There’s a lot that I’d like to say about Rod Dreher’s latest missive in the same-sex marriage discussion, but I’m strapped for time and so will confine myself just to one point.
I agree with Alasdair MacIntyre, and so also with Rod, that modern liberalism lacks a certain sort of moral foundation, and that this lack leaves it unable to formulate, and indeed unable even really to tolerate, understandings of human sexuality and the human good more generally that go beyond the merely self-serving. I also agree with MacIntyre, and so again also with Rod, that liberalism thus “transformed into a tradition” is an essentially particularistic mode of moral and political theorizing whose inadequacies can be shown up and, hopefully, supplanted by a self-consciously tradition-bound mode of inquiry that is not characterized in the same way by these sorts of lacks. Where I – and, I would imagine, MacIntyre as well – do not, however, agree with Rod is in the particular way in which he seems to think this embrace of tradition ought to be effected: for the move to tradition seems, on his way of putting things, to rest primarily on a simple appeal to a set of old verities (“I am a Christian”, he writes, and “I believe in a different source of moral authority” than the merely individual conscience), and so strikes me as insufficiently attuned to what MacIntyre identifies as the need constantly to grapple with the problems and shortcomings that are inherent in one’s tradition as it stands at any point in history.
That is to say, as has been said quite well in recent days, that a tradition, as opposed to a mere ideology, is never something that is static, that it is always something that is ready to modify and adapt itself to the new sets of problems – philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, or whatever – that arise during the course of its existence. (I take it that this is, at least roughly, what MacIntyre is not a Burkean.) A tradition that fails to do this is a dead tradition, which is really to say that it is no tradition at all; hence a tradition, unlike perhaps a constitution, cannot be the sort of thing it needs to be unless it is a living thing, which is to say a growing and changing and always at work at problem-solving thing. But when self-conscious attunement to one’s inescapable place in a tradition becomes, as it does in Rod’s language, a simple commitment to “traditionalism”, to preserving those “ancient structures” that are the only things standing between us and those who wish “radically [to] undermine the foundation of our moral order”, it seems to me to fail in this crucial task. Put somewhat differently, on MacIntyre’s view it is quite possible – and indeed has very often been actual – for even the most established tradition to be shown to have been an inadequate tradition; hence when two traditions come into conflict, it obviously cannot be as tradition simpliciter that either of them triumphs, but only as a tradition that is superior to the other. And showing that this is so obviously requires something quite other than simply shouting “Tradition!” when the time for debate arises; rather, it requires grappling with one’s own tradition’s blind spots and potential inadequacies, and not merely harping on those of its rivals.
And where are the blind spots and potential inadequacies in the “traditional” (which is just to say traditionally Western – he’s equally opposed to polygamy, after all) conception of marriage that Rod is championing? Well, one important challenge that I’ve talked about before and would like to focus on here is that of finding a way to articulate, and achieve a robust social recognition of, what I’ve called the “kinds of nobility” and “standards of perfection” that are characteristic of homosexual relationships in contrast to heterosexual ones. (Note that you can believe in such things even if you think the standards in question demand a quite challenging sort of chastity.) I assume, or at least I think I can assume, that Rod recognizes the need to do this sort of thing, and as I’ve noted before it’s a sad irony that it is primarily those who stand in opposition to same-sex marriage who’ve brought the push for it on themselves by failing so miserably in these crucial tasks. We need to find a way to recognize a certain class of homosexual relationships as the kinds of things they are, and so to articulate what it is that such relationships ought to be like if they are to be exemplary instances of their kind: but if not by calling them “marriages”, then how can this recognition be achieved? Through the language of “friendships” or “partnerships” or “civil unions”? Surely not; those first two categories are laughably inadequate to what is at stake, while the third is just the attempt to use a meaningless legalism to fill what is fundamentally a cultural hole. (Indeed, for this general reason I agree with JL Wall that the common suggestion simply to drop the language of “marriage” from the lawbooks altogether is actually a call for an even more radical departure from tradition than the push to extend the category to same-sex couples.) And so the point is just this: that orthodox Christians and others who share a similar conception of human sexuality and the proper nature of the family, are presently so inadequate to this task constitutes a serious failing – a failing of of the sort that has left many great traditions of the past lying dead by the wayside of history. That need not happen here, of course; but to keep it from happening will require the real work of grappling with this and similar present and future inadequacies and finding ways to adapt our tradition to address them. Extending the title of civil marriage to homosexual couples, while still attempting to retain as much as possible of the Christian conception of sexuality and the nuclear family, would be one way to meet this challenge; and while there are other responses that are feasible in principle, it is hard to imagine many of them working out in practice. If, however, our tradition is nothing more than a traditionalism, if it is something that is living rather than dead, it needs to show itself adequate to recognizing this and similar challenges and finding within itself the resources to address them.
Well, I guess that wasn’t short, though for all those thousand-plus words I still managed to say only a small bit of what I’d have liked to get to. Apologies if (that?) it was excessively dense.
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