The Natural Superiority of Women (49 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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of reproduction. Physical relatedness evolves to a much higher order of psychological complexity, but whatever the origin of relatedness, interdependency is the social condition that characterizes all living organisms, that is, responsiveness between organisms, or interactive behavior.
The social state is the process of interaction between organisms during which they confer survival benefits upon one another. In other words, social relationships are an extension and amplification of the physiologic relations obtaining between maternal organism and offspring. The suggestion is that apart from the very nature of protoplasm itself, which is cohesive, both maternal organism and offspring in the process of reproduction undergo an intensification of their physiologically cohesive or interdependent energies, with the result that the offspring experience strong impulses of attraction that cause them to remain in association with the organism or organisms of the same kind; while the maternal organism, as a consequence of the reproductive process, finds that her own tendencies for social aggregation are intensified and focused upon the needs of her offspring.
With rare exceptions, throughout the whole kingdom of life organisms are found in association. Excluding, possibly, certain insects, if one ever finds a solitary animal in nature it is either only temporarily dissociated from its social group or something else is wrong. In fact, when any living creature begins to isolate itself from the group, and tends to remain isolated, one can be certain that something is awry, or else that such behavior is actually conferring survival benefits upon the group. In short, social interaction and responsiveness is a well-nigh universal concomitant of life. Cooperation, not conflict, is the law of life.
Some years ago, as reported by Professor Chauncey D. Leake, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group of distinguished American scientists, following a fruitful conference of several days, formulated the following principle: "The probability of survival of a relationship between individual humans increased with the extent to which that relationship is mutually satisfying."

1
This is, of course, a special case of the more general principle: "The probability of survival of individual or groups of living things increases with the degree with which they harmoniously adjust themselves to each other and to their environment."

 

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These principles apply to all human relationships without exception, and with particular force to the male-female, husbandwife relationships.
When we examine the manner in which these principles actually work in all individuals and groups, we find that the benefits conferred upon those mutually participating are striking. In addition to the great psychological benefits conferred, it has been found that in human beings every physical system of the body is benefited as well. Psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology bear living testimony to that truth.

2
It has been found in recent years that children do not grow properly if their socio-emotional relationships are disturbed. Dr. Ralph Fried of Cleveland published a most impressive study on the subject, and workers in Canada and elsewhere independently made the same discoveries. May it not be that the psychosocial subjection in which women have been kept for many millennia has some connection with their greater sickness rate? Response to an unrelenting depressing environment is often expressed in chronic or frequent illness. When, however, organisms live together under cooperative conditions they contribute to one another in such a way as to enrich what can only be described as the fa-ulty to live.

To love thy neighbor as thyself is not only sound ethics but perfectly good biology; but even sounder than that is the principle to love thy neighbor even more than you love yourself, to live as if to live and love were one. The most immediate relationships in which this principle can best be applied are those of husband and wife, parents and children. If parents would learn what is known about these matters, and apply the knowledge in their family relationships as all of them, I am sure, would be more than willing to do if they possessed that knowledge, the greater part of the world's human problems would be solved, for it is in the home that human beings are formed, and it is human beings who mold the world according to the kingdom that is within them. We must understand that it is in the nature, dominantly in the nature, of human beings to be cooperative, to want to love and be loved. It is not in the nature of human beings to be aggressive and hostile. Aggressiveness and hostility are the responses of an organism that is frustrated, that has been thwarted in its expected satisfactions of love; such an organism,

 

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in many cases, turns to aggression in order to attract, to compel toward itself the love it seeks. Hostility arises when the organism feels itself both frustrated and threatened.

3

It is only very recently that we have learned to understand these things as scientists; men of religion, prophets, seers, poets, and philosophers have understood them for thousands of years, while the remainder of poor struggling humanity has painfully striven to climb the ladder of their high ideals. But it has not been given to many to ascend beyond its lowest rungs. The source of much of man's difficulty has lain in the fact that for the greater part of humanity the struggle for survival has been an unremittingly hard one, in the course of which men have been forced into ways of life that hold the promise of being of benefit to themselves though they may be inimical to the interests of others. Such behavior is learned, it is not innate.
When people first began to grow into the ways of urban civilization, about twelve thousand years ago, and began to exploit each other as commodities, the ability to obtain the advantages that an urban civilization made possible a new standard of "success." Success was now no longer seen as being a good, cooperative member of one's society, but as the achievement of the money and the power to increase the material comforts of life. Though spiritual success was not denied as a possibility, as something toward which one might strive, the success that received increasing attention was material success.
The progress we flatter ourselves as having made since prehistoric times has been great, but in a very real sense it has meant a progress at the cost of many of our humane values. Our progress has been concentrated upon things, while spiritual values and our preoccupation with the truly good life have been allowed to lag, even to fall into desuetude. It sometimes seems that for every step forward we have taken in science and technology, we have taken one backward in morality; for every step forward we have taken in material civilization, we have taken backward in moral development. Hitler's extermination of millions of human beings, the dropping of atom bombs, government terror, fascism, communism, war, the competitive relation of man to man, all these things and much else appear to be evidence of a very real and serious deterioration of man as a moral human being. It is not that prehistoric humans lived in a Golden Age, as some thinkers

 

