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Concubinage refers to the state of a woman or youth in an ongoing, quasi-matrimonial relationship with a man of higher social status. Typically, the man has an official wife in addition to one or more concubines. Concubines have limited rights of support as against the man, and their offspring are publicly acknowledged as the man's children, albeit of lower status than children born by the official wife or wives. (Wikipedia)
Wherever society becomes affluent, concubinage raises its head. When a poor man is successful, the very first thing he does is to acquire a concubine. This article examines concubinage in the context of social development to illustrate how an activity becomes a social institution, how a certain habit matures from the individual person to rational way of life. When the society grants its seal to it, whether it is right or wrong, good or bad, it comes to say. It is institutionalised. To know that part incidentally we have to know some, if not all, aspects of that act.
George III was on the throne when the American War of Independence was waged. He had fourteen children. He was deranged for ten years during that period. When he recovered his sanity, the queen remarked to him, “You would not have lost your senses had you been like other men seeking extra marital relationships. You were loyal to me.” That is the truth behind concubinage. Man is not made for one woman. He overflows in his energies, especially in his passion for woman. No tree produces one seed or 10 seeds to propagate itself. It is always in thousands, in hundred thousands. To ensure that one or a few seeds sprout, Nature produces an abundance of seeds. Biologically that preserves the species. In the early millenniums society discovered the value of marriage. Until then there was no marriage. Man was promiscuous. It resulted in contagious diseases spreading and ending human life at 30 years of age or beyond.
- Monogamy was not so much a moral institution as one aimed at the health of the human body.
- Nowhere in the world in those periods did the woman have an earning capacity except in the working classes.
- Man’s passion, woman’s need for economic support gave birth to concubinage among wealthy men.
Institution is a middle stage in the chain of from Act ….Consciousness.
Act – Activities – System – Organisation – Institution – Culture – Custom – Usage – Consciousness
There are very many allied questions to the above statement.
- Why has concubinage become a flourishing national institution in countries such as China?
- How does an act or an activity spread in a society?
- What is its relationship to morals or Truth?
- The one aspect of life that has proliferated like concubinage is corruption but societies have always overcome it as they developed. Why?
- What is the difference between the underlying forces that actuate corruption and concubinage?
- What differing roles are played in this institution by Man and Woman?
- Is Romance any way connected with concubinage at the physical level?
- Is concubinage a social phenomenon or human phenomenon?
- How do we understand it in the context of the breakdown of marriage?
- What is the role of the multiplier effect with regard to the spread of an institution such as concubinage?
These questions illustrate the fertile potential for future academic research into the applications and expressions of the 1000 principles of Social Development presented on this site. Most of these principles have been known for long. A subject becomes Science when it is transformed from being an amorphous, unformed body of knowledge vaguely endorsed by the society into a set of valid principles, established logically and reasonably. That is the path for creating a Science. Humanity has evinced the greatest possible scientific interest where its discoveries have directly led to greater comfort and convenience in material living. Social Development will mature into SCIENCE if mankind becomes equally interested in its own psychological well being.