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Rosemary Joyce tackles marriage:
"The main difficulty in refuting people who make the claim that "marriage" has "existed since the beginning of human history" for "men and women [to] come together...for the purposes of having children" is actually that there is too much historical fact that refutes it to easily summarize.
As an anthropologist, the temptation is to cite other cultures ...
But I think those responses, while valid, miss the point.
Santorum and others like him don't mean to include the practices of men and women in Native American, South East Asian, or African traditional societies when they say marriage has existed unchanged since "human history" began, and they don't care if primate studies suggest our species might not actually be quite so naturally straight as they imagine. They mean the history that they claim as their own: the one sanctioned by God as continuing "civilization".
But they are still wrong about those historical facts."
And I'll also quote the last sentence, which is I think the real take-away from the article:
It is inhumane as well as ahistorical, and it ignores the one real universal about our species: we are human, and humans evolve to fit their times and circumstances.
Original blog post here
Interesting meta about writing such a post is here
no subject
Of course, I am approaching this question like an archaeologist. Thinking about what it means to be human in terms of events, people, and societies throughout the entirety of human history is a different proposition from considering what it means to be human in the Western-dominated modern world. As an example, I recently read an article about the excavation of a Chimu burial ground in Peru, which seems to represent a single sacrificial event and mostly contains the bodies of children and young llamas. To a modern understanding of human rights, this is horrifying, and obviously wrong. And this is a perfectly valid point of view, arrived at through any number of perfectly reasonable theories of human nature. But it doesn't get you anywhere. You can stand around and condemn it all day, but everyone involved has been dead for centuries - if everyone who let this happen is burning in hell for eternity, okay; but that's a dead-end statement that lacks resonance in the present. The way to give it meaning is to try to really understand what happened, and in order to do that you have to be open to other possible interpretations. Then you can begin to ask questions like why the society chose to do this; was it truly a choice or percieved as a necessity; was it achieved through coercion on the part of the elites, and is there evidence of resistance; conversely, is there evidence that the people were complicit (a Marxist might phrase this in terms of false consciousness); are there commonalities in the burials that suggest a particular segment of society was being singled out (for inclusion or exclusion); what do we already know about their spiritual practices from other contexts, and how might that interact with a climate reconstruction to pontentially explain this; etc etc, and in doing so we learn something about these specific poeple and about the range of human experience in general. But we can't even get started unless we move beyond the idea that obviously this is evil, and crime against human nature; we need to be able to pull from a wide variety of explanations, to hold each of them up to the evidence and say, okay, I think this is what's going on here, but it looks there might be a little of that going on too.
However, we now live in what is increasingly, for better or worse, a global society, and as you note there are some serious challenges to reconciling disparate closely-held views of human nature. But we've managed to agree on at least a few basic human rights, a global consensus on how we as a society will enact our special status as humans (and I think that is pretty amazing and gives me some hope). One thing we've agreed on is that, in general and barring special circumstances, certain exceptions, and a few edge cases that we may never entirely resolve, every human being has a right to life. Gone are the days when a king could be buried in lavish state ceremony, together with his freshly-killed 12 wives, 18 servants, baby daughter and three horses. And if we encountered a mass grave full of children that dated to within the last hundred years (more or less, depending on location), a response of horror, anguish, and a demand that those responsible for this crime against humanity be brought to justice, would be perfectly appropriate, and, in fact, it would be incumbent upon us to do so. But it's important to recognize that this is only appropriate because our social and historical context has normalized a particular theory of human nature that attaches certain rights to human beings.
Obviously in the modern world we have a lot of people trying to live together who disagree fundamentally about many smaller issues than "killing is bad." Since the original post is about marriage I'll use that as an example. There are certain theories of human nature that say that two women marrying one another is wrong, for various different reasons. Fine. However, there are numerous women living under these circumstances who are very happy with their lives and doing active good for society. This would imply that either 1) the theory is wrong, or 2) these women are living in opposition to their nature. I personally find 2) to be utterly ludicrous and tend to accept position 1). (Or, well, not that the theory is wrong per se, but that it doesn't fit into our modern ideas of human rights as constitued by our lived experience of modern society. In much the same way that I don't think a theory that allows human sacrifice is "wrong," because it provides a great explanation for human behavior in certain times and places, but I do think it is incompatible with modern society.)
Ultimately I think we can certainly forge a plural society in which we agree on the big things (like no killing) but disagree on the details, and I think the way to do it is to ensure that the people we trust to make and enact our laws are people who accept that human nature is socially contingent, so we can have a society where I can marry a woman if I want, and my neighbor is equally free to think I'm unnatural for doing it - as long as she doesn't kill me.
Sorry to take so long to answer this - I have actually been thinking about it! And I'm not sure I addressed everything (I wrote this without rereading your comment), so maybe more in a couple minutes.
