With “Monogomy: A Critique,” Mcmurty, criticizes the widely accepted and rarely-challenged ideas of monogamy, first establishing how blindly accepted monogamy is, by the general population, as natural and universal, even by those who regularly break out of it through infidelity or sexual adventures, albeit on a less conscious level.

He goes on to define exactly what monogamy is in legal and definitive terms. It needs to be contractual (ironic for the more intimate and loving relationships, considering all the legal and financial factors that go into that), it can only be 2 people (the minimal amount that there possibly could be in an intimate relationship), there can’t be more than one marriage at a time and there can’t be sex outside of the marriage. All of these are aggressively punishable by law, and thought, in terms of discrimination, shame, economic loss and exclusion. Then he explains the main arguments, discounting a higher power for monogomy. 1: monogamous marriage provides an escape and security from the outside world and 2: it provides a loving context for a child to be brought up against. However, there’s no justification neither of those could be had with a different, more alternative, type of marriage, and in fact, by comparison to those alternatives, Mcmurty argues a monogamous relationship can actually be detrimental to both causes.

For one, limitation of a marriage being confined to two people creates countless psychological problems for the child, whose young mind yearns for constant attention and love, but gets the short end of the straw, by having it centralized to only 2 people. This is where sibling rivalries often occur and overt parental tyranny expands. As for providing a social sanctuary, both for the child and the parents, having only 2 members takes away all the variety and security that larger numbers could provide, whether economically, socially emotionally or intimately.

Second, not being able to have an erotic life outside of one’s spouse creates an atmosphere of jealousy, lack of trust and alienation that carries over to the child. The strict enforcement of sexual energies is often unable to be realistically maintained, whether caused by the strictness of the restrictions itself or the promiscuity of the person in question, and expectations for otherwise create suffering when it does happen, and fear and anxiety even when it doesn’t. Sexual restrictions also promote a number of negative social personality traits; aggression, distance from others not in the marriage, and an intensifying sexual imagination leading to fetishism and overt perversion.

So why is monogamy enforced so aggressively? Mcmurty argues that the principle of strict monogamy in our culture is based on “the right to exclude” others from our partners. It is the “ownership” of sexual and emotional powers by one another. Marriage is so full of legal stipulations and laws and “property language” (“mine”, “take”, “keeping you only unto him”, “she belongs to him”) that this isn’t so hard to believe. Argruably, everything valued in our society is governed by the ideals of individual ownership and the exclusion of others, and it would be too obvious a blot on our structure if sex and love wasn’t included in that. Monogomous Marriage fundamentally serving the need for love and care is a conditioned myth; what it really does is maintain the essential principles of our social system, while the trade-off is a promotion of increasingly complex mental disorders, stressors and personality conflicts within individuals.

According to Mcmurty, these recent developments in the breakdown of the marriage institution might suggest our gradual lessening of these essential ingrained principles, and he gives a number of examples: “swingers”, the popularization and acceptance of Playboy, huge divorce rates, the non-marital long-term relationships. However, his ultimate outlook is grim; he states that the term “wife swapping” is still used, implying ownership, non-marital relationships settle into the “marital mold”, playboy remains a money-driven commodity, and divorce is little more than an escape hatch (and it should be noted, divorce rarely stops the divorcee from finding another monogamous relationship in the future). The closest thing to a hope, Mcmurty suggests, are communes. But those are seen as on the outskirts of society and Mcmurty further suggests that “it would be a mistake to underestimate the tenacity of an established order”

In “The Metaphysics of the love of the Sexes,” the author tries to explain why love is such an important human trait, and why it so fixated by people whether in fiction, or in reality, by portraying it as nature’s manifestation of an instinctual need to procreate. Schopenhauer argues that because the successful continuation of our species is perhaps the single most important thing for us instinctually, then it follows that the means through which we perform that essential act, love of another individual, would be obviously be considered the most all-important and all-controlling aspect of life to us. The will to love is cleverly disguised by nature as a vague individual desire for self-pleasure, when in fact it's a very precise need for the entire human species. All the conditions with which we pick the mutual parent of our future child, or our lover, have instinctual backings. We are not consciously aware of why we go though all these considerations, and believe it to be self-serving, when in fact, it’s because we want the child to be the best he or she can be.

There are countless human attitudes on love that follow from this basic need. We don't want to marry people we don’t love because a partnership between two people who aren't in line with each other would only lead to discord, chaos and unhappiness between the two, meaning the same things would be present within the child, lowering his or her will to live, or make him or her destructive to others, which would do bad to our species as a whole. We fall in love with people who are different from us (see the term, “opposites attract”) because we want our child to have a full package, including the elements lacking in ourselves. Smart and cultured women will often be attracted to unintelligent and brash men, because it is the will and power of the man, not his mind, that is frequently transferred to the child. When outside forces of social construction convince us to pick people who are similar to ourselves, the children, as a rule, suffer by not getting a full package of traits. Men sacrifice their personal interests and even well-being for love because of the “greater good”; to procreate.

