Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy by George A. Dunn & Jason T. Eberl

Author:George A. Dunn & Jason T. Eberl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

MC and MB: Hunters, Warriors, and Bikers

Gender inequality is a common feature of religious life in modern America. The Roman Catholic priesthood remains all male and Orthodox Jews forbid women to lead worship or read publicly from the Torah. In these “all-boy” domains, male bonding becomes a primary good and maybe even something like a religious duty. In this respect, at least, SAMCRO’s insistence on male exclusivity is entirely unexceptional.

That men should bond through religious rituals is not surprising, at least from the perspective of German classicist Walter Burkert, who has offered some intriguingly manly speculations on the origin of religion. According to Burkert, religious rituals originated in ancient times within all-male groups of cooperative hunters. His term for such a group is a Männerbund, literally an “all-male society.” We’ll just shorten Männerbund to MB, since, as we’ll see, these close-knit bands of male predators bore a striking resemblance to our modern-day all-male MC.

These MBs formed as men discovered they could kill animals many times their size, even whole herds of them, if they learned to trust each other and work together4—not unlike the way the Sons are able to separate Ethan Zobelle from his large Mayan escort through some very skillfully coordinated action. Such cooperation was no small feat for our ancient ancestors because the human male had already evolved a highly aggressive attitude toward other males in order to compete for the favor of females, an attitude still prevalent today—recall how Jax clobbered the clueless nitwit in Nevada who sat on his bike and then rode off with the bloodied chump’s girl. Burkert also describes how early human males learned to cooperate to protect their women and offspring from marauding male outsiders. As these new societies came together and evolved, they began to ritually re-enact their hunting successes in order to transmit to their sons the specialized knowledge they’d acquired and emphasize to the women the enormous gifts their dangerous new business brought for the whole tribe.

Burkert insists that such cooperative engagement on the part of men introduced a new level of stress that had both psychological and sociological repercussions. First, it required an unusual level of repression to get aggressive young males to work together without turning their aggression against each other. We see that also in SAMCRO, where, despite the intensity of the brotherly bond, rivalries, resentments, and assorted “pissing contests” regularly break out in the clubhouse. The contentious relationship between Tig Trager and Herman Kozik is a particularly prominent case in point.

Second, the bond that the MB required of the hunting band divided the loyalties of its members between their male comrades and their families. Again, the same thing happens in the MC. Consider how the often turbulent relationships of club members with their wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, and even children compete with the demands of SAMCRO, seen most dramatically in the strained marriage of Opie and Donna. As with Opie and Donna, such conflicts of loyalty are almost inevitably resolved in favor of the club.

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