Stand Alone Complex

I've recently come across the idea that the Christian laws against incest were put in place in order to stop the practice of rich families marrying internally (see post below). Families would do this in order to keep their fortunes, dowries and inheritances within the family, rather than see their heightened economic status slowly dissipate into the surrounding general society. Perhaps they also had some interest in keeping the growth of the family down to a minimal level, so that each share of the fortune was kept large.

The church's was they found that, with restrictions against incest in place, more money would flow to the church itself. As the families broke down over generations, loyalties to immediate groups like clans and caste diminished in favour of a sense of belonging to larger groups; like the state and the church. In other words, through this mechanism, was a long-term attack against one of the church's competing centres of power.

Apparently, this idea is put forward in J. Goody's The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, and Deepak Lal's Unintended Consequences. In the meantime, I'm so taken by the concept, and so willing to see it slip, oh so smoothly and cleanly, into my personal mythos of man, that I'm almost willing to believe it on pure principle. Unintended consequences, indeed.

In the news today, the two suicide bombers in iraq, who have been reported my many sources as having blown themselves up in crowded markets, killing many people, didn't actually do that. Apparently, in truth, someone else blew them up--by remote control.

Presumedly they knew what was strapped around them; but, as they wandered around the crowd, keeping to the middle of the most dense areas and battering between people, they must have been thinking: when is it going to happen? Meanwhile, whoever it was that bundled them up in explosives and told them that this would redeem them from whatever dreadful sin caused them to be punished with their mental illness; whoever it was that claimed providence over death, picked their preferred time and place, and lived to do it again.

UPDATE: it turns out the reporting around the above described incident was error prone and unreliable. And so, the above two paragraphs are hereby pronounced Completely Invalid!