I’m very confused by this post. Is there a goal? If you want to talk about monogamy dying, why does the “ideal” matter? It sounds as though you are setting yourself up to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Is the goal to talk about why monogamy is dying? If so, what is the data? Among whom is it dying? If a couple lives together for a few months before marrying and then stays together and raises children together for decades, is that less effective because of the prior shacking up? Even if they are perfectly faithful throughout?
Ultimately it comes down to why we care and v our ultimate goal.
In order for the perfect to be the enemy of the good, it would have to be true that striving for the perfect would lead to failing at the good. Or, I suppose, being so intimidated by the perfect that you don't even try the good.
Let me use a rather apropos example: medicine. A doctor, wishing to heal an infection, might wish he had a drug that would instantly wipe out all of the infection, and at the same time fix all of the acommpanying symptoms. One shot and, bang, you're totally fixed and good to go.
That is NOT what medicine is like, obviously. They give you the shot, or the IV drug and, days later, one is still laying in the hospital bed. But the hypothetical perfect drug didn't prevent the doctor from giving the IV.
I believe that J. Daniel, on the other hand, is claiming that things like remaining a virgin before marriage, or not visiting prostitutes, is actually BAD for your marriage.
So my 'ultimate goal' is to glorify God, and the proximate means of doing that is being chaste and faithful in marriage, etc etc. To do that I need to know what chaste and faithful are... I need to define the ideal. Doesn't mean I will meet it. But I do have to define it.
Not what I'm claiming at all--I, indeed, explicitly said the contrary in my post. I'm saying that for monogamy to be a successful social norm, it needs support pins, and that one of those pins historically is prostitution (also the extended family and other kinship-like networks). Virgin-on-wedding-night is a whole bag of rocks I didn't touch on and don't care to. Suffice it to say that, my own personal opinions aside, I've known many couples who have had decades-long successful marriages--some who were virgins at the altar, some who weren't. Which was which clusters entirely based on age of bride and groom at the wedding. Below 22, virginity is pretty common. Above, less and less so. Doesn't have an effect on marital outcomes once you control for differences in subcultural support.
Do you have a link to the research that speaks of 'once you control for...'? Cause I would love to know how they worded that.
Now I am a bit confused as to your view of prostitution. The standard view is, of course, that it is bad for a marriage. Certainly lots of marriages have broken up when the wife found out her husband was visiting prostitutes, mistresses, or the wife next door. But you seem to say it is good for marriage.
Do you mean that only on a cultural basis? Or would you include individuals?
"Once you control for" -- oh man, these books are literally buried in a storage unit in another state, so I'm gonna have to summarize as best I can.
Among poor people, divorce rates are consistently lowest in groups where there is a church, an extended family, or other such pressures present. Divorce stratifies radically by class, with rates declining as wealth increases.
Sexual practices also stratify by class, with lower classes having the most chaotic sexual customs, middle classes being the tamest, and upper classes being most likely to maintain mistresses and such. This scales pretty directly with income. Charismatic religiosity (i.e. personal devotional faith) also declines markedly with every step one makes on the way up the socioeconomic ladder (formal religiosity also declines, but its proportion of religiosity expands at the expense of the charismatic).
As to why this happens, one could posit a number of reasons:
It may be genetic--the inborn traits that predispose one to be less personally chaotic push one's family quickly up the socio-economic ladder.
It may be cultural--the values and approach to morality that allows for limited indulgence as the result of deferred gratification may push people up the socio-economic ladder and also result in more stable family situations.
It may be a mix of both, or it may be political, or the result of laws that make marriages harder to break up when more property is at stake, or it may be another set of reasons entirely.
What is clear, though, is that adultery (of any sort) is most destructive to a marriage if the parties to the marriage are 1) romantics, 2) not embedded in a socio-cultural system that buttresses the marriage, and 3) not dependent upon one another for anything but companionship.
