I'm been thinking about airships today, after I finished Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorama. The book itself is decent but a bit disappointing. An absolutely killer set-up--alternative history that takes place in an Art Deco, steam-punk pastiche of about seven or eight different European cities (dubbed New Venice) located near the North Pole, with anarchist revolution, police in top hats and capes, and garbagemen wearing Carnival-style bird masks--that is somewhat marred by Valtat's decision to wear his politics on his sleeve (I'm starting to think that this is near-universal prediliction of modern French male writers, particularly when they decide to go "slumming" into genre fiction) and a plot that doesn't really get going until about 200 pages into the thing. Also, Valtat is French but wrote this in English, which means that the dialogue is pretty stilted at times. But the cover says this is the first in a series, so I have hopes.
Anyhow. The story features an airship, which reminded me a number of other books/stories that have airships (short story by M. Chabon in a McSweeney's collection, that huge thing by Pynchon a couple of years ago, Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy). And then I did some (very cursory) research at the local Borders and online, and realized that steam-punk is rife with airships or zeppelins or whatnot. Which in turn provoked the question: what it is that is so appealing about airships? I mean, they seem to touch a chord with so many readers of these books, and they certainly do so with me, but maybe in a manner that makes me distrust myself: that nostalgic, romanticizing part of me that wants to remember all the beautiful aspects of a world I never lived in and to ignore the day to day drudgeries and evils of that world.
Airships are a part of modern technology that we have passed by, mostly because we found something that does what they do, but only better. Thus they appeal to folks like me, who are conflicted about modernity: they flatter our conservative side, the idea that once things were more elegant, more civilized, more interesting, but also celebrate some of the fundamental aspects of the modern human being. They speak to a breaking of barriers, a lifting of ourselves out of the ordinary--or the seemingly necessary--that technology makes possible. They take us off our earth-bound lives, let us seen things anew. This is what modernity promises. But then it gives us lots of other things too--pollution, a rat race that seems it can only get faster, crazy new ways to kill ourselves. Airships seem to signify a moment that we have lost, when we could have put a stop to some of the really pathological elements of the modern world. They are all things good about technology and none bad. Crystal goblets, jazz music, urbane and witty dinner companions. They don't emit exhuast, or don't seem to. Like luxury liners, or the Orient Express, they allow us the image of cosmopolitan travel, but at a sane pace, and for the right reasons. It is significant that villains almost never come from airships. Indeed, in both the Pynchon and Valtat works, they allow for a kind of utopian vision of democracy as joyful and only slightly dangerous anarchy.
The lie of the steam-punk zeppelin is that the brake on innovation was ever possible. Modernity doesn't respect the kinds of limits that the airship represents. The whole point of the modern world-view is that limits are intolerable: that is its demonic genius, both what is wonderful and horrifying about it. The airship suggests, pleasantly, that our world and that our technology didn't have to be like this. But of course it did, once we accepted that world's, and its technology's, basic premise: things can always be better. It was not inevitable that the airplane would supplant the airship, but it was inevitable that something would. Which is why trains and steamships, despite their similarities to the airship, do not feature so prominently in these alternative universes. We know why they've largely disappeared as travel technologies. Not because of some dramatic disaster in New Jersey 80 years ago, but just because they were too damned slow. They are, to use some Barthean terminology, history, and not myth.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Egypt, social media, and democracy
At a certain point, the protests in Egypt provoked the same question that almost all popular uprisings in the past five or so years have provoked, which is whether, or how much, their success is due to the use of the new media. This idea goes back to 2001 protests in the Philippines, in which the role of the cell phone has been much commented upon. These protests resulted in the resignation of the sitting president. Social media were credited for promoting political protests in Belarus, in Madrid, and the election protests in Iran in 2009. Tunisia's recent regime change has created the same sort of debate, this time in regards to wikipedia. Claims about the importance of Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging, in spreading the word and in coordinating massive public actions have also produced push back, most notably in an essay by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, who dismissed the idea that social media played much of a role in the Iranian protests. In fact, both he and the Net's most famous skeptic, Evgeny Morozov, have even suggested that the social media may have helped police track down and arrest protest leaders.
It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.
But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.
It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.
