Category: Sexualia

Lizard brains

At its most fundamental level, same-sex marriage is not about what we think about homosexuality. It is about what we think about marriage.

(Maggie Gallagher)

I listened Friday evening to Jonathan Rausch’s and David Blankenhorn’s discussion on The Future of Marriage, facilitated by Krista Tippett, on On Being‘s “Civil Conversations Project.” The participants are two of the brightest, most thoughtful and civil, contestants in the struggles we’ve been undergoing over what we think about marriage, and they’ve “achieved disagreement” in large part because they share many counter-cultural convictions about marriage.

Rausch, a gay man who lectures straights about how they’ve screwed up marriage (and what they need to do to fix it), summarizes part of his view:

When I talk to young people on college campuses, they all think marriage is, you know, it’s a thing two people do and, if they need a piece of paper from the state, that’s just a convenience. I tell them, no, no, no, no. Maybe you have to be gay to see this, what it’s like to be excluded from a community and all the tools that go with this, but this is an institution.

This is a commitment that two people make not just with either other, but with their community. And that commitment is to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness to health, till death do we part. That’s a promise you as a couple are giving to care for each other and your children forever to your whole community and the community has a stake in it. And that’s what we gay people want. We want to be married in the eyes of community in that web of family.

Blankenhorn, formerly an opponent of same-sex marriage (arising from his  conviction, before same-sex marriage was a hot issue, that children need their fathers), announced a change of tactic, if not of heart, this summer, for reasons he explained in a New York Times Op-Ed.

The whole point of the On Being series is civility in disagreement, of course, but I was surprised when Blankenhorn recounted “losing it” the first time he engaged with Rausch publicly:

Mr. Blankenhorn: … I was a fatherhood nut and then I was a marriage nut and we weren’t giving a single thought to gay anything. This was just what we were doing, trying to strengthen this institution that protected children. So when the gay marriage issue came along, I first tried to avoid it. I spent years not trying to talk about it because I knew it was divisive and I didn’t want to — it seemed like a side issue. I didn’t take it that seriously. Eventually, in the early 2000s, I got drawn into it a bit, got all tangled up when I met Jonathan because he invited me to come talk when his book came out in 2005…

Mr. Rauch: 2004.

Mr. Blankenhorn: 2004. He invited me to come give a talk. We didn’t know each other, you know. I had met him. I read the book and I thought I was going to give a rational calm presentation, but I found myself just being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things about him and the book and accused him of bad faith and cited all these radical gay writers and said that this is what his real agenda was. It was an un — uh, it was not by best day.

[laughter]

Mr. Blankenhorn: But, I…

Ms.Tippett: Why do you think it works that emotion in you?

Mr. Blankenhorn: I don’t know. I still don’t know.

Ms.Tippett: I haven’t read anything about that.

Mr. Blankenhorn: It just kind of poured out. I called him the next day. I said I was sorry. I said I really regret having acted this way. He was like, oh, OK.

Far too much of our “debate” over this issue consists of “being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things” about the other side.

I won’t try to rehash the bad, hateful arguments, or summarize the good, thoughtful ones – that’s why I’ve provided some links (though they’re skewed toward the pro-SSM side, which is not my own; Tippett and her staff perhaps had trouble finding good arguments on the anti-SSM side now that Blankenhorn has left it) – nor will I declare which side I think more prone to saying ugly things.

Rausch and Blankenhorn both acknowledge that SSM is a profound change:

It took me a long time to get my mind around the notion that in the straight world this is not, you know, an obvious thing. This is a huge shift in the way they’re thinking about marriage for 3,000 years and I think we need to respect that. I think societies have to ingest change at a rate they can sustain. That was something I had to learn.

(Rausch) As Tippett quipped in a different podcast recently, “as human beings, one of the things we’re learning from science, change is stressful and it sends us back to our lizard brains, right?”

But there’s good change and there’s bad change. Just as paranoiac can have real enemies, so a stressful change can be truly bad, not just lizard-brain-stressful bad. A huge shift in the way we think about marriage after 3,000 years is an eminently debatable subject. That something should go from unthinkable to almost axiomatic in 50 years ought to give us pause, and I intend to continue saying and writing things to incite pauses.

But I intend to say them civilly –as by and large I think I’ve done so far.

Before I had gay friends who were comfortable enough to be “out” to me, I tried empathically to enter into what it might feel like to have come to terms with one’s same-sex attraction in a society where, it appears, you and those like you have the political and social momentum. Blankenhorn describes the process I went through:

There’s the intellectual, you know, you think, you read, you know, you sit in your study and you try to think about the correct view … But, I — you know, you build up a kind of a barriers of belief in theory and it keeps the other people out, and so you talk about them. You have theories about them. You can explain their lives to them, but you never really talk to them and see it from their point of view.

