SOCIAL HISTORY AND SSM: Matt Taylor

George McAllister asks whether historic variation in family structure is relevant to the SSM debate.

I'm no expert on social history, but I do see a problem with any argument that advocates a particular family structure based on its historic success: we currently live at a time of exceptionally rapid change, almost a discontinuity when compared with the previous 5,000 years of human civilization. The early 21st century "first world" is qualititatively different than any society that has ever existed. Consider just a few factors: instantaneous worldwide communication, contraception, in-vitro fertilization, life expectancy over 80 years, the near disappearance of hereditary social class. These factors, and many others, cast serious doubt on any comparison with historic societies.

The problem is far more pronounced when we look forward in time as well as backward. As long as we're considering many-thousand-year time scales, just think for a minute what might happen even in the next 100 years. Any of these might have enormous implications for our view of family and marriage:
- extreme increase in life expectancy (could anyone stay married for 500
years?)
- gender change that creates functioning reproductive organs in the patient
- in vitro conception between parents of the same sex
- emergence of artifical life forms of sufficient intelligence to be deemed "people"

We don't have a crystal ball to know which, if any, of these scenarios may actually occur, and inevitably there will be changes which we did not foresee at all. Nevertheless, these possibilities are at least as relevant to our time as the family structures of centuries past. Perhaps more so, since we can actually influence family structure and social policy in the future, whereas the past is already a "done deal."
posted by Eve at 5:10 AM | link

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