Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human

By William Tucker

In his stunning new book, Marriage and Civilization, author William Tucker looks at the evidence from biology, evolution, anthropology, history, and culture to come to a remarkable conclusion: it was the monogamous pairing of male and female - unusual among mammals - that led to human evolution. Moreover, it is monogamous marriage that has shaped Western Civilization, giving us our sense of justice, undergirded Western democracy, and is the greatest institution we have for perpetuating human freedom and happiness.

Yet marriage is now under threat - and perhaps not in ways that people suspect. We could actually see the de facto abolition of marriage, with the state taking many of the responsibilities formerly assumed by the nuclear family.

Among Tucker's many eye-opening observations:

 

• How primitive polygamy was a retrogression from the original monogamous structure of the human family
• Why monogamy was essential to the development of ancient Greek democracy
• Why it was the Catholic Church, not the Bible or Christianity in general, that was the great defender of monogamous marriage in Western Civilization
• Why polygamous societies - from primitive farming communities, to the Mongols, to the Muslim world, to the early Mormons - are internally violent and have bloody borders
• Why same-sex marriage - utterly irrelevant, in evolutionary terms - is a distraction from the real marriage debate we should be having
• The prospects for monogamous marriage - and the dangers if it collapses

 

Marriage and Civilization might be the most important, provocative, and talked-about book of the year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621572190

William Tucker

William Tucker's journalism has appeared in a long list of publications, from The Atlantic Monthly to The Weekly Standard.

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Copyright © 2014 by William Tucker

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eISBN 978-1-62157-219-0

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To the memory of my parents,

Grace and Bill Tucker.

They stayed married.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Monogamy and Its Discontents

PART I: THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS

CHAPTER 1

Where Did the Family Come From?

CHAPTER 2

The Primate Inheritance

CHAPTER 3

Chimp Sexual Communism

CHAPTER 4

The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde

PART II: THE EMERGENCE OF HUMANITY

CHAPTER 5

Why We Didn’t Remain Chimpanzees

CHAPTER 6

Hunter-Gatherer Monogamy

CHAPTER 7

The End of Hunter-Gatherer Monogamy

CHAPTER 8

Herding and Horticulture: The Two Roads to Polygamy

PART III: THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER 9

Marriage at the Dawn of Civilization

CHAPTER 10

Egyptian and Hebrew Beginnings

CHAPTER 11

The Iliad and The Odyssey

CHAPTER 12

Greece and the Birth of Monogamous Society

CHAPTER 13

The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Rome

CHAPTER 14

Christianity, Droit du Seigneur, and the Virtuous Woman

CHAPTER 15

The French Revolution and the End of Aristocracy

CHAPTER 16

The Victorian Era and the Triumph of Marriage

CHAPTER 17

Mormonism: A Nineteenth Century Dissent from Monogamy

PART IV: THE NON-WESTERN WORLD

CHAPTER 18

Nomadic Warriors and Islam

CHAPTER 19

Marriage in India

CHAPTER 20

Marriage in China

PART V: MODERN QUESTIONS

CHAPTER 21

The Black Family and the Emergence of Single Motherhood

CHAPTER 22

What Is Happening to the Family Today?

CHAPTER 23

What Do Women Want?

CHAPTER 24

What Marriage Means for Civilization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

It is a good thing when a man and woman choose to live together as husband and wife. It is a joy to their friends, a warning to their enemies, but only they know the true meaning of it.

—Homer, The Odyssey

We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders, and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.

—The late Steve Jobs’s note to his wife on their twentieth anniversary

INTRODUCTION

MONOGAMY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In the 1950s, America was a land of Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons, and Father Knows Best. After centuries in which men had sought their identities as soldiers, as swashbuckling adventurers, pioneers, outlaws, or hard-driving businessmen, a new male role had appeared at the center of the culture—the family man.

The family man was a man who was devoted to his wife and children and worked hard to support them. He didn’t harbor vague dreams of running off on wild adventures or abandoning his wife for an affair with a wanton woman. He didn’t try to drink away his troubles or hide out in a barroom. In short, he didn’t feel trapped in his home.

It has been a mighty struggle to domesticate men. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the great enemy of domesticity had been the demon rum and a good many families had been ruined by a man’s propensity to take to the bottle. Betty Smith’s iconic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn told the story of a father gradually drifting away from the family to drink. Even as late as the 1990s, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes tells the exact same story of a father who drinks up his paycheck before making it home every Friday evening and eventually disappears from the family. Although it is now remembered as a remnant of American Puritanism or a hopelessly outdated effort at social engineering, Prohibition was actually a movement of middle-class women attempting to hold lower-class men to the responsibilities of supporting their wives and families.

