Marriage inflation

When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.

W. S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers

Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

If you printed a lot of extra money and passed it around so as to make everyone wealthier, the end result would merely be dramatically to decrease the buying power of money.  If you make it easier for college students to get an “A” grade in their courses, the end result will be that “A” grades will come to be regarded as a much less reliable indicator of a student’s true merit.  If you give prizes to everyone who participates in a competition, winning a prize will cease to be a big deal.  In general, where X is perceived to have greater value than Y and you try to raise the value of Y by assimilating it to X, the actual result will instead be simply to lower the value of X to that of Y.

You will also merely relocate rather than eliminate the inequality you were trying to get rid of.  If money loses its value, then people will trade in something else -- precious metals, durable goods, or whatever -- and a different sort of economic inequality will arise.  If grades can no longer tell you which students are most likely to do well as employees or in graduate school, you’ll find some other way of determining this -- writing samples, interviews, letters of recommendation, or whatever -- and the hierarchy of student achievement will reassert itself.  If getting a prize ceases to impress, then athletes and others engaged in competitive enterprises will simply find some other way to stand out from the pack. 

Egalitarian schemes, in short, often have great inflationary effect but little actual egalitarian effect.  They can amount to mere exercises in mutual make-believe.  You can pretend all you want that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average.  People who wish it were true may even go along with the pretense.  But of course, it isn’t true, and deep down everybody knows it isn’t true.  Hence even many who do pretend to believe it will act otherwise.  There will be a lot of pious chatter about how special all the children are, but no one will take the chatter very seriously and everyone will in practice treat the children differently according to their actual, differing abilities. 

Now, speaking of egalitarian pretense, consider the idea of “marriage equality,” which Justice Anthony Kennedy pretends to have stumbled upon somewhere in the U.S. Constitution on a Friday morning last June, with (so far) about 42% of the U.S. population going along with the gag.  Depending on the political needs of the moment, the proponents of “marriage equality” have also often pretended that their arguments wouldn’t support polygamy, incestuous marriage, you name it. 

But everyone knows this isn’t true.  For, contrary to some further pretense from the “marriage equality” crowd, the point about the implications of “marriage equality” has nothing to do with making a fallacious slippery slope inference, but rather with making a perfectly valid reductio ad absurdum inference.  A slippery slope fallacy fundamentally involves making a causal claim to the effect that A will lead to B, where there is at best a contingent connection between A and B and where no specific causal path from the one to the other has been established.  A reductio ad absurdum argument, by contrast, involves making a logical claim about the entailment relations between propositions.  In the present case, the idea is that if you not only remove heterosexuality and even fidelity from the essence of marriage, but in general treat the institution as essentially a matter of current social convention and legal stipulation rather than something grounded in nature, then in principle there is no limit to what might be counted as a “marriage.” 

To be sure, a causal claim follows from this logical point.  The causal claim is that, when people see the implications of the redefinition, they will start demanding further and even more radical redefinitions in the directions they favor; and that legislators and courts will have difficulty resisting these demands, because these further redefinitions are implicit in the premises that justified the original redefinition.  But (a) this causal claim is secondary to the logical claim, and (b) the logical claim, since it reveals a conceptual and thus non-contingent connection between the cause and the effect, explains the causal mechanism by which the claimed effects are likely to follow.  So, again, there is no slippery slope fallacy.

And sure enough, the logical and causal claims are being confirmed, it seems, with every passing week.  The latest instance is this week’s article in Slate advocating -- wait for it -- “marriages” between human beings and robots.  That’s on top of calls for “group marriage,” incestuous “marriage,” and “trial marriage.”  Further out on the fringes but still, it seems, a thing these days, is “self marriage.”   “Marriages” to animals and “marriages” to cartoon characters are also not lacking in advocates.

Now, the people who should be worried about all of this craziness are not the critics of “marriage equality.”  It just gives them an occasion to say “Told you so.”  The people who should be worried about it are the advocates of “marriage equality,” for two reasons.  First, because it gives the critics an occasion to say “Told you so.”  But second -- and more to the point of this post -- because it completely devalues the “marriage” label and thus undermines the whole point of the “marriage equality” movement, which was to dignify same-sex unions by sticking the “marriage” label on them. 

