An altruism question

Those who reject the principle of selfishness will find in the history of ethics two main alternatives. One is the primordial and medieval theory that man should sacrifice himself to the supernatural. The second is the theory that man should sacrifice himself for the sake of other men. The second is known as "altruism," which is not a synonym for kindness, generosity, or good will, but the doctrine that man should place others above self as the fundamental rule of life. --http://www.peikoff.com/opar/altruism.htm

Conflicts

When the earliest of humanity spread out from the African terrain, the general assumption is that they all spread upward, that is, to the northern areas. One group, which in time became the Neanderthals, took to crossing the then land bridge of the Gibraltar straits, into western Europe. Others more or less settled among the shores of the Mediterranean which at that time were not the desert-like areas known today. Most wandered to the northeast, some settling among the delta of the Nile, others across the curve into the Anatolian region, still others crossing the isles into the Grecian areas into what became Thrace. The rest, by various ways, traversed across the near east region into the region of the Indo of the far east. As each advance took place across the land, offshoots took to going north, depending on the Ice Age glacier decendencies. There was also, after a time, a return migration from the Indo area across the northern lands, following the game which they by that time had begun to hunt, becoming very much the hunter society.

It was those which settled along the eastern coastal waters of the Mediterranean, those who settled in Thrace and the Anatolian regions and down into the Mesopotamian valley, from which, it seems, civilization first took root, where the then lushness of the land did not derive a fierceness of struggling to survive, but allowed the leisureness from which all the rest developed. There is a proviso on this - too much lushness does not generate development, as there is little incentive for development. After all, why bother - what would be the gain in terms of survivability. None, or very little, actually, and what there was would have preceded along a path little different than of the other primates. In many ways, this would as consequence lead to the 'dead end' societies of today's primitives, who have, as they've had, almost no incentive to advance beyond where they presently are - human beasts of the jungle [and which is why Africa, except for its outlining fringe areas, never developed anything more than primitive civilizations].

In the north, however, matters were very much different. With the shifting of the ice masses of the Ice Ages, what was once lush lands ceased to remain as such. As a consequence, the leisure kind of life as examplified by those that settled on more southern areas, a life marked by gathering/foraging more than by hunting, and a diet consisting more of a vegetarian/seafood mode than heavy meat eaters, all changed. The hunters became the more important members to the group's survival. This principle economic activity, being focused on what can be considered a parasitic relationship to animals, was of course, the special preserve of menfolk. Thus the political/religious institutions which evolved took a quite different turn than the developed areas of the Anatolian region. There arose a system of patrilineal families, which were united into kinship by the authority of a chieftain, the person who was responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek out pastures for the animals which were kept, like goats, and the area where game was to be sought. Because expediency is often the measure of survival in harsh times, especially in a culture not highly developed, pastoralists were more apt to engage in the oftime violent seizure of another's animals or pastoral grounds - it was, after all, the easiest way to wealth, and was the most obvious form of prowessness. Thus arose importance to the practice and discipline of war - for war, as Jacob Bronowski pointed out in his Assent of Man, is organized theft.

The hunter society, by its nature, stems more from the centripetal form of relationships. Alpha-males are considered needed for the social structure to work for the survival in a harsher land where leisure is much more at a general premium and foraging does not garner the surpluses found in the more hospitable climates. The political/religious would, then, be based on the agonic mode of commanding attention. This would be for the purpose of channeling the aggression of the males into a bonding to defend the members of the respective societies against, in the original pre-human ape/hominid societies, the leopard, or other similar predatory animal powerful enough to threaten the groups' survivals. As the evolvement became the human, the "leopard' became as much as a metaphor to signify "the enemy". Their religion, then, evolved as a means of, eventually, to justify the politics. In so doing, it would have had to shift emphasis from the benignly Mother Goddess that the women had preached into something congruent with the male domination of the hunters surviving in a harsh land.

Religion is a primitive form of philosophy. The ethics of religions stem from what, pragmatically, were the actions considered as virtues to the groups involved. These in turn stemmed from the conditions in which the groups lived as they developed the cognitive abilities. As Jacobs pointed out, there are those two fundamental sets of virtues. I suspect, tho, that there were few areas on earth where conditions were so optimum as to foster rapid growth that led to the earliest civilizations beyond the initial group developments - and that this is why, in a few select areas, matriarchal societies were able to take hold and advance as rapidly as cognitive possibilities allowed. The other groups advanced, yes, for the most part, but much slower, for the reasons already pointed out.

I further suspect, too, that the virtues of the trader syndrome were in place before these divisions among the civilized groups took place and the diaspora took place. This is not to say that the competing groups around the civilized ones did not possess a rudiment of virtue sets, but that their developments, if they had them, went much slower, and probably like those that went out far north, turned patriarchal as well in the course of time - tho for a different reason [this is to say, the patriarchialness of the kind found among the primitives of today]. This is also assuming before these groups were overcome by those early homo sapiens that migrated up along the coast of Africa from their apparent origin in South Africa areas.

In any case, these virtues acquired prominence over the course of time, and ethics arose from them. Could ethics have arisen without religion - probably not, for the initial striving to understand the world around in a patterned sense, even in the optimum case, would have resorted to analogies involving relatings to their own kind. Thus the "mother earth" deity, for instance. I don't, however, hold to the idea that the matriarchal religions had to develop as ferociously as did the patriarchal ones did, mostly because I hold their development was far more benign and fostered a far less a stressful inquisitiveness.

What had been originally a mild form of the matriarchal/matrilineal association, where the first religions came out of the first attempts to make sense of what at first seemed as a lot of chaos in the world, quickly shifted to what was felt a need for some form of organization to combat that sense of chaos. The most likely way of making sense of something which doesn't at first makes sense is to relate to something which is understandable, at least to the degree anything could be understood in those times. In this case, just as the women used the earth goddess as a means of countenancing sex and birthing and the former bountiness of the land, so the hunter leaders used the human-as-example forms. Gods, like goddesses, were created as analogies to explain the unpredictables of the world - oversized invisible humanlike beings who controlled the weather, crop growth, and so forth, with the same degree of inconsistency which had been observed among fellow humans. As this, under the harsher and different conditions of the north, seemed to be a more correct viewing of things, the analogies quickly became considered as if actuals, in a much more formidable form than were the goddesses - and which were then used as means of controlling the members of the groups. Goddesses still were acknowledged, but they shared with gods. Moreover, such matters as the sensual/sexuality of the society of the southern climes did not get very developed in the north - sex was largely for procreational purposes, and too many children made difficulties in distributing food supplies, as the herbs used for birth control were not as easily found up north.

The earliest remaindered Art stems from this transitional period of time, that of the Cave Arts, found mostly among caves in France and Spain. That art existed before their time can be deduced by the high quality of the works found on the walls and ceilings of these caves. But, of course, the earlier works would have been lost in time, just as was the case in the other settlements along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Wood and skins and their like do not last very well over the extensive millenias. There are many theories regarding the purposes of these cave paintings, many of which were biases by the presumption that ancient societies were patrilineal like most historical ones. But such, as shown was not the case, and therefore required different perspectives on those paintings. These paintings, for one, span the breadth of several millenia, thereby covering both matriarchal and patriarchal societies. There is little doubt that some of the earlier works were at least for sure used as decorations for the cave home. Nor is there doubt that those who did those paintings were, at least in large part, women, many having children with them while they plied the colors to the walls - as, like with pottery, hand and fingerprints attest. If paintings first, then, took place while there were matriarchal societies living at these locations, the interpretations of these works makes for a different understanding of why these works, and just how much they really were due to the oft cited "shaman magic imparting success to the hunt" routine. Art is concerned with what is considered of importance, hence the effort of taking the trouble of re-presenting. But importance does not necessarily mean of considered intrinsic value - it can also reflect something which profoundly impresses. It is hard in this day and age to imagine what it would have been like to come upon vast herds of large animals. The closest would be the last century's buffalo herds of the Midwest, or the flocks of passenger pigeons said to have darkened the sky with their immensity. Then consider how much more such an event would have been to those ancient people - certainly momentous enough to be considered important enough to depict on cave walls.

