WHAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL?

I’ve never forgotten the trepidation — but also driving curiosity — of learning to read.  With no idea of what happens in a brain to allow such a thing, I simply did what I thought was trying:  staring hard while running my eyes along the lines of print.  Something like trying to ride a bicycle.  You push off and pedal.   At some point something happens and you’re doing it.  So that’s how I’m trying to understand discussions of genetics and the influence of certain molecules.  I just run my eyes over the sentences, which are full of mysterious stuff, in hopes that I’ll suddenly understand.  It’s not the same as taking a class.  Far more disorderly.

So far, I’ve got this:  “Humans normally have 46 chromosomes in each cell, divided into 23 pairs. Two copies of chromosome 8, one copy inherited from each parent, form one of the pairs. Chromosome 8 spans about 146 million DNA building blocks (base pairs) and represents between 4.5 percent and 5 percent of the total DNA in cells.

Google could not tell me the difference between paired chromosomes and the double helix (paired) genes.  I think many people confuse the two.  But chromosomes are much bigger than genes which are molecular.  Genes are on the helixes, not on the chromosomes.  This is where one needs a teacher.  But my conception is that the helixes on which the genes spell out formulas must be curled tightly as yarn strands to amount to chromosomes.  Uncurled, they stretch tremendous distances.

“Identifying genes on each chromosome is an active area of genetic research. Because researchers use different approaches to predict the number of genes on each chromosome, the estimated number of genes varies. Genes on chromosome 8 are among the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 total genes in the human genome.  Some of these genes appear to be the difference between human and chimp.

“Chromosome 8 likely contains between 700 and 1,100 genes.

“Chromosome 9 likely contains between 800 and 1,300 genes. 

“Chromosome 14 likely contains between 800 and 1,300 genes. “

As nearly as I can tell from Google, the pair of sex determining chromosomes is the 23rd pair.  The two chromosomes of the pair are mismatched: one is X and the other may be Y, which is much smaller.  Some suggest it is an X with an "arm" or "leg" torn off. If there are two XX chromosomes in the pair, the result is female.  If it is XY, then the result is male.  The number of genes would be unequal between the two chromosomes.  Presumably, what is missing is the instructions for the egg, which is much bigger than the little halves of code with a tail called sperm.  The egg needs directions for all the machinery of the cell.

The criteria for a species is whether the creature can reproduce within that group.  It's not about size or shape of genitals -- it's about molecules.  Even though human beings, chimps, and bonobos (our closest relatives) share 98.8 of their genes, we can only overlap, not be fertile inter-breeders, because we have been evolving separately for a very very long time.  In fact, the genes are arranged into a different number of chromosomes.  BUT humans carry neanderthal genes and we did overlap in time.  So are neanderthals the same species as we are?

“If human and chimp DNA is 98.8 percent the same, why are we so different? Numbers tell part of the story. Each human cell contains roughly three billion base pairs, or bits of information. Just 1.2 percent of that equals about 35 million differences. Some of these have a big impact, others don't. And even two identical stretches of DNA can work differently -- they can be "turned on" in different amounts, in different places or at different times.”  DNA instructs the construction of molecules — it is the MOLECULES that matter.

Human v. chimp

Brains, just like the rest of the body, evolve.  By slightly different timing, sequencing, and combining of molecule production, all human organs and cells work a little differently from those of each other and more differently from other species.  All humans of every "race" can produce children together.  African, Chinese, Swedish, whatever.  So far.  More and more humans are struggling to make babies. Our molecule management systems are having to adapt to molecules that never existed before.  We made them in a lab.  The body doesn't know what to do with them. Infertility is becoming a problem.  Fishes are getting scrambled about who is the female.

https://vtdigger.org/2016/01/31/scientists-say-60-percent-of-male-fish-bearing-eggs/

Scientists can compensate in many ways, which offers very expensive experiments. For instance, in a recent lab experiment, the short section of genes containing the molecular instructions for fertilizing an ovum were separated from their Y chromosome (male) and were used to make “sperm” which did indeed fertilize ovum and start them growing.  This is not parthenogenesis, which is an ovum that just starts growing without a sperm, maybe because of some kind of shock or special condition, like PH.  In some lower orders of creature, this is not problematic. Just another way of doing business. 