In the late 1930s, James Thurber touched the national psyche with his story of the mild-mannered Walter Mitty, whose pocketa-pocketa dreams of heroism were regularly interrupted by the demands of his nagging wife. In a famous New Yorker cartoon, Thurber depicted a poor Walter-Mitty type coming home from work to find his whole house morphed into his wife about to envelop him.

The generation that came of age in the 1950s, however, was different. They had fought a war in their youth and sowed some wild oats and now they were ready to settle down. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the iconic image of the decade, tells the story of a young World War II veteran who has fathered an illegitimate child in Italy but comes back to America, marries, and settles into suburban life. The perpetual narrative of the era was that marriage and family were the ultimate goal of life and could be attained by anyone.

The statistics backed it up. More than 75 percent of households were occupied by married couples. Illegitimacy was at a minuscule 5 percent, and more than 80 percent of white children were living with both natural parents. Among African Americans the figures were slightly lower but not outrageously different. Illegitimacy rates were around 10 percent, and 70 percent of children were living with two parents. The phenomenon of single motherhood was virtually unknown.

Certainly there were the inevitable affairs and infidelities, the dissatisfied husbands, the frustrated wives, the closet alcoholics, the mothers who suffered nervous breakdowns, the children who grew up hiding some family secret—all the vicissitudes of life. As Tolstoy had written seventy-five years before, All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Yet the overwhelming message from the popular culture—and the one the public took to heart—was the story that marriage worked. There was a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl. In 1955, the Academy Award went to Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, about a Bronx butcher, a fat, ugly little man, who is still single after all his younger brothers and sisters have married and hangs out every night with his buddies who spend their time asking, So waddaya feel like doing tonight? I don’t know, Ang’. Wadda you feel like doing? At the insistence of his desperate mother, Marty finally goes to a Saturday night dance hall she tells him will be loaded with tomatoes. There he meets a lonely schoolteacher who has been ditched by her date. They find solace in each other, however, and soon the emotional spigots are gushing. I can’t shut my mouth, Marty marvels as he walks her home. I can’t stop talking! When he gets back with his buddies, however, word has gotten around that he really got stuck with a dog on Saturday. Soon they shame him into giving up the idea of calling her for another date. When the usual banter begins again, though—Whadda you wanna do tonight, Angie? I don’t know, whadda you wanna do?—Marty blows up. "I’m going to call her up and ask her out. And then I’m going to call her up and ask her out again. And then I’m going to get down on my knees and beg her to marry me." The movie ends with Marty dialing her number in the phone booth.

In ninety-four minutes, Chayefsky had laid out the credo of the society: a girl for every boy, a boy for every girl. Marriage and domesticity were for everyone, even a fat, ugly little butcher from the Bronx.

In 2012, Charles Murray, who had brought attention to the breakdown of the African American family in his 1984 book Losing Ground, published a new report charting the breakdown of the white working-class family entitled Coming Apart. Murray showed how the once proud, tightly knit Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown had collapsed. In the 1960s, a head of social services had complained, [Fishtown] doesn’t want us there. It refuses to admit it’s a poverty area. No more. Today, welfare dependence and single motherhood are rapidly becoming the norm. In 1960, 85 percent of Fishtown adults ages thirty to forty-nine were living as married couples. Now the figure is 48 percent. In 1960, 81 percent of households had someone working full time in the work force. Today it is only 53 percent. Divorce rates have climbed from 5 percent to 35 percent, and children living in broken homes or with single mothers rose from 2 percent to 23 percent. Among men most of the new leisure time has been absorbed by sleeping and watching television.

Remarkably, Murray noted, although many of the attitudes that denigrate the importance of marriage originate among the intelligentsia and the upper middle class, that stratum of society has so far managed to keep its families intact. The result has become a yawning gulf of economic inequality. Over the last half century, Murray concludes, marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes. The rule is: those who form traditional families succeed; those who don’t fail.

So what happened? How did a society that once proclaimed marriage and family were for everyone turn into a society where men abandon their family responsibilities and women elect to raise their children alone, despite the economic consequences? And what happens next? Does the disintegration of family formation continue to creep upward until it engulfs the middle class? Should we attempt to strengthen the traditional two-parent family or do we accept broken homes and single motherhood as a new type of family—one that seems to require the everlasting support of the government?

Underlying all these issues, of course, are those monumental questions that have never really been settled: What is the human family? Where did it originate? Is it simply a Western institution of recent vintage that can be easily discarded? After all, as the anthropologists like to remind us, 75 percent of the cultures ever discovered in the world do not practice Western-style monogamy. They allow polygamy, where men can take more than one wife. Islam, the world’s second largest religion, still sanctions this practice and seems happy with it—although Islamic countries do have a strong tendency to be at war with themselves and their neighbors. Are we one step ahead of the rest of the world or are they one step ahead of us? Are human beings naturally polygamous or monogamous? Does it even matter?

