Unless and until it does. And it most certainly will.
Does it matter, this kind of imposed social change? Who knows. Maybe we in the West have simply been doing it wrong all these years, relying on some ancient set of mores written by desert-dwelling goat herders who, when they weren’t cowering in fear of Yahweh or hoarding shekels, likely had their dicks in the livestock.
Too, there are probably plenty of societies in world history that accepted polyamory and adopted different (and to us), non-traditional “family” arrangements — it takes a village! after all — and they have gotten along just fine, producing stable, industrious, and healthy cultures. Which is easily provable. If we could find them.
Honestly? The libertarian part of me doesn’t much care about such living arrangements, save the effects they may have on law and the tax code. While another part of me worries about, yes, the children — and about the political aspects of such attempts to deconstruct the traditional family structure (which, as many same sex marriage activists have admitted, is the very reason for their campaign; they wish to deconstruct traditional society, not find acceptance within it — which is why they demand “tolerance” go but one way).
All of which is a long way of saying that it looks like we’ve finally “reasoned” ourselves out of the very structures that have produced for us stability and prosperity, once coupled with free market capitalism and individual freedom. Which, like the traditional family unit, are also being pressured into submission by the leftist mores that demand a kind of egalitarian relativism.
Where we end up? Beats me. But in the end, I suspect that some countries will splinter as a result, and we’ll see a kind of logistical and demographic reworking of sovereign communities that reflect some of the basic beliefs about how the family and government is ordered.
As federalists, we believe that states get to act as social petri dishes. The problem comes when the courts determine that they must. If any of this brings along with it a change to how we obey the courts’ authority, maybe it’s for the best, in the long term.
Besides penning Of the Spirit of the Laws it was a kindness of old Montesquieu to write The Persian Letters, so we could see the squalor of Western mores through a vision of the splendor of Eastern polygamy.
Hopefully my grandchildren and great grandchildren will end up on a Savage Reservation someplace living out recognizably traditional lives for the amusement of the Alpha and Beta-plus tourists.
They’ll be better off.
The Roman Empire was rotting from within before the Vandals or Visigoths got to it.
I say for our next move after vilifying and de-legitimizing male/female marriage and other outre’ religious superstitions disguised as morals; let’s physically divide the country into two pieces.
That’ll work.
I’m guessing that this is one of the main reasons that traditional marriage acts have won in every state in which they are on the ballot. We’ve seen the Left incrementalism so many times not to see where marriage will be headed once they do away with one of the 2 components of marriage (opposite sex union between two people). And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see who this will really benefit – not those few transgressive/hippie groupings, but the more common Muslim polygamous marriages. Then what?
Put your burkha on and shut up woman. Your mere presence here is an insult to your father’s manhood. And your brothers ought to do something about it.
WHORE
– As the ‘villages’ go broke, one after another, particularly in Progressive enclaves/states. it will be interesting to see what the Left offers the Unions/public sector in lieu of money to keep them on the plantation.
– Me, I’m hoping for some potentially lucrative marketing idea’s.
First they have to run out of “other peoples money” extracted from enckaves and states that aren’t broke.
Podcast conversation on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Points in the direction why it didn’t happen here at the start, where something very bad did happen in France at the start (and has continued to happen now and again elsewhere across Europe and the rest of the world since).
This is why marriage should be defined by the people, via their legislatures and direct voter initiatives, and not by judicial decree.
Showtime is already ahead of the curve on this, they have a reality show titled ‘Polyamory’. I believe it’s filmed in California.
People still have Showtime?
They gave me a year for free to placate me when they screwed up real bad. I’ve probably watched six hours tops in nine months.
The Borgias is a damn good series.
[…] [who links this post — thanks] weighs-in with some spot-on analysis over at his joint. A highlight: …The libertarian part of me doesn’t much care about such living arrangements, save the […]
weighing in with the science pedantry:
Poly(x) relationships function on the tribal level fine. They generally seem to evolve as a response to there being an imbalance (both ratio- and power-wise) between the sexes, which means that it’s advantageous that extra members of the disadvantaged sex have members of the advantaged sex to attach themselves to in a relationship that’s not limited to pairwise. Plus, I’d say there seems to be some relationship between population size maintenance and the type of poly(x) that’s favored: polygynous cultures explode (r-selection), monogamous cultures tend to be slightly above replacement rate (r/K close to one), polyandrist cultures contract or stay nicely at replacement rate with every kid getting extra care (K-selection). Other group marriage variations seem to be a pretty new phenomenon and don’t appear to have a lot of adaptive value with an eye toward offspring, … but that’s probably the point.
Once you get much bigger than small religious or social groups, however, and the sex ratio gets closer to even, what you end up doing is vacuuming up members of the “x” sex in poly(x) into relationships that are completely inequitable. Single-couple family structure seems to work best in these environments both for the purposes of law-making in a fashion that benefits all parties involved (versus draconian polygynous societies) as well as perpetuating the fundamental unit of society (versus “let’s just all get married so we can be self-involved and never have kids” societies).
I’d wager a guess that most people would actually be Just Fine with there being other formalized social contracts that AREN’T marriage, provided marriage has the primary lock on reproduction. You want to have a formalized contract with somebody you’re boning so they get your life and health-insurance benefits if they get sick? Fine. You four best friends who aren’t boning still want to be able to watch out for each other down the line and so decide to pool your resources via contract? Also fine. You want to raise kids who’re genetically related to you in a fashion that will keep them from self-destructing once they hit puberty? Best idea is formalizing that with a partner of the opposite sex in a way your community can support, i.e., mawwiage.
But I think I had a long discussion a couple of years ago about how societies with ULTIMATE SEXUAL FREEDOM/MARRY EVERYBODY!!! can work fine with reproductive technology not available to us right now. Provided the kids are all raised separately. Because nothing spells the end of wanting to reproduce with somebody like the Westermarck effect, whether or not you’re genetically related.