7. AN "AGREEMENT" BETWEEN PRINCIPALS AND THE THIRD PARTY?

I. FIRST TRANSITION:  HUNTING TO GATHERING

Made possible by language, agreements first appear with hunters.    Hunting and gathering divides work between males and females:  human beings are unique in this division.  No other species divides labor--and society--as do human beings. Hunting in the human way entails agreements which, essentially, are the same in structure as the agreements building society.  But we are now talking about contracts, which are agreements about agreements.  The same basic contradiction that inheres in agreements in modern society--that they contain no provision for enforcement of terms--applies to agreements between paleolithic hunters.  These hunters were male, always.  Women for their part collected plant food.  The activity of male hunters was complex, entailing planning, preparation and maintanence of hunting technology, and movement over wide areas.  As hunting was more complex than gathering, the nature of hunting agreements--and disagreements--was complex.  Yet, still, hunting agreements contained, as I say, no real provision for settling disputes among members of a hunting party.  We may assume that disagreements did exist and were, or tended to be, disruptive of the most basic enterprise of paleolithic peoples.    Hunting, and the agreements which bound hunters in bands, was and were necessary to survival.   There was a need, not easily fulfilled--bands were small and sparsely distributed throughout the land--for arbitration.   Precisely the value of the agreement, that it suspends violence within a group engaged in important collaboration, is also the defect of the agreement:  that there is no mechanism or provision for settling disputes between members.  The issue of "partiality" is raised.  Members of such a group are partial to their own cause.  There is a natural inclination within agreements to seek arbitration of disputes outside the group.   Outsiders, it is thought, will be impartial.  In this way and for this reason every group defined by an agreement sets its sights outside of the group, to a "foreigner."  The groups attention extends, in this way, from a point within the agreement--often this point is one of disagreement--to a point outside the group.  We may say that the group thereby passes beyond itself.  Agreements consciously or unconsciously pass into new agreements.  New agreements "have to do" with old ones.  The new agreements provide the required (assuming disagreement) settlement of disagreements within the old agreement.  Hunters then, naturally, looked for arbitration to whatever was "outside" their hunting party.  These arbitors could be another hunting party, although these outsiders were also likely enemies and partial to themselves.  Women then came to be mediators in disputes among men of the hunting party.

The common wisdom, promoted by university and marxist scholars, is that simply the pure technical superiority of agriculture over hunting would in itself be sufficient to motivate human beings to change from one to the other.  This is understandably the prevailing idea; the burden of proof would be upon anyone wanting to show anything else.  However it is evident, too, on the basis of what we have now established regarding agreements as such, the necessities of agreements to human life, yet their impotency in settling dis-agreements, that hunting and gathering would be caught, by virtue of its reliance on agreements, in a veritable self-contradiction which it could not settle or resolve on its own.   

A great deal of attention has been given in anthropology, especially in Germany, to the attention to male and female roles in culture.  J. Bachofen talked of Mutterrecht.  In the 19th centruy scholars assumed that the beginnings of human culture, in the paleolithic, were dominated by a "female" principle:  the leaders of society were women; the structure of society was matriarchal, reflecting female interests.  At some point in history, it was said, males overthrew female culture to establish themselves and their interests as focal to culture.  The Vaterrecht was established, and persists to this day. Here, in Force Theory, we reverse this order. We are saying here that male culture preceded female culture; only males had agreements, originally, which are the basis of human culture as such.  What failed in this "male culture," on the other hand, were precisely these agreements.  Hunting itself became a complex of technics and strategies; these all required agreements.  Human culture at this point was not merely technics of hunting but agreements about hunting.   Male interests, in the stressful occupation of hunting, were prior to female interests that had been inherited from the even more prolonged period of animal-like gleaning and plant collecting. Also men defended the tribal territory.  Women continued in the gathering and gleaning mode of life that had been inherited over millions of years.   What allowed the female revolution, we aver, and the sinking of male culture in favor of the female principle, wwould have to be the failure of male agreements.  I want to be more precise on this point.  It was not so much that male agreements failed as that they demanded arbitration, which existed nowhere except among women.  Women were the outsiders to agreements to whom the males appealed for arbitration of their own disagreements.  Women were now in an advantageous position.  In their role as mediators, women became leaders.  But there is more.  The entire bias or leaning of culture, under female leadership, was in favor of plant collecting and gleaning; hunting dwindled as a way of life.

