Saturday, March 30, 2013

Reifying Marriage


IM (an American citizen with an inquiring mind):  Gadfly, there is a lot of talk these days about same-sex marriage . . . even the Supreme Court is now involved.  But, before we delve into this topic, how was your paper presentation in New Orleans? 

Old Gadfly:  It went well, IM.  Amazingly, the research can help me explain what is happening with the same-sex marriage issue.  Let me say at the outset of our conversation that what we are witnessing is a process called the reification of marriage.  And, I know you will be engaged with me in this conversation because it is important, even though it involves a complexity that Copernican drones are incapable of understanding because they lack the motivation and the reasoning capacity to develop this level of critical analysis.  

IM:  What was the topic of your paper?

Old Gadfly:  The paper was part of a panel of presenters from academia and one from a government agency.  The theme of the panel was “The Emergence, Evolution, and Praxis of Ethics Systems.”  The title of my paper was “Values as Tagging Mechanism in Ethics Systems:  Linking Theory to Empirical Evidence Using a Phenomenology Design.”

IM:  What did you learn in your research for the presentation?

Old Gadfly:  Values are highly subjective—many based more on emotion than reason; yet, they serve as the signal, or what we call tagging mechanisms in complex adaptive system theory, for shaping ethics systems.  For example, justice is an important value—we can approach it from emotional and reasoned perspectives.  John Rawls, in his seminal work, A Theory of Justice,[1] claimed:

Among individuals with disparate aims and purposes a shared conception of justice establishes the bonds of civic friendship; the general desire for justice limits the pursuit of other ends.  One may think of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental charter of a well-ordered human association.[2]

Rawls admitted this definition is ideal by acknowledging that societies are seldom well-ordered. Thus, according to Rawls, institutions are needed, and “are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life”.[3]  The impact of Rawls’ logic is to support his claim that: “Clearly this distinction between the concept and the various conceptions of justice settles no important questions.  It simply helps to identify the role of the principles of social justice.”[4]  Thus, in Rawls’ reasoned judgment, justice is a means, not an end.  In the process, he reified the abstract concept of justice.  And you can see how Rawls' understanding of justice works its way into a topic such as same-sex marriage.  As I will further explain later, this type of elitist behavior is considered a social pathology.

To test my proposition that values serve as tagging mechanisms in shaping ethics systems, I developed a two-part theoretical framework.  The first part linked three theories at the individual level to understand how moral reasoning[5] is shaped by our neuro-networked brain functions[6] and the psychological needs that shape motivation.[7] See the graphic below.


Individuals are members of groups that I call collectives.  So, for the second part of the theoretical framework I hypothesized how the level of collective moral reasoning might be derived through a phenomenological (perceptions based on lived experience) analysis of Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil; and Robert D. Kaplan’s books, Balkan Ghosts:  A Journey through History, and The Arabists:  The Romance of an American Elite.  For this portion of the analysis, I used Robert Merton’s theory of social structure and anomie.[8]  See the next graphic below.



Merton theorized certain behaviors based on whether an individual (or as a collective, in the case of my analysis) accepts or rejects institutional means and accepts or rejects collective goals.  Anomie, some form of alienation from the existing structure, triggers a behavioral response.  As you can see in the graphic above, there are four primary behaviors:  conformity, ritualism, innovation, or retreatism. 

Conformists obey and do not challenge existing norms.  Ritualism is a pathological form of conformity.  As Merton described it: “activities originally conceived as instrumental are transmuted into ends in themselves.”[9]  An example is the food stamp program.  The Occupy Wall Street Movement also falls into this category because in the minds of this collective, the 1% symbolized by Wall Street greedily hoards wealth that belongs to the other 99%.  A significant number of Romney’s “47%” function in this category. 

In another category, those who innovate are willing to challenge existing norms.  Arguably, advocates for same-sex marriage operate in this realm.  We’ll talk more about this shortly.  In the fourth category, those who have given up by rejecting institutional means and collective goals, retreat.  This may explain why 7.9 million fewer Democrats and .8 million fewer Republicans voted in the 2012 elections compared with 2008. 

There is a fifth behavior, called rebellion, which seeks new institutional means and collective goals.  I would submit the Tea Party Movement (much like the Boston Tea Party experience) represents behavior in this category.

IM:  Did your analysis of Arendt and Kaplan link any evidence to theory?

Old Gadfly:  Yes.  While the results are preliminary at this point, they do paint a picture.  Arendt and Kaplan made phenomenological observations of various societies in their analyses.  By doing a content analysis of the context and language in Arendt’s and Kaplan’s narratives, the collective behavior of the various societies appeared to manifest features summarized in the following graphic.

  

            IM:  Can you walk me through this chart with an example?

