s totalling gripping biography of Charles Darwin, The power of place. What a fascinating, admirable, complex character he is, how richly brought to life by Browne’s writings and researches. At the moment I’m reading of his new-found fascination with orchids and their pollination. It seems that he developed this interest partly to take his mind off the endless controversies surrounding his Origin of species, but, not surprisingly, he soon found that their pollination by particular insects supported what came to be known as co-evolution, a whole new field of evolutionary studies.
And yet, reading about this extraordinary and complex bloke (his Descent of Man is on my six-book list, somewhat neglected at the moment), who is still vilified today, and not just by creationists, I still get annoyed at all his upper-class advantages. Not his fault of course, but connections handed him his trip on the Beagle, his marriage to a member of the super-rich Wedgewood family, his university education at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and so forth. At least his life provides a good argument against libertarianism.
So the other four books on the six-book list are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (I have a policy of making at least one book a work of fiction) and Lost connections by Johann Hari – these two books I’m completely ignoring at present, for no good reason – and the other two books, which I’ve brought with me to my exile in the Adelaide Hills, Kingdom of fear by Hunter S Thompson (apparently the ‘S’ is necessary when referring to him) and Shattered lands by Sam Dalrymple.
I bought Shattered Lands the other day at Shakespeare’s Books here in Blackwood, because I couldn’t resist the bookshop’s name, and once inside, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t buy. I also assumed, correctly, that Sam was the son or close relative of William Dalrymple, a writer often recommended to me by a friend, but whom I’ve never read. So I was influenced but didn’t want to be too influenced. Another influence on the purchase was Anna Reid’s Borderland, so informative about a land exotic to me, Ukraine. Shattered Lands promised to tell stories about a world equally exotic, in time rather than place – the British Raj.
In speaking of this to my once-wife, Sarah, she looked up William Dalrymple, and I was shocked but not surprised. Get this, from Wikipedia:
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and “almost Edwardian”. Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
I, too, was born in Scotland. My father was an unskilled labourer, and sometime amateur boxer, the last of a number of male children to a Dundee shipwright – a reasonably classy occupation. That’s all I know of that side of the family, and I’ve never been much interested in tracing ancestry. My mother was a Stewart, and her father, a coal-miner, was Daniel Stewart, hence I’m named Stewart Daniel Henderson. The Stewarts came over the channel with William the Bastard in 1066. They were Stewards then, but changed ‘d’ to ‘t’ when given swathes of land in Scotland for helping William to slaughter the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Then, when one branch of the ever-branching Stewart family looked like becoming Kings of Scotland they changed their name to Stuart, further removing them from the Stench of Stewardship. And those Stuarts went on to…
To cut a long story short, with a bit of trimming and tweaking, I could’ve/should’ve/would’ve been the current monarch of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and life just isn’t fair.
So, where was I? Kingdom of fear is the first book by this author I’ve read, and likely the last. I suppose I chose it because the reading group I’m with have dealt with Ken Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest and Kerouac’s on the road, and I though I’d continue a bit with the hobo libertarian stuff of the USA, which is sometimes entertaining, and often food for thought for a non-libertarian such as myself. At least it’s more appealing than right-wing libertarianism, which really is the pits.
Thompson’s political views chime fairly well with my own, though he’s a bit long-winded about it all, and it of course is all set in the gun-toting US of A, which I’ve just about had enough of. At the same time it’s much more familiar to me than the Burmese-Indian and Hindu-Moslem clashes of the 1930s and beyond, which have me constantly referring to maps to locate Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Kanniyakumari and the like. And the Hindu caste system is surely one of humankind’s greatest grotesqueries.
So that’s all. I’m nowhere near the end of any of these books, but I’m generally enjoying where they take me, especially the Darwin stuff. The Indian stuff too, as my history reading has generally had a western bias, understandably enough.
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The power of place, 2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands, 2025
Hunter S Thompson, Kingdom of fear, 2003
Parisian salon society
Thanks, Lucinda!
I don’t know if I’m a Francophile, but my first experience of any foreign language was when my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me, started teaching me French from his high school textbook before lights out, when I was about ten. I went on to do French at high school for three years, topping the class each year, which wasn’t hard. I left school at fifteen, but eventually went to university in my thirtieth year, and completed a 3-year arts degree majoring in French, I’ve no idea why. I did about half of an honours year, then dropped out due to poverty, and a realisation that my French writing was pretty shite. And that, the way things were going, I’d never get to France.
