For millennia, our ideas about extramarital sex, the double standard, and single parenthood have been inflexible moral judgements. All of those have changed rapidly because of modern wealth and technology. So do our morals necessarily address good and evil directly, or do they also address our situation?
This is a serialization from my book, Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life. To see the Table of Contents and the dust jacket blurb, click here; to start from the beginning, click here; to read the previous post, click here.
The Two Parent Household
The Double Standard: Historically, a single mother and her children lived on the edge of survival.
Consider pregnancy and marriage from the standpoint of survival in our not-too-distant past. If a daughter comes home with a husband, then we can estimate that the two of them can provide for roughly twice as many children as a mother without a husband.
Actually, they can probably raise more than twice as many children. Raising and supervising children, particularly small children, makes any other sustained, intensive work very difficult. So a daughter who is married is in a much better situation to provide sustenance for herself and her children.
The Single Mother
But a daughter who comes home pregnant without a husband puts her relations in a bind. If they abandon her, they not only lose her, they also lose her children, who are equally their relatives regardless of their legitimacy. But if they keep her in the family, then often her parents, siblings, and everyone else will have to sacrifice some of their resources to help support her. For those groups who lived in situations where resources were extremely limited, this extra burden could have proven catastrophic.
So we can see a pragmatic (i.e., survival) reason for some of our sexual mores. Whether or not those mores are moral, they have definitely been practical. And as the practical reasons change, we need to be able to recognize those changes and when necessary, respond accordingly.
The Double Standard
There are a couple of other aspects about our sexual conduct that further illustrate how our situation can change, and how our strategies may need to change with them. First of all, there is the chronic problem of the double standard: extramarital sex has historically been less shameful for men than women. A possible explanation for that is also given above. If a daughter comes home with illegitimate children, then there is an extra burden for her family. But this is not true for the son who fathers those children. Without strong legal or social penalties, a son who impregnates a woman can escape her burden. And even with legal obligations such as we have in this country (e.g., child support) there is no doubt that a single mother still inherits a much heavier burden than the independent father, and some of this burden will often be assumed by her relations.
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The double standard, too, has begun disappearing. It still exists, but there is no doubt that the gap between the two standards has narrowed greatly. Part of that, again, is because we can now control pregnancy much better. But in addition, there is another reason that also allows another shift in attitudes: our resources are not as constrained as they once were.
Modern Luxury
Our modern excess in resources allows a shift in our attitudes about single parenthood. As I noted above, at one time a single parent could raise a family only at great difficulty, and often only through sacrifices from friends and relations. As such, single parenthood, with or without illegitimacy, has been historically considered highly undesirable by many cultures.
Today although many people would contend that single parenthood is certainly not ideal, there is no doubt that it is much easier. With an increase in resources, we have also seen a dramatic increase in single-parent homes. So if a daughter comes home pregnant today, it is generally seen as a headache, not a disaster.
Changing Attitudes
Here we see three very recent, very rapid shifts in attitudes, in an aspect of human behavior that was inflexible for millennia. Extramarital sex, the double standard, and single parenthood previously represented large problems, carrying with them social censure, abandonment, or even death. But with effective methods of controlling pregnancy, and with the excess of material resources in the west, these three have quickly become lesser problems, that do little more than raise eyebrows in the community.
Picture by Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother,” courtesy of Wikipedia. Portrait shows Florence Thompson with several of her children. The Library of Congress caption reads: “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.”
In general, I’d say “yes,” and that a great deal of our “morality” tracks back to economic considerations rather than spiritual ones. You’ve cited a very easily understood example, that of unattached mothers.
“Thou shall not kill” is another one, that I’ll posit is more to the point, with obvious economic overtones. Testing the premise that “thou shalt not kill” is simply an economic maxim and not a spiritual one requires looking no farther than instances of theft, home invasion, or war — which threaten economic stability — and the dictate vaporizes on the spot:
–kill the thief
–kill any intruder
–kill any of “them” that threaten our “stuff”
Any “spiritual” basis for “thou shalt not kill” gets thrown out the window immediately.
I would wander off into the idea that “eternal life” that so entrances humanity via promises of “heaven” and “reincarnation,” etc. are simply economic transactions as well (with a heavy helping of undue influence and coercion.) “Yes, we’ll follow and obey and in exchange you promise to deliver “eternal life.” However, that scenario doesn’t have the nice, sharply defined controls that “thou shalt not kill” does and it’s not so easy to see. Suggesting as much also (cough) alienates folks pretty quickly so I tend not to bring it up. It’s also difficult to deny the attraction after a particularly hard day, week, month or loss of a loved one, etc.
Love the Dorothea Lange photograph. Did I not read anything about abortion or government support for having single mother children? Or was abortion included in the “effective methods of controlling pregnancy”?
