Metaphysical Marriage

The third in a series . . .

This essay is the most important in my series on marriage. It states mostly clearly what I think marriage is and why it’s the most important institution ever invented by man. The audio version of this talk is at the bottom of the page, which I’m making free to all subscribers (paid and unpaid) in the hope that you will share this essay with friends, colleagues, and family.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”— George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Marriage has existed, as we all know, in every society known to man. Its core principles developed spontaneously around the world over millennia free of State control. We also know that its forms and formalities (e.g., wedding ceremonies) have differed from one culture and religion to another, and all have changed over time. The accoutrements of marriage in sixteenth-century Persia were different from those of eighteenth-century Paris and both are different from marriage in twenty-first century Las Vegas.

In times past (and in some places around the world today), marriage was dictated by wealth, status, dynastic considerations, parental fiat, and patriarchy. The major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) all have their own marriage rites and traditions. Even within Christendom, the marriage rites and rituals of Catholics and Protestants differ dramatically, and within Protestantism they differ among Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, and every other denomination. Marriage is a sacrament for Catholics, a covenant for Calvinists, and something else for Mormons. And yet, certain basic principles and characteristics remain fixed from place to place over time.

Why is that? Why should the core purposes and functions transcend time and place? The answers to these questions are more important in the twenty-first century than in any other time in world history.

What marriage Is

The first section of this essay peels away the secondary attributes of marriage in order to reveal its essential core. Understanding and defining what marriage is, is the heart of the matter. Rationally understood, marriage is a complex social institution—part moral vow, part legal contract, part political license, part cultural norm—that creates and defines a particular kind of moral-legal relationship between a man and a woman. Marriage takes two unique individuals and creates something new—a married couple—that is now to be treated by the law as a single unit. It formalizes, consummates, integrates, solemnizes, objectifies, and perpetuates the biological necessities and the romantic union of a man and a woman through a public declaration sanctioned by law that this couple shall be henceforth and forever treated as one. Marriage, the most private and intimate of all personal actions, is a public act.

As a concept, marriage has specific referents in reality (i.e., its constituent parts include men and women who become grooms and brides and then husbands and wives to each other), a proximate cause (i.e., the desire to consummate romantic love spiritually and physically), specific characteristics (e.g., monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence), and a central purpose (i.e., the potential bearing and rearing of children who become sons or daughters to their mother and father). The unity of these elements, causes, characteristics, and purposes defines what marriage is.

Put in Aristotelian terms, marriage has a material cause, an efficient cause, a final cause, and a formal cause. Its material cause—the material from which it is made—is one man and one woman; its efficient cause—the motivation and action that put it in motion—is sexual attraction and romantic love; its final cause—the purpose or function for which it exists—is the bearing, rearing, and protection of children as a family; and its formal cause—the form by which it actualizes its purpose—is monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

Epistemologically, the concept marriage refers to a certain kind of relationship defined by certain kinds of actions between the institution’s existential referents (i.e., husbands and wives) and their connection to a larger community. The relationship that is marriage and the unique actions that go with it, are, always have been, and must be gender specific and gender connected. The concept marriage necessitates certain ostensive referents that are metaphysically absolute. A marital union without husbands and wives is more than a contradiction in terms; it is disconnected from metaphysical reality; nay, it represents the disintegration (i.e., the destruction) of the concept.

Furthermore, the epistemological meaning of marriage is inseparable from its purpose. This is easily demonstrated. That marriage is directed to one objective end is demonstrated by an irrefutable counterfactual or reverse inference: there is no state in the American union, nor is there any nation in the world that permits biological brothers and sisters (or mothers and sons or fathers and daughters) to marry. And with good reason. Biological siblings typically carry common recessive genes, and any incestuous sexual reproduction often leads to children with serious congenital defects and disorders. The institution of marriage is designed to encourage health families and healthy individuals.

What’s more, imbedded in the concepts “husband” or “wife” are innumerable seen and unseen cultural mores and moral norms that guide the complex and particular functions and actions that define marriage. The specific and unique actions between a married man and a woman are component parts of a special kind of relationship that is distinguished from all other relationships within the broader community in which they live. Moreover, the concept marriage distinguishes this kind of particular relationship from all other male-female relationships. One important purpose of wearing a wedding ring is, for instance, to send a signal to all people outside this particular marriage that the parties are taken and not participants in the romantic or sexual market. To arbitrarily change the definition of marriage and disconnect it from its metaphysical and epistemological foundation would be to introduce conceptual and therefore moral, social, and political anarchy into an institution that encompasses what is probably the most important social-legal relationship known to man.