... Ok, I think some of what I said is actually just rephrasing some of what you said, but let me just address this: I don't think "human nature" is down to individual choice. I think every individual probably does have their own idea of what constitutes human nature, but that idea is socially and historically contingent. I suppose it's theoretically possible to design and subscribe to a completely individual theory, but it would be completely unsustainble unless it shares a lot of its basic tenets with at least one of the theories that currently shape the society. Which is basically what you say when you talk about worldview being based on unconscious assumptions, actually.
And I suppose I belong to your group C - but an educated version who understands that x+y=z and y=mx+b are both straight lines and should try to get along, but y=log(x)? that is CRAZY TALK! (; (This is a convoluted math metaphor for social theory, I am a fan.)
So anyway, I think that we certainly can have a pluralistic society. I think that "culture wars" can be avoided by ensuring we that call out anyone who makes a claim to a "human nature" that espouses no true commonality, but rather what the speaker considers ideal. If we can't escape nature-based arguments we should at least try not to say "all people are X" when what we really mean is "I believe all people should be X." Clarifying that rhetoric, which is what Rosemary Joyce is trying to do, should help us get leaders who can differentiate between ideology and practicality.
no subject
But I really meant to just put forth this question, which I once tried to ask my anthropologist professor, and she sort of awkwardly side-stepped it. But I wasn't trying to grill her, I was just honestly curious. If you essentially "see through" all social structures as inherently malleable and even arbitrary (because I don't think malleable = arbitrary), how do you live in them? It's a sort of detached position. I don't question that when you encounter something horrible you know and feel that it's horrible. But I always remember this one passage in Hume where he's talking about how all the religions and traditions and myths of man are just invented and can't even reliably point to something true, but he's still in favor of them because they're nice and they comfort people and they "work." So my immediate question was: do they "work" for Hume? Once he's seen through to the man behind the curtain, can this do for him what it does for the naive? But let's make this more complicated: What happens when Hume is your neighbor, your teacher, or a writer for TV, or what happens when some 30% of the population is Hume -- what happens to a collective lived experience? What happens to the "social imagination," as it were? Because your suggestion:
we can have a society where I can marry a woman if I want, and my neighbor is equally free to think I'm unnatural for doing it - as long as she doesn't kill me.
does not seem to be what the culture wars are about. Since, like you say, we already have laws protecting people from being murdered, this isn't what's at stake. It's a culture war about who gets to control our "social imagination." (I am stealing this phrase from Charles Taylor btw.) This is why Focus on the Family wants no gay couples on TV and why gay rights movements want to chip away at heternormativity. This is ACTUALLY want the gay marriage movement seems to be about, exactly because of that word, marriage, which everyone wants to define. Nobody actually wants to live side by side with someone who disagrees with them on something important. It used to be that people thought religion was something important, but a lot of that energy has now centered around the family and the individual because of many other factors.
But the central point is: If your idea of human nature is that humans want to believe they have a nature, what does it do to you (or the general you) as a human being to believe that they don't have one? And even if you're willing to accept that as a way of life, is this kind of understanding sustainable if extended to societies as a whole?
no subject
So I reject the idea that seeing "behind the curtain," or recognizing that my idea of what it means to be human is socially contingent, somehow requires me to embrace nihilism as a way of life. There's no inherent contradiction between accepting that human nature is malleable, and living fully as as member of a particular society. So I'm not entirely sure what your last question even means - can we build an entire society that rejects the notion that human beings have a special status? I think that's a contradiction in terms, not possible. On the other hand, I think we can certainly sustain a society built on the notion that human nature is socially contingent, a society that values an understanding of the historical and social circumstances that led to its current consensus (or lack thereof) on "human nature." And I think that having this understanding is what will lead us to make sound policy judgements, and lead to a reasonable consensus on the meaning of words like "marriage" that most people can live with.
We have laws against people being murdered, but the reason we have those laws is that we came to a general consensus, within a particular social and historical context, that murder should never happen, and we made the law as a social contract to ensure that it stays that way. Granted, murder isn't currently at stake in the "culture wars" (whatever that actually means), but the process is the same: observe the social and historical context, formulate a policy decision that is consistent with that context, and if necessary codify it into law or contract.
I think there's a conceptual difference between Hume's dismissal of religion as unreliable but nice, and the idea that social structures are malleable. I doubt that mythology "worked" for him at all - but I equally suspect that overall, the society in which he lived worked reasonably well for him. So though religion can't do for someone like him what it does for the masses, I would argue that his understanding of social structures leads to him find a much greater meaning in the secular aspects of human life than perhaps the "naive masses" can achieve - exactly because he understands the range of possible human societies, and appreciates the complex interactions that created the society in which he lives.