Don't rain on my gay parade: Equality and the future of marriage

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought. --Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
     President Obama's recent statement - his personal support of same-sex marriage and rejection of civil unions, putting him in stark contrast with Mr Romney - has given everyone a lot to think about. While I am not ignorant of the campaigning dynamic going on in such an unambiguous admission, neither am I interested in it. Rather, I am interested in the question it raises for the future of American society. Should we, like the President, embrace homosexuality as equal under the law in all respects? Or should we, like the soon-to-be Republican candidate, embrace the preservation of traditional, monogamous, heterosexual marriage?
     First, a preliminary philosophical observation. Always and in every society there is an Other (a group generally viewed as outside the accepted circle of good, God-approved individuals) who is denied social equality and legitimacy. We see a long list of Others in our society's history. Women, visible minorities, religious minorities, disabled persons, subcultures, and so on.

     Some societies perpetuate these prejudices and preserve social and legal inequality. This is done by squelching the voice of the Other and preventing it from being heard as a valid point of view. In some societies prejudices increase because of economic rivalry, a historical wrong or sociocultural resentment. However, as a democratic society evolves, these prejudices have generally been eroded by other more enduring values and principles.
     In a democratic society it is inevitable that, once they are considered persons and citizens with the right to vote, the voice of the Other will be heard. That voice will complain of the prejudices endured and their manifestation as gross legal inequalities. It is always in the legal arena that any issue in inequality will first come to a head.
     A democratic society will invariably increase legal equality of non-destructive preferences and behaviors, whatever these may be, and regulate or ban preferences and behaviors that hurt those besides their practitioners. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859. This ranges from sexual self-determination to the use of narcotics to ethnic background to religious belief/practice to protesting to riding a bicycle without using a helmet. Our legal courts are charged with seeing the basic trajectory of our country and, when it is time, creating or altering laws to increase equality and decrease destructive acts.
     Legislation in a democratic society cannot be coterminous with morality. In the United States we expect to enjoy personal freedoms, even if we do not always follow the status quo. We are allowed to live in peace with differing views and practices on many subjects. We understand the difference between morality and law - no wonder that so many moral people break laws on a regular basis without a single pang of guilt.

     You don't see pornography or other sexually explicit entertainment outlawed, do you? People who see homosexuality as immoral almost certainly view these other practices as immoral - and many others, too. However, it doesn't matter how many people believe watching porn is wrong. Laws are not written based on what the majority believe is moral or immoral. Laws have to do, as I said already, with stopping people from hurting others, and granting equality to groups disenfranchised in older generations. It is unethical to write a law stopping someone from doing something just because you think they shouldn't. That's called bigotry.
     Therefore, there is no basis whatsoever to outlaw minority practices unless they are destructive to others. I have the right to believe an act to be immoral but I do not have the right to impose my view on others. I have the right to believe an act to be moral but I do not have the right to require others to do it, or to see things the same way. A democratic society believes in free thought, which stands and falls on free speech, which stands and falls on free action - so long as my free action does not impinge on the rights of someone else.
     Only if gay marriage is destructive to others, therefore, can there be any basis for outlawing it. Otherwise it's simply a clear-cut example of an oppressed minority finally having an opportunity to receive equal treatment under the law - the constitutional right of the GLBT community as much as it is mine or any heterosexual person.
     So, does gay marriage hurt others? I don't think that it has ever hurt me. No gay or lesbian has ever hurt me by simply being the way they are, much less hurting me by committing themselves to each other in monogamous, life-long union. I can't see how that could ever hurt me. Am I missing something here?
Here are some possible arguments of how homosexuality and gay marriage could be destructive to others:

