Month: February 2012

Marriage, a mere rite of passage?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

The following article appeared on February 27 in MercatorNet’s new blog on the issues confronting the institution of marriage in the western world today. The blog, Conjugality, already contains a number of articles focusing on the challenge being presented to the integrity of marriage by the campaign to have same-sex unions recognized as marriage by legislatures across the world.

“This is about the underlying principles of family, society, and personal freedoms”, Miss Lynne Featherstone MP, Britain’s Equalities Minister, wrote in London’s Daily Telegraph last week, referring to her Government’s plans to introduce legislation enabling gay people to describe their civil partnerships as marriage. Reading those words you might think that at last someone is about to address this fraught subject on the basis of such basic things as principles, family, society and personal freedom. But alas, no. Clearly, what we are confronted with here is more of the same – phony principles, redefinition of that basic building brick of community, the family, and therefore a very wobbly definition of society itself.

One would have hoped for more from the mother of parliaments.

Lynne Featherstone

“Marriage [she maintained] is a rite of passage for couples who want to show they are in a committed relationship, for people who want to show they have found love and wish to remain together until death do them part. Why should we deny it to people who happen to be gay or lesbian who wish to show that commitment and share it with their family, friends and everybody else? We should be proud of couples who love each other and a society that recognises their love as equal.

“That is why you will not find us watering down this commitment.”

Watering down? A mere rite of passage? Marriage is a state in which a man and woman live. This is nothing less than complete obliteration of the very concept of natural marriage. When Romeo and Juliet tried to grapple with the Capulet-Montague problem they bypassed names and solved the conflict – up to a point.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet…”

But this does not solve the marriage problem which gays have created for themselves. Call a rose an onion and it is still a rose. But it does not work the other way around – no matter how many things you call by the name of rose you will never turn them into roses. The onion which you call a rose remains an onion. It will look like an onion, smell like an onion and will still sting your eyes and, like an onion, make you. The exercise is sheer folly. So is the effort to make into marriages things that are not marriages and never will be marriages. This bond between a man and a woman which we call marriage is something “given”, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey said when he wrote in the English and Irish editions of The Daily Mail on February 20. It is given by our nature and it has its own intrinsic and inherent meaning. We do not give it its meaning. It, of itself, like Romeo, gives us its value and meaning.

“The fierce debate over the past few weeks [Miss Featherstone wrote] has shown people feel very strongly about marriage. Some believe the Government has no right to change it at all; they want to leave tradition alone. I want to challenge that view – it is the Government’s fundamental job to reflect society and to shape the future, not stay silent where it has the power to act and change things for the better.”

Miss Featherstone is working by the notorious definition of the powers of the British Parliament left to us by Sir Hartley Shawcross, then British Attorney General, when he declared that

Lord Hartley Shawcross

“Parliament is sovereign; it can make any laws. It could ordain that all blue-eyed babies should be destroyed at birth, and because Parliament so declared it, it would be legal.”

Legal, but utterly immoral. It is not enough that Parliament “reflect” society. Parliament’s duty is seek justice and legislate according to the principles of that justice and right reason.

People who understand what marriage really is are calling on the British Government to bring this question to the people and in doing so are showing a much deeper trust in the good sense of the British people than the Government is showing. Is it another instance of the drive for statute law riding roughshod through the treasure-house of British common law, something noted and predicted over 60 years ago by a British legal expert, Richard O’Sullivan, Q.C., when he wrote,

“All around us here today…is a scene of material destruction. In a recent lecture on “Law and Custom at the University of St. Andrews, Lord Macmillan (not to be confused with former British prime Minister, Harold Macmillan) drew attention to what he called the suppression – and what we may call the spiritual destruction – of the common law. The lover of our ancient laws and institutions, which we have inherited from our fathers, cannot but look on with some dismay at the process which we see daily’ in operation around us whereby the customary common law of the land, which has served us so well in the past, is being more and more superseded by a system of laws which have no regard for the usages and customs of the people, but are dictated by ‘ideological theories’.”

This is not a question of “rights”. It is a question of possibilities. It is not simply a question a tradition which people wish to preserve for some sentimental reason. It is a question of a law of nature which is prior to anything we call tradition, which has its roots in our very being and on which the common good of our society depends.

We are not prioritising gay rights, Featherstone added, or trampling over tradition; we are allowing a space for the two to exist side by side. In other words, she wants to allow one group of people to continue to see roses where roses exist and she wants to facilitate another group to see roses in a field of onions and say that there is no difference between the two.

Lord Carey commented on Miss Featherstone’s article:

“Lynne’s logic implies the will of the people is sovereign. So let’s suppose that in 10 years’ time it is proposed that, as people are living in multiples of four, we may call that marriage also.”

Why not, we might add, should those people living in what we euphemistically call a ménage a trios not also be granted the right to call their union a marriage bond. The possibilities are endless.

Ms. Featherstone and others are muddying the waters when they make all this is a Church-State conflict. It is not. It is a matter of logic, epistemology and anthropology. Any parliament which sets out – as foolish legislatures across the western world are now doing – to redefine things “given” by nature is confusing, in this instance, the law written in men’s hearts and minds with the law written in their libido. In the process they are legitimising social chaos, not enhancing human freedom. They are surely taking us back over a thousand years to that moment at the end of the Dark Ages when on a shore on the east coast of England the legendary King Cnut tried to command the tide of the North Sea to change its ways. But at least he learned a lesson and did no harm. This foolishness, sadly, will have no such happy outcome.

“The horror… the horror…”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Look at this video and you will be left wondering – almost to the point of despair – about what kind of world we live in where stories like this one can be considered normal. They are happening every day, the “values” underlying them are being promoted every day, not just tolerated, by the Western World Ascendancy. The most chilling moment for me was when Tyler told her “It is the right thing to do”. Right? Did someone – was it Bernard Nathenson – once call this the flight from reason? “The horror… the horror…”

www.youtube.com

In the band Aerosmith’s autobiography “Walk This Way”, lead singer Steven Tyler talks about his former fiancée and mentions his experience with abortion. Her…

All at Sea on Same Sex Marriage – and Everything Else

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

I can’t but help thinking that while the whole boring topic of same-sex marriage rages on and our fellow human beings throw insults at each other across the divide, we are letting the human race slide down the tubes of oblivion in a welter of sentimentality and gross self-indulgence – all for want of not seeing the wood from the trees. The debate is irrelevant for a number of reasons. The debate we should be having is anthropological and because we have abandoned that debate we are all at sea with the same-sex marriage issue and any number of other questions as well.

In the last decade of the 20th century the people of the Irish Republic voted in a referendum which changed their constitution to allow its legislature to pass laws which would govern the dissolution of marriages. Up to that time marriage in that jurisdiction was “until death do us part”. After that constitutional change – passed by the people with the narrowest of margins – marriage ceased to be a “for life” thing. One pro-marriage campaigner at the time argued that if you had divorce enshrined in legislation then your laws had immediately changed the definition of marriage – it ceased to be, in law, what it was before. In Ireland the net result was that the value of marriage plummeted, as it has done throughout the rest of the western world.  Marriage became a flashy and expensive ceremony which simply put some kind of stamp of a relationship between – until recently – a man and a woman. The old vows were uttered – until death do us part – but everyone now knows that they do not really mean that in law.

For a multitude of different reasons many people began to by-pass the whole thing altogether. As happened throughout the rest of the world more and more couples began to co-habit rather than get married. With that, since co-habiting couples tend to break up (see Brad Wilcox’s research on the matter,  here ) single parenthood became endemic.  Across the world some people still get married and they firmly intend that this will be until death does them part. However, the state no longer supports them in their pursuit of this intention – because if one of them were to wilt in that intention, the state would row in behind that partner and dissolve the marriage. No fault divorce is the name of that brand and it is the clear leader where this product is concerned.

Caesar Augustus, grappling with the citizens of Rome’s slide into debauchery tried to tighten up divorce laws in the lex Julia – if divorced by her husband, a wife found guilty of adultery in a special court might sacrifice the return of half her dowry and was forbidden to remarry. His tinkering failed miserably, of course. Our own tinkering, as experience shows, will fare no better.

Parallel with all this in our own time came what has been euphemistically called the sexual revolution – based on a reading of human sexuality which was as anthropologically flawed as was the reading which ended up giving us no-fault divorce. The real problem came when people began to replace  serious thinking about our condition as human beings – and the circumstances in which we live together in this world – with sheer sentimentality.

This week, Frank Bruni in the New York Times gives one of the clearest examples I have seen of adult human beings, elected legislators, abdicating their duty to make rational judgements in matters of great concern and surrendering to their emotions in a way which betrays their public trust and their responsibility to those they love in their personal lives. Bruni, of course, is totally approving of such behaviour.

He was cheerleading the onward march of the gay marriage campaign and how the opposition to it crumbled in one Washington State senator’s soul in the face of a totally emotional argument. In the final hours of the debate on the issue in that State, “Senator Brian Hatfield, a Democrat who considers himself a devout Christian and who said in a statement that he ‘went as far as to ask God for a sign.’ It came, he said, in an e-mail he got from former State Representative Betty Sue Morris, a fellow Democrat, who recounted how much she regretted a vote she cast against same-sex marriage in 1996 — and why.

