Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (2023)

Incoherent wishful thinking I read this for a reading group I've been in for the past 10 years. It's one of the worst books we've read. I'll start with some relatively minor (but still significant) flaws: 1) This reads like a piece of journalism blown up to 200 pages. Much of the book consists of Saini setting the scene of her encounters and quoting conversations with scholars rather than pointing to specific, more substantive evidence and scholarly arguments. 2) There are insinuations of gender biases in the literature (male scholars argue this way, female that) and of the role of European colonialism in spreading patriarchy to the rest of the world. These remain at the level of insinuation, so are never defended systematically. Some of Saini's own evidence undermines her own insinuations, especially in the case of Europe's impact (this is an instance of the incoherence I mentioned above; for more of which, see below). This is not to deny that European colonialism may in some cases have reinforced or changed patriarchy. I suspect this happened in smaller-scale societies, where patriarchy may not have existed already or been as entrenched. 3) Saini explains that her title - Patriarchs - is meant to acknowledge that there is no single thing patriarchy, just different versions of it. Yet repeatedly she discusses patriarchy precisely as a single thing. Furthermore, patriarchy, according to Saini, hasn't really diminished over time - a strange conclusion to anyone familiar with world history, especially in the last 100 or so years. 4) The greatest incoherence and wishful thinking occurs when it comes to Saini's central thesis. She argues that patriarchy is not at all rooted in biology, but rather took off when the state, needing growing populations, imposed rigid gender categories on their populations. But Saini's own evidence undermines her theses! She points to genetic bottlenecks that occurred before states formed as men who were successful in raiding and war were able to capture females and have lots of kids (this was one of the main rewards, and presumably drivers, of early warfare) while other men failed to reproduce. While she occasionally acknowledges these inconvenient facts (without, of course, recognizing how they simply don't dovetail with her the-state-launched-patriarchy thesis), she never wrestles with the extensive literature on the millenia of raiding and warfare before the state. Looking deeper in evolutionary time, Saini's treatment of human evolution is wholly inadequate. For example, she never discusses the fundamental evolutionary point that male and female mammals generally have different reproductive strategies - the former, whenever possible, favoring many offspring, the latter fewer and of higher quality. (These strategies don't apply at all times or under all circumstances, but they are a good starting point for explaining mammalian reproductive behavior). Saini never considers Richard Wrangham's influential work on male violence among the great apes (Demonic Males) or Bernard Chapais's on the evolution of pair bonding (Primeval Kinship). She mentions Christopher Boehm once, but does not explore the potential relevance of his ideas for the origins (and now decline) of patriarchy. Namely, Boehm argues that hunter-gatherers were not more egalitarian than chimpanzees because their individual desire to dominate had disappeared; rather HGs developed collective mechanisms to tame alpha males. Once agriculture happened, and population increased, however, those mechanisms broke down. The alphas were unleashed. My hunch is that this tracks what happened with patriarchy as well. And in recent times, of course, conditions have changed once again with industrialization, urbanization, democratization, modern communications. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward equality. Boehm's explanation includes biological elements, but also an important role for circumstances of one kind or another.