Flintstone Ideology

Conservatism, as an ideology, has a mighty challenge to overcome; if you propose that things are to remain the same, and that things are best as they are now, you'll have to show that things were the same in the past as well. Confused? Stay with me and all will become clear.

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The American animated sitcom "The Flintstones" is a perfect example of what I'm trying to say about conservative ideology. There you have a nuclear family, the Flintstones, set in the Stone Age, but with all the features of a modern capitalist society. They live in a town called Bedrock, have neighbors and best friends in Barney and Betty Rubble, own a car and Stone Age equivalents of almost all modern household appliances. Fred Flintstone, the father and head of the titular family, works at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company under a stingy boss, loves bowling and is a member of the fictional "Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes" Lodge No. 26, a men-only club paralleling real-life fraternities such as the Loyal Order of Moose.

The Flintstones animated series reinforces the idea that society as we know it has always existed in some form or another. This is right up the conservatives' alley, as they maintain that the hierarchies and inequalities are natural and inevitable, that the unequal distribution of power and wealth as well as between the sexes is innate and can't be changed. According to conservatism these traits and features are set in stone, so to speak, or in the Stone Age in the case of The Flintstones. Contrary to this belief, these concepts of the nuclear family, private property, and the state as the guardian of the owners of private property are not set in stone, nor are they the result of the evolution of our species; they are all relatively recent developments set in motion by our capacity to produce a surplus.

Inequality has been attributed to the divine favor of gods, to leaders actually being gods, to the belief that only hierarchies are capable of maintaining peace; to the intellectual, moral, or genetic superiority of the upper class; to the need to reward useful behavior; and to many other questionable beliefs. In contemporary social science and political philosophy the arguments for inequality are seen in social contract theory and in "freedom-based" arguments for unequal private property rights. In the end they all use the belief that inequality is natural and inevitable to justify coercive rules and the use of violence to maintain that inequality. This represents the horizon of the conservative and capitalist ideologies into the past as well as into the future. The hierarchical and unequal state of the human condition is eternal, intertwined with human nature, and the result of human evolution.

The only problem with this world-view is that it's false. It's as fictional as "the modern stone-age family" depicted in The Flintstones. It's the result of an ideological interpretation of history, as opposed to a materialist (and scientific!) view on human development. Tribal human communities are all but extinct, but the few that are left, and the written materials of 18th and 19th century anthropologists show that hunter-gatherer tribal societies were egalitarian, cooperative, stateless, moneyless and held women in high regard. Mind you, that is more than 90 percent of our existence as a species, as we remained hunter-gatherers until the Neolithic age. For more than 90 percent of our history we lived in what Karl Marx called "primitive communism". In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.

For more than 90 percent of the time of our existence we lived in egalitarian, stateless societies, and most of that time we lived without the nuclear family as well. There was a basic division of labor in the sense that most of the hunting was done by males and most of the gathering by females. Other than that, human relations were completely egalitarian. If anything, women had the upper hand as they were the ones bearing childs and gathering was more important than hunting anyway. From the time we stood upright, we freed our hands with opposing thumbs, allowing us to grasp things and make things. And since we're a relatively weak species, without fangs or claws, our survival dictated that we banded together in groups and cooperated. From the early dawn of mankind our social strategy was centered around labor and cooperation, the latter of which works best in an egalitarian community defined not by familial relationships but kinsmanship. Children weren't the offspring or responsibility of a particular father and / or mother, but of the tribe.

A dialectical and materialist perspective on human history locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and Engels the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. For more than 90 percent that mode of production remained the same, and the first upheaval was the advent of agriculture, the domestication of animals and the settlement of humans in cities near fertile ground. This allowed for the production of a surplus of food, and only with that surplus arrived the possibility for some to be freed from labor and specialize in other things. With the surplus came civilization as we know it or, as Marx describes it, class-society in which a small group owns the means of production, initially land, who appropriate most of the surplus produced with the labor of the rest of society.

The rest, as the popular saying goes, is history. Or history as we've been thought to be more precise. You see, history is written by the winners in any given conflict and it's no different in the class-conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The materialist explanation of early human history has been ignored or refuted for most of modern history, as early anthropologists came from the rich class of owners. Reading and writing were the prerogative of the upper classes up until the industrial revolution, when capitalism and democracy created the need for the general population to be somewhat educated. But not too well educated. In the words of George Carlin:

"They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club."
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And the conservatives of our time like to believe, and have us believe that this, the capitalist free market unequal society, is the end of history. That this is as good as it's ever going to be. Just like the ones who said that feudalism, slavery or the divine right of kings was the best it was ever going to be. They live in the fantasy of eternal sameness, as do the Flintstones. Their end of history is the same as their beginning of history, only that beginning is fictional, or at the very least picked randomly at a time that's beneficial to their ideal conception of that history. If The Flintstones were a realistic reflection of the Stone Age, the Flintstones, the Rubbles and many other family units would be living together in one big cave, their children would be raised by all women and men, women would choose with whom to procreate, there would be no head of the household and so on. Fred and Barney wouldn't have a job and the bowling-alley would be like all other things: owned by the community.

Conservatives' greatest fear is that their established view of an unchanging world is challenged in any way. They have a Flintstone Ideology in which current human relations, hierarchies and mode of production are set in stone. When this belief is challenged by progressive forces they'll answer in a reactionary way claiming that things used to be so much better when traditional values and hierarchies were still respected. Their preferred view on human history is one in which these traditional values and hierarchies have always existed, and their preferred society is the one depicted in The Flintstones, which originally aired in the 1960s. The progressive ideology of a more egalitarian, stateless society without capital accumulation is a nightmare to them, so they'd rather skip more than 90 percent of our species' history. And now you know why.

A lot of what's written here is inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels, in particular Engels's "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State". The current concept of a nuclear family originates in the patriarchal conception of private property after the advent of surplus production and the state. The state came into existence as a means of protecting the privileged position of the owners of private property. And private property was, and still is, the means by which surplus value is appropriated by this class of owners. This is a TL;DR version of a meticulous dialectical and materialist interpretation of human history. If you want to delve into the full audio-book of Engels's work, you can find that here. If you'd rather read it, get the full pdf here. Watch the below linked lecture for a more condensed version of this historical materialist view on early human history.

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