This poem was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison-cell in either 1943 or 1944. It was probably smuggled out of prison by a guard he befriended.Today I am getting caught up with my TA work, and feel chained to my desk, and overwhelmed like him at the difference between what others know of me and what I know of myself. The words I can imagine from someone reenacting his ordeal, but that he actually wrote them himself, and they survived, is a gift.
Who Am I?
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a Squire from his country house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person to-day and to-morrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!
(Translated by J.B. Leishman. From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. Rev. ed. London: SCM Press, 1962. p. 15)
So, I've been here in Grand Forks, ND for three weeks now. Had a lot of victory in my actions this week... and working on my thought life. There was a prayer group started among some of the guys living on my floor of the dorm, on Tuesday. Skit night was on Friday night, and it was a blast. There was a "linguist's confession" video during the show, and part of it showed me leaping onto a table and yelling, "I'm really an extrovert!" I will not live it down.
I'm a TA in a class called LING 480 Learner-Directed Second Language Acquisition. There are eight of us TAs: Me, Amy, Amber, Sallie, Lydia, Lesa, Bob, and Becky. Greg is the professor, and his wife Angela is manager of the lab sessions and TAs (us).
Up to now, we've been using Angela's lesson plans for the first two weeks (I got here a week before classes started). Now, we have to plan one lesson a week, and let the students each plan and lead one lesson a week. I have eight students, four in each group. The lab groups meet from 2-3 and from 3-4 every weekday. We're learning Kirundi, a Bantu language from Burundi, Africa. And our nurturer is named Pascal.
Beyond that, I'm taking a class called Ethnographic Methods in Field Linguistics (LING 535). It's a challenging amount of reading and writing. The current prof, Doug Fraiser, has inherited the teaching materials from Tom Headland, who made it very rigorous. I've been reading about ethnocentrism, the reputation of missionaries, the reputation of SIL, structures of family units around the world, kinship terms... and writing a summary of just about every article I read. It will be good to look back on, and it makes me reflect quickly on what I've been reading. It just takes a lot of time.
Been making lots of acquaintances. First of all my students. It's always beneficial for an introvert to expand his circle.
I felt the desire to flip open Jeremiah 3 this morning. It says,
"By the waysides you have sat waiting for lovers,
like a nomad in the wilderness.
You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness.
Therefore the showers have been withheld,
and the spring rain has not come;
yet you have the forehead of a whore,
you refuse to be ashamed." (Jeremiah 3:2b-3)
I have done this too often... at least twice a week... where I would imagine my way into a sinful situation, often while listening to a Christian book on my ipod. Then once the idea is realized, I would mb. Later in retrospect, I would rationalize it as not sinful. Refusing to be ashamed forestalls repentance. Be ashamed and repent. Then you won't be ashamed.
This week I've been practicing a version -- make that three versions -- of Pachelbel's Canon in D to play at my cousin's wedding. We're combining two violins, a flute, and a guitar. The flute can't play the high notes, so now we've transposed it to Canon in C. And because Canon in C doesn't have the fancy, complicated violin melodies, we decided to cut it in the middle and I'd improvise some of them for a minute, and then come back so we could play the last few bars and end together on the same chord. Almost every time we play it, though, Mom tells me I should study the part by myself and figure out what I'm going to play, so I don't lose everyone.
I took her advice, and found this hilarious rant. (Watch out for foul language at the end.)
Then I found this, and it made me happy to know that someone successfully modified the Canon for the poor cellists.
It's a weird title, I know. I wanted to highlight Salvo Magazine's feature article this month, "Seam Redeemed," a theological interpretation of The Learning Channel's fashion reality show "What Not to Wear".
Read on to find out why the clothes matter, and how a wardrobe transformation mirrors salvation. Here.
Bonhoeffer's book The Cost of Discipleship is now on my summer ordering list. I need grace, and I also need to understand it in a way that will make me stop sinning and change the way I work. Bonhoeffer goes through me like the north wind in that regard.
