Thoughts on "The Future of Marriage" - Pt. 1

My copy of David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage finally arrived on Friday afternoon. I had a very busy weekend, but at my every rare free moment, Blankenhorn's book held my undivided attention. I just finished chapter 4 last night. By the end of this chapter, Blankenhorn has described the matrilineal Trobriand marriage culture and contrasted it with the patrilineal marriage culture of the Near East and Old Europe. By identifying the core similarity between these two completely opposite marriage cultures, and then seeing that it applies to virtually all the other known marriage cultures in history, he comes to define marriage at its essence to be “for every child, a mother and a father” (emphasis his).

In the process of distilling the core of marriage out of two opposing marriage cultures, he also identifies the source of the differences between these cultures, namely, what the people believe about where babies come from. Blankenhorn explains that from what evidence of prehistory that we have, it seems that prehistoric peoples generally worshipped female deities, viewed children as created primarily by the mother, with the father having little to do with raising, or even identifying his children. Around the same time that history dawned, marriage did as well, and it seems that at least part of the reason for this coinciding social evolution is that marriage connected children not only to their mothers, but to their fathers as well. However, lacking the knowledge we have today about how conception actually works, different societies developed different ideas about how babies are conceived.

In the Near East, children were believed to grow entirely out of the man’s semen. The semen was thought to be the physical source of a baby, while the woman merely provided a womb with which to incubate the child. The woman was compared to the soil in which one plants a seed. It is the seed that determines what kind of plant grows; the soil has no effect whatsoever in this regard. The soil simply feeds whatever seed might be planted there.

In the Trobriand Islands, the view is entirely opposite. It is thought that babies form completely out of the matter of the woman’s body, out of her menstrual blood, to be specific. Intercourse is believed to be loosely related to conceiving children, but not necessarily required. The father is not considered a biological relative of the child. Nevertheless, fatherhood is a revered social role. The fathers on these islands are extremely devoted and involved with their children. They play an enormous role in the development of their children, and the islanders believe that it is the father’s devotion and involvement that causes the children to physically resemble him. Blankenhorn suggests that these different understandings of the physical source of babies determine in large part the resultant marriage cultures. But in both cases, the aim is the same – to connect children with both their mother and father.

Of course, we now know that both of these views regarding the material source of babies is false. But one thing struck me as an important similarity and truth within both of these views. In both cases, the mother’s contribution to the developing child is much more bulky, structural, and essential, while the father’s contribution is to the form, shape, and character of the child. In the Near East version, the semen is likened to a seed, which is essentially a tiny set of instructions for how to use water, sunlight, and decaying matter to grow a plant. It is that set of instructions, an imprint, which determines the character of what grows. The mother’s or soil’s contribution is in providing access to the water and sunlight, and directly providing the nourishment itself, the physical bulk, of what is to grow. Similarly, in the Trobriand view, the mother’s menstrual blood is the matter with which the child is formed. It is her body itself that provides the physical matter for the child, while the father’s contribution is to form the appearance and character of the child through his direct and intimate involvement in the child’s development. The analogy offered to this in Blankenhorn’s book is that a father molds a child the way that grasping clay in your hand leaves your hand’s shape and imprint on it.

I first learned about where babies come from, in terms of eggs and sperm, at a young age from my mother. A few years later I learned about it in school, and it was then that I first saw a picture of an egg surrounded by sperm. I was very surprised to find that the egg is so many times bigger than the sperm. I suppose my surprise stemmed from having been so emphatically taught that men’s and women’s respective contributions to the source of a child are equal.

On the other hand, while a sperm is physically very small, it is encoded with some very important information. Of course, a child does get DNA from both parents, but it is specifically the father’s genetic contribution that determines whether a child is a boy or a girl. This is a profound contribution from the father to one’s identity. So, in this regard, the scientific truth does fit with both the Near Eastern and the Trobriand’s distorted beliefs on the subject.

This truth extends beyond conception into pregnancy, during which the mother literally builds a flesh and blood baby out of the actual biological matter of her own body, and then after giving birth through great physical pain and risk, feeds the child at her bosom, next to her heart, with milk that her own body creates. The father, meanwhile, shapes the type of person the child will become, whether it’s through the intimate interactions of the Trobriand culture or the disciplinarian role of the Near East and Old European cultures. In all of these cases, Mother provides the matter; Father provides the form.

Are these two contributions equal? They are certainly of equal importance, and I am very grateful to live in a time in history when we have scientific proof of this. Despite their equal importance, however, the contributions are very different, and in their individual attributes, they are not equal at all. A father does not give his child nearly the amount of physical sacrifice that a mother does, but the mother does not mold the character of the child nearly as much as the father does.

These examples from history demonstrate how inadequate scientific knowledge can lead to distorted beliefs about where babies come from, and then ultimately determine the marriage culture of different societies. It occurs to me that this same thing is happening right now, as we face another turning point in the history of marriage. I've regularly seen same-sex marriage advocates simply refuse to acknowledge the scientific truth that only the combination of a man and a woman can produce babies. And when they do acknowledge it, they dismiss it as being irrelevant to the debate. Our own lack of scientific truthfulness is distorting our marriage culture, the same way it distorted that of the societal examples in Blankenhorn's book. I'm guessing this is a point that Blankenhorn is about to make in the next few chapters, which I will be tackling tonight.

The fact that mothers provide the matter to build a child, while the father molds that child to its particular form also resonates in an intuitive way with the technological advances that might someday make same-sex reproduction possible. When and if this becomes a reality, it will only be possible for two women, never two men. This is because women do have within them the physical matter to build a child, so by taking a genetic imprint from another woman to use as sperm, modern technology can build a female child without a man's involvement. However, since only men carry the genes to create other men, two women can never build a boy, let alone form a man. On the other hand, two men, while having plenty of genetic imprints available to form both boys and girls, nevertheless lack the essential matter with which to build a flesh and blood baby. Same-sex reproduction will never be available to men.

A little reverence for the demonstrable facts of how babies are made goes a long way toward intuitively understanding what marriage is and why we need it. It is this very basic understanding of nature, along with religious tradition, that is the source of so many overwhelmingly voter-approved state constitutional marriage amendments, especially in places like Wisconsin, where the amendment was approved by an overwhelming margin despite the fact that the pollsters and pundits were predicting it to be a close call that could go either way. People know in a very visceral and intuitive way that marriage serves a profound purpose that would have to be discarded in order to institute same-sex marriage. It is only the encouragement of ignorance or dismissal of basic truths that allows the same-sex marriage proponents to make advances for their cause.