To paraphrase W.S. Gilbert’s line, when everything is a marriage, nothing is a marriage.  Or more precisely, marriage equality, followed out consistently, is marriage inflation.  The more kinds of arrangement there are which people are willing to call “marriages,” the less big a deal it is to have your own favored arrangement labeled a “marriage.”  “So Bob and Ted can now marry?  Whoop dee doo.  So can Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, or Bob and his niece, or Bob and his iPod, or Bob and himself.”  What “marriage equality” gave with its left hand, it threatens to take back with its far left hand. 

That’s only half the problem, though.  Remember the other aspect of the Lake Wobegon phenomenon.  People talk more egalitarian, but they don’t necessarily think more egalitarian or act more egalitarian.  It’s not just that people will use the word “marriage” in a way that so cheapens it that it is no longer much of an honorific.  They will also continue to place greater value on the actual thing that was traditionally called “marriage” than they put on the newer so-called “marriages” -- just as they continue to put greater value on actual knowledge and ability even after the “A” grade has been devalued, greater value on actual athletic skill even after athletic prizes have been devalued, and so forth.

If you want to know what people really think is the essence of something, you look at how they describe the ideal specimen.  And everyone knows what people think of as the ideal marriage:  You fall in love, you have lots of kids, you watch them grow up and have kids of their own, and you stay faithful to each other through thick and thin and old age until death parts you. 

Why do people idealize this?  For one thing, because of the love it embodies, where by “love” I mean not merely the romantic feelings which get things going (but typically cool), but also and more importantly the self-sacrifice involved -- the lifetime surrender of one’s own narrow interests for the sake of spouse, children, and grandchildren.  For another thing, because of the tangible, fleshly tie with other human beings that it represents -- the literal biological connection with past and future generations, and with other living members of the current generation.  In other words, what people idealize in marriage is the perfection, and fusion, of the unitive and the procreative (to use the natural law jargon), the way complete self-giving completely enmeshes one in a literal family and extended family of other human beings. 

The novel arrangements people want to stick the “marriage” label onto are not like this.  All of them involve abstracting out mere aspects of the ideal -- romantic feelings, shared bed and board, legal rights, or what have you -- and redefining the whole in terms of those aspects.  All of these novel arrangements are products of the modern liberal ideology of individual autonomy, and thus all of them explicitly or implicitly rule out absolute, lifelong thick-and-thin commitment.   And except where people of the opposite sex are involved -- and not even there if use of contraception is the rule -- they do not involve the literal biological tie to other human beings that is the natural outcome of the sexual act.

To be sure, these arrangements can be made to seem kinda sorta like the ideal -- via surrogate or test tube parentage, for example.  And of course, as “marriage equality” advocates rightly emphasize, widespread fornication, widespread illegitimacy, easy divorce, and contraception have already moved us far away from the ideal in any case.  In practice, most people in the West are quite willing these days to settle for some distant approximation of the ideal, a watered down substitute, the marital equivalent of O’Douls or Splenda.  The novel “marital” arrangements simply push this tendency out to its logical extreme.  And evolutionary psychologists will assure us that our tendency to idealize the older model is in any event simply an artifact of the conditions under which our forebears evolved, without normative force today. 

Now, the natural law theorist will argue that it does have normative force.  (Cf. “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” in Neo-Scholastic Essays.)  But that is neither here nor there for present purposes.  What matters for present purposes is that, whether or not it has normative force and whether or not people today are inclined to try very hard to live up to it, people do still regard the traditional marital arrangement described above as the ideal.  And they attach a dignity to that ideal that they do not attach to the mere approximations.  That old couple you know who’ve been together for 60 years and have five children and fifteen grandchildren has what we call a “marriage.”  And when some actor or pop star dumps his third wife and weds his mistress, we also call that a “marriage.”  But no one thinks that the latter arrangement has anything close to the dignity of the former, or that using the same word for both somehow suffices to make them equivalent. 

Similarly, expanding the use of the word “marriage” to cover various exotic arrangements no more extends dignity to those arrangements than freely giving out As to all the children in Lake Wobegon increases general student knowledge and ability.  With the former as with the latter, some people will think: “How adorable!  I’m glad they get to feel good about themselves.”  But few will seriously think that the exotic arrangements have anything close to the dignity that the traditional marital ideal has, any more than they really think that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. 

So, like the “A student” who comes to realize that his “achievement” was due to grade inflation, “marriage equality” advocates may soon wonder whether their victory was a hollow one.