What is wrong with affirmative action? A Communitarian Critique

This is a post about what we should be doing instead of affirmative action.  It is my thesis that affirmative action was a flawed solution to the problem when it was first put forward, and changes in the economy have undermined it so that it is now a bad solution to the wrong problem.

Affirmative action as it exists today is what we get when people assume that society is built of isolated individuals and that we can overcome the legacy of segregation by helping some individuals escape that legacy.  Black thinkers have often said that we need real effort to overcome the legacy of segregation and affirmative action is a way we tell ourselves we solve the problem but in reality we merely perpetuate it.

Racial Segregation as Historically Unique

The problems of affirmative action come first from a flawed understanding of segregation and past social role-enforcing legislation.  The liberal narrative, based on the theory of autonomous individuals, is that segregation was a way of keeping individuals who happened to be black (or other racial minorities) down, and it thus gets compared to laws, at one time prevalent through the US, barring (pardon the pun) women from practising law or other professional careers.

This narrative misses the point of segregation at the time, and it draws a false equivalence between laws that restricted the careers of women to laws that restricted economic opportunities of blacks.  The difference of course is that at the family level, men and women have always been economically interdependent.  We get married, have kids, and pass what we have on to them.  Thus changes in laws regarding gender and economics have relatively immediate effects.  Changes to laws regarding racial restrictions on economic opportunities, however, have long shadows because intermarriage is not as common and was at the time banned in much of the country.  Blacks and whites are thus not as economically interdependent as men and women are, and so capital does not get mixed up every generation.

The Effect and Legacy of Segregation: Why Affirmative Action Fails

Segregation is thus best understood not by its effects on individuals, but on families, neighborhoods, and communities.     Segregation isolated families, limiting economic opportunities and providing effect to efforts by the wealthy to keep families trapped, dependent on work almost as if slavery never ended.  You keep blacks separated, without opportunities, and dependent on jobs on the plantations, and they can never move up in the world.  Their children will be dependent on jobs on the plantations, and the cycle will continue forever.  With the end of slavery, freed slaves didn't have capital to start with.  Segregation helped ensure that would never change.

Segregation thus needs to be understood as a way of ensuring that wealth and capital could not accumulate in minority communities rather than a question of animosity on a personal level.  Additionally segregation was not only common in the South but at some points relatively common throughout the entire United States.  It took different forms in the industrial North but if you substitute 'factory' for 'plantation' there the same overall statement holds.

In this regard "desegregation" never happened and most of the urban United States is quite segregated.  The rural United States is far less segregated, mostly because of Mexican migrant workers who have worked for cash for a few years, only to buy land and tools with cash, and settle down to start new lives.  To the extent that rural America is segregated (at least in the West), it is between sedentary individuals and migrants, not racially.  The cities (particularly the big cosmopolitan cities) are very different and segregation in one form or another is common throughout the United States.  One of the big divisions that must be understood in the affirmative action debate is between rural Republican supporters and urban Democratic Party supporters, neither of which really understand so well how the other side lives.  Rural Republicans on average tend to be far more diversity-loving than urban Democrats for example, but also much more conscious of the effects if immigration.

Affirmative action was first passed when the primary urban economy was that of manufacturing.  One could have a good solid career without a college education, but a college education meant a better chance at moving into management.  Affirmative action should be understood in the context of desegregating a corporate workforce more than desegregating a society.  What affirmative action did not do however was to directly address the flight of capital from predominantly black neighborhoods.  While one might have hoped that the black manager would still live near the black floor workers, in reality what has happened is that people with money have moved to the suburbs and those without money have stayed where they are.

Thus affirmative action became a way of continuing to economically isolate predominantly black neighborhoods and communities while saying we are addressing this issue by helping a few individuals escape those neighborhoods and communities.  Affirmative action thus becomes a way to tell young black students that getting an education and moving to the suburbs is a way to sell out and give up on the communities they grew up in.

Although race and poverty are historically deeply intertwined in the United States, continuing to emphasize that connection helps perpetuate programs which address the wrong problems.  If we want to break the connection between race and poverty we must start by breaking the connection in our solutions and addressing urban poverty specifically, instead of trying to help individuals escape "their kind."

This idea seems outside the mainstream but it is a common thread from black thinkers from across the political spectrum.  Jesse Jackson and Clarence Thomas are more on the same page here than they are with the so-called mainstream consensus, and while this view is a direct challenge to liberal theories of society, it addresses the realities on the ground.

