Category: Marriage

Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained

Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited:

Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed. 1957] Children born out of wedlock and separated from parents would become unexceptional.

In the 1950s he foresaw the coming sexual anarchy of the West and its downside. Alfred Kinsey’s widely publicized research, the newly founded Playboy magazine’s explicit carnal appeal, the Elvis Presley delirium among adolescents, the runaway commercial success of Peyton Place, the critical success of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—all were parts of a piece at mid-century. In 1957 Sorokin wrote crabbily, “Americans are victims of a sex mania as malign as cancer and as socially menacing as communism.” This overreach got him ridiculed in the movie Gidget, cartooned in The San Francisco Chronicle, and called a publicity hound and prude.

What Sorokin saw dawning is now at full noon. The edgy and sordid are box office. Hot porn is just a click away. Casual sex is the norm. Ten or twenty sexualities clamor for a spotlight. Real or not, it doesn’t matter. Hopes and dreams crowd out what is possible and what can be done. The pursuit of pleasure—Neil Postman called it amusing ourselves to death—looks as if it might be a terminal social disease. In the Western world marriage loses its appeal. The idea of family formation changes shape, resulting in social conditions in which 40 percent of U.S. children today are born to unmarried women. These sexualities bear legal rights and popular favor perhaps unique in human history.  

Late Sensate license—if it feels good, do it—has become its own faith. Facts, reason, and logic are losing their universal public authority, even in academic life. Despite astonishing affluence and material ease, some one-sixth of Americans over the age of fifteen are taking prescribed anti-depressants. Others are reaching for whiskey, marijuana, opioids, and other palliatives. The Late Sensate does not appear to be working too well psychologically, and governability is at issue. Sorokin’s advice to perplexed or anxious individuals facing social turmoil was to focus on the transcendent through the humanities. Plant a garden. Go walking. Respect the natural environment. Practice yoga. Live simply. Turn off the television set and talk to others.

More than fifty years later, this is not unwise advice. “Only the power of unbounded love…can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet,” Sorokin expounded. “Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.” Sorokin’s prescriptions of altruism and universalism might seem painfully naïve and anodyne today. But this difficult, intuitive man’s clear-eyed premonitions, his studies of social dynamics, and his tough-minded benevolence remain remarkable guides to considering current events.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

Chess Players Commiserate on their Failed Marriages

A: "We were bishops of opposite color." 

B:  "Sorry to hear that.  In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material."

C:  "We just couldn't get it together.  Whenever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft."

D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up the topic of back-rank mate."

E. "She got tired of my excuses,  especially 'Sorry, honey, not tonight. After a hard day at the office I'm weaker than f7.'"

F. "The bitch had a way of putting me in psychological Zugzwang: no matter what I said or did, I only dug my hole deeper."

G. "In bed one night she called me a perv when I muttered something about the Lucena position. 

H. "Her frigidity did us in.  She'd allow a check but never a mate."

I.  "She said  I lacked ambition citing my penchant for underpromotion."

J.  "We fought like knights and bishops."

The Wise Live by the Probable, not the Possible

The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible.  It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry.  But it is not probable. 

Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way.  What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out.  People don't change.  They are what they are.  The few exceptions prove the rule.  The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities.  "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)

It is foolish to gamble with your happiness.  We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose.  So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that  you will change her.  You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.

The Right Woman

HeroHow do you know that your present inamorata is the right woman for the long haul? 

Well, if she tells you that she can do better, then you know she isn't.  When Brandeis girl said that to me years ago, I handed her her walking papers. 

But if she says to you, "My hero!" and means it, then that is a defeasible indicator that you are into something good. In a couple of weeks we celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary.

The beauty of it is that you don't have to be particularly heroic. You only have to appear that way to her.

In a world of seemings, seeming, which is always seeming to someone, can take you quite a distance. On the other hand, seeming with no being behind it won't seem for long.

 

Is Marriage a Long Conversation?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (tr. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 59):

Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.

