Single-Spouse Marriage Systems: the elite male problem

While most human marriages have been one husband, one wife, most human societies have permitted multiple-spouse marriages. Most commonly, they permitted a man to have more than one wife.

Since fathering a child takes rather less inherent biological effort than mothering one, it is hardly surprising that multiple wives (polygyny) is the most common deviation from single-spouse marriage.

In societies where women make substantial contributions to subsistence — almost invariably, hoe-farming societies — rates of polygyny can get very high. For the cost of adding extra wives is much less than in societies where males dominate subsistence activity: typically plough-farming and pastoralist societies.

Foraging societies tend to have low levels of polygyny, as subsistence contributions are relatively even (the subsistence contribution of women is more constant, that of men more nutrient dense) and entirely labour driven. There are no productive assets, beyond weapons and other hand-held tools.

The landscape management and foraging complexity of Aboriginal societies in Australia generated distinctive patterns of gerontocratic polygyny. Old men married young women, young men married their widows and, in their old age, married young women. It kept fertility down and fostered the transfer of complex foraging knowledge across the generations. They also developed some extraordinarily complex marriage-and-kin systems as part of complex landscape management, as that preserved a rolling network of kin connections.

If women control the main productive asset, and there is no other basis for elite male status, then there is no elite male problem. If that is not the case, then if a society is going to have compulsory single-spouse marriage systems, it is the elite males who have to be convinced. There seems to be two general reasons for the elite males to accept single-spouse marriage.

First, there are very strong pressures for social cohesion. If there is a need to have maximum internal cohesiveness against outside groups — specifically, if there is a need to include low-status males — then a single-spouse system minimises internal sexual competition and maximises the breadth of stakes in the success of the group. The fewer elite males there are, the lower the cohesion pressures need to be for such an arrangement to emerge.

This is the pattern that seems to explain the emergence of single-spouse systems in the classical Mediterranean and in groups such as the early Christians and the Alevis. In the case of classical Greece and Rome, access to slaves further reduced the cost of single-spouse marriage to elite males.

The second reason for single-spouse marriage being accepted by elite males is if the education cost of raising a child, particularly a son, to elite status is sufficiently high. Multiple-wife systems mean less investment by the father in individual children. If such an investment is at a premium, then a single wife is a better option.

This is the pattern you see in the Indian caste system and in the modern world. Brahmins could theoretically have multiple wives, but very rarely did, as the training investment in raising a Brahmin son was so high. Indeed, this very high training cost seems likely to be the reason why the jati system developed — to ensure the daughters of Brahmin, who understood the needs of raising a Brahmin son, were available to marry Brahmin grooms.

Single-spouse systems did not develop as territorial or population expansion devices. On the contrary, polygyny is a much better territorial expansion device because it creates a shortage of wives. Polygyny creates a shortage of wives as a woman who gets married leaves the marriage market, but her husband does not. So low-status men end up excluded from the marriage market. The classic response to this problem is “those people over there have women, take theirs”.

Islam sanctified this pattern, with the Quran explicitly endorsing sexual access to “those your right hand possesses” (Ma malakat aymanukum: i.e. women acquired by the sword). Sanctified sexual predation helped drive the territorial expansion of Islam for a thousand years. From its rise in C7th Arabia to the turning back of Islamic expansion into Europe after the Battle of Vienna, 12 September 1683. (And yes, that is apparently why 11 September was chosen in 2001.)

The Norse (Viking) raids also seemed to have been significantly fuelled by polygyny and died away as the Norse lands Christianised.

If external expansion is fuelled by low-status men seeking women that the local marriage market does not provide them, then elite males have no reason to accept a single-spouse system. Which comes back to; if one wants to explain why a single-spouse system is being accepted, then one has to explain why elite males have accepted the system, as they are giving up the benefits of multiple wives.

These musings are part of the intellectual scaffolding for a book to be published by Connor Court looking at the social dynamics of marriage. As they are somewhat a work in progress, they may be subject to ongoing fiddling.

Origins of philosophy

This very short post by philosopher Stephen Hicks states that:

*Metaphysically*, philosophy was born with Thales and the Milesians. *Epistemologically*, it was born with Parmenides and the Eleatics.
The Milesian school began around 600 BCE on the coast of Asia minor. The Eleatic school began around 500 BCE about 1100 kilometers west in the southern Italian peninsula.

He also has a nice post on what distinguishes philosophy from pre-philosophic thought.

There are three original cultures with serious philosophical traditions -- Greece, northern India and China. Their philosophical traditions all started in periods of small, competing polities sharing a common language and culture: the Archaic Period in Greece (776-480 BC), the Srmana Period in northern India (700s-332BC ) and the Spring and Autumn Period in China (771-456BC).

The contiguous time periods are very noticeable. One can see why German philosopher Karl Jaspers came up with the notion of an Axial Age. As for what they have in common, one is that they all had contact with the militarised pastoralist societies which developed as a result of the invention of the composite recurve bow and effective deployment of mounted archers. They were periods of increased urbanisation (particularly noticeable in India but also in the Hellenic world.) They were all places that developed coinage but that was after philosophy and is a natural response by urbanised trading polities to intense inter-polity competition.

In the case of China, the focus was on competing autocracies developing out of a vassalage-and-honour ("feudal") system. So Chinese philosophy focused on how to live and what to serve (Confucianism), how to rule (Legalism) and how to navigate serenely a world of flux (Taoism).

India had a range of types of polities, including deliberative assembly republics. The Vedic order was collapsing and being challenged by new ideas, notably Buddhism and Jainism, followed by the Brahmin response, which led to what is known as Hinduism or better understood as the Hindu synthesis. This clash of ideas, ways of thought, ways of being governed, led to the very rich Indian philosophical tradition, ranging from mathematics to ethics to metaphysics but with a strong tendency to an otherworldly focus.

The Hellenic world (which ranged from Spain to Crimea) also had a wide range of types of polities, but much less religious flux, resulting in a very rich philosophical tradition ranging from mathematics, to ethics to metaphysics but with a stronger element of epistemology than elsewhere and a more this-world focus leading to proto-science and (if physicist and historian of science Lucio Russo is correct) a full-blown Scientific Revolution in the Hellenistic Period.

Philosophy starting in culturally linked competing jurisdictions makes sense because:
(1) thinkers could move from less friendly to more friendly locales;
(2) diversity of polities led to more chances of "positive mutations" (i.e. mixtures of circumstances and institutions provoking, or friendly to, more intense and broader reasoning);
(3) common language facilitated far more connections between thinkers and ideas.

India and the Hellenic world had a far richer range of polities than China, leading to a much broader range of experience and examples for reasoning about social and political matters. The effect was much stronger in the Hellenic world, which had few significant monarchies and which was in contact with a much broader range of societies and geographies than northern India and far more so than China. In particular, the sheer number of polities with deliberative assemblies made the politics of persuasion a much stronger factor. This encourages thinking about rhetoric but also public reasoning in general.

So, it is not surprising that the Hellenic world had a somewhat broader ambit of philosophy than India and that both had much broader than China. Nor is it surprising that philosophy, as with other forms of human creativity, tends to operate more strongly in periods of polity diversity and competition.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Empires of the Silk Road (1): from Scythians to Tamerlaine

Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is a history of central Eurasia that anyone interested in the wider patterns of world history should read. It is a book with the “barbarians”, the steppe nomads, at the centre. In reconfiguring Eurasian history Beckwith, almost as an afterthought, puts European imperialism in the context of Eurasian history far better than anyone else I have read—even those who were deliberately, even ostentatiously, trying to do so. He also engages in passionate critique and denunciation of modernism and postmodernism, but I have already discussed that.

Beckwith states his purpose quite clearly in his preface:

my aim has been to write a realistic, objective view of Central Eurasia ad Central Eurasians (p.xii).

The book was sparked by calculations finding that the trade in luxury goods must have constituted a major part of the economy of central Eurasia with subsequent study finding that:

the appearance, waxing and waning, and disappearance of Silk Road commerce paralleled that of the native Central Eurasian empires chronologically (p.xii)

with the book evolving significantly from its original conception due to Beckwith’s developing understanding as he assembled the materials for his book.

Beckwith laments the lack of scholarly depth (or even elementary coverage) on much of Central Eurasian history. He attacks the stereotypical view of the steppe nomads as distinct from agrarians and city-dwellers and as warlike, poor and hard-to-defeat natural warriors. A view he regards as comprehensively wrong (Ppxii-xxiii). In particular, agrarianism and urbanism were both part of the steppe empires.

Trading warriors
The central economic dynamic in the interaction between steppe peoples and the agrarian peoples was trade. Trade within the steppe empires and trade with the “river valley” empires. The most salient and lucrative being the trading of nomad horses for Chinese silk. An imported horse cost between 25 and 38 bolts of raw silk (p.22). China was unable to raise enough horses for its own needs (apparently due to a lack of Selenium in its soil). The vast majority of steppe silk came from trade and taxation, not war and extortion (p.23). Beckwith’s identification of trade as being the central dynamic in interactions between nomad pastoralists and urbanised agrarians replicates Salzman’s analysis.

Beckwith identifies the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex as a link across cultures and times:

The most crucial element of the early form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was the socio-political ideal of the heroic lord and his comitatus, a war band and his friends sworn to defend him to the death (p.12).

A pattern that extends at least as far back as the Scythians and from the Anglo-Saxon huscarls of Britain (an archipelago off the coast of north-west Eurasia) to the Japanese samurai (inhabitants of an archipelago off the coast of north-east Eurasia). Since a leader was expected to provide his comitatus with luxurious gifts (p.26), trade was central to the warrior and leadership culture in the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex from the Norse, right across Eurasia (Pp165ff). As later developments from this original source, samurai Japan developed a vigorous mercantile culture, just as knightly Europe did.

A colleague of mine suggested that the Germanic cultures developed feudalism when the Celtic cultures did not because a German warrior was permitted to sell his loyalty. The same point applies the samurai of Japan (who adopted the model, probably while in Korea [Pp90-1, 106]). In both cultures, oath-breaking was heinous, as one would expect. A contractual culture can only work if contracts are taken seriously and the binding of leader and warriors (or of warrior to warrior) was the central “glue” of the society—blood brotherhood as the substitute for the “automatic” brotherhood of blood relations. (And chosen connections according to evolved rules have rather different implications than the automatic associations of lineage: there is, for example, much less reason to develop binding institutions outside of lineage if lineage connections trump all.)

In a similar vein, Beckwith argues that the Germanic conquests represented the “re-Central Eurasianisation” of Europe and the “feudal revolution” of Europe was the product of that (Pp109ff).

