The Real War on the Family

Today I am rather upset.  For some time now, I have lived in an apartment complex with unrepentant hypocrites, punks who are perfectly happy making trouble for me (drunken parties at all hours, furniture falling the middle of the night, ear-ringing music, singing, cleaning, running, jumping, moving, whatever) but periodically complain--quite insistently--that my kids make more trouble than they can possibly be expected to bear (running, playing, laughing, being punk kids).  I accept that my kids are sometimes obnoxious.  I try to contain them.  I do not accept that this requires me to abandon my job (to become a full-time denizen of local parks with my offspring), to force my wife to abandon her job (she works at home), to chain my kids to the wall with gags when they are in the house, or anything similar (e.g. the demand that no movement occur in our house after 7 PM: sometimes, people have to go the bathroom; sheets get pooped on and must be washed; kids wake up scared and need to be comforted as part of putting them back down, etc.).  My neighbors' obnoxious insensitivity is an acute stress in my life, and the life of my family, which does not live quieter or more peacefully as a result of constant complaints and threats (overt and implicit) from people living close to us.

Periodically I hear rumors that there is a war on the family, that the family is under attack in America (or the West or the world generally), and that the Enemy is some ideology or behavior that is "weird" or "unnatural" or "non-sharia" (forbidden in some holy book like the Bible).  Frequently the Enemy is called out as homosexuality or liberalism (conceived in a very odd fashion) or non-Christianity (some religion that is obviously neither Christian nor Jewish; Jews get something of a pass for being ur-Christians and enduring the Holocaust).  Most recently, my ears have been subjected to a more or less unremitting din that the Enemy is using "gay marriage" (in particular) as a tool to destroy families like mine, which happens to be cis-gendered heterosexual with kids (a picture-perfect image of what the religious right in America has decided to call "the traditional family").  Let me lay my cards out in the open here: I have serious rational doubts that "gay marriage" of any kind represents a serious threat to my family or families like mine.  I hear from time to time that government recognition of "gay marriage" as a thing will force churches to solemnize unions against their creed.  That is nonsense.  As a heterosexual, I have no right to a Jewish wedding.  I cannot make a rabbi marry me; the fact that my local courthouse will marry me changes nothing about my relationship with my local rabbi.  The Mormon wedding I had, in the Salt Lake Temple (very beautiful!), did not permit a sizable number of friends and family to be in attendance.  The fact that the local courthouse would have made them welcome did not--and does not--change that.  The push to make us all marry the same way, to make there be something we call "the American marriage" (and worship together as an entire nation), strikes me as fundamentally evil (fascist, authoritarian, destructive, arrogant)--and frankly un-American, insofar as it violates the clear strain of disestablishmentarianism that runs through the American experiment from its inception (in the 18th century).  I don't want the power to make other people marry the way I would marry, to make them live as I want to live, to make them have kids as I want to have them, to make them make noise the way I do, etc.   

The American religious right wants me to believe that my marriage is not real (or legal, or safe, or useful to me in public venues like the court) unless it passes muster with a board of experts or elders somewhere (who might be nice, reasonable people or raging lunatics: that is irrelevant).  For these people, the greatest threats to my family arise from "weirdos" who live outside it (e.g. homosexuals)--and must be forced to keep their weirdness in check.  I have long felt that this is simply bullshit, that the real threats to my family are more mundane.  I think the collapse of American social institutions (non-governmental organization and associations, small businesses, small churches, small schools, small farms) that has been going on since before the Great Depression is more threatening to my family, and "the family" generally (however anyone conceives it), than gay marriage (which doesn't threaten the family at all).  The people killing families in America are those who support corrupt business (Wall Street), corrupt government (Washington and most state legislatures), and corrupt religion (big churches and schools who care more for their own power, and bottom-line, than for the well-being of the people who fill their pews or their classrooms).  The thing that all these corrupt forces have in common is bigness: the worst organizations are always the huge ones, pretending to serve millions (which in practice means serving thousands well at the expense of treating ten-thousands badly). 

Want to know who really has it in for my family--and the family generally?  Here is my beginner's list: the Federal Reserve, the White House (no matter who occupies it), the Senate, Congress, the Pentagon, GoldmanSachs, JPMorganChase, Citibank, General Motors, Merck, Pfizer, TimeWarner, Comcast, Harvard, University of Michigan, Monsanto.  These motherfuckers, and people like them, people who expect society to eat their failures while they reap outlandish profits for success, represent a serious ongoing threat to the family's existence.  Want to confirm my bias?  Go read about every industry these people wreck: healthcare, housing, travel, banking, education.  It is always the same.  They come in with huge mounds of capital, wipe out competition from small competitors (which operate close to failure as a rule), and then use government goons as their enforcers--writing laws to make it impossible (or at least really hard) for people like me to get decent shelter, healthcare, travel, food, or religion without putting money in their greedy fists.  When the service they provide is lousy--when I am poisoned by bad debt, bad education, bad religion, iatrogenic medicine, etc.--they blame me (for being ignorant and foolish: "if you took proper care of yourself, loser, you would be like our star performer, Ms. X, over here, who is putting her Harvard degree to good use!") and keep right on trucking, selling their schlock to dumb kids like me who have yet to be burned (and lose their house, their travel, their career, their time, their relationships, their money, their illusions, their dreams).  And then monied interests on the religious right come in and put all kinds of effort into banning gay marriage, like that matters.  I am being strangled slowly by the Great Society that saved my grandparents and great-grandparents' bacon, but we cannot notice that.  No, it cannot be that "the family" is under threat today from ordinary human beings (most of them heterosexual, male, and white, just like me!) doing their utterly normal and boring thing (i.e. creating socio-economic asset bubbles that help them at the expense of hurting everyone who deals with them).  It must be Satan, the Illuminati, the Lizard-people, feminazis, illegal immigrants, terrorists, and the gays!  Guys, it's clearly a demonic conspiracy by the weirdos.  Think how cool this would be: we could form a Fellowship of the Ring to sneak behind Enemy lines and throw gay marriage into Mount Doom.  Unfortunately, people seem to take this sort of nonsense really seriously.

This brings me full-circle to my recent experience with awful neighbors.  Know something interesting about these punks I live with?  I am pretty sure most of them are straight (not gay!).  I am pretty sure they have opinions that might in some environment qualify them to pass as "conservatives" (though I hate the way this word is used today, much as I hate the way people use "liberal" or, God help us, "progressive").  But I don't know: maybe my neighbors are gay (and neo-Nazis, Illuminati, Lizard-minions, feminists who want to stick it to the Man, etc.).  What I know for sure is that one of the few people I will miss when we leave this neighborhood is a gay Buddhist--an older guy who went out of his way to befriend us, to make us feel welcome in a neighborhood that otherwise hates our guts.  It is possible that his gestures of kindness (like the friendly conversation we had yesterday) are a cloak for some devious agenda: he probably just wants us to like him so that he can begin the process of destroying our family.  It is possible, but I really, really doubt it.  How does it make my marriage one bit stronger when I join a big group of bullies to make his marriage illegal (or impossible)?  How does this action do anything (1) to make his life better (rendering thanks for the charity and consideration he has shown us)--or (2) to confront the real threats that assail my marriage (like the existence of organized gangs who think that I owe them fealty, that "religious freedom" and good society generally require me to pay them money and time for goods I taste as spurious fakes, cheap knock-offs that don't deliver anything like what the salesman promised)?