Fairly good advice, but how would old bachelor Fritz know about this, he who in another place recommends taking a whip along on a date?  (To be accurate, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Portable Nietzsche, p. 179, puts in the mouth of an old woman the saying, "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip! Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!")

In my experience, marriage is not a long conversation so much as it is a long and deep and wordless understanding. A good marriage is a relation deeper than words.

Unsuccessful in Love

The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.

Epigram 57

Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.

Epigram 59

I married in my youth a wife.
She was my own, my very first.
She gave the best years of her life.
I hope nobody gets the worst.

J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel  Stoner.  An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is.  Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.

In Five Books of Professors, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:

(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.

"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget.  For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.

My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives."  Yes.

Companion post:  A is A: Monism Refuted

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What About Infertile Heterosexual Couples?

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes,

The purpose and point of marriage, as everyone knows, and as the law has long recognized, is to bind a man and a woman to one another for the sake of any children they produce. Please, please, please don't say that infertile heterosexual couples are allowed to marry, as though that refutes my claim. Immature 21-year-olds are allowed to drink alcohol, but that doesn't mean the purpose and point of the drinking age isn't to prevent immature individuals from drinking alcohol.

That's right.  As I say near the end of a long entry, The Infertility Argument for Same-Sex Marriage:

The law cannot cater to individual cases or even to unusual classes of cases.  Consider laws regulating driving age.  If the legal driving age is 16, this is unfair to all the 13-16 year olds who are competent drivers.  (E.g., farm boys and girls who learned to operate heavy machinery safely before the age of 16.)  If the law were to cater to these cases, the law would become excessively complex and its application and enforcement much more difficult.  Practical legislation must issue in demarcations that are clear and easily recognized, and therefore 'unfair' to some.

But a better analogy is voting.  One is allowed to vote if one satisfies quite minimal requirements of age, residency, etc.  Thus the voting law countenances a situation in which the well-informed and thoughtful votes of mature, successful, and productive members of society are given the same weight as the votes of people who for various reasons have no business in a voting booth.  We don't, for example, prevent  the senile elderly from voting even though they are living in the past out of touch with the issues of the day and incapable of thinking coherently about them.  We don't exclude them or other groups for a very good reason: it would complicate the voting law enormously and in highly contentious ways.  (Picture armies of gray panthers with plenty of time on their hands roaming the corridors of Congress armed with pitchforks.)  Now there is a certain unfairness in this permissiveness: it is unfair to thoughtful and competent voters that their votes be cancelled out by the votes of the thoughtless and incompetent.  But we of the thoughtful and competent tribe must simply 'eat' (i.e., accept) the unfairness as an unavoidable byproduct of workable voting laws.

In the same way, whatever residual unfairness to homosexuals there is in allowing infertile oldsters to marry (after my foregoing arguments have been duly digested) is an unfairness that simply must be accepted if there are to be workable marriage laws.

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‘Traditional Marriage’ or ‘Natural Marriage’?

This from long-time reader, Bill Tingley:

As always, Bill, I find reading your blog enlightening and enjoyable. I note you are using the term "traditional marriage" to refer to marriage. Now that the Supreme Court has redefined marriage as nothing more than a civil union, the meaning of the word "marriage" is in turmoil. So we do need a term to mean what "marriage" has always meant until the day before yesterday. Instead of "traditional marriage", I suggest "natural marriage". "Natural" more accurately conveys what is essential to marriage than "traditional" does. After all, everything that can be said to be traditional about marriage follows what is natural about it, sexual complementarity. More than that, natural law informs us that the good of sexual complementarity is actualized in marriage. Nor does it hurt that the rhetorical force of "natural" pushes buttons that confuse the Leftists and denies them their knee-jerk response to all that is labeled traditional.

Now that the Left has destroyed the word 'marriage,' we need a word to distinguish the genuine article from the leftist innovation.  I agree with Tingley about this.  I suggest 'traditional marriage.'  He suggests 'natural marriage.'  His reason for the superiority of the latter over the former is that:

. . . everything that can be said to be traditional about marriage follows what is natural about it, sexual complementarity.