Since then I’ve managed to spend some eight days wandering cluelessly around Paris, which was great fun. And of course I’ve read a lot of French literature, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and such serious stuff as Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir and Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, although my favourite French writer has long been Stendhal, who basically turned his back on France and all things French, preferring the more demonstrative Italians – interestingly, as he seems to have been the most sexually repressed of characters, though the most obviously feminist.
A shame, for Stendhal might have been brought out of his shell by the salon society that was coming to an end by his time – the post-Napoleonic era. I’m reading a lovely little book, True Pleasures: a memoir of women in Paris, by an Australian, Lucinda Holdforth, who brings to life the salonistes and salon-creators of that city, and their admirers, from Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th century, to Nancy Mitford and Gertrude Stein in the 20th. It rather painfully reminds me of my solitary wanderings on the Rive Gauche and through the Marais during that week in 2016, hoping to find something associated with my very dissociated French readings. Will I ever get back there? Not likely.
So now, towards the end of Holdforth’s book, I’m reading about Germaine de Staël and her contretemps with Napoleon. I knew of her, of course, mainly through my reading of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and my researches around that work, but I wasn’t quite aware of just how viciously Bonaparte had treated her. She wrote at least two novels, Delphine and Corrine, and various political and literary tracts, none of which I’ve paid the slightest attention to. In fact many of these female salon-holders were quite voluminous writers, and I’ve read none of them. I’ll try to make up for it, maybe after I’ve found out what’s going on with that possibly non-existent dark energy.
All of this makes me wonder about my take, as a man (of some kind), on female intellectualism and aesthetics through the ages, especially the last few centuries. When I was a teenager, still living in Elizabeth, I read some modern (at the time) feminist literature, including Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch, Eva Figues’ Patriarchal Attitudes and Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique (all of these were just books around the house, thanks to my mother and elder sister), but I can’t remember much about those readings, or whether I even finished any of them, except that I’m sure I patted myself heavily on the back for being so enlightened. Since those days I’ve come to realise just how difficult it is to get out from under the worldwide control of patriarchy, in spite of having encountered many powerful women in my life, for better and worse. And I’ve tried to imagine what a ‘world turned upside down’ would look like, hence my interest in bonobos, so vastly different from us, and yet so strangely inspiring. And my interest in women of intellect, trapped in a world which has deprived them of political power. At least in a direct sense, but they have exerted insidious influences. So here’s a potted account of some of those influential women – and I’m limiting myself to the French influencers, though not all were French by birth.
Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665): Born in Rome, daughter of a couple of nobles (the male being a marquis, whatever that is) and married at 12 to the future marquis de Rambouillet, with whom she had seven children. They lived in Paris but she was unimpressed with court life and by 1620 she had gathered a circle of intellectual/influential friends at Hôtel Pisani, later renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, the first recognised salon, in which ‘the fine art of conversation’ was overtly cultivated. The list of visitors and habitués is long, but some of those recognised by me are the tragedian Pierre Corneille, Madame de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Cleves, the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, letter-writer extraordinaire. So Madame de Rambouillet might be called, very simplistically, the inventor of the salon.
Ninon de L’Enclos (1620-1705): Paris born, and perhaps the most interesting of them all, as there’s no obvious sign of the aristocracy in her background, though her father was an established musician and composer who taught her to sing and play. The family was exiled from the city due her father’s duelling habits, and Ninon was forced into a convent when her mother died in 1642, but it didn’t last long, and ‘for the remainder of her life she was determined to remain unmarried and independent’. She returned to Paris, becoming a frequenter of salons, and a courtesan (lovely word), soon establishing her own ‘court’. She was a friend and patron of the young Molière. As you can see, she lived a long and fruitful life, and among her lovers was Louis II de Bourbon, aka Le Grand Condé (one of France’s greatest generals), and La Rochefoucauld of Maxims fame. Her associates included the young Saint-Simon, one of France’s most influential writers, and fascinatingly, ‘when she died she left money for the son of her notary, a nine-year-old named François-Marie Arouet, later to become known as Voltaire, so he could buy books’. But of course, being a known courtesan had its down sides, what with patriarchy and all. In 1656 she was imprisoned (in a convent) at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen consort (and mother of Louis XIV), but was soon rescued by another, rather more interesting queen, Christina of Sweden, who interceded on her behalf through the formidable Cardinal Mazarin. She was also a noted author, writing in particular about morality without religion, and was a friend to intellectuals such as Jean Racine, and powerful women such as Mme de Maintenon, second wife to Louis XIV. Immanuel Kant and Saint-Simon wrote approvingly of her (and Saint-Simon rarely wrote approvingly of anyone else), and – well, that’s enough.
