The Marriage of Equality and Inequality – 3: Brave New Worlds

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 19, 2012

(<<< Prologue) (<< Part 1) (< Part 2)

Another Eden, Another Adam, Another Eve

The advance of marriage equality may be less a product of political strategy or moral evolution (or devolution) than of the lessening objective importance of marriage itself.

The detachment of sexuality from sexual reproduction had to entail a relative devaluation of “holy matrimony” – i.e., procreative monogamy.  There have been, of course, multiple and mutually reinforcing conditions at play in this process. The least that can be suspected is that the decline of traditional marriage and its declining material usefulness or necessity are bi-conditional. If as fundamental a social-cultural institution as marriage is in substantial decline, thus allowing the rise of marriage equality as a political project, the phenomenon must reflect objective alterations in human circumstances generally, at least within the wealthier societies of the West, and may foreshadow even greater changes to come.

Marriage, to the traditionalists, cannot be reduced to elective affinity – “lifestyle choice,” “personal commitment,” even “love relationship” – because to them it is a matter of the highest seriousness: Not a matter of imaginary and sentimental, implicitly random and contingent relationships, as easily revocable as they are freely chosen, but a matter of life and death, and more of the latter than beneficiaries of historically recent advances in medicine and public health tend to recall. The cultures in which marriage equality is advancing are the ones in which complications of childbirth have not for a very long time been a leading cause of death among women; in which births per family in the politically relevant sectors have fallen below replacement rate; in which lifespans beyond the child-bearing years as well as the child-bearing years themselves have been extended. The accompanying developments, including the broad participation of women in the workforce and civil society, have tended to equalize men and women as citizens, and a parallel equalization of rights and expectations has occurred within heterosexual marriages, alongside a lessening of social distinctions privileging or stigmatizing married versus divorced or never-married individuals.

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The Marriage of Equality and Inequality – 2: Unsympathetic

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 17, 2012

(<< Prologue) (< Part 1: Bigotry)

Nobody's perfect.

The marriage traditionalists are probably too numerous, too stubborn, and too well-entrenched – a majority or large minority depending on how you squint the opinion polls – for the harsh judgments of an opinion elite, or even for a prospective epoch of political, legal, and legislative setbacks, to silence them.  As of now, they consider themselves under attack for believing in, conducting themselves according to, imagining themselves in relation to, ideas that in living memory if not quite the week before last were so consensual that any alternative to them would have generally been taken as absurd (and a little risqué).

For the traditionalists, to acknowledge “marriage equality” would be like re-defining “2 + 2″ as equal to “5.”  They find it mystifying that anyone believes, or pretends to believe, that marriages between two men or two women are really “the same” as marriages between a man and a woman, or that the proposition is somehow close enough to true to allow for equal treatment. The traditionalists do not just believe that the word “marriage” merely should be taken to refer to the union of a man and a woman, and they do not admit of a distinction between a popular or common usage and a legal one:  They insist, over and over if rarely with explanation, as per instruction from pollsters and spin-sters, that marriage simply is between a man and a woman – period.  State and the law – so they believe and, perhaps more, so they may intuit without articulating – should reflect this primary denotation, not merely because a one-to-one correspondence between common or traditional usage and the law is generally preferable, but because, to state the apparently too obvious, heterosexual coupling is biologically and organically the basis of human life, making any discounting of it, where not merely a degrading indulgence, both inhuman and morbid, and ominous as a principle of the state.

Put differently, the biological “facts of life,” as natural or animal facts, would be precisely those facts that exist prior to language and opinion, prior to politics and law, prior to everything we know and do as human beings, as embodied selves.  Under the inherited, possibly to be displaced definition – prior to sociological analysis of divorce, adultery, single parentage, and fertility rates; prior to any cataloguing of exceptions; prior to philosophical, historical, critical, and medical-technological de-centerings; well prior to the foul and morally insensate utterances of assorted hacks, demagogues, and pre-philosophical theologians – the word “marriage” has referred to those facts, as the institution through which the web of resulting social relations, all social relations under the heading of “family,” has been organized, and not just physically, but conceptually.

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The Marriage of Equality and Inequality – 1: Bigotry

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 16, 2012

< (prologue)

Prior to a discussion at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog on Friday, the last time I publicly admitted respect – not quite the same as “support,” but destined to be taken that way – for the views of marriage traditionalists was February. A popular young member of the political twitterati, while reacting to the California appeals court victory of pro-equality forces against the forces of “H8,” offered a by now common view on the underlying question:

There are many strong arguments (both legally and socially) against abortion, even though I disagree. I see none against marriage equality.
February 7, 2012 11:29 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@amaeryllis
amaeryllis

I suggested to her that presuming the lack of any serious argument on the other side actually diminished her side’s political accomplishment. In short order, she “blocked” me from her twitter feed, sweeping me up with other presumed H8′ers who she claimed were pestering her that day.

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The Marriage of Equality and Inequality (Prologue)

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 16, 2012
lararium
The lares and penates (household gods)

Marriage, and essentially monogamy, is one of the absolute principles on which the ethical life of a community is based; the institution of marriage is therefore included as one of the moments in the foundation of states by gods or heroes.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 167, GWF Hegel

The rise of marriage equality as a political project must reflect, and likely foreshadows, truly fundamental alterations in human circumstances.

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Bibi Christ

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 9, 2012

Netanyahu at CUFI ConferenceA curious choice of words from Benny Morris on the new Israeli unity government:

With the backing of 94 MKs, Netanyahu will present a far more solid antagonist for Obama or any other external or internal doubting Thomases in the coming months.

