The amount of polygamy in a society is almost perfectly related to the power-differential in said society. Roughly every society with huge power differentials has some dude at the top with a wife, and dozens to thousands of concubines. Sometimes it's legal (All early agricultural societies). Sometimes, it's just that the feudal lord has all the 16-25 year old girls in the area working in his castle, with a back staircase into their chambers, for no reason at all.
Forager tribes run 1 wife per man, with occasionally a very rare man having 2 wives...but the egalitarianism built in to the tribalists is super-strong, mostly as a evolved wife-distribution mechanism. Guys with too much power get killed. It's only agriculture, which allows wealth (and power) accumulation, which in turn allows (and in all known early incarnations, guarantees) huge polygamous systems.
You want monogamy? Enforce equality, as the progressives want. It's the closest thing we're gonna get. On the other hand...you want an explanation of the drive towards equality (which I've never before understood): In non-egalitarian systems guys who aren't at or near the top of the heap don't get any nookie, or kids. As in, the top 10% of the men have 70-90% of the kids. It's probably evolved in real deep.
Matt Ridley's The Red Queen is the best book I've read since Kurzban's bunny book in January. There are friends of mine who didn't nudge me hard enough 10 years ago to read this book who have an accounting to give. More complete review late today, if my wife doesn't have a baby.
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True enough. The paradox though is that 'enforcing equality as the progressives want' does not create anything resembling equality. It creates big powerful commissars. And they'll get a lot of chicks. Chicks who will be extra-easy due to the ideology of 'enforced equality' being promulgated.
RWCG,
Thanks for calling this out. Agree 100%.
OTOH, Libertarianism leads to a lot more equality of power.
"You want monogamy? Enforce equality, as the progressives want. It's the closest thing we're gonna get."
Agreed - but the important equality here is status equality, not the money equality that progressives care about. In a rich society, the two are not significantly correlated since nobody's so poor that their material deprivation lowers their fitness.
Indeed, progressives are happy with status differentials and spend a lot of time differentiating themselves from white proles. They also prefer a sexual free market ideology that accentuates differences in charisma and looks (in the same way that a free jobs market accentuates the difference between lousy and genius programmers). It's the conservatives that are status-egalitarians. They want to enforce norms of behavior that strictly apply to everyone. Visible violations of these norms are punished - something the left denounces as "shaming" - but a low-status person can be praised for virtue. In a state of nature without this norm-enforcement, charismatic people get away with lots and low-status people are disdained regardless of their behavior.
Your summary seems to be: "resource inequality = mating inequality." This is plausible for Malthusian societies, which accounts for the vast majority of evolutionary history. Today, resources inequality is very loosely coupled to status inequality, which is the real driver of mating inequality. In this environment, conservatism amounts to a form of status redistribution, and the political ideology most amenable to nudging us towards mating egalitarianism.
Cephalicfurrow nails it.
Another way of saying it is if you want equality don't give women the vote. The natural female imperative is polygamy. The perfect system for a woman is one in with they can share the genes of an alpha in a harem while being granted the resources of a beta via government transfer.
Monogamy is a cartel agreement that requires a lot of hard and soft social enforcement to maintain. It is NOT natural.
But it also creates societies that most people, via revealed preferences, actually want to live in. This is why marriage needs to have a sacralized status in the minds of most people.
Great post. + commenters!
I rave wildly about The Red Queen. So rich in frameworks!
Jehu,
Monogamy appears to be a pretty strong natural norm among forager cultures.
CF,
I agree that it's not money equality that matters. At the same time, I don't think it's status equality either. AFAICT, it's actually power equality.
Which means the solution is to disarm the ability for wealth to buy power by limiting the power of governments...
many-numbers,
I think that's a common myth among the PUA/Game/red pill set.
In reality, in many cases, finding a loyal decent guy, and trading loyalty is a better trade for many/most women than getting some resources, and participating in a harem.
Cephalicfurrow, I'd go along with that, except to note that "conservative" has many meanings. I'd define your terms a little more carefully if you don't want to be misinterpreted.
The women's vote thing? I can't say I've noticed this behaviour among the women I associate with.
Heh... funny thing that.
Ever read Leo Frankowskis adventures of Conrad Stargaard?
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