Beckwith argues that the comitatus was imported into Islam as the mamluk or ghulam system, which he denies was a slave soldier system (p.25). The suggestion of importation of the concept makes sense, particularly given the historical connections Beckwith points to. While the original cases may well have been free warriors, that they did not become slave soldier systems seems more dubious. The Janissaries clearly were, for example. Given how extensive Islamic slaving and slave-trading was, slaves provided an obvious recruitment method: particularly after initial connections to recruitment sources faded and given the lineage-based loyalty systems in the wider society.
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Beckwith argues firmly that the chariot was a Central Eurasian development, from about 2000BC, given the domesticated horse preceded the chariot there, while it appears with the chariot in the river valley civilisations from Shang China to Mesopotamia and Egypt, its ritual and prestige use flowing from its hunting and military use(Pp50ff). The C17thBC saw a wave of war-chariot peoples seizing control of Central Anatolia (the Hittites), Upper Mesopotamia (Mitanni) and Greek Aegean (the Mycenaeans). The war chariot was a light and manoeuvrable vehicle, unlike the earlier four-wheeled ox-wagons. The development of running javelin throwers to disable horses, chariots and charioteers brought the military effectiveness of chariots to an end during the Bronze Age collapse , though their prestige (and racing) uses lasted much longer (Pp56-7).

Intellectual zing
Beckwith notes that there is an outbreak of intellectual ferment in the fifth and fourth century BC in the Hellenic, Indic and Sinic worlds centred around archetypal figures such as Socrates (469-399BC), Plato (427-347BC), Aristotle (384-322BC), Guatama Buddha (c.500BC), Panini (c.C4thBC), Kautilya (c.321-296BC), Confucius (c550-480BC), Lao-tzu (c.late C5thBC), Chuang Tzu (C4thBC). While tracing many specific borrowings has been difficult, Beckwith points out that:

… there are some, and it must furthermore be considered odd if such distant areas as East Asia and the Aegean … should have started arguing not only about their actual governments but about government in general, asking questions about their existence, and talking about logic and looking into the way the human mind works. … The asking of question about the questions themselves was new, and it is difficult to find the precedents or motivation for the development in each case (Pp73-4).

Beckwith notes some common features—each culture was divided by large number of states, none dominant (what economists call competitive jurisdictions), they shared in the increase in world trade due to the rise of the nomadic empires (with the consequent growth of a commercial class and spread of ideas). Any connection was by land and went through Central Eurasia.

Beckwith notes that, in the C6th and early C5th, the entire northern steppe zone and much of the Central Asian zone was Iranian speaking. Anacharsis the Scythian visited Greece in the 47th Olympiad (591-588BC). Demosthenes was the grandson of a Scythian woman. Zoroaster likely came from pastoral Iranian society. There are references to Confucius suggesting Central Eurasians had answers. Whatever the reason why such widely separated cultures showed such a striking surge in intellectual creativity in the same period, it is surely likely to involve the cultural realm that linked them—Central Eurasia (Pp73ff).

Steppe nomads generally led longer, more prosperous and easier lives, than the inhabitants of agrarian cultures (p.76). This would certainly provide the basis for their own intellectual surge. Moreover, by being link cultures—that is, being in contact with a range of different civilisations—that may well have encouraged asking more basic questions, given the range of cultural outlooks they were confronted with. That, after all, was the experience of early Islam, as it surged across the Middle East and North Africa, and of post-medieval Western Europe, as it surged across the globe.

The trade imperative
Beckwith argues forcefully that the notion of barbarian nomads raiding and pillaging victimised agrarian cultures is a result of accepting uncritically the self-justifying propaganda of the great imperial agrarian empires. On the contrary, he argues, the steppe peoples were far more often subject to aggression and disruption by the imperial states. This could be ultimately self-defeating, as encouraging instability and division among steppe peoples undermined the flow of trade:

The aggressive foreign policy successes of the Chinese and Roman empires had disastrous consequences. The partial closing of the frontier to trade by other empires, and their destabilisation of Central Eurasia by their incessant attacks, resulted in internecine warfare in the region. The serious decline in Silk Road commerce that followed—observable in the shrinkage of areal extent of Central Asian cities—may have been one of the long-lasting recession that eventually brought down both the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Han Empire… and with them the end of the end of Classical civilization (p.92).

The cooling weather and spread of disease may also have been factors, of course.

In the C3rd, a great wandering of peoples roiled around Central Asia, Northern China and Western Europe, spreading the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex from Spain to Japan (p.94). The most dramatic manifestation being the rise and vanishing of the Hun empire, though the destruction of the army of the Eastern Roman Empire by the Goths at Adrianople was the most cataclysmic single event. Beckwith points out the persistent pattern of Roman duplicity in dealing with the Central Eurasian peoples (Pp94ff). When things (eventually) settled down, Germanic warrior cultures manifesting the Central Eurasian Culture Complex dominated remnants of Mediterranean Classical Culture (with a Judaic religious overlay):

The resulting blending of the Central Eurasian Germanic peoples and their Romanized subjects laid the foundation of what eventually became a distinctive new European civilization (p.101).

Beckwith examines the incentives and imperatives driving the Central Eurasian peoples. Beckwith notes that:

All empire builders, whether ruled by nomadic or agrarian dynasties, attempted to expand as far as possible in all directions.

But the steppes are lands without natural borders and herds do not have the same attachment to specific territory that farming does, so

… from a Central Eurasian point of view borders were meaningless. As a consequence, when a winning clan was extraordinarily successful, the new nation would rapidly expand across the entire expanse of the Central Eurasian steppe zone right up to the walls and fortresses of the peripheral empires (p.108).

The archetypal examples being Scythians (or Northern Iranians), the Turks and the Mongols.

Imperial instability
The decline of Rome and Han China encouraged migration. The economic difficulties of the border lands of the Empires encouraged nomad rulers—wanting trade goods to bind their comitatus—to move closer to the wealthy centres of the Empires, setting in place destructive spirals that consumed the Western Roman Empire, though the (somewhat reduced) Eastern Roman Empire and Persian Empires managed to survive (Pp108ff). The consequence for the rest of Europe was the creation of warrior rule leading to the “feudal” (peasants work for knight, knight protects peasants) system and the creation of medieval Europe (Pp110-1).

Beckwith sees the reforms of Heraclius and his grandson Constans II (the last Roman consul)—creating the system of themes—and the loss of Syria and Egypt to the Arab Conquest as marking the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and the beginning of the Byzantine Empire (p.122). If one is going to make such a division, that is a good place to make it, even though its inhabitants continued to consider themselves Romans and they were named such by the cultures around them.

The pattern of brief and bloody unification under the Qin followed by long reign of the Han was repeated with a brief and bloody unification under the Sui followed by the long reign of the T’ang, a dynasty with strong Central Eurasian antecedents and connections (p.124). Turks had been invited by various contestants for power during the turmoil that saw the T’ang replace the Sui, and this “aggression” was used as an excuse to expand into Turkic territories as part of the T’ang desire to emulate and outdo the Han and establish the greatest empire yet (p.125). The T’ang allied with the Arabs to break a Turkic-Tibetan alliance that raised the perennial Chinese fear of “being cut off” from the trade to the West (p.134) (i.e. having to deal with a single jurisdiction in its landward trade).

Beckwith notes the attention given by surrounding civilisations to Central Eurasian affairs in this period, due to concern for trade and because of a common ideology of a single legitimate ruler (their own: whether Roman Emperor, Caliph, Son of Heaven or whatever). Contact via Central Eurasia helped force awareness of other empires and led to some almost amusing diplomatic circumlocutions. Yet, despite the constant warfare this ideology of single legitimate ruler encouraged, trade continued to expand across the Silk Road until the middle of C8th (p.139).

Religious branding
Religions played their own role in this mix: the Frankish Empire with Catholicism, the “Byzantine” Empire with Orthodoxy, the Islam of the Arab Empire, the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, of the Uighurs to Manicheanism and the Tibetan Kingdom to Buddhism (Pp148ff). The T’ang empire adopted Taoism (to the disapproval of the Confucian mandarinate) and became increasingly severe towards other religions while the “Byzantine” Empire had a series of Iconoclast rulers, who supported this unusual diversion from mainstream Orthodoxy with torture and murder (p.150). (Though, of course, there had been plenty of torture and murder in the establishment and maintenance of said Orthodoxy in the first place.)

With these religions went literacy—sacred texts generally being central to them—and the result was a great flowering in literary and graphic art from Japan to Europe (p.156).

The late C8th saw a decline in international trade for reasons which are unclear, though Beckwith points out the systematic Chinese massacre of Sogdians (men, women and children) “and anyone who looked even remotely non-Chinese” after the suppression of the disastrous An Lu-shan Rebellion could hardly have helped trade relations (p.157). The T’ang Empire suffered continuing economic decline, with barter increasingly replacing money, and apparently pulled the international trading system down with it (p.156). The T’ang massacred the Uighurs, exterminated Manicheanism and went on to attempt the same with Buddhism, ending the T’ang cultural revival and going into a spiralling decline that led to the collapse of the dynasty within 50 years (p.160). The Frankish, Tibetan and Abbasid empires broke up leaving the “Byzantine” Empire as the remaining large state in or around Central Eurasia (Pp161ff).

The decline of powerful secular states left religious authority to fill the vacuum. Tibet became dominated by Buddhist monasticism, which also spread across China, Korea and Japan. Christian monasticism flourished in Europe. The Sufi brotherhoods provided an Islamic equivalent. Monasticism spread literacy, but also spread religious orthodoxy. A climactic downturn encouraged southward migrations from the northern steppes, a major disturbing factor in Central Eurasia. The Rus Norse-Slavic culture, and nomadic dynasties in northern China, both straddled the geographic boundary between nomadic and agrarian cultures, spreading agrarian urbanisation into the Western and the Eastern Steppes (Pp163ff).

At first, the relatively small size of individual states “limited the evil that governments and politicians could do to individuals” (Pp176-7) as artists, philosophers, scholars and thinkers could move to more amenable polities: the competitive jurisdictions effect once more. But the consequent intellectual flowering in Islam failed under the assault of religious conservatism led by al-Ghazali, who used the techniques of the philosophers against them in the service of dogma. Averroes (ibn Rushd) rebutted his arguments, but he was on the periphery of the Islamic world in Spain while al-Ghazali operated near its centre. Averroes was very influential in Latin Christendom, had almost no influence in Islam and “saw the destruction of Islamic intellectual life by rabid religious conservatives in his own lifetime” (Pp178-9).

Just as Islam was turning it back on reason, Latin Christendom was in an intellectual ferment from the interaction with Islam in Spain and Outremer (Pp180ff). One reinforced by the (albeit temporary) Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.

Eventually, the Mongols—who had remained animist during their great imperial expansion—adopted Buddhism (P.194). The pax Mongolica promoted trade and movements of people. Which also promoted movement of disease. The Black Death started as a pandemic in northern China, killing possibly 90% of the population, spreading across the trade routes to Europe, where it killed perhaps a third of the population. It had a disastrous effect on the Mongol successor states. “The Calamitous Fourteenth Century” was so throughout Central Eurasia (Pp195ff).

