Why Marriage Will Endure
Human nature isn't putty for progressives
In the 1890s, the Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei attempted to modernise China along Western — that is, liberal — lines. He proclaimed the equality of humanity as well as a notion of individual autonomy. The Oneida experiment ended, however, when a generation of children was born and the parents lobbied to be allowed to marry and form stable family units. The parents chose attachment over radical autonomy.
Human nature is not putty in the hands of progressives. The earliest humans were monogamous, and there is no record of any society before the family. The family is a natural society, not a “social construct.” In Aristotle’s definition, it is ‘a society established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants.’ People in a stable union aiming at a common end through common action form a society, and the primary end of the family is the good of the child — its existence and rearing.
Sex is the strongest of the passions and primarily directed toward the child. And raising a human child takes about twenty years — a duty that falls on both parents equally because they are equally the cause of the child’s existence. This requires a stable and exclusive union. Although the mother’s role is more important at the start, the father’s role becomes increasingly important with time: boys need both a mother’s breast and a father’s boundaries.
Marriage thus creates a contract uniting a man and a woman in a permanent and exclusive union primarily for the begetting and rearing of children. Nothing in human life can wreak havoc like sex can. A fling merely for the sake of procreation is a betrayal of the child. All sex outside marriage is wrong for the same reason masturbation and homosexuality are: attempting to get sexual satisfaction while avoiding the responsibility attached to it.
The marriage contract distinguishes the wife from the concubine. But marriage also has secondary aims because the family in fact comprises two societies: the conjugal (husband-wife) and parental (parent-child). Only conjugal society need be guaranteed by contract. Babies can’t make contracts, and they enter the parental society naturally whereas adults enter conjugal society freely. It also satisfies man's craving for sex, love, companionship, and self-perpetuation.
Aristotle recognised this reflects the reality of human nature:
Between man and wife friendship seems to exist by nature; for man is naturally inclined to form couples—even more than to form cities, inasmuch as the household is earlier and more necessary than the city, and reproduction is more common to man with the animals. With the other animals the union extends only to this point, but human beings live together not only for the sake of reproduction but also for the various purposes of life; from the start the functions are divided, and those of man and woman are different; so they help each other by throwing their peculiar gifts into the common stock. (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. VIII, ch. 12, 1162a 16-28)
This is a beautiful passage. ‘The household is earlier and more necessary than the city’ because the pair bond is primary — as old as mankind. Note, too, that man and woman ‘help each other’ with ‘their peculiar gifts’. Equality doesn’t entail identity. He continues:
It is for these reasons that both utility and pleasure seem to be found in this kind of friendship. But this friendship may be based also on virtue, if the parties are good; for each has its own virtue and they will delight in the fact. And children seem to be a bond of union (which is the reason why childless people part more easily); for children are a common good to both and what is common holds them together.
Men and women thus marry not merely for the sake of creating life but for the sake of a better life for themselves. ‘Childless people part more easily’ because, in their child, the man and his wife see that the image of each of them is also the image of the other, and forges a new identity for them. Although marriage exists primarily for the child, it also benefits the parents, especially by demanding the cultivation of the cardinal virtues.
Aquinas added to his teacher’s argument:
in relation to the principal end of matrimony, namely the good of the offspring…nature intends not only the begetting of offspring, but also its education and development until it reach the perfect state of man as man, and that is the state of virtue. Hence, according to the Philosopher [Nichomachean Ethics, ch. 11, 1161a 17] we derive three things from our parents, namely existence, nourishment, and education. Now a child cannot be brought up and instructed unless it have certain and definite parents, and this would not be the case unless there were a tie between the man and a definite woman, and it is in this way that matrimony consists. (Summa Theologica, III, Supplement, q. 41, a.1)
Only man, the rational animal, has a culture, and this isn’t transmitted genetically. Children must be initiated into it. Instinct alone is insufficient. Hence the father has not only the animal responsibility of providing for and protecting the pregnant and nursing mother — male birds, for example, bring food back to the nest — but also the specifically human responsibility of educating the child.
Aquinas continues:
in relation to the secondary end of matrimony, which is the mutual services which married persons render one another in household matters…just as natural reason dictates that men should live together, since one is not self-sufficient in all things concerning life, for which reason man is described as being naturally inclined to political society, so too among those works that are necessary for human life some are becoming to men, others to women. Wherefore nature inculcated that society of man and woman which consists in matrimony.
The sexes are thus naturally supplementary. Plato, however, got this badly wrong:
The female sex differs from the male in mankind only in this, that the one bears children, while the other begets them and consequently that no occupation of social life belongs to a woman because she is a woman, or to a man because he is a man, but capacities are equally distributed in both sexes, and woman naturally bears her share in all occupations, and man his share, only that in all woman is weaker than man. (Republic, 454 D 455 D)
Some mistakes are so stupid only intellectuals can make them. In no society, for example, has the protector role been mainly female, and in no society has the nurturing role been mainly male. Women are also, for example, more susceptible to infections and hence have always been spared the dirtiest jobs. As Aristotle explains,
The nature of both partners, man and woman, has been prearranged by a divine dispensation in view of their partnership for they differ by not having their faculties available all to the same effect, but some even to opposite effects, though combining to a common end for God made the one sex stronger and the other weaker, that the one for fear may be the more careful, and the other for courage the more capable of self-defence and that the one may forage abroad, while the other keeps house and for work the one is made competent for sedentary employments, but too delicate for an out-door life, while the other makes a poor figure at keeping still, but is vigorous and robust in movement and touching children, the generation is special, but the improvement of the children is the joint labour of both parents, for it belongs to the one to nurture, to the other to chastise. (Economics, I, 3.)
