Works before faith: against orthodoxies

We seem to care much more about what people believe than what they do. Or, rather, we care more about what they affirm than what they do and what their actions show to be their real commitments.

Maybe this is the result of the Reformation with its talk of the Inner and Outer Man and salvation by Faith but not Works. Maybe it is an expression of the older mind/body dualism that those Reformers inherited from Augustine. Maybe it's just the result of reading a lot of Plato; here I jest. Most likely, it is at least partially a result of the fantasy that there is a real—more authentic, more virtuous, and fully private—me independent of my actions, a true and hidden character; the fantasy that let's people say things like, "I wasn't myself yesterday," and, "I'm sorry for what I said, that wasn't me." And, then we can be told, contrary to all behavioral evidence, what a person really believes or what her character really is.

Whatever the cause or causes, this emphasis on belief (as affirmed) over action feeds into real strife. At least in the United States, we prize orthodoxy. We judge one another based on our political and religious ideologies. And, we use these ideologies as epithets. Someone is just a stupid liberal or a heartless conservative, a godless atheist or a deluded believer. And, too often, when someone is on the other side of such a divide, we immediately dismiss them. Of course, this damages discourse, because we disengage, but it damages other kinds of human interaction even more deeply.
When someone disagrees with us we are quick, I think, to dismiss them as a cooperator. Because one of us is a liberal and the other a conservative, we are unwilling to work together, even when what we want is the same thing. Lots of people on the left and lots of people on parts of the right are very concerned about poverty and, believe it or not, mothers and children. Working together, though, is too often forestalled by ideological difference: I can't work with those socialists; I won't work with fascists.
I remember several years ago Hillary Clinton—I'm not generally a fan—calling for cooperation between the left and the right on abortion. Since she thought both sides had an interest in reducing the number of abortions, they should come together to discuss those things that they could both get behind to achieve a reduction. But orthodoxies and principle continue to keep anything like that from happening. As always, the perfect is made the enemy of the good.
One more personal reminiscence: The year between university and graduate school, I worked at a  Church-sponsored meal program and clinic for the homeless and near-homeless. As you might expect, most of the people involved were unreformed 60's-style liberals, with a fair smattering of Catholic Workers. But, there were also deeply conservative volunteers, including a far-right Republican police detective who washed dishes at the meal several days a week. Rather than seeing an ideological divide, he and the other volunteers worked together for something they both valued. The fact that they disagreed about sociopolitical causes and solutions to homelessness and poverty didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was the work. (And, the work they were doing probably said a lot more about what their real beliefs were than their stated ones.)
Now, I don't want to claim that beliefs as affirmed don't matter. Of course, the causes of poverty matter, but so does feeding the poor. And, as a philosopher, I care deeply about beliefs. But, in interpersonal relations, I care more about actions and the real beliefs they express.
It's all good to deride deluded Christians, but if they are fighting oppression and you are doing nothing, what does the right belief matter? It's wonderful to scream about godless atheists, but if they are fighting human rights abuses while you are reading a devotional, who cares? It's fun to talk about heartless conservatives, but if with their heartless beliefs they are also helping refugees, what is more important?
Only last week, I was told that I lacked principle—utterly true, if for different reasons—because I teach at a Catholic university, and no gay atheist should do that. Leaving aside the mischaracterization of my beliefs, I can only mourn a viewpoint that says I should have nothing to do with those whose orthodoxy or ideological purity is suspect, or that I cannot cooperate with them in a project that we both find worthwhile, e.g., education.
I have colleagues and students and friends who I think are utterly deluded about all sorts of things and I have pretty serious philosophical and political differences with my partner of 18 years, but at the end of the day, it is by their works that I judge them. As it should be.

Like a horse and carriage

It is inevitable that in the prolonged debate that is going on about same sex marriage not just in the United States but throughout Europe and the Western Hemisphere, people are going to have to talk about the relationship between love and marriage. Of course, Frank Sinatra told us just how deeply the two were connected, but it isn't always clear that they are so closely intertwined. 

We all know of "loveless" marriages and even unions in which the partners seem more connected by their disdain for one another than their affection. After all, all those movies in which marital partners are constantly at one another—and not only when they try to destroy one another as in War of the Roses—are entertaining because of the sometimes uncomfortable way in which they limn the world we know. But even though we often think of such marriages as unhappy and better exited than endured, we almost never think that they should be automatically dissolved for their lack of love. So, one might argue, love and marriage need not be connected.

Moreover, there are those—Jonathan Rauch is particularly good here and I often have students read his arguments—who argue that given the long history of marriage, in which love was an afterthought if anything, and our legal tradition, which makes no mention of love as one of the requirements for marriage, we ought to stop talking as if there really was a connection between the two.

And, in the actual debate on the ground, whatever its rational value, you get people on either side saying that marriage is or is not about love.

"It's about the freedom to love whom I love."

"Marriage isn't about 'love' it's about children and society."

"No love is wrong."

Etc.

There are, I think, a couple of issues here. One thing that we have to note is that we don't require of two people when they marry that they feel any particular sort of emotion for one another. That is, neither as a society nor in the majority (any?) of our religious traditions do we ask for proof of affection or evidence that there is a certain sort of feeling for one another. We don't ask for a quantification of love, because we cannot even name the quality when it is felt by others who are not ourselves. This is a slightly odd version of the problem of other minds or the privacy of subjective mental content, but there is just absolutely no way for me to know what you feel when you are in love or love someone else. So, even if it were desirable to make some love requirement, we couldn't do it. (Some budding neoroscientists might try to claim that we can map emotions to the locations in which they occur in the brain; be that as it may, we still will not have gotten to anything like the way love feels.)

This might lead us to think that love shouldn't have anything to do with the way that we conceptualize (secular civil) marriage as a society. But, there's a danger in taking this position, too. For, if there is really no connection between love and marriage then there is surely no good reason to allow people of the same sex to marry one another nor is there any good reason to allow any two particular people to marry, since there could then be no argument that one had a right to marry whom they loved—the two concepts being divorced—as long as they had a right to marry some other person. In other words, if love and marriage really have nothing to do with one another, then the conservative argument that gays and lesbians really do have the same rights as others—namely, the right to marry—but just not the right to marry people of the same sex would start to have some teeth.

So, it seems, we need a conception of love that is related to marriage but that doesn't mean that those "loveless" marriages or marriages in which people have to learn to love one another aren't real marriages. I aim to provide the skeleton of that here.

(For more on "loveless" marriages, see the video below.)

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

I think the right answer is the combination of at least two different things. One is an idea that I first heard put well by Dan Savage. The gist of his claim was that love—at least the sort of long-term, forever love that we claim informs our marriages and partnerships and families—is a sort of lie that we tell one another. That is, we don't know today that we will love another for the rest of our lives, so when we say that we will we are committing ourselves to the truth of a statement that we cannot know to be true. But, that's okay, because we aren't really making a statement. We are making a commitment to live today as if we are going to be together for the rest of our lives and to do the same thing tomorrow. Without getting too sappy, being together forever is just being together now again and again. But this is to say that love is not (just) a feeling, but a commitment, an act of will, to act towards the other person in a certain way. 

If this first claim is true, then there are only going to be certain people to whom I could relatively easily make this kind of commitment and who these people are is going to be governed, in part, by my orientation. There are some lies that it is harder to get myself to believe and, among those, would be that I could be committed to a woman in the sort of way that could become lasting. (This is also why, even if some would regard same-sex marriages as second-best in general, they must be viewed as the best for those like me.)

The second thing to consider is the silly way that modern people tend to think about love. Nothing brings this out more clearly than the way that people will say things like "I love him, but I'm not in love with him." Now, I don't want to deny that love is based on and has as a part, even an essential part, an emotional and affective state. But, I don't think that state is very closely aligned, even if causally and temporally related to, the state of being in love. Being in love is like having a crush. It is that initial magical state that exists at the beginning of a relationship and, for some people, never again. But this is more like passion.

And, here I'd like to point to one of the lessons one can learn by growing up among seemingly cold, Germanic midwesterners. I remember my maternal grandmother once giving me advice on marriage: "If you get married, you should have children soon, because the passions dies quickly." That can seem horribly cold and when I was a young man, I thought it was. But she was pointing to an important distinction, that between passion or emotive feeling and something else that is better termed love. A marriage or any relationship based just on passion, on emotion, on the thrill is bound not to go too long. Why is this? Because something else, be it children or some other sort of shared project, that is,  a shared life, a common thing, is needed to hold it together. And this sharing of some project, some conception of the good, some life-centering object, is really a huge part of what love is.

The other thing I learned from my family is that there is a huge difference between displays of love and love. In our family, it was never to common to hear someone say that they loved you, but it was nonetheless apparent through action that they did. The actions of love, in which you felt that others took responsibility for you and that you were responsible to them, were there. Of course, it is nice to hear the words, but hearing the words need not mean anything; the actions are meaningful.

My point then is this: Love is essential to a marriage, but it is essential in the following ways. Love is a willed commitment to another person, a sharing of a common life project and a commitment to act in ways that demonstrate care and responsibility for and to one another. And, it is this that we make people promise when they enter civil marriages, not some affective state. Can this commitment exist outside of marriage? Yes. But, when two people who are not already so committed to another and are not already connected to one another in ways that create such responsibilities wish to make this commitment, is there a good reason to prevent it?

Amicorum communia omnia

There is a tendency, both by social conservatives and progressives in the United States, in any case—though no less a European than the current incumbent of the See of Peter is guilty of it—to view all of human history as if it were the history of the English-speaking world, and to limit the scope of even this history to roughly the late Victorian period through perhaps the late nineteen-fifties. Few places is this more obvious than in debates over marriage, presumably because it allows us to have a particularly idyllic view of that august institution.

Both those opposed to same-sex marriage and those in favor of it are fond of speaking of marriage as the eternal basis of (all parts of) society. For social conservatives, this claim often has the form of arguing that there have historically been no arrangements in society through which people have allied themselves other than "traditional" marriage. It must be noted that "traditional" marriage is usually meant to be something like the legal construction of marriage in Anglo-American (Protestant-inflected) law and not any of the other traditional models of marriage. (This is much like forgetting that the popular "Wedding March" comes from a scene in Wagner's work that represents rape more than marriage.) Thus, to alter this arrangement can only be detrimental to society as a whole. In addition, it is pointed out that we have made changes in recent years—no fault divorce, community property, etc.—and society has not generally benefited. It is rarely noted either that the relative equality of rights within marriage, the possibility of marrying across class and racial lines, et alia, are recent developments of the institution of that it was good, in these cases at least, to tinker with the institution. Nor is it noted that there is no longer tradition than common law marriage, having roots in the long-standing practice of concubinage in the West and recognized in such practices as the Catholic view that it is the partners to a marriage who make the marriage real, something that the Church can only witness.

For progressives, the claim often has the form of saying that since this is such a basic institution within society it must be manifestly unjust to exclude same-sex couples. But what is often missing from their consideration are the ways in which marriage has traditionally represented an unequal partnership between two already unequal members of society. Or, and I hate to take a page from the conservatives here, the ways in which marriage assumes a complementarity of partners, and not just a complementarity of personality but a complementarity of natures. Or, to put it another way, marriage is traditionally conceptualized as a relationship of difference.

So, you might ask, what am I a getting at here? Well, there used to be members of the gay and lesbian community who imagined different sorts of relationships for themselves. I don't just mean people who imagined sexually open relationships, I don't just mean people who imagined a radical reorganization of all society starting with the family. But I do mean all sorts of people who thought they could form relationships based on responsibilities and obligations and, yes, rights that did not thereby have to be marriage.

And, throughout history, there have been many different sorts of arrangements than just marriage. History is not just the story of husbands, wives and children and those defined by the absence of marriage: spinsters, bachelors, widows, widowers, divorcés and divorcées. There were also people whose lives were not defined in relation to marriage at all: monks and nuns, beguines and beghards, crusaders, hospitallers and nursing sisters, educators like the Brothers of the Common Life and Oxford and Cambridge fellows and many others.

I've picked on a lot of religious groups here both as a reflection of my own educational biases and because they ought to appeal to at least some conservatives. I realize that these were not groups whose lives were defined by sex but, then again, neither are the lives of those in same-sex relationships. No relationship that lasts, that matters, that forms its own society, that feeds into society, is based only on sex. What all of the groups I have mentioned have in common—and have in common with the relationships with which I am here concerned—is a shared view of life, a common purpose, shared goals, an interest in the good for one another, a desire to form a bond in which this view and purpose are furthered in new and interesting and mutually beneficial ways, in ways that themselves build up society. These were relationships built on mutual responsibility and 

You know, there is a figure way back in Western history, Aristotle, who thought that friendship was the basis of society. He didn't think marriage was a particularly good example of friendship either; the conflation of marriage with friendship is quite recent. Perhaps we could all benefit from considering just what sorts of friendship are worthy of society's protection, approbation and sanction. A little history and imagination couldn't hurt.

On forms of the common life

The state's Supreme Court has ruled that California's ban on same-sex marriage is contrary to the state's constitution. What this means is that in about thirty days, city halls within California will begin to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. 

It also means, predictably, that conservatives of all stripes will be more motivated than normal to vote for the referendum already on the November ballot to amend the state's constitution. I'm not sure about the most recent referendum, but some of the most recent attempts have also sought to overturn California's current system of domestic partnership. 

In California, domestic partnership is an almost marriage. It gives you most of the legal and (state-based) tax rights and responsibilities, without calling it marriage. Because I am a pessimist most of the time, I fear that we will end up not just without marriage but also without domestic partnership, an arrangement that was also to the benefit of older couples who may not have wanted to lose federal benefits by remarrying. 

I am perfectly happy as a domestic partner; I think it perfectly well describes and fits the relationship I am in (and have been for the last 11.5 years), one in which no one is a husband or a wife, where two people are united in a home and a life and a life project, where two people have made a common life, but which is not much like a traditional marriage, and I think that I will probably end up losing that relationship either through referenda or through being made to marry.

I just heard on the radio that San Diego's gay and lesbian community was celebrating the decision. Some of us are not as sanguine.