I don’t know whether the lab-made “sperm,” which would normally be half of a set of double helix human instructions,  were conveyed right into the ovum with a pipette or were actually cells with tails and the proper “sonar” for seeking and penetrating an ovum.  A condition of being allowed to do the experiment was that the scientists destroy the resulting “morula” before it could develop further, maybe to the next stage: “blastocyst.”

“A morula is distinct from a blastocyst in that a morula (3-4 days post fertilization) is an 16 cell mass in a spherical shape whereas a blastocyst (4-5 days post fertilization) has a cavity inside the zona pellucida along with an inner cell mass. A morula, if untouched and allowed to remain implanted, will eventually develop into a blastocyst.” 

In these experiments, the scientists are required to destroy the blastocyst to keep it from developing into a monster, but something in the body must check what’s going on at this stage, because even naturally many of these little beginnings are lost. Part of the experimentation is to find out why.  Clearly for many there was a glitch in the code that prevented further development.  

But what drives the funding of such experiments is cultural -- long-standing convictions that to many people are real. They become obsessed with the idea that they MUST have a baby with their own genetics, which was only situational and emotional — nothing to do with science or human tissues.  We are hypnotized by these convictions, which are driven by the inheritance of wealth and power down through centuries.

One MUST have children to inherit one’s wealth and status.

One OWNS those children, because they are an extension of oneself through time.

Sons are JUST LIKE FATHERS and will manage wealth and reputation just as their fathers did, which is good for everyone.

If those children get out of control or are a source of disgrace, they should be killed. Like a lab morula. 

An honor killing victim.

In the Middle East, men legally kill daughters, wives, and sisters, in a set of laws called “honor killing.”  Women are captive, sequestered, and cloaked because resources are scarce and the guarantee of biological origin is of extreme importance.  Motherhood can be witnessed, but until we figured out the genome, fatherhood was never provable.  Women could claim to have been impregnated by God to avoid being punished or killed for unfaithfulness.  It worked for Jesus' mother, didn't it?

These rules are good for the group, and in a situation where one is dependent on group support in order to survive, individualists are identified and driven out or just killed.  This is biological, sub-human, almost insectoid.  It persists because in places where there is not enough, it works. Evolution is about what works, even when the context is behavior rather than what cells and inheritance do.  If we have the technology to intervene, what should we do with it? What do we do about imitation inserted non-complete "code dads" when we still haven't figured out what to do about donor dads who sold their sperm?

Behavior that tends to break up the group consensus and identity will put the individual at risk.  Some groups will simply pull away, some will incarcerate, some will kill, and some will ignore to the point of death, as with troublesome children.   Social evolution happens when there are enough ignored, starved, troublesome individuals that they band together to support each other.  Those who have been resourceful and clever enough to survive into adulthood may remember and reach back to help younger versions of themselves.

If they only duplicate the behaviour of the original group, the tragedy will repeat itself.  If they can find new values and strategies that make both groups “richer” by adding new ecological niches, then they can co-exist and both groups thrive.  Killing is no longer helpful to the group.  Protecting everyone’s children creates wealth.

A petrel flying in a storm

Even in my nuclear family I’ve been an oddball, obstinate, defiant — what one ministerial supervisor called “a stormy petrel.”  This gives me a special sympathy for the rest of my outcast flock of friends even if I insist on flying into the teeth of a storm alone.

CHILDREN ARE A CULTURAL FETISH

Zuni fetish

Porn is a cultural fetish.  A fetish is something that makes your underconsciousness turn your autonomic neural system (emotions) on hard, pun or no pun.  The trigger could have been built in, could have been acquired by conditioning (the association of two things until one causes the other), or possibly by some single intense event.  It could be naturally biological or so unnatural as to be incredible and possibly funny, like having a great rush of emotion at the sight of a kitchen spatula, because someone used one to spank you.

The primary fetish of our culture is children.  Therefore, they are the object of our porn.  Like our autonomic system, it works by opposed pairs:  we have one intense flush of emotion when our children do well, excel at sports or school, attract praise for their presentation . . . and an opposite flush of emotion for miserable discarded delinquents who do disgusting things, esp. if they are our sons and daughters.  The revulsion is so strong that some beat their children, unable to tolerate any bad reflection on them whether social criticism or a breach in their authority.  (The opposite of love is not hate, for love and hate are intertwined in human emotion.  The opposite is indifference.  Or cold rage, not connected to the hot part of the autonomic system.) 

