It is often said that there are two types of Catholics in the modern era: those who have read Humanae Vitae and those who have not.
National Review is a publication for which I have the deepest possible respect, surpassed only by my love for Fr. Neuhaus’ project at First Things. Buckley’s aphorism that the role of the modern conservative was to stand athwart history yelling “STOP!” was one that I could only absorb in time, and the more seasoned one becomes in this world, the more a love for the tried and true and the familiar angles and curves of tradition seem to matter.
Jason Lee Steorts is the managing editor for the National Review, and Steorts has written an exceptional challenge to defenders of marriage that — though I profoundly disagree with it — is well worth the read:
Having and raising a child with someone just is fulfilling, end of story, and the expression and deepening of romantic love just is fulfilling, end of story, and the overlap of these two kinds of end-of-story fulfillment is a very happy situation indeed. But the behavioral component of the reproductive function, as exercised within marriage, is not, in itself, fulfilling. It is valuable only instrumentally, in relation to one or both of the intrinsically fulfilling things that I have named. Not only is this alternative suggestion of mine more consistent than that of the new natural lawyers with our general view of biological functions as instrumentally valuable, but it is also more securely grounded in aspects of human experience whose intrinsic worth seems to be self-evident.
Steorts’ article is not free of polemic, but the challenge deserves a thoughtful response.
For those familiar with the topic, it appears as a challenge to Ryan Anderson at the Heritage Foundation, who has done an exemplary job of making the argument in defense of marriage, namely by refocusing the conversation on the rights of children produced by a marriage — every child deserving a right to their mother and father. Steorts argues:
As a sociological reality, this criticism is hard to dispute. But as an argument against same-sex marriage it rests on a false choice. Marriage and romance could, after all, be about both the fulfillment of adults and the interests of children; and where the two conflict, the interests of children (including unborn children) could trump the fulfillment of adults.
The invective of “trump card” is hard to ignore here, because once set up, Steorts sets his mind to knocking down with effortless efficiency:
Restricting sexual relations to heterosexual marriage would cut off, at the first link in the causal chain, a large number and variety of bad outcomes for children. It would be highly efficient. But it would also rest on a one-sided and extreme view of human sexuality. It would suppress the reality that committed romantic relationships are fulfilling for adults and that this fulfillment can be sought conditionally upon adults’ willingness to safeguard the interests of any children (including unborn children) who come to be in consequence of their relationships.
One sided indeed, as no one is responsibly making such an argument. The point raised, however, should be held in mind for Steorts’ conclusions where two points of natural law and a selection from the early Church Fathers are used to draft a conclusion. More on that later…
…but returning to the argument briefly, the problem with “traditional” defenders of marriage is summed up briefly:
The lie is that it is immoral to think of sex and marriage as anything other than child-directed, and its motivation is that, if we allow people to think otherwise, some parents will falsely analogize their own situation to that of people who have no children.
We stop here momentarily, because this is where Steorts’ argument comes off the rails, tilting ever so slightly with one set of wheels off and the other still firmly on the track.
The train wreck comes later.
* * *
Pope Paul VI is often criticized for the method of which he drew out the best arguments from his critics, only to utterly destroy them when he surprised the zeitgeist with Humanae Vitae in 1968, a year where counterculture was more norm than contrarian.
Paul VI made this precise claim in Humanae Vitae concerning the very topic that Steorts mentions:
The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.
So the sexual act is not merely for procreative purposes, as Steorts argues. Nor is it merely for the unitive quality, as proponents of same sex arrangements would prefer. In fact, the argument employed by Anderson and others is that marriage contains both the procreative and unitive qualities.
Paul VI is often credited with making four predictions in Humanae Vitae, all four of which have eerily come true where — if not the pope — would have been the best sociological prediction of the 20th century. These four have been an increasing rise of infidelity and moral decline, the androgynization of society, an abuse of public authority in the intervention of family life, and the problem of “total authority” over one’s body — a claim that bears a full quotation of Paul VI’s concerns:
Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed.