The spread of the plague also had a disastrous long-term effect on the mamluk regime in Egypt: medieval Europe, on the other hand, was given a major impetus (back) on the path of economic development through capital-substitution which the great expansion in European population up to the Great Famine of the early C14th had threatened to derail.

Beckwith places Tamerlaine very much as a Central Eurasian figure: a dynastic founder with armies of cavalry and infantry, expert at conquering cities operating off a base that was substantially urban and agrarian (p.200). Beckwith notes the positive effect Mongol rule had for trade and transmission of ideas and techniques, including art and literature, but downplays the notion that it was some transformative event in world history: the ethnic patterns that outlived it already existed (Pp202-3) while the promotion of trade had been a perennial aim of Central Eurasian nomadic peoples.

But, with the passing of Tamerlaine and the failure of his dynasty to produce anything other than squabbling (and shrinking) local principalities, the old patterns were about to be transformed by a revolution in world affairs, covered in the next part of this book review, which concludes in a third post.

Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries

Skepticlawyer recommended Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, a fine, erudite study of the persistence and suppression of paganism under the Christian emperors.

What struck me was MacMullen’s mastery of sources, some quite obscure. The chapter headings—Persecution, The Cost to the Persecuted, Superstition, Assimilation, Summary—summarise MacMullen’s thesis quite nicely. That paganism was seriously persecuted by Christian rulers, that Christianity (once it became the official doctrine of the Empire) spread more by the operation of legal and other penalties and inducements than preaching (particularly among the elite), that paganism was a more resilient competitor than it has often been given credit, that Christianity assimilated much of the rituals, observances and functions of paganism. A thesis advanced via citing much revealing incident and careful sense of evidence. Including how much our evidence has been strained through Christian sources and selection. Scraping off the last copy of Cicero on political good sense for the hundredth (surviving) copy of Augustine’s meditations on the Psalms is a typically vivid example of this process (p.2).

In the first paragraph of his Preface, MacMullen, sets the story as the replacement of one Establishment with another where we already know how the story ends (p.1). MacMullen then launches into a discussion of the problem of evidence: not only loss of sources but the suppression or congenial reconstrual of the inconvenient:

The father of ecclesiastical history, Eusebius, in a particular serious aside, disclaimed the telling of the whole truth. Rather, he proposed to limit his account to “what may be of profit”. His example found favour among his successors, by whom all sorts of details were bent out of shape or passed over, events were entirely suppressed, church councils deliberately forgotten, until in recent time even the wrong saint and pope might vanish from the record, or almost (p.4).

With surviving literary sources so compromised, studies such as those of urban inscriptions in North Africa, tell us (in contradiction of the surviving literary sources) that Augustine did not live in a Christian world (p.5).

By the fifth century it became increasingly difficult for the wealthy and the prominent to remain pagan:

Savage penalties were more loudly advertised by the impatient autocracy of the emperors, to offset the irremediable venality and favouritism of their students. The means of persecution available to the church thus had more of an edge (p.26)

Justinian, the great codifier of Roman law, was particularly brutal in his persecution (p.27). MacMullen pointedly contrasts the survival of the pagans of Harran under Muslim rule, noting their role in the transmission of Greek thought and learning to the Muslim empire, with the decline and loss of literary tradition by the Edessene church, which had suffered under the persecutions of the Christian emperors for choosing the “wrong” side in theology (Pp.28-9).

MacMullen estimates that a majority of Roman officials had become Christian by 360s-370s. Only one significant missionary effort is recorded in the sources: positive and negative inducements seem to have been much more important in the process of Christianisation of the Empire (p.30).

There was a clear process of the persecutions intensifying. From preferment in office it moved onto requiring attendance at church (on pain of confiscation and exile), being banned from imperial service (420s), being lawyers (468), being teachers in the schools (527) then the 529 reign of terror in Constantinople when prominent pagans were arrested, gaoled, interrogated, tortured (p.58). As the costs of intolerance fell, the level of intolerance intensified. Paganism was simply unacceptable. In 472, even ownership of pagan places of worship was subject to being stripped of rank and property (p.66).

MacMullen points out the range of human needs paganism appealed to with its rites, rituals, feasts and other services (p.71). Part of what went on was that Christianity incorporated these in itself more and more.

MacMullen estimates that about a tenth of the Empire was Christian at the time of Constantine. With the secular support of the Roman state, that number reached probably half of the Empire’s population by 400, or in three generations (p.72).
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The importance of official preferment can be seen from a fundamental change in the empire from the principate to the dominate: the huge growth in government officials under Diocletian and after. MacMullen estimates that there were about 300 career officials in the reign of Caracella (r.211-217) and about 30-35,000 under the later Empire. This without considering the expansion in church offices (though much of that would be replacement of pagan ones). MacMullen argues that this led to a dramatic change in the range of intellectual opinion, with the empirical/sceptical end of the spectrum as represented by Pliny, Plutarch and Plotinus disappearing (p.83). It was a move to a situation where, for over a thousand years, the question was not which religion but how much (p.84).

MacMullen argues that Pliny, Plutarch and Plotinus had been taught by philosophy and books to restrain resort to the divine in explaining phenomenon, but both of these sources of scepticism lost power in favour of more “popular” outlooks, which became Christian outlooks (Pp85ff). Study of nature was to luminaries such as Tertullian, Augustine and Eusebius a superfluous diversion from the really important issue of salvation and study of God (Pp87ff). The corpus of the past became full of perils to the soul according to the new instrument of instruction, the church (Pp89ff). MacMullen identifies all this as the beginning of the Byzantine and medieval world and worldview.

MacMullen also notes a large difference between the pagan and the Christian. In the former:

… sacred texts, doctrine and directorate had no place (p.108).

This contrasted dramatically with Christianity:

It was a religion of the book … developed around certain sacred texts very gingerly chosen. For centuries, it had no temple; it filled the streets of no cities with its crowds and celebrations. Celebration instead was kept simple, not to distract focus on the Word; and the too-enthusiastic acting out of response to that Word, except in moral life, was discouraged.
This simplicity of structure was generally well protected. Change was suspect (p.105).

The one great Christian innovation during this period being the development of the ascetic life.

As Christianity became, not merely a public cult but increasingly the public cult, it more and more incorporated forms from paganism (parades, feasts, music, dancing, funerary rites) thereby increasingly taking over the human needs and comforts paganism provided: with the extra benefits of doctrine (to engage intellects and supplant other ideas) and active secular support (Pp108-9). Hence MacMullen’s argument that paganism never completely disappeared: it got incorporated.

The cult of St Michael was a particularly good example of the process. Angel worship had been condemned in the 360s by the Council of Laodicea, St Michael being a particularly awkward example since his cult had both pagan and Jewish roots. Yet his cult proved too attractive and prospered (Pp125ff).

Similarly, the Council of Elvira (c.306) forbade images of Jesus, Paul and Peter in Churches. Once again, the pagan influence proved too strong, with the Emperors leading the way (P.130).

Incorporation
In his Summary MacMullen reiterates the point about the breadth of human wants and services paganism covered that early Christianity did not (p.150) even though it did manage to spread both geographically and in numbers even, to a much lesser degree, in wealth. With the conversion of Constantine and the capture of the Roman state, all that changes. While doctrine did not much change, public rites, rituals and displays did incorporating all sorts of pagan forms. A variety of positive and negative inducements lead to a massive increase in Christian adherence. Yet, 250 years after Constantine:

… Justinian was still engaged in the war upon dissent (p.151).

And a war it surely was.

But one won in part because:

Elite and masses were in broad agreement about how the universe worked, though they put different names to the superhuman agencies at work (p.153).

Working with this, and responding to the persistence of the human needs paganism served:

… Christianity became (as a salesman would say today) “a full service religion” (p.154)

This is the world of theological incorrectness, of religion as it is rather than doctrinally ought to be. Hence:

The triumph of the church was not one of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation (p.159).

But still, in the end, a triumph of massive, sustained application of state coercion.

There is a sense of shock in reading about Christianity as an imposed religion: it is not the culturally received view. Especially as it becomes quite clear that Christian persecution of paganism was typically more severe than the later Muslim persecution of Christianity, since Muslims permitted the structures and observances of Christianity to continue while the Christian rulers successively, and evermore restrictively, banned the same for paganism. One sign of the greater Christian persecution is that it took, on MacMullen’s estimate, less than two centuries for Christians to increase from about 10 per cent of the population in the Empire at the time of Constantine’s reign to them becoming about half the population (around 400). It typically took much longer for Islam to become the majority religion in the lands of the Arab conquests. It is likely, for example, that Egypt did not become a majority Muslim country until sometime in the C12th to C14th: five or more centuries after the original conquest.

But paganism was “demonic error” while Christians had an accepted (if clearly inferior) role in Muslim jurisprudence and were a useful source of revenue from the jizya (“you get to keep your head this year”) tax.

Ramsay MacMullan’s disturbing study not only brings alive the process of the Christianisation of the Roman world, but it also throws light on other periods of religious transformation, as I discuss in my next post.

God and Philosophy: Western philosophy without a yawning gap

I have, ever since I first become aware of it, loathed the politics of Plato’s Republic with its all-controlling Guardians and everyone in their controlled place. It has always struck me as the ur-text of totalitarianism.

It was reading Etienne’ Gilson’s God and Philosophy which enabled to see how Plato’s loathsome politics flows from his metaphysics. Gilson summarises Plato on ideas as:

Truly to be means to be immaterial, immutable, necessary and intelligible. That is precisely what Plato calls Ideas. (p.24)

Naturally, if ideas are so wonderful, then they are more “real” than mere transitory people: to have a “true grasp” of such wonderful ideas gives on a status far beyond that of ordinary mortals. Platonic Guardians here we come.

Hence the politics of “my ideas are more important than people”. Not merely in the sense of ways of making people lives better, but in the sense of disregarding the actual consequences of one's ideas for people, of requiring people to conform to the ideas.

Add in an appropriate amount of Revelation, and we get the principle of the priestly “gatekeepers of righteousness” of I am important because I am conveyor of God’s ideas and God’s purposes, which are definitely more important than erring sinners. But, of course, a Nazi gauleiter or Leninist commissar is working off the same dialectic as any persecuting cleric, with a great deal more mechanisms of social control at their disposal.

Gilson is a delightfully clear writer, even in translation, and covers a lot of ground with great economy. Being a Catholic philosopher, he has a firm belief in truth and thus of the history of philosophy as “a handmaid to philosophy” (P.xx): having ascertained what philosophers have written leaves us with the question of whether they were correct.

