This is what the long version tries to say, but I’m not sure you’d have known that without this, and perhaps this is enough, if we’re like minded – but this will certainly help if you’re compelled to read the whole thing.
The Spanking Gene
Or
The Autistic and the Blade
Chapter Summaries
One, Jeff’s Introduction
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The project. It’s to reinterpret the iconic The Chalice and the Blade, by Dr. Riane Eisler in terms of genetics rather than social models, to say that their dominant social model is less of a model and more of a gene, more of a Neurotype matter. I’m framing it as an attack on the species by an aggressive and ultimately unworkable genetic adaptation – the Spanking Gene, like the warrior gene.
I hope you’ll know what was in the Chalice and what I am trying to update about it when I’m done.
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Two, Eisler’s Introduction
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I started here, so it’s the project again, then into the book, Eisler’s project, which was to complete our picture of history and prehistory by including women and female things, and Eisler’s framing, of “Partnership,” and “Dominator,” social models, or paradigms. She takes us into the prehistoric, pre-war world of the Near East and Old Europe and introduces us to the Goddess, the original monotheism. There is theory, theirs and mine. Talk about my Neurotype and Autism generally.
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Three, Chapter One
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Eisler shows us the Paleolithic and Neolithic world, with dates, making the case that for a long time there is no evidence of the life of conflict we have come to think of as the original state of affairs. They speak of life and life giving – and I spend most of this entry trying to make the case that all that means evolution, aboriginal, forever knowledge of evolution, that this knowledge is the crucial thing that was lost when the disasters happened and everything changed.
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Four, Chapter Two
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More of the Goddess and the art, and Eisler pointing out the patriarchal sort of errors that suffuse the archaeology world, how since Babylon, it’s all looked back at incorrectly, through modern, violent, patriarchal eyes. Eisler talks about choosing social models and I talk about choosing not to spank, saying that spanked people don’t really choose their social models, and also Neurotype, that not everyone is offered the same choices. My theory that if you don’t spank a born Dominator, they’ll have more options.
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Five, Chapter Three
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The beauty and mystery of Minoan civilization on Crete, Eisler talks about the art and the lack of fortifications – Crete was where the old world lasted longest, and this is a mystery in the normal world of Allistic science and history. I try to solve it, there is some theory, speculation about how the Minoans could have avoided the Spanking Gene, or that if they didn’t, perhaps they nonetheless didn’t activate it, per my epigenetics idea.
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Six, Chapter Four
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More about the end of Crete, the Bronze age collapse, before we go back to the Neolithic collapse under the invaders during the fifth and sixth millennia BCE. Eisler busts the usual explanations for why things turned to fairly constant war, the “increased population in the cities,” the “improved weaponry,” of the Copper and Bronze ages and replaces them with the invasions and the culture the invaders brought with them, and of course, I adjust “culture,” for “genetics.”
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Seven, Chapter Five
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Eisler spends this one on Systems and Change theories, Chaos theory to explain the extreme social change. I spend some arguing, trying to make a case about genes and evolution, arguing with the very idea of “cultural evolution.”
I spend some time trying parse it and “social models,” and make the case that the “treatment,” of Autistic children proves the existence of the Spanking Gene, that a lack of a normal response to spanking is considered pathological.
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Eight, Chapter Six
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Here Eisler uses the Greek plays, the Oresteia to show us how the old ways were so high handedly replaced, in the plays, the gods decide Orestes is innocent of murdering his own mother, because motherhood isn’t a thing anymore. Eisler’s point is this lie is forced in this public way – mine is that to believe that lie, you need a different sort of a brain. There is a lot about women being forced out of every position of power in society.
I spend time trying to apply some broad genetics to the invasions and the millennia following them, advancing a theory of genetic drift, with more than one vector, the immediate slaughter of competing genes, as well as the ongoing growth of the gene within the affected population from the environmental pressure of spanking and law.
I spend some time trying to triangulate a true starting point for it all.
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Nine, Chapter Seven
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Eisler continues about the erasure of the Goddess and the old world, moving from Greece to Palestine and the Bible and I spend some more time pondering the Hebrew conquests and the Biblical rules about women and breeding, making my guesses about what they mean about what the Dominator sort seems to understand about genes and evolution, noting some tension between isolationist warrior societies and a gene that simply wants to be everywhere.
Then I talk about creation myths and note the odd truth that the Hebrew invaders count themselves to have been created during the period where we see the sudden rise of violence as religion in the archaeological record, and if we allow for a gene and maybe a Neurotype, we can literally agree.
Eisler says that after multiple edits, that in modern times, the only mere mortal in the Christian Pantheon is the former Goddess, the Mother of God.
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Ten, Chapter Eight
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Here Eisler starts again about a social model, about society structuring our relationships and I spend some time trying to turn that upside down and say how our relationships form society instead, and that ours is based in the fundamentally broken relationship between parent and child that is spanking.
In terms of history, Eisler shows how much that the modern Dominators credit to Greece for human advancement were really much earlier, old world innovations. I end with some discussion of the philosophers of fascism as simply the exponents and proponents of the Spanking Gene.
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Eleven, Chapter Nine
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Here Eisler tells of the pushback, of repeated Partnership sorts of attempts to change the world, starting that even Greece was better than the slaughter and dark time that preceded it and going to the Christian movements. I suggest that the worst of the modern day warrior sorts seem to declare themselves a separate type of human and differentiate themselves from the people they abuse by saying the abused are “suited for it.” That the language of supremacy itself betrays that they have a sort of Neurodiversity theory too.
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Twelve, Chapter Ten
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Eisler shows a pattern, that as a society moves towards war, that it attacks its own, the women, the partnership sorts, that we see waves of social misogyny, followed by some bloody war, again and again. I argue with their explanation as always, but I too see a pattern of people simply getting worse and worse with each other – beginning with spanking and police – until some massive social meltdown, a war or a world war.
Same pattern, almost the same causes, but one detail, children, and the epigenetics of spanking never does make it into modern, normal people’s thinking.
Next I spend some time trying to show that much of what we see as political lying and gaslighting likely comes down to neurotype, one type’s lie is another type’s best guess, making examples of the capitalist’s inability to correctly describe the communism they despise. I repeat some stuff about spanking, more theory.
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Thirteen, Chapter Eleven
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Here we are almost home in the modern age, starting with the European Enlightenment (by the Turtle Islanders, per The Dawn of Everything), and suggesting that a fine task for us today would be to compete that job, the enlightenment, carry any momentum it had for Partnership forward. For my part, I try to apply the same genetic ideas to this Age of European expansion that I tried to with the previous events.
I have an argument abut education, that you can’t just teach people anything, it has to match their genes and their brains, their types, and that the arc of society does not follow what the teachers teach, it only follows their methods, which are an environment of abuse that causes adaptations that make some sorts of ideas more likely than others. There is more theory about Neurotype, and a few more theories based in my Divergence, from conservatism, to freedom fighting, to whether feminists spank.
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Fourteen, Chapter Twelve
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Eisler lists some fears of future dystopia scenarios, should we not turn things around – and I bust the idea as fantasies of the Spanking Gene, that no such control is possible in the real world where people do not remain constant but are forever adapting and changing, and as an example, such attempts at nightmarish control in the last century are what we now call a century of simply chaos and war that no-one is claiming to have had any control over.
We do not discuss overpopulation.
I offer a simple, logical argument about the logic of spanking and punishment. Eisler mentions “the power of myth,” and I add the caveat that this power is dependent on there being a resonant string in your brain, that brains make myths, myths don’t make brains.
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Fifteen, Chapter Thirteen
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Winding down. Here at the end of their book, Eisler is reiterating things, and I reiterate some of my arguments. Some visionary is quoted about a “new consciousness,” and I complain that it’s hardly the point, that the whole book says we want the old consciousness back, not another new mistake.
30th., Anniversary Epilogue
Thirty years later, when it says, “male female relations,” in this portion, it also says, “and parent-child relations,” as well, and there is even a meta sort of remark I like very much, about how the political Right is smart to focus on parents and children – even if they have it all wrong by my tastes – while the pseudo “Left,” is top down – like social science or something.
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Sixteen, Diagnosis and the Prescription
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Since this section is already a summary in every book, I’m just leaving the excerpt in place. It really is the point.
“This is a thing I believe, and I think this is all science that brings me to believe it, that if we somehow managed to stop making our own environment a social Hell, it wouldn’t be one anymore, it would change, because we would change. If we grokked evolution, and sought better environments, rather than building nightmares to “deter,” something, we would be happily living in those better environs already.”
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Jeff
Aug. 28th., 2024
The Spanking Gene 