It would only be later, when the society turned heavily to the hunter kind that there might have become a sort of mystic notion imparted to the paintings, perhaps an attempt to divert the mother goddess view to one more in line with the harsh land of the gods. Then, with the shifting of the game to other areas, there became the leaving of the cave entirely, taking a more nomadic existence back across the land, down to more southern climes.

Now, virtues, as expressed by the syndromes, implies ethics which encompass those virtues. The ethical code of the northern hunter societies, as was to be expected, derived from out of the agonic taking tribal syndrome. It was essentially the ethics of stealing, because the attribute of taking implies the other end, of being taken, and also implies the zero-sum perspective of the world, wherein one's gain is at another's expense - which is what all the other animals essentially have: eat or be eaten, take or be taken. It was, essentially, a justification for reverting to acting like human-style animals. Even tho these early humans, like all humans, had the capacity to think, that is to abstract to at least some degree, to be able to make judgments - the form of ethics became modeled, almost inevitably, after the only mode that was outrightly noticed by them, that of the animals around them. By the time these groups encountered trading, these societies had already formed a hard and fast code based on the agonic mode. Raiding others' territories successfully, as well as other aspects of the hunt, evolved the virtue of "prowess", to achieve this prowess, then, required "obedience" and "respecting hierarchy" for the group, as well as "loyalty". These comprise the basic virtues of the agonic mode syndrome. It also explains why such extreme agonic societies, such as the latter dynasties of ancient Egypt, used animal characteristics as their gods - for these animals adhered to the code "effortlessly", as part of their nature, and this was considered a superior trait, something to be emulated. The same can be said of those early civilizations in the Americas, which were founded by patriarchal groups which had migrated across the straits. Thus no American civilizations were ever matriarchal, and why in the land of lushness there arose such agonic societies as the Incas and Mayans and Aztecs which rivaled the Egyptians in being so authoritarian.

When the game patterns again shifted, these northerners, some, went south - and came into contact with the cities and civilizations that, as noted, flourished there. They also came into contact with something else - a whole different view of the female and her relationship to society.

To reiterate, the political/religious structuring of the matriarchal societies was that of the Mother Goddess with, as the word matriarchal means, the female as the prevailing sex and the male as a subserving one. While by the time of the patrilineal hunter society invasion this was more nominal than anything else, resting mostly with the matrilineal means of lineage, and the earth mother being referred to more as an allegory than actual - to those invaders, it was an absolutely intolerable situation. These patrilineal/patriarchal societies, as noted, subserved the females, some very denegratingly so, having by this time completely altering out any referring in their religions of goddesses. The two systems could not co-exist. Those holding to the taking code could not permit sanction of a competing code, especially one which would negate their established power structures and upset their status quo. "Shun trading' was a defense against that alternate viewpoint of the matriarchal societies, even as it was later admitted, tho reluctantly, that there was much value being gained by having the riches acquired by trading.

There was a problem, too, in understanding trading, by their standards - they viewed the world as a zero-sum matter, and thus, somehow, trading had to have been in some way a matter of stealing, from distant shores at least. They could not conceive of a sum-plus view, only a greater measure of riches acquired from other rich places distantly. Thus trading became a sort of "necessary evil". the forms followed thru, but with suspicion - and, as such, it had to be controlled as much as possible, yet still expect to get the gaining out of it. This was morally done by disparing it as much as possible, and then hobbling its activities by as much restrictions as could be devised. And to do that, you had to take it all over - hence all the wars and episodes of conquests that dominated the fertile crescent at the dawn of history.

Which raises another question - if these matriarchal societies existed for thousands of years, building great cities of civilization into the fertile crescent, then spreading thru trading across into the Mediterranean, establishing outposts all along the coastlines, and into the European interior, as far as the British Isles, how could such obviously superior societies, so advanced in so many ways, be overthrown by barbarians? It would seem that the answer may be, sadly as it may be true, that after thousands of years of the trading syndrome, the "warrior" mentality, psychologically speaking, most likely deteriorated mightily for lack of necessity for developing it more - thus enabling the barbarians to gain the amount of hold they did when they first invaded.

The psychology of the two kinds of world view, the trading and the taking, were and are quite different from each other. The taking syndrome was tribalistic, whose members were raised to consider themselves as parts of groups, a valued quality when it comes to matters of organized theft. A group can overwhelm better than several individuals because the hierarchical structure makes for greater cohesion of purpose. Moreover, there is the psychological aspect of "us" versus "them" which is not as pronounced as a class among individuals as it is within a group, thus giving greater impetus to the achievement of conquering goals as opposed to the defensiveness of the individuals taken as a group. This is especially so when, in their zeal to maintain the patriarchal social structure, they were willing to slaughter wholesale all but the prepubescent females as the quickest way of obtaining female subjugation and ending any matriarchal rule. The consequence of this is the instituting of slavery, which was a human offshoot of the pastoral practice of domestication [which was why, with the conquerings by the patriarchal societies, slavery has always existed as a way of life from earliest historical times to only a hundred years ago or so - and still exists among the more virulent patriarchal groups of today; whether it is called by that name or not, the essence is the same].

The trading syndrome is one ennobling individualism. individuals qua individuals are not prone to yield and submit - they make poor slaves, always being apt to insubordination. So, the simplest way to be rid of them is - to be rid of them. Hence besides the females mentioned, there was also wholesale slaughtering of entire towns, decimations of entire cultures across the ancient world [ it has even been recorded and dealt with as a virtue [!!] in the Bible]. Yet, by the same token, it had come to be perceived that without at least some of the inhabitants, the whole richness of the trading world would come down completely, leaving poverty for all in its wake.

Thus there was the allowing of trading, but hobbling it as much as possible, considering it "necessary evil", yet still removing all traces of the matriarchal social structures - including to the extent of rewriting all the legends of the matriarchal into patriarchal gods and destroying as much as possible the originals. This meant imposing a two-tier system, the "commoners", the original inhabitants, and what became known as the aristocracy, the conquering ones - and it also meant elevating, where it hadn't existed before, males to the authoritating positions within the trading [indeed, to render all positions as male positions]. It also created, for the conquerors, because of having slaves, the leisure time which they were encouraged to make rich use of - which didn't amount to much since they in turn had to be almost constantly on war footing against other invaders out to do the same thing they had done: conquer.

Then there is the psychological influence of envy - perhaps the most potent of the reasons for the successes of the patriarchal conquerings. As noted by William L. Davidson in defining it, "envy is aimed at persons, and implies dislike of one who possesses what the envious man himself covets or desires, and a wish to harm him... There is in it... a consciousness of inferiority to the person envied, and a chafing under this consciousness..." [Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1912] [my emphasis]. It has been around since before mankind. It appears to be a trait displayed in any group in which there is a deviancy from the established norm. it appears to be an outpouring consequence of the fear which results from considerations relating to the value of the being to the group. It stems not only from those low in the scale of hierarchy, but in the leadership as well, wherein there is the fear of displacement from another who can command attention better. It, of course, stems from the agonic mentality, and in humans came from the patriarchal societies of the northern hunter tribes.

Yet is has never been considered to be a virtue. Quite the contrary. Human societies have persistently sought, as far as possible, to suppress it - it is a taking aspect which even negates the viability of the taking syndrome, as envy destroys the very social relationship necessary for any society to survive in any human fashion. This is to say that as an unofficial accord, in the hunter societies, where life was often little more than as human animals, it maintained the status quo. But, in a society with the trading syndrome, which is the uniquely human syndrome, it cannot function - it can only destroy, reducing all back to the level of that pre-existing hunter state.

As you will note, in reading this exerpt from my manuscript, it is the essence of tribalism, the harshness of needing survival as by a group in order to survive, the patriarchal assendancy over the matriarchial societies, that brought forth the commandment notion of ethics, and the disrespect of being considered as evil.....  and the acts of altruism [in spirit tho not in word, as it was not coined until the 17th century by Auguste Compte] as an integral aspect of the tribal mindset......  not out of benevolance and the flourishing of being human, but out of survival of the group, an 'emergency' view of ethics which became treated as permanent....  not out of kindness as such, but out of necessity of earlier times, and continued as hardened tradition.....

I am still under the impression that my giving for my own happiness's sake, though I do not will or wish anyone else to do likewise is morally wrong in the objectivist view.  Is this correct