Gay Marriage: A modest proposal

It is apparent that the modern institution of marriage is profoundly ill suited for producing and raising one’s biological children. I suggest, therefore, that just as we no longer use the word “gay” to mean merry and light hearted, we introduce a new word and new kind of contract, reproductive contracts, for people who intend to have children together and raise them. And for “marriage”, allow anyone to marry anyone, or any group of people or animals, for any length of time five minutes or longer. Thus three men, a horse, and a dog, could marry for seven minutes to have sex in the alley between Van Ness and Polk Gulch, but let us have a different word, and a different contract, for the case where the intent is to bear and raise children.

Among such contracts we need it to be possible to make a contract where a woman commits to always be sexually available to a man and to never have sex with someone else, and the man commits to always support her and father his children by her, and to never provide significant support to any other sexual partner – which is not the commitment men and women are making in today’s “marriage”

Such a contract, to be a contract, would if broken, have bad consequences for the party that broke it.

We need to provide a range of possible contracts some of which are optimized for reproduction. If an eighteen year old girl can commit to gigantic college debts for an education of unpredictable value, debts that cannot be expunged by bankruptcy, she can commit to be always sexually available to one man, and only that man.

Many, though not all, Islamic societies are markedly more successful than western societies at reproducing culturally and physically and at providing children with fathers, and they do this by providing a wide variety of marital contracts, rather than one size fits all.

I have been reading “Sex and Culture” by JD Unwin, which makes an impressive survey of a wide range of societies over time, and provides compelling evidence that women’s emancipation leads to the collapse of civilization.

He has a politically correct explanation of this phenomenon. His theory is Freudian, and thus we know it to be false. Supposedly sexual repression diverts sexual energy to building civilization. Supposedly, sexual repression creates civilizational energy.

One problem with this politically correct explanation is that though the Classic Greeks controlled female sexuality with an iron hand, there were no similar constraints on male sexuality. Xenophon’s ten thousand raped, whored, and fornicated their way from Asia to Greece, impregnating every concave surface along the way, while energetically building civilization.

Still, it is clear that changes in the Greeks reproductive practices immediately precede changes in their culture and civilization, and similarly with a huge variety of other cultures and civilizations he examines

Thus, when first they attract our attention by the abundance of their energy, the Hellenes are of the opinion that diseases are due to the action of certain malignant powers which can be coerced by incantations or swayed by prayers. Only certain men, the priests of Asclepius, know the proper words, so they must be consulted. After the earth has completed a few more revolutions, the Hellenes defeat the Persians at Marathon.After a few more revolutions each city appoints a state-physician, who is paid out of public funds; private practitioners also set up; surgery becomes a favourite method of treatment. Men begin to specialize in diseases of the eyes, ears, or teeth. Moreover, one of the leading physicians, Hippocrates, has nothing but contempt for charms and incantations. In his opinion they are both vulgar and superstitious; he lays stress on a quiet reserved manner at the bedside.

The earth continues to revolve, then we notice that once more the Hellenes are changing their opinions. Clinical histories are replaced by cures which can be classed only as magical; amulets return to favour.

Physicians no longer regard incantations and purifications as vulgar; they even adopt them in the course of their own treatment. In a word Hellenic therapeutics return to what they, had been a few orbits ago.

He found strong commonalities between cultures that correlate sexual practices strongly with world view and strongly with the success or failure of the culture. One might expect the world view to change first, with success or failure following, but instead, sexual practice was the leading indicator, and world view changed later, following, rather than preceding, the rise of the culture.

His theory predicts that the future of Western civilization is the collapsing ruins of Detroit and Liverpool, in that the symptoms he finds reliably foreshadowing the decline of past civilizations have well and truly recurred in our civilization.

Now, however, the state of the ruins of Detroit is more visible to us, a sociobiological account of the same data seems more plausible:

Under conditions of high paternal certainty, men invest in their children. They raise their sons, thus transmitting their culture. They do stuff for posterity – and thus are visible to the historians. When paternal certainty diminishes, the culture vanishes from the history books, for historians, like sons, are posterity, and without paternal certainty, men don’t care about posterity.

