It's important to recognise that western organised religion stomped on a great many multi-millenia gender roles and cultural traditions about the globe via colonisation.
Promoting what might made right as "the norm" severely downplays the alternative collective learning of uncountable generations.
Sure, but let's be honest that the majority of humanity stabilized around a man and woman having children in a monogamous relationship, with a minority practicing polygamy. The rest were tiny outliers numbers wise.
That's not quite the blank slate that some people imply humans are, imho.
You have to get into pretty small and obscure populations before you come across meaningfully “alternative” constructions.
Polygamy has been widespread throughout history, eg:
In accordance with the marriage-customs of the Egyptians the priests have but one wife, but any other man takes as many as he may determine; and the Egyptians are required to raise all their children in order to increase the population, on the ground that large numbers are the greatest factor in increasing the prosperity of both country and cities.
It's been widespread throughout the western christian church also - Popes weren't the only ones with multiple families.
> What grinds my gears about this is that it’s always some white American invoking the moral sanction of unspecified black and brown people.
What grinds my gears is the sheer number of idiots that assume the internet is made up of white American males.
Some of us were tagging along on logistics runs and meeting the Minangkabau, the Bugis, the Fore, and many many other people in the 1960s.
To the best of my recollection Paul Gauguin wasn't hanging out in Tahiti for the grinding monogamy.
Still, it's hard to bame people in a post missionary world for having culturally blinkered views formed by the pinhole of white saviour pamphlets.
> Some of us were tagging along on logistics runs and meeting the Minangkabau, the Bugis, the Fore, and many many other people in the 1960s
See my point about small populations. Indonesia has 278 million people, of which the Minangkabau comprise 8 million. What’s the gender norms of the dominant Javanese culture? Are they accepting of polyamory?
And white travelers like Gauguin really have little insight into foreign cultures. Sex tourism is much more a legacy of colonialism than monogamy.
Still too early to tell otherwise.
If you want to quote from the Bible:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
So even looking at porn or thinking sexual thoughts about anyone else is engaging in a poly relationship. By that standard, nearly everyone is in a poly relationship.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith."
Because of Christ's grace, your belief is sufficient even if your acts are not.
Don't you find it weird that doing the bad thing but agreeing that it is bad is... okay, while deciding the thing is okay is... heresy?
In one, you try to be better but aren't always successful. In the other, you've embraced the bad.
otherwise you're <insert name of belief>, in name only.
mercy and justice are apprioriate outcomes for breaking the rules, not just 'yolo whatever i believe so everything is permitted'.
There what someone believes, and what someone says they believe.
People are (ought to be) in state of continual improvement.
There is a difference between what things are common weaknesses and what things are social ideals. Just because sloth is not unusual, doesn't make it culturally acceptable.
> looking at porn or thinking sexual thoughts about anyone else is engaging in a poly relationship.
It is a poly relationship in your heart, which a step in the direction of an actual poly relationship.
Lust/adultry, anger/assault, envy/theft, etc.
"For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."
Or, later in the same letter, Paul speaks about his own struggles:
“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Rom 7:18-19
> Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions.
Some of the cultural norms you named there are millions of years old and show little variance across cultures and time. Others only a few millennia old at best and show very high variance.
Examine any of these “fundamental norms” and see that they were not so fundamental after all. With their narratives built to enforce cultural norms today, not genuinely explore lessons from the past.
My grandma will _insist_ that homosexuality simply didn’t exist when she was younger. This is the “sophisticated” product you speak of - a blatant denial of reality.
There are tradeoffs to every path, many only visible long after the path is taken.
It’s easy to reject the old path because the tradeoffs are visible and it’s clearly not perfect.
That doesn’t mean the new path is going to be better - just less known.
I agree in this case, but only because I think marriage is an institution that we’ve learned needs (sometimes strong) active endorsement and it’s pro-social.
My view is that cultural norms are at worst tyrannical and at best the essence of being human.
> Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions.
