[Crossposted at Family Scholars Blog.]
In an anti-abortion/anti-marriage equality essay, Stephen Heaney writes:
With a different understanding of marriage, one might argue that same-sex couples are harmed by the lack of marital status because they believe it is owed to them.
The simple fact that no one in the entire history of humanity has ever thought it even possible for two people of the same sex to marry should give us pause.
Stephen is, of course, exaggerating; obviously, some people in “the entire history of humanity” have thought same-sex marriage possible, or we would not be discussing it now.
The same day I read Stephen’s essay, I also read this, by “Tardiff Mark”, in the comments at Unequally Yoked.
Rather, what needs explanation is why a sizable minority in Europe and North America have, in the late twentieth century, come to think that marriage could be anything else than what it has always and everywhere been. Those pushing for a change tend to explain the situation by saying that their opponents are ignorant bigots. Those pushing for a change, however, differ with the entire human race of earlier ages and just about the entire human race today. The only logical deduction is that those pushing for a change consider themselves to possess a wisdom and insight into marriage greater than just about the entire human race. Is that reasonable?
Mark also exaggerates when he says “what it has always and everywhere been.” Obviously, places like present-day Canada and New York are part of the set “always and everywhere.” (There are other historic examples.)
Mark and Stephen share not only a tendency towards exaggeration, but also the idea that it’s suspicious and probably wrong to have a belief that differs from what most of humanity has believed. The implication — a flat-out claim in Mark’s case — is that those who favor same-sex marriage are arrogant and conceited to think that we might be right when so many have disagreed with us.1
But there are all sorts of things that virtually everyone in our society — including most opponents of same-sex marriage — believe that much or most of humanity, historically, would disagree with. Slavery, for example, was an accepted part of most human societies for thousands of years. The very idea of democracy with universal suffrage — allowing even poor people and women to vote — would have been not just foreign but immoral in the view of most humans in history.
Even if we limit ourselves to marriage, most human cultures have allowed children to marry adults, a practice we find disgusting. War brides — essentially a form of rape — have also been common. Marital rape, repulsive to us, would have been acceptable in most of human society for most of history.
Now let’s talk about homosexuality. Most opponents of same-sex marriage that I’ve spoken to tell me they have absolutely nothing against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. On the contrary; like Rick Santorum, they allude to respected and loved LGB friends, and are at pains to say they do not think of homosexuals as disgusting immoral perverts. If we take same-sex marriage opponents at their words, then, they too are disagreeing with what much (perhaps most) of humanity has believed throughout history.
It’s fairly obvious that much, perhaps most, of humanity has believed some monstrous things throughout history. I don’t believe that modern people are individually any smarter than people born 100 or 1000 years ago. But collectively we may be wiser, because knowledge of morality, like knowledge of science and technology, may accumulate over time.
Think of some of the great discoveries — germs, for instance. That the Earth orbits the sun. Evolution. We also have great inventions, such as architecture, antibiotics, the printing press, the rudder, and democracy. These are bits of technology and knowledge that don’t need to be reinvented every generation; technological wisdom, when things work well, accumulate over time.
Do I have access to printed books and antibiotics because I am personally smarter than humans who lived 1000 years ago? Of course not. I have access to these things because I was lucky to be born in a time, a society, and an economic class that inherited access to these and other accumulated wonders from previous generations.
Similarly, moral wisdom, when things work well, accumulates over time. The realization that homosexuality is not morally disgusting — is in fact, not in any way morally inferior to heterosexuality — is one of the great discoveries of humanity, and one that reduces suffering and increases contentment just as surely as the discovery of a useful new medicine.
Just as the realization that rape is morally intolerable changed our understanding of marriage, the realization that homosexuality is moral is changing our understanding of marriage. That’s the way it should be. Change is not always bad, and clinging thoughtlessly to the often cruel bulk of human history is not a tenable moral position.
- Mark and Stephen are far from alone in this assessment; I’ve seen many opponents of same-sex marriage make similar claims. [↩]
The argument laid forth is so basically an “Appeal from Tradition” fallacy that I would expect it to be what they use in logic class to teach said fallacy. That being said, I wonder if these arguments aren’t just a coy way of reframing the “gays want special rights” argument, painting them, as you said, as arrogant i.e.thinking themselves more special then heterosexuals.
