A blog dedicated to the joy and adventure of thinking (and often spiced with humor).
(About a 5 minute read)
I sometimes get the impression that plenty of us tackle the big ideas in life almost the day we escape our cribs for the first time.
“Gurk! Life is mine to seize! I see it clearly now. I shall be my own hero. Gerp!” Or, “Poppels! But our capacity to love is what most defines us as moral. Twurks! What’s this? Why, it must be what what ma-ma calls, ‘poo’. And look! It’s endlessly shape-able!”
“I think marriage is a bit of a farce these days”, she said.
“Oh? Tell me more”, I replied.
“Well, back in the day, it was a proper coming together of families and material, and the commitment was to go forth together and prosper, raise children, etc. Now it’s not that. Now it seems to be just a reason to have a party. People get divorced as soon as they get married. There is no joining of families. ”
I knew Brenda was right about the family bit. If you travel back in Western history more than about 200 years, the main reason for getting married — apart from raising children — is to form strategic alliances between families, mainly for financial and economic purposes. The son of a mason might marry the daughter of a “builder” (i.e. the equivalent of a contractor/architect in today’s terms) in order to take financial and economic advantage of linking the two trades under one roof. That, and raising children, were the core purposes of marriage. The love between a man and wife had nothing to do with marriage back then, and marrying for love was actively discouraged.
“So is marriage totally bankrupt?”, I asked her.
“I suppose where kids are concerned, it’s nice to have married parents”, she said. “Kids are really the only reason I can fathom to bother getting married.”
I think earlier this evening Brenda in her conversation with me more or less summed up what many of us in the West think these days about marriage: Basically, except for the sake of kids, why bother with it?
Of course, one still hears of other reasons to get married. Perhaps three of the most frequently heard reasons are (1) that we should marry to make sex safer; (2) that we should marry to commit to our love for someone; and (3), that we should marry to avoid loneliness. And, like most of us, I know people who would find all three of those reasons to be weak. Whether they are or are not weak seems just as debatable as saying the only reason to get married is for the sake of kids.
But what do you think? Are kids the only good reason these days to get married? Are there other good reasons? Your opinions, please.
In many small-scale societies, there’s an institution that looks like marriage, where people “pair bond,” but there’s philandering on the side by both men and women. They’ll often just cycle to another pair bond. It’s not uncommon for hunter gatherers to have three, four or five pair bonds in the course of their life, while getting children from each one.
So far as I know, our species of human has been around for about 260,000 years. According to several scientists, it’s a reasonable guess that, for most of that time, we lived as hunter/gatherers and had marriages that resembled those Henrich describes as common in small-scaled societies today.
It also seems a reasonable guess that people in our ancestral societies most often married for romantic love. Hunter/gatherers tend to have very few possessions, so marrying someone for their goods is a relatively bad idea. People might have married to create alliances between families and groups, but hunting/gathering marriages tend to be comparatively short lived — so marrying to create alliances between groups might not always be an especially attractive idea. And humans seem emotionally tailored by evolution for romantic love. For those and other reasons, I think it’s safe to say our ancestors most often married for love.
I suspect that was not only the traditional pattern of marriage in our own species of human, but also the traditional pattern of marriage in our precursor species. In other words, when we think of traditional marriages — the kind of marriages we would have if left to nature — we should think of folks most often marrying for love, now and then screwing around on each other, and eventually traveling on to a new wife or husband. All within the context of having kids who would — to a large degree — be raised with help from the entire band.
In my opinion, marriages were very unlikely to differ from that model until about 10,000 years ago, with the beginnings of agriculture. Once you start growing crops, owning the cropland is not far behind. And once you have landowners — and inheritances — then you have all sorts of pressure to marry for possessions, or for alliances, and not necessarily for love. You also have extraordinary pressure to stay married at almost all cost. And you now have agricultural surpluses that can support extra wives. The extended family becomes more important than the band, but the nuclear family — a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution — is still more than 9,000 years in the future.
Anyway, just some Sunday morning thoughts on traditional marriages.
My building is an old house converted into three apartments. Ordinarily, one neighbor lives across the hall from me, and the other lives upstairs. But my landlord has recently been struggling to keep the other two apartments occupied.
I think he’s been trying to give people a break by renting to folks who are financially insecure. Such as the couple and their kid who just moved out yesterday. The lady had a job, the gentleman didn’t, and the family fell short of making the rent. My landlord must surely have known only one of the adults in that family had a job, but he leased to them anyway. That may be kind, compassionate and generous, but it is not a formula for keeping rental units occupied.
I’ve known my landlord now for between 12 and 15 years. Before I rented from him, I worked for him doing odd jobs — mainly house and apartment painting. He’s a very honest man, a very hardworking man, and, like everyone, he’s got his eccentricities. One of his eccentricities is that he likes to treat his tenants to some large extent as if they were family. He’s more comfortable thinking of you as a distant cousin than he is thinking of you as a profit center.
In terms of properties, he’s not a big landlord, nor a tiny one. He owns about 30 rental units — most of them houses. I wonder about his tendency to treat his tenants as family. For the most part, that tendency shows up in his willingness to take a chance on the folks he rents to. He doesn’t need a perfect credit score nor a perfect rental history. My guess is he takes about the same chance with folks off the street as he would with a cousin or even sometimes a nephew.
That’s good for people. And it’s good for the community. But it’s not good business practice. In business terms, my landlord’s tendency to treat people as family and take a chance on them results in reduced occupancy, reduced income, and less profit. If he were in a highly competitive business environment, he might be out of business by now, weeded out by more profitable competitors.
I don’t have enough information to do a real analysis of my landlord’s business. I don’t, for instance, know how his occupancy rate compares with the average occupancy rate in this market. Nor do I know what any of his financial margins are. But I really don’t need to know all that stuff to know that my landlord is bucking the system by treating people the way he treats them. He’s bucking capitalism. At least, as we know it.
Capitalism is a beneficial system in several respects, but it comes with a huge flaw. It is obsessed with profit.
Now, there is nothing wrong with profit in and of itself. But there is certainly something wrong with an obsession with profit.
Anytime you maximize one and only one value, you create a system that denies other values. And capitalism, by maximizing profits, creates a system that denies other values — in fact, it denies all values that are in any way at odds with maximizing profit. So, for instance, capitalism becomes the enemy of sane ecological policies in so far as those policies interfere with maximizing profit. Or, it becomes the enemy of treating people as more than mere sources of income in so far as treating them as more than mere sources of income interferes with maximizing profit.
That’s one of the reasons — a rather small reason, however — that I think capitalism as we know it is a system destined for transition. I can think of other, more important reasons, capitalism will change. But at the moment, its obsession with profit has my attention.
If we could look 100 or 200 years into the future (and perhaps not even that far into the future), my guess is we would find a “capitalism” that is remarkably different from what’s practiced today. Indeed, we will either do something to radically curb and regulate the obsession capitalism has with profit, or we will most likely live in something akin to fascist/feudal societies that have a relatively low standard of living and quality of life for most of their members. That’s my hunch. I could be wrong. But I’m probably accurate enough to be annoying about this one.
