On Jun 5, 2006, at 6:43 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> but isn't the standard line that men
>> want to be sure any kids are theirs and not some other guy's, or they
>> won't stick around to support them?
>
> This would only come into practice in the last 4000 years or so, with
> the development of a social surplus controlled by a 'ruling class' of
> distinct lineages through which property (control over a laboring
> popualtion) is allocated. At most one could push this back to fully
> developed neolithic village culture. It could hardly be relevant to a
> band of _homo heidelbergensis_. And we are now dealing with ideology,
> which presupposes a historical development of conditions which the
> ideology develops to make sense of. And we don't have any historical
> and/or archaeological evidence of when and under what conditions
> symbolic behavior became complex enough to embody ideological
> traditions.
Hey don't blame me, I think it's all nonsense.
When our delightful little Ivan was born, a couple of people glossed the frequent observation that he looks like me by saying "it's genetic" - to guarantee I won't run off with a showgirl or something. So this perception has apparently deeply infected the common sense of sophisticated secular urbanites.
Doug