Not only is it a stupid “appeal from tradition” argument, it’s a dishonest one. Only by claiming the right to decide which historical relationship practices qualified for the modern word “marriage” and which ones didn’t, do they get to make this claim at all. Marriage in a church or a registry office (much less to only one person, or one person at a time, or extending only from the onset of reproduction, or any number of the other characteristics “traditionalists” impose) is an outlier in the record.
Damon and Pythias: just friends.
While I admire my ancestors for their achievements, why should we think they were wiser than we are today? People who appeal to tradition and a “simpler time” have rose-tinted glasses and imagine the past to be some sort of wonder-land of tradition, family, good values and stability. A single glance at the past will show it to be anything BUT this! The past was filled with War, Violence, Absolute Monarchs, Crazy Superstitions and very bad ideas! Steven Pinker has a good book coming out this month showing how the past was far more violent than the present in just about every single way.
Why should it be assumed that our ancestors had better lives, or knew more than we did? If anything, their ideas should be looked at with a sceptical eye, since the people of the present are far more knowledgeable than the people of the past. I’m not saying the people of the past were all horribly immoral – often they did the best given the circumstances they were in. They believed in bad ideas, often because they didn’t have the benefit of thousands of years of history showing them which ideas turned out good and which bad. But they were ignorant. Horribly ignorant. Not their fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were.
If the past was really such a nice place, then why have we spent so much effort developing and inventing things to improve our lives? If the ancients and our ancestors had such WONDERFUL societies, then why have human beings been fighting and arguing with each other on the organization of society throughout all of human history!?
The Past is not perfect,
The Present is better, but far from Perfect
And the Future will hopefully be better still, but will probably not be perfect.
Humanity has struggled for ages in this miserable, unhappy world. We’re in a universe that plainly doesn’t care much for us. We have fought so long and so hard for the progress that we’ve achieved, and people want to go BACK to the PAST? Apart from important historical lessons, what does the past have to offer us? Certainly not a way of living, that’s for sure. The Future is where hope lies. Not the past. Never the past.
Well, most societies at most times have permitted polygamy, if we’re taking votes. Many societies still permit it in this year of 2011.
I’m not expressing an opinion about polygamy one way or the other – that’s a whole other topic – but logically, then, Rick Santorum and friends should be advocating that every good man should have several wives. (Or maybe only the rich ones, that’s how it’s usually done.)
The “we’ve always done it this way” argument, like most (or maybe all) arguments against same sex marriage, is insincere. These people aren’t really wedded to the past in all its manifestations (slavery, polygamy, child rape, racial discrimination, inter-tribal warfare), they’re just grasping at straws. Hard to take this kind of thing seriously.
Are you sure?
My impression of a lot of so-called conservatives is that they long for the oppressions of the past, as long as they can be sure that they’ll belong to the oppressor class. Part of it is that they want the (relatively) privileged life, but part is simply that a lot of people get their satisfaction knowing that somebody else is lower on the social ladder than them and that they’ve got people they can kick around with impunity.
People are often willing to support a system that oppresses them as long that system gives them a whole category of people they are free to abuse. That’s how oppression of Black people was managed in the South. The people who did most of the hands-on work of racism were from the classes that the more refined white folks called “trash” or “rednecks.” Male oppression of women is used much the same way.oppressing
@AMM, perhaps the males among the “conservatives” might be in favor of polygamy….but they’d do well to reconsider.
Does anyone remember the famous polygamy Jacob set up for himself in the Bible? Two wives, two servant girls, he’s the absolute boss, good times, huh? So one day Jacob (who was ordinarily no one to trifle with) is coming home from the fields, undoubtedly tired, and one wife meets him on the way. She says, “You’re sleeping with me tonight, I bought you from my sister with some herbs.”
He’s the master of the harem, right? The Sheik. His next line is, “Wait, woman, you dog, it’s my decision who gets my Favors tonight, not yours!”
In the story, however, he very wisely doesn’t say that – these two sisters are about to tear him limb from limb, remember. So without a word, mute as an ox with a ring in his nose, he allows her to lead him off.
