Due to a particularly sharp-minded muse of mine I am not putting together the hopeful Noble nominated masterpiece Letters from Planet Meathead, and am instead writing this. You may thank me with a donation, or by gifting your first born daughter—just leave her at the drawbridge with Egil.
Reference Notes
For further reading see Our Kind by Marvin Harris and the following books reviewed on this site:
“…the individual, up to a certain age, being regarded as merely a natural being, was entrusted to the family and to maternal tutelage, since everything related to the maternal, physical aspect of existence fell under the maternal-feminine aegis. However, at a certain point what happened, or better, what could happen, was a change of nature and status. Special rites, known as ‘rites of passage,’ which were often preceded by a period of detachment and isolation, and which were accompanied by harsh trials, generated a new being according to a scheme of ‘death and rebirth’ who alone could be regarded as a ‘man.’”
-Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins
What Evola was discussing was the universal definition of manhood among all pre agricultural peoples known to have lived on planet earth. When a Christian missionary came to such people in the Americas after 20,000 years of cultural separation, or his associate the whiskey merchant, or their slave the indentured land clearance drone, the native men never identified any of these civilized male humans as men, but categorized them as female, child or animal. Only if the European was a warrior was he elevated to the status of enemy or ally and respected as a man, for, in all cultures prior to agriculture, to be a man was—though based on physical gender differences—dependent upon the completion of a spiritual journey that rendered him unconcerned with everyday things in the home space.
According to this view the modern American cutting his grass, and hauling his wife’s groceries and trash, and picking up the children from work in the minivan is not a man, but a woman with a penis and testicles.
Through various types of physical culture, such as boxing and hunting, civilized men have sought to retain the spiritual element that defines them as the risk-taking 'seeking' half of the human species, which necessitates some period of separation from the security-minded half of the human species. The genius of modern democratic forms of government is the vote, which permits and encourages those segments of the population most easily frightened into compliance to feel potent through complaisance by casting a vote in hopes of insuring their own well being through the action of others. The illusion of agency among the domesticated citizen is the evolutionary apex of the agricultural worldview, which I think, will have its ultimate expression in the actual cultivation of future human infants by those who they will eventually vote for.
Most of the women in my family will object to this assertion, as they see men and women according to our liberal world view as merely afflicted by a physical difference which must, of moral necessity, be bridged and nullified. We live in emergent one gender society and many of the type of writer I am associated with has decried it as a sudden reversal of The Way of Men, a feminist abomination recently emerged from the 1960s counter culture movement. Genghis Khan would disagree, as would Geronimo, you neutered paleface whelps!
Those ladies of my blood, will however, forget feminism when it comes time to move furniture—then the call goes out, “Where are the men!” Likewise, those athletic young ladies who have sought combat instruction from me demonstrate a noticeably different psychology than their male counterparts and bear handling differently. They might hold the door for their coach in defiance of his old time gender sensibilities. But when it comes time for the men to get on the mat and spar—or fight—they grow as pale as General Miles’ white soldiers did when considering the prospect of actually fighting an Apache—so Miles sent in his own Apaches. It was not for nothing that Geronimo’s stone age clan beat the shit out of the Mexicans for 300 civilized years, and gave the U.S. Army a bigger headache than did the entire Spanish Empire a decade later.
Primitive men have always bested civilized men in the field even when at gross material disparity of force. Indeed postmodern military doctrine, or 4th generation warfare, is an adaptation of primitive warrior methods to the specter of world killing weapons. The U.S. Empire is waging low intensity war in over 30 nations per year, and keeping the 8 billion person world under its thumb, primarily through the efforts of perhaps 1,000 special operations warriors who live and fight on a primitive model pioneered in 1917-18 by Ernst Junger, Erwin Rommel and Sergeant Alvin York, among others. Junger called it ‘moving in Indian file,’ a method that harkens back as far as we can trace lethal technology, but which civilized warriors only adopted after being schooled and outfought in the wild places of the world. It was not the prowess of the civilized fighting man which conquered the primitive warriors of the world, but his machines of death and his vast numbers.