1. God will punish the entire society for its immoral conduct. The biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is the chief example supporting this argument. However, if you read the story carefully, you'll note that Abraham only has to find ten righteous people in the whole city to save it. As long as heterosexual marriage is resolutely preserved, then, I can't see why even the most superstitious person would worry about being turned into a gigantic salt shaker. 
2. Homosexuality will be approved by society so it will harder to convince our children that it is wrong. Exposure to a different idea or way of life is not the same as actual harm. If it was, we could not stop until we had a morally homogeneous society, and this conception runs contrary to every fiber in my democratic body.
3. Gay marriage will lead to gay adoption. Let's assume it does, or will, eventually, given the view of democratic society I outlined above. I've never heard of a study showing that a child raised by a gay couple is more likely to have some serious psychological trauma, or be abused, or anything else. Again, it's pretty clear that the horror of the idea of kids being "raised gay" is a result of moral prejudice. Such prejudice is the right of anyone, but by no means can it determine the direction of new legislation.
4. Gay marriage will lessen the validity of heterosexual marriage and lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage, raise divorce rates, corrupt society because the family unit no longer passes on valuable moral teachings to children, etc. I say, there's some truth in that. But the bigger truth is that Western society lost that battle almost one hundred years ago with the legalization of birth control methods as part of the early feminist movement and the liberation of women to be more than baby factories.

     The fact of the matter is that marriage isn't primarily about babies anymore. Society has changed, for better or for worse, and there's no going back. To try to salvage an obsolete notion of marriage is hopeless. In fifty years no one outside of extremely conservative religious groups will even bother. I can visualize the Catholic church continuing to maintain strict policies against both contraceptives and gay marriage for maybe that long, but not much longer. American society, meanwhile, will continue to develop and update its laws to reflect its nature - assuming the political scene is fixed sometime before the Union of States utterly dissolves. If you want a society that considers marriage to be primarily about progeny, you'll have to go to some other part of the world (not Europe). But I predict as their populations stabilize and the middle class becomes wealthier, as health care quality and availability increases and infant death mortality drops, the urge to define marriage in terms of procreation will weaken and ultimately fade.
     Folks, it's a brave new world out there, and we need to go and be part of it. Instead of pining for a lost era where black was black and white was white, we need to figure out how to make society work as best as it can.

What my dog taught me

      Stretch. Sigh. Pant-pant-pant. Lick the chops. Pant-pant-pant. Perk the ears. Head up. Curious. Push up from the hind legs. Trot toward the noise. The clicking of black toe-nails on wood. Sniff. Muzzle to the floor. Investigate the fallen flower of cold broccoli. Tongue out. Take it into the mouth. Doesn't taste right. Drop it. Pant-pant-pant. Raise head and eyes toward master. Inattentive. Want a head pat. Little tail wag. Master turns, lowers hand. Good boy. Turns back to stove. Trot back to bed. Stretch. Lie down. Sigh. Eyes open, watching, resting. Pant-pant-pant.

     To a dog, everything is now. Animals are a world apart from their owners, though their owners often forget. A dog may be anxious, but it cannot worry. A dog may be afraid or excited, but it cannot be pessimistic or optimistic. A dog may be jealous, but it cannot be bitter.

     To a dog, the past and the future, as we conceive them, do not exist. There is no set of distinct events fading toward the horizon. There is only a general sense of “how things are” and “what will happen if I do this.”

     It is without question that dogs have a sense of immediate past and future, in questions like “this happened because I did this” or “I want this to happen so I will do this.” Training animals that cannot apprehend simple causality, like a jellyfish or a bumblebee, is impossible.

     However, as not only a lover but also an observer of animals, I question anyone who says that dogs can remember distinct events that occurred even hours ago, much less months or years. Not only is such information irrelevant for an uncivilized species, the brain is not developed with those abilities. As researcher William Roberts famously observed, animals are “stuck in time” - they cannot travel backward or forward to other places, events or scenarios, historical or hypothetical. They can't remember when they were puppies or that traumatizing event two months ago, and they plan think ahead for the weekend or even envision themselves taking their afternoon walk. Dogs lack the kind of memory called “episodic.” In other words, even though a dog can learn something, it doesn't remember learning it. Similar psychological phenomena occur among humans in the cases of young children and anterograde amnesiacs.
     Try testing your dog yourself for evidence of episodic memory (thanks, Professor Ira Hyman). Put your dog in the backyard for ten minutes, then go and visit it. If your dog is like mine, it will be immediately overjoyed to see you. Now stay in the backyard for ten minutes. Your dog will quickly become bored with you. Leave the dog in the backyard for another ten minutes, then return. Bless its heart -- it is just as excited as the first time! You could repeat this procedure all day with little to no change in the animal's reaction.

