Foundations Of Civilization by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.
Foundations Of Civilization by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.© 2003 Equal Justice Foundation
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• Pleasure without conscience;
• Knowledge without character;
• Science without humanity; and
Ideologies driving current gender feminism have caused me to look at the foundations of our civilization. We have put in place draconian laws ostensibly to protect women that deny men every civil liberty ensconced in our Constitution and English common law. These laws punish the innocent and free the guilty, provide no discernible protection for women, often increase the level of violence, and destroy marriages and families wholesale.
The ideologues who promote these laws suggest that men are violent to support the patriarchy . They claim that to eliminate domestic violence and allow women to reach their full potential we must return to the ways of the Goddess and the ancient matriarchy. The premises of that ideology are certainly subject to debate.
I have looked and asked, and I cannot find any evidence that any matriarchal (or matrilineal) society ever evolved beyond Stone Age levels of technology. And, where matriarchal societies are found today, e.g., the Navajo Nation, inner city ghettos, or in the extensive list given by Jaana Holvikivi , the level of technology these societies support is no better than Stone Age. Evidence from our inner-city ghettos suggests the reversion is quick and profound when a patriarchal hierarchy declines. As the old adages states, one should be careful what they wish for, as they may get it.
In the past forty years the meaning and definitions of what constitutes a patriarchy or a matriarchy have been the topic of much debate in feminist circles.
I have no wish to indulge in an ideological debate over the meanings of these terms. The following definitions are taken from an unabridged dictionary published by Random House in 1966. These definitions are followed throughout this discussion.
The matriarchal system: A form of social organization, as in certain primitive tribes, in which the mother is head of the family, and in which descent is reckoned in the female line, the children belonging to the mother's clan.
1. A form of social organization in which the father is the supreme authority in the family, clan, or tribe and descent is reckoned in the male line, with the children belonging to the father's clan or tribe. 2. A society, community, or country based on this social organization.
Any reasonable debate about patriarchy and matriarchy should begin with their origins. Time likely has a different meaning to me than most of you. As an earth scientist a million years is about the finest increment I typically can reconcile. But the present discussion forces me to look at a finer scale.
Paleontologists, or anthropologists if you want to narrow the field, have determined that homo sapiens became dominant about 50,000 years ago. Our forbearers were not as tall and lived much shorter lives on average than we do at present. But, give them a shower, a haircut, some modern clothes, and they wouldn't look significantly different than we do now.
While humans didn't look different 50,000 years ago, they behaved much differently. A major difference was that families as we know them today did not exist as paternity could not generally be determined with any confidence. Thus, whatever social organization was present centered around females in what we now call a matriarchy and descent of children was matrilineal.
Obviously many details of the development of civilization are unknown but the broad outline is apparent.
Coincident with the retreat of the last great continental ice sheets at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, approximately 10,000 years Before Present (BP), tribes in at least China, India, and present-day Iraq (the Fertile Crescent) recognized that human males would go to great lengths to protect and defend children, and their children's mother if they knew they, and they alone had sired her children.
These early tribes also somehow recognized the great values of a patriarchal hierarchy in terms of engineering and technology, living conditions, health, and security. Among the benefits that accrued to tribes who adopted patriarchy were domestic animals, e.g., sheep and cattle, and plants, e.g., wheat and fruits that enabled them to establish permanent settlements, or cities that define what is meant by “civilization.”
All of our present civilization stems from the social and biological revolution inherent in the development of the patriarchal method of associating children with their biological fathers. Reflecting the power of patriarchy, Confucius (551 B.C.-478? B.C.) stated that “The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.”
To know paternity required basic changes in ancient human society. Without means of birth control women could not be allowed to have sexual relations with any man except their mate. So marriage was invented and rigid strictures placed on women that are still reflected in many societies and religions.
I don't imagine marriage, and sexual restrictions on females, were any more popular then than they are now with what we presently call “feminists.” But the tribes who rigidly enforced marriage precepts and a patriarchal society prospered while matriarchal societies, unable to compete, were globally doomed and only survived in isolated enclaves.