Let’s turn now to the actions that add up to and define the relationship known as “marriage.”

First, marriage marries. It is a coming together and a kind of reconciliation that unites in one two very different kinds of people, the two great halves of humanity (i.e., a man and a woman with their profound physical and psychological differences), each of whom seeks lasting fulfillment and joy in a life lived together. Epistemologically, marriage encapsulates and defines a specific relationship. Legally, marriage recognizes a new unit out consisting of dissimilar entities. It reconciles biologically distinct and sexually asymmetrical adults, who nonetheless share a sexual complementarity that has the potential to create new human life sharing the DNA of both parents. The primary purpose of marriage brings new life into society and then connects that new life legally with its biological mother and father.

Second, marriage is created by the voluntary actions of a man and a woman in a public ceremony—a wedding, which has various rites and rituals that serve an important social function. It is a rite of passage marking the transition from one moral-social-legal condition to another. Marriage is initiated by a vow—a declaration witnessed by the public and recognized by the government. This vow is part personal, part public. A man and woman promise to each other and declare to their community that they shall be true to each other and forsake all others forever and that they shall care for each other in sickness and in health. (Why do they do this? Why should anyone care?)

Third, the primary actions that define relational parts of marriage are gender specific. Marriage transforms men and women into husbands and wives and then into fathers and mothers. It defines the rights and responsibilities of husbands and wives toward each other and of mothers and fathers toward their children; and it sends cultural signals to the rest of society defining the relationship between married and unmarried men and women.

And finally, the underlying assumption of marriage is that husbands and wives will raise all children born to them. The vow of marriage therefore has a kind of (non-religious) sacred responsibility attached to it. It is much more than a private contract or a negotiated deal of cohabitation. Arguably, it is the most important decision an individual will ever make.

Marriage Stakeholders

To better understand the full complexity and meaning of marriage, it must also be seen from the perspectives of its four natural stakeholders: 1) the men and women who seek to marry; 2) the children born to a married couple; 3) the community of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which the married couple lives; and 4) the government whose job it is to protect the rights of married couples and any children they might have.

From the perspective of individual men and women, the moral relationship that is marriage begins with a choice—the selfish, moral choice of a man and a woman to protect and perpetuate their romantic relationship as a husband and a wife in the context of civil society. Men and women choose a future spouse from innumerable potential options. They do so for entirely selfish reasons. Person “A” chooses person “B” instead of persons “X,” “Y,” or “Z” because of the pleasures, satisfaction, and joy that “A” receives from “B.” Marriage as a duty is an entirely immoral concept. Marriage is first and foremost a volitional moral bond between a man and a woman, who create for themselves a whole new private universe motivated and held together by their mutually assured love. This means, first, that the self-interest of the husband and the self-interest of the wife have largely, though not entirely, merged as one. Marriage should never involve sacrifice. If one’s spouse is one’s highest value, then giving up all lower values is not and cannot be a sacrifice. It means that both husband and wife elevate the other to a privileged place in his or her life such that each is self-interestedly concerned with the happiness and wellbeing of the other. Legally, men and women seek marriage to protect their rights as a single unit. Marriage is a rights-protecting institution.

Another important angle from which to view marriage is from the all-too-forgotten perspective of children. It bears asking: what do children need and want, and to what do they have a right? In other words, what is owed to children in the context of marriage?

Children have a strong rights-based claim to be raised by their biological parents. This claim is based on one crucial fact: children come into the world as helpless beings dependent entirely on adults to survive. The responsibility to satisfy this right redounds morally to the child’s natural mother and father, who in turn have a self-interested stake in the well-being of their biological child. We also know that children have a powerful desire to be raised by the two people who gave them life and brought them into the world. Virtually all children have a genuine longing to experience the different forms of love and affection expressed by a biological mother and father. Marriage provides the institutional structure by which adult society protects the rights and interests of children, and it protects the natural bond between parents and their children from outside interference.

Marriage is also a social institution. Its vows are witnessed and sanctioned by the community—by our relatives, friends, and neighbors. For better or worse, all societies everywhere have shown a real interest in the institution of marriage, and most people share an interest in the success of other people’s marriage. It is in our self-interest that marriages succeed. Social chaos typically comes with cultures that don’t respect marriage. Social science literature for over fifty years has clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that the break-up of the two-parent family in the United States is the direct and principal cause of crime and social chaos in many American communities.