Why Racial Solutions are the Wrong Way to Go

The typical defence of affirmative action is that it helps level the playing field.  The problem however is that this presupposes that families don't matter but corporations do.  People should be dependent on corporations for jobs, and family legacies are the primary problem to overcome.   Racial preferences end up however dividing a society which should be unified in looking for deeper solutions to the problem of urban poverty.  Racial preferences end up thus being how we say we are solving a problem even when they no longer make any sense.

Moreover the primary beneficiaries of the preferences still belong to family legacies.  If your father was the first black man to attend Princeton, then when you attend, you get to count towards their statistics to show progress.  None of your capital goes to address the problems of the poor black neighborhoods.  But hey, it's progress, right?

What's missing of course in the discussion are the people left behind.  We save blacks by screwing the black community.....

Five Basic Necessities of a Good Life

Our society is aggressively materialistic, and the left in my experience is even more materialistic than the right today.  We are told you must have televisions, smart phones, computers, and the like.  Some things (like a phone or a computer) may be functional necessities for access to services, and there may be other things which are functional necessities for living together in cities.  However mere subsistence is not a good life, nor is meaningless consumption.  Dorothy Day wrote significantly about this in the 1940's in the same pieces in which she critiqued social security.

The engines of "social democracy" which are at the heart of anti-poverty efforts from the New Deal on tend to assume that poverty is a function of a lack of subsistence and just not having enough immediate money to buy things with (and we dare not ask what people intend to buy with their welfare checks because that would be against their autonomy).

If that weren't bad enough, the other side to social welfare programs is exactly what Hilaire Belloc complained about.  Means testing ensures that people cannot meaningfully be on public assistance and self-employed at the same time.  Public assistance thus chains people to looking for a job and working a job.  But hey, at least they can still buy stuff, right?  In essence social welfare as we know it is disempowering, socially corrosive, and not conducive to either addressing poverty generally or to human flourishing.

What do we need to flourish beyond merely having access to food and water?  I have identified five basic things:  A home, a family, something to do, tools to do it with, and hope for a better future.  Our current approaches to fighting poverty actively attempt to deprive people of all these five things.  To the extent that poor people circumvent these rules by taking on small jobs for money under the table, they are fighting a totally corrupt and oppressive system and they should be commended.

By a home of course, I do not merely mean a place to stay.  I mean a place one can call one's own. Ideally we should work to help people move into their own homes, though the practical details become more complicated especially once banks get involved.  The home is the economic center of the household.  It is the center of both economic production and consumption.  Economic production in the household is one thing critically missing from anti-poverty efforts today.

Family comes in two important and interlocking aspects, but both form an important safety net.  The first is the nuclear family.  The nuclear family lives together, eats around the same table, and helps around the same house.  The nuclear family forms the nucleus of the household.


As Elizabeth Warren has shown in "The Two Income Trap," family is the most essential safety net there is.  Marriage forms very strong economic ties, and these are essential.

Extended family also is not to be underestimated as a safety net.  Extended family provides a wide range of resources that is difficult to come by otherwise.

However the importance of family goes well beyond the safety net aspect.  In addition to providing security, families provide social context and social contact, two things we need to flourish.  Families must be cultivated among the poor.

The third is "something to do."  We humans are economic and creative creatures as well as being social creatures.  Idleness causes a great malaise in the spirit.

Of course I don't mean that merely a way to pass one's time.  I mean there is a need to do something creative and productive, and ideally one which is hooked into the other four elements.  This can, I suppose, be a mere hobby but it is better if it is a family business.

Such a business cannot exist without ownership of tools.

The goal of all of this is to have security in the present and a hope for a better future. 

Rethinking Education

We are excessively credentialist today, far more than we ever have been.  People go to school to get credentials more often than to get education, and this is particularly true in business school.  If you are going there to get the piece of paper, then the fact is the education is worth less than the piece of paper the diploma is printed on.

Education has thus become a way to suck money out of the middle class and transfer control over the economy more and more to the super-wealthy.

If that wasn't bad enough, our public school system is designed to look like a great equalizer while it in fact perpetrates massive class distinctions.  More and more funding gets shifted onto the communities, leaving wealthier neighborhoods with far better schools than poor neighborhoods.  Our education system claims to equalize things, but in fact it just perpetuates class distinctions, many of which are closely tied to the legacy of slavery and segregation.