The free(ly) entered agreement becomes an agency of (contractual) force:

Agreements become contracts.  But in allowing an agreement to become a contract, parties to the agreement must be willing to place themselves in the hands of an agency previously identified by the original parties as an enemy.  This is because only an enemy can be impartial in the capacity of arbitrators of disagreements.  The enemy does not know the parties, personally, and does not care about the outcome of the agreement.  Any "friend" would be partial.  Hence the agreement itself is transformed in one important sense to what it originally was not and never meant itself to be.  The agreement continues "at the descretion" of the aritrator, exactly the person or party who was enemy to the agreement.  This state of affairs can only be called a paradox.  Through the contract the agreement passes beyond itself to precisely what opposed the agreement.  This paradox is easily explained.  Such a transfer of authority does not violate the terms of the agreement; it simply subjects parties to the agreement to an "alien" force.  The agreement now exists "at the descretion" of the arbitrator of the agreement. 

To secure for the principals the product of the agreement there must be still a further agreement with this arbitrator, who still may be "arbitrary" and self-serving.  This is precisely how the work of men came to be the consumer object of the women.  Such a transfer of power is documentable through the archeological record.  We may go on to talk further about the agreement.  The agreement between the principals is no longer voluntary; it is enforced.  I talked earlier about the "equality" of the principals.  Parties to the agreement are still equals to one another and they still share an enterprise.  Originally the product of the agreement--"said product"--was for the principals.  Now this product is for the principles "as per a new agreement with an arbitor of disagreements--and at the descretion of the arbitor.  Precisely the thing, however, that would oppose the agreement--say, the way women oppose male agreements--now comes to dominate the agreement.  The agreement is transformed in one movement in its original intention:   the final product of the agreement is taken out of the hands of the principals and is consigned to the discretion of the "alien other."   I talked earlier of men, to whom women were "other" and "alien," who nonetheless submitted themselves to the discretion and even mercy of women. 

This is how women rose to power--by settling the disagreements among men.  Otherwise women today would have no authority at all.  Women are alien and "other than" men; the two genders might as well have been separate species.  Women oppose men and trive, by gender instinct, to take from men what men have.  When men disagree among themselves they fall into this trap.  Agreements do not terminate themselves simply because the their parties disagree.  Parties to an agreement can argue and disagree; still their relationship, if this relationship is a true agreement, will often continue.    The formal relationship, established through language and understanding, has this sort of durability.  The durability of an agreement in the face of disagreement consists not so much of a principle within the agreement as what is around and opposing the agreement.   Precisely through the contract they agreement now exists "at the descretion" of the mediating third party.  This state of affairs can be brought about through any simple disagreement among the principals.

Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2009-08-09 14:52:17)

FROM AGRICULTURE TO CIVILIZATION TO NEOPATRISM

There is not one single evolution of the the human species, simply, but two evolutions--male and female.  I said earlier that women rose to power, and their way of life absorbed the male way of life, through the role women had as mediators in disputes between men.  To be arbitrator meant for women that they held the reins of power.  Male agreements existed "at the descretion of" (to use a legal term applying to court power) women mediators.  How this state of culture came about is explained through the archeological record, which points unequivocally toward an entirely different set of evolutionary circumstances for men and women.  This division of labor, and therefore division of genders, is suggested in the term "hunting and gathering."  Hunting and gathering require radically different abilities and points of view.  This--their three million years of separate evolution--explain why men and women are so different.  Culture, in fact, because of the different cultures that men and women had--and the effect of culture to exaggerate biological differences that already exist--has the effect of making the male-female divergence more extreme.  There is clear archeological evidence, as I have already said, for the existence of this divergence.  Women became themselves plant-like in conformity to the plants they collected; men, on the other hand, followed a roaming way of life.  The life of men imparted itself to male genetics.  Our concern here, however, is not the issues of hunting strategies nor the uniquely human technology.  We have been focused here more narrowly on the question of agreements.  It is in the phenomenon of agreements, as derived from the hunting-and-technical way of life, that socially separates men and women.

