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November 13, 2005
Just Playing Around With Boldface
Events have conspired to delay this long promised post. However, like marriage, some things are worth waiting for. Here at last is "The End Of Courtship", part two. As usual, I've front-paged a few especially relevant excerpts, then taken excessive liberties with emphasis and boldface. Also worth waiting for is the Bradley Prize, which Dr. Kass won in 2003, along with Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, and Mary Ann Glendon. Here's a picture (pdf) of the happy winners. And why should they not appear happy? Let's just look at some of the rich social observation that helped Dr. Kass earn his cool quarter million... The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control — the pill — which for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences. Not to nitpick, but this is factually incorrect. The pill is the latest in a long line of fertility control techniques, some of which can be traced back over at least two millennia. What's really new is that the pill is safer, cheaper, more convenient, and of course, legal. Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality — as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. News flash? That's what they're there for . If they didn't work, no one would take them. Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage...most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS... Full disclosure. I myself am the product of a "broken home". And you know what? You get over it. Given time and experience, you can even begin to see the good in it. My parent's divorce was long overdue, mostly because they took their marriage vows so seriously. They should have done it years before. I don't know a single divorced couple who took the end of their marriage lightly. Not one. They all agonized over it, they all did their best to make it work. It is impossible for me not to feel honest anger at Kass's glib dismissal of their efforts. If "countless" students think that their parent's divorce has been "the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives" it's probably because they they haven't yet had much of a life, or encountered grown-up problems of their own. We now return to our scheduled programming... They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively...Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another...they are not generally eager for or partial to children... Nice. A real marriage, with virgins and all, is ineffably superior to those cheap hook-up marriages. That's why I've been saving myself... cohabitation is an arrangement of convenience, with each partner taken on approval and returnable at will. Many are, in fact, just playing house... Does he even know what he sounds like? Sail ever on, o my captain... Given that they have more or less drifted into marriage, it should come as no great surprise that couples who have lived together before marriage have a higher, not lower, rate of divorce...Too much familiarity? Disenchantment? Or is it rather the lack of wooing... I thought it was about equality. Shows what I know. Anyone who has ever loved or been loved knows the difference between love and the will to power... Sometimes, they were merely compelled to marry... Having in so many cases already given their bodies to one another — not to speak of the previous others — how does one understand the link between marriage and conjugal fidelity? Gratuitous Tocqueville quote... Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. Back to Kass... The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition, and custom, and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons. And yet, counterexamples are available... Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman's powerful and immediate link to life's generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deed, great quests, or sheer distraction after distraction. Wow. A quarter of a million dollars. If you read this essay in its original form, you may notice that Dr. Kass has included footnotes. Yes, footnotes. To maintain my facade of scholarly erudition, I shall include one for you, me being such a completist and all... Truth to tell, the reigning ideology often rules only people's tongues, not their hearts. Many a young woman secretly hopes to meet and catch a gentleman, though the forms that might help her do so are either politically incorrect or simply unknown to her. In my wife's course on Henry James' The Bostonians, the class's most strident feminist, who had all term denounced patriarchy and male hegemonism, honestly confessed in the last class that she wished she could meet a Basil Ransom who would carry her off. But the way to her heart is blocked by her prickly opinions and by those of the dominant ethos. Wow. Just...wow. posted by Justin on 11.13.05 at 01:02 PM
Comments