And yet there is hope.  In the knowledge economy, open source software and other things are becoming more common, representing a real rise of a Distributist social order over a Capitalist one, often by people who have been left out of the economy.  Right now this is a phenomenon of the middle class, and the challenge is to help poor families reach into this world as well.

To this end, I think it is worth noting that most of our education infrastructure is not particularly useful.  It is true that learning math and reading is important to these things but only to a point.  I have argued elsewhere that double entry accounting systems are largely transcriptions onto paper of accounting systems designed for illiterate and innumerate peasants.  Education does not equal intelligence.

The approach forward must be one which stresses apprenticeships and self-study, along with guidance of mentors.  Most of the knowledge industries can be managed in this way.  However for this to work people must grow up around tools.  Increasing access to tools and facilities is thus the primary work that must be done.

An alternative to Liberalism, part 1, post 1: Introduction and some Definitions

This is in part a critique of OzConservative's insightful critique of liberalism and in part an expansion.  My critique is somewhat nuanced, and is not necessarily a refutation of what he says.  In many ways I go beyond the piece I am replying to, while in others I may not go as far.

My overall thesis is that liberal philosophy is built on two fundamental pillars, autonomy theory and technocracy.  Autonomy theory confuses descriptive truths about human existence with prescriptive recommendations, and thus effects a bit of a slight of hand.  The real problem though is when this is combined with technocracy, namely the idea that social progress approximates technological progress and therefore we can invent our way out of problems.  These twin ideas form the heart and soul of liberalism, and they can be shown to be as sexist, for example, as anything that has come before.

Finally I will try to offer something of an alternative.  It is worth noting that this is not the only alternative, and it will be drawn from pagan traditions both in the Classical world and Northern Europe.  In this regard this places me much closer to the Catholic and Orthodox thinkers I know than to the Protestant ones I know.   The major difference is that in rejecting Christianity and other internationalist religions, I am free to reject the idea of a single world authority.

But before we begin it is important to be clear about the nature of social constructs.  Liberals often call things "social constructs" to dispute their binding nature.   Social constructs however can be quite binding.  For example, there is no innate difference between a twenty dollar bill and a five dollar bill.  They are printed with different designs.  The relative value is socially constructed.  We are not really free, however, to just decide that five dollar bills are worth fifteen times what a twenty dollar bill is.  Moreover the entire liberal economic system would collapse if social constructs were done away with.  Money, for example, couldn't exist.  Many social constructs are thus built on social imperatives and so we can't do without them.

In part two I will discuss autonomy theory, and an alternative based on Greek and Norse paganism.  My thesis here is that humans are necessarily self-authors, but working in a context defined by culture and validated by others.  This context provides  subtext as well and it suggests a very different way to think about identity, that we should identify with our works and actions rather than with our emotions or thoughts.  Viewed from this way, self-authorship is a fact of life and can neither be enhanced nor repressed, and the disagreement with modern liberal thought is one of quality vs quantity.  Where modern liberal thought tends to seek to expand the scope of self-authorship, a very different, and more traditional approach is to expand the ownership of works within a domain.

In part three, I will discuss technocracy, and alternatives to this approach as well.  Technocracy will be dissected regarding the actual, measurable harms that it causes, particularly in medicine, and will be discussed in terms of corporate and political machinery as well.  An alternative will be provided which will look at social systems not as machines but as organic systems.  In passing a more traditional alternative will also be discussed, namely the tendency to anthropomorphize everything (in this view the natural world is like a person, as is the state, the family, the war-band, etc), and the idea that this may not be such a bad thing.

In part four, I will take issue with the basic historical narrative offered by liberalism, and look at two very specific examples of cases where the facts don't meet the narrative, namely women's position in ancient Athens and the reformation in Europe.

Why DOMA section 3 Should be Struck Down

The Defence of Marriage Act has three sections, the first lays out the reasons for the act, the second exempts same-sex marriage from the requirements of the full faith and credit clause (note that recognition of marriage is not required under that clause anyway and so it effectively does nothing), and the third defines marriage as one man and one woman for purposes of federal law.

I see section 3 of DOMA as a theft of responsibility from the states, which generally otherwise get a free hand  in defining family law for their residents.  Once marriage is made into a federal issue then the federal government can steer the states on the matter.  The DOMA is itself not too threatening in this regard since it is only one criteria added.  However, if in the future, other criteria are added, navigating the state and federal marriage codes could become quite complicated and states would have every incentive just to incorporate federal law by reference, thus depriving states of sovereignty in this area.

To be sure DOMA could be struck down in a very bad way, in a way depriving the states of their sovereignty in this issue.  I don't think think that will happen because I don't think the court will want to dive into such a contentious issue right now and upset so many state's laws, and so any victory against DOMA which is in line with a court.

Some things, such as eligibility to marry, should be between a state and her people, not between the federal government and the people.  The size and scale of social machinery are the principle threat to family and tradition and for this reason whatever the federal government is capable and competent to defend, marriage is not on that list.

Social subsidiarity in Balinese society

As mentioned my son is learning about Bali in social studies.  The last post discussed the way that sacred space is woven into all aspects of the Balinese life-world.  This post will discuss social organization.

This gave me the chance to introduce my son to Aristotle's ideas of social structure, as well as to explain largely how the society works using subsidiarity as a principle, namely the idea of a larger order dependent on autonomous smaller orders for its existence.

In Bali, the two large orders are caste and town (Pura adat).  The castes follow standard Hindu rules, though due to sound shifts, V's are changed to W's (so Vishnu is called Wishnu, and the Vasya are the Weisya).

The costs and benefits of the Hindu caste system are too numerous to go into here.  Whole books could be written on the subject, but two points are worth noting.  First caste stands in the way of self-sufficiency.  Different kinds of labor are divided by caste such that one cannot achieve much without working with others of different castes.  Thus one important aspect is that the caste system trades independence for interdependence and thus ensures that society must always work together.  Instead of an undifferentiated mass of individuals as we are used to thinking of society in the West, Hindu society aggressively partitions society and apportions members of it with lots in life.  This may be explored in a future post.

However the major focus of this post will be the town.  As an economy that was up until very recently dependent on rice agriculture for survival, most Balinese come from an agricultural background.  Even today rice farming is a very important both economically and culturally to the island although tourism is the main industry on the island these days.  The primary form of farming is that of small rice paddies, periodically flooded based on water availability.  Water management is a central communal focus.

Family and Neighborhood

The fundamental unit in any society is the married household.  Married households are societies in miniature and they are the primary method of passing cultural expressions and values onto children.  As in most societies these are often multi-generational and there may be several generations living under one house.  However in general, only married child is allowed to stay in the home of the parents and inherit the living quarters.  Other sons must go out and build their own, while daughers move into their husbands houses upon marriage.

Each married household itself must belong to the banjar through the husband's membership.  The banjar is the smallest social/governmental unit in Balinese society, being similar to a neighborhood association but with a wider range of power and responsibilities than is seen in the West.  The Banjar is thus properly seen as an organ of government in Balinese society and a fundamentally democratic one (Bali is traditionally, like most Hindu societies, a monarchy but one with local democratic institutions).

The banjar thus constitutes the first of the fundamental public institutions of
Balinese society.

Farming Association and Water Management

The second fundamental institution is that of the Subak, or farming association.  The Subak is actually more akin to a water district, and the primary responsibility is to coordinate schedules for flooding the paddies so that there is enough water for every member.  Because there may be some distance between the paddy and dwelling, the subak and the banjar may not be coterminous.  A given banjar may consist of people in different subak2, while a given subak may consist of people in different banjar2.

One can see in this approach something akin to the guild system of Europe.   Here the various professional individuals work together to divide up scarce resources and ensure that everyone is productive.

The Subak and Banjar essentially form the warp and weft of village organization, and are woven into the municipal government.  These various villages would then form the kingdom of Bali which into historical times was a monarchy (and the royal family is still well respected and carries with them a great deal of moral authority, as far as I can tell).

Sacred Space and Cosmology in Bali

Being in Jakarta (on the island of Java) right now, my oldest son is studying Bali in social studies.  The material he has been given is hopelessly confusing to folks who are not familiar with anthropology but fortunately I was able to help him make some sense of it.

I intend to publish two blog posts about my interpretations of what I have seen in his books.  These dovetail with a lot of my own anthropological studies and consequently it is important.  The first, this post, will be on sacred space and cosmology in Bali.  The second, to be written soon, will cover subsidiarity and family/town structure.

I write about these topics because I believe that they have a lot to teach modern mankind.  We have lost our sense of sacred space, and are isolated by servitude dressed up as freedom.  If we begin to understand our condition through the eyes of those who hold what we have lost, we can begin to rebuild.  It may not be along the lines of any specific group, but we can't start until we know what we are missing.

Unlike Islamic sacred cosmology which is global in scope and centered on Mecca everywhere, Balinese Hindu cosmology is local in scope and kept very close to the human experience.  In this way, it provides I think a very human and earthy sense of what has been lost.

One of the important foundational principles I have found over and over is the fact that in traditional cosmologies that horizontal space is isomorphic with vertical space.  This means that horizontal space models and vertical space models are often interchangeable.  As in the Vedic coronation ritual, this can be circular model, or as with the directional system of Bali it can be linear.

The Four Directions and the Center of the World

Balinese villages are laid out according to four directions which are not necessarily perpendicular.  These directions are defined rather by natural layout and sacred space.  The primary axis runs from the observer to the peak of Mount Agung, a stratovolcano and highest point on the island.  It also runs the other direction towards the sea.  This makes Mount Agung the directional pole, or center of the world to traditional Balinese society.

Mount Agung is also metaphorically and physically up, from the perspective of the village.  Not only is it a tall mountain peak but it is traditionally seen as the dwelling place of the gods, much like Mount Olympus in Greece.  Away from Mount Agung is the sea, which is seen as physically and metaphorically below the observer, and the dwelling place of the dead.  Thus the axis from Mount Agung to the sea is also the axis from the heavens to the realms under the waves and under the earth, and thus a vertical axis.    This is important in the Three Temples section below.

There are two other directions which are important in Balinese society:  East and West, which address the rising and setting of the sun.  These directions are not necessarily perpendicular (and in fact can be parallel to in rare cases) the main axis towards/away from Mount Agung.

The Three Temples

Every village has three temples attached to it, which make up a model of sacred space along three planes.  These correspond generally to a universal model generally, and an Indo-European spacial model specifically which is of course not surprising given the fact that it is fundamentally Hindu in outlook

The most important temple is the Pura Desa, or "Village Temple" which is located in the center of the town.  This is dedicated to Visnu, but spacially is positioned in the center of human activity, and therefore must be seen in two overlapping contexts.

The first such context is that this is the temple of the human domain, much like Midgard in Norse mythology.  This is on the horizontal plane, in the area of human activity, and it is worth noting that Visnu alone of the Hindu gods was assumed to have come to earth and lived life as a human twice, as King Rama of the Ramayana and Lord Krishna of the Mahabharata and the Krishnayana.  The connection that Vishnu has then with the human condition is different in quality and kind than the other main Hindu gods.  Therefore this has to be the first interpretation as to the place of the Pura Desa.

The second context however is that the center in Vedic ritual is associated with kingship and sovereignty.  This is true in both the Asvamedha and the Vedic coronation ritual.  It is worth noting that the Vedic Raj, or King was always from the warrior or Ksatrya caste, and also Vishnu, in both of his avatars, was a Ksatrya.  Thus the Pura Desa represents a point of social order, and the presence of the kingly influence, in Balinese village life.

The second type of temple is the Pura Dalem, or the temple to the dead, represented directly away from Mount Agung from the reference point of the village.  The temple of the dead is thus metaphorically below the village and thus corresponds to the underworld.  While Hinduism had, by historical times, moved away from the idea of an underworld of the dead and towards a system of reincarnation only broken by the self-deification that comes with identifying with the universal (the Upanishads say that the gods became gods through this process), this shows a trace of the older cosmology has not died away.  In Hinduism the underworld is also the world of the Asuras and hence a place of riches and gold, from which prosperity flows.  This leads to a central ambivalence towards the underworld found across the Indo-European world.  On one hand, it is a spooky place full of often hostile entities, but on the other it is the place from which all prosperity comes.  Certainly ritually this means that the dead in Balinese society dwell below the realm of human activity.

As a side note, outside of India and Hinduism, most Indo-European traditions had a great deal of variety regarding possible lives after death, and it is also possible that these were not seen as mutually exclusive, and that one might be reincarnated and at the same time spend an eternity in the realm of the dead.  This sort of ambiguity is most prevalent in Norse heathen religion, but is clearly present in Greek myth as well, and the Greeks had a very lively relationship with their dead.  Daniel Ogden has written a fair amount on that topic and I highly recommend his works on Greco-Roman necromancy in this context.

The final type of temple found in relation to every town is the Pura Puseh, which is located towards the center of the world and the dwelling place of the gods.  Thus it is metaphorically above the realm of human activity.  Here the divine ancestors and the gods are worshipped.

Overall these two aspects serve to orient village life in Bali around sacred space and cosmology.  In essence the sacred model of the world is forced into one's mind at every turn and it must be ever-present.

Improvised turkey stuffing

Right now I am living in Indonesia.  One thing about being overseas is the fact that it is not necessarily always easy to get all the same ingredients one is used to working with.  So today being thanksgiving I cooked a turkey.

No, I couldn't get all the stuff I would normally use for stuffing.  So I improvised.  And no, I didn't measure anything.

What did I add?

• Day-old rice (this is what you'd make fried rice out of because freshly cooked rice gets too soggy)  How much?  Well I added what I had.
• 2 Granny smith apples, diced
• Lemon juice (1 1/2 lemons was arguably a little too much, so maybe one lemon next time I try to recreate this?)
• Cashews.  No idea how much.  Maybe 100g?
• Ginger root, just a bit
• Soy sauce to taste
• Tumeric leaves, 3 smallish ones

I tasted a little bit on the edge that was fully cooked and arguably a little more tart than I wanted but really quite tasty.

Tumeric is one of those things you can grow in pots indoors in the US if you can buy some fresh tumeric root at an Asian market.

A Critical View of the Gay Rights Movement.

As time goes on I have become fairly disillusioned with the gay rights movement.  It isn't so much that I disagree on issues so much as I disagree on a vision of the society of the future and the overall trajectory our culture needs to take to survive what I see are coming crises.  Those of us who are traditionalists find it very hard to support a movement which is fundamentally hostile towards tradition generally, especially when this extends not only those traditions minimally necessary for their causes.  The failure to embrace traditions and traditionalist defences of their causes means that those of us who do feel there is a real need to retraditionalize and yet find through our traditions that we agree with the gay rights movement on some issues must choose between what we feel is a fair application of traditions in support of a group that would prefer that we don't exist, or fighting anti-traditional forces at an unacceptable human cost.

The problem with an anti-traditionalist view is that it fundamentally isolates people from eachother, destroys all sense of place, and thus stunts human flourishing.  There is a rising traditionalist movement both among the left and right of American politics, and I place my hope there instead of in the anti-traditionalist progressive wing.

The Traditionalist Defence of Same-Sex Marriage and Gay Rights Hostility

In the primary traditionalist view, marriage is about children as it is universally across cultures and history.  The basic issue anthropologically is that men and women are differently situated regarding reproduction and so societies are generally forced to choose between women bearing sole responsibility for childraising and creating a social and legal framework for sharing such support between men and women.  That social and legal framework is marriage and is more universally ritualized than is saying farewell to the dead.[1]

This view is echoed in Aristotle's "Politics" where he suggests that there are three layers to society, namely the individual, the family household, and the polis.  The household's main role is that of creating children and passing culture on to them so they can form households that are within the union of the polis.  Of course in addition, the household is an economic unit, and one which supports the elderly in most societies and times, but all of this is put in the primary service of the raising of children.

The family household is the bedrock of the state.  It provides a stable foundation for raising children and this also provides the basic unit of grass-roots culture of all sorts.  Strong families then produce productive citizens, and this is why Cicero said (in "The Republic") that one should not turn one's parents in to the state for crimes because the state needs strong families more than it needs criminal justice.

It is worth noting of course that neither Aristotle nor Cicero likely had any problem with male-male sex per se, and it isn't clear what Greek attitudes were towards female-female sex were, though there is some evidence for widespread occurrences of this in religious contexts in vase paintings and the fact that the religious organizations that gave rise to Sappho's erotic poetry were also found throughout the Greek world.  Of course the Greek world was full of rules regarding who could have sex with whom and what sorts of acts were acceptable, as are all cultures.

From this perspective then, marriage creates a family household with characteristics which make it uniquely qualified for childrearing.  These include essentially a form of corporate existence which can outlast the death of any single member without necessarily there being a loss of property, custodial rights and responsibilities to children, and the like.  But children are the future and they are the focus.