Agreements are the sole domain of male humans,  it now appears.  There are several important paradoxes in human hunting that agreements resolve.  The human being, running but mainly just walking, is a slow-moving creature.  He is surpassed in speed by all the other animal hunters that there are.  So, the human hunter alone of animals must use his cunning to outdistance his prey.  There is the further consideration that the human being is less powerful than other preditors, without strong anatomy and without powerful jaws and claws.  The human hunter could not succeed without his strategies and technology.  The deficits entailed in human physical weakness and lack of speed, combined with new assets of strategy and technics, made agreements a poweful new tool in hunting. The male human brain itself, divided into left and right sides--the left, or communication, side specialized for agreements and the general male mode of interaction. In other words, men now discussed among themselves how a given hunt was to proceed.  We have no record of the words used; we know only, from the coordinated activites of the men, that these agreements were in place by at least the Upper Paleolithic and probably long before, at the advent of language.  Anthropology supports all these conclusions.  In other words, males of early hunting party did not just have strategy and tools, they had to agree to have these things.  Here we see the first agreements whatsoever--to manage and relegate weapons.  Such agreements have been imprinted in the male brain since the beginning of time.  The mind of the male human being did not change in the short period of female, matristic domination.   The male social orientation was through agreements, of which females, with their ungulate gathering mentality, did not have agreements.

Women can and obviously do argue; they do not agree or disagree.  For there to be a disagreement there must first be an agreement; of agreement women do not, except through their exposure to men, have real knowledge.  Thus we may conclude, since women "ruled" the matrist, gathering-and-farming economy, this economy was not properly a society.  A society, as we have already established, is constituted through agreements; but in early agriculture there was no strong male presence to forge such agreements.  The economy and means of life at that early period of human economy--the stage of agriculture following hunting--could be described as a rather sophisticated ungulate, gleaning mode of life.  Baboons in their material life are simply at a lower level, but not essentially different, than early agriculturalists.  But there is more.  Within the early agricultural economy there began to emerge what had been submerged:  the male mentality of technological predation and, correspondingly, the human male reliance on agreements as social relations.  Women cohered and interacted in social groups; men conspired in social groups.  Conspiracies, of which men are highly capable but women are not, allowed the re-emergence of men as leaders and the overthrow of the female or matristic order.  Out of bovine agricutural communities there arose cities, which are in effect simply the physical expression of the agreements that there are.*  When cities arose--even though the old agricultural goddesses may have lingered for awhile--men dominated the high offices of those cities.  A word is in order on the subject of trade.

Trade as a simple transaction--say, a barter, or even when money is used--is a way human beings can interact "materially" without, however, having an agreement among themselves.  The point about trade is that it is an interaction that is initiated and fulfilled in the same moment.  A thing for trade is offered; another thing is offered; the two change hands.  There is nothing more to a commercial transation than this.  Trade is a higher level of interaction than animals, with the possible exception of gorillas and chimpanzees, are capable.  This is shown from animal behavioral studies.  On the other hand, trade does not entail an agreement because it is carried out in one instance.  Women are natural traders.  Their desire even in present day life to be in a market place buying and selling points to this fact.  An agreement, on the other hand, is more than a trade.  Agreements place trade relations in the context of past and present; they involve promises; above all agreements secure a peaceful environment for trades to take place.  Male humans excel in agreements to trade.  Throughout the history of early agricultural communities, trade flourished as it does today in Africa and New Guinea.  The mentality of these places however is of a very low order and does not rise to the level of agreements.  Cities as I say are simply materialized agreements.  Cities provide permanent market places for people to meet; they provide a "market" for a kind of abstract trading that humans finally do.  In these midst of this civilizing effort, meanwhile, there was an enduring preoccupation with physical territory, rights of ingress and egress to facilitate trade, and so forth.  These concerns were an extension of the early preoccupation of hunters to maintain the descreetness of their hunting territories.  To civilize in these terms means simply to make agreements--legal ties--which is the domain of the male but not the female human being.

