I found a post I made a long time ago after reading a book by Carl Zimmerman called “Family and Civilization”. It’s not specifically about same sex marriage. Rather it’s about the decay of the family in general.
Zimmerman compares western civilization to both ancient Greek and ancient Roman civilizations drawing parallels between the family structure and the status of the civilization. Civilizations start off with “trustee families”. Trustee families are clannish, people identify themselves strongly as members of a family, societies are made up of many families living in the same region, If a person owes a debt other family members feel it’s their duty to help pay the debt, if you harm someone from my family there will be serious “blood vengeance” . The west had trustee families from the fall of Rome till about the 11th century . After many centuries the trustee families morph into “domestic families” which isn’t so brutal and is the family values of early church fathers like Jerome and Augustine and later church doctors like Aquinas. Domestic families are conducive to a growing and healthy civilization. Civilizations are at their peak when the domestic family is the trend, for example Pericles’ Funeral Oration demonstrates the domestic family values of Greece when they were the super power around the time of the Peloponnesian War. Just a few centuries later when Greece was in decline and Rome was on the rise, Greece had lost the domestic family while Rome had just turned into domestic families. In Western Europe, from around the end of the dark ages to the enlightenment, the church would intervene between warring families, sometimes compensating one family to stop the violence. In this way the Church helped to bring the domestic family to prominence and helped the state to develop and gain power, no longer being irrelevant among family disputes. This allowed commerce and trade to grow and helped society become more civilized and culminated in the enlightenment.
The domestic family is the mean between 2 extremes. On the one hand there is brutal primitive trustee familism that focuses almost too heavily on the group. On the other hand the Atomistic family comes about as a way to free the individual from the duties of the group, individual freedom is cherished more than family duties. In Rome around the 1st century A.D. and in Greece around the 4th century B.C. the family structures started to become atomistic. In Rome there was the “dignitas” marriage (a more traditional, serious, sacred, lifelong commitment, form of marriage) and the “concubinatus” marriage ( a less stringent, more lax, voidable marriage). The upper class adopted the concubinatus form of marriage, marrying and divorcing as they please whenever they want a new partner. The civilizations were built up and became successful due to the domestic family structure, but when the civilization became healthy enough to support an academic class the academic class, rich, ruling class, and upper class began to attack and dismiss the very values that made their civilization great. After a while it trickled down to the lower class and fewer people had the dignitas marriage when they saw everyone around them having a less strict more convenient form of marriage. During the atomistic times, divorce, adultery, birth control, homosexuality, venereal diseases, and other things become widespread or widely accepted.
In Rome, “ women were known not for the number of their years, but for the number of their husbands” says Zimmerman.
Polybius around 200 B.C. describes the Greek situation, “In our time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of population….For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they do not wish to marry, or if they married do rear the children born to them, or at most rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew….”
Theodor Mommsen in History of Rome writes, “Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially among the upper classes…the maxim to which Polybius a century before traced the decay of Hellas, that it is the duty of the citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget too many children.”
It was 80 here in Flordia today,
It’s still snowy. We had -17C this morning. BRRR.