Here is my understanding of religious liberty, a very American one (if I do say so myself).  The state, our American one(s) included, is not functionally distinct from a religious cult.  (All religions are cults to me, for the record.  They all involve groups of people organized into hierarchies that exist to perform certain tasks, tasks that include some necessary goods and services and some more or less empty rituals that are also necessary insofar as they let us get along with one another.)  Historically, in America, the state is a cult that aspires to be ecumenical, embracing more than one religious community.  The Puritans who originally settled Massachusetts wanted to stone Quakers, for reasons that we might legitimately call religious.  To them the American state said, "No!"  The English adventurers who settled the South wanted to keep black slaves, for reasons that included religion (you can still read their position in the historical record).  To them the American state said, "No!  But wait: we need unity against Britain, so maybe yes?  OK, Britain is gone and we don't like your 'slaving way of life' (or whatever you want to call it: 'traditional way of life' works too).  Hell no!"  All these things might be logically construed as infringements on religious liberty (e.g. Puritan liberty to stone Quakers, southern Protestant liberty to enslave blacks).  Personally, however, I prefer to see them as legitimate victories for the religious liberty of Quakers and black people, whose right not to be stoned or enslaved trumps and should trump the rights of others to stone or enslave them.  But perhaps I am simply a naive fool, deluded by the homosexual agenda.  Today we find the religious state of America trying to decide whether to make its marriages, the marriages that it performs in courthouses and recognizes for legal purposes (in the environments wherein it decides whether to treat people as married or not), available to gay people or not.  While not being married or marriageable might legitimately be construed to constitute a burden significantly less onerous than being stoned or enslaved (I am not saying that modern gays endure the same fate as early Quakers or black slaves back in the day), it seems clear to me that the usual American principle applies to gays as to those before them.  As long as our state provides services to people, it has an historical duty to make those services ecumenical. 

Marrying gays does not constitute a heavier burden on society than marrying straights.  If there is such a thing as the "traditional Judeo-Christian marriage" that is cis-gendered heterosexual, then the place to advocate for that and practice it avidly is in private spheres, not the public one (where there is not, has never been, and never should be one single doctrine of marriage to rule them all: unlike many American Mormons today, I explicitly repudiate the Edmonds-Tucker Act and everything that it stood for).  You can wear a burkha of your own free will and choice, if you so desire.  You can choose to marry a toaster, or a dog, or anything you please, provided you do so without perpetrating criminal violence.  This is your religious freedom in America.  You cannot make me wear a burkha or marry a toaster against my will and call that "religious freedom."  That is bullshit.  (If it were the '60s or '70s, we could say it was commie bullshit, i.e. the idea that we must all be on the same page all the time for society to function well.  But communism collapsed, so it is now just American bullshit: Americans don't even know what the American tradition means anymore, if they ever did.)  Unfortunately for Americans like me, some of our fellow citizens in high places, places as high as our Supreme Court (not to mention Wall Street or state and federal governments), think this shit is gold. Like the fools who gave us Edmonds-Tucker and Prohibition back in the day, these people cheerfully waste public time and resources fighting lame crusades against gay marriage (etc.), all the while leaving the real threats to families like mine completely unaddressed--unnoticed and unchecked, proceeding to create the next asset bubble that will make it impossible for me and mine to preserve the illusion of economic and social stability that earlier generations of Americans enjoyed.  (Note that these illusions are always illusory, and some people always see through them.  I am not saying all the old folks had it better, only that their experience allowed them to create illusions that my experience will not allow, that it ruthlessly falsifies.  I need to break free from their American dream before it turns into my own American nightmare.)

To my neighbors, who think it is their right to be loud and proud while my kids cower silent in a dark room, I say, "Fuck you" (as I arrange to move elsewhere, a luxury I am fortunate still to afford).  To self-styled champions of religious liberty who think that life will improve for everyone if we block my gay neighbor--one of the few nice ones I have in the hell where I currently reside--from marrying in an American courthouse (not your local synagogue, unless that is what the rabbi wants), I say, "Fuck you, too."  I hate the high and mighty condescension of people who pretend to know better than I what my family needs, people who want to save my family by trampling all over it and remaking it in their own image.  Yes, my family has problems.  Yes, some of those boil down to our own human imperfections (we have too many kids; they are too noisy; we don't make enough money; we don't discipline them the way Dr. Phil would, etc.).  No, you cannot solve our imperfections with a heaping dose of unilateral judgement--condemning our kid-noise because it interrupts your drunken orgies, forbidding gay marriage because the thought of two men together or whatever makes you say, "Ick!"  How do you think they feel about you?  I am sick and tired of people passing judgement on others that they are not willing to eat for themselves.

Rape, Chivalry, Sexual Dimorphism

Three related thoughts about the differences between men and women, and the way these become virulently poisonous.

I. Rape is an ugly reality in animal life, including the life of humanity. We have developed many tools to curb and contain it. Unsurprisingly, some tools work better than others, and any tool can be recycled as a weapon (perpetrating abuse instead of containing it). We have not found a final solution for rape that is universal (applicable to everyone always). I do not think we will. The most we can do is educate ourselves (about the dangers in the world and the reality that we cannot control them perfectly, as a species or as individuals).

We must not blame victims. That will not help them (as they seek healing) or us (as we seek means to protect them and others like them, including ourselves). Rape is out there no matter what you wear, no matter what god you pray to (or ignore), no matter what meetings you attend, no matter your education (etc.). Your job as a human being is to make sure primarily (1) that you don't perpetrate it, and only secondarily (2) that you equip yourself to fight or flee it when it finds you--as best you can. It is never your fault that you remain vulnerable. We are all vulnerable. Nobody says that a victim of assault or robbery "should have practised street-fighting more." That is a worthless comment, particularly when it comes from someone who has never been attacked. People are not the same, and neither are their circumstances. Bad things happen to good people all the time (I mean "good" in the broadest sense here, encompassing everything from "innocent" to "morally upright" to "prepared").

Therapy (religion, applied science) worth anything is not about pouring salt in the wounds of the innocent. A really righteous person would not waste time warning young women (or men) to cover their shoulders and then blame any rape on their failing to heed his warning. He would warn them not to be or become tolerant of rapists. If any of them were raped, he would respond with empathy: "I am really sorry that happened to you. Please don't feel that it was in any way your fault. You cannot be held accountable for the fact that some other people are monsters. You are not a monster. I love you." This is what bearing the burden of your fellow men and women looks like. You commiserate with them (rather than looking for a way to make everything awful in their life appear to be somehow their fault, a disaster of their own making).

The real problem we see today in modesty rhetoric, I think, is lack of empathy. People want to help, even conservative religious people, but they fail to notice that blaming the victim really isn't helping (anyone, at all, ever: even if the victim takes the message to heart and begins wearing burkhas and training for combat, that is no guarantee that rape won't happen). I like to imagine that if people could see more clearly into the mind of victims, perhaps if they themselves became victims (not that I wish that for anyone), they would realize their error and stop "helping" (and maybe even apologize for their sins).

