Comment by derektank
5 hours ago
>no amount of pleading or social engineering can solve this
Isn’t the institution of marriage itself a form of social engineering? I agree that trying to build new social institutions from whole cloth is a huge lift, but at the same time I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine alternative social arrangements that allow for the care of the elderly.
Marriage is the highest form of social engineering, it is an observed fact that it is the primary driver of the civilizing process in human history.
Its absence and the resultant breakdown is being observed in real-time, it should be no surprise that the degradation of society from its absence takes a long time to be felt and it will take a long time to repair this error.
This is a pretty bad-faith argument. Marriage and civilization are definitely correlated, but claiming that the breakdown of marriage is the cause of social issues needs substantiation. Marriage (and sexual abstinence) was very important for property inheritance. It was then codified into social systems as a downstream impact of property rights. A world with birth control, DNA testing, and an extensive legal system muddies this justification.
It's not social engineering, it's biology; many animals mate for life too.
Yet many humans don't mate for life, throughout human history. So is that their biology?
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Big difference between mating and marriage. Lot of marriage where mating is not happening but couples cannot separate because of social/legal/emotional ramifications.
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