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1696-1780): Convent-educated in Paris, and unhappily married for a time to another of those marquis blokes, generally known as Mme du Deffand, an intellectual and skeptic, close friend of Voltaire, she established an aristocratic salon in the 1730s which attracted Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Fontenelle and Mme de Staal-Delaunay as well as Voltaire. She had become completely blind by 1754, at which time she received help from Mlle de Lespinasse (see later entry) in organising the entertainment, but they fell out due to the latter’s wit and other attractions, apparently, so Mlle de Lespinasse established another salon which drew away many of the intellectuals. In her later years she established a close relationship with the British politician and indefatigable letter-writer Horace Walpole.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721 -64): Although not born into the aristocracy, and possibly ‘illegitimate’ (though she had many scandal-mongering enemies due to later becoming the mistress of Louis XV), Mme de Pompadour was renowned for her beauty, as well as her personal charm. From Wikipedia:
When she was married aged 20, she was already somewhat famous throughout the salons of Paris for her beauty, intelligence, and abundance of charm. Her husband, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, though initially displeased with their marriage arrangement, was said to have fallen in love with Mme Pompadour swiftly.
Let’s face it, it helps to be good-looking, even for a bloke. Her marriage produced two children, both of whom died young, sigh, but it also enabled her to attend salons, where she encountered Montesquieu, Duclos, Helvetius, Fontenelle and Voltaire, among others. Her reputation soon became known to the King, and so ended her marriage, and, presumably, her participation in salons. In latter years, her reputation as a generally civilising and humanising influence on the court has definitely increased. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-76): An ‘illegitimate’ child of wealthy types, it was, much later, discovered that Mme de Lespinasse was the daughter of Mme du Deffand’s brother. Unhappy and neglected in childhood, she received an indifferent convent education and was largely self-taught, comme moi. Her success in that endeavour has been attested to by the many intellectuals with whom she conversed. Mme du Deffand, acting as a patron of sorts, brought her to Paris, where she quickly gained such a reputation in her aunt’s salon that a dispute arose between the two, with Mme de Lespinasse emerging as the intellectuals’ favourite. She started her own salon, which became a meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie, particularly Diderot and D’Alembert. D’Alembert moved in with her, though the relationship was platonic, apparently (check that with Plato). As to her intellectual bonafides, they were later proven to the world by the publication of her letters in 1809, long after her early death, possibly from tuberculosis, but exacerbated by depression and opium dependence. These letters, largely about her relations with men, have been favourably compared, by Sainte-Beuve among others, with Heloise (the 12th century French philosopher and nun – and suggested reading for me), and later romantics such as Rousseau and L’Abbé Prevost. A sad ending, but at least she didn’t live to face the Reign of Terror…
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817): aka Germaine de Staël, who should be better known than her nemesis, wee nappy bonaparte. Mme de Staël was another saloniste who was an important writer in the romantic tradition, though today her critical and historical writings are more valued. Her mother, Suzanne Churchod, was also a saloniste and writer, and her father, Jacques Necker, was France’s controversial finance minister under Louis XVI. As aforementioned, I knew of her through Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but I wasn’t sufficiently aware of her prominence. Always a political moderate, she went into exile during the Reign of Terror (1792-4) and was later forced into exile by wee nappy. Her marriage, at 19, to a Baron Staël von Holstein, was apparently a matter of convenience, though they tolerated each other. No doubt due to the position of her father amid the political turbulence of 18th century France, Mme de Staël wrote reflections on political theory, while wisely avoiding direct political involvement. Nevertheless, as political division and violence mounted, she was forced to flee the city. She eventually reached England, where she was unimpressed by the general voicelessness of women. She returned to Switzerland in 1793, and published a defence of Marie Antoinette, who was on trial at the time. Like Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (and guillotined for her moderation), Mme de Staël was an advocate of constitutional monarchy. It was at this time that Benjamin Constant became her lover. She returned with him to Paris in 1795, where her salon gained fame and notoriety. The rise of wee nappy, however, with his more or less fake, self-boosting misogyny, spelt big trouble for both Constant and de Staël, and – well the rest is history, and I’ve gone on too long.
I’ve described only a few interesting women of the place and period – other salonistes worth exploring are Juliette Récamier, Mme de Choiseul, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet, to name a few. Vive les salons! Je veux en être un!
