So, not for the first time, I'm going to defend Kass.
1. It's by no means clear that men and women are "equally" polygamous. At least, sociobiologist seem to spend about 80% of their time claiming it's not so. So let's cite Kass for hyperbole and imprecision, and move on.
2. Is ritual *the same* as character. No. But does ritual help *form* character? Allow me to cue up the Nicomachean Ethics -- of *course* it does! If Kass makes a mistake, it's not authoritarian, but Aristotelean. No one is arguing that raising a boy on Howard Stern logically necessitates that he'll be less less respectful of women than a kid raised on on Jane Austen. But it's a bet must of us would take.
3. All culture is "coercive" it's just a question of how, and how much. If you tried to wear a blazer in my highschool, you'd have been 'subtly coereced' to wear ripped jeans and a t-shirt via complete ostracism. Now culture (or at least, my culture) ostracizes homophobes, and good thing too, I say! If Kass wants the destigmazitzation of 'prudes,' and restigmatization of "players" (formerly known as "cads"), bully for him!
1). What difference does it make if it's equal? Throughout the article, Kass acts like there's no such thing as unfettered female sexuality: only modesty and looseness, which is a "confusion." On this alone we should throw out everything he says, because it's predicated on telling girls and women that they aren't what they are, and aren't feeling what they feel. In fact, everything he says contrasting men and women is utter crap.
Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women.
Can he write this only because he avoids those sad, confused, young women who aren't the lilies he thinks they should be? This certainly isn't my experience of the world.
2). Ritual, as long as were talking about ritual and not culture and not upbringing doesn't have jack to do with character. Iranians have some of the most baroque and elaborate social rituals in the world, governing just about every conceivable interaction. They sure seem polite, those Iranians, but there's no shortage of knaves and scoundrels and liars and cheaters among them.
But you don't really mean ritual, you mean those other things, about which we don't really disagree. Of course I'd raise my kid on Jane Austen (well, something like that: I've never made it through a whole Austen novel), rather than Howard Stern, but not because I would want her to "hold herself in reserve," but to read about real feelings and sharp wit.
And, on this score, I'm not sure I see the substance of the distinction between Aristotelean and authoritarian.
3). Sure, it's all coercive, but no bully for anyone who wants to coerce people into not even acknowledging parts of themselves (or, alternatively, into believing things about themselves that are false). How much of the world's misery is attributable to the fact that most young men are inarticulate about their emotions? Quite a lot, I'd say. Kass's account of the male biology is a classic (and tired) reinforcement of male stereotypes.
Come on, defend some interesting version of conservatism, not a hack like Kass.
I still think you have Kass wrong, and are not reading him with sufficient charity. But let's drop him. Here are the doctrines of the noted ethicist Ssak. Ssak thinks:
1. Sexuality is a really important part of a person's life.
2. The sex drives of men and women, in the main, are immensely different.
3. Many insitutions and mores seek to regulate the male and female sex drives, and make them more compatible.
4. Lately, these institutions and mores have undergone immensely rapid change -- there have been good effects, but one result has been more promiscuity, less marriage, and less general understanding of what it takes to make marriage work
5. since working marriages are really important, let's try to figure out how to get some of those good mores and institutions back.
From your comments on Kass, I suspect you'd object to Ssak's points two and four. Why?
Actually, here are my quibbles with what you've written.
About 2, I'd say maybe, but we don't have much of an idea how they differ, and that makes 3 problematic, not to mention the fact that "compatibility" doesn't seem to be something we could bring about institutionally. I don't object to 4; I think it's true--people are miserable without the the rules and rituals of yesteryear, but...they were differently miserable with them, and there's no justification for trying to reinstitute them, rather than moving on to more relevant ways of living (this would be an objection to 5).
I object to point 5. I first want to ask what are the mores and institutions that have disappeared? And when did these mores come about, and when did they disappear? I think one more that had kept down divorce was a direct taboo against divorce. Why this taboo existed, there are various ideas, i.e. religion, or because it was important for the people at the top of the social ladder to have those at the bottom in predictable, controllable social unions. Meanwhile, promiscuity at the top was a known and accepted "secret."
What were the effects of these mores? Well, my grandparents stayed together, even though from all evidence my grandfather regretted that. But he was raised and lived in a rural society that did not believe in divorce. If there had been no social taboo, if those mores hadn't existed, it's not even arguable that it would have been better for my mother, his daughter, to divorce my grandmother.