If one goes beyond the argument of same sex civil marriage, one can easily see where this has strayed into phenomena where people effectively deny or alter their humanity in favor of what they design to be better for them. It is a lessening of the human condition, not a fulfillment, when we operate against the natural law.
Paul VI also preached about the virtues of self-discipline — namely respecting men and women for the totality of their sexuality. The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions. For if with the aid of reason and of free will they are to control their natural drives, there can be no doubt at all of the need for self-denial. Only then will the expression of love, essential to married life, conform to right order. This is especially clear in the practice of periodic continence. Self-discipline of this kind is a shining witness to the chastity of husband and wife and, far from being a hindrance to their love of one another, transforms it by giving it a more truly human character.
The contrary view to this is our modern age. Women are encouraged to take birth control as young as 10 years of age, while men are simultaneously kept in a permanent state of adolescence while treating women as mere objects for sexual gratification. Already much has been made of the disincentives for men to marry, and in instances where new life is treated as a mistake? Women coached on a culture of “pro-choice” rhetoric are then pressured into the arms of a waiting abortion industry, while assisted by legions of “bro-choice” men eager to clear up the misunderstanding and get back to being teenagers.
Having eliminated the procreative quality of the sexual act, is it any wonder why modern Western culture sees marriage (and by utilitarian extension, sex) as a purely unitive act?
This is the crux of the marriage debate. If sex is purely unitive, then what is marriage? Merely a formalization of the informal.
* * *
So much for the noble lie.
Steorts continues — perhaps in a style worthy of Christopher Hitchens — defusing the comparison of animus qua racism that is often leveled against defenders of marriage, with their “bloodless legal abstractions” and “sociological speculations” decrying with dry Jeffersonian calmness that such error of opinion may be tolerated as a cabinet curiousity, fobbing off the analysis with “what should we think of them? So far, only that they are wrong.”
Backfilling the hypothesis of wrongness, Steorts dives into the what precisely defenders of marriage are rejecting:
What traditionalists must in honesty be said to reject is, if not a deep aspect of personal identity per se, then the expression of a deep aspect of personal identity. And the significance of that rejection is often minimized in ways so glib and irrelevant as to suggest that those who offer them refuse to grapple seriously with the issue — for example, their facile observation that there are many people who, for whatever reason, are unable to achieve romantic fulfillment (as if being unable to achieve it were the same thing as being told not to try), and their facile observation that “we are all sinners” (as if what counts as a sin were not in question here).
Glib, facile, irrelevant, and a refusal to grapple seriously with the issue? As before, the invective tends to draw the attention away from the argument… but in essence, defenders of marriage reject one’s personal identity in refusing to redefine the institution of marriage to include those who — by definition — cannot marry one another. After all, this is an argument long rooted in Christian tradition and the natural law, is it not?
In anticipation of this argument, Steorts moves to the argument from tradition by quoting none other than St. Clement of Alexandria, who in turn is quoted by Kyle Harper in his book From Shame to Sin:
Clement believed that in Christian marriage the couple’s sexual intimacy would be aimed exclusively at procreation, so that it could even escape the nets of desire and pleasure. . . . These sentiments appear most clearly in Clement’s Miscellanies, which express his deepest teachings. “With marriage, food, and other things, let us do nothing from desire, but only will those things that are necessary. For we are not children of desire, but of will. And so the man who marries for procreation should practice continence, not even desiring his wife, whom he should love.” Procreation should be sought with a reverent and controlled will. For Clement, proper sex was solemn, cool, ratiocinative. Marriage itself was encratic.
To wit, I give you St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Chapter 23 (appropriately titled On Marriage):
Marriage is the first conjunction of man and woman for the procreation of legitimate children.
Ouch.
To be subjected, then, to the passions, and to yield to them, is the extremest slavery; as to keep them in subjection is the only liberty.
