Silly me.
I have always thought in my anthropologically Pollyannaish way that the possibility of such a cunning and competitive creature as homo sapiens making it this far without exterminating itself speaks to some deeply rooted cooperative impulse. Imagine my surprise in finding out that the received wisdom among evolutionary anthropologists is that social skills and cooperative behaviors developed to better compete with other humans.
Huh? So, the ability to wage war and ultimately to obliterate all life on our home planet is an adaptive improvement on the behaviors of Paleolithic hominidae? Who knew? And how about a species that can completely encode such a trait in but a few thousand years (i.e., a blink of the evolutionary eye)? Despite the credit due our species under this view for collectively mutating faster than A-Rod, the grimness of the entailments I can scarcely imagine (how about this one - North Korea wins).
Who can blame AIG for trying to reverse-hedge the insurance business?
While I would not question the position that competitive pressures within the BDSM social milieu exist and are indeed intense, the success of BDSM as practice once a partner relationship has been established is predicated on something rather less zero-sum, a trait that is apparently being looked upon as theoretically radical, possibly even heretical, among anthropologists.
In a recent New York Times article there is reported a recent shift toward a new direction among careful thinkers in such matters. In a recent monograph, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes that human babies are uniquely expert in eliciting from their adults deeply suborned evolutionary adaptations, the net effect of which evince to us our own capacity to trust.
The great apes get their progeny up and running on their own much faster than humans; among mammals human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time. This extended span of rearing is, understandably, rather a lot for any human mother to bear. Thus among the many ways humans cooperate in rearing children is, according to Hrdy, chief among beneficial adaptations. By their wily ways of keeping adults not merely entertained, but largely empathetic to their helplessness, infants provoke and reinforce the expression of the trust trait. This is true for apes, but apes will not generally ask for or offer assistance in the rearing of their young. Humans do, and we generally get a positive (read: non-infanticidal) response from our fellow adults because, well, we all find the little blobs of gristle pretty adorable.
Perhaps we are able on a sub-conscious level to recall our own helplessness as infants, and thereby file our responses to little ones under "empathetic", but according to Hdry we were "nice before we were smart." Even so, we were smarter than other cooperative animals (such as certain birds, wolves, etc. - it's how we managed not to become dinner) before we became fully homo sapiens spaiens some 12,000 years ago. But that's what makes the problem interesting. We had brains that were already cunning, territorial and selfish, and there is much about our behavior even today that augers against evolutionary success, but we seem to have evolved more profitably in the area of trust. Babies express it reflexively, parents recognize the trust their babies show toward (certain, not all necessarily) other adults, and trust the other adults to aid in the rearing of the children.
Of course, as soon as we entered the neolithic era, developed agriculture and settlements, we came up with the idea of territory and, concomitantly, war to enforce its boundaries. The selfish genes entered their ascendancy, but the extant traits for trusting were able to keep pace, and the time spent rearing our offspring has not gotten any briefer in the intervening millennia. As an adaptive trait trust and the sharing of pooled resources is still pretty novel.
In light of all this it's a bit startling to learn that the assumption of anthropologists, sociologists and political theorists has been for generations that humans are primarily competitive, and social adaptations are largely in service of that dominant impulse. Perhaps my rosey colored views can be attributed to my long experience at play in the fields of trust. Loving just one person takes a great deal of trust, and also faith that their love is genuine. The pains of loving fully and well are profound, and faith is required because the pain can so easily be taken personally. Loving many takes an expansion of faith, and the vectors of trust become much more densely interwoven. My wife trusts and loves my partners proceeding purely on the love and trust she sees in me for them (much as I believe Professor Hdry suggests obtains in other loving contexts), and I do likewise with her partners. Trust does much to ameliorate competitive impulses (which have their place in the evolutionary scheme of things once trust has been violated, I suspect).
I think most would agree that it's difficult to trust in just one relationship, much less many. With more than one or in several relationships conscious trust becomes something to which one has to surrender since there is no such thing as stage-managing it. What exactly is it were asking to trust anyway? That we not get hurt? If we're unwilling to hurt then we're unwilling to love. If we submit to trust (to quote the great Peter Gabriel line) we get love, and we get the inevitable pain of love too, but we take it, gladly.