I don't think we should automatically assume that a return to mores of yesteryear is a good thing. After all, there are reasons that they are gone. It is my understanding that under the old system, there were a lot of problems. Under this different system,there are still problems, but I don't think the solution is a return to the old system.
Remember that, as far as I know, Jane Austen is not an accurate portrail of the time period. She didn't live anything like the life she depicts. A better example might be Pere Goritot.
Leon Kass is an insufferable, sexist prig.
Lots of love for Leon, I see. Look, there's no denying that Kass' prose style would choke a horse, and he partakes, at least in part, of a that virgin/whore dichotomy we're all so fond of. Nonetheless, there's a real position in there, and opponents should understand and confront his arguments, not peremptorily reject them.
Ogged, you say we don't have much of an idea how the sex drives of men and women differ. Really?
Belle, Kass aside, do you think one *must* be sexist to belive that men and women, in the main, approach sex and relationships differently? Must one be a prig to be concerned about sexual mores that lead to kids growing up in broken homes? [No doubt, many sexists and prigs think these things, of course.]
Michael, I fear you have been misled by my careless phrasing. I probably should have written that Kass wants to retrieve *elements* of older institutions and mores. No one sane -- and Kass is that -- wants *simply* to reinstitute the mores and institutions of Victorian England. But look, the percentage of people who marry is at an all time low in the West, so it's not crazy to ask what has changed, and if all those changes have been good ones. That's what I take Kass to be doing.
I take Kass as saying that the state of marriage is in the state it's in, basically, because there are no real courtship rituals any longer.
To be sure, there are still exceptions, to be found, say, in closed religious communities or among new immigrants from parts of the world that still practice arranged marriage.
Statements like that certainly don't make me feel any better about coutrship rituals. I find arranged marriages abominable, and closed religious communities are creepy, to say the least. My point in my previous post was that I don't think people stayed together more "back in the old days" because they were better married, it was more that they just weren't free to divorce. So when Kass posits all the evils that supposedly arise from lack of good marriages through codified courtship rituals, Many people are distressed over the record-high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, marital infidelity, and premarital promiscuity, I don't completely agree. First, I don't think these are technically record-high, because there are no records kept on all these things that go back for a significant amount of time. But I'll agree that it certainly seems divorce is rather high, and maybe premarital promiscuity. Teenage pregnancy is absurd to put in there, unless he really means unmarried teenage pregnancy. I'm not going to agree with marital infedelity, and, for the same reason, illegitamacy.
These courtship rituals, then, even if they're real, aren't quite as good as he wants to make them out to be. Which leads me to my next point, what are these courtship rituals we don't have now? The man going to pick the girl up from her protected father's house to go on a date? Then later the women will transfer from the protection of her father to the protection of her husband. I think that would certainly be one, and it rather imples women as a second sex in society, so I don't think we can really chalk this courtship ritual up as desirable. I suppose no premarital sex might be another. I think this particular ritual should be nuanced. No premartial sex with your wife. I'm not sure it's ever historically been the case that able young men married as virgins, unless they married young. So this ritual, too, implies sexism.
So, what has changed in the west to affect marriage? I think it's the rise in status of women, the acceptability of divorce, along with the accenptability of being single, and the focus on marriage has changed, too. People now look for their soulmates, instead of a women who's quiet and obedient with a pretty face, or has a good dowry, or whatever. Marriages are harder to maintain between two equal partners than between a dominant husband and subservient wife, which Kass seems to regret. But I don't think love is possible in the latter, which is why I regard Kass's claim to be a romantic as black irony. Typical chauvanism.
Michael,
Now you're in the position of having to offer up an alternative explanation of what has gone wrong. If I read your objections correctly, you perceive that Kass's explanations aren't convincing. Now what? According to what you have written, women's liberation (to which I do not object) is an unequivocal good but, strangely enough, it brings a corrosive element that seems to be threatening one of the pillars of the modern, western world. So...is it an unequivocal good? If the previous order--which you objected to as patriarchal and stifling--did a pretty good job of preserving one of the fundamental structures of the social order--at the expense of individual liberty--and the current order does not do this, are you not compelled to wonder if, perhaps, the present order isn't as problematic as the one which it replaced? If it is failing to achieve its goal is it not a worse state of affairs than the one which it replaced?
"...what are these courtship rituals we don't have now?"
According to Kass, following Bloom and David Brooks, we don't date. We herd and copulate but we don't date. It is claimed that the dating process was one of the modern courtship rituals which helped us get to know our future spouses. I never dated but I am happily married so I'm open to a cogent argument against this position.