     What about a dog predicting when its master will return home? Doesn't this prove that the dog distinctly remembers past events? Not at all. Dogs remember such repetitive events through something akin to a circadian rhythm or an internal clock. Mine gets antsy in the evening because he knows that we go for a walk every day, and he knows by instinct that it usually happens shortly after he starts whining and pacing in my office. The incessant clickety-click breaks me out of gaming, surfing or (occasionally) working reverie.
     On the other hand it is very difficult to find positive evidence of episodic memory without a strong semantic mode of expression. Hyman explains that this kind of memory is tied to an awareness of the self and argues that even chimps may lack the same cognitive abilities.

     Because of their episodic memory, consistency makes or breaks an animal's happiness. While most will enjoy some variety to their day - an exciting change to the walking circuit or a treat with a new flavor - too much will cause anxiety. Dogs' eyes are hardwired to learn an environment. Think of wolves in the wild. To be successful hunters they need to learn the position of every rock, tree and bush in their territory - and these are props that rarely move. Any aberration is perceived as a red flag, warning bells go off - threat or meal? Human beings, having created their own environments for millenia and abandoning the hunter-gather lifestyle for farming and industry, naturally are no longer this sensitive to visual change in their regular venues. But if you move a couch that hasn't been moved in a while, your dog will notice. Your dog won't even know why - but it will be at least a little anxious about this. The owner may be, too - but at least the owner has the power to move it back. The dog just has to deal with it.

     I've had a dog for nearly three years now. We walk or run together every day, usually late at night, one of the last things I do before I go to sleep. We walk alone. There aren't many people that walk when it's dark, and even when we cross paths with someone, we rarely stop to chat.

     This being the case, I've had hours upon hours to observe my dog's behavior and reflect on his psyche. I have to. I leave him off the leash and often signal him - a finger snap or a single word - to do or not do something. I want to give him as much freedom as I can, because he is first and foremost a living thing, and a pet second. And as one living thing to another, he inspires and challenges me and gives me a window to consider another kind of life.

     For the most part, it's a life that seems inordinately desirable. It is simple, present, and generally without worry. I could do without salutation-by-crotch-sniff and bark-in-the-back-yard-all-day, but the exception proves the rule. Dogs have it pretty good.

     I admire my dog for his boundless joy at the little things. Master coming home after a long day. A belly scratch. A quick game of chase. Scraps falling on the floor while master is cooking. A twisting roll on the grass in the sun. Yet another interesting smell.

     I admire my dog for his devotion and dedication. He is fascinated with me and interested by default in anything I happen to be doing. He is upset when I am upset with him and happy when I am happy with him. His existence only makes sense when he is being my dog.

     Doubtless, it's all too easy to idealize a life unplagued the anxieties that come as the price of a complex grasp of the self and the world. Like Adam and Eve, we have given up the world of instinct for the world of right and wrong, which necessitates experiences of shame, deceit, anger and bitterness, at the same time opening up possibilities of generosity, wisdom, courage and love. In short, the sophistication of our brains contains both the birth and death of civility and civilization - our very humanness.

     I don't wish I wasn't human. But my dog teaches me that when I suffer, it's because I choose to suffer. When I experience conflict, it's because I decided to wrestle with an outside force. My dog teaches me that I have the power to choose my battles. Never fighting at all would, I suggest, reduce my humanness to a mere appearance; and that, I cannot do. But what I can do is apprehend my own complicity in the internal, psychological and spiritual pain I experience every day.