Ouch x2.
So what was St. Clement driving at? Certainly not the re-interpretation given third hand by Harper. Rather, Clement saw marriage as a balance. Neither purely procreative nor unitive, but both, and on the basis of love:
(T)here is a time in which it is suitable, and a person for whom it is suitable, and an age up to which it is suitable. Neither ought every one to take a wife, nor is it every woman one is to take, nor always, nor in every way, nor inconsiderately. But only he who is in certain circumstances, and such an one and at such time as is requisite, and for the sake of children, and one who is in every respect similar, and who does not by force or compulsion love the husband who loves her.
So much for St. Clement, LGBTQ Warrior, which renders Steorts’ argument here rather suspect:
The man would love his wife, yes, but sex would be abstained from unless specifically intended to get children. This is certainly a possible view. If you hold it, and are open and consistent about holding it, then you won’t seem to be denying a source of fulfillment to same-sex couples that you allow to couples of opposite sexes, since you will claim that nobody has anything legitimately to want out of sex other than children.
Of course, Clement doesn’t say this at all. None of the Early Church Fathers held the view that Harper qua Steorts imposes upon Clement. Yet in the attempt to pries open the argument (and perhaps sensing its weakness), Steorts moves into the question of romantic love:
The fact is that romantic love has long been the primary means by which nature, shaped by culture, has induced to become parents most of the people in our civilization who have been parents. They have not, like Clement’s followers, or like some monarch thinking about alliances and succession, made a solemn, cool, ratiocinative decision to form a reproductive partnership. The further fact, our full awareness of which is relatively recent, is that, in some people, nature has largely or exclusively restricted the type of fulfillment provided by romantic love to relationships with members of the same sex. No one should pressure them to seek that fulfillment. Some might find celibacy or a Clementine marriage more appealing. But to legalistically forbid them the very possibility of romantic fulfillment even as the masses of Christendom enjoy it and take it for granted cannot but seem an unlovely pharisaism, however ancient or canonical its provenance.
Still firmly in unitive territiory; not quite embracing the procreative. Steorts moves into the realm of the natural law, caging two questions and providing two answers — and these are worth reading in their totality:
The first, the traditional natural-law argument, holds that from the function of a thing we can know what makes it good…. The main objection to this argument (which is made by the second type of natural-law theory, of which more anon) is that you cannot derive an ought from an is…. having a biological function does not give someone a reason to exercise it when the very question he asks is whether he should exercise it…. If he does want a watch or a bridge, he’ll want it to function properly, of course — but only because he’s already taken the result of that function as his ought. Whether to do so with the exercise of the reproductive function is the very question he now asks.
So in comes the second type of natural-law theory, known as new natural law, to save the argument. This theory says that someone should exercise his reproductive function (under conditions suited to the rearing of children) not because of the mere fact that he has it, but because its exercise is fulfilling. In general the theory claims that there are certain “basic human goods” that are fulfilling, or the absence of which hinders fulfillment, and so people should seek these basic goods or at least do nothing incompatible with them. Now you might think that the ought/is problem returns from its banishment to menace us anew. “From the fact that something is fulfilling,” you might ask, “why ought I to seek it?” And in a sense, that is a real question. There could be someone who said, “I do not want to be fulfilled,” and we do observe people who seem to act in knowing self-destruction or nihilism. There is not much we can say to them.
Readers sympathetic to the National Review article might protest that I cut the argument short, but purposefully to demonstrate that Steorts inadvertently provides the objection to the first objection by responding to the second.
Nihilism may not have been in the lexicon of Clement, but if there was a social illness that more pervaded our own time than any other incipient idea, it would be our own nihilist age. It is the maddening part of the discussion over the definition of marriage, because those who stand in the way of its re-definition are so often branded as haters, bigots, and so forth. To demand reason in the face of emotion is an impractical stipulation — ergo the nihilist will go to any extreme to remove the impediment.