For Luther, on the contrary, a Christian's secular vocation is justified only in that one's protest against the world is thereby most sharply expressed. A Christian' secular vocation receives new recognition only to the extent that it is carried on while following Jesus.
George Steiner, After Babel: aspects of language and translation, Oxford Univ. Press 1975, p. 398. Quoted in Paul W. Kroll, "Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation," Journal of Asian Studies 62.3 (2002), p. 99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3096353
We must not trust the translator whose words are entirely 'unbroken.' As with a seashell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.
I never before realized the intimate relation between the words 'couple,' 'copulate,' and 'copula'.
Couple (noun): two persons paired together. (From Middle English, pair, bond, from Anglo-French cuple, from Latin copula bond, from co- + apere to fasten. It entered English in the 13th century.)
Copulate (verb): to engage in intercourse. (From Latin copulatus, past participle of copulare to join, from copula. It entered English in 1630.)
Copula (noun): something that connects: as a: the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition b: a linking verb such as "to be". (From Latin, bond. It entered English in 1619.)
And I thought 'copula' was a dry, technical word from syntax.
With English getting such interesting words from Latin at this time, it's no wonder John Donne, who lived from 1572 to 1631, had so much fun writing poems. Even if the copula between him and his subject was a small insect. It's a good thing Donne didn't write Shakespeare's The Tempest or else he might have made the sprite Ariel say, "Where the flea sucks..."
(Definitions and etymologies are from Merriam-Webster's dictionary.)
After working on my capstone project since writing the proposal in February, it's finally turned in. You now, if you so choose, can have the pleasure of reading it.
And now some thoughts about the challenges, successes, and advice for newbies embarking on a capstone project. Can you tell that writing carries me away when I'm excited?
A. What successes and challenges did you encounter in completing the project and other work for this course?
At the outset, we were given a lot of flexibility on the format of our project and the scope of our research. I
"cheated" in my proposal by choosing a huge project which I started to realize I would never be able to fully accomplish, but then wording the proposal so vaguely that I could later narrow down the focus to the parts I found easiest or most interesting.
I was excited to do some original research with wordlists. On the other hand, it was easy to get bogged down when the wordlists printed out totaled six lists at 23 pages each! Another place where I got bogged down was in researching the etymology of 'to be' in the OED online... it was so complicated that I left off researching the etymology of the rest of the verbs for a few days. John and Prof. Wall continually pulled me back to earth with their comments about keeping human interest at the center.
At first it was a challenge to find prior research on my topic, and it was an even bigger challenge to find a usable digital text of Queen Elizabeth's translation of Boethius for my quantitative analysis.
B. How would you address these challenges?
With the proposal, I asked for Prof. Wall's advice and then made some quality guidelines for myself. I also looked online got some ideas from the honors thesis guidelines at Harvard.
To make the work manageable, I had to narrow the scope more than once. When writing the proposal, I initially thought of comparing the syntax and the vocabulary of the two translations of Boethius, and I also thought of comparing them with King Alfred's translation. I dumped King Alfred because I can't read Old English. Then I reluctantly jettisoned syntax because it has been done before, and because it would take a lot more analysis and diagrams. I was honestly surprised that a proposal dealing only with vocabulary was accepted, especially because I hadn't taken classes on lexicography or semantics, and I had only taken one class on the history of English, in addition to whatever studying I did for the GRE English Literature test. But it was accepted, with the proviso that I include a focus on rhetorical analysis. I think this rhetorical aspect was helpful in maintaining human interest and demonstrating the literary aspect of my degree.
I had to narrow down the scope a second time once I printed out the wordlists. Out of 5000 words per translation, I chose to work with a macrocosm of around 200 words, using the words occurring in the text 20 times or more. This meant that I was dealing with similarities between the two translations rather than their differences, but it also meant that a table could fit on a single page while still being very representative of the text as a whole.
When I got bogged down in the dictionary, I took a break, and a couple days later, picked back up with the etymology of another word. All the words on my list were easy except for 'to be' at the top, so I left that one for last, and finally gave it a quick summary in line with what I'd done for the rest, with a note to the reader for further research. This "capping the dead-end pipe" technique was very valuable in several other places.
