Who’s to blame?
A lot of people are listening to TED Talks these days. I think it is because they are supposed to be smart and scientific. They are mostly just secular and progressive. I was listening to one about how monogamy does not work anymore and how we should be “Monogam-ish”— that is, mostly monogamous. The first part of the talk was full of all kinds of pseudoscience, but the main idea was that marriage is a worse than fifty-fifty gamble and it definitely needs an adjustment if it will have the potential to make us happy. And the thing we need to adjust is probably the monogamy part.
You may or may not think that’s particularly controversial. For my purpose here, this is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. It is part of the general unhappiness with the things that are supposed to make us happy, including human institutions that have lasted tens of thousands of years. The secular and progressive way of dealing with such a phenomenon is to blame the institution — the thing that was supposed to make us happy. If we are not happy in our marriages, then the problem is marriage.
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