The decline of the American family then occurs through a series of stages including the rise of the ideal of an independent retirement, the shift in voting from per household to per adult.  As time goes on however, we have in my lifetime supplanted more and more of the traditional family structures with institutions, changing from neighborhoods and children playing together to factory farm day-care/preschool/public school systems chained together with ever-lengthening expectations of years that children shall go through that system.  And we expect schools to play ever-increasing roles in culture war issues and many of the huge battles over abstinence-only sex ed, and portraying homosexuality as normal in public schools is a result of this.  Add to this ever-increasing social services supplanting parent roles so both parents can work and the elderly can have an independent, if lonely, retirement in the name of not being a burden to anyone.  This decline of the family and replacing it with government institutions is very concerning and fortunately there is a small, growing traditionalist movement which is seeking to reverse this to some extent.  This includes a nacient domesticity movement as well as a general increase in multi-generational households particularly as immigrants come to the US.

From this perspective, same-sex marriage is not necessarily a bad thing.  It provides, for children who are in de facto same-sex households anyway, the same legal protections regarding continuity of their environment that those children have in opposite-sex households.  If marriage is about the children then the question of same-sex marriage needs to be about the impacts on the children not the impacts on the parents, and if marriage enables better support of the children, then we shouldn't disadvantage the children just because they are raised in a household where both main contributors are the same sex.

Such an argument has a potential to broaden the appeal of same-sex marriage as a cause but every time I have suggested it, I find myself under attack mostly from the very advocates of the cause I am suggesting could be furthered there.  It is hard to understand why advocates for a position would be actively hostile to people reaching out to others on behalf of that position, but I think the issue is that it is easy to see this as dangerously close, from their perspective, to the idea that marriage is about procreation.  I don't think it is a problem to suggest that marriage is about procreation cross-culturally, though, or that we are in a relatively unique period of history where a combination of factors are temporarily weakening that interest including the fact that we have had a huge social subsidy through fossil fuels which has largely fueled the modern age.

I think that these are almost undeniably true, and that as energy prices continue to rise many things we take for granted including the potential for an independent retirement for most people.  Our consumption of medical technology today is also unsustainable, as is the apparent middle-class boom in wealth caused by housing prices continuing to rise.[2]  The very things which enable us to see this as an issue today are not guaranteed to be around far into the future.  Consequently I think there is some wisdom in avoiding the arrogance which suggests that all previous generations have done things wrong.

The fact is, tradition is dynamic.  Aspects of tradition can be repurposed and traditional rites can change greatly in a short amount of time.[3]  The lack of a traditional framework in modern culture has a great deal of cost in terms of mental health.[1]  Consequently one of the promises of the movement to retraditionalize society and in particular the family is that this improves sustainability long-run.  Tradition thus doesn't necessarily mandate certain viewpoints, but instead provides a narrow rhetorical framework for arguing about them, for example making the children the focus of any debate on same-sex marriage.   The fact though is that while this is constraining it offers a sense of place and stability that is lost as tradition atrophies.  One major reason for the New Age movement may be a reaction to the loss of our vital traditions.

The failure to accept that people may embrace a traditionalist view of family and yet support same-sex marriage means that traditionalists such as myself find ourselves struggling on one hand for the idea that children need the support that marriage offers in same-sex households and also the fact that the proponents of same-sex marriage believe that tradition is what holds us back from social "progress."  But it is a funny sort of progress which uproots people from their towns, and weakens families, robbing people of a sense of place in the name of "freedom," and it is a funny sort of freedom that does not include a right to one's traditions.  I have even heard opponents to my views suggest that the sustainability issue isn't real because we can solve it by building large numbers of nuclear reactors.  Great, supporting same-sex marriage requires ensuring many more Chernobyls and Fukushimas.....  If that is the price, no thanks.

But I think we are offered here a false choice.  Another option is that we focus on reconnecting the family with the raising of children and the care of the elderly and worry less about the specific structures of other people's households in that area, and recognize that same-sex marriage may well be a way to help do this if the context is right.  The major problem is that non-traditionalists (which comprise the city folk, both right and left) tend to be hostile towards the role of marriage in raising kids.  There are a number of reasons for this, some more legitimate than others, but this is the backdrop under which this dialog occurs.

Saving marriage in its traditionalist sense does not necessarily mean banning same-sex marriage.  It does however mean that adult children should live near their parents to the extent possible, and that mutual support and assistance in raising future generations should be offered, but fighting for this means fighting against the tide on both sides of the political spectrum.