Prostitution's role in marriage has historically been to give the men who were either unmarried or who were in marriages that were 1) sexually mismatched, 2) unhappy, 3) unromantic, 4) characterized by disability, 5) involved a lot of distance a way to meet their sexual needs without threatening the social position of the wife or of the neighbors.
Part of the Progressive Revolution of the early 20th century was to enthrone Romance as the primary value in marriage (where it had previously been one value among many). The outlawing of prostitution coincided with (and, indeed, helped create) a chance in the culture around sexuality. Conservatives complained that it made every woman a whore, whores complained that it wrecked business by diluting demand. Many women found it liberating. Many other women found the demands of constant sexual gatekeeping uncomfortable. The results are what you see all around you today.
When it comes to culture, I am an ecologist. Monogamy is a cultural ecosystem that evolved over centuries. It has obvious advantages and positive externalities, and obvious disadvantages, and the ecosystem grew up to make it work. The luxuries and opportunities of modernity disturbed every single feature of the system. Now, almost all that we're left with is the Romantic ideal, which is something that was, in previous centuries, considered the most dangerous part of sex (as it should be, as it is the most volatile feature of human bonding).
Now we're in a post-monogamy world going through rapid iteration and selection to find a new mating system--hence why everything is currently ad-hoc. Unfortunately, around 90% of people are not so construted as to cope well with ad-hoc systems in the inner sphere of personal concern (this would take a long digression about psychometrics to unpack in detail--take it as read for the sake of argument for now), so we are sliding well down the behavioral sink. This has potentially catastrophic implications for our civilization, which is the only reason I get my knickers in a twist about it.
We will find a new mating system and ethos that works to perpetuate the species and the culture, or we won't. If we don't, the culture (at least) and the species will go extinct or will come very close before material conditions regress to the point that ancestral bonding norms for which we already have accessible scripts become viable again.
>>We will find a new mating system and ethos that works to perpetuate the species and the culture, or we won't.
We won't. We will return, as we always have done, to what works. There are large parts of the world, including many sub-cultures, which aren't actually in a 'post-monogamy' world :)
And that right there is why we keep talking past each other. I'm talking about the ground conditions that enable the system to work and what they must solve for. You're just talking morality.
Birth rates among non-Latin Catholcs and Mormons are now negative, birth rates among the *Amish* have fallen (though they're still healthy). The economic and technological ground conditions and the cultural technology that enable any known mating system to work well simply don't exist in the modern world. Therefore, my point stands--either we'll figure it out, or we'll have a hard population crash (and perhaps die out).
This isn't a moral problem, Von. It's an ecological one. Moral determination can only ever police the borders of a healthy culture, it can't (and never has) preserved a healthy culture in the face of ecological change. The cultures adapt, or they die.
>>If a couple lives together for a few months before marrying and then stays together and raises children together for decades, is that less effective because of the prior shacking up? Even if they are perfectly faithful throughout?
Sorry, I missed this in my first pass. I don't think that this example actually fits here, because I define this as monogamy. I think it is in my first definitions post. I would call this couple 100% monogamous.
>>For the purposes of this discussion alone I am proposing the definition of monogamy as: “The social practice of having only one sexual partner for life.”
In this new scenario, the pairing is not the first for either. In trying to find a mate, both had spent time living with other partners. Those earlier relationships failed, until they found each other.
The rest is the same, including a long term faithful and monogamous marriage with children. Is that marriage now worthless because neither was virgin when they met?
Well, the problem now is nothing in any of my posts speak of any marriage being 'worthless'. That is certainly not language I would use.
The question would be, is their marriage, and the wider social context, part of the 'death' of monogamy? Was their 'trying to find a mate' (sounds like wood ducks) part of a social context that is antithetical to monogamy, chastity, faithfulness...? It sounds like you are saying it is, and I agree.
Well, that raises the question of what “the death of monogamy” means. For me, the basic essence of monogamy is a couple committing to produce children and raise them together, while the end of monogamy is what we have in various parts of the country, where there is no expectation that fathers will know who their children are, that they would commit to raising them with those women.