References
Lucinda Holdforth, True Pleasures: A memoir of women in Paris, 2004
Just about all the info on the above-mentioned women comes from their Wikipedia biographies.
Lies, lies, lies and democracy
what the….?
Imagine a political situation in which only women are allowed to vie for elected positions in government, whether local, state or federal. Further than that, only females over the age of eighteen are permitted to vote for these women. Certainly a delightful futuristic dream, IMHO. Surely the best form of democracy ever developed.
Some would say, however, that such a system is not democratic. And yet, I regularly read about the ancient Athenians as the ‘inventors of democracy’, and US political pundits and historians continually claim that the USA is the first modern democracy. These porkies are so unpalatable, I really should turn vegetarian.
So let’s face the facts (once again, for I’ve been here more than once before). In ancient Athens, only a small percentage of the male population had any say in the city-state’s government, as was also the case during the Roman republic, as Livy’s History of Rome relates.
The word demos means people, or the commonalty of a state. Let there be no mistake. And women are also people, if I’m not mistaken. It therefore follows, as night follows day, that no political system is democratic that does not permit women to be candidates for elected office, or to vote for candidates. Personally, though, I’d accept a political system that prohibits men from participating, as a very worthwhile experiment.
But let’s look at some facts. The USA held its first national election from December 1788 to January 1789. At the time, the new nation consisted of only 13 states, mostly hugging the Atlantic coast. I won’t get into the complex issue of state laws here, I’ll just focus on the federal scene. Only a small proportion of the adult male population was eligible to vote in 1788-9, and of course voting has never been mandatory in the US, so the number of votes counted amounted to a few tens of thousands out of a population of some three million (over half a million of whom were slaves).
But even without considering the missing female vote (which completely disqualifies the vote as democratic), the US claims about being the first modern democratic nation are complete bullshit. Modern democracy has proceeded in a series of baby steps, a step-wise widening of the franchise since Magna Carta in 1215, and did not become complete – if it ever really has – with the vote for women, native populations and ethnic minorities in the 20th century. Also, every vote must have an equal value – no gerrymandering, no ‘electoral colleges’ or any other processes which devalue the vote for some compared to others.
So, just on the women’s vote alone, leaving all the other vital issues aside, New Zealand was the first in 1893, but perversely, that nation didn’t allow women to become candidates until 1919. South Australia, where I live, was the first state anywhere in the world to give women the vote and the right to stand for election, in 1895. Australia changed its laws to allow women to vote and to stand for election in 1902, the first nation in the world to do so. However, not all women were included – indigenous women (and of course men) did not have that right until the 1960s. In fact the more we look at the history of women’s suffrage (and suffrage in general), the more complicated it becomes. The word ‘suffrage’ itself sounds odd, but etymologically it has nothing to do with suffering (never mind Olympe de Gouges). It goes back to Latin, suffragium, meaning something like a voting tablet but also the right to use it. Wikipedia is again magnificently comprehensive on the topic, letting us know that universal suffrage was experimented with in the Corsican Republic of 1755-69 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The French Jacobin constitution of 1793 sought to enact universal male suffrage (never mind Olympe de Gouges, encore) but it was scuttled in all the turbulence.
But let me return to the USA and its hollow claims. Women were given the vote there in 1920, two years after its neighbour, Canada. Voting rights for native Americans have been complexified by, for example, claims that they have their own ‘nations’ and governing systems, and by claims that their rights should be determined on a state-by-state basis, but the landmark federal legislation known as the 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to ‘prohibit racial discrimination in voting’, theoretically clearing the way for native and African Americans to vote. Of course, such racial discrimination has continued, as well as attempts, some successful, to water down the Act’s provisions, but generally it is regarded as the most successful piece of anti-discrimination legislation in US history. Even so, conservative states have constantly battled to restrict voting by minorities. So democracy in the USA has long been tenuous and incomplete, as it still is, with gerrymandering, suppression and the infamous electoral college.
Another bugbear I have with the good ole USA though, and I’ve written about it before, is their breast-beating about being the first modern democracy and their lies about gaining their freedom from ‘the British king’, as if poor sickly old George III was ruling the Old Dart and its colonies with an iron fist. In fact he was non compos mentis during the American Revolutionary War and in any case Britain was then governed by the Tory Party under Lord North, their Prime Minister, and had been a constitutional monarchy, with a Bill of Rights and a parliament, since 1689. Of course the franchise was minuscule, much like that at the ascension of George Washington a century later. Baby steps.