I definitely agree that rape is a male issue (a meme I have encountered several times in society). But I think women should talk about it, too (as they do in real life). As one of the really tough, intractable problems in human experience, it is fundamentally a human problem (that we all share, that we all must struggle to solve, even though there is no such thing as a final solution).

The really tough reality I confront here is that we are not all alike. We do not see the same things in the world; even if we do, we do not see them the same way. We experience life differently, as individuals and communities. Our unlikeness means that we cannot approach rape the same way. My approach cannot be yours (or vice versa). My community cannot be yours (or vice versa). The solution I make for myself cannot be the solution the community makes together, and there is no such thing as a single, unified solution that applies to all situations universally. 

When we say that rape is a female issue, we are lying (it seems to me, and I think decent people agree). I am wary of making it a male issue because that too strikes me as a lie (or at best an incomplete truth: I think rape is fundamentally a human problem that we must all confront individually and together, in dialogue with one another).

The problem with making rape a female issue is that this provides criminals with an easy out (when they blame the victim for their bad behavior). The problem with making rape a male issue is that this leads to behavior that many women experience as benevolent sexism (that criminals can incorporate as a front for their bad behavior: "I held the door for you, so you owe me your life!"). The truth is that there are many different fronts we need to attend in the battle against rape (I think). Victims don't need the same therapy as perpetrators. Potential victims don't need the same therapy as actual victims. Men don't need the same approach as women, I would venture to say, though we definitely need to talk to each other about our mutual experiences and expectations (so that we have a reasonable chance of incorporating the best information into whatever solutions we end up devising to deal with the criminals). 

II. I am going to speak for a moment as a man (not a woman), a Westerner (Anglo-Saxon), and a religious person (with a fair amount of experience working in "rough" environments, among human beings whom some modern progressives would occasionally be tempted to execrate as boorish, homophobic, racist, sexist, misogynist trash). Coming from my background, I have to say that I see a real positive utility arising from chivalry. The men among whom I grew up were not a uniform bunch. Some were very educated (like my father); others were not (at all). Some were physical monsters (capable of picking up a small car and/or fighting wild animals in the woods); others were not. Some were decent; others were not. The decent ones, uneducated or not, typically adopted an approach to life that sought to demonstrate respect for others, particularly for those who might feel threatened by them (e.g. when circumstances put them and a weaker person in close proximity: "weaker" need not imply physical inferiority, though that was definitely a recurrent issue; it also indicates inequality in social privilege that recurs in human experience, as in baboon experience). Sometimes, decent people would get the respect signal wrong; they would misjudge the person they wanted to conciliate (e.g. when they opened the door for an angry young woman who didn't want that). Their response would be to take the blowback from that mistake on the chin: "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to offend you. What can I do to make it up? Leave you alone? Offer you something? I am at your service."

Whether rightly or wrongly, these men offered an approach to life that was accessible to me as a young man. I needed a way to relate to others, particularly those I didn't and couldn't really understand (e.g. most women and many men, too). I needed a way to exist without imposing myself (as I have never wanted to do), and they offered it. I think chivalry is historically as good a word as any for their attitude (though I am open to others that might sound less sexist), which I find echoed in old poetry and literature occasionally named (whether with approval or disgust) chivalrous. The worship of woman (which recurs in literature such as I am invoking here) has problems, of course (see my comment above), but the decent men in my life have convinced me that these are more artificial than fundamental (particularly when we notice how they apply also to relationships with "weaker" males). By that I mean that the fundamental attitude of polite deference to others, particularly when circumstances conspire to make one appear powerful, is a good one. The problem with chivalry is that many people (including many stupid men) confuse it with gestures rather than attitude. Instead of seeing the principle of respecting others' autonomy (granting them room to situate themselves comfortably relative to you), they see some arbitrary rule ("a woman's place is to sit around and wait for me to open the door for her").

The decent men I know would never accept shenanigans such as occurred (e.g.) recently in Steubenville. Though very physical, and on occasion even frightening (to me, as a man), they made it clear to me over and over--in quiet conversations in the locker room or at church or some other place where we happened to coincide, and in their interaction with people--that they had a deep sense of their own personal dignity, and the corresponding personal dignity of every individual human being that they interacted with (male, female, big, small, black, white, foreign, domestic, powerful, weak: it did not matter). I saw that other men might talk or make gestures like the really decent ones without being really decent. I noticed that chivalry (respect, whatever one wants to call it) is more than a collection of shallow rules. I also learned that the really decent folk with power (raw physical power or social privilege or whatever) were keenly aware of their own weakness--of the temptation that their position offered for "taking unfair advantage"--and that they took conscious measures to avoid becoming the perpetrators of abuse. They also made a point of noting how their strength inevitably depended on the cooperation of others, how it was not really their own. (Some of them expressed this by attributing it to God, not because they identified God as their own whim, but for the opposite reason: "God" for them meant "not me, the world outside me that I cannot understand but that I choose to confront with dignity.")

As a human, I see that chivalry has limits. I see that it cannot be the solution of every person (or even of every man). But I am not ready to throw it away, myself, as a man. I have found it more useful than not. 

III. To me it seems that there is only one distinction between the sexes (male and female) clear enough to be written into law: men cannot give birth, so final decisions regarding reproduction belong exclusively to women.

Everything else (the more or less imaginary gender preferences and aptitudes whose ebb and flow we observe in contentious scientific literature) should be sorted out extralegally (definitely) and without social coercion (e.g. in the form of referenda promoting one group's fantasy of gender roles at the expense of everyone else). If women don't want to be CEOs (as I don't, though I am not a woman), then they shouldn't have to be; but that should be their decision, not an expectation imposed externally. Society should have no definite gender roles enforced by law (certainly) and should resist the idea of softer enforcement (e.g. via the continuation of work requirements that make it unnecessarily difficult for qualified individuals to live as they find opportunity and desire). 

Raising the Children

Jared Diamond.  The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?  New York: Viking, 2012.  ISBN: 9780670024810.

There are many interesting ideas in this book, but this one struck me as something particularly worth mulling over (from pages 207-208):

States do have military and technological advantages, and advantages of vastly larger populations, over hunter-gatherers.  Throughout recent millennia, those advantages have enabled states to conquer hunter-gatherers, so that the modern world map is now divided completely among states, and few hunter-gatherer groups have survived.  But even though states are much more powerful than hunter-gatherer bands, that doesn't necessarily imply that states have better ways of raising their children.  Some child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherer bands may be ones that we could consider emulating ... I don't recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, high risk of death in childbirth, and letting infants play with knives and get burned by fires.  Some other features of hunter-gatherer childhoods, like the permissiveness of child sex play, feel uncomfortable to many of us, even though it may be hard to demonstrate that they really are harmful to children.  Still other practices are now adopted by some citizens of state societies, but make others uncomfortable--such as having infants sleep in the same bedroom or the same bed as parents, nursing children until age three or four, and avoiding physical punishment of children.