     I believe that through pain comes many good things that would otherwise be inaccessible. Through pain I can forge my way to a new understanding of myself. But, akin to the mandates of just war theory, I must apply the laws of proportionality and comparative justice to each case. It is hardly worth entering a war if I cannot prevent more evil than I cause - if the benefits do not exceed the cost. Strangely, through my dog's inability to choose his battles, he has taught me that I can do what he can't.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. -Mark Twain
The full text free: legal download.
Further thematic reflections on the novel.
Sparknotes summary and analysis.
Caution: spoilers.
     Many students of great literature will come across Tom Hardy's magnum opus of the Victorian woman and have a hard time seeing beyond the protagonist's suffering, and, more troubling still, her apparently stubborn refusal to reject the system that belittles and hurts her, poor and female as she is. However, there is more to Tess than meets the eye. She is not so blind or foolish as it would seem. Moreover, Hardy writes her brutal story not to celebrate her misery but to show its philosophical moorings and effectively to unharness it. This he does with much success.
     First, we note that Tess does not believe that she is treated fairly - rather she is quite aware that her station in life is ugly. Her conversation with her younger brother, Abraham, reveals her awareness of the injustice of social inequality. It could be written off as a Victorian sensitivity toward sin, but the universal tone of the subject at hand (other worlds) suggests otherwise.
     "Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
     "Yes."
     "All like ours?"
     "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
     "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
     "A blighted one." (p.26)

     This being at the beginning of the narrative, I see Tess as being aware of class inequality but entirely ignorant of gender inequality. She maintains a staunchly Victorian attitude toward her sex, namely, that God intends her to be chaste, demure, delicate, subservient to men, and religiously devout. Throughout the entire story she never shirks this God-given identity, and this is her mantle of honor.
     The reader cannot question her integrity - and this is precisely what makes the story so compelling. Unlike The Jungle, which I read in December, the awful and horrific series of events the protagonist endures does not result in moral corruption here. While her naïveté disappears, the strength of her will never falters.
     This vignette concludes a couple pages later, when Tess falls asleep and Prince, the horse pulling her and her brother's wagon, is killed when he runs into a mail-carriage.
     " 'Tis all my doing - all mine!" the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle. "No excuse for me - none. What will mother and Father live one now? Aby, Aby!" She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole disaster. "We can't go on with our load - Prince is killed!"
     When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized on his young face.
     "Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on to herself. "To think that I was such a fool!"
     " 'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his tears.

     The self-reproach that Tess endures for the consequences of slight errors (due to her naivete - this is her only vice) is harsh, to say the least. And this is entirely consistent with the Victorian model of the ideal woman.
     It's discouraging to read about such a noble and selfless character so little rewarded for her virtues. Tess is certainly a Christ-like figure. Look at her end. She is hung for murdering an evil man, the pretty boy who wooed her and stole her virginity. Hardy makes several religious allusions (e.g. the Two Apostles painting) to tie her death to the crucifixion and suggests her death was inevitable, the expression of the blind justice created by a society that successfully exploits the working class every day.
     "Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals... had ended his sport with Tess... The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless; the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.
     Morally, Tess is as pure and spotless as Christ himself. However, she is woman - without power and the scourge of her society, guilty of all human sin solely because of her sex - and she is not divine - she has no great omniscience or omnipotence to tide her over until God can justify her. She can work no miracles to prove her virtue, and when walking through the wooded regions of southern England, she believes - falsely - that she is out of sync with God himself:
     A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood and could not comprehend as any other.
     But this encompassment of her own characterization.... was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while, she was making a distinction where there was no difference... She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (p. 85)

