The prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed to
ethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethical
motives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is that
ethical motives 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 overwhelming on the side of
monogamy; civilized men are in favour 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 experience from the level of an
ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing 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 Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of
the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety,
but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring,
and so gradually kills it.
The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to get
all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the
important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the
unmarried—that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in
dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with
scare-crows and prohibitions—to try to convince him logically that
passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and
imbecility—supererogation because he already knows that it is
dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a
passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein
under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions—to bring it down, by slow
stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How much more,
then, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden
polygamy, before marriage, but permitted monogamy! The prohibition in
this case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible,
as in the other. Curiosity would be satisfied; nature would get out of
her cage; even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out
of a hundred would submit, if only because it would be much easier to
submit that to resist.
And the result? Obviously, it would be laudable—that is, accepting
current definitions of the laudable. The product, after six months,
would be a well-regimented and disillusioned young man, as devoid of
disquieting and demoralizing passion as an ancient of eighty—in brief,
the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails to
produce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand its
impossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, often
ending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill the
Y. M. C. A.’s with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgusting
Freudian suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens.
Neither promotes the sort of public morality that is aimed at.