But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
The theology of net neutrality
This past semester I advised a student on an independent project concerning net neutrality. This was maybe not the best arrangement for the student, since I didn't really know all that much about net neutrality (we don't have a new media currently on the faculty, which is why I had to do). It was great for me, though, as it allowed me to learn a little more about a subject that seems to be generating a great deal of discussion and debate recently.
For whose unfamiliar with the phrase, net neutrality refers to a policy proposal that would forbid internet providers to charge different rates to different customers. The providers want to do this based on the reasonable market principle that some people or companies (Google, ABC news, Youtube) use a lot more bandwidth than others (ie., me). It just makes sense, so goes this reasoning, to charge the former a higher rate than the latter. But defenders of the status quo argue that this sort of pricing policy would lead to tiered service--so that some users, like wealthy and large corporations--would be able to buy extra-speedy access, while the rest of us would be left with a more slower and degraded system. They argue that the government should step in and ensure that providers can't differentiate service between haves and have-nots. Network neutrality proposals would also ensure that providers couldn't use their control over service to block ideas, or sites, or content that they don't like.
To anyone of my political persuasion, net neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Of course you want to keep the internet free of censorship, whether by governments or corporations. Of course you want to keep access to, and transmission of, information on the internet as equal as possible. It is one of the major selling points of new media culture that it more closely resembles a truly democratic public sphere than anything we've had for a long time, maybe ever. Opponents of net neutrality must be either crazy, then, or in the pay of the only people who would appear to profit from a hierarchical net: internet providers and maybe, other large corporations. That's the sort of attitude that the folks at the Daily Show are taking here.
It's one thing to point out that one's opponent's views are colored by the economic interests, and also maybe certain social contexts that make them blind to some aspects of a problem. That is only to observe that they are human. It's another thing to use that observation to excuse oneself from the necessity of having to engage in those arguments. One of the things I found out in the course of looking into the debate a little more closely is that the opponents of net neutrality can't simply be dismissed as dupes of neo-liberal orthodoxy or Big Media lackeys. There are some good arguments against the government creating the sort of regime that net neutrality proponents support. First, many NN opponents point out that when governments involve themselves in regulating markets, they introduce biases that stifle competition, hamper innovation, create massive and often highly ineffective government bureaucracies, and ultimately work against consumers and precisely those market outsiders that otherwise would have challenged the powers of entrenched interests. Significantly, this is what happened in the nineteenth century, say NN opponents, when government intervened in the railroads because of very similar worries to what neutrality advocates are worrying about now. Then too, the opponents point out, given the rapid and dramatic changes in new media culture over the past twenty years, any potential regulatory regime might be addressing a world that now longer exists by the time that it will be implemented. Remember when the danger seemed to be that Microsoft was going to take over the world? And then it was AOL-Time Warner? And then Google? And now Facebook? There is a reasonable worry that by creating a set of rules designed for a specific media environment, the government locks us into that environment, and the sort of dynamic culture that we've seen through new media will calcify. Moreover, given that things seem to be changing so radically, and so unpredictably, whose to say that the dangers of the current media world won't be solved by a simple shift in direction or emphasis, or simply the introduction of new technologies?
But then here's the thing. For every piece of history that the opponents of NN can pull up, defenders of the idea have a corresponding example of how monopolies or oligopolistic situations create market failure. Or they interpret the lessons of the past in a different light. Their historical lessons also seem pretty plausible. And because it is so difficult, or impossible, to predict what we are going to see in the next decade, even the next several years, its really a matter of faith as to which side you are going to believe. If you go into this debate suspicious of modern corporate capitalism, then the faith in technology and the market to solve any and all problems seems naive, at best. If you approach it with a distrust of government intervention, then the desire to create legislation to address that problem that does not even seem to exist, at this point, can feel like just another example of the left trying to control the creative forces of humanity. It is this clash of theological positions--belief in the goodness of the market on the one side, and belief in its ultimate destructive nature on the other--that makes the debate so unedifying. People are predicting futures that they don't really have much of a handle on, and they use past events simply as ideological justification for their position (notably, there are few if any historians involved in the argument, from what I can tell. That's probably because most historians, of whatever political persuasion, realize that whatever its value, history makes for a poor predictive device.)
