199. Embracing "Gay Marriage," Holding on to Socrates

 

"Old people can't reproduce themselves and they can 'marry.'" That does it.  There's no place left to go, traditionalists.  You had one argument left and Justice Kagan's counter-example destroys it.  Now you have to share your precious word.

Remember the argument?  "You can't have the same word unless you're the same in all relevant respects.  Ability to reproduce is relevant in marriage.  You can't reproduce.  You can't have the word." 

Then, boom, "neither can old people."  Traditionalists try to explain the counter-example away.  "We give old people the title 'married' the way we give honorary doctorates.  They didn't earn them but we want to show our respect for them."  It doesn't wash.  "All right, then, think of 'married' as an honorary title.  Can you withhold your respect?"

I, by age and upbringing a traditionalist, don't dispute that I will have to give up my position on the word "marriage," but I'm curious about how much else I will have to give up.  My position on "animal rights"?  I argued, in posts 27 and 79, that the word "rights," taken from the legal context that gave it its meaning, only disordered our concepts when we tried to apply it to animals.  We had to reconceive so many terms that depended on it — "contract," "obligation," "responsibility," all the terms, in fact, that referred to reciprocal relationships.

"Same-sex marriage" appeared to do the same thing.  The word "marriage" was so firmly fixed in one meaning ("the legal union of a man and a woman") that nobody, when they wrote laws and constitutions and devised ceremonies, even thought of man-man or woman-woman.  Add those and you had to reconceive a lot of other terms.   Like "adultery."  A wayward lesbian spouse can adulterate her marriage in the sense of introducing a spiritual or esthetic impurity into something pure, but she can't adulterate it in the sense lawmakers had foremost in mind: introducing a physical impurity into a blood line.  And "bastard."  A spouse in the old sense faced the problem of raising a bastard child.  Courts worried about the status of bastards.  I saw no equivalents in gay marriage.  Then there was "incest." Which equivalent relations would come under our marriage prohibitions, and be fueled by the ancient taboos that flowed into them?  Brother-brother?  Father-son?

Reconceive these words, that's what the traditionalist thinks he needs to do, but perhaps all he needs to do is refeel them.  Emotional adjustment, not intellectual adjustment.  The latter is easily accomplished.  All you do (and there are always plenty of quick-minded helpers) is redefine your words a little and expand your ideas slightly.  The former is, for traditionalists, not so easy.

Even if words are incontestably out of place, not all verbal dislocation is evidence of conceptual disorder, and not all that disorder is bad.  Comedians and poets live by dislocating words, and we join right in, laughing or crying.  It's not serious, or it's serious in a different way.

When you're classifying things, however, it's serious.  Socrates started us all off seriously, though he put his advice to his students, as so often, into a metaphor: "slice nature at her joints" (Phaedrus 265d-266a).  Let names end where bones end.  Careless namers are bad butchers.

Take Socrates' metaphor seriously and the merest reminder turns you serious.  Hear "verbal dislocation" and, thinking of a shoulder, you see bad things — something coming out of a socket, ligaments twisting, other bones wrenched down the line.  That's bad in nature, where bones break loose, but you know it's also bad, though less obviously, in language, where words break loose. 

I know, you can take Socrates’ metaphor so seriously that you turn into a schoolmarm, red-penciling every word that's even slightly out of place.  On TV now weathermen regularly speak of a "piece of energy."  Yesterday one said that "a piece is coming over the Rockies.  "No, young man," you say in his margin, "stuff is coming over the Rockies.  It can come in pieces.  Energy can't do that.  It's an attribute (or capacity, or quality).  Here it's an attribute of molecules, the stuff of the atmosphere you are talking about."

For me that's a classic case of verbal dislocation leading to conceptual disorder.  Say energy comes in pieces and you've confused your concepts of stuff and attributes.  You've weakened your ability to make clear distinctions. 

"All right, word dislocation is seriously harmful in scientific taxonomy, seriously harmful in the physics lab, seriously harmful in philosophy class, but in daily life?"