            Old Gadfly:  Sure. Let me describe Arendt’s characterization of Israelis.  Members of the Israeli government located Adolph Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel for trial.  As you can imagine, the holocaust was an emotional memory for many Israelis, just as 9/11 was for Americans.  Yet, the striking difference is that Eichmann was arguably responsible for sending six to 15 million Jews and other Eastern Europeans to Nazi concentration camps for extermination.  Osama bin Laden, on the other hand (within a later historical context not examined by Arendt in her particular narrative), was responsible for the loss of around 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 (9/11), yet also responsible for the deaths of others, in the hundreds (not millions), in other parts of the world. 

The collective Israeli approach was conformist in so far as it accepted institutional means for promoting justice and accepted the Israeli goal of justice within its sovereign borders and within the international system.  As such, the Israelis were operating with deliberative moral reasoning characterized as Kolberg’s Stage 6 (universal principles).  This level of moral reasoning implied that, within this particular historical context, Israelis had achieved a collective motivational level of self-actualization. Maslow[10] provided a clear definition of self-actualization:  “It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially.”[11]  To this day, the Israeli nation fights for self-fulfillment as a nation.  Finally, since the Israelis were willing to invest the time and resources to try Eichmann in a court of law, open to the public, they were operating at what MacLean calls the neocortex complex level, which allows associative reasoning unconstrained by emotion or memory, or the pressing need for survival.

IM:  Since you mentioned the American action against bin Laden, how would you characterize Americans in their approach, especially as indicated by strong public sentiment in support of it?

Old Gadfly:  Ironically, America’s response could have been an opportunity for a real teaching moment, especially for an individual who campaigned on moral righteousness.  Here is how I would characterize Americans in this particular instance:  conformist, Stage 1 and 2, security, and reptilian.  The conformist distinction aligns with institutional means for promoting security and the importance of security as a goal.  Moral reasoning reflected an intuitive response characterized as the importance of obedience and punishment at Stage 1, and self-interest at Stage 2.  The motivational level clearly reflected the motivation for security.  Finally, while the memory of 9/11 still evoked a nation-wide emotional element, many have rationalized that by not executing bin Laden in favor of attempting to bring him to trial would have rallied other terrorists; further, a capture might have incurred too much risk for the SEAL team.  No doubt, these rationalizations have merit as hypothetical conjectures.  However, since the removal of bin Laden, al Qaeda-affiliated terrorism has not gone away.  The tagging mechanism related to this form of terrorism is an abstract ideology that was symbolized in concrete form by bin Laden.  Our attempt to reify the al Qaeda behavior by thinking al Qaeda would disappear with the execution of its concrete symbol did nothing to dismantle the abstract organizing signal.  The ideology remains intact.  Thus, our response characterized more of a reptilian approach, fueled by the memories and emotions at the paleomammalian level of functioning.  In the long-run, the execution reinforced this level of terroristic collective behavior and diminished America’s strategic moral standing.        

IM:  This is fascinating, Gadfly, and I want to learn more about your study; but already, given your description of how values serve as tagging mechanisms for shaping ethics systems, I can infer some of the illogic of the push for same-sex marriage.  I want to try my hand at explaining it to you, but I must admit your comment about the reification of marriage stumped me.  What is reification?

            Old Gadfly:  Essentially, reification is making a thing out of something abstract.  It’s an attempt to make an abstraction more concrete and, in the process, diminishes the original meaning of the abstraction.  Marxist reification dealt with labor, and this form of reification haunts us today (I am stupefied that we have and apparently tolerate unionized government officials in a constitutional republic). 

One of the first sources on reification with which I am personally familiar was Robert Merton.[12]  Now, understand, Merton’s research took place in the 1930s.  He was very much aware of the liberal fascination with Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, and their statist-oriented social experimentation.  Eugenics was an important goal imposed upon  society by the political and intellectual elite.  Even the great American champion of progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, believed in eugenics.  These efforts were examples of reification of governance and the collective behavior of the governed.  Merton never used the word, reification, in his analysis, yet implied it in other language.  Here is an example from Merton:

The empirical observation is incontestable: activities oriented toward certain values release processes which so react as to change the very scale of values which precipitated them. This process may in part be due to the fact that when a system of basic values enjoins certain specific actions, adherents are not concerned with the objective consequences of these actions but only with the subjective satisfaction of duty well performed. Or, action in accordance with a dominant set of values tends to be focused upon that particular value-area. But with the complex interaction which constitutes society, action ramifies, its consequences are not restricted to the specific area in which they were initially intended to center, they occur in interrelated fields explicitly ignored at the time of action. Yet it is because these fields are in fact interrelated that the further consequences in adjacent areas tend to react upon the fundamental value-system. It is this usually unlooked-for reaction which constitutes a most important element in the process of secularization, of the transformation or breakdown of basic value-systems. Here is the essential paradox of social action--the "realization" of values may lead to their renunciation.[13]

