Comments on: Gay marriage isn’t the problem

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 21:17:04 +0000

But is there any evidence that arranged-marriage cultures have less life expectancy? Of course it is also possible that the life expectancy that mattered in the past was the first years of children. So that would imply what women wanted was a good immune system for the children and not necessarily of an adult.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 14:35:05 +0000

Our “civilized setting” can change pretty quickly, though. For example, having a strong immune system might not have mattered so much among the upper middle classes in a European city in 1938, given clean water and dwellings, availability of medical attention, etc. but mattered a great deal 5 years later amid the wreckage.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:48:53 +0000

I think the analogy to diet is a strong one, because our body has strong instincts that have been useful in the past, but which sometimes backfire in our civilized setting.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:44:20 +0000

This reminds me how little I know about 19th-century France. Let’s see, they close out the 18th century with the Revolution and Napoleon’s rise to power. Then Napoleon falls, and… then the French “paper tiger” loses a quick war to the Germans, and then… they fight World War I to a standstill. Oh, and somewhere in there a number of “republics” come and go. I’m sure I’m missing a few things.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 12:19:50 +0000

There is some evidence that women are subconsciously attracted to men who have immune systems complementary to their own, and that this has advantages in that any resulting children are likely to have stronger immune systems than if the mating had been between a couple with more similar systems.

If this is true and the effect is reasonably strong (there are thousands of articles and blog posts on this, but it seems one would have to dig out the original research to get any idea of the strength of the effect), then societies which permit female choice would have a biological advantage over those with strictly arranged marriages.

By: Wobbly

Wobbly — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 04:53:45 +0000

“Prejudicial to the social order” sounds like quite a crime.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 00:53:41 +0000

Michel Chevalier sounds like an interesting individual:

In 1830, after the July Revolution, he became a Saint-Simonian, and edited their paper Le Globe. The paper was banned in 1832, when the “Simonian sect” was found to be prejudicial to the social order, and Chevalier, as its editor, was sentenced to six months imprisonment.

After his release, Minister of the Interior Adolphe Thiers sent him on a mission to the United States and Mexico, to observe the state of industrial and financial affairs in the Americas. In Mexico he exchanged ideas with the mineralogist and politician Andrés Manuel del Río. It was during this trip that he also developed the idea that the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Americas shared a cultural or racial affinity with all the European peoples with a Romance culture. Chevalier postulated that this part of the Americas were inhabited by people of a “Latin race,” which could be a natural ally of “Latin Europe” in its struggle with “Teutonic Europe,” “Anglo-Saxon America” and “Slavic Europe.”[1] The idea was later taken up by French and Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid- and late nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France, and who coined the term “Latin America.”

By: David Foster

David Foster — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 18:58:32 +0000

Michel Chevalier, a French engineer who visited the US circa 1833, had some interesting comments. He observed that Americans were the most money-obsessed people he had ever met..but that, paradoxically, this obsession allowed them to be much more romantic than the Frenchman or Frenchwoman when it came to marriage:

“I ought to do the Americans justice on another point. I have said that with them everything was an affair of money; yet there is one thing which among us, a people of lively affections, prone to love and generous by nature, takes the mercantile character very decidedly and which among them has nothing of this character; I mean marriage. We buy a woman with our fortune or we sell ourselves to her for her dowry. The American chooses her, or rather offers himself to her, for her beauty, her intelligence, or her amiable qualities and asks no other portion. Thus, while we make a traffic of what is most sacred, these shopkeepers exhibit a delicacy and loftiness of feeling which would have done honor to the most perfect models of chivalry.”

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:23:41 +0000

I suppose societies built on extended families and arranged marriages would look at our society's attitude toward romantic love the way we'd look at a society that sang the praises of eating whatever you want. Sure, you want your food to taste good, but listen to your mother: you need to eat healthy food, not junk.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 12:56:07 +0000

Surely, romantic love is more prevalent and important in societies organized around nuclear families as opposed to extended families? See this post. Also, the new book America 3.0 has much to say about the importance of family structure in the evolution of societies.