This is just true. But this is all of us: we all have a relationship with society around us and dismiss parts of it. As we should.
Wisdom in one context can be foolishness in another. To live a good life it is necessary to re-evaluate the actions of your forebears and determine if it is still applicable to your modern context. That doesn't make someone a "social iconoclast", it makes them wise. Our ancestors did the same thing to their ancestors. Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, and our societies have changed a lot since then, and will continue to change.
Note that I personally have no desire to be anything other than monogamous, but I know several people (both young and elderly) who are successfully polyamorous. I also know people who have catastrophically failed at polyamory; but then, of course, I also know people who have catastrophically failed at monogamy.
As far as I'm concerned, normalizing polyamory will strengthen monogamy. It seems like some people out there just aren't cut out for monogamy, and in a monogamous world they inevitably become cheaters. Let the polyamorous people remove themselves from the monogamous dating pool and you will exclusively remove people who would otherwise be compelled to cheat.
To be clear, in my example, polyamorous people are only a problem for society because that society has decided that polyamorous people are a problem. I am advocating for basing our societal mores on reasonable consideration from first principles rather than simply tradition.
> But I think there’s a much larger group of people that could do it in a society that offers them strong support and reinforcement, who will fail and flounder in a society that leaves them free to make choices.
While it is certainly possible to argue against the notion of such-and-such freedom, this appears to be making the following argument: "it is possible to imagine that individual freedom will result in undesirable collective outcomes, therefore, all of our traditional restrictions on individual freedom are necessary and may not be challenged." I find this argument to be unconvincing.
The support for this argument that you have given is of the general form: "I am incentivized to be a good husband because I would suffer socially if I were not; therefore, monogamy incentivizes positive relationships." I will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior. My in-laws are proof of this: my mother-in-law refuses to divorce for religious reasons, despite the fact that my father-in-law is both abusive and a proven cheater. Her misery and guilt over her husband's infidelity does not benefit society in the least. And lest you think that this is a problem of society failing to properly ostracize the husband, rest assured that his children refuse to speak to him and he does not care in the slightest.
I’m pretty sure that no kid has thought to themselves “I wish my parents had a bunch of unstable relationships with many different people.” That’s not a social construct. Monogamy is one of the most universal social constructs, embraced by different, unrelated cultures that differ along many other dimensions. How did all those different societies reach the same arbitrary “decision?”
> will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior.
Empirically, American subcultures in where divorce is taboo, such as Asians, Mormons, etc., are more successful—e.g. their kids have higher economic mobility—than other Americans. Indeed, divorce as a phenomenon has largely affected the lower classes. In affluent WASP circles divorce may not be as openly condemned the way it was, but it’s still taboo in a way that it isn’t among, say, Appalachians.
You're begging the question. Polyamory doesn't imply instability any more than monogomy does. I know people who have been in decades-long poly relationship.
What I do see happen often in poly and poly-adjacent communities, especially those with children, is that children become a more communal responsibility, somewhat mimicking the effect of larger, multi-generational households you see in Asian and Hispanic communities, which usually leads to higher stability and better outcomes.
It’s doesn’t logically imply it. But statistically they are much more unstable. There’s studies that show 90+% of open marriages end in divorce.
The study you're citing doesn't actually have a methodology that one can interrogate about how it reached this figure, and there's some fairly common patterns like opening a marriage in response to infidelity, that would create a misleading correlation between open marriages and unstable ones.
That's vastly different from entering into a relationship with the intent to be non-monogamous (and perhaps already having multiple partners), but is probably much more common, because, for whatever reason there's less of a taboo on sleeping around while married than on having multiple committed romantic relationships.
Not that normal marriages are sunshine and rainbows. But I have yet to see a poly marriage with kids that wasn’t deeply disturbing. Though of course the primary folks said everything was fine.
We don’t have enough data to tease out the cause. We can only say that open marriages, for whatever reason, are less stable than closed ones.
