Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

438 | HOW THE MIND WORKSinto the decision. The plot of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye's Daughters(adapted into the musical Fiddler on the Roof) unfolds on this battlefield,and similar plots are found across the world. When children elope, it is acatastrophe for their parents. The business deal or strategic opportunityof a lifetime may have just been frittered away. Worse, if the parents hadpledged the child years before—which often happens, because childrenare born at different times and the second half of an exchange must waituntil a child reaches marriageable age—the parents are now in defaultand at the mercy of the loan sharks. Or the parents may have mortgagedthemselves to the eyeballs to buy a spouse for the departed child.Defaults on marriage agreements are a leading cause of feuding and warfarein traditional societies. With the stakes so high, it is no wonder thatthe parents' generation always teaches that romantic love is frivolous ordoes not exist at all. The intellectuals who conclude that romantic love isa recent invention of medieval troubadours or of Hollywood scriptwritershave taken this establishment propaganda at face value.Those who take fictive kin as evidence that kinship has nothing to dowith biology have also bought an official doctrine. A big problem withmarriage rules, like the one mandating marriage between cross cousins,is that the age and sex mixture of a group fluctuates, so sometimes therewill be no eligible partners for a child. As with all rules, the challenge isto work around them without making them a farce. An obvious solutionis to redefine who is related to whom. An eligible bachelor might becalled a cross cousin even if the genealogical diagram says otherwise,saving a daughter from spinsterhood without setting the precedent thatother children can marry whom they please. But deep down no one isfooled by these face-saving measures. A similar hypocrisy applies toother fictive kin. With kin emotions being so powerful, manipulators tryto tap them for solidarity among non-kin by calling the non-kin kin. Thetactic has been rediscovered again and again, from tribal chiefs to modernpreachers and sappy rock musicians. But even in tribes where fictivekin labels are publicly treated with the utmost seriousness, if you presssomeone in private he will acknowledge that so-and-so is not really hisbrother or cousin. And when people show their true colors in a dispute,the colors go with blood relatives, not fictive ones. Many modern parentstell their children to address family friends as Uncle and Aunt. When Iwas a child, my friends and I used to refer to them as our fake uncles andfake aunts. Children are even more adamant in resisting the ubiquitouspressure to call their new stepparents Mom and Dad.