Tradition and gay marriage
Nathanael stepped up to challenge my (rather dramatic) statement “tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice” with his 0752 17AUG04 post, more or less pointing out that thousands of years of human thought have crafted tradition and one is foolish to discard such collective wisdom.
Of course, he has a point. Once upon a time I went to Kingdom Hall with Jehovah’s Witnesses because I figured that a sect that had lasted so long, kept so tight and had so many followers probably had something wise to say. It did, but of course not so wise I felt it was ultimately other than pernicious. The Christian Bible has its wise and less-wise portions (and its wise and less-wise followers) and is incontrovertibly a prominent distillation of a millennium and more of Mesopotamian thought, but of course it’s not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days. Aristotle was quite the philosophical ninja in his day but by now he’s mostly a historical reference point and an obligatory part of introductions to the history of philosophy.
Nonetheless, to break from everything said in the Bible or by Aristotle simply because they are old is foolish. Progress happens by building on and improving existing ideas more than demolishing them, because people who went before us committed the ideas they considered best to the ages, and one might expect that these would beat a sampling of randomly generated ideas in any worthwhile test of veracity.
Then again, some ideas recur because they tend to serve the purposes of those having the power to disburse them. Though Europe forbore to call the station of their underclass “slave,” serfs weren’t exactly free, either. Not to mention that if one was not a noble or a cleric, one was almost always a serf, which doesn’t leave much room for freedom at large. Nathanael refers to slavery as an “innovation for the Portuguese when they re-introduced it to European culture in the 1400s,” but one might suppose that it was really a return to tradition in which making a slave of one’s own tribe remained verboten but outsiders were fair game, allowing for more complete domination without the credible fear of insurrection. Slavery is not a unique to any cultural tradition and though some of its variations and alternates (such as “untouchables” which have analogues in the ‘eta’ of feudal Japan) are less common.
Furthermore, Nathanael quotes but does not address the other two clearly unacceptable examples of tradition - racial discrimination and disenfranchisement of women - that I offered. That there is plenty of evil embedded in tradition remains undisputed. Rather, Nathanael attempts to show that lack of “respect for tradition” leads to many of the worst kinds of revolutionary brutality and regression. Even the sins of many calling themselves traditionalists he ascribes to this lack:
So far as I can see, however, his case against this ‘lack of respect’ has more to do with ideological purges executed by totalizing political revolutionaries. Such revolutions necessarily have to be packaged and sold to a power base, rhetorically streamlined, and so on. I’m sure Nathanael can easily find places where sudden, internally-generated social departures have also caused chaos, but these are less dramatic and easier to set in contrast with their not-particularly-attractive traditional bretheren.
Before I go on, however, I should enter a caveat: historical social agreements evolved in response to pressures of their day, with each party negotiating the best it could expect to get under the circumstances. In an era dominated by the right of might, one can expect those whose physical traits were statistically less suited to martial pursuits (women) would be not only disadvantages, but would likely support systems in which they trade “freedom” of dubious value for the literal patronage of even an unequal system of marriage alliance in which one attaches one’s fate to a another who would presumably fight for one’s interests for love or at least offspring. Likewise did peasants attach themselves to their lord, who may not have been kind or particularly just but at least had reason to prevent his people’s housing from being razed and farmland from being salted. Many people view these arrangements purely as examples of tyranny without seeing the benefits they offered the disadvantaged in comparison to the alternatives conceivable at the time. And the fact remained that even a lord had an interest in keeping his peasantry minimally happy, as a husband had an interest in treating his wife minimally well - those with nothing to lose could still revolt and damage one’s interests even if they can’t advance their own.
Furthermore, Daniel Dennett’s defense of tradition as engineering is quite valid to my mind. Traditions have intrinsic design value as intricate solutions to a set of problems and constraints that are both novel and frequently beautiful. The loss of heritage is an acute pain, as Dennett points out, that only humans feel. It can be sad to watch the ‘ambulatory phase’ of meme-sets disintegrate, as we do tend to cherish our history in its own right and don’t wish it to end even after the death of everyone who still holds them. I suppose it’s because we hope for our traditions to be an enduring patrimony. Nonetheless, maintenance has costs, and we must ask ourselves if a tradition that requires us to, say, ‘circumcise’ our daughters is worth preserving.
