Lee Harris on Tradition and Same Sex Marriage

Lee Harris is one of the most interesting commentators and thinkers of our time. Author of the brilliant Civilization and its Enemies, he has written great articles on al-Qaeda’s fantasy ideology, the limitations of cosmopolitanism, the ideological origins of anti-Americanism, as well as serving as a regular contributor at Tech Central Station (and here).

His most recent article, “The Future of Tradition,” is outstanding.

It also bears directly on Canada’s present discontents.

It’s a reflection on the meaning of, and defence of, tradition, which starts out with criticizing a comment Canada’s Chief Justice made in the same-sex marriage reference. She dismissed objections to same-sex marriage as nothing more than “residual personal prejudice.”

Hers is an abstract moralizing that Harris rejects by defending tradition. But his is a philosophically sophisticated defence of tradition, which philosophers generally have a hard time doing.

Most in recent history reject tradition in favor of abstract notions of justice. Harris rejects these people, which is something we’ll come back to. Another weak philosophical defence of tradition, such as that offered by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, is to say that tradition is a popular way of expressing truth that could be stated better by science. In other words, tradition is wisdom for the masses.

Harris will have none of this, and he goes about defending the “visceral code” that a civilization constitutes itself with. Traditions teach individuals how to become civilized, and the family serves as a cornerstone for this process. He provides the example of a mother teaching her child not to abuse animals:

For example, if a mother teaches her child not to twist the tail of a cat, she is not articulating a pro-peta position, but trying to construct a child who will not hurt animals; but, in doing this, she is also helping to construct a social reality in which animals will not be cruelly mistreated �?? which is quite a different social construction from one in which they are.

The basis of the mother’s response is her own awareness that it may be natural for children to play too roughly with animals, since she herself was once a child and did such things herself. But now, judging between her way of treating animals then and her way of treating them now, there is no doubt in her mind which way is better. It is not that she is blindly condemning other people’s ways of doing things; she is condemning her own past behavior, and that makes all the difference.

Her higher ethical stance toward animals, to use Hegel’s language, is the triumph of dialectical reason: She has herself, within her own experience, come to see the error of her ways, condemned these ways, and then sought a better one. Unlike the person who dismisses unthinkingly and unsympathetically the ways of others, the mother has reached a higher truth not by dismissing the lower truth, but by experiencing it fully enough to see its shortcomings.

The mother does not need to be aware of all this; nor does she need to be conscious that there are philosophical issues at stake in the problem of animal suffering. In truth, the mother is interested only in making her son embody in his actions the virtue of kindness to animals, to make it part of his visceral code, so that he will no longer be able even to imagine himself as the kind of child who would hurt an animal. Indeed, it may only be to us, as outside philosophical observers, for whom what she is instilling appears as a virtue. For the mother herself, it may well be no such thing; it may rather represent an absolute minimum of decency by which one gets no praise for upholding the code but is sure to be crucified for violating it. And, at all events, what concerns her is not her child’s moral principles, but his practical behavior. He must not pull cats’ tails �?? a categorical imperative hardwired into the boy’s visceral system by whatever set of admonitions, shouts, screams, slaps, spankings it took to etch the apodictic quality of her message into the boy’s core character. It is certainly not a Maimonides-like encryption of an empirical truth about the dangers of behaving in ways that might be conducive to getting scratched by a cat, and thereby contracting cat-scratch fever.

It is the mother’s repertoire of behavior that contributes to her social construction of her community’s reality. But implicit in her shouts and slaps is a stern value judgment that there is a radical distinction between the ethical plane on which one refuses to torture animals, on the one hand, and the ethical plane on which one enjoys torturing animals, on the other.
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Thus, the transgenerational duty to one’s grandchildren may be put in these simple terms: Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their visceral code instantly tells them is wrong. How much philosophical thought is given in explaining this wrong, or in disputing its validity �?? all that is irrelevant to the theory of tradition contained here.

Harris’s point is that the “visceral code” that is a tradition provides a guideline to behavior, decency if you will, that people get habituated/educated into.