Daily life makes national life, especially in a democracy, and a citizen's assent to national decisions may depend on his understanding of a word.  Consider, if you are an American, the word "war."  You can assent to bombing and killing and exposing your young men to bombing and killing and to doing all the things you know they have to do when they go to war. That's part of your understanding of the word "war."  War is hell.  That, I think, was the understanding of the makers of the Constitution when they specified that only Congress could declare war.  They didn't want any sliding into hell.  But if a president moves the word "war" out and another one, like "police action," or "surgical strike," in, your country can do that.  Same bombing and killing of war but since he's called it something else you, having lost your word and obscured your concept and diminished your ability to make distinctions, will be less equipped to oppose that bombing and killing.  If he'd called it "war" you might not have given your assent.  That's serious as blood.

Though there are many cases where a composition teacher can take the oft-given advice to "lighten up," to "quit being so picky," and accept the innocuous substitution of one word for another, in the "war" case, and in cases approaching the seriousness of war, he cannot.  In the part of our national life that grows out of daily life it's clearly serious — or, if you prefer, "consequential."  It's consequential enough for him to take scientific taxonomy as a model.

"So he'd have us all be scientific taxonomists."

The only excuse for not being a scientific taxonomist in daily political life is time.  You can't carve a subject perfectly in the rush of events. But you don't have to butcher.  You can't make every word fit perfectly in a plea for help.  But you don't have to bawl.  Just a little care with the carving knife could, for example, have cut the spin off that expression "peace-keeping force" that Ronald Reagan used for the Marines he sent into Lebanon.  He (or his word-doctors) wanted people to think approvingly of peace, leaving out the force in the standard referents for the word "peacekeeper": hand guns, submachine guns, missiles, and armed vigilante groups, ready to keep the peace by, don't mention it, killing.  Then, instead of acting on the referential meaning he acted on the spin, and had his force just sit there peacefully — until his less confused enemy blew it up.  To the degree that American voters accepted this and drew no lessons from it for the next intervention they are deaf to Socrates and all taxonomists and composition teachers who speak for him — that is, they are lazy students.  If they get bloody chunks of meat and bone from deliberately bad butchers they have only themselves to blame.

It's a matter of dissecting-table habits.  Carelessness over the body of sports, or entertainment, or love, or legal relationships, inclines you to carelessness over the body of warfare.  Again a president, to rouse you against a nation he wants to war against, calls it "evil."  Unless you slice away that spin (recommended by one of his doctors for its "theological" cast) you are going to find yourself, and the Congressman guided by you, unable to make sensible compromises.  Only bad Christians compromise with evil.  The whole conceptual structure of international relationships has been wrenched around.

"As 'same-sex' wrenches around the conceptual structure of marital relationships?"

Just what I was getting around to.  "Same-sex" certainly removes from our minds a lot that the word "marriage" once put into it.  The sense of a socket-connection, for example, the one we think of when we "marry" the ends of hoses, is gone.  But whether that dislocation matters or not depends on what we gain by the dislocation.  Much as it might hurt an analytic philosopher to say so, conceptual disorder is not the worst sin in the world.  It's probably not as bad as hard-heartedness, or intellectual pride.  To avoid hardheartedness, to exhibit compassion, to convey good will, to reassure an excluded minority that we are one with them, that may well be more important than keeping all our words in order.

So "marriage" wins a position after "same-sex."  The analytic accountant would say that the social benefit outweighed the verbal cost.  His only complaint would be against those who, out of neglect or ideology, failed to enter a cost at all.  The logician would say, in view of the irremovable counter-example, that it was a necessary victory.  The Christian would see a demonstration that the force of brotherly love and compassion is greater than the force of intellect.  Christ over Socrates.

I am happy to go along — provided that my needs as a composition teacher in America are met.  Socrates has to be left with enough weight to help me sell students on verbal care and conceptual order, enough anyway to help keep their country out of unjustifiable wars.

Note: My self-published book, Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry: Readings from the Erotic Renaissance, is now available on Amazon and Kindle.  Author entry: H. R. Swardson.