When complex societies began to appear in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital - numbers. Numbers were used to collect taxes, keep track of people’s income, debts, fines, etc. As the size of the society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of numbers. Humans needed a system for storing and processing information outside the memory limits of a brain. “Writing” was invented as a data-processing system to store data en masse.
Writing’s most important task was to store reams of mathematical data. Storing data was easy, but the challenging part was retrieving stored data efficiently. Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but they internalized techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information using forms, tables, catalogues, dictionaries, etc. This is unlike how human’s brain processes data.
The most important impact of script on human history is that it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
Then arabic numerals (base 10) were invented, which became the world’s dominant language. All states, companies, organizations, institutions use arabic numbers to record and process data. More recently, binaries (base 2) has given rise to an even more revolutionary writing system - computers.
Writing was born to serve humans, but it is increasingly becoming its master.
Two inventions allowed humans to organize mass cooperation networks (e.g. kingdoms, countries)
Imgained orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in hierarchy. Examples include:
The belief that they are different is rooted in fiction, yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
In most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations. e.g. Europeans imported slaves from Africa to America because of the following accidental circumstances:
But the hierarchy of ruling cast of white Europeans and a subjugated cast of black Africans was further perpetuated by religious and scientific myths that served to justify the division. Even after the abolition, racist myths that justified slavery persisted and the separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom.
A black person had much less chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white neighbors. Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks were really inferior.
The cultural prejudice that blacks were less intelligent, more violent and sexually dissolute was established, which in turn contributed to more discriminatory laws. It is a vicious cycle.
Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
In history, people everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal.
Some of the cultural, legal, political disparities between men and women reflect the obvious biological differences. But most of the other masculine/feminine attributes that societies associate with men and women lack a biological basis.
e.g. Ancient Athenians thought having a womb makes a person unfit for professions such as politicial leader, philosopher, orator, artist or merchant. An individual with a womb had no independent legal status and was forbidden from a lot of things. Clearly it has no basis in biology.
e.g. Modern greeks view heterosexuality as a biological reality. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
In fact, our concepts of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is: in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature.
Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality. In other words, masculine and feminine qualities are being set by our own imagined orders rather than by biology.
Sex (male vs. female) is a biological cateogry. Gender (men vs. women) is a social category.
The author talks about the vicious circle. A chance occurrence in history creates hierarchy, which then that perpetuates into discriminatory laws, resulting in poverty/lack of education => cultural prejudices => more discriminatory laws.