Anthropologists on gay marriage
I found it very exciting that the American Anthropological Association chose to make a statement about gay marriage:
Arlington, Virginia; The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, the people who study culture, releases the following statement in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization."The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."
This is to say that people who study the way people actually live find that there are so many different ways and that these are astonishingly diverse. And it is hard for that observation to avoid undermining our confidence in the way we live, even if anthropologists insist that it wasn't meant to do that. Of course this leads me back to my strange sympathy for Scalia's position in dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. I just read in Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration.
Let's say that again in a simpler way. When people are different, we feel threatened and criticized by their difference. We feel that their difference is an attack on us and we feel defensive. (One reason for that could be that if we feel that the way we are is a result of a moral choice, people who are different are implicitly advocating their choice as better and criticizing ours. If I say that some activity is good, not just that I happen to like it, someone who pursues some other activity is in some way throwing my value judgment into doubt, or exposing it to scorn. This can be as simple as reading vs. watching television: the rivalry between the two for people's attention, and the views of the partisans of or participants in each, can immediately take on moral dimensions. I have five or ten books here that take my side of the question and really do take it morally and personally.)
(There is also the question of progress. If I think of some technology or practice as progress or an improvement over others, someone who doesn't use the technology, or who doesn't engage in the practice, is challenging my claim. The Amish, at an extreme, challenge our view that we are getting better by inventing new ways of doing things. The vastly peaceable Amish are vastly threatening.)
I think it's important to recognize that differences can be a kind of challenge. When we act and believe that our actions have some kind of meaning or significance, learning about other ways of doing things can seriously threaten our beliefs. (This is somewhat akin to the way that The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviours by Kersey Graves turns out in context to be an attack on Christianity. That book is open to a great deal of criticism, but it suggests that the gospels' stories about Jesus are not historically unique.) Do people really feel -- without effort -- that necessary things are not more valuable than contingent things, or that unique things are not more valuable than common?
Our culture, at the very least, contains a reverence for uniqueness which works against diversity. I'm sure anthropologists and sociologists have already thought for many years about the comparison to precious metals which (especially under mercantilist economics, but not exclusively) have been thought valuable because they are rare. When we think of things as better and more valuable when they are rare or unique, we apply a logic exactly opposite to that of the song about the magic penny. And I think this logic goes deeper than we can possibly imagine.
Well, there's something to try to track down. Meanwhile, the anthropologists' observation has force: "[...] No support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution."
(Thanks to Biella for letting me know about the statement.)
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