Bare Branch culture

Today's vocabulary phrase is "bare branch". As this article by Johnathan Rauch explains, a bare branch is an unmarried male who will leave no descendants:

Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they write: "Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."

Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives — numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities — inner cities, for example — polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need.

Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street --
literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."

Such dynamics put paid to the notion that a social regime based on radical individual autonomy governed by no taboos is possible, or that it would maximise the distribution of freedoms and options among a population. As the author points out, the distribution of marriage partners is a zero sum game. Social relations cannot be subjected to the sort of laissez faire free market treatment that economic resources are given in our capitalist system. This is one of the main reasons that I do not call myself a Libertarian.

The key factor that will hopefully help prevent polygamous marriages from proliferating, should they become legal in the US, is the growing economic status of women, and the increased autonomy that said status affords them in society. The main benefit that women gain from being a partner to a polygynous marriage in those societies that still practice it are economic and personal security. Where women are not allowed to participate freely in the economy, they out of necessity become dependents upon men. And in primitive economies governed by authoritarian rule and the spoils system, the concentration of wives follows the concentration of wealth.

But if men in the US increasingly avoid the responsibilities of marriage and child rearing, economically challenged single mothers may just see joining a polygamous marriage as a way to avoid the overwhelming burdens of being the sole provider and caregiver for their children. All boats have not risen equally in the high tide of economic emancipation for women in the last 30 years. The unfortunate rise in single motherhood has countered many of the gains that other women have made. Indeed, single motherhood is the primary predictor of poverty status in the US.

It is ironic that the monogamous marriage could be considered a taboo, or an unfair personal restriction imposed by society, since compared to the historical alternative of polygynous marriages it represents a liberation for the common man, who can now afford to enjoy the benefits of matrimony previously hoarded by the wealthy and powerful. Such enjoyment goes beyond the mere physical benefits of sexual gratification. Married men are happier, healthier, wealthier, and live longer than single men. So, to use a Skipper-ism, if the "Good" is determened by what works, then the monogamous marriage taboo is the case of a socially imposed restriction that actually facilitates greater individual benefits than a radically autonomous, individualized, no taboos regime could deliver.

This discussion segues nicely to this discussion about reactionary Islam and the status of women by blogger Pat Santy (via Instapundit):

Enormous effort goes into veiling women, dressing women modestly, silencing women, covering women's bodies, punishing women, controlling women, reviling women, humiliating women, beating women, subjugating women, avoiding the dishonor of women, keeping women uneducated, policing women, infantilizing women--in short, dehumanizing women -- all under the guise of "protecting" and "honoring" them as they relegate them to animal-like status.

The women in this misogynistic Islam are brainwashed from birth into thinking that this cultural preoccupation somehow is necessary and that it "liberates" them in some bizarre manner.

Amazingly, this medieval culture has grasped the fundamentals of both Orwellian and postmodern rhetorical rationalizations, that are so prominent in certain intellectual quarters within our own culture! I have heard the canned rationalizations coming from their lips of muslim women myself; and they all claim that it frees them from having to be "sexual objects."

On the contrary, in Islamic society that is apparently the only role open to women. That, and breeders for the jihad.

This societal psychopathology poisons all interactions between the genders; takes up an incredible amount of time and effort in so-called "intellectual" circles and is the subject of religious edicts and innumerable rules and strictures on women's behavior and in the religious and social life; and causes the pseudoscientific rantings of arrogantly pathetic men (like the one above) who try to justify their misogyny so that they don't have to deal with the reality of their frightened and impotent masculinity.

Women become mere possessions-vessels/repositories of the impotent male's honor. That men and women could relate equally in every sphere of human endeavor is a concept that is so alien and so threatening; I suspect it is what partly drives the rage the males feel toward western culture in general.

Without the subjugated woman, the entire house of cards of Islam and Arab culture will come tumbling down.

I have said it before and I will say it again here: the treatment of women under Islam is not only the key to understanding the pathology of the culture, but also the key to developing an antidote to its most poisonous and toxic elements. Unveiling the women of Islam and eliminating their second-class status; empowering them in the oppressive Islamic countries where their individuality and self-expression has been crushed-- may cause a ripple effect that could eventually alter a family structure that currently encourages the development of generation after generation of dysfunctional and pathological men and women.

It should be noted that the repression of women under such hyper-patriarchal regimes is also very repressive to men. It necessarily generates the conditions which generate the aforementioned bare branches, disenfranchised men with no healthy outlet for their sexual needs, no better way to find a meaningful role in society than as cannon fodder in a colonial war or jihad. For the sake of men and women everywhere, lets give up on the misguided application of "open-mindedness" where it applies to our most valued human relationship, marriage, and accept the hard-earned lessons of history, for once.