I don't need to spell out the value in metaphor of BDSM play to the case supporting Professor Hdry's theory - I think many readers of this column understand the virtues of trust, of cooperation, of loving profligately and wastefully, and of electing to suffer in love. The demands on, and challenges to, trust in BDSM play are always formidable, and within that sphere I've elaborated on an infantile impulse my conscious mind surrendered over 40 years ago, but which may also be a key trait in shoring-up mankind's evolutionary prospects against its own prodigious inclination for self-immolation.
Showing posts with label polyamory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polyamory. Show all posts
17 March, 2009
17 September, 2008
Marriage Failure a Natural Success
In a hilarious example of editorial resistance to the way things actually are, the Washington Post published this feature on the findings of researchers at the esteemed Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the genetic basis for marital dysfunction.
The writer and editors of the Post article blandly accept the social idealism of the study's authors, not bothering to trouble themselves with a critical (i.e., journalistic) perspective on the biological ramifications of what, essentially, now seems to be a demonstrable biological truth (albeit as yet scientifically uncorroborated); that some 40% of men are genetically outfitted to "cheat".
The use of the word cheat in the article is very telling, as are words such as "risk", "dysfunction" and "threat":
Do we blame fish for dying off when we dam a river?
The report is all very nuanced, and not made any less so by the inclusion of weasel words such as "satisfied", with the concomitant couching of the entire study's relevance in terms of that vague and variable criterion - stacked, let it not go unobserved, on but one side of the matrimonial partnership (which, I suppose, if one considers the Latin root mater in matrimony is placing the emphasis where it wants to go anyway). It's quite likely that nearly 100% of men with this naturally-occurring genetic variant would have equally valid (i.e., weak) complaints about their matrimonial "satisfaction", thus is the criterion spurious and the point of the study moot.
But, since we're on the subject, let me apply Occam's Razor and offer a simpler thesis: Naturally-occurring human genetic encoding trumps socially-engineered monogamy.
Big surprise.
Despite its laughable faults, this study does support an explanation for women-kind's reliable attraction to renegades and outcasts, the proverbial "bad boys", the "alphas", of whom it is always known at the outset never stick around. The basis of the attraction to the James Dean type is by now well-understood: women sense good-quality genetic information much as men do - the kind that begets more of the species most efficiently (and therefore gets passed on), the kind they want expressed in their offspring. If 40% of males pack the tomcat allele, then there's no denying that variant's success in getting itself passed on.
If a woman thinks about it (i.e., does the risk-analysis math) she may indeed go directly for the beta male, or upon hooking up with an alpha seek to modulate his risk profile down the scale to beta levels (thus possibly jeopardizing her marital satisfaction in an entirely different way). On the level of woman's feeling, however, the recently popular beta types, e.g., the "emo-boy" and homo-manque, have apparently had their moment in the sun and have been largely discarded (as they characteristically fretted they would be) by sexually astute and self-aware (read: trend-leading) women.
From the perspective of a long-time married man who, given my history, likely has two or more of the offending allele, marital survival is in no way predicated on the luck of the double-helix draw. Fin and my marriage is completely legit in all the conventional senses of the word (licensed, blessed, taxed, etc.), but it is also something else utterly outside conventional legitimacy: we can't "cheat" because we tell the truth.
Or, pulling in Occam again, cheating ≠ truth telling. Fin knows all about my partners, they know all about her, I know about hers and they about me. Everyone is clued in and gets complete disclosure upon request from me, and I from them. I think the marriage succeeds not because it's open but because we are open with each other, fully exposed and vulnerable... and therefore, paradoxically safe.
Think about it - the "cheating" is just the lying (cheating = lying); we fear what we don't know, and if our partner lies to us about his or her desire for other partners, about the nature and extent of their lust, about their kinks, about whatever, we don't get to know them, who they really are, who we're spending our lives with, who sleeps next to us (when we're really most vulnerable), who's helping to raise our kids. Now, that's fearsome, not knowing who you're married to. That could be reason enough to get out of the relationship.
Make no mistake, I'm not arguing here for having a lock on everything your partner is or will ever be in order to stay in your relationship. Quite the contrary - mystery promotes attraction (see "bad boys" above). I'm talking about proceeding from truthful premises and being content with the unvarnished truth of what you find out about your partner, which is often what they're finding out about themselves in the same moment. Their own picture of themselves is likely incomplete, so the truth is we don't get to know anything our partners don't know - although we pretend it's possible and often demand answers along these lines. In effect, we ask to be lied to.
