"An example of equilibrium selection that has already largely run its course is norms that favor monogamous marriage (MacDonald 1995; Henrich et al. 2012). Men within any society have powerful incentives to marry more than one woman and women have incentives to enter into a polygamous marriage with powerful men rather than a monogamous marriage with less powerful men. However, polygamous societies tend to be unstable because of the large numbers of men without reproductive prospects. Monogamous societies therefore tend to beat polygamous societies in between-group competition, a fact that can be documented in the historical record."
From this excellent article, which I read when it was published: https://evolution-institute.org/focus-article/reaching-a-new-plateau-for-the-acceptance-of-multilevel-selection/.
I remember finding similar remarks thrown in in at least one of the three Peter Turchin books I have read (War and Peace and War, Ultrasociety and Ages of Discord).
This theory that monogamy is highly culturally adaptive seems like a solid one. I get the impression that there is still a large amount of debate in anthropology about the commonness of monogamy among pre-agricultural peoples (a Guardian article from 2.5 years ago certainly suggests this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/may/19/equality-and-polyamory-why-early-humans-werent-the-flintstones). However, this is probably irrelevant, since I think the idea is that this theory holds only for agricultural and post-agricultural peoples - or at least the selection pressures for monogamy in competing tribal bands would be much weaker. Why would the selection pressures for monogamy in competing tribal bands be much weaker? Because if people have strong filial and communal ties to everyone in their band, there is probably: a) much less likelihood of the community, as it were, allowing for the existence of lonely males who remain virgins or romantic failures well into adulthood (someone in the community ought to take pity on the poor boy!); and b) if (in a different kind of culture) there is a situation where the senior or older men in the band marry multiple women, and get all the sex (a fair amount of anthropological evidence that this went on in at least some hunter-gatherer societies, is my impression (the film Ten Canoes portrays a hunter-gatherer culture like this, apparently authentically capturing an archaic tradition of Arnhem land aboriginals)), the younger men know in a small tribe that they will eventually 'get their chance' at this when their fathers and uncles die, so there is much less psychological motivation for becoming an angry sexual terrorist attacking the band from within (also all societies make their norms religious and sacred, making anger at, or resistance to, the norms impious and shameful (see Atran 2002)).
Anyhow, if we can trust the claim that the historical record bears out a trend towards a strong norm of monogamy in agricultural and post-agricultural societies (certainly, there does seem to be a strong push in that direction in the transition from chiefdoms to states), then we may well also be justified in drawing normative conclusions from this theory that apply today. The idea that the norm of marriage - or at least settling down with one partner - is a key ingredient in social cohesion and stability in the long-run, and that a society with a lot of 'free-range' men is a dangerous society, may be one pillar of 'social conservative' ideology that is not rotten to the core. Of course, as the dash-embedded subordinate clause in that previous sentence just implied, Christian and other monotheistic traditions of marriage are not specified by this theory, so "conservatives" aren't really vindicated in that way (they are not vindicated assuming that human beings can be monogamous en masse without a socially ingrained fear of divine punishment for infidelity or patriarchal control over female sexuality, which I hope is true).
Now, clearly, we must note that the overturning of a strong norm of monogamy in Western societies was one of the chief achievements of second-wave feminism, which helped pave the way for gay liberation also. Unfortunately, it seems very plausible that a patriarchy is the system which evolved to, as it were, 'enforce' a strong norm of monogamy. Morally, it would be undesirable to try to return to a society with such a strong norm. Let us accept instability.
(Is all of this far too speculative? Let future research be the judge; the study of cultural evolution and the field of cliodynamics are in their infancy.)
No comments:
Post a Comment