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Who Said Ideas Don't Have Consequences?
According to the Washington Post, there is a movement underway to legalize polygamy. They are doing so on the same grounds as those advocating the recognition of gay marriage: personal choice. While autonomy is useful means of discussing individual decision-making (like abortion, for example), it is a very bad way of looking at social relationships. This is because such relationships have a tendency to hierarchy and exploitation. When we say that people's choices are always sacrosanct, we disarm ourselves against those who claim that those they are taking advantage of are choosing to be oppressed. This is a road down which we surely do not want to travel.
I wrote about the problem that polygamy presents to those defending gay marriage rights back in March. At the time Charles Krauthammer was attempting to extend the arguments used by gay rights advocates to polygamy. I think he was right to draw this comparison.
This is NOT to say that I think gay marriage should remain illegal. I think it should be legalized, and that polygamy should remain illegal. Polygamy is unacceptable because it is inherently exploitative. Gay marriage isn't. It's as simple as that.
The lesson of this situation is that we need to be very careful when presenting arguments. If we do so in a sloppy way, we may empower our opponents on other issues as they throw our words back in our faces.
10 Comments:
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I disagree with the basic premise of your argument regarding why people marry. Your perspective - that marriage is a solemn commitment to love someone else and spend your life with that person - is a very romanticized view that has been around only for the last 100 years. It is false for a couple reasons. First, love is a highly rational choice. There is a specific decision process that determines who we love and why. Second, the idealization of romantic love - having a single person who is your soul mate - is largely a side effect of the industrial revolution. With husbands spending a great deal of time in factories, women had to find a substitute for the physical husband. The substitute became the romance novel. Without the industrial revolution, the family would still be the primary social and economic unit. The family has always been the primary production mechanism with the family farm.
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100 years of romantic idealization of relationships between two individuals cannot erase the fundamental social and economic foundations for marriage. People don't marry each other simply because they love each other. They love the future potential and the current attributes of the mate. Both women and men search for a significant other who has a steady job, and promising career track, and the financial resources to raise a family. These resources are important because they help parents provide for the child(ren), and because they give the parents time to be with the childen (child rearing). This is the main reason why women are having a difficult time finding mates today: the men have fallen off the career track because they are not doing well in college compared to women. So, women go out and find the selection of possible mates to be very limited.
This is very good reason to justify polygamy. The family farm is no longer a viable economic unit, and the industrial base is being hollowed out. The only way to raise a child is with something close to a village, but the village has also been decimated by corporations moving employees everwhere around the world. Thus, the only way to provide children with the love and support they need, WITHOUT forcing women or men to stay home with the children permanently, is to have some sort of polygamy arrangement. You are probably correct that one woman married to, say, 10 men is probably moving toward exploitation of some type, just as one man married to 10 women leads to exploitation. So, the best arrangement is to have an equal number of partners married to each other: 5 women married, collectively, to five men. This type of arrangement would promote a healthy balance between work and family because it would force individuals to form a community around the marital relationship, instead of leaving the formation of community up to the whim of a corporate vice president or CEO.
Simply put, marriage should, ideally, be a combination of resource sharing, procreation, and love. You love the person who has access to resources that can help you raise a family. If a person cannot help you raise a family, you are very unlikely to marry that person. Divorce proceedings provide lots of indirect evidence for this rational process at work in couples. The divorce rate stands at 50% in this country. People marry for love, but then they discover that the partner does not know how to manage money well, and thus brings the family into debt, or the partner does not have plans to progress along the same life path or career track. Many marriages end because one partner wants more out of life, such as a higher income or more status from a high-paying job, but the other partner does not. With women now consistently making more money than men, the women are much more likely to file for divorce so that they can search for a partner who can be an equal partner in the marriage. This decision-process should be factored into any logic regarding polygamy.
Marriah, at 6:08 PM
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Sorry, but there is simply no way that people can sustain the intense emotional commitment required for marriage with multiple people. Your imagined scenario of multiple genders for each isn't marriage. It's the abolition of marriage.
By Arbitrista, at 8:15 AM
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P.S. The idea that romantic love is a product of modernity (whether the Romantic movement, or your notion that it comes from industrialization) is completely false. Romantic love within marriage goes way, way back. Go read the Odyssey and tell me that Odysseus and Penelope didn't have a romantic relationship.