The theme of this book will be to try to provide answers to these important questions as a route to understanding what is going on in modern America and the world beyond. The question of how monogamy and polygamy evolved in different societies has only recently come into focus and provides a remarkable perspective on how societies develop. This inquiry can be carried right back to the dawn of human evolution when our earliest chimp ancestors first wandered out onto the African savanna about five million years ago. Were they monogamous or polygamous? Does it make a difference? And if so, does that have any relevance to the questions that nag at us today?

The premise from which we will work is simple. Human monogamy—the pair-bonding of couples within the framework of a larger social group—is not entirely a natural institution. This is attested by the observation that 95 percent of all species are polygamous. Where monogamy has been adopted in nature, it usually involves pair-bonded couples living in isolation in a challenging environment. Birds pair off within a larger group, which is why in matters of romance we often feel more affinity with them than we do with our fellow mammals; while 90 percent of bird species are monogamous, 97 percent of mammal species are polygamous and individual pair-bonds are almost unknown. Only the beaver and a few others practice monogamy.

Yet the payoff that was somehow achieved by our earliest chimp-like ancestors was extraordinary. The adoption of social monogamy by early hominids created something unique in nature—a society where males cooperate at common tasks with a minimum of sexual competition. In almost all species, males spend most of their time fighting among themselves for access to females. The unique social contract of monogamy—a male for every female, a female for every male—lowers the temperature of sexual competition and frees its members to work together in cooperation. It is at this juncture that human societies—even human civilizations—are born.

Unfortunately, monogamy does not sustain itself naturally. It requires rules—rules that must be continuously enforced by the members practicing it. Moreover, the benefits of monogamy are not distributed equally. There are clear winners and losers, and there will always be pressure against the system from individuals who are dissatisfied with it. Yet any society that responds too enthusiastically to these grievances or decides that the system is no longer worth defending will find itself slipping back into an older social order where male competition is far more intense and the peace of civilization is difficult to maintain.

All this can be illustrated with some simple arithmetic. In any animal or human population, there will always be approximately the same number of males and females. When it comes to mating, then, there should be a male for every female and a female for every male. Without the restrictions of monogamy, however, the more powerful males will collect multiple females, leaving the lowest status males with none.

When this happens in nature, the unattached males usually wander off alone to lives that are nasty, brutish, and short, or else congregate in a bachelor herd where they engage in endless status competitions until one or more emerge as strong challengers to the reigning alpha males. A titanic battle then ensues and if the challenger wins he takes over the pride, pod, or harem of females (there is a name in almost every species). He becomes the new alpha and gets to sire progeny.

Monogamy presents a different picture altogether. If every male is guaranteed a mate, then the losers are high-status males. Their breeding opportunities are curtailed. The winners are lower-status males, who are no longer thrust into exile but are given the opportunity to mate. There are winners and losers on the female side as well. The winners are high-status females who now have exclusive access to a high-status male instead of having to share him with other females. This is particularly important if the male is a provider. A high-status female who can lay exclusive claim to the efforts of a high-status male provider tremendously increases her chances of raising successful offspring. At the same time, the fortunes of low-status females are severely constricted by monogamy. They no longer have access to high-status males, either genetically or provisionally, but must be contented with the resources of an inferior, low-status male.

Although all this may seem transparent, its application to the workings of societies both contemporary and historic produces remarkable insights. First of all, it poses the question, how did monogamy ever evolve if high-status males are the biggest losers? After all, it is usually high-status males that dominate a social group and set the rules. Second, it explains why the predominant pattern in many former civilizations—that of Ancient Egypt or Imperial China, for instance—was polygamy at the top while monogamy prevailed among the common people. The rulers of most ancient civilizations were unabashed in taking multiple wives and consorts—even whole harems. In a few instances—the Ottoman Empire, for example—this stark inequality became so pronounced that the society became basically dysfunctional. On a smaller scale, the same pattern holds in Islamic societies today.

The important point is this. Although monogamy is manifestly a more equitable and successful way to organize a society, it is always under siege and forever fragile. It requires rules that must be upheld by its members. If a society becomes lax or indifferent about upholding its norms, the advantages will quickly unravel—as we are plainly witnessing in the America of today.

This is a book written for the average reader. It is not a scholarly treatise or an original piece of anthropological research. It is an attempt by a reasonable, educated person to tackle some subjects that many scholars and academics in the field seem to find uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, any contemporary discussion of marriage and the family quickly veers off into arguments about same-sex marriage. Yet the issue does not have much relevance to this book. From an evolutionary standpoint, gay marriage is a non-starter. It is only a few decades old and has played no part in evolutionary or human history. Whether it emerges as a symbol of a society’s respect for marriage or a symbol of its undoing remains to be seen. Conservatives argue that gay unions cheapen marriage and detract from its central place in society. But it could just as easily be argued the other way—if gay people aspire to monogamous marriage that only enhances its place in society.

