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.

Ethics 101: Civil Society

A rant about the modern rage to make us all practice the same religion, as though such a thing were possible and/or good.

There is no such thing as "general moral decline" affecting an entire society of people uniformly.  I don't change my standards for what constitutes rape because some stupid yahoos in Steubenville reveal themselves to be criminals.  I don't change my standards for what constitutes pleasant sexual relations because my neighbor is into BDSM.  I don't decide to like Gatorade because some celebrity appears on TV telling me to.

Forget society. Forget all the morons who think they can make me like stuff merely by playing commercials and offering soundbytes. Forget marketing. If you have to tell me why I need something over and over while showing me a bunch of beautiful people (and/or celebrities), then I almost certainly neither need nor want what you're shilling. (Reverse psychology: seeing commercials often makes me hate what I see advertised, such that I become more likely to avoid it.)

Forget the ridiculous way of thinking that associates random decisions people make in utterly ludicrous ways: "My daughter decided to smoke: obviously this is because gay people are trying to get married! Heterosexuals in Steubenville cannot help getting horny and raping people: the homosexuals strike again!"  If there is a devil out there playing games with people's heads, then he is most certainly playing with yours as you spew this kind of nonsense.  For goodness' sake.  Grow up and take some responsibility for yourselves. Don't mind what all the people around you are doing. They are always doing dumb stuff (i.e. stuff that would be dumb if you did it).  Read history.  The best way to save the world is to stop trying so hard to make it sin the way you do.  We don't all sin the same way.  We cannot all like or dislike the same things.  We should not all want or avoid the same things.

People are always going to like and dislike different things, sometimes with really good reason. Eating wheat is a cardinal sin for my sister (who has full-blown Celiac disease: she was dying in her teens because she ate my mom's homemade bread), but not for me. The correct response to reality (bread kills my sister, not me) is not to ban bread (it is evil for my sister! people who make it are murderers!), but to make other options free to those who cannot stomach it (for whatever reason: if you eat bread and your stomach hurts really bad and you poop blood, then you shouldn't need doctor's orders to pass on the breadbasket). Be whatever you are, and ignore anyone who isn't OK with that.  You have the right to think my sister is silly for avoiding bread.  You do not have the right to punish her for avoiding it.

We do not all need to have the same habits.  We do not all need to recognize the same sins or deal with them the same way.  My sister's ability to make rice bread does not threaten my mom's ability to make wheat bread. Homosexual marriages do not threaten my heterosexual one.  Civil society is not about making me and my sister eat the same things (as though there existed some kind of food that was not also poison).  It is not about making homosexuals and heterosexuals (or anyone else) have the same kind of marriage.  It is not about making us all like the same stuff (as we never have and never will).

Everyone has different needs.  Everyone has different tastes.  Everyone does things harmless to himself that would be harmful if other people did them (as you know if you have ever helped a teen learn how to drive, or shoot a gun, or do anything at all, really).  My life is never going to be a prescription for other people's, and theirs is never going to be a prescription for me. I don't like what others like.  I don't need what they need.  I don't need or want their approval every time I decide to order steak for myself when they would rather have something else.  The restaurant of life has many options on the menu: let other people take whatever they want, and I will do the same. We can share space and be nice without liking the same stuff.

Some Thoughts on True Love

I had another thought about wanting to change people this morning. The awful truth, as I see it, is that even when this succeeds (and you manage to change your partner to be closer to some ideal you value and s/he doesn't), the result is bad. You become more set in your ways, more attached to unrealistic fantasies (not just those that relate to your spouse). You become more fragile, more liable to be upset when life upsets your fairytale applecart. Victory in this context is actually worse than defeat.

Looking at my own close relationships, I see great value in commitment.  There is particularly great potential for person growth in a long-term romantic relationship ("marriage"): if you approach marriage honestly, with humility and openness (starting well before the ceremony) and commitment (especially afterward), it can teach you so much about yourself (individually) and human nature (generally).  You learn to adjust your expectations to match reality.  You become more open to other people (not just your spouse: being intimate with another person makes it easier to relate to non-intimates, I think, in that it teaches you to read and anticipate human nature in new ways).  You "grow up" in ways that you could never anticipate or mimic (as far as I can see) in a life-path without that kind of intimacy. Such has been my experience.

But I also see (in the lives of some unfortunate people around me) the opposite as well. Some people retreat into marriage instead of advancing into it boldly. They "settle" for one another passively rather than choosing each other for better or worse. And their marriage makes them weaker, less open (to each other and the outside world), less capable (of anticipating and providing for their own needs, let alone anyone else's). They become nags and cheats--small, mean souls fighting constantly over little stuff that real people would scorn as beneath their notice. They look back fondly on the puppy love of their youth as though it were some great thing, some immense purity that they lost. They try over and over to recapture it instead of moving on to the higher ground, the love beyond romance which many of them don't even know exists. 