“She shared her story with me on the phone on Monday. ‘In December of 1998,’ began Morris, 70, who then started crying. ‘Excuse me. I just remember it so vividly. My beautiful daughter, Annie, was home for Christmas, and she told us that she was gay.’

“In the days that followed, Morris said, she remembered her vote and ‘felt like I had denied her something.  A wholeness.  A freedom.’

“‘Here’s this precious child that you love and you care for,’ she added. ‘You don’t want to be a part of making them grieve for anything.’

“As it happens, she said, Annie didn’t even remember the vote. Now 47, she lives in California and married her long-time partner in 2008, just before Proposition 8 overturned the state’s short-lived same-sex marriage law.

“Morris told me: ‘Whenever someone opposes this, I always counsel: you never know. You never know when it will be your child or your grandchild. And you will eat your words.’

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled yesterday that the proposition was unconstitutional. The battle will now probably go to the State Supreme Court.

That is a sad story – but it is sad for far more reasons than Frank Bruni is likely to accept. It is sad ultimately because it show legislators acting like marshmallow idiots and it show a parent treating her child with less responsibility than they would their pet poodle. Wholeness?  Freedom? What are we thinking?

The root problem is our total loss of any sense of human beings as human beings, our loss of our sense of their real nature and the needs of that nature. We are substituting that sense with a response built entirely on our emotional feelings. Unless we go back to a serious anthropological understanding of our nature – of which sexuality and relationships are a part – we can forget about all the frills we put on our silly ceremonies and all the names we put on them. Most of them mean nothing already. Soon none of them will mean anything at all.

Folly of Obama’s Technocratic General

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

David Brooks makes a cri de couer in yesterday’s New York Times – prompted by the folly of Obama’s technocratic general, Kathleen Sibelius. It reminds one of Tolstoy’s take on Ernst Heinrich Adolf von Pfuel, the Prussian mastermind who lined up against Napoleon as the French Emperor drove east. Tolstoy was summing up the various modes of foolish self-assurance which he observed among different nationalities.

“The German’s self-assurance”, he said, “is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth – science – which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

“Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion – science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.

“Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory’s object – its practical application. His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.”

Obama’s generals are demoralising Brooks. He tells us why: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/opinion/brooks-flood-the-zone.html?

Every once in a while, the Obama administration will promulgate a policy that is truly demoralizing. A willingness to end the District of Columbia school voucher program was one such case. The decision to force Catholic social service providers to support contraception and other practices that violate their creed is another.

These decisions are demoralizing because they make it harder to conduct a serious antipoverty policy.

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

Some of the factors are economic: the shortage of low-skill, entry-level jobs. Some of the factors are historical: the legacy of racism. Some of the factors are familial: the breakdown in early attachments between infants and caregivers and the cognitive problems that often result from that. Some of them are social: the shortage of healthy role models and mentors.

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity. Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.

You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. You want lefty social justice groups, righty evangelical groups, Muslim groups, sports clubs, government social workers, Boys and Girls Clubs and a hundred other diverse institutions. If you surround her with a different culture and a web of relationships, maybe she will absorb new habits of thought, find a sense of belonging and change her path.

To build this thick ecosystem, you have to include religious institutions and you have to give them broad leeway. Religious faith is quirky, and doesn’t always conform to contemporary norms. But faith motivates people to serve. Faith turns lives around. You want to do everything possible to give these faithful servants room and support so they can improve the spiritual, economic and social ecology in poor neighborhoods.

The administration’s policies on school vouchers and religious service providers are demoralizing because they weaken this ecology by reducing its diversity. By ending vouchers, the administration reduced the social intercourse between neighborhoods. By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward.

Members of the Obama administration aren’t forcing religious organizations to violate their creeds because they are secular fundamentalists who place no value on religious liberty. They are doing it because they operate in a technocracy.

Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation.

Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.

Technocratic institutions have an unstated theory of how change happens. It’s the theory President Obama sketched out at the beginning and end of his State of the Union address: Society works best when it is like a military unit — when everybody works together in pursuit of a mission, pulling together as one.

But a realistic antipoverty program works in the opposite way. It’s not like a military unit. It’s like a rain forest, with a complex array of organisms pursuing diverse missions in diverse ways while intertwining and adapting to each other.

I wish President Obama would escape from the technocratic rationalism that sometimes infects his administration. I wish he’d go back to his community-organizer roots. When he was driving around Chicago mobilizing priests and pastors on those cold nights, would he really have compelled them to do things that violated their sacred vows?

I don’t think so. I think if that Barack Obama possessed the power he has today, he’d want to flood the zone with as much rich diversity as possible.