Of course, working out what particular philosophers did hold can be a tricky business, and Gilson has a nice discussion of trying to work out what Thales meant when he said water was the first principle and all things are full of gods (Pp 1ff). Which allows Gilson to take us on a journey through Greek ideas of gods and divinity and how Greek philosophy, in its critical rationality, undermined belief in the Greek and Roman deities without leaving anything much in its place. Gilson holds that people can be brought to worship almost anything as long as they can see it in some sense as a somebody: what they cannot be brought to worship is a thing (p.37). Not entirely convinced of that, but it is surely true that classical philosophy did leave a belief-vacuum into which, of course, Christianity poured itself.
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Starting with the very non-philosophical statement of Yahweh to Moses “I am Who am”. Gilson holds Moses’s statement He who is and Plato’s statement That which is to be the dividing line between Greek and Christian philosophy: Christian philosophy accepting a supreme principle (God) who is also a Person (p.42). Christian philosophy was the use of the techniques and concepts of Greek philosophy to express ideas that “had never entered the head of a Greek philosopher” (p.43).

So much so, that St Augustine reads Plotinus (specifically the Enneads) and somehow sees the Christian Revealed God therein (p.48). Gilson defines the issue for Christian philosophy as posed by St Augustine nicely:

That is why, from the time of Saint Augustine up to our own days, human reason has been up against the tremendously difficult task of reaching a transcendent God whose pure act of existing is radically distinct from our own borrowed existence. How can man, who out of himself is not, living in a world of things which out of themselves are not, reach by means of reason alone, “Him who is”? Such is, to a Christian, the fundamental problem of natural theology. (p54)

The answer of modern philosophy is, in effect, you cannot and so we should attend to other questions.

When I did philosophy at Sydney University, it was taught as first there was Greek Philosophy, then there was Descartes and modern philosophy began. Nothing much of philosophical interest happened in the one-and-half-millennia in the middle. It was all bound up with a Revealed God and the ultimately theological concerns of scholastic Aristotelianism and we need not go there.

There was a couple of things wrong with this. First, much of our modern political thought arises out of medieval thinking. There is a direct line of intellectual descent, for example, from Pope Paul III’s 1537 Bull Sublimus Dei to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (John Kilcullen has a very useful webpage on medieval political and moral thought.)

Secondly, people such as Descartes, Locke even Hume are reacting to Aristotelianism. If one does not consider the development of Aristotelianism, one is paying attention to only half the philosophical conversation.

So, attention should be paid. Though, to be fair, as Gilson points out, Descartes himself proceeds as if his only intellectual predecessors were the Greek Philosophers.

Which brings us to St Thomas Aquinas and his development of Aristotelian thought whereby:

The self-thinking Thought of Aristotle has certainly become an essential element in the natural theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not without first undergoing the metaphysical transformation that turned him into the Qui est or “He who is” of the Old Testament” (Pp 62-3)

based on analysis of what it means “to be”. To be is taken to be an act, “the acts of all acts” (p.65) with a metaphysics that reverses the order of human knowledge:

…we first conceive certain beings, then we define their essences, and last we affirm their existences by means of a judgement. But the metaphysical order of reality is just the reverse of the order of human knowledge: what first comes into it is a certain act of existing (p.64).

Which is, precisely, of course, what Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume etc denied, hence modern philosophy.

Gilson holds that Aquinas made metaphysics existential, concerned fundamentally with what exists, where existence is understood as an act:

From its earliest origins, metaphysics has always obscurely aimed at becoming existential; from the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas it has always been so, and to such an extent that metaphysics has regularly lost its very existence every time it has lost its existentiality (p.67).

Gilson’s puts Aquinas central metaphysical concept quite nicely:

… existence is not a thing, but the act that causes a thing to be and to be what it is (p.70).

The famous (or infamous) existence precedes essence.

In moving to modern philosophy, Gilson starts with the point that medieval philosophers were all clerics of some variety, while modern philosophers have been overwhelmingly lay folk (p.74). Descartes changes the subject of philosophy, from Aquinas’ attention to divine wisdom to:

... an altogether different sort of wisdom, namely knowledge of truth by its first causes to be attained by natural reason alone and directed towards practical temporal ends (p.76).

Given the brutality of the religious strife that had divided Europe, all from people claiming they had the Revealed truth correct, and the riot of new knowledge confronting Europe of the age of Discovery, hardly a surprising shift in focus.

But, as Gilson points out, the effect was to bring philosophy back to the Greeks as if nothing much had happened since them (p.77). Gilson holds that this could not be fully done, because a modern philosopher operated in the context of the Christian God in a way a Greek philosopher simply did not (Pp78-9). The result was to create “a stillborn God”, God as “Author of Nature”:

Assuredly, the God of Christianity had always been the Author of Nature, but he had always been infinitely more than that, whereas, after Descartes, he was destined to become nothing else than that (p.89).

One ends up with a situation where the God of philosophy is not the God of theology: for example, in such a thinker as Malebranche (p.97).

Gilson pays no attention to Islamic or Jewish thinkers. Still, it is a striking thing that the rejection of Aristotelianism had overlapping effects in both Islam and Western civilisation on the matter of causation. Al Ghazali, arguing against Islamic Aristotelianism, essentially claimed that the God of the Philosophers was not the God of the Qur’an. He has a famous passage where he writes:

... our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

Which is Humean causal skepticism centuries before Hume. Except that al-Ghazali’s version is a little less silly than Hume’s. Both Hume and al-Ghazali wrote down their arguments in the perfectly rational belief that various causal processes would ensure so people could read and understand their arguments. Al-Ghazali at least has God to hold things together. (Though that surely still leaves the question of what is meant by God causing things?) Hume has nothing, yet patently proceeds as if causality operates in a reliable, indeed predictable, fashion. “Happenstance regularity” is surely sillier than “regularity in nature being just God’s customary practice” (the mainstream Islamic position: not one favourable to the development of science).

Gilson argues that the real break in the line of philosophy comes with Kant (p.110).

Coming after the Christian philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza found themselves confronted with this new problem: How find a metaphysical justification for the world of seventeenth-century science? As scientists, Descartes and Leibniz had not metaphysics of their own. Just as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had to borrow their techniques from the Greeks, Descartes and Leibniz had to borrow their techniques from the Christian philosophers who had preceded them. Hence the vast number of scholastic expressions which we meet in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and even Locke. All of them freely use the language of the Schoolmen in order to express nonscholastic views of a nonscholastic world (Pp110-1).

With the Christian God still operating as the supreme principle for the intelligibility of nature.

Kant changes both the subject and the language of philosophical enquiry. With the criticism of Kant and the positivism of Comte we no longer have a God who is an object of cognition. The metaphysical “why?” question goes away, to be left with the scientific “how?” (p.132).

Gilson notes that the scientific resistance to metaphysics has some justification:

Just as science can play havoc with metaphysics, metaphysics can play havoc with science. Coming before science in the past, it has often done so to the point of preventing its rise and blocking its development. For centuries final causes have been mistaken for scientific explanations by so many generations of philosophers that today many scientists still consider the fear of final causes as the beginning of scientific wisdom. Science is thus making metaphysics suffer for its centuries-long meddling in matters of physics and biology (Pp128-9).

But, as he points out, it does leave epistemology in a very unsatisfactory state (one which has hardly got less unsatisfactory since Gilson wrote God and Philosophy).

Gilson further observes:

A world which has lost the Christian God cannot but resemble a world which has not yet found him (p.136).

As we consider the patently religious impulse involved in much environmentalism, a sort of neo-animism, we can see a repeat of rational critique creating a vacuum into new forms of religiosity (environmentalism, Pentecostalism) or revised takes on old forms (fundamentalism) move. The meaning of things, the “why?” questions, clearly will not go away.

Gilson stands four square for the philosophical synthesis of Aquinas. Whether we want to join him there, God and Philosophy is an excellent short, but intellectually full, journey through Western philosophy from the Greeks to the C20th, without leaving a very large gap in the middle.

ADDENDA I have edited this post slightly to make it clearer.

Those Terrible Middle Ages: sticking up for the medieval

Various folk have been waging a (mostly losing) fight to rehabilitate the medieval. Against them are all those down the years who, in their attachment to the Classical heritage, have seen the medieval period as an interlude of darkness until Western civilisation “returned” to its classical roots during the Renaissance. It is not helped that medieval political arrangements seem very different to our own: far more so than those of Classical Rome or Greece, which helps the classicist case.

Then there is simple chrono-centrism—we are so much cleverer than them because we’re later. (Modern academe is rife with this: I have heard a speaker at an academic conference criticise Bernard Lewis on the grounds that he was so old he was an undergraduate in the 1930s, so obviously deficient in his understanding—to the clear approval of the audience. Apparently, further study does not make you more perceptive: a truth many academics certainly demonstrate daily.)

These strands can come together in a potent brew—the medievals did all sorts of things differently from us, so they must have been dumb. And history is a story of progress, so the further back you go, clearly the worse things are. A story of progress: except for the Dark Ages of course, so the medievals must have been really bad.

Feudal sometimes seems to mean lacking whatever I think my period has achieved. To C18th historians, feudal often meant obscurantist, lacking in rationality, rationality being conceived of as congenial consistency. To C19th historians, feudal often meant anarchy and disorder. Conversely, English constitutional history was always inclined to a somewhat more rosy view, at least about such things as Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort.
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C20th historians and economists increasingly tended to try and understand the medieval in its own terms—there is something of a cottage industry in economic history in teasing out the rational adaptation to circumstances underlying medieval institutions. The wider intellectual culture still seems to be inclined to dismiss it as a period of ignorance, superstition and incapacity. The recent growth of the “California School” of historians trying to explain how the West didn’t really rise—and certainly not by any worthy efforts of its own—owes some of its resonance to such attitudes. (Corporations as a post-medieval creation indeed. That would be a surprise to the corporation of the University of Oxford, recognised as such in 1231. Or those who traded in shares of the dams on the Garonne River which—when its final form of the Societe Toulousaine d’Electricite du Bazacle was nationalised by the French government after WWII—had been a limited company for almost eight centuries.)

Regine Pernoud’s Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths is a fun book sticking up for the medievals. Pernoud spent most of her career as an archivist at the French National Archives, and her passion for primary sources certainly comes through. Not in ostentatious quoting, but in insisting that scholarship should go back to such sources and by telling tales of her own experience in prominent historians repeating falsehoods that a trip to the archives could dispell.

Pernoud starts of with some of her own experiences in happily accepted myths about the medieval period, and then takes us through various forms of myths and debunks them in various chapters suitably labelled (Clumsy and Awkward, Torpor and Barbarity, Of Frogs and Men, Women without Souls, The Accusing Finger) before moving on to make a plea for a better sense of history and better teaching of history (she has a few suggestions).

I rather enjoyed it all. Pernoud has a lively writing style. She also has a moderately Catholic perspective, but it does not notably get in the way. The book very much concentrates on the French experience, but that has a certain corrective value in itself.

I did have some cavils. It is easy to show medieval serfdom was a superior state to outright slavery. Nor is her assertion that it was also superior to post-medieval serfdom in Russia and Eastern Europe hard to support. Trying to portray it as a form of benevolent welfarism rather overstates the matter, however.

