Bonfire of the Vanities
The profane is now sacred. We are not simply a civilization in decline, but rather an anti-civilization rapidly becoming an exact negative of what it was. A reversion to barbarism is unsurprising given the populations being imported into the West to replace us; an America comprised of Oaxacans, Somalis, Afghanis, and Bangladeshis is not America at all, but rather a clumsy confederation of the world’s dysfunction and biologically underwhelming races. Of course the majority don’t assimilate—they can’t. This is largely why they’re being imported in the first place, among other reasons primarily pertaining to economics. The assault on monogamy is just one aspect of the “wilding” of what was once a civilization. Consider that Asians in America have out-of-wedlock birthrates of 11%, whereas whites are at 26%, Hispanics at 53%, Amerindians and Inuits approaching 70%, and blacks at over 80%.
A study of sexual behavior in Thailand, Tanzania, and Côte d'Ivoire suggests about 16–34% of men engage in extramarital sex.[1] Studies in Nigeria have found around 47–53% of men and to 18–36% of women engage in extramarital sex.[2],[3] A 1999 survey of married and cohabiting couples in Zimbabwe reports that 38% of men and 13% of women engaged in extra-couple sexual relationships within the previous year.[4] A quick perusal of the nations where out-of-wedlock births are tracked (the numbers for sub-Saharan Africa are extraordinarily difficult to place exactly, as many countries don’t even have birth certificates) reveals a veritable plethora of world powers (accompanying percentage of out-of-wedlock births):
· St. Lucia: 87%
· Jamaica: 86%
· Colombia: 84%
· Panama: 80%
· Barbados: 78%
· Seychelles: 78%
· El Salvador: 73%
· Costa Rica: 70%
· Peru: 69%
· Martinique: 66%
· Greenland: 66%
· South Africa: 59%
· Belize: 58%
· The Bahamas: 56%
· Mexico: 55%
· Philippines: 49%
Contrast the above percentages with those of the developed world:
· China: less than 1%
· South Korea: 1.9%
· Japan: 2.3%
· Taiwan: 4%
· Greece: 9%
· Croatia: 12%
· Romania: 15%
· Slovakia: 17%
· Italy: 18%
· Switzerland: 19%
· Poland: 20%
· Malta: 21%
· Spain: 24%
· Germany: 24%
· Canada: 25%
· White Americans: 26%
Also bear in mind many African and Middle Eastern societies are polygynous. In Senegal, for example, 47% of marriages are polygynous, and over 40% of marriages in Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso are polygynous, thus greatly skewing the number of out-of-wedlock births. In Chad, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Gabon, Cameroon, Liberia, the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Kyrgyzstan, over one-quarter of all marriages are polygynous. As James Fenske writes:
Polygamy remains common in much of Africa. In the “polygamy belt” stretching from Senegal to Tanzania, it is common for more than one third of married women to be polygamous (Jacoby, 1995). Polygamy has been cited as a possible contributor to Africa’s low savings rates (Tertilt, 2005), widespread incidence of HIV (Brahmbhatt et al., 2002), high levels of child mortality (Strassmann, 1997), and to female depression (Adewuya et al., 2007).[5]
The infant mortality rate of those highly polygynous countries is almost fourteen times that of countries with enforced or normative monogamy. Polyandrous societies are few and far between, but they are no more models of civilization than are their polygynous equivalents. For Olivia Goldhill:
Monogamy is so much the norm in Western culture, it can be strange to realize that it’s not ubiquitous worldwide. Stacey points to what she calls a “perfectly functional” community of Mosuo women in China, which has a strong matriarchal culture. Households are organized by matrilineal lineage, meaning children live with their mother and blood relatives on their mother’s side. Women are allowed to have as many partners as they like, and sexual relationships take place during “night visits.”[6]
The Mosuo, it should be noted, live in “extreme poverty”—so much for smashing the Patriarchy.
Biological predispositions are primarily responsible for the aforementioned conditions across virtually all Third World populations, but we may be looking at somewhat of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario; is it the impulsivity and high time preference that drives out-of-wedlock births especially, but also polygyny, or is it the absence of enforced monogamy? More likely it is the former, as the records for out-of-wedlock births show for colonial populations under European rule versus as independent countries. This phenomenon is also observable in the United States post-Jim Crow. Similarly, abuse and neglect of partners and children are endemic to these “post-colonial” populations; a cursory study of crime rates confirms a clear genetic predisposition to violence and impulsivity. Chicken or egg, non-monogamous societies create a negative feedback loop with a whole host of problems that are only amplified the less prevalent the nuclear family. Cause, effect, or most likely an inextricable combination, to quote J.D. Unwin:
The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.
As Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson report:
Increasing polygynous marriages decreases overall male parental investment by (i) eliminating opportunities for low-status males to establish pair-bonds (and invest in offspring), (ii) diluting the per-child investment in larger families, and (iii) shifting investment by high-status males from offspring into obtaining more long-term mates. While allowing the resources of richer men to be distributed among more children, the net effect of polygyny on male parental investment will often be to reduce the average investment per child. Normative monogamy provides increased opportunities for low-status males to marry, save and invest for the long term. The labour and talents of these would-be risk-taking criminals (and/or substance abusers) are instead channelled into long-term investments in family and child-rearing (reliable economic productivity). Their pair-bonding and paternal investment psychologies are tapped and harnessed relatively more than their risky, status-seeking mindsets. For married high-status males, normative monogamy raises the cost of seeking additional mates and thereby shifts efforts from mate-seeking to improving offspring quality.[7]
According to the Ethnographic Atlas by George P. Murdock—and affirmed by a 1998 survey sponsored by the University of Wisconsin—of the 1,231 societies from around the world studied, just 186 were monogamous. Unsurprisingly, virtually all of them were either in Northeast Asia or Europe, or else settled by Europeans. 453 had occasional polygyny and in 588 more it was quite common. Contuing with Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson:
The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages…the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects—promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide.[8]
Researchers from the Demographic Health Survey looked at intimate partner physical violence in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. The four countries unsurprisingly have high rates of domestic violence. The researchers selected the countries based on the availability of timely data and to represent different regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, using responses from more than 14,000 married women. Depending on the country, 13 to 28% of the surveyed women experienced physical violence from their husbands…Women in [polygamous] relationships were 1.3 to 2 times more likely, depending on the country, to be at risk for physical violence from their husbands than women in monogamous marriages.[9],[10] Consider as well elevated rates of child abuse; harmful behaviors toward children, including both physical and mental abuse, are far higher among the assorted black and brown populations, and incidence rates of fetal alcohol syndrome, as just one example of pre-natal neglect, are fourteen times higher among blacks than whites. Blacks in the United States also abort their pregnancies at a rate of 61%. Add to this pattern of neglectthe observable phenomenon of step-parents and their un-married equivalents’ rates of abuse of their non-biological (step-) children. Given the rates of out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood among non-whites and –Northeast Asians, such behaviors are far more prevalent. For Henrich, et al.:
Normative monogamy may reduce spousal homicide, domestic violence and the use of physical coercion by decreasing the spousal age gap, gender inequality, paternal uncertainty and mate competition. Research indicates that both spousal age gaps and paternity uncertainty are important predictors of spousal homicides. Meanwhile, crossnational regressions reveal that stronger monogamous marriage norms are associated with less (i) domestic violence, (ii) maternal mortality, (iii) female genital mutilation, and (iv) sex trafficking, even after controlling for GDP… The lower childhood mortality and better health outcomes created by greater parental investment implies that resources are not ‘wasted’ on children who never become productive adults.[11]
Though GDP is by no means everything, in this particular context it can be a useful barometer as part of a larger point. In highly polygynous countries, the GDP per capita in 1985 dollars is $975; in less polygynous African countries it is $1,574; in comparative monogamous countries it is $2,798; and in enforced or normatively monogamous countries, it is $11,950. There is a clear correlation between higher-investment parenting and positive outcomes for the children; the GDP figures and cultural monogamy also neatly map on to the planet’s highest-IQ populations. Biologically, these high-IQ populations have a longer gestation period, larger cranial capacity and brain size, a greater number of neurons, and longer periods of pre-pubescence. These are also societies (pre-mass Third World immigration) largely defined by their relative stability and homogeneity. The correlation between stability and monogamy is clear; returning to Henrich et al.:
Several converging lines of evidence indicate that monogamous marriage reduces crime. First, we review evidence indicating that unmarried men gather in groups, engage in personally risky behaviour (gambling, illegal drugs, alcohol abuse) and commit more serious crimes than married men. Getting married substantially reduces a man’s chances of committing a crime. Second, we review cross-national data showing that polygyny leads to a higher percentage of unmarried men, and that more unmarried men is associated with higher crime rates. Then, using within-country and historical data on sex ratio, we confirm that the more unmarried men or greater intrasexual competition are associated with higher crime rates. Finally, we discuss detailed anthropological cases that are consistent with this connection. Cross-sectional data show that unmarried men are more likely than married men to commit murder, robbery and rape. Moreover, unmarried men are more likely than married men to gamble and abuse drugs/alcohol. These relationships hold controlling for socioeconomic status, age and ethnicity. Of course, these data do not prove that being unmarried causes criminal behaviour because individuals who are less likely to commit crimes, or abuse substances, might also be more marriageable or more likely to want to married…Across all crimes, marriage reduces a man’s likelihood of committing a crime by 35 per cent. For property and violent crimes, being married cuts the probability of committing a crime by half. When men are divorced or widowed, their crime rates go up…Interestingly, unmarried cohabitation does not reduce crime rates. Having a job had mixed effects, none of which were particularly large. The positive effect on crime of living with a wife is even larger than the negative effect of heavy drinking (for similar results from London see the study of Farrington & West).[12]
We can now understand that polygynous societies are often just as arrested in their development and unstable as those with large numbers of single parents and out-of-wedlock births—the end result is often the same. Competition takes on a far more toxic character, and this is compounded by the proverb “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” As Henrich et al. write, “The empirical patterns from all such diverse cases tell the same story: unmarried low-status men, often in bachelor-bands, engage in higher levels of aggressive, violent and anti-social activities.” Understand that most “migrants” to the West are young, unmarried men and are from lower-IQ, low-impulse-control, and higher time-preference populations.