The naive simply don't see that intimacy is more than lust or romance. The rush of hormones behind puppy love is great, of course, but to get the really good stuff from life's loving-cup you have to drain it to the dregs--all the way to the last, bitterest drop. That is when you see that true love is as bitter as it is sweet, and you realize that there is no sweetness you would trade for such exquisite bitterness. A really good lover isn't just someone you were once infatuated with. A really good lover is someone you would follow into heaven or hell without counting the difference--and you prove this to yourself when she opens that door, either one of them, and you march blithely in.  No second thoughts.  No regrets.  Total commitment.

I know too many people willing to make their spouses suffer, and not enough willing to suffer joyfully with their spouses (though this latter category contains a lot more people than the most cynical among us might expect: for some reason, the real lovers never get much publicity; if you rely on Hollywood and Disney for your romantic education, you might not even know that they exist).

Many young people think that love is about getting what you want and giving whatever comes naturally. Marriage done right teaches us to educate our desires (so that we don't want impossible things) and give gifts so wonderful we never even conceived that they could exist. Marriage done right shows us that we all want to give more than to receive (anyone can take stuff, but it takes a real person to give something worth having), and that our capacity for giving is much greater than we ever dreamed (much too great for the kind of meanness that comes out as spite or jealousy or any covetous lust for control: we want to give each other little moments in heaven, freely and with no obligation, not squabble over whose turn it is to do the laundry or what kind of paper towels to buy with whose money). But it requires absolute integrity (from both participants) in order to work. Like any really great thing, it is not accomplished on an adolescent whim (not even when a prophet of God invokes the sealing power: that power is just a feeble rhetorical sign-post that means nothing without our blood, sweat, and tears).

Enlightened Hedonism?

Some friends recently decided to end their marriage (amicably), after discussing (in a public forum) the paradox of choice (the more choices we have, the more dissatisfied we become with any single choice).  One of my friends remarked that for him this meant that marriage contracts might be better made for brief periods (e.g. five years) rather than for one's entire life.  This discussion and the events around it got me thinking about my own relationships, and what holds them (and me) together.

I see the paradox of choice, and I think it is part of human nature.  As with other aspects of human nature, it is better dealt with than ignored.  (To ignore it is to invite it to find you unprepared, leading you to make decisions that you are likely to regret later, with the benefit of hindsight.  Personally, I like to know my enemies, including the one who dwells between my ears, and keep them close when I cannot avoid them entirely.)

To make a choice is necessarily to make oneself vulnerable (to disillusionment, disappointment, unexpected consequences, etc.), especially when the choice involves something truly momentous (as the choice to get married undoubtedly does).  But not choosing is also weak, since choices are a necessary part of life (much as intimacy is: as bad as a bad marriage is, no marriage at all might be just as bad).  How do we allow choice without letting it take us places where we do not want to go?  Historically, people create narratives that allow them to "have their cake and eat it too" -- narratives that promise future choices (maybe an eternity of them) in return for making a limiting choice here and now.  Oftentimes, these narratives seek to be prescriptive, telling people what choices are acceptable (e.g. monogamous heterosexual marriage) and what choices are not (e.g. homosexual marriage, serial monogamy facilitated by divorce, polygamy, polyamory).  These prescriptions can be helpful for folks, for reasons that I will get to in a moment, but as a result of my personal experience, I am hesitant to recommend any one of them to the entire human race as the only prescription for happiness.  To me, it seems that human happiness, generally speaking, is incoherent: different people have different ideas about happiness, such that there is no one way of life (or marriage) that guarantees it generally (for all that many different ways work with more or less success for larger or smaller groups of people: I would be miserable in a homosexual marriage, but a homosexual person wouldn't; the fact that there are more people like me and less like the homosexual does not mean that his experience is somehow "wrong" or invalid, or that he should not have the opportunity to marry his way, in my view).

Given this laissez-faire attitude toward human morality on my part, many friends wonder where my personal moral stability comes from.  How do I avoid giving in to the temptation to drop whatever I may have now and pursue more attractive options elsewhere?  Why don't I drop my allegiance to my wife the same way I dropped my allegiance to LDS church leaders?  (The short answer is that I have yet to catch her lying to me brazenly about matters of vital interest to me, but that is really just incidental.  There is a serious question here, one that deserves more than a glib answer, however en pointe.)

