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.

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.

Tony Judt

The British-born, American historian of French culture, Tony Judt, died over the weekend. Right now, Judt is perhaps most famous for a series of essays he has written over the past year or so detailing his struggles with Lou Gehrig's disease. They are unflinching in their honesty about the condition. As difficult as they are to read, I can only imagine how hard they most have been to write. Just prior to this, Judt had attained some level of controversy over his articles on Israel and the Middle East. A former Zionist, he came to a strongly critical position of the Israeli state late in his life. This contributed to a cancellation of a scheduled 2006 speech at the Polish Embassy in New York, prompted by pressure from the Anti-Defamation League.

But in fact Judt's speciality was intellectual history, and this is how I first became aware of him, especially around the publication of Past Imperfect, which indicted a number of Marxist and Left-wing intellectuals in post-War France, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, for their moral obtuseness. At the time, I was falling out of love a bit with Western left-wing thinking myself, so I rather enjoyed Judt's elegant polemics. Now I think that it could also be seen as a bit of piling on: hitting the Left when it was in disarray and demoralized following the collapse of Soviet Communism and the seeming triumphant rise of free-market capitalism as solution to the human condition. But Judt was, to his credit, never a neo-liberal. As far as I can tell he remained a social democrat throughout his life, and his political positions were always a bit unpredictable, which is about as safe a guarantee of an original and honest mind as I can imagine. To get some idea of what we have lost, read this, one of the last essays he wrote for NYRB.

Ronald Reagan and the wages of stupidity

The idea for this blog post arose as I was listening to Cokie Roberts comment on Sarah Palin's upcoming book tour (transcript here: the Palin comments are at the end of the interview). Roberts notes that lots of Republicans--all the sane ones, I guess--are pretty dubious about Palin, and that David Brooks even went so far as to call her a joke, which is about as polite a way of putting the matter as I can think of, off the top of my head. But then she adds a quote from Newt Gingrich: that lots of people thought that Ronald Reagan was a joke too, at first.

Which got me to thinkin': one of the things that a lot of liberals probably won't admit to anyone anymore, not even to themselves, was just how much of a joke they thought Reagan was. All my professors at Harvard in the mid-80s did, and all my clever classmates at Harvard did, and because I was not ever brave enough to challenge that strong of a consensus I did, too. We thought he was a scary joke, to be sure: stupid, but also stupid enough to start a nuclear war. The other thing to point out is that, of course, we were correct--in this instance at least. The man was an idiot, and it wasn't just liberals and Democrats who knew it. Republicans knew it, too, but for them was a useful idiot. He was genial, and therefore popular with the people, and therefore able to sell the policies and ideas of people much smarter than him. Also, as stupid as was, he was right about the weakness of the Soviet-bloc states, and most of the smart guys, who had spent their careers in the Cold War, assuming that it would continue for a long, long while, just didn't see the Fall of Communism coming. So whether out of some sort of idiot-savant prescience or just pure dumb luck, he came out looking very good on that one question, and it turns out that it was a very big question.

The shear amount of damage that Reagan did to the United States and the rest of the world is so vast that it is hard to pinpoint any single, worst example of his influence, but in the long run this may be this: he made being stupid an acceptable quality for President of the United States, provided that the candidate is malleable and personally agreeable. George Bush Jr. should never have gotten anywhere near the levers of power. But Reagan allowed Republicans--and enough of the general public--to consider the possibility that, with a competent enough staff, the intelligence of the Commander in Chief really wasn't all that important. America was so powerful, economically and militarily, that it could muddle through.

I am certainly not the person who is going to make the argument that IQ has much if anything to do with excellence in politics. George Bush is by some accounts a quite intelligent man: by conventional measures. He's just not very wise. He lacked the judgment that was so desperately needed after that 9/11 attacks, and this country and its citizens have paid a very high price for that. But no one talks about Bush much now. Too embarrassing, maybe. They talk about Reagan.

Clearly, most of the media are afraid of criticizing Palin because they are worried about playing into her narrative of the snarky East Coast elites. But they forget one thing. The country is not in the position it was in 1985, and it can't afford someone like Ronald Reagan again. That Sarah Palin reminds anybody of the 40th President of the United States should not be an argument for her political relevance, but an argument against it. It's really time that someone had the balls to pull the Teflon off that guy.

The infantilization of modern political life

In keeping with my ongoing policy of commenting upon Internet events that have occurred eons ago (in New Media time), I’m going to take apart a conversation that James Poulos, of the blog Postmodern Conservative, had with Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network lo’ these several months ago on Bloggingheads.tv. The discussion that I’m interested in happens near the end of the broadcast, when Poulos starts to complain that modern political discourse often focuses too much on our emotional, subjective responses to policy matters (the war in Afghanistan, in this case), and not enough on attempts to wrestle with what is actually going on. At that point, Hurlburt interrupts Poulos and claims that it was ever thus, that this is just how human beings reason. Says some stuff about the pre-frontal cortex and so forth and then: “I would disagree with the idea that we were somehow, colder, better, more rational actors in the past.”

It’s here that Poulos loses the argument, because rather than saying, “well, that’s not quite what I was arguing,” he takes up Hurlburt’s point and then tries to refute it. Goes off about deliberative rationality and all that stuff and ends up sounding a little like Roderick Hart or Jürgen Habermas, wagging his finger at the rest of us for not performing our democratic duties sufficiently well. You can tell that his heart’s not really in it though, possibly because he knows that Hurlburt’s got it all over him if it comes down to the historical facts. Not only is the decline of the rational public sphere a pretty worn argument by now, it’s just not true. It’s hard to look at any point in modern history and argue that political discussion was somehow dominated by cool, rational discussion. Didn’t happen in the nineteenth century. Didn’t happen in the eighteenth century, sure as hell didn’t happen in the seventeenth century.

The thing is, Poulos actually had a much more interesting argument, but he let Hurlburt sidetrack him into a debate that she could win and he couldn’t. That has to do with his initial point about subjective responses to policy (and to polling questions about that policy). This other argument, which does not refer to the tired distinction between emotionality and rationality, can be traced back at least as far as Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man. Sennett’s point, which is also Poulos’s at the beginning, I think, is that modern politics has become increasingly less focused on what politics was once centrally about--ie., the distribution of power and resources--and more and more about subjective feelings about policy, political figures, public events. What is Sarah Palin going to do for the white working class? Who cares? How does it make them feel? So we (and by "we," I mean both supporters and opponents) spend a lot of time talking about her daughters, and her pregnancy, and her son, and Levi, and the shopping trips, and almost no time on her actual performance as Alaska's governor.

I think that Poulos was on much stronger ground with this first point, and I would bet that part of the reason that Hurlburt moved him away from it was that it made her uncomfortable. After all, Palin is not the only recent political figure for whom symbolism is arguably more important than policy. As an Obama supporter from the very beginning, I have to say that one of the most noticeable features of his Presidency so far has been the way he allows liberals to feel good about ourselves--good about the country, good about the world. But now that he’s actually taking steps to govern, this imaginary mirror that he provides us no longer works so well, and many liberals are starting to abandon him.

In the end, it’s all tied up with what I would argue is the infantilization of modern political life: a desire for the world to look how we want it to look rather than how it is, and an intense focus on matters relating to self, on what I want. It's an intensely inward-looking, egotistical pathology, especially noticeable on the right, but certainly not limited to that side of the spectrum. It has infected all of us, and it is everywhere in the public culture.