But some other hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices may fit readily into modern state societies.  It's perfectly feasible for us to transport our infants vertically upright and facing forward, rather than horizontally in a pram or vertically upright but facing backwards in a pack.  We could respond quickly and consistently to an infant's crying, practise much more extensive allo-parenting, and have far more physical contact between infants and care-givers.  We could encourage self-invented play of children, rather than discourage it by consistently providing complicated so-called educational toys.  We could arrange for multi-age child playgroups, rather than playgroups consisting of a uniform age cohort.  We could maximize a child's freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.

I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there.  A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children.  We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, video games, and books.  We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children.  These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children [or even ourselves, right?], but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do.  The adolescent identity-crises that plague American teen-agers aren't an issue for hunter-gatherer children.  The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that those admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of a long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting [voila the truly traditional family, which is not about sex or gender or any of that crap, at all], far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child's crying [easier with allo-parenting, i.e. more than two adults per child], and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

The chapter contains many more insights, but these paragraphs represent a pretty good summary.  What strikes me is that my own upbringing resembles a more "hunter-gatherer" one in certain ways.  My parents took me out of school after second grade, so the majority of my social contact occurred in mixed groups (containing adults and children of different ages, with relatively little of my time spent relating exclusively to age-mates).  I always had friends who were significantly older (and eventually younger) than I was, doing things I did not (and/or could not) do, and I did not really experience a "typical" adolescent identity crisis (though I did have one, in graduate school, which is where I finally awoke to the reality of the adult world in modern Western society as it exists outside the rhetoric people use to describe it).  As a result of my own experience, I don't have a finger on the pulse of society: I have never known or cared what "the American people" wants or likes, since in my experience "the American people" is a rhetorical fiction (three words reducing innumerable pluralities to an impossible unity).  I only relate meaningfully to the people I know, who are never going to be "the American people" (or the sinister "public servants" who minister to the needs of this chimaera).  When you come to me with plans for "the American people," I instinctively recoil--perceiving that you want to impose something on my people against their will, and that you feel this will be easier if you can invoke "the American people" as your justification (my mob is the only one that matters, so you had better roll over and do whatever I say).  I don't like the American people--paradoxically, since I embrace many tenets that are historically fundamental to the American social experiment (e.g. the idea that individual human beings have alienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even when they may choose to exert those rights in ways that I would not, personally: until you commit clear criminal damage against another person, I don't mind how you choose to express yourself).

The environment I experienced as a child was necessarily much less rigid than the one I have encountered as an adult: my family lived on the edge of an old Southern rus rustica slowly turning into modern suburbia.  We had an enormous garden.  We spent lots of time together, working on a variety of different things (garden plants, landscaping, schoolwork, cooking, cleaning, installing solar panels, books, bees, church stuff, martial arts).  We didn't "play" much with outsiders: we went to activities where there were agendas we pursued, agendas that might include playing (e.g. at church or the dojo) but were not necessarily defined by it.  We had toys, but the best toys we had (before computers) were those we made ourselves.  While we were active in a religion that many see (with good reason) as patriarchal (in a pretty chauvinist way), we did not discriminate against women ourselves (at least not on purpose: I never thought of myself as qualitatively better than any of the females I interacted with because of my genitalia; what mattered to me was always being a good person, and I knew many women who were really good people, in every sense of the word--morally upstanding, professionally skilled, and socially adept).

Entering the adult world was disruptive and scary for me.  Unlike the hunter-gatherers Diamond writes about, I did not feel that my childhood prepared me for adult reality.  But this was not because my parents pulled me out of school: I know plenty of people whose time in school made them even more vulnerable than I feel.  It was not that I lacked something growing up, really.  I liked my childhood.  I feel like it prepared me to do many good things (e.g. how to work hard, how to get along with many different kinds of people, how to be self-motivated, how to solve problems in real life, how to be comfortable outdoors, how to embrace alternatives to modern conveniences when they become obnoxious or inconvenient).  But it did not prepare me well to fit into the world of age- and class-segregated professionals whose ranks I was supposed to join upon finishing my stint in the university (which I am at last about to do!).  After 10 years bumbling around in pursuit of terminal degrees that might land me remunerative employment (if Zeus pulls my lot from the right jar), I feel like there is a great gap in American culture--a gap between theory and practice--that leaves many people like me dangerously blind and helpless.
  
Hunter-gatherers grow up knowing how they will live.  They learn to hunt and gather as their ancestors did (and do).  I grow up being told that if I am "good" (at something, e.g. solving some kind of abstruse problem on a college entrance exam), then someone will give me a "job" (doing something, that could be anything).  I frequently heard advice like this: "Get an education!  And everything will work out.  God (or somebody else wise and powerful, e.g. the President) will provide."  This was disconcerting, particularly as I came closer and closer to failure in my academic efforts.  I had friends who were smart, worked hard, and failed.  Knowing them pretty well, I could not see their failure as a reflection of shortcomings I did not possess.  I saw my own human weakness, and it seemed a lot like theirs.  I learned to live with a constant sense of my own irredeemable inadequacy.  Where my childhood gave me a way of life that reinforced my security, showing me how I was competent and could provide livelihood (to myself and my family, i.e. my cooperative collective), my adulthood has offered me only alienation: its way of life is to make me subservient to masters I never know, subject to impersonal forces of supply and demand whose operation I cannot see for myself (until the pink slip arrives on my desk and it is too late).  As a child, I felt there were clear expectations of me, and that I was able to see and meet those expectations.  They made sense.  (If you don't tend the squash plants, they will be eaten by bugs, and we will have no squash for dinner.)  As an adult, I am not sure what people want.  (If you get bad reviews from teachers, colleagues, or students, your bosses might reward you or fire you, depending on circumstances too numerous and mutually contradictory for you to make heads or tails of).  I don't know that I meet expectations.  I am pretty sure that much of the time I don't.  I live in constant fear of my little job--fear that I might lose it and become a burden on my family, fear that I might keep it and become a burden on society (which might not need people like me plugging away diligently at whatever little job I happen to be doing).

As I see it, my parents had for themselves clear goals that I could see and support.  I saw and shared their goal to have squash for dinner (or solar panels to supplement the grid, or blueberry bushes to make breakfast more interesting).  My bosses in society (political leaders, religious leaders, academic supervisors) either don't have clear goals (what do the American people want? the Mormon people? academia? professors? students? bosses?) or have goals I am not comfortable with (we want people to serve us against their will with goods and services to which we feel entitled for many reasons that you will find laid out in excruciating, impossible detail in our mission statement).  I don't know what success looks like in the adult world.  Actually, I know exactly what it looks like: it looks just like failure, except that I come out of it triumphant (so far), while not all of my friends and colleagues are so fortunate.  I feel like I am a piece of meat in the adult world, a little pawn being pushed around by bigger men in a game whose stakes I am only barely able to see.  Instead of teaching me how to fend for myself, the way my family tried to do, social institutions have preferred to teach me how to serve them: pay us your tithes and taxes, whenever you can; when for some reason you cannot, remember that this is the fault of our political and religious opponents, whom you should oppose always and at all cost.

