‘Egalitarian’ and ‘Patriarchal’ May Not Mean What You Think They Do

Here’s what those terms refer to from a sociological standpoint

Sometimes people become confused when I use the terms egalitarian and patriarchal because they have preconceived notions about what those words mean. Let’s define them now, from a socio/political standpoint, and then take a look at how the shift from one system to the other affected human societies.

For 97% of human history, we lived in tribes of 20–50 hunters and gatherers. Food sharing, cooperative child-rearing, and otherwise just looking out for and taking care of each other was the primary survival strategy. There were no nuclear families as we know them today — the tribe was the family, made up of a lot of related kin. There is significant evidence that tribes used to trade people often in order to promote genetic diversity. Since there was no way to verify paternity, clans were matrilineal, but it hardly mattered because everyone took care of everyone else.

Some of this we know from various scientific disciplines and some of it we extrapolate by looking at modern foragers. Hunter/gatherer groups today are not entirely homogenous, but they do have many things in common, including being very individualistic while at the same time very cooperative and putting the good of the tribe to the fore.

They practice something called reverse hierarchy and enforced egalitarianism where the majority bands together to keep anyone who gets too big a head or too many ideas about power in check. This often takes place via teasing, or perhaps even shunning, but ostracization from the group and execution have also been known to take place in extreme cases. In the case of execution, the immediate family carries out the sentence so that there is little room for feuds and bad blood to arise because the cohesion and wellbeing of the group is the most important thing.

We call this an egalitarian society, not because men and women have equal rights and power (they don’t always in modern H/G tribes), but because of the socio/political structure which does not favor a chief or other full time or hereditary leader.

Ad hoc leaders emerge for certain tasks and decisions are made by the group for the good of the group. The absence of social classes, significant wealth disparity, ruling classes, and no hierarchy of traditional power that is maintained by intimidation — these are the things that make for an egalitarian culture.

Even when they get to the point where they have a chief (Polynesians), or women don’t have near the power that men do (Australian aboriginals), there are still strong elements of egalitarianism in many indigenous cultures and they are a sharp contrast to the highly stratified social hierarchies and wealth disparity of Western societies. The good of the tribe still matters more than individual fortunes, and the well-being of the group is still a central focus. At the same time, individual independence and autonomy are also valued in a way that is not typical for Western cultures, which tend to favor conformity.

In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals. Source

As we go along in human evolution, this sort of social structure continues well into the Neolithic age. Proto-agricultural enclaves, such as Çatalhöyük, one of the best explored and excavated archeological sites in the world, was one such settlement. Enforced egalitarianism was the norm here as well (just as it was in Paleolithic tribes).

It wasn’t until near the end of the settlement’s existence that more hierarchical societal mechanisms come into evidence. Ian Hodder, the archeologist in charge of the site, believes that it was a highly developed system of beliefs and rituals that helped the settlement to be cohesive in the absence of leaders. Mind you, this was a settlement of 10,000 that existed for several thousand years with no leaders. This is what the term egalitarian means from a socio/anthropological standpoint.

Around 6–9 thousand years ago, the socio/political climate began to change. The rise of agriculture brought new challenges and new social structures. Women went from being primary food producers (hunting is sporadic and even today many H/G tribes get most of their daily calories from gatherers) to being relegated to the inside of the house. They began to have children every two years, rather than every four.

Land and material possessions were beginning to be accumulated and there was a new desire to pass them down to definite heirs whose paternity was verified. The only way to assure paternity was to socially and sexually control women, who were no longer social adults, but now wards of first their fathers and then their husbands.

Along with the loss of autonomy for women came new hierarchies related to jobs that arose due to having food to store, and distribute for the first time — such as administrator, and soldier. We went from social groups where cooperation and social cohesion were central to ones where individual gain at the expense of others was the norm. This is called patriarchy (or as I often term it for easier understanding, patriarchal dominance hierarchy).

Patriarchy is not just about power differentials between men and women, although those did arise for the first time 6–9 k years ago also. This was just one aspect of a larger socio/political development characterized by Might Makes Right. Those with more power took what they wanted, and those who did not have the power to resist fell under their control. This applied not only to women but also to weaker, poorer, men as well and a highly stratified class system emerges for the first time in human history. In fact, social stratification is the central element of patriarchy.

Mummies from ancient cultures show that the elite and the royal ate much better and had a lot less disease than the commoners. Sometimes they were noticeably taller because of this disparate access to resources. This is a distinct contrast to egalitarian cultures that came before which are characterized by food sharing as a central part of group survival — something that is still the case in modern forager tribes.

Western cultures developed out of this tradition of hierarchy and elites and there is a clear demarcation from when nearly the entire human population used cooperation, food sharing, alloparenting, and other egalitarian dynamics as a survival strategy to when Might Makes Right took over. Anthropologists overwhelmingly agree that the advent of agriculture gave birth to the rise of patriarchy.

The long and short of all of this is that about 6–9k years ago the prevalent social system for humans changed from “everyone help and take care of each other” to “Might Makes Right” and “I got mine!” This is what is meant by the beginning of patriarchy. Although this includes the social and sexual control of women, which had never existed before, it is not limited to that.

Patriarchy is a socio/political system based on the maintenance of traditional power via intimidation. It is a dominance-based hierarchy that emerged with the Agricultural Revolution, although there are most likely other elements that also came into play related to growing populations, possible natural disasters, etc.

So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago. Source

What we do know is that the primary socio/political organization of most human cultures changed drastically at this time, about 6–9 k years ago. Power differentials between men and women are only one aspect of this social system, and evidence of some power differentials in a culture is not on its own necessarily a marker of patriarchy, but that’s another story.

This new social system spread and overtook egalitarian enclaves, not because it was a better system, but because it caused a fair amount of social disruption.

And indeed, the expansion of agriculture across the globe was punctuated by catastrophic societal collapses. Genomic research on the history of European populations points to a series of sharp declines that coincided first with the Neolithic expansion through central Europe around 7,500 years ago, then with their spread into north-western Europe about 6,000 years ago. Source

Economic models of the spread of inequality (patriarchy) done at Standford University concur.

In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies. Source

And yet, the population explosion and the self-aggrandizing projects made possible by this change in social structure did eventually lead to what we now consider the modern world. It’s up for debate whether or not this was actually a good thing. Sure, we have electricity and modern medicine, but we also have dire poverty, inequality, and levels of human loneliness never dreamt of in Paleolithic times.

Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits. Source

Quite obviously, we can never go back to widespread leaderless egalitarian societies, but there are still things that we can learn from that sort of social structure. Cutting-edge business practices today largely favor small, collaborative working groups rather than traditional hierarchies because allowing the people closest to the work to make most of the relevant decisions is a lot more agile.

In today’s world, egalitarian doesn’t necessarily mean leaderless, and patriarchal doesn’t necessarily mean male-dominated. Having a better understanding of what these terms indicate from a socio/political level beyond popular usage allows us to better understand our world.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022