Many better authors and thinkers have written on this matter before but as I nudge past the middle of my thirties I begin to notice that by now many men have paired off in one form or another or have made pairing off the conspicuous goal of their lives. It is the holy grail of manhood, more or less, to be paired off. In the eyes of many such men (and women) to have not have been significantly othered is a sign of failure.
There are, however, people who consider the act of becoming significantly othered, or rather the process of pairing off, is ultimately and irrevocably a sign of a problem. I am not disposed to either position but I notice that a few guys have decided that marriage and epecially childrearing i s symptomatic of all that is wrong with specifically American culture. In my crankier moments I am inclined to suppose that the men for whom this doctrine appeals (since it is a doctrine, in its own way) are those who couldn't convince anyone else to stick with them in the significant other category or who have, to be more fair, bitterly struggled within the constraints of the conviction that they are unable to pair off due either to inherent weaknesses of character in themselves or perhaps due to systemic evils that precluded their consideration in the mating pool.
Roy Baumeister gave a lecture years ago in which he pointed out that society and culture depends on the reality that men are, not to overstate the case, expendable. This cannot be more true than it is for the unmarried man. The unmarried man can be spent in the service of a cause or an idea and literally or metaphorically die and society is no worse off for his absence. Any man who thinks this through will quickly realize it and this in some sense explains the radicalizing tendency in young men (and old men, too, I suppose). If coupling ends up being one of the base-line social behaviorzs in the human species then those who do not couple must draw their social meaning from some other source.
In earlier ages of human history there were two ways of doing this, joining a religious organization or joining the military. In our time these have tended to be rejected by most people. even a lot of pro-military people will not actually join the military or would admit they remember their military days with a mixture of anger, disdain or frustration but will salute the uniform anyway because, well, someone does have to do the job, after all. There is no society which must not at some point consider the necessities of its own defense. Be that as it may, most people will look neither to the armed services nor a church for a social identity in our time to go by statistics. And it may be that for the churches and armed forces the number of people with at least a passing interest may not be physically or doctrinally strong enough in constitution to pass msuter for membership in either.
What fills the gap of social identity for a man in lieu of church or army? Particularly one who has consistently failed at the mating game, however the mating game was hoped to get played out? Ideology. This is not at all surprising. It is one of the surest ways that cults form, whether cults of personality, cults of cause, or cults of aesthetics. The two most popular ideological cults in the West might well by derivatives of Marxist and Randian thought. Of course there are religious conservatives and secular old-school conservative, too, but what seems to happen for those who find they are not considered fit to mate is to embrace an identity of social commentary and self-established dissidence.
In my more cynical moments I say to myself that it's no surprise that men who, upon discovering how superfluous and useless to society they are, decide that it is necessary to criticize society as both unjust and unvaluable. Either the society is guilty of wanton materialistic consumerism or a lack of productivity and free thought. The idea that society itself produces goods and services that the dissident consumes need not be considered. The problem with this reflexive critique is that the would-be protesting unmarried person participates in the same kinds of things that the society he protests does. Does he consider America to be a land of oppression and greed? Does he spend his weekend playing video games? Does he spend it brewing beer as a hobby or riding a bike or attending concerts? Then he is just convincing himself he is a rebel or a dissident as a way to paper over the reality that his life does not matter in any way he finds meaningful.
Clinging to an ideology as a way to look down on others ensures that, despite the man's own failures to embody the highest ideals of his own ideology, he can still look down on the married and reproducing as living lives of stupid wastefulness. In his own heart and mind he can convince himself that his failures to integrate into statistically normal human behavior, which he may at one point have coveted intensely, are signs of the inherent failure of the indiscriminate herd instead. A man may decide that the problem was not his acrimonius personality because that couldn't be the problem. Instead the problem is the shallowness of women or the unrealistic expectations of society.
Embracing an ideology allows the man to simultaneously build up himself and tear down whatever he may have once desired as not only being not worthy of effort but also worthy of condemnation. He may go from having wanted marriage to being against both marriage and childrearing. He can tell himself he is in favor of sustainable living but if you take that position seriously then simply being an American who enjoys concerts and recreational outdoor activities or old cars makes you inextricably part of the problem of being an American. If he laments the averageness of the ordinary person and spends his days playing video games he is simply another average American who is attempting to sell himself on the idea that he is better than average by dint of will power rather than productive activity.