All of which would just be another example of intellectual follies if not for the fact that this decision--either for or against net neutrality--probably will have a fairly major impact on our culture. And it is very possible that one of the two sides is correct: we could end up stifling one of the great instances of communal creative energy in modern history, either through action or inaction. And there does not seem to be a way for us to reliably and reasonably justify which path to take, at least not based on any clear empirical evidence.
For whose unfamiliar with the phrase, net neutrality refers to a policy proposal that would forbid internet providers to charge different rates to different customers. The providers want to do this based on the reasonable market principle that some people or companies (Google, ABC news, Youtube) use a lot more bandwidth than others (ie., me). It just makes sense, so goes this reasoning, to charge the former a higher rate than the latter. But defenders of the status quo argue that this sort of pricing policy would lead to tiered service--so that some users, like wealthy and large corporations--would be able to buy extra-speedy access, while the rest of us would be left with a more slower and degraded system. They argue that the government should step in and ensure that providers can't differentiate service between haves and have-nots. Network neutrality proposals would also ensure that providers couldn't use their control over service to block ideas, or sites, or content that they don't like.
To anyone of my political persuasion, net neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Of course you want to keep the internet free of censorship, whether by governments or corporations. Of course you want to keep access to, and transmission of, information on the internet as equal as possible. It is one of the major selling points of new media culture that it more closely resembles a truly democratic public sphere than anything we've had for a long time, maybe ever. Opponents of net neutrality must be either crazy, then, or in the pay of the only people who would appear to profit from a hierarchical net: internet providers and maybe, other large corporations. That's the sort of attitude that the folks at the Daily Show are taking here.
It's one thing to point out that one's opponent's views are colored by the economic interests, and also maybe certain social contexts that make them blind to some aspects of a problem. That is only to observe that they are human. It's another thing to use that observation to excuse oneself from the necessity of having to engage in those arguments. One of the things I found out in the course of looking into the debate a little more closely is that the opponents of net neutrality can't simply be dismissed as dupes of neo-liberal orthodoxy or Big Media lackeys. There are some good arguments against the government creating the sort of regime that net neutrality proponents support. First, many NN opponents point out that when governments involve themselves in regulating markets, they introduce biases that stifle competition, hamper innovation, create massive and often highly ineffective government bureaucracies, and ultimately work against consumers and precisely those market outsiders that otherwise would have challenged the powers of entrenched interests. Significantly, this is what happened in the nineteenth century, say NN opponents, when government intervened in the railroads because of very similar worries to what neutrality advocates are worrying about now. Then too, the opponents point out, given the rapid and dramatic changes in new media culture over the past twenty years, any potential regulatory regime might be addressing a world that now longer exists by the time that it will be implemented. Remember when the danger seemed to be that Microsoft was going to take over the world? And then it was AOL-Time Warner? And then Google? And now Facebook? There is a reasonable worry that by creating a set of rules designed for a specific media environment, the government locks us into that environment, and the sort of dynamic culture that we've seen through new media will calcify. Moreover, given that things seem to be changing so radically, and so unpredictably, whose to say that the dangers of the current media world won't be solved by a simple shift in direction or emphasis, or simply the introduction of new technologies?
But then here's the thing. For every piece of history that the opponents of NN can pull up, defenders of the idea have a corresponding example of how monopolies or oligopolistic situations create market failure. Or they interpret the lessons of the past in a different light. Their historical lessons also seem pretty plausible. And because it is so difficult, or impossible, to predict what we are going to see in the next decade, even the next several years, its really a matter of faith as to which side you are going to believe. If you go into this debate suspicious of modern corporate capitalism, then the faith in technology and the market to solve any and all problems seems naive, at best. If you approach it with a distrust of government intervention, then the desire to create legislation to address that problem that does not even seem to exist, at this point, can feel like just another example of the left trying to control the creative forces of humanity. It is this clash of theological positions--belief in the goodness of the market on the one side, and belief in its ultimate destructive nature on the other--that makes the debate so unedifying. People are predicting futures that they don't really have much of a handle on, and they use past events simply as ideological justification for their position (notably, there are few if any historians involved in the argument, from what I can tell. That's probably because most historians, of whatever political persuasion, realize that whatever its value, history makes for a poor predictive device.)
All of which would just be another example of intellectual follies if not for the fact that this decision--either for or against net neutrality--probably will have a fairly major impact on our culture. And it is very possible that one of the two sides is correct: we could end up stifling one of the great instances of communal creative energy in modern history, either through action or inaction. And there does not seem to be a way for us to reliably and reasonably justify which path to take, at least not based on any clear empirical evidence.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The real point of wikileaks
At our Christmas party, a good friend pointed out that one of the most important things that establishment media has managed to do in the whole wikileaks story is to make Julian Assange the major character. In this way, we spend our time debating a) whether he is a vile rapist or an heroic destroyer of state and corporate hierarchies, or: b) whether he should have released all of the information that he did, only one some of it (ie., the stuff that we would want released.)
But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.
In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:
"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."
Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.
What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.
This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).
What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.
The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.
Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?
The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.
But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.
In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:
"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."
Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.
What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.
This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).
What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.
The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.
Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?
The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Politics and marriage (third part)
When I argue that the debate over gay marriage is a political question, what I mean to say is that our arguments about marriage need to be centered on how we think we ought to live, and how we ought to use our public resources to promote those ways of life (to any liberal reading this: I understand that you think that the genius of the modern liberal state is precisely that it keeps those kinds of questions outside of public debate. You're wrong about that. To explain why is going to take another, much different, post.) I can point to at least four different arguments about gay marriage that seem persuasive, or at least, reasonable, to me. Two would argue for gay marriage, two would argue against. Two I would classify as progressive, two as conservative.
[Note that for the purposes of the following I am going to ignore the question of the morality of homosexuality. This is for a number of reasons, the simplest being that I don't think that homosexual behavior as such is immoral.]
The conservative argument for gay marriage derives from the claim that marriage creates a different kind of relationship with another human being: a deeper, more difficult but in the end more rewarding relationship. To quote the priest who counseled my wife and me before we got married, "it is an adventure in becoming an adult." This way of thinking about oneself and other people runs counter to much of the information we receive from modern consumer society, which focuses on personal and immediate gratifications. If a life as a married person is in fact this sort of long-running moral education, then surely we would want to expand it to a many people in our society as possible. I am all for having more adults and fewer 45-year-old children running things. The argument gets even stronger if the couple in question has children, since the current literature seems to support, pretty clearly, the idea that stable, two parent households are better for children than single parent families.
The progressive political argument for gay marriage, which I also briefly mentioned in an earlier post, is that it would substantially change the way in which gay people were understood within the wider culture. By allowing gay men and women to participate in this most conventional of institutions, modern society would essentially be saying that gay behavior is no big deal, that our gay neighbors and friends and family members are the same as the rest of us. They may act in morally reprehensible ways, but these would be the same kinds of sins the rest of us commit, like cheating on your taxes or bullying underlings at work or beating your kid. This attitude has already begun to move through much of modern society, but the act of legalizing same-sex marriage could help speed it up. And if that happened, maybe in turn we would have fewer confused teenagers hanging themselves in bedroom closets or jumping off of bridges.
The conservative case against gay marriage would go back to the idea of what words mean, and how they mean anything at all. From this perspective, the word "marriage" has a meaning precisely because it labels a human relationship that differs from being friends, or lovers, or life partners. It may involve one or even in some cases all of these other elements, but it cannot be equated to them. If it could, we wouldn't need the idea of marriage in the first place. Like redefining God or justice or democracy, expanding the concept of marriage might like a good idea at first, because it is more inclusive. But as with these other terms, if you expand the word so that it includes everything, in the end it means nothing. And this could happen, arguably, with the idea of marriage. We could make it so inclusive that within several generations no one would bother with it.