To find prior research on my topic, I looked through the bibliography in my copy of Chaucer's works, did a lot of searching on JSTOR, went to local community college library and thumbed through old literature indexes, and used the ProQuest Dissertations database. Then, armed with a list of possible sources, I took out interlibrary loans. My time with these interlibrary loan books expired before I was through with the project, so I made copies at home of the title pages, introductions, and any other chapters that I would need later on. These copies went into a folder along with my JSTOR articles. Over the course of the project I would read an article, underline the important parts, and eventually incorporate a quote or a citation into my essay.
There were a couple really fun research finds: one was Tim William Machan, who wrote an entire dissertation on the grammar, vocabulary, and translation style of Chaucer's Boece. Throughout his life he has added to the project, producing books on Chaucer's translation technique, the sources of the Boece, and a new critical text of the Boece. Needless to say, I couldn't read everything by Machan, but his research was helpful on specific topics.
Another fun research find was Jacob Zeitlin's review of John Samuel Kenyon's book on the syntax of Chaucer's infinitives. I was peering over the edge of the abyss -- that is, of analyzing why Chaucer used two different forms of the infinitive -- and then I found out Kenyon had done a dissertation on this very thing and published it in 1909! Add this to the fact that I have a book on types of poetry from my grandmother that was edited by Zeitlin, and that he wrote that ridiculous comment about "every serious student of Chaucer" having to give Kenyon a careful reading, and it was enough to make my day.
It took me a long time to get a usable digital copy of Queen Elizabeth's translation. This is partly because it hasn't been published much. There is an edition on Google Books from 1899, but I would have had to edit it myself to get rid of the OCR typos. Fortunately, two different publishers (U. Chicago and ACMRS) came out with new editions of Elizabeth's translation last year. I got the printed books through interlibrary loan, but didn't want to type it up myself. So I emailed the editors for each of these editions, begging for a digital copy. They were sympathetic, but said I'd have to talk to the publishers. A staff member at one of the publishers was happy to help, but it turned out that according to company policy I would have to buy the book ($64!). I didn't have much of a choice, but I bought it and they emailed me the pdf. Another two weeks of editing the plain-text file I extracted from the pdf because of run-on line errors, and I was off and running.
C. What recommendations would I make for students who are about to embark on their capstone experiences?
1. Choose a topic you're interested in, that you won't mind researching to death. Try to find something no one has ever done before.
2. Skip or gloss over tough parts rather than procrastinate.
3. Use your online resources and a physical college library to the fullest extent. Use your people to the fullest extent, too.
4. When you have your sources together and need an extra push to get over the data-crunching, go to a quiet spot for a few days. I spent a week at my grandparents' house for this: three days to complete the second draft, and the rest of the week visiting with them.
5. Start out with a good outline before you drop data into the essay. I wrote my proposal, gathered my sources, and then constructed a mindmap using a computer program called Freemind, to figure out all the topics I needed to cover and how to organize them.
6. Ask people to read your drafts, and listen religiously to their advice. Most likely, you already know the answers to their questions, and most likely, you think what you chose to write down was more important than those answers, but the essay can't exist as an organic whole in your mind alone. It has to be communicated.
7. When the research and the bulk of the writing is finished, print out your last draft and mark it up in pencil, and then give it to someone else, and have them mark it up again. Give it a once-over for spelling, a twice-over for formatting, use the find-and-replace function for consistency errors. Then re-read your original proposal, and where your current essay lacks the fire of youthful curiosity burning in your proposal, put it back in.
8. In this final re-write, spin new webs of "thesis, summary, transition" to guide the reader through every step of the way. Break up every long paragraph that would be a stumbling block. If your readers can tread lightly, they will breath in deeply.
9. Use technology as creatively as you can to cut down on work and make your project shine. I confess that I never actually read the whole book of The Consolation of Philosophy which I was supposed to be analyzing. (The project was a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the translation based on select samples, not analysis of the whole text as a literary work.) Instead, I listened to it on my iPod from Librivox.org, read summaries, and dipped into the texts here and there as I needed. I used a computer program called KWIC (key word in context) to generate my wordlists from plain-text files, and to do quick concordance searches for word usage. And at the end of my project, I used Wordle.net to create word-cloud graphics to show off in the appendix.
