The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (15 page)

Something about the world doesn't seem to make sense. On the one hand, it is run mostly by men. On the other hand, in most parts of it, polygamy is illegal. If men really are the sort of animals described in the two previous chapters, why did they let this happen?

Sometimes this paradox gets explained away as a compromise between the male and female natures. In an old-fashioned, Victorian-style marriage, men get routine subservience in exchange for keeping their wanderlust more or less under control. The wives cook, clean, take orders, and put up with all the unpleasant aspects of a regular male presence. In return, the husbands graciously agree to stick around.

This theoiy, however appealing, is beside the point. Granted, within any monogamous marriage there is compromise. And within any two-man prison cell there is compromise. But that doesn't mean prisons were invented by a compromise among criminals. Compromise
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between men and women is the way monogamy endures (when it does), but it's no explanation of how monogamy got here.

The first step toward answering the "Why monogamy" question is to understand that, for some monogamous societies on the anthropological record — including many hunter-gatherer cultures — the question isn't all that perplexing. These societies have hovered right around the subsistence level. In such a society, where little is stowed away for a rainy day, a man who stretches his resources between two families may end up with few or no surviving children. And even if he were willing to gamble on a second family, he'd have trouble attracting a second wife. Why should she settle for half of a poor man if she can have all of one? Out of love? But how often will love malfunction so badly? Its very purpose, remember, is to attract her to men who will be good for her progeny. Besides, why should her family — and in preindustrial societies families often shape a bride's "choice" forcefully and pragmatically — tolerate such foolishness?

Roughly the same logic holds if a society is somewhat above the subsistence level but all men are about equally above it. A woman who chooses half a husband over a whole one is still settling for much less in the way of material well-being.

The general principle is that economic equality among men — especially, but not only, if near the subsistence level — tends to short-circuit polygyny. This tendency by itself dispels a good part of the monogamy mystery, for more than half of the known monogamous societies have been classified as "nonstratified" by anthropologists.
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What really demand explanation are the six dozen societies in the history of the world, including the modern industrial nations, that have been monogamous yet economically stratified. These are true freaks of nature.

The paradox of monogamy amid uneven affluence has been stressed especially by Richard Alexander, one of the first biologists to broadly apply the new paradigm to human behavior. When monogamy is found in subsistence-level cultures, Alexander calls it "ecologically imposed." When it appears in more affluent, more stratified cultures, he calls it "socially imposed."
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The question is why society imposed it.

The term socially imposed may offend some people's romantic
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ideals. It seems to imply that, in the absence of bigamy laws, women would flock toward money, gleefully signing on as second or third wife so long as there was enough of it to go around. Nor is the term flock used lightly here. There is a tendency for polygyny to occur in bird species whose males control territories of sharply differing quality or quantity. Some female birds are quite happy to share a male so long as he has a lot more real estate than any male they could have monopolized.
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Most human females would like to think they are guided by a more ethereal sort of love, and that they have somewhat more pride than a long-billed marsh wren.

And of course they do. Even in polygynous cultures, women are often less than eager to share a man. But, typically, they would rather do that than live in poverty with the undivided attention of a ne'er-do-well. It is easy for well-educated, upper-class women to scoff at the idea that any self-respecting woman would willingly suffer the degradation of polygyny, or to deny that women place great emphasis on a husband's income. But upper-class women seldom even meet a man with a low income, much less face the prospect of marrying one. Their milieu is so economically homogeneous that they don't have to worry about finding a minimally adequate provider; they can refocus their search, and spend their time pondering a prospective mate's taste in music and literature. (And these tastes are themselves cues to a man's socioeconomic status. This is a reminder that the Darwinian evaluation of a mate needn't be consciously Darwinian.)

In favor of Alexander's belief that there's something artificial about highly stratified yet monogamous societies is the fact that polygyny tends to lurk stubbornly beneath their surface. Though being a mistress is even today considered at least mildly scandalous, a number of women seem to prefer that role to the alternative: a greater commitment from a man of lesser means — or, perhaps, a commitment from no man.

Since Alexander began stressing the two kinds of monogamous societies, his distinction has drawn a second, more subtle, kind of support. The anthropologists Steven J. C. Gaulin and James S. Boster have shown that dowry — a transfer of assets from the bride's to the groom's family — is found almost exclusively in societies with
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socially imposed monogamy. Thirty-seven percent of these stratified nonpolygynous societies have had dowry, whereas 2 percent of all nonstratified nonpolygynous societies have. (For polygynous societies the figure is around 1 percent.)
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Or, to put it another way: although only 7 percent of societies on record have had socially imposed monogamy, they account for 77 percent of societies with a dowry tradition. This suggests that dowry is the product of a market disequilibrium, a blockage of marital commerce; monogamy, by limiting each man to a single wife, makes wealthy men artificially precious commodities, and dowry is the price paid for them. Presumably, if polygyny were legalized, the market would right itself more straightforwardly: males with the most money (and perhaps with the most charm and the ruggedest physiques and whatever else might partly outweigh considerations of wealth) would, rather than fetch large dowries, have multiple wives.

If we adopt this way of looking at things — if we abandon a Western ethnocentric perspective and hypothetically accept the Darwinian view that men (consciously or unconsciously) want as many sex-providing and child-making machines as they can comfortably afford, and women (consciously or unconsciously) want to maximize the resources available to their children — then we may have the key to explaining why monogamy is with us today: whereas a polygynous society is often depicted as something men would love and women would hate, there is really no natural consensus on the matter within either sex. Obviously, women who are married to a poor man and would rather have half of a rich one aren't well served by the institution of monogamy. And, obviously, the poor husband they would gladly desert wouldn't be well served by polygyny.