The progressive argument against gay marriage is probably better made by people like Michael Bronski or Michael Warner, but my take on it is that by using gay marriage as a method of bringing gay people into the mainstream of American society, the whole gay rights movement is essentially ceding a great deal of political territory that it may eventually regret having given up. Was a time, folks, when the fight for gay rights was linked to much bigger, even revolutionary goals, like: fundamentally changing how western society thought about not just sexuality but desire, human relationships, our position within a market economy, etc. The reason that someone like Harvey Milk was not in favor of gay marriage is that he wanted to build an alternative to that monogamous, state-sponsored ideal of love. Now, I've already gone on record here as saying that I think that for many people, including myself, the marriage model is a worthy ideal. That's not the same as saying that it needs to be the ideal for everyone. This universalistic, cookie-cutter approach to human politics, in which we all pretend that underneath, we're all the same, and everyone really wants the same things: love and peace and food and shelter. I'll go on record as saying I pretty much hate that conception of the human condition. There are a lot of people, both gay and straight, who are quite a bit different from me, thank God. A gay relationship is fundamentally different from a straight one. Not better or worse, just different. I don't know that we need to force all the various configurations of love into one model. And sure, you can say, yes, but all gay people are asking for is the right to get married. No one is saying that they have to. But once marriage is part of the gay community it will almost certainly become the norm, and the expected outcome of any serious romantic relationship, as has happened with the straight community.
We are all God's children. We are all blessed in his sight, and equally loved. The diversity of human personalities is what makes us so fascinating: it is proof of the divine spark that we carry within us. A variety of different human institutions celebrating that diversity is what we truly need, not some phony-baloney attempt at conjuring up a kind of bland, uninteresting sameness that could never be achieved in any case.
All right. That's it. I'm done with this subject for a good long while.
[Note that for the purposes of the following I am going to ignore the question of the morality of homosexuality. This is for a number of reasons, the simplest being that I don't think that homosexual behavior as such is immoral.]
The conservative argument for gay marriage derives from the claim that marriage creates a different kind of relationship with another human being: a deeper, more difficult but in the end more rewarding relationship. To quote the priest who counseled my wife and me before we got married, "it is an adventure in becoming an adult." This way of thinking about oneself and other people runs counter to much of the information we receive from modern consumer society, which focuses on personal and immediate gratifications. If a life as a married person is in fact this sort of long-running moral education, then surely we would want to expand it to a many people in our society as possible. I am all for having more adults and fewer 45-year-old children running things. The argument gets even stronger if the couple in question has children, since the current literature seems to support, pretty clearly, the idea that stable, two parent households are better for children than single parent families.
The progressive political argument for gay marriage, which I also briefly mentioned in an earlier post, is that it would substantially change the way in which gay people were understood within the wider culture. By allowing gay men and women to participate in this most conventional of institutions, modern society would essentially be saying that gay behavior is no big deal, that our gay neighbors and friends and family members are the same as the rest of us. They may act in morally reprehensible ways, but these would be the same kinds of sins the rest of us commit, like cheating on your taxes or bullying underlings at work or beating your kid. This attitude has already begun to move through much of modern society, but the act of legalizing same-sex marriage could help speed it up. And if that happened, maybe in turn we would have fewer confused teenagers hanging themselves in bedroom closets or jumping off of bridges.
The conservative case against gay marriage would go back to the idea of what words mean, and how they mean anything at all. From this perspective, the word "marriage" has a meaning precisely because it labels a human relationship that differs from being friends, or lovers, or life partners. It may involve one or even in some cases all of these other elements, but it cannot be equated to them. If it could, we wouldn't need the idea of marriage in the first place. Like redefining God or justice or democracy, expanding the concept of marriage might like a good idea at first, because it is more inclusive. But as with these other terms, if you expand the word so that it includes everything, in the end it means nothing. And this could happen, arguably, with the idea of marriage. We could make it so inclusive that within several generations no one would bother with it.
