Tag: monogamy

Telling The Truth

 

Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.

I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.

Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.

It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.

There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.

It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.

In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.

There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.

Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.

The fetishization of control

 

Here are a number of apparently unrelated behavioral conundrums. In general we take them for granted, but this in itself is curious.

  • Why is it that there is so much uncertainty as to the basic physiology of female sexual arousal and response: can’t women just tell us?
  • Why does mainstream pornography cater almost exclusively for men and focus on the performance of sex acts where even the pretence that the female participants find them enjoyable is a matter of little, if any, cinematographic concern?
  • Why, notwithstanding copious evidence that our species is in no way predisposed to monogamy, does it seem that many women not only retain a social preference for it, but actually eroticize it to such a degree?
  • What’s up with jealousy? Is it sufficient to rationalize it as fear of abandonment in order to explain its intensity and prevalence?
  • Why, in general, do we find it so hard to break destructive patterns of behavior, and not only sexual ones?

The argument associating the sexual subjugation of women with the rise of settled agriculture and associated property rights is convincing as far as it goes. Nevertheless, it does not explain the tenaciousness of these phenomena, their psychodynamics, which cause many phenomenologists with insufficient insight into mental processes to suspect that there must be more to them than culturally revisionist accounts of human origins allow. If the eroticization of control is not innate notwithstanding its pervasiveness, how has it come about?

When a phenomenon which is not “intrinsically” erotic acquires a subjective erotic charge, we speak of fetish, kink or paraphilia. At its most general, a fetish is simply a member of the subclass of subjectively conditioned stimuli (CS) which give rise on the part of the subject to a pleasurable erotic response; further distinctions relating to the intensity of that response (“turn-on”, “preference”…) are merely a matter of degree. As such, fetish is merely the erotic subclass of a more general set of pleasurable conditioned stimuli, which in turn is a subset of all stimuli with a subjective conditioned response, i.e. also those stimuli which elicit fear or pain, which we refer to as phobias. For expositional clarity, I will speak here only of fetish, but it is useful to bear in mind that exactly parallel reasoning applies to all conditioned stimuli.

It follows that a fetish is a subjectively acquired mental association, resulting either from frequent exposure or from exposure under highly emotional conditions, between a particular stimulus and an erotic response. [1]

For the sake of argument, at least, let us assume that there are also stimuli which give rise to an unconditioned erotic response, so-called  “unconditioned stimuli”, US. It should be noted, however, that the categorization of a stimulus as conditioned or unconditioned is not at all self-evident; whilst there do exist truly unconditioned stimuli such as manual stimulation or electric shocks, which are handy for experiments, most stimuli are conditioned to some degree, and even unconditioned stimuli can be subject to a degree of overlaid conditioning which influences the response. Some associations may seem more objectively relevant than others and therefore be frequently and cross-culturally learnt, but they are still learnt behavior. For example, the fact that you salivate when you smell mum’s (or dad’s) baking at home may not seem like a learnt response, but in all likelihood to a substantial degree it is. Unconditioned responses are very much the exception: in more complex matters such as socialization and sexuality, almost everything of relevance is in fact learnt behavior.

This is just classical conditioning and it is a consequence of how our brain works with emotion; how, in fact, emotion and cognition are tied together. The subject who has acquired a conditioning will have a tendency to seek out the conditioned stimulus, believing it will lead to pleasure, even when it no longer does. That is to say, the initial temporal association between the CS and the US, even if it was completely arbitrary, has led to a cathexis of the CS, anticipating the pleasure of the unconditioned response (UR). For example, imagine that society was able to make and enforce a rule whereby all cakes were red, and the use of red in any other context was prohibited. If then the latter rule were abrogated, the sight of the color red alone would still stimulate salivation. This mechanism has been shown in numerous animal studies.