In the public world, the hot haters of children insist that authorities confine bad children, punish them, and in some places kill them. (In the slums of Buenos Aires it is estimated that 57 have been simply shot by the police.  In Missoula a man shot dead a student for being in his garage.)  The cold haters of children enslave them as soldiers or laborers.  Or defund any system that would protect, feed, and educate them. 

Individuals at the mercy of their own autonomic emotional systems may confuse nurture with sex, begin as kissing and end as fucking.  This essay has as bookends two stories.  One is the report of a man whose father beat him.  The father would begin in the conventional cultural way of a whipping, but at some point his eyes changed and he went “amuck”, out of control, frenzied, and nothing would stop him except the boy becoming comatose and he himself becoming exhausted.  This was not just hot but molten.

The other story was told by a trick who had paid a young boy to let him suck the boy off.  He was in the middle of the act, stopped to take a breath, happened to look up, and saw that the boy, with tears streaming down his face, was sucking his own thumb.  The trick stopped and never again abused small boys.  He had not understood that they had feelings and that they didn’t like what was done to them.  In both of these stories the men were treating boys as fetishes, not as real human beings. 

According to Webster, “a fetish is a strong and unusual need or desire for something;  a need or desire for an object, body part, or activity for sexual excitement; an object that is believed to have magical powers.”

If one looks around, there are innocent signs of child-worship.  Some of my Halloween visitors were wearing costumes that must have cost fifty dollars -- maybe more -- and this is a small, modest, farming community.  Somehow people find money to send kids to Washington, DC on school trips, or to incredibly expensive universities, and buy them cars when they are barely old enough to be legal drivers.  In the local high schools where I taught briefly, the kids controlled the teachers, insisting that lessons had to be “fun” and conform to their expectations of what should be taught, which they mostly got from TV series.

The underconsciousness (which I am using as a Freudian might use “subconscious” or "unconscious") is pre-literate, notoriously hard to understand and more felt than thought.  Freud himself, three-piece-suit patriarch that he was, feared his unconscious and should have, though he couldn’t manage it enough to stop his cigar fetish and resulting cocaine fetish that ended his life.  Very bad example of what to do.  Color me Jung.

You can feel a fetish if you stop and consider.  Very much like the signs of a flight/fight/freeze autonomic reaction: the blood supply engorges some things and drains others, certain chemicals rush out of their manufacturing organs, consciousness changes to hyperalert and contradictorily shuts out everything that is not crucial to action.  If there is no escape at all, one’s mind goes to dissociation, like the mouse hypnotized by the snake.  Great danger, intense desire, hard-earned triumph, assurance of high status are all triggers.  Scary movies on Halloween.  Driving cars fast late at night on bad roads.

It’s become conventional for desirable material goods to be described as pornographic:  house porn, food porn, clothes porn.   They’re really fetishes.  I feel it when I leaf through my little collection of books about fine houses.  They’re in several categories: the New Age hand-made houses of California; the fine glass/stone/log/corten-roof lodges in the Montana mountains.  But also Mary Emmerling’s cottages where furnishings are often recycled or repurposed and color schemes are the key. In my birth family, houses were a fetish, our safety and unity, because of the long deprivation of homesteading and farming.  We are emotional about the places we’ve lived.

 Mary Emmerling house vignette

Children are not a fetish of mine partly because of awareness of their consciousness.  I cannot see them as objects, I do not see pregnancy as redemption or status (our culture wants to), and I saw that to my parents children were a burden.  I also resented any person who EVER made me into an object.  I will NOT be controlled (I can be persuaded), and therefore must be cautious around people for whom control is a prompter of violence.  Like children.

Emotional desire, controlled by the autonomic system and other underconsciousness, is the key to survival and drives all action, including this writing.  But it feels as though it is from outside, like a movie or a sexy person or a magnificent kitchen.  In fact, all desire and therefore all porn/fetishes are from the internal response, but the promise to be able to call out desire and satisfy it with “meaning” (which always goes back to the promise of survival, if only in thought) is a commodity and therefore creates a market.  It literally pays to keep us all throbbing and engorged with desire.

But we become habituated.  The word “fuck” is used so much it’s meaningless.  Nudity is no shock.  But making something rare, illegal, and dangerous will restore value.  The FBI and their “stings” make that obvious.  Otherwise, why would anyone without a seriously damaged psyche consider a pre-adolescent child a sex object?  

The child-like Marilyn is reading James Joyce.