Nor are these superficially ironic preferences confined to people near the bottom of the income scale. Indeed, in sheerly Darwinian terms, most men are probably better off in a monogamous system and most women worse off. This is an important point, and warrants a brief illustrative detour.

Consider a crude and offensive but analytically useful model of the marital marketplace. One thousand men and one thousand women
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are ranked in terms of their desirability as mates. Okay, okay: there isn't, in real life, full agreement on such things. But there are clear patterns. Few women would prefer an unemployed and rudderless man to an ambitious and successful one, all other things being even roughly equal; and few men would choose an obese, unattractive, and dull woman over a shapely, beautiful, sharp one. For the sake of intellectual progress, let's simplemindedly collapse these and other aspects of attraction into a single dimension.

Suppose these 2,000 people live in a monogamous society and each woman is engaged to marry the man who shares her ranking. She'd like to marry a higher-ranking man, but they're all taken by competitors who outrank her. The men too would like to marry up, but for the same reason can't. Now, before any of these engaged couples gets married, let's legalize polygyny and magically banish its stigma. And let's suppose that at least one woman who is mildly more desirable than average — a quite attractive but not overly bright woman with a ranking of, say, 400 — dumps her fiance (male #400, a shoe salesman) and agrees to become the second wife of a successful lawyer (male #40). This isn't wildly implausible — forsaking a family income of around $40,000 a year, some of which she would have to earn herself by working part-time at a Pizza Hut, for maybe $100,000 a year and no job requirement (not to mention the fact that male #40 is a better dancer than male #400).
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Even this first trickle of polygynous upward mobility makes most women better off and most men worse off. All 600 women who ranked below the deserter move up one notch to fill the vacuum; they still get a husband all to themselves, and a better husband at that. Meanwhile 599 men wind up with a wife slightly inferior to their former fiancees — and one man now gets no wife at all. Granted: in real life, the women wouldn't move up in lockstep. Very early in the process, you'd find a woman who, pondering the various intangibles of attraction, would stand by her man. But in real life, you'd probably have more than a trickle of upward mobility in the first place. The basic point stands: many, many women, even many women who will choose not to share a husband, have their options expanded when all women are free to share a husband.
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By the same token, many, many men can suffer at the hands of polygyny.
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All told, then, institutionalized monogamy, though often viewed as a big victory for egalitarianism and for women, is emphatically not egalitarian in its effects on women. Polygyny would much more evenly distribute the assets of males among them. It is easy — and wise — for beautiful, vivacious wives of charming, athletic corporate titans to dismiss polygyny as a violation of the basic rights of women. But married women living in poverty — or women without a husband or child, and desirous of both — could be excused for wondering just which women's rights are protected by monogamy. The only underprivileged citizens who should favor monogamy are men. It is what gives them access to a supply of women that would otherwise drift up the social scale.

So neither gender, as a whole, belongs on either side of the imaginary bargaining table that yielded the tradition of monogamy. Monogamy is neither a minus for men collectively nor a plus for women collectively; within both sexes, interests naturally collide. More plausibly, the grand, historic compromise was cut between more fortunate and less fortunate men. For them, the institution of monogamy does represent a genuine compromise: the most fortunate men still get the most desirable women, but they have to limit themselves to one apiece. This explanation of monogamy — as a divvying up of sexual property among men — has the virtue of consistency with the fact that opened this chapter: namely, that it is men who usually control sheerly political power, and men who, historically, have cut most of the big political deals.

This is not to say, of course, that men ever sat down and hammered out the one-woman-per-man compromise. The idea, rather, is that polygyny has tended to disappear in response to egalitarian values — not values of equality between the sexes, but of equality among men. And maybe "egalitarian values" is too polite a way of putting it. As political power became distributed more evenly, the hoarding of women by upper-class men simply became untenable. Few things are more anxiety-producing for an elite governing class than gobs of sex-starved and childless men with at least a modicum of political power.

This thesis remains only a thesis.
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But reality at least loosely fits it. Laura Betzig has shown that in preindustrial societies, extreme
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polygyny often goes hand in hand with extreme political hierarchy, and reaches its zenith under the most despotic regimes. (Among the Zulu, whose king might monopolize more than a hundred women, coughing, spitting, or sneezing at his dining table was punishable by death.) And the allocation of sexual resources by political status has often been fine-grained and explicit. In Inca society, the four political offices from petty chief to chief were allotted ceilings of seven, eight, fifteen, and thirty women, respectively.
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It stands to reason that as political power became more widely disbursed, so did wives. And the ultimate widths are one-man-one-vote and one-man-one-wife. Both characterize most of today's industrialized nations.

Right or wrong, this theory of the origin of modern institutionalized monogamy is an example of what Darwinism has to offer historians. Darwinism does not, of course, explain history as evolution; natural selection doesn't work nearly fast enough to drive ongoing change at the level of culture and politics. But natural selection did shape the minds that do drive cultural and political change. And understanding how it shaped those minds may afford fresh insight into the forces of history. In 1985 the eminent social historian Lawrence Stone published an essay that stressed the epic significance of the early Christian emphasis on the fidelity of husbands and the permanence of marriage. After reviewing a couple of theories as to how this cultural innovation spread, he concluded that the answer "remains obscure."
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Perhaps a Darwinian explanation — that, given human nature, monogamy is a straightforward expression of political equality among men — deserved at least a mention. It may be no accident that Christianity, which served as a vehicle for monogamy politically as well as intellectually, has often pitched its message to poor and powerless men.
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