By Arbitrista, at 9:33 AM
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"there is simply no way that people can sustain the intense emotional commitment required for marriage with multiple people." I agree. I also don't think it's possible with one person. Read STEPHANIE COONTZ's Op-Ed, "Too Close For Comfort" in the NYT. It is unrealistic to expect a single person to perform the function of an entire community.
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http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30A1FF83A5B0C748CDDA80994DE404482 Marriah, at 5:07 PM
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You must have a very happy marriage.
By Arbitrista, at 6:58 PM
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I do in fact! Because I don't expect my wife to share absolutely everything with me. We both have friends outside of our marriage, in contrast to those couples who have no friends except for each other. Polygamy is merely an institutional recognition that it does indeed take a village to raise a child. I'm not saying that I would ever join such an arrangement, but there isn't any reason for the government to prohibit it if a group of adults can make it work.
By Marriah, at 7:28 PM
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So much here to disagree with, marriah, but I'll just point out a couple of things:
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"If a person cannot help you raise a family, you are very unlikely to marry that person."
I strongly disagree with the underlying assumption here that people only marry to produce offspring. I got married with absolutely no plans to have children, and I know many other people who have done so as well.
With women now consistently making more money than men...
I sure would like to see some data to support that claim, because it doesn't match up with the world in which I am living. Repressed Librarian, at 2:31 PM
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There are many reasons to get married, and having kids may be the last reason to get married for many people. But the issue is about whether those same people stay married. I really don't think a couple will stay married if kids aren't in the picture. To put it another way, if one partner eventually wants children but the other does not, the marriage is heading for divorce. Regardless of one's reasons for getting married, I don't think people should get married unless they want to have children, largely because children become an investment into your own future. When your friends have died at the age of 90, only your children will be around to take care of you. Regarding women's income, the trend is about 1/3 or all wives now make more money than their husbands. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2005/jun/wk3/art04.htm
By Marriah, at 6:49 PM
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"I really don't think a couple will stay married if kids aren't in the picture."
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How many people with kids get divorced, Marriah? This is just an assertion you are making, not an argument.
"I don't think people should get married unless they want to have children."
My wife and I aren't going to have children. Are saying that we shouldn't have gotten married? Who the hell do you think you are?
And your statistic on male-female income disproves your point. First, the number only shows that 1/4 make more than their husbands if both work, not 1/3. And secondly, by inference 3/4 of men make more than their wives. And women only make 80% of what men do. How in the world does that support your hypothesis?
You appear to have a very screwed up definition of marriage Marriah. It's more than a little insulting for you to make pronouncements on who should and shouldn't get married based on your idiosyncratic beliefs. And it's pretty shoddy science to draw sweeping conclusions from very limited evidence that indicates the reverse of what you are attempting to demonstrate.
Have a nice Thanksgiving weekend. Arbitrista, at 3:57 PM
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Publius, I'm sure you and your wife have a great marriage. If both of you agree about your opinion about having kids, more power to you. Nonetheless, the quality of a marriage has little to do with having children. I believe that the family - not the individual - is the fundamental unit of society because it is the most enduring. If polygamists want to form a family in the institution of marriage, the state should allow them to do that. It's much more effective than forcing individuals to choose between two or more potential mates. The bond that two or more people have for each other hasn't evolved much since the days of the tribe or clan. With regard to women and there incomes, the statistics are not meant to show that there is a majority of women earning more. Instead, the statistics show a verifiable trend such that, in approximately 20-30 years, there will be more women who are better educated and thus bigger money makers than their husbands. The cost of sustaining a family has skyrocketed, and so many educated, successful women are deliberately choosing a husband who can pull his own weight when raising a family.
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For all of those statistical outliers out there, including you and Rebecca, my argument is not meant to denigrate anyone who chooses to get married without the prospect of children. However, it will be interesting to see if you are married in, say, 40 years. I hope you are, and the census reports that the number of married families is now in the minority compared to either childless couples or single families. If you manage to defy the statistical trends, that's fine. Just because I am pro-children doesn't meant that I will impose my choice on you and your friends. Yet, staying married despite the absence of children defies the odds. Polygamy, in this sense, allows you to defy the odds by allowing you to help raise someone else's biological child. Marriah, at 9:17 PM
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