But here's the thing, I don't see it as inherently wrong for unmarried people to long for social meaning. I am pretty happy to find my social meaning among friends and family and, yeah, life in a church. In fact there are various advantages to having a life connected to a shared faith, particularly a faith which holds that this life is not the only life there is. You might suppose that such a belief system would devalue this life and make it easier for one to be, ay, a suicide bomber. Well, that's not necessarily the case. In religious traditions where suicide is considered an affront to both the divine image in humanity and to the divine suicide is not a viable option. If we are enjoined by the apostles to give thanks in everything this forces us to recognize that to be a living dog is better than being a dead lion even if society in so many ways would rather we all be dead lions than living dogs.
This is, at its core, the temptation for any man who would embrace an ideology from which he can condemn his neighbor, because a man (or woman, really) who has not paired off and is fully confronted with how superfluous he or she is as a non-breeder to society as a whole and has not yet found a productive and emotionally satisfying role to play feels there is no other option.
The reason I can't just cynically dismiss these concerns or the appeals of ideology to the unmarried is because I'm not married. I've never even dated and have never seriously tried. I have been unemployed for sixteen months and thanks to having been laid off by a 501(c)3 I can't collect unemployment. In a strange irony my politically conservative friends are more shocked than my liberal friends that I am not eligible for unemployment. I have had plenty of time to realize that I often feel superfluous to the lives of many of my friends.
I have also seen that even the most rudimentary social life involves money I realize I can't really afford to spend most of the time. This is one of the reasons I can't take leftist ideologues seriously if they do the same consumeristic things for fun that right-wing ideologues do. People do need ways to play and socialize and relax. And as ideologues against breeding, whether intentional or recreational, have to consistently ignore that the sex drive has an often annoying persistence to it with respect to what they consider rational or beneficial. Men and women will horse around, look in each others eyes, and decide they want to spend their lives together and make babies. Men and men will horse around, look into each others eyes, and decide they want to be together. Ditto women.
To the ideologue who is convinced breeding is bad or that the frivolous however he defines it must be avoided, only the gays (maybe) have any business pairing off if only because they can't breed. But at some point the ideologue must condemn the normal attempts to enjoy life. Solzhenitsyn ruined a marriage by being so determined to not be a consumeristic fellow he was a stick in the mud and drove his wife to fury by refusing to let them do anything fun or frivolous like going to the movies.
What an ideology lets you do, if you decide to make it your purpose in life, is to ensure that even if you're not in a crowd you can act toward anyone in such a way that you have a kind of herd mentality all your own. You treat people as classes and not individuals. This is a necessary intelletual and social shorthand, I admit, but it can make you decide that all homeless panhandlers are categorically good or evil and that's not how you should approach that issue at all. I certainly don't give to panhandlers now because I have no job! What the ideology lets you do is to identify or condemn the individual on the basis of the ideology. Christians do this all the time but I trust you know that everyone is capable of this. Someone who hates Southern people on the assumption that they are all racist Republican rednecks is still working in the same spirit as a Klan member in terms of his or her heart.
I can understand why a man or woman who has never had any success in the mating game would decide to embrace an ideology. It is, in essence, what you could say I have done in terms of reflecting on what it means to follow Jesus. It is a belief that guides my life even though I often believe that I am a pretty big failure at it. What I try to remind myself of as often as I can is that Jesus' teaching does not permit me to decide who is and isn't my neighbor so even though rabidly ideological people on both the right and left drive me up the wall I remind myself that they are my neighbors, too, and that I am called by Jesus to love them however I can.
And I can appreciate that in lieu of having a social relationship that affirms your value (i.e. the healthy coupled relationship that "most" people end up having) you have to get your value somewhere. So while I don't especially agree with either the Marxists I know or the Randians I know those that aren't paired off I have some empathy for because the ideology is, so to speak, the spouse of that person. They don't know it or see it in those terms but in terms of social meaning that's where it comes from.