Michael Young- One thing I’ve learned about bookscrounger that I just adore is his respect for people who disagree with him. I really have no hostility about this discussion either. But let me say that you may be making to broad an interpretation of the phrase “Thou shalt not kill” . Quick disclaimer, I do not know any Biblical languages, but I have been taught that a more precise meaning of “Thou shalt not kill” is “Thou shalt not commit murder.” In no way to offend you, but just to make a point, you wouldn’t take the term “thou shalt not kill” to mean the command prohibited the killing of animals to eat. Thus it was not a restriction on all types of killing, now if it meant thou shalt not kill humans, it would seem to conflict with other commands given to Israel by God when there was a time to put someone to death for certain crimes.
🙂
Mike, you’re absolutely right. It is better translated as “murder,” in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. The KJV uses “kill,” others “murder.”
Having said that, I can’t see where it affects the point all that much; a behavior which is prohibited in one scenario (for economic reasons) is condoned in others (again, for economic reasons.)
For a (poor?) example: gambling is permitted in Las Vegas and Nevada (along with prostitution) because the state had very little else to offer, and it’s a huge economic benefit to the state. Gambling (and certainly prostitution) are viewed as cancerous in areas which are already economically developed, economically stable. (Jack Abramoff’s & Edwin Edward’s special case scenarios excluded :;) )
Two or three of the other commandments are directly related to economics, “thou shall not steal,” “thou shall not covet,” etc.
There were no insurance companies to ease the pain back then. We toss around terms like “catastrophic” loss these days while we wait for a check to arrive; in those days losses were truly “catastrophic” and often truly unrecoverable.
Thanks Mike,
In my prior response I totally overlooked the aspect of the economic factor that you were making. It is a good lesson for me to “listen” more and talk less. As I understand it, under the ancient civil laws in Israel, if a person killed another person even by accident, the family of the victim had the right to kill the person guilty of causing an accidental death. That person could escape that if he was lucky enough to make it to a city of refuge before being caught. If it was economics that they were considering, one would think the rather than killing a person in that circumstance, they would have made that person work and pay to the victim’s family.
With regards to the double standard. While our society may be changing, and with that, attitudes are changing, I believe that the double standard is more innate to our psyche than many might think. I have merely very sketchy antidotal information on my sense about this, but it seems to me that girls or women that have been “liberated” from feeling premarital sexual relations are wrong, and also either had precautions against pregnancy or just didn’t get pregnant, still seem emotionally bonded to the first man that they give themselves. To borrow a rather crude line from Charlie Sheen, he said: “You don’t pay a prostitute to have sex with you, you pay her to leave.” Although I consider myself a person of faith (as faulty as that faith may be at times), I personally think that while it may be pleasant and special to have a formal marriage ceremony with family and guests, that the formality is not a moral requirement. I believe it is a moral requirement to chose only one sex partner for life, until death do us part, regardless as to if one choses to have a ceremony or not.
Absolutely. We are part genetics, part culture, part thought. A friend of mine, a well-known neuroanatomist* says we are 80% genetics. I disagree with him; not with his number, but that there is ‘a’ number at all. It depends on the person, it depends on the situation. We are all of us at times 100% genetic, given to passion, not just sex but anger and violence and hunger and other bodily functions. At the far extreme there is the story of the Roman Scaevola, who failed in his mission and burnt off his hand. It is unimportant that this may be legend; it is still possible for someone to do this, we can demonstrate equivalents through hypnosis and surgery.
One of the things I am trying very hard to do is to get people to understand there is not one answer. Kill, murder, euthanize, even massacre, there may be a time it is necessary. Massacre may seem dubious, but it is what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We say that hindsight is 20/20, but in this case it is not; we still do not know if that was the best way to do it, but there was no way to know then, and no way now: we only had two bombs to drop, and they had to end the war. We picked the most devastating targets that we could. And it barely worked. If Hirohito hadn’t put his foot down, we would have had to take the country one village and one island at a time.
To the post at hand, some animals mate for life, some copulate and leave. We believe that all of it is based on the best strategy for survival. To that, I will offer this illustration: imagine a man who sneaks around, finds baby girls in their cradles, takes them out and copulates with them. That sounds horrific, but it is what ermine do. The pups become pregnant, and the fetus within them grows as the pups do. We assume this is a superior strategy for animals that face the problems that ermine do.
So the puzzle for me, and the one that I am writing books on, is how do we explain human abuse and horror, and how do we stop it? Because when you see war, and physical and sexual abuse of children, and when they happen all the time in all cultures, as horrible as it is to contemplate we have to assume that at some situations in the past that these strategies were superior to others.
More anon.
*The neuroanatomist is named James Fallon (no relation to the comic). He supports one of the theses for my current book by pointing out that modern dictators fit the definition of psychopaths, in this talk to the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Very challenging thoughts. I am one who takes the side that we were right in using those two atomic bombs, but it is a very hard position to hold with my belief that I am for peace, love, and harmony for all of humanity. Thanks
There’s really no way to know, is there? History is where the scientific method completely falls apart. Conditions cannot be exactly recreated, so no experiment can be repeated, and no hypothesis can be tested.
I think the decision we made with the A-bombs is the same any head of state makes fairly regularly: yes, it is a matter of life and death, but also of how many lives, and how many deaths. We hope we made the right decision. But science fails us, there is no way to know.