Notice the sleight of hand here as Turley claims that "polygamy is actually one of the common threads between Christians, Jews and Muslims," but the only evidence he cites is that "Martin Luther at one time accepted polygamy as a practical necessity."Well, isn't that special! Obviously, opposition to polygamy is one of the defining characteristics of Christianity and the West. Monogamy is a cartel among men to share women relatively equally, to compete on quality of wife but to not compete on quantity of wives. This cartel, along with some other customs like opposition to cousin marriage, underlies the West's traditional advantage in trust and cooperation among males. [...]
The shallowness of analysis, the fetishization of anti-discrimination and minority rights, and the refusal to even think about the reasons behind the great traditions of our culture makes this a prize example of the destructive trends at work in the West.
A shallowness and fetishization aptly, if inadverdantly, captured by whoever wrote the headline: "Polygamy laws expose our own hypocrisy" - "hypocrisy" being the gravest of the vices to the adolescent, as "at least I'm not a hypocrite" is the summit of moral attainment and moral reasoning.
In the past I've had friendly arguments with two types of defenders of legalized polygamy (in practice, of course, what we're talking about is polygyny) - one who scants history, and the other who scants biology. The first is the indignant libertarian purist, who tends to argue as if he believed that our existing culture of liberty rose out of nowhere, or rather is in some way a parthenogenetic product of the Englightenment, which itself was sui generis. This permits a ronco-matic appeal to religious freedom, full stop, without having to puzzle too hard over whether some ideas of arguably religious provenance might be foundational. The second, bless his heart, is the delusional male who hasn't stressed his noggin overmuch reflecting on the nature of polygynous societies.
(Surely, reader, you're not going to tell me that you didn't see earnest, right-thinking excoriations of anti-polygamy laws coming soon to editorial pages near you?)
Hey, you sound like you're on a roll, but didn't finish the post/essay/whatever they're calling them this week.
Posted by: Phil Fraering on October 07, 2004
I dunno. One difference between polygamy and SSM is that there is a lot of recent historical experience with polygamy.
I suspect that polygamy wouldn't be popular in our safe, wealthy society, where women have many options and most married couples are productive enough to support their children. Turley makes a weak argument for allowing it, but you could make a stronger argument along libertarian lines, just as you can make a strong libertarian argument against forbidding homosexuality.
My argument against govt sanctioning of SSM is utilitarian, on grounds that a SSM experiment might be costly if it failed, but would be difficult to undo. You could make a similar case against allowing polygamous marriage, especially as most of the likely practitioners would be Muslim immigrants, and the practice might easily lead to social problems. However, merely finding polygamy distasteful shouldn't be an adequate reason for prohibition.
(BTW, speaking of hypotheticals, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect Muslim women to become less inclined to accept polygamy as they acculturated? Once they're here they face most of the same incentives as the natives.)
Posted by: Jonathan on October 07, 2004
I didn't quite mean it as criticism; it just seemed like you had somethig more to say.
Thinking about it myself, I do have something to say.
There is something that bugs me, greatly, about Turley's editorial. He feels the need to interject that he "personally detests polygamy," after continuing on and on about how opposition to polygamy can only be because of religious or racial bias.
OK, let's think for a second. IF three people, be they two women and a man, or two men and a woman, want to be married together, and there's no utilitarian (for lack of a better word for your and Steve Sailer's argument) basis for not wanting polygamy (and Mr. Turley seems to believe there is none of any importance), and they're not beating or abusing each other, what is his reason for detesting them?
I agree with you much more than I agree with him; I enjoy living in a society where individuals have rights instead of a few select clan elders. I'm just pointing out a really annoying rhetorical trick I've been noticing a lot lately.
Posted by: Phil Fraering on October 07, 2004
There are probably good reasons, beyond the law, why polygamy is unusual in our society. Perhaps only a small minority of citizens would prefer polygamy if it were legal. (Not all marriages are polygamous in societies that allow it.) I speculate that allowing polygamy wouldn't cause many problems, but who knows.
I suspect that would-be polygamists in our society can already get most of the deal in fact, if not law, by setting up the right kind of limited partnership or LLC. A polygamous marriage is essentially a special class of business partnership anyway, so it may be helpful to evaluate such arrangements in economic as well as moral terms. My hunch is that these arrangements make sense only in a limited range of situations.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 07, 2004
Phil - but it was perfectly justified criticism - it is abrupt.
