The Dead Hand of Plato and Anti-SSM Arguments

Is there a distasteful stridency on the Yes side of the Irish referendum to recognise same-sex marriage?

Many in the No camp would undoubtedly say that there is, but then again this group have been accused of a persistent defiance of basic reason. Boringly, I think both accusations stick. It’s not hard to utterly demolish the No side’s arguments and point out their abject dishonesty. But the self-satisfied tone of much of the pro-SSM camp (I include myself) often betrays a lack of concern for a fundamental contradiction in our enterprise: Marriage is an inherently Conservative institution. Why the contradiction? I hope to show that despite the rational ground on which the Yes side will say it has built its campaign, most are oblivious to the vestigial philosophical legacy of Essentialism haunting both sides but embraced only by one.

First, I’m going to let an inspection of a typical No argument demonstrate just how contemptuous of reason the pro ‘traditional marriage’ campaign has been. Their wonton betrayal of the Enlightenment can not be overstated. Richard Waghorne, writing in the Irish Times 20/04/2012 on the issue of Same Sex Marriage in Ireland offers us a serviceable specimen of their catastrophic attempts at reasoning.

Ironically in his opening gambit to ‘dispatch’ ‘a number of self-contradictory or inaccurate arguments’ which are ‘characteristic limitations of the case’ he opposes, we find the smuggled logical slips so symptomatic of the slop admissible in Conservative thought.

Addressing Kieran Rose’s appeal to popular support for SSM (The Irish Times 10/04/2012) Waghorne states

Public opinion is, […], no more conclusive a reason to legislate for gay marriage today than hostile opinion was good reason to delay reform concerning homosexuality.

This is immediately identifiable as a category error: marriage is inherently a social construct and access to such an institution represents a positive right.

The freedom from persecution for homosexuals who pursue romantic fulfilment is a negative liberty.

As political philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued, negative freedoms are necessary liberal bulwarks against the majoritarian bullying visible in the totalitarian projects of Theocracy, Fascism and Communism (bullying which the writers of the secular, republican US Constitution were wise enough to preempt and quench). No thinking person would agree that one’s right to life can be made dependant on a popular vote. In the same vein, widely held hostility for homosexuality was certainly never an ethically sound reason to criminalise gay acts.

Confusing such individual freedoms with the formation of our social institutions is egregious fallacy. Paper money is currency because we decide it to be. Such is the nature of convention; these are matters for which public consultation (of some sort) is required by definition.

Marriage belongs to this same class of concept: it is a bestowal of the ultimate measure of social currency on a romantic union of consenting adults. The question of which unions may qualify is necessarily a matter determined by social assent.

Waghorne’s accusation of ‘intellectual dishonesty’ is itself, therefore, rather falsely derived and, as a matter of slavish conformity with the cliche, well accampanied by fellow products of vulgar motivated reasoning.

In considering gay marriage, it is essential to see treating different situations differently in no way constitutes discrimination

This begs the question- What is essentially different between gay marriage and traditional marriage, and is such difference essential to our idea of marriage?

Our Idea of Marriage

[T]he one institution supported by society because it is the family form which on average gives a child the most advantageous upbringing.

-Waghorne

Despite the important identity fudge here (rewording this as ‘social support for the institution begotten by social support’ lays clear the tautology) the reason given for its buttressing by society is telling, as is the ‘on average’ qualifier.

Obviously, child-rearing is essential to Waghorne’s understanding. Which is strange, for there are no vows requiring it in any marriage ceremony. Nor do we admonish the childless married.

‘On average’ makes a statistical claim, the validity of which, as always, is entirely dependent on the questions being asked.

Children in set A have affluent and unmarried parents, in set B the children’s parents are poor and married. Will the set C of all well-reared children, intersect proportionally more with A or B? A familiarity with http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4824 and http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-cyf.aspx makes clear the evidence does not flatter Waghorne’s case.

We could therefore say the family form which, on average, gives a child the most advantageous up-bringing is one which has high socioeconomic status, wedded parents or not.

Why not elevate such relationships beyond those of the poor and married?

Would treating their application for social recognition differently on this basis of inequality in child-rearing credentials be discrimination? Waghorne’s assertion would suggest variations of income bracket are not valid differences in family form. Why then are genders?

I do not subscribe to the view that gender is merely a construct. Homo Sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species. It is a fact that the males and females of our species are different because male and female are the names we give to those sets of differences. The danger, however, is to essentialise the two categories and ignore culture’s role. Richard Dawkins’ essay, ‘The Tyranny of The Discontinuous Mind’, on the problem of taxonomy in light of the theory of evolution, is worth invoking.

Essentialism—what I’ve called “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind”—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution—as late as the nineteenth century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

Waghorne’s argument encourages a collective snaring in the gender Essentialist trap via the only way still socially acceptable: in the name of child rearing. We should not allow oppressive transcendental nonsense* to distract us from a mature, functional approach to the issue.

There is no valid data to suggest Mother and Father combined, Male and Female parenting, is an essentially advantageous category. I’m not sure common sense would even suggest that there should be.

[T]he right of a child to both a mother and a father where possible

this is indicative of Waghorne’s Platonic Idealism, ‘mother and father’ appeals to our sense of the ideal parents. “Gender complementarity” is often trotted out here as an example of nature’s holistic wisdom and it is about as canvincing as the case to allow alternative medicine take priority in hospitals. While family consisting of a child’s own biological parents may well represent the most desirable family structure, that any father and mother combination is automatically better suited to meeting the needs of a child than any father and father, or any mother and mother equivalent is simply a traditionalist fiction.

Yes, there is much to show familial stability is germane to the discussion of children’s best interests.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12090250/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9334548/

(though maybe not as germane, when we control for parental behaviours): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3171291/

and marriage can be said with confidence to bestow greater stability on families:

http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/abs/4902

So we can then say, reversing the formulation: “it is the family form which on average gives a child the most advantageous upbringing because it is the institution supported by society”.

The question in this case then becomes: why deny this to children of homosexual parents?

To recap:

• Marriage is not essentially a child rearing institution.
• Even if it were, there would be no reason to suggest married homosexual parents represent a threat to a child’s rights on the basis of her well being.
• Even if homosexual parents were hopelessly inadequate, SSM wouldn’t, per se, represent a threat to children in traditional families or those awaiting adoption when we could easily legislate for this, non existent, deficiency.

Thus the power of falsification forces one to appreciate that SSM opposition obnoxiously rests upon stratum after stratum of fallacy and ignorance.

However, I actually believe such a conclusion to be uncharitable.

Beyond Intents and Purposes

This debate serves us an interestingly tangled philosophical nexus of social and intellectual schema of which the Essentialist, discontinuous mind and value pluralism are but two.

Thinking about Same Sex Marriage, I’ve been struck by the irony of Liberals’ concern with the protocol of a traditionalist rite.  It is curious to watch those whose worldview is ostensibly one of enlightened functionalism*, enter the haunted gauntlet of essence and ideal from which marriage draws its power. I can understand Conservatives’ ire at the incursion into their territory, at the corruption of their Platonist, primitive but compelling, magical thinking.

Social ordination and our happiness at its attendant recognition and status is a curious play on our propensity for communal illusion. Entering a favourable statistical bracket, as marriage no doubt represents, is rarely celebrated with the expense and glee which accompany our consecrations of the legal fiction of matrimony. We may well behave as if they did but, for better or worse, Platonic Ideals simply don’t exist**. They are a trick of language, a shadow cast by our useful ability to share abstractions. Only a top down understanding of reality, from Forms to a lapsarian, corrupt material world, explains marriage’s appeal. Mere real love is not quite complete, it must be solemnized, made whole, by a representative of the Ideal- a religion, a nation. If it were simply a matter of declaring intentions to the tribe, surely a Facebook status update followed by a party would suffice. Again, this enthralment to a figment of the dictionary is not born of the metaphysics of liberal politics, it the product of a society dazzled in the headlights of language.

Like language, marriage is basically a process of naming- which is why a detached, ‘bottom up’, ‘scientific’ view of the institution often throws up puzzlement. For nearly all intents and purposed, a cohabitating couple are ‘married’. This said, it would take deep cynicism to disavow the poetry performed in the decree which magically both “describes and produces two people as married“.

Does the rose pronounced ‘married’ smell sweeter than that named ‘life partner’? Liberal Juliet chose to see through the linguistic witchcraft of her tribe, but by wanting to get married today, Liberals are breaking from her example and are hijacking longstanding meaning. Consequently, Conservatives are left to worry, like a Shakespearean purist contemplating a Cantonese translation of Hamlet, does an idea of marriage which admits gay couples remain the same rose?

Here we must be clear: SSM will not translate the essence out of the institution because it never meant what Conservatives today argue it does. They misquoted the original and the apocryphal has remained tradition.

However, though tradition is often stupefying, it must be said, grudgingly, to carry its own numinous magic. Indeed much of the glory of marriage, even for Liberals, is derived from this spell and its corresponding ‘history as it is meant to be‘ prestige. To alter it, then, is to break with tradition, which for an institution so valued for its power to connect with precedent must be understood as fatal.

While advocating SSM from this position of appreciation for the abstract virtues of tradition appears hypocritical, anything which disabuses us of the notion that there is an ordained path through history is to be welcomed. This is as true for endorsement of romantic narratives as it is for Conservative delusion or Marxist revolutionary teleology. If society at large is going to indulge its desire to play fairytales for the prize of placebo stability, the rules need to be made consistent lest we become mired in an abyss of dangerous though consecrated misconceptions.

Among the consecrated nonsenses, Monarchy serves as testament to Prestige’s empty hold; it would be absurd to deny that it is truly felt. The primordial respect for such tribal esteem is, though far from rational, a very real aspect of the human condition. An enlightened society is one which can both appreciate the joy of the illusion and behave rationally. To deny here the possibility of a rational component exposing its intolerable inconsistencies is a fundamentalist corruption of civilisation.

It is my sincere belief that the shriller voices on my side would do well to heed what I feel are the instinctive reluctancies of undecided voters leaning towards a No vote, though I doubt concerns with tone will be decisive to the outcome. We can certainly say that if same sex marriage fails to pass in this country it will be in some large measure due to a class committed to infantilising the population by planting weasel worded appeals to the exclusively primeval.

It might help to recognise though that we have all been tilling this irrational ground.

*For an interesting discussion of the reification attendant on tyrannical essentialism, and its contrast with functionalism see  http://opiniojuris.org/2012/04/23/rethinking-occupation-the-functional-approach/

**with the possible exception of mathematical concepts!