Perhaps the fantasies about Old Testament polygamy are more tasty than the reality was. You’ll notice that Old Testament polygamy gets very little discussion in “biblical” moral discussion of this issue. I wonder why not.
I’ve always heard that history is written by the victor – in this case, the victors erased much of the history that included same-sex relationships, open relationships, etc…anything that didn’t fit their mold of “man-woman marriage.” Using that redacted history as support for an argument that it’s never been that way is a bit dishonest (to say the least.)
Besides, supposedly right now there are no gays in Iran I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate, yet many cultures are reported on based on whatever the majority ruling party at the time defines as the norm.
I’ve been assured by a (very conservative) friend in India, born there, lived his whole life there, that there are no gays in India.
Sure.
I think in societies on the brink of extinction that everyone in sight was recruited into the effort to maintain the population, whether they wanted to or not. This makes a certain amount of sense, destructive though it is of individual liberty. (A lot of on-the-brink choices destroy individual liberty, which is itself in a lot of ways a luxury of affluence.)
This doesn’t explain India, which could use fewer people, not more. This attitude of my friend is probably a relic of earlier times.
“Similarly, moral wisdom, when things work well, accumulates over time. The realization that homosexuality is not morally disgusting — is in fact, not in any way morally inferior to heterosexuality — is one of the great discoveries of humanity, and one that reduces suffering and increases contentment just as surely as the discovery of a useful new medicine.”
Some cultures already didn’t think there was anything wrong with homosexuality or feminity in men. Then we invaded them and “taught them” that it was disgusting, so now the Fa’afafine of Samoa (for example) have become thought of as much lower status than before (no more reverence or specialness), and “really gay men” (as opposed to trans women). We also did the same with two-spirits – imposed our own vision of what they were on their culture. Pretty much erasing the original meaning and declaring it to be, in history books, “really gay men who do women’s stuff”.
And if there were words for the equivalent of trans men, we erased them – apparently because there is nothing special enough perceived about men to create a role that is about doing “what men do”. And wikipedia lets me believe that there actually was an equivalent word for a FAAB person who became third gender culturally, in many cultures, before we destroyed them. But no article specifically about it.
Maybe Christian (or Abramic religion) churches is part of the big problem, and that humanity did very well without it in terms of not treating it as morally repugnant?
Both sides are incredibly essentialist. The big problem with the conservative argument is they assume marriage is some sort of immutable form which has always existed. But the specific recognition and group of rights we’re talking about is a recent western development. It’s exactly the same with the gay rights campaigners and homosexuality, which hasn’t been around forever and is also a recent western development. It’s not like this is a clash of two fundamental truths which have always existed, if 18th century church law or 19th century psychiatry had gone a different way you wouldn’t be having this argument.
The most foolish part of the “it’s always been this way” argument is that it ignores the most fundamental human trait: our flexibility.
Quite simply, while there are commonalities between cultures, there is no “human culture.” Some cultures have practiced polygamy, some not; some have demonized homosexuality, some have been neutral, some have celebrated it. Marriage itself has been so many things — from simple temporary pair-bonding to group affairs to strictly patriarchal polygamy to the consummation of a deal between parents to a simple, practical agreement to today’s romantic view — that citing a universal “marriage” is just plain silly.
Culture adapts and changes and, yes, improves as we learn from the past. That is simply what it does. Being human is learning from the mistakes of our forebearers and trying to do better.
One thing our forebearers have screwed up often is marriage. In the past fifty to 100 years, the cultures in the west have managed to shake off most of the worst abuses in marriage, and to change it, slowly, into a partnership between two equals. This is a new, and better, view of marriage than what had preceded it. We extended “equals” belatedly to include people who were of different races, as we realized that those races were, in fact, equal. Now, we’re extending the definition of “equals” to include same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples; in twenty years, this will seem obvious, and in 100, people will find it absurd that we ever believed anything else.
This is how humanity works, when it works. And to pretend we shouldn’t learn, shouldn’t advance, shouldn’t strive to be more than we are, is to spit on those ancestors we claim to respect, who, after all, walked away from their hunting grounds for new and distant horizons, unsure of what tomorrow would bring, but sure that they were not meant simply to do the same things, generation after generation, forever.
