Tiger Should

Robert Wright is a Gladwellian subspecies of scientific popularizers, the author of books like Non-Zero, in which he expostulates tediously on what he sincerely believes to be a lesson from the faddish discipline of game theory, all the while making the head-strikingly obvious, commonsensical point that not all propositions are either/or, not all circumstances are win/lose. One hardly needs a doctorate in mathematics, nor even a 400-page popsci tome, to understand this concept. Anyway, he's also blogging for the Times, and has lately been on about Tiger, the golfer, not the cat, and is today at his laborious worst as he pins the future of monogamous human pair-bonding on the athlete's promiscuous, uh, shoulders. I have mocked and derided marriage enough already and won't bore you by repeating myself. As a universal institution, it is plainly a catastrophic failure, and as a moral aspiration (I am talking to you, gays), it smells to me like self-loathing, even as I do admit that the attendent legal benefits make it somewhat worth pursuing so long as such benefits exist. But the lesson of the failure of lifelong monogamous marriage is not that we ought to harangue famous celebrities into making earnest testimonials on behalf of an institution that has either failed or been failed by them, nor yet that we need to construct an even more favorable legal regime in order to create incentives for people to enter into committments that they likely will not and cannot keep, but that marriage, while it is fine for some people, ought not to be a univeral institution or aspiration. Perhaps for some people serial monogamy works better, or promiscuity, or polyandry, or polygamy, or any of the many other variants of human sexual and procreative activity. Perhaps these things are simply not appropriate matters for public purview, less yet legal statute, and should be left to the fuckers and fuckees, as the case may be.