I wish I knew how to hunt, how to build, how to survive (and enjoy life) without a job--or continuous access to modern luxuries that many of us have been socialized to regard as essential (e.g. electricity, air conditioning, automotive transportation, grocery stores, hospitals, and my least favorite, "insurance").  Useful education, in my view, would teach me how to tend to my needs at minimal cost (to myself and others), making me a maximally autonomous individual.  But that is not the kind of education I have received at church or school.  Paradoxically, education in an institution does not really set people free: any freedom it offers comes at the expense of some self-sacrifice, some self-effacing contribution to the institution.  This is not an inherently poisonous or awful thing.  I don't mind giving something in exchange for something else.  But it becomes problematic when I give institutions everything I am, and all they can give me in return is empty promises like, "Hope for change!" and "God will provide!"  I didn't need to pay thousands of dollars in tithing, taxes, or tuition for that kind of knowledge, people.  I don't need to put in thousands of man-hours reading books and writing up reports that I then tear to shreds and write over, if the end-result of all my labors is a shrug: "We don't need professional humanists (or buggy-whip artisans) any more.  You should have chosen a better career, one that made you really useful."  Well, if I could see what utility means in this obscene place we call the world (or the market or even, gag, Wall Street), then maybe I might know how to serve it better.  If you could show me something to believe in or work for that weren't a pie-in-the-sky founded on transparent nonsense (or blatant theft, Wall Street), then maybe I could make something you might like (or at least avoid making myself a drag on society in pursuit of something worthless).

I am personally satisfied, at least at the moment, with the fruit of my labors as an adult.  If I am fired tomorrow, I will walk away from my position with some good experiences, and no student debt (thank all the people who founded scholarships for clueless undergrads with a taste for reading ancient Latin and Greek).  I will take whatever skills and aptitudes I have and seek a place to apply them meaningfully.  But I won't count on their translating easily into any of the narratives I heard as a student (narratives in which it was taken for granted that I would become a tenured professor, take out a mortgage on a house, have five kids, and retire to tend roses at the age of 65, providing a regular source of revenue to society in the form of tithes and taxes).  I don't think it is realistic to plot this kind of future, ignoring the increasingly obvious reality that it can always be subverted (when I fail to make tenure; when the education bubble bursts and tenure disappears entirely along with all the "free" money; when there is not time or food enough to keep another kid in my apartment; when the housing market prices us out; when Japanese beetles eat all the roses and the result of my constant worry is premature senility).  I guess what I am saying is that I wish school were more of a training ground for honest-to-goodness entrepreneurs (not just the pretenders who want to talk but cannot act with real responsibility), and less of an assembly-line reducing authentic, expansive human beings ("I contain multitudes") to narrow skill-sets designed to serve the inhuman and inhumane business-needs of corporations like GoldmanSachs, Monsanto, or the US federal government.  I don't really want a job.  I never did.  I want a life.  That is all.  It doesn't have to be easy.  It doesn't have to be expensive (in terms of capital: it will always require hard work, from me most of all, but I like that; I want to work at something I believe in, something that isn't the rat-race I see at the center of adult American life these days).  But it has to be real, and I have to be able to pursue it in ways that are authentic and maximally independent (respecting my individual autonomy: I don't mind being told what to do, but I do mind being expected to offer abject deference when my boss appears manifestly duplicitous or incompetent--as all bosses do sometimes, myself included).   

The Love of a Free Man

Every child has a right to Mother and Father.

Every child has a right to good food, clothing, and medical care.

Every child has a right to opportunities for improving itself (i.e. education).

People are fond of making statements like these, statements that sound nice but carry some very poisonous implications (in my opinion).  The problem with all these rights arises when other people see how I am failing to provide them to my children. 

What happens when my family lacks mother- and father-figures that meet with somebody else's approval? 

What happens when my idea of what constitutes good food, clothing, and medical care conflicts with somebody else's?

What happens when my idea of what constitutes a good education for my child isn't yours?

In the modern world, this is more or less what happens.  A bunch of busybodies see my family and are terribly offended by it (seeing its existence as an attack on theirs).  Responding to the threat posed by my existing with relationships that don't look enough like theirs, these busybodies get together and organize protests.  They make flyers.  They create memes on Facebook.  They make all kinds of holy noises about things like "grassroots politics," "the moral majority," "family values," "progressive values," and whatnot.  They form PACs.  They gather donations.  They write angry letters to their clueless representatives in some august body of government bureaucrats pretending to be responsible lawmakers.  The bureaucrats get ants in their pants and do what they always do--form a committee.  This committee sits down and determines to establish once and for all (1) what a good family looks like (what constitutes an acceptable Mother and Father for all Americans?), (2) what good healthcare looks like (what constitutes an acceptable diet for all Americans?), and (3) what a good education looks like (what constitutes an acceptable education for all Americans?).  The committee is very precise and deliberate.  It must be practical.  It cannot make room for all kinds of silly exceptions to general rules.   It has to lay down the law--for everyone, for all time.

And so what happens when my little family isn't up to snuff?  What happens when the committee isn't impressed by my fathering skills, or my wife's mothering?  What happens when it notes that I don't feed my kids a USDA-approved diet--of poisonous denatured crap marketed by profiteering companies whose deep pockets make them much more interesting and persuasive to bureaucrats than I will ever be?  What happens when the committee doesn't like the education I have chosen to give my kids?  Nobody knows.  But one thing is certain: I will be under scrutiny, and I might lose the right to even have a family, if the committee decides that I am not worthy of such an honor (or deserving of such a responsibility, if you prefer).

Who limits the committee's jurisdiction?  Nobody really.  The bureaucrats answer to their loudest constituents--a bunch of punks who want to micromanage my life to make it look like theirs--and to other bureaucrats, some elected and some not, who tend to think that the answer to all society's problems is letting more of them get a lick in.  ("Just let us handle this one, kid.  We'll take care of your problems!")  Inviting these clowns into your life is easy: getting them out is really hard (no matter what political party they belong to or where they worship on Sundays).  Combine the bureaucrats' inherent love of absolute authority with their busybody constituents' insistent demand that all human relationships be micro-managed to meet their finicky tastes, and the result is a perfect recipe for enslaving me.

I don't give a damn about gay marriage, one way or the other.  If you want one, go for it with my blessing.  If you don't, I would never force it on you.  I am not an angry guy.  But there are ways of making me mad.  I get mad when punks want to bring bureaucrats into my home (into my bedroom, for God's sake) as some kind of absolute authority pronouncing judgement on the worthiness of my personal relationships--"defending" my marriage (or my diet or my education) by forcing me to make it according to the arbitrary determinations of some stupid committee.  I resent this "defense."  I see it as a direct attack on my religious freedom, not the legitimate defense of anyone else's.  (You want religious freedom?  Get the heck out of my house, out of my bedroom, out of my larder, out of my career, and out of my life.  Go and live your own.  You don't have to solemnize my gay marriage, or say only nice things about it.  You don't have to eat steak.  You don't have to go to school where I do.  You don't have to bail my business out when it fails.  You don't have to buy healthcare for me.  Your religious freedom doesn't include the right to make me live the way you do.  I have religious freedom too, punk, so go eat the poison you like and leave me to the ones I prefer.)  