The Psychological Root
The dates below have not been updated for a few years but should be accurate to within 10%, and of course become increasingly subjective when the agricultural sphere opens up. The intention is to put the accelerating nature of our ever shifting human paradigm in focus and to illustrate the feminization of men—which is my concern—as I have no objection to the feminization of women, or even the forays of those few women into the sphere of men, as I see manhood as a spiritual realization, not as a biological designation, which makes me psychologically primitive—there babe, I even made your counterpoint!
5 million years ago bipedal apes are down out of the trees learning how to deal with all of those four-legged headaches in the grass. The interaction between mankind and ‘the four-legs’ remains a central theme of much primitive myth down through 1900.
250,000 years ago primitive humans with brain size equal to and in excess of our own are living in groups featuring gender role based survival strategies.
75,000 years ago in the wake of the Toba Super Eruption and the extermination of most modern humans and the consequent ‘bottleneck genetic event’ humanity most probably develops its current in-group out-group conflict-domination model, as illustrated by the accelerated nature of the events below.
40,000 years ago modern humans have fully articulate and speculative language as we know it, which explains a lot of what follows as aggressive cooperation enabled by this new level of thought exchange. At the same time the first instance attributed to belief in an afterlife or a transcendent mystery occurs at a Neanderthal Burial in the Middle East, which is a prescient development on their part, for those new humans with the long range weapons and next generation communications are coming up out of Africa, where they have already wiped out most of their coppoid cousins.
30,000 years ago as the last few Neanderthals hide out in caves across Eurasia, copious evidence in the form of cave painting suggest that modern man is now a spiritual being who believes in a transcendent [essentially that which is unknowable but sought none-the-less]. Theories that this feature of human life might be an adaptation of a root Neanderthal tradition retained after intermarriage are purely speculative.
10,000 years ago agriculture is beginning to lead to intensified and coercive settled societies, in which manhood rituals become the exclusive domain of the ruling class and are generally denied to male slaves. This continued into the 20th Century with the barring of black athletes from competing for the heavyweight boxing crown.
Most agricultural societies reach a male-female symbiosis favoring the male, with the nomadic sky gods ruling the cosmos and the fertility goddesses serving as wives. Most men were denied manhood, and women were often classed as property. However, there was a symbiosis that reflected the ages old tradition of men seeking—whether on the battlefield, hunting trail or wondering of the heavens—and women maintaining some level of influence at home.
3,000 years ago in the increasingly arid Middle East, a desert invasion corridor, monotheism develops along Abrahamic and Zoroasterian lines, justifying the necessity for genocide and diminishing the sky god-earth mother symbiosis to a good-over-evil duality.
1,700 years ago Rome harnesses the esoteric offshoot of Judaism known as Christianity as a state ideology, admixing pagan goddess and heroic traditions into the cults of Mary and sainthood to enable broad based conversion of pagan subjects.
1,400 years ago Islam emerges as an extreme interpretation of the patriarchal duality worldview just as the centuries of religious war between the dualistic theocracies of Rome and Persia leave both of those powers prostrate and vulnerable.
500 years ago with Islam at its greatest expanse Christian nations, hemmed in on the European peninsula, use Arabic inventions to colonize the unknown parts of the world in a global flanking maneuver. The resulting social and economic strains result in the emasculation of Catholicism, the wars of the Reformation [basically a medieval WWII] and the formation of the dominant Northern European states along protestant lines that are more materially driven and harbor a return to the more ruthless Middle Eastern Judaic tradition of genocide in service to resource exploitation.
With this development the most economically powerful nations in the world utterly reject masculinity except among the combat infantrymen, seamen and perennially warlike aristocrats that prosecute their wars of global resource hungry conquest. This is the protestant origin of the current western military-domestic complex, which has feminized the vast majority of the male population, as is necessary when there is a vast home space, and a restricted unknown space. Political ideology and science, which together comfort the citizen with the notion that all things are known, now replaced traditional allegory based faiths as the new mind control apparatus.
