I’ve been reading UltraSociety, by Peter Turchin. Turchin’s a biologist who turned to mathematical models of human society, and he’s done interesting work, not all of which I agree with (or agree is quite as radical as he claims).
But one of the points he makes in UltraSociety, a point which has also been made by many archeologists and anthropologists, is that for most human existence we were radically egalitarian.
One of the great curses on understanding ourselves has been a tendency to compare ourselves to other primates, in particular chimpanzees, with whom we share most of our DNA.
But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.
For most of our existence, we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.
In normal human society (a.k.a., not what we have now, what we had during most of our existence), if someone started to put themselves above others they were first mocked, then ostracized and if that didn’t work, they were killed.
Being stronger didn’t matter, because as Turchin and others have pointed out, what makes humanity unique as a hunter and killer is the use of thrown and missile weapons. Even thrown rocks are deadly. Sharp, thrown objects like spears and javelins are deadlier; bows deadlier still.
Get out of place, don’t accept social correction, get dead.
It was that simple, and that’s how we lived for most of our existence.
So what’s going on now is unusual, and it takes a great deal of coercion to have it happen.
The fundamentals are only two: First, you must have an ideology which legitimates radical inequality (CEOs earning 1,000 times what normal people earn; politicians who send people to war and don’t go themsleves); second, you must have violence specialists who are better at violence than random people who get tired of being unequal.
This is also why periods with good weapons of assassination tend to be more equal (the pistol or even the concealed dagger). It is why Nixon, who ruled in a period of relative equality, went to visit protesters with only one aide, while modern Presidents live in fortresses and federal buildings are armored up. As a young man, I remember being able to walk through the first floor of the Department of Defense in Ottawa. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do it in most buildings. In the 80s, you could.
So, as inequality increases, so too must defenses against violence. This is true for domestic inequality and it is true for international inequality, now that it is possible for those who feel aggrieved thousands of miles from our countries can see that our country is responsible, travel to it, and inflict harm.
Turchin makes another important point, which cuts against Pinker’s “violence just keeps decreasing.”
Violence actually appears to have the form of an A. Before agriculture it was relatively low, after agriculture it increased until peaking around the time of the Axial sages, whose teachings tried to reduce it, and when those teachings were applied by various rulers, did. Thus, a long decline in the odds of dying by violence. (This claim comes with sharp local exceptions in time and place–exceptions which may prove, in the end, larger than the generalized decline. The story isn’t over yet.)
In the meantime, inequality isn’t natural to humans. It’s bad for us in every way possible (it shows up on every metric from health, to happiness, to stress, to how long we live), including to those at the top.
And maintaining it requires an ideology which pretends it is justified, and a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.
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Dale
Maybe I am missing something, but I have to disagree with almost everything you said. I recently watched a NOVA program highlighting the study of a 13,500 year old girl aged 15-16 found in a submerged cave in Florida. A Paleobiologist evaluated her skeleton and pointed out numerous signs of mistreatment, including a healed green stick fracture on her forearm. The biologist said this was a sign of violent twisting of her arm. She also showed signs of at least one pregnancy. The biologist and her peers on the program concurred that most of the ancient female skeletons they found showed similar signs of violence. Males had puncture or blunt object wounds to their heads and torsos. Females died young, often in childbirth. The larger population of males would fight each over the remaining females. Sounds a lot like what we have found in chimpanzee groups. Otzi, the male found in the Italian/Austrian Alps was found with an arrow point in his back. Kennewick man has a spear point in his hip. Our forebearers lived a brutal, short existence.
With the advent of the cultural revolution and civilization we have only learned to kill each other more efficiently and in larger numbers. We are getting better at it all the time. Central American cultures sacrificed tens of thousands years to their gods. White Americans cleansed the Americas of indigenous peoples pretty quickly. Hitler and Stalin wacked off millions. Or should I say they both found wildlings followers to do the dirty work. The U.S. wars in the Middle East have been able to pit one group against another with relative ease. Our drones are doing a great job too.
Our species has never been peaceful and egalitarian. We like killing. We’re very, very good at it. Perhaps society has barred us from one on one violence within social groups, but it still tolerates KKK-like lynchings and going after the “other than you”. We are seeing this happen daily within the present political atmosphere in the US.
So I’m afraid I can’t agree with you on this one.
nihil obstet
The NatGeo special Stress: Portrait of a Killer has some interesting info on this subject. It boils down to 1)stress will kill you and 2) social standing causes stress. An interesting part of the documentary is on baboons. [Spoiler] Baboons are horrible, just like chimps. Alpha males rule by fear and grab the good stuff for themselves. In the troop that the researcher Robert Sapolsky was studying, the troop found some meat, and the alpha males seized it and ate it. It was poisoned. The alphas died. The troop then developed an egalitarian style and have maintained it in the years since, training the young males who came into the troop that “you don’t get to be a dick. This is how we do things here.” My reaction was “We don’t use poisoned meat. We use guillotines. And it’s time.”
Adam Eran
I’d also add that the climate of fear, and the presence of more emergencies makes the acceptance of command-and-control hierarchies more palatable. Violence for its own sake is an instrument of the hierarchy.
EverythingsJake
May not even be of greater benefit on certain, arguably, important measures to those at the top of the scale.
Recommended, as I recall, by Naked Capitalism:
The Spirit Level
Hugh
I am reminded of a figure on MSNBC, Donny Deutsch. He’s had a pretty privileged existence. The mere mention of the word socialism makes him just about wet himself. Naturally, he hates the idea of Medicare-for-All. It’s impossible. It would force people to give up their doctors. It would cost too much. It’s *gasp* socialist. Of course, none of this is true. It’s cheaper, covers everyone, people live longer and healthier, and they love it. And some form of it has been done in nearly every other industrialized country on the planet. It says a lot that in Donny Deutsch-land, people get to pick and choose their doctors until they get just the right one. Most people are lucky to even have some kind of crappy insurance. And luckier still if they find a doctor who A) will accept them as a patient and B) isn’t a complete asshole. And where does Deutsch think the doctors he’s sure he’s going to lose go? Is Medicare-for-All going to make them evaporate into the ether? It is all the nuttery and fearmongering of the rich and entitled. I got mine. You can go die in a ditch.
My fantasy is to strip the Donny Deutschs of this world of their gold-plated healthcare plans and force them and their families to have the same crappy healthcare the rest of us have, and often don’t even have. It’s easy to shake your head and dismiss someone else’s pain when you are so removed from it.
And what can be said about healthcare and Medicare-for-All applies to many other aspects of our common life. How long would our “betters” last if they had unstable jobs and had to live only on minimum wage before they turned not just into socialists, but probably Trotskyites? How long would they accept crappy K-12 and over-priced colleges for their kids? They wouldn’t. But they do for us because they can. That’s the cost of inequality.
Andy Sprott
If inequality is unnatural full stop, why is it so common? A very large majority of human cultures (I’d say substantially all, but behaviour is so plastic that there may well be documented exceptions), once sedentary and once producing reliable surplus, develop some form of hierarchy and differential control of resources. It’s unnatural if you’re a mobile hunter gatherer and subject to the many damping mechanisms – if you’re not and you don’t, it’s a lot more “natural”.
If you want to argue that we are cognitively ill adapted for life ways common since the Neolithic, I would agree – but unnatural, in the sense that it doesn’t arise without exceptional circumstances, external forces, coercion, etc. that doesn’t fly.
Ian Welsh
If you prefer to say maladaptive, I’m fine with that. You get the point. It’s very bad for us, and not how we evolved. We are not chimps.
Willy
Some of us are chimps. Others are bonobos. I think it’d be more fun to be a bonobo, unless you’ve got more of a psychopathic mindset, in which case it’d be more fun to be a chimp.
Any experts on rarely contacted (or mostly left alone) primitive tribes in the house?
They seem pretty naturally egalitarian to me. Personally, I’d do some experiments with them to determine what possible degree of authoritarian pathologies could happen. Give em xboxes, golf carts, Pink Floyd CDs, guns, booze… things they might find useful. Then put one leader in charge of it all.
Herman
This is why I am always harping on modern technology. Technology like advanced surveillance and robotic weapons seem to be tipping the balance decisively in favor of powerful institutions like governments and corporations as are more advanced propaganda techniques, psychiatric drugs and possibly in the future new biomedical techniques that might make it easier to control people.
Contrary to what most people think, traditional elites had fewer and less effective means of control than modern elites. Even absolute monarchs were severely limited in what they could do to control their people, hence why history is replete with peasant rebellions and other disturbances when people were pushed to the breaking point.
On the subject of Steven Pinker and the violence issue, here are some critiques of his writing on ancient violence.
http://primarydeposits.blogspot.com/2012/09/scienciness-and-history-part-2-steven.html
http://primarydeposits.blogspot.com/2012/10/pinker-and-archaeology.html
A critique of Pinker’s views on modern warfare and the ‘Long Peace” since the end of World War II in particular.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066
nihil obstet
The strength of origin myths is striking. The evidence is overwhelming that inequality is very bad for us, and yet there is a clinging to beliefs about inequality being “natural”, to conform us to the dominant ideology.
DMC
Really, its not the inequality in itself so much as it is the sheer distance from those with the least to those with the most. Rich is one thing, plutocrat is another. Artificially imposed social norms and restraints will require increasing energy to maintain. When the number of people with nothing left to lose reaches critical mass, look out.
EverythingsJake
In a rare occurrence, I have to respectfully disagree with Ian. Trump is a chimp. That hair color isn’t human. Maybe Hillary too. Dawn of the Planet Chimps (or we’re probably well past Dawn).
Hugh
Let’s see, until a few centuries ago slavery was common and still occurs. Is it natural? So were polygamy, animal sacrifice, including human sacrifice, witchcraft, and witchcraft trials. Are any of these “natural”?
Athenian democracy had both slaves and plutocrats and treated women as chattel, but even so more than 20 centuries ago, there was at least in some ways a kind of commonality and equality for male citizens. The Roman Republic had its Social Wars. The 18th century Enlightenment saw a return to these ideas and its contradictions as the slave-owning Founders and Framers in the US who were heavily influenced by it demonstrated. With the spread of public education and the rise of the now declining middle class, the rationale for a ruling overclass has been vitiated. There are now literally millions who can do as good or better than any in that overclass. You don’t enter that overclass through knowledge or merit. It’s either chance or winning the genetic lottery, being born in the right bed. I mean seriously look at our leaders: Trump, McConnell, Pelosi. Having talent or an ounce of character, courage, or intelligence has nothing to do with it.
Historical anthropology is not my thing, but the structure of hunter gatherer and agrarian societies is different. There are also important shifts from matriarchal to patriarchal societies and from fertility-related chthonic/earth goddesses to more warlike ouranian/sky gods. I would note in this regard that Judaism for instance was not always monotheistic. It used to be dual with both a male and female principle, and it was not until the 7th century BC Babylonian Captivity that the female principle was extirpated from the biblical but not the archaeological record. So sometimes what matters is not what is “natural” but who gets to write the history.
Zac
The stone thrown at the head of the sleeping bully became the Pharaoh’s pyramid.
Ton
@Hugh
Spot on. And it wasn\’t just Judaism, Christianity is based on a lie as we now have Herod\’s and Pilate\’s records, not once is Yeshua mentioned or discussed as being executed and we found Caiphas\’ records as well, again no mention of Yeshua being tried or a threat.
Then there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIw1OPH6QvM&list=WL&index=50&t=0s
Which puts the entire 7th Century into a much different light. Muhammad wasn\’t a desert conqueror, he was a Roman Citizen in revolt against the Roman Empire and was certainly a veteran of the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 572–591 and Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628.
This is also why the Muslim Rulers considered themselves successors to Rome even if they never truly understood why.
Ten Bears
The ends justify the means (or so I am told).
Five, six, perhaps ten thousand years ago the Cults of Male Domination usurped the woman’s place in the proper ordering of the world and all else that followed: War, religion, politics, religion, pornography… serves naught but to reinforce that domination. When I first wrote that, ten or twelve (or more) years ago, I called it the Jew/”Christian”/Muslim/Mormon Cult of Male Domination and though indeed that is the credo that enforces most of our worldviews the India Indians seem to have a thing for gang-raping four year old girls to death; and having retired have had the opportunity to do a deeper study of The Art of War and its history and man, were those guys ever… “Christian”.
War is not the natural state of man. It is something put upon us, something we are conditioned, brainwashed, to. The best Strategy is no strategy, the best War no war.
That said, the usurpers need be eliminated, by any means necessary.
Watt4Bob
@Zac
I have an acquaintance, a singular fellow, met when working as a prep cook years ago.
I’ll call him Rick.
Rick lived with his single Mom, she remarried when he was nine years old.
Rick’s new ‘Dad’ pulled some sort of violent stuff very soon after moving in, so Rick waited until the guy fell asleep on the couch and took a heavy, cast iron frying pan off the stove and smashed him the face, putting an end to further violence.
According to our boss, the Chef who told me the story, Rick’s new Dad behaved much better after that ‘attitude adjustment’.
I can’t really express the level of admiration I feel for the spirit of that act.
450.org
And now Rick is a Trump supporter and by virtue of that a supporter of child molestation and child sex trafficking and the rape of children (shiksas) considering the Jeffrey Epstein business and how it touches most everyone if not everyone who is someone.
Where’s Rick’s cast iron skillet when it comes to Trump and all his elitist mass-murdering friends to include the Clintons? White trash deplorable Trump supporters avoid challenging, fair fights at all costs, cowards that they are. No, instead they like to take it to poor & desperate immigrants fleeing the drug cartels that sell the deplorables their meth and heroin all the live long day.
You know who needs to go back to where they came from? The Scotch-Irish who comprise the bulk of the Evangelicals who support Trump. Send them back to the Borderlands of Scotland & Ireland where they belong. For several centuries now they’ve prevented America from socially evolving. If Scotland and Ireland don’t want them, send them to Israel since they so emphatically support Israel and believe the Jews are God’s chosen people.
You know who I admire? I admire all the brave women who have come forward to hold Epstein and the elite child rapists to account much to the chagrin of the deplorable white trash Trump supporters who so fervently support child rape and child rapists and support legislation that makes the victims of that rape carry their rape children to term without ever holding the child rapists to account for their rapes.
Note that AG Barr’s father hired Jeffrey Epstein at the Dalton School and Barr will not recuse himself from this MOST IMPORTANT case that can bring so many people down if the law is upheld and enforced.
Donald Barr was born to a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism (sure, yeah, right, whatever). So, being a Jew, Donald hires another Jew, Jeffrey Epstein, to teach calculus and physics at the Dalton School even though Epstein has no qualifications to teach these classes at this prestigious institution or any institution. Epstein’s only qualification is that he’s Jewish. After teaching for a couple of years, another Jew, Greenberg, hires the Jewish Jeffrey Epstein as an options trader at Bear Sterns where Greenberg is a senior partner. After several years, Epstein is made a partner. If Epstein was a goy, we would have never heard of him because none of this would have ever happened. His unique qualification that enabled his mysterious and aberrational meteoric rise is that he’s Jewish. Convert today or as fast as you can and enjoy all the world has to offer. Or don’t, and remain a donkey.
bruce wilder
Like Hugh & Dale and some other commenters, i have to say that this narrative about what is “natural” based on projecting back into the social conditions of a pre-history none of us can possibly have personal familiarity with strikes me as tendentitious at best. First of all, the paleolithic is a very long period of time and people were relatively few, and spread out into many and varied environments. Even if we restrict our imagining to homo sapiens sapiens with a clear symbolic culture and a presumed conceptual, storytelling language beginning in Africa roughly 70 kya and spreading thru Eurasia 40 to 60 kya, the scale of those societies is a little murky: genetics seems to imply that our actual ancestors were only about 20,ooo to 40,000 people out of a contemporary population maybe 10x or 20x that at any one time.
Scale is important to figuring out what hierarchy would be good for, what kind of problem-solved would tend to make hierarchy adaptive in an evolutionary sense, resulting in greater reproduction of hereditable traits in later generations. Whether that inherited legacy would be genetic in some unspecified way or cultural is something to sort out carefully. 70,000 years is the period in which human culture has been in overdrive and we do not have very specific ideas about what the genetic basis for that is beyond understanding that it has something to do with language and imagination.
Hierarchy on the scale of empires is a very late development in the sweep of human history: the so-called hydraulic civilizations where hierarchy proves very useful and populations grow massively as a result of its success in managing floods and irrigation and sewage as well as warfare. 5 kya or less for Mesopatamia, Egypt, Indus, Yellow River, et cetera.
If there is a genetic and/or cultural legacy from the population explosions attendant on successful empire building, is it lodged in the dominant leaders or the submissive followers? Where did rank and indo-european concepts of social stratification come from and what is its basis (genetic, cultural)?
Empire is decidedly post Neolithic Revolution. The agricultural revolution may have happened with no appreciable hierarchy organizing larger scale society beyond the usefulness of leadership in satisfying the temptation to raiding or defense. The neolithic revolution witnessed a population explosion followed after centuries at the new higher population level by a population crash followed by a lower equilibrium (?) population. Something important may have happened regarding the human adaptation to the environment and social organization. Do not know what.
In the long stretch of millenia when people were in small nomadic or semi-nomadic bands with only periodic encounters with larger gatherings or just small-scale encounters with other bands we simply do not know much about the details of social organization. People were inventing religion and storytelling. They may have mostly looked like weird religious cults, practicing arbitrary and frequently cruel cultural fashions. The most common spontaneous behaviors in small groups — hazing, tatooing, blood sacrifice, child beating — these are not encouraging me to take an optimistic view.
Watt4Bob
@450
“Where’s Rick’s cast iron skillet when it comes to Trump and all his elitist mass-murdering friends to include the Clintons?”
For the life of me, I don’t see where Rick fits into your rant?
While I share your dislike of Trump and his mass-murdering friends, I think you understand that none of us is ever going to find them sleeping on the couch, right?
And you never got back to me about those pesky anarchists who you say supported Franco/fascism in the Spanish Civil War, while the rest of us thought they represented some of the principle resistance?
I’d suggest taking as much satisfaction as you can from Epstein’s impending doom, even if it has little to do with his religion.
I’m not telling you to tone down your anti-fascist sentiment, just don’t let it push you over the edge.
Willy
I’ve also considered doing experiments with various kinds of small ‘modern civilized’ groups, done with two competing groups separately marooned onto two similar deserted islands. We’d observe what kind of culture develops.
Experiments with groups yielding obvious results, such as prison convicts vs. Sunday school teachers, probably needn’t be done. Psychopaths vs humanists might be interesting. Yankees fans vs Dodgers fans not so much, as really only fans from those cities would care. I considered Christians vs Muslims (our friend Bliz already ‘knows’ the results of that one), but I think mixing them together would be more interesting, separated by sex. A good one for around here might be plutocrats vs regular working guys. Would plutocrats really build a best and brightest society? Or would they be as bad as the psychopaths all trying to offshore each other off the island?
nihil obstet
Any small groups that we can observe now or for the past several thousand years consist of individuals whose mental and emotional framework developed in hierarchical societies. “Let’s put them on islands and see what nature comes out” isn’t going to reveal an inherent hardwired nature.
Willy
Observing rarely contacted primitive tribes would (not saying the Sentinelese, but some in Brazil might count).
The islands might help confirm which modern hierarchical influences are what. Psychopaths-humanists might help confirm which temperamental influences are what. Putting plutocrats there would mostly be for our amusement (haven’t figured out how to get them there, but after the coming revolution…)
Ten Bears
But we’ve seen that, Willy, in the protected “prime directive” tribes in the Amazon, Congo and Philippines (though I fear their curiosity will be their undoing), where they are to busy staying alive to make War upon each other. They barely have contact.
Abe Normal
\”a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.\”
Ah, so it\’s men that are the problem. There was no inequality before they were invented!
Give me a break.
Willy
Not so sure about your idea Ten Bears. Keeping people too busy staying alive to keep them from making war on each other already seems the neoliberal plan (except for those times when neoliberals become neocons and want war).
Maybe I’m watching the wrong videos, but the ones I’ve seen show peaceful tribes that sure seem to have plenty of spare time for their tribal parties and family down time, when they could be sharpening their spears of conquest instead.
I’m the guy who believes that Kant’s Categorical Imperative wont work because there just isn’t a critical mass of humans to make it work. That part is up to us, not so much the believing as the persuading. Too many human sheep, remember? The “them” are the greedy sociopaths. We-vs-them have probably always been vying for control over the sheeple mob.
Eric Anderson
This thread is a fine example of the availability heuristic in action. All these historical examples of why Peter Turchin (not Ian) is wrong.
But did you do the research. Are you an expert? Or, in arguing, did you simply draw upon your limited number of cognitively “available” examples that our common cultural literacy provides?
Please, enthrall me with all your examples of the societies that lived in epochs in relative egalitarian peace that are cognitively unavailable to you because historians didn’t write about it.
Homework assignment:
Read up on Kropotkin and the role of altruism in human and animal behavior.
Eric Anderson
Sheeple are people who don’t understand the power heuristic thinking errors exert upon their lives.
bruce wilder
The problem with “islands” as labs for testing hypotheses about hierarchy is that islands lack scale, which is a critical element in making hierarchy advantageous. You put elephants on an island, let evolution take its course, and if the elephants survive at all, it is as pygmies.
Scale matters a lot to human technologies, because technology — making and using tools — relies on specialization. Specialization leads to commitments to dedicated, sunk-cost investments and exchange. This is the context in which hierarchy becomes advantageous to social groups.
Sheeple do indeed make heuristic thinking errors. A lot of what passes for conservative ideology are unexamined and false conceptions that create a pretence that the boss knows best and can be trusted. This kind of idiocy is the unspoken axiom of Chicago School economics. I fear it is all too natural.
Ten Bears
Apples n’ oranges Eric, apples and oranges. We are again at that loggerhead twixt worldviews. We assume as we are of the dominant Jew/”Christian”/Muslim/Mormon Cult of (white) Male Domination worldview as with ones and zeros our perception of the other’s worldview is the correct worldview. It is not. It cannot be. They are different worldviews. It’s all just patriarchal pap anyways.
rangoon78
Thank for the Pinker links. This one’s good “He notes that economic inequality is not violence–“the fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding.” While his reduction of economic inequality to Bill Gates having a bigger house than Steven Pinker is jaw-droppingly callow, one can agree that economic inequality is not the same as rape and genocide. By his criteria, however, a parking lot shoving match is like rape and genocide, while slavery is not. In this light, his statement about confusing moralization with understanding is disingenuous.”
http://primarydeposits.blogspot.com/2012/09/scienciness-and-history-part-2-steven.html
StewartM
But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.
But not bonobos, and also we share similar vasopressin receptor genes with them (believed to be involved with empathy, pair bonding, and social interactions). Plus like bonobos and unlike common chimps we don’t have a mating season. The only similarities with common chimps we have lies in tool usage, common chimps do more of that than bonobos (though some recent evidence conflicts with that).
For most of our existence we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.
Marvin Harris, Our Kind
StewartM
Dale,
Is this your story?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-reveal-girl-rsquo-s-tough-life-in-early-americas/
Hunter-gatherers are known to undergo periods of hunger. However, famine is rare. I would suggest comparing her skeleton to those of later populations; as a rule hunter-gatherers skeletons are taller, suffer fewer missing teeth, and otherwise indicate better health. The skeletons of the average Roman, Chinese, Mesopotamian, or other members of the ‘great civilizations’ look awful. Even the pharaohs had died due to teeth problems and abscesses.
Also, that age of childbearing, 15 or 16, is actually pretty normal. What is abnormal is deferring sex/childbearing into one’s 20s. Nature wouldn’t be pumping teens full of hormones telling them to ‘do it do it do it’ if nature didn’t intend for them to, well, actually *do it*. it is our deferring marriage/sex/childbirth that is a relatively recent phenomena, borne from the fact that our more complex societies require longer periods of training and education to be effective workers (and thus economically support children).
bruce wilder
EA:
Amazon has vast quantities of fantasy romance scifi porn (it has become its own strangely confused and variegated fusion genre since kindle). Thankfully historians write none of it. Lots of Princes and people afforded the luxuries of great wealth that they can share affectionately with servants and rogues, though. So, egalitarianism of spirit has to share mind-space with other conventions of status and power. And, most of the characters are athletic and attractive. Completely unnatural. Completely.
Eric Anderson
I’m so confused Bruce.