Homespun and Corny Principles

This month in Policy Review, Lee Harris addresses the notion of tradition and its place in society's past, present and future. It's long but I think it's an essential read. He spends a good deal of article describing tradition, rejecting some definitions, favoring others and putting the role of tradition into perspective. While there is much that my more right-leaning side agrees with, it is good basic overview of the role tradition plays in our history, or at least a "conservative" overview. I was especially fond of his "tradition as recipe" analogy. It is not enough that one passes down the knowledge of how to make the family recipe, he says; one must also pass down the cook. And yet even more important, one must teach that budding young cook how to replace himself in the next generation.

He then describes the role of the family which culminates in the "shining example":

This is the highest ethical contribution of the family — setting for the child not merely the minimal acceptable ethical baseline, but the promotion of its most cherished ethical ideal in the form of our developmental destiny — what Aristotle called our telos. In short, what we want to be when we grow up.

But a telos, to be the focus of a concrete ambition, must exist in the form of an actual individual who has fulfilled this ambition in an exemplary way. Such an individual we will call a shining example.

To Harris, the shining example is lacking in our society. We are striving for abstract ideals set out by the intelligentsia that we can never hope to achieve. What we need is real exemplary models, something tangible. Someone to look up to, not a paragon of virtue, per se, but someone who overcomes his weaknesses to prevail. Harris implies that the intelligentsia, which is apparently in conflict with middle America, is destroying this.

And as you can easily guess, all this leads directly into the current marriage debate. And I think it does so a little abruptly. Harris never really explains exactly why gays should not seek marriage, except that we should respect the mysterious ethical traditions of middle America, without ever really telling us what they are. But if we delve deeper we can see what he means. We should respect their shining examples. He claims there will be tragedy if middle America loses its ethical fundamentalism.

If the reflective class, represented by intellectuals in the media and the academic world, continues to undermine the ideological superstructure of the visceral code operative among the “culturally backward,” it may eventually succeed in subverting and even destroying the visceral code that has established the common high ethical baseline of the average American...

I was with him right up until this point, the point where he sets up the divide: gay America is a product of the "reflective class", the abstract ideals people and not-gay America is the ideological superstructure, the group that will pass down the family recipe along with the cooks. Gay America is striving for an abstract ideal; not-gay America is striving to be like its "shining examples".

To Harris, who is himself gay, homosexuals have rejected middle America even if some of them are a product of it.

Even the most sophisticated of us have something to learn from the fundamentalism of middle America. For stripped of its quaint and antiquated ideological superstructure, there is a hard and solid kernel of wisdom embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise their children, and many of us, including many gay men like myself, are thankful to have been raised by parents who were so unshakably committed to the values of decency, and honesty, and integrity, and all those other homespun and corny principles. Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of intellect, but a strength of character.

And then to the gays:

But there can be no advantage to them if they insist on trying to co-opt the shining example of an ethical tradition that they themselves have abandoned in order to find their own way in the world.

What Harris fails to see is that many gays have not abandoned the ethical tradition of the ancestors. I am not, despite my education, estranged from my middle American roots; I am a product of it. Middle Americans have their shining examples, their good parents who mold their children into good parents who mold their children into good parents. They want them to have honesty, decency and integrity. To Harris, these middle Americans are "passing on, through the uniquely reliable visceral code, the great postulate of transgenerational duty: not to beseech people to make the world a better place, but to make children whose children will leave it a better world and not merely a world with better abstract ideals."

I cannot speak for all gays, but that is exactly what I would aspire to. Yet I have a tragic flaw, but so do many other straight couples. I cannot "make children". But that does not mean I cannot aspire to rescue a child from a situation where he cannot see any shining examples, any honest, decent people. Committed spouses. Committed parents. This does not mean that I cannot impart my transgenerational duty, my duty to actually help make a better world, not just one with better abstract ideals.

Because a world with marriage for gays would in fact be a better world.

Harris concludes that gays are outside of middle America and that they have no place trying to squeeze their way into it. He concludes that they shouldn't co-opt middle America's shining examples. Note, however, what Harris thinks of a shining example:

The shining example does not need to be the paragon of all virtues; in fact, he must not be. This is because what makes the shining example shine is not his immunity to human frailty, but his ability to rise above it when he encounters it in his own nature.

So what makes the Goodridges not shining examples? Or any of the other gay couples who have made families and committed themselves to each other for decades? Who have honesty and decency and integrity? As Harris points out, a shining example is not immune to human frailty; he overcomes it.

In essence, Harris is saying that homosexuality is a frailty. It is a weakness. And gays have overcome nothing. They have failed. This is the "hard and solid kernel of wisdom embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise their children". Homosexuality is a sin.

Harris tells me I am free to reject middle America's theology, and I do. But I am entreated to respect their "ethical fundamentalism", which is not a weakness for them but a "strength of character". But the only thing I that separates me from them, is that I haven't beaten my sexuality.

See, this isn't about honesty, or integrity, or decency, or any other homespun or corny principle. This is about homosexuality being wrong, being a weakness, being something to overcome. Lee Harris may think that; but I don't. And neither do hundreds of thousands of other gay Americans. My sexuality is a blessing, not a curse.

But I can tell you something that many gay Americans have overcome; the twisted lure of the gay underculture. The club-hopping, body-waxing, AIDS-infested, drug-addicted, free-loving promiscuity that plagues the community. And how have they overcome it? By forming stable, committed relationships in the face of the temptation of debauchery on the one side and the push away from "decent" Americans on the other. Ironically they found that stability in the values of middle America, the very middle America Harris claims all gays have abandoned. But he wants them to look elsewhere because to co-opt those values would be detrimental to "a fundamental ethical baseline below which [civilization] cannot be allowed to fall." One can only infer that that ethical baseline must not be lowered to include homosexuality as a virtue.

Well I will not take Harris' advice and beat "a rapid retreat from even the slightest whisper that marriage ever was or ever could be anything other than the shining example that most Americans still hold so sacred within their hearts." He wants gays to have their own shining examples. Well there are thousands of gays, right now, overcoming vices and raising children who will raise children that will make the world a better place. Just like their straight counterparts. My shining example looks conspicuously like their shining example, except while my shining example isn't necessarily gay, theirs is definitely not.

So, Mr. Harris, we have found our shining example which we've created "out of [our] own unique perspective on the world" and it looks an awful lot like middle America's. That's not so surprising when most of us came out of middle America in the first place. It probably means that our sexuality doesn't necessarily make our perspectives all that unique. Or at least any more unique than any other individual.

That said, I'd now like to participate in my transgenerational duty and get married. Is that ok now, middle America?