Primary Sources, Round Two:

Amy Lamboley takes on Sara Butler (this could be the beginning of a beautiful opposition) about the fight that Matt Ygelsias started. I generally agree with Amy so far as "contemporary value" goes but Sara so far as "aesthetic value" does. Put another way, I think that if you want to know what other people at a certain time were thinking, it's most useful to read what they wrote, and secondarily useful to read what other people at a similar time wrote. (The latter only goes so far; I pity the future man who tries to extract a nuanced sense of the difference between British politics and American politics by comparing V.S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison).

But when trying to figure out what we ought to be thinking now it's not clear that Adam Smith will be more compelling than Milton Friedman. David Hume recognized this himself, and warns his readers that as advances in science, history, and especially psychology came along, that we ought to turn to authors who could take account of those developments.

Tom Stoppard makes the argument for me in The Invention of Love:

Housman: Plato is useless to explain anything except what Plato thought.

Jackson: Why study him then?

Pollard: We study the ancient authors to draw lessons for our age.

Housman: That's all humbug.

Pollard: Is it? So it is. We study ancient authors to get a First and a life of learned ease.

Housman: We need science to explain the world. Jackson knows more than Plato. The only reason to consider what Plato meant about anything is if it's relevant to settling the text. Which is classical scholarship, which is a science, the science of textual criticism, Jackson-- we will be scientists together. . . Pollard will be what passes as a classical scholar at Oxford, which is to be a literary critic in dead languages.

Polygamy:

So the latest round of the marriage debate brings us to the next question. Should the state recognize polygamous marriages?

It doesn't of course; at oral arguments in Lawrence v. Texas, a court that was half-receptive to same-sex unions blanched measurably at the thought of polygamous ones. Why is that?

If 2-parent households are better for children than 1-parent households (are they really?) then why aren't 3-parent households better than 2? (Yes, this question is half-facetious, but it's still a question. Why aren't they?).

Change of Heart:

Amy has turned purple.

Harvard:

Here are some reasons I'm glad I don't go to Harvard:

1: Their philosophers get by reading Korsgaard instead of Kant, and lord-knows-what instead of Hume.

2: (Probably as a result of this) they seem to think that Kant is right and Hume is wrong.

It's a simple matter to poke serious gashes in Kant-- by showing that the three much-lauded formulations of the Categorical Imperative aren't consistent, or that the two definitions of synthetic/analytic reasoning aren't consistent either. I'm actually not clear why anybody thinks Hume (and the later logical positivists) are wrong.

Blech.

But this is beside the point. Mr. Yglesias is right that nothing in philosophy requires you to read the arguments of those who went before-- after all, an argument is just as valid no matter who says it, right? But then, most people don't read the "greats" (Hume, Nietzche, J.S. Mill, Hobbes) because they were historically interesting, but because they are a pleasure.

(permalink not working):
Sara asks why doesn't anyone elope anymore?

1) According to the OED -- elope: "In popular language also (and more frequently) said of a woman running away from home with a lover for the purpose of being married". If you live in your own home, as so many adult women do, it's rather hard to run away.
2) When your parents give you permission to elope, they take some of the exotic thrill away (or I assume so, although I haven't yet gotten around to testing this theory myself).

Will notes that privatizing marriage would permit homosexual marriages. Like Amy, I figure that's all well and good by me.

And Amy muses about government regulation of contracts in marriages. Here's what I'd like to see. As it stands in religion cases, the government accepts your word for what your religion is and what it tells you to do. If a person says, "I can't eat meat on Fridays between Ash Wednesday and Easter," then the government accepts that as a true statement without questioning whether shrimp or certain species of fish-eating ducks (evidently, not "meat") should also be included in the no-meat ban, or whether your religions actually requires you to abstain from meat. I don't think that the government should say "this is what a marriage is." Rather, I think couples should come to the government and say "We are about to enter into a relationship with each other that we shall call "marriage". These will be the terms, mutual rights and obligations so long as we are in a state of marriage. Should the marriage "fail" ("fail" defined as __), then our separation shall be on these terms: [enumerated.]" Now the government is regulating a contract between two individuals drawn up on their own terms. It grants recognition that two people have signed a contract, but it doesn't actually marry the two people. Perhaps this would meet Amy's "optimal position for government. . . to regulate the legal arrangement without imposing its vision on the personal one."

Smoking:

A smoking ordinance similar to New York's is coming up in my hometown of Bloomington, IN. The law penalizes establishments for the infractions of their customers. I think this is a bad idea.

I Scream:

I meant to link to this a few days ago but forgot. Ben and Jerry's now has competition in the ideological ice cream market. It's almost enough to make you think Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce was wrongly decided.

Crime:

The New York Times bears good news and bad news. The good news: pilots will be carrying guns into the cockpit next week. The bad news: despite Justice Kennedy's admonitions, congress has passed laws restricting judicial discretion in sentencing.

