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The Gods of Our Fathers - documentary on the rise of patriarchy and civilization
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[Music] [Music] we human beings have taken over the whole planet but now we must learn to share it or else we will lose it we have to outgrow tribalism patriarchy all our old ways and we have to move fast because we're running out of time [Music] [Applause] [Music] I've always enjoyed a good revolution so kitchens are an interesting place to be these days this is where the basic power balance between men and women is being renegotiated at last and if we get it right the whole human race will be the winner most males behave quite decently as individuals but when human beings get together in large groups we behave very badly wars tyranny the huge gulf between rich and poor north and south and all those things are directly connected with the imbalance of power between men and women male domination is right at the heart of what's wrong with math civilization or just one of the hundreds of thousands of everyday people who want to partake in this inaugural celebration everybody and I mean everybody's gonna get a great show today America is inaugurating a new president and all the old hopes for peace and justice and equality are having an outing but compared to its stated ideals the United States is a grave disappointment America's militarize up to its eyeballs and it spent much of its history fighting wars and other people's territory native Indians Mexicans Filipinos Vietnamese all classes of its own citizens have spent generations in the back of the bus and even now not one of its 42 presidents has come from the female majority of the population go talk to congressman Broun Elizabeth Curtis was just surprised herself by being elected to Congress she doesn't fit the mold and not just because she's a woman she's also been a full time peace activist for years and last year she earned less than the minimum wage house meets at 11 good bye lovie have fun you and Barbra Streisand my another reception [Music] this reception is for all the women who were elected to Congress in 1992 there were almost twice as many of them as ever before Elizabeth first glad hands the crowd like any traditional politician but she's not it is time for those of us who have been disempowered in many ways who felt that we are on the outside of the mainstream to understand that in fact we can be incredibly powerful okay I need my senator clementa I think this is a very male institution here you know when the hundred and third Congress came in and we're we're we're of color we're women it's a marvelous group of people but once we got into the whole of the Congress I suddenly realized how few of us they really were less than 10 percent is female you look at those portraits in the rotunda and somebody from outer space would say this is a country made up of white men there's no women old people of color in their statute it's manifest destiny writ large we just wipe out parts of our history the founders of the American Republic were trying to escape from the evils of the past they thought all they had to do was create a democracy they didn't realize that the pattern of violence and oppression was part of civilization itself now we do and we even have a name for it the patriarchal [Music] [Applause] [Music] some king or Emperor gives the orders those who enforce them have lots of power and privileges people at the bottom have no rights at all the poor slaves almost all women and Outsiders can just be killed if they get in the way in fact American warplanes were bombing Iraq on inauguration day what I think about now is we play this terrible game of cat-and-mouse is there are thousands of children dying in Baghdad from the last time we were bombing what are we doing when do we begin to say that an Iraqi child's life is the same as the life of a white America until we do that we'll go on having wars Americans have been trying to break out of the old pattern for over two centuries and there has been progress there's no king now and no slaves and women have the vote but hierarchy and violence still rule the world men still rule the world this has been the pattern of our history for so long that many people think it's just human nature and there's no point in asking a pig to fly but before we abandon hope we should be sure whether the patriarchal order is natural or not and the key evidence for that is not here it's deeply buried in a different you thousand years ago the options began to grow narrower it was probably women who invented agriculture since gathering plants was traditionally a woman's job but farming changed everybody's roles and created a new way of doing things all over the world the village way [Applause] people have probably lived on this spot for about 8,000 years and at the start it would have been what's called an autonomous village there were no cities yet no kings no soldiers just hundreds of independent villages each living its own quiet life and decisions probably still got me the old hunter-gatherer way everybody came together and talked things over until they reached a consensus panitch alchemy is an anthropologist and the villages she studies are in 20th century Egypt but the economic realities in a village like this have not changed much in thousands of years but I would dare say anywhere the social fabric would completely collapse without the input of women in economics everything to do with the essential day-to-day life of villages must be processed through women if men cultivate the wheat it has to be picked over and put through a mill to become flour and then to be processed into bread which is the lifeline of everyone [Music] the main investment of any rule of household besides the land is the cattle that they own this is the woman's domain before so means women are so central to the home but sometimes they hardly ever leave it [Music] it's the fact that there is so much live capital [Music] unlike hunter-gatherers villagers owned things and to make sure this valuable property stayed in the family almost all the earliest cultures passed it down through women babies have fathers too and the villagers knew it once obtained animals it's obvious that making babies requires a male input but you can't really be sure which male is the father while you always know who the mother is so men's property went to their sisters children when they died not to their own [Music] the status of men dropped steeply when human being settled in villages once their value to society had come from their ability as hunters but the wild game was quickly hunted out near the villages and when hunting lost its importance so did the people who used to do it we don't actually know who sat at the head of the table in the autonomous villages but we do know that in some places women were buried in the center of the house with the valuable household goods and men were buried out at the corners with the children archeologists find up to a hundred female fertility figures for every male symbol fertility was the key to whether the villages lived or died and fertility was traditionally female magic men were never actually oppressed there was never a matriarchy in that sense but you can see how men might have felt marginalized in the early village cultures so what's that got to do with us well first of all the huge changes that happen when hunter-gatherers settled down in the autonomous villages show just how flexible this thing called human nature is male domination is natural and neither is equality of the sexes it all depends same goes for whether we're warlike or peaceful democratic or authoritarian change the way we live and you may also change the way we behave towards each other [Music] men were just not very important in the autonomous villages and people who don't feel important tend to feel resentful instead you realize of course that we're talking about the raw material for a revolution here and the revolution dually happened so long ago that it isn't in the history books but thousands of years later we can see the results of it all around us [Music] now women are at the bottom of the pecking order men run practically everything and there's military all over the place what happened the Middle East is the best place to look for answers because over half the people on earth live in cultures that stem from here there are various kinds of histories and the one that got recorded is not the only one but more importantly it is the history of the dominant to us it's the dominant group it is it is male history it is the state's history the archive isn't I see and the documents I consult in the Egyptian National Archives down there on the Nile is they are documents of stated fashion whether they are police records prison accounts medical treatises now for important purposes these are all written by men women are excluded and when they appear they appear in a very marginal way call it funny studies the history of militarism in Egypt today he's celebrating his doctorate with French mostly young scholars who spend their working days trying to piece together researches the live women in medieval Islam she's a history professor at the American University of Cairo women have always been neglected in history so not just as a woman but also as a historian I'd like to bring out what has been neglected invisible silence I learn a lot from it because it explodes myths unfortunately the sources that I used have been written by men expressing the patriarchal view of what is important the army the state the bureaucracy what my students call boring history the women hooda studies left no written records so she looks for clues in the writings of medieval Islamic scholars who to figures out what women were really doing from the demands of the male scholars that they stopped doing it first of all a woman should go out only for an assessment if she does she should go in long an unattractive garment sounds to me a woman should work close to the walls of houses in order to make way for men men should make the road difficult and narrow for women as religious scholars they viewed the female body as threatening to the order of the main world the nudity of the female bodies is frowned upon and this is a very sensitive subject on the part of our religious scholar because he hates women prancing in the public bath you know walking around nude because they exchanged domestic news about themselves about their husbands and they competed among themselves in terms of you know like clothes and jewelry and what did my husband get it was trouble for the man at home I always encountered this in my research you know about women that the female body in public space caused chaos and again I'm wondering whether this is not also a male retention of the past you know when material power was expressed through the years sexuality of the female when the male revolted against that sexual dominance he started taming it [Music] women's fertility made them powerful in the village times but those times did not last [Music] around 5,000 years ago a great change swept across the world the era of the autonomous villages came to an end nobody really knows why but in half a dozen places around the world a new way of living arose it was the point where human beings stopped just fitting into the world and began to subjugate it [Music] in Egypt in Mesopotamia in China in Central America great numbers of villages were united under single rulers human beings invented the state and patriarchy was born at the same moment all the early States were pyramids of power and privilege with a single man at the top a fairy a god-king a sacred person and how could a single man get so much power only by terror [Music] the tombs around here belonged to the kings and Nobles of Egypt's first dynasty they died about 5000 years ago so there's not much left of the tombs now except the outside walls of mud-brick but once the interiors were lined with inlaid cedar and filled with gold and ivory in all manner of precious things and some of the kings may have been quite decent men when they were alive but this is what happened when they died they strangled scores are hundreds of the people who've worked for the King concubines bodyguards minor officials servant girls and buried them nearby to serve Him in the next world around the tomb of Jer the third king of unified Egypt are the graves of 317 other people the great majority of them young women and these were not the Kings enemies there were people he knew but murdering hundreds of people and burying them with the king is almost normal in the earliest kingdoms Egypt Mesopotamia China they all did it absolute power corrupts absolutely welcome to civilization but the terrible things they did had a purpose terror is a primitive form of mass communication put up enough images like this and you don't have to station so you one quarter of early Mesopotamian laws were about controlling women the man wants to make sure that the the children are his and one way of doing it is to regulate you know marriage and to say to the woman you know I have to control your movement the legacy of Mesopotamia is still visible today in all parts of Cairo the wealthier houses contain harems where women were segregated in order to prevent social contact with men who were not part of the family you have this ideology in architectural form the house is enclosed by high walls the male space is on the ground floor so that there's easy access for the male visitors and the female spaces are on the upper floors where they could overlook these male spaces [Music] I'd served the purposes of secluding the women from strange Maine eyes at the same time it allowed women privacy to socialize without interference from females [Music] segregating women and making them wear veils were just part of the process of turning women into private property women had to wear veils in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago so did respectable women in classical Greece and Rome women in medieval Europe were still veiling their hair and even in our grandmother's time women still wore veils on special occasions today almost everybody has forgotten that the veil comes from an ancient upheaval that also brought us tyranny endless war but he does [Music] every state echos the first state hierarchy militarism male domination [Applause] the meeting place [Music] please [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] like anybody trying to run a mouse civilization Bill Clinton must get millions of people to pay taxes work together obey orders from a distant Capitol that's so hard to do that until recently all math societies hadn't be dictatorships but Bill Clinton doesn't have to be a dictator [Music] he can actually try to talk people into cooperating because he has all the technology of mass communication is available to party or persons but the common ground we call America but what was it like before mass media go all the way back to ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago no human being has ever lived in anything bigger than a village and suddenly here we are in the world's first unified state and we have a little problem how to rocket think of the number of people involved 50 thousand a hundred thousand half a million and remember that the ancient Egyptians stitch and everybody lived in a world with no mass communications no radio no television no books no newspapers hardly anybody could even read and write so they had no way to talk things over as a mass society no way to reach a consensus no way to agree voluntarily and what ought to be done so somebody had to give the orders and everybody else had to obey when we left the villages we had to leave equality behind to a mass society without mass communications has to be a dictatorship but he doesn't have to go in for militarism and it doesn't have to destroy women's rights [Music] Egypt was one of the few ancient kingdoms where all the elements of patriarchy did not arrive at the same time in fact the early Egyptians at least accepted no more the patriarchal order than they absolutely had to the very first Kings behaved quite badly but my society in Egypt did not become a permanent nightmare of exploitation and depression as soon as they could the Egyptians moved away from the terror of the founding times they even gave up building pyramids eventually and satisfied themselves with more modest temples in fact Egypt became the great exception a mass society that managed to keep a lot of the old village values you [Music] before the coming of Judaism Christianity and Islam patriarchy was dominant but it tolerated the presence of goddesses so he received goddesses juxtaposed to gods in the religious ideologies the early early period the more dominant the female figures [Music] you [Music] beneath the sands lies the city of La who briefly Egypt's capital over 3,000 years ago Nick Miller the curator of Egyptology at the Royal Ontario Museum is overseeing the dig the sharp contrast that has always impressed me there's this difference between the status of women in Egypt and that in shall we say classical Greece the ancient Greeks were a very peculiar Bunch indeed and they were basically terrified of their women folk I don't say that lightly I really believe this if you will go over Greek mythology you will find that almost all the monsters are female and that must surely mean something this did not happen in Egypt a man had his women folk around him this gives the whole court life a kind of a feminine quality the art shows extremely fine linen garments on the women through which the bodies show very clearly [Music] women's clothing particularly which I have kind of an interest in at this time it does develop new styles appeared in many cases you can date a picture on a tomb wall by the fashions of the moment it was not a misfortune to be born a girl in ancient Egypt nobody'd even heard of the veil why this huge difference between Egypt and other places ancient Egypt lived along a river in a desert so wide that early armies couldn't cross it to the north was open sea so for almost 2,000 years ancient Egypt was safe from attack by other civilized States but Egypt's luck eventually ran out around 1600 BC the first invaders arrived it was the end of Egypt as the great exception first came the Hyksos and then came the Hittites an even more aggressive law and in the course of organizing itself to fight them off Egypt became like everywhere else this temple was built over 3,000 years ago by Ramses the third one of the first Pharaohs to glory in being a conqueror and a killer there's the great Pharaoh in his war chariot pulled by horses that look like New Kingdom harley-davidsons trampling the foe underfoot there's the Pharaoh ten times larger than life holding a bunch of doomed captives by the hair and there are the Pharaoh scribes counting the severed hands and various other severed bits of his slaughtered enemies this was when Egypt finally accepted the full patriarchal package once other civilizations can reach out and hurt you you have to militarize that's what happened in 19th dynasty Egypt and it had an immediate impact on women with the exception of the 19th dynasty which was a military dynasty under Ramses the first you have the beginning of a new approach a new presentation of the kingship they saw themselves as reforming the increasingly effeminate and ineffectual ways of the latter part of the 18th dynasty we're not like those guys who Miss ruled you before we are men we are warriors we are the new conquering kings of the Empire and they represent their sons in a way that the earlier Kings had not representations of the royal princes in the 18th dynasty even the ones who ultimately become King are very rare indeed under the 19th dynasty you have the boys rows of them ramses ii brags of having had 108 sons and those presumably were only the legitimate ones [Music] the picture in the 19th time students wanted an increasingly masculine presentation nice guys finish last the Chinese the Incas Mesopotamians Millions Aztecs even Egyptians they all went the same way in the end first a reasonably Pleasant and tolerant culture and then smash along comes the local version of the patriarchal revolution and its tyranny slaughter and depression forevermore which still leaves one big question maybe the most important one why was it necessary in every patriarchal culture to destroy the status of women [Applause] poverty babies with the average woman have if nobody was pushing her around it would certainly not be the six children that were the norm in our grandmother's generation in cultures that let women make their own choices small families are the norm because women know the children are a lot of work big families are a legacy of militarized societies military power requires lots of people especially soldiers that means lots of babies especially boys but you can't get a high birthrate of women are really free to choose so you have to reduce them to a state where their best hope of security and respect is their children or more precisely their boy children [Music] truly niala see the passing down of possessions and property and name from father to son means that you must have a son if you're so unlucky as not to have a boy this is big trouble one recourse is to try to attain a boy by for example giving your inheritance to a nephew that obliges him to take care of you and respect you women who don't produce sons wind up being destitute for that very reason you can't afford to alienate your brothers or uncle's or any milk in the source of weakness for women is the fact that they are replaceable that a man can take another woman instead of his wife it's not that their functions are replaceable it's the fact that they are personally there are so many other women to choose from the McNish is exhilarating women try to overcome this oppression by practicing maximum freedom within the space that is allowed to them they just know the boundaries they know where not to go and within that they have because of woman's intelligence women have created a stake in patriarchy and have tried to play by the rules and get the most out of it you're not going to upturn the culture what people write in newspapers or how the country is ruled you're not going to change that anyway I'm talking about making the most out of scarce resources in a culture of poverty that is devalued and doesn't have a voice the rulers had to destroy women's freedom to get the birthrate they needed men support do that but most men love their mothers and their wives and their daughters why would they collaborate and hurting them besides a fully militarized patriarchy was not good news for the average male for every general there are thousands of foot soldiers and being a foot soldier is not good for your health a few men ended up on top but most men were less free less rich and maybe even less safe than before so why did men go along with the patriarchal revolution I suspected in most places there was an unspoken deal made right at the dawn of civilization the patriarchs had to buy men's support and what they had to offer was status here was a way to reverse the huge loss of status men had suffered back when we all moved into the villages any competent tyrant would spot the raw material for a deal here so here's an offer you can't refuse throw your lot in with us back patriarchy and we'll make you superior to all women you'll have to obey us but from now on you'll have control over your women and you can be certain well pretty certain that they're your kids what's more your kids will belong to you not your wife and your property will go to your sons not your sister's kids oh and we'll change the religion - from now on God will be male and so will all his priests and they'll all back your new male privileges [Music] around 2,000 years ago new religions swept away the old pagan beliefs in almost all the mass civilizations of the old world the new religions of the Middle East turned the universe into a perfect hierarchy with a single male sky God at the top and the goddesses who always play the major role in earlier religions were demoted to mere Saints or at best the mother of the god [Music] early Christianity and Islam all segregated worshippers by sects their rules for women were patriarchy these rules [Music] [Applause] and those who interpret God's will of course are exclusively made [Music] [Music] in Islam God becomes much more abstract as an idea as a concept [Music] Oh [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] linguistically speaking is referred to as a male God however it's really a very abstract concept of divinity and definitely there's no tolerance of any female divinity there in their structure and rules Christianity and Islam represent the final triumph of patriarchy [Music] yet the new religions were a paradox for at the same time they were actually a revolt against inequality the very core of patriarchy they proclaimed that all human beings were basically equal and that's probably why they spread so fast however little the new religions changed things in practice they were a sign that people would break with patriarchy if they had the chance maybe not oh we have [Music] [Laughter] [Music] the veil has made a comeback in Egypt recently and fundamentalism is on the rise but looks can be deceiving even though there is no law that says women should wear the veil in Egypt we see it all over the Muslim world you know why are women wearing the veil and why they willingly wearing the veil we know that some are pressured to wear it and I think that it's panicking the insecurities of patriarchy and its need to say to women you should be more controlled patriarchy is right to panic because these young women behave in ways unimaginable to their grandmothers and they put on the veil it's not in submission to some 4000 year old law off and it's just a tactic to move outside the house you know still our to meet me but I get that Ali Anakin's event can finish be able to go still mushiya mark say ok thou fat about tobacco jumbo I mean an alarm listen up together [Music] fidelity table inaudible vistas a slay me man if my Malaysian ilaha darkest Nina McDonald de la ley of la savate Murdock are the marks in elected are we are we early Lee Miller had have enough left so pack it in the sector [Music] the modern economy pulls women into the workforce and education gives them new ideas such rapid change has provoked a fundamentalist backlash it's the same struggle that started centuries ago in the West and it isn't over there yet either if you put it in perspective we can say that the new right has become a universal phenomena it takes the manifestation of women veiling in this culture it takes other forms and in other cultures there are fascist movements in other countries that demand certain forms of behavior I'm sure there are similarities I think the world economy is going through a crisis and people always turn to religion or conservatism to what they know all across the globe a communications revolution is undermining the old ways televisions bringing the images and ideas of an emerging global culture to traditional societies and that's already having an impact on the power balance between sexes everywhere people see a very alien world much of it is foreign it's about places people have never been and will never go to but people are avid to learn just how on Islamic the stories can be one incident was caused by television for young girls decided to escape from the village and go through Cairo and become TV stars they were of course brought back some early and they didn't get very far but this had a great impact on the village that television can be subversive not this year not this decade but patriarchy is slowly collapsing even though male hierarchy and privilege still predominate everywhere even though every country in the world is still militarized [Music] after 5,000 years patriarchy is not just in our institutions it's in our heads but it is not in our genes the problem is not human nature it's that math societies are still trapped inside the ancient machine they know thousands of years ago to deal with the problems of thousands of years ago the machine called patriarchy was the only way to run an early mass society it was refined to both the killing machine and a breeding machine as the early civilization started fighting one another and we conquered the whole planet with thousands of years ago [Music] but now our weapons have become so destructive that we can no longer afford to type major Wars and we don't actually have to live in patriarchal dictatorships anymore mass communications mean that we can be democratic patriarchy no longer makes sense as an institution [Music] I think we have built enormous monuments to man's domination there was a photograph of all the new members of Congress we were all lined up on the steps and I was on the top step and ready to have this photograph taken and two of the new members two white males just on the photograph with a student and I am lost as if I'm not there it's sort of symbolic there's no me and I think I have to learn somehow to be able to move that aside and say I'm here to photographs like this may one day seem as bizarre as those old pictures of the Soviet leaders lined up on top of Lenin's tomb and it will be as normal for women to hold power as it is for men to do the dishes somebody that bought something dinner with you at an auction that's right I don't have to take them to do that so we stand amongst tonight basically what you do is you eat and drink in this job that's a no-no you try to avoid both the drinking but you look like you're eating at drinking there's no golden age coming no happy ever afters but patriarchy is in retreat in every front and the vital front is right here where men and women are changing the most fundamental human partnership the process is often confusing and painful but we are changing it and that's a good reason to be hopeful about the human race if we can achieve equality between the sexes then the other big problems like war and nationalism and north/south are not insoluble either and a century from now people may have to explain to their kids about patriarchy the way we have to explain about slavery and wouldn't that be nice [Music]
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