A big part of success in anything has to do with allowing yourself to be surprised, indeed, being grateful for the leavening and spice of life's surprises, big and small. This is never more true than in relationships, but in principle yielding to surprise solves (in the sense of Wendell Berry's concept of "solving for pattern") for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating few new problems of its own. Often events are just surprising and nothing else - not really problems at all if one can accommodate having not expected them.
Blaming unhappiness on hardwired (and therefore unsurprising) biology is lazy, even shabby, thinking. Lying is a social act, related in this case to a social institution, marriage. Given that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that cheating plays a big part in a sizable percentage of those divorces, it may be fair to say that lying (by cheating) is a property of conventional marriage; i.e., dishonesty comes with the package, if not in the bridal registry.
That after 25 years Fin and I are still married is already statistically unconventional, but in the conventional sense our marriage is a failure in that it utterly fails to force biology to heel, and has failed, thereby, to fail. With respect to this failure to fail we have also been told occasionally through the years that our marriage is basically a sham, that our relationship is nothing more than that of roommates with privileges (ironically, this often comes from folks whose marriages are somewhat brittle, if not in outright distress).
And you know what? Those folks get to be right. That's all 25 years of cohabiting companionship, mutual support, commitment, pooled resources, sexual experimentation (within and without), crisis management and the gathering to our relationship of a cherished and loyal coterie of friends, lovers and fellow travelers comes to: a sham marriage. Nothing like a real marriage, with the lying and the cheating and the stacked odds on ending and the counselors and the lawyers... the real institutional trappings of the institution of marriage.
So, there you go: lots of alleles = marital failure. QED.
What bearing, then, does the bit of embossed paper with the endorsement of several potentates with powers granted them by The State of New York have on my relationship with my wife? Nothing with any real meaning, really.
Other than perhaps economic. The last lines of the article cited above confirm as much:
I wonder if anyone still believes in the idea of a sacrament.
The writer and editors of the Post article blandly accept the social idealism of the study's authors, not bothering to trouble themselves with a critical (i.e., journalistic) perspective on the biological ramifications of what, essentially, now seems to be a demonstrable biological truth (albeit as yet scientifically uncorroborated); that some 40% of men are genetically outfitted to "cheat".
The use of the word cheat in the article is very telling, as are words such as "risk", "dysfunction" and "threat":
"Men with two copies of (a particular) allele had twice the risk of experiencing marital dysfunction, with a threat of divorce during the last year, compared to men carrying one or no copies," said Hasse Walum, a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who led the study. "Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no copies."If we consider more than one copy of the allele in question (an allele is a member of a pair or series of genes that occupy a specific chromosomal position) predictive of a man's success or failure in marriage and long-term relationships in light of the much more rigorously predictive models of Gregor Mendel and later Charles Darwin, then a fair alternate conclusion could be that men possessed of more than one of these rover alleles are more likely to wander and therefore reproduce - precisely nature's intent for all its creation - and that failure, if any is to be assigned here, accrues entirely to the institution of marriage as it is conceived in the popular consciousness.
Do we blame fish for dying off when we dam a river?
The report is all very nuanced, and not made any less so by the inclusion of weasel words such as "satisfied", with the concomitant couching of the entire study's relevance in terms of that vague and variable criterion - stacked, let it not go unobserved, on but one side of the matrimonial partnership (which, I suppose, if one considers the Latin root mater in matrimony is placing the emphasis where it wants to go anyway). It's quite likely that nearly 100% of men with this naturally-occurring genetic variant would have equally valid (i.e., weak) complaints about their matrimonial "satisfaction", thus is the criterion spurious and the point of the study moot.
But, since we're on the subject, let me apply Occam's Razor and offer a simpler thesis: Naturally-occurring human genetic encoding trumps socially-engineered monogamy.
Big surprise.
Despite its laughable faults, this study does support an explanation for women-kind's reliable attraction to renegades and outcasts, the proverbial "bad boys", the "alphas", of whom it is always known at the outset never stick around. The basis of the attraction to the James Dean type is by now well-understood: women sense good-quality genetic information much as men do - the kind that begets more of the species most efficiently (and therefore gets passed on), the kind they want expressed in their offspring. If 40% of males pack the tomcat allele, then there's no denying that variant's success in getting itself passed on.