Thanks to my classmate John Crews and professor Beverly Wall for their constructive criticism, and my parents and grandparents for space and motivation. Thank God that I'm done!
At Melissa May's blog, RShapiro left a comment with this description of "fastidiousness".
I've decided to concentrate on fastidiousness, which is a virtue related to modesty, but not the same as modesty. Fastidiousness is where cleanliness and neatness meet politeness and good manners. It's a quieter version of "classy." I think "Cleanliness is next to godliness" has been overplayed, but insofar as clean, neat dress, homes, and offices put others at greater ease, fastidiousness is something of a virtue too. So, like all professionals should, I'm trying to make sure my clothes fit properly and are appropriate to the occasion.
Keli Carender, aka Liberty Belle, a young conservative-libertarian activist in Seattle, makes an insightful comment in her post of April 27:
I will say this though: the time for protesting is winding down as campaign season picks up. I will be choosing my candidates in the next couple of weeks and I will be spending much more time on their campaigns than I will on organizing protests. We must be victorious at the ballot box or we will be up a raging creek without a paddle. We will only win in November if each of you finds one or two candidates to support and you give it your all. We all must sacrifice to get good people elected. Please, please make your decisions as soon as possible and COMMIT!
The last three years, I have waited until I got the ballot to choose my candidates. Keli is choosing her candidates now, in order to help them win other people's votes, not just her own. I admire that.
Twa beautiful things I found this morning. First is Cori's blog Reaching Through the Dark, a string of song, prayer, drawings, and encouragings to win over those of us struggling with self-destructive thoughts. From there, I found a link to an organization for the same purpose called To Write Love on Her Arms. Read their opening story here.
Negative
Reminiscent of mid-nineties pop tunes
Sappy-sparkly singing and lyrics
"Nowhere in the world I'd rather be / than here in my room dreaming about you and me" makes halfway sense if her lover is literally with her, but since he's not, it's either dishonest or she idealizes dreams over the reality of being together.
Positive
Spanish background utterances
Tune has unexpected range
Tune is reminiscent of Mandarin pop
Regular and extended quatrimeter that depends on stress but is eminently punctuated
"Here in my room" and "tonight" paints a setting
Rhythm switches between 3/4 and 4/4, and between syncopated and regular
I looked up her bio, and it turns out it was written in the mid-nineties! Selena was a tejana (Mexican-American) music star, which explains the Spanish in the background. "Dreaming of You" was released in 1995, a few months after she was murdered by the president of her fan club at age 24. It turned out to be her biggest single, and it made #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 list for 1995/1996.
For some reason, people must still like her, because it was playing today on K103, Portland's soft rock station.
Sometimes writers had better stop when they're ahead. The last clause in the sentence below unpeels everything that came before it.
And creationism? Anytime someone tells me they are a creationist, I find a way to get the hell away from them ASAP because they are either incredibly stupid, incredibly ignorant or blind to reality, in any case, they have virtually no "information" I have any interest in hearing.
Over at David's blog, we have a little discussion going over the question: "What is it in our teaching that keeps highschool students from learning proper research skills?"
The two main deficiencies we came up with were self-discovery and reading skills. Here's my latest response, expanding on reading skills:
"[M]any of the skills I mentioned are also found on standardized tests like the SAT or GRE. What I didn't learn just from heavy-duty reading, I learned from test prep materials.
For example, just last week I was reminded of analogies when I was studying for the GRE. Check out The Princeton Review's chapter on analogies here... it's excellent. Once students are able to spot relationships between objects and think of parallel relationships with other objects, then they apply it to what they're reading: "How does this relate to what I'm trying to find? Or if it doesn't relate, how does it narrow the possibilities?"
For reading comprehension, you could use short stories or articles with comprehension questions (timed, of course). These are also on standardized tests. The desired result is the ability to skim, or focus, or pick out details, as the situation requires.
