[Chris:] for the benefit of these two, there's only a couple of sentences
[Andrea:] Yes. in trying to answer these questions and psychological analyses and the whole appropriate to the age of the and I quote we must not forget that but is also a law giver and educator Egyptian Pharaoh undeniably Egyptian in origin. In the Bible cannot provide and abandoned him. He was rescued by an Egyptian princess. In the normal legend they represent what is known as a family romance. This the special, almost sacred being. development continued Egyptian Pharaohs and as an adult true parents.. However, and come to the conclusion that by a name Egyptian Children of Israel. Compared to what really happened that they were liberated. There and not from below. To maintain that Moses was an Egyptian they never. In short Moses Moses revealed to that like the Egyptians each generation of Jews that gave them their character in general which is that today
[Chris:] Well done Andrea, excellent. A difficult book in some ways, did you find it difficult?
[Andrea:] Yeah, I
[Chris:] Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Well I thought you gave a very clear and er convincing account of it despite that so congratulations, well done, that was excellent. Erm, well what does everyone else think? Moses and Monarchism is not one of those books of Freud as I expect you to read for this course, I mean I expect you to read [cough] things like Civilization's Discontents and so on because they're, they're kind of central and they're not very large books, they're clearly er focused on our subject but erm it would be I think a little bit unreasonable for me to expect you to read this one, although, er I'd quite like you to I mean some ways erm... it's a fascinating book, erm my guess is if it, if you don't hate it, you'd probably quite like it. There's a number of students who said they started to read it and couldn't put it down. Bit like a detective story in some ways. But erm, what er, what are you to make of it?
[Mike:] Erm, I'd like to say
[Chris:] Mm. Mm. Well could you, could you expand on that, cos you're not saying that they, it's actually passed from people's D N A?
[Mike:] No, I'm not saying that
[Chris:] No so explain how it works Mike.
[Mike:] Er, well, it seemed as though it and er... ideology of change rather than industrial relations, erm revolution
[Chris:] And so the relevance of that to what Andrea was telling us about is what?
[Mike:] Erm,
[Chris:] Yes. Yes. Well that's it, that, that's a very good starting point because one point that Freud er makes in the book and Andrea er alluded to... but is, is very important in fact he calls it, there's a little sub-section of the book called the Analogy and this is the erm analogy that Freud is gonna use for his study of Moseism the analogy he gives, er can you remember it Andrea? Recall exactly what it is? Well let, let, let, let me tell you, I don't want to put you on the spot, the, the, the analogy is of er the typical pattern of development of a neurosis, which Freud says is a trauma that happens often in infancy. This is then forgotten or repressed when it seems to have vanished altogether and there's a third period, what Freud calls the return of the repressed when the initial trauma comes back in the form of symptoms and er ideally in the form of an analysis that finally brings it to the surface of consciousness and dissolves it, and this is a typical pattern. Er, it's certainly what happened to me I must admit in fact it's certainly been the pattern of my life and er... I'm not surprised what thought, Freud thought was a kind of typical er typical pattern. Now what Mike is talking about is the kind of historical parallel to this and Freud mentions a number of examples. Mike has given us one which is I think an excellent one. The examples that Freud talks about are for example er, the Trojan War in early Greek history. We know that the Trojan War, you know erm, what's described in the Iliad and the Odyssey to the kiddies and er all these Greek and Greek heroes, we know that war actually happened, but it happened an awful long time before these poems were written and er Freud's view is that what happens in a culture is there's some initial traumatic event like the French Revolution or Trojan War, there's a period of latency during which it seems to be forgotten about and nothing very much happens anyway, and then at a later stage it comes back again, there's a return of a repressed and er... Freud erm... Freud quotes one or two other examples, er of the same kind of thing and Mike's example is a very good one albeit er perhaps it's good because it's so recent, so the point you're making Mike is that are you saying that Freud's analogy is, is credible where French history and even industrial relations is concerned that there was a trauma, the Revolution of seventeen eighty nine, there were latency periods and then this kept coming back from the repressed time and time again? Yeah. Yeah. Right.
[Mike:] Apparently they even put the barricade in the same place
[Chris:] Oh did they? Right.
[speaker004:] Is er, is Freud saying, is he just looking at this and saying I, I see a pattern here?
[Chris:] Yes
[speaker004:] Or is he saying, you know is he saying this is how I found religions to thrive, you know or
[Chris:] He's certainly saying I find a pattern here because he's using it, as his pattern to understand and I only just said at the beginning what the, makes the Jews Jewish, what gave them their national character and their, their ethnic identity. He's certainly saying there's a pattern there er what was the second?
[speaker004:] Well, is, is he saying that these are the, these are the things that our religion needs in order to, to be a strong religion, I mean it, she said you know something that I found interesting was what Maska Reece has said about erm the ability of the minority to, to sort of overcome repression
[Chris:] Yes
[speaker004:] erm, I read a book this summer er by Kurt Vonnegut called Cat's Cradle and in the book erm there's this, there's this er country and the country has outlawed this certain religion
[Chris:] Mm.
[speaker004:] erm called Bocodonism and it turns out, find out later in the book that the reason they outlawed this is because of the guy Bocodon who was, who originated the religion had made a deal with the head of the state of the country that he would outlaw it, so that's how the religion thrived, because it was outlawed
[Chris:] Yes, I see yeah
[speaker004:] see and he started up that way and, and the religion was the most popular thing in the country, but all the people were outlaws.
[Chris:] I see.
[speaker004:] And er that's how the religion thrived
[Chris:] Right
[speaker004:] because they were all repressed but they were fighting against this repression and it was coming out, you know.
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker004:] Erm and er I was wondering if Freud did that or if that's what Freud was saying, that, that, that religion by nature must be repressed or that a minority as the nature of minority is, is er it works harder when it's repressed or it can become stronger.
[Chris:] No he's not saying that, he's not going that far because he's not talking about all religions. We saw earlier didn't we when we talked about, about future who did that? Sorry, you did that, right, well think back to what you said about future what Freud said the future. Right now there are plenty of religions that don't show this er pattern of trauma, repression and latency of return of the repressed, they, they just kind of go on from er from time immemorial, erm and there are plenty of examples of that. I think Freud would say though however that these are more like the th the was talking about religion, now clearly if something is a outlawing it isn't gonna make much difference to it, or if anything it's, it's just gonna make it er, er make it more difficult, but there are certain types of religion and Judaism is one of them where th this very pattern you're talking about did occur and here Freud is er probably standing on, on firm ground, for reasons which I'll explain in my lectures I don't wanna take up too much time, but I have done a bit of research on this myself and as you will see, erm there's, there are good reasons for thinking that Freud was certainly right about some of those and we certainly know that a monotheistic and, and an absolutely rigidly monotheistic religion appeared in Ancient Egypt as erm Andrea said, just before erm the er reign of this heretic er heretic, heretic pharaoh one of whose er... near descendants, I forget how he was related now, erm was originally called Tutamkhatan and then was forced to change his name to Tutankhamen and he was dug up by Howard Carter in nineteen twenty two or something er and er the Tutankhamen is called Tutankhamen and not Tutamkhatan is that there was a religious. [cough] The [cough] Akhenaten is interesting because he was the first Ayatollah of history as far as we know. He, he, he started the
[speaker004:] [cough]
[Chris:] of religious intolerance that still lives on today and causes Salman Rushdie to live in fear of his life. Erm, the, the idea
[speaker004:] [cough]
[Chris:] God Akhenaten was his prophet and in fact claimed to be the son of God his son and er all other religions were persecuted and er, so what in Ancient Egypt was that the traditional polytheism which was rampant was persecuted by there was only one god and as Andrea says, even proscribe the word gods in, in the plural, you know the, you know the er feminist thought police would try and rule out certain words you're not allowed to use like chairman which has become chairperson or something like that
[speaker004:] [cough]