And then there is the lie at the very beginning of their revered Constitution. ‘We the People’ was patently dishonest – they should have written ‘We the Men’…
Democracy – a much abused term. And then came Trump…
References
https://academic.oup.com/book/6972/chapter-abstract/151255043?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm
Olympe de Gouges, The declaration of the rights of woman, 1791
the clothed and ‘sexually modest’ ape – cui bono?
good ole Christian propaganda
It is illegal, just about everywhere in the world, to walk down a street completely unclothed, above a certain, very young, age. It’s also considered shocking, alarming and generally disruptive to the well-being of society. This truth has fascinated me ever since I was old enough to think muchly about it. Even the religious must accept that their god created humans déshabillé, so why all the fuss? Well, there’s been much philosophical palaver about the Garden of Eden story, the shocking discovery of ‘Otherness’ and how it distracted our ancestors from benefitting from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and so forth, but from a more anthropological or palaeontological perspective, the question is, when did the purpose of clothing widen from providing protection and warmth to concepts of public decency? Not to mention style, fashion, class and all the rest.
So Wikipedia cites a 2010 study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, on the origin of habitual clothes-wearing:
That study indicates that the habitual wearing of clothing began at some point in time between 83,000 years ago and 170,000 years ago based upon a genetic analysis indicating when clothing lice diverged from their head louse ancestors.
That’s a useful time-frame, but it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an insight, based on genetics or anything else, about the why of habitual clothes-wearing – that’s to say the mindset of those ancestors. Clearly, need had a lot do with it initially. Even today there are indigenous peoples in tropical climates who go about their business completely naked for much of the time, but climates have varied considerably, both locally and globally, and one theory has it that a very cold period in Eurasia some 40,000 years ago likely wiped out our Neanderthal cousins. A good set of fleecy jackets and ugg boots might’ve seen them through.
It’s more or less taken for granted, though, that we wouldn’t have been so self-conscious about our nakedness when we were as hairy as our chimp and bonobo cousins. On that topic, here’s Wikipedia again:
The first member of the genus Homo to be hairless was Homo erectus, originating about 1.6 million years ago. The dissipation of body heat remains the most widely accepted evolutionary explanation for the loss of body hair in early members of the genus Homo, the surviving member of which is modern humans. Less hair, and an increase in sweat glands, made it easier for their bodies to cool when they moved from living in shady forest to open savanna. This change in environment also resulted in a change in diet, from largely vegetarian to hunting. Pursuing game on the savanna also increased the need for regulation of body heat
We might dispute the time-frame, but there’s surely no doubt that we’d lost a substantial proportion of body hair, over a substantial period of time, before we started getting coy about our jangly bits and crevasses. During that long period, we developed into anatomically, neurologically (and perhaps neurotically) modern humans, being increasingly obsessed not only with proto-clothing but various other forms of bodily adornment, scarification and the like.
Of course, as the human population grew and spread, it diversified culturally. Bodily adornment and dress became a cultural indentifier, as did the treatment of women. The veiling of women can be dated at least to the Assyrians some 3,500 years ago, though it was practised exclusively by the elites. Slave women would be severely punished for such practices. The point being made had to do with women’s ‘availability’, particularly in the matter of sex. Apparently, slave women should be accepted as sexually available as a matter of course, while a respectable woman belonged exclusively to her husband, along with his other wives. And just by the by, the ancient Athenians’ veiling and closeting of women, as well as their economic dependence on slavery, makes as much a mockery of their being touted as ‘the first democracy’ as does the slave-based colony later to be officially called the USA, as ‘the first modern democracy’.
But returning to clothing in general, it is likely that, at least in cooler climates, the change from hunter-gathering, nomadic lifestyles to a more settled agricultural existence in the Neolithic period led to clothing becoming the norm, for adults at least. Perhaps the persistence of hair around the genital region marked it out as special and inviolable. It’s notable that the early paintings and drawings of Australian Aborigines depicted them as naked but for leaf-decorated belts or strings, with attached hides conveniently covering their privates. This may have been whitefella modesty, but it also makes sense that they would have been useful for attaching dilly bags, small weaponry and other items. It also makes sense that the genital area would have been most in need of protection, and so marked out as special, and then sacred.
Religion, of course, has played a role in all this, especially in terms of female bodies, but this of course begs the question of why all the dominant traditional religions are so patriarchal, and so obsessed with controlling sexuality….
