Liberty, marriage, divorce
I’ve been slowly reading Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. It’s a fascinating discussion of trends in higher education that have only continued—and accelerated—in the ensuing years, so that even though some details in the book may be dated, the main points are not.
Bloom ranges further afield than merely discussing how academia—and I quote here from the cover of his book—“has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students.” The work is filled with trenchant and pithy observations on a wide variety of other matters in our society.
I’ve written recently about marriage and divorce, here and here. The number and tenor of the responses—one hundred and fifty-five comments so far, and still counting—are a good indication of how much emotion and controversy the subject generates.
In his book, Bloom sees the modern breakdown of the family as having its roots long ago, in the rise of the championing of individualism as a value to support. Much as we in this country cherish and promote individual liberty (and I, as a classical liberal, am no exception to this rule), the resultant loss of community and continuity, and the obligations thereof, poses a problem.
In his book, Bloom makes several observations on the subject that are well worth pondering, so I will quote at length:
More than two hundred years ago Rousseau saw with alarm the seed of the breakdown of the family in liberal society, and he dedicated much of his genius to trying to correct it. He found that the critical connection between man and woman was being broken by individualism, and focused his efforts, theoretical and practical, on encouraging passionate romantic love in them. He wanted to rebuild and reinforce that connection, previously encumbered by now discredited religious and civil regulation, on modern grounds of desire and consent.
Bloom is saying that marriage, which used to be cemented by firm societal bonds both civil and religious (and, I might add economic), was already losing some of those raisons d’etre way back in the late 1700s.
Rousseau thought love might be a good substitute; we all know how problematic this has turned out to be. I’m all for love, but it hasn’t developed into quite the connubial cement that was hoped for in order to stem the tsunami of divorce we’re experiencing today.
Bloom observes that our society’s emphasis on individualism, coupled with its relative of ease of divorce, have had a synergistic effect on the mindset of those entering into marriage [and although Bloom uses the masculine pronoun here, his words refer to women as well]:
The possibility of separation is already the fact of separation, inasmuch as people today must plan to be whole and self-sufficient, and cannot risk interdependence. Imagination compels everyone to look forward to the day of separation in order to see how he will do. The energies people should use in the common enterprise are exhausted in preparation for independence…The goals of those who are together naturally and necessarily must become a common good, what one must live with can be accepted. But there is no common good for those who are to separate. The presence of choice already changes the character of relatedness.
I’m not suggesting that a remedy would be to make divorce so difficult that people would be chained together against their will in an effort to somehow force them to accept their relatedness and therefore work cooperatively. I am part of a society that values greatly the idea of individual liberty, and any attempts to turn back the clock and make divorce laws far more Draconian would not be an organic expression of what marriage now represents, but rather an artificial and authoritarian attempt to impose standards that made sense in a bygone era but no longer do. Legislating that sort of thing at this point would have results something akin to those of Prohibition.
As Bloom writes, somewhere in the background of the mindset almost all of us now bring to marriage is the fact that we can always divorce if things don’t work out. I’m not going to reiterate the arguments I made in my earlier posts about marriage and divorce; the point of this one is not about men vs. women in divorce, but about the institution of marriage itself and the expectations with which we enter it. Bloom’s words illuminate the fact that many now bring to marriage both a “what’s in it for me?” stance and an expectation that, since divorce is so rampant, they must take into consideration what they will “win” or “lose” in the event it happens to them. These facts color the experience of marriage itself and the commitment to it for many—or perhaps even most—people.
Individualism and conviction of value of individual freedoms are not the same, but modern liberals routinely conflate them. The first is bordering with narcissism, it is one’s view of purpose of his/her personal existence; the second is political conviction, it is about how society should be organized. This is like difference between freedom and licence. For classical liberals, freedom from coercion and intrusion of authority into personal life is a necessary condition for developing moral responsibility and self-restraint; for social libertarians freedom is the negation of binding moral obligations. There is a very profound book of French philosopher Henry Bergson “The two sources of moral and religion” on these issues. The first source is social pressure, that any society, even the most primitive, exerts on its members, to make them conform with its norms and values; the second is a “vocation”, an ideal which every individual strive to achive without any pressures from others or any authority. The second impulse is much more effective and makes most of coertion or conformism unnecessary.
Our present problem is that many old mechanisms of conformism and authority are irreparably damaged, but new ones, more connected with the second impulse, are out of reach for coarse minds, and seem too obsolete for “progressives”, lulled into neo-paganist secular religion of hedonism and human-worship.
