Marriage and Civilization

[selenite0]

Orson Scott Card’s essay on heterosexual monogamous marriage as the cornerstone of civilization makes perfect sense to me, but I completely disagree with his conclusions. Marriage patterns have changed through history. Hunter-gatherers were usually monogamous (who had the resources to support anything more complicated?). Agriculture and pastoralism provided more resources which the men with the largest share used to support multiple wives. As more complex societies evolved the pendulum swung back to monogamy as a way to maximize the production of labor and children. Card details the mechanics of this well. That productivity provided much of the power that led to the monogamy-practicing industrial powers dominating the world.

Now we're transitioning from an industrial society to whatever comes next—-call it an information society until we get there and find out what it really is. One of the economic symptoms of the transition is an emphasis on customizing products for every buyer instead of mass-producing what the median user wants and forcing it on everyone. We're seeing that happen with marriage. It used to be one-size-fits-all. One man, one woman, multiple kids, combined property, for life unless there's a flagrant breach of contract. Not any more.

Marriage is being customized in thousands of flavors. It started simply—writing your own vows instead of using the church's ritual, children by technologically-assisted choice instead of biological default, no-fault divorce instead of private eyes with cameras. Then the bargain versions came on the market. Plain sex could be found at colleges and bars without strings. Murphy Brown could support kid and nanny by herself. Poor women were offered bureaugamy—-the taxpayers will support you and your children as long as you don't marry anyone else. "Shacking up" became a routine stage in relationships.

All of these worried the traditionalists, but if they closed one eye it looked like the institution of marriage was remaining the same.

But people are asking for the fancy custom models now. Detailed prenuptial agreements are common in some circles. Mormon polygyny is reemerging and demanding acceptance. Polyamorists are experimenting to find all the workable combinations. And same-sex couples are waging and winning a dramatic PR battle for recognition as couples, moving from "domestic partners" to "civil unions" to actual (if arguably invalid) marriage licenses.

Marriage traditionalists react to this the same way a laid-off steelworker does to suggestions to try telephone tech support or feng shui consulting. They're having their noses rubbed in the fact that the institutions they've built their lives around are being torn apart with nothing offered as a replacement except a promise of more change. This is terrifying to anyone who wants his life based on order instead of chaos. Bush's FMA rhetoric is responding to the same emotions as Kerry's "fair trade" promises.

The same fear and anger is triggered by the process that's creating gay marriage. The orderly industrial-age spirit wants changes to happen through the assembly line—-write bills in committee, elect people who support them, vote them into law in the legislature, then have the executive enforce them and the courts review them. Information-age chaos believes any path is good as long as it gets to the right place, so court decrees and civil disobedience are just as good as a majority vote (I expect this will have some drastic backfires). But traditionalists don't know how to play that game and (correctly) believe the deck is stacked against them.

Now they're fighting gay marriage as hard as they can because it's their last chance to make a last stand. America is at the tipping point, going from a field of order with some pockets of chaos to a sea of chaos with eroding islands of order. They may hold back the change for a few years but they can't reverse it. Some will take the Amish as a model and withdraw into isolated communities to hold onto the old customs.

The rest of us will create new ways of forming families and caring for children. We'll see which ones work well and poorly and stick with the ones that work (bureaugamy is already on its way out). I expect we'll wind up with a number of different family patterns because people are different and we have to work with that, not against it. Our new civilization will be held up in dynamic (not static) stability by the children of these varied families. The transition to that civilization will be terrible. Transitions always are. But the best way to get through it is quickly. The old patterns are already shattered. Stretching it out just delays finding the new ones.


(See related post here)

Comments

[neonnurse.livejournal.com]

That is one of the most intelligent things I've read yet on this whole thing! Well done!

[technomom]

Hi there! anansi133 linked to your post, and I have to say that it's wonderful. Thank you - this is going in my memories.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

This is doubly ironic, since I've never met either of you guys in meetspace!

