You certainly do. Indeed, I hope that you will lay out. Your vision of meritocracy much more fully and you can certainly feel free to talk about anything that you think helps make your case.
> But what I am arguing here is that it is inevitable because it is intrinsic to the human condition.
You are stating this, but an argument should really have some kind of support. I do see you talking about meritocracy, and about what happens when some women forego reproduction, but these things don't connect in any obvious way to the conclusion.
I'll add that Judaism and Christianity emerged relatively recently among pastoralists and agriculturalists. These are subsistence systems where patrilineal kinship systems and the attendant features (virilocal residence where married couples stay with the husband's family, a low positioin for women, high paternity certainty, etc.) are extremely common. But in older horticulturalist societies, founded on "scratch-plow" or or "hoe-agriculture" production, matriliny is far more common. I don't know how interested you are in anthropology, but here's a really good referene work on matrilineal descent:
"Although matriliny and matrilocality are relatively rare in contemporary human populations, these female-based descent and residence systems are present in different cultural contexts and across the globe... our significant findings pointed to associations between matrilineal descent and other patterns of cultural inheritance through the female line, such as female-biased hereditary political succession, matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance of real and movable property."
I think perhaps you missed the opening post. You seem to be arguing against a kind of patriarchy that I am not arguing for. I establish the definitions for what I am calling 'Patriarchy' here in my first and other posts:
> A patriarchal society, both from the old definitions and from an examination of history, is one in which fathers rule.
Yes, and a matrilineal society is one in which fathers do not rule; the closest that can be said is that *maybe* uncles and brothers rule family units that are centered along female lines.
Actually, no. Matrilinear has to do with line of descent, not ruling. And as I point out, many of the other features are similar.
And I am speaking of 'intrinsic' not automatic or universal. To the best of my knowledge none of the powerful societies have been matriarchal... ie had strong female rule.
They don't have to be matriarchal to be not patriarchal. They just need to have a system where fathers don't rule.
Matrilineal societies are often those where paternity certainty is low, meaning that people generally have no idea who their fathers even are. Biological fathers are thus for the most part absent entirely, and even if there is a male head of household (which there often isn't) that head is mother's brother, not father.
No. Writing had not been invented in the Neolithic when horticulture was an advanced subsistence system - once the plough was invented, paternity certainty rose, and matrilineal cultures dwindled.
What evidence do have comes primarily from linguistics (for instance, the Chinese word for surname is "mother-name") and from the field of archaeogenetics, which gives results like this:
"For societies with writing systems, hereditary leadership is documented as one of the hallmarks of early political complexity and governance. In contrast, it is unknown whether hereditary succession played a role in the early formation of prehistoric complex societies that lacked writing. Here we use an archaeogenomic approach to identify an elite matriline that persisted between 800 and 1130 CE in Chaco Canyon, the centre of an expansive prehistoric complex society in the Southwestern United States. We show that nine individuals buried in an elite crypt at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the canyon, have identical mitochondrial genomes. Analyses of nuclear genome data from six samples with the highest DNA preservation demonstrate mother–daughter and grandmother–grandson relationships, evidence for a multigenerational matrilineal descent group. Together, these results demonstrate the persistence of an elite matriline in Chaco for ∼330 years."
Oh yay, now I get to mention economics and job operations in a meritocracy...
You certainly do. Indeed, I hope that you will lay out. Your vision of meritocracy much more fully and you can certainly feel free to talk about anything that you think helps make your case.
My response will be posted tomorrow. (Hopefully I can cut some portions out, because it is long...)
Long doesn’t bother me
> But what I am arguing here is that it is inevitable because it is intrinsic to the human condition.
You are stating this, but an argument should really have some kind of support. I do see you talking about meritocracy, and about what happens when some women forego reproduction, but these things don't connect in any obvious way to the conclusion.
I'll add that Judaism and Christianity emerged relatively recently among pastoralists and agriculturalists. These are subsistence systems where patrilineal kinship systems and the attendant features (virilocal residence where married couples stay with the husband's family, a low positioin for women, high paternity certainty, etc.) are extremely common. But in older horticulturalist societies, founded on "scratch-plow" or or "hoe-agriculture" production, matriliny is far more common. I don't know how interested you are in anthropology, but here's a really good referene work on matrilineal descent:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2018.0077
"Although matriliny and matrilocality are relatively rare in contemporary human populations, these female-based descent and residence systems are present in different cultural contexts and across the globe... our significant findings pointed to associations between matrilineal descent and other patterns of cultural inheritance through the female line, such as female-biased hereditary political succession, matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance of real and movable property."
I think perhaps you missed the opening post. You seem to be arguing against a kind of patriarchy that I am not arguing for. I establish the definitions for what I am calling 'Patriarchy' here in my first and other posts:
https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/the-inevitability-of-patriarchy
https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/problems-with-patterns-of-patriarchy
> A patriarchal society, both from the old definitions and from an examination of history, is one in which fathers rule.
Yes, and a matrilineal society is one in which fathers do not rule; the closest that can be said is that *maybe* uncles and brothers rule family units that are centered along female lines.
Actually, no. Matrilinear has to do with line of descent, not ruling. And as I point out, many of the other features are similar.
And I am speaking of 'intrinsic' not automatic or universal. To the best of my knowledge none of the powerful societies have been matriarchal... ie had strong female rule.
They don't have to be matriarchal to be not patriarchal. They just need to have a system where fathers don't rule.
Matrilineal societies are often those where paternity certainty is low, meaning that people generally have no idea who their fathers even are. Biological fathers are thus for the most part absent entirely, and even if there is a male head of household (which there often isn't) that head is mother's brother, not father.
Can you name a powerful culture which used this system?
No. Writing had not been invented in the Neolithic when horticulture was an advanced subsistence system - once the plough was invented, paternity certainty rose, and matrilineal cultures dwindled.
What evidence do have comes primarily from linguistics (for instance, the Chinese word for surname is "mother-name") and from the field of archaeogenetics, which gives results like this:
"For societies with writing systems, hereditary leadership is documented as one of the hallmarks of early political complexity and governance. In contrast, it is unknown whether hereditary succession played a role in the early formation of prehistoric complex societies that lacked writing. Here we use an archaeogenomic approach to identify an elite matriline that persisted between 800 and 1130 CE in Chaco Canyon, the centre of an expansive prehistoric complex society in the Southwestern United States. We show that nine individuals buried in an elite crypt at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the canyon, have identical mitochondrial genomes. Analyses of nuclear genome data from six samples with the highest DNA preservation demonstrate mother–daughter and grandmother–grandson relationships, evidence for a multigenerational matrilineal descent group. Together, these results demonstrate the persistence of an elite matriline in Chaco for ∼330 years."