The first objection is perhaps the more troublesome of the two, because it is the dagger aimed at the heart of Humanae Vitae.
The good news for defenders of marriage? It’s made by Nerf, and has been dismantled with effort by luminaries such as Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, but perhaps more succinctly by Ralph McInerny in his excellent tome Ethica Thomistica:
Earlier in this chapter (Ch. 3) we alluded to supposed difficulties concerning Is and Ought. The shortest way of summing up the alternative view to the approach we have taken is this: The way things are gives us no clue as to what we ought to do. Some version of this slogan has been abroad since David Hume, who once wondered how it is that people, after a suite of statements in which they tell us that this is such and that is so, conclude that something ought to be done. How derive that Ought from an Is? Characteristically, Hume simply posed the question, but the suggestion of the passage is that we ought not make such transitions from Is to Ought. We are not told where that ‘ought’ comes from.
Subsequent discussions spell this out, however, and, for the century just ending (20th), the most influential work in this regard is G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. The book is in English and was published in 1903; in it Moore speaks of what ever since has been called the Naturalistic Fallacy. William Frankena suggested that it could just as well be called the Definist Fallacy, since it concerns the relationship between the things we call good and the goodness we say they have. Let us say that Rollo is good. Or, to begin with a less complicated case, I say: “The Yugo is a good car.” It is easy to imagine a dispute breaking out over this astonishing remark. You want to know what on earth I can possibly mean by calling the Yugo a good car, and, warming to the task, I begin to mention mileage, transmission, price, and the like when suddenly a silence falls over the room. We turn and there in the doorway is G. E. Moore. We are told in memoirs such as those of John Maynard Keynes that Moore could disconcert anyone by the tone of voice with which he asked, “What do you mean by saying X?” Otherwise self-confident chaps disintegrated before this Olympian query, much as a quizzical look might cause you and me to check our zippers or wonder if there is food on our chin. Wittgenstein is said to have said that Moore was a good example of how far you can go in philosophy without any intelligence whatsoever. An unkind remark, but the career of the Naturalistic Fallacy has been more durable than Moore’s reputation. What is the fallacy?
If, in explaining why a Yugo is good, I say that it is cheap to buy and cheap to run, I will be thought to be explaining the meaning of ‘good’ in this case. That is, “A Yugo is good” comes down to saying that “A Yugo is cheap to buy and cheap to run.” But if ‘good’ = ‘cheap to buy and cheap to run,’ then the account can be substituted for the word defined and vice versa. But that means that “A Yugo is good because it is cheap to buy and cheap to run” is equivalent to “A Yugo is good because it is good.” The suggestion is that the only way we can avoid having ‘value judgments’ turn into tautologies is to realize that the properties of the object called good can never account for calling that object good.
Things happen fast after this. We are told that there is a wholly contingent relation between the properties of the thing and our calling it good by citing those properties — they really don’t explain our calling it good at all. If the properties of a thing do not account for our calling it good, then, in Moore’s memorable phrase, “Anything whatsoever can be called good.” There is nothing in the makeup of a thing that requires, or prevents, our calling it good. There is a gap between fact and value that cannot be closed by citing facts about the valued thing.
It is a long quotation, but offered in the hopes that the reader will benefit from the lengthy explanation. In short, is and ought are indeed bound, because as Steorts argues with regards to watches and bridges, if neither of them are good watches or good bridges, then both cease to function as they ought and cease to be watches and bridges. Much like the Yugo, if a marriage no longer contains the properties of a marriage (Clement’s definition is appropriate here), then it is not a marriage at all. There is indeed an ontology of marriage at play.
McInerny continues that in Dostoevsky, Aloysha’s refutation of atheism — where everything would be permitted if God did not exist — is viewed by others (Jean Paul Sartre among them) who accept the consequences of such a declaration if not the refutation, paraphrasing McInerny:
And there are increasing numbers of people who do not avoid it and take the Sartrean or Neitzschean route, drawing out the implications of our not having a nature or a destiny on any basis at all in the way things are for appraising them one way rather than another. There is a chic nihilism abroad… Anything goes.
Of course, Steorts plays his ace against the “New Natural Law” movement — and the Thomist who doesn’t believe scholasticism requires such rehabilitation can breathe the “aha!” we were secretly holding onto as Steorts’ target comes into plain view and the bomb bay doors begin to whir and open:
Here is my alternative suggestion: Having and raising a child with someone just is fulfilling, end of story, and the expression and deepening of romantic love just is fulfilling, end of story, and the overlap of these two kinds of end-of-story fulfillment is a very happy situation indeed.
The implausibility of the new-natural-law argument will become even clearer if we reflect on its proffered explanation of why permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity are supposed to be normative for married men and women who are childless.
Yet these objections are overwhelmingly addressed by Paul VI. Linked to McInerny’s refutation of the Naturalistic Fallacy, we have an open winner.
Steorts concludes with a few thoughts, most of which are readily explained by the procreative/unitive distinctions made earlier and the nihilist emphasis on the unitive over the procreative, and the impulse to believe the counterargument to be the mirror opposite: procreative over unitive. Steorts does not seem to consider that both/and is the appropriate answer, and perhaps this is driven by a rather Humean distinction between ought/is.
The fatal flaw driven home, Steorts concerns regarding love (which in the eyes of the Thomistic scholastic, one could easily argue as disordered) and the threat of “throuples” and other consenting relationships (which oddly appear to be a line where Steorts does make the naturalistic argument when suited to the argument) are all viewed from the spyhole of emphasizing the fallacy of the procreative act at the expense of the unitive act, when the counterfactual is simply that both should be realized in their full potential, and not as a zero-sum game where one quality is emphasized at the expense of the other.
Furthermore, the distinction between ought/is fails to stand to scrutiny, and remains a rather central argument to the defense of marriage. Linked to the arguments of Humanae Vitae, Steorts has presented an interesting challenge to the New Natural Law crowd, but Thomistic scholasticism remains rather unswayed by the argument. Marriage serves both a purpose and has a precise definition.
McInerney’s critique of the Yugo applies most directly to Steorts’ closing arguments:
The natural-law arguments do not do this. All they say is that any type of sexual relationship that is not behaviorally open to procreation and suited to childrearing is, for that reason, wrong. But nobody really thinks that all such relationships are equally wrong. Unless this perception is some sort of mass delusion, there must be categorical differences on the basis of which to distinguish our categorically different attitudes. As an argument against same-sex marriage, the refusal to admit any such differences looks rather worse than a debater’s point or a failure of thought. It acquires the air of an insult.
Yet the division of properties from the subject is no mere debater’s point. It is the very essence of the conversation, otherwise the nihilist response of “Anything at all may be called good” becomes the conclusion we are ultimately driven towards if we make the catastrophic error of separating ‘ought’ from ‘is’. As Steorts himself observes, there is not much that can be said after such an intellectual Rubicon has been crossed.
Steorts’ challenge is well put, and designed squarely at a narrow yet influential audience. Yet it fails to persuade, not because of animus or prejudice, but because of faulty premise and a differing view on the philosophical underpinnings of the conversation itself.
UPDATE: Austin Ruse over at C-FAM (and contributor at The Stream) offers his thoughts:
We make law based not on pleasing each citizen’s whims, but on our perceptions of reality. Those perceptions are formed by observing human biology and reflecting on the conditions in which human beings are most likely to flourish. That marriage involves a man and a woman is the conclusion of reason and the unanimous verdict of every culture until the day before yesterday. We know, everyone knows, that two people of the same sex simply cannot have the same type of relationship that two people of the opposite sex can. It is delusional to pretend otherwise, and it does not cease to be delusional just because lots of people are coerced into playing along.
Read it all.