When it comes to porn, the law has a problem.  Since the real phenomenon is in the individual underconsciousness, it cannot be defined with bright lines as the boundaries of a useful law must be laid out.  This “I know it when I see it” conviction of judges is only based on what triggers them, mostly old white conservative men whose only escape is golf and whiskey, much the same demographic as legislators.  As more women and minorities enter the arena, the definition of porn begins to change.  Invasion of personal space, laws that reinforce poverty while enriching the law-makers, persecution of the stigmatized, treating children as street vermin will be the new illegalities.

It’s not hard to understand why children are our American fetish: all the wrong people produce them as though they were puppies, the cost of simply giving birth naturally is impossibly high, supporting a family takes two incomes so that there is no time to spend with kids unless it’s meant to improve the family prospects for the future, like transporting them to lessons and sports.  Daily we see images and stories of children lost, suffering, misused, destroyed and fear for our own children.  If they go wrong, we will be held legally responsible, and many of them are angry with us -- but we don’t know why.  The answer is not sex -- it’s talk.  THEIR talk.  As though they were actual people.

MARRIAGE IS A STRING OF PEARLS

Marriage is a like a string of pearls, matched or graduated, real or cultivated or imitation, in various shades, some more baroque than round.   And now the string has broken and the pearls are rolling every which way.  This is such a “twee” metaphor that I hesitate to work from it, but there have been worse, so I’ll keep going.  The thing to remember is that the elements (pearls) of this category are complex and the string is not the same from one example to another.

Let’s name the pearls -- try anyway:

• True love  (whatever that is)
• Sexual access
•  The conception of children
•  A cultural institution for raising children
•  A family contract made on behalf of children
•  An economic deal to support the family as defined by the culture
• A complex of conventions about what a family is

• A unique arrangement of persons living together that is called a family for lack of a better name

• A religious concept (meaning a culturally endorsed and imaged idea) that might require: 

• Two different genders (leaving ambiguous or mixed genders unaddressed)

• Or “races” (again leaving mixtures out and not defining “race” except for being people who are different)

• Or requiring fertility (sterility can be a deal-breaker)

• Or allowing delegation of  sexual or reproductive obligations to someone else (slave, servant, harem, temple whore) 

• Or might specify how many wives or husbands can be allowed 

freshwater baroque pearls

• Or might defend the right of any person to transcend convention 

• Or might even allow the marriage of people who have been dead for a long time

•   A way of continuing a generation-to-generation sequence of relationships that preserves those relationships.

•   A way of keeping together wealth and land occupation

•  Mutual protection: a small version of tribe which may have been the precipitating group that gathered around a major figure.  A tribe must contend with these marriage/genetic families as divisions within.

•  A governmental category given some privileges like tax breaks and recorded in a central registry for reference and identity purposes.

cultured pearls

•  A legal category imposing restrictions, obligations, privileges.

•  A medical category implying genetic derivations and granting consent for procedures and responsibility for care.

•   An indicator of status

Just married

A lot of other stuff that is too unique to describe and probably not stable enough to stay put as a category anyway.

In response to that -- or maybe in confirmation of that -- is a whole book:

“Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage.

“In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change “drifters” into “planners.” In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts “planners,” who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with “drifters,” who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States.”

So basically the idea is that there is not enough socially accepted definitions for people to maintain marriage or even practice it in some stable way.  This is partly because of the breaking up of binary definitions of sex -- it is now possible to “be” something besides a husband/wife -- mommie/daddy.  “Career,” “adventure,” “success” interfere with the formation of the bonded family that will support children.  Bonding = bondage.  Now no one has your back -- if you didn’t have parents who did that, you won’t even know it’s possible.  

The economic situation is quite comparable to the bait-and-switch story of the vulnerable state of individuals who are not coping.  We shut down the warehouses for the crazy by promising small neighborhood imitation families who would shelter those people -- but they didn’t.  The money wasn’t there.  The warehouses were reinstituted in the jails.  Likewise, the idea was that a woman would have the same income as a man and therefore would not need to depend upon a spouse.  Instead women are still paid two-thirds of male wages, still shut out of really lucrative jobs, and yet are still stuck with the kids.  The idea that the pill would mean only wanted children was about as effective as the idea that pills would mean no more crazy people.