[Chris:] well Akhenaten took it even further and it was an offence punishable by death to even say the word gods... and if you visit Ancient Egypt and walk around the ruins, you will occasionally know they were fond of putting these hieroglyphic erm er inscriptions over everything. And here and there you will see hieroglyphs have been erased, if somebody's got a chisel and there's a, just a raise a whole block of hieroglyphs, er just there and then... and almost always that is Akhenaten's workmen did it and the hieroglyphs they were erasing was the plural er gods. You could use the word god but not the word they had to be suppressed. So Akhenaten founded this intolerant monotheistic er religion as with kind of Ayatollah and er suppressed the th the, the traditional polytheistic. We, we now know this is a matter of historical fact there was a counter-revolution. Akhenaten either died or was murdered, we're not, we don't know, we don't know how er he was a very peculiar man as I'll explain in the lectures er physically, very strange probably as a result of inbreeding and erm the old religion re-established itself there was never a return to monotheistic sun worship, but er all its hypothesis is that, that since we know the exodus occurred round about this time and since we know that Judaism too is a religion of a single-minded monotheist you know I'm the law by God I shall have no other gods before me, it says in the Bible full stop. Erm Freud's hypothesis is that this religion left Egypt because of the persecution, Moses was one of Akhenaten's followers who went out into the desert, erm here as I'll explain in the lectures er some of my own research opens up a new angle on this that Freud didn't know about and why they went out into the desert, why they picked up these er Hebrew erm er immigrants who were living on the fringes of the Egyptian Empire. I'll explain that in the lecture. But anyway the idea is that er the religion was, was suppressed in Ancient Egypt and because it was suppressed there, the people migrators went to the Promised Land, when they found the Promised Land there they stopped and founded a new, a new religious state, which of course is still with us. I mean now we're still, you know we're still er... er if Freud did write about this, we're still living with, with the consequences of this. In the, in the current Middle East... erm... so this pattern certainly applies to Judaism, not to all religions, he's not saying that all religions have to undergo persecution in order to as it were flourish, but some religions do and perhaps the characteristic Judaism or at least this kind of monotheism is these kind of religions tend to be intolerant and single-mindedly, tend to say that we know the truth, everybody else is wrong and consequently they tend to persecute others and get persecuted and this leads to these periods of suppression, but there's a tendency for this kind of return of repress just as Mike was saying, his very brilliant analogy he suggested the French Revolution when the students put the barricade up in the same place or so the erm Freud's idea is that the things that happened in that first traumatic period back in Ancient Egypt and for example erm he said this is why the modern erm Jews insist on circumcision because the Ancient Egyptians did and this is, this is correct. We know that the Ancient Egyptians er did insist on circumcision er they were racially very erm... erm... er very prejudiced the Ancient Egyptians cos they were living at the peak of cultural time and regarded all other races as inferior to them and one of the main er stigmas in inferiority was erm not being circumcised and Ancient Egyptians regarded people who weren't circumcised as filthy... and erm they er they had this tremendous er racial pride in themselves as the circumcised people, and this of course has passed on into Judaism and even to Islamic faith. Islam er pursues this er strange habit of mutilating the genitals of little boys. I don't think they can get away with it with little girls but they get away with it with little boys. Well it is genital mutilation isn't it? Would, would, would... would, but, I mean I'm quite in favour of people having their genitals mutilated as adults, once they're over eighteen, they go to hospital and sign a consent form and have it done as long as they pay for it themselves, but to do it to newborn children strikes me as outrageous. I this is just the voice of reason. [LAUGHTER] You can draw your own conclusions about me. Er, Mike? Do you, do you think there's a valid parallel here then with say Judaism? A valid parallel w w would you say using your, substituting your analogy with the French Revolution?
[Mike:] Erm... well
[Chris:] I mean how does it, how does it work psychologically? If, if, if you're right about this could you explain the psychological mechanism that makes these kinds of returns of the repressed happen, I mean why did the Fre why did the French students feel they had to recreate the revolution?
[Mike:] It was symbolic
[Chris:] Why should they want to be heard in a traditional way, you'd think students having a revolution will want everything make a kind of clean... clean break wouldn't they? I mean why do people have to kind of, if, if, if we accept for a minute that there's something in this analogy, this model that Freud is talking about, why do people have this compulsive need to repeat like this, why do they have to repeat history? Mm, but Mike that it wasn't new, how do you explain that Kirsty?
[Kirsty:] Well Well, I, I can't tell you, but I'm sure that er
[Chris:] Mm, Right.
[Mary-jane:] Rather than it actually
[Chris:] Yes. That, that's a sensible kind of conclusion to draw and perhaps this would meet Kirsty's point as well, because the... what you might be tempted to say is look erm, in our cultures we have, we have absorbed from our cultures ways of seeing the world, bits about history and things restructure our thoughts and even when we try and do something new, I'd say let's have a revolution everybody, put up your barricades, you know, actually we had some great fun in the sixties with that erm the, when this happens there's a tendency to nevertheless do it in the traditional way, in other words although obviously the sixty eight revolution was about a completely different issue than the seventeen ninety eight revolution, it was very much later in history. Nevertheless the form of it was the same, there was a, would you buy that one Kirsty that there was a
[Kirsty:] Yes.
[Chris:] a kind of cultural tradition in the
[Kirsty:] Yes, yes I mean unconsciously they will happen
[Chris:] Yes.
[Kirsty:] erm, but are shown that
[Chris:] Yes, yes. Yes, so would you accept that Mary-Jane, that, that people may consciously er think for example oh no we're, we're, we're, we're students we're having a revolution and this is new but unconsciously they might be following some deep historical precedent? Yes.
[Mary-jane:] Aware that
[speaker004:] I'm sure they were aware
[Chris:] Well
[John:] another revolution I mean that the fight that none, none of these things have really come to a full success, yeah, so nobody looks at them and says well we need no more revolutions because they'll all work. So everyone thinks that being the is being one that's really gonna change the world, yeah and I think that the pattern he's talking about it's just resurfacing and resurfacing and resurfacing.
[Chris:] I mean to take another example er and this illustrates Mary-Jane's point about it, it can be conscious,is isn't there a tendency wouldn't you say John for Clinton to see himself as Kennedy returned? Yeah.
[John:] Yeah I think that what Clinton did was to play on that to get elected and you know he wanted people to see him as that, but
[Chris:] Yeah
[John:] I think that now he's in office and this is why I've started to dislike him a little more since he's been you know inaugurated even. I think he thinks he's better, I really do
[Chris:] Yeah
[John:] I think he thinks
[Chris:] Yeah
[John:] okay now I'm here and I am not only gonna be I mean now people
[Chris:] Yeah
[John:] I am Kennedy
[Chris:] Much better than Kennedy. Right, he probably does think that, but isn't it interesting er doesn't this illustrate the point we've been making that he felt he needed to have a play that, strung that historical cord as it were.
[John:] Mm. I, I definitely, I definitely think that's a pattern, you know leading up I, I think this is a continuing thing but that, that in the end these people always think that they're gonna take one step further.
[Chris:] Mm.
[John:] And that's what keeps, that's what keeps it going.
[Chris:] Mm.
[John:] Yeah.
[Chris:] So perhaps in some ways er we would deduce from this that the... the motive of the revolutionaries in sixty eight was in perhaps to some extent to complete what had been started in seventeen eighty nine but not finished... and somebody would, Clinton presumably he would say I'm gonna complete the programme that John F Kennedy started, but was unable to finish because the tragic way in which his career was ended. Erm, so the, that... that seems to be getting towards something that Freud is saying, another aspe aspect of this which is the compulsive aspect, the feeling that you gotta keep doing it. Presumably one reason why people doing something is they didn't do it enough the first time, or they didn't do it properly, or they didn't do it successfully and therefore they've gotta keep doing it. Is, is that possible?
[speaker004:] this father figure
[Chris:] Mm.
[speaker004:] I mean it's like the father is condoning what they're doing.
[Chris:] Yes, and, and sometimes of course this is, this, this becomes a conscious rationalization for what people are doing aren't they? I mean presumably erm when erm... er you know when er when people fight religious crusades, very often they see themselves as er justified by a religious precedence of the past by the great prophets of the past or, or, or great leaders who did similar things and er they, they consciously justify what they're doing don't they by saying well you know we're er we're, we're doing, fighting this crusade or, or carrying out this policy er and these are the historical precedences. And they quote those precedences as a justification for what they're doing and of course that then, then the whole kind of compulsive repetition thing becomes very very conscious because now people are saying you know, we're doing this er because of historical precedence, because of erm and tradition. So I think that that's, that that's absolutely true. Of course to go back to something I think Kirsty or somebody said, erm this could also happen un unconsciously couldn't it? I mean I was interested a a a another very interesting point you made Mike at the beginning, you said that is there, had there been studies that show the standards of French industrial relations did you say that, that this has kind of become a pattern for industrial relations conflict in France.
[Mike:] No, I made
[Chris:] Yeah, right.