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have believed, but it was almost certainly not nasty, brutish, and short, as Thomas Hobbes imagined. However, of one thing we can be virtually certain: People were far more interested in one another's welfare than people of the Western civilizations of the world are today. Had this not been so, no human group could have survived to the present day.
The principal disorders of Western civilization today may be traced to the development of the competitive way of life in an increasingly competitive industrial world. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that it acquired a terrifying momentum that has accelerated with dizzying speed during the last two hundred years. The Industrial Revolution revolutionized the lives of the greater part of Western humankind; though it brought great benefits it also brought great disasters in its wake. Commerce, it has been said, through competition, is the lifeblood of a nation. All things compete, erroneously said the Darwinists. Evolution and the progression of species come about, it was argued, by means of a struggle for existence, through competition, and by the selection for survival of the fittest competitors. Society, opined the sociologist Herbert Spencer, mirrors the struggle for existence that is constantly going on in a state of nature. War is natural and good, said the generals, because it delivers the only just verdict on the fitness of nations to survive. You've got to be a go-getter, says the American creed, because if you're not, somebody else will go out and get what you want, and deprive you of the victory. You must get the highest marks, be first, be out in front, because this is a competitive world and the race is to the swift, and you've got to be a football hero to make a hit with the beautiful girlseven if it means breaking the leg of another player who is known to have a bad knee, or stepping on his hand and crushing it deliberately because he belongs to a minority group, or resorting to conduct that outrages every tenet of decency and sportsmanship. It's Civilization; Man's Own Show; Rugged American Individualism, you know. Well, America has made some progress, not because of competition, but in spite of competition, because people have frequently gotten together and done things. Competition is the striving of people against each other in order to attain the same goal. Greatest progress has been made when they have striven
together
to attain the same goal. But cooperation and competition have been sadly confused

 

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and intermixed, and the resulting disorder and its effects are nowhere better seen than in the United States, the land in which the competitive spirit is most highly esteemed!
The United States is one of the few countries in which it is possible to apply the term "aggressive" to a person in a flattering way. We like our men to be tough; we don't like our boys to be sissies because they've got to go out and fight for themselves. The tragedy is that many women have been trapped by this rough masculine doctrine into teaching their children to be competitors. Mothers will even bargain with their children for love that should be unconditional and the birthright of every child: "Junior, if you don't eat your cereal you won't make the football team, because you won't develop the necessary muscles, and Mama won't love you." In this, and in many other ways, Mother bargains with Junior for her love. Perhaps no American mother has uttered just those words, but most of us know from innumerable experiences that many mothers convey the essential meaning of such words to their children. Margaret Mead has appropriately called this bargaining type of love "conditional love." Junior must be a greater success than his father was, and, of course, Mary must do better for herself than Mama did. At the same time the children will receive an ethicoreligious training, in which they are told on the one hand that they must love their neighbors as themselves, and on the other that they must go out and compete with them. Yes, on Sundays you may fall upon your knees, and upon your neighors during the rest of the week. This is very confusing, and to most children, particularly adolescents, disturbing. Are adults hypocrites? Do they believe what they
say
or what they
do?
Quite rightly, children decide that adults believe what they do, not what they say. And so they go out and do likewise. In this way the vicious circle is perpetuated. The nationally cooperative organism is taught to be competitive, even though the ideals of the religion to which she or he may have been exposed teach cooperation, with a resultant internal conflict that is never successfully resolved.
Cooperation and competition are not mutually reconcilable drives. Either you are a cooperator or you are a competitor; if you are both, then you are in a state of disoperativeness, disconnectedness, of confusion, unreconciled and in conflict with oneself. And this is the state in which most members of Western

 

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civilization find themselves; this is the state that is essentially identified with the masculine spirit, the masculine role in society; this is the state from which men need to be weaned.
At a critical time in the development of their children mothers learn to reject the love of their sons, a love which the sons offer unconditionally but which mother cannot wholly accept. Unconscious, half-conscious, or conscious anxieties about incest, mother attachments, or fear of making the boy too soft cause many mothers to make the little rejections of their small sons' love, an experience which for the child constitutes a traumatic deprivation and frustration. The father's participation in this process in the form either of an unconscious or of a conscious jealousy of his son's place in the affection of his wife, complicated by the little boy's jealousy of his father, adds to the boy's feeling of privation and frustration and contributes to his store of aggressiveness and hostility. Clearly, the mother-son relationship is a particularly delicate one and requires the most sympathetic and gentle understanding.
If to be tough and crude and crass and competitive is to be a man, and if to be gentle, tender, kind, considerate, and cooperative is to be a sissy, then in the name of all humanity let us have fewer men and more sissies! But why grant the confused the solace of their own confusion or fall into their confusion by using their terms? What they contemptuously refer to by the term
sissy
constitutes the qualities usually associated with the female; and no man can bear the imputation of resembling in any way the "inferior" sex. But those very feminine qualities are the essential qualities of humanitygentleness, kindness, thoughtfulness, and cooperativenessand insofar as men have departed from these qualities they have departed from the true path of humanity. By this I do not mean to suggest anything so absurd as that it would be a good thing for humanity if men became women! I
do
mean to suggest that if little boys were helped to be gentle, kind, thoughtful, and cooperative, they would easily become so in their own masculine way. And in that endeavor, fathers as well as mothers can help. If fathers will themselves place a little less emphasis on being rough and tough, and more on being gentle, tender, and kind themselves, particularly in relation to their wives, their sons will observe, and do likewise, and humanity will be bound to make great advances in the right direction.

 

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