No matter how intense, we fall out of love when we observe things about our lover we didn’t see before, that contradict our underlying principles for picking a partner because of the inability to have the best possible child with that person. When that happens, heartbreak hurts as much as it does, because it denies us our chance to justify our placement in the human race and do that one thing essential to it; give birth.

These rules introduce a controversial paradox, the fight between individual desire, and species desire. To marry for money or status is an individual desire and often results in self-contempt because of what the instinct tells us. To marry for love, however, frequently results in unhappiness because the two people brought together are often drastically different in temperament, and after the illusion of “love”, as created by nature’s need for procreation, wears out, this becomes too obvious. This is why it’s so hard to see successful marriages. Both the desire of the species and the individual must be balanced.

Despite seeming to attack the idealism of love, however, Schopenhauser concludes that while understanding this philosophy is to admit the nature of mortal man is selfish and individualistic, it is also understanding that at our core is an extremely unselfish desire to put others (the rest of the human race) before ourselves. That’s why love is almost holy in nature. The yearning and longing for one’s lover is a “pledge of man’s immortality”

The effect of conditioning on the human brain is infinitely pervasive. We are basically products of conditioning in that, from our birth to our present, our personalities and patterns are influenced by social structures, the nature of our emotional attachments and physical relationships. Within the wide and open confines of our genetics, I believe that we are what our environment has made us. With that understanding, it makes perfect sense that people from dysfunctional backgrounds become dysfunctional people with dysfunctional relations. And considering the family that I came from, it makes sense why my greatest personal problem is a mental one. I do not want to be a direct product of my parents’ upbringing, because they weren’t exactly the best people to take influence from. My father was bipolar, OCD, self-centered, alcoholic and abusive. My mother’s chronic depression and passive tendencies mean that she just sat by and took all the emotional (and, very rarely, physical) abuse thrust upon her, while admitting herself into an unsatisfying marriage. And while I identify these flaws in them and, to a large extent, distinguish my own quirks from theirs, I can’t help but wonder how my experiences growing up in that environment of conflict and suppressed emotion might contribute to my own personal growth later down the line. Already I have picked up on some traces of their personality in my own. I find myself spacing out and awkward in social situations much like my Mom continues to be. I also find a complete lack of follow-through when it comes to things that I really want to do, such as move out of the house, get a job or push my grades up significantly in school. This, in particular echoes my Mom, as for the past three years she has expressed an honest desire to separate and move out, but has not pushed herself to get the money or find the place. And then there’s the emotionally abusive long-term relationships that I’ve already found myself stuck in, that eventually drove me to frequent short tempered outbursts that resembled my father far too much. Based on this evidence, I think that, had I not identified this earlier, I’d be much more unhappy with myself as a person, as well as my relationships with people.

But this is where the solution lies: I have identified it. I think that the first and hardest step to changing is acknowledging that there’s a problem, and I’ve done so before the problem has even fully manifested. You see, I finally broke up with my ex after a year and a half of breakdowns and arguments, and recently entered a stable relationship where we both communicate and exchange ideas respectfully. I’ve developed a stable and mature group of friends who continue to support me and from whom I take constant influence from. My grades have gone up and I have finally got back on the job hunt. I think the key to finding a solution to personal problems is purely scientific; you have to acknowledge patterns and causes. Emotional and mental problems seem to be directly related to cause and effect. I think it’s the larger social pressures from outside sources that contribute to the initial development of a complex and allows the victim to form their own destructive patterns and addictions, which they then might amplify through interaction with another dysfunctional person, or pass on to their children through raising and conditioning them. Those kids may then grow up with those problems and continue the destructive tendencies or react and develop their own. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, and until someone in the chain examines, identifies and changes something, they can easily continue to grow and worsen over generations.

Of course, this problem is simple when looked at on a single-family scale. When you bring entire communities and cultures into the picture, it gets a whole lot more complicated. Their personal problems and destructive tendencies become amplified and a part of larger movements, and therefore, when dealing with your own personal problems, I think you have to take your cultural identity into account as well. For example, the state of Africans in America right now appears to be the result of a culture-wide inferiority complex, the origin of which seems to be rooted in slavery and hundreds of years of inequality and hardships. It’s a natural reaction when history books, teachers and those in power have maintained for countless decades that your entire ethnicity is inferior to others. Now, I’m not gonna deny that progress has been made. Today, racists are seen mainly as maniacs and are pushed to the outskirts of society. However, large gaps between education rates, prison rates, drug usage and economic status suggest that there’s still a large invisible barrier preventing African Americans from achieving as well as Caucasians, and I think that this is my theory of personal problems working on a nation-wide level. The gaps come from within the culture as much as from outside of it. In this case, the social pressure is the enforced inequality for hundreds of years on African Americans; the stamping out of their religion, culture and human rights for monetary purposes. Another pressure is the difficulty that the race faced after slavery died; having to start from scratch and build a life in America with minimal support and a vast amount of inside-racism would tire out anyone. Consequently, many African American families in a lower economic status become stuck in economically and socially destructive patterns just like how many individuals become stuck in mentally destructive patterns. The culture distances itself further from what mainstream America might consider “wholesome ideals” as an attempt to regain their identity and take some sort of power back, whether for personal therapeutic reasons or for a strictly economic need.

