Winston wrote: ↑July 7th, 2021, 9:51 am
Could that be true? There may be some basis to it, because it is true that many ancient cultures in Europe, Africa and the Americas were matriarchies. And fantasy movies like to show a Council of Elders that are comprised of wise women. So it could be that women were wiser and more spiritual before Christianity dominated the western world? Of course women today are not good leaders at all, but I'm talking about the women before patriarchy took over the ancient world. Were they wiser and more spiritual as New Agers claim?
Absolutely not... They were significantly worse. Matriarchy with no checks and balances is a dystopian hell on Earth. If you go back to neolithic age before the civilizations of classical antiquity, DNA evidence shows that almost 95% of men failed to reproduce...
https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-r ... ve-success
The life expectancy of this time period was 20 years old. And this isn't even because of infant mortality rates. Even if you lived to the age of 15, most men only lived to the age of 28-33. Even in Ancient Rome, about 25% of the population made it to the age of 55. Evidence from the neolithic time period shows an astonishingly high rate of violent homicide. 20% of humans overall, and one third of men, were killed at the hands of other men.
Why was society so violent? Because it was extremely polygamous. There were no checks whatsoever on how many women the most powerful men could have in their harems. We don't have any first hand accounts on what life in the actual Neolithic age was like due to their being no written records but in sub-saharan Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries before the Europeans colonized them, they were living with a very similar level of technology and similar cultural norms. Chieftains could literally have 3,000 wives. If you so much as looked at the chief's wife, you could be killed, the vast majority of the population was held in slavery and could be killed for whatever reason the chieftain felt like. Councils of elders probably were mostly women, that would be because all the men were dead by the time they could've been old enough to be on such a council.
During classical antiquity when early forms of patriarchy took hold though, life wasn't much better under highly polygamous societies in the Middle East and China. A polygamous patriarchy is not much better then a matriarchy is. Some kings and emperors were known to have 1,000 wives. Wars with neighboring countries were very common and if they weren't at war, they were often had hostile tensions with their neighbors knowing they could be invaded at any moment. Homicide rates were at least 20x higher then they are in the US today meaning a homicide rate of at least 100 per 100,000 people. Wars in the Ancient past were typically total wars that ended with the small scale genocide of the conquered people. Often times, the male population was exterminated while the women and children were deported and enslaved.
You may have heard of Ancient Sparta and the brutal lifestyle and philosophy they lived by. Well did you know Ancient Sparta was one of the most matriarchal societies in history? In Ancient Sparta, any infants who were considered weak were left to die. At the age of seven, boys were kidnapped and forced to train under agoge until they reached the age of 20. At the age of 20, Spartan men were permitted to marry, but were not allowed to live with their wives until the age of 30 when their military training was truly complete. If you ever wanted to have sex with your wife, you had to sneak into her house (where she lived with her mother and sisters), kidnap her and bring her somewhere you could secretly have sex with her. This practice was done because the Spartans believed men should prove their worthiness by taking sex rather then receiving it. Women in Sparta were criticized by the patriarchal Athenians as being dominant and violent. Aristotle actually claimed that Sparta's inherent problem was that it was a gynocracy ruled by dominant women.
The reason this happens when women are given power and society becomes matriarchal is because unfortunately, too many women fetishize male aggression. Disturbingly high numbers of women have masochistic sexual fantasies and are attracted to men who show violent, aggressive tendencies. This results in a system where there are no checks on male aggression and it is instead encouraged by society. Non-violent men find it impossible to get a wife, so the violent men are the only ones who end up reproducing and spreading their genes. This was especially true of women before monogamous Christian patriarchy took over Europe.
Christian patriarchy slammed the breaks on thousands of years of relentless bloodshed that had characterized human history up until then. After the Vikings were kicked out, violent homicide rates in Europe dropped from 100 per 100,000 people to 10 per 100,000 by the 13th century and about 3-4 per 100,000 by the 14th century. War time rape was outlawed by the church, killing prisoners of war was no longer acceptable, slavery was abolished until the Atlantic Slave Trade enslaved Africans specifically (because they didn't think it was the same as enslaving Europeans), massacring civilians on a large scale no longer happened except with the crusades, countries became much more reluctant to invade their neighbors and instead respected a primitive sense of national sovereignty, the scale of warfare was reduced significantly and army sizes tended to be less than 5,000 instead of the surprisingly large armies we saw in classical antiquity. The concepts of chivalry started in Europe, encouraging knights to see their role as the protector of the weak and innocent rather then people who could just bully and push others around as they pleased.
Medieval society looks violent to us today, but one has to keep in mind what kind of history the Medieval world was emerging from. In the 1st century BC, Julius Caesar bragged about slaughtering 1.2 million Gallic civilians. This is brutality on a similar level to Vladimir Lenin's Red Terror and it was done on a much smaller population then existed in Soviet Russia. The An Lushan Rebellion in China resulted in the slaughter of at least 13 million people with an overall population reduction of 40 million. Two thirds of China's population at the time. The constant warfare of the Three Kingdoms era in China resulted in tens of millions of people being butchered over the course of 60-100 years. At least 40 million in terms of population decline, as well as enough to stagnate population growth.
The two bloodiest eras of Medieval history on the other hand, was the hundred years war and the crusades. The hundred years war (really a 120 year period of three different wars with long ceasefires in-between) resulted in about 2-3 million people being killed. The crusades, which took place over 200 years also killed about 2 million people. Certainly a lot of people, but during the Roman Empire, many hundreds of thousands of people died just because of the short lived Jewish revolts lasting a few years.
How did Christian patriarchy do this? By ensuring universal monogamy and marriage. In the Medieval world, as long as you survived to adulthood, any man could get married and have a family. Every man had a simple purpose for living that brought him happiness. Being good to women was now encouraged because the arranged marriage tradition put reproductive choice primarily in the hands of parents who wanted their daughter to marry a good man who could both provide for her and treat her well. Why would you sign up to fight and die in brutal conflict or join a violent gang when you could enjoy simple farming life with a cute wife instead? In Ancient times, because of severe levels of polygamy, this lifestyle was impossible for a large percentage of men. If the top 1% of men have 25% of the female population in their harems, then 24% of men will never get a wife unless they revolt and kill the top 1% so instead, the aristocracy of Ancient times directed their male underclass's aggression towards their neighbors. Under Christian patriarchy, male aggression was curbed by the institution of monogamy. Men only became aggressive when they really needed to be, to fight off criminals and invaders. There was much less incentive for violence and aggression and most of the violence we did see in the Medieval era was essentially the after-effects of having lived through thousands of years of it before. People in Medieval Times had no tolerance for bad behavior and had a very "eye for an eye" type philosophy so if you committed a murder, you were hanged, if you tried to seduce another man's wife, that man would probably beat you up and maybe even kill you for it.
People today, however, have been very sheltered for a long time, and thus have forgotten many of the lessons about humanity that our ancestors knew to be common sense.