For the sake of argument let us assume that the scent or appearance of cakes stimulates salivation unconditionally (although as just stated this is debatable). The conditioned response (CR) and the unconditioned response are then identical. This, however, in general need not be the case, and even when it is the case the utility of the association is not the same: the response to the scent of baking confers nutritional advantages and additional pleasures which the response to the color red does not. In fact, one might wonder whether salivation in itself actually is pleasurable and not merely a prelude to some other pleasure, in its turn acting as stimulus input to another system which in order to achieve reward prompts certain action, namely the appropriation of the source of the salivatory response. As philosophers have noted, anticipatory pleasure does not require actual anticipation of pleasure. [2] The associations which we make between stimulus and response, while they may give rise to pleasure, creating it in a way ex nihilo, are not, therefore, innocuous – they may lead us astray, perhaps even in ways which we fail to grasp.

In this light, I conjecture that the eroticization by both sexes of control has the character of an endemic fetish. I choose the word “endemic” rather than simply “pervasive” because the fetishization of control is self-reinforcing, the result of a cultural disposition, namely patriarchy, which as we know is highly resistant to inflection even notwithstanding significant underlying changes in the conditions of its cultural production. At the same time, biology is not entirely lost and the body not simply a blank slate on which anything can be writ. In fact, any strategy of resistance to patriarchy has to start with the body because, even if its echoes may be faint, it is an incontrovertibly different and competing reality.

Now, it may seem to us that an association between, say, the color of the walls of a room and the pain of an electric shock is entirely arbitrary; but if that color has always been seen in that context, and never outside of it, to make the association is entirely natural. There is nothing in the logic of the situation which determines what is a relevant and what an irrelevant harbinger of pain or pleasure; we know from analyzing the world that the sound of the lion’s roar is indicative of the presence of an actual lion and that other sounds are not, but the brain works according to instinctive mechanisms which are merely based on temporal association (occurrence together) and specificity (failure to occur in isolation) within lived subjective experience, particularly in heightened states of consciousness. Causality does not need to be established or understood to become hard-wired in emotional response.

When we label certain sexual behaviors as fetishes and others as normal, we make a value judgment which is also not based on any sound understanding of causality. Examples of conditioned behavior which in the past were almost universal, or are so in other societies today, abound, and yet in our contemporary society these patterns of stimulus and response have in many cases been attenuated or entirely lost. Even in the lifetime of an individual, it is quite easy to reprogram many of these associations: for example public nudity is often associated with shame, and yet many subjects have over time completely overcome this. This shows, if any proof were necessary, that statistical near-universality is no proof at all of necessary biological priming.

A fetish, therefore, does not have to be uncommon in order to partake of the  characteristic psychodynamics of fetishism; and by the same token the frequency of occurrence of a certain behavior may be a necessary condition of its potentially being innate, but it is very far from a sufficient one.

It is probably clear to everyone reading this blog that, even if they continue to experience some degree of residual shame, nudity is in fact innocuous; that it is not associated with any necessary negative (or indeed positive) consequences even if in certain social contexts it may well be. Though obvious to my readers, though, this is anything but obvious to most inhabitants of the planet, who may feel the acutest pain even from showing a few square centimeters of flesh in an “inappropriate” context. And so, I invite these same readers to observe that the expressed longing towards monogamy in relationships on the part in particular of women, and also certain common attitudes of passivity and subordination in the sexual realm, may have nothing biological in them at all. No more than the type of male sexual behavior portrayed in pornography which probably seems to everyone (again, meaning all of my readers) in very many respects implausibly to characterize “natural” human behavior.

In a social context which canonically links sex to romantic interest, courtship and love, and which makes it very difficult to obtain in any other way, it is not surprising that these notions end up being associated and therefore eroticized. Whilst I am not arguing (or of the view) that this is the sole reason for the eroticization of control – which also has a biological priming in attraction and pair-bonding – it seems to me that it is certainly sufficient. And so, “normality” is just another form of kink; one which is produced, as it were, by the banal operation of pervasive social norms. We also see, in this light, that the frequent claim that many more men then women are fetishists is based on an excessively narrow as well as patriarchal understanding of fetish.

