I deposited the following rant on the current hot topic over at Taki's Magazine, under the flourishing title, "'Do You Take This Pony?' Or, The Counterrevolution Will Be Facebooked."
You used to be able to take some sort of traditionally-minded patriarchal order for granted. Now it is in pieces and streaks of mayhem, mediocrity, anxiety and insanity are running strong. What do we have to leverage some sort of restoration? Blogs, web magazines, comment threads and social networking sites, apparently. Just another reason to turn gloomy and Spenglerian.
But, why not and what the heck? I use my Facebook profile to air all sorts of reactionary web literature, as if I’ll coax egalitarianism back to the underworld proper with another turn of phrase by Mr. Zmirak, Mr. Spencer, or the Other McCain.
Recently one of those links was to Mr. Derbyshire’s rubric for the secular-right heteronormative argument, which Razib Khan brought to our attention. Since gay rights are so hot right now I got plenty of response, some of it from relatively new friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who only lately have wandered within my right-wing orbit. The Left gets heaps of abuse for social experimentation, but I have my own styles of social labwork, and I love nothing better than witnessing the squeals and writhing of those who can’t keep this particularly unsettling reactionary vampire at bay with the usual crummy crosses, garlic, and accusations of prejudice and discrimination.
I have met the common egalitarian mind, and it is really hot and bothered that Mr. Derbyshire would write the following:
Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose further redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?
Oh, those crazy conservatives! What can you say about people who are worried that man-pony marriages will soon become epidemic?
The point to Derbyshire’s remark, of course, is logical and cultural, which would become clear to the PC antagonist could he but pluck his head out from whatever orifice it was crammed in and engage in a moment’s reflection. Once the publicly-accepted understanding of something changes so does the wider social setting, which shapes what people can make of their lives. Our understanding of marriage reflects the kind of world in which we live, and the confidence and reinforcement we can expect to enjoy in that world. Will it be, on the one hand, a setting where people see in their attachments to others nothing deeper or more fundamental than a practical and perhaps momentary solution to the question of their own individual needs and wants? Or will it be one in which those attachments relate to greater obligations, a wider social order, and ultimately a transcendent good?
I might be free, in the egalitarian society, to cohabit with a woman and call it marriage. Yet I’m palpably not free to enjoy the support of a wider society that gives my attachment to that woman its traditional meaning and obligation. To the extent that gay “marriage” is accepted as a non-controversial public understanding, the older traditional patterns erode. Those traditional attitudes aren’t just an arbitrary function of nasty heteronormative preference. They are based on a time-tested recognition of what makes sense and tends to work with regard to human activity and attachment.
By the way, if you would like to upgrade from my budget traditionalist conceptualizing to the authentic product, you will need to obtain a copy of Jim Kalb’s recent accomplishment, The Tyranny of Liberalism. Now if you will excuse me, I have a Facebook feed to tyrannize.
Addendum: Let me finish off my gloss on Derbyshire, to spell out every last hint and syllable for people who need to believe that conservatives are, for example, terrified of the legitimization of barnyard love. The point of such phraseology by Derbyshire (are we really having to make this clear?) is not that pony marriage trends are likely to develop, but that such questions start to occur to people given what we now have decided marriage to be. They start to occur, in the sense that it becomes harder to say what is truly special about an arrangement that is just a suitable utilitarian pairing between two individuals and that lacks the old meaning and significance. People start to say, “What’s to stop us from marrying ponies?” not because such things are actually on the horizon, but to express something about how difficult they find it to make sense of the concept of gay “marriage” as an overall social standard. To be worthy of the appellation marriage needs to have a real overall social purpose, like transmitting the habits and customs of one generation of a civilization to the next, which then ends up relating to a more transcendent meaning. Gay marriage lacks this. So would marrying a pony.
I have also heard from five people in the last twenty four hours, almost verbatim, that “THERE IS NEVER ANY REASON TO DENY PEOPLE THEIR RIGHTS.” Never? Never ever? I seem to recall some sort of historical trend involving the mass murder of those who had some reluctance in accepting the social reconstruction of the rights regime. The Vendée? The unfortunate flotsam and jetsam of opposition to the Communists? I know that my impoverished interlocutors can’t be bothered with the marrow of their own civilization’s history. I also recognize that direct brutalization is no longer the egalitarian fashion, in our present phase of “soft” anarcho-tyranny (except when it is, and we decide it is time once again to spread some more of that democracy by the bayonet and the bunker buster). But maybe the PC moralists could afford to be a little less categorical and a little more agnostic in their socio-political judgments.