A decent, civil society begins with marriage and the family. The social function of marriage is to provide an objective structure in which the sometimes-volatile intellectual-emotional-physical union of men and women can find order, stability, and protection. From the perspective of society, marriage encourages men and women to unite sexually in a responsible way so that the community may create a future for itself. Marriage also creates new relationships and actions between the married couple and the community in which they live. It ends the “next of kin” legal connection between an adult son/daughter and his or her parents, and it establishes each married partner as the other’s legal next of kin; it establishes rights and responsibilities relative to joint property, executorship, and the custody and care of children; and it announces to the world that any child born to a married woman is presumed to have been fathered by her husband, who now must assume certain responsibilities. As a social institution, marriage creates millions upon millions of small, private, self-interested, rights-bearing platoons that are protected by the fortress of the law.

Finally, the role of government in marriage is limited but important. The first thing to note is that government should be in the rights-protecting and not in the love-promoting business. Love is and should be invisibilis to government. A rights-protecting government should care not one whit about love. Government’s only proper purpose is to protect individual rights, and that’s its sole function in marriage. From the government’s perspective, the institution of marriage is a rights-enhancing, rights-protecting institution, which means that government has a legitimate role in protecting the individual rights of the various parties involved in marriage. Marriage properly recognizes a constellation of rights that are meant to 1) insure that both parties fulfill their chosen marital obligations; 2) protect married couples and their children from outside interference; and 3) protect children from abuse, neglect, and abandonment. The government’s attitude toward marriage should be one of laissez faire or salutary neglect. (I shall have more to say on this specific topic in a forthcoming essay.)

Why Marriage?

Morally, socially, and institutionally, marriage captures a core human truth that distinguishes it from all other human relationships. It is rooted in the sexual difference, complementarity, and asymmetry of men and women and in the experience that all societies have with reconciling the complex but necessary sexual relations between men and women. Marriage universally was, is, and will forever be society’s macro-solution to the problem of human generation and survival. (While it is true that the socio-legal institution of marriage was and is organized for ordered reproduction as a central, organizing purpose, procreation is not a necessary pre-condition of any particular marriage. Infertile couples and those who choose not to have children are in fact married. Still, we must never forget that marriage was, is, and must be rooted metaphysically, epistemologically, morally, sociologically, and culturally on a model of partnership that is nonetheless connected to human procreation. But for that fact, the difference between marriage and all other kinds of partnerships would be one of degree only rather than one of kind.)

Anthropologists and the ancient philosophers tell us that marriage developed historically as a natural, pre-political form of association. Aristotle, for instance, suggests in the Nicomachean Ethics that the “friendship between a husband and a wife seems to be in accord with nature.” Moreover, marriage is “earlier and more necessary than a city.” Put somewhat differently, procreation is an objective, metaphysical necessity of human survival. The fundamental question is, how will this necessity be promoted and achieved by men and women in a social context?

As a natural, pre-political institution, marriage arose in response to certain observably immutable facts of reality: 1) that men and women are sexually attracted to one another; 2) that sex between men and women sometimes creates new human beings; 3) that only women carry and bear children; and 4) that children are entirely dependent on adults for their survival and for their physical, intellectual, and moral maturation. These are necessary, absolute, and observable facts of reality—facts that are true about human nature regardless of what anyone feels, wants, prays, or chooses—facts that ground marriage in the requirements of human life.

Anthropologically, we know these immutable facts of human nature led to a series of persistent and pervasive social problems in all societies. Imagine a world before the rise of marriage, a world in which men and women engaged in indiscriminate (and often forced) sexual relations that often resulted in pregnancy and the bearing of children. In such a state, the central problem was this: men and women have sexual relations but only women get pregnant and bear children. This is what we mean by the sexual asymmetry between men and women. Women are biologically connected to children, and every time a child is born a mother is always present. These natural and sociological facts are, however, confronted by one massive counterfactual: fathers are not always present when children are born and raised. In other words, there is no similar biological necessity, however, connecting fathers to childbirth, and hence to babies and their mothers.

Every culture known to man has understood that a society of husbandless mothers and fatherless children is a formula for disaster. For instance, if men did not know that the child born to the woman with whom they’d had sexual relations was theirs, they would typically either abandon mother and child to fend for themselves or they would engage in potentially deadly competition with other men to claim their paternal rights and authority. Neither outcome was salutary for the immediate parties involved, nor for the larger community. Moreover, when men engaged in promiscuous sexual relations and impregnated more than one woman (as some were—and are—want to do), their economic resources were either centralized in one family and thereby impoverishing the others, or the resources were dispersed and diluted among several families. It also led to polygamous sexual relations, wherein dominant males would monopolize multiple women and leave male outcasts sexless and childless. Eventually, the sexual aristocracy would face an upheaval from the sexually impoverished, who would revolt and fight for their right to procreate. In other words, a society defined by non-marital, non-monogamous sexual relations often led to social disruption, anarchy, and barbarism.