We may review what we said earlier.   Once the sole domain of women, gathering engaged men while male culture was absorbed by female interests.  Women had been peacemakers between the men; the religion that survived the transformation of hunters into gatherers was a matristic religion.  The Magna Mater appeared as goddess over all the people.  There probably was, in the earliest phase of collecting and agriculture, a protracted period of peace.  As males asserted themselves after a period of agricultural slumber, cities emerged.  The timing of these cities in history has been documented by archeologists.  But there is more.  Once again, because of the very nature of agreements themselves--to lack provision for self-settlement or self-resolution--these agreements began pathetically to fail. Cities failed partially, perhaps, because of material conditions such as eroded or salted soil.  We are saying, however, that whole civilizations may have failed, finally, because of the failure of the agreements which were at the heart of their social relations.   While men, makers of agreements, once turned to women as mediators, this was no longer an option:  women had been now absorbed into male culture.  Only an enemy could now serve as mediator or arbitor in the disputes and disagreements that were beginning to dominate the life of cities.  Barbarians, as they were referred to, were called upon to enter into the city--where previously they would have been repelled as enemies--to mediate in these disputes.  It was not through military invasion that barbarians gained the upper hand; rather they gained power in the same way women had once come into power--as mediating kings. 

(*Thought of the moment:  the Incas built a civilized community through pure force;  it, the civilization, had no agreements holding it together. The smaller communites within the region were forcibly located, made to change their languages, and so forth at command of the Inca army.   Inca culture was simply too big a structure to be held together by force alone, without agreements.    The civilization came undone in the relative few moments Pizzaro assaulted it.)

barbarians take control as mediators in failed agreements.

agreement between barbarians and city people.

agreements and failure of agreements.

jews as mediators between barbarians and city people

Jim:  good, good, good!!!!  Well, one of my objectives has been met since leaving (verschoben, verbannt) Philtalk.  That is of having a serious discussion about something.    I see us now as ahead of the Germans, as though we are keeping score!  Since you were an anthropology major at U Illinois, you see what I am talking about and offer constructive criticism.  What I have been saying is that agreements are about this or that thing, depending, they have one thing  in common: the human parties are agreeable to the agreement.  That is why we call an agreement and agreement.  ...Because people agree to it.    And what an agreement is, I suggest, is simply a relationship within which parties agree to "just get along." Peace, not what these people are going to be doing, is the most important part of an agreement.   This stipulation, formal or informal--completed at the showing and touching of hands to prove "no weapon"--is all there, too, to any religion.  Religions say simply:  let's all get along.

Men as opposed to women have to be fastidious about this.  Men are simply more violent.  They are highly right-side brain--calculating--oriented.  Women are nothing like this.  I liked your talk of the market place as being a lot of haggling--that's what women are like!  In the market place you talk about, if there is haggling by men they are simply imitating the women.  In short, men are the way they are by virtue of the hunt.  And no, they don't plan a hunt while hunting, but the day or week beforehand.  Men are much more future-oriented than women. 

Sorry I didn't get to say goodby at camp.  Well, you surprise me a bit, old chap, by your comprehension of basic anthropology and social philosophy.  Here we stick to that subject, preferably.  --richard

jim:  actually, it is true:  i do try to radically simplify this material i am working with, and bring phenomena together with one broad stroke of the brush.  that is what philosophy does.  i do oversimplify at times.  your point about agreements not being altogether simple is well taken.  i'm working on it.

i try to get from, on one end of a spectrum, a generalization about "man" to a generalization about what we must do about society.  there are going to be a lot of other generalizations between.

i like your anecdote about the british and the monks.  it is right to the point.  unfortunately, however, following Force Theory we are going to have to take extreme action against those monks.  we must remove them altogether so that they won't come back.  that is, not withstanding the Spanish saying:  the night and the Jesuits always return.   these monks and their ilk are the worst obstacles to what is to be accomplished.  there's nothing worse, in the way of true advance of mankind, than a so-called intelllectual or priestly establishment.  see The Man who would be King, a movie based on Kipling.  you'll know what i'm talking about. 

no news from camp.  my friends the samers have left for fla.; i believe it'll be bleak in indiana.  richard