I'm also uneasy with "I personally detest, but", but I don't really see it as a rhetorical trick. Sometimes it's just an honest admission that one can't think think of any good reasons why a certain behavior should not be allowed. (I "personally detest" a lot of things I wouldn't regulate.) I just personally detest the blank-brained assumption that all such matters are simple equal-protection issues.
Jonathan - you seem completely uninterested in the meat of Sailor's objection. Typical libertarian! (OK, not really. I suppose you're approaching it sideways when talking about evaluating it in economic terms.)
Posted by: Moira on October 08, 2004
I'm not uninterested in Sailor's argument. Maybe he is right, and our society would be worse off if we allowed polygamy. I just don't think he supports his case as well as someone who advocates restricting people's options should. My impression is that there is enough recent experience with polygamy, notably among middle-eastern Jews, to raise reasonable questions about how harmful it would be.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 08, 2004
Jonathan - you're wrong, of course, but I gotta run to Home Depot so I can't tell you why right now. (Perhaps Home Depot will have a category for "Jews, Middle Eastern, History" next to the drywall and wiring volumes to help me out.)
Posted by: Moira on October 08, 2004
But Moira, drywall will wreck our society! You probably think I am wrong about that too.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 08, 2004
No, I'm with you on the drywall, bro.
I'm really interested in this topic - I'm preoccupied right now with redoing my system though. Had a meltdown this weekend. Hate using Fleck's machine and his evil left-handed mouse.
Any more on the groups you're talking about? (Or reading recs.) Wouldn't they be relatively small groups living within larger (and not highly cooperative - relatively non-nepotistic, impersonal societies)? We also have to define what we mean by success. I'm interested here in patterns of large-scale, efficient, "open" organization. There's also the issue of things working out OK (for a while, at least) for certain types of family systems, if they have emigrated to a society that is already a large-scale, high-trust, efficiently organized joint. I wonder how much that high-trust system depends on the majority's type of family-organization, though, and if there's a tipping point where the non-cooperative tendencies of polygynous family structure begin to make a difference. Just throwing out ideas here.
Posted by: Moira on October 11, 2004
-Good luck w/the computer.
-My cursory Google search revealed that websites controlled by people who have axes to grind are overrepresented in search results. (And check out those Google classifieds!) Maybe I'll do some better searches.
-My view on this topic is heavily colored by conventional wisdom about Yemeni Jews, some of whom practiced polygny before (and maybe in some cases after -- I am uncertain about this point) they migrated to Israel. AFAIK polygyny didn't cause big problems.
-Of course Israel is a different society than Yemen. Lots of variables here.
-And not all Yemeni Jews were polygynous. I suspect it was a small minority but I don't know.
-I speculate that the question whether widespread polygamy would be socially destructive is moot anyway, because (another speculation) very few people want to be polygamous in our society.
-Christians aren't polygamous; most Jews moved away from polygamy a very long time ago, and all, or almost all, of the rest had done so by a couple of generations ago; yet many Muslims are still polygynous. Why the different patterns among these religions?
Posted by: Jonathan on October 11, 2004
Aren't rights more important than happiness? Whether the implications of legal marriage are a right for anyone is debateable, of course. Most probably aren't, but maybe some are. But the point is that I will always be horrified at the notion of sacrificing any right, of any person, one or one million, a popular person or a hated one, in favor of producing a better, happier outcome for anyone or any group, or even for the human race as a whole. Utilitarianism, yuck!
Posted by: sssenza on October 27, 2004
Yes, open, free societies with an expansive conception of individual rights and an ethos of equality of social dignity are wonderful things. You may have noticed that such societies are the exception rather than the rule in human history. I think it's important to think about why that's so.
I haven't satisfied myself about whether polygyny would or would not be destructive to the cush gig we've got going here, but here's a hypothetical for you, sssenza: if it were demonstrated that polygyny inevitably destroys the types of social relations that are necesssary for the development and maintenance of open, free societies with expansive conceptions of individual rights, would you advocate that it be permitted?
I'm sure you recognize that this question is not just about polygyny. (I'm also sure you realize that even in the freest of societies there will be conflicts of "rights".) However, if you can persuade me that de jure monogamy is irrelevant to the development or maintenance of the type of society we have, please do.
Posted by: Moira on October 27, 2004