War and chauvenism

This entry was originally posted on 8 December 2004 at 12:55 p.m.

One of the books i'm reading, Our Kind by Marvin Harris, makes a very interesting argument about male chauvenism and warlike societies--that both are products of population pressure. It basically goes like this:

Few Resources -> Population Pressure
Population Pressure -> Competition b/n groups
Competition -> War
War -> Gender Inequality/Preference for Male Children

Like i said, interesting--because not all the links are readily apparent. For example, that last one. Why would war produce gender inequality? Well, he argues, in societies where people still fight with technology that requires physical strength, the 6-15% difference between the sexes is a life-or-death difference where the edge goes to men.

The idea is that men become more valuable in societies where resources are scarce and groups have to fight for them. As a result, male babies are preferred over female babies (females can produce more babies, but between resource scarcity and the need for adult males, it's more costly to raise females). And (and this is where it really gets interesting) this leads to both female infanticide and the necessity of capturing adult females as part of the spoils of war. (Keep in mind that mature females are easier to manage than female infants--they're already socialized and are at the point where they can provide domestic services and bear children.) Which means that women become objects and lose their status as contributors to politics, etc.

I'm not going to argue the validity of Harris' argument (i'm sure i've simplified it significantly, too, so any arguments that i could make against it might already be accounted for in a more sophisticated version). But i am going to ask a couple of questions.

First, can this be considered a "law" of human nature? Is it always the case that, at the very least, for all human societies, regardless of their degree of sedentariness, scarcity of resources will bring about war, and war will result in greater value being placed on men's lives than on women's lives?

And if so, does this apply to our own society?

I find it interesting that we're under the leadership of a president who has taken us to war. War on two fronts, in fact--one of which involves revenge (and currently undermanned and being swept under the carpet in the media), and the other of which, despite all cries to the contrary, involves the aquisition of a major natural resource whose world supply is quickly dwindling. Okay, so there's war for resources. I find it equally interesting that the current administration would gladly strip a woman's right to choose whether or not she'll keep her child.

The important thing to note is that the latter factor doesn't directly limit the number of female infants; in fact, logically, it would raise the total population substantially. On the other hand, the same administration strongly supports abstinence as the only form of birth control, and is willing to compromise the separation of chuch and state to ensure that this message gets across. (I'm not sure what happens theoretically if you add the religious factors into the mix, but it doesn't change the stance at all. One could consider religion simply as the medium for communicating these social policies.)

Does it fall directly in line with the Harris hypothesis? I can't say one way or the other. But i find the parallels very interesting. On the surface they have absolutely nothing to do with one another. And one might argue that surely even the current administration is far more advanced than, say, the Yanomami people (though i find this an arrogant, ethnocentric, technocentric, and patently insulting proposition).

But in the end, if you reduce it just a little and squint your left eye, isn't it interesting?