“In our own case we can see this oftrepeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religon; we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old. When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.” This is from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Everlasting Man”. This observation can be put in parallel with concluding paragraph of Francis Fukuyama book “The great disrupture: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order” (in my reverse translation):
“In a society, the two processes occure developing in parallel. In political and economical sphere the history is progressive and linear, and at the end of 20 century the culmination of that became liberal democracy as the only viable choice for technologically advanced societies. In social and moral spheres, though, the history seems cyclical, and social capital is devaluated and accumulated again during lives of many generations. There is nothing that can guarantee the growth of social capital in a cycle. The only basis of hope are very mighty human intrinstic capabilities for recreation of social order.
Your recent comments about marriage struck a chord in me; especially this one. We’ve pursued individualism as a society to extreme lengths, and have become egotistical and selfish as a result. Those traits don’t bring a lot of happiness into people’s lives.
Today is my 21st wedding anniversary and I’m feeling philosophical on the subject. My husband and I were both divorced and brought 6 young kids with us into the marriage (very challenging!). It has not been an easy relationship, and he was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder that makes it even more difficult. Some well-meaning people have suggested I leave him. My question is simply this: what good is that going to do? It certainly doesn’t solve the problem, and truthfully we do better together than we would ever have done apart. Our family now numbers 8 children; they are all law-abiding, productive members of society, and we are proud of them all. I doubt seriously that they would have turned out as well if we had divorced at the first sign of difficulty. Sometimes we did stay together “just for the children,” and that’s all right. There are times when it’s more important to put other people’s needs ahead of our own and look at the big picture. In the end, we are happier together than we would be apart, and we are stronger individually and as a family for working through our challenges. Individualism is a good thing if it can be harnessed and used to cooperate with others for society’s betterment. If not, then it becomes a real danger to social order.
Bloom’s book really hit me in the late 80’s. He punctured my young, inflated ego. It took twenty years of reading and study to puff it up again, even to its current fluffy state.
I think the notion of Romantic Love to be deeply wrong, because the Romantic vision of life is deeply wrong. I do not think it an error of kind but of degree.
Poe was correct to write that the highest emotions of art and of life are the bitter-sweet experiences of the sublime. The awesome and terrifying aspect of violent nature — such as thunderstorms — arouse the most refined and the most vulgar of emotions, simultaneously.
But to conieve of love as an emotion
[continued from my stray clicking]
But to conceive of love as an emotion seems to be obviously incorrect.
Consider this. Is happiness an emotion? Clearly not. The people who climb Mt. Everest find the experience to be the happiest of their lives, yet in the midst of climbing they suffer horrible pain. They are happy even as they have wildly negative emotions. How can this be?
Modern people have trouble reconciling this obvious fact. Since happiness is not an emotion, it must be an activity. People who are happy are happy with something. And sure enough, the classical idea of happiness was an activity in accordance with virtue.
So is love similarly. Love is a commitment, not an emotion. One can love a person in the midst of a violent argument.
Emotions are fickle. Emotions can never be the basis of any social institution, much less marriage.
This is not to say that emotions are unimportant. they are. But emotions should be understood as effect not cause. Actions and things cause emotions. Institutions are built from actions and things.
So are marriages.
There is an alternative to love, Book. It is military loyalty, discipline, and the band of brothers bond.
In a sense, liberty requires duty to flourish. It is that mighty paradox of the human condition. Too much choice breeds contempt and parasitism/predation where people no longer cooperate for a greater whole. Too little choice and people become simply cogs in the Islamic Jihad or the Arafat PLO system of eternal warfare and despotism.
Yet duty cannot be enforced upon people. People have to be willing to choose it. Such is the paradox that even mighty and wealthy republics such as the United States still needs a military force that wants to serve. Demands to serve, even. Even George Washington could not evade such realities when the enlistment deadlines for his troops expired, when the Revolutionary War was still ongoing.
I am part of a society that values greatly the idea of individual liberty, and any attempts to turn back the clock and make divorce laws far more Draconian would not be an organic
Remember that topic about shooting the looters in Baghdad and Iraq, Neo? Liberty requires security. Good security requires liberty, meaning it requires the free choice of civilians like the Sunnis. As free as they can have anyways.
The point is, the more a society values individual choice, the more it becomes weakened to the depredations of those that seek to destroy and overthrow society. Leftist provocateurs and useful tools are not present in Iran, for example. Last batch got snatched up and arrested, last time I checked. One of Soros’ tools, even. He would have died, if his ransom wasn’t so large.
Duty, by itself, provides you no choice after you have accepted it. It demands that you follow what you have promised. Free choice says that you can change your mind whenever you want. Liberty with duty coalesces into a system where you can make choices, but not without consequences. The consequences of bad choices is crushing economically and psychologically. So people defend themselves by refusing to cooperate, refusing to create a greater whole than the sum of its parts. Unhappiness then results.