The Gay Rights Movement as Homophobic

The second major problem I see with the gay rights movement is that it is fundamentally homophobic insofar as gays and lesbians are treated as fundamentally other.  This sets up a sort of passive-aggressive acceptance of homosexuals on the basis that they will never quite match society's definitions of "normal."  The idea is that gays and lesbians must have equal rights because they do not conform to societal models of normality.  Because they are fundamentally other, they cannot be normalized, just accepted.  We will never see a market for a dyke barbie playset because, we are assured, homosexuals are a small minority for biological reasons.

This is not the only area of course where we see this sort of passive-aggressive acceptance of "the other."  It is common in race and gender as well.  For example, there is a significant gender disparity in medical textbooks on figures representing health and disease, with male figures more often representing health and female figures more often representing disease.[4]  One can find similar racial disparities in many areas.[5]  For example, Time Magazine darkened OJ Simpson's mug shot in the 1994 issue focusing on the murder of Nicole Simpson and OJ's arrest.  The subtle standards of normality are brutally pervasive and all rhetoric must be read in their context.

That context of normality in modern culture is defined by Disney movies for little girls, by Barbie and Ken, by romance movies generally, and by bridal magazines.  There are industries upon industries which make money essentially selling heterosexuality to young girls and young women.  Therefore heterosexuality is normal, and people who deviate from that are not.  The cultural argument then boils down to "are they bad?  Or is it that they can't help it?"  The basic assumptions accepted on both sides of the debate are deeply homophobic and seek to constraint as many people as possible to a life of exclusive heterosexuality, and in this context "gays are born that way" carries with it a subtext of "you aren't born that way, are you?"

Of course the reason is that once you reject this false choice, many more unpleasant questions start surfacing and the issue becomes very difficult to contain.  The idea that homosexual sex might actually be normal within limits for most people forces back the questions relating to marriage, why we fight against it so hard, and so forth.  There are however growing numbers of people (myself included) who reject sexual orientation labels because we see them as social control mechanisms, and this brings us back to the fundamental questions of same-sex marriage but from a viewpoint so far unlike what goes on in political discourse that it just can't be reconciled with either major camp.

It is as if our society presents us with two boxes, marked "gay" and "straight" and tells us to get in one and stay in it.  If we look around there is a small box hidden behind those two labelled "Bi" but anyone who goes in that box gets treated with suspicion by everyone else.  But the natural condition is not to choose any of the boxes.  Many societies have woven homosexual sex through their societal structures in various ways and therefore I conclude that virtually everyone is capable of having fulfilling sexual relationships with people both of the same sex and opposite.  This may feel intuitively wrong in our culture, but we cannot separate the industries and social forces which construct our taboos from those feelings.

I contend that until one moves beyond the general hostility towards homosexuality in our culture, a hostility which deeply pervades even the gay rights movement, we cannot really discuss on even terms the question of same-sex marriage, and once we do the issue will be so heavily transformed we will no longer be able to recognize it.  I think, however, if you separate the traditionalist framing of the issue from hostility towards homosexuality it makes more sense than the anti-traditionalist view.  The only question left is which direction to take it, while focusing on rebuilding the family as the bedrock cultural institution and taking back authority from the state to vest in the family.



Fleshing out a view of human sexuality which works from a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective is very difficult.  However, I think it is clear generally that our views of sexuality and the biological nature of sexual orientation in our culture do not actually work when studying most cultures and times, particularly those cultures which have normalized significant same-sex sexual contact in some contexts.[6]

Notes:

[1] Grimes, Ronald.  "Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage"

[2] Warren, Elizabeth.  "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"

[3]  Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process."

[4] Davis-Floyd, Robbie.  "Birth as an American Rite of Passage, 2nd Edition"

[5]  One can see an argument that race provides a critical difference between Brandenburg v. Ohio and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project on the question of when advocating to or on behalf of a terrorist organization is Constitutionally protected.

[6]  For example, the Sambia of New Guinea require that boys become men by fellating tribal elders, see note 1 above.  Also Aristotle discusses the use and limits of pederasty in ancient Athens while Plutarch practically calls this, along with wife-swapping, the backbone of Spartan society in "The Life of Lycurgus".  Note also that males having penetrative sex with male slaves was common in much of the ancient world.  The imposition of the Levitican prohibition by Christians in Late Antiquity was largely unusual at that time.