Monogamy eventually conquered even the nobility with the rise of the merchant class, and by the nineteenth century Queen Victoria had tamed the appetites even of royal men to the point where every man had at least to pretend that he was the faithful, attentive and lifelong devotee of one woman. It is no accident, says William Tucker in his brilliant book Marriage and Civilization, that on the whole peace comes to Europe as a result. Peace, that is, except where societies continue to be based on polygamy, such as much of the Muslim world, or where polygamy was suddenly reinvented, as in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons’ polygamy caused huge resentment among neighbours, as well as tensions among Saints, and cycles of terrible violence followed them on their peregrinations all the way to Utah. It culminated in the Mountain Meadow massacre of 1857, carried out in revenge for the killing by an enraged husband of a Mormon who had lured the man’s wife into joining his harem. The violence died down only with the outlawing of polygamy in 1890. (Unofficial polygamy persists to this day in a very few Mormon fundamentalist communities.) The foremost anthropologists of cultural evolution, Joe Henrich, Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, have argued in an influential paper called ‘The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage’ that the spread of monogamy in the modern world can best be explained by its beneficial effects on society. That is to say, not that clever men sat around a table and decided upon a policy of monogamy in order to bring peace and cohesion, but more likely that it was a case of cultural evolution by Darwinian means. Societies that chose ‘normative monogamy’, or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies. That, the three anthropologists think, explains the triumph of monogamy, which reaches its apogee in the perfect nuclear family of 1950s America, with Dad going out to work and Mom at home cleaning, cooking and looking after the kids.
This book is about how most, if not all positive things come from a bottom up approach and evolved rather than being planned top down. With such a theme, the book definitely does have quite a bit of confirmation bias. However, there are indeed some interesting passages and insights that I remembered while reading this.
This passage is on how monogamy, as a societal structure, turns out to be popular because societies which adopt monogamy tend to be more productive as compared to polygamous societies. Why monogamy turned out to be the system we adopt today isn’t a result of defining moral principles and selecting the best one, but a natural process of Darwin like evolution.
