Intermezzo on Monogamy
THE PREVALENCE of monogamous marriage in Christendom is commonly ascribed to ethical considerations. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethical consideration–which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is that such considerations are no more than deductions from experience, and that they are quickly abandoned whenever experience turns against them. In the present case experience is still overwhelmingly on the side of monogamy; civilized men are in favor of it because they find that it works. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of all available antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in brief, kills passion–and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation.
The civilized man –the ideal civilized man–is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately–when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the police to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this by destroying appetite. It forces the high contracting parties into an intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus that "maximum of temptation" of which George Bernard Shaw speaks has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the everyday sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his shoes shined. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it.
Mencken,
From In Defense of Women, 1918
