While checking in to see what Dave Weigel was doing at Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” — addressing the Trig Truther problem, among other things — I came across Chris Bodener’s latest post in a series, “The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy,” which is every bit the bass-ackward exercise in Darwinian pretzel-logic that you might imagine.
Let’s begin with what should be an obvious question: Which requires more discipline to achieve, chastity or promiscuity?
We may consider it self-evident that virtue requires discipline, and discipline demands greater intellectual focus than does decadence. A major reason promiscuity has traditionally been stigmatized — and is still disdained by wise people — is that it is so frequently associated with other vices, including sloth and dishonesty. And this is true of societies as well as individuals. Ancient Rome declined in large measure because its leadership caste, once stubbornly attached to hardy virtue, became decadent and corrupt. Thorough knowledge of that history informed the concerns of the American founders most famously expressed by John Adams:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Once we elevate our gaze above the level of mere mammalian biology (the mating habits of bonobo chimps, etc.) and study the actual history of human civilizations, we can see the folly of any argument that aims at the derogation of pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity. And the “evolutionary” argument is as easily disproven as any of them.
Humans are not mere beasts, and human survival is dependent on many factors absent in the animal kingdom, where instinct suffices. For mankind to propagate, advance and flourish — to succeed as a species — requires that the young be nurtured and taught the skills, habits and beliefs that have sustained their ancestors. While it is possible for individual humans to survive anarchy, violence and poverty, it is impossible for human society to progress under such conditions.
Progress requires a sense of permanence and continuity, the notion that there is a future for which we must prepare. The integrity of the family historically has been protected by law because peace, stability and order are necessary to the general advancement and improvement of mankind’s condition.
“The cultural achievement of a people can be correlated with the degree of sexual continence they observe; and indeed is directly based upon it. Societies . . . which place no restriction . . . upon the early satisfaction of the sexual impulses, are at a ‘dead level of conception’; they possess the power of reason but they do not apply it to the world of their experience; a sense of responsibility has no place in their social vision.”
— Raymond Firth, reviewing Unwin’s Sex and Culture (1934)
After a half-century of encroaching decadence in America, we now have many soi-dissant intellectuals about whom we might well say, “a sense of responsibility has no place in their social vision.” Their misanthropic contempt for our inherited traditions is not coincidentally related to their lack of concern for our legacy to the future:
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion— to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
Faithfulness to ancient vows and a concern for long-term interests — not only one’s own interests, but the interests of one’s spouse, children and community — requires a larger vision than the puerile short-sightedness that would urge us to pursue the ultimately destructive impulses of selfish hedonism.
Those who resort to anthropological or biological justifications for promiscuity are transparently attempting to provide a patina of scientific authority for an ideology of selfishness, urging us to adopt habits incompatible with our survival as a civilization. If we imitate the sexual habits of bonobos, we can’t complain if the result is a Culture of Savagery, characterized by inhuman cruelty.
When we see authors calling for “a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity” in the name of science, we ought to be as skeptical of their science as we are of their motives. Personally, I wouldn’t trust such people any farther than I could throw them, and the fact that Andrew Sullivan relies on such “scientists” . . . Well, that’s not exactly a strong recommendation, is it?
At any rate, monogamy is very directly related to my own personal survival. You see, Mrs. Other McCain has a kitchen full of knives, and I’ve got to sleep sometime.