I've also seen this happen at, yes, Mars Hill. Mars Hill involvement becomes the "spouse" equivalent of a social life that involves meaning. It was pretty much my entire anchoring point for several years in my social life. I had almost no friends who weren't outside that church and the friends and family I had were pretty much my whole life. I didn't consider it cultish in any way. Others would say it is indisputably a cult. I would say that both views are immature and inaccurate due to being incomplete.
What I began to notice was that the people who were most bitter about 2007 tended to be idealogues who once had gotten behind the church. I also began to notice a striking difference between how married and unmarried people handled the debacles of 2007. The married people, who on a daily basis have a social relationship that defined them, had complaints but often stuck around (unless BOTH of them were upset and in which cases they eventually left).
For the unmarried, however, there were no degrees of gray. Either it was all right or all wrong. Why? Well, perhaps because if you held at the back of your mind that this might be the place where God would send you your future spouse you weren't going to badmouth or tolerate badmouthing of the place that forms your social identity. Think of it as a case in which an individual can, thanks to things like the internet and social media, become a self-contained instance of deindividuation. For those of us who weren't already coupled off the debacle was more of a debacle because the stronger the tie of your identity is to the social unit the more disastrous a controversy or scandal in the social unit becomes. In this respect all those married people may have failed to appreciate the real level of the problems of 2007. I speak rather broadly, of course.
But this gets to the core of ideology and the unmarried person and why societal critique becomes so essential and formative. If ideology obliges you to critique society as a form of self-identification then you have to speak up against whatever you consider wrong in society based on the ideology. You not only have to do this because the chosen ideology requires it but also because you don't have a relationship intimate or stable enough or a network of such relationships stable enough from which to derive any other meaning.
The Marxist or Randian or Democrat or Republican has something that plays the role a god does for the religious person not merely because that's true at a general level but for the unmarried or uncommitted person that is the anchor in lieu of a partner or a close family member. In this respect to say that secularism is "a religious belief" is not remotely accurate with respect to proposed truthclaims but it is socially true if only in the sense that it describes a metaphysical view which informs or motivates social action. In other words, a lonely atheist and a lonely Christian can both attempt to use their ideological and metaphysical committments as compensation for the fact that they are both really lonely. What ideology permits the unmarried man to do is to use the ideology as a kind of social drug to ensure that whatever has fallen short in his social life is less a function of bad luck or possible problems in himself and more a function of the problems that are in society. The problem isn't himself but everyone else and ideology becomes the means through which to reason that this is so.
Then again, it depends on how he measures himself by his ideology. If I were to use my Christian faith as a way to measure others and find them wanting I'd do that well but my understanding of the teaching of Christ is that I don't get to do that. It's tempting but the strength of the temptation is all the more reason to be aware that it is a temptation. It is in some ways more of a relief to admit that I feel like as an unmarried male I am completely disposable so far as society is concerned than to take refuge in an ideology that would condemn a society that in the grand flow of things has no real use for me.
This is what I believe is ultimately the problem with unmarried ideologues regardless of whether they flow right or left, they feel obliged to measure the entirety of humanity as having value or not based on that ideology. The leftist and the rightest alike are able to shut their eyes and ears to any flicker of compassion or empathy on the basis of that ideology. Sure, there are radicalized Islamist suicide bombers but people who are against "breeding" have the same hate and resentment, too. A Randian who believes that productive work is the highest good who isn't paired off really has only that as a measure of self-worth because it's not going to come from someone who loves you even if you stink and forgot to do the dishes yesterday and of whom you can say that love is reciprocal. We also live in a culture which has so elevated the value of romantic coupling as defining either adulthood or fulfillment that it becomes easy to reflexively condemn this. In many ways I can sympathize with the often resentful or bitter unmarrieds who, seeing they are not paired off and at various times desperately wanted to be, decide to transform their old longing into loathing. Ideology is the catalyst through which this process can be expedited.
Trouble is that the biological urges that drive coupling are so strong they won't go away and the unmarried ideologue who chooses to look down on those who have successfully paired off is looking down on a biological impulse within himself (or herself) and saying that this is prima facie bad. Overpopulation means that one of the most basic and rudimentary impulses in humanity is essentially evil. I either don't have to explain why this presents a moral and social problem both in the individual or for a group, or no amount of explanation could possibly convince you that it is one.
No comments:
Post a Comment