Since then, I’ve had more chance to “see it from their point of view,” and I don’t think my prior empathic effort to enter into their world led me far astray.

Three good aspirations in the debate would be:

  1. to stay away consciously from the lizard brain;
  2. to consciously lower barriers and try find thoughtful opponents to share their point of view (someone who shares your religious faith and trusts you enough to come out would be especially good; I’m not likely to learn much from someone who thinks sex has no more meaning than a handshake or hug); and
  3. so to debate this and other issues that if “the little light goes on” some day so that you change your mind, you won’t have to apologize for having been abusive or arguing in bad faith.

Evangelicals & Contraception

[I’ve encountered a few things worth digging into a bit, and have been left with too little time for collections. I’ve not foresworn them, though.]

The Spring 2012 Human Life Review opens with 21st-Century Evangelicals Revisit Contraception and Abortion.

You need to realize that the Review is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. That’s just a fact. The Founder was Catholic, his Catholic family carries on the work, most contributors are Catholic (the regulars on the masthead are 4 Catholics, 1 Orthodox, 1 Episcopalian, and 1 Jewish atheist) – and frankly, almost all of the really rigorous prolife thought has been Catholic during my lifetime at least. Thank God for them.

Add that Evangelicalism is decentralized in the extreme, and changes, chameleon-like, to remain “relevant” and I was skeptical that the piece could say much. But it’s one of the great marketing coups of our time that Evangelicals think they’re united, and have largely succeeded in getting people to identify their peculiar sensibility as “Christianity” rather than as a subset or sect. And since there are a lot of folks with that sensibility, if you want a political movement, it will generally be good to enlist them.

I was right about the article not measuring up:

While the evidence is largely anecdotal, there appears to have been an increase over the past two decades in the number of Evangelicals who are reconsidering their support of contraception as they seek to develop a more consistent pro-life witness.

“Anecdotal” is a near necessity, I suppose, as it would be hard to do a study of Evangelicals that wasn’t methodologically dubious.

But the article did pull up some interesting history, parts of which have delighted the “progressives” who aren’t religiously illiterate (think Slacktivist, for instance). I’m going to summarize, with my own personal observations italicized):

  • The Reformers joined Rome (as far back as Augustine, pre-schism but proto-western in his thought) in their condemnation of Onanism – which is about the best one can do at gauging what their view of contraception would have been.
  • Evangelicals (at least as the author views them – consider that caveat as applying to each subsequent occurrence of the term and its cognates) were among the earliest and fiercest opponents of birth control in the late 19th Century. This came as news to me.
  • Anthony Comstock was Evangelical, not Catholic. This, too, came as news to me.
  • Opposition to birth control was generally seen as a reformist and heroic cause.
  • After Comstock’s death, his nemesis Margaret Sanger became ascendant, and the Episcopalians broke millennia of Christian tradition in 1930 by a timid endorsement of contraception for those who can’t remain abstinent, so long as they adhere to Christian principles – principles that the endorsement itself was ambiguating. Soon, “most Protestant groups came to accept the use of modern contraceptives as a matter of Biblically allowable freedom of conscience” (Wikipedia).
  • After World War II, worries about overpopulation became pandemic.
  • By 1950, arch-fundamentalist Dr. Bob Jones Sr., of Bob Jones University, was demanding that newlywed aspiring dorm parents promise to practice birth control if they got the position.
  • By 1973, many Evangelicals viewed Roe v. Wade as a blow for religious liberty. The Southern Baptist Convention was particularly equivocal. (I was then unequivocally Evangelical, and was vaguely uneasy about pro-abortion clergy – none of them Evangelical, in my experience – playing Harriet Tubman to “enslaved” pregnant women. But I was not activated until 1980.)
  • Beginning in late 1979 or so, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop enlisted Evangelicals in the anti-abortion cause with their film and book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? I was one of those enlisted.
  • Evangelicals, however, were still very friendly to contraception.
  • By hanging out with Catholic pro-lifers, some Evangelicals anecdotally are reconsidering contraception, and one of the niche Evangelical markets is “the Quiverfull movement.” But the leaders he cites in support (all three listed here, with a fourth) are generally fringe figures in Evangelicalism – serious Calvinists, in my experience, aren’t entirely certain whether they remain “Evangelical.” 

I have always, since my earliest days of enlistment in the pro-life cause, thought the Bible case against abortion, if all we had was Bible, was one that Evangelicals would never buy if an argument of equal strength told them to do something they found uncongenial. But then, with Bible only, I doubt that Evangelicals would believe in the Holy Trinity or have a remotely correct Christology. They owe a very large unacknowledged debt to the Church that preceded them, and that they typically think is quite corrupt and paganized. Sigh.

But the Church has always opposed abortion, and I’ve come to appreciate the strength of theological arguments (in addition to things I learned in biology class) that are not narrowly Biblical.

In theory, at least, Evangelicals don’t like theological arguments of that sort, so I don’t know how much staying power their renewed opposition to contraception and abortion will show.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The Benedict Option

Rod Dreher got the closing chapter in The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, with Wendell Berry: A Latter-Day St. Benedict.

Excerpts and a few comments:

There is among Republicans little if any appreciation of how the party’s enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism—and the idea that economic growth is the raison d’être of our common existence—undermines the communal and social bonds necessary to support the traditional family-centered morality Republicans claim to esteem.

…

Conservatives, [Berry] writes, exalt the family as a sort of “public icon” but will not stand against economic practices that undermine the family’s structure and purpose. Liberals exalt sexual emancipation and the abrogation of established traditions governing sexual relations but refuse to recognize how their libertine ethic undermines the community they claim to support. Neither side can offer a credible solution to the current crisis because neither side has a credible answer to the question once posed by Berry: “What are people for?”

This is true and is a terrible Republican “conservative” blind spot. If you’re incredulous at the suggestion that consumer capitalism undermines families, you need take the blinders off and get out more. But the Democrat blind spot is never far from my mind, either, and makes me a bit cynical about Gubernatorial candidate John Gregg’s otherwise fetching “we take care of our own” TV ads.

We are a people given over to autonomous individualism. Mainstream liberals are more sympathetic to sexual autonomy; mainstream conservatives to economic autonomy. The ferocious contempt partisans of both sides have for each other obscures their fundamental philosophical agreement.  As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has said, all modern political arguments come down to disputes “between conservative liberals, liberal liberals and radical liberals.” He meant that in our culture, nearly all political factions accept as given that the choosing individual is the base unit of our political order, and all claims must be made in terms of expanding freedom to choose.

C.S. Lewis’ essay “On the Reading of Old Books” observed:

Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” — lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.

Dreher, channeling MacIntyre, is suggesting that one of our untroubled agreements is that “the choosing individual is the base unit of our political order, and all claims must be made in terms of expanding freedom to choose.” Having viewed the world mostly from the Right, that’s starkly obvious in Left slogans like “pro-choice.” Perhaps even more telling is Justice Anthony Kennedy’s view in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in the early 90s:

These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the 14th Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life ….

(Emphasis added) That’s telling because Justices know that the legitimacy of their opinions come entirely from the persuasive plausibility, as the court has no troops or police to enforce its will. Radically autonomous individual choice either has real cachet or Justice Kennedy is tone deaf. I wouldn’t bet on the latter.

There are more communitarian ways of viewing reality, and as I’m now ensconced in a religious tradition one of whose modern voice wrote “Being as Communion,” I’m trying to shift into such ways of thinking.

[W]hile it is satisfying to bewail the failures of the Republicans and the Democrats, let’s not deceive ourselves. Our problems come not so much because American political parties have lost their way but rather because we, the American people, have lost our way. There are no votes in telling people this, so politicians don’t. Still, the wise among us will heed Wendell Berry’s verdict: “Our country is not being destroyed by bad politics; it is being destroyed by a bad way of life.”

…

This principle—that our natural state imposes duties and limits upon us and our relations to others—is increasingly foreign to the American way of life, which rejects limits, natural or prescribed. As the military historian Andrew Bacevich has argued, with reference to Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to convince Americans to live within our means (the so-called malaise speech), we have become a people who will tolerate war in the Middle East as the price for maintaining the right to live without limits. It is, or has become, the American way.

…

Alasdair MacIntyre counseled rejecting both political parties in 2004 “not primarily because they give us the wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions.”

…

I am convinced that conservatives have placed far too much stock in political action and far too little in the work of culture. “Society’s long-term direction is not set mainly by politicians,” the political theorist Claes Ryn recently wrote. “It is set by those who capture a people’s mind and imagination.”

You don’t need much to capture minds and imaginations. A TV network will do. Currently, Glee and Modern Family, having supplanted Will & Grace, are doing a nice job of convincing us that niceness is job #1, and that it’s not nice to say “no” to anyone’s sexual preference. That’s a major reason why the same-sex marriage cause is triumphant already, although the “conservative” undermining of the family didn’t help. (Bless their hearts. They just can’t help themselves.)

The ideal polity will favor small-scale economics—small farmers, small manufacturers, small merchants—because that is the kind of society in which people are most likely to develop in wisdom, virtue, and happiness.

…

We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless quite different—St.Benedict.

Much more might be a spoiler. I commend the whole book and the works of Berry generally.