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.

195. Humane Feelings and the Collapse of the Cincinnati Reds.

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Oh how well we clear thinkers understand games.  We know (preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.

And where might this superior thinking lead us?  I think the experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good idea.

For the players I think right thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the dying Fred Hutchinson.  That means, distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin), judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands."  That would follow from their knowledge of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction.  To win you keep your poise; you don't heighten your determination.  You do not say, it would be fatal to say, "Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."

And what are you saying if you are a clear-thinking fan?  "Way to go.  Keep it up.  No Hutch."  And if you are a clear-thinking analyst you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."

Us now.  What do we say?  We know the full story.  We know what a great job these players have done maintaining their poise.  It's almost unbelievable.  For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher.   They have followed him as he went out of uniform and into the stands.  They have seen him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and swung their bats and climbed in the standings.  And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine straight victories. 

Sure, in the last six of those wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that must have made it easier.  But now they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in the papers.  We know that the fans know that.  They know that the preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the coming games.

What most of them don't know, and won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he would make his way to them, and hug each of them.

That's a test we have to imagine, before we face our own test.  Say you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in.  You know you have the best chance of being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line.  You know that you have the best chance of coming through if your mind is empty.  And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep Hutchinson's image out of it.  You know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them.  OK.  You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs.  Do you bail out?  Sneak off, go home, try to forget him?  Or do you risk the hug? 

That's Johnson's problem, and we, forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third, struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in the sagging shoulder.  Our problem, our test, is whether or not we want him to do it.  Wanting is what makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic.  Trace elements are good enough.  One small slide and there it will be: character!

What we will have a trace of may be small but there will be no mistaking it.  One kind of character says, "No!  No!  No hugs!  Go the other way.  Ignore him.  Forget Hutchinson.  Do anything, callous or not, to win.""  The other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic.  Feeling for a suffering human being comes first."

It's a small test and we baseball fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously.  Here is our chance to share in the decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed.  We can share in their decision-making by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close: do I really want this ruthlessness?  There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you.  Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the Romans, and Machiavelli. 

And there's so much to lose, either way.  Yes and you lose your humanity (in older terms, your soul).  No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was, and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.

Try to go both ways, want both success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a "dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."

These are the hazards once you throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat.  Do that, become a fan in the old full, sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play.  Did I make the right decision?  Do I have the right character?  We all want to be justified.

So some of us will have Johnson, after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven.  "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my mind was on the next game."  We are seeing Hutchinson's character tested.  If he is the good manager we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy Budd forgave Captain Vere.  You do what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a big deal out of hugs.

And some of us will have Johnson, after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of thought?  Logic.  The ordering of our concepts."  And he will go into the consequences of that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who will look to his example.

Since those who give in to their hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it will come out, we are left pretty much in the air.  It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice.  I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but I'd be interested in hearing from others.  My email: hswardson@yahoo.com

194. Humane Feelings and Conceptual Order

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Violations of conceptual order can dizzy us.  I was dizzied by the Olympic Committee's ruling that let Oscar Pistorius, with his metal feet, compete against normal people.  If you finished ahead of him would you be proud?  Would you say, "Look at me, I beat a man with artificial legs"?  If behind would you be embarrassed ("Oh my, I got beat by a cripple") or would you be indignant ("Not fair, he got a spring from the metal")?  In the end you'd be wondering, I think, if you could call what you had just been in a "race."

Such violations can also amuse us.  I laughed when in News of the Weird, under the heading, "Unclear on the Concept," I read of the priest who said that though he had committed rape he didn't use a condom because it was "against church doctrine."  Concerning sin, I presume.  Sin?

And occasionally they outrage us.  I was outraged when I read the New York Supreme Court's justification for its ruling that the former man, Renée Richards, could play on the women's tennis circuit: he was "now female" on the "overwhelming medical evidence" that he had the same genitals as the others.  There the court is, brows knit over Richards' genitals, while his already developed male muscles, the reason the U. S. Tennis Association (who fought the ruling) had conceived a separate circuit, are ignored.  Men obviously play tennis with their penises.  "None here, boss."

My outrage deepens as I see Richards taking her muscles to the Lahoya Women's Tennis Tournament and, as Wikipedia has it, "crushing the opposition."  And (in my imagination) feeling satisfaction. "Wow, I really blew Nancy away.  The club champion!"

But that's not the end of the outrage.  I go so far as to be outraged by those who don't regard the New York Supreme Court's ruling as an outrage.  To the author of the Wikipedia entry on Richards it "was a landmark decision in favor of transsexual rights.  Through her fight to play tennis as a woman, she challenged gender roles and became a role model and spokesperson for the transgender community."

I think I am not the only one who will feel the ground giving way under him here.  The loss of meaning in our words — "winner," "loser," "competition," "race"— sucks us down.  Something in our conceptual substratum has given way.  How do we get out? 

I suggest we start by distinguishing a game from a party.  A party is something you throw for other people's satisfaction.  You want them to be happy, and have a good time, and feel good about life.  You are expressing your altruism.  That's what Judge Ascione and the Wikipedia author are expressing.  They are welcoming Richards to the party of general humanity.

A game, on the other hand, is something you play for your own satisfaction.  You want to win, and be superior, and feel good about your abilities.  You are expressing your egoism.  

Rules follow from the need for satisfaction of the ego.  A group of young adult men asks, "What stipulations must we make in order to be able to say, happily, 'I'm better at this than you are.'"  Whole categories — children, handicapped people, old men, women — are excluded because it's no fun beating them.  They know they are going to lose before they start.  These rules parallel rules to exclude those who are winners before they start.  "Well never be able to say, 'I'm better at this than you are,' if those types — golfers under 50, male wrestlers, heavyweight boxers — are allowed to play."  Games are necessarily contests between peers.

So the test is, "Can I happily and legitimately say, 'I am superior'?"  Activities that don't pass this test must be called something other than "games."  If not "parties" then "ceremonies" maybe, or "entertainments," or "exercises," or "promotions," or "treatments."

That's logic, that's order, that's the mind coming to the aid of the emotions.  And what happens to it when it comes to something like the Special Olympics?  Satisfaction of the ego is out the window.  This is altruism.  Humane feeling takes over here, and ought to take over.  But that doesn't keep the word "game" from losing its meaning — along with "winner," "loser," "competition," and "race."

If you try to maintain those meanings, if you stick up for conceptual order there, you are properly rebuked. "You are as bad as the Wikipedia author.  You close your ears to the claims of the heart as he closed his eyes to the claims of the head."  You, found deficient in humane feeling, are embarrassed.

Yet (and this is what gets me) in that stadium, as in every stadium where our unthinking hearts go out, you are embarrassed by demanding what can save the day elsewhere.  Say the American people are asked to join a "war on communism," and attack it "only ninety miles away" in Cuba.  You point out that "communism" is an abstraction and that you can't "war on" (concretely kill) it.  People who fit words together that way can get you to do dumb things, as in the Bay of Pigs.   Or, with the "war on terrorism," in the Middle East.  Thank you, thank you, picky English teacher, for pointing that out.

So, argue for conceptual order in the political arena and you are a hero.  Argue for it in a Special Olympics stadium and you are a monster.

"A monster because you lack what makes us human.  Humane feeling is what makes us human, right?"

No, reason is what makes us human.

We've gone from quandary to quagmire.  We can't let the reason quit putting our concepts in order.  That would leave  beliefs in a pile of their own, separate from consequences. Inferences in one pile, evidence in another.  An ends pile and a means pile.  A life viewed as a bunch of piles can't be lived.  On the other hand, a life without humane feeling is not worth living.  Oi.