In any case, it’s the modern world now, and I think we have the technology, both social and technical, to eliminate most forms of unfreedom. I would further say that freedom as a value trumps the value of preservation of traditions, so Dennett’s defense doesn’t really hold sway here when they come in conflict. Nozick would even argue that freedom is a primary value that allows the pursuit of all others. In that view, the value of tradition is irrelevant.
So we’re back to talking about the functional value of tradition to determining the best ways of doing business. It’s a rock of wisdom that’s nonetheless shot through with flaws. Can we justify effectual things with appeals to tradition? Not directly. I suppose we can say that we have no idea how something works and thus we must do it as we always have, but this only persuades people who share the conviction of our own ignorance.
I, for one, see plenty of reasons for the institution of marriage as well as the advantages for any (set of) individual(s) wishing to avail themselves of it. Governments have an interest in recognizing them both because households are to a large extent the basic granules of the economy and because they incubate future adult citizens. Individuals have an interest in legal recognition of marriage because of the legal and (occasionally) financial benefits provided by the government. Human psychology sustains the actual tradition of the interpersonal contract for reasons related to both sociobiological programming and the clear advantages of resource-pooling with a committed partner. Marriage between animals and humans don’t have any of these features to a significant extent.
Nathanael says regarding marriage:
“This”, Nathanael says, “is enough to refute Nato’s argument,” but I think that claim is at best premature. There are reasons to define the rule a certain way. As he quoted me:
The legal recognition of marriage is for something. It has a function. If it was entirely arbitrary as well as functionally neutral, then it would certainly not be accessible to reasonable critique and so the preservation of tradition would be the only value in town. But it does confer advantage (as well as disadvantage, but presumably those who desire it judge the advantages to weigh more in their case) and it does have a purpose, so we must show why it should be available to some and not to others with reference to that purpose. Nathanael appears aware of this when he continues:
The only problem is that he seems to think that this is some sort of unanswerable rhetorical question, or he would not be able to claim that he “refuted” anything. Perhaps he thought I had no answer to that question and admitted none, which would certainly have made my argument incoherent.
On the other hand, the legal recognition of marriage for anyone can be called into question, and I admit that’s a contentious issue. I still tend toward the recognition of marriage but I think reasonable people can disagree. Besides, that is not the matter in dispute.
In the end, though, I’m forced to moderate a bit - it may not be obvious that appeals to tradition cut no ice. If the ice is very thin and there’s no reason available to apply, then one can, I suppose, appeal to it directly. Further, tradition has within it all sorts or reason that is not necessarily visible to the naked eye, so one should seriously address oneself to understanding how it functions and why. It is valid to demand justification someone who opposes tradition. In the heat of my personal outrage on this issue (of which I have a great deal) I slightly overstepped.
Still, marriage is legally recognized and confers advantages. If they are going to be offered to anyone, then it must be explained why they are not offered to everyone. Saying that they are offered in the way they are because of tradition is unimpressive. One can throw up one’s hands and say “well, if you won’t accept tradition, we’re all in a muddle,” but that can only hold while there’s no non-arbitrary reason for marriage and thereby implicitly militates for removing legal recognition thereof. The position assassinates itself.
If some broad-minded traditionalist can give me a reason for marriage that doesn't rely directly on tradition and also excludes gay marriage, then we'll have something to talk about.
Of course, he has a point. Once upon a time I went to Kingdom Hall with Jehovah’s Witnesses because I figured that a sect that had lasted so long, kept so tight and had so many followers probably had something wise to say. It did, but of course not so wise I felt it was ultimately other than pernicious. The Christian Bible has its wise and less-wise portions (and its wise and less-wise followers) and is incontrovertibly a prominent distillation of a millennium and more of Mesopotamian thought, but of course it’s not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days. Aristotle was quite the philosophical ninja in his day but by now he’s mostly a historical reference point and an obligatory part of introductions to the history of philosophy.
