- Stephen C. on Church Civil Wars, Liberalization, and Africa: “I think it would be jarring for a not-insignificant minority, but yes, I generally agree that it wouldn’t be foundation shaking, even though theologically it would be a clear move away from the gender complementarianism implicit in the current system.” Nov 7, 04:40
- on Church Civil Wars, Liberalization, and Africa: “Weren’t women some of the earliest leaders among the unofficial adopters of LDS scripture and teachings in Africa? I have no sense if ordination of women is likely any time soon, but it could make little difference overall in some places, including in the U.S. That seems especially likely if ordaining women comes about through a long series of small steps (like recent teachings on priesthood combined with formal recognition of women performing temple ordinances as an order of the priesthood with its own equivalents to quorums and ordination ordinances) rather than a major new canonized revelation.” Nov 6, 19:27
- on Church Civil Wars, Liberalization, and Africa: “Yes, there is definitely a long, technical post to be written at some point on how different Christian churches (including the CoC, ironically) are threading the African polygamy needle (e.g. not recognizing it while not forcing families to break up), with obvious possible implications for our own situation.” Nov 6, 18:54
- on Church Civil Wars, Liberalization, and Africa: “I wonder if the Anglican African Churches keep this stance on polygamy: https://www.anglicancommunion.org/resources/document-library/lambeth-conference/1988/resolution-26-church-and-polygamy?subject=Marriage” Nov 6, 18:19
- on What Conditions Might Generate a Social Preference for Polygamy?: “TNC, Your first paragraph made me cringe. Are you suggesting that Utah Mormons were bred to be righteous? Or am I misreading it? I also cringed at your second paragraph, with the notion that polygamy was some sort of welfare system for the absorption of non-elite females with greater spirituality than non-elite males. Then I cringed at the second wives are servants notion in the third paragraph. Count that as a triple-cringe.” Nov 6, 08:59
- on What Conditions Might Generate a Social Preference for Polygamy?: “Are you really sure? In the context of my simulations, yes, I am sure. Recall that in my simulations I have assumed that “there are no synergies among sister wives.”. That eliminates any benefit from free labor. Similarly, (although I did not explicitly mention it in the paper or in an omitted footnote), I assume that there are no synergies between husband and wife other than the bearing of children. Thus, a man’s “status” is of no interest to a first wife because “women have only one goal—to maximize their number of descendants” and there is no mechanism in the simulations for enhanced “status” to result in more children. In the real world, no, I’m not so sure. But I can’t relax the “no synergies” assumption without also accounting for the antagonism polygamy would introduce. (Google tells me that antagonism is the appropriate antonym for synergy.) I have no data that would allow me to weight those factors. Weighting one more heavily than the other would just predetermine the results and weighting them equally would get me right back where I already am.” Nov 6, 08:57
- on Wakara’s America: A Book Review: “Hoosier–I hope that you will enjoy it! Brigham was often explicit (and he wasn’t alone) in expecting to “need” to kill lots of Indians, by which he meant kill lots of Indian men. He cited an uncanonized prophecy from Joseph on this matter. Wakara sometimes supported that killing work, especially the killing of the Timpanogos at Utah Lake (who were his kin, but they were estranged) in 1850. But it was amazing to me that Wakara really wasn’t involved much at all in the “Walker War.” He was far away from the fighting all of 1853-1854. (Ryan Wimmer’s master’s thesis was a treasure trove of primary documents, which allowed me to place Wakara week-by-week). But even though Wakara wasn’t involved beyond the initial confrontation, as soon as the fighting broke out in 1853, Brigham was quick to call it “Walker’s War” and that was picked up by the national press. The point is that settlers blamed the Utes for the violence they started, which is a tradition as long as America is old. (See Lepore’s “The Name of War.”)” Nov 6, 06:43
- on What Conditions Might Generate a Social Preference for Polygamy?: “Anna, the “raising up a righteous generation” does not specifically imply raising a large generation at all. Total births per women decrease, possibly a benefit in a society getting the hang of desert agriculture, but reproductive success for just a few men skyrockets. Brigham Young has tens of thousands of descendants, you can see the sort of bulldog look in a lot of them. I suspect there are a lot of other traits fixed by polygamy, and that that affects how easy it is to identify Utah people at a glance; personality traits could be affected by that as well, which could easily fit the bill for some values of “righteous.” So, the spiritualism-related female convert bump gets absorbed, there is a pretty effective welfare system in frontier Utah for a while, families have… different… stresses, the whole thing gets dismantled after three generations (long enough to set a few traits in the population, not so long they need a war to eliminate excess males) and it becomes spicy folklore and racy speculation. Religions have done much worse. Paul, “Allowing first wives a veto would render the exercise trivial—polygyny would simply never happen” – are you sure? Are you really sure? I’m sure it’s a politic thing to *say* in our environment but on the ground I’m not sure the temptation to give one’s husband higher status while obtaining free household labor is universally defeated in societies that give first wives such privilege.” Nov 5, 23:00
- on What Conditions Might Generate a Social Preference for Polygamy?: “First of all, NYAnn’s suggestion that I explicitly acknowledge infertility is a good one. So good, in fact, that I noted the assumption of 100% fertility in a footnote. Unfortunately, the footnotes did not survive the transition from my Word document to the blog platform. Here’s the missing footnote: Given the “maximize the number of descendants” goal, I synthesize only fertile, heterosexual, nonadulterous, and nonabusive people. The absence of other types of people is not to ignore their existence—it is solely to uncomplicate the analysis. Beyond that, however, if somebody were to come by and just read the comments, they would think that I had either (a) written a full-throated defense of polygamy, or (b) advocated for some system of weeding out bad genes. Neither of those conclusions would be remotely correct. To summarize for those who did not read the OP, my conclusion was that when the population is balanced with regard to sex, I can identify no conditions under which a majority of the adult population would prefer polygamy over monogamy. In the process, I demonstrated that the interests of non-elite men and women differ from those of elite men and women–so much so that the votes of non-elite men would be decisive in rejecting polygamy. That conclusion is not dependent on the underlying assumptions, which are necessarily unrealistic. There is no set of assumptions that would make polygamy attractive to non-elite men, who would be left with no opportunity to do whatever it is that makes polygamy attractive to elite men. As for non-elite women, it will not do to simply assert that poor women would rather be loved in an exclusive relationship than share the resources of an elite man. Such women undoubtedly exist, but so do the 25 women who have chosen to have Elon Musk’s baby. In fact, informal polygamy is not that exceptional in today’s society. Many women (probably a minority) are complicit in that. I think it is entirely appropriate to at least ask the question whether it would make sense to formalize the system. Brigham Young thought the answer was yes. My analysis indicates that the answer is no. The eugenics accusation is absurd. The only policy I am investigating is whether to allow women to marry men who already have a wife. Otherwise, all reproductive decisions are being made by individuals or couples, not the government. I disagree that human mate selection is not ranked selection. We all rank one another. Most of us try to marry the highest ranking person we can. That differs from my analysis only in that everyone uses a different ranking system and I required everyone to use the same ranking system. My motivation in doing so was solely to make the simulation tractable, not to advocate that a particular ranking system be imposed on everybody. This is usually the part where I say that it would be interesting to relax some of the restrictive assumptions in further research, but I do not, in fact, think that it would be interesting. I can only relax the assumptions by introducing some randomness, and that is not going to change the conclusions.” Nov 5, 21:37
