That's pretty much the reason I suspect. Family law already seems pretty tough. It would be a massive clusterfuck.
Plus, as addressed in the psychology today rebuttal, Peterson's arguments are flawed anyway because they are based on polygamous societies where females have no freedom - aka are patriarchal polygamous societies. Applying his reasoning to today's society makes no sense because women are independent actors thanks to equal rights perfectly capable of choosing their own partners. Much of the violence in polygamous societies stems from male competition over mates which is going to be quite neatly under cut when the "prize" has their own say in matters.
So basically it is a shit non-argument that uses past examples that have no relation to the current trend of society in attempt to try and justify a return to his pet patriarchal society, a religiously/socially enforced monogamous one where males hold the power.
It's a little funny to me that the counter argument is "I just meant we need a social convention" when we clearly already have a society where the vast majority of people expect and glorify stable pairing, and per his own words "polygamy is illegal". Seems like it shouldn't be surprising that they interpret it as something more when we already have what he's "calling for".
Why are people still saying things like this? Enforced monogamy has an evolutionary context that people are intentionally ignoring for the sake of trying to make shitty zingers.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1420-9101.2003.00654.x
Here's a paper from the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
I can't believe I used to defend this nutjob. Holy fuck, ever since I started listening to his talks on literally anything other than psychology he's just been getting worse and worse.
I mean, I don't know about that last part. I just want people to stop misinterpreting things. It's not even another case of "this is what he ACTUALLY meant!", it's a matter of literally ignoring definitions and context with little room for interpretation. As vague and abstract as Peterson can be, even to a fault at certain times, he was pretty staight-forward in this scenario.
If I'm understanding correctly, enforced monogamy in an evolutionary studies arises in the duality of animal sexes, wherein a male animal benefits most having as many partners as possible for themselves but the female benefits from having the widest possible choice of fertile partners. In this case, enforced monogamy would cover cases in which a single or small number of male animals control all of the female animals and only allow the females to mate with them and no one else. This benefits the selective fitness of that male's genes at the expense of limiting the selection of the females' (which would rather benefit through having multiple partners and therefore the widest selection of diverse genes, increasing survival chances).
This sounds far away from what Peterson seems to be suggesting, which is that the cure for young human men committing violence is that we should encourage every woman to match with every man, so that everyone is married and therefore not incentivised to act violently out of lack of a sexual partner.
But the whole basis of enforced monogamy is that it is the strongest male controlling all of the females, like a harem, not that every member of each sex of an entire species matches up no matter what, which I imagine would simply discourage evolutionary fitness by going against the whole idea of survival of the fittest in the first place.
Great paper, really love the part where it mostly talks about insects (cockroaches) and, I quote
Thus, male mating history can exacerbate the
fitness effects arising through sexual conflict in N. cinerea, an effect that may be common in species where mate competition interacts with mate
choice to produce a system where a few males monopolize matings (Jones, 2001; Preston et al., 2001).
[...]
Thus, sperm depleted males
appeared to maintain spermatophore size above a certain threshold required to prevent
remating by the female. Because males were able to enforce monogamy on females, there
might be reduced selection on sperm quality (Hunter & Birkhead, 2002), a hypothesis supported by the observed decrease in the viability of the sperm in
males as the number of mating partners increased.
Something that doesn't even necessarily apply to humans. Is this the lobster argument again?
The point I was making is that it's not a term Peterson just went and made up. Obviously, in this context, we're talking about the social and anthropological aspect of enforced monogamy in the case of humans. It's not a controversial idea that humans tend to be monogamous for a reason.
Humans are monogamous because of cultural reasons. It was common for the rich back in middle ages to have concubines, and for men to sleep with women outside of marriage. This applied to Asian countries as well. Even Vikings would raid rape and pillage with wives back home. Even farther back, in the iron age, orgies and other sexual deviancy with multiple partners was common. The main reason why it was later shunned was due to it being considered adultery, which later the church would judge harshly for. If you look at middle eastern and African countries, you'll see polygamy is extremely common due to the christian church not being as big in those regions. Plus these countries rely on multiple wives for reproduction reasons to bear more sons for more work hands.
Well, yeah. People found out that it's not a good idea to leave children fatherless and considering how rampant STDs were, monogamous relationships are advantageous and superior in terms of raising offspring.
He just says vague rambling shit with big words to try and look intelligent.
