[...]neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Jonestown reflections: 30 years later[...]…

Just curious.

Oh, and a great post about Jonestown, btw. I’m reading Seductive Poison now; it’s great, as you say.

The subject was Jonestown, and I highly recommend to all the book “Journey to Nowhere” by the late Shiva Naipaul (brother to V.S.). It was published in 1981 and actually came out a year earlier in Britain with the title “Black and White”. It may be out of print – I know it was for a long time.

Naipul went to Jonestown just after the massacre, and spent a year in the US researching the People’s Temple, including interviews with survivors, defectors, and political associates of Jim Jones. He makes a good argument that there was far more to the rise and fall of the People’s Temple than the usual stuff that’s brought up about cults and charisma and mind control. Mainly it’s a book about ideas and their consequences in the real world. It’s partly about California and the flotsam of the 60′s, but its also the only book I know of that talks about the Guyanese aspects of the story. Naipaul wrote eloquently, here and elsewhere, that the then-emerging Third World was as much a state of mind as anything else. He died at 40 in 1985. Many times since 9/11 I’ve wished his voice was still with us.

(A slightly interesting aside – one of his contentions about the political and social legacy of the 60′s is that “aggressive introversions” (namely feminism, environmentalism and – ahem – gay rights) climbed onto the coattails of the civil rights movement, co-opting its language and premises and ultimately trampling it underfoot.)

The history of what used to be called the “Orient”, basically encompassing anything east of Constantinople (i.e., Istanbul), is of course far different, with Muslims, Chinese, Thais, Javanese, Hindus, and others having multiple wives who were legally recognized as such. Culturally-distinct Japan went its own way, as the one man-one woman formula has been adhered to since ancient times, but most of Asia–and Africa as well–was polygamous. Much of both remain so today, and not only among Muslims. Many are the Chinese and Thai men with “minor” wives, the term describing not their age, but their status, which provides for some rights in terms of support and inheritance, but places them behind “primary wives” and their children.

The miscegenation laws you refer to are of relatively recent vintage, historically-speaking. They were essentially unknown in Europe, and were adopted in this country, for the most part, after the Civil War. Not all states enacted them, either. By contrast, Spain and Portugal–Western nations both– encouraged intermarriage in their American colonies. That’s a big part of the reason why many Latin American countries are highly interracial (although it is also true that south of the border, a higher percentage of European blood usually equates to higher status).

Historically-speaking, the purpose of marriage is NOT to enable two people who love each other to cohabit. The “love marriage” is a recent, and very middle-class, innovation. Prior to the “modern age”, beginning more or less with the Renaissance, serfs and impoverished commoners often did not bother marriage at all. There was seldom any significant property to be inherited, and the “common law” would recognize a couple as married anyhow if they lived together for a prescribed length of time. Among the nobility and wealthy commoners, marriage was regarded as too important to be left to the whims of infatuated youngsters. Therefore, marriages were arranged that would unite, for example, wealthy but “nouveau riche” families with old, established ones, or down-at-the-heels but high-ranking nobles with lower-ranked but more successful ones. In other words, more of an exercise in dynastic and commercial politics than anything to do with love. But marriage also does more than this. It provides a measure of security for women and children (even when regarded as “property”, they were the husband’s property, and couldn’t be taken from him without due process. As imperfect, and unacceptable, to our modern thinking as this is, it is arguably better than being without any legal protection or status at all). Marriage also provides for a clear line of inheritance, not so much from within the family, but from outside interlopers. This provides for posterity, encourages stability, and gets men (mostly) to think about the future. Does gay marriage serve either of these historical purposes? Convince me.

You need a remedial class in logic for it also means that gay activists aren’t working for human rights, period. Nice go with the strawman, low guy on the academic totem pole.