You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects—promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
I would be very surprised if there weren’t….a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.
You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
Clearly functional… but as functional? http://www.gwern.net/docs/2012-heinrich.pdf
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Off the top of my head, Erwin Schrödinger.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
I detect a horrible gap in the fabric of the universe! We need to create some ASAP!!
SMBC is on to it.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Sure, absolutely.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.