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Tuesday, 6 July 2010

Monogamy, Ctd.

Posted on 09:38 by hony
A reader writes:
"I'm curious to know your current argument for monogamy. I can plainly see the pre-civilization argument for it, but why should it exist in this day and age?"
First off, I am pleased that someone finds my arguments for pre-civilization human monogamy compelling. If you just apply the cold logic of evolution, you find the checks and balances rules here and while a male human could easily sneak in on many females, he would increase the risk that none of his children would live, and the females would choose the option of having a sole provider that she could trust for assistance raising her young than the option of letting whomever wished to come impregnate her and then hope that some male would provide her and her offspring nourishment.

Civilization, however, has certainly thrown a cog in the evolutionary machine. No longer do geeks like me have to piddle at the bottom of the gene pool, instead we can create elaborate laws, traps, and methods by which to find women we clearly don't deserve if the Alpha Betas still ruled the campus.

So why be monogamous now? First off, I am an engineer, and not a biologist, psychologist, theologian, or even family counselor, so I am not the expert in these things. What I am about to say purely is my opinion based on my experiences and my observations of the world around me, and probably cannot be backed up with scientific fact.

It seems to me that the turning point for our species was when we began to invest nutritional excess into mental, rather than physical, development (yes our brains are a physical organ but go with me here). We began an arms race against other ecologically-similar species as well as amongst ourselves for top predator, and our weapon was the fastest, cleverest brain. And so already complicated things like emotion became much, much more complicated. We began to imagine, create, and best of all develop an oral and eventually written tradition which allowed our species total knowledge to increase exponentially.

The reason polygamy became possible is because we had the free time to do it. An agrarian society, in which a small percentage of producers sells their product to a large percentage of artisans, seems to me to be an opportunity for polygamy not found when everyone is searching for food, all the time.
But here's the flip side of that: civilization has allowed us to pander to our emotions.

So why be monogamous? The long and the short of it, as I see it, is that I create more self-satisfaction from building a relationship with one woman than I would create if I instead cultivated short, meaningless sexual relationships with many women. This is compounded by the fact that I derive happiness from the trust my monogamous spouse has for me, further compounded by the happiness I derive from knowing my children are my own, and further compounded by the fact that I can rely on my spouse for emotional and physical affection whenever I need it. These things would not be possible, or at least not as possible for a polygamous person.
Of course where I am going with this is love. I love my wife. She loves me. If I just slept around I would not love any of those women, and the short-lived bursts of physical pleasure might indeed be nice, but for my emotional well-being I think the slow-building investment is better than a high-risk investment that can go up or down 100% in a day without warning. And that is the advantage of monogamy. I get low-risk, high-yield happiness that requires a long-term investment, but has safe, strong long-term yields.

People could counter-argue that married individuals do not report being much happier than single people. There are two possibilities here: single people are lying, or perhaps after a time they learn to derive happiness from other things. Their emotional well-being, void of long-term relationship-based love, finds other ways to reward the mind. One chronically single friend of mine climbs mountains, and seemingly derives happiness from the burn in her legs as she ascends, or perhaps in the euphoria found upon the summit. Another single friend has immersed himself in indie rock, and spends nearly as much time at shows as I do with my wife. A third has built a small unit of other guy friends - all bachelors - who move almost as a single unit through life, sharing each others experiences.

The bottom line is that civilization has given humanity the opportunity to invest in our emotional well-being. It seems to me that monogamy is a pretty sure bet.


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