How the West Was Won

Posted by Jew from Jersey
29 August 2021

In his book Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud suggests that the prehistoric harems came to an abrupt end when masses of sex-starved men rose up and murdered the small number of men who had been monopolizing the women. They proceeded to divide up these women amongst themselves, also instituting new rules making it impossible for any one man to monopolize women again. In Freud’s mind, this is the basis of human culture and civilization and especially of religion, where traces of evidence of the original murder can still be discerned. The murder was also patricide and incest, since the old man was the other men’s father and the women being divided up were their mothers and sisters. This is the origin of the incest taboo, which has no rational or moral basis.

It’s a good story, and Freud is surely right about civilization being predicated on the non-monopolization of women. But it is possible this transition from haremous to monogamous society took place in a somewhat less dramatic manner. Perhaps the dominant men, in competition with dominant men from other groups, realized that they could increase their power by getting better results out of their minions if they rewarded them with some access to women. They did this not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it was highly effective in incentivizing the lesser men. They also knew their women sometimes “slummed it” with the lesser men anyway. The greater men then reasoned that instead of punishing this faithlessness, they could harness it to their own benefit. It also made any threat of actual rebellion less likely among the lesser men. The end result was a more structured form of society that produced more goods and services through more motivated labor. Once one tribal overlord did this, all others had to follow suit or risk being overrun.

Now imagine that at some point, such a leader realized that some of the more focused men, the ones who most often were awarded access to women, had special skills or were capable of managing long-term projects. It might be more efficient to simply assign to such a man one woman on a permanent basis. This would keep him from getting distracted, while still providing him the benefits of access to sex. It also effectively gave him custody of his own children, instead of having them revert to the woman to take back with her into the harem. It is probably the hallmark of a monogamous society that the father should retain custody of children, and of a haremous society that the mother should.

Occasionally, a woman so exiled from the harem and permanently paired to a minion might rebel and require punishment, but occasionally she might actually discover a new sense of identity in this role. If she could “bond” with the minion in place of the overlord, she might enjoy the psychic benefits of “first wife” status and take the energy freed up by no longer having to compete with “co-wives” and invest it instead in building up her new man’s status, effectively providing him the psychic benefits and energy of the harem he could never have. And behold, when this happened, productivity increased far faster than could have been expected from increased sexual frequency and lack of distractions alone. It was something more like magic.

This discovery, what we now call “monogamy” was in fact the greatest technological advance in the human timeline. It was more consequential than the adoption of agriculture, the discovery of penicillin, the flight of the first airplane, or even the wheel. In fact, it is what makes all these other innovations possible. The lifelong bonding of one man and one woman occurred late in human development, but once it was discovered, every society had to have it. The bounty provided was so great that no tribe or kingdom wanted to be without it. The only drawback was: it was unnatural. It was not what women and men were naturally inclined to do. In order to prop it up, it was necessary to create culture, religion, folklore, and all of what Karl Marx would call “superstructure,” to convince men and women against their inclinations that this is what they were supposed to do. Even then, such behavior was still only successfully practiced by a small number of people. But as long as they were held up as paragons, and the others shamed, the dynamic worked well enough to provide wealth and security that extended far beyond those individuals who successfully practiced it.

Many men never rose to the occasion, performing only haphazard work and enjoying only haphazard access to women. Actually, some of these perennially low-status men retain allure to women precisely because they refuse to be husbands. Women of the harem have likely always searched out precisely such surly and plucky minions who may one day challenge the leader. If she chooses right, a woman may enter a new harem at the ground level as “first wife.” But a husband is by definition not such a challenger. A husband is a middle man who has forfeited his natural desire to have a harem and accepted his servile status.

Husbands are the sexual bourgeoisie, something akin to first sergeants or sergeant majors in the army or chief petty officers in the navy. Neither glamorous nor downtrodden, they are vital to any complex social order. A lowly private will likely die anonymous, but he may someday be a general. A sergeant-major outranks a private, but he will never be a general. Brave soldiers and a dashing colonel get all the credit, but no battalion ever won a battle that couldn’t rely on its senior sergeants. An economy of millionaires and propertyless underemployeds is a failing economy, no matter how much wealth it has. A thriving economy is produced by a thriving middle class. And a thriving middle class relies on a bulwark of married people. Of course, not everyone has what it takes to be middle class. Not every man can be a husband, nor can every woman be a (non-haremous) wife. But in any robust economy, the poor aspire to be middle class, and even the rich pretend that they are. In a civil society, the unmarried and no-longer married aspire to be married or at least to appear so. If we are not all to return to pre-civilization, it is the culture of the married middle class that must dominate. Others must be the exceptions that prove the rule, that honor it in the breach, the tax that vice pays to virtue.

Running at full strength, the monogamy juggernaut induced even the most desirable and powerful men to forego sexual opportunities. This was the practice of chivalry. No one alive today has ever seen true chivalry. All that remains of it today are clichéd pop-culture references, so we are used to thinking of it as mere etiquette: a man holding doors open for a woman or saying “Mi’lady” as he tips his hat. In context, these were gestures performed by a powerful man to signal to a woman that he was foregoing claiming her as his concubine, even though it was within his power to do so without consequence. Instead, he was electing to let her pass unmolested so that a lesser man might claim her without having to challenge him. Powerful men believed that ceding some women to inferiors would allow them to come out ahead, stronger in war and wealthier in peace.

But women’s incentive to remain married to the middling men was from the beginning tenuous. Women never feared defeat and slaughter at the hands of enemies as men did since women could be reasonably assured that in the event of defeat they and their youngest children would be adopted into the harem of the victor. To have an incentive to stay married, women had to either be threatened with violence by their own relatives and neighbors if they strayed, or else raised in such a way as to strive to overcome their own natural polygamous impulses. Civilization is not possible without the sexual subjugation of women. Soldiers will not fight and hired hands will not labor without access to at least an occasional prostitute. And husbands will not provide specialized skills or manage resources without wives who treat them like greater men than they actually are. Men must be bribed with women to stay loyal and productive. But while society as a whole benefits from these arrangements, on a personal level women gain little from them. There is a case to be made that women can benefit from monogamous marriage, but it is not a case that can be made convincingly to a woman when she is young which is when it really matters. If she only comes around to the putative benefits of monogamy later in her sexual career, she is no longer in a position to offer a man, or society, much of the benefits therein.