Donald Armstrong
1 min readAug 24, 2024

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No.

But Homo sapiens first emerged about 200K years ago, while an agricultural way of life wasn't developed until roughly 8,000 years ago. Settled societies in Mesopotamia date back a mere 5,500 years. Wars, in the modern sense, territorial conquest and empire-building all followed.

And during this latter phase, the value placed on warriors, the breakdown of small kinship groups, the anonymity afforded by large cities and the superior physical strength of men were all conditions that undermined the egalitarian tendencies of many earlier, nomadic cultures. This allowed men to assume the dominant role in both the family and the larger society.

My point is that male dominance, far from being the natural and inevitable way that the sexes relate to one another, is an aberration that has prevailed for only a tiny fraction of human history. Viewed this way, modern feminism is a fundamentally conservative movement that seeks to restore a balance between the sexes--and assertions of a man's natural right to exercise the ultimate authority within the family unit are highly questionable.

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Donald Armstrong
Donald Armstrong

Written by Donald Armstrong

Moved by a conviction that we humans--gifted with reason--can do so much better than we are; asks how both politics and faith can better serve humanity's needs.

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