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Part I
Prehistory
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Chapter 1
The mammals
The animals’ retreat from fatherhood
A. Gehlen
When and where did fatherhood begin? Or when and where are fathers first to be found?
As we ply our way up the river of time, all hopes of discovering the sources of fatherhood will first have to make their way through a swamp where nature and culture intermingle; and in places such as these, research can only look for questions, rather than furnish answers. What parts of paternal behavior are instinctive, or innately present without any need to be learned and taught? And which of its parts, on the other hand, derive from social inventions, or from bodies of rules with which human beings have chosen to govern themselves? And when, for the very first time, did men begin to act like fathers?
Nature has traditionally been seen as feminine, whereas an equally ancient commonplace sees culture as masculine. Here again, as always, the stereotype is partly an expression of mental sloth, while nonetheless containing a measure of truth.
Fatherhood, like motherhood, has to be seen as a continuous activity. No one moment can determine it. It lies in something more than the simple act of procreation. What makes a man a father has far more to do with assuming an enduring role that accompanies the growth of his child. But there is also a basic difference between fatherhood and motherhood, since motherhood is a clear extension, after the birth of a child, of the condition of the female parent who conceived it and bore it within in her body: the two events flow seamlessly one into the other, in the life of the individual mother no less than in the course of the evolution of the species. With men things stand quite differently. Since time immemorial, the physical act of procreation and the process of being a father have always been separate and different things.
Unlike motherhood, fatherhood cannot be linked to a pattern of physical acts, and it cannot be constructed by extending and perfecting the facts of biology, or by dressing them in socially acceptable forms. Fatherhood implies a radical and permanent departure from the norms of purely animal life. In addition to noting that the father’s role in the life of a child begins – in accordance with traditions of education – at a later date than the mother’s, it is even more important to stress that the institution of fatherhood appears at an infinitely later date in the course of the history of human life. It implies an initial capacity for reflection, no less than a beginning of civilization. It may indeed be the primary cause – and this is one of the topics we hope to explore – of the advent of civilization.
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The expanse of time in which nature preceded civilization is so immense, and the arc of civilization so disproportionately minuscule, as to counsel us to view them in terms of an image, even if doing so is nothing new. Their disparity in span can help us understand why it’s still quite common – in spite of the enormous costs, both social and psychological, that the situation implies for motherhood to be characterized by warm and harmonious modes of behavior, whereas fatherhood generally finds expression through forms of conduct which are less predictable and less spontaneous.
The earth is about four and a half billion years old. If we view this veritable eternity as a single solar year, the mammals make no appearance until the middle of the month of December. A proto-human being first arrives on the scene at nine o’clock of the evening of December thirty-first, homo sapiens at about ten minutes before midnight, sapiens sapiens (with our own physical characteristics) at hardly three minutes before the end of the year, and Neolithic civilization in the course of the very last minute. Socrates, Christ and everyone else whom we see as belonging to antiquity are all bunched together in the last few seconds.
Much of this span of time is ignorant not only of the human being, but even of the act of procreation. It’s only in the spring of this year that we see the beginnings of organic life. Still more time had to run its course before single-cell organisms began to share the earth with simple multi-cell organisms, and then with others that were so complex as no longer to be able to limit reproduction to splitting off a few of their cells, and instead to pursue the road of coupling between differently sexed individuals. Asexual reproduction results in offspring which are always genetically identical to their single parent: so, it doesn’t facilitate evolution or adaptation to environmental change. With the coupling of two sexes, on the other hand, every reproductive event gives rise to a new and unique genetic combination. Such forms of life enormously increased their possibilities for self-defense and survival while nonetheless inaugurating problems that reach right down to us. Life, henceforth, was eternally divided into male and female forms.
Ever since this duplication first took place, and little by little as the ladder of evolution rose up toward the human being, the role of the female has been growing more stable and precise than the male’s. The well-known proverb mater semper certa, pater numquam – the mother is always certain, the father never – speaks of something more than the dilemma of the child who wants to know who his or her parents might be. It also defines the attitudes with which parents resolve the question of how to relate to their offspring. Among the higher animals, the mother is always certain, in the sense that she knows who her offspring are. The father lacks that knowledge.
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We know that the course of evolution, in all its vast and hasteless meanders, has proceeded through infinite numbers of variations. But its most recent phases established an irreversible division of sexes which since has exerted its influence not only on biology but also on the process of human society and civilization.
While perfecting life, evolution restricted the role that fathers were to play in it.
Any number of species of fish give the males the task of caring for the fertilized eggs. This counts, however, in the lives of such fish as a simple extension of the act of mating. The female expels her eggs, and having been the first to complete her functions, she can also be the first to depart the scene. The male then performs the subsequent task of spraying them with sperm, so it’s only “natural” that he also assume the duty of thenceforth looking after them.
But nature’s view of “natural” turned itself upside down as life left the seas and began to inhabit dry land. The new forms of life could no longer rely on water as a medium to which both eggs and sperm could be entrusted, and therefore invented interior fertilization. With this new form of mating, the male is the first to conclude his reproductive activities, and is therefore likely to abandon the scene, whereas the female has other functions that remain to be performed.1
This great new advance in physiology has a secret existential rub that was greatly to condition the behavior of the male and to stand in the way of his becoming a father. Internal fertilization displaces all the crucial events into a dark and mysterious recess: the female body encloses both eggs and sperm, removing them from all possibility of the male’s control. The ever more lengthy lapse of time with which nature separated the act of mating from the birth of the offspring created a new uncertainty: what has actually happened? The male is deprived of all perception that the new-born creature has anything to do with him.
The parents’ drive to transmit their genes to the largest possible number of offspring is surely the most powerful of all the drives that regulate animal behavior. Since his progeny could also have been spawned by another, the male has little reason to remain in the female’s vicinity up until the time of its birth. Surely it’s wiser, from the male’s point of view, to use that lapse of time for the fertilization of other females, thus increasing the possibility of passing along his genes.
When nature alone controls reproduction, the males of every species have purely quantitative functions. Each of them constantly produces millions and millions of sperm cells. In theory, an extremely exiguous number of males would suffice to populate the earth. In practice, however, the dynamic of natural selection has proved to be better served by a greater number of unfaithful males – competitive, seductive and sexually “violent” – since the victors among them are better equipped to transmit their genes to a higher number of descendants. These, in turn – thanks to their inherited genes – will tend again to be seductive, competitive and physically powerful, thus setting up a pattern that more efficiently perpetuates the species.
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The female has a qualitative function. The number of descendants she is able to bear is highly limited. The female who lapsed into the behavior displayed by the seductive male – the female who immediately abandoned her young – would be punished by the process of natural selection: rather than increase, her descendants would diminish in number, since their chances for survival would grow more tenuous. Unlike the male, she can’t make up for their loss by immediately generating others: the further production of eggs takes time, and gestation too is a long, drawn-out process. And offspring who inherited her characteristics – if they managed to survive, despite her lack of attentions for them – would tend again toward the same behavior, in turn exposing their offspring to danger, in a spiral of ever diminishing returns.
Mothers, in short, simply cannot allow themselves to be anything other than good mothers, whereas males, quite to the contrary, can allow themselves not even to be fathers at all. Zoology makes it clear that the pre-moral laws of survival already guide the females of the animal kingdom toward the greater stability and family morality which continue in human society to set them off from males.
But let’s return to our march through the course of evolution.
Whereas reptiles generally abandon their young, assuming no parental functions, most species of birds form stable couples in which the male and the female share the tasks of constructing a nest and nurturing and raising their young. Among many of the ostriches and penguins, the males are even exclusively entrusted with the incubation of the eggs. Certain other aspects of bird behavior are even more surprising, since rather than natural they have to be seen as protocultural. There are species of which the song – a male prerogative – is not an innate ability, it has to be taught by the father.2 So, in slightly different parts of their range, birds of such species sing in different ways, the song of any particular group of these birds is a “dialect” with a local tonality of its own; it isn’t dictated by instinct, and belongs instead to a particular tradition which the throats of the individual fathers interpret and preserve.
While producing creatures that demanded ever more complex processes of gestation and growth, evolution was also to take the step of prolonging the symbiosis of offspring and mother, pulling it into her body in the period previous to birth, and extending it into her metabolism once birth had taken place.
Between 200 and 250 million years ago, mammals appeared. The mother’s importance leapt to even higher levels, since she found herself responsible for ever longer periods of her offspring’s growth.3 Her young are wholly dependent on her since she also functions as their only source of nourishment for a lengthy period of time.
The primates, whose infants show no autonomy at all, appeared around 70 million years ago.4 The dyad of mother and child grew even more special, to the point of forming a complementarity that excluded the rest of the world. The social life of the apes now serves functions which have ceased to be exclusively physiological; it already nurtures an embryo of culture, of which motherhood is the one and only vehicle.5 In addition to assuring the growth of its young, the lengthy nursing of the great apes serves protocultural functions. While carried against their mothers’ bodies for an extended period of time, infant apes take the world into their eyes in ways which are not much different from those that hold in human life. When the infant ape becomes autonomous, it’s equipped not only with instinct, but already with patterns of learned behavior – such as the use of the limited number of tools it has seen its mother manipulate – which are no less essential to the mode of life on which its existence will depend.6
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All apes are capable of learning by observation. The young, obviously, more than the adults. And the fact that adult females learn more than males seems to derive from their repeated periods of symbiosis with their young, rather than from any innate superiority.7 In addition to teaching their offspring, the mothers learn fr...