How is limiting one father and mother more advantageous than one father 5 mothers? By pure numbers monogamy will never reach polygamy in terms of offspring. Polygamy was only recently looked down upon due to new testament declaring it an extremely sinful act. Which spreads from europe to other nations. Society didn't give up polygamy because they thought it would stop men from turning into a wave of angry manlets, they gave it up due to religious and cultural reasons.
True, but Peterson (as well as many conservatives) do think monogamy should be encouraged for the continued stability of modern society. Peterson just removes God's command and replaces it with some form of natural law which he anchors in the human psyche, as opposed to the word of God.
He is merely stating (what he believes to be) a fact - that there is a correlation between the strength of marriage as a social institution / enforced monogamy and the stability of a society.
Whether there is enough evidence to concretely state the things he does is debatable, though.
Attempting to apply evolutionary theory to human behavior as opposed to animal behavior is fraught with complications. We have to consider the effects of socialization over the course of our anthropological history. It's impossible to say how culture might have developed differently if key events had not occurred. As humans, wer are heavily influenced by social pressure and cultural ideals, many of which serve no evolutionary purpose and would be considered arbitrary from an outsider perspective.
I direct you again to the Psychology Today rebuttal posted a few pages back, wherein his entire argument is flawed because it is based on societies where women had no individual rights or agency, which is not at all comparable to today.
He's not-so-subtly suggesting a roll back of female rights to autonomy with this, essentially, by advocating a return to a uniquely-monogamous society that benefits males exclusively. This is reinforced by his attitudes towards hook-up/one-night stand culture which has become more prevalent as women are now also able to indulge in sleeping around and being choosy about their long-term partners whilst pursuing short-term fun.
I'm far from agreeing with the guy, I'm just stating what his position on the matter seems to be.
I agree, he would sacrifice freedom for what he would believe will bring stability to society, so even if he's correct on that regard there is the question of the autonomy of women being compromised in his potential solution. Then again you can see how this ties in to my previous point on his vague belief in some kind of moral darwinism - he suggests that societies which succeed must be doing things right in terms of social structure.
I know, but he is still wrong, because he is basing his argument off an incomparable social situation (Polygamous societies where females have no rights/autonomy and are patriarchal) and deciding that polygamy is the deciding factor for "social extinction" rather than looking at the context within which that polygamy is practised as the flaw - when most actual psychologists/sociologists would take his argument about the male aggression within them and point out that it is most likely due to those societies being patriarchal/aka Male-Dominated that causes the conflict and is therefore not at all comparable to the social context of today where women are not prizes for males to compete over in the traditional evolutionary sense but are themselves independent actors capable of choosing their mates.
feel like this is relevant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCGyLjBjuGI
God I hate videos like this. It makes SO many claims and gives almost no backup for them.
sounds like the problem is perhaps toxic masculinity, and has nothing to do with whether a person is monogamous at all
...
The dude only got famous because he misunderstood the context of a bill; not surprised that he continues to say stupid shit.
Yup. "Intellectual dark web" my ass, Peterson earns six figures annually just by sitting in front of a computer and acting like he's white ISIS.
I can't even tell if this is satire or if you have some sort of severe mental deficiency.
His Patreon was at 60 grand a month when he stopped disclosing how much it made, and the amount of donors has only increased since then, so yeah he's literally making six figures just to tweet and record his unhinged ramblings, and that's before book sales.
So? People enjoy what he does in speeches, debates, blogs and whatnot. You only dislike the fact that he gets paid because you have a different political stance.
This wasn’t really my main issue with your comment though. I have a few contentions with Peterson myself, and disagree with his more conservative viewpoints, but calling him “white Isis”? Even comparing him with Isis alone sounds ridiculously insane, but why white isis? As opposed to brown Isis? How does his race even play into this?
What is hyperbolic comedy
Which is why I said:
The person didn’t clarify that he/she was joking, so how am I wrong for assuming they’re serious?
It actually feels like some people in these threads just say more and more ridiculous shit about Peterson just because it's popular to do so.
I disagree with 90% of what he says outside of the context of psychology and theology, but some of the claims in this thread about the kind of person he is and the opinions that he holds are just so fucking ridiculous, over the top and false that I don't even know where to begin. I really don't want to sound like I'm arguing in favor of somebody who I disagree with on so many topics, but come on. He says enough questionable shit to actually criticize him on without making stuff up.
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