Marriage Again:

Amy Lamboley weighs in on marriage. My inclination is to agree- insofar as marriage is a contract about distribution of wealth and custody of children, the government ought to recognize and enforce it (within limits). But I'm skeptical about how much it should control who can enter the contract (age limits, maybe; gender limits, why?).

On the issue that we haven't much brought up-- homosexual marriage-- this is my thought. Social institutions ought to be defended socially (and even traditionalists make reasonable allowances). Trying to stop gay people from forming their own martial partnerships seems to me to be the equivalent of trying to stop them from forming their own church or country club.

Ever-changing Form:

For those who have been trying to read the blog this morning, apologies for the barrage of templates. We decided that "blocky" wasn't wide enough for protracted rambles. This one is kinda boring, but I hope it's clean and easy to read.

poem tease:

I have a beautiful book of poetry by Robert Penn Warren, Rumor Verified, yet I have trouble reading it. I start reading a poem and get entranced in the "crocus dawn - premise of a promise" and I am amazed and I want to know what else is there -- "This poem is just beyond the corner of the eye. You cannot see it--not yet--but sense the faint gleam". There's so many places to explore, each full and intriguing in its own right, that I can't sit still but keep skipping through to see what the next might bring. I've started reading the poems aloud to myself, something I almost never do.

Anyway, here is the first fourth of one poem. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere online, but if you email me (abutler (at) uchicago dot edu), I'll send you the full.

"Afterward"

After the promise had been kept, or
Broken. After the sun

Has touched the peak westward and you suddenly
Realize that Time has cut another notch

In the stick with your name on it, and you wonder
How long before you will feel the need

For prayer. After you have stumbled on the obituary
Of a once-girl, photo unrecognizable,

Who, at night, used to come to your apartment and do
everything but
It. Would fight like a tiger. Then weep."

on marriage, again:

Sara Butler (of no known relation) over at Diotoma has responded to my recent musings on government in marriage. Will has also spoken up on the subject.

"If I wanted to "marry" two men, I could; if Amanda wanted to "marry" someone for six months or two days, she could. Marriage, as a meaningful institution, or even as a meaningful word, would not survive. [Sara]" As for six months, I think that's possible under the present system in America. Cf: Hollywood. An empirical note on that point: Among Shiite Muslims, there exist contract marriages in which the couple agrees to marry for a pre-determined length of time. I know 1 day and 99 years are both acceptable time frames, but I don't know if those are the lower and upper bounds. In a culture where pre-marital sex is heavily condemned, this is a socially acceptable way to avoid the prohibition. It's also possible, if you can support them all, to take four wives the traditional way and marry a fifth for 99 years.

And I'm really not proposing the abolition of marriage. I think there are too many hands in the pot at the moment. The IRS is the division of the government that cares the most about a person's marital status; I think that signifies something about how much the government is presently involved in the business. Where else does it come up? The census. The afore-mentioned marriage license. A few other places, I'm sure. And divorce. I have no idea if there are any numbers on this or not (or how you'd calculate them), but I would be surprised if government recognition had an effect on the marriage and separation rate (ignoring tax code effects).

I do think of marriage as a relationship foremost between two people, with the community a distinctive second. Maybe it's my type of romanticism. Think of Jack Burden and Anne Stanton in All the King's Men or "Das Reich der Zwei [the Nation of Two] in Vonnegut's Mother Night. Think of what happens when two people's mutual desire is overcome by community pressure: you get Jude the Obscure and no one's happy. But Sara and I disagree on this.

This is just my hypothesis, but I don't think the recognition the community gives from marriage comes from the government's assertion that two folks are married. That two people believe their union is before God, or that two families now see themselves as connected, or that friends have witnessed the couple assert their vows and devotion -- these (to me) are what legitimize and sanctify marriage. The community is present in these places in ways it isn't so manifestly a participant when two folks and a random witness stand up in a courthouse, or when a man&wife emerge out the far side of a Vegas drive-through. So when the government decides to formally exit the marriage business, I logically imagine a collective apathetic shrug of shoulders. [All this concern over marriage legislation probably proves me wrong, but I can hope :-)]

I do take marriage seriously. I see it as "what brings us together. . . that blessed arrangement. That dream within a dream." And I've heard the Supreme Court talk about drawing the line at the marital bedroom. I agree. Let's shoo everyone out of there who doesn't belong. Reducing it to the two people it's really about appeals to my Protestant aesthetic. Maybe if marriage became something slightly less ordinary, something society pressured people into a bit less once they hit 25 or 30, with weddings and marriages just not common topics of conversation -- then the people who bothered to wed would be more prompted by a personal intimacy than by any other reason. Or maybe these thoughts left the factual and wandered off into the clouds long ago.

All right, in mine too:

I join Dan Drezner in endorsing Josh Chavetz.