Fifteen years ago, I wrote a post arguing that monogamy is an artificial social institution like democracy: "unnatural" in the sense that it doesn't respond to the tug of immediate impulse, but superior to impulse because it solves some of the problems that unfenced impulse creates.
Now earlier this week I saw on Twitter a post quoting from a new book* that appears to argue that family life itself is unnatural, and that really nobody much likes it (neither men nor women) … at any rate not compared to the life of immediate impulse. The quoted selection goes on to say that the reason traditional societies feature patriarchal privilege is that this privilege is a bribe to men to encourage them to settle down in households. The reality, says the author, "isn't that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don't care."
Really? I don't know … there were good days when I was glad to have a home and a wife and a couple of kids. Notwithstanding all the destructive chaos that was ultimately unleashed, I do remember that. (It didn't last, of course.)
Maybe I'm just easygoing. Or easily bribed.
__________
* Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Independently published (September 15, 2023)
No comments:
Post a Comment