Angry in the Great White North

In Bountiful, BC, the issue of polygamy has come out of the shadows:

Two leaders of a controversial religious sect in Bountiful, B.C. have been arrested and charged with polygamy.

Winston Blackmore and James Oler were arrested Wednesday, B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal confirmed.

Oppal said Blackmore is alleged to have committed polygamy with 20 women and Oler, with two women.

"This has been a very complex issue," he said. "It's been with us for well over 20 years. The problem has always been the defence of religion has always been raised."

As with the gay marriage debate, religion is a red herring.  Traditional marriage and polygamy are both solutions to the problem of paternity of children, which is a concern independent of religious sensibilities.

Though polygamy solves the problem of paternity, polygamy is inherently destabilizing, the exact opposite of traditional marriage.

Let's start from the beginning.

To win the gene game, men and women are trying to achieve the same goal, but by different methods dictated by biology.  The goal is to have children carrying their genes into the next generation.

The sex cell in men - the sperm - is cheap and created in the millions.  So for a man, the obvious strategy is to have sex with as many women as possible and so maximize the spread of his genes.  Large numbers of children means a decent chance that some will live to adulthood.  As long as some make it to a reproductive age, the man has won the game.

The sex cell in women - the egg - is expensive and there is just one a month.  In addition, the woman has to carry the child to term (the man has already wandered off).  For a woman, it's quality, not quantity, since she can't physically have too many children (a man can father hundreds or more).  So for a woman, the goal is to limit sex with quality men who can father healthy children, which maximizes her chances of successfully raising these children to adulthood.  That investment of time and effort is needed to make sure she wins the game.

Obviously, there is a huge disconnect here.  First of all, a society based on this model is one where most children grow up fatherless in an environment of institutionalized rape (or something close to it).

But besides that, the problem is that the solution that the man pursues - maximize sex in order to maximize the number of children - simply doesn't work because there are other men pursuing the same strategy.

The missing element is the guarantee of paternity.  With all these men having sex with the same pool of women, who knows which men succeeded at fathering the children the have resulted?  That is the basis of the compromise that is at the heart of polygamy and traditional marriage, both of which are forms of exclusive commitment.

In both cases, the compromise is the same.  A woman promises exclusive access to a man.  That promises means the man knows the children are his.  In return, though, he makes a promise of fidelity.  Because he has agreed not to father children by other women outside of the commitment, he now has reason to invest the time and resources to help these few children of his. 

Polygamy and traditional marriage work the same way here.  There is an exclusive relationship established, and recognized by the community.

By the way, that last point is key.  Marriage (whatever the form) has to be recognized by the community at large.  That is because publicly making the commitment means that everyone else recognizes that these people are now off limits.  That community recognition is a key element to the fidelity part of traditional marriage and polygamy.

So marriage (whatever the form) is an institution involving both the individuals getting married and the community at large.  That means marriage is not a right, by the way.  Rights are things that do not need the community to enable.  I have a right to free speech since I can speak, and all I need is for the state not to interfere when I decide to exercise this inherent right.  On the other hand, I can't have a marriage without the state's positive involvement (and for that matter, without the agreement of a second party), so that means marriage is not a right.  I'm just bringing up that point to toss the "it's my right" argument into the trash where it belongs.

So if polygamy and traditional marriage achieve the same goal, and in similar ways, what's the problem?  The problem is that gender selection in humans is a 50-50 affair.

In any community in which there is a balanced number of men and women, how do you create stable polygamous family units?  There is always a surplus of men.  Indeed, it has been observed in the polygamous communities that young men are routinely ejected from the community for religious transgressions (typically questioning authority), while young women are quickly forgiven.

The reason for doing this has nothing to do with maintaining religious orthodoxy (again religion is a red herring).  The real reason is to reduce the the number of men in the community and so make more women available for constructing harems for the men remaining (invariably older men in positions of power).

Does that sound like a formula for a stable community?  Does that sound like a community in which women are treated equally?  Indeed, men are perhaps as much victimized by polygamy as women, at least those men that are targeted to be ejected.

Polygamous communities only work because they are imbedded inside of larger non-polygamous communities.  The larger community is a place to which exiled young men can go.  If there is no "outside", then the exiles have nowhere to go, and the polygamous community would reach a breaking point with frustrated young men growing in number over time.

I suppose the numbers can be culled through violence. Fortunately for Bountiful, that solution has not been needed, since the excess can find their way in a larger world.

Either way, though, that is, exiling them or killing them, is a terrible way to treat men.  And this is done so that women are compelled to enter into polygamous marriages if they want to have children, which is a terrible way to treat women.

So not only does polygamy treat both men and women unfairly, a polygamous community is inherently a special case.  The universal application of polygamy would bring society to its knees.  if you have polygamy, you have to limit its application so that the imbalances created are localized and then absorbed, but then you're talking about different rules for different people, and that itself has a corrosive effect on society as a whole.

Polygamy is fundamentally dangerous to a society.  On an individual level, men and women suffer because polygamy is not consistent with the biological realities of human communities.  Compare this with traditional marriage, which is consistent.  On the larger scale, polygamy, if it is practiced, can only be practiced by a small subset of the population, and the state has an interest to ensure that the practice is never widely adopted.  But then that creates two classes of citizens, with the stresses that inevitably result from that.

The only logical solution is to outlaw polygamy altogether, and apply the law universally.

Fortunately, we've already done that (at least the outlaw part), and in a rational world, we'd be done.

But irrationality abounds, and I expect that people who are viscerally opposed to anyone suggesting that their own lifestyle choices are problematic and selfish will rally around the polygamists, as these same people did with gay marriage.

With gay marriage, the problem was that by redefining marriage to be utterly divorced from the issue of children and paternity, marriage loses its raison d'etre.  Marriage becomes merely a contract of convenience for insurance purposes, or a quaint label for people who think traditions are collectibles, like those nasty little ceramic cats, and so portray themselves as "married" without a care to what marriage means or what it's for.

With polygamy, the problem is that the ability of the widespread practice of traditional marriage to stabilize society disappears, and instead we have a model of marriage that is destabilizing, and is more destabilizing the more people engage in it.

But irrational people don't care about these consequences.  For them, it's religious nuts who think they own marriage, right?   Religious people can be ignored because they're religious, regardless of whether what they're saying makes any mention of religion at all.

Which is too bad, because nothing about what is happening to marriage - whether it is about gay marriage or the potential legalization of polygamy -- is about religion.  But then to admit that would mean having to listen, and who's wants to listen to religious people?

Update: Hopefully this won't be in the running for the the worst column about polygamy ever.