Anyways, I know you two will have plenty to talk about... (evil grin)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Yep, technomom and I could have some great talks on family, kids, poly, paganism, etc (though celticdragonfly might do more talking than me). Some other topics we might want to avoid . . .

[technomom]

Now you've got me terribly curious about topics we should avoid ;-)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I figured my hawkish stance on the war might provoke some clashes. Not that I don't enjoy debating it (http://www.livejournal.com/users/selenite/1718.html) but that's usually better for a separate forum than during social time. And I figure pagan parent geeks are rare enough we should concentrate on the common ground.

[technomom]

True. I'm fine with discussion, but prefer to avoid conflict - and if two people are absolutely certain that their opinions are correct, it's best to simply agree to disagree and move on :-)

Yay for pagan parent geeks!

Reference

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Polyfidelity as a model for raising kids:
http://www.lovewithoutlimits.com/future_family.html

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Jane Galt worries about marginal effects on institution:
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Argument that marriage is obsolete:
http://savageminds.org/2006/06/21/the-end-of-marriage/

Interesting, but we've got to come up with some methods for taking care of kids, and I don't think one-parent-and-casual-friends is optimum.

[rhjunior.livejournal.com]

You make the assertion that "marriage patterns have constantly changed" without much consideration to the full spread of the data.

Or in other words: Yes, there have been polygamous/polyamorous societies in the past. But just how well did they do?

The fact that even the most successful polygamous society never managed to get much further than the Dark Ages should give one pause. Anthropologists are fond of dredging up this aboriginal tribe or the the other to show that polyamory is natural to man; while yes, this or that primitive jungle tribe has perpetuated for thousands of years as a polygamous or other "sexually P.C." culture, they never seem to note that after all those thousands of years they are STILL a primitive jungle tribe.



You note that "bureaugamy" has failed as a parental/familial model. I submit to you that we have seen "divorceamy", "serial partner-ogamy," and "single-parent-ogamy" proven to be equal if not greater failures. (Consider that people begged for and still tend to beg for "bureaugamy" on the grounds that single parenthood cannot cope with the familial burden!) And NO civilization, no matter how sexually libertine, has EVER granted homosexual pairs the same status and social role as that of a married couple.... not even the Greeks called a "gay" couple married, or suggested they were an optimal choice for raising heterosexual people's offspring. One might suspect that this was for a damned good reason.

Our society has already experimented with every possible variation of polyamorous "families," from unwed mothers to serial divorcees with joint custody to wife-swapping hippies who serve up wedding cake decorated with the words "Smash Monogamy" at their four-way bisexual hand-fasting. We have tried them all and found ALL of them to be wanting. We have prisons full of fatherless sons and graveyards full of disease-slain "sexual pioneers" to show for it; we are not interested in dabbling in such things any more.
And we are fantastically uninterested in allowing people to conduct a self-gratifying social engineering experiment on helpless children that even the Greeks would not contemplate.... solely to salve the bitten consciences and chronic self-esteem issues of the militant homosexual.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

Monogamy seems to be a prerequisite for reaching industrial society, but it's not holding up that well in our post-industrial. Making monogamy work well, particularly for raising kids, requires a support network in the form of an extended family and a close-knit community. Those are both breaking down today as our high-speed economy keeps yanking people off to other cities. The old network is weakened by the loss and people aren't staying in one place long enough to form stable new ones.

So if the old model isn't working--and birth rates in Europe and America say it's not--we're going to have to come up with something else. Which will involve a lot of failed experiments along the way.

I have another post looking at different family structures and how they relate to our political factions, I'd be interested in your thoughts on it.

[rhjunior.livejournal.com]

As the product of an unbroken line of monogamous marriages five generations long, I will note that it's "holding up" quite fine, thank you very much. You mistake the consequence of indulgence for the failure of virtue. Yes, you will see failure in decision making when you use the law to make immoral decisions easier than moral ones.

[rhjunior.livejournal.com]

or in other words, monogamy has not been tried and found wanting--- it has been needed, and yet not been tried.