So I consider the newer scenario to fit within monogamy as it is important. It’s not perfect, but under the current realities of secular society, it’s a lot better than the way we’re creating so many fatherless kids.
Yeah, the difference here is that I'm not focusing on the level of the individual, but the culture or society. So I would say that this scenario consists of parts A, B, and C... and A and B *aren't* monogamous, and *C* is. So I make no claim as to what it all adds up, but I do wish to say that *C* isn't a trait of a monogamous system.
I’m skeptical about the reliability of polygamous relations as regards committing to raising children. I’m debating with someone on Facebook, though, who argues that they would be reliable. I’m uncomfortable with the idea, but willing to be open minded. But if that does reliably work… I just don’t know.
>>he end of monogamy is what we have in various parts of the country, where there is no expectation that fathers will know who their children are, that they would commit to raising them with those women.
I would agree that that is a strong part of the death of monogamy. Would J. Daniel??
It certainly doesn't help, but I think it's an effect that feeds back into the causes.
The ultimate causes are economic and social (the two are so tied up together that it's almost impossible to disentangle them):
The death of the extended family, the death of pseudo-kinship networks, the home ceasing to be a hub of economic productivity and instead becoming an economic sink, the invention of the mortgage and building codes sending the price of housing sky high, I could go on listing at least fifty items.
Marriage customs are always and everywhere an adaptation of the family to the economic and social circumstances of the time, and these things feed back on each other. For monogamy to work, the couple and their children must either be economically productive enough that life is better together than apart, or they must be embedded in a kinship-type network that makes life better together than apart.
Without that, the only thing you have holding the family together is individual grit and relationship skills, and that means you will have a very low opt-in rate and a fairly high attrition rate, as both of these things are distributed among humans on a Pareto curve.
I’m very confused by this post. Is there a goal? If you want to talk about monogamy dying, why does the “ideal” matter? It sounds as though you are setting yourself up to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Is the goal to talk about why monogamy is dying? If so, what is the data? Among whom is it dying? If a couple lives together for a few months before marrying and then stays together and raises children together for decades, is that less effective because of the prior shacking up? Even if they are perfectly faithful throughout?
Ultimately it comes down to why we care and v our ultimate goal.
In order for the perfect to be the enemy of the good, it would have to be true that striving for the perfect would lead to failing at the good. Or, I suppose, being so intimidated by the perfect that you don't even try the good.
Let me use a rather apropos example: medicine. A doctor, wishing to heal an infection, might wish he had a drug that would instantly wipe out all of the infection, and at the same time fix all of the acommpanying symptoms. One shot and, bang, you're totally fixed and good to go.
That is NOT what medicine is like, obviously. They give you the shot, or the IV drug and, days later, one is still laying in the hospital bed. But the hypothetical perfect drug didn't prevent the doctor from giving the IV.
I believe that J. Daniel, on the other hand, is claiming that things like remaining a virgin before marriage, or not visiting prostitutes, is actually BAD for your marriage.
So my 'ultimate goal' is to glorify God, and the proximate means of doing that is being chaste and faithful in marriage, etc etc. To do that I need to know what chaste and faithful are... I need to define the ideal. Doesn't mean I will meet it. But I do have to define it.
Sounds like an opportunity for clarification
Not what I'm claiming at all--I, indeed, explicitly said the contrary in my post. I'm saying that for monogamy to be a successful social norm, it needs support pins, and that one of those pins historically is prostitution (also the extended family and other kinship-like networks). Virgin-on-wedding-night is a whole bag of rocks I didn't touch on and don't care to. Suffice it to say that, my own personal opinions aside, I've known many couples who have had decades-long successful marriages--some who were virgins at the altar, some who weren't. Which was which clusters entirely based on age of bride and groom at the wedding. Below 22, virginity is pretty common. Above, less and less so. Doesn't have an effect on marital outcomes once you control for differences in subcultural support.