I strongly agree that appeals to tradition are fallacious, and with the basic idea of the post–that “moral technology” (cool phrase!) can improve over generations. I strongly disagree, however, with the idea I see implicit in some comments that it necessarily improves over time. This is the same old progress narrative that casts all human history as marching triumphantly toward Western capitalism–i.e., the same narrative that casts some cultures and some human beings as more evolved than others–dressed up in progressive clothing.
Jeff,
This passage makes me really uncomfortable. Is marriage in the US today better than marriage in this same country 150 years ago? Definitely–the end of anti-miscegenation law and coverture are great examples of improvements in moral technology.
But it’s simply not true that “our” ancestors “walked away from their hunting grounds” as starry-eyed visionaries. Many people’s ancestors were massacred, forced off their traditional lands, and/or forced into slavery–very violently torn away from their “hunting grounds” and traditional ways. I do not see how we can say that US culture today–built on the backs of this violence, still thriving on exploitation and very literally destroying the planet–is on the whole more moral than hunter-gatherer cultures. I think your implication that non-industrial cultures are less evolved and stagnant, while non-hunting cultures are an evolving human achievement, is racist.
If my original post gives the impression that I think moral progress over time is inevitable and always in a positive direction, please chalk that up to poor writing on my part.
To clarify, I think that moral improvement happens over generations when things work well, but not all of the time.
I see three issues here.
1. Is it accurate to say that no civilization has recognized “same-sex marriage”? I suspect we could find a grudging agreement that
a) there is some precedent for some social recognition of relationships between people of the same sex, although people will disagree about the extent to which these relationships parallel the nature of marriage today, and
b) examples of social recognition for “same-sex marriages” are vastly outnumbered by examples of social recognition for male/female marriages.
2. What significance should we attach to the historical record? Some people see history teaching that changes in social institutions can trigger unanticipated adverse consequences in the long run. Putative examples include the growth in –
a) divorce,
b) out-of-wedlock birth,
c) single-parent households, and
d) welfare dependency.
3. What significance should we attach to the fact that people are asking about history? It’s tempting to suggest that people look to history to confirm their prejudices, because history is long and includes examples that can be marshaled to support pretty much any view. And, admittedly, some people are beyond the reach of reason, even as they use reason to reach out to others.
Nevertheless, imagine that you’re surrounded by people with disintegrating marriages, out-of-wedlock births, raising kids without dads, and/or seemingly trapped in a cycle of dependency on social welfare programs. And imagine you believe that government programs contributed to this dynamic. How enthusiastic would you be about a new innovation in what you regard to be a fundamental social institution?
Each of the phenomena I note above – divorce, out-of wedlock births, etc. – is a vast topic in itself. Yet I wonder if anyone has assembled a succinct analysis of the role of changes in social policy regarding each of these phenomena. I suspect that these phenomena relate to larger social dynamics, and that changes in public policy were merely the tail on the dog that was pulling the wagon. (I’m skeptical about the power that people ascribe to public policy generally.) But it would be comforting to have a web page to point to which explains that, no, changes in public policy were not really the causal variable here. Or no, the increase in the divorce rate does not really cause social problems; it merely reflects social problems that previously existed. Or some other conclusion to placate concerns that changing laws would trigger catastrophic unanticipated consequences.
Because I haven’t undertaken such a project, I tend to be sympathetic to people who express fears about unanticipated consequences arising from changes in social institutions.
“b) examples of social recognition for “same-sex marriages” are vastly outnumbered by examples of social recognition for male/female marriages.”
The proportion of same-sex attracted people is less than other-sex attracted people, of course they will be outnumbered. The fact that this recognition is rather new and in fewer countries than those who only recognize other-sex marriages, is only an artifact of the recent legal recognition of their status.
“Some people see history teaching that changes in social institutions can trigger unanticipated adverse consequences in the long run. Putative examples include the growth in –
a) divorce,
b) out-of-wedlock birth,”
1) Preventing marriage in order to prevent potential divorce is about as sensible as preventing car driving (for everyone) to prevent potential accidents.
2) Out of wedlock birth, while a problem in some states in regards to legal parenthood (especially that of the father), is a religious argument first and foremost (and as such, I advocate that marriage status should not matter for parenthood rights). No one cares if the child comes from a not-married family, only churches seem to make any noise about it (and only in the US, too).