Confronting the collapse of my faith in men whose character supplied my (legitimate) need for moral authority as teenager was rather frightening.  As a kid, I made some moral choices because God (in the form of prophets ancient or modern) told me to, and that was the ultimate answer to all questions (the decision beyond which there was no appeal).  History shows that this kind of thinking has deep roots, with oaths before God featuring among the earliest binding contracts known to (civilized) man.  What happens when the God guaranteeing all these oaths is revealed to be a rhetorical fiction, a puppet played from the inside by some old duffers who wear the mantle of divinity with a good deal of humanity?  What happens when you realize that there is no man in the sky watching every move you make?  (Or as Plato would have Socrates ask in the Republic: what happens when you wear the ring of Gyges, a ring that makes you utterly invisible, allowing you to do anything you please without normal untoward consequences?)  In the narrative I grew up with, this event was a terrible disaster: without God as the real ground for morality, human life becomes "evil" animal hedonism.  (Remember the scripture in Mosiah 3:7, where "the natural man is an enemy to God, and is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."  The good man must give himself up to the absolute moral authority of God or lose his goodness.)  My own descent into hedonism has not (yet) borne this narrative out, but I am constantly confronting it (in the assumptions religious believers make about me when I am indifferent toward theism, and/or in the stories I hear of and see in the lives of people around me who do value things differently as atheists than they did as religious believers).  In concrete terms, people wonder why I don't leave my wife (for example) or (at least) treat my relationship with her as casually as I do my relationship with (say) the LDS church.  Where does my moral foundation lie?  Why are promises sacred?  Are there any points at which a promise becomes non-binding, for me?  Where are those points?

It is fitting that I should answer these questions with a disquisition on pleasure, since pleasure and pain are really the heart of what they inquire about (how much pleasure are you willing to pass up to keep a promise? how much pain will you endure before breaking a promise?).  Here it is very useful to bring up the Buddhist teaching (confirmed by my personal experience) that pleasure and pain are really the same thing, a fleeting impression on the human psyche that brings mixed consequences (causing us to notice factors in our environment differently, with the result that we alter our behavior in a way loosely calculated to improve the chance that our genes survive, to add a modern biological garnish to the ancient dictum).  If I know that pleasure is pain, then I instinctively recoil from it at least as much as I spring toward it.  I love it and court it, as I must, but I also aim to keep it at a safe distance.  Rather than embrace it uncritically, drinking deep every time nature (or God or whatever is pulling the strings that make the universe dance) proffers the cup, I hang back, stealing in for a drink only when I think it is safe (judging from my own and others' experiences, in that order: my experience of myself trumps what other people tell me about themselves).  How does this kind of thinking look in real life?  How do I use it in real situations?  Let's see.

(1) How much pleasure am I willing to pass up to keep a promise?  Big pleasures come with big consequences.  Intimate relationships require time and commitment to work in a way that is sustainable and stable (as I like my pleasures to be).  When I enter into an intimate relationship with someone, a really pleasurable (and pleasant) relationship like marriage, I invest in that person.  I spend time with that person.  I talk to that person.  I think with that person.  I let that person shop for me, work for me, sign for me, even think for me (in situations where that is required).  Why would I throw that investment away merely because somebody else walks by one day with a cute rear-end (or whatever)?  That would not make sense.  It would not even be pleasurable (from my perspective: the pleasure of chasing a new romantic interest pales in comparison with the pain of losing my wife, to whom I have already devoted so much time and interest).

In my mind, the paradox of choice means that modern life is uniquely cruel to people who obsess over making the right choices (thinking that they have to find the right brand of shoes among 500, or the perfect wife or romantic partner among the population of co-eds at the local university or church or wherever).  Much of the time, the criteria we come up with to facilitate choice in situations of super-abundance are worse than useless.  We become obsessed with noise and ignore the really important information (the information that is actually relevant to our personal sense of pleasure).  Instead of taking five minutes to decide what shoes we need, going to the store, and buying those shoes, we walk into the store undecided, try on 30 pairs, buy 5, and then go home to wonder over and over again whether we should trade some of them in and/or buy some of the ones we rejected.  Instead of pursuing with gusto the romantic adventures that life thrusts upon us, we move obsessively from one partner to another, chasing our illusions of "the perfect mate" from one "failed" relationship to the next (and so on until we become Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh: these are not terrible men, but I would not want to marry them--in some bizarre world where I am a heterosexual woman). In marriage, from my perspective, the noise is other people (who seem better than your spouse when you don’t know them as well). The information that really matters is how your spouse is (am I abused? am I abusive? is there something that I really need that I cannot get, something that my spouse really needs that I cannot give?).  If my marriage became impossibly bland--empty, passionless, etc.--then I would consider ending it (as much for my wife's good/pleasure as for mine: why should she be trapped in a relationship that is merely a shell of what it should be, what it once was?).  But I would never end my marriage on a whim (merely because a lady with nice parts flirted with me).  That would be decidedly unpleasant (I think).

