In his jaunty paper Alternative Family Lifestyles Revisited, or Whatever Happened To Swingers, Group Marriages And Communes?, family relationships professor Roger Rubin reports that only 43 of 238 societies across the world are monogamous. Many Toda women in southern India marry several brothers. Abisi women in Nigeria can marry three men on the same day. In rural Turkey, a man can marry more than one wife and each one takes on a different role. Even in the west, non-monogamy is actually the norm. Which is quite a surprise, given the psychosexual stranglehold the seventh commandment (you remember, the one about not committing adultery) has on Judaeo-Christian cultures. But it is the norm that dare not speak its name. In the US, 60% of men and 50% of women reported having extra-marital affairs. It takes the form, as Meg Barker, relationship counsellor, sex therapist and senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University, puts it “of secret, hidden infidelities rather than something that is openly known about by all involved”.

“The sex issue: Is monogamy dead?,“Stuart Jeffries

I’m still on my ‘being driven batty by media’ kick this week… The current debate over heterosexual bigotry— it is not a debate over marriage at all– is yet another case in point. The thing about bigotry is that it tends to color everything it sees. Just a few decades ago, when mixed racial marriages were outlawed (another case of legalizing bigotry) the assumption was that this “mixing” was an aberration in a history of purity.

Genetics, of course, now tells us decisively that the races don’ t even exist; people have mixed it up with people of different skin tones and hair and eye colors since the beginning of time. Now I keep hearing reporters repeat an analogous lie about heterosexual monogamous marriage, which has supposedly been around for at least 2,000 years. Only it hasn’t, or, rather, it’s been around as one form of marriage– one idea– among many.

There have always been all sorts of marriages, monogamous and not, heterosexual and not, legally recognized and not. The ideal of monogamous heterosexual marriage is a kind of bourgeois fantasy, a moral prescription and not a sociological description. It’s not one that even most Christians would have recognized a few centuries ago. This debate is not about marriage, it’s about ridding ourselves of another layer of destructive self-delusion.

In his [Rifkin’s] most recent book, The Third Industrial Revolution, he says that a reshaping of society made possible by a variety of trends, including automation systems and green technology, could leave people more time for what he calls “deep play.”

He imagines robots’ making manufacturing so cheap and efficient that most people will simply be able to work less to meet their basic needs. He says we will then be free to start new kinds of nonprofit activities that link us with other people in new ways, helping us lead more-fulfilling lives.

“The New Industrial Revolution“Jeffrey R. Young

I shouldn’t complain about mainstream journalists who seem to lack historical awareness, but I will: the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is supposed to be written to and for intellectuals, can be almost shockingly unaware of history. Perhaps the problem is less a lack of historical awareness and more a question of an institutional sensitivity to recent trends. They want to be relevant. I suppose these two things are identical.

The Chronicle writers are also mainstream in avoiding anything that might be leftist, much less Marxist, less they be accused of (a liberal media) bias. In this case, the article mentions Henrik Christensen and Burton J. Bledstein and Jeremy Rifkin– all very trendy– but says nothing about Terry Eagleton, much less Harry Cleaver and Karl Marx, all of whom have more interesting things to say about productivity, work, and technological change.

Capitalism creates problems (contradictions) by making certain forms of work obsolete. It then has to reinvent work, not for existential or economic reasons, but for political reasons. Work is the central organizing ideology of capitalism and without it, as Marx said, “the knell of capitalist private property sounds.” These liberal academic debates about the loss of meaning from the loss of work are silly. We can figure out how to live without it.