But this is ultimately detrimental to the ethnicity as a whole, lowering their education rates, raising their prison rates and spawning even more racism from outside cultures. I think the solution lies in, similar to the method of preventing individual personal problems, identifying the source and all the complex causes of the problem. Humans have always advanced their status on the evolutionary ladder because of their capacity for thought, and modern history has shown that’s the exact same way individual groups of humans can advance and change; through education and passion. That’s why government once made it illegal to teach slaves how to read and write. I think college education, especially in the city and on the SFSU campus, has gone a long way towards this, offering an extremely large selection of African Studies classes, as well as studies for most other major ethnicites and classes that even cut across culture to examine bigger problems (Racism: A Cross Cultural Analysis, comes to mind). Also, various forms of art can offer both therapeutic relief (poetry, rap) and an educated awareness (The Wire, Crash) for those stuck in destructive cultural cycles but are capable of breaking out of it.

But a large majority of the problems that Africans in America face are also reinforced by outside cultures and covert racism, which is why, even after grasping the difficulty of personal problems in the world on an individual and cultural level, there’s another level of complexity you must take into account. The realization that all our cultures live on the same planet and constantly interact with each other makes the fight against problems even more complicated, because each culture’s collected quirks and complexes stand out and feed into one another, creating more tension, suspicions, racism, and further complexities. And these complications and outside differences become a serious barrier to the more universal issue that many of the oppressed should be fighting, which is not a question of race, but of class. There are places in the world, such as Cuba where racism has actually been explicitly outlawed, and consequently, ethnicity is not as pervasive there as it is here. One must ask the question that if America is supposed to be completely equal why don’t we just also clearly outlaw Racism? The answer lies in the fact that in a capitalist society such as ours, race is fundamentally related to class. The color card is constantly used by people in power, to pit others who are in the same lower class, but are of different ethnicities, against eachother. With people so worried about other races or competition, they become distracted from the bigger issue, which is the gap between the poor and the rich; something that actually has tangible effects on a person’s quality of living. Meanwhile, the hatred and suspicion between different peoples continues to brew, fueled by fears of poverty and a desire to profit, and it’s that very emotion that could lead to our society’s eventual self-destruction, should a significant and earth-shattering enough global occur.

I think the solution to this frightening problem is that people need to realize that the idea of race is a made up term. Literally! We are all a part of the human race, not a part of our own individual races. The usage of the term “race” to describe different ethnicities was actually completely made up in an era of scientific racism when scientists were hypothesizing that the size of human skulls indicated intelligence. And then, they decided that there were only 4 major races anyways: Black, White, Indian and Asian. It completely disregarded every other ethnicity out there, which would be too tiring and endless to list in it’s entirety, but the most obvious of which is Latino (duh)! This pathetic attempt at explaining the differences between ethnicities is what leads to the assumption that different ethnicities are, for some reason, genetically “inferior” to other ethnicities, when, in fact, you can find more genetic differences between two people of the same “race” than you can between two people of a different “race”. But that was the dominant form of thinking which is what reinforced all those years of Slavery in America and which continues to enforce dominant thoughts of ethnicity today, allowing the higher classes to take advantage of the weak for power. So by acknowledging its inaccuracy and refusing to use the word, “race” to describe a person’s ethnicity you take the first step towards admitting complete equality.

And this is important, for unless we all learn to live with one another and band together, we will overlook the even bigger concern that should be on our minds, which is extended survival as the human race. Once you realize how long the life of a planet is and understand that the dinosaurs were once practically rulers of this planet, but disappeared mysteriously practically overnight, our extended thriving on this planet doesn’t seem as much a guarantee. Our personal struggles with our minds, our community’s struggles with social structures and our races struggles with one another will just be tiny inkblots on the timeline of Earth in the long run. Depression, dysfunction, racism, battles between classes, inequality and everything of that nature are just signposts of a species that’s defeating itself through excess. So let’s all get a hold of it as quickly as possible, before any of it gets any more out of hand than it already has. For our species’ well being, people!