Thoughts And Trivia

My recurrent theme (and a pet peeve) is that the intrinsic animal instincts of humans are in conflict with the mores of our society due to which the institution of marriage is crumbling.   A newspaper report says that in UK, more and more men and women are finding marriage to be incompatible with professional and personal time-demands. Is there no way out?
Can we refashion our mores of society (or the institution of marriage)to be more in tune with our basic animal instincts?

Some virus like programming in our minds makes humans(women not excepted)to be polygamous.   Its as if an alien being takes hold of our psyche.   Would you not expect that we should have been programmed to place our own survival as a top priority.   But no, its passing forward our genes to a mate perceived to have best genes (person with brawn rather than brains), that appears to be ingrained as top priority in our psyche - even at the cost of our own survival.   Unsinn (non-sense) ganz verruckt (total madness)- as the Germans would say.
On the other hand humans also want to optimise their chances of physical survival by selecting a mate with best ability to provide food (and monetary safety).   In stone age these two qualities coincided, because the best mating genes was also the mate with best ability to hunt food.   Not any longer in modern society, where brains (with a minimal brawn) dictate ability to provide food and monetary security - rather than brawn alone.   Thus humans want to mate with brawny candidates but want to marry the brainy ones.
This is what threatens the institution of marriage.
Single parents, Live-in relationships, procreation thru in-vitro child-birth, step-parent are all off-the-cuff reactions to this dilemma.
While the animal instincts would not go away, social-contract expectations from marriage would get refashioned.   We cannot predict the ultimate solution society would arrive at, by trial and errors.   But the fundamental approach could be that on one-hand women would get freedom to choose father (not necessarily their husbands) of their children.   On the other hand men would be freed from the life-time financial responsibilities towards their spouses and family.

Posted by Girish Bhatnagar at Tuesday, October 04, 2005