Perhaps her strongest point is in showing how much of what the medieval period gets blamed for actually occurred in the post-medieval period. The case of Gallileo, for example. In particular, Pernoud argues that the rediscovery of Roman law had various deleterious effects—such as on the status of women and the tendency towards monarchial absolutism. She points out that there are plenty of medieval references to women speaking and voting in various assemblies but that Roman law’s more patriarchal conception of male headship of households was very antipathetic to such. That women had to be granted the vote in the late C19th and C20th was not some dreadful medieval legacy. Her discussion of such matters is a useful corrective to simple-minded notions of linear history.

Those Terrible Middle Ages is an enjoyable, informative and accessible promotion of a more informed understanding of the medieval period.

Function and form: of marriage, sex and Sodom

One of the striking things about many of the opponents of same-sex marriage is their lack of a sense of history. To them, marriage has been essentially the same down the ages, as one can see in the comments here. A slightly more sophisticated form of the same lack of a sense of the rich and varied history of human marriage is shown in columnist Charles Krauthammer’s statement:

… until this generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know of, anywhere at any time in history

which is either smug ignorance of much anthropological data or else arch narrowing of terms. Even supporters of same-sex marriage such as Steven Schmidt can make statements such as:

The institution of marriage is the foundation of society and alterations to its definitions shouldn't be lightly undertaken. It has always been defined as the legal union of a man and a woman, and it's understandable that many Americans are apprehensive about making a definitional change to so profoundly an important institution.

while standing in a land whose preceding cultures included ones that had same-sex marriages. (Of course, the Papacy had shown itself ready to take rigorous steps to ensure such social forms did not emerge where it had any say.)

Beyond simple historical ignorance, there is a deeper question. Is marriage a thing with a single nature, or a collection of phenomena in the human world? We are in deep philosophical waters here. People who say that same-sex marriages cannot be “real” marriages are saying that marriage is something with a specific content regardless of what particular human societies have or have not called ‘marriage’.

This is not a very scientific way of proceeding—it is certainly not one that anthropologists would adhere to. But it is a very powerful idea, that there is some definitive form of a thing. In the case of marriage, the Catholic Church adheres to that position on natural law and scriptural exegesis grounds. It is a common problem with natural law theory that it defines things in terms of what people are used to and passes that off as some general categorisation—thereby universalising the parochial. A theme which, in Christian thought, starts with St Paul on hair:

Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering.

The above-cited comments are following in a long tradition.

That there is a definitive (as distinct from proper or preferred) form of marriage across space and time is not a view that is required by Christian or other religious belief. Christopher Brooke, in his The Medieval Idea of Marriage engages with what is meant by Christian marriage without pretending that thereby defines all marriage. His approach has no quarrel with anthropologists identifying various forms of same-sex marriages in actual human societies.

Yet it is clearly not the business of the modern state to enforce Christian marriage as the only standard, but some general standard of marriage that will cover believers and non-believers of all varieties. Hence, to the pre-existing philosophical claims of classical natural law theory, is added the political attractiveness of claiming that marriage has some inherent nature.

It is clear that marriage has always been an evolving institution: even the Catholic Church’s conception of marriage has evolved somewhat, driven in no small part by popular wants and resistances. All sorts of things have affected the evolution of marriage: such as the old-age pension—as that supplanted children-as-pension-plan—or the increasing economic independence, and self-control of fertility, of women.

What do we mean by saying what marriage is? Does it make any sense at all to try and find a single concept of marriage? Or is ‘marriage’ a quite general category into which a whole lot of different forms and instances fit, more or less well?
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The general anthropological approach follows the latter. We have a general notion of what marriage is, then we look at the range of things in human societies that seem to be reasonably contained within that general notion (which may well evolve as we come across more cases). So we find polygamous marriage, polyandrous marriage, same-sex marriage, temporary marriage with a range of nuances and varieties within those broad categories. Connected to a range of quite divergent views and assumptions about sex, gender, parenting, kinship, property, etc. The notion of some definition of marriage that excludes what various societies have done seems just some form of arrogance. A case of our particular model of the world trumping how the world actually is. Universalising the parochial not as a bug or poor usage but as a basic feature.

The evidentiary approach insists that any model we use has to connect to the world to work as a model of the world (leaving aside the inherent limitations in being a model). So any such exclusion from the category of being marriages is just wilful arrogance.

Any model, however, only has to provide a congenial framing to appeal. It can be very appealing to say “I just know what marriage really is, and I do not care what other people may or may not have done”.

Of course, the issue for public policy is what marriage should mean legally in a particular society. But to have a normative concept parade itself as a defining concept is to imply there is no proper choice. Public policy should just conform to how marriage “really” is. There is no (other) proper choice in the matter.

Which is precisely the classical natural law way of proceeding. Define deemed proper purpose and forms that create the basis for judgement, these taken to be innate to how things are (hence I will use the term ‘purpose[i]’). A formulation that both defines what it is and defines what it ought to be. To conform to something—such as marriage—deemed proper purpose(i) and form is moral, to go against such is immoral. But if some actually existing marriages do not conform to such deemed proper purpose(i) and form, how do we determine what constitute said proper purpose(i) and form? Clearly, it is not done by empirical observation, for the concept of marriage is not defined by inference from the range of marriages-as-they-occur-in-the-world. An approach that is not merely anti-empiricist, it is anti-empirical.

Nor is the concept derived from what people want. To define according to proper purpose(i) and form is to trump human desires. Consent is not enough: it has to be consent in accordance with the proper purpose(i), within the proper forms. Just as a Marxist does not care (except to grade various levels of oppression) whether workers have consented to work in a capitalist firm—since a capitalist firm is “inherently exploitive”—so an adherent of classical natural law theory does not care that two people of the same sex have consented to live together as life partners, since same-sexual activity is not according to proper purpose(i) and form so such consent does not count, it has no positive moral weight.

Of course, any system is going to put bounds on consent. But to make purpose(i) and form the central source of legitimacy is to put strong bounds on consent. Indeed, on the significance given to human purposes. Hence St John Chrysostom, the “patron saint of preachers”, held (on natural law grounds deriving from Philo of Alexandria, also the likely source of St Paul’s use, notably in Romans, of the very un-Judaic notion of things being para physin, against nature) that engaging in same-sex activity was worse than being a murderer while the greatest proponent of classical natural law thinking, St Thomas Aquinas held same-sex activity to be worse than rape.

This elevation of category over consent continues. Professor Henry Jaffa holds, on natural law grounds, that homosexuality is wrong in the same way that slavery is wrong for it puts people in the wrong category:

Slavery is against nature, because it treats human beings like subhuman chattel. Sodomy is against nature, since it treats men as if they were women.

Actually, slavery is wrong because it is a pervasive and monstrous violation of human autonomy. But, then, anathematising same-sex activity is also a violation of human autonomy. Of course, under Prof. Jaffra’s argument heterosexual anal or anal intercourse would be just fine, which is not the classical natural law position. Elsewhere, Prof. Jaffa has said:

I challenge anybody who wants to defend homosexuality to say if they condemn slavery and genocide. Assuming they do condemn slavery and genocide (unless they are some kind of a Hitler) I think we would say that all would agree today that slavery and genocide are wrong.
However, as far as I can tell, the only ground on which they can be condemned is on the basis of nature.

Which is a pretty impoverished notion of both moral argument and respect for human autonomy.

Both Marxism and classical natural law theory, when in power, ended up deciding it was just fine to kill people if they did not conform to designated proper purposes(i) and forms. The former “purifies” society because there should only be one class, the latter because there should be only one sexuality: both are at war with the diversity of the human.

Which is another way to have a model trump reality. For why do we have ethics, courtesy, law, economies, rules and structures of any sort? We do because we are purposive beings. We act in the world according to choices driven by our purposes. These acts, choices and purposes interact: they require cooperation and restraint. Hence rules of morality, courtesy, law, social structures, economic structures, institutions: all the vast array of human norms. Forms of things are taken, moulded, structured according to those acted upon purposes. It is why the matter of preferred states of affairs arises in the first place. Human purposes are the point, the forms are what are acted upon or through in pursuit of human purposes. To elevate physical forms as morally primary must be to belittle human purposes and thus people. When Jesus said ( Matthew 15: 16-20)

"Are you still so dull?" Jesus asked them. "Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man 'unclean.' For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man 'unclean'; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him 'unclean.' "

He was showing rather more understanding what is morally central than many of His alleged followers have since. But elevating physical form—thus belittling human purposes and (specific) people—elevates the role of priests (it was, after priestly obsession with form that Jesus was preaching against: see also Mark 7:1-23), or their secular equivalents, as “gatekeepers of righteousness”.

It also sells effortless virtue: how hard is it for someone whose income does not come from business ownership (such as, for example, some tenured academic) to decide that capitalists are evil exploiters, or for a heterosexual to decide homosexuality is wrong? Effortless virtue based on contempt for others is not exactly the message of the Gospels.

The problem is not having concern for categories and the nature of things. All our perception is pervaded by putting things in categories (“this is a stone, tree, person, cat, …”) tagged with our direct and indirect experience of the nature of things: a process that is neither random nor manifests the perfection of necessity but as much a part of our perceiving as any “sense impression”. Such recognition is not only part of perception: it is central to the point of it. So much of learning is about developing such recognition. Any recognisable physical object has tagged knowledge associated with it as much as any recognisable piece of writing: different recognitions having different levels and types of tagged knowledge. Indeed, writing works by extending this normal part of perception: that we can grasp words as referring to things is simply an extension of the normal information associations of our perception. Though such extension may affect our perception of the physical world, just as Zen thinkers would argue.

An example of the importance of the information associations of perception is when looking at something out of focus. It is a blur of shapes. Once it comes into focus, not only do we have more information, we tag what we see with the associated information. The difference between looking at someone we know and someone we do not shows up the importance of associated information. As does looking at something, putting in one conceptual “box” with associated information, and the realising it is something else—such as thinking something on the ground ahead is a dead insect and finding, when we get closer, it is just some fluff and thread.

In reality, we are all, in a weak sense, Aristotelians. We all work with (or even shape) things according to their expected capacities. Just as social existence (let alone social analysis) is impossible without expected regularities in human nature, we equally could not act in the world without expected regularities within physical nature: both sets of regularities not being fortunate happenstances but based on inbuilt propensities and capacities. Our understanding of these is built up by experience, observation and thinking thereupon. Starting with how babies learn about the world around them. In the words of an email from early childhood educator, they:

… apply limited Action Schemes to everything they come across, which is part of learning about the world. The earliest action schemes are things like grab and suck. Babies are born knowing how to do this—or at least they can do it within hours of being born. Later there is grasp & shake, which is why we give babies rattles. There's also banging, dumping (around 9 months) and turning things over to see the other side. As babies develop they get to combine these basic action schemes into more complicated patterns. So younger babies are kind of looking at the world of objects as: is this something I bang, something I shake or something I ignore? Babies & toddlers put everything in their mouths too, just like animals do. Touch it, to feel its texture, grasp and shake and turn it over, taste it. Watch a gorilla do the same thing to an unknown item the next time you're at the zoo.