Nonetheless, to break from everything said in the Bible or by Aristotle simply because they are old is foolish. Progress happens by building on and improving existing ideas more than demolishing them, because people who went before us committed the ideas they considered best to the ages, and one might expect that these would beat a sampling of randomly generated ideas in any worthwhile test of veracity.
Then again, some ideas recur because they tend to serve the purposes of those having the power to disburse them. Though Europe forbore to call the station of their underclass “slave,” serfs weren’t exactly free, either. Not to mention that if one was not a noble or a cleric, one was almost always a serf, which doesn’t leave much room for freedom at large. Nathanael refers to slavery as an “innovation for the Portuguese when they re-introduced it to European culture in the 1400s,” but one might suppose that it was really a return to tradition in which making a slave of one’s own tribe remained verboten but outsiders were fair game, allowing for more complete domination without the credible fear of insurrection. Slavery is not a unique to any cultural tradition and though some of its variations and alternates (such as “untouchables” which have analogues in the ‘eta’ of feudal Japan) are less common.
Furthermore, Nathanael quotes but does not address the other two clearly unacceptable examples of tradition - racial discrimination and disenfranchisement of women - that I offered. That there is plenty of evil embedded in tradition remains undisputed. Rather, Nathanael attempts to show that lack of “respect for tradition” leads to many of the worst kinds of revolutionary brutality and regression. Even the sins of many calling themselves traditionalists he ascribes to this lack:
Self-conscious "traditionalists" are always innovators, who have to dumb tradition down in order to render it into something that can be deliberately "obeyed" or "followed." What narrow-minded "traditionalists" lack is adequate respect for tradition. Students of contemporary Islam, such as Bernard Lewis, are keenly aware of this.
So far as I can see, however, his case against this ‘lack of respect’ has more to do with ideological purges executed by totalizing political revolutionaries. Such revolutions necessarily have to be packaged and sold to a power base, rhetorically streamlined, and so on. I’m sure Nathanael can easily find places where sudden, internally-generated social departures have also caused chaos, but these are less dramatic and easier to set in contrast with their not-particularly-attractive traditional bretheren.
Before I go on, however, I should enter a caveat: historical social agreements evolved in response to pressures of their day, with each party negotiating the best it could expect to get under the circumstances. In an era dominated by the right of might, one can expect those whose physical traits were statistically less suited to martial pursuits (women) would be not only disadvantages, but would likely support systems in which they trade “freedom” of dubious value for the literal patronage of even an unequal system of marriage alliance in which one attaches one’s fate to a another who would presumably fight for one’s interests for love or at least offspring. Likewise did peasants attach themselves to their lord, who may not have been kind or particularly just but at least had reason to prevent his people’s housing from being razed and farmland from being salted. Many people view these arrangements purely as examples of tyranny without seeing the benefits they offered the disadvantaged in comparison to the alternatives conceivable at the time. And the fact remained that even a lord had an interest in keeping his peasantry minimally happy, as a husband had an interest in treating his wife minimally well - those with nothing to lose could still revolt and damage one’s interests even if they can’t advance their own.
Furthermore, Daniel Dennett’s defense of tradition as engineering is quite valid to my mind. Traditions have intrinsic design value as intricate solutions to a set of problems and constraints that are both novel and frequently beautiful. The loss of heritage is an acute pain, as Dennett points out, that only humans feel. It can be sad to watch the ‘ambulatory phase’ of meme-sets disintegrate, as we do tend to cherish our history in its own right and don’t wish it to end even after the death of everyone who still holds them. I suppose it’s because we hope for our traditions to be an enduring patrimony. Nonetheless, maintenance has costs, and we must ask ourselves if a tradition that requires us to, say, ‘circumcise’ our daughters is worth preserving.
In any case, it’s the modern world now, and I think we have the technology, both social and technical, to eliminate most forms of unfreedom. I would further say that freedom as a value trumps the value of preservation of traditions, so Dennett’s defense doesn’t really hold sway here when they come in conflict. Nozick would even argue that freedom is a primary value that allows the pursuit of all others. In that view, the value of tradition is irrelevant.