I wondered when we’d get around to defining marriage through the perspective of children instead of just sex or bonding desire (which is NOT the same as sex, though it can start out that way).  Margaret Mead always says our marriage licensing should have two steps:  one a renewable contract between consenting adults that defined their economic and other obligations to each other, esp. concerning property ownership.  If that went well and the couple (ignoring gender but not accommodating threesomes) wished to make the twenty-year commitment to a child, then a new license would be necessary.  It would only be revocable by the state on grounds of incompetence, unfitness, and the like -- whatever endangered the child.  

BUT such a double-decker system would only work if there were a decent way of caring for children who were outside families, either because the government removed them or because they just got thrown out.  The trouble is that people go right on making babies and the babies go right on loving their caregivers, no matter how unfit or ill-equipped they might be.  And institutional child-raising has always been a rotten idea.  

pearl divers

The first problem has always been economic.  In times and societies where resources are scarce and what is thought to be necessities cost dearly, the nations contract into tribes, the tribes contract into defensive families, and the families fail to form or break up under the weight.  Kids must shift for themselves however they can.  Like every other natural spectrum, some of them will be able to manage and a high proportion will simply die, but there will be a middle category of “bent” kids, like grass grown under a board where it survives by sacrificing sunlight.  

Eugene O'Neill

Very soon damaged kids grow into damaged adults -- not necessarily predators but unable to respond in ways that don’t damage themselves, others, or the system that the government is trying to enforce.  Sentimentality (which passes for religion in some circles) holds up the ideal of family in the way it has been defined in the past: Norman Rockwell -- not Eugene O’Neill.  So what was it that held together the Eugene O’Neill aggregations of drunks, addicts, violent people, full of pride and blame?  Was it that a known evil is always better than an unknown evil?  Is it that they knew that without the minimal shelter of the house, they would die in the brush or the alleys?  Was it Irish pride in defying the neighbors?  

I don’t know.  I’m a solitary.  No leftovers, no hitch-hikers.  A small town is my loose family.  I follow along at the edge of the Blackfeet tribe.  But I live an examined life and that is much of what sustains me.  I avoid alcohol, drugs, careless relationships because they keep me from thinking.  (Reading and writing are only expressions of thinking.)  It's not a virtue: it's a coping mechanism.  Writing and only writing would be a mistake if I didn’t have such a huge cache of experience behind me, though the part that was “family” was never sustained.  That is, I have dived for pearls, but then I gave them away.  No regrets.  No strings.  Stories.

SEX IS A PORTAL

Sex is a portal.  It opens the door to adulthood.  In fact, partly because of its entanglement with the law and partly because it changes a lot of interpersonal dynamics, for most people it is the only criterion.  Maybe a driver’s license comes close, but the tie to educational progress is pretty well broken.  Money?  I have too little experience to know.  I've never made a "grown-up" salary.

I’ve been watching “Game of Thrones” at the rate of four episodes per night, which means that the child actors grow up by leaps and bounds, something like watching all the Harry Potter movies one-after-another.  

Isaac Hempstead-Wright

Isaac hempstead-wright (Bran Stark) in particular develops quickly away from his beguiling child face, so that his upper lip shadows and then his nose asserts itself.  I don’t know how parallel this is to the character in the story.  The girls seem to be easier to manage visually, since no testosterone is giving them Adam’s apples and beards.  

Also Isaac Hempstead-Wright

When one looks at Google Images, Isaac looks almost nerdy, though endearingly so, but he probably will have to assure all of us that he is an adult by somehow looking sexy, which is the only main thing a lot of people know about adulthood.

Daniel Radcliffe in "Equus"

Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe made the transition through the "door" by stripping onstage to be in "Equus."  It worked well, partly because he’s an excellent actor anyway, and now he’s turned out to be quite handsome as an adult.  

Daniel Radcliffe

He is helped because the spotlight shifted to J.K. Rowling anyway.  By now he's taking adult roles in series.

Neil Patrick Harris as Dougie Houser

Neil Patrick Harris was once Dougie Houser whose whole shtick was acting like a genius adult while he looked like a little kid, needed something strong to turn the "doorknob" to adulthood.

Annie Leibowitz' photo of Neil Patrick Harris in Vanity Fair

Natassja Kinski by Richard Avedon

Annie Leibowitz, always resourceful, took him there in the Natassja Kinski way.  Double snakes, one overtly penile -- the bigger one.  It works in part because though Harris’ body is hairless, his face is not a child’s.  On the other hand, Kinski looks almost a child, though she was twenty.  In our culture women need to be childlike; men need to be more than adult.  Kinski herself, who was born into the risky edge-world of a daring and powerful actor father, feels exploited.  Hard to argue.

