[blitz_skull]

But his point still stands.. the lens of chronological snobbery is intellectually dishonest regardless of “framing”.

Our modern society is radically oriented towards the individual, and not the family. That does bias our view of how good or bad a previously family-oriented society was.

It’s hard to fully quantify the long-term implications of that change.

[stubybubs]

Throughout history we've had single marriages, polygamy, second+ marriages, combined families, divorce, matriarchal societies, and patriarchal societies. And there was certainly a time before any kind of marriage at all existed, and it's possible nobody knew who any fathers were. Throughout all of that, the individual is the only common denominator.

There is no reason to think that a single marriage is the best format, other than it happens to work well within the framework we've built up to support it over the last few hundred or few thousand years in specific countries. So the individual is it, because it's common to all.