There is something really profound lurking here, a truth that is applicable all along the depth and breadth of human experience (my own and that of other people too, as near as I can tell).  Democritus expressed this truth by saying that “the sweetest pleasures are the rarest.” While the extreme version of this is untrue, there is something solid to the idea of limiting one’s exposure to certain pleasures more than one might instinctively want to. Take fasting for example. I stopped eating three square meals a day, and suddenly maintaining a healthy weight became effortless (calorie-restriction does still work, but it feels so much easier when instead of eating three small meals every day, I get to eat one or two huge ones). Consider sex. Every now and then, my wife and I are separated for environmental reasons (she has a period, I am sick, the kids are obnoxious), and whenever this happens, our next amorous encounter registers off the charts (not that we have a bad sex life meantime, but the difference between sated-sex and famine-sex is amazing). Work is the same. I get more done, I am more creative in the office, and my physical work-outs are much more productive, when I make the effort to stay away and avoid “punching the clock” just to convince myself that I am doing something. I think these empirical realities (in my life) are important, since they represent a reality that many modern men overlook entirely (coming from a background that takes scarcity for granted and works to cultivate abundance, which was foreign and desirable to my grandfathers as it is not to me).

This leads me to an interesting dichotomy between my ideas of (i) general human happiness and (ii) particular human happiness. (i) Generally speaking, I think human happiness is better served when there are many options available for people to try.  Marry a woman (or several).  Marry a man.  Marry your dog.  The market should be as free as possible. (ii) Speaking particularly, however, I think happiness is all about eliminating options.  People generally should be maximally free to pursue their own happiness; that said, pursuing one's own happiness requires cultivating one's own garden without being too concerned about anybody else's.  Pick the method(s) that work for you, and ignore everything else.  When I examine my personal morality carefully, I am all about taking away my own choices. In a culture defined by glut, I deliberately cultivate famine (spending hours without food, days without sex, and as much time as possible not working). I do this because I find that constant glut (which my environment recommends reflexively) is not pleasant: who wants to binge all the time on endless food, sex, or work?   Not me.  Confronting my morality with complete honesty (as I wear the ring of Gyges) has taught me this lesson about myself.

(2) How much pain will I endure before breaking a promise?  Periodically, people talk about certain emotions being unlimited, invoking words like "divine love" or "compassion" or "grace" to point to the idea that the universe always gives you another chance (even if that comes only in another life).  While I see some utility in this idea, I confess I am not really convinced.  If you rape me, I might forgive you, but I am never going to put myself deliberately in your company again.  I am not going to make myself vulnerable (no matter what some god says).  Our relationship is (for this life at least) permanently altered.  If you lie to me about things that are vitally important to me, then I am never going to trust you with my dearest secrets.  Not because I don't love you.  Not because I don't believe that you might still have some good qualities.  Not because I think you should die horribly in some tragic accident.  I just don't have the stomach for making myself deliberately vulnerable to somebody I have good reason not to trust.  I don't set myself up to fail.  If a relationship is not working, then I think the understanding on which that relationship exists needs to be re-examined, and it may end up needing to change.  That is acceptable.  Change happens.

My wife has discussed behavior that might lead her to end our relationship.  If I were abusive or sexually promiscuous (chasing skirts like better men before me), then she would step out of the marriage without any guilt.  I think this is wise.  Cultivating a good marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most pleasant, in my experience), and ditching a bad marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most unpleasant, in my vicarious experience).  The reality that the healthiness of my relationships depends on constant care becomes very obvious in this paradigm, which will not let me off the hook with the specious plea: "Well, you signed up for this crap when you took me at the altar, so take it--the good along with the bad!"  Instead of settling down to this sort of complacency, I am expected to court my wife every day, reminding her that I am really a pleasant person to have around.  She could end our involvement at any moment, and my awareness of that fact keeps me from taking her utterly for granted.

In summary, I have found that hedonism is not altogether dehumanizing (in the bad sense).  Now that I look back, it seems to me that I was always a hedonist, even when I was religious.  The difference between me as I am and me as I was is that I now understand my relationship to pleasure much better.  I see how I react to pleasure, how I value it, and I have learned to minimize the sorts of behavior associated with it that tend to bring unpleasant consequences (as I perceive them: others are welcome to decide differently, provided that they do not dictate to me unilaterally from their experience just as I would never presume to dictate to them).  This does not mean that I value pleasure perfectly now, that I never make mistakes, but I do like to think (and it seems true) that I learn better from my mistakes now than I did five years ago.  One benefit that comes from partaking of the forbidden fruit is that you really do become wise. 

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?)