Sunday, September 06, 2015
[Re-post] Ascent of Woman? The Descent to cultural, historical and scientific illiteracy of the BBC
[Re-post]
The BBC documentary 'The Ascent of Woman: 1. Civilisation' broadcast last night is perhaps the very worst nonsense ever put out as a documentary.
Most of the counter-factual shibboleths of extreme-feminist ideology were aired as truth, with not a single line of the script standing up to even cursory scrutiny.
Just to pick out a few of the most glaring absurdities, even just remembering from last night's broadcast, without viewing again to make notes …..
* The veil is not emblematic of 'patriarchy' [sic]. It is a female intra-sexual phenomenon: a result of female-female competition for pair-bond partners. Inasmuch as there is male involvement it is at the behest of women who wish to project their spheres of interest and influence into the civic world of male-male competition, to get males to work for them as reinforcing agents.
* There is no such thing as 'patriarchy' [sic] – or 'matriarchy' [sic]. These are terns invented by cultural anthropologists both ignorant of the biological basis of social system and wishing to both explicitly and implicitly impose an ideological view. The sexes invariably are in tandem, so it makes no sense to view one sex or the other as being somehow in control. There is no such thing as a dominance interaction that is other than same-sex: dominance is never cross-sex. [The supposed 'female dominance in species such as the ring-tailed lemur is in fact male deference to provide female feeding priority.]
* The sex of a deity says nothing at all about the 'sexual politics' [sic] of a culture. All cultures had both male and female deities, with female 'fertility' and male 'sun' deities, with male sacrificial supposed half-human / half-deity 'go-between' figures who sacrificed themselves to the 'fertility' goddess.
* 'Civilisation' did not begin at some arbitrary point in time, often mistakenly thought to be on the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Research reveals an ever further recession into the past, and no 'quantum-jump' of some former 'non-civilised' sociality into 'civilisation'.
* Hierarchy in no sense recently emerged: hierarchy is inherent in and the very basis of male sociality in all cultures at all points in history and prehistory, and in all primates, mammals generally, and going back phylogenetically to before even the evolution of insects. Even the most seemingly 'egalitarian' hunter-gatherer / forager society features male hierarchy. It does not require resource disparities. On the very contrary, the surplus provided by farming in allowing a wider basis of signalling male mate-value, actually enhances egalitarianism in its wider sense – though there s no significant 'flattening' of hierarchy; this being impossible, given that the basis of distinguishing rank would simply shift to other criteria of genetic quality.
* An archaeological dig in no way can lead to any conclusion as to the 'sexual politics' [sic] of the people whose historical site is being investigated. Artefacts unearthed can be subject to wild speculation but are no basis whatsoever as evidence. On the very contrary, the scant finds in a dig are pegs for contemporary ideological bias.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 9:15 am 