Now we add another wrinkle: contrast Des Moines, Boise, and Provo with Fresno, Stockton, and Los Angeles—first and foremost there is the racial factor, but there is also an ideological one and, also crucially and inextricably intertwined, we have class considerations. Wealth inequalities are generally far more pronounced in polygamous societies, and these societies for this reason and for the others above are far more volatile and unstable. Returning once again to Henrich et al.:
Within economics, work on tournament theory predicts that when incentive gradients are steep (e.g. winner-take-all competitions), individuals should often prefer riskier strategies, especially when they are losing or perceive themselves as unlikely to win. These decision-theoretic models, which hinge on the same logic as our evolutionary approach, predict that even those who perceive themselves as winning or likely to win often need to pursue somewhat riskier strategy when incentive gradients (analogous to fitness gradients) are steeper, because they know that those who are currently losing will be pulling out all the stops.[13]
The final factor to consider is that Christianity condemns polygamy as an offense against the sanctity of marriage, as sexual relations between a man and wife must be mutual and exclusive, which coincides with and serves to reinforce Europeans’ natural tendencies—in the absence of propaganda—to be monogamous. As Razib Khan writes:
From what I gather much of the magic of gains of economic productivity and social cohesion, and therefore military prowess, of a given set of societies (e.g., Christian Europe) in this model can be attributed to the fact of the proportion of single males. By reducing the fraction constantly scrambling for status and power so that they could become polygamists in their own right the general level of conflict was reduced in these societies.[14]
Henrich et al. state:
Religion may also be important in the spread of normative monogamy. The infusion of norms related to monogamous marriage into the supernaturally reinforced set of beliefs propounded by Christianity [88] may have been crucial to the long-term success of this marriage system and one element in the set of effects on religion created by cultural group selection [89]. The central challenge to monogamous marriage norms comes from wealthy and politically powerful men who have substantial fitness-related motivations and incentives to resist such practices. Imbuing monogamy with supernatural sanction, including the ability to create legitimate, divinely recognized, heirs in hereditary monarchies may have made all the difference in the pre-industrial world.[15]
Certainly Christianity is not the sole cause of normative or enforced monogamy (consider the above data and the hundreds of millions of black Christians), but its synergy with whites’ genetic predispositions created a mutually-reinforcing set of conditions whereby European men, free from fighting over women were able to invest their time and energy into exploring and inventing instead. The resultant internal stability cannot be understated, either. With all of this in mind, it is easy to see how with the importance of Christianity declining, with masses of alien peoples with wildly different customs being imported, and with our cultural norms perverted and social pressures removed, the bottom of our civilization is dropping out.
[1] O’Connor, M.L. (2001). "Men who have many sexual partners before marriage are more likely to engage in extramarital intercourse". International Family Planning Perspectives. 27 (1): 48–9. doi:10.2307/2673807. JSTOR 2673807.
[2] Isiugo-Abanihe, U.C. (1994). "Extramarital relations and perceptions of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria". Health Transition Review. 4 (2): 111–125. PMID 10150513.
[3] Ladebo, O.J., Tanimowo, A.G. (2002). "Extension personnel's sexual behaviour and attitudes toward HIV/AIDS in South-Western Nigeria". African Journal of Reproductive Health. 6 (2): 51–9. doi:10.2307/3583130. JSTOR 3583130. PMID 12476716.
[4] National AIDS Council, Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, The MEASURE Project, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC/Zimbabwe). AIDS in Africa During the Nineties: Zimbabwe. A review and analysis of survey and research results. Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002.
[5] https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/mater...ps-2012-20.pdf
[6] https://qz.com/663686/for-many-of-us...althy-pursuit/
[7] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/d...rstb.2011.0290
[8] Ibid.
[9] http://www.asanet.org/press-center/p...ican-marriages
[10] It should also be noted that 30.5% of marriages in Zimbabwe, where the average individual attends school for 5.4 years, are of adult men to minors.
[11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/d...rstb.2011.0290
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn.../#.XBMh-ttKiM9
[15] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/d...rstb.2011.0290
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