If a woman thinks about it (i.e., does the risk-analysis math) she may indeed go directly for the beta male, or upon hooking up with an alpha seek to modulate his risk profile down the scale to beta levels (thus possibly jeopardizing her marital satisfaction in an entirely different way). On the level of woman's feeling, however, the recently popular beta types, e.g., the "emo-boy" and homo-manque, have apparently had their moment in the sun and have been largely discarded (as they characteristically fretted they would be) by sexually astute and self-aware (read: trend-leading) women.
From the perspective of a long-time married man who, given my history, likely has two or more of the offending allele, marital survival is in no way predicated on the luck of the double-helix draw. Fin and my marriage is completely legit in all the conventional senses of the word (licensed, blessed, taxed, etc.), but it is also something else utterly outside conventional legitimacy: we can't "cheat" because we tell the truth.
Or, pulling in Occam again, cheating ≠ truth telling. Fin knows all about my partners, they know all about her, I know about hers and they about me. Everyone is clued in and gets complete disclosure upon request from me, and I from them. I think the marriage succeeds not because it's open but because we are open with each other, fully exposed and vulnerable... and therefore, paradoxically safe.
Think about it - the "cheating" is just the lying (cheating = lying); we fear what we don't know, and if our partner lies to us about his or her desire for other partners, about the nature and extent of their lust, about their kinks, about whatever, we don't get to know them, who they really are, who we're spending our lives with, who sleeps next to us (when we're really most vulnerable), who's helping to raise our kids. Now, that's fearsome, not knowing who you're married to. That could be reason enough to get out of the relationship.
Make no mistake, I'm not arguing here for having a lock on everything your partner is or will ever be in order to stay in your relationship. Quite the contrary - mystery promotes attraction (see "bad boys" above). I'm talking about proceeding from truthful premises and being content with the unvarnished truth of what you find out about your partner, which is often what they're finding out about themselves in the same moment. Their own picture of themselves is likely incomplete, so the truth is we don't get to know anything our partners don't know - although we pretend it's possible and often demand answers along these lines. In effect, we ask to be lied to.
A big part of success in anything has to do with allowing yourself to be surprised, indeed, being grateful for the leavening and spice of life's surprises, big and small. This is never more true than in relationships, but in principle yielding to surprise solves (in the sense of Wendell Berry's concept of "solving for pattern") for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating few new problems of its own. Often events are just surprising and nothing else - not really problems at all if one can accommodate having not expected them.
Blaming unhappiness on hardwired (and therefore unsurprising) biology is lazy, even shabby, thinking. Lying is a social act, related in this case to a social institution, marriage. Given that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that cheating plays a big part in a sizable percentage of those divorces, it may be fair to say that lying (by cheating) is a property of conventional marriage; i.e., dishonesty comes with the package, if not in the bridal registry.
That after 25 years Fin and I are still married is already statistically unconventional, but in the conventional sense our marriage is a failure in that it utterly fails to force biology to heel, and has failed, thereby, to fail. With respect to this failure to fail we have also been told occasionally through the years that our marriage is basically a sham, that our relationship is nothing more than that of roommates with privileges (ironically, this often comes from folks whose marriages are somewhat brittle, if not in outright distress).
And you know what? Those folks get to be right. That's all 25 years of cohabiting companionship, mutual support, commitment, pooled resources, sexual experimentation (within and without), crisis management and the gathering to our relationship of a cherished and loyal coterie of friends, lovers and fellow travelers comes to: a sham marriage. Nothing like a real marriage, with the lying and the cheating and the stacked odds on ending and the counselors and the lawyers... the real institutional trappings of the institution of marriage.
So, there you go: lots of alleles = marital failure. QED.
What bearing, then, does the bit of embossed paper with the endorsement of several potentates with powers granted them by The State of New York have on my relationship with my wife? Nothing with any real meaning, really.
Other than perhaps economic. The last lines of the article cited above confirm as much:
"Fisher (quoted previously in the article), who described herself as a romantic, said she would not reject a potential mate who has two copies of the risky allele (Surprise!). She paused, (no doubt doing the risk analysis) then added: 'But I might not start a joint bank account with them for the first few years,'" (italics mine).What's left? Well, Fin and I don't lie, cheat or resist our genetic makeup, and we stay together despite the odds. Clearly it's something other than the kind of failed marriage that gets looked at in studies.
I wonder if anyone still believes in the idea of a sacrament.
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