Welmer

In my last post concerning marriage I created a hellish picture of its current state, suggesting that there is sufficient cause for its abolition. I think it’s important for people to think seriously about this. When something has gone so horribly wrong as contemporary marriage has, it is time to evaluate its worth. We should ask whether there is anything redeeming about the institution, and weigh its benefits against its drawbacks. Obviously, many men are doing so, and many have come to the conclusion that marriage has little to offer them. Some still have an optimistic attitude about marriage because, I can only surmise, hope springs eternal, and others defend it as a bastion of decency and the foundation of monogamy. However, I’d like to emphasize that I am not advocating the abolition of monogamous relationships – far from it – but instead the contemporary legal incarnation of marriage, which has become the bane of the monogamous relationship.

Today, monogamous relationships survive in spite of marriage — not because of it. For women, the act of getting married is the prize; for men the only remaining benefit is social approval and a few tax breaks. No fault divorce has eliminated any guarantee of fidelity while presenting a serious financial (not to mention psychological) threat. Where children are concerned, legitimacy is meaningless, and both child custody and support are determined without regard to marital status. Homosexuals can now convincingly argue that their civil rights are being violated by not having access to the legal privileges of an institution that has been reduced to a lifestyle choice (which, unlike homosexuality, can be discarded at will) and serves no definite purpose other than to manufacture drama.

Over the years (actually, probably over the millennia), it has been said many times that marriage is about procreation, but illegitimacy rates in the US show that to be false. For example, if the black population of the United States lacked out of wedlock births, there would be far fewer young black Americans today. This is coming to be true for American whites as well. People are perfectly capable of replacing themselves without rings and white dresses. In fact, as primitive tribes demonstrate, all they really need is food, and the rest can be taken care of in a manner little different from wild animals.

If marriage has never been necessary for the maintenance of our species, what was its original purpose? First, in all likelihood, to keep the peace. In the animal kingdom, ritualized violence is often an important aspect of sexual competition. Humans, however, are equipped with a far more deadly weapon — reason. The lower mammals may fight hard for female attention, but some genetic imperative prevents them from killing each other, whereas humans (as well as chimps — our closest cousins) discovered that murder is far more conclusive in settling the matter of which male gets the prize. Indeed, women have been taken as booty from the earliest days of tribal skirmishes with spears and clubs.

Old fashioned murder was not particularly different from the modern sort. It was often a group effort, which we know as “war.” Warfare over females is common in hunter gatherer societies, and serves as a check on population growth not only due to the murder of men but the associated killing of their children. Even the most primitive tribesmen must have known that when a man is deprived of female companionship, he becomes inclined to take a female by any practical means. Men with female sexual partners must have felt rather nervous about this, and so developed pacts with other men to protect their status with their women. Thus the concept of marriage developed as a mutual recognition between men of the legitimacy of the male/female reproductive partnership. As long as this recognition existed within a given tribe, peace would be easier to preserve, and both men and children were safer than otherwise.

However, guarantees within a tribe didn’t generally apply to outsiders, and raids for women characterize primitive societies both past and present. The easiest tribes to raid were certainly those that had no concept of marriage, because the males would not be inclined to defend other men who had no respect for their own status with women. Repeated over time, this guaranteed the eclipse of tribes without a clear concept of marriage by those that did. Eventually, certain tribes figured out that they could procure cooperation from others through marital exchange. In some tribes, this became a mandate. The Tlingit Indians of southest Alaska were divided into several different exogamous clans in which men and women of one clan were required to marry into another, ensuring a cooperative relationship throughout a relatively large population spread over hundreds of miles. This increased the power of the Tlingit to the point where they were able to maintain a large population of slaves from nearby, less politically sophisticated tribes. In China it is still taboo to marry someone of the same surname, despite the fact that some surnames are shared by tens of millions of people. This is probably a relic of enforced exogamy, practiced to strengthen interclan cooperation in the distant past.

As civilization began to take hold and economic and cultural specialization grew increasingly sophisticated, the family took on more importance as a source of training for children, thereby adding another practical benefit to marriage. Economic specialization in particular made training of children beneficial not only to children, but to their family as a whole. Thus, in addition to maintaining political stability, marriage also began to contribute to economic progress and prosperity. Eventually, the codification of marriage throughout every level of highly stratified societies became an invaluable tool for rulers to enhance the strength of their power base. Until very recently, the state continued to promote marriage for this reason. In fact, it took a major ideological shift and the upheavals of the 20th century to break this institutional tradition.

It has only been a few decades since absolute individualism became the governing philosophy of the West, and the effects can be seen most strongly in the disruption to the traditional idea of the family. Although the government still preserves some legal relics of the previous norm, including the recognition of marriage and certain tax categories, it is an undeniable fact that the family has taken a subordinate role in regards to the desires – however transient – of the individual. No fault divorce, decriminalization of adultery and skyrocketing illegitimacy rates bear this out. The law has changed to reflect the new state of affairs, treating marriage and its dissolution as economic transactions while ignoring the effects they have on social stability. This is justified on the dictate that individual freedoms and rights trump, or are in the interest of, the greater good. This may be true or false. There is no doubt that some highly collectivist societies (such as North Korea) can turn out very badly by a number of measures, but the philosophy of extreme individualism often masks collective efforts by one group to gain leverage over another.

Whether the West’s extreme individualism is good or bad on the balance is of little concern in an effort to revive an institution that is on life support and in danger of catastrophic failure — there simply isn’t enough time to reevalute our civilization’s shibboleths to revive marriage as it was. Rather, we must work with what we have, which is a strong focus on civil rights and freedoms. From that perspective, it can be argued that the traditional concept of marriage is a fundamentally unjust institution that privileges some people at the expense of others, and in fact unreasonably restricts the rights of those who enter into it. Therefore, the abolition of marriage must be considered to achieve a greater degree of freedom and justice in society. States may retain civil partnerships entered into under contractual agreements, but these must be little different from corporations or partnerships entered into for business purposes.

If marriage were done away with, what would be left of the family? Legally, nothing, which may turn out to be for the better. And what of the children, then? It may appear that this would leave children with little or no support in a great number of cases, and this is where a radical implementation of our concepts of civil rights is required: rather than casting childrearing as a duty incumbent on parents, a child’s right to his or her parents must be recognized by the law. Essentially, parenting should be considered a child’s civil right. Parents who shirk childrearing could be considered violators of their children’s civil rights, as could parents who deprive their child of the other parent. A parent who refuses to raise his or her child should be held civilly liable for support of the child, but only if that parent voluntarily shuns childrearing responsibility. Viewing parenting as a child’s right could reframe the debates going on in family law courts across the country, and give parents an incentive to cooperate rather than throw the dice with an adversarial legal system. In effect, trying to remove one parent’s custodial privileges would become an argument against the presumption of the child’s civil right to parents rather than a fight between two parents over who gets the prize. By reframing the debate over custody in these terms, there could be a revolutionary change in the behavior of parents in a cooperative childrearing relationship, as they would have no legal incentive to terminate that relationship unless it could be definitively proven to be in the best interest of the child.

I’d like to expand upon this idea in a later post, because I think such a concept could be implemented under current social norms, and it could have a broadly beneficial effect on children and society in general. This could represent the evolution of marriage from its primitive roots through to a modern concept of a childrearing partnership that would preserve all of the former benefits while also guaranteeing the rights of the child to an upbringing that prepares him or her for a fulfilling life in our society.