City Cousins and Country Cousins

What Makes Them Different?

William Sundwick

The Neolithic Revolution occurred approximately 12.500 years ago. It was followed immediately by the urban/rural political divide. As soon as hunter-gatherers coalesced into agricultural settlements, and stopped being nomadic, they established villages, then cities. Yet, the food to feed the population in those cities was grown by the farmers. It was their surplus that sustained the city.

In time, however, the farmers’ natural advantage over the city dwellers became inverted. Farmers became indentured to the lords of the manor (the “city”) under feudalism. Power flowed upward – the cities became creditors and the manor, or vassals, were debtors.

The eternal conflict between debtors and creditors intensified. Mercantilism was about more than international trade. Any power center (e.g., an estate, corporation, or nation) sought to maximize profit by keeping costs (imports) to a minimum while getting maximum price for its products (exports).

As agricultural workers lost their bargaining power, since they had only one buyer (the city), workers in the city found more favorable economic conditions. If they could produce goods and services only a few skilled individuals could provide, like luxury goods for the nobility, they could demand whatever price they wanted, provided there was a market.

The activities of marketing and money lending became concentrated in cities. Other rent-seeking economic behavior followed. And, the emigration from the countryside to the cities began. That’s where the jobs were. Industrialization only aggravated this. Education also became available mostly in the city – to provide the skills necessary for even more specialized production. Capital, both human and material, became the currency of a new age.

But the farmers stayed the same. Indeed, they found they also needed access to capital in order to maximize their surplus. Family farms became businesses -- or sold out to businesses.

And, the emigration of the young to the city continued. The cities began to grow outside of their previous boundaries – they spawned suburbs! So, even the land area devoted to farming shrunk.

This happened throughout the developed world as, first industrialization, then cosmopolitanism with its diverse poly-cultural richness and higher educational levels, drew ever larger populations, magnetically, to urban areas.

But what about those who either couldn’t or wouldn’t leave? The old, the less educated, the poor. Might they not be resentful of all their talented youth abandoning their traditional way of life for the city? In the United States, and some research indicates in Europe as well, there has now developed a political ideology around the “forgotten ones” status. It often takes on racial animus, “us” (white people) versus “them” (immigrants and non-white others). Religious affiliations can exacerbate the feelings – provincialism and tribalism are frequently promoted by religious denominations. Only some of us are God’s chosen, and fewer of us live in cities.

And those suburbs? That’s where city cousins and country cousins can be neighbors! Suburban development is not unique to the United States. European cities have their own suburbs, with similar characteristics. There are poly-cultural, cosmopolitan suburban communities and multi-cultural communities which experience tension between their constituent cultures. Relatively few suburbs are mono-cultural like small towns or rural areas (very wealthy suburbs may be the exception).

Political sensibilities in the poly-cultural suburbs tend to skew left, or liberal, but multi-cultural communities with their tensions might exaggerate political allegiances across the cultural divide. Sometimes multi-cultural tension is not racial, but class based. It could be between “old-timers” who have been there since the community was a mono-cultural small town and the “newcomers” who have moved there from the city, perhaps victims of gentrification in the city center, or to raise a family in more space.

In the United States today, we are currently engaged in a discussion about the urban/rural divide as it relates to legislative districting. There are severe constitutional constraints on how apportionment is handled from state to state. Recently, the Supreme Court decided federal courts must stay away from partisan redistricting. But the fact remains: if state legislatures decide on the boundaries of the districts, they will always draw the maps so that the dominant party’s position is perpetuated, if they are able. Individual states may come up with alternatives (perhaps even proportional representation), but not all have constitutional provisions for ballot initiatives.

Unless you can make a convincing economic case to farmers and small town mono-cultural voters that their life is made much better by immigrants or free trade, it’s not likely that the present contour of rural right-populism can be replaced any time soon by a more urban poly-culturalism. Some folks simply prefer to live around fewer people, and more empty land. They skew conservative in their values.

Cosmopolitanism is seen by many country cousins as the ideology of the elites – for the winners in society, not them! Likewise, many poorer urban residents see rural provincialism as a strategy for protecting what’s theirs from “theft” by non-whites, especially. Perhaps heightened awareness of their privilege might be prudent for both city cousins and country cousins in this debate.

A Feminist Manifesto (from a Heteronormative Male Who Raised Only Sons)

William Sundwick

Patriarchy

Let’s not trivialize the “elephant in the room.” Patriarchy has been the near universal social structure throughout the Euro-Asian world since the Neolithic revolution of agriculture, perhaps 12,000 years ago. It has been accepted by all the world’s major religions for thousands of years. It underlies the persistence of monarchy and transmission of wealth in all of history’s greatest empires.

True to the patrilineal society in which we live, both my adult sons took my surname, not their mother’s.

So, where do feminists come from, anyway? In primitive Neolithic societies child-bearing and nursing the young were activities which necessarily distracted from the attention that had to be paid to tending crops and domesticating animals – and, life spans were not long enough to allow for much post-child-rearing endeavors, especially when generous fertility was required, due to infant mortality.

