Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Gay marriage and changing concepts of marriage

By Eric Porter - posted Monday, 3 August 2015


To start, consider the logic of the campaign for gay marriage. Advocates demand the legal right to marry as proper recognition of their love for their partners. To deny them this recognition, is to deny the authenticity of that love, and to suggest their love is less worthy than heterosexual love.

This view of marriage is surprisingly widespread. Increasingly, it treats marriage as legal recognition bestowed upon heterosexual couples to confirm and authenticate their love. Extending marriage to homosexual couples would thus make this official approval available more equitably. The campaign for gay marriage wants homosexual love to have the same recognition as heterosexual love – primarily legal recognition, but by extension also social and even moral recognition as well.

But is this true? Is marriage, in essence, a stamp of approval for a couple's love? Is that the purpose or even the function of marriage as an institution? Or is this a distortion of marriage, something that might impair its broader social function? And thus, on these grounds alone, should gay marriage be rejected?

Advertisement

Certainly, over the past two hundred years or so in western countries, "love" has become the preferred mechanism for sorting men and women into couples in preparation for marriage. Similar trends are now evident in other parts of the world but these have the same source, stemming directly from cultural globalisation.

But before that, things were quite different. Other means were, and still are, preferred for sorting men and women into couples. This distinction is important. Using "love" is not just one option among others of equal value. Rather, "love" is qualitatively different. Those other options, however varied, have one thing in common – they all indicate the social nature of marriage – that it is a "social" institution. That is, until the rise of "love" as the preferred sorting method, marriage did not simply serve the need for individual recognition but instead served a broader social function. Sorting men and women into couples was a community responsibility and it was thought appropriate for the community – represented by family, elders, tradition, the church or religion – to make the selection.

As a social institution, the purpose of marriage was to provide the nucleus of the family. The family was valued because it formed the bedrock of society. Society in this view is bigger than the sum of its parts. It has a life that transcends individual mortality, ensuring that a way of life is available to all independently of the individuals that compose it. It provides continuity, stability, security and predictability, all essential for its inhabitants.

Family is fundamental – even if family structures have varied widely through history and across cultures. It is the purpose, not strictly the structure, of the family that testifies to its importance. Unless it accomplishes this purpose, it fails. Family is responsible for the continuous regeneration of society. It establishes the essential and irreplaceable link between the past, the present and the future, guarding the past against betrayal and the future against negligence. Moreover, as Burke observed, it is these 'little platoons' that instil in us that sense of belonging, security and loyalty that makes social life possible.

In essence, the family combines biological with social reproduction, making biological parents jointly responsible for bringing up the next generation. This ties action (sex) to consequence (offspring) in a moral bond that links past, present and future. The association of sexual pleasure with procreation is not simply a throwback to a past of unreliable or unavailable contraception. Rather, that association prevails because children are a responsibility and their upbringing is essential to the community and its future. Thus sexual indulgence is set within bounds that curtail the behaviour of men in particular, guarding women against abandonment and allowing children to grow and learn in security, sufficiency and stability.

Family remains essential to society – and its breakdown in recent decades parallels the broader social breakdown. Substantial contemporary research, combined with millennia of experience, substantiate the necessity of the family. To sanctify the marriage bond because it provides the nucleus of the family and, hence, the life blood of the community, is thus perfectly reasonable and rational. Any action that undermines this bond, however well-intentioned, strikes at the very basis of society.

Advertisement

By contrast, using "love" to determine who married whom is distinctive because it constitutes a major step in the rise of modern individualism. Lodging the decision of who marries whom in the individual does not just remove the decision from the community – it says this relationship is entirely personal, separate from the community. At this point, the social role of marriage is already in question.

This trend became significant in the 18th century. As Lynne Hunt has argued, this century saw a rapid growth in social empathy – through literature in particular, subjective feeling and interior reflection became more accessible to others, regardless of their backgrounds. Hunt links this to a growing belief in natural and equal rights and, hence, to individualism. I want to link it to the rise of "love" as the means for sorting men and women into couples.

The key moment was the so-called 'Romantic revolution' that bridged the shift from the 18th to 19th centuries. The rise of "love" embedded the choice of a partner in what the Romantics considered the most authentic source of individuality – an individual's feelings. Feelings were, then as now, treated as spontaneous, unmediated expressions of one's inner being. True freedom meant unrestrained expression of one's feeling. Anything which inhibited this was condemned and rejected. Through the Romantic revolution, the individual supplanted the community in the choosing of partners, and feeling supplanted reason as the basis of individual freedom and authenticity.

Initially, this use of "love" for selecting marriage partners was liberating. No longer was the choice of a life partner determined collectively. Individuals, guided by the inner light of feeling, were now increasingly free (at least in principle) to choose a partner regardless of class, race or creed. Nevertheless, while this choice was now free, it remained for a long time simply a different avenue to the same destination – that is, the same social institution, performing the same social functions it always had. In this sense, marriage remained an institution defined by its social function.