These basic facts of human nature also lead inexorably to certain sociological facts: 1) that the well-being of mothers and their children is promoted by the presence of fathers; and 2) that raising children in stable family units promotes the interests of children and the perpetuation and wellbeing of society. The discovery, development, and institutionalization of marriage in all places around the world was therefore a response to the challenges and requirements of human life. Marriage attaches husbands to wives and fathers to their biological children in order to protect mothers and their children and to provide stability in society at large.

Marriage was and is therefore the universal solution to a series of ineradicable human problems. It was developed and institutionalized by freely associating individuals to 1) enable women to avoid becoming husbandless mothers of fatherless children; 2) tame and channel sexual jealousy; 3) pool, manage, and protect limited economic resources; 4) transfer property from one generation to another; and, 5) establish a safe and stable environment for men and women to create families and to raise and educate their children free of outside interference.

In promising monogamy, married couples make a commitment to each other (and to their community) that they would only have children with and through each other. The exclusivity of marriage insured that men would know who their biological children are to eliminate competing paternity claims and the social conflict that goes with them. The permanence of marriage protected the vulnerability of women during pregnancy and during the years in which they are rearing dependent children. As a social institution, exclusivity and permanence ensured that children were raised by their natural parents throughout their minority.

In sum, marriage is the institution that creates, orders, and protects family life primarily for the benefit of children. Without this primary purpose or final cause guiding what marriage is, two of its fundamental characteristics (i.e., exclusivity and permanence) would not be necessary (or at least they would be optional) and they might not even be desirable. In fact, if humans reproduced asexually, or if newborns and young children were somehow not dependent on adults for their survival, marriage would be an unnecessary institution, at least from the perspective of society and government.

Every civilization known to man has understood the need to recognize that human reproduction and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience. This is how and why I say that marriage is grounded in the metaphysical reality. Put slightly differently, marriage is the moral-socio-legal institution that recognizes and supports the metaphysical necessities of human life. It acknowledges and secures the relation between a child and a particular set of parents. It is the foundational pro-life institution that every society has recognized to secure a future for itself. No decent or free society has ever treated the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as optional or as a matter to be decided by government fiat. Unless a particular civilization has an explicit death-wish (e.g., the Jim Jones “Jonestown” commune in Guyana), every society known to man has recognized that its future is dependent on its ability to successfully organize a healthy marriage culture.

Marriage as a Socio-Moral Institution

As a socio-moral institution, marriage is different from all other human relationships. It is naturally ordered to procreation and to the rearing of children, and, as such, it is a natural extension of biological reality. Put differently, it attaches men and women to each other in a permanent legal bond and then to their children. That’s what the institution of marriage does; that’s what its forms and formalities do. Moreover, virtually every human society has discovered and instituted marriage as the most salutary and orderly way to create a future for itself. It is a life-serving institution. It is the only form of human association rooted in the self-preservation of the species. Were it not for this fact, marriage would be just another form of partnership or friendship. Marriage provides a moral and legal structure that serves as the primary building block for creating stable families, and thus it is the means by which society not only perpetuates itself but builds a truly civil society. Marital unions reflect and identify a basic and necessary truth about human life, providing an objective good to society in ways that other kinds of relationships could not. Marriage is, therefore, the necessary and foundational building block of any civil society.

Indeed, a strong marriage culture is a sine qua non of a free and decent society. Civilized societies depend on parents educating their children to become rational, self-governing, rights-respecting, virtuous, productive citizens, which in turn requires mothers and fathers to commit their lives to each other and to the education of their children. Marriage makes this possible. Parenting is a long, costly, difficult, and delicate process of ongoing care and supervision that requires a deep and abiding commitment of both parents. Biological mothers and fathers working as a team do this better than anyone. We all benefit—including free-riding unmarried individuals—from those who create, support, and educate children to sustain our civilization. Most people know incompetent and rotten parents, but we have not invented a better way to raise children. The alternatives (e.g., the government raising children) are considerably worse.

The argument for marriage may be summed up with this simple syllogism: Procreation is a necessary precondition for the existence and survival of human life; marriage is fundamental to responsible procreation and parenting; therefore, the existence and wellbeing of a civil society is dependent on marriage. Historically and cross-culturally, marriage is and has been the solution to one of mankind’s most vexing problems. It is therefore good not because it is traditional; it is traditional precisely because it is good. Marriage is good because it is true and serves human life.

This audio recording of “Metaphysical Marriage” is available to all subscribers of The Redneck Intellectual.

Have a great week!