            In a fairly recent lecture[14] at the University of California at Berkeley, Axel Honneth, a product of the Frankfurt School, spoke about reification:

There are innumerable investigations in the domain of cultural sociology or social psychology that have discerned an increasingly strong tendency on the part of subjects to feign certain feelings or desires for opportunistic reasons, until they eventually come to experience these very same feelings and desires as genuine elements of their own personality. This is a form of emotional self-manipulation that Lukacs already had in mind when he described journalism as being a “prostitution” of “experiences and beliefs,” regarding it as the “apogee” of social reification.[15]

Some scholars, such as Lukacs in this particular case, are not intellectually constrained—they understand and have the courage to proclaim the consequential disservice modern journalists commit in the name of journalism. In his lecture, Honneth emphasized that reification is a social pathology, where the instrumental aspect of behavior tends toward selfishness and self-interest with careless and thoughtless disregard for the consequences imposed on the broader collective.  Honneth went on to say:

. . . “reification” is used in a decidedly normative sense; it signifies a type of human behavior that violates moral or ethical principles by not treating other subjects in accordance with their characteristics as human beings, but instead as numb and lifeless objects—as “things” or “commodities.” The empirical phenomena thereby referred to encompass tendencies as disparate as the increasing demand for surrogate mothers, the commodification of romantic and familial relationships, and the boom in the sex industry.[16]

IM, does this provide a sufficient notion of reification?

IM:  Yes, and I see now why you say the current activities related to same-sex marriage are a form of reification.  Traditionalists believe marriage, as an abstraction, has promoted stability within society by perpetuating the agape form of love between a man and a woman, living in harmony with the Laws of Nature.  Living in harmony with the Laws of Nature means procreating and nurturing children for future posterity.  Other forms of love such as filial (friendship or brotherhood of a nonsexual nature) and Eros (sexual affection) represent lower motivational needs (sexual appetites, sexual pleasure, belonging, etc.) and as such tend to be more instrumental than agape; thus, more selfish and self-interested.  Yet, many would argue that even traditional marriage has social pathologies in the form of divorce, abuse, and so forth.

Old Gadfly:  It is true that there are pathologies as you describe.  Do these manifestations, based on intention and choice, invalidate the traditional abstract concept of marriage?

IM:  I sense not, but I’m looking for a neocortex level response.

Old Gadfly:  Let me help you out.  Do all traditional marriages start out from an agape form of love?

IM:  I suspect, many evolve out of a filial form, especially those who cohabitate for some time.  Others try to legitimize an out-of wedlock pregnancy.

Old Gadfly:  None of those you describe is beyond primitive or emotional perspectives.  How about couples who start out with an agape form but later divorce?

IM:  My sense is that one or both individuals take on greater selfishness or self-interest that makes the original bond vulnerable.

Old Gadfly:  I agree.  Our quick analysis does not invalidate the traditional concept of marriage.  The only logical way to invalidate it is to reify it.  So, let’s get more specific regarding how marriage is reified.  How does social science reconcile with biological science in this regard?  Is sexual orientation a genetic and involuntary disposition?  If so, does this not justify, from a moral reasoning perspective, the opportunity to marry someone of the same sex?

IM:  Gadfly, you already know the answer, because we discussed this question before; but for the sake of completing our analysis, I’ll answer the questions you pose.  First, behaviors are phenotypic in nature—that is, shaped by one’s environment and experiences.  Behaviors may be predisposed genetically, that is, humans are predisposed to eating and sexual activity based on genetic material.  A dandelion exhibits behavior by orienting toward the sun.  This is a primitive form of genetically predisposed behavior.  Further, all life forms below the human being lack any form of intention.  Our dandelion cannot choose to orient away from the sun.  However, the orientation of sexual behavior in a human being is certainly influenced or shaped by one’s environment and personal experiences; but the human being has the designed capacity (i.e., associative reasoning in the neocortex complex) to choose how to accommodate environmental influences.  I don’t know about you, Gadfly, but I remember feeling pretty comfortable with frat house sexual mores until I met my wife to be.  My whole outlook on life moved well beyond the frat house primitive orientation.  When the environment and personal experiences are reified through rationalization, those who embrace this form of rationalization have lost the capacity and discernment to reason deliberately—unless confronted with an alternative worldview.

Along these lines, I was amused and disappointed by an op-ed piece by a professor of biology in yesterday’s New York Times, trying to use science as justification for same-sex marriage.  Professor David Haskell reifies the abstract meaning of marriage by explaining human behavior as an analog to lower life forms.  So, The New York Times, evidenced by this op-ed piece along with a strong advocacy for same sex marriage, demonstrates what Lukacs meant when he “described journalism as being a ‘prostitution’ of ‘experiences and beliefs,’ regarding it as the ‘apogee’ of social reification.”[17]  Even worse, the professor is teaching our young people who are experiencing the same frat house environment to which I just confessed.

