At the risk of spinning this off on a tangent:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
1. The idea that polygamy is somehow contrary to the way humans are constructed has no grounds in science. Furthermore, most human societies have been polygamous in some form or another (polygamy by both sexes, polygamy by one sex, multiple marriages, open marriages, etc.) Furthermore, until about 1600, the three most advanced civilizations in the world (China, Ottoman, Central American) all practiced polygamy as a norm.
Except that polygamy in those cultures (hell, in pretty much all cultures in history that practiced it) primarily revolved around men controlling women and treating them like property. It was just as much about inheritance and family lines (and power/wealth) as such things were in Europe and arguably moreso. The number of wives didn't have anything to do with how liked you were, or how great a husband you were, but how wealthy and powerful you were. You took the females of other less wealthy families off their hands in return for them gaining a connection to your family. The idea of idealizing this form of polygamy is somewhat silly.
There are pretty close to zero examples of polygamy in history in which women were not treated as property. Polygamy existed up until more modern concepts of equal rights started to appear (and yes, in wester culture first). That's not to say that monogamy in Europe was all peaches and roses, but it absolutely was a step in a better direction. That's not also to say that a modern re-interpretation of poly relationships is invalid either. I'm just saying that using the historical precedence of polygamy to support any sort of argument on the issue is fraught with peril.
As to the "wired for monogamy" bit. I'm speaking more biologically and relationship wise. Polygamous relationships throughout history have pretty much always been social constructs arising from management of wealth/power relationships. Even within those arrangements, there's always a pecking order. And even in them today we see people think of one as the "primary" and the others as add ons. While I don't discount the possibility of a group of people having a truly open marriage where all are equal partners and all are equally "primary" to everyones else, the overwhelmingly consistent fact is that people tend to pair up in their relationships. Not making any kind of moral judgment here, just making an observation.
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(Our concept of the North American indigenous peoples as being savage actually primarily comes from their sexual practices and religion. Settlers were largely in awe of their technological prowess--their cities were several times larger than the top European cities combined. They had efficient and cohesive waste removal and water delivery systems. They were able to create islands in lakes to produce fertile farming land. And, on that note, their farming techniques were 6-10 times more efficient than European techniques. They were extremely learned, and had pioneered all of their technologies themselves).
This is almost completely incorrect. Where the hell did you learn this? Some nutty liberal history professor with an ax to grind? First off, the large agricultural cities were not in North America. They were in central and south America. And for the most part, they were already in decline when the European settlers arrived (or were already lost in ruin as was the case in South America).
And while they were impressed, they were hardly in "awe" of those cities. The Egyptians build really large cities 2000 years earlier, but that didn't make them particularly advanced. Just had a large population and lots of time. While you can certainly say they'd pioneered all their technology, the fact is that the folks living in the Americas when Europeans arrived were stone age level of technology. They never invented the wheel, let alone any form of science, nor had they learned to smelt metals. They were just as impressive to the Europeans as if they'd been transported 3000 years into the past into Mesopotamia. So... Not much.
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The only thing that Europeans did better was seafaring and war. And that's because they imported all of those technologies from the Chinese or Ottomans.
Where they imported it from is irrelevant. The reality is that because of their isolation, the American natives never developed the kinds of technologies that the people in Europe, Africa, and Asia had developed and were at an extreme disadvantage as a result. The Europeans were not just better at seafaring and war. That's silly. They were better at construction, better at math, better at writing, better at metalworking, better at cloth making (ie: they could actually do it), etc. These things meant that they were better at seafaring and at making war, but it's absurd to isolate the result from the cause. They were better at those things because they were at least a few thousand years ahead of the natives in terms of technology.
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Do you know why Europeans hated polygamy? Because they were obsessed with personal property. Everything was hierarchical, which requires absolute control over female sexuality, or else you couldn't be sure of lineages through which to transfer property and power.
Yeah. Because that wasn't the driving force behind polygamous marriages either. The Europeans hated polygamy because they had adopted a moral code which prohibited it. Call part of that the Catholic church creating a sacrament, maybe call part of it an early move towards gender equality in society, whatever. But their reasons were philosophical, not economic or political. As I've said before, the same economic and political reasons apply to polygamy as apply to monogamy.