Just so we're clear: I will marry whom I damn well please, of whatever gender or age I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will eat what I damn well please, in whatever quantities I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will send my kids to school where I damn well please, for whatever reason I want.  I don't care if I am not the best qualified person to marry or make dietary choices or educate kids.  I will not sign my marriage, my diet, or my kids over to some committee (not even if the chair of that committee affects the titles or trappings of deity: the real God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike and doesn't give a damn about making results fair--in this life or any other that we know anything definite about).

The committee and the busybodies it represents can cite me statistics all day long, proving (1) how my marriage would be better if I were a rich, white heterosexual with a partner of the opposite gender (so we'll just seize the kids of poor single parents, or force them to marry someone of the appropriate gender and socio-economic class right away if they want to keep their children?); (2) how my diet would be better if I followed USDA guidelines (get your heart-healthy whole grains while they're hot, suckers!); and (3) how my kids would be better off if society took them away from me and gave them to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama (think of all the rights and opportunities my children don't have because I'm not a millionaire!).  I don't care.  Maybe the committee should sterilize me while they're at it.  Heck, they could cut all the fuss and bother and just send me straight to the gas chamber.  (Yes, Godwin, I embrace thee.  This is the Internet, after all.)  What a load of crap.  Not only does it make no sense as an idea (religious freedom means that I have the right to make you my bitch! this is precisely what the founders of our republic wanted, as anyone who reads the Federalist and/or Anti-Federalist papers will agree), it would be a practical disaster (creating far more confusion and suffering than it could ever hope to alleviate).

Love is not a human right. It is a human opportunity (that can never be granted by committee). You should leave people as free as possible to find and express it in whatever circumstances life gives them. Sometimes, those circumstances will make somebody's love look poor and mean and worthless to other people, but that is no reason to take it away, to deny its expression, to replace it with the love of others who are more fortunate, or more aesthetically pleasing to some committee of busybodies too busy interfering with others' lives to manage their own.  (Don't you people have something else to do?  A budget to keep?  Drones to send against Pakistani women and children while you agonize over some American woman's decision to remove a few cells from her uterus?  A beam to remove from your own eye, maybe, before you go poking around for the motes in mine?  Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.  If you are reading old Judaeo-Christian scripture, this is what you are.  If you don't read scripture, then pick up any book you like on Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mao's China, or Lenin's Russia: these are your heroes, the shining beacons of moral purity that you want me to follow to a better future.  Even if you are right, I don't want to come to that future.  I would rather go to the gas chamber.)

In conclusion, if I ever sit on a committee charged to consider the institution of marriage as it exists throughout humanity (in my country or any other), this will be my contribution: "This committee has nothing useful to say when it comes to prescribing the nature of people's personal relationships. As long as they are not killing each other or inflicting criminal damage, people can have whatever personal relationships they want. They can register those relationships legally using any language they please, and they can participate in society however they find opportunity."  See?  I actually believe in religious freedom, unlike the punks (conservative and liberal) who want to make everyone live as they do.  (What would Jesus do?  He would make you live like me, obviously.  What would Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King do?  The same thing!  Everyone must be good the same way!  We're all going to march in lock-step to heaven on earth!  Not with me you're not.  I am never going to board that ship, not matter who or what stands at the helm.)      

Love Is Not My Answer

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37 KJV).

This scripture is an interesting one, about which I have had occasion to think quite a bit over the past few years.  Here are some insights that have come to me, as a result of my personal experience with religion, family, and the community at large. 

The family is a problematic institution, historically. The love that it produces turns easily into hatred. The peace that it cultivates often produces seeds of war. Saints and ascetics have been trying to tame the wild human family for years (castrating it, chaining it, smothering it, attacking it with violent hatred or seducing it with sweet love). It is a myth that religion and the family are peaceful companions on the road to heaven. A nice myth. But reality shows that they are enemies more than friends, and the family doesn't always fight on the right side (any more than religion does: we all fight dirty eventually).

Read in a positive light, I think anti-family Jesus is appealing to people to step outside their tribalism (outside the mafia that is "the family" so often in history), recognizing that the other guy out there has a family just as real and worth preserving as yours. (Hector has a family as real, human, and valuable as the family of Achilles.) I support this kind of reasoning, up to a certain point: there is a limit to the pain I am willing to cause my own family in order to avoid hurting yours.

This limit is part of what holds me back from embracing "pure compassion" as preached in some Buddhist sects, or "the pure love of Christ" as it often appears historically (usually in contexts like the monastery, where the family is something dangerous and suspicious that we would do better to avoid). I don't have an equal love for all beings. I care about the things close to me (that I am conscious of) more. I love my people more than the people I have never met. I don't see this distinction as completely overcomable (and I actually embrace it, within certain limits: I accept that there are and must be limits to the lengths I am willing to go to defend my private love; I see that love is not equal, fair, or nice all the time, and I strive to keep my love as docile as possible).

For me, part of the process of growing up has been sorting out explicitly where I stand vis-a-vis my family, myself, and the community at large. I cannot help loving myself. But I can doubt my self-love as something useful when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my family. But I can doubt my family-love when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my community (less than I love myself or my family--that's simply how I roll). But I can doubt my community-love when it causes me to do others (including myself) obvious, unnecessary harm.  I cannot help loving.  But I can stop loving blindly, reflexively, unconditionally.

I have realized that love is not the answer. It is the question, often, but as an answer it is very dangerous (precisely because it has an historical tendency to turn into vicious, violent hatred: the worst crimes in history are those that come from love, with the worst love being the love for community that loses sight of the individual utterly out of an awfully pure desire to save and exalt the collective). 

If I had to respond to anti-family Jesus, who invites me to follow him, giving up my love for family in order to replace it with love for God, this is what I would say.  "In my experience, the best answer for one love is not another one. A better answer than love is indifference, doubt, hesitation, inaction. 'Do unto others as you would that they did unto you,' you say? Better not to do unto them, say I.  Let them be, and keep out of it until you see an obvious need that you can meet--because somebody needs it, not because you love them. Leave love out of it!  She is too wild and dangerous.  Her remedies are worse than the diseases they pretend to cure."

The more experience I accumulate, the more important it seems to me to notice that there is no such thing as life without death, success without failure, love without hatred.  Another way to put this: the nature of life is to die; the nature of success is to fail; the nature of love is to hate.  I think life makes its own morals, and these are inevitably mortal (causing death as well as survival: we live by making other things die, then prolong the life of organisms around us by dying ourselves) and parochial (favoring one party or parties at the expense of others: my love for life necessarily means that I long for the death of other things, and eventually for my own death).  In brief, I don't see any possibility for a world in which love (or life) is an unqualified good, something to be embraced without any reserve.  I cannot love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, because such love creates a hatred of the Devil that is too powerful.  My unconditional love of God becomes unconditional hatred for all that is Not God, and the danger threatened by this hatred is greater than the safety offered by love, in my experience. 