In other words, they explore the nature of things to build up a conceptual order that allows them to deal with what is otherwise a sensory cacophony. It is by assigning instances to classes, examples to categories, tokens to types—or whatever terminology we wish to use—that we extend our ability to act from this build-up of experienced associations.

It is a mistake to see this process as definitive, complete, certain or in any other way perfect. But it is also a mistake to note its incompleteness, uncertainty, fallibility, etc and to thus conclude that there is no understanding or knowing involved—that it is, in some sense, a perfect failure. Nor to fail to note its reflexive nature—that it is not separate from the world but of and in the world, with all the feedback effects that entails.

Reason and right
There are two problems with the innate-purposes model. First, in not grounding norms as coming from us being purposive beings. Rocks do not have norms. Living things do, and they do depending on the complexity of their purposivefulness—the range of purposes, the awareness of such purposes, the level of interaction (particularly possible reflexive interaction) of such purposes. This purposiveness distinguishes living things from non-living things: the level of such purposiveness the sentient from non-sentient. This is not to say that morality is just about what people want and feel. Merely that wanting, feeling and the capacity to deliberately choose one action over others in some considered way is what morality exists to deal with. Indeed, it allows morality to exist. Morality is not grounded in the nature of reality, it is grounded in our nature as sentient beings.

And also in the reality of conflict. If human purposes never conflicted the questions of how should I live? and how shall we get along? would never arise. In having purposes, we face conflicts between our purposes and between what we want and what we can do. Hence the issues of instrumental rationality (how do I act to achieve X?) and substantive rationality (how do I manage my different purposes?). In dealing with other people we face conflicts with our purposes towards them and between their purposes and ours. Hence morality and the vast array of human norms.

(As an aside, this fits in nicely with the conception of Paradise as the beatific vision, since conflict within and between purposes no longer arise. It also fits in with the notion of Satan essentially casting himself out of Heaven by, in his pride, bringing conflict to where it could not be.)

Rationality is about dealing with our own purposiveness. Given the demands of having sense of identity, of self; the reality of psychic pleasure and pain, the endless struggle to think well of ourselves; and that neither our time nor our capacity for cognition is infinite—hence the utility of habits, routines and using the apparent knowledge of others—a lot of what gets characterised as “irrationality” is rational management of purposiveness given limited cognitive resources. It is a trap to define ‘rationality’ as implying perfect reasoning (or as “agrees with me”).

Morality is about dealing with the interactions of the purposive using our sense of ourselves as moral beings within a moral community. Given that morality has functions, that consequences matter, that rules have both economising and signalling value, that morality requires our adherence, that it arises out of human purposes and purposiveness, that it has to create a moral order to work, with requisite authority, all the philosophically respectable theories of morality are onto something important about morality (which is how they get to be philosophically respectable in the first place).

Though divine command theories of morality, not so much: even if they do speak to the requiring authority point. Leaving aside objections such as John Stuart Mill’s, divine command theories of morality also suffer the problem that it is basic to any command that it is communicated, otherwise it is not a command. So such approaches only make sense within some particular tradition of revelation. But, as morality exists much more broadly across space and time than any specific tradition of revelation, clearly morality is not grounded in divine command since people to whom no such command has ever been communicated to still act morally, still act within a sense of moral order. This even without the problem of the uncheckability of such revelation or that there are moral issues that get dealt with without any specific command even within such traditions (which takes us back to Mill’s point about the good requiring a meaning beyond God commanding it).

All of which raises the question of whether theories of morality, such as utilitarianism or various forms of natural law theory, determine what is moral or do they provide various ways of structuring the pre-existing function of morality?: the better the “functional” fit, the better the moral theory. The former seems to imply that one has to know a specific theory to be “truly” moral (which seems highly implausible), the latter, which seems to be more like how things work, raises questions about the nature of moral authority.

The weight of nature
One sign of environmentalism being a religion is that it gives great metaphysical weight, such as to profoundly constrain human purposes, to nature. It thus greatly reduces the more weight given to human purposes in exactly the same way (if more broadly) that giving great weight to an aspect of nature—the procreative function of sex—devalues human purposes and thus people. (I think we can take it that burning people alive for getting married, throwing them to the dogs to be eaten alive because of how they dress and who they have sex with or denying them as much of the equal protection of the laws as can be managed, all manifest devaluings of people.)

That morality is grounded in human purposiveness is why morality, and norms in general, occur across religious and non-religious traditions. Indeed, why, given the persistence of regularities in human nature, there is a high degree of overlap in moral norms. The main contributions of religion are to add extra motivation, to provide a sense of belonging and to provide a role for priests and clerics as both moral exhorters and “gatekeepers of righteousness”. Which includes putting particular emphasis on those things that separate the community of the righteous from heathen “Others”. The observation of C.S.Lewis:

those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences

applies particularly to priests and clerics. Who so often find it useful to characterise the different as wicked. The same-sex attracted have generally been—before modern communications and mass urbanisation allowed the same-sex attracted to achieve social “critical mass”—very easy targets, since there are few people more vulnerable and easily isolated than a same-sex attracted youth growing up in a family and religious milieu that anathematises same-sex activity and attraction. Indeed, as the same-sex attracted have become harder targets, and as the impulse to make them targets has faded (an interactive process), so their social position has improved. (There are lags in this process: so there is evidence that public policy in the US, for example, is more hostile than public opinion [pdf].)

The second problem with the innate-purposes approach is having the model—the concept—trump reality. To not understand that concepts are models, what models are and what roles they play.

We live in a world of things that we put into categories. Some categories are pretty inescapable. Others are not: the world is full of continua. When we make distinctions, we draw boundaries in those continua. Boundaries that are often fuzzier than we are generally willing to admit. Colours are an obvious case, but so are things such as language, species, gender, institutions. Boundaries that are often more arbitrary than we realise—different languages make and elevate very different distinctions. Any concept is an abstraction from reality: that process of abstraction is also a process of simplification and is a process easily prone to error. The more abstract our thinking, the easier for it to go wrong. And our abstract thinking can easily go very wrong.

Which is why it is highly desirable to have strong checks on our abstract thinking—concern for evidence; concern for people’s experiences and concerns; concern for careful reasoning. That so much of the world can apparently be expressed mathematically has been a huge boon for our more abstract understanding of the world, since mathematics makes it so much easier to have rigour in our thinking. (Though mathematical models themselves can be a trap.) The manifold failures of actually existing socialism have been a very clear display of the failures of Marxism: a highly abstract and allegedly rigorous approach to understanding human society that is an excellent example of how our abstract thinking can go very wrong.

We may also reasonably feel that that classical natural law theory led to burning people alive, or throwing them to the dogs to be eaten alive, on the basis of who they had sex with is a pretty clear manifestation of serious failure as a moral standard. Just as are the highly adverse effects of parents failing to accept the sexuality of their same-sex attracted children. Also from a system that was highly abstract and allegedly rigorous approach to understanding human society. The consequences of basing judgement on a model of how people are supposed to be, rather than how they actually are, are not pretty. The oppressive tyranny of the utopian urge comes precisely from its war against people-as-they are in the name of people-as-they-are-supposed-to-be. It does not matter whether it is in the name of the “single legitimate” sexuality, religion, race or class: they are all murderous and tyrannical wars against the diversity of the human.

Any system that ends up selling effortless virtue based on contempt for others is not a good look. But how can any system of moral evaluation that is ultimately not grounded in human purposes end up anywhere else? Christ really did have an excellent point.

Marxism gets there by Marx’s labour theory of value (for as labour is the only source of value, workers are the only legitimate class), a theory of value which is most certainly not grounded in human purposes, even though it purports to be. Classical natural law theory gets there by use of Aristotle’s theory of causation, using it to hold that procreation is the only legitimate function of sex, thus making heterosexuality the only legitimate (active) sexuality. (Celibacy is permitted: indeed required outside of marriage.)

Cause and intention
Aristotle’s theory was based on there being four causes—the material cause (the underlying stuff something is made out of), the formal cause (the form, structure or pattern that it exhibits), the efficient cause (what brings a thing into being: technically, what actualises a potentiality in a thing) and the final cause (the end, goal or purpose of a thing). Post-medieval philosophy abandoned formal and final causes.

In this case, it is final cause that counts. For it is final cause that sets up a criteria for judgement about whether something is being used according to its deemed proper purpose(i) (and so within the forms which support that purpose[i]). So the Catholic Church declares all conscious sex, other than that where the ejaculation occurs into an unimpeded vagina, as unclean (that is, immoral). For only sex that conforms to the form of sex according to its procreative purpose(i) is moral. Hence, only sex within marriage (the social form for raising children, given that sex is limited to that procreative in form) is permitted and no other form of sex to the point of ejaculation is—even between husband and wife.

Edward Feser, in his admirably clear The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, states the notion of there being a definitive form of marriage (due to it having a final cause) with his usual clarity:

For the metaphysics underlying natural law theory entails that marriage is, not by human definition, but as an objective metaphysical fact determined by its final cause, inherently procreative, and thus inherently heterosexual (p.149).

So all those cultures which have encompassed same-sex marriages are just metaphysically deluded.

Moreover, the notion that any human institution has a single function, a single purpose, is generally dubious: to have it as a metaphysical necessity is nonsense. The same point applies to sex in general (particularly as sex is pleasurable, so can provide catharsis and express connection). Or any biological feature, since without the ability of something to evolve into something else there cannot be evolution. For, in the natural world, the purposes of living things drives use which drives form (hence a fin can evolve into a foot, a foot can evolve into a hand). [Biologist Ian Tattersall explains how the process of adaption of something into something else now has its own term:

what has in recent years increasingly been termed "exaptation." This is a useful name for characteristics that arise in one context before being exploited in another, or for the process by which such novelties are adopted in populations. The classic example of exaptation becoming adaptation is birds' feathers. These structures are essential nowadays to bird flight, but for millions of years before flight came along they were apparently used simply as insulators (and maybe for nothing much at all before that). For a long time, then, feathers were highly useful adaptations for maintaining body temperatures. As adjuncts to flight, on the other hand, they were simply exaptations until, much later, they began to assume an adaptive role in this new function, too. There are many other similar examples...]

Giving final cause defining moral weight as purpose(i), so setting proper use due to form, puts things precisely the wrong way round.

But even without the problems of requiring purposive singularity or reversing the process of how natural selection works, there is a difference between role

the role of this billiard ball in this causal sequence was to knock that other billiard ball into the side pocket as a result of being hit by a cue

function

billiard balls have the function of being part of a game of billiards

and purpose

his purpose in hitting this billiard ball with his cue was to knock that other billiard ball into the side pocket.

An asteroid striking the moon has a key role in the causal sequence that created a crater. A kidney has the function of processing and distilling liquid waste in the body. A kidney transplant has the purpose of replacing a failed kidney. One is an individual event, one is something embedded in a functioning (indeed, highly coherent) structure and one is a matter of conscious intent. Each higher level entails the ones below it: the reverse is not true. They may, in some sense, all be manifestations of intentionality in the sense of being directed to something: they are very far from being manifestations of the same sort of intentionality. Hence rocks do not have morality or moral dilemmas while humans do. For we are purposive in a way that rocks, for example, or bacteria, are not and bacteria are purposive in a way rocks are not.

The purpose in the kidney transplant comes from the mind of the participants, as does the purpose of the billiard player. Such purposiveness is not innate to the structure of things but arises out of human purposiveness.

Being consciously purposive creates the questions of how we should we live and how shall we get along. But these are not the same question—Robinson Crusoe confronts the first question but not the second—and treating them as the same question does not have a happy history for it gives controlling power to those who get to define “the good”. Which, of course, makes it very attractive to those who think they and theirs will get to do that defining.

To move between these very different forms of directedness without taking sufficient note of the very large differences between them is a form of a classic way for our reasoning to go wrong: shifting between concepts without noting it. Malthus engaged in a particularly clear example by failing to distinguish between two different notions of tendency. As did Darwin in his use of “struggle for existence”. Roland Barthes does a version in his seminal (and I do not mean that in a good way) Death of an Author essay. Indeed, as David Stove pointed out, entire philosophical traditions can be built on it. The purposiveness of the kidney transplant is not remotely the same as the function of the kidney or the role of the asteroid and does not have the same grounding.

Classical natural law theory imprisons human purposes within the deemed reproductive function of sexual organs, even though sex in nature clearly has much wider functions than just reproduction. For the function of sex in nature is, in classical natural law theory, not inferred from how sex is used in the natural world. Nor are the range of purposes animals have in engaging in sex taken seriously: again, an anti-empirical approach.

Such imprisoning human purposes within deemed biological function is profoundly belittling of human purposiveness, as we have seen: hence its deeply, indeed murderously, oppressive nature. The greater is imprisoned within the lesser, thereby both enjoining and requiring either changing (“reparative” therapy), constraining (imprisoning, flogging, etc) or eliminating (hanging, burning alive, throwing to the dogs to be eaten alive, etc) those who do not fit.

The classical natural law theory has a too simple a concept of order, of how things have natures. It imposes single (or at least absolutely trumping) concepts of innate function, with too strong a notion of intentionality, which do not evolve, on a much more mixed, indeed fluid, reality. The model ends up trumpingg reality. Hence it cutting out of the “properly human” those who are attracted to members of their own sex or cutting out of “marriage” historically existing same-sex marriages. Just as it produces too simple concepts of sex, of money, of how labour is organised, what hair is for, and so on. If things have trumping functions, trumping purposes(i), then whatever trumping function you can identify has to be the “right” one. Universalising the parochial is inherent—dare one say, natural—to classical natural law thinking. Which, of course, can be very useful as a mechanism for boosting the familiar and anathematising the different: a very useful feature for gatekeepers of righteousness. A feature that goes right back to Philo of Alexandria.

A nice example of universalising the parochial is provided by Edward Feser in The Last Superstition in his citing of disgust at homosexuality. While disgust is a universal human emotion (and may, indeed, be a distinctively human emotion), what excites disgust varies enormously among and within human cultures. Notions of disgust are particularly malleable to religious teachings—as we can see in the reaction of many Muslims to dogs. A devout Orthodox Jew, Muslim or Jain, or vegetarian, may well be repulsed by turning a pig leg into ham to be eaten: even those of us who love ham may find some of the processes involved somewhat repellent. Such malleability is particularly true of sex—human cultures have varied in their view of same-sex acts from homicidal anathematisation to making them compulsory. Indeed, the widespread adoration in the late Classical period of Emperor Hadrian’s deified lover Antinous (of whom we have more surviving statues than perhaps any other classical figure) bespeaks of how cultural presumptions change. As does the use (such as by Plato in the Symposium) of lovers and tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton—icons of Athenian democracy: the first non-divine figures to be recognised by the Athenian polis with civic statues—as emblematic of how love between men was a support of a free society (a rhetorical commonplace for centuries).

So why should the disgust of some people in some times and places at same-sex acts count, but Muslim disgust at dogs or disgust by some politically correct left-winger at Edward Feser’s conservative Catholic views not? Obviously, it is not disgust but the criteria which makes some disgust significant and others not which is the authority here.

Feser also provides a tiresomely “clever, clever” argument about homosexuals being free to marry:

… the answer is that they can marry. But of course, what that means, as a matter of conceptual necessity, is that they can marry someone of the opposite sex. What they can’t do is marry each other … (due to the objective metaphysical facts of marriage, p.149)

All in the name of the One True Sexuality.

Well, suppose we have a theory of the One True Religion. Everyone is free to worship God in public service but since, as a matter of conceptual necessity, the only true service is Anglican (Americans would say Episcopalian) what Catholics are not free to do is to worship publicly in a Catholic service. We can immediately that this treats the wishes of Catholics with belittling contempt. In exactly the same way Feser’s argument about marriage does the same-sex attracted. (In my example, I am, of course, describing the situation in the England of Elizabeth I and the United Kingdom of Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) Feser replies that he has a theory: but so did the Anglican and Presbyterian establishments. Bigotry always has a theory. One, moreover, which taps into the “true” nature of the universe and the human condition, so is not bigotry. One way bigotry appeals is by providing a sense of being an insightful “knower” of the wicked and corrupting nature of the objects of bigotry. In the case of Georgian England, the righteous disgust of good Protestants at any movement towards any easing of the restrictions on the nefarious Catholics infamously led to the Gordon riots of 1778. But we have already established that some popular disgust counts and others do not.

The cause that doesn’t
Feser’s theory is Aristotelian metaphysics, where everything has a final cause. But that does not, of itself, set up any criteria for judgement precisely because it is a universal feature. John Locke tried to ground our moral status in us being God’s property: but, if God has property, then everything is God’s property. So, that gives us no special status. Similarly, if everything has a final cause then that provides no criteria for judgement.

Just as, if one cherry picks particular bits of Leviticus (such as Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13) but not others (in repeated defiance of Leviticus 18:4-5, 26; 19:19, 37; 20:22 which require all the laws set out be followed) then one’s authority is not Leviticus but whatever criteria one is using to pick and choose so, if one grants some final causes status but not others, one’s authority is not them having a final cause but whatever criteria one is using to elevate some final causes over others.

Consider a pig leg. Its final cause is to convey a pig around. But, unless we are vegetarians (or have religious objections to pig-meat), we have no objection to turning the pig leg into roast pork, or into ham. The original final cause which brought the pig leg into existence matters not, we choose to engage in a causal sequence which has a different final cause—to consume the pork or ham with : nutritional benefit and sensual enjoyment completely frustrating its original function. (Wild boar can be even better: fish, venison and kangaroo fine things.) The rights or wrongs of that, or any other action, do not depend on some particular final cause in the sequence of final causes any particular bit of matter goes through.

It is purposiveness that matters, not purposes(i). A vegetarian would argue that a pig has a sentient existence that trumps our wish to eat pig meat. Non-vegetarians would disagree. But it is the status of the pig as a sentient, and thus purposive, being that is the key issue. Is it enough like us in sentience to make eating it wrong or not? A practising Jew or Muslim may say that God has barred the eating of pig, but that is grounded in God’s explicit Revealed decision: purposiveness of the highest order in their religions.

Since the is’s of nature entails no oughts, people take the moral “lessons” from nature that they bring to it. For is us, our purposiveness, that is the source of values, so people take from nature the values they bring to it. Hence Nazis took from nature their obsessions with violence, purity, territory; environmentalists take their revulsion against capitalism and industrialisation; classical natural law theorists take from nature monotheism’s obsessions about sex. (One notes that the naturalness of nudity gets it no cred from the God-fearing.) Animist traditions, arising out of living embedded in nature, tended to have a much broader view of the function of sex because that is what they could observe thereby avoiding being in the position of deciding that some sex acts tell them about the nature and functions of sex and other sex acts do not. (And so to deciding that some marriages tell us about the nature and functions of marriage but other marriages do not, that some humans manifest how people are supposed to be and some do not.)

In the case of the original source argument about same-sex activity being “unnatural”—The Athenian in Plato’s The Laws—lacking recourse to the Judaic laws, it was grounded in false claims about there being no same-sex activity in nature:

If we were to follow in nature's steps … declaring that it is right to refrain from indulging in the same kind of intercourse with men and boys as with women, and adducing as evidence thereof the nature of wild beasts, and pointing out how male does not touch male for this purpose, since it is unnatural

and:

… for making a natural use of reproductive intercourse—on the one hand, by abstaining from the male … on the other hand, by abstaining from every female field in which you would not desire the seed to spring up. This law, when it has become permanent and prevails … is the cause of countless blessings. For, in the first place, it follows the dictates of nature, …

Later natural law theorists then characterised such activity observed in nature as unnatural flaws in the animals concerned: a case of cutting away their original props, leaving them standing in mid-air, metaphysically speaking. Hence their recurring tendency to universalise the parochial, as in Feser’s characterisation of marriage or St Paul on hair, or St Gerald of Aurillac on work, or medieval Scholastics on money or … .

We do not exist for marriage, marriage exists for us: indeed, it exists from us. It is a social form grounded in, and created by, human purposes: not in some innate form that trumps human purposes. Hence, since we vary and our conceptions vary, marriage can and does come in all sorts of forms, forms that change over time. It is probably no accident that Aristotelianism collapsed in European philosophy just as Europe was being confronted with a huge range of new societies, lands, species and natural phenomena: the collapse of what historian Alfred Crosby calls the venerable model took Scholastic Aristotelianism, with its tendency to universalise the parochial, to judge the world rather than infer from it, with it. It is hard to maintain a strong sense of there being a definitive natural order when one is confronted with a riot of human and other diversity undreamt of in your philosophy.

In The Last Superstition Edward Feser argues that the historical philosophical arguments for abandoning Aristotelianism are poor. He looks to animus against religion as a motivator. Given many of said rejecting philosophers were believers in God, the simple inadequacy of classical natural law theory in the face of the riot of new knowledge seems a more plausible explanation.

As is anti-clericalism: more specifically, opposition to priestly power and its consequences. The opposition of priests in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, to intellectual freedom is longstanding and well attested. Descartes, for example, apparently stopped working on his cosmology after Galileo ran into a spot of bother with the Church. But, with the invention of printing and the Reformation (in part a consequence of the spread of printing), there was a further effect. Scientific printing in particular was essentially forced into Protestant lands because of the way Catholic priests (as “gatekeepers of righteousness”) exercised their power to license what was printed. This despite the fact that Catholic theology—with its notion that the world, as the direction creation of God, has primacy over Scripture, as a creation of the body of believers (however divinely inspired)—was more science-friendly than Protestant theology, with its notion of the primacy of Scripture. (Hence contemporary creationism is much more of a Protestant, than a Catholic, phenomena.) Indeed, Protestant printers would use the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books as a mark of what to print, because such works had both the lure of the forbidden and allow book buyers to celebrate their “Protestant liberty” in defiance of “Papist despotism”. (The more things change …) Since such priestly power was indelibly connected to medieval Scholasticism, Aristotelianism was further tarred by repressive association.