Do you have a link to the research that speaks of 'once you control for...'? Cause I would love to know how they worded that.
Now I am a bit confused as to your view of prostitution. The standard view is, of course, that it is bad for a marriage. Certainly lots of marriages have broken up when the wife found out her husband was visiting prostitutes, mistresses, or the wife next door. But you seem to say it is good for marriage.
Do you mean that only on a cultural basis? Or would you include individuals?
"Once you control for" -- oh man, these books are literally buried in a storage unit in another state, so I'm gonna have to summarize as best I can.
Among poor people, divorce rates are consistently lowest in groups where there is a church, an extended family, or other such pressures present. Divorce stratifies radically by class, with rates declining as wealth increases.
Sexual practices also stratify by class, with lower classes having the most chaotic sexual customs, middle classes being the tamest, and upper classes being most likely to maintain mistresses and such. This scales pretty directly with income. Charismatic religiosity (i.e. personal devotional faith) also declines markedly with every step one makes on the way up the socioeconomic ladder (formal religiosity also declines, but its proportion of religiosity expands at the expense of the charismatic).
As to why this happens, one could posit a number of reasons:
It may be genetic--the inborn traits that predispose one to be less personally chaotic push one's family quickly up the socio-economic ladder.
It may be cultural--the values and approach to morality that allows for limited indulgence as the result of deferred gratification may push people up the socio-economic ladder and also result in more stable family situations.
It may be a mix of both, or it may be political, or the result of laws that make marriages harder to break up when more property is at stake, or it may be another set of reasons entirely.
What is clear, though, is that adultery (of any sort) is most destructive to a marriage if the parties to the marriage are 1) romantics, 2) not embedded in a socio-cultural system that buttresses the marriage, and 3) not dependent upon one another for anything but companionship.
Prostitution's role in marriage has historically been to give the men who were either unmarried or who were in marriages that were 1) sexually mismatched, 2) unhappy, 3) unromantic, 4) characterized by disability, 5) involved a lot of distance a way to meet their sexual needs without threatening the social position of the wife or of the neighbors.
Part of the Progressive Revolution of the early 20th century was to enthrone Romance as the primary value in marriage (where it had previously been one value among many). The outlawing of prostitution coincided with (and, indeed, helped create) a chance in the culture around sexuality. Conservatives complained that it made every woman a whore, whores complained that it wrecked business by diluting demand. Many women found it liberating. Many other women found the demands of constant sexual gatekeeping uncomfortable. The results are what you see all around you today.
When it comes to culture, I am an ecologist. Monogamy is a cultural ecosystem that evolved over centuries. It has obvious advantages and positive externalities, and obvious disadvantages, and the ecosystem grew up to make it work. The luxuries and opportunities of modernity disturbed every single feature of the system. Now, almost all that we're left with is the Romantic ideal, which is something that was, in previous centuries, considered the most dangerous part of sex (as it should be, as it is the most volatile feature of human bonding).
Now we're in a post-monogamy world going through rapid iteration and selection to find a new mating system--hence why everything is currently ad-hoc. Unfortunately, around 90% of people are not so construted as to cope well with ad-hoc systems in the inner sphere of personal concern (this would take a long digression about psychometrics to unpack in detail--take it as read for the sake of argument for now), so we are sliding well down the behavioral sink. This has potentially catastrophic implications for our civilization, which is the only reason I get my knickers in a twist about it.
We will find a new mating system and ethos that works to perpetuate the species and the culture, or we won't. If we don't, the culture (at least) and the species will go extinct or will come very close before material conditions regress to the point that ancestral bonding norms for which we already have accessible scripts become viable again.
>>We will find a new mating system and ethos that works to perpetuate the species and the culture, or we won't.
We won't. We will return, as we always have done, to what works. There are large parts of the world, including many sub-cultures, which aren't actually in a 'post-monogamy' world :)
And that right there is why we keep talking past each other. I'm talking about the ground conditions that enable the system to work and what they must solve for. You're just talking morality.