Under conditions of high paternal certainty, resources are transferred by men to women and children. Under conditions of low paternal certainty, men stop investing in wives and children, and resources are transferred from women and children to some high status adult men:  This is the culture celebrated in rap songs as pimps and bitches, the sexual and reproductive system advocated by blogs on game. The game blogs explain that that is a necessary response to female immorality and a legal system that fails to support marriage, and so it is.

There is of course a great deal of ruin in a nation. Rome was not burnt in a day. The collapse he predicted has been happening as predicted since he wrote in 1934, and yet we are still in a predominantly rationalistic culture. It is a long way to the bottom.

The lowest, most primitive level of culture in Unwin’s analysis is  “zoistic”.

Above zoistic culture there is manistic culture, above manistic, deistic, and above deistic, rationalistic.

1. Zoism – subhuman, animal level culture.A zoistic society has no religious beliefs – it is not that they do no believe in the supernatural, but rather that they do not believe in the natural.  Everyone at a zoistic level of culture engages in magical thinking, attributing to themselves and other people capabilities we would consider supernatural. They think that dead bodies walk, and the ghosts of the dead hang around, but they swiftly forget the recently dead, because they live in an eternal present. They have difficulty distinguishing between their dreams and the past.  Stuff that happened long ago and stuff that happened in their dreams last night are one and the same. They dispose of the dead like garbage, and do not tend the graves of the dead. Zoists have no ghosts, because they forget, and no gods, because they attribute magical powers to everyone, including themselves. In their dreams, they meet supernatural beings as equals, and so, they suppose, in the past they also met supernatural beings as equals. A typical example of zoistic thinking is the jury in a medical malpractice lawsuit, where the lawyer seldom bothers to give the jury a concrete explanation of how the doctor caused or could have avoided a bad result.
2. Manism. Some special men are attributed supernatural powers, much more than regular men. These men engage in mystical chants, and rattle magical stones and necklaces, as for example, the expert witness in a silicone or asbestos lawsuit. These special men can smell out other men who use their magical powers to do harm, thus witchfinders and radioactive pollution. Manists have special graves for real or imagined dead sorcerers, and engage in rituals commemorating these powerful ghosts. New ageism tends to be manist. Deism with lots of saints is close to being manist, and conversely, Manism with a small number of immensely powerful and important ghosts is close to being deism.
3. Deism: We all know what deism is.Deism with god far away, a god who dumped problems on us and commands us to solve them as best we can, is pretty close to being rationalism.
4. Rationalism: There is no supernatural, or if there is it is far, far away, and long, long ago.

A typical example of zoistic culture is the indictment of Napoleon Chagnon, “Darkness in El Dorado”, which ignored not only evidence and reason, but cause and effect. Chagnon supposedly caused death, disease, and violence to the people he studied not through any causal mechanism, not through any physical material process, but through thinking Darwinist thoughts, Darwinist thoughts being cruel, violent, and bloody. There was no need to provide any causal connection through alleged deeds by Chagnon, no proposed concrete mechanism linking his allegedly evil ideas to the alleged evil consequences.

Similarly you have doubtless seen it frequently explained that communists were killed in country X because the CIA wished them to be killed, without any need to provide a material physical explanation of how CIA wishes became militia nooses. We joke that the CIA killed the communists by broadcasting mind control rays that turned the masses into enraged space bats, but when we make this joke, no one gets it, because they see no need to propose some physical material method, some alleged concrete deeds, whereby the CIA turned its wishes into dead commies.

A typical system of justice in a zoistic or manistic culture, is that when something bad happens, the shaman takes a large dose of hallucinogenic drugs, and on the basis of his dreams, declares that so and so caused the bad thing – again, observe medical lawsuits, asbestos lawsuits, and political correctness lawsuits. These are all examples of zoistic culture, which makes no distinction between natural and supernatural, or manistic, which makes little distinction, and supposes the supernatural to be exceedingly common. It is zoistic if the lawyer does not bother with an explanation of how the accused caused harm, manistic if the lawyer produces an expert witness, who chants magical formulae in place of an explanation.

The highest level of culture is rationalistic. In a rationalistic culture, there is natural and supernatural. But supernatural stuff is the business of the Gods, as in a Deistic culture, and unlike a Deistic culture the Gods are far far away, and for the most part, long long ago. In a rationalistic culture anyone claiming supernatural stuff in ordinary everyday life gets odd looks. In a rationalistic culture, if the jury cannot understand the mechanism whereby the accused supposedly caused harm, they will not convict.