The American Civil War, the extermination of the North American warrior societies, and the conquest of every corner of the world by material means, with limited martial craft, amounted to the near death of the warrior ethic, which is the most vigorous form of manhood. The industrial revolution brought spiritual genocide to the battlefield. These conquests placed European Christian and Atheist [with each of these antagonistic belief complexes firmly rooted in material based Middle Eastern theology] industrialists as masters of all the world save Japan and Haiti. This proved that superior men could not, in the end, match superior numbers and machines generated by the vast compliant populations.
Finally, in the 1940s, the termination of the world’s largest war fought largely without warriors set the stage for true globalization, which would ultimately mean for men on the primal model, that no ‘other place’ would remain as the aim of globalization is to make all the world a home space.
50 years ago as a byproduct of the global Cold War the U.S. Space Program and the lunar landings admitted the possibility of a new realm of exploration, a place away from home that might offer an alternative to domestication. This space travel notion has since been quashed by politicians and scientists alike. Man’s future is now envisioned solely as a creature of an entirely domesticated planet. This committed view that earth will forever by the inescapable home of Humanity is so pervasive, that of the last 10 science fiction readers and writers I polled concerning the issue of space travel all vociferously denied that any human will ever be able to travel into space beyond low earth orbit to any useful purpose, and that the solar system is absolutely inescapable. Perhaps this is very true. Perhaps space travel is not possible. Perhaps that old kook who once told me that the lunar landings were faked was correct. Nevertheless, it is astounding to me, that in my life time, the most wonderstruck portion of the most educated portion of the human population has gone from believing in the inevitability of space travel to asserting its impossibility.
15 years ago Islamic warriors embarked in earnest on an apocalyptic war of global insurgency with one of the stated aims being a return to the enslavement of women. The financially ailing West has reacted in classic dualistic fashion by advancing the opposite cause of female empowerment. I see this dualistic struggle in the light of the ancient Roman versus Persian war, with three possible conclusions:
1. Roman [i.e. Western] victory
2. Islamic [i.e. Persian] victory
3. A protracted and wasteful struggle that will leave both human paradigms prostrate and vulnerable to some other, yet to rise, force
Summary
That was something of a tangent and I suppose sketching the entire history of Man in an hour now ranks as my most arrogant achievement as a writer. My purposes here were 3:
1. To provide a reference for the extreme compression and acceleration of human action since the advent of agriculture, in order to gain some perspective on how slowly our psychology has evolved and how suddenly it tends to be tested.
2. To show that the emasculation of men is not new, is inevitable with technological progress, and is something of the mind, for no primitive man was ever considered a man because he had a penis and testicles, and in some rare instances women were regarded as men despite the absence of same.
3. That the rise of a civilization wherein the traditional role of Man as explorer and combatant and resource acquisition specialist can be replaced by machinery, leaves Woman as the logical inheritor of a thoroughly domesticated planet, with perhaps some vestigial male role as an entertainer or companion.
Of course I’d like to think otherwise, but don’t permit myself to get too optimistic. I leave the reader with my sketch of the Last Man from my Sunset Saga:
Hyman Maxim resides atop his Stratospheric Tower in 2843 with his consort, a perfect woman of his own design. His generation ship is nearly complete, as he sits infinitely alone at his compact; the last organic member of the human race; the last of his species to trace a life-line back to Ugly little Lucy. The re-teraforming sequence is set in motion and commences in one year. He has enough clones and drones to operate the Endeavor on its interstellar flight. But since those religious fanatics trashed the Genome Vault his last hope for a meaningful company of travelers resides with his Time Hunters.
Discussing philosophy with Aristotle, playing chess with Tamerlane, painting with Leonardo, singing with Hiawatha, drinking with Richard Burton, and enjoying the most distinguished women of a dozen lost worlds would be far preferable to spending eternity with this scary bitch that he designed 300 years ago, when he was too young to know any better.