Slowly, however, the popularity of "love" and the individualist ideology of feelings behind it began to erode marriage itself. The revolution in mass media that reached critical mass in the interwar period, accelerated this change. It was here that the "cult of love" was born. The Hollywood movie played the pivotal role in shaping and disseminating the idea that the central focus of life was "love". It produced fantasies with happy endings where the boy got the girl and both lived happily ever after. Fulfilment meant finding one's "soul mate" with whose subjective feelings and truth one could commune in a direct, unmediated fashion.

This "cult of love" was very much a substitute religion. As Nietzsche told us, God "died" in the 19th century, leaving a great abyss to be filled. People looked into that abyss and saw themselves looking back. At first that was a collective self – the nation as an object of veneration, awe and hope. But that collective self was itself mortal. Two nationalism-fuelled world wars and a seemingly endless Cold War killed it off. Higher living standards and the rising tide of consumer society saw the collective self fragment like a shattered mirror. Its successor was the legion 'gods' of myriad egos seeking affirmation through consumption. Philip Rief called this 'therapeutic society', characterised by an increasing concern with individual cravings for affirmation and validation. We might see it as the sanctification of the self as god-substitute, venerated through social recognition. The cult of love is one mechanism through which that recognition is delivered.

Marriage began to change. Increasingly it too was seen as a means to individual fulfilment and recognition. If someone chose me, said they loved me, vowed that they would devote their life to me, then I must be special. After all, he or she could have chosen anyone else. And the fact that they based their choice on love, a feeling that grows from the inner sanctum of their being, that holy of holies in which their true self dwells, in purity and honesty – then their affirmation of my true self must be authentic. And if I feel the same way about them, then that affirmation is reciprocated, each little god hidden within giving and receiving recognition and authentication through mutual worship.

Clearly, the social role of marriage cannot co-exist with the cult of love. The cult of love represents the invasion of the family by hyper-individualism of civil society and the market. Hegel saw these as contrasting forms of consciousness. Interaction between them creates a positive dialectic where each counterbalances and clarifies the other. Civil society promotes individual freedom otherwise lost in the bonds of loyalty and obligation of the family; at the same time, the family anchors people with a sense of belonging and security otherwise lost in loneliness and alienation of market competition.

But the cult of love smuggles individualism into the heart of the family where it erodes loyalty and rejects obligation and sacrifice. Now the members of the family become equal and identical individuals, with their needs and wants protected by rights. Spouses retain their individual careers, demand their "me time" and expect a division of labour and offspring that is quantified, equal and efficient.

And they expect recognition – the continual affirmation of their authentic individuality by the other. Failing this, divorce becomes unavoidable. Divorce will also require an equal and equitable division of goods – including the children. Such a division is itself a species of recognition. And the essential elements of family – security, predictability (home), sacrifice, will melt into air. The children who depend for their healthy growth and development on these elements of family, are now drawn into this war of recognition, batted back and forth between parents like a ball in tennis.

This seems a long way from gay marriage. What's the connection? The cult of love which casts marriage as recognition for a person's authentic being. In this sense, gay marriage is the latest in a long line of steps in the debasement of the family. It makes sense to people because marriage itself is already so closely identified with this cult. And now, judged solely according to "love", how can homosexual couples be distinguished from heterosexual couples? Love in this sense, as an expression of an individual's inner-most feelings, is impossible to evaluate because it is so utterly subjective. Only its external signs can be observed. And here, no distinction can be made.

We already know with heterosexual "love" to be wary because the feeling itself can be confused, misidentified and changed. Falling in love might be the best experience – but it can also be the worst. Resting society's most important institution on such capricious and unreliable feelings is risky. That is why marriage involves vows before God and man, and is secured by legal contract.

Yet now the cult of love turns this upside-down. Rather than perceiving the necessity of vows and legalities to compensate for unreliable feelings, to secure marriage from the ebb and flow of emotions, these formal trappings of marriage become recognition for love, as a tribute to feelings. This attitude has couples writing their own "vows" which portray their love as beautiful and sublime.

The same attitude stands behind the campaign for gay marriage. That is, a worshipful attitude to feelings, a veneration of intensity over depth, and a failure to recognise that "true love" is not the cause but rather the result of marriage. In marriage, it is from learning trust and respect through sharing the miracle of life, and the obligations and sacrifices of parenting that love can emerge.

In contrast, the cult of love is a dangerous fantasy: though it provides credibility to gay marriage, it threatens the bedrock of society – the family.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

9 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Eric Porter is an historian who until recently taught politics and political economy at RMIT.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Eric Porter

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 9 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy