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Death to the exemplary
IN THE CULTURE war of today, the representatives of one side have
systematically set out to destroy the shining examples of middle
America. They seem to be doing so with an unconscious fanaticism that
most closely parallels the conscious fanaticism of the various
iconoclastic movements in the history of Christianity. They are doing
this in a variety of ways--through the media, of course, and through the
educational system. They are very thorough in their work and no less
bold in the astonishingly specious pretexts upon which they demand the
sacrifice of yet another shining example.
In the current debate on gay marriage, its advocates are cast in the
role of long-oppressed suppliants demanding their just due. Indeed, the
whole question is put in terms of their legal and moral rights, against
which the opponents of gay marriage have nothing to offer but "residual
personal prejudice," to recall again the memorable words of the chief
justice of the Canadian Supreme Court.
But it is a mistake to conflate the automatic with the irrational,
since, as we have seen, an automatic and mindless response is precisely
the mechanism by which the visceral code speaks to us. It triggers a
rush of emotions because it is designed to do precisely this. Like
certain automatic reflexes, such as jerking your hand off a burning
stovetop, the sheer immediacy of our visceral response, far from being
proof of its irrationality, demonstrates the critical importance, in
times of peril and crisis, of not thinking before we act. If a man had
to think before jumping out of the way of an onrushing car, or to
meditate on his options before removing his hand from that hot stovetop,
then reason, rather than being our help, would become our enemy. Some
decisions are better left to reflexes--be these of our neurological
system or of our visceral system.
This is why for most people, including many gay men and women, the
immediate response to the idea of gay marriage came at the gut level--it
somehow felt funny and wrong, and it felt this way long before they were
able to spare a moment's reflection on the question of whether they were
for it or against it. There is a reason for that: They were overwhelmed
at having been asked the question at all. How do you explain what you
have against what had never crossed your mind as something anyone on
Earth would ever think of doing? This invitation to reason calmly about
the hitherto unthinkable is the source of the uneasy visceral response.
To ask someone to reason calmly about something that he regards as
simply beyond the pale is to ask him to concede precisely what he must
not concede--the mere admissibility of the question.
Imagine a stranger coming up to you and asking if he can drive your
eight-year-old daughter around town in his new car. Presumably, no
matter how nicely the stranger asked this question, you would say no.
But suppose he started to ask why you won't let him take your little
girl for a ride. What if he said, "Listen, tell you what. I'll give her
my cell phone and you can call her anytime you want"? What kind of
obligation are you under to give a reason to a complete stranger for why
he shouldn't be allowed to drive off with your daughter?
None. A question that is out of order does not require or deserve an
answer. The moment you begin to answer the question as if it were in
order, it is too late to point out your original objection to the
question in the first place, which really was: Over my dead body.
Marriage was something that, until only quite recently, seemed to be
securely in the hands of married people. It was what married people had
engaged in, and certainly not a special privilege that had been extended
to them to the exclusion of other human beings. Who, after all, could
not get married? You didn't have to be straight; you could be gay. So
what? Marriage was the most liberal institution known to man. It opened
its arms to the ugly and the homely as well as to the beautiful and the
stunning. Was it defined as between a man and a woman? Well, yes, but
only in the sense that a cheese omelet is defined as an egg and some
cheese--without the least intention of insulting either orange juice or
toast by their omission from this definition. Orange juice and toast are
fine things in themselves--you just can't make an omelet out of them.
Those who are married now, and those thinking about getting married or
teaching their children that they should grow up and get married, may
all be perfect idiots, mindlessly parroting a message wired into them
before they were old enough to know better. But they are passing on,
through the uniquely reliable visceral code, the great postulate of
transgenerational duty: not to beseech people to make the world a better
place, but to make children whose children will leave it a better world
and not merely a world with better abstract ideals.
We have all personally known shining examples of such human beings, just
as we have all known mediocre parents as well as some absolutely
dreadful ones. Now suppose we are told, as we often are told in the
gaymarriage debate, that the institution of marriage is not what it used
to be. What does this mean? Does it mean that the shining example of a
good marriage, of a good father and a good mother, and of a happy family
has ceased to be one that we want to realize in our own lives? Not at
all. We may in fact be farther than ever from living up to the shining
example--but that is hardly proof that we should abandon it as an ideal
to which to aspire. If the crew of a ship is developing scurvy because
limes have gone out of fashion, is this a reason to throw the limes
overboard or a reason to change the fashion?