I think this overlooks something important, namely, that marriage, while grounded in the biological complementarity of male and female human animals, and essentially so grounded, is a social institution.  So there is more to marriage than the merely natural.  For this reason, I prefer 'traditional marriage' to 'natural marriage.'

To clarify this, a brief look at the relation between the natural-biological and the social-cultural is in order.

Consider three situations, each a kind of 'intercourse.'  (1) A man and a woman playing chess with each other.  (2) A man and a woman just copulating with each other.  (3) A man and a woman getting married to each other and consummating their marriage.

Ad (1).  Chess has no objective reality outside of the system of rules or laws that constitute it, and these are of a conventional nature.  In this regard, the laws of chess are nothing like the laws of nature.*  They are not descriptive of culture-independent occurrences.  Nor are the rules of chess prescriptively regulative of processes and transactions external to them, in the way traffic laws regulate vehicular processes, and laws against fraud regulate business transactions by setting up norms that one ought to follow when one drives or does business.  The rules of chess are constitutive of the game, not regulative of some antecedent process, and what they constitute is something of a wholly conventional nature.  Chess is a social artifact in toto; there is nothing natural about it. A man and a woman playing chess are engaged in a social interaction with no natural or physical process underpinning it.  Of course, the touching and moving of pieces are physical processes, but there is nothing in the physical world corresponding  to an instance of chessic intercourse in the way there is something in nature corresponding to a description of photosynthesis.

Ad (2). Brute copulation is at the opposite extreme.  Copulation is a physical process whether it is done in marriage or outside marriage, whether it is done lovingly or rapaciously.  Brute copulation has nothing social or cultural about it.  It makes sense to say that chess is a social construct or a social artifact; it makes no sense to say that brute copulation is a social construct or social artifact.

I am assuming a healthy-minded realism.  I am assuming that there is an important distinction between what John Searle calls brute facts and what he calls institutional facts.  It is a brute fact that the sun is 93 million miles from the earth or that two animals are copulating.  It is an institutional fact that Barack Obama is POTUS and Michelle Obama FLOTUS.  A woman's being pregnant is a brute fact; a child's being illegitimate is an institutional fact.  The existence of gold, the metal Au, is a brute fact; the existence of money is an institutional fact even if the money is realized in gold coins.  "Brute facts exist independently of any human institutions; institutional facts can exist only within human institutions." (The Construction of Social Reality, p. 27)  It follows from these definitions that the consummation of a marriage, even though it necessarily involves sexual intercourse, is an institutional fact.

(Searle's use of 'brute fact' is a bit idiosyncratic.  I would say, and I think most philosophers would agree, that a brute fact is a contingently obtaining state of affairs the obtaining of which has no causal or other explanation.  If an atheist says that the universe just happens to exist without cause or reason, then he is saying that its existence  is a brute fact in my sense.  Of course, it is also a brute fact in Searle's sense.  Only a leftist loon would maintain that the physical universe is a social construct.  That the moon has craters, however, is not a brute fact in my sense though it is in Searle's inasmuch as it is not an institutional fact.  That astronomical distances are measured in light-years is an institutional fact, but not the distances themselves!)

Ad (3). Marriage is between chess and brute copulation.**  Chess is whatever FIDE or the United States Chess Federation says it is.  Marriage cannot be what any legislative body, or bunch of judges playing legislators, says it is.  For it is grounded essentially in the natural fact of human sexual complementarity. Chess is entirely a social construct; marriage is not.

On the other hand, marriage, unlike brute copulation, has a social side: it is after all a contract.  For this reason, I prefer 'traditional marriage' over 'natural marriage.'  Strictly speaking, there is no natural marriage: non-humans mate and reproduce and cohabit, but they don't marry.

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*An interesting question is whether 'laws of chess' can only be construed as a subjective genitive:  the laws of chess are chess's laws, not laws about something external to these laws. But 'laws of nature' can also be construed as an objective genitive:  the laws of nature are laws about something external to them, namely the natural world.  

**And if I may be permitted a joke, too much chess and any extramural copulation, brute or not, can destroy a marriage.