hajia

It is always interesting to read about what the future may bring in various spheres of life. Experts in all fields often engage in this exercise and we, the lay men, have no choice but to devour what they pontificate. People like Bill Gates have been known to engage in this exercise and they often turn out to be correct. The Economist magazine is good at this in its end of year edition by inviting experts to write in their fields. In one of such editions a top zoologist predicted the demise of the male specie in our evolutionary march. He predicted the emergence of a female sorority that will roam the earth and procreate without a single male!
Well ten or fifteen years ago I read several books on this and two of them came to my mind immediately. I remember one book written by Paul Ederman (on the future of finance) and another by Alvin Toffler (on technology). The latter was titled “The Third Wave” and in it Mr. Toffler correctly predicted the idea of people working from their homes through the use of computers. Some people are now working from the comfort of their living rooms and we are now living witnesses to this phenomenon. Note that the guy did not peer into any crystal ball, neither did he go into a trance before reaching the conclusions. He just analysed the then current events and extrapolated by taking into consideration the current technology and the potential capacity for successful R&D. And he got it right.
Now another guy named Jacques Attlai has looked closely at the institution of marriage and came up with what he thinks it will turn into. The article was given to me last year by a friend who at that time was working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The piece below is an excerpt from the article and it is mind boggling to say the least. Already some of the seeds of change in marriages are already visible in Western societies and some are rearing their heads in Nigeria and elsewhere. Divorce rates are rising globally and women are winning economic independence at an unprecedented rate.. These two factors are fast eroding the relevance of the domineering male specie. The article zeroes in on a typical Christian concept of marriage complete with monogamy and alimony at the centre. But parts of it are applicable to Muslim societies. Read on……


MARRIAGE: HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW?
Two hundred years ago, few people foresaw legalized divorce or open homosexuality—let alone gay marriage. Abstract art and jazz were unimaginable. Aesthetics, morals, and family relationships, it seems, are the bane of the futurologist. We constantly speculate about the future balance of power, looming conflicts, and emerging technologies. Yet somehow, we imagine that morals and aesthetics are immutable. So we forget to ask how conceptions of good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable, beauty and ugliness will change. And they will.
Monogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention, will not survive. It has rarely been honored in practice; soon, it will vanish even as an ideal. I do not believe that society will return to polygamy. Instead, we will move toward a radically new conception of sentimental and love relationships. Nothing forbids a person from being in love with a few people at the same time. Society rejects this possibility today primarily for economic reasons—to maintain an orderly transmission of property—and because monogamy protects women against male excesses.
But these rationales are dissolving in the face of powerful new trends. The insatiable demand for transparency, fueled by democracy and the free market, is placing the private lives of public men and women under greater scrutiny. The reality of multiple lives and partners will become more apparent, and society’s hypocrisy will be revealed. The continued rise of individual freedom will permanently change sexual mores, as it has most other realms. Likewise, jumps in life expectancy will make it nearly impossible to spend one’s entire life with one person and to love only that one person. Meanwhile, technological advances will further weaken the links between sexuality, love, and reproduction, which are very different concepts. Widely available birth control has already stripped away an important obstacle to having multiple partners.
Just as most societies now accept successive love relationships, soon we will acknowledge the legality and acceptability of simultaneous love. For men and women, it will be possible to have partnerships with various people, who will, in turn, have various partners themselves. At long last, we will recognize that it is human to love different people at the same time.
The demise of monogamy will not come without a struggle. All the churches will seek to forbid it, especially for women. For a while, they will hold the line. But individual freedom, once again, will triumph. The revolution will begin in Europe, America will follow, and the rest of the world will eventually come around. The implications will be enormous. Relationships with children will be radically different, financial arrangements will be disrupted, and how and where we live will change. To be sure, it will take decades for the change to be complete and yet, if we look around, it is already here. Beneath our hypocrisies—in movies, novels, and music—the shape of our future is visible.