So why are people such as the Marines and their Marine wives happy with doing their duty, constrained to one choice? Probably because keeping your promises is a trait of long term cooperation and civilization. Long term cooperation, or I call it cooperative hunting, in addition to civilization has made humanity far happier as a result.
We get back to honor, in the end. Why did people wish to be known as honorable and thus honest back in the olden days? It was not the false pride and hubris of the Arabs when Arabs speak of honor. It was not the belief in blood purity and status as was the concept of honor to the Indians. It was not the belief that honor was absolute loyalty unto death to the Emperor, for the Japanese. Western honor was solely about whether you kept your promises or not. Promises which were the building blocks of Western civilization. If you did not keep your oaths, then no community could trust you not to turn traitor. Very similar to the Arab custom of never betraying a guest or harming one.
All such conceptions of honor are only a means to an end. And that end was civilization, good or bad.
Liberty and human progress unchains humanity from many of the problems we once had. Yet, it creates new problems at the same time that it solves old ones.
It is not liberty alone that is the problem. It is the devaluing of honor and duty as pillars of future progress and civilization. You can increase the amount of choice a person to infinity, Neo, yet without duty and honor to balance the equation, humanity will always be miserable. Humans also tend to spread their misery around as well.
To make a short analogy, neither liberty nor duty can flourish by itself. It is better and more optimal for both to exist and for both to cooperate in a greater whole. Yet what is optimal is of course not always the status quo.
The same, therefore, applies to men and women. Marriage should have elevated the survival and well being of both partners. That is what “should have happened”. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, though. Sorry for calling you Book at first; I was talking to her over the same topic: the topic of liberty requiring an iron hand able to ensure stability, order, the rule of law, and security.
Divorce, by its very existence, pits men and women against each other, making them adversaries instead of helpmates. It also favors the most heartless, predatory and ruthless of both sexes.
I value individual freedom, Neo, but I’m really stunkered as to what to do about our current situation. As long as there’s easy divorce, people will be tempted to resort to it, and the only ones who survive it well are going to be those with hearts of iron and lawyers resembling sharks.
And it’s going to get worse as the kids who grew up outside of marriage altogether, born to single mothers who never married their fathers, begin coming of age. I’m afraid familial dysfunction is going to grow geometrically with the generations, not just in a linear fashion—meaning, I think we’re going to see less divorce because there’s no more marriage. And then what? The old cave man joke of the man hauling the woman off to his cave by her hair? Gangs of young men fighting older ones for females? Or some sort of horrible, repressive system, such as shari’a, to keep the raging hordes in line? Certainly, what’s happening with family breakdown in inner cities, for instance, isn’t pretty to see.
Don’t really want to get into the whole question of what love is, and what it isn’t, and is romace good or bad, etc., etc., etc. I will say that I think our modern myths—endless happiness through endless sex partners, with alimony and child support payments to sooth any hurt feelings, and “easy” divorce, that cause no pain are the silliest romantic myths of all.
Sally, what a lovely story about your marriage! Thank you for sharing it with us, and congratulations to you.
Hear, hear! I agree wholeheartedly.
It seems this continuing trend towards extreme individualism is changing the course of the institution of marriage. That is, we are steering it away from an institution that benefits Society as a whole to an institution that should be benefitting the individual.
Hence, anyone or any combination of people should be allowed to marry because individuals demand it. Never mind that it may not be in Society’s ultimate best interest. If it is deemed a benefit, or can be made into an individual RIGHT, then it must be reprogramed as such.
Individual rights now trumph all else, and God only knows where such folly will end.
Minds, like parachutes, need to be open in order to function properly.
OTOH, there are many who confuse an empty head with an open mind…
I think that Rousseau was being as romantic about the past as he was hoping to be about the future.
But lately I’ve been doubting any claims of observing change. Usually the only thing that has changed is that the person has noticed an ongoing problem for the first time.
Among a certain *class* marriage 200 years ago was permanent and stable… and unfaithful. From time to time religiously pious sub-classes added male faithfulness to female faithfulness rules. But it’s true that *people who married* didnt’ divorce. But 200 years ago there were whole classes of people who never married at all, and farther back it was even more “common law” marriage. And women and children were abandoned and men were left and cuckolded and children mysteriously sported red hair.
What has *changed* in my view begins before the marriage unit falls apart and that’s partly due to mobility and partly due to weakening the family place as the primary unit of social welfare and support.
And I suppose that is “individualism” but it’s the extended family and support structure that fails *first*. It’s parents not wanting to be saddled with grandchildren if their teenager has a baby because the mere thought of *caring for family* has become something unreasonable in our minds.
Weakening the extended family (culturally and simply through mobility) ALSO serves to put a great deal more pressure on the marriage unit. Rather than getting a great deal of support from parents and siblings and cousins and Aunts and Uncles, male and female role models in abundance, baby sitters and shoulders to cry on and helpers in *life*… a spouse has to take the whole load.