Sentence-stripping or arcing... at the sentence level, you have to learn to ignore the extra words and find the subject, verb, object, and connectors. I first started doing this with a sentence-diagramming workbook in 7th grade, but it took off in constitutional law class when I had to read wordy supreme court opinions. Underlining the key words, and restating if necessary, is essential. At the paragraph level, John Piper has a method called arcing. I haven't learned it, but it makes sense. Check out http://biblearc.com.
Relevance is just something I constantly have to remind myself of. If I chase too many irrelevant topics, I get distracted or bored, and the time is gone. Search functions, indexes, tables of contents are your friends.
Footnotes and bibliographies are your friends even more. Try picking up two or three scholarly books on the same subject. Scan through their bibliographies for matching sources. Look through the footnotes for the chapter that is most relevant to your area of research. Is there a name or a book that keeps coming up? Get it. That's the expert that both of your authors look up to, or are responding to. I originally heard this from Gregg Harris, and now it's like a game for me. (Hint: to find scholarly articles or old reviews of old books, try Jstor. Your local library might be subscribed.)
Manageable note-taking: I still haven't mastered it yet. Two hints here: 1) Experiment with outlines for your essay before you start writing. Use mindmap software, a whiteboard, or a notebook... it doesn't matter as long as you do it. Then fill in your text and quotes in the outline. 2) Underline and write in the margins. Have a conversation with the author, because your opinion is just as human as his, and you can't write about what you thought of his ideas unless you remember what you thought... and finally, you should ask the author questions. They might be answered in the next paragraph. Do this moderately with books you own, and heavily with articles you've printed out. Keep the articles in a folder, and when you get to a place in your essay that you remember a point from article X, you can reach in and quote the exact wording, because you probably underlined it.
Today, I decided to track down 1SA1, a quote from David Livingstone:
Analyze and respond to the statement, “The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa.” David Livingstone
This statement is taken word for word from Augustus Strong's Systematic Theology(2nd ed. 1889) p. 31. Strong is severely outdated as a source on religious anthropology, but if you're starting to write a speech on the subject, this section of the book is organized, orthodox, and well-stocked with quotes.
Those races and nations which have at first seemed destitute of such knowledge have uniformly, upon further investigation, been found to possess it, so that no tribe of men with which we have thorough acquaintance can be said to be without an object of worship. We may presume that further knowledge will show this to be true of all.
[Robert] Moffat, who reported that certain African tribes wore destitute of religion, was corrected by the testimony of his son-in-law, [David] Livingstone: "The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa."
Using Google Books, I was able to find many editions of Livingstone's book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. They all contained the quote in one version or another, but it's clear that the book was abridged over the years. The first edition (1857) should be the most accurate reflection of Livingstone's thought.
The indirect and scarcely appreciable blessings of Christian missionaries going about doing good are thus probably not so despicable as some might imagine; there is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of the existence of a God, or of a future state, the facts being universally admitted. Everything that cannot be accounted for by common causes is ascribed to the Deity, as creation, sudden death, &c. " How curiously God made these things!" is a common expression; as is also, " He was not killed by disease, he was killed by God." And, when speaking of the departed—though there is nought in the physical appearance of the dead to justify the expression— they say, " He has gone to the gods,"...
Because Strong introduced Moffat into the story, he must have been reading from the appendix to Dr. Livingstone's Cambridge Lectures, edited by William Monk (1858). There, Monk repeates the quote from Missionary Travels and contrasts it with earlier statements from Robert Moffat that the Hottentots and Namaquas did not have a concept of God.
Livingstone's statement brings with it some conditions. First, he was writing specifically about some bush tribes in Zambia: the Bakalaharis, the Bechuanas, and the Bakwains. Second, it must be compared with the findings of other missionaries like Moffat, and with those of modern anthropologists. Third, while Livingstone reported that Africans knew that God existed and there was life after death, he also said on the same page that they thought kneeling in prayer was hilarious, and their sense of right and wrong were far from Christian.
