Pessimistic View of Present and Future Marriage
Marriage is a competitive advantage for a population. Child development requires both sexes. Single mothers are perhaps the most serious risk to children’s mindfulness, competency, life, and achievement. Population collapse makes all the redistribution made possible by the industrial civilization that WAS married, impossible for the post-industrial civilization that isn’t married. Furthermore, women have expanded their workforce participation largely into fields that can be easily eliminated with the next (current) wave of technology.
So I work on this issue (and others) every day. And I don’t hold out optimistic fantasies because hope and faith are not strategies for anything other than failure.
Marriage evolved as we understand it for a set of obvious reasons: (a) men will kill over mates more so than for any other reason (b) women (girls) were an in-house workforce for their parents (c) they obtained freedom to reproduce their own in=house workforce by marrying a man who would provide for her and her children while she did so – rather than be a servant in her parent’s home, or worse, a serf in someone else’s, or worse, left to prostitution which was the last refuge of endless numbers of women. (d) Next, once agrarianism became possible, and the difficulty of obtaining capital (land, animals, tools, shelter) the faemily was necessary for hte formation of that ‘business’ and inheritance became a means of survival between generations. (e) Lastly, married men are unlikely to war, whereas all revolutions and wars of expansion in history require a surplus of single men (like we have now) whose use of violence is more likely to producde returns for them, than not having wife, family, and chldren.
So we face an interesting problem: marriage is returning to a class issue. It always was a class issue. The Jews only stopped serial marriage in the 1500s and the irish only in the 1800s.
We assume that the germanic “hajnal line’ ethic produced by manorialism from 700 onward, resulting in the high trust society and the absolute nuclear family is natural rather than as unnatural as high trust, rule of law, truth before face, duty to commons before self, particpatory government and the relative absence of corruption – or what we call the european “WIERD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed: And we are weird.
Why? Western civilization is the most psychologically, emotionally, and physically costly civilization on earth – it’s not for the ‘unfit’ so to speak. And the market in the absence of subsistence farming makes it far worse than it has been in all of history.
So some classes are so because they are more ‘fit’ for the high cost of western civ, and especially market western civ. Marriage is the first institution of cultural production that demonstrates your ‘fitness’ for responsibility over time. And failure at marriage is the evidence of our unfitness for responsibility over time.
So, It’s a class issue because self regulation and interpersonal adaptation is a class issue – one of degree of fitness – and so ending liabilty for interference in a marriage, legislating no fault divorce, common property, child support, and alimony all play to (a) class issues (b) female devotion is only in time vs where males demonstrate loyalty over time.
Add that the risk for the male is extraordinary (foolish really), and the cost to the female is between stimulating attention seeking and hyperconsumption, versus forgoing years of hyperconsumption to have children, or to produce less than replacement levels of children with higher chances of infertility and birth defects.
We face a worse problem (which should be obvious) is these exasperated males, when encountering a radical economic change, and certain of social and political alienation, will, as they have throughut all of history, ‘make a bloody mess of things’.
So I don’t have a lot of optimism. Instead, like most geostrategists I see the end of the european age, and a restoration of various pseudosciences and superstitions, that may be better than the fall of rome, but no less change inducing.
I expect economics to do the work of natural selection and that we are more and more likely to see multiple women or generations of women forming pre-agrarian households and the re-emergence of brothers and uncles as the male force in a family instead of fathers. With ‘fathers’ temporary participants in female households other than their own.
And this will, as it has been, continue to increase poverty becaues household formation is much cheaper and permits higher consumption than single parenting.