Some passing thoughts on Nietzsche, velvet ropes, and marriage

Ressentiment is a characteristic of all “slave moralities,” according to Nietzsche’s picture in Genealogy of Morals. Roughly, ressentiment is an emotion of imagined revenge felt and nurtured by the underclass against those who do or are felt to oppress them. Because part of what it is to be in the underclass is to be powerless, those at the bottom of society have no real way to lash out  at those above them and so they imagine a punishment, whether that is the inevitable revolution or karma or the punishments of hell. “Though we may be downtrodden now, you will get yours in the days or world to come,” the oppressed mutter under their breath and it makes them feel better, even as it poisons the world for them.

Nietzsche gathers many examples of ressentiment in action, but one that has always stuck with me is drawn from Aquinas. In the Supplement to the Summa (question 94), Aquinas considers the ways in which those in Heaven will rejoice in their knowledge that others will be damned. Nietzsche is, perhaps, too harsh on this passage—Christianity is his bête noire—and Aquinas does say that the saved will not rejoice in the punishment of others as such, but only in knowing what could have happened to them but did not and in seeing Divine justice done.

That is, at least from the modern perspective, fairly dark stuff and Nietzsche uses it to argue that the religion of Love is actually a religion of Hate. I’m not endorsing dear Friedrich’s conclusions, but he points out something interesting here about traditional Christian conceptions of Hell and Heaven. Part of the joy of Heaven consists—even if it is indirectly so—in the fact that there are others in Hell, others who did not get in and have to suffer. You see this even today among those conservative Christians—I know mostly of Catholics—who get extremely angry when one of their co-religionists suggests that Hell will be not empty but very sparsely populated.

I think of this as a the velvet-rope theory of Heaven: it’s really only valuable if others can’t have it. If you take away its exclusivity, it isn't worth much. (Someone of a more biblical or theological bent might want to think through this is in the context of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.)

What, you might ask, has me thinking about this? Debates about marriage, I might reply.

It seems quite likely to me that same-sex marriage has a short future in the United States, at least in any sense stronger than just a license with no attendant rights or responsibilities. There are many arguments against state recognition of same-sex marriage and they come from different backgrounds. Some are full-throated religious arguments. Some rely heavily on tradition. Some rely on old-fashioned natural law. Many rely on the weird hybrid theory that is the new natural law. But many of them have as at least part of their content, a claim that the recognition—in civil law alone—is a harm to the institution of marriage and their own marriages. (See, for instance, link, but there are many more examples.)

Some of these last sort of arguments are worth thinking through even if we disagree with them, but very many of them amount to little more than a velvet-rope theory of marriage: if you let those people in, it will cheapen mine. We saw a version of this, of course, in arguments against miscegenation. Even if some opponents are right that same-sex marriage decreases the attractiveness of traditional marriage, it’s important to ask why that is.

On thinking about natural law in the shower

I first learned to think and do philosophy as part of a tradition, a fairly conservative Catholic tradition that took both Aristotle and Aquinas seriously. My graduate training was very different, but the effects of that initial training are still in me. I might be a very bad and marginal member of that tradition, but I am still in it in some ways. One way that I remain is in a general respect for virtue theory and—oddly enough for an avowed homosexual—natural law approaches to ethics. I still take Aristotle and Aquinas seriously and I think their approaches to the good life, to flourishing, to what is good for us still speak to us.

If there is something odd about this it is because natural law moralists, in particular, have been at the forefront of objections to the decriminalization of homosexuality and to recognition of same-sex marriages. I'm not interested in debating whether modern advocates of natural law are in the right here. But I do want to note one important thing. Both virtue theory and natural law theory are meant to be empirically grounded theories. They make pronouncements about what is good for beings like us and what would amount to a good life for beings like us based on facts about our biology and psychology.

It is a basic assumption of both sorts of accounts that humans have some immutable nature. I think this is probably right, at least in the medium term; what might happen to that nature over evolutionary time is a different issue. But, many modern proponents of each of these theories seem to assume that our knowledge of this nature is also immutable. What I mean is this: Contemporary natural law theorists operate under the assumption that Aristotle and Aquinas had a complete and completely correct account of human nature, in its biological and psychological aspects. Thus, they believe not only that human nature is immutable, but that we have known all there is to know about it for at least almost a millennium. 

What we have learned about human biology and human psychology and the nature of human interactions since the middle ages is or seems to be of almost no interest to many practitioners of both virtue theory and natural law ethics. You see them quoting Aquinas as authoritative on all such matters.

Now, I think that Aquinas understood quite a bit about human psychology, but I don't think he got it all. And, his biology was pretty bad. Similarly, I think Aristotle understood human motivation and psychological development and society pretty well, but he was missing out on some pretty important pieces, pieces which have partially been supplied by further exploration in the ensuing years. 

Mostly, I think that Aquinas and Aristotle and others in this tradition were right to base an ethic on what we are like and what will lead to happy and fulfilling and flourishing lives for creatures like us. They were also right to think that is largely an empirical question. But this empirical question is an empirical one, not an a priori one or one that was settled in the high middle ages. If we discover new things about ourselves—say about sexuality or human interaction or the family—then our theory has to respond to that.

If virtue theory or natural law is just a constant rehashing of what people thought 900 or 2300 years ago, it isn't philosophy, it isn't even virtue theory or natural law, it's just a dead orthodoxy. And, that's exactly how it should be treated: as dead and irrelevant. 

(I should mention one exception to the immutability of the theory here: Almost all such theorists have discovered that lending at interest is morally acceptable; that we learned something about economics that Aquinas wouldn't have known, since he roundly condemned this practice as usury and a violation of the natural law. This exception may be self-serving or might be a realization that the theory needs to evolve.)

Why shouldn't you sit in my front yard to eat your lunch?

In the middle of the summer a contractor for the city began replacing the sewer lines in our neighborhood. Having finished that, the same contractor is now digging up the streets they have just sort-of repaired to replace the water lines. This has meant a summer with the constant sound of heavy machinery and multiple backhoes and bulldozers racing through the street at breakneck pace and parked throughout the neighborhood overnight, through weekends, and during holidays. The work is scheduled to be completed by March 2017; so much for private contractors being more efficient than public workers. 

These are the sorts of first-world problems that people like me like to complain about. Living in San Diego, they combine with the third-world streets—only slightly better than those around my husband's family home in La Matanza in Argentina—to give us some small thing to temper the weather and sun and ocean and mountains and everything. But I'm not going to complain about that now. Instead, I'm going to complain about myself.

Since this is the last week before the academic year picks back up, I am still at home with the dog and my one remaining monarch caterpillar. I spend the day reading and avoiding work and dreading/longing for the beginning of classes. As I ate a piece of leftover pizza today, I noticed that one of the workers had walked from the work-zone, which surrounds us, but isn't within a block of our house in either direction, to sit on our retaining wall to eat his lunch. This irked me, but I figured that he was only sitting on the wall and, after all, he needs somewhere to eat his lunch. After a second piece of pizza, I looked out again and he had been joined by another worker. His companion wasn't sitting on the wall but lying on the stones on our front yard, between two plants. From being irked, I became angry.

When I walked the dog I noticed that they had their coolers and a radio and a whole spread in front of the house. As Mateo and I walked around the block, I thought about what I should do. Should I confront the workers and ask them not to lie on our yard? Should I call the company and complain about their behavior? Should I wait for Fernando to deal with it?

When we got back to the house, I said hello to them and went inside. By this time I had begun to ask myself a different question: What the hell is wrong with me? Here were two people eating their lunch in the middle of a hot day doing relatively unpleasant work. And, I was upset because they were sitting on a wall and lying on some rocks. Of course, that wall and those rocks are mine. But, they were doing no harm and getting a little bit of rest.

The answer to what is wrong with me (in this context) is a fully American, fully Lockean, common, and inhumane conception of property. The harm they were doing was a very minimal trespass, one that did no damage either to the property or its owners. The wall and yard are in the same shape as they were before their lunch. I wasn't going to be using it for something else during that time. But, as my reactions and actions show, I have deeply imbued the notion that property is sacrosanct, that is exists as a right and value in and of itself and before all others.

But that's not what property is like. Property, as Aquinas taught, exists for the good of the community. A right to property exists to help us avoid tragedies of the commons, because people take better care of what is theirs than what is all of ours, because collective farming and cooperatives and group work in classes tends not to be as productive. But property is not some primary value; it can be justified only insofar as it contributes to the commonweal. In a certain, very real way, each of us holds it in trust for the community. And, when the good of the community is threatened by property claims those claims must be reexamined. Sometimes the community will win and sometimes property will. But when it's between two men sitting down for fifteen minutes and my claims on the wall, it's probably the community that wins.