We see an example in Egypt where the matriarchy was overcome by a patriarchy invading from Mesopotamia roughly 5,000 years BP, or about 3,000 B.C. Before the patriarchal invasion, writing and tool use were unknown in Egypt.
There was also the problem of estrus these early patriarchies faced. Since primate females breed indiscriminately during estrus, a patriarchy is incompatible with, and impossible to maintain or establish in a species whose females undergo that biological process. Human females are presently the only mammals that don't go through some form of estrus.
I know of no evidence to suggest human females did not evolve in the same manner as other primates, and estrus is generally of great survival value for a species. So there is an open question of when and why estrus disappeared from human females? Personally, I think these ancient tribes used the same selective breeding techniques for females of our species as they did to domesticate cattle and grains.
Women who accepted the patriarchal lifestyle and became faithful wives prospered, and their children survived and flourished. And adultery by man or woman became a high crime deserving of capital punishment for the preservation of civilization.
Women who did not accept, or biologically could not adapt to the patriarchy were most likely killed, or sold into slavery or prostitution with infanticide used to eliminate their unwanted offspring.
Development of civilization in the form of cities, writing, governments, mining, agriculture, and the other accouterments of science and technology was rapid after the establishment of a patriarchy, at least in geological terms. By 5,000-3,000 B.C. (7,000-5,000 BP) patriarchal societies had established cities and rudimentary (by today's standards) technology over much of the globe, often by conquest, as the means of mining, metalworking, engineering, writing, and agriculture so fundamental to civilization were developed.
About 500 years ago a revolution began as the scientific method evolved in patriarchal societies. The invention of the printing press also provided for widespread distribution of ideas and methods.
Barbara Amiel, in her book Confessions, notes that societies were preoccupied with the propagation of its members until the last stages of the Industrial Revolution. The division of labor was the culmination of necessity and biology; it was necessary to make the most of man's superior physical strength and woman's unique ability to bear children. For a few children to have survived, explains Amiel, a woman had to give birth to 10 or 12. Were women not pregnant or in labour for most of their short and arduous lives, the tribe would not have survived.
The real breakthroughs in technology date from the end of the 19 th Century, or about 100 years ago. In turn, the technology led to incredible improvements in health and hygiene, and longer and healthier lives. No longer did half of the children die before age five and the percentage of women who died in childbirth became a very small fraction. Diseases of my youth, polio, smallpox, diptheria, whooping cough, and many others have virtually or completely disappeared today, and our lifespans have nearly doubled.
The men who developed these incredible technologies come virtually exclusively from intact patriarchal families.
So the thumbnail sketch of the foundations, and benefits, of our civilization is complete. But these foundations have been sabotaged.
Until the middle of the 20 th Century the need for a patriarchal basis of civilization in order to protect and educate the children remained firmly entrenched despite attacks by the likes of Marx and Engels. However, the development of cheap, reliable, and universally available birth control, e.g., The “Pill,” undermined the need for the sexual restrictions fundamental to patriarchal marriages. For the first time on a widespread scale women could now freely enjoy sexual relations without fear of pregnancy and marry and bear children as or when they wished. As a result the stigma of female promiscuity had largely disappeared by the beginning of the 21 st Century.
The development of reliable birth control roughly coincided with a movement in the 1960's we generally call “feminism” with the seemingly desirable goals of equal rights under the rule of law, equal opportunity in employment and education, equal protection under law, and protection from violence for all persons. These are laudable goals and few quarrel with them but there are those who believe they should have equal rights without the burden of equal responsibility.
Unfortunately, the feminist movement had a radical branch whose members believed that it was the patriarchy that was causing the oppression of women and that we should revert back to the presumed, and largely invented, gentler, kinder matriarchy of old. Many of these radical feminists also adopted the failed Marxist ideology that class struggle begins in the family. Thus, according to this dogma, to attain true “gender equality” the institution of marriage must be destroyed, and families must go as well if women are to achieve their full potential.