No one is sufficient.
As Fukuyama observed, nuclear family is a relatively recent phenomenon, it starts with industrialization, whem men were driven to overpopulated uran or suburban zones with limited housing capacity and began “go to work” outside their houses. Peasant families were extended and all family members worked where they lived. In Russia this transition to nuclearity has not accomplished yet: in most families 3 generations live together, and grandmothers are wery active in rearing young children, especially when both parents are working. But in postindustrial society there is no need to “go to work” for more and more people, so this historical anomaly of nuclear family can be completely reversed.
The comparison you make between Prohibition and the divorce laws is a good one, but I disagree on where you go with it. Like Prohibition, no fault divorce laws were a “noble experiment” which had disasterous consequences some of which, like organized crime, we still suffer with today.
The Prohibitionists were correct in that many people have ruined their lives and the lives of others because of alcohol addiction. Their solution to the problem created more problems than it solved. Similarly the problems with a strict fault based only divorce system were listed in the first of these essays. Most of the comments seem to be references to the consequences of the divorce laws as they stand today.
Economics teaches that most decision making takes place at the margin. If gasoline goes to $5.00 a gallon, most people are still going to drive to work, but they might decide not to drive to the Grand Canyon on vacation. When the taxes on alcohol are raised and restrictions are placed on selling it, less is consumed but motivated people can still buy it without having to deal with criminals. That does not end alcoholism but it does make alcohol somewhat less available and fewer people are likely to become addicted.
I believe that current divorce laws probably make it too easy to end a marriage that could have survived if both partners persisted through the more difficult times. Suicide has been described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I think that you could probably say the same thing about many divorces.
It is too late to put the no fault divorce genii back into the bottle. As you point out, society has already changed in response to the divorce laws and there is a substantial fraction of the legal industry that makes a good living from divorce and who have a disproportionate influence on their fellow lawyers in the legislatures. However, it might be possible to make divorce a less attractive option. My modest proposal would be to make unilateral divorce less attractive in cases where there is no fault charged against either party. This would lead to more litigation and more billable hours, hopefully enough to consume all the assets of the married couple. Give either party in a divorce proceeding the legal right to cause Mutually Assured Destruction of equity and only those people who are willing to walk away from a marriage with nothing but the clothes on their back will persist in the process. Make one of the first steps in a divorce the requirement to sell the house, stocks and any other assets and transfer the money into an escrow account from which legal fees and court costs will be taken. In the unlikely event that there is any money left at the end of the legal proceedings, that can be divided up by the court.
I think different kinds of people come to marriage with very different expectations, dependant on manyh factors. so it is difficult to imagine a “model” divorced person. I think, in many cases, one gets better at it with experience and that second and third marriages (nearly the norm?) represent a gallant attempt to keep believing in the connubial ideal: that man belongs with woman. For that, it should be encouraged.
Marriage will evolve – as do all social rituals and roles – but returning to traditional perspectives is not, I believe, the answer.
As long as you have divorce, you will have men and women pitted against each other in law courts and society as deadly enemies, not friends and lovers.
In his book, Bloom sees the modern breakdown of the family as having its roots long ago, in the rise of the championing of individualism as a value to support.
I don’t see why championing, for example, loyalty to the state would be less destructive. It still would not be loyalty to ones spouse. (And individualism is not the same thing as selfishness, whatever people may choose to think: “Modern men imagine themselves moral, because they have delegated their vices to larger groups.”)
Legislating that sort of thing at this point would have results something akin to those of Prohibition.
Perhaps we should take individualism to its logical conclusion, and dispense with marriage laws. The courts could still enforce whatever marriage contract people chose to sign. At the very least, we would find out what people wanted from a marriage.
One thought that should have occurred to me before is that if individualism causes fewer people to get married, it can only be because it is not in their interests to marry.
If you want to increase the number of marriages, you should therefore simply try to make marriage a better deal for those most reluctant to marry.
The alternative is to demand that other people — tens of millions of them — should make a great sacrifice to serve a goal thought to be important by you.
Similarly, for a divorce to happen, at least one partner must believe they will be better off divorced than married.
This is why people complain about unfair terms of divorce, but not unfair terms of marriage — no one can be forced to accept terms of marriage imposed by someone else, because they can (and apparently do) refuse to get married in the first place.
The situation is asymmetric because marriages are consensual, and divorces are frequently acrimonious.
Thus whether a marriage happens or not depends on the decision of the person with least to gain from the marriage. Whether a divorce happens depends on the decision of the person with most to gain from the divorce.
Whenever people complain about individualism, they mean that neither they, nor others can force some other group of people to act as the complainant desires.