Sex, Love & Marriage: What We’ve been Doing Wrong (and Right) for 8,000 years!
Audio here!
The Judeo-Christian traditions, and others over the last 6,000 years or so, have turned human sexuality and romantic love on its head. For 98% of human existence (of which 8,000 years is but a blink of an eye), humans lived in small communities ‘where everybody knew your name.’ Our ancestors led very egalitarian lives compared to the dominance based, often patriarchal societies of so-called modern civilization.
Today, ‘unnatural’ (as in, not part of the social evolution of humanity until very recently) emphasis has been put on competition with its Hobbesian attitudes of a selfish, brutish, cold human existence. This has, in part, let to inherently self-centered economic systems like Capitalism (based on the artificial notion of Private Property) which has, among other problems, demanded sexuality be considered almost inhuman, scarce, and hierarchical, and thus championing the supposedly moral virtues of monogamy and the “nuclear family.” Any real attempts of returning to our basic human natures has been faced with threats from the State, Church, and even from the Sciences (particularly from the field of evolutionary psychology).
So, how can humanists and other freethinkers better understand the nature of human nature with regards to Sex, Love and Marriage in such a society as ours? On this 2-hour special, we turn to two researchers in these areas to try to get a better handle on what and who we are, and where we may want to venture in the 21st Century.