Roots of Fidelity - Volume II
Year: 2026
Type: book
Abstract: The Roots of Fidelity: The Dhamma, the Island of Reality, and the Relational Object is a three-volume interdisciplinary study of fidelity, monogamy, pair-bonding, family, and household organization as interconnected biological, ethical, relational, social, legal, and civilizational structures. The trilogy asks how durable relational forms arise from embodied vulnerability and dependency, how they become organized through pair-bonding, care, family, household, law, and social regulation, and how these structures may later be ideologically redescribed as arbitrary restrictions upon autonomy. Volume I established the ethical and ontological foundation of fidelity; Volume II moves outward from the pair-bond toward the evolutionary, anthropological, and sociological architecture through which fidelity becomes durable across generations. Volume II, Evolutionary Monogamy, Family, and the Civilizational Architecture of Care: Biology, Anthropology, Sociology, Law, and the Critique of Ideological Fragmentation, develops the trilogy’s central transition from fidelity to family. Its governing proposition is that vulnerable life requires stable care, and stable care requires relational form. Human beings enter social existence through embodied dependency rather than self-sufficiency; prolonged childhood, reproductive vulnerability, and care burdens therefore generate recurring problems of cooperation, division of labor, pair-bonding, household formation, obligation, and intergenerational continuity. Fidelity, on this account, does not remain confined to the couple: under conditions of sustained dependency it becomes care-coordination, family, and eventually institution. The first part examines convergent monogamy and the Care-Coordination Invariant, drawing on comparative biology, evolutionary anthropology, and the problem of vulnerable offspring. Social monogamy in birds, mammalian pair-bonding, and human monogamous family formation are not treated as identical phenomena or as products of a single evolutionary lineage. Rather, they are analyzed as instances in which different evolutionary histories can produce recurrent structural solutions to problems of offspring vulnerability and reproductive coordination. The volume therefore distinguishes convergence from identity and argues that comparative biology is relevant not because animal behavior mechanically determines human marriage, but because stable pair-bonded care can arise independently under recurring coordination pressures. The analysis then turns specifically to the human reproductive Gestalt. Against reductionist models that interpret human reproduction primarily through tournament competition, dominance, or residual sexual rivalry, the volume reads anatomy, mutual mate choice, paternal investment, childhood dependency, kin support, household labor, and pair-bonding together as elements of a larger system. Competition remains present, but it does not define the whole reproductive architecture. This section also develops the distinction between practical monogamy and exceptional or restricted polygyny, and situates the grandmother effect and transgenerational care within a wider account of human cooperative reproduction. The final part examines monogamy as social regulation. Through Durkheim’s analysis of anomie and later cultural-evolutionary work on normative monogamy, marriage is interpreted not simply as private morality but as a regulatory institution connecting desire with obligation, reproduction with responsibility, and sexuality with household investment. Normative monogamy can limit extreme accumulation of partners, reduce destabilizing reproductive competition, widen access to marriage, and redirect investment toward paternal care, household continuity, savings, productivity, and social cooperation. In system-theoretical terms, monogamy functions as a feedback structure regulating flows of desire, mating competition, recognition, obligation, inheritance, and social stability. Situated within Integrative System-Theoretical Realism (ISTR), Volume II traces this movement across biological, social, and ideological levels. Embodied vulnerability and reproductive dependency constitute the biological problem; pair-bonding, family, kinship, marriage, inheritance, and moral regulation translate it into social form; ideology then interprets, criticizes, or redescribes those forms. The volume argues that historical variation does not abolish structural recurrence: marriage and family take diverse forms, but the underlying problem of coordinating vulnerable life persists beneath that diversity. Its critique is therefore directed not against criticism of defective institutions, but against reductionist accounts that mistake the architecture of care itself for the machinery of domination. Volume II thus follows fidelity outward: from desire to care, from embodied vulnerability to care-coordination, from care to family, and from family to social regulation and civilizational continuity. In doing so, it provides the biological, anthropological, and sociological bridge between the relational ontology established in Volume I and the historical analysis of family, household authority, law, and ideological inversion developed in Volume III.
Author: Levin, Yoav
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7201972710