The shining example of a happy marriage and its inherent ideality was
something that we once could all agree on; but now it is a shining
example that has been subjected to the worst fate that can befall one:
It has been become a subject of controversy and has thereby lost its
most essential protective quality: its ethical obviousness in the eyes
of the community. Once the phrase "gay marriage" was in the air,
marriage was suddenly what it had never thought to be before: a kind of
marriage, a type--traditional marriage, or that even worse monstrosity,
heterosexual marriage.
Ethical fundamentalism
THE HIGH SOLEMNITY of marriage has been transgenerationally wired into
our visceral system. We must take it seriously and treat it solemnly,
and this "must" must appear to us at the level of second nature; it must
possess the quality of being ethically obvious. Marriage must not be
mocked or ridiculed. But can marriage keep its solemnity now? Who will
tell the rising generation that there are standards they must not fail
to meet if they wish to live in a way that their grandfathers could
respect?
This is how those fond of abstract reasoning can destroy the ethical
foundations of a society without anyone's noticing it. They throw up for
debate that which no one before ever thought about debating. They take
the collective visceral code that has bound parents to grandchildren
from time immemorial, in every culture known to man, and make of it a
topic for fashionable intellectual chatter.
Ask yourself what is so secure about the ethical baseline of our current
level of civilization that it might not be opened up for question, or
what deeply cherished way of doing things will suddenly be cast in the
role of a "residual personal prejudice."
We are witnessing the triumph of a Newspeak in which those who simply
wish to preserve their own way of life, to pass their core values down
to their grandchildren more or less intact, no longer even have a
language in which they can address their grievances. In this essay I
have tried to produce the roughest sketch of what such language might
look like and how it could be used to defend those values that represent
what Hegel called the substantive class of community--the class that
represents the ethical baseline of the society and whose ethical
solidity and unimaginativeness permit the high-spirited experimentation
of the reflective class to go forward without the risk of complete
societal collapse.
If the reflective class, represented by intellectuals in the media and
the academic world, continues to undermine the ideological
superstructure of the visceral code operative among the "culturally
backward," it may eventually succeed in subverting and even destroying
the visceral code that has established the common high ethical baseline
of the average American--and it will have done all of this out of the
insane belief that abstract maxims concerning justice and tolerance can
take the place of a visceral code that is the outcome of the accumulated
cultural revolution of our long human past.
The intelligentsia have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if
middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust
in its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the
bedrock of decency and integrity in our nation and in the world. These
are the people who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and
to defeat the evil. If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction
is blurred through the dissemination of moral relativism and an
aesthetic of ethical frivolity, where else will human decency find such
willing and able defenders?
Even the most sophisticated of us have something to learn from the
fundamentalism of middle America. For stripped of its quaint and
antiquated ideological superstructure, there is a hard and solid kernel
of wisdom embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise
their children, and many of us, including many gay men like myself, are
thankful to have been raised by parents who were so unshakably committed
to the values of decency, and honesty, and integrity, and all those
other homespun and corny principles. Reject the theology if you wish,
but respect the ethical fundamentalism by which these people live: It is
not a weakness of intellect, but a strength of character.
Middle Americans have increasingly tolerated the experiments in living
of people like myself not out of stupidity, but out of the trustful
magnanimity that is one of the great gifts of the Protestant ethos to
our country and to the world. It is time for us all to begin tolerating
back. The first step would be a rapid retreat from even the slightest
whisper that marriage ever was or ever could be anything other than the
shining example that most Americans still hold so sacred within their
hearts, as they have every right to do. They have let us imagine the
world as we wish; it is time we begin to let them imagine it as they wish.
If gay men and women want to create their own shining examples, they
must do this themselves, by their own actions and by their own
imagination. They must construct for themselves, out of their own unique
perspective on the world, an ethos that can be admired both by future
gay men and women and perhaps, eventually, by the rest of society. But
there can be no advantage to them if they insist on trying to co-opt the
shining example of an ethical tradition that they themselves have
abandoned in order to find their own way in the world. It will end only
in self-delusion and bitter disappointment
One of the preconditions of a civilization is that there is a
fundamental ethical baseline below which it cannot be allowed to fall.
Unless there is a deep and massive and unthinking commitment on the part
of most people to the well-being not merely of their children, but of
their children's children, then the essential transgenerational duty of
preserving the ethical baseline of our civilization will become a matter
of hit-and-miss. It may be performed, but there is no longer any
guarantee that it will be. The guarantee comes from shining examples.
Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage
of History (Free Press).
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