"I find arranged marriages abominable, and closed religious communities are creepy, to say the least."
So you've stated your biases in favor of individual freedom over tradition. The question is whether this is a defensible prejudice. You're convinced but Kass is more circumspect. Which attitude do you believe would be better when investigating this area?
"People now look for their soulmates, instead of a women who's quiet and obedient with a pretty face, or has a good dowry, or whatever."
I really must object to this potted rhetoric. It is a cliche to assert that the bad, old days had men crushing women's spirits and killing their souls in domestic bondage. My wife's 84 year-old grandmother tells quite a different tale about her husband (whom she adored). Is she mired in false consciousness? Was she just lucky to get a good man or was there an understanding about responsibilities, sex roles, and the division of labor which smoothed the way to a happy (but, by no means perfect) marriage? My parent's marriage ended over personality differences, not dowry's, loss-of-beauty, or failure to be subservient. I think you should eschew the rhetoric in favor of some stronger arguments.
David,
I would not say that the woman's movement was an equivocal good, rather I would say that marriage is an equivocal good. Marriage might certainly be compared to slavery, and the farther back one goes, the more apt the comparison is. Before you object to this as potted rhetoric, I want to make a few equivocations. First, I'm not saying all marriages were horrible. However, a good marriage was still incidental to the fact that it was still slavery in reality, by law and or by social custom. Now, as to your grandmother, she's a bit young. She was on the dying end of this, but and I would think it likely that the inequality between her and her husband was less extreme than it would have been 50 or 100 years earlier, but still present.
Now, obviously there are benefits to marriage outside of the happiness and health of the bond between two (loving?) people. They raise children, are productive workers, and whatever else you want to add. So, in these respects, one could argue we need to preseve the instiution of marriage. Of course, alternatives to marriage that still might preserve social order have been proposed, but I don't think there's really a political climate for such things, so I'll ignore them. (Sorry Plato)
If, like baa admonishes, we are to be charitable to Kass, I think we might say he has begun a discourse on, "well, what measures would improve the state of marriage?" I obviously do not think a return to the practices of the olden days would advance a healthy social structure. As for arranged marriages, they have a 2% divorce rate, so I'm told, and that seems to be an awful, awful thing. There is a large problem in Afghanistan right now because women cannot leave their husbands, and are resorting to suicide. Sometimes by immolation. That's my problem with arranged marriages; if they don't work, they're very hard to get out of. As for closed religious communities, it's the closed-mindedness that gets to me. They have to be closed minded to maintain their rigid structures. While I am conservative in that I recognize that children need to be brought up in an environment that teaches ethics, I still believe that society should be fluid with regard to the possibility of accepting new ways and ideas. A society that doesn't....well, point out where that's ever made a good society. I can show plenty examples of the opposite. So I think my "prejudice" is easily defensible.
I think you should eschew the rhetoric in favor of some stronger arguments.
But that might require research, and I have a paper to write. :) But I'll keep thinking about this, and see if I can come up with something positive, instead of all this negative.
I believe that Kass is placing the blame for the substantial erosion of marriage on the "boomers." I am assuming this because that appears to be the standard trope among those who write about this from this perspective (eg. Bloom & Brooks). If this is the case, then my wife's grandmother would represent the previous, more desireable era.
"...that's my problem with arranged marriages; if they don't work, they're very hard to get out of."
I don't think that the overwhelming majority of us can stomach the idea of arranged marriages. This is because Rousseau's ideas of romantic love and its consummation in marriage has triumphed over all other, pre-romantic ideas regarding marriage. The question is whether or not the Roussauan (Rouseauvian?) understanding is the best or the most stable understanding. Based upon the current state of marriage I am inclined to wonder if he wasn't overly optimistic regarding the power of love to bind men and women in a permanent union. I say this as one who has married for love and who has bought into the ideal. Then again, I don't think that Rousseau could've forseen the loosening of taboos on pre-marital sex and divorce. From this standpoint, I think that Kass is barking up the right trees, even if we aren't comfortable with the questions he's asking.
"I still believe that society should be fluid with regard to the possibility of accepting new ways and ideas."
Any society which accepts new ways and ideas which undercut the stability of that society is engaged in collective suicide. I don't think it is realistic to expect citizens to countenance what they believe is their own destruction. We can debate about the need for lattitude but it is important to remember that there is an ultimate limit to what can or will be tolerated.