I do not renounce love, for that is impossible.  But I do renounce unconditional love, reluctantly but firmly.  Such strong brews are not for man (or this man, at any rate: I do not presume to dictate to others; this much love I can offer them!).  

The Family Is Perishing! So What?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the demise of the family.  It is an issue that continues to bother me, especially as demagogues of every political and religious stripe repeatedly invoke it to push through social programs whose positive utility I doubt (even as I see their negative utility clearly in some cases: trying to control the sex lives of your neighbors via legislation causes all kinds of obvious problems, but no clear benefits that I have ever seen).

What are we talking about, in concrete terms, when we invoke the demise of the family?  Many of my friends adopt a position here that looks more or less like this: the population of the First World is dropping precipitately, and we must counteract this by getting married and cranking out more kids, come hell or high water. Assuming that this problem is really a problem and that my procreating wildly would put a dent in it (a rather large assumption), I wonder if it is really good for kids to be born into a society where they exist merely as stop-gaps: "We had you because we need to make sure our genes don't get diluted by weirdos who aren't like us." I am not sure I like this as an approach to procreation. I doubt its utility for the population as a whole (stuff happening in the global community occurs outside of anyone's agenda), and I really doubt its utility for individuals (who might not have the resources for the giant families that God seems to want them to have: do we all have to live like farmers in Bangladesh? is that God's plan? really?).

To me it seems that the family has always been falling apart. Read what prudes wrote about the collapse of morals among the working class in the nineteenth century.  They said all the same kinds of things we hear today about families in the inner city.  Somehow, despite the collapse of the family before I was born, I managed to make it into the world--into a nice family--and do pretty well.  So far, my kids are getting lucky, too, though there are fewer of them: my wife isn't prepared to crank them out the way my mom was (she isn't physically fit for that task, for starters), and I am not rich the way my dad was (for many reasons).  Society now is much different than it was, and no amount of hand-wringing by the Barack Obamas and Rick Santorums of the world is going to change that reality: they can cook up schemes to make me more educated and better housed all day long, but wishing won't make it so.  I know I cannot afford a house, and that paying for more school would be a wasted investment, and I am moving on. Screw the American dream.

I am tired of living in somebody else's world, an old man's world in which you can interview with a company on the spur of the moment, right before you graduate with a BA, and then work there for the next fifty years (the way my grandfather did).  That was great, when it happened.  But life went on.  History happened.  That world is over, finished and done just like the Roman empire (or the Confederate States of America, or the Soviet Union, or the Mormon state of Deseret).  I am tired of being told that my mission in life is to revive it, no matter what the cost to those I hold near and dear.  I am tired of being expected to sacrifice all I have (and all that my kids will ever have: hello crushing debt!) so that old farts can go to fancy malls and pretend that the Great Depression never happened.  Screw that.  Here's a thought: life is not static.  The family participates in life, ergo families aren't static.  This is even true if we make people immortal (since we're Mormons and we like to think this way). The relationship between Jesus and God the Father is not the same since Jesus got nailed to the cross.  You don't just pick up where you left off and pretend that kind of thing never happened.  Life is about moving on (inherently, necessarily).  I will not relate to my kids the same way I do now in twenty years (assuming we last that long in this world).  I don't relate to my parents the same way now as I did when I was five years old.  If eternity is our destiny, then I expect my post-mortal relationship with my family will go on evolving: after an infinity of years (measured by any standard you like, human or divine: but let's say KST, Kolob Standard Time), my family relationships will have shifted infinitely.  My family will be destroyed and rebuilt all the time, essentially--the same way my body is destroyed and rebuilt regularly.  That is what life is, and if there is such a thing as eternal life I know of no other way to conceive it than as an indefinite progression of what already happens.

Immortality is just mortality with no ending.  Once you see that, these arguments about "the destruction of the family" become ridiculous. Is the family always going to be falling apart?  Then why save it?  I just don't have the energy to get worked up every time another demagogue tells me that I have to give him time and money and votes or my family will implode.  It's like they want me to spend all my time standing in a highway, staring down the oncoming traffic and screaming, "Yikes! I'm going to die!"  Eventually, my hormonal pathways are all exhausted and I embrace the inevitable: "Yikes.  I really am going to die (unless I find something better to do than stand in the highway screaming with these crazy people)." You can only spend so much time scared to death, even when the threat is real. Fear isn't static any more than life is.  It comes and goes, rising and falling in dynamic waves whose very nature is to avoid static equilibrium (in spite of all the bloviating and hand-wringing of priests and politicians since the dawn of history).

Here's a thought.  The next time somebody tells me that the family is dying, I am going to smile and walk away.  Then I am going to find my kids and give them a hug.  I am going to find my wife, and give her a kiss.  And then I am going to spend a tender, thoughtful moment embracing the reality that we won't always be the people we are right now.  How grand!  Just think that everything wrong with us right now will not always be wrong.  Time will pass.  Stuff will happen.  Our problems will move on with it.  We will find new things, new successes and new problems.  We will do our best to meet them, and then life will go on (with or without us: it doesn't really matter; we cannot last longer than we last or do better than our best).  When I do reach the end of my life on earth, I don't want to look back on a history of fear. 

I don't want to spend my whole life running from the mortality of my relationships.  (No matter what they are today, they will change in the coming years.  Always.  Dying and being reborn as something new, unless you kill them dead and embalm them to keep them from evolving.)  I don't want to look back and remember only that I was terribly scared of losing everyone and everything that ever mattered to me.  I want to look back and feel grateful for all the good things I had, good things that came to me as gifts--unexpected, unsought, unearned, but no less sweet for all that.  I want to leave my kids with an appreciation for life's fragile, temporary joys rather than an expectation that these last forever, uninterrupted by any change or sorrow.  I don't know whether life is immortal or not.  But if you know how to take the good with the bad--the sweet with the bitter, the way life mixes things all the time--then you will always be fine.  If you last forever, you will know how to endure eternity without wishing for death.  If one death is the end of you, then you will know how to meet it with joy, having made the most of your experiences.  I have made my peace with my life--with my family and myself and the world around me as it exists right now--so the demagogues have nothing to offer me (no matter what they claim to stand for: I don't care).  If they are really interested in defending my family, then they would do best to leave us all alone; when we need their help, we will come asking for it.

On Cultivating Moral Excellence

A friend sent me an article defending "traditional marriage," inspiring me to give voice to some thoughts of my own about cultivating moral excellence.
 

What these defenses always leave out are the negative consequences of the traditions they defend.  Before contraception, and even after it (in some places), one product of the traditional marriage was the unwanted infant (since taboos have never stopped people from having sex, nor have they given women any unique control over their reproductive capacity).  As I see it, what children need in order to survive is adult attention, from people who actually care about them.  In traditional societies, this attention sometimes comes from a group much larger than the nuclear family (which doesn't exist in its current form until inheritance laws bring it into being -- disinheriting bastards to benefit their brothers -- and factory culture takes it up as a useful tool for exploiting poor people, who need to exist to run the machines but cannot be too independent, lest they leave the factory or take it over themselves; the factory owners push nuclear families because they provide workers sufficiently hardy to survive and reproduce, and sufficiently fragile that they can be controlled: they are not autonomous units the way non-Western families often are). 

