Sedentary and Servile Existence
Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist
until agriculture. The human capacity for being shackled to crops and to
herd, devolved rather quickly. Food production overcame absence or
paucity or ritual and hierarchy in society and introduced civilized
activitied like the forced labor of temple-building. Here is the real
"Cartesian split" between inner and out reality, the seperation whereby
nature becomes merely something to be "worked." On this capacity for a
sedentary and servile existence rests the entire superstructure of
civilization with its increasing weight of repression.
Male violence towards women originated with agriculture, which
tansmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children. Before
farming, the egalitarianism of foraging life "applied as fully to women
as to men," judged Eleano Leacock, owing to the autonomy of tasks and the
fact that decisions were made by those who carried them out. In the
absence of production and with no drudge work suitable for child labor
such as weeding, women were not consigned to the onerous chores of the
constant supply of babies.
Along with the curse of perpetual work, via agriculture, in the
expulsion from Eden, Gold told woman, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow
and they conception: in sorry thou shalt bring forth children; and that
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Similarly,
the first known codified laws, those of the Sumerian king, Ur-Namu,
prescribed death to any woman satisfying desires outside of marriage.
Thus Whyte referred to the ground women "lost relative to men when humans
first abandoned simple hunting and gathering way of like," and Simone de
Behavoir saw in the cultural equation of plow and phallus a fitting symbol
of the oppression of women.
As wild animals are converted into sluggish meat-making machines,
the concept of becoming "cultivated" is a virtue enforced on people,
meaning the weeding out of freedom from one's nature, in the service of
domestication and exploitation, As Rice points out, in Sumer, the first
civilization, the earlist citied had facotires with their characteristic
high organization and refraction of skills. Civilization from this point
exacts human labor and the mass production of food, buildings, war and
authority.
To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. The name for
it -- PONOS -- has the same root as the Latin POENA, sorrow. The famous
Old Testament curse on agriculture and the expulsion from Paradise
(Genesis 3:17-18) reminds us of the origin of work. As Mumford put it,
"Conformity, repetition, patience, were the keys to this [Neolithic]
culture ... the patient capacity for work." In this monotony and
passivity of tending and waiting is born, according to Paul Shepard, the
pesent's "deep, latent resentments, crude mixtures of rectitude and
heavyness, and absence of humor." One might also add a stoic
insensitivity and lack of imagination inseparable from religious faith,
sulleness, and suspicion among traits widely attributed to the
domesticated life of farming.
Although food production by its nature includes a latent
readiness for political domination, and although civilizing culture was
from the beginning its own propaganda machine, this changeover involved a
monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman's AGAINST HIS-STORY, AGAINST
LEVIATHAN! is unrivaled on this, castly enrighting Toynbee's attention to
the "internal" and "external proletariats," discontents within and
without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from digging stick
farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems,
and almost total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
The formation of storage and surpluses are part of the
domesticating will to control and make static, an aspect of the tendency
to symbolize. A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus takes forms
of herd animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of
equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of
wealth in the shape of storable grains do gradations of labor and social
classes proceed. While there were certainly wild grains before all this
(and wild wheat, by the way, is 24% protein compared to 12% for
domesticated wheat) the bias of culture makes every diffirence,
Civilization and its cities rested as much on granaries as on
symbolization.
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Karl Alexis McKinnon|I live as the beasts in the fields, rejoicing in the
SP2 |fleshly life. I favor the edible and curse the inedible.
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