     The same language surfaces when Tess's bastard child dies and she asks the vicar for a Christian burial. Social convention makes such a request impossible. The vicar, sympathetic to Tess's dignity and tenderness, brings about an internal battle "between the man and the ecclesiastic," or rather, between his instinctive human impulse and the mechanical social function called propriety.
     He refuses. Tess begs, reasons, threatens, abases herself, and ultimately the vicar tells her that a Christian burial is "just the same" as being thrown into the earth. Convention be damned! And the narrator vindicates the truth in his word, not his mind:
     In spite of the untoward surroundings... Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
     Tess's persistent self-doubt continues to plague her. Leaving home in an attempt to make a new life for herself and lift the burden of her presence - the consumption of three squares a day, and the loss of her virginity, the Victorian working woman's only prized possession - she sings some ballads to herself, some psalms, but stops suddenly "and murmured, 'But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as yet.' " (p. 104)
     It is this self-doubt that cripples her one chance at self-preservation at the key moment when, after telling her husband, Clare, of her past inglories, he utterly rejects her.
     There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts and hardly opened her mouth... She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world. (p. 242-43)
     Clare, too, is no less bound to convention than his wife:
     No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. (p. 267)
     In other words, morality is not a question of perfection but of intention. Because Tess is incessantly victimized as a woman, her intentions far exceed her degree of perfection; contrast this with an upper-class male of the same era, who only fails to achieve perfection as a result of his own moral determinations.
     Especially revolting is how Alec d'Urberville (the man who deflowered her, thus ruining her life) repeatedly castigates Tess for his own moral imperfections - a practice that still continues in many socially conservative communities today:
     He stepped up to the pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments - far more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand and swear that you will never tempt me - by your charms or ways..."
     Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity, placed her hand upon the stone, and swore. (p. 315)

     And Tess, named the temptress of the garden and the witch of Babylon, continues steadfastly to defend her husband of his innocence.
     Tess is repeatedly accused by d'Urberville to have rejected or recanted the true faith. Angel Clare, her husband, having studied theology and having readied himself to serve as clergy, ultimately chose a path closer to nature, with less deceit and hypocrisy on the way. While he and Tess were close, he imparted to her his more liberal understanding of matters theological. Later she hears d'Urberville expostulating a fundamentalist vision of salvation - he had turned preacher during their years apart - and she has a brief occasion to pass on what her husband told her, which to her instincts rang true, since (I suggest) it gave priority to morality over dogma.
     D'Urberville ceases to be a preacher as quickly as he became one, telling Tess her words instantly eroded his religious conviction. As soon as he saw her, he says, he instantly realized his conversion had been a lie, because he knew he would trade it all to possess her again. He admits to the thinness of traditional Christianity but cannot see how morality can exist without it:
     [Tess] tried to argue and tell [d'Urberville] that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on. (pp.334-35)
     Is Hardy offering a critique of the Victorian philosophy of the sexes, or a statement about the nature of religion generally? I'm inclined to find both in this classic work.
     On the one hand, we see a clear indictment of the nineteenth-century model of womanhood. It takes a woman comfortable in the diverse avenues of social manipulation - thus betraying the very ideal she pretends to achieve - to play the desired role convincingly. For the high-minded, working-class woman, however, such niceties are impossible, for if you truly buy in to the model, you cannot maneuver your way out of the social sins you will surely commit. The ideal is fundamentally flawed in its conception and demands a hypocrisy to operate - and this very inconsistency is what destroys its spirit.
     On the other hand, Tess's religion is true and her intentions pure. Through her character Hardy espouses a religion of morals rather than of propositions. Clare rejects the religion of his father - the very same religion that Alec embraces, but to no avail for his spirit - suggesting that traditional Christianity is vanity, perhaps even destructive (but I am not sure if Hardy takes it this far).
     All three main characters - Tess, Clare and Alec - come into contact with natural religion - primarily moral and wonderfully simple in nature. Tess embraces it from the start, and at most the thicket shrouding the truth in darkness is hacked away. Clare experiences a true battle between the two - his mind embraces natural religion, but when confronted with social law returns to the ungodly propriety taught falsely as religion. In the end he realizes the error of his ways and turns around - too late, alas, to save his wife. The damage had been done and nothing could undo it.
     Last, Alec was Tess's opposite, in that he was fundamentally irreligious or immoral. For a while religion hid his true nature, but never had the power to change it. He pondered both propositional religion and moral religion, could never understand the latter, and in the end rejected the former as being equally incomprehensible.
     Ultimately all three characters are true to their inner identity, and no professing or pondering will change it. What a different story it would have been if Tess had given up her religion (and if anyone had just cause to do so, it was her), or if Alec had converted his heart to the religion of grace, or if Alec had never grasped Tess's true quality and rejected her finally.
     Much like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles can be read as a guide to the three kinds of people in the world: those who embrace moral (true) religion, those who embrace propositional (false) religion, and those who live in confusion and contradiction by attempting to use the rules of the latter to grasp the former. It is only when you finally let go of your need to understand everything that you can experience true morality.
     Romantic? Absolutely. Simple? In theory, yes. But the book displays age-old wisdom beautifully and that's what's most important.

The point of Tae Kwon Do

     I've spent a couple hours every week for the past two years practicing the art of Tae Kwon Do.
     When I was a child I was enrolled in a TKD class from ages nine to thirteen. However, I wasn't really practicing the art of Tae Kwon Do. Most weeks I hated going because it was a bit of a popularity contest and I was always the loser.
     As an adult, though, paying with my own hard-earned money, spending a significant number of the precious evening hours I receive every weekday, choosing to drive myself over there when I could just as easily sit and play video games or watch TV, it's become something quite different.
     Not only that, but I've applied myself a lot more this time around. Hell, I made black belt in two-and-a-half years, and despite the rather dubious reputation of many TKD gyms, and the ease in which so many doofuses earn their First Dan (or ninth!) - comparable to the Internet University fad of the 1990s - my gym is not like that. My rank as an assistant instructor was paid with sweat and blood. And the journey ahead is even longer and more challenging.
     I've learned that practicing martial arts are really about just one thing. It's not about the exercise. It's not about meeting people. It's not about getting a cultural experience or getting your kids out of the house for a bit. It's not even about perfecting forms, learning to defend yourself, or competing in tournaments.
     Tae Kwon Do is about mastering the evil inside you. And I suspect all martial arts, at their heart, are no different.
     Fear. Pride. Envy. Impatience. Anger. Selfishness. Tae Kwon Do has helped me become a better person. I suppose someone could use just about any activity and any sport to work on their virtues at the expense of their vices. However, the philosophy of Tae Kwon Do, enshrined through symbol by the Buddhist monks who crafted the art, focuses on transcendence, finding peace with yourself and your surrounding, and achieving true happiness. TKD was created for precisely that purpose. And everyone knows the right tool is the tool that was made for the job.
     Maintaining a healthy body through rigorous exercise and demanding kicks is part of that, to be sure. As is competition, self-defense, and so on. However, the point of all that is philosophical at its core. To ignore that is to fail to ever understand the art as a holistic response to the need of a deeper connection with your inner self.
     Keep reading.

 