The sentence casts Netanyahu as Jesus Christ or at minimum an apostle, and in a certain way it’s almost right, especially following ex-Shin Bet chief Diskin’s attack on the Israeli leadership as “messianic,” more generally in light of the peculiar Dual Covenant structure of the Israeli-American, Jewish and Christian Zionist, alliance. The concept of revelatory sacrifice may even be the best frame for understanding potential Israeli action, yet also any withholding of action, against Iran. If the effect is more maddening than practical or helpful, it may be because the whole predicament is already so tragically mad, something Morris probably understands, or at least understood, as well as anyone.

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Ghost Machine

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 6, 2012

The Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel iPhone commercials just happen to trace the process of the realization of dead labor in the information device, the purest and most typical excrescence of our present moment in commodity culture. The sleek design of the handheld object already refers implicitly to intensively manual assembly accomplished somewhere very far away, an underworld away, under circumstances of production whose inhumanity is well enough known to information junkies to be presumed a narcissistic supply for guilty, which is to say sadomasochistic, pleasure, to be instantly recalled and indefinitely re-experienced in the domination of an automated pseudo-personality. The virtual coolie, coolly erotic in its or her black and white plastic maid’s uniform, a sexualized plaything, is dreamed as a datable data-goddess, but it or she must be understood as the one way-mediating spokesperson for thousands of real beings whose own desires, other than to serve, are never to be voiced at all – they are already past, human life absorbed and congealed into a rapidly self-obsoleting, and therefore luxurious, use value. Her or its artificial intelligence is their unintelligibility.  Like most advertisements, the ads sell membership within one identifiable stratum of the leisure class.  In the best Apple-Mac tradition, the depictions of an African American man and a young American woman emphasize a liberal-universalist fantasy, political progress as utopian consumption, even while accentuating the pleasing transformation of mere consumer into petty tyrant – having the number of ounces in a cup counted for, as we are told, no reason at all; whimsically demanding a weather report that, as is made quite obvious, was readily obtainable by a glance through a rain-spattered window. As the Jackson ad emphasizes, the slave can also be instructed simply to cease functioning: Intimation of ultimate power.  To complete the description, or fill it out in other dimensions, each mini-movie’s setting, the private dwelling of a famous person, refers to profits shared first with  favorites, eventually with all members of the cult of the device whose lower-case “i” realizes another set of overlapping references, ego and internet, equalized reductively:  self(-)consumption. The name given to this enslaving imaginary slave manufactured for us by wage slaves is “Siri.” It or she is a distributed personality seemingly from our collective future, but the stuff of its or her spectral existence, its or her vital ectoplasm, has been subtracted first from someone else’s possibilities, to stake an un-exorciseable claim on all of ours. Apple need never mention that the commands can also move in the opposite direction. The ads confirm that in another sense they have been doing so all along.

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Two New Sites

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 4, 2012

Installed and designed two new sites:  Anam Cara Yoga Studio and Wright Turn Only.

For Anam Cara, all of the photos used on the site were client-supplied, as well as most of the text, which had to be edited a little.  Also, for the first time I specifically optimized a version for iPhone.  Otherwise, this one is simpler than Scott’s, and I made life a little easier for myself by using the WordPress platform from the beginning, and customizing from there, instead of making the whole thing “by hand.” It should also make further expansion much easier if the client decides to add bells, whistles, and other extras.Still have to solve some glitches on Internet Explorer 8, so, if you’re using an obsolete browser at work or something, you may get some weird results on the “When We Do It” page.

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Let them eat flat screens

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 1, 2012

Referring to a recent widely remarked-upon Heritage Foundation report that described the material wealth of America’s nominally “poor,” Cato Unbound editor Jason Kuznicki frames a familiar defense of free market capitalism against its “progressive” critics:

It takes remarkable upper-lip musculature to sneer in such circumstances. But some do manage. “Let Them Eat Cake,” says one progressive commentator about the report — hardly an outlier.

Forgetting, then, that most American poor really do eat cake. Also forgetting that the very notion of the poor eating cake was unthinkably absurd for all of human history. That’s why it became a catchphrase — because it was absurd. And yet our poor eat cake while talking on a video phone and watching their choice of movies on a flat-screen TV.

“Let them eat cake” was taken as a catchphrase not because the idea of the poor ever eating cake was an “unthinkable absurdity,” but because it expressed the total lack of empathy on the part of a queen for her starving subjects.  Kuznicki’s reading reflects the same syndrome in its assumptions about who the poor are in a system that cannot be understood except as a global one.  The flat screen that the American “poor” person is enjoying in the imaginary depiction was likely assembled by someone far away and unknown, someone who, along with his or her family, is very likely a much better representative of today’s poor, or at least of that segment inducted into wage slavery. To the small extent such people even exist for the American libertarian, whose ideological rejection of “government” corresponds to a determined rejection of the principle of the whole, they simply do not because they cannot matter, just as the hungry poor of France were “unthinkable” to the Queen (not that social liberals do very much better in any meaningful sense).  It’s one example of what such exercises in rigorously non-dialectical materialism have to leave out in order to make a traditional defense of free market liberalism – “it’s so productive!” – internally coherent.  The argument wins out, on the basis of something like the Rawlsean compromise (in brief, as long as the poor benefit materially, let the wealthy continue to grow wealthier), but remains sustainable only within artificially defined borders without which its appeal to the pure selfishness of an utterly empty self would be exposed not just in its self-insignificance, but in relation to what must be destroyed to keep it materially if not morally alive – at least until the day that the absurdity by whatever unthinkable and therefore totally unexpected way impinges on it as though from the outside, the externality revealing itself as always having been internal after all.

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