The diversity of the human
Whether to grant the same-sex attracted equality before the law is a public policy choice. But it is genuine choice, grounded in human purposes. There is not some definitive form of marriage built into the structure of the universe that leads us to only one proper choice about what form of marriage is permissible.

That opponents of same-sex marriage are not willing to venture any predictions about what will happen in the US States that legalise same-sex marriage is itself an indication of how not grounded in human purposes, and in human nature as it is, the opposition to such equality before the law is.

The question is whether the same-sex attracted are a legitimate manifestation of the human or not and so whether their relationships are to have equal protection of the law. The supporters say they are legitimate manifestations of the human, with all that implies:

The increasing presence of "openly gay" people in social life and in the media has changed our habits. And over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

Hence attitudes to same-sex marriage being so much a division between generations. To the extent that the public animus towards same-sex attracted appears to be seriously hurting the standing of Christianity among young Americans.

A vivid and personal instance of this shift in perspective was provided by a National Party MP:

I have killed a man. In fact, I have killed men. Not through what I have done, but through my own pathetic and stupid prejudice. Not long ago I went to the funeral of a young gay friend of mine who had died of a rare wasting illness. He ultimately died of a broken heart – he died because he was sorry to be gay. He was a country bloke who didn't want to be gay, but he just was.
He didn't want the prejudice that he would inevitably face. I guess he wanted the textbook life that we generally romanticise about and call “normal'”, but it just wasn't him. At the cemetery I saw two of his friends, both male, holding hands as they lowered the casket, bawling their eyes out at the loss of their beloved friend. Through their tears my eyes were finally opened. Their love and respect was what mattered. Who cares what people do as long as they love each other?
I felt like a complete moron. In all these years of thinking that being gay was odd or unusual, in actual fact I was perpetuating prejudice that was killing young men – and which still kills young men.
I killed my friend through my failure to accept difference, and through the lack of understanding from other country blokes, just like me, who made him hate being gay. It is not overt prejudice or open vilification. It's the more dangerous, subtle, constant things we do that must have gnawed away at his soul. It was people such as me who give gay people a funny look, who make gay men ashamed in country Australia.
And I haven't just killed him, I have killed many. Killed them at the end of a rope in the back shed or at the barrel of their father's gun or next to an empty bottle of grog. It's a tough realisation to come to. I have been brought up and remain a strong Catholic, believing in strong “family values'' and that heterosexual relationships were what God was all about. But only a week after the funeral I went to a wedding where the priest read the Gospel where He says “of all of my commandments the most important one is to love thy neighbour''. Unless they cut out a bit on the end that said “unless they are gay,'' I reckon God didn't care much about who you love, so why do we?
Thomas, if you can hear me, forgive me for now I understand.

In other words, they stopped being flawed departures from what should be and became just people.

Apart from the utterly unnecessary human misery they create, the “mild” manifestations of bigotry matter because they keep alive the notion of a category of people whose existence is problematical, as a “problem” requiring “solution”. A final solution even: ideas have consequences.

The opponents say the same-sex attracted are not legitimate manifestations of the human:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

and it is perfectly obvious where the idea that there exist people who are not legitimate forms of the human:

In that night our Blessed Lady and Mother of God was delivered of our Blessed Saviour upon the hay that lay in the rack. At which nativity our Lord shewed many marvels. … And it happed this night that all the sodomites that did sin against nature were dead and extinct; for God hated so much this sin, that he might not suffer that nature human, which he had taken, were delivered to so great shame. Whereof Saint Austin saith that, it lacked but little that God would not become man for that sin

leads. (Not only did it take decades to acknowledge that homosexuals were victims of the Holocaust, when the camps were conquered, they were often transferred from the death camps to ordinary prisons, since same-sex activity remained a criminal offence: that is, they remained not a legitimate manifestation of the human.) A homicidal and exterminationist view being involved right from the beginning of the welding of the natural law tradition to Scriptural revelation precisely because it has purpose(i) and form not only trump human purposes but setting the definition of what it is to be (acceptably) human.

It is simply mad to think that men having sex with each other, engaging in the “wrong form” of sex, is more morally offensive than rape or murder: as The Golden Legend avers. All the homosexual orgasms in the history of the world do not morally outweigh one person being burnt alive for having sex with another. Indeed, they do not outweigh the mental torture inflicted on one adolescent for having the “wrong” aspirations to love and be loved, for being induced to think that they are somehow outside the natural order and hateful to God.

For it is nonsense to say “against the sin, not the sinner”. If someone said “love you, but I hate the fact that you are black”, we would see it for the bigoted statement it is. Our erotic nature is a fundamental part of us, not some optional extra. Just as pretending that encouraging people to be thoroughly alienated from their own erotic nature “has their best interests at heart” is a specious and contemptible rationalisation of deeper animus at their being so dreadfully different.

For if the same-sex attracted are not legitimate manifestations of the human, what has been done to them in the name of such thinking does not count. If they are not are not legitimate manifestations of the human, what has been done to them in the name of such thinking does not tell us anything about the logic of such thought. It is a normal pattern of bigotry to either ignore the brutality and other harm that results from it or to blame such on the objects of bigotry: the problem is never the way bigotry frames matters but always with the objects of bigotry. (The self-righteous certainty of political correctness regularly operates in this way.) The whole point of bigotry is to deny the objects of bigotry the status of “real people”, with the consideration that would entail.

So the brutality arising out of the anathematising of same-sex attraction and activity is either ignored, belittled or any harm involved is the fault of the same-sex active themselves. Or attention is simply shifted to how “threatened” the huge heterosexual majority is by the small same-sex attracted minority’s “corrupting power”, just as Jew-hatred built up the Jews in the same way. For if the small minority does not have great corrupting power, then it is just a large majority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority—which is central to why we see the same patterns in anti-gay activism as was manifested in anti-Jewish activism.

A corrupting anathema
The anathematisation of same-sex attraction is profoundly corrupting of moral sensibility. The elevating of forms and alleged purposes(i) over human purposes and purposiveness is profoundly belittling of what it is to be human. Not merely in the casting out of categories of people from the “properly human” but in not granting that purposiveness as the real root of all norms and so not treating what it is to be human with sufficient seriousness. Such elevation of designated forms and purposes(i) over human purposes, even over what it is to be human—indeed, to define what “counts” as properly human—must be oppressive.

For it was precisely Philo’s re-interpretation of Genesis 19 according to natural law principles which shifted the story from a warning to all not to treat the weak and vulnerable badly (so a story grounded in human purposiveness, which is how Christ used the story, following in the tradition of Ezekiel, and Zephaniah) to divine horror at same-sex activity (so a story grounded in form and function) and one which, moreover, was morally quarantined off as the anathematisation of an easily isolated, and thus vulnerable, minority: such that even tolerating such people became an offence against God. The notion of virtuous extermination was thereby embedded in Western civilisation. It is hard to over-estimate the evil consequences in re-casting the premier Scriptural example of the Wrath of God from a warning not to treat others badly to an anathematisation of the different: indeed, as an injunction to oppress and kill the different.

What is it to be human?
So, the debate over same-sex marriage is, in large part, a debate over what it is to be human. People vary, marriages vary: equality before the law is a way to cope, via simple decency, with the variety of the human rather than prosecuting an unending war against it.

It is, of course, deeply insulting, even infuriating, to be in the position to have to argue that, really, one is a fully legitimate manifestation of the human. But it is the position that Jew, blacks, women—all those who have had to struggle to achieve equal protection of the law—have had to go through.

In The Last Superstition, one has a grown man, and a philosopher, comparing homosexuality to alcoholism, autism, etc (p.134). No one who has suffered the destructiveness of the sufferer and those around them of alcoholism (or, for that matter, the travails of raising an autistic child) can possibly compare it to erotic attraction to one’s own sex without a seriously impaired sense of what actual pathology is, and is not. Particularly given same-sex attracted men are, as it happens, disproportionately likely to be volunteers, in the caring/service jobs or carers; tend to have more varied and intense friendships than heterosexual men; are less likely to engage in violence and more likely to be actively creative. But, then, Jews (if anything, even more wildly disproportionately intellectually creative) were equally dismissed as inherently pathological.

Again and again, those to be denied equal protection of the law are pathologised and belittled or are cast as somehow alien. Just as “decent conservatives” in the C19th American South did not want to see blacks as their moral equals, or conservative Catholics in C19th France, Austria or German would be outraged at the thought that Jews could be legitimately French, German or Austrian, so now many conservatives see homosexuality as somehow alien to the proper order of things. Of all the attempts to do cast out people in one’s own society as somehow alien, none is more nonsensical than seeing the same-sex attracted as such, as Bruce Bawer expresses so vividly:

Western civilization, far from being threatened by homosexuality, is to a staggeringly disproportionate degree the creation of gay men and women.
"Do you want to protect your children from gay influence?" I imagine [Allan Bloom] writing. "Very well. Destroy the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, silence Messiah and Swan Lake, and burn Moby Dick and The Portrait of a Lady. Gay culture is all around you — and it belongs to everybody."

But the effortless virtue of feeling superior to Leonardo Da Vinci, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Henry James, Alan Turing (for whose ill-treatment British PM Gordon Brown recently apologized) and all the other non-heterosexual creators of Western civilisation because, unlike them, you are not “queer”, must be a heady thing. It is also, of course, an utterly contemptible thing.

But, then, there is something profoundly pathetic about members of a huge majority trying to build up members of small minority as some great moral threat when, of course, it is the small minority who are the vulnerable ones. Leaving aside what happens in Muslim countries, in places like Jamaica or Nigeria even seeking to worship together can be actively dangerous. But freedom for the people-who-should-not-exist to worship, or to have same-sex marriage ceremonies, is not the sort of religious freedom that anti-gay activists concern themselves with when they bleat about religious freedom.

The madness, the pathology, is not in homosexuality. The madness is thinking it matters. That the same-sex attracted are anything more, or less, than just folks. Anything more, or less, than just a manifestation of the variety of the human.

The position of the Catholic Church is, as it has always been, that homosexuals, people with an “unnatural”, a “disordered”, attraction to their own sex, should not exist as they are. Once you have a category of people who should not exist, then clearly society, and decency, is served by making sure they do not exist or, if you cannot manage that, restrict that they exist as much as possible. Hence the Catholic Church’s position has been to be as exterminatory towards the same-sex attracted as it can get away within the existing historical circumstances. If they could be publicly killed them for acting on that attraction, that was done. If they were so outside the ambit of the Gospels that God could be portrayed as a Virtuous Exterminator, purifying the globe of their polluting presence before the Incarