Sex, Love, Lust – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Modality, Possible Worlds, and the Accidental-Essential Distinction

This from a reader:

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes in its article on Essential vs. Accidental Properties, "A modal characterization of the distinction between essential and accidental properties is taken for granted in nearly all work in analytic metaphysics since the 1950s.” Personally, I find modal definitions of this type very hand wavy. Ed Feser states my objection more eloquently than I can:

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the possible worlds analysis of essence has things backwards: we need to know what the essence of a thing is, before we can know what it would be like in various possible worlds; talk of possible worlds, if legitimate at all, must get explained in terms of essence, not essence in terms of possible worlds ( Aquinas, iBooks edition, page 90).

I think the modal characterization will be a dead end for us.

Response

Two points. First, I do not understand how one could characterize the essential versus accidental distinction except modally. Second, a modal characterization need not be in terms of so-called 'possible worlds.' One should not suppose that a characterization is modal if and only if it is in terms of possible worlds.

First point first. I am a blogger and a native Californian. I might not have been either. So being a blogger and being a native Californian are accidental properties of me. I could have existed without possessing these properties. But I could not have existed without being human. So being human is an essential property of me. Generalizing, if P is an essential property of x, then x must have P, it cannot not have P. If P is an accidental property of x, then x need not have P, it could lack P. And conversely in both cases.

Note that I had to use modal words to characterize the distinction: 'might,' 'could,' 'must,' 'need not,' 'cannot.' I conclude that the accidental-essential distinction is irreducibly modal: it cannot be made except modally. It is indeed essentially modal!

To appreciate this, consider the first two accidental properties I mentioned. I was not always a blogger: speaking tenselessly, there are times at which I am not a blogger. But I was always and will always be a native Californian. Speaking tenselessly again, there are no times at which I am not a native Californian.* It follows that we cannot define an essential (accidental) property of x as a property x has (does not have) at every time at which it exists. The distinction cannot be made in temporal terms; one needs to employ modal language.

If a thing has a property essentially, then it has the property at every time at which it exists. But not conversely: if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has the property essentially. So again it should be clear that the distinction in question is ineliminably modal.

I should make it clear that the modality in question here is non-epistemic/non-doxastic. Suppose Tom died an hour ago, unbeknownst to me. I ask you, "Is Tom teaching now?" You say, "Could be!" But of course it can't be that he is teaching now if he is dead now. You are not saying that it is (really) possible that he be teaching now; you are saying that his teaching now is logically consistent with what you know or believe, that it is not ruled out by what you know/believe.

Second point second. From what I have written it should be clear that we don't need the jargon of possible worlds to talk modally. But it is a very useful and graphic way of talking. Accordingly,

D1. P is an accidental property of x =_df there are possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

D2. P is an essential property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

We can add a third definition:

D3. P is a necessary property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P, and x exists in every possible world. Example: Omniscience is a necessary property of God: he has it in every world in which he exists, and, since he is a necessary being, he exists in every world. Non-theological example: Being prime is a necessary property of the number 7: 7 has it in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists, and it exists in every such world.

The above definitions do not sanction the reduction of the modal to the non-modal. For modal terms appear on both sides of the biconditionals. Nor could we say that the right-hand sides explicates or analyzes the left-hand sides. So I agree with Feser as quoted above. What is first in the order of metaphysical explanation is a thing's being essentially thus and so or accidentally thus and so. We can then go on to represent these states of affairs in possible worlds terms, but we need not do so.

Jenner and Dolezal. Is Jenner essentially male? I should think so. Being male is a biological determination. It can be spelled out in terms of sex chromosomes. They are different in males and females. Jenner as he is today is a sort of super-transvestite: he is not just a male in women's clothing, but a male who has had his body surgically altered to have female anatomical features. But he is still male. How could he be a woman? You can't be a woman without first being a girl, and he was never a girl.

If you deny that Jenner is essentially biologically male, will you also deny that he is essentially biologically human? If not, why not? If literal sex change is possible, is species change possible?

Is Rachel Dolezal essentially Caucasian? Well, of course. Race, like sex, is biologically based. It is not something you choose. Nor is it a social construct. Barack Obama thinks that we Americans have racism in our DNA. That's bullshit, of course. There is nothing biological about being a racist. But there is something biological about race. You can be a traitor to your country, but not to your race.

Biology matters! And so does clear thinking and honest talk. Obama take note.

______________________

*Ignoring the fact, if it is a fact, that I existed pre-natally. If this wrinkle troubles you, I can change my example.

Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

This just in from D. B.:

Apropos of fairly recent usage of the word 'sublunary' on the MavPhil  blog,
and the entry on sexbots, I offer you C.S. Lewis' take on both in this
paragraph from That Hideous Strength.
"On this side (of the moon, facing the earth - DB), the womb is barren
and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. 
There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each 
lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by 
devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in 
their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
(First Scribners Classics ed., 1996, p. 271)

The Dawn of the Sexbots

'Dawn' in the title above is curiously inapt in these times of twilight as the light goes out in the West. Indications of decline: fascination with the grotesque and the abnormal; the mainstreaming of deviant behavior; the cultural ubiquity of pornography; the loss of any sense that we are spiritual beings with a destiny that transcends the merely physical; the loss of the belief that there is anything worth living for beyond the gratification of our basest desires; the abdication of those in positions of authority, together with their denial of reality and their routine lying, as witness the brazen mendacity of Obama and Hillary. Vanity Fair, May 2015:

At 55, he [David Mills] is tired of atheism activism, which he’s been doing since the late 1970s, and ready for a career reboot. Recently he became the owner of a RealDoll—the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls, created two decades ago by artist and entrepreneur Matt McMullen. Mills, who learned about them from an episode of the sitcom Family Guy, visited the company’s Web site and was convinced the photos were of models, not dolls, because they all looked so realistic. More research proved otherwise.

“I thought, Well, gee, I would enjoy something like that!” he recalls. “I mean, I love women. God, I absolutely love women.” And especially their legs. “That’s what attracts me to a woman as much as a face, if not more.” Big problem, though: “My fundamental personality conflict is that I really like women but I don’t like to be around people.”

Mills is morally sick with a sickness that eventually comes to seem normal to its victim. For Mills, a woman is just a female animal body. But such bodies have their manifold physical imperfections. So he wants a perfect body, one that maximally excites his lust, whether or not the body embodies a person. To relate to a person is too much of a bother when the gratification of lust is the supreme desideratum. Enter the sexbot, a body that embodies nothing.

What’s an average day like for him [Mills] now?

“Well, somebody will send me an e-mail: Oh, it’s just so sadddd. I know you’re such a sad person with this doll and I feel sooo sorry for you,” he says, mocking this individual. “Well, here’s how sorry you should feel for me: I sleep till 11, and if I want, maybe later. I get up. I sit around a couple hours, watch TV, maybe have lunch with my daughter if she comes. You know, go out to a restaurant and have a good dinner, come back, maybe watch some porn or TV. Maybe have a late-night snack, a beer or two, and go to bed. So don’t feel sorry for me, for Christ’s sake.”

Matt McMullen, above, of the appropriately named Abyss Creations. Look at his eyes. If the eyes are the windows of the soul . . . . Look at his arms, plastered with ugly tattoos, the graffiti of the human body whereby a spiritual animal defaces the temple of the spirit . . . .

Elizabeth Anscombe, “Contraception and Chastity”

An untimely meditation by a brilliant mind. A powerful antidote to the confused suggestions of the age.

Excerpt:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here – not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.

Why Stop Here?

Why stop at these traffic lights? (Pun intended) We need to go further so as to include the pederasts of NAMBLA and PIE. We need lights depicting an adult hand-in-hand with a child with a little heart between them to signify the sexual love that unites them. After all, it is discriminatory to marginalize the practitioners of sexual perversions. Surely it is the role of the state in these enlightened times to provide full acceptance and legitimation of everyone, regardless of race, creed, or sexual perversion. Story here.

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963. Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis. It was indeed a wonderful/remarkable year. I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough to remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain. What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way? Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

St. Valentine’s Day’s Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her. In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales. Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music. [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary. They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee. Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement. Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events. It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love. A great version from 1964. Lynne died at 83 in 2013. Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters. Another great old tune in a 1962 version. The best to my taste.

Three for my wife. An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda (2/15):

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day. Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements. Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism? But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life. A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Feser on Sex, Part II

The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality, as witness his second in a series on sex. It concludes:

So just what is the deal with sex, anyway? Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned? The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things. Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect. Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually. Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm. And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in. It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain. The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were. Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire. This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other. But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated. And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin.

So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess. And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism — treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body — or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal. The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex. The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position — specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure.

Feser on Sex

Old Ed pulls no punches. In response to Peter Singer's claim that "sex raises no unique moral issues at all," Feser remarks, "I have long regarded this as one of the most imbecilic things any philosopher has ever said." I agree. Feser goes on to make a number of important points.

The Part-Time Monk

The part-time monk saves his spunk for the marital bunk.

The Dirty and the Funny

The muse of philosophy must have visited my otherwise undistinguished classmate Dolores back in the fifth grade. The topic was dirty jokes and that we should not tell them or listen to them. "But sister," Dolores piped up, "what if you laugh not because the joke is dirty but because it is funny?"

It was a good distinction then and a good distinction now.

The Shrinking of the Friend Zone in a Sex-Saturated Society

Editorial commentary at the Gray Lady nowadays resembles micturition more than intelligent cogitation, but there are a couple of notable counter-instances, one being the writings of Ross Douthat. Herewith, three quotations from his recent Prisoners of Sex:

The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.

In his second sentence above, Douthat puts his finger on another indicator of our junk culture's having gone off the rails. Must I explain why?

Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many people’s access to the familial forms of platonic intimacy.

Contemporary feminism is very good — better than my fellow conservatives often acknowledge — at critiquing these pathologies. But feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire.

Sex, War, and Moral Rigorism: The Aporetics of Moral Evaluation

Fr. Robert Barron here fruitfully compares the Catholic Church's rigoristic teaching on matters sexual, with its prohibitions of masturbation, artificial contraception, and extramarital sex, with the rigorism of the Church's teaching with respect to just war. An excellent article.

Although Fr. Barron doesn't say it explicitly, he implies that the two topics are on a par. Given that "the Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives," one who accepts just war rigorism ought also to accept sexual rigorism. Or at least that is what I read him as saying.

I have no in-principle objection to the sexual teaching, but I waffle when it comes to the rigorous demands of just war theory. I confess to being 'at sea' on this topic.

On the one hand, I am quite sensitive to the moral force of 'The killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances' which is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. Having pored over many a page of Kant, I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens. The Catholic doctrine implies that if Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Indeed, if the killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."

This extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.

But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know it is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism. (Not every naturalist is an eliminativist loon.)

If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that one absolutely must resist the evildoer, and absolutely must not turn the other cheek to a Hitler?

An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her rigorism remains tenable.

To sum up these ruminations in a nice, neat antilogism:

1. Some acts, such as the intentional killing of noncombatants, are intrinsically wrong.
2. If an act is intrinsically wrong, then no possible circumstance in which it occurs or consequence of its being performed can substract one iota from its moral wrongness.
3. No act is such that its moral evaluation can be conducted without any consideration of any possible circumstance in which it occurs or possible consequence of its being performed.

The limbs of the antilogism are collectively inconsistent but individually extremely plausible.

A Question About Marriage

For many years now I have been an occasional reader of your blog, and I greatly appreciate your insight on many subjects, particularly your criticism of the Left. I am, I hate to admit, an aspiring academic who is taking on enormous debt to finish a Ph.D. in sociology of religion, and am immersed in the poisonous Higher Ed world of the SIXHIRB musical litany, but that is another story for another time.

My question concerns choosing a wife: Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs?

I am an incorrigible INFP, and I thought your logical precision and holistic perception as an INTP would aid my thinking process, which is mostly intuition/feeling. You have been married quite awhile, and I respect that greatly. You say that your wife is religious, a practicing Catholic, and that you believe that to be a good thing. I agree, and thus I am in this dilemma.

My Romance Story:

I come from a devout Mexican Catholic family from Texas, with a very religiously devout mother who is never found without a rosary, and I consider myself 'religious' and Catholic, i.e. I go to Mass every Sunday, I pray, I believe, I read the Bible, and so forth. Now, I am certainly not a saint, as the rest of my story will show.

I met, during a study abroad this year, a stunning young woman who works for the United Nations. One night, our date over red wine at a cafe quickly escalated into dozens of nights of passionate, indulgent sex, and then into several trips throughout Europe in which we brought our negligent sexual passion into the creaky beds of many hotels. Sex crazed, we were.

Now that I am back in the States for the holidays, free from the physical presence and temptations of the Woman, the big question of our future is at hand. Should we continue or not?

We have been dating now for five months, and she is wonderful in all things, successful, an excellent conversationalist, and best of all, not a feminist! But, she has no faith, does not go to church, and largely thinks religion is oppressive, and most painfully for me, she does not believe in Christianity. I would also add she is more of an agnostic than a militant atheist, since she believes in some vague afterlife, and respects my religious beliefs.

'Listen to your heart' is what they say, but my heart is confused at the moment, and the damned sex monkey does not help. The Woman is wonderful, but long term speaking, once the infatuation is over through the sobering, cold water of marriage, will religion be the stone upon which we stumble? Will I be happier instead with a practicing Catholic woman? What will my Mexican-Catholic mom say when I bring home a non-believer? She won't like it, that's for sure.

In my opinion, I am skeptical that it will work long term, but she thinks there is no problem. What do you say?

Your question is: Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs? My answer is: Yes it can, but it is not likely. And in a matter as important to one's happiness as marriage, and in a social climate as conducive to marital break-up as ours is, it is foolish to take unnecessary risks. I would say that career and marriage, in that order, are the two most important factors in a person's happiness. You are on track for happiness if you can find some occupation that is personally satisfying and modestly remunerative and a partner with whom you can enjoy an ever-deepening long-term relationship. Religion lies deep in the religious person; for such a person to have a deep relationship with an irrreligious person is unlikely. A wise man gambles only with what he can afford to lose; he does not gamble with matters pertaining to his long-term happiness.

So careful thought is needed. Now the organ of thought is the head, not the heart. And you have heard me say that every man has two heads, a big one and a little one, one for thinking and one for linking. The wise man thinks with his big head. Of course, it would be folly to marry a woman to whom one was not strongly sexually attracted, or a woman for whom one did not feel deep affection. But a worse folly would be allow sex organs and heart to suborn intellect. By all means listen to your heart, but listen to your (big) head first. Given how difficult successful marriage is, one ought to put as much as possible on one's side. Here are some guidelines that you violate at your own risk:

Don't marry outside your race
Don't marry outside your religion
Don't marry outside your social class
Don't marry outside your generational cohort
Don't marry outside your educational level
Don't marry someone whose basic attitudes and values are different about, e.g., money
Don't marry someone with no prospects
Don't marry a needy person or if you are needy. A good marriage is an alliance of strengths
Don't marry to escape your parents
Don't marry young
Don't imagine that you will be able to change your partner in any significant way.

The last point is very important. 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) As I said, 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.

There is also the business about right and wrong order. Right Order: Finish your schooling; find a job that promises to be satisfying over the long haul and stick with it; eliminate debts and save money; get married after due consultation with both heads, especially the big one; have children.

Wrong Order: Have children; get married; take any job to stay alive; get some schooling to avoid working in a car wash for the rest of your life.

I think it is also important to realize that romantic love, as blissful and intoxicating as it is, is mostly illusory. I wouldn't want to marry a woman I wasn't madly (just the right word) in love with, but I also wouldn't want to marry a woman that I couldn't treasure and admire and value after the romantic transports had worn off, as they most assuredly will. Since you are a Catholic you may be open to the Platonic-Augustinian-Weilian thought that what we really want no woman or man can provide. Our hearts cannot be satisfied by any of our our earthly loves which are but sorry substitutes for the love of the Good.

Related: Al-Ghazzali on Choosing a Wife

Some Points on Homosexuality in the Context of the Culture War

A few days ago I was blissfully unaware of Duck Diversity Dynasty, the reality show on the Arts and Entertainment channel. I still haven't watched even one episode, nor am I particularly inclined to; the antics of rednecks are not my thing. I have gathered, however, that the series falls more on the entertainment end of the Arts and Entertainment spectrum. One of the characters whose reality is depicted, Phil Robertson, shown on the left, has made comments on homosexuality that have drawn attention, to put it mildly. I won't rehearse the details of a brouhaha about which my astute readers can be expected to be familiar. I will simply make a few comments bearing upon the contretemps that strike me as important.

1. To have the homosexual disposition or inclination or proclivity is one thing; to exercise it in homosexual sex acts such as anal intercourse is quite another. You may be born with the proclivity, and stuck with it, but you are free to exercise it or not. The proclivity may be part of 'who you are,' ingredient in your very identity, but the practices are freely engaged in. Acts done or left undone are contingent and thus no part of anyone's identity. Moral criticism of homosexual practices is not criticism of anyone for who he is.

2. It follows that rejection of homosexual sex acts as immoral is consistent with acceptance of homosexuals as people. In a trite phrase, one can hate the sin but love the sinner. The sinful and the immoral, however, are not quite the same, though I cannot expatiate on the distinction at the moment.

It is therefore very bad journalism to describe Robertson's comments as 'anti-gay' for that elides the distinction I just drew. Opposition to homosexual practices is not opposition to homosexuals.

And of course there is nothing 'homophobic' about Robertson's comments. I don't reckon that the good old boy pictured above has any irrational fear of homosexuals. 'Homophobic' is a coinage of leftists to prevent one of those famous 'conversations' that they otherwise call for. It is a question-begging epithet and semantic bludgeon meant to close down debate by the branding of their opponents as suffering from a mental defect. This is why only a foolish conservative acquiesces in the use of this made-up word. Language matters. One of the first rules for successful prosecution of the Kulturkampf is to never let the enemy distort the terms of the debate. Insist on standard English, and always slap them down when they engage in their notorious 'framing.' As for 'gay,' that too is a word we ought not surrender. Use the neutral 'homosexual.' Same with 'queer.' 'Queer' is a good old word. Nominalists think abstracta are queer entities. There is no implication that the analysis of such is in any way proctological.

3. Whether or not Phil Robertson and people like him can cogently defend their opposition to homosexual practices, they have a right to hold and express their opinions in public fora, and a right to be tolerated by those who oppose their views. To tolerate is not approve of, let alone endorse; it is to put up with, to allow, to refrain from interfering with the promulgation of distasteful ideas. Without widespread toleration it is hard to see how a nation as diverse and pluralistic as the USA can remain even minimally united.

4. There are solid arguments based in theology and philosophy for rejecting as immoral homosexual practices. And they are available to Robertson and Co. should they decide to lay down their shotguns long enough to swot them up. These arguments won't convince those on the the other side, but then no argument, no matter how well-articulated and reasonable, no matter how consistent with known empirical fact and free of logical error, convinces those on the other side of any 'hot button' issue.

5. As a corollary to (4), note that arguments against homosexuality needn't presupose the truth of any religion. They can be purely philosophical. The same goes for abortion. If I argue against late-term abortion on the the ground that it is sufficiently like infanticide to inherit the moral wrongness of infanticide, then I argue in a way that makes no use of any religious premise.

6. The A & E Network has every right to fire Robertson and Co. By the same token, a baker or a florist has every right to refuse service to a same-sex couple planning a same -sex 'marriage' and it is simply wrong for government at any level to force the baker or the florist to violate his conscience.

7. In the interests of comity, homosexuals and their practices ought to be tolerated. Whether or not the practices are immoral, they ought to be legally permissible as long as they are between consenting adults. But this right to be tolerated does not translate into a right to be approved or applauded or celebrated or a right to impose their views on others, or a right to change the culture to their liking. In particular, it does not translate into a right to have their 'marriages' legally recognized.

8. Given the obvious distinction made in (1) above, the following sort of argument is invalid. "Tom didn't choose to be homosexual; he was born that way, so his practice of homosexuality via anal intercourse is morally acceptable." That sort of argument obviously proves too much. Pedophiles, sadomasochists, necrophiliacs, and so on down the list of sexual perversions are most of them born with their proclivity, but that fact does not justify their engaging in the corresponding practices.

For more on this delightful topic, see Jim Goad, When Ducks Cry.