He also draws an analogy between tradition and recipe:

A society that wishes to reproduce itself must take care to pass on to the next generation the knowledge required to maintain itself at more or less the same level of civilization. It is not enough to pass on the good china; you must also pass on the family recipe for making the pot roast. Yet even that is not quite enough; you must also find a way to pass along the culinary skills needed to transform a recipe written in words into an actual plate of pot roast. Figuratively speaking, a civilization must pass on the china, the recipe, and the cook. But even this is not quite enough. You must also make the cook realize that in addition to cooking, he must know how to replace himself, and, most critically, he must feel that he has a duty to replace himself. Not only must he teach his children to cook, but he must also teach them how to teach their children to cook.

If a society wishes to find a way of ensuring that newly emergent and valuable techniques are passed on and preserved, its members must feel themselves under an ethical obligation to leave the best possible world not only for their children, but also for their grandchildren.

The grandchild, far from being incidental, is decisive. Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation �?? their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time �?? indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within. Which leads to our main question: How is this task accomplished? How do you make parents feel such a deep and unshakeable ethical commitment to their grandchildren?

Today’s intellectuals, inspired by their abstract notions of justice, rights, and equality, have no feel for tradition and postively undermine it. By now you should notice that Harris is not celebrating tradition for tradition’s sake. It is the only way to educate one generation to the next, as his insistence on taking thought of our grandchildren shows.

The clearest way that modern intellectuals fail their civilization is in the poverty of their abstract reasonings concerning morals. Conversely, Harris argues that our moral education comes through the prudential imitation of “shining examples,” which enable us to see moral principles in action, in their concrete reality, and not simply in pious politically correct wishes:

The shining example establishes that the telos is capable of being actualized by a real human being and is not merely a fantasy ideal. The shining example does not need to be the paragon of all virtues; in fact, he must not be. This is because what makes the shining example shine is not his immunity to human frailty, but his ability to rise above it when he encounters it in his own nature. The fantasy hero is congenitally incapable of feeling fear before battle; the shining example feels it but is able to master this feeling �?? and, indeed, in mastering this feeling is able to show others how it is possible for them to master theirs. Similarly, the shining example of marital fidelity need not, indeed must not, be above all sexual temptation. Here, too, he will feel the same wayward urges that lesser mortals feel, only in his case he will know how to put these feelings in their proper place. What makes the shining example shine is not exemption from human weakness, but the unfailing capacity to transcend it. He is tried but always proves true; this pattern of virtuous persistence through adversity provides a living model for those who aspire to become shining examples themselves. The worthiness of a shining example is a worthiness obtainable by virtually anyone who is prepared to follow in the footsteps of the shining examples who preceded him.

Contrast this with one “educated” by abstract reasoning alone:

To follow in the footsteps of a living person is a radically different process from attempting to conform one’s day-to-day life according to an abstract principle or maxim. If someone tells a child to show respect to other people, the child may sincerely wish to do so, but he may not have a clue how to go about it. His plight, moreover, is precisely analogous to the plight of any modern adult who found himself suddenly whisked away to a radically different epoch and cultural milieu �?? say, ancient Babylon. Naturally, our time-traveler would want to show respect to the people around him, but he would also be painfully aware that his lack of inside knowledge about the customs of the ancient Babylonians would seriously militate against the accomplishment of his goal. He would not know how to greet other people, how to pass by them on the street, how to look at them when they were in front of him, whether to bow and scrape before those in authority, what hand to use in taking food at the dinner table, or even whether to sit or stand or lie during the meal itself. He would face exactly the same problem that any child faces when those responsible for his upbringing are content to fill him full of abstract maxims and vacuous ideals. Yes, he wants to be a good boy �?? but how the devil is a good boy expected to behave when confronted with vexing dilemmas and confusing choices? Does he tattle on a friend when the friend is bad, or does he remain loyal to him? Does he look into an adult’s eyes when one is talking to him, or is it okay to wiggle in his seat and let his eyes wander off where they will?

The final 2 pages of the article relate these reflections to the same-sex marriage debate:

Marriage was something that, until only quite recently, seemed to be securely in the hands of married people. It was what married people had engaged in, and certainly not a special privilege that had been extended to them to the exclusion of other human beings. Who, after all, could not get married? You didn’t have to be straight; you could be gay. So what? Marriage was the most liberal institution known to man. It opened its arms to the ugly and the homely as well as to the beautiful and the stunning. Was it defined as between a man and a woman? Well, yes, but only in the sense that a cheese omelet is defined as an egg and some cheese �?? without the least intention of insulting either orange juice or toast by their omission from this definition. Orange juice and toast are fine things in themselves �?? you just can’t make an omelet out of them.

More devastatingly, he argues that the proponents of same-sex marriage have it wrong when they argue that “heterosexual” unions continually fail to live up to their own standards:

Those who are married now, and those thinking about getting married or teaching their children that they should grow up and get married, may all be perfect idiots, mindlessly parroting a message wired into them before they were old enough to know better. But they are passing on, through the uniquely reliable visceral code, the great postulate of transgenerational duty: not to beseech people to make the world a better place, but to make children whose children will leave it a better world and not merely a world with better abstract ideals.

We have all personally known shining examples of such human beings, just as we have all known mediocre parents as well as some absolutely dreadful ones. Now suppose we are told, as we often are told in the gay-marriage debate, that the institution of marriage is not what it used to be. What does this mean? Does it mean that the shining example of a good marriage, of a good father and a good mother, and of a happy family has ceased to be one that we want to realize in our own lives? Not at all. We may in fact be farther than ever from living up to the shining example �?? but that is hardly proof that we should abandon it as an ideal to which to aspire. If the crew of a ship is developing scurvy because limes have gone out of fashion, is this a reason to throw the limes overboard or a reason to change the fashion?

The removal of marriage from the ethic of the “shining example” enables new words to be used further to trivialize the meaning of marriage:

The shining example of a happy marriage and its inherent ideality was something that we once could all agree on; but now it is a shining example that has been subjected to the worst fate that can befall one: It has been become a subject of controversy and has thereby lost its most essential protective quality: its ethical obviousness in the eyes of the community. Once the phrase “gay marriage� was in the air, marriage was suddenly what it had never thought to be before: a kind of marriage, a type �?? traditional marriage, or that even worse monstrosity, heterosexual marriage.

We have previously noticed the destruction of language in the debates over same-sex marriage, specifically over the language of “choice,” which both proponents and opponents use, but that favors the side that regards marriage as simply a social construction.

Harris continues:

We are witnessing the triumph of a Newspeak in which those who simply wish to preserve their own way of life, to pass their core values down to their grandchildren more or less intact, no longer even have a language in which they can address their grievances. In this essay I have tried to produce the roughest sketch of what such language might look like and how it could be used to defend those values that represent what Hegel called the substantive class of community �?? the class that represents the ethical baseline of the society and whose ethical solidity and unimaginativeness permit the high-spirited experimentation of the reflective class to go forward without the risk of complete societal collapse.

In other words, the intellectual class exhibits what philosopher Giambattista Vico called the “decadence of reason,” which is parasitic on the habits of the civilization that it is actually a part of. In the same sense, I’ve argued that same-sex marriage is parasitic on the very institution it wants to “join” (and here). Or perhaps a more polite way of phrasing it is that it demonstrates its dependence on marriage by taking its form. Why else do its proponents wish to restrict it to 2 people?

Harris concludes with a reminder that defending tradition isn’t simply a blind adherence to the past. Moreover, tradition admits of many variations which couldn’t exist were it not for the tolerance of the tradition itself. Like another fierce critic of the intellectuals, Allan Bloom, he’s critical of the politicization of gays; unlike Bloom, he regards the tradition in which he finds himself as more supportive to the human aspiration to live the examined life.

UPDATE: Northwest Winds weighs in.