Parallel to sexy-child women and super-competent men, there is a dynamic of innocence versus wickedness.  Somehow wickedness is considered a feature of adulthood and victimhood (though certainly powerful men can become victims like Ned Stark), but moral wickedness or criminality is considered not just adult but also sexy in both men and women.  Consider "Oz" or "Deadwood," et al.  It is presented as an entitlement to abuse -- or at least use -- the childish. 

Childishness and innocence in pre-pubertal boys is sexy to certain people.  Defiant wickedness in adolescent boys is sexy to almost everyone except authority figures.  Authority figures, especially ones who are either protective of innocents or else cruelly powerful, are sexy.  Bureaucrats are not.  Grownup crybabies are not.  Unless they're Russell Crowe full-out grieving while clasping the feet of his dead wife in "Gladiator".

Natassja Kinski grown-up

These are cultural categories that vary from one time period and one place to another.  In our kakatopia, they are not so much about sex or even power as they are about wealth.  They are ways to get richer and to demonstrate wealth, which always attracts more money.  But they are definitions for groups bent on survival.  What about individual lives?

The highly technical announcement for professional psychoanalysts that I've pasted below is about "opening doors" through the embodiment/incarnation of sexual transgression.  I think "The Black Swan" ballet movie was aiming for this but missed.  I will not be doing real-world research.  But isn't the embodiment of sex what happens to all of us at puberty? And doesn't it mean the old and powerful can consume the young and helpless?

Transgression: murdering the future

Presenter

AVGI SAKETOPOULOU, PhD

Discussant

HOWARD LEVINE, MD

This presentation extends Botella and Botella’s (2005) and Levine’s (2012) work on figurability and unrepresented states to the domain of sexuality, and specifically, transgressive sexuality. Transgressive sexuality operates within an economical regime of escalating excitations, pushing against the limit of what is tolerable. Its insatiable appetite for intensified stimulation can lead to a welling up of pleasure to the point of pain or exhaustion producing pleasure that is suffered. Such suffering of pleasure can override homeostatic controls and, at its apex, may result in a shattering of the ego (Bersani).

This shattering, I will propose, behaves like a portal that allows unrepresented experiential fragments to leap forward. These embodied bits are akin to Bion’s beta elements: insofar as they have evaded representation they cannot be thought with or thought about. By nature impossible to gather into language, they arrive as sensuous bodily states which can then be worked with in the consulting room. A vignette will illustrate how an analysand’s transgressive sexual encounter and the generative dysregulation it produced made it possible for us to find a way to think and speak about previously unrepresented states.

More when the book comes and I've had a chance to read it.

  

THE SHADOW GRID OVER MARRIAGE

Queen Victoria's Engagement Ring

Marriage in the US today is a more than million-dollar industry, a rite of passage, a racket, a romantic fantasy, a beautiful thing, a source of pride and celebration for many people over many years, and a total mess that makes the lawyers rich.   People make a great fuss about marriages across “race,” across too great a gap in age, between two people of the same gender, and among certain groups who allow marriage to be one man and a lot of women.  I haven’t heard anything about one woman and a lot of men unless we’re talking about a woman and her sons, as in certain Old West outlaw gangs.  But that’s not quite marriage.  Marriage is assumed to be a matter of sex, even if no children result.  No longer does anyone flinch at teenagers or pensioners living together without marriage.  Nor do we balk at “friends with privileges.”  Children proudly and happily attend a wedding where their parents tie the knot, even when they are the products of previous failed relationships.

Victoria and Albert

The Great Grid of Historical Great Britain hangs over our arrangements, conflating the functions of church (blessing, pledging and dedicating) with the functions of the government (licenses, disease exams, and pre-nups).  Neither has anything to do with the human ability to empathize, attach, and commit to each other.  Not really.  This is mostly because a marriage in its deepest social purpose is a way of controlling property and tracking responsibility for children.  Not that control or responsibility is always there, but that if the matter got to a court, it could be enforced.  This is particularly vital when dealing with a king or a pope, which is why kings resort to murdering barren wives and popes are presumed to be celibate even if they have children.

