Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 37
- 2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Well, yes, I agree, but then I'm inclined to natural law arguments in the first place. There is a telos to human sexuality which is discernible from nature and implicitly known to almost every human culture, despite occasional deviation. We can cash that out in either evolutionary or moral terms, but it seems fairly evident to me.
This position is naturally consistent with Christian theology (it is in fact the traditional Christian position), but it would cut against the idea of any kind of 'Christian exceptionalism', where male-female monogamy is a unique Christian innovation, rather than a Christian re-statement of a universal principle. Hence my asking the question - if male-female monogamy is unique to Anglo Christians, why isn't it, well, unique? Why does the same pattern recur globally, even in very isolated cultures and communities?
The alternative - that, ironically enough, the Christians are right and it's a human universal - seems to make more sense to me.
This idea is a bit foreign to me, are there people actually arguing that?
Monogamous marriages are much older than Christianity. Ancient Greek and Roman societies universally had monogamous marriages (in the sense that marriage was between one husband and one wife, and men were not allowed to have concubines living in their household). The entirety of the old testament describes pretty much only monogamous marriages for commoners (and royals pretty much did what they wanted anywhere, anytime - including in Christian kingdoms much later).
Well, someone just upthread for a start.
I don't assert that everybody in every culture throughout all of history has had exactly traditional Christian beliefs on sexual morality. Demonstrably it is not universal human consensus that marriage is an objective reality constituted by the decision of a single man and single woman to form a faithful, sexually exclusive lifelong bond oriented towards the begetting and raising of new life; and I'd argue that there are some ways in which the early Christian understanding of sexual morality was revolutionary.
However, I assert that in broad strokes, it appears to be relatively universal that humans form monogamous male-female pair bonds in order to raise children, and while there are forms of alternative sexual behaviour that we often see in history (polygamy and homosexuality being likely the most common), the universality of the male-female parenting unit, and likewise its universal recognition in social institutions either equivalent or roughly analogous to marriage, is apparent. (It is perhaps also relevant that polygamous relationships typically have been understood as marriage, but same-sex relationships have not; the possibility of children is the most obvious explanation for that difference.) What the consequences of that observation should be for our understanding of sexual morality today is, of course, a controversial question, but I can see no way to evade the observation itself.
That is, for better or for worse, marriage, by which I mean sexually exclusive long-term male-female pair bonds, appears to not just be a quirk of Christian or Abrahamic culture. It's widespread enough that I think it must be understood as either part of human nature itself, or as an inevitable consequence of human biology and evolutionary history in the environmental context of this planet.
I doubt you disagree with me on that, but I might as well state it as clearly as I can in my own terms!
More options
Context Copy link
"Arguing" is giving it too much credit. There actually are people (generic everyday wokes, leftists-by-default, young women who want to maximally exploit their sexual market value right now damn the consequences) who reflexively claim as much, but it's strictly arguments as soldiers. Christianity, the Patriarchy and Capitalism are to blame for absolutely everything ever, no need to explain or differentiate, and obviously the natural state of things is some utopian vision of free love, don't you know that Science has proven it (i.e., she once read a magazine article that vaguely gestured at studies)?
This may sound uncharitable, but I have encountered it often enough.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link