The Polyamory Political Rift
May. 1st, 2003 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsCapitalism Magazines's Paul Blair has a rant in their on-line blog (which they somewhat arrogantly call their "news" page) in which he takes on James Taranto and Andrew Sullivan.
While normally my liberatarian principles are in full display, I'm afraid that I must agree here with Jonathan Rauch. Legalized polygamy would lead to a sexual underclass of men who will have no possible reproductive outlet. Blair asks, "What's wrong with that?"
The answer is simple: the end of civilization. Not "as we know it," but the end of civilization, period. Monogamy is the mechanism by which prosperous civilizations in times of relative peace guarantee that any disparity in available reproductive partners is not too great.
The evolutionary heritage of young men between the ages of 15 and 30 don't care about civilization. Those are the ages during which most young men are seeking reproductive partners-- and there is no controversy that young men who have not found one are forty times more likely to commit a violent crime than those who have.
Polygamous societies are traditionally exceptionally militaristic and continually at war. They have to be: they need to (a) kill off their surplus males or (b) provide those males with an opportunity to get laid, usually at the expense of a vanquished nation. Monogamous nations, on the other hand, don't have this problem; their male population is pacified by the awareness that every man stands a reasonable chance of acquiring a mate.
Blair objects that this sounds like some "feminist caricature," but Blair's objection is straight out of the "social studies" left-wing anti-science screeds: because you cannot really say what one person believes in his heart, it's unreasonable to try and model a society on what you cannot know. But that's simply wrong: although we can't know the state of any one mind, people in large groups do respond in predicatable ways, those ways are well understood, the mechanism of stimulus and response quite valuable and repeatable.
On the one hand, Blair's objection is understandable: in a perfect world it would not be the government's role to dictate what kind of relationships we should have. On the other hand, Rauch is likewise correct: legalized polygamy would have a devastating effect on our civilization. A large underclass of men with nothing to live for, no hope of establishing a family, none of the pacifying and civilizing effects of the companionship of women, will take out their anger and retribution on the rest of us.
Echoing Santorum, Kurtz raises the possibility of a "slippery slope" leading from same-sex marriage to polygamy. But one can easily draw a distinction. The widespread practice of polygamy would have great social costs. It would distort the sexual marketplace by creating an undersupply of marriageable women. The result is the creation of what Jonathan Rauch calls a "sexual underclass" of "low-status men" whose prospects for marriage are virtually nil...
What business is it of the government whether or not someone "reduces the marriage pool"? [...] This is completely antithetical to any notion of individual rights, let alone human decency. This is yet another example of conservatives' willingness to dispense with rational principles.
While normally my liberatarian principles are in full display, I'm afraid that I must agree here with Jonathan Rauch. Legalized polygamy would lead to a sexual underclass of men who will have no possible reproductive outlet. Blair asks, "What's wrong with that?"
The answer is simple: the end of civilization. Not "as we know it," but the end of civilization, period. Monogamy is the mechanism by which prosperous civilizations in times of relative peace guarantee that any disparity in available reproductive partners is not too great.
The evolutionary heritage of young men between the ages of 15 and 30 don't care about civilization. Those are the ages during which most young men are seeking reproductive partners-- and there is no controversy that young men who have not found one are forty times more likely to commit a violent crime than those who have.
Polygamous societies are traditionally exceptionally militaristic and continually at war. They have to be: they need to (a) kill off their surplus males or (b) provide those males with an opportunity to get laid, usually at the expense of a vanquished nation. Monogamous nations, on the other hand, don't have this problem; their male population is pacified by the awareness that every man stands a reasonable chance of acquiring a mate.
Blair objects that this sounds like some "feminist caricature," but Blair's objection is straight out of the "social studies" left-wing anti-science screeds: because you cannot really say what one person believes in his heart, it's unreasonable to try and model a society on what you cannot know. But that's simply wrong: although we can't know the state of any one mind, people in large groups do respond in predicatable ways, those ways are well understood, the mechanism of stimulus and response quite valuable and repeatable.
On the one hand, Blair's objection is understandable: in a perfect world it would not be the government's role to dictate what kind of relationships we should have. On the other hand, Rauch is likewise correct: legalized polygamy would have a devastating effect on our civilization. A large underclass of men with nothing to live for, no hope of establishing a family, none of the pacifying and civilizing effects of the companionship of women, will take out their anger and retribution on the rest of us.
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Date: 2003-05-02 06:41 am (UTC)Personally I would like to have gender totally redefined, where you can choose both your physical gender and your self-identified (psyche?) gender. But then again maybe thats just my screwed up sexual identity speaking...
From Elf's post: "the pacifying and civilizing effects of the companionship of women"... Hmph. Indeed. But how do you define women? I certainly have the opposite effect on my partners and I'm supposedly a woman. I hate blanket statements like that, even though I'm sure I'm guilty of them at times.