A delicate matter

From an early age, I have been devoted to the subject of this book; you could say that scarcely a waking moment of mine goes by in which I do not think about it, even with or through it. It is a delicate matter, by no means as easy to handle as some suppose.

Cultural history, properly understood, involves complex assessments of evidence which is often thin or ambiguous. For most of human history, the majority of human beings have not been able to read or write; documentation of illiterate lives is scanty and, to some extent, suspect because it has necessarily passed through literate hands. Artefacts remain but the fossil-record of human activity, as any decent archaeologist will tell you, is no more reliably complete than its zoological equivalent. Mirages easily arise from simple facts: every schoolchild knows about the Stone and Iron Ages, though we hear little of the Wood Age because wood rots and leaves fewer traces for us to unearth. Much cultural activity is superfluous, a product of leisure and abundance.

As these desirable states are unevenly distributed, the cultural sphere is, in Hegel's phrase, a "terrain of inequality"; there are always discrepancies between metropolis and provinces, between the expert and the uninitiate, the chattering and the grunting classes.

David M Friedman's A Mind of its Own ignores all these fundamental problems; it's an easy read and must have been an even easier write. He begins from his sense that there is "something in the mind of Western man, an uneasiness about his link with his penis"; he never asks whether this uneasiness is specifically "Western" (there is one reference to Eastern wisdom about eating "the testes of a he-goat ... fried in clarified butter") nor whether the West has been in the same place from pre-history to the present day. He is confused about the distinction between "man" meaning Homo sapiens and "male", so refers to the penis as "man's defining organ" or "the organ that makes a man a man". As quite a few other species have penises, male human beings are in no sense "defined" as human beings by their possession of the estimable member. The distinction, as Friedman seems to regard it, of being an all-male male belongs rather to the varieties of barnacle which fascinated Darwin and which we don't hear about in this book ... these "flattened, purplish wormlike" creatures exist as "mere bags of spermatozoa" and "pass their whole lives" ... "fixed and half embedded in the flesh of their wives". This may be some men's ambition but it is no man's condition.

Friedman reveres "the most mysterious human product of them all", by which he means not culture, nor God, nor even the Daily Mail, but semen. Yet for one so keen on semen, he is oddly reluctant to think about the dissemination of knowledge and world views. The accounts of cultural shift in his pages are all of the bogus "The age of Freud was forced to yield to the age of Friedan" type, in which epochs are changed as easily, and almost as regularly, as underwear. Leeuwenhoek looks down his microscope at some leftovers from the exercise of his conjugal rights and "this sight changed everything, man's understanding of himself, his relationship to God, to nature".

One of the first things you learn from genuine study of cultural history is that man is not a quickchange artist. The converse idiocy which neglects rather than exaggerates difference between past and present also turns up in A Mind of its Own when we're told that "rape, adultery, paedophilia, and incest" were "acts that man in his natural state committed regularly and without compunction". Even Freud, from whom Friedman borrows this lurid and, on evolutionary grounds, implausible pre-history would have noticed the logical absurdity of supposing that "adultery" was an option for man "in his natural state" before society instituted marriage. "The history of the penis", Friedman intones, "is the history of its evolution as an idea"; "evolution" is an empty gesture here, for he says nothing to justify the claim that intellectual and biological change occur in accordance with the same principle. Justifying such a claim would require a patience and range of observation like Darwin's, but "dickhead" rather than "Darwin" is the word which springs to mind when reading this book.

It is said that the Lord God spoke thus to the first man: "My son, I have created for you two wonderful organs, the mind and the penis. I have good news and bad news for you about these treasures; which would you like to hear first?" The man asked for the good news, so the Lord God told him "with your mind, you will explore the universe and come to understand it; with your penis, you will both give and receive extreme pleasure". The man asked what the bad news was. The Lord God replied: "You'll never be able to use both of them at the same time." Many a true word spoken in an old jest, as this "cultural history" shows.