The Decalogue (1989): Promise-keeping

     The Decalogue (1989, released on DVD in 2000) is a series of ten hour-long films, each representing one of the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. Directed by Krzyztof Kieślowski and filmed in Polish, the collection explores a modern interpretation of the words Moses received from God on Mount Sinai, so the story goes.
     You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
     The second film explores the issue of the oath, vow, promise, or more generally speaking, the contractual "statement of intent." Contrary to popular opinion, the second commandment does not condemn foul language ("Jesus, that hurts!") nor is it so narrow as to only apply to judicial hearings ("Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"). Rather it is an invective of the rather sorry state of the human condition from prehistorical times right up until the present day, characterized by the making of promises one has no intention of keeping.
     For example, last week I told someone at church I would call him before today (Sunday) to let him know if our Sunday School class was canceled. It was. I called him Friday afternoon, left a message on his voice-mail telling him the class was, in fact, canceled, and entered the weekend with a clear conscience. I kept the second commandment.
     On the other hand, last summer when I was interviewed for a teaching position at a local high school, the principal told me he would call me and let me know his decision. After a couple weeks of fretting and pacing, I finally realized the man had no intention of calling me. That was just something interviewers say, in order to avoid an awkward or unpleasant telephone call, but at great expense to my own peace of mind over the course of a couple months, at first due to my growing but ever uncertain feeling that I hadn't landed the position, and afterward because I was mad at my interviewer (and our culture) for being so casually dishonest. He broke the second commandment.
     I want to live in a society where a person's word is her bond. As Jesus taught during his Sermon on the Mount,
     Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
     Jesus lived in a culture where there were "little oaths" and "big oaths," "small promises" and "real promises." If you swore by Jerusalem or by heaven or by my head, it was a biggie, and if you should not carry through on the intention you communicated, you were in trouble with the Man Upstairs. Traditionally, Christianity has followed suit and made a distinction between promises and oaths, only the latter being taken as binding.
     In characteristically sage fashion, Jesus sweeps all of that nonsense away. If you tell someone you're going to do something, you should do it. Period. If you let your words fall without meaning - or if a community should fall into that same habit - you've lost something that makes you human, and you've added a destructive element to the world's composition. Shame on you.
     There's one exception to the rule. If something ridiculously serious takes you by surprise, you shouldn't be held accountable to your promises. For example, if I told a friend I'd pick them up at the airport tomorrow at 8:00 PM, and at 7:00 PM I get a call that my wife died, I'm sure, even if I forgot to text my friend that I'd be unable to fulfill my responsibility that evening, that when they found out what had happened, they would immediately and unconditionally forgive me. Only a completely unreasonable person would be disappointed that I had not still managed to follow through with my pledge.
      Of course, not every situation where breaking a promise "makes sense" is as dire as the situation I describe. The Hadith teaches that if a Muslim makes a promise but then is confronted by something better to do, he should do the better thing, and afterward make atonement for what was left undone. For example, if I ask someone to meet with me at a certain time, but then I find out I need to spend an extra hour grading my students' assignments, I should ask for forgiveness, and... what else? I'm not sure.
     After watching only the first two episodes of The Decalogue, I'm fully convinced that I've underestimated the universal and timeless significance of the Ten Commandments. I think the second commandment was targeting a ubiquitous ailment that poisons human relationships at all levels, whether between strangers, colleagues, or friends, whether between child and parent, spouses, or employer and employee.
     And thus, my question to you, reader, is simple. How important is your word? Do you make promises so casually that you can't keep track of them all? Do you have your excuses lined up, like I do? I was just so busy I forgot. Something came up. I meant to. You should have e-mailed me. You should have reminded me. And so on. Shame on us all. Together, let's pledge right now to find ways to break that awful habit and be known as people on whom others can rely without worry.
     Amen! (Heb. "So be it")

Why can't we all just get along?

