The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    45/546 page 15
    FREE CHOICE NOW ESSENTIAL (b) the factor of disease, with the resulting different degrees of abnormality both in the chooser and the chosen, and ( c ) the comparative weakness of the genetic instincts which may accom pany lowered vitality—an optimum of conditions is needed for the genetic power to act at all. What are these most favourable conditions ? Absolute freedom of choice, so that many may be reviewed and their least significant as well as their more important features weighed. For, owing to the comparative feebleness of the genetic instincts, the natural movement towards the sexual object is less violent, consequently its alleged attractions are more narrowly scrutinized. This does not mean that there is neces sarily greater wisdom in assessing the value of these attractions, because even rigorous criticism may be conducted along false lines. It simply means that a cooler estimate is possible, a more fastidious taste displayed in regard to possibly quite unsound desiderata, and consequently it is less than ever likely that consent will be given to any choice except that exerted by the parties themselves. In such an environment, therefore, to withhold freedom of choice would mean not only greatly to reduce the number of marriages, but also to cause an enormous amount of misery, much of it imaginary, but misery all the same. As I have already suggested above, therefore, it seems that, apart from the spread of Liberal ideas and the emancipation of females, 1 freedom of choice probably arose in Western civiliza tion as the outcome of extreme differentiation, and in an age of low genetic power it is a sine qua non of fertile mating. The lack of free choice was certainly felt and, to some extent, allowed for in feudal France and England, when property laws made freedom in this matter precarious. And the evidence of history, biography and fiction shows that, as time went on, this lack came to be regarded as more and more of a hardship. If my surmise is right, this means that mankind had already become highly differentiated in the early Middle Ages. Few would deny that this state of affairs has since been seriously aggravated. What with the growing complication of life, race-mixture (this difficulty did not exist in mediaeval 1 Or rather of children, from parental authority. For, as I show in another chapter, child-marriages, implying parental choice, prevailed in England for centuries ; and even as late as 1792, so liberal-minded a woman as Mary Wool- stonecraft took parental authority in mating for granted, both for girls and young men. See A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Dublin, 1793, p. 200).
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