Birth rates among non-Latin Catholcs and Mormons are now negative, birth rates among the *Amish* have fallen (though they're still healthy). The economic and technological ground conditions and the cultural technology that enable any known mating system to work well simply don't exist in the modern world. Therefore, my point stands--either we'll figure it out, or we'll have a hard population crash (and perhaps die out).
This isn't a moral problem, Von. It's an ecological one. Moral determination can only ever police the borders of a healthy culture, it can't (and never has) preserved a healthy culture in the face of ecological change. The cultures adapt, or they die.
Well, once you find the books I would be interested in hearing what they mean by 'controlled for...'
>>If a couple lives together for a few months before marrying and then stays together and raises children together for decades, is that less effective because of the prior shacking up? Even if they are perfectly faithful throughout?
Sorry, I missed this in my first pass. I don't think that this example actually fits here, because I define this as monogamy. I think it is in my first definitions post. I would call this couple 100% monogamous.
>>For the purposes of this discussion alone I am proposing the definition of monogamy as: “The social practice of having only one sexual partner for life.”
Ok that’s fair. Let me push a bit more, then.
In this new scenario, the pairing is not the first for either. In trying to find a mate, both had spent time living with other partners. Those earlier relationships failed, until they found each other.
The rest is the same, including a long term faithful and monogamous marriage with children. Is that marriage now worthless because neither was virgin when they met?
Well, the problem now is nothing in any of my posts speak of any marriage being 'worthless'. That is certainly not language I would use.
The question would be, is their marriage, and the wider social context, part of the 'death' of monogamy? Was their 'trying to find a mate' (sounds like wood ducks) part of a social context that is antithetical to monogamy, chastity, faithfulness...? It sounds like you are saying it is, and I agree.
Well, that raises the question of what “the death of monogamy” means. For me, the basic essence of monogamy is a couple committing to produce children and raise them together, while the end of monogamy is what we have in various parts of the country, where there is no expectation that fathers will know who their children are, that they would commit to raising them with those women.
So I consider the newer scenario to fit within monogamy as it is important. It’s not perfect, but under the current realities of secular society, it’s a lot better than the way we’re creating so many fatherless kids.
Yeah, the difference here is that I'm not focusing on the level of the individual, but the culture or society. So I would say that this scenario consists of parts A, B, and C... and A and B *aren't* monogamous, and *C* is. So I make no claim as to what it all adds up, but I do wish to say that *C* isn't a trait of a monogamous system.
>>the basic essence of monogamy is a couple committing to produce children and raise them together,
So if they did this... but had an open marriage, or a polygamous marriage, would that still be 'monogamous'? In your view?
I’m skeptical about the reliability of polygamous relations as regards committing to raising children. I’m debating with someone on Facebook, though, who argues that they would be reliable. I’m uncomfortable with the idea, but willing to be open minded. But if that does reliably work… I just don’t know.
>>he end of monogamy is what we have in various parts of the country, where there is no expectation that fathers will know who their children are, that they would commit to raising them with those women.
I would agree that that is a strong part of the death of monogamy. Would J. Daniel??
It certainly doesn't help, but I think it's an effect that feeds back into the causes.
The ultimate causes are economic and social (the two are so tied up together that it's almost impossible to disentangle them):
The death of the extended family, the death of pseudo-kinship networks, the home ceasing to be a hub of economic productivity and instead becoming an economic sink, the invention of the mortgage and building codes sending the price of housing sky high, I could go on listing at least fifty items.
Marriage customs are always and everywhere an adaptation of the family to the economic and social circumstances of the time, and these things feed back on each other. For monogamy to work, the couple and their children must either be economically productive enough that life is better together than apart, or they must be embedded in a kinship-type network that makes life better together than apart.
Without that, the only thing you have holding the family together is individual grit and relationship skills, and that means you will have a very low opt-in rate and a fairly high attrition rate, as both of these things are distributed among humans on a Pareto curve.
https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/are-the-chads-having-more-sex-than