Society in its baldest terms is economic.   This is a survival issue: if human beings don’t have enough food and shelter, they die.  Therefore they are programmed to acquire, guard and exploit sources of wealth.  Inheritance of wealth is a way of projecting the fortunes of an individual beyond their own physical life, which is good for the group as a whole.  Unless it is not -- if quarrels among inheritors or the temptation to outsiders become too great, then the wealth is dispersed, destroyed, or moved to some other context.  Government that is based on law instead of force can legitimately require taxes for the good of the whole, but ingenious rules can as well divert wealth to uses that are not for the survival of the group, but rather for the greed of individuals who are surviving nicely by whatever means.  Religions are constantly accused of doing this and no doubt it happens.  Okay, now that’s out of the way and we can talk about the alliances among humans that are good for individuals and society and how the ghost shadow of the British Empire messes things up.

“Hunting and the American Imagination” by Daniel Herman is the source of one of my favorite ideas: that the United States was founded on two conflicting desires that come from Brit society:  the desire to own land in order to be the Lord of the Manor who can forbid everyone else from doing anything he doesn’t like (for instance, shooting his game) and the desire to freely hunt in the forest (esp. if one’s family is hungry).  So Americans came to this continent with the idea of founding an empire at the same time as being idyllically free, which they projected on the indigenous population before they confined them.  The dynamics of relationship contain the same conflict: wanting to control and wanting NOT to be controlled.  It’s easiest to see in the dynamics of the street gangs, which are often said to be “families.”  When they’re old guys with kids, they become “mafia.”

So people want to be married, but they want the partner to be more married than they are.  Street gangs are based on force and so are some marriages -- the stronger partner imposes control.  From society’s point of view this can destroy wealth, because the abused person will simply leave, unless they are locked up like kidnap victims or too emotionally attached to separate, the way a pimp controls his whores or the way beaten-up women refuse to press charges.  Religion uses moral leverage and the law uses police and court to keep relationships intact.  Trapped in this way, the pair may keep their assets but spin off their rage onto weaker persons, like children or oldsters.  But in terms of social cost, this also diminishes wealth.  Running away also disperses monetary wealth and property ownership.

In the past poverty has prevented formal marriage and probably that’s true now as well.  Marriage is shared property stable enough to raise children and increase wealth.  It is playing the “Lord” card.  But it is possible -- more so in a rich society like ours -- to be Robin Hood, moving through the landscape hunting and gathering as opportunity offers.  (Notice that story has a foot in each religious camp:  Maid Marion is an abbess of the established and emplaced church and Friar Tuck is portable religion.)  Today the forest is in the city -- “squatting” in vacant buildings is a form of camping.

Social patterns have a disconcerting way of surfacing before the law recognizes them, so now we have people who combine assets without any legal arrangement or via a lawyer-negotiated contract.  They don’t call it marriage.  They may not even have a sexual arrangement, but they don’t usually produce children.  We need better social parameters regarding children.  They just happen.  But then what?

At present we have an overburdened system that can remove abused and neglected children from bad situations, whether defined as “family” or not.  The sentimentality of family, national origin, ethnic genes, or inherited religion interfere with this.  But the biggest missing piece of the puzzle is what to do with the kid who has no place to go.  The foster care system is inadequate.  We reject orphanages. Infants and toddlers are both the hardest and the easiest, since they need so much but are often emotionally appealing.  “Adrenarche” children (8 to 12 -- I wish I could think of a good name for their category -- “pre-teen” is a non-name.) are economically valuable to certain people as dominated puppets  for sexual and labor uses, which destroys them as human beings so that they are assets to their controllers but debits to society, esp. when they quickly age out of value to their captors.  

Adolescents, moving in and out of shadows, in and out of maturity, in and out of groups, are the slipperiest category of all.  They include rock stars, top models, and soldier heroes.  They are also a constant source of violence, sexually-transmitted disease, and new babies needing care, possibly very expensive care since their gestation may have been problematic.  Society is torn between punishing them and making them gods.

How do we maximize the survival interests of individuals and society?  Some feel it is worth letting oligarchs be rich so long as it maintains order.  Others feel piling up wealth by force or law destroys too many individuals and must be opposed, even with answering force.  Whatever works will determine the future.  What personal characteristics or social parameters will promote survival?  Can we redefine wealth in a way that blunts greed?  some of us already think that knowledge, art, intimacy, and the other humanities (including science) are far more likely to preserve our species than any material assets.  So much wealth now is simply bookkeeping and gambling.  Nothing a person could eat.