Kouryou-chan and the Storm
Nov. 19th, 2003 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsLast night, it seems like almost every hour Kouryou-chan kept coming into the bedroom and saying that she had a bad dream, or heard a noise, or that she was scared. The wind and the rain knocked about the trees outside and kept rousing her, and she kept rousing us. This morning I have all the mentual acuity of a rutabega.
Which is not to say that I am not thinking this morning. And I am most certainly not celebrating the decision of the Massachusetts high court this morning.
Quick: without invoking religious or nationalistic ideology, complete the following sentence: "Conservatism is the premise that..."
Conservatism is the premise that institutions embody knowledge to achieve desirable outcomes. Institutions, being larger than individuals, synergize the efforts of individuals into a corpus of wisdom that, overall, maximizes the desired outcomes of individuals, and that corpus cannot be meaningfully or effectively expressed in any other way than the insitution.
Liberalism, as its logical counterpart, is the premise that as economic and technological circumstances evolve better and more desireable outcomes became available, and therefore the ossified wisdom embodied in institutions be challenged and, if necessary, amended or overturned.
(Hence the canard provided by an interstitial cartoon on ABC in the 1970: "Do you think that revolutions which overturn insitutions themselves become institutions which must eventually be overturned?")
Marriage is certainly one of those insitutions, and it has been around in one form or another for centuries. The current form of marriage is new, being less than thirty years since the advent of no-fault divorces even when children are involved and barely a hundred years since changes in the law allowed women to own property or vote-- and these changes in power have had serious impact on our perception of what it means to be married.
But from where I stand, I don't see a desireable outcome in allowing the State to modify the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. It would be better if we would simply do away with the definition of marriage as a state institution entirely and return to person-to-person contractual obligations.
The problem with doing so is that "person-to-person contractual obligation" doesn't have the same emotional resonance, impact, and effect-- in short, does not compel the way the suprafluental (larger than we and so impossible to explicate clearly) wisdom embodied within "the insitute of marriage" compels.
Let Massachusetts try same-sex marriage; but other states should hold off for twenty years or so, and we should revist this in experiment in five, ten, and twenty years, and at the end of the experiment we should ask if the change has made people happier, or not.
Even without the meandering, intellectual thinking about marriage as an institution, we have to be aware that there is an election coming up next year in which we have a slim, but real, possibility of tossing out of office a man who embodies, in my opinion, the worst impulses of the Republican party with respect to pandering to power, abuse of authority, and spending our future's inheritance today. This court decision has galvanaizied and aroused the ignorantly "conservative" (as well as their less-ignorant leadership) and will create a backlash guaranteed to make removing an abusive president even harder.
The reactionaries, on the other hand, are not only not surprised, they're not reacting greatly. Reactionaries know that conservatism is only a brake, and not a very effective one, on liberalism.
I think we should keep this in mind: conservatism is not the enemy; rousing the complacent to reactionary fervor is the enemy. The Massachusetts decision, if it is spun into a "nation-wide precedent," is going to condemn us to four more years of Ashcroft and Bush.
Which is not to say that I am not thinking this morning. And I am most certainly not celebrating the decision of the Massachusetts high court this morning.
Quick: without invoking religious or nationalistic ideology, complete the following sentence: "Conservatism is the premise that..."
Conservatism is the premise that institutions embody knowledge to achieve desirable outcomes. Institutions, being larger than individuals, synergize the efforts of individuals into a corpus of wisdom that, overall, maximizes the desired outcomes of individuals, and that corpus cannot be meaningfully or effectively expressed in any other way than the insitution.
Liberalism, as its logical counterpart, is the premise that as economic and technological circumstances evolve better and more desireable outcomes became available, and therefore the ossified wisdom embodied in institutions be challenged and, if necessary, amended or overturned.
(Hence the canard provided by an interstitial cartoon on ABC in the 1970: "Do you think that revolutions which overturn insitutions themselves become institutions which must eventually be overturned?")
Marriage is certainly one of those insitutions, and it has been around in one form or another for centuries. The current form of marriage is new, being less than thirty years since the advent of no-fault divorces even when children are involved and barely a hundred years since changes in the law allowed women to own property or vote-- and these changes in power have had serious impact on our perception of what it means to be married.
But from where I stand, I don't see a desireable outcome in allowing the State to modify the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. It would be better if we would simply do away with the definition of marriage as a state institution entirely and return to person-to-person contractual obligations.
The problem with doing so is that "person-to-person contractual obligation" doesn't have the same emotional resonance, impact, and effect-- in short, does not compel the way the suprafluental (larger than we and so impossible to explicate clearly) wisdom embodied within "the insitute of marriage" compels.
Let Massachusetts try same-sex marriage; but other states should hold off for twenty years or so, and we should revist this in experiment in five, ten, and twenty years, and at the end of the experiment we should ask if the change has made people happier, or not.
Even without the meandering, intellectual thinking about marriage as an institution, we have to be aware that there is an election coming up next year in which we have a slim, but real, possibility of tossing out of office a man who embodies, in my opinion, the worst impulses of the Republican party with respect to pandering to power, abuse of authority, and spending our future's inheritance today. This court decision has galvanaizied and aroused the ignorantly "conservative" (as well as their less-ignorant leadership) and will create a backlash guaranteed to make removing an abusive president even harder.
The reactionaries, on the other hand, are not only not surprised, they're not reacting greatly. Reactionaries know that conservatism is only a brake, and not a very effective one, on liberalism.
I think we should keep this in mind: conservatism is not the enemy; rousing the complacent to reactionary fervor is the enemy. The Massachusetts decision, if it is spun into a "nation-wide precedent," is going to condemn us to four more years of Ashcroft and Bush.