The Mosuo (in northern China) managed (and continue to manage) to raise perfectly healthy, happy children without anything like traditional marriage (in the Western sense): they had their own traditions, which involved sexual "promiscuity" (from a Western perspective) and a family in which children were raised by aunts and uncles.

Someone has to look after the children.  No one intelligent is denying that (or thinking that we can pass the buck to robots or the nanny state).  But it is not really true that every child in the world would be best off in a heterosexual household defined by traditional Western gender roles.  The traditional Western family is still producing a lot of unwanted babies (much less since the arrival of contraception, but they are still out there, mostly in places that are late in coming to the Western model of civilization, a model that isn't perfect by any means).  Why can't homosexual couples adopt these kids?  Why shouldn't they?  I see no reason.  (If there are reasons, they are the same reasons that would disqualify a heterosexual couple: indigent and/or abusive people should not raise kids, no matter what their sexual orientation, which is actually irrelevant.)

The backbone of moral traditions worth keeping is something more than simply sex ("it's dangerous!") or duration ("we've been doing it this way forever!").  Really useful moral values encourage the creation and duration of solid human relationships.  There is no perfect, Platonic formula for the perfect human relationship (e.g. marriage) -- just as there is no perfect, Platonic formula for the perfect human diet (or the perfect human religion).  Arguments that proceed as though there is such a formula lose me from the get-go, since they invariably come from ignorance (either the defender is unaware of complexities and historical issues that she ignores, or she is assuming that her audience is ignorant and is playing them for fools: in either case, I remain unpersuaded).  I am open to the idea that we need to find ways to get children greater access to meaningful adult attention.  I am not at all convinced that fighting gay marriage is useful in that regard; in fact, I suspect it is counter-productive (hurting children more than helping, not least because it is wasting time and resources that might otherwise go to them instead of to businessmen masquerading as mouthpieces for God).  I am all about increasing human compassion and sharing it more.  I just don't see defenses of traditional marriage doing that.  Attacking someone else's family because it doesn't look like mine doesn't make either family any better, and it certainly doesn't do anything material for kids without families.  It seems like mental masturbation, to me, reminding me of the quote from Thomas Merton:

"They [in this case, defenders of the traditional family] are great promoters of useless work.  They love to organize meetings and banquets and conferences and lectures.  They print circulars, write letters, talk for hours on the telephone in order that they may gather a hundred people together in a large room where they will all fill the air with smoke and make a great deal of noise and roar at one another and clap their hands and stagger home at last patting one another on the back with the assurance that they have all done great things to spread the Kingdom of God" (from New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 83).

This is not to deny that there is any place for such activity (even masturbation has its rightful place in human life), but it hardly belongs at the center of human consciousness.  If it becomes the focus of our efforts, then we have seriously lost our way (in the same way that the compulsive masturbator who never pursues a human relationship becomes detached from the real purpose of sex, which is to draw people together into vibrant, vital relationships that enable and enrich life).  I am all about cultivating those vibrant, vital relationships.  From what I see, they do not require strict adherence to Western gender roles (though some people find those roles very fulfilling: that is perfectly fine!).  That doesn't mean that they exist in total anarchy: issues of integrity, honesty, and (yes) jealousy will always be important in human relationships.  In my mind, these are the things that need work: real defenders of the family cultivate integrity, honesty, and non-possessiveness (the opposite of jealousy).  They care for their relationships the way a farmer looks after his plants, tending them carefully every day: they don't have time to spray pesticides all over their neighbors' crops, in a mistaken attempt to help him out; they are too busy looking after their own.  

When people come to me all riled up about defending marriage, it seems (to me) to show an insecurity on their part -- a fear that their own relationships are inadequate, an idea that they might abandon them suddenly if society didn't threaten them with terrible punishments should they attempt to do so.  They come to me from a position that treats all people as dangerous animals to be corralled and broken (like wild horses).  There is some truth to this position, but (to continue the analogy) the best horse-tamers are those who don't break their animals.  They simply befriend them and show them new ways of being.  Kindness is a better teacher than harsh discipline, here -- I think -- especially when the discipline has no other justification than atavistic fear rooted in ignorance.  (My wife is always pointing this out to me with the kids, when I come down too harshly on them.  If I terrify them every time they do anything I don't like, they don't really learn anything except an atavistic fear of their father, and possibly of certain things whose significance totally escapes them.  I can be firm with them, but that firmness has to be kind, and it really ought to be rational, too.  Otherwise, it hinders their moral development more than it helps -- turning them into robots who attempt to do my will unthinking instead of wise people who see reality and react to it intelligently on their own.) From my perspective, I care about the family too deeply to defend it the way many social conservatives do these days.  This does not make me a stereotypical social liberal, in my view.  

Side note on my strange position between conservatism and liberalism.  It is really funny.  Everyone firmly on one side sees all these nefarious conspiracies on the other: depending on which set of friends I talk with on any given day, I am alternately a card-carrying member of the KKK or the Weathermen -- a reactionary fascist who loves big business or a fire-breathing communist determined to make sure every kindergartner in America knows how to have anal sex.  What nonsense!  There are not really vast grassroots conspiracies in American politics, in my experience: just people at the top exploiting people at the bottom in tried and true ways to maintain their position, throwing the occasional bone to an ideological cause they believe in "because that's the right thing to do" -- as it is, sometimes.  We all muddle through as best we can in typical human fashion, and it isn't all bad or good.  It is what it is.  Making the best of it seems to mean letting go of the illusion that it is all perfectly manageable, that there exists any absolute good that can be pursued without any bad consequences.  Aurea mediocritas is the watchword that makes sense: we live and die well not by extremes, but by "the golden mean" -- an imperfect balance between "good" and "evil" that keeps our relationships intact without making them easy.  As I need a little arsenic to remain alive, so I need a little fascism and communism now and then, but never too much of either.

I care about people.  I seek to understand them.  I want to help them better themselves where I can.  I want to give them room to grow into what it is that they find elevating and inspiring.  I do not seek to impose my own vision of beauty upon them, not because I do not have one or because beauty does not matter to me, but because my kind of beauty is one whose very existence depends on creative freedom.  My culture thrives best outside the hot-house, outside the narrowly controlled environment where every external factor appears regulated and controlled.  I do not need to be defended from the strangeness of my neighbors: I accept that strangeness, as I hope (and ask) that they accept mine.  I look after the beams in my own eye, and let others see to their own motes: if they ask me for help, I will give them whatever I can, and they can use it or not as they see fit, but I cannot presume to legislate for them (any more than I would presume to write music for Bach or compose poetry for Homer: a man's work is sacred to him, in my view, even when it is not very good). The best moral censor in the public arena is the one who contributes the most good, not the one who wages the loudest campaigns against whatever he happens to regard as bad.  Quietly exemplifying the principles one believes in trumps grandstanding in every case, regardless of what those principles happen to be.  (How you talk is much less revealing than how you live, and you live better when you don't spend your whole life thinking about how you talk, as though talking were the most useful aspect of living.  Maybe I should rethink all the energy I spend writing things like this blog, eh?)