Radical feminists were sowing the seeds of their own destruction by the late 1960's until Erin Pizzey opened a shelter for battered women in Chiswick, London, England in 1971. In 1978 Pizzey published her book Scream Quietly of the Neighbors Will Hear that brought the problem of family violence to worldwide attention. Domestic violence was immediately seized upon as a feminist cause celebre that gave them immense public support and funding.
It must be emphasized that every social study of family violence has found that women are equally or more violent in intimate relationships than men. In fact, lesbian relationships apparently are the most violent of all. With over a hundred studies, these results are one of the most replicated and established findings in all the social sciences. Family violence is a human problem, not a gender issue. And only a small fraction, 3-4%, of couples are seriously violent, and much of that may simply be sadomasochism (S&M) the couples find mutually acceptable. Also, much of the violence between couples is attributable to mental or personality disorders, e.g., borderline personality disorder, or head injuries.
But the fact that men and women are equally violent does not fit the funding or propaganda needs of radical feminists, who have built a huge industry on their claim that all men are “batterers” and all women are “victims” based on their dogma that the root cause of domestic violence is that men must abuse women to support the patriarchy. Therefore, according to this radical ideology, to stop domestic violence, a very minor problem in the vast panorama of human affairs, we must destroy the patriarchy, and governments throughout the English-speaking world are in the process of doing just that.
Today as a result of the hysteria generated by the radical feminist war cry of “Stop domestic violence!” the English-speaking world has passed incredibly draconian laws that deny men every civil right we have evolved over the centuries, and are destroying families wholesale. For example, one-third of divorces now involve allegations of domestic violence or abuse, virtually all of which are false.
In about half of the hundreds of pleas for help the Equal Justice Foundation receives from married men, the woman has filed domestic violence charges against her husband to cover up her adultery, the most famous of which is the Emerson case.
To maintain a patriarchal society there are two fundamental components:
• The paternity of a woman's children must be unambiguously known.
• The biological father and mother must raise and educate their children together.
Unfortunately, present law and practice do not sustain either of these two prerequisites. I made the points above that patriarchy, built on families, is the foundation of our civilization and that no matriarchy has ever been found to have advanced beyond Stone Age technology. However, social engineering, brought to us by gender, or radical feminism, based on neo-Marxist principles, is rapidly destroying the patriarchal family on which our civilization rests.
Today less than 10% of children are born into and grow up in an intact household with their biological father and mother. More than one-third of our children are currently born out-of-wedlock, as shown below, and by 2012 more than 40% of children are born to unwed mothers in the United States.
In fact, as shown in Table 1, if changes are not rapidly made, very few children born today will reach the age of 18 with two parents whose marriage is intact from the date of birth.
From Table 1 it is obvious that the most likely outcome for a man who becomes a “father” under current law is that he will pay child support for more than a decade whether married or unmarried. Worse, he probably won't get to even see his children after charges of domestic violence, abuse, or sexual abuse of the children are filed against him to drive him away.
The other prerequisite for maintenance of a patriarchy has also largely broken down. DNA paternity tests show that presently 30% of all presumed fathers are not the biological sire of the woman's child. Thus, there is a roughly one in three chance a child won't be the product of his loins whatever relationship he may have with the mother.
As a result, patriarchy is rapidly dying. With the probability of divorce (see review by Cecil Adams) or separation near 70% for all marriages, a man has to be functionally insane to marry under today's laws and a drooling idiot to sire a child.
History clearly demonstrates that, virtually exclusively, the scientists and engineers who support our technology and civilization come from intact, patriarchal families.
Thus, a civilization that has taken well over 5,000 years to evolve seems well on its way to self destruction in the English-speaking world in less than a century. And all in the name of a failed ideology combined with the abandonment of these societies' own principles and discipline.
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