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That's seriously the only historical reason we have to explain the important of monogamy in Western culture. Nothing in Christianity prohibits monogamy (in fact, it endorses the idea of multiple wives). Both Roman and Germanic traditions (from which we derive modern European culture) both endorsed degrees of polyamory.
Nothing in Judaism does. The Romans were monogamous to a fault, so I'm not sure where you got that bit of falsehood. The idea of monogamous marriages was adopted pretty early in the Catholic Church, almost certainly because that was the Roman tradition, so when the Church became the official religion of Rome, the practice was adopted and has been maintained ever since. The point is that it was a social movement. The Romans didn't practice monogamy because it was the best method for maintaining wealth and power. In fact, it caused them all sorts of problems. It would have been much easier if Roman leaders could take multiple wives, but it was barred by tradition and law. This didn't stop them from divorcing and remarrying as a means to "move up" politically, but they absolutely were not polygamous.
The Church went a step further with this, making marriage a sacrament and thus making divorce a violation of church law. Whole Henry VIII bit followed from that if you recall, and to the creation of the Anglican Church. Again though this was social.
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But what you find is that, once the first-son system becomes standard in European tradition, both marriage and monogamy become extremely controlled and enforced.
Nope. Had nothing to do with it. The "first son" tradition was well established in cultures which allowed polygamy. You need to figure out if what you're talking about is exclusive to one side before making such claims.
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So, no, anyone who tries to use the argument that polyamory will "confuse" a child, because they are somehow hardwired to understand the concept of having only one mother or father is really relying on something that has no support in either biology or history.
Whether it will confuse the child is only part of the issue though. I think people spoke of that only in the context of a "limited polygamy" situation, where you have a couple who are married, but also have aunts and uncles in an extended relationship. The confusion would be between existing cultural assumptions and wondering why mommy is sleeping with uncle instead of daddy. Obviously, that's not going to be confusing if you have established polygamous marriages, so this is somewhat circular. However, we don't legally allow such marriages (for all the historical reasons I mentioned earlier). So as long as that is the case, there will be confusion and problems for kids growing up in that sort of situation.
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And studies show, very clearly, that children flourish in situations where they have supportive families far more than any other structure. Because polyamorous families face unique challenges, they generally become families out of a commitment to it--they take a proactive stance in the family, and work hard for it. That creates an enviornment for children that is vastly superior to the average monogamous household. And divorce is often held as really ******** with kids minds. But know what's found to be WAY worse than that? Kids raised in households with loveless marriages. Hearing your parents criticize each other, fight with each other, etc. are all more damaging to a child than a civil divorce will be. If you are fighting a lot, but can figure out a way to divorce without putting your kid in they middle of it, they'll be way better off.
/shrug I think you're over idealizing polygamy though. As I said earlier, if the odds of two people getting a divorce is X, what are the odds that one person out of 5 or 6 will want a divorce at some point? More than X, right? If the harm is from someone who was a parental figure leaving, or parents falling out of love, that's going to happen just as often, but since there are more people, it's more likely to affect any given child. So if you do adopt a full parental role for all adults in the marriage for all children which result, you're actually increasing the odds of that sort of separation effect on the children.
Obviously, you could eliminate this if you make it illegal for people to divorce, but then aren't we just moving in the wrong direction here? What started out as an attempt for a more "open" form of marriage has to become less so to work. Nothing is perfect. I think you're imagining that the bad things that happen in monogamous relationships will somehow not happen in poly relationships. But I don't see any rational argument for that to be the case. Each spouse in a poly relationship is just as likely to "fall out of love" or even begin to hate/despite any other spouse as they would if they only had one. In a monogamous marriage, that means there's one connection to worry about. The relationship between person A and person B. But if you add just one person, you triple the number of potential relationships which could go bad (A-B, A-C, B-C). You add two people, and now you've got (A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, C-D). Add another and you've got (A-B, A-C, A-D, A-E, B-C, B-D, B-E, C-D, C-E, D-E). Any one of those relationships sour and it produces a negative effect for the whole. And let's face it the strain of managing such a large group wold be pretty tough as well.
Like I've said before, I'd love to see this sort of thing work. I'd even love to see it become more of the norm. But I think it's naive to believe that it's at all some sort of magic social/family bullet.
Edited, Jan 21st 2012 4:45pm by gbaji