[Mike:] say that this has everybody out
[Chris:] Because that implies that this kind of thing then spreads to other areas of life, I mean it, after all the revolution of seventeen ninety eight didn't have anything to do with erm industrial relations as such, I mean it was er it was really about the monarchy, the state and er people starving and all that stuff, but the... this introduces the interesting idea that once you've got a kind of pattern in the culture to something, it can then reappear in other areas. Erm, it, what it struck me as is a parallel with Freud's idea of transference, you know that once something happens in the, in the traumatic period in a, in a childhood, there's then a tendency to transference to occur later in life, we recreate later in relationships to er the model of the early one and er it struck me that what you said about French industrial relations sounded a bit like transference in erm in the psychoanalysis the idea that i i it spills out as it were from the initial which might have been saved er within the family to other relationships i in later life that people have with their superiors at work or something... I mean you can see this actually sometimes you know that people have relationships with their superiors which are clearly erm based on erm their relationships with their parents and they see the,th their boss as a parental figure and the employee sees themselves as er as, as, as a kind of erm child and it shows itself sometimes in quite er quite unmistakable ways. Kirsty? Yeah yes, yes, yes.
[Kirsty:] I told my husband that he had this problem.
[Chris:] Oh really?
[Kirsty:] Yes, absolutely
[Chris:] Yeah
[Kirsty:] never is good enough and he expects too much
[Chris:] Yes, it, it's not uncommon.
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Kirsty:] but can I ask something else erm
[Chris:] Yes
[Kirsty:] obviously this erm theory of Freud's er is not acceptable Jews. I would like to find out how a Jewish
[Chris:] Yes, I mean they haven't been. Once in one of these classes one year I had a Jewish student got up and got very upset during such a class as this and stomped out and then slammed the door er which I was rather sorry about because erm I think he was being a little bit erm too sensitive because the person who was giving the paper said anything anyway erm, but warrant that, but he was just offended of the idea that anybody could suggest that Moses wasn't Jewish, and of course
[Kirsty:] Well he was a young
[Chris:] Oh they did, yes. This another one of the black books, along with Woodrow Wilson. This was one of the er... this th this is one of the black books and one of the problems with this has been I think that a lot of psychoanalysts er have been Jewish of course and I think they regard as kind of heresy or some kind of disloyalty to suggest that Moses erm wasn't Jewish.
[John:] I, I don't understand how that though. I mean, you know,ho how does that relate to his pattern that he's talking about?
[Chris:] Well it, it, it, it doesn't relate to a pattern erm to be an analogy. What it relates to is the specific historical reconstruction it. You see, you could say that this of Freud's operates on two levels. On one level there's this analogy, this pattern about history that we've been talking about... but er... is Freud's attempt to explain Jewish er culture in terms of a, of a general pattern of history, of course there are many other examples and Mike has suggested a brilliant one here. On another level, on a completely different level the book is about Freud's attempt in my erm in the second edition of I used the analogy of a detective story like Sherlock Holmes or something, or something er i i it, it's an attempt by Freud to reconstruct specific historical events that may or may not have happened, using a kind of detective's method because Freud picks up tiny little clues like Moses' name, the fact that he doesn't appear to be able to speak the language in the Bible, he always speaks through an interpreter, and in the Bible this, this is explained away by saying. Freud's he just couldn't speak Hebrew, he could only speak in Egyptian and so on and so on. So it's an attempt on, on, on the second level to minutely reconstructing historical, the lost, the truest but what really happened and in that on that level, it's important for Freud to establish that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian, because this gives him the link with Egyptian monarchism and the events of the exodus and explains it as well. It also explains erm his view why the Jews then murdered Moses rebelled against them, he wasn't one of them anyway. He imposed this religion on them which they didn't want and Freud thinks this explains a lot of things like the story of the golden carving, how Moses comes down
[speaker004:] [cough]
[Chris:] down from the mountain and er and so on. So that level it, it's really it's the detail level, it's not a part of a fundamental pattern. Moses, Moses being a different nationality isn't a part of the it's a, it's a historical detail.
[John:] But it still seems like I mean in the, in the story, he was raised as a, as an Egyptian
[Chris:] Yeah.
[John:] and, and so he
[Chris:] [cough]
[John:] as an Egyptian
[Chris:] Right
[John:] you know, so the rebellion against him could just as easily have been because he was raised as an Egyptian or that, that the, you know the between monarchism from the past could also have been. I'm not arguing
[Chris:] No, no
[John:] but I don't see the real relevance and I think one of the reasons that erm I mean I, I hear it and I know that Freud was very critical of religion and I, I, I think for some very good reasons,
[Chris:] Mm
[John:] erm but I also think, I also find him to be exceedingly critical of the figures that he looks at just like he was very critical of Woodrow Wilson.
[Chris:] Yes.
[John:] Because he, he almost has this personal sort of he sort of a personal vendetta against them in some ways
[Chris:] Mm.
[John:] you know and, and not only goes without the psychoanalyse, at least this is the sense I get not only about psychoanalyse, but also to sort of knocked out and, and er maybe that's, maybe that's trying to do and that was the point I also haven't read the book so I don't know.
[Chris:] No. Well I don't, yes I don't think in the book erm I mean did you get that impression Andrea? Get some kind of personal animosity against Moses?
[Andrea:] No, it's more sort of
[Chris:] Yes.
[Andrea:] how it really occurred
[Chris:] Yes, I, yes I think Andrea's put her finger on it. The impression you get in the book is not that Freud had erm some animosity against Moses the way he had against Woodrow Wilson, he was quite open about it in the Woodrow Wilson book, but that Freud is an intelligent erm... believer in science, who nevertheless takes religion very seriously because of its psychological truth. Freud, Freud's, you know Freud said that everything that religion says is true, but it's psychologically true it's not factually true, it's not you know true at the reality true psychological. So he took religion terribly seriously, but he believed in science and he looked at the Bible and said well what does this really mean? What do these myths about Moses who is the key figure in Judaism, what do these myths really tell us? And so what he's trying to do is to as Andrea says erm uncover the truth, get to the, get to what really happened as it were, under the layers of myth and distortion could have been introduced in the Bible story, and as I said if you read the book erm and it is quite fascinating in many ways, it is a bit like a detective story because what Freud does is he tries to get to the truth by analyzing the, the actual texts and the texts contains discrepancies and anybody who's ever tried to erm edit a book, learns this to their cost actually, but er you find no matter how carefully you change things, there's usually things you miss, little discrepancies that give away how it was the first time and er Freud's view is this, this has happened very much to the Bible, it's been so heavily edited and re-written and later the... the various editings show and if you read it very critically, you can begin to see perhaps the underlying pattern er coming through and erm just as you can tell for instance by reading Genesis, that it's a of two accounts because there are two stories, the first story is Chapter One of Genesis, then in Chapter Three or something there's a second story repeats it with variations. So from that biblical scores have concluded, the book that we know as Genesis was originally two accounts that were pushed together but not very expert actually, because you can still see the join,an and Freud's view about the Moses there are numerous discrepancies and numerous joins and if you take it all apart and say what is it, what does it make up, his conclusion is that erm Moses was, was not Egyptian, sorry Moses was not er erm no not, not a Hebrew but Egyptian. Erm I would have thought this was welcome news in the modern world actually when you know all these people in the Middle East have got to live together. I would have thought this was rather an enlightening view to take, but Semites erm, but there we are. A a as you and various other people likely said erm a lot of people regarded it as a kind of act of erm racial er disloyalty I'm not bothered about what race I am, I'm just bothered about the truth, and the truth is that I think erm Moses was not Jewish... well who's to know, who's to know erm... as I said it's a fascinating book and if, if you like that kind of detective story approach to history, you, you might, you might enjoy reading it, erm... there are,i it raises a lot of other issues, many of which I'll talk about in the, in the lectures, so I, I won't waste time say repeating it all here. Who er who haven't we heard from. Emma, you've been sitting there very quietly and judiciously. Have you got any comments to make about this?
[Emma:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Yeah, that's right But you see what Freud, what Freud fastens on there and is something that only a psychoanalyst could do, is, is that there's a discrepancy in the story. Well what's the discrepancy?