All of which makes me want to express my exasperation by paraphrasing Marx – the question isn’t so much to understand this weird sex-policing world we’ve created for ourselves, but to change it…
References
Jeanne Julie Eleanore de Lespinasse: an open heart, a closed book?
If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honour in it which have won you rights over my soul forever.
Julie de L’Espinasse, to the Comte de Guibert, 1773
Although I managed to spend a bit of time at a university in my thirties, I think I’m largely self-educated, being reluctant to follow any course set down for me, and allergic to too much discipline, and so I’m always fascinated to hear of historical characters of a similar type – Montaigne, Rousseau and Stendhal come to mind (not that I’m comparing my ‘achievements’ to theirs!), and it’s probably not coincidental that they’re all French, though I’ve no idea what this signifies.
So the other day, finishing Aldous Huxley’s strange, well-meaning but unconvincing utopian novel Island, I wondered at the passing mention of Mlle de Lespinasse, a woman I ‘knew’ from my recent rereading of Stendhal’s Love. So here’s a couple of key passages about her from Wikipedia:
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs.
Looked down on for her poverty and illegitimate birth, Mlle de Lespinasse had an unhappy childhood marked by neglect. She acquired a basic education at a convent, but she was largely self-educated, an impressive feat given that she was later able to hold her own among France’s top intellectuals.
This second passage in particular captured my heart, so to speak. I wouldn’t say that I was neglected, or impoverished, growing up, and the term ‘illegitimate’ seems quaint if not grotesque in today’s WEIRD world, but I identify with the thrill, and much of the isolation, of self-education. I feel I’ve spent much of my life talking to myself. As for salons, today’s equivalent, if there is any, would be the meet-ups I’ve occasionally been part of, for humanists, skeptics, ‘literature-lovers’ and the like. Somehow, though, they’ve never quite worked for me. I’m not one for ‘holding forth’, and am pretty easily overwhelmed by others.
But let me focus on Mlle de Lespinasse, a rather formal title, and a rather more tragic figure. She died at 43, probably of tuberculosis, exacerbated, it seems, by an impassioned and immiserated spirit, not to mention liberal quantities of opium. One might say that she died of a broken heart. When I was a kid and first heard the notion of a broken heart, I imagined it snapping like a biscuit, and then you fell down dead. But even then it wasn’t quite so silly, it was awe-inspiring in fact, that the heart could be so brittle, so damaged by a love unrequited or rejected. Now of course, I see this sinking, this despair, this death of a highly intelligent and admired woman, confidante of the likes of d’Alembert and Condorcet, as more of a ‘feminist’ issue. In Saint-Beuve’s introduction to her life and letters, he refers to her emotionality:
But of what use is it to become clear-sighted? Did a woman’s mind, great as it may be, ever check her heart? “The mind of most women serves to strengthen their folly rather than their reason!” La Rochefoucauld says that, and Mlle. de Lespinasse proves the truth of it.
Of course this is just another patronising, patriarchal comment, from a world that largely debarred women from being movers and shakers in any political, scientific and enterprising arenas. Partnership with and encouragement of the males who dominated those arenas was all that could be hoped for. It seems that Julie de Lespinasse, along with Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (aka Mme de Staël), her mother Suzanne Churchod (known at the time as Madame Necker), and other salonistes of their time, were all expected to play the purely nurturing role that has been woman’s lot since religio-cultural politics reduced women to vassalage, whenever that might have been – since the rise of agricultural society, at least. The notes to her published letters present a nice example of this nurturing:
In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe [to L’Académie française]. “M. de La Harpe”, says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, “was one of her nurslings; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them.”
So that would have been in 1776. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to L’Académie française, in 1980.
So I’m currently learning more of Julie de Lespinasse, as she was known, and I’m nervous about my experience of her being filtered through the notes to her letters by “
So I’ve read the first letter in the 1809 collection, addressed to the Comte de Guibert, one of the two men who most occupied her passionate and guilt-ridden thoughts, the other being the Marquis de Mora. Obviously these weren’t your Mellors the gardener types. Guibert was an ambitious army officer, later a General, and Mora was a tubercular semi-invalid. Both were quite a bit younger than Julie (I can’t help thinking of la nouvelle Héloïse), who was forty at the time of the first letter, in 1773. It’s a bit hard to make sense of this letter, being a bit in medias res – she writes a lot of ‘him’ – Mora? – and of ‘you’, and seems almost terrified of her own thoughts – what she thinks and what she should think, as one passion rises and the other falls. Here’s how the letter ends:
But tell me, is this the tone of friendship, the tone of confidence? What is it that is drawing me?Make me know myself; aid me to recover myself in a measure; my soul is convulsed; is it you, is it your departure, what is it that persecutes me? I can no more. At this moment I have confidence in you, even to abandonment, but perhaps I shall never speak to you again of my life. Adieu, I shall see you to-morrow; possibly I shall feel embarrassed by what I have now written to you. Would to heaven that you were my friend, or that I had never known you! Do you believe me? Will you be my friend? Think of it, once only; is that too much?