Modern research shows he is right, especially regarding discipline from fathers.
Cohabitation, then, is not merely about making and raising children but also companionship and the common good. And since the state the contract aims at producing determines the conditions of the contract, it is clear from the nature of wedlock that marriage possesses the properties of unity and indissolubility.
Regarding indissolubility, the marriage must endure until the last child is reared. Since most women can give birth until around 45, this means the partners are by then over sixty years old. The woman has given her fertility and beauty; the man, his strength and labour. Both, then, owe each other loyalty until death, and they owe it to their children to keep the family estate intact. And — as their children’s primary educators until the last — they must provide a good example, not abandon each other to loneliness in old age and thereby wound their children.
Regarding unity, polygamy violates it in both its forms: polygyny (one husband with multiple wives) and polyandry (one wife with several husbands). Both violate natural law, the latter especially. Polygyny suppresses the fertility of all the wives except the favourite, meaning monogamy propagates the human race better. Polygyny also makes rearing children difficult because the husband’s attention is divided: coming from different wives, there is no equality among the children.
But although polygyny makes the primary end of marriage difficult, it makes the secondary ends basically unattainable. No equality between husband and wife is possible because she is merely one among many. Her attention to him is single; his to her, divided. He is not exclusively hers. She will be superseded by younger, newer wives. Thus “polygyny,” writes Westermarck, "is an offence against the feelings of woman, not only amongst highly civilised peoples, but even among the rudest savages."
In the marriage rite of ancient Rome, the bride said to the bridegroom, “Ubi tu Cains, ego Caia" (Where you are master, I am mistress). Polygynous wives cannot say this. Lacking unity, love, dignity, and equality, polygynous families have therefore proven a poor foundation for civil society, and Christ corrected the polygyny of the Old Testament patriarchs. Human love — directed to the mind, heart and soul — differs in kind from animal desire.
Polyandry (one wife having multiple husbands) is worse than polygyny. Although the wife and children are provided for by the husbands materially, this is not the central purpose of marriage. It violates natural law more gravely than polygyny does because, since the father cannot be determined with certainty, he can’t perform his natural function. The child cannot turn to him for leadership. There is also no head of the household.
Polyandry, then, has never been the recognised form of marriage in any developed society; polygyny, representing a degeneration from the earliest monogamous hunter-gatherers, has never resulted in a large, stable successful society. Promiscuity — even worse than polyandry — was never a stage in human history. As Devas explains in his Studies of Family Life,
“the state supposed is suicidal, and instead of allowing the expansion of the human race, would have produced infertility, and probably disease, and at best only allowed the existing numbers to maintain, under the most favourable circumstances, a precarious existence. To suppose, therefore, that the whole human race for any considerable time were without regular marriage, is physiologically impossible. They could never have survived it.”
For our degenerate times, promiscuity might be the most convincing proof of the necessity of marriage — a reductio ad absurdum of liberalism. Dostoevsky believed there was an argument for God from the existence of evil. He collected newspaper clippings of crimes against children so horrific that only demonic influence, he believed, could explain them. Man can sink far beneath the beasts. The demand to legalise incest, abhorred even by pagans throughout history, is likely to function in a similar way.
This is because incest — apart from the genetic risks — reverses the essential natural relations. The daughter is subject to her father because she derives her existence from him, but marriage would make her his equal. Even worse, the son is subject to his mother but as her husband would command her obedience. The logical consequences of Marcuse’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ are thus like Dostoevsky’s newspaper clippings: in a dark time, the eye begins to see.
But the impossibility of promiscuity does not mean everyone need marry. In his Essays, Bacon writes, for example, that “a single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill up a pool.” But marriage is necessary for anyone having sex, and it could — theoretically — be legally enforced. Suppose extinction threatened the human race. Although the propagation of the race is currently the remote duty of every individual but the proximate duty of none, it would then become the proximate duty of all.
The justrium liberorum instituted at Rome by Augustus was a response to a similar crisis. In principle, penalties could also justly be inflicted on celibacy. But man’s craving for sex means this situation won’t arise. Even MGTOW guys still want to have sex with women. Only homosexuals take men going their own way all the way.
The Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman, in his masterwork Family and Civilization, described ‘childbearing as the main stem of the family’. And for as long as there are children, marriage will be necessary because no stranger with a certificate from the state can substitute for a mother’s love or a father’s protection and leadership.
Could you please elaborate on how "in a dark time, the eye begins to see".