[Emma:] ... discrepancy
[Chris:] The The prelude to this was set by another psychoanalyst called Otto Rank one of Freud's er early followers who had published a book called the Myth of the Birth of the Hero and in this book what Rank did was to trawl through world folklore and literature, from myths of heroes, and of course there are a lot of those books, and dozens and dozens of them and what he does in the book is he distils all these dozens and dozens of myths and he finds that there's a common pattern emerges and it's, it's pretty stereotypical actually and the common pattern is the hero is born of royal or divine parents, the hero for some reason or other that loses his parents or is cast out by them or is er exposed in some way, erm... the hero is often threatened by some outside force and then rescued by er humble people. The humble people bring up the hero as their own child, eventually the hero realizes through a dream, through a prophecy, a visitation or something that he is not the child of his humble parents, but the... find out who his real parents were, and then returns and arduous struggles and eventually gains his rightful place. There are many many examples attached to Jesus. Okay, Jesus is the Son of God, poor old Joseph is just a kind of surrogate father erm, you know like a test-tube baby father actually test tube er... is er is like you know er a complete surrogate father er for God erm they're threatened by Herod so they have to flee to Egypt... and er then they come back and eventually Jesus realizes who he is and after a long struggle with good and evil, temptation at the desert, crucifixion and God knows what, erm off he goes back to you know, sitting up there on the right hand of God saying you know... I'm the Son of God which he is, so Oedipus, Oedipus is expelled by his parents, there's a prophecy he will murder his father and marry his mother, so they get rid of him, but he doesn't die, he... gets found by a shepherd, brought up by a shepherd. You all know what happens later. Er, there are lots and lots and lots of stories. An Indian, Indian myth made dozens of them. It's very very. So concluded that this was a common pattern, however there is one exception. The only exception is Moses and in Moses as Kirsty says, the story seems the wrong way round. Is it Moses. The parents are humble Jewish erm immigrants in Egypt, the adoptive parents of the Egyptian royal families, Emma reminds us the daughter of Pharaoh finds Moses floating in the bulrushes. Now Freud says if... this myth, this can't be the original myth because the original myth has as Andrea pointed out to us very clearly in her paper is the family romance bit that a lot of people or most people have. Many people can, can remember it that in their youth they saw their when they're their early childhood they saw their parents were very special people the parents. Later of course as up this early infantile attitude where you idolize your parents becomes replaced by a more rational and so on, but Freud's finding was that this early attitude in childhood doesn't get er abolished, it just gets repressed, it's forced out of conscious because you true and of course things that are not true have to be removed consciousness, but they cannot be erased, so they're forced into the unconscious and they live in the unconscious and they feed myths like the Myth of the Birth of the Hero and all of us in our er... erm... in our er... conscious see the hero as a, as a parental figure... that reflects the family romance, the idea that once we were, we were a special child with very special parents. So the point of conclusion is if the myth is different in the Bible then the likely explanation is that it was tampered with, but that the scribes and the people who wrote the Bible altered the and they changed it round why should they change this myth? Of course the answer is changing the myth would have made Moses Hebrew and not Egyptian, because if Moses had been the daughter of Pharaoh he would had to been Egyptian and that the Hebrews couldn't tolerate because at a later stage their religion became strongly ethnic and racially divided, you really got to be born Jewish to be Jewish, so they couldn't tolerate their, their founding fathers of not being anything but Jewish, so they altered it, they changed the records and they falsified the myth, but they left this glaring inconsistency in it, so the myth is no longer it's er rewritten... and this is one of the little bits of evidence and now of course erm if you don't take psychoanalyst insights into the family romance seriously, that may not cut much ice for you, but if you... erm... appreciate the force of these unconscious stereotypes in creating this like this, it's cert it's a quite potent piece of evidence because you think well why should the, the Bible change the myth, why can't it just put up with the normal myth. It's just one, one of those many piec pieces of evidence you know so that the Freud you know like the great detective you know uses all these little insignificant facts and finally puts them all together and draws everybody together you know in the drawing room and says I will now reveal the murderer, you know Moses was not an Egyptian, sorry Moses was not a Jew he was an Egyptian. Well, Well, yes I mean he says yes, yes he does say about that, he says that he has no doubt that there was a historical and said there were two Moses. Apparently as you know I mean biblical criticism is a very and well people have devoted their whole lives to it, but apparently there is a, a school o of, quite a large school I think o of biblical critical that claims that there are actually two Moses and not one. The two figures have been kind of squelched together just as in, in Exodus there are two, sorry in erm in er Genesis there are two er Garden of Eden stories... so they claim there are two Moses figures who have been erm as it were compounded together, but both of them says Freud were powerful religious leaders and they probably did give their followers moral principles, perhaps not exactly as we have but something very like it and so Freud is not sceptical about that. He believes there was a man Moses, he believes he did exist though actually probably two of them. He does believe they were powerful leaders and that to some extent the Bible... erm shows a true like for example Freud says that there are some in the like Moses' temper, and he loses his temper, he murders an Egyptian Freud. That could well be a bit of verisimilitude, it may well be the original man Moses was a powerful man with a powerful temper and perhaps this was come down to us er as, as a bit of historical truth, but erm... nevertheless the whole figure of Moses and his laws by later generations... and this, this th what Freud is trying to do is to erm undo this rewriting the process again truth. You can still see it going on today and it still happens doesn't it like the Good News Bible if you look at that, I mean this a version of the Bible rewritten, presumably to tell people good news I don't know, I've never, never read it but I presume that that's what the Good News Bible does and we now have countless bibles, where, where, where, where God is, God is female... erm my guess is supposing that were the only Bible we had a feminist bible were no other bible and everybody for hundreds of years believed it, my guess is that in the future literary critics and bible critics could study that very carefully and I bet you somewhere there you'll find internal evidence to show that once God had been male and had his gender changed, I'm quite sure of it because edit a whole book like the Bible and completely eliminate all the evidence that God was once male would be a very difficult here, here and there you need little bits of evidence... and, and again there's lots of others I'll mention in the lecture like God's name. In the Bible God has two names, er Yarway Anno Domini and er Freud says that Domini could be a corruption of
[speaker004:] [cough]
[Chris:] and er there is some evidence that the two words are the same and that the original name of God was and that God was the sun and again there is evidence of sun worship er in the Bible. Again, the editors didn't the Son of Righteousness. When Christians hear that they usually think it's spelt S O N but it isn't, it's S U N and the Sun of Righteousness er with healing in his wings, so Freud says and I believe it's actually this seen it, it's very common on Egyptian monuments it's a picture of a sun er with, with wings, with rays shining out of it. That's the Sun of Righteousness with healing in its wings. Actually the healing is not usually in the wings it's in the hands that come out from the sun and the healing is the of Ancient Egypt which meant life, spirit and er and health. So the Sun of Righteousness with healing in its wings is probably an Egyptian symbol so Freud. Again there's a lot of other evidence that Freud doesn't mention and he could have done like the Ark.... Er if you read the accounts of the Ark it looks very like an Egyptian sarcophagus. There are four angels at the corners with outstretched wings. This is a typical pattern of an Egyptian sarcophagus. I personally think the Ark was Moses' sarcophagus and they carried it erm to the Promised Land probably with the embalmed body of Moses in it. That's what Harrison Ford should have discovered! And when they opened the Ark they should have discovered Moses in it but they didn't because it was and there we are. That'll teach you. Sorry saddened spirits.
[speaker004:] the point
[Chris:] Yeah.
[speaker004:] That in fact
[Chris:] Right, oh yes it's got a, a lot of discrepancies, but the point is that the discrepancies it has are... explicable in terms of what the discrepancies were trying to hide and correct and to that extent it's a bit like psychoanalysing an individual patient. When you analyze their conscious,, you discover that all the changes and the rewritings level after a tendentious purpose to hide certain things and to keep certain things in the repressed and the same is true o of the Bible, in other words all these rewritings and were not just random, they were often motivated by a desire to hide or change certain things. In other words they, they show a definite pattern and you can determine what that pattern was. Well yes Well for example one of the things, one of the consistent kinds of changes that seems to have occurred is an attempt to deny polytheism, but there are lots of places in the Bible where it hasn't been consistent and where God on occasions speaks in the Bible erm... as if other gods could exist, like I, I, I'm the Lord, I'm a jealous god. Why should he be jealous if there are no gods to be jealous of? There are lots of bits of evidence that suggest that the Bible has been consistently rewritten to make it more monotheistic than it really was in the beginning. In the beginning, okay believed in and or whatever you wanna call it, but it also believed in other gods as well, except he was the chief god, he was number one god as it were and he's the one you got to follow. These other gods exist, but they're the wrong gods. There was a tendency says Freud to eliminate all the wrong gods and say there is only one god... but the whole point. That of course is exactly what Akhenaten tried to do at the beginning another example the return of the repressed its original religious intolerance. Well it's an interesting thesis. As I said I'll be having quite a lot to say about in the lectures, so we'll just regard this class as a kind of prelude to that. Er Andrea, er it's gone eleven I mustn't detain you any longer. Congratulations on excellent paper, first class er well done. Next week are hearing from Simone who isn't here. Now folks if you see Simone... remind her. Anybody know Simone anthropologists? Okay Yes. Yeah let me tell you actually yeah the following week.
[speaker004:] Oh okay.
[Chris:] Two weeks today okay.
[Anne-marie:] Great opportunity to pass on genes effortlessly, though the female has a limited number of eggs which has specific requirements for survival and therefore temporar temporarily stalls her reproductive success. So from the moment of concep conception because females are biologically out-of-gear now have a much higher potentially accepted success. Even if relative initial differences in intentionally productive success they have the groundwork for different male and female receptive strategies.... Now first the receptive strategy for males. For males the characteristic meaning of strategy is the continuous pattern of low or no. Because of high potential reproductive success and their effort to earn the parental care for seeking additional mates. internal behaviour in in most species. Another reason for low in males is the. In species where fertilization is internal, they are also much less pertinent with genetic relationship of offspring because investing in unrelated offsprings one's. Furthermore, males minimize vest investment in attempt to their potential for reproduct for a high reproductive success. This takes a great deal of effort because simply having the potential for a greater reproductive success in females does not necessarily mean that they actual have ha actually have greater reproductive success. This is because males vary greatly among themselves in success. Such males have large numbers of offspring while others might have none at all. Erm so we still that in general erm males have potential for greater reprodu reproductive success than females, but erm this, this doesn't actually, they don't always er actualize their potential because erm... some do there's a great difference among males and erm just some of them will have great er large numbers of offspring, whereas other males might not have any at all. Erm for the females the variance in reproductive success is of the, the differences in the female condition such as the ability to invest in offspring, erm or food producing, but among the males the variation in reproductive success are a function of male competition and female shortage. Males compete with each other for females and for ever more are subject to females for particular members are not the reproductive strategy for females. For females mating strategy differs due to and reproductive success of biological specialization and parental care, such as the gestation. Consequently females are expected to select mates most capable of investing resources in their offspring. Possible strategies include the domestic strategy where the female recognizes domestic qualities in males in advance and therefore benefits herself by choosing a male with qualities. An alternative strategy is the where the female is resigned to getting no help from the mate and concentrating rather on selecting a mate with the best genes and in this case. So as a result of combining both of these strategies the differing male and female strategies
[Chris:] Come in. Hi, how you doing?
[Anne-marie:] erm you end up with four different... er types of er reproductive strategies which are of monogamy, polygyny, polygamy and polyandry and the first one monogamy is when you have one male and female and er this minimizes the differences in reproductive success and the way it does that is because erm it, it minimizes the difference between the sexes because monogamy takes the limitations of the male erm to reproduce only with the one female so the male to female ratio of reproductive success the same in monogamy, and er what happens to that is this little in er more equal towards their parental investment. Er the second polygyny where you have one male and then females and here reproductive success erm meaning that there's a large again you'll have the males who'll have the large reproductive success than males who have none at all and erm of course often differences between male and female because the male has and the male has opportunities to erm try to control success rate the female biological and er consequently with this kind of system from female choice and male competition and er are about eighty percent and er polygamy is when you have many males and many females and er is also and er I would assume it's kind of like males have opportunities. But again the result of that system the main difference with that would be you know if they had different erm partners, whereas other one partner. Erm polyandry's the last type of example, he has one erm many males and one female and with this system the differences between the sexes is the first and er... males that do their larger parental investment females and it's a very rare. Now on the other side of parental investment is desertion. The other alternatives of parental investment is desertion. When investing offspring, when investing offspring results in increased males stay together, but if it is possible to reach by deserting a partner, then the individual is likely to be erm you can't decide on based on potential opportunities made parental investment. because of the those offspring can survive without further parental investment and if parental investment is therefore. The decision based on a number of current offspring, larger numbers can be greater benefited with and therefore it's more likely that if the parent had a lot of er offspring then he would continue with the investment and erm the conclusion from now is that males have a greater reproductive success, therefore they are more likely to desert because they can erm and erm this and erm the basic argument of this is one parent can get away with investing less share of erm resources... they're likely to spend more er... then they're to do it, so in other words erm if, if one of the, of the two is being to get away with having the other they can go out to er pursue their own and therefore erm each partner force the other to invest more.... Okay that's basically erm... I have to say. I have a few questions of my own erm in, in doing it and erm... was er when you say that, that males... had males... parental investment erm I was wondering how... they, how can a male when the male decides to desert how can they be certain if the female is going to take care of the offspring, because I was wondering if erm if probability like the based by their genes it doesn't matter if one female doesn't take care of the offspring because they... produce more offspring
[Chris:] I think that would depend on the species wouldn't it and the, and the local conditions, for example in that erm case I mentioned in yesterday's lecture monogamous birds with long breeding groups where you get desertion. What seems to happen there is the bird that's deserted has to stay with the existing family because if he or she erm deserts, those chicks will, will, will die, so er it's what is sometimes called the Concorde fallacy that if you put a lot of resources into something, you've gotta see it through, because if you pull out just before the end you can lose everything, whereas i if, if you stay on even if you know it's a failure, erm at least you may get something out of it, so the, in that case wi with monogamous birds the parent that's deserted the one that's left may have to stay, because if they desert then they can have no reproductive success whatsoever whereas at least if they stay they get something. Erm... in fact a similar effect happens, I'll be mentioning this in the lecture but let me just mention it now. A similar thing can happen with so-called piracy in fish. Erm one of the problems fish have on this is that they lay their eggs in gravel or something like that and where males have their own nest sometimes another male comes along and er takes it over, hijacks it piracy and interestingly enough what happens in those situations a pirate male will come in, displace the existing male from his nest and fertilize a few eggs and then buzz off. The resident male who was displaced then comes back and looks after all the eggs, including those of the pirate and the reason he does it presumably in the first place he can't distinguish which eggs he's fertilized and those fertilized by the pirate and secondly, he knows he's fertilized some of the eggs and therefore it pays him to stay and look after all of them. So erm in other words i it wou would depend on the circumstances on how much has already been invested.... In the case of human beings of course you have to notice that men seem to have an advantage because as I think I mention i in the lectures, it's perfectly possible, you see this happening in our own society which is supposed to be monogamous, perfectly possible for a man to get married, raise a family and then in his forties to desert his wife and raise a second family. Much more difficult for a woman because by the time a woman's got into her forties, her child rearing erm career is usually rather short and even if she wants to continue, it becomes much more hazardous for her and for her offspring, so er in, in the case of erm modern societies with erm monogamy bu but divorce as we have, you can't help thinking that to some extent the, the odds are, are loaded in the favour of men as it were in terms of their reproductive success. It's paradoxical because often divorce law reforms thought of as favouring women and in circumspect that allows women to get away from an unreasonable husband and that kind of thing, it's certainly true, but at the same time you have to notice that in terms of reproductive success it may benefit more er men more. Okay, now so I think what one may have to say it depends on the species and the circumstance. Does that answer your question? We can come back to this, I mean have you got any others?
[speaker004:] Yeah, erm modern when in choosing a mate and er connection with that because... with the assumption that males generally don't give any parental investment what really benefit them to... you know biologically can, can support the offspring themselves short period of time why can't they then go you know to have their own... I mean
[Chris:] Right, right Yes, I mean you put your finger on an important problem here that we need to discuss and that is that if you concentrate on human beings in general, and this is true on our own society but I, I think it's true of just about all societies and it's emphatically true of primal hunting adult societies then men do make a lot of parental investment don't they? I mean you think about primal hunting adults like the bushmen or the Australian Aborigines, the... the men do the, do the hunting for erm... for meat and women do the, do the gathering for and the point is that er meat is very nutritious... and it's an important part of their diet and men go hunting and they come back and they share food with their wives and their relatives or someone and male parental investment is terribly important... So women for instance if you ask David McKnight who's a world authority on the Australian Aborigines and has spent many years living with them, say what do women look for in the traditional society, what do women look for in a husband? His answer is immediate and emphatic a good hunter, he says you know what a woman wants in a, in a husband is a man who can you know bring home the bacon literally, er it's not smoked of course, but it's fresh! But you see the point, so in our species and of course in most societies this is true men are breadwinners whether in an agricultural society or an industrial society erm you know one often feels that if you're the man in the family you earn all the money your wife spends it on [LAUGHTER] most of the time [] erm it certainly happens to me er
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] I spend most of my time working while my wife spends most of the time shopping but erm
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] she certainly spends the money, but erm... but the, the Well I think you know you've gotta, gotta speak up for us poor husbands sometimes
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] erm the er but you see the point I'm making, in our species males do contribute. Now, this contribution is not direct, it's indirect in the sense that males, a male for example who is provisioning... a wife who is pregnant is not directly invent investing in the offspring clearly you can't do that she has to do that, cos the offspring's inside her body, but indirectly he may be feeding his wife, protecting her and providing for her in, in a way that is absolutely critical to her reproductive success too. So it's important to notice that in many species and certainly in ours, although males need not as you say make any contribution apart from their genes in principle, in fact males are heavy investors in offspring, albeit indirectly, so that must be important mustn't it and that must
[speaker004:] But the thing is that it seems that we're a cultural the way the system is set up
[Chris:] Yeah
[speaker004:] I mean to begin with then obviously the female livelihood they depend on that primal investment it's, it's a situation the way that... that it's divided up
[Chris:] Well presumably the reason why the men do the hunting is that they're... they figure they're more aggressive and are not gonna be pregnant or incumbent to children.
[speaker004:] Well,i i i i in that sense it's logical that they're the ones that do er the hunting and I guess the way it's set up logical I think
[Chris:] Mm
[speaker004:] but I don't see, I'm trying to make it like a genetic connection or something I mean or some kind of... like you know I mean to me it's just... set up
[Chris:] Yes, yes sorry Katherine?
[Katherine:] Erm I think well the which is erm which is directly extrapolated to like what happened now
[Chris:] Mm.
[Katherine:] and there's this thing about I mean you know that there... that we may be behaving, there may be erm ways that we behave that aren't actually functional th the, the society we've got now might not actually be functional because of the technology we've got
[Chris:] Yeah
[Katherine:] well that's the problem
[Chris:] Yeah.
[Katherine:] I mean
[Chris:] Yeah
[Katherine:] then but when that becomes
[Chris:] No, oh no, certainly not, but, but I mean before we get to the prescriptive level which is quite er a, a long way down the road, at the analytic level I think, I think Anne-Marie's point is she's trying to understand erm just what the... the significances of these difference in parental investment are. Er the point I was making to her was erm in her paper which er was excellent by the way, I forgot to say and I think you put it all very clearly and very nicely,y you, you very nicely set out the basic... idea that the consequence and that in principle a male need contribute nothing more than his... penis. Th th the point that erm we were then discussing was that in practice of course males may,m ma may contribute a lot more an and, and the question was is this er something to do with the adaptions of our species or is it just the this was the question you, you asked me wasn't it? And Katherine's point was what the system today of course is quite different than what and that is of course completely true. Erm, the, the question remains however I mean er you, this is, this is your point really... to what extent other... other characteristics er may erm... may be part of the same erm of the same thing... for example if, look at sexual dimorphism. Human beings as we know are sexually dimorphic and tha that figure seems to fit the er... the, the pattern, but erm... women have a lot of characteristics that are peculiar to them, like for example erm more youthful looks, women will retain more youthful looks longer than men do and it is normally regarded as important... and a lot of women spend an awful lot of money in the modern society on trying to remain erm looking er looking youthful. Now why is that? Could that be for example because males with resources would want normally to acquire youthful wives, or perhaps it might in other words it could be couldn't it that if males provide resources to females that they can use for primal investment, this would then have selective effects on females who will want certain things in order to get erm the investment and one of the things they might want to do is to look youthful. I dunno it kind of figures doesn't it... or not? Alex looks very sceptical.
[speaker004:] No I don't, I'm still thinking about what you said yesterday about premature ejaculation
[Chris:] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
[speaker004:] and younger men
[Chris:] Th it all fitted together did it oh I [LAUGHTER] oh I see []
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER] I was sort of like more light-hearted sort of er like er got plenty of money, but it's crappy pay.
[Chris:] Oh yes, I like the joke you know er er where one women says to another how could X possibly marry him you know
[speaker004:] Yeah
[Chris:] he, he, he's
[speaker004:] Got a nasty cough, providing disorders
[Chris:] you know he's short and ugly an and the other lady says to her but er you should see how tall he is when he stands on his wallet. I [LAUGHTER] mean []
[speaker004:] Yeah and he starts premature ejaculation
[Chris:] Erm
[speaker004:] I mean it could be or it could be the reason why er why younger [LAUGHTER] not []
[Chris:] Yes, I mean it's generally true isn't it I think of all societies I can't think of any o of, of any exceptions that it normally is older males who have more resources. I think in all societies I can't
[speaker004:] It can older males that
[Chris:] Well
[speaker004:] gonna say you know
[Chris:] yeah There's an interesting study in the book printed by Bergahoff, Moulder and so on all those you know there's four, thing, thing and thing erm human reproductive whatever it is, it's on the reading list, of Kipsigy Payments now that's, has anybody read that? Well that's interesting the Kipsigies are er traditional people who live in Kenya and if they have, in other words er men have to pay a certain amount to the erm you know, woman if they're gonna marry her and what they did was they study the and related it to the, to the girl that was actually getting married and what they found of course was that it fits the predictions of our theory er just as you'd expect, given that the cultural things you have to allow for like, like for example in that most traditional cultures they like er women to be plump as we'll see in the, in the... actually fat is critical to female fertility and er so they might not have been plump, so what they did was they simply weighed the girls and they compared their, their, their weights with, with the, with the and sure enough strong correlation the fatter the girl, the bigger the. In a way they were
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] and they had two they had two disabled girls, there are two girls who were erm you know physically er disabled, I forget what was wrong with them I think one had a clubfoot or something an and they were almost free they weren't completely free, but they were nearly free because of their disabilities and Yeah, exactly, so if, if you look at it in terms of the Kipsigy you know system, you can clearly see that what they showed was youth and plumpness were the critical fac an an and attractiveness, if the girl was young, plump and attractive she got a high and if the girl was older erm, if she had something wrong with her or she was skinny, then the less and that's, so it's quite interesting
[speaker004:] Did they find that the older men?
[Chris:] Well, yes now in fact we know they have not in that study. Now that doesn't the Kipsigy was just the study of the erm... you know it's a good statistical it's good hard-hat social science you know with distribution and everything it's all good stuff, erm... they don't say that, where we do know this is something I have researched myself very carefully, the Australian Aborigines erm we have rich data on this and I've read an awful lot of it and I compared notes with world authorities like David McKnight and erm erm what's his name erm... Shapiro authority on this, and they agree that er that's definitely what happens. In Australian Aborigines the young, the young girls go to the er the older powerful men. Of course, if you think about it the consequences of that is these guys die and when they die, those wives that they married as young girls are now middle-aged women or possibly younger, anyway past their youth, but th th they, they may not be. Certainly they're re-marriageable and these are societies where every woman is married but no spinsters, so they're redistributed. Very often they have a bit of a say in it, because you know that the young girl hasn't got, but erm... interestingly enough they tend to get recycled to young men and it's the older men that get the young girls from their older male and it's younger men who get. You can sometimes get a situation that occurs where a man is married to a woman who is in fact his grandmother, this can happen. This leads to horrifying
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] you think that if you work if you, if you think about it, in other words he has married... a woman who is the mother of a wife of his father who he calls mother. I happen to think this is the key to Australian classificated kinship society very stressful. What is really going on is they are rigging a system to hide that kind of it's clearly anonymous to marry a woman who's your grandmother. Yes, in the sense that y y i it can happen and apparently sometimes does that the young man will receive a recycled wife who is in fact the mother of a daughter who has married his father and so he calls her the daughter-mother, her actual mother is his wife.
[speaker004:] I see
[Chris:] [LAUGHTER] Absolutely [] and this is why I think they get round this, they've solved this problem by saying okay folks, we will adopt a purely... erm classificator or in other words fictitious, rigged system of kinship and we won't call there and that's what they do. What effectively, I think, I mean I've never actually sat down because it would be an enormous mistake and nobody would thank me for it, but my guess is that those enormously complex classificated can be understood as a method by which old men rig the system for their own benefit and hide this kinds of ridiculous anonymous and the anomaly basically is the young men end up with old wives
[speaker004:] When they get older
[Chris:] Right, that's what happens you see. When they get
[speaker004:] Could it be also that erm children I mean I dunno how they, the children are reared and what sort of situation. Could it be that er evolution in sort of Aboriginal societies are more harsher than that allowed for a more experienced man to teach a young child how to live as opposed to, it, it's beneficial for
[Chris:] Yes
[speaker004:] experience
[Chris:] That's right. Again that, that is, is very clear and it's representing initiation rituals. Because what happens you see in these societies and Australian Aborigines are with no exceptions is that if you want a wife if you're a young man and you want a wife you first of all gotta get initiated. There's no way you will get a wife until you are initiated. In fact you won't get any sexually mature erm er woman to have er any relationship with men, unofficial or otherwise if you're not initiated because they'll just say you're a boy and, and er and er an adult woman would feel it was demeaning you know to sleep with a mere boy, she'd insist you've got to be a man and to be a man you normally got to be initiated and that normally means being circumcised. Now the, the initiations are controlled by the elder men who have all, all the wives and if you don't behave and join the club and conform to what th the crown elders expect, you won't get initiated and i if you don't unless you say you won't get any wives and the guys who are doing the initiating the initiated are the very same guys who have all the daughters. So a young man really has to get initiated and conform to what the elders expect if he's going to have any reproductive success at all and that's exactly what happens. So these guys undergo these horrifying initiation rituals to prove you know that they want to join the club band and i if they pass the initiation test then they're joined in and then they're given a wife. In many societies David McKnight tells me the man who does the circumcision who actually chops off the foreskins as it were, owes you a wife for it and he says in many of them if you give a man your foreskin then you've got a right to demand a wife. He says he knows cases where wives weren't given, and there were then very serious er conflicts broken up, because the man who didn't get the wife then thought he'd been cheated and apparently his complaint was you know er wife I give you my foreskin. Apparently they talk like this. David McKnight says this is the language they use you know. Australian Aborigines are very direct about this... so they, so they do expect something back for the initiation an and it's a kind of reciprocal thing where okay, you initiate me and I'll put up with all this crap from you, but you know, you give me a wife, you've got daughters I want a wife and er if I don't get it, there's gonna be real trouble and this is how the system works. So you're quite right, the elder men have a tremendous control, not over on the over-supply of women, but also over the younger men.
[speaker004:] How can that be beneficial I know what you're saying but
[Chris:] Well I think the answer to that is you've got to remember this kind of hunting is cooperative and cooperative hunting does rely first of all on having other men to go hunting with you which is, which is important and also... or so I'm told by people like David McKnight and Warren Shapiro an awful lot depends on information, we want to know where the game is, who saw what where, what did they catch you know, was there rainfall over the so and so ranges and so on, and you need to know that information if you're gonna be an effective hunter and you need good communication with other men. Er very often Australian Aboriginal societies you meet men the corroborees at these ritual gatherings and if you're one of the club, then in the ritual they'll tell you, they'll say hey, you know, you know... you know you say where did you get all these kangaroos you know oh we got them over at the so and so ranges or down at the so and so water hole that's where they all are this week, and this is very important information for man. If you're not a member of the club and you're not accepted the rituals and people don't like you, they won't tell you and as a result you won't be an effective hunter, you won't be able to support many wives even if you wanted them and if you have wives what they needed, because if a man doesn't feed his wives they, they, they all eventually get up and go, they'll say two fingers you know, you can't feed us. This is one of the things I want you to se see today and this wonderful film I was gonna show today and I hope I'll show next week, third time lucky, they actually interview the wives, the polygynous wives of... of some erm... erm guy in Africa, some African erm... and they to them they actually ask the wives, why do you, you know why are you married to this man and they say well he feeds us, you know th that's why we're married to him, he gives us food and he's apparently got five this particular man they interviewed, three of them were active and two of them were elderly, and the three active wives are quite open about the fact that this man's a good provider and therefore they stay with him, but they, they wouldn't in the case of Australian Aborigines, they wouldn't stay if they didn't get fed and they only get fed because he's a good hunter and to be a good hunter you need to go on good terms of men and that's how it works. But of course it's, it's a very tough deal for women, I mean women in erm in a way really get the raw end of it because that to some extent they're at the mercy of the whole system, even though they can if they absolutely have to. It's not easy and where's she gonna go? You know she's gotta find someone else to go an and live with because by and large you can't survive on your own in the Australian outback... certainly not if you're a woman, hardly if you're a man. So it, it's as you say it's a very tough, hard life and in order to survive, people really do need the help of other people and that's why you've really got to conform to a large extent in the society and you haven't got a lot of choice about... erm you know wh what you'd like to especially if you're, if you're young and female and not much men not if you want to get any wives that is.... So the erm... but as, but as Katherine reminds us, I mean if, if that's the kind of life our emotional parameters are my, my guess is that that, is that that's probably the truth, certainly a persuasive argument. Then... when you look at the other range of human societies, then you have to say well you know how is it, how is it working out in other... in other types of societies where all the basic erm conditions of life may be different... and that of course is one of these big erm big and small problems... that we still, we're still really at the at the starting point fact. I mean does anybody think that parental investment theory is... relevant at all to modern industrial society or is it completely irrelevant? Matthew you're a, you're a sceptic and a, and a, and a and an independent thinker what do you think? I don't know, I'm not very sort of convinced one way nor the other That sounds judicious. Dean?
[Andrea:] Well, I'm, I'm a supporter of it, which you know erm it, it strikes me being far more effective than other forms er of er explanation.
[Chris:] How much ice does it cut in the modern industrial society?
[Andrea:] I think, I think it... think it must cut quite a lot because I mean there's certain I don't these biological constraints.
[Chris:] How would they show themselves I mean?... What people to look you know in the modern society women don't have to rely on men or don't have to have traditional sex roles, this is a point of view isn't it?...
[Andrea:] Well I think er I think, well I think you have to have, I mean I don't really parental investment and stuff like that gestation period.
[Mike:] I think, I think that in any, I mean in, in, in, if you wanna, if you wanna look at it in terms I mean I think labour it it's always gonna have to be there and I think the biological constraints put the you know, sharpened device
[Chris:] Well there are ways aren't there I mean even in traditionally, I mean what of wet-nursing I mean that's an example isn't it where a woman gets another woman to do the job for her. Darren is that, what point were you gonna make?
[Mike:] Well I think, like I said two ways one is erm
[Chris:] Mm
[Mike:] Or if you look at it another way that is men and women are equal and we haven't yet got round that they are very different but they are equal. I dunno, er you know you can put woman staying at home having the child for instance when there aren't enough children to fill the schools realize that having children is a very important in economic values what with nations increasing staying at home
[Chris:] Yes I must say I, I personally sympathy with that I mean I think that erm, women's er role is er very much despised and disparaged it should be because if you think about it they're having the children and bringing them up, well this is one of the most worthwhile things to do
[speaker004:] society you can't going to survive unless you have a woman back in the having the kids and we might see that as a you know you laugh when I say that, you know
[Chris:] Well he doesn't survive, he might survive
[speaker004:] Alright, alright this is what I mean
[Chris:] yeah, yeah
[speaker004:] but you know it's really difficult discussing this topic without people sniggering and getting all upset. It's that they have equal decisions, really so you can't say. It's only how we of behaviour
[Chris:] Well
[speaker004:] but they are really equal because without one another, they're not gonna I don't think, I don't think it will, I think erm... certainly from a cultural point of view the questions that comes up of erm in that type of society they think sod this I'm going hunting, but the fact of the matter is the men. I mean time of physiological difference and strength needs of their strength that they could just about fire a and he couldn't even pull them back and so they you know, fine if you wanna go hunting use the boat Yeah the arrows, but the Yeah, yeah and, it's but then it's a question of where a woman... a woman could, but you know is it that easy to jump out cultural... you know cultural investment provided by that and er... you know y y y you and if a man is slightly stronger other way round so he can collect, collect more food and another argument which is that
[Chris:] Yeah, it's the, it's the with the word natural isn't it that er you know people often use the word natural to mean good and right and therefore something you should do, but of course no not always I mean if I said to you death is natural, nobody here would think I was advocating suicide or that er we shouldn't have hospitals to try and save people's lives I mean er when you say death is natural, what you mean is death is one of those things that we just have to put up with, we'd rather we didn't but we're all gonna have to face it in the end, some of us sooner than others er [LAUGHTER] but erm but there we are. However if you say erm oh well you know erm boys will be boys that's natural,tha that sounds as if you're kind of making excuses for them and condoning them, so I think you've got to be very careful about how you use the word natural and clearly it raises the whole question of how far you can, you can push erm... cultural ideals against natural constraints an and what really is the issue. You see it may be that... Dean's right I must admit I think I, I agree with Dean I think he is right that the real problem is that natural selection may have fitted us by, as it were, rigging our emotional system. It may be at a, at a truly rational level we can all perfectly well do all kinds of other things rationally on a truly rational level, because there we have this... this er high degree of that comes with rationality, but at a deeper, kind of gut level, the emotional feelings we, we find that it's, it's much more difficult, and at that point if you don't try and change things and do things that are unnatural, you find you're kind of going against the emotional grain and er perhaps some people find it easier than others, but perhaps everybody will feel a certain erm tug as it were, certain erm discomfort or a certain emotional alienation from themselves which er perhaps is because we're trying to do something more basic we just weren't designed for. I don't know I mean this would... Would you sympathise with that Dean?
[Andrea:] Yeah, yeah question so, so we're, we're saying that the difference between male and female roles in this disruptive selection.
[Chris:] Sorry remind us what you mean by disruptive selection again.
[Andrea:] Where, well where er disruptive selection i i i is very huge differences between men, male and female and this was then accentuated over a period of time
[Chris:] Oh I see what you mean yes, fine, okay.
[Andrea:] Okay, so are, so, so it's just tha tha tha that along with this a psychological context, so you got a biological and psychological going hand-in-hand simultaneously.
[Chris:] Yes, I mean this is the point I'll be developing later, later in, in, in the lectures, I'm currently spending a lot of time kind of researching and thinking about this, but... i i it's ultimately the question of genes affect behaviour and more and more I come to the to the view that they probably do so erm through what we call our emotions, that our genes kind of erm guide us to do so and things through various subjective feelings like when we're hungry, we, we know we're hungry and it's a subjective feeling of hunger. What is actually happening of course we know in that case what is actually happening, because nerves erm er neurones in, in the base of the brain are actually sampling the blood flow as it goes through with sugar level and when the sugar level drops to a critical point, some of those neurones start to fire and as they fire gradually the message is passed on up to the higher brain centres and eventually you get the feeling you're hungry. Now, you, you're, that's a subjective feeling, you don't actually know that there are neurones in your blood sugar level, but you, you certainly know when you need something to eat and it, it's a kind of subjective feeling and it's not farfetched in the least to claim that our genes have rigged our brain in that way to do that because obviously we'd like to have more reproductive success if you know when you're hungry than when you don't and it may be that a lot of, in a lot of other ways genes affect our, our behaviour through similar erm effects, that is subjective feelings we have, often of an emotional nature to make us want to do certain things and an an and dislike doing others, and it may be that we, we're really kind of lumbered with that.
[speaker004:] Why is it in the genes why is it people are able to adjust their diets
[Chris:] Well, oh yes, I'm sure I'm not saying that's the only thing that controls people's food intake I mean clearly there are things cultural some cultures, the Japanese seem to love eating raw fish, I mean [LAUGHTER] how they can bring themselves [] to do it I do now know, I mean the raw is I don't think I'd want to eat again, but er erm not always if they were cooked either, but erm... the, the er and certainly if you look at the Australian Aborigines even though we take the Australian Aborigines as our kind of primeval people, they have astonishing food taboos, I mean their attitudes to food are very very culturally er effective to, to a quite extraordinary extent, some so that somebody... somebody discovered that eating a tabooed food by accident, they'll get very ill, a kind of psychosomatic illness. So I'm not saying th th that there aren't these th the important other inputs, but, but what I am saying is that if you ask yourself where the kind of gene behaviour interface really exists is clearly in the human er in, in the human mind and it may be that the basic kind of parameters erm have, have been set for our emotions and I really don't see how we can change those.
[speaker004:] I was thinking for instance when you have generation of young men how do you, what's the time left to something extreme can be done culturally and people can be sort of you know convinced that they're right and that they go out there and get machine guns can be done culturally, whereas
[Chris:] Well it may be of course that that kind of thing has always tended to happen gather of society skirmishing goes on and young men are expected to go and find very often
[speaker004:] Yeah, yeah, more immediately, but I mean when they're sort of it has
[Chris:] Well then I agree, then I, then I think you do need a fairly sophisticated psychological theory to try and explain er how that could come about. That's one of the reasons why I'm, why I'm also interested in er in Freud because I think Freud provides that, I happen to think that Freud's studies of, of crowd group psychology actually explain that, although it takes time to you know, certainly not at five minutes to four, it takes time to explain, but I think there is an explanation there and I think you c y y you can claim that there are certain emotions to do with identification and idealization,th that our genes have a programmer which things like erm nationalistic erm, erm er kind of jingoism can exploit in a modern culture which in primal cultures would have primal cultures people identify with their, with their local kin and their local culture and that's... that might ultimately promote their reproductive success, but that in modern cultures, this identification occurs with erm... on a completely different level and with lots of people will not merely because you need so many more people modern cultures you have much more erm much bigger groups and you just meet many more people that, than you were ever... th there is some interesting research, research recently published for instance which shows erm... organizations seem to have a critical size and that people are not really able to track more than about two hundred and fifty other people, in other words you can have face-to-face relationships with up to about two hundred and fifty others, but once it gets beyond two hundred and fifty it's too much and you start forgetting somebody as if the brain was primed to an optimum group size and once you get above that you just can't keep. Have you read about that? That's right, I would say so Yeah That's right, yeah yeah. Yeah That's right yeah.
[speaker004:] Is there also something to do what's happening in Eastern Europe. They say you know Swiss
[Chris:] Well you see the, the, the great Soviet experiment is a good example isn't it of, of a whole civilization was based on a o o on a kind of great social experiment was based on ultimately on erm unsound principles and then a part of the scenes. Er and I suppose the great you know lesson of social sciences in, in some ways if it's, if it's for anything it ought to be to try and avoid that kind of disaster, because erm... if we understood ourselves better we might you know in the future try and avoid that thing because we just wouldn't attempt if, if that wasn't an attempt to be. So erm I mean the justification for this kind of course I would claim is ultimately to try and make people more realistic about what is possible... and er the, because th th the advantage of knowing what's possible is you can avoid impossible experiments that ultimately result in disaster for everyone.... Well sceptical silence, but that's what I'd like to think that we, we were doing. Well yes. Drug, anti-drug legislation may be another thing. Of course drugs is, is one of the wonderful examples that the very thing that Katherine was talking about, something that wasn't there in the beginning and that has been produced by modern technology and is now a big problem, but is not a problem to Australian Aborigines because they don't have any drugs... er to speak of, of course now they do and alcohol is a terrible problem with Australian Aborigines I talked to David McKnight about it. Absolutely awful. Well the Australians are at least trying to [LAUGHTER] didn't have much success apparently [] Really?
[speaker004:] and they went loco
[Chris:] Folks it's four o'clock erm just a second erm just before you go let me remind you next week it's Laura. Okay? And Darren we gotta, I'll see you in just a sec. [phonecall starts] Hello. Ah really? Erm, who, who gave you the message? Oh er, I, I don't think I ra I don't think I rang you actually, er I wonder if the message was from someone else. Erm, I do need to see you some time erm... let me just... just see erm, but I've got your erm your last term's report here that we need to meet to discuss. Er, could, could we make a date? Erm, as I said it wasn't me that phoned originally, my guess is that there may be somebody else at the school who is trying to contact you, but while you're on the line, let's just make a little... let's just make a little date. Erm... what about, when would be convenient for a quick tutorial?... What about Thursday?... Right. What about next week, what about Monday?... Right y your day off, well that means you don't want to come into the school?... Okay next Monday, what time would suit you?... Right. Right. Could we make it at erm two P M? Right, that's two P M next Monday the first February, okay. See you then. As I said I didn't phone, I dunno who it was. Erm, it might be an idea to try and get hold of him whoever took the message cos it might be something important, but anyway I'm glad you phoned. Thanks, bye [phonecall ends]. Right now, sorry to keep you waiting for a minute. Erm, now did we, did we do your reports?
[Mike:] No.
[Chris:] Right, let's, let's do that first cos that's important. Erm, I'll have to sign the form. There we are, right. Right I got all four here of course I didn't bother to write a comment cos I'm delighted. I've given you an A for participation B plus for written work and that gives you an average of B which is good or excellent. So that's alright there's no problems there. Now... Mr 's philosophy
[Mike:] Aha.
[Chris:] has given you A for participation which is good, C for written work which is satisfactory and B minus for assessment, so it actively participates er gave a paper for the class, but no second essay. Does that mean you owe him an essay or something?
[Mike:] No, essays, you got both you've got two essays.
[Chris:] Well, right he's, this was probably written before he got the second one, because they would have done this last term
[Mike:] They were handed in on time, handed in on time.
[Chris:] Well, perhaps you ought to bring that
[Mike:] He marked them both.
[Chris:] I should raise that with him
[Mike:] He's marked them both
[Chris:] Has he?
[Mike:] Yeah.
[Chris:] Right.
[Mike:] I mean I got pretty bad marks I find it difficult, find it very difficult.
[Chris:] Really?
[Mike:] Well, it's frustrating the hell out of me you know.
[Chris:] Why's that?
[Mike:] I've never done any