Yet, archaeologists and anthropologists agree that pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were NOT necessarily patriarchal, but often were far more egalitarian, as are many indigenous peoples today. Women might make superior hunters than men, or superior gatherers, and the investment in land and infrastructure simply was not there, needing protection from adversaries. Hunter-gatherer villages were small, and monogamy less likely – every child knew its mother, if not its father. Matrilineal cultures could, and did, evolve in these conditions.

Property, evil

With agriculture, and land, came the notion of property. Property was overhead – it added an additional layer on the Neolithic world. Property determined wealth, wealth easily translated into power, and those who possessed it would fight to keep it. They considered women and children property as well. Families emerged, forged alliances with other families, forming tribes, then tribes invented myths to perpetuate themselves (religion). Later, tribes grew into nation-states and empires. Men were the “haves,” women the “have-nots.” Women were chattel, and slavery was the dominant organizing principle for labor. Only in modern times have women been allowed to own property, and has slavery been abolished.

Rendered powerless by religious and legal systems, many women became acculturated in a different method of influencing the world – through manipulation of men. Rather than contesting men for power, they discovered ways to share it.

As cultures became more complex, the demand for specialization of labor led to the development of educational and other social support systems. At the same time, there were great improvements in life expectancy, especially for women vis-à-vis their men. Suddenly, women often became the better-equipped to manage many of the ancillary activities of daily life. Not only the role of teacher, but the nurse, seamstress, and other home-based activities became accessible to women.

Reaction

But, as men detected a change in the power balance, they sought to redress it. Women resented this. Moving through the 20^th century, women’s health concerns were much ameliorated by science and medicine. It was no longer necessary to be neutralized by child-rearing. Late In the century, it even became possible, with proper educational credentials, to start a career, interrupt it to start a family, then resume it later, when children were older. These options were only available to a privileged slice of educated women in “advanced” western countries, however. And, even there, the vestiges of patriarchy were still found in pay scales, allegedly due to those “interruptions” in their careers.

Clinging to power in their patriarchal world motivates many men in the world to this day. The recent episode of the “Google manifesto,” which caused a software engineer to be fired, indicates the continued sensitivity many men feel about their abilities to compete with women in the workplace.

Some societies still have legal constraints on women’s activities (Saudi Arabia), others endorse religious restrictions on women (both from Islam and the Roman Catholic Church). To most of us in the western world, the rationale for these legal or religious restrictions appears anachronistic, to say the least – there is still a vocal minority of men who feel they are oppressed by feminism.

Gender fluidity

Emerging in the 21^st century are even more challenges to the patriarchal social structure. Now, it is becoming difficult to even determine gender in an individual. Freedom to switch genders is being asserted more forcefully throughout the West. If women can simply say “now, I’m a man,” they are forcing a confrontation with the rules of patriarchy. The male reaction, along with their female collaborators, would be to deny that freedom. Reproductive freedom is a similar argument – it forces a confrontation with many patriarchy-enforced values, mainly via religion.

Queer Theory has developed an ideology of fluid gender roles, where individuals can move comfortably back and forth between genders, or adopt characteristics of both genders simultaneously. Indeed, this is not new -- cross-dressing and unconventional career choices have long been on the plate for all of us, as has choice of the gender of intimate partners. The only change is that now we have academic and psychological endorsements from social elites. The expression “heteronormative” was invented as part of queer theory to focus on the aspect of normalization in the patriarchy.

What about families? Is feminism a threat to the family unit? It seems to me, at least, that for all the reasons mentioned above: the complexity of the demand for labor, the advances in science and technology, and the favored position women have developed over the last couple centuries in the West – we can now say that any “interruption” in the care of children caused by mothers being absent some of the time is transitory at best, and might even be beneficial to child development. What is threatened is not the family itself, but the hierarchy of authority that has sought to dominate the family, and all social institutions, since the very earliest days of the Neolithic revolution!

Greater autonomy of women (including property rights) has also been a stabilizing influence on the family because it places constraints on men’s philandering. The ability to divorce a husband is a feminist contribution of the last hundred years.

In many cases, my own included, men are now forced to accept – even in the deepest recesses of their socialized brains – that women are, and ought to be, autonomous actors in their own lives.

The future

In the future, many now see a growing “useless class” of unemployed, due to advances in artificial intelligence, and many (but not all) of them will be men. It is them, and not the growing class of educated and skilled women that are the primary threat to the persistence of the patriarchal social model. Their only salvation may lie in replacing capitalism with a non-property-based system.

We can expect to see a corresponding dissolution of those authoritarian entities which have perpetuated the patriarchy – the state and the church.  And, as we try to envision this future, we should remember that history lies in the records, not the myths. What do we know about alternative social models? Those that existed in the remote past, and those that exist among some indigenous groups today? Learning about them will be more useful than stubborn allegiance to the myths of the past, even those that have seen a very long run of thousands of years.

Human society has proven very adaptable over its long history. There is no reason to think that the patriarchal gods of the last five millennia cannot be replaced by a new “earth mother” model, in many ways similar to the earliest hunter-gatherers.