To put Livingstone's words into perspective, read the entirety of chapter 8 in Missionary Travels, and then search the book for words like 'existence' to find other anecdotes about African beliefs on spirits, gods, and a life after death.
Finally, we must realize that Livingstone had a definite bias. He was sent as a missionary, but his main goals were exploration and social justice. He preached, and only made one African convert that we know about. He recorded observations on geography, natural history, medicine, anthropology, culture, religion, and commerce. He was motivated to open up the interior of Africa to "Christianity, commerce, and civilization," to replace the slave trade with production of raw materials for export, and to recruit missionaries to settle in Africa and be a colonizing force for the gospel.
It may have been disconcerting to hear ‘what Livingstone really did in Africa’. Yet, if one considers that he was an explorer with a ‘mission’ in the first place, and that he did not want to be obstructed in this mission, it is possible to see our own frustration and that of his twentieth century biographers in perspective. He was not the nice missionary, and doctor, and not even a successful ‘amateur field scientist’, nor a ‘highly motivated Victorian missionary’. For those reasons one must conclude that David Livingstone cannot be considered as a ‘usable’, let alone ‘reliable’ source of ‘general’ information. However, his specific observations as a professional, all in the field in which he was trained (medicine, natural history), ‘reveal Livingstone at his best, recording information in which his emotions and ideals were not directly engaged’, as we soon shall see.
Even though Livingstone's accounts are not totally reliable, I would trust specific anecdotes of his conversations with tribal people. His conclusions about religion being universal can be backed up with evidence from other sources, including Romans 1:16-21:
[T]he gospel... is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek [non-Jew].... For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him...
David Livingstone's travel accounts open for us a window on how Africans (his subject) and Europeans (his readers) of the mid-1800s viewed the world. Let me emphasize: he was one of only a handful of sources by which Brits and Americans could learn about people in Africa. According to lists here and here, he was one of the first to report from Zambia and other parts of the interior. When Livingstone said most of the tribal people he had met already knew about God and an afterlife, this contradicted the ambivalent reports of his father-in-law Robert Moffat, and confirmed Romans 1 as factual. It was big news in 1857.
In that spirit, I offer you a link to Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1857) p. 178, with a story of David Livingstone's travels repackaged just for kids.
I think they meant "Judges, not Jurors". Oh, the pressures of politics to produce excitable and mildly clever script on the dregs of last night's coffee.
Bryan Caplan of the Liberty Fund's Econlog taught a class at George Mason University about the economics of the family. In the notes, he outlines the dynamics of the market for mates, labor allocation within the family unit, the economics of family size, economic incentives for divorce and out-of-wedlock births, and finally he gives an alternate view of gender history in light of these economic factors.
Here's a sample:
Most people today probably marry for love, but few regard all attributes as equally lovable. Instead, most people are looking for a partner with desirable traits... This suggests that we can look at dating/love/marriage as a special kind of market.
It is usually a barter market, where a given level of "male mate value" enables you to "buy" a given level of "female mate value." (Exception: dowries, bride-prices).
One big part of the expense [of having kids] is the mother's foregone labor earnings. The more income a mother can earn, the fewer kids we expect her to have. This is precisely what we see - high-income women have fewer kids, and family sizes are smaller in rich countries than in poor countries. However, this argument is not air-tight. As wealth increases, demand for all goods - including kids - rises.
Divorce can also be analyzed from an economic point of view. Individuals try to get divorces when they decide they are better off without their spouse. Make divorce cheaper - more people get divorced. Ban divorce - people think harder about who to marry.
Complication - women's mate value generally falls more rapidly than men's. Lifetime benefits of a marriage can be equal for both men and women, but men's benefits are more "front-loaded" than women's. Alimony is one way to try to keep incentives well-aligned.
The traditional family structure was technologically necessary for most of human history assuming women wanted to have children. An overwhelming majority did. Family structure changed because technology reduced the burden of household production, and because families decided to reduce their number of children.
Memo to Generations with Vision Forum: invite Professor Caplan to speak at your next family econopolicy conference. I haven't heard much from their current lineup, but somehow I'm tired of seeing the same keynotes each time.
