Marriage and the Generation of Society

A lot of the arguments over same sex marriage ignore the central question of what marriage *does* for a society. Not just for individuals, as many opponents of ss-m say it’s for procreation, while supporters claim it’s for recognition and psychological well-being for homosexuals.

I want to take a different angle. What is the good of marriage for a society, and one - by its very nature - wants to maintain itself over the course of time.

From this perspective, marriage is the primary institution by which a society perpetuates itself. Not only in terms of adding/sustaining the number of bodies and workers in a society, but also to transmit the values of a society from one generation to the next. Immigration would be another candidate, especially in sustaining the number of bodies and workers. However, I think asking immigrants to be responsible for transmitting the values of their NEW society is to be unjust toward them, especially since, as newcomers, they’re leaving their old countries behind precisely to enter into, and to learn from, the new values of liberty, freedom, etc., that a liberal society is meant to stand for.

I’m going to bypass the issue of whether defining marriage in terms of procreation rules out childless heterosexual couples because I don’t think that’s a valid objection. Such couples participate in the form of marriage and in no way alter that form by remaining childless. Call me an old fashioned Platonist, but there you have it.

If marriage is that primary device whereby society transmits itself, then we can more directly address the issue not as one that concerns “religious folks,” but rather what concerns us as citizens. By citizens, I mean members of a political community that understands itself as an entity or cosmion that extends into the past as well as the future. A reflection, in fragmentary form, of the cosmos, of history, of the just order of things as we understand it. Perhaps nothing as grandiose as the community of the living and the dead (as Pericles and Edmund Burke said), but at least one that includes yesterday and tomorrow or at least that point in the future when we need to draw our pensions.

We need to address the reasons why our individualism has led us to regard marriage from one in which we suffer (in the religious and physical sense) the duties and responsibilities of being stewards of the one we love and the next generation. Love begets children and/or it begets speeches, as Socrates says, but one thing for certain is that it begets, it does not make contracts. Of course, our national media and political leadership are too crude to understand that difference the soul that begets and the will that contracts.

Here I think Alexis de Tocqueville’s diagnosis of individualism is to the point: it shrinks our polis down to our immediate family relations (and perhaps a few neighbors who - this is important - are just like us) and it prevents us from considering our actions and their implications beyond a single generation. Individualism shrinks down our horizon of space and time.

Seen in this light, marriage becomes a device to keep two lonely contractors warm and protected from the cold, chilly air of our technologically-ordered public space. It is needed for alleviating our ennui and anxiety, not for any goods internal to marriage itself. This is what I hear when marriage is defined as a “lifelong commitment.” How far is the modern democrat from even somone perhaps in the nineteenth century who understood himself as viewing his existence within a long family lineage, not to mention that lineage that goes back to Adam and Eve. Generation and Genesis. The modern individual cuts himself off from past and future under the assumption that, in his isolation, he stands above time.

Reducing marriage to a mere contract reflects the inability of Canadians to think of themselves as a political community.