The progressive argument against gay marriage is probably better made by people like Michael Bronski or Michael Warner, but my take on it is that by using gay marriage as a method of bringing gay people into the mainstream of American society, the whole gay rights movement is essentially ceding a great deal of political territory that it may eventually regret having given up. Was a time, folks, when the fight for gay rights was linked to much bigger, even revolutionary goals, like: fundamentally changing how western society thought about not just sexuality but desire, human relationships, our position within a market economy, etc. The reason that someone like Harvey Milk was not in favor of gay marriage is that he wanted to build an alternative to that monogamous, state-sponsored ideal of love. Now, I've already gone on record here as saying that I think that for many people, including myself, the marriage model is a worthy ideal. That's not the same as saying that it needs to be the ideal for everyone. This universalistic, cookie-cutter approach to human politics, in which we all pretend that underneath, we're all the same, and everyone really wants the same things: love and peace and food and shelter. I'll go on record as saying I pretty much hate that conception of the human condition. There are a lot of people, both gay and straight, who are quite a bit different from me, thank God. A gay relationship is fundamentally different from a straight one. Not better or worse, just different. I don't know that we need to force all the various configurations of love into one model. And sure, you can say, yes, but all gay people are asking for is the right to get married. No one is saying that they have to. But once marriage is part of the gay community it will almost certainly become the norm, and the expected outcome of any serious romantic relationship, as has happened with the straight community.
We are all God's children. We are all blessed in his sight, and equally loved. The diversity of human personalities is what makes us so fascinating: it is proof of the divine spark that we carry within us. A variety of different human institutions celebrating that diversity is what we truly need, not some phony-baloney attempt at conjuring up a kind of bland, uninteresting sameness that could never be achieved in any case.
All right. That's it. I'm done with this subject for a good long while.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Politics and marriage (second part)
My first post on this subject was not meant to argue (all appearances, I now realize, to the contrary) that marriages with children are morally superior to marriages without children. It's just that Gallagher's position was attractive to me insofar as it reminded the potential groom or bride that "it's not all about you." And I think that to the extent that we can keep that sentiment alive in a consumer society constantly focused on arguing otherwise, it would be just dandy. But kids are actually not the central issue. Whether a marriage produces children or not, there is something morally valuable and noble (sorry to get all 19th-century on your postmodern ass*) about choosing to make a life-long commitment, to forgo certain guaranteed but momentary pleasures and joys on behalf of a deeper, more profound understanding of, and attachment to, another person. This is the sort of relationship that I saw my maternal grandfather and grandmother live through to the end of their lives. It is an inspiring life choice. There is no reason that I can plausibly entertain as to why this kind of relationship need be restricted to a heterosexual couple.
Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.
So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.
But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.
It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.
All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.
*Or not, actually.
Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.
So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.
But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.
It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.
All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.
*Or not, actually.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Politics and marriage (first part)
In the early years of this century, my wife, my oldest daughter and I lived in a tony neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia near a little city park called Fitler Square. It was not very diverse economically. Almost all of the people who lived in the area were "upper middle-class" (or as we used to say back in my hometown of Taber, Alberta, "wealthy"). Even those who weren't, like my wife and I (MD and future PhD respectively), were probable future members of the club. But it was diverse in other ways--ways that might seem pretty predictable if you know much about educated, well-to-do East Coast Americans in the 21st century. Almost every day my wife would take one-year-old, Zoe, to Fitler, or the small playground about two blocks to the west, right next to the Schuylkill. Her best friends were Margaret, a little girl from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whose parents were living in Philadelphia for year while the father was on sabbatical; a little girl from Japan whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it; and Spencer, who had two dads. I didn't really know much about any of the parents because it was generally Jane and not me who took Zoe to the park, but from what I could tell from her conversations with them they all seemed like normal, more or less well-adjusted folk. One day, when my Dad was visiting from Canada, I mentioned something about Spencer, and he said that he didn't think that gay parents were the best thing for a child (Dad is pretty conservative). At the time, Jane was working as a child psychiatrist in a clinic in West Philly, and also doing some work in a juvenile offenders "home" (ie., prison) near the art museum. Many of her patients, unsurprisingly, came from broken households: parents who were drug addicts, and/or drunks, and/or prostitutes, and/or criminals. One five year-old had been stabbed by his Mom a week after she was released from prison; another was dealing with a father who was undergoing a sex-change. At the age of 14, she had already been raped once. I compared their lot to that of Spencer's, a young man being raised by two sane adults who loved him and had enough money to make sure, at least, that he would have some stability at home, and likely a decent education. I told my Dad that I didn't really think the sexuality of one's parents was the decisive element in the upbringing of a child in the modern world.
All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."
What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.
The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.
This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.
My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.
This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.
This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.
All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."
What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.
The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.
This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.
My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.
This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.
This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.
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