A Couple Interesting Quotes on Cohabitation: "Cohabitating relationships, by their nature, appear to be less fulfilling than marital relationships. As a result, cohabitation is not an ideal living arrangement for children. Emotionally or academically, the children of cohabiters just don't do as well, on average, as those with two married parents, and money doesn't fully explain the difference." "The available social science evidence suggests that living together is not a good way to prepare for marriage or to avoid divorce. No scholar that I know of, or anyone else for that matter, has been able to contest this with any counter evidence." “Living together may prove compatibility for a moment in time, but it Source: http://www.cohabiting.org Habby · November 13, 2005 02:14 PM If marriage is a superior arrangement to cohabitation, then by all means, marry if you can! But does the superiority of marriage prove the wrongness of cohabitation? I'm not sure how. By similar logic, the superiority of cohabitation to casual sex would make the latter wrong, and I fail to see why. (The best does not render the good bad.) Eric Scheie · November 13, 2005 02:36 PM Jehovanists vs. Naturalists vs. Gnostics again, I see. Also, Femocrats vs. Transcendental Scientists. I'll try to think out a response to all this.... Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 13, 2005 07:12 PM The late John W. Campbell Jr. once observed that it was the automobile that liberated sex in America. Because the car gave people the ability to travel quickly to places where they were not known, thus gaining them a measure of anonymity they could never have back home. Alan Kellogg · November 13, 2005 08:00 PM How can one make a coherent response to such incoherent ramblings as Kass's? I don't have time for it, so I'll just share a giggle at Kass's use of a student's idle ramblings to prove his point about what women really want. Hello? She's an ADULT; she doesn't HAVE to cave to her "prickly opinions" or "the dominant ethos." PS: this guy once again falls into the comfy trap of thinking his moral code is the ONLY moral code, and that everyone else is, by definition, amoral. Not to mention the other comfy trap of thinking that his prescribed way of life and love is totally free of costs or consequences, without even trying to establish any sort of cause-and-effect link between marriage without cohabitation and lifetime happiness. I think the important thing to remember is that people like Kass are preaching to people who have already decided they want to believe what he will say, and will believe it no matter what, but who like having something resembling an intellectual underpinning to support their prejudices. Raging Bee · November 14, 2005 01:13 PM While I oppose Leon Kass's bumping me off at some arbitary age, and while I disgree with his his Jehovanist premise that the purpose of sex is procreation, and while I disagree with his subordination of the female to the male (Transcendental Science?), and knowing that I would also disagree with him on homosexual marriage, I must also violently disagree with many of the disagreements with many of his other arguments here. I am an anti-Naturalist and a Jehovanistic-style Gnostic. First of all, divorce is not good, as it is by definition the death of a marriage. I will not say that divorce is necessarily always wrong, in rare cases it may be right, as abortion is right in the rare cases where it is necessary to save the woman's life. But divorce is not to be promoted, as it is in the media today. The media glamorize the countless divorces of actors, saying "You should do the same, divorce is 'in', 'hip', 'cool'! Swing it, baby!". That is wrong. They bombard us endlessly with the Big Lie that "Since people live longer today, it's only natural that you should throw away your spouse and get a new one every few years." That's exactly the position they also take on abortion. Indoctrinated with the premise that human beings are interchangeable and disposable, then it is no wonder that so many submit to being but numbers in a socialist state. If human beings are as disposable as toilet paper, then the democides of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot become credible. As to promiscuity, I say at least do it with style like wicked Wanda and her 666 women, or Rev. Victor and his 777 men. Or else strive for the style of holy Dawn and her holy Negro wife Norma. The tight bondange of eternal fidelity. Total Commitment. That is my ideal. As the noble E. Merrill Root put it, the promiscuous man knows a quantity of women but he will never know the quality of a woman. Eric wrote "But does the superiority of marriage prove the wrongness of cohabitation? I'm not sure how. By similar logic, the superiority of cohabitation to casual sex would make the latter wrong, and I fail to see why. (The best does not render the good bad.)" I have to disagree with that. First of all, as I have said before, "casual sex" is an oxymoron, since sex is, by definition, passion, and one cannot be casual, indifferent, about one's passion. Second, a lesser good becomes bad if chosen in preference to a greater good. To consciously choose a lesser value over a greater value is intrinsically immoral, reprehensible. To say, as so many do, that they do not "have to" strive for the highest values possible to them, is contemptible. The Big Lie that is constantly being pushed today that sex is "no big deal" -- that is despicable. Those who have such contempt for their own sexuality, for their own selves, are ready to submit to any slavery. They have slave-like souls, by their own choosing. I am an absolutist, an egoist, a dogmatist. I say dogmatically: Yes, sex does have to be all that passionate, all that Romantic, all that Sturm und Drang, all that world-without-end, all that sacred, holy, Divine. The total passion for the total height. Polytheistic Godliness, Selfishness, Sexiness. Conservative Lesbian Individualist Theology. Transcendental Femocracy. The total passion for the total height. The Ego in the Infinite. That is where I stand. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 14, 2005 05:21 PM The media glamorize the countless divorces of actors, saying "You should do the same, divorce is 'in', 'hip', 'cool'! Swing it, baby!". That is wrong. What "media" are you talking about? I've never seen anything of the sort; everything I see about these divorces has the tone of undisguised contempt for the celebrities' shallowness and tawdry, bad choices. They bombard us endlessly with the Big Lie that "Since people live longer today, it's only natural that you should throw away your spouse and get a new one every few years." That's exactly the position they also take on abortion. Indoctrinated with the premise that human beings are interchangeable and disposable, then it is no wonder that so many submit to being but numbers in a socialist state. If human beings are as disposable as toilet paper, then the democides of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot become credible. Who is this monolithic "they" who spout such breathtaking non-sequiturs? Care to name any names? Provide any links? Are "they" all conspiring to "get" you too? I'm divorced, Pagan, horny, and no great defender of "traditional" marriage, and I have NEVER encountered anyone with an attitude remotely like what you're raving about. What sort of wierdos are you hanging with? How, exactly, does the individualism and libertinism of the Western democracies link to the genocidal collectivism of they deranged fascists/communists you name? For someone who calls himself a ploytheistic selfish individualist, you're sounding a lot like Pope Palpadict. Are you even serious? Raging Bee · November 15, 2005 08:47 AM "They"? -- the One-World Communist Conspiracy and its minions, advocates of the Naturalist philosophy, "fuzzy liberals" Because I am a selfish individualist, an egoist, I am therefore a dogmatist: I hold my own premises and conclusions to be right and those to the contrary to be wrong. "Individualism and libertinism" -- what has that to do with divorce, abortion, suicide? All those are mere negations. There is nothing sexy about divorce, the end of a marriage, the suicide of love. Adultery is sexier and at least has the quality of being transgressive, which libertines like. Divorce is as dull and conventional as book-keeping, a mere legal fiction. Marriage is adventurous and Romantic, a vow of total commitment, like rolling the dice and betting the farm on #7. And I would strike out "till death do us part" and vow instead "for eternity in Heaven or in Hell". "Pagan"? You know not what a "pagan" is. In the original, etymological sense of the word, "pagan" or "heathen" meant a country-dweller, a rustic, those Roman peasants who held to the Gods of their fathers while those in the cities were pursuing every kind of exotic cult from the East. I submit that the worship of Isis had a far different (deeper) meaning to the Egyptians than it had for the Romans. There were also the Celts, Vikings, and Slavs who similarly held to their old Gods. The "pagans" then were the last to convert to Christianity. The last of these converted around 1100 A.D.. Today, the closest counterparts of the old "pagans" are the rural "God, Family, Country" "Red Staters", who are the most orthodox, most fundamentalist Christians, those who hold most strongly to the God of their fathers. If we are ever to see a real revival of the ancient and eternal Polytheism, it will have to be part of a general revival of the great historic religions of the West, the Second Religiousness of which Spengler wrote. Therefore, I want to see Christianity, the historic Christianity of the West, the Christianity of the Crusades, strengthened, not weakened. I want to see Jews become more ethnocentric. I want to see Protestants become more fundamentalist. I want to see Catholics become more ritualistic, more doctrinal, more dogmatic. As a Polytheist, I find the Catholic theology, with its dogmas of the Trinity, the Christ, the Virgin Mary, most closely approximates my own. I have seen The Passion of the Christ, and I have concluded that the myth of the Christ is one and the same as the holy myth of Osiris,. I have concluded that the myth of Mary is one and the same as the holy myth of Isis, the eternal Queen of Heaven. Because I am a Polytheistic selfish individualist, I again say dogmatically: Yes, sex does have to be all that passionate, all that Romantic, all that Sturm und Drang, all that world-without-end, all that sacred, holy, Divine. The total passion for the total height. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 17, 2005 06:23 PM I must add that all the ancient "pagan" Polytheistic high cultures of the centuries B.C. and in pre-Columbian America were extremely Right-Wing: elitist, hierarchical, monarchical, dominated by the two primal Estates: warrior and priest. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 17, 2005 06:29 PM Meanwhile, on the distant planet Bolox XII, trouble was brewing... Raging Bee · November 18, 2005 10:00 AM |
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Well, you have to admit that his thoughts on divorce and birth control have a broader-based appeal than his opposition to ice cream licking.
He's, like, modernizing himself. (From Victorian times all the way to the 1950s.)