So we’re back to talking about the functional value of tradition to determining the best ways of doing business. It’s a rock of wisdom that’s nonetheless shot through with flaws. Can we justify effectual things with appeals to tradition? Not directly. I suppose we can say that we have no idea how something works and thus we must do it as we always have, but this only persuades people who share the conviction of our own ignorance.
I, for one, see plenty of reasons for the institution of marriage as well as the advantages for any (set of) individual(s) wishing to avail themselves of it. Governments have an interest in recognizing them both because households are to a large extent the basic granules of the economy and because they incubate future adult citizens. Individuals have an interest in legal recognition of marriage because of the legal and (occasionally) financial benefits provided by the government. Human psychology sustains the actual tradition of the interpersonal contract for reasons related to both sociobiological programming and the clear advantages of resource-pooling with a committed partner. Marriage between animals and humans don’t have any of these features to a significant extent.
Nathanael says regarding marriage:
Another way to look at this is an ad absurdum argument. If two men can marry, why can't a man marry an animal, or his car, or two women, or himself, or his mother? There may be good reasons, but they are incompatible with the simplistic nondiscrimination rule Nato proposes. To decide if a rule is being applied in a nondiscriminatory way, we have to first define the rule, and if we are to define that rule as (for example) "only two human beings may marry," then there is no logical reason not to restrict the rule further, and say "only one man and one woman may marry."
“This”, Nathanael says, “is enough to refute Nato’s argument,” but I think that claim is at best premature. There are reasons to define the rule a certain way. As he quoted me:
if one wishes to curtail freedom of any kind, it is incumbent on one to explain why. If one wants to curtain[sic] freedom in a discriminatory way, one must explain not just why the freedom should ever be abridged, but why it is valid to abridge in a special case.
The legal recognition of marriage is for something. It has a function. If it was entirely arbitrary as well as functionally neutral, then it would certainly not be accessible to reasonable critique and so the preservation of tradition would be the only value in town. But it does confer advantage (as well as disadvantage, but presumably those who desire it judge the advantages to weigh more in their case) and it does have a purpose, so we must show why it should be available to some and not to others with reference to that purpose. Nathanael appears aware of this when he continues:
it is not a case against gay marriage. It simply makes it clear that the task is to explain why a man should have a right to bind his future to another man, as (for some reason) he is considered to have a right to do with a woman, but as he is not considered to be allowed to do with an animal, an inanimate object, a place, a member of his immediate family, etc.
The only problem is that he seems to think that this is some sort of unanswerable rhetorical question, or he would not be able to claim that he “refuted” anything. Perhaps he thought I had no answer to that question and admitted none, which would certainly have made my argument incoherent.
On the other hand, the legal recognition of marriage for anyone can be called into question, and I admit that’s a contentious issue. I still tend toward the recognition of marriage but I think reasonable people can disagree. Besides, that is not the matter in dispute.
In the end, though, I’m forced to moderate a bit - it may not be obvious that appeals to tradition cut no ice. If the ice is very thin and there’s no reason available to apply, then one can, I suppose, appeal to it directly. Further, tradition has within it all sorts or reason that is not necessarily visible to the naked eye, so one should seriously address oneself to understanding how it functions and why. It is valid to demand justification someone who opposes tradition. In the heat of my personal outrage on this issue (of which I have a great deal) I slightly overstepped.
Still, marriage is legally recognized and confers advantages. If they are going to be offered to anyone, then it must be explained why they are not offered to everyone. Saying that they are offered in the way they are because of tradition is unimpressive. One can throw up one’s hands and say “well, if you won’t accept tradition, we’re all in a muddle,” but that can only hold while there’s no non-arbitrary reason for marriage and thereby implicitly militates for removing legal recognition thereof. The position assassinates itself.
If some broad-minded traditionalist can give me a reason for marriage that doesn't rely directly on tradition and also excludes gay marriage, then we'll have something to talk about.
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