Peril of Ignoring the Ghost in the Machine

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

A rather chilling scenario of our future has been laid before us by Roger Scruton in a review of some books dealing with the nature/nurture issue in this month’s Prospect Magazine. One of the books is Professor Susan Greenfield’s YOU AND ME: The Neuroscience of Identity, in which she asks questions about the risks posed for the moral development of children by our careless approach to the new technology of communications. This technology is dominating society’s nurture of its young more and more and the implications of Greenfield’s and Scruton’s observations are that we allowing a kind of nurture of our future generations which borders on the irresponsible.

Roger Scruton

Echoing Greenfield concerns, Scruton reminds us that nurture can as easily destroy freedom as enhance it. We can bring up children on passive and addictive entertainments that stultify their engagement with the real world and rewire the neural networks on which their moral development depends. The short-term pursuit of gratification can drive out the long-term sense of responsible agency. Moreover, if children learn to store their memory in computers and their social life in portable gadgets, then gradually both memory and friendship will wither, to linger on only as futile ghosts haunting the digital archives.

Greenfield is taking on a formidable high-tech establishment on this issue and they throw charges at her that there is no hard evidence out there to back up her fears. She recalls that the tobacco giants in the last century made exactly the same charges against those who warned of the dangers of smoking. By the time the evidence came along millions had died. As she reminds us, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

Baroness Greenfield is no Luddite. She is Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and knows all about the powers and effects of addiction – be it to whatever kind of good thing the boffins of this world can come up with. She acknowledges the great advantages which modern communications have left us with but clearly thinks that there is a dangerous laisszez faire element in our approach to the whole thing.

“Mind change” is what she thinks is going on. It is for her “an issue that’s as important and unprecedented as climate change”. Watch her explain what she means on this Guardian clip here .

Susan Greenfield

Scruton is a philosopher and sees another dimension to the plague we may be unleashing on ourselves and on future generations. He sympathises with all her worries and sees that her argument suggests that there is a kind of human development that prepares us, at the neurological level, for the exercise of responsible choice. If we bring up our children correctly, not spoiling them or rewiring their brains through roomfuls of digital gadgetry, the sense of responsibility will emerge. They will enter fully into the world of I and You, become free agents and moral beings, and learn to live as they should, not as animals, but as persons.

In her book, Greenfield asks: what is it that makes “you” distinct from “me”? Human identity is the term she grapples with. She says that it has long been a topic of fascination for philosophers but has been regarded with aversion by neuroscientists – like herself. Her study searches for a biological interpretation of what she sees as a most elusive of concept. In it she looks into all the social and psychiatric perspectives and ultimately into the heart of the physical brain. As the brain adapts exquisitely to environment she wonders if the cultural challenges of the 21st century are threatening to change human identity itself?

Scruton, the philosopher, takes her concerns on board and once more ends up calling us to our senses with regard to what our responsible behaviour should be towards our children in the face of the tsunami of high-tech gadgetry with which they are now being swamped. If we fail to recognise the need of the young for meaningful and real contact with other thinking, feeling and breathing human beings – as opposed to virtual ones – then we are effectively denying them the right to remain truly human. The evolutionist – of whatever type – who maintains that all these things will in time be positively adapted to by human beings is, he seems to be saying, a dangerous threat to civilization because she or he is ignoring something essential in our nature. Simply because they cannot understand the mysterious elements in the human condition, they choose to ignore it. In doing so they put us in peril.

He concludes, Allow children to interact with real people, therefore, and the grammar of first-person accountability will emerge of its own accord. Undeniably, once it is there, the I-to-you relation adds a reproductive advantage, just as do mathematical competence, scientific knowledge and (perhaps) musical talent. But the theory of adaptation tells us as little about the meaning of “I” as it tells us about the validity of mathematics, the nature of scientific method or the value of music. To describe human traits as adaptations is not to say how we understand them. Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, therefore, the mystery of the human condition remains. This mystery is captured in a single question: how can one and the same thing be explained as an animal, and understood as a person?

Read Nature, nurture and liberal values by Roger Scruton in Prospect Magaazine.

Waterloo looming?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
So it looks like it is all over and Republicans are going to unite behind Romney as their best hope of beating Obama. It may be a very close run thing.
Mitt Romney scored a sweeping victory in Nevada today with a broad coalition of voters that included groups that he has struggled to win in previous contests, including very conservative voters, strong Tea Party supporters and evangelicals.The victory extends the momentum Mr. Romney received from his commanding victory in Florida last Tuesday, and pushes forward his march toward the Republican nomination.

Mr. Romney’s rivals largely conceded the state before the results were known, with some leaving Nevada to campaign in Colorado and Minnesota. Mr. Romney, who won Nevada in 2008, had never given up the lead in polls here.

http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na