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, 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.
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”. 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.” 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 is shaped by our neuro-networked
brain functions
and the psychological needs that shape motivation. 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. 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.” 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 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.” 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. 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.
In a
fairly recent lecture 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.
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.
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.” 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.”
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.