Again, this may all seem obvious but where I think this insight becomes truly significant is when it comes to the right attitude to adopt to these endemic fetishes. In the sex-positive community, we are encouraged to be tolerant of kinks and to seek to indulge them to the maximum extent possible, to find mutual accommodations rather than to force kinksters into searching for the most statistically improbable compatible partners. When the kink is something relatively trivial (to anyone else) and it does not get in the way of other forms of expression of the relationship important to the other partner(s), then this is not particularly problematic. However, for endemic fetishes and phobias like possession, exclusivity and jealousy this is much harder to do if one does not have the “matching” disposition (assuming there is one). In this case, whilst one may have compassion for it, one cannot and should not necessarily indulge it without reflection; if the relationship is not to run aground and the partners are incapable or unwilling to make the necessary psychological accommodation, then the fetishes in question will need to be adjusted.

This may or may not be easy – we simply don’t know because we usually don’t, in the space of a single lifetime, try. However, it seems to me in any case that there are plenty of examples of its being successfully effected, and that these tend to follow the classic schema of deconditioning, namely, on the one hand, exposure to the unconditioned stimulus in the absence of the conditioned one in order to establish, by virtue of the biological reality of the unconditioned response, the cognitive possibility of these stimuli not being associated, and, on the other, exposure to the object of phobia whilst observing the lack of actual threat, thereby progressively disarming the phobic response. In other words, what is needed is a conscious, intentional and progressive confrontation of one fears to reality, not in a theoretical way but in actual experience.

In my view, reprogramming sexual response is valuable in itself. A fetishist may lose all interest in “unconditioned” stimuli, but then he or she forfeits the pleasure of the “unconditioned” response. Pornography for example can take sometimes entirely displace the desire for actual sex, but it obviously does not afford the same rewards. There seems to be a pleasure premium from aligning ourselves more closely with our biology. Moreover, the fetishization of control represents an attachment to an impossible ideal, a relationship state which at best may be simulated for a few years but is impossible to maintain or, at the very least, subject to severe biological stress. Relatively quickly, it is to be anticipated that an indispensable condition of arousal will wither away, and the subject is then left with a stunted erotic profile (and all of its physiological correlates).

There may be other advantages of deconditioning too. It is astonishing that we know so little of innate patterns of female desire, even on the physiological level. It would seem likely that we are looking in the wrong place. As feminist cultural theorist Luce Irigaray argues, the fetishization of control is testimony to the almost total absence of the feminine in social organization, an absence which has colossal collateral costs. Female sexual models, indeed even the actual physiology of female arousal, are calqued on patriarchal conceptions of male sexuality (the only kind, obviously, with which patriarchy is actually concerned) and taught to girls through socialization. Biology is soon only a faint echo, so faint and so deeply buried that we cannot recover enough of it to say anything with confidence about it; we are only guessing or basing ourselves on intuition. Irigaray says that, culturally, there is only one sex, the male: and the female is just the non-male. It is a terra incognita, peopled by mythical creatures straight out of our subconscious. The theory of endemic fetish which I have outlined offers an explanation as to how and why this eminently curious state of affairs has arisen.

The take-away is: “normal” is just a consecrated type of kink. But it may well be in our best interests to deconsecrate it; it may even be imperative to our survival as a species.

Notes

[1] “All the forms of sexual perversion…have one thing in common: their roots reach down into the matrix of natural and normal sex life; there they are somehow closely connected with the feelings and expressions of our physiological eroti[ci]sm. They are … hyperbolic intensifications, distortions, monstrous fruits of certain partial and secondary expressions of this eroti[ci]sm which is considered ‘normal’ or at least within the limits of healthy sex feeling“, Albert Eulenburg (1914), Ueber sexuelle Perversionen, Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Vol. I, No. 8., translated in Stekel, W. (1940), Sexual aberrations: The phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex, New York: Liveright, p. 4.

[2] Iain Morrison (2008), Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Ohio University Press, ch. 2

The twin errors of “Sex at Dusk”

For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.

What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.

The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.

This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.

The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.

I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.

Note

* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).

PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…

Mononormativity

“It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man

Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).

When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.

My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.

In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.

Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.

I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.

Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.

In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.

Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.

My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.

We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.

This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.

I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.

The Aquarian Couple

In my last post, I wrote about the need to constitute relationships which are free of all forms of control and self-limitation. Only when we are open to life in its entirety are we aligned with our biological nature and our spiritual destiny.

As I’ve said before, this does not, however, mean that we need to embrace polyamory. It is important to recall a fundamental truth, namely that most social institutions are based on real human needs even whilst they are inimical to others. The demand for sexual exclusivity within marriage betrays a deeper, valid intuition as to the possible depth of a loving relationship. Many people are not willing to explore this depth, but by refusing to do so, they just as certainly set themselves on a path away from self-examination and transformation. Therefore I advocate radical commitment and radical openness. One must be willing to be burnt in the fires both of particularity and of generality – not pick and choose a la carte.

Our ancestral nature is tribal, but we are not going back to being hunter-gatherers in the jungle any time soon. For most people, pair bonding is the obvious solution to a biospiritual imperative. As I have previously argued, both the pleasures and the pain of this situation are there to teach us and to make us more aware.

Today’s spiritual couple is not just a neoprimitivist reincarnation, but is called upon to reinterpret our biological heritage to the needs of the present time. In my vision, the Aquarian couple is more deeply committed than any traditional couple, and at the same time more radically open than most polyamorists and almost all swingers and other persons in so-called “open marriages”. For this reason, whilst it is important to make clear that one stands outside the dominant social norm, these other terms are also inadequate. One is forced, really, to coin a term. I call this the Aquarian couple.

Aquarian relationships may come to an end, as everything eventually does, but they never fail, just as life is not a failure simply because it ends in death. On the spiritual path, we do not hold on to life but each day, each moment we die and are reborn. Similarly we do not hold on to our relationships, and they are new in each moment. I know many examples of this kind of couple and it is time that their stories are told and honored, as testimony to what is possible, satisfying and desirable in human relationships at the dawn of this new age.

Monogamy and personal growth

As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those  dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous.  We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

Mating in Captivity – A Review

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.

I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.

Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”

Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.

At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.

Sex at Dawn, revisited

Almost exactly two years ago I reviewed Sex at Dawn on this blog. One of the things I predicted was that it would sollicit a massive counterattack on the part of those who found its central tenets too threatening. I am happy to say that this reaction has been a lot more muted than I expected, despite the book’s success. Our species is readier than I thought to look at its image in the mirror.

A lot of the criticism of the book that we have seen in fact does nothing to invalidate its core conclusions – it’s more like sniping from the bushes than all-out warfare. And I do not doubt that some of those who criticise it really think some important ideas are missing, and some of them are right. However, tedious trawling over references misses the central point: there never was any scientifically reasonable account of a monogamous organization in pre-agricultural human societies, and other accounts are much more plausible. Having shown this, Sex at Dawn has, for now, become the standard narrative. The authors don’t have to show beyond all possible doubt that their account of early human sexuality is correct in every detail, because they are not taking on an established scientific theory, they are taking on a cultural narrative which has polluted the science. There never was any monogamy “theory” worthy of the name.

I am therefore unimpressed by and, given that I am a multidisciplinarian, not a narrow specialist, do not intend to read, reviews which purely criticize this or that aspect of what ithe authors say. I invite the critics to correct the account so we can get to a more accurate and plausible story than Ryan and Jetha have managed. I myself can see that there are some phenomena which their theory does not explain (it is after all not a theory of everything). I do not doubt at all that future accounts will differ in many respects from theirs, but they will not differ in respect of the central conclusion – there never will be a robust theory of primitive monogamy.

I also believe that there is quite a volume of evidence which I believe points in a convergent direction and Sex at Dawn does not even review, in particular the evidence from the psychoanalytic tradition and recent work on somatoform disorders. To my mind, Sex at Dawn does not really endeavor to explain those elements of contemporary behavior which some might (and do) cite as evidence in support of primitive monogamy, but had it had this goal, there is plenty more it could have done.

This article for instance sheds light on the (predictably) almost ignored subject in psychiatry of morbid jealousy, and to my mind is highly suggestive of the conclusion that jealousy itself is part of a neurotic complex due to the system of property which has been overlaid on human nature. Definitely, jealousy does have a psychodynamic explanation as the theory of the Oedipus complex implies; in that sense it is “natural”. No one is saying that there is no competition within the cooperative unit of the tribe. But it is expressed in contemporary society in ways, under circumstances and with consequences which would certainly not have arisen in primitive societies. This is extensively discussed in Salovey’s 1991 compilation of essays on the psychology of jealousy and envy which presents plenty of reasons to caution against highly simplistic conclusions about innate human nature based on how jealousy is experienced and expressed in contemporary society.

Essentially, the cooperative tribal unit becomes competitive when resources are scarce – including when scarcity is manufactured. The socially manufactured scarcity of sexual expression and opportunity leads to jealousy very predictably, and replacing it by abundance erodes jealousy even today, as plenty of couples can testify. Simply put, jealousy is a capacity we all have to employ emotional manipulation in order to hoard scarce resources to the detriment of wider social units. Sexual jealousy would have been highly disruptive of primitive tribal societies for the reasons which Ryan and Jetha point out. That it occurs under entirely different circumstances today does not tell us anything relevant at all In fact, in bonobos it seems that sex serves precisely the opposite purpose, namely to elicit sharing of resources such as food where it might otherwise not have occurred. This leads to group cohesion and greater resilience vis a vis external threats.

So Sex at Dawn has done better than I had hoped – it seems there is no longer anyone seriously defending the naturalness of sexual exclusivity as a social institution on the basis of scientific evidence. That means the way is open to investigate a host of issues which until now have been taboo.

Ultimately, I doubt though that paleoanthropology will tell us much more about human nature than it already has. The great appeal of Sex at Dawn is that it makes sense of feelings we may all have, but have been taught to suspect. In this way it  opens a way forward for a much more generous humanity than we have been conditioned to believe possible. The sentiments on which proponents of monogamy base their conclusions have in reality been generated by they themselves, and we are at liberty to construct alternative narratives. I am told I should love only my children, but in fact I love all children. I am told I should desire only my spouse, but in fact desire is much broader. I am told I should be jealous of men who are interested in my spouse, but in fact it has the propensity to create a deep bond with them. And I am told that if I display any of these sentiments there must be something “wrong” with me or my primary relationship, but in fact acknowledging all of this makes both my sense of self and my relationship only stronger.

In fact, all of the inherited narrative (as I shall henceforth call what Ryan and Jetha call the “standard narrative”) seeks to constrain me; I do not recognize myself in it all and see it only as a tool of social control. It would not exist if most did not take the opposite view; but that is proof only of its perfidy, not of its truth.

Monogamish

I don’t agree with Dan Savage on everything: occasionally listening to his podcast drives me nuts. But most of the time it is a real breath of fresh air. In this video, he very eloquently gets across the message on why responsible non-monogamy is a deeply humanistic, respectful and appropriate ethic which salvages, rather than threatens, the mess we have made of the social institution of marriage when, around the 1950’s and with the rise of feminism, popular culture fundamentally redefined it by, as he puts it, “instead of extending to women the same license and latitude that men had always enjoyed, … impos[ing] on men the same limitations and restrictions that women had always endured“.

The new paradigm was not of course drawn from nowhere: the church had been preaching it for centuries. The point, however, is that we had always allowed ourselves double standards and endured the feelings of guilt and shame that went with them. Those double standards kept some lid on the extent of extramarital sex and the social consequences to which it could lead, but they did not, and could not, eliminate it.

The asymmetry in society’s standards which had slumbered beneath the surface for hundreds of years (ever since the counter-reformationist Council of Trent outlawed divorce in 1563), was clearly articulated in the first version of Napoleon’s seminal civil code, considered (for other reasons rightly) by him as his lifetime’s greatest achievement. The provisions on divorce are worth citing: article 229 states that “the husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife’s adultery,” article 230 by contrast that “the wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence.”

Such discriminatory provisions, of course, could not stand the test of time. Though divorce was again outlawed in restorationist France in 1816, when it was reinstated by the law of 1884, the clause on common residence (itself inspired by canon law, which seems to have been more ambivalent about extramarital relations as such) was struck out, thereby consecrating, for the first time in a legal text, the religious condemnation of adultery (whatever is the correct understanding of that term), paradoxically enough together with a facilitation of divorce on such grounds, which the Council of Trent explicitly excluded.

Dan is right when he says that the myth according to which extramarital desire is proof of lack of love and commitment is not only evident nonsense, but also pernicious to the very institution it seeks to associate itself with. If we go round pounding such notions, which are so obviously at odds with our biological nature, into everyone’s heads then it is no wonder relationships and families are a mess and it is no wonder that affective trauma gets passed from one generation to another. It is not easy to reconcile social monogamy with sexual non-exclusivity, but only because it requires a great deal of deconditioning and the demasking of a great deal of inherited suffering. Attempts to do so, under the likely conditions of asymmetric incentive between the partners, may often end in failure and acrimony or worse. Nevertheless, the idea that there is anything natural in the association between these two ideas has been comprehensively disproved by the accumulated experience of vast numbers of couples for whom it is, by now, a complete non-issue, indeed for whom open sexual boundaries have meant much greater, not less, intimacy.

Dan’s is no self-interested male agenda, of which, being gay, he anyway cannot be suspected; it is a plea for relationships based on real respect, commitment and love between adult and equal human beings. The kind of relationship in which children prosper emotionally, and each partner feels more empowered in going about their life due to the love and stability they enjoy. It is surely high time for society to cast off the vestiges of shame around sexuality which objectively stand in the way of making the institutions work which they purport to defend.

Property, debt and the money supply

I have just finished reading David Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5000 Years“. It is somewhat relevant to our topic here, and in any case it is interesting, so let me summarize it and give a brief review.

In the first part of the book, Graeber, who is an anthropologist, takes to task the traditional notion of economics whereby cash was invented to reduce the transaction costs inherent in a system of barter. I am not sure how original his thesis is, but it is persuasive. In a nutshell, Graeber says that we know very well this is not true. In fact, the ability of cash to serve as a general means of engaging in daily economic transactions is no earlier than the 19th century and even postdates Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Apparently he knew this very well. Graeber says that Smith’s notion of the relationship between salaried worker and capitalist employer is not descriptive at all, but prescriptive, indeed utopian. In traditional societies, and Graeber quotes many examples, cash, when it exists, serves ceremonial, not transactional purposes. Rather, everyday transactions are carried out on credit.

Credit may mean a number of things. It may simply be a general expectation of reciprocity over time, which indeed may not even presuppose a predisposition to think in terms of personal or kin benefit at all (as per E.O.Wilson’s theory of multilevel selection). I have argued elsewhere that the role of emotions and empathy, and more particularly of shame, is to be understood against this background. On the other hand, in more complex societies, especially against the backdrop of taxation, as well as the standardization of weights and measures, credit becomes a matter of accounting records and ultimately transferable bearer instruments. Credit in this case can be standardized in terms of a commodity unit of account, even if the commodity itself is not exchanged. Official tables of correspondance between one commodity and another can also be promulgated by state authorities. Graeber argues that this antedates coinage, and a fortiori the general use of coinage, by a considerable margin. Thus the story of money is the story of debt.

This account occupies the first four chapters. As of chapter five, the book for me starts to come apart. In that chapter, Graeber attempts a moral philosophy of debt, but is clearly out of his depth in doing so. There are interesting elements in relation to slavery in chapters six and seven, but the point Graeber is trying to make is never clear. The rest of the book attempts a world history of money, and is disappointing. There is an omnipresent ideological underpinning to what Graeber says, and a disappointing lack of critical distance vis-a-vis the international financial economy. Regardless of its origins, one would have wanted an account which assessed its strengths and weaknesses in terms of serving the well-being of the human race today. Possibly even some thought-through proposals for change. Graeber is a long way from rising to this challenge; so much so that one is left wondering what the point in fact was of the analysis of slavery and of the moral nature of debt which he belabors.

That the book was going to fail in any such enterprise was for me obvious already from the title. Why 5000 years? Graeber argues that everything started, or at least starting going wrong, with the first agrarian empires. It is not at all clear why the fact of empire (however it is defined) is relevant. Humankind has been organizing itself into agriculturally based communities for at least twice this period. Such communities enabled community size to exceed the tribal unit for which our brain seems preprogrammed (known as Dunbar’s number). Once this happened, hierarchy and specialization became possible, property become a key issue, and it was no longer possible to keep track of a network of implied reciprocal obligations. There is every reason to date the development of formal credit systems, guaranteed by a central authority, to this date, rather than arbitrarily to begin at the dawn of written records.

Why does Graeber make what seems such an obvious mistake? In one sense, it is not of particular importance to his thesis. But there is, I think, a deeper reason. Graeber seeks to promulgate a romantic notion of the “human economy” in primitive societies (although he protests he does not). A “human economy” is an “economic system primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction and rearranging of human beings”. Logically, one supposes that “human economies” evolved, under the force of state formation (“empires”), into credit economies. Ignoring the fact that the purpose of the latter is hardly, per se, “the accumulation of wealth”, what type of society would be expected to be characterized by a “human economy”?

Graeber does not answer this question, but the examples he gives concern both hunter-gatherer and sedentary populations. And therein lies the rub, for these are organized on fundamentally different principles, and their economic systems reflect this.

Graeber says of this type of economy that “some are quite humane, others extraordinarily brutal”. Since, however, it is his own argument that the means of exchange relates directly to the exercise of violence, he should be more attentive to this distinction. In fact, what he misses is quite as basic as what Smith misses also. In the sedentary populations, property and intra-group violence have already arisen; and both credit and currency are used in a way which intrinsically recognizes and reinforces this, whatever their form and regardless of the keeping of written records. Graeber is blind to this because he accepts uncritically the monogamy myth, failing to see it as a primal form of violence, and this despite the rich variety in the sexual organization of the societies he mentions. He fails to see that monogamy is an outgrowth of property systems and not intrinsic to the human condition.

This matters, because human economies, according to his own definition, are about “organizing” human beings. Later, this means slaves. Before this, it means women in reproductive age. It is because property rights are already asserted by men over women that “human economies” have anything to ceremonially exchange. Absent this feature, the notion has no sense or raison d’etre.

Strangely enough, Graeber describes at length in his book rituals of exchange witnessed amongst Australian aborigines, whose social organization remained (or more probably returned to) one of hunter-gatherers. These economies therefore have a reasonable claim to incarnate principles which arose prior to “human economies”. And guess what: attitudes to sex are much more relaxed; indeed, sexual exchange plays a key part in the overall ritual of economic exchange between the tribal groups. In fact barter occurs in primitive societies only in an inter-group setting, and always within an overall context of socialization between the groups.

Rather than an inspiration for an economic theory truer to mankind’s basic nature, the “human economy” therefore seems to me to mark the beginning of where things went wrong. It would be hugely naive to appeal to such a model as a solution for the world’s economic woes.

Things certainly got for a long time worse before they started to get better. This, however, is no indictment of credit or currency as such. The behavioral assumptions of classical economics have been under attack for decades, and Graeber does contribute something. We are still lacking a better model. But the models of classical economies are perfectly good for most of the purposes to which they are put, and distinctly better than any guide to practical action which might emerge from Graeber’s views. We do not have to believe the myth of homo economicus, and we certainly do not have to accept the distribution of wealth and opportunity which history has bequeathed us. We can acknowledge the embedded violence in the economic system as it exists, and still use the science to improve the happiness of human beings – which is its foremost goal.