That is the question – is it too much? I try, and largely fail, to imagine receiving such a convoluted letter, from a person I admired but didn’t love, in the romantic sense. What would a bonobo do? No, that’s not a joke question – I mean of course, what would a ‘bonobo-ised’ human do? I think he would offer comfort, hugs and kisses, but not eternal, undivided devotion. That may not seem enough, but then a bonobo-ised Julie de Lespinasse wouldn’t be placing all her hopes in one individual – especially not a male.
So I may or may not continue reading these letters, and reflecting on what they reveal about human need and pain in an individual surrounded, it seems, by gifted admirers. Sad but uplifting too. It’s a privilege to ride along with someone who feels so much.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Éléonore_de_Lespinasse
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c005633001&seq=65
Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor fantasy
cushy torture – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…’
I don’t tend to read novels these days, but I’ve recently joined a book group of friends who meet to discuss a selected Work of Literary Importance, and currently it’s Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve actually read the book twice before, but as many have said, when you read the same book decades apart, it really isn’t the same book.
And of course when you’re reading a book in translation, and written over 150 years ago, can you trust what you’re reading? Is it better to read a modern translation or, in this case, one closer to Dostoyevsky’s time? Imagine, say, translating Shakespeare into Russian. Impossible, right? But surely it’s been done, and why not? I’ve no doubt there are highly intelligent bilinguists who’ve managed to render the freshness of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language into dazzlingly fresh 400-year-old Russian, though my brain hurts just thinking about it.
Anyway, I’m currently reading Karamazov online in the good old Constance Garnett 1916 translation (the original was first published in 1880), and when I get to part two I’ll switch to David Magarshack’s 1958 translation, which I have on my shelves. And personally I find that Garnett’s translation does a fine job of capturing Dostoyevsky’s sometimes over-the-top intensity and self-mocking humour. It really rollicks along, in a grotesque sort of way.
I’m definitely getting more out of this third reading than from previous ones (or maybe I’ve just forgotten…) and I certainly feel that Ivan Karamazov is the novel’s central and most interesting character and obviously closest to Dostoyevsky himself. This is brought home in the conversation with Alyosha – actually largely a monologue – that precedes his fantasy of the Grand Inquisitor, which I’ll focus on in detail – or maybe not.
Actually I found the Grand Inquisitor story, which has of course become famous, something of an anti-climax, and a source of irritation, probably because my anti-Catholicism has hardened over the years. I was more impressed and moved by Ivan’s distress at the everyday injustices of Russian life, especially the treatment of children. In his rambling but passionate monologue on injustice and cruelty with precedes the Grand Inquisitor fable he comes closer to modern thinking – it seems to me – than in all the god talk that follows. Take this, for example:
Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea.
Living in the centre of a city, as I do, it’s impossible not to see physical suffering on a daily basis – as well as the inscrutable faces of a procession of people who may or may not be carrying a world of regret or frustration in their hearts. To think about it is often too overwhelming – better to confine yourself to your own business and its profits and losses. Which makes me think of what we owe to others, as the most socially constructed species on the planet, and what we’ve come to believe we owe to ourselves as fully-fledged members of the increasingly individualised WEIRD world (see the references).
But let’s get back to Ivan. Or Ivan/Dostoyevsky. He comes out with half-truths, half-buried insights, as people do in conversation:
… the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.
Dostoyevsky, it seems to me is very good at presenting people struggling for insight and often failing. What we get here, I think, is Ivan’s mixed feelings of irritation and envy for the ‘simple-minded’, however he conceives them. He seems often tormented by his own intellect, and the complexity of his feelings. Hence his sympathy, mixed with a degree of contempt, for Alyosha. He takes the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ (Matthew 22:39) as impossibly unreasonable, though makes something of an exception for children, channeling into the concern we all have for the powerless, vulnerable and innocent. To highlight the impossibility of Christ’s injunction he cites a host of historical cruelties by ‘Turks and Circassians’, though of course he could’ve cited the Mongols under Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane and others, the Christian slaughter of tens of thousands of Moslems and Jews in the Holy Land, the Catholic mass-murder of the fellow-Christian Cathars, and the Russian massacres in the east under Ivan the Terrible – etc etc. Then he tells another more modern story of a young man, brought up in squalor and horribly mistreated, who grows up to be a thief and finally a murderer. At the end he repents and is made much of as a redeemed soul, before being guillotined. What are we to make of this story, and Ivan’s attitude? It seems clear that he’s mocking, or expressing disgust for, our dehumanising of others, and then punishing them for their inhumane behaviour, while congratulating ourselves on their repentance. Could something be rotten in the state of Christianity?
Ivan next turns to the ill-treatment of the clearly innocent, from pack horses being beaten to death, to children:
You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…
This sort of stuff is personal for me, I must say, as I left school at fifteen after being slapped across the face with full force by a sadistic headmaster, and have been plagued by revenge fantasies ever since. But this was nothing compared to the stories of child abuse and murder Ivan goes on to recount, stories, or rather, truths, which make him almost ashamed to love his own human life so much, when he observes the inhumanity around him. And although he’s friendly to and sometimes envious of Alyosha, he’s not easily taken in his brother’s ‘loving-kindness’ – “You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!”
Ivan professes belief in ‘God’- clearly the ultra-male monolatrist-cum-monotheist one created in the land of Canaan around 2,600 years ago – but he understandably wonders how one could respect a god that permits such cruelty in the world, or, more to the point, creates creatures who commit such cruelties. And this appears to be the point of his talk with Alyosha, to whom he at one point says “I won’t give you up to your Zossima”. Ivan may only be pretending to believe in God in order to get Alyosha to listen and question. Even if all he can offer is torment and cynicism.
And yet, what Ivan expresses a hope and a hearing for makes perfect sense. An end to wanton cruelty, including the additional cruelty imposed upon the cruel. Hell’s torture imposed upon the damned, for example. All of this, thinking from a post-religious context, one that I inhabit, brings me to the issue of free will, crime and punishment, but that I’ll reserve for a future post.
So, after all this tortured talk, Ivan relates his fable of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s a clever idea. Jesus, the putative son of God, supposedly martyred for our sins 2000 years ago, turns up in 15th century Seville in the midst of a large-scale auto-da-fé and, though silent, is immediately recognised and adored by the crowd, especially after he starts tossing miracles about the place. He’s just performed the highlight of his show, raising a dead child from her coffin, when a 90-year-old Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, arrives on the scene, orders the Jesus to be arrested and imprisoned, and his men to get back to the business of burning heretics, Jews and other riffraff.
Later that evening, the Inquisitor pays a visit to God’s offspring in his cell. Turns out he (the Inquisitor) has a lot to say, and his speech is impressively voluminous for a ninety-year-old. The Jesus figure, meanwhile, remains as silent as a god. And the Inquisitor’s message, for all its verbosity, is pretty basic (and I suspect a modern translator would dispense with the ‘thou wast’ and ‘thou hast’ etc, as per the MEV Bible). He’s saying that, after many centuries of struggle, the Church (as it was then, before the Reformation put a spanner in the works) has effectively corrected the ‘I will make you free’ promise made somewhere in the gospels:
let me tell Thee that now, to‐day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing.
It’s the old argument of dictators everywhere, still used – in fact it’s the MAGA argument, if you can call it an argument. Leave everything to me/us and we will provide you with something much better than freedom. ‘Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy?’ says the nonagenarian.
Next, our Inquisitor goes on at length about the three ‘satanic’ temptations in the desert – in short, providing food to the people gratis, proclaiming/displaying absolute power, and dazzling the people into belief through miraculous displays. We’re treated to a lot of rhetoric here, to the effect that the Church, groaning under the weight of its own leadership, has taken upon itself the burden that Jesus rejected, providing sustenance, authority, and officially sanctioned miracles, and there’s no way they’re going to let any sons of deities come along and upset all that hard graft. Oh, and by the way, he admits in passing that they’ve done all this by working for the Other Side.
So the whole of the Inquisitor’s speech can be seen, perhaps, as an anti-Catholic tirade presented as a pro-Catholic tirade, as well as a withering description of human inhumanity and fecklessness. It goes a bit far, in my view, but then in my own reading and researches, at least recently, I tend to learn about exceptionally clever people – generally more clever than myself – doing exceptionally clever things, so I suppose that’s a different bias…
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1980. Translated by Constance Garnett, 1916
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, The world, a family history, 2022