Old Gadfly:  Great analysis, IM.  Before we close our conversation, summarize where we are on the same-sex marriage issue.

IM:  As you explained in a previous conversation on memes, the whole same-sex marriage notion is a strong and contagious notion stemming from the reification of the concept of marriage.  I suspect as this wave continues to build same-sex marriage will run its course.  The beauty of the theory of evolution is that it allows mutations to occur.  These mutations allow some diversity to challenge the existing order.  Same-sex marriage is such a mutation.  In this case, even though purchased adoptions bring children into a “same sex” relationship, adopted children do not get to perpetuate the “genetic” material of their adopted guardians, only the “phenotypic” material.  Yes, there are cases where natural children of women become members of a lesbian relationship.  But one partner is not a biological parent.  In both cases, children are reified when they enter such an environment because they have no choice in the matter. 

I’ll close by saying, in terms of the durability of the same-sex form of “marital” species, the Laws of Nature will dictate how well it will survive in the long run.  I’ll offer a hint:  a species must be able to biologically replicate itself.  In the short-run, however, there will be unintended consequences.  This reality was so eloquently explained by Merton, when he said action ramifies such that “consequences are not restricted to the specific area in which they were initially intended to center, they occur in interrelated fields explicitly ignored at the time of action.”[18]   Those directly affected by the issue is small.  A recent Gallup report indicates about 3.4% of the population claim to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual.  And the highest percentage is among the 18 to 29 year group.  Fifty-three percent of Americans favor legalizing same-sex marriage.  Yet, when many who are not gay, lesbian, or bisexual are asked why they support same-sex marriage, typical responses are mostly emotional—he’s my son, she’s my friend, they appear to love each other, it’s not fair to deny the same right to others, and so forth.  ProCon.org, a 501(c)(3), summed up the arguments this way: 

Proponents argue that same-sex couples should have access to the same marriage benefits and public acknowledgment enjoyed by heterosexual couples and that prohibiting gay marriage is unconstitutional discrimination.

Opponents argue that altering the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman will further weaken a threatened institution and that legalizing gay marriage is a slippery slope that may lead to polygamous and interspecies marriages.

Look at the loaded language:  “benefits and public acknowledgement enjoyed by heterosexual couples.”  What are the benefits?  If the joy of producing new life is a benefit, then legalizing a gay marriage will not enable this.  If inheritance and other economic or financial benefits are the intent, then civil union laws provide for this.  Public acknowledgement is public-wide reification of the traditional concept of marriage.  The ProCon.org language also assumes opponents to same-sex marriage presume traditional marriage is a weakened and threatened institution.  Same-sex marriage is an imitation.  Tom Cruise’s heroic feats in Top Gun were an imitation.  Top Gun and its popularity did not weaken or threaten the real fighter pilot institution.  Yet, Top Gun was a great way of reifying the fighter pilot world by making it more concrete for the theater patrons.  Finally, the slippery slope toward polygamous and interspecies marriages is an extreme red herring.  The slippery slope is the one or more generations of lost children who will be phenotypically shaped and discriminated against in terms of the potential for self-actualization by the selfish and self-interested behaviors of those fighting for moral legitimacy.        

            Old Gadfly:  Thanks for the reasoned work out, IM.  Our discussion is an example of how religious orthodoxy can influence unreasoned behavior.

            IM:  We never addressed this issue from a Judeo-Christian perspective.

            Old Gadfly:  Your observation is correct.  The entire Western culture has yet to truly comprehend the ubiquitous orthodoxy of secular humanism.  Another discussion for another day.  



[1] Rawls, J.  (1999).  A theory of justice (Rev. ed.).  Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.
[2] Ibid, p. 5.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Vol. 1. Moral stages and the idea of justice: Essays on moral development. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.
[6] MacLean, P. D. (1990). The triune brain in evo­lution: Role in paleocerebral functions.  New York, NY:  Plenum Press.
[7] Maslow, A. H.  (1943).  A theory of human motivation.  Psychological Review, 50, 370-396.  Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
[8] Merton, R.  (1938).  Social structure and anomie.  American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672-692.
[9] Ibid, p. 673.
[10] Maslow, A. H.  (1943).  A theory of human motivation.  Psychological Review, 50, 370-396.  Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
[11] Ibid, p. 382.
[12] Merton, R.  (1936).  The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action.  American Sociological Review, 1(6), 894-904.
[13] Ibid, p. 903.
[14] Honneth, A.  (2005).  Reification:  A recognition-theoretical view.  The Tanner Lectures of Human Values, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, March 14-16, 2005.  Retrieved from http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Honneth_ 2006.pdf
[15] Ibid, p. 93.
[16] Ibid, p. 94.
[17] As cited in Honneth, p. 93.
[18] Merton, (1936), p. 903.

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