I'll try to post brief notes on another chapter later today and then must go to Louisiana to give lectures on Pope Pius IX.

I suggested Goldberg as a starting point for someone who apparently needs to begin with the ABC's of sexual dimorphism--hardly an arcane phrase and something you might, if you have the slightest interest in the topic, take the trouble to look up. The fact that women in some societies may inherit power from their male relatives does not fundamentally alter the basic structure of the societies. Hatshepsut--a rather poor ruler, by the way-- is said to have worn a beard on public occasions and Elizabeth I was rumored (probably falsely) to shave. The reason for such stories is obvious: The expectation that a ruler would be a man. Most English queens (the Stuarts, for example) other than Elizabeth I have exercised power through powerful male advisors and through husbands.

It is not that no woman anywhere has ever held power, but that men and women are programmed differently, in the womb and again at puberty, by genes and genetically determined hormones which affect size, strength, and brain development. Men are far more subject to the libido dominandi, while women are more attached to hearth and home, as their circumstances until very recently made necessary. Males and females also have different sexual strategies, except in societies whose decadence has doomed to extinction, such as in modern Europe and the US, where women abort some of their children, surrender others to daycare, and, in general, do not provide children to replace their parents and maintain the population. In Britain and the US, it is Third World immigrants who have the babies. How much more do you need?

Any number of books on sexual differences, many written by feminist scientists, will document these generalizations. But if scientific research is "arcane," then I cannot imagine on what basis you would presume to draw conclusions that even to the peasant mind much seem counter-factual and absurd. This is all I have to say on this matter until you undertake a course of reading that will give you the right to entertain (much less express) an opinion in a forum such as this.

Poor Mr. Cuttill, I cannot devote the next few hours to introducing you to the topic of sexual dimorphism, though even Wade's not very good book, could be a start. Don't bother to read my book, but it will give you some of the important bibliography down to the end of the 1980's or if you want something simpler, start with Steve Goldberg's Inevitability of Patriarchy.

And I simply can't thank you enough for re-introducing Dryden! I hope the others have been going back to him, too. I've just about finished Marriage-a-la-Mode, and hope to add a couple comments/observations on that play plus All For Love and Shakespeare's A&C over the next couple days. So you may want to keep your eye on that thread as well.

Are you still willing to do some Jane Austen in the near future? If so, I'd like to vote for either Mansfield Park or Sense and Sensibility. But any Austen would be great...

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, though not much given to French-style speculation, once wrote a little book taking up Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's once famous then rejected theory of primitive mentality. (Primitives cannot make ordinary distinctions of subject/object, image and reality, shadow and thing, etc.) Evans-Pritchard suggested that anthropologists had been as hasty in rejecting the theory as L-B had been rash in proposing it. He argued, partly on the basis of his own long-term and patient study of the Nuer, that L-B was not far off base in his characterization except that he missed the obvious fact that primitives are very practical and have no trouble in practice distinguishing between what they see in a dream and what they see while they are awake. Nonetheless, in some circumstances they frequently refuse to make such distinctions. Hence, for example, the story I heard from a physician who had given a wife some medicine for her sick husband to take. She immediately took a dose herself on the grounds that they were the same person.

E-P also pointed out that only a small fraction of people in civilized societies were much more advanced than the primitives--hence Bob Tyrell's Menkenesque remark about people ignorant of Mozart and Rilke (though, to be frank, I could as likely imagine Tyrell performing brain surgery as reading Rilke. European big-brained apes have been coasting off the Greeks for a very long time, and yet most people I meet cannot open their mouths without showing their ignorance of the most basic logical principles, i.e., non-contradiction. Most of us, including scientists when they step outside their field, are pre-Parmenidean.

My personal hunch is that our barbarian ancestors--Celts, Slavs, Germans--needed Greeks and then Romans to teach them a civilization they could never have developed by themselves. It took about 1000 years to create a substantial class of civilized Europeans who promptly rejected first Christianity and then Greek and Latin and are galloping headlong back to their beloved barbary. Nietzsche, though usually hysterical in his hatred of the Catholic Church, says somewhere that Luther gave the Germans the chance they needed to reject the Mediterranean civilization and to back to their native savagery.

I don't entirely believe any of this, but I am not alone in noticing that if the 19th century rejected Christ and his Church, as indeed the elite class did, then the 20th can be characterized by the rejection of Latin as the basis of education. Most members of the last educated generation died out some decades ago. I do not say that all civilizations depend on Latin and Greek, only that ours does. And we speakers of degenerate English are in particularly desperate straits because our language, unlike, say German, Italian, and Russian, has virtually no formal grammar except what had been borrowed from Latin (hence the ruinous efforts of Chomsky et co.). At least a German has to think a little about cases, moods, tenses, and an educated Italian has access to a language almost as formally complex as Latin (4 tenses of the subjunctive used according to Latin rules), while we speak the language of Tarzan.

The same with falling arches. Most folks’ arches fall at 20 years of age; Occidentals’ don’t because of their shoes, this malady setting in around 60.

Some things may be inherited. By rumor, Africans are said to more likely suffer sickle cell anemia, Orientals bad eyesight, and Celts alcoholism.

As for folks up in the Blue, I’m totally uninformed, and thank Herr Grumpy for enlightening me.