In a rationalistic culture, no one would invoke our mistreatment of Gaia and her resulting righteous wrath to explain a flood or hurricane. They might theoretically believe in the wrath of Gaia if raised in that church but would think someone who proposed it as a direct causal mechanism in actual life disturbingly crazy, would think someone who said “the earth has a fever” a bit peculiar.

Intermediate levels have ghosts, spirits, demons, gods, etc taking an active role in daily life. There is a distinction between natural and supernatural, stronger at the higher levels of culture, weaker at the lower levels of culture, but at the intermediate levels of culture there is lots of supernatural stuff going on in everyday daily life. At the Zoistic level, there is no natural, at the rationalistic level, no supernatural.

JD Unwin attributes cultural level to sexual practices, with a Freudian, therefore false, explanation.

An alternative possiblity is that both the sexual practices and the cultural level are caused by something else: Adult males inculcate rationality in their children and transmit civilization, while women tend focus on physically nurturing children, rather than teaching their sons how to be men.

I would go with a Roissian explanation. Roissy, like Dr JD Unwin, attributes the collapse of civilization to the collapse of patriarchy, but the proposed mechanism is different.

The general spirit of the Roissy explanation is that Patriarchs built and maintained civilization, one of the key mechanisms being that producer protector males got pussy, got assigned the patriarch’s daughters, thus got a wife and family as reward for building civilization.

If women get to choose, they choose player sperm. Players, such as Roissy tries to be, undermine civilization.

Another mechanism is that Patriarchs transmit civilization to their children, and players do not, for players are rarely present in the lives of their children.

To the extent that men are uncertain of paternity, they reduce investment in raising children. The major male contributions to childraising are physical protection, and socialization in extended relationships, socializing children to relate to the larger, more distant, society – thus men transmit civilization. In our society, the majority of children are fatherless.

We are in a civilization that is approaching majority fatherless. The evidence in “sex and culture” can reasonably be interpreted as implying that in monogamous civilizations with severe constraints on wives and mother, paternal investment is markedly higher, resulting in marked differences in children, than in civilizations with less severe constraints, though that is not the interpretation the author suggests.

The evidence Unwin assembles shows that the civilization that puts women on a pedestal and chains them to it, will beat the hell out of both the culture that just chains them up, and the culture that lets them lek freely.

Today, however, we have technological means for providing paternal certainty that are more reliable than chaining women to a pedestal.

The “lack of energy” Unwin depicts could equally be interpreted as lack of economic and cultural capital.

It is not clear that women even like equal rights in matters pertaining to sex and reproduction. On anecdote and casual observation, there seem to be lot more women than men converting to Islam

The conversation about Polanski indicates widespread belief that alpha males of one’s own in group should be entitled to rape lesser females,

Polanski’s rape was actual rape, plea bargained down to nominal statutory rape, not actual statutory rape, and it seems to me that most of those supporting Polanski are female members of his in group – males are less supportive of other males raping – males don’t like the competition, lower status males don’t like the possibility that high status males of their own group might bang their women. Women don’t really mind that possibility. They mind being raped by low status men, which is of course in actual practice quite vigorously suppressed in Muslim societies. They are disturbingly relaxed about the risk of being raped by high status males like Polanski.

This is also visible in the crime victimization survey data – the wife of a male head of household has an unmeasurably low rape/sexual assault rate, while all other categories make only moderate difference, indicating that males do a far more vigorous job of policing their wives against sexual assault than women do to protect themselves or even fathers do to police their daughters, as we would expect from sociobiology, evolutionary psychology.

Googling up interviews with western converts to Islam from Christianity, most of them are young single fertile age women. Googling up interviews with western converts from Islam to Christianity, few of them are young single fertile age women.

In Britain, I found data indicating three thousand converts from Islam to Christianity, one hundred thousand converts from Christianity to Islam.

It looks to me as if women are voting with their feet to say that Sharia is a pretty good system for women, and the reaction of those in Polanski’s in group suggests that this attitude is widespread, in the sense that the Polanski case also suggests that women do not much like equality, as we would expect if evolutionary psychology is true, and political correctness is false.