The important thing for supporters of same-sex marriage is to draw a stark line between acceptance of gay marriage and acceptance of an anything-goes attitude toward marriage, which says that it makes no difference whether people tie the knot or live in sin, whether they marry a man and a woman or marry two wives or three wives (because polygamy is always lurking at the edge of these discussions), or whether they marry their dog or their cat or a favorite lampshade.

Far more fundamental than the issue of same-sex marriage is that we arrive at a biological, anthropological, and historic understanding of the role that monogamy has played in the evolution of human society. At present, the debate bounces back and forth between claims that family disintegration and single motherhood represent only a new kind of family or even a justifiable revolt against an oppressive patriarchy versus the assertion that God created marriage to be between a man and a woman and we’d better keep it that way.

This book will be an attempt to put the matter in an entirely different perspective—to assess the role that monogamous pair-bonding has played in the evolution of humanity and the flowering of civilizations. For that reason, we will begin our investigation in the nineteenth century when a stable Victorian society where monogamous marriage had triumphed became aware that Christian marriage was only a frail bark floating on a much larger sea of humanity that honored quite different marital customs. So let us turn to nineteenth century armchair anthropology and the speculations it produced about the origins of marriage and the human family.

PART I

THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS

CHAPTER 1

WHERE DID THE FAMILY COME FROM?

Nothing fascinated nineteenth century anthropologists more than the question of how and when the human family evolved.

Since antiquity, monogamy had been the general rule of Western civilizations. Yet people always knew that other mating systems were possible. The Greek gods practiced a very loose monogamy that bordered on marital chaos. Many of the early Hebrew patriarchs took multiple wives. Although monogamy was established in the legal codes of Greece and Rome and reinforced by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, it was well known that other cultures—most notably Islam in the Middle East—did not acknowledge it.

This became even more uncomfortably clear as European explorers pushed out among the tribes of Africa, the South Seas, and the American Plains, revealing that the practice of polygamy was almost universal outside the Christian West. The first account of Captain Cook’s voyages, published in 1771, became the benchmark for recognition that Western marriage customs were not at all common in the big wide world. Writing of New Zealand natives, Cook recorded: Polygamy is allowed amongst these people, and it is not uncommon for a man to have two or three wives. The women are marriageable at a very early age; and it would appear that one who is unmarried is but in a forlorn state. Another observation, confirmed by others over the following decades and centuries, was that primitive tribes were almost constantly at war with each other. Their public contentions are frequent, or rather perpetual, wrote Cook, for it appears, from their number of weapons, and dexterity in using them, that war is their principal profession. Numerous subsequent encounters and anthropological studies would later confirm this.

For Christian society of the eighteenth century, of course, all this had an easy explanation. Such peoples were heathen, unenlightened in the ways of God and in need of conversion. With the discovery of the first Neanderthal skeletons in 1856 and the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), however, this easy explanation began to lose ground. Gradually it became clear that the earth was far older than previously imagined and that human origins went back a long, long way—perhaps even to some missing link between man and the apes. Polygamy’s roots, then, might be found in distant prehistory as well, and perhaps even be part of our evolutionary makeup.

The first attempt to explain the origins of the human family in evolutionary terms came in 1861, two years after The Origin of Species. Johann Bachofen, a Swiss law professor, published Das Mutterrecht (The Mother-right): An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen began with the simple observation that remains the most powerful argument of those, including many of today’s feminists, who see family as based in single motherhood. Bachofen argued that while maternity is always known, paternity is always a bit of a mystery. In the civilized world, married men understand the connection between intercourse and conception and lay their paternal claims. In a primitive world, however, the link between sex and paternity would have been more obscure. As a result, males would have had more difficulty laying claim to their offspring and the family unit would have consisted only of a mother and her children. The two-parent family was only formed, said Bachofen, when women became weary of rearing children alone and persuaded men to settle down and help. He buttressed his case for this early matriarchy with evidence from mythology and legend.

These speculations were expanded in the next decade by Lewis Henry Morgan, an upstate New York attorney and amateur anthropologist. Among Morgan’s clients were several Iroquois tribes. He became fascinated with their system of matrilineal tribal clans, each of which took the name of an animal. These clans still form the subject of endless controversy, prompting arguments as to whether their animal names acknowledge man’s kinship with the animal world or are of no more significance than the mascots of high school

Reviews for Marriage and Civilization

[benjamin.lima · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book succinctly explains why we're all doomed. Enthusiasts for polygamy, "state"riarchy (where the state takes over the provider's role), libertinism, etc., ought to ponder the historical record and the evidence of human nature (Ghenghis Khan) as widely as Mr. Tucker does.