Asian multi-generational family structures are often invoked to justify fatherless children raised “by the community,” etc., and it drives me nuts. There is nothing liberal about us—we have some of the most rigid marriage norms and gender roles around.
You're again begging the question!
Non-nuclear doesn't imply non-durable!
Any problem for the society is like that. You can say robberies are a problem only because society decided it is. That's how society works - there's no some external source where it could be checked, so the implication that it's arbitrary baseless decision because it is social is wrong - all rules of thd society are such, so if you want to have any rules at all, those would be the ones you'd have. It's impossible to have a society where everyone derives their morals from the physical laws anew all the time.
I agree this is decidedly positive for the monogamous folks. There is now less risk of them connecting with and falling in love with someone who isn’t a good match.
Birth control is a radical invention and it is shocking that it hasn’t led to even more rapid cultural change than it has.
One also needs to separate generalized cultural knowledge from individual knowledge. As people mature, they should tend to individuate and discover “what works for them” vs “what works for society”.
That individual knowledge can be bootstrapped on cultural knowledge, but ultimately we may each need to reject aspects of our culture in order to discover our unique path.
The information surface area and processing power of 8 billion people far exceeds the few bits representing your “handful of archetypes and social roles”.
Anyone who believes that Western civilization has been largely functional should soundly reject these ideas and agree that individuation is a fundamentally Good Thing.
And Asia has its own distinct issue, which is that development coincided with population control evangelism from the west.
And yes, it begun in the second half of the 20th century, but I don't think that makes it spurious.
I wouldn't be surprised if western cultural influence played a meaningful role, but I can't imagine that explaining the entire phenomenon.
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility (see the graph at the top)
* https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#total-fertility-ra...
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-w...
As you might know, Malthus was quite concerned about the issues of overpopulation. His solution was to educate women. This seems to be working surprisingly well !
Really? I never knew this! Can you expand on his rhetoric at all?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aehr.12250
I seem to remember that he practiced what he preached (not only as the first ever professor of economics, but also as a pastor), and has founded at least one school for women, but annoyingly I can't seem to find the source any more ??
Of note also : by the end of the 19th century the (neo-)Malthusian feminists had already embraced ideas that he disagreed with like contraception and for some even abortion.
Individuals in the western capitalist society spend most of their time making capitalists of all sorts exceedingly wealthy, rather than spending most of their time on themselves.
Give us 4 - 6 months off a year like our ancestors had, and we'll have plenty of children
I was having lunch with some of my dad’s USAID friends, and someone joked whether my wife and I were thinking of having a fourth. Then someone reflexively said “well nobody needs four kids.”
Well, most of that is highly variable and contingent, local. Ask an anthropologist, they'll tell you.
Personally, I don't think one should prescribe the "one true" form of family for other people.
The question you raise in my mind is "What are you going to do to the non-conformists?"
This norm was not evenly distributed. Generally, if you were a peasant (and especially a woman), you were expected to adhere to the norms rigidly. While those with means or power frequently got to flaunt them or even started their own religions to get around them[1]. To me it just looks like another lever of control for the powerful over the "plebs".
At many points in time this quote could easily apply to monogamous marriage, men having multiple wives and/or concubines, and consanguineous marriage.
Referring to the other comment about human morals evolving - religion is evolving as well, although it learned to cover it up. Catholicism is my favorite here, because it's perfected the art of bullshitting itself. For example, divorce is not allowed - but if you look for "evidence" that the partner has misled you into a marriage, then we call it "Marriage never happened" and boom - your not-a-divorce has been granted. Abortion suddenly in the spotlight? It's because our understanding has evolved and it's only now that we see that it's never been acceptable. And so on.
There is a common view of cultural norms as at worst tyrannical or at best random and arbitrary, rather than the sophisticated and curated product of billions of human lives.
Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, gender roles, and cultural traditions. Base human psychology and sociology must bow to their intellect and are theirs to shape as they choose.
> For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
> Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
> Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
> Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
> For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
> Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.