     Stanley Fish's 1996 article in First Things, "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?", is a must-read. Despite continued leaps and bounds in the realms of science -- from plate tectonics and the moon landing to the human genome and a bonafide "wrinkle in time" -- it's amazing to see just how little progress has been made in the human art of philosophizing.
     In humankind's great experiment to ensure a permanent intellectual peacetime, the enlightenment effectively swallowed up the entire playing field. Liberalism depicts the mind as "not yet settled" on a particular set of dogmas (foundational beliefs from which thought proceeds). Fish offers the tenets of liberalism as follows:
     1. Even if you do not embrace a point of view you can still understand it
     2. Beliefs are analyzed by rational criteria which themselves are bound to no particular beliefs; they are objective
     3. A fixed commitment to an idea or value is a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity
     4. A reasonable mind is an open mind, ready to jettison its most cherished convictions
     In my recent experience in the worlds of education and institutional religion in the Midwest -- in sync with my time spent in Scotland and Canada in years gone by -- Fish is right to say that liberals, generally speaking, hold to these very tenets as dogmas. And I've been one of them. I've acted as an authority figure in matters religious, moral, ethical and philosophical, and I've promulgated the view that our society is meant to be one characterized by skepticism, tolerance and infidelity.
     Fish further argues that to suggest to the liberal that this message is self-contradictory, since it marginalizes and excludes (among others) the religious voice, might get you a conciliatory seat at the table of discussion, only to be patronized by ears which do not hear and eyes that politely stare before looking elsewhere for more "reasonable" contributors.
     I find this positively devastating. This means that there's an unresolvable intellectual and moral war in our society, and we've been doing a good job at fooling ourselves that if we could only universalize the principles of skepticism, tolerance and infidelity, it would yield that world which John Lennon imagined ten years after the publication of this article.
     Fish has been criticized as an extreme relativist and an anti-foundationalist. He got his start in medieval literature (especially Milton, quoted extensively in the article linked above) and then developed a literary theory that made central the interpretative communities of a given text -- akin to reader-response theory. For Fish, truth is always contingent (dependent) on the culture from whence it rises. Appropriately, perhaps, Terry Eagleton accuses Fish of being a liberal among liberals, having abandoned all hope of an objective plane from which to launch a properly robust and legitimate critique. (I'm truly sorry that I wasn't still in Edinburgh when Eagleton delivered his The God Debate Gifford lectures two years ago.)
     Two questions must be answered. First, is it possible to be committed and tolerant at the same time? What does that look like? Second, has liberalism as a movement graduated to that lofty, laurel-laden vantage point?
     I remember an article by Fish that I read in college, "Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road," published in 1989. Near the end of the article (p.29) he tries to clear up how anti-foundationalism (the denial in the existence of any truth, known or unknown, that operates as the basis for all real knowledge) does not contradict itself by offering itself as yet another foundation. This is basically the same issue the relativist faces when saying "There is no absolute truth" -- is that statement absolutely true?
     Fish comments, "Philosophers of a certain kind love this kind of argument, and one can almost hear them chortle as they make it." He observes that his thesis merely asserts the local, in-culture quality of all foundations, his own included, and the way in which they are established "by persuasion," that is, by argument and counter-argument, all limited by context, none of them "just there." And, as long as anti-foundationalism "holds the field" against all critics, it can be considered "absolutely true (at least for the time being)".
     Well, if you're like me, your brain is swimming right now. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Fish is right about modern-day liberalism. Whether or not it's possible to be at once tolerant and committed, we can say for certain that it's not happening often enough.
     And for myself, I've noticed a blatant undercurrent of tension and muddled thinking whenever I pronounce the rightness in accepting the (in my view ridiculous) literal beliefs of conservative Christians, whether about the rapture, the devil, the resurrection or the divine nature of Jesus. Even though I don't subscribe to those beliefs, I accept that others believe them.
     Unfortunately, the language of acceptance and tolerance is very ambiguous. As Fish states, do I treat the ramifications of those beliefs as credible and fully equal to my own? For example, if I married a woman of non-materialistic persuasions, and we raised a child, and that child became sick with leukemia, would I allow her to skip a visit to a medical clinic and simply trust to the priest? Hardly.
     Can tolerance, then, really be called tolerance if it excludes personal risk? I have a hard time seeing how.
     Real intellectual conflicts do exist in our world. It's difficult to identify universal principles that all people to agree on, and can be used as the basis of fruitful dialogue. The problem is only exacerbated if we consider societies on the other side of the globe, or those from centuries past. And throwing the blanket of tolerance over them does mitigate conflict, but to what extent does it do so falsely? Is it worth it?
     Maybe in some cases, it is. Right now we have a locked Congress with an approval rating lower than polygamy, made of two sides who refuse to compromise, much less tolerate each other. We have a country to run, an economy to bolster, and a debt to repay. Let's quit bickering and meet half-way, right?
     On the other hand, maybe the Conservative's open love for dogma has been mocked by the Liberal's equal but far more secret love for the same for too long. Could a deep-seated hypocrisy in the values I've embraced for years, the Enlightenment doctrine, produced the bitter and backwards politics we now see emanating from the GOP?
     It's a theory, and it's one I wish I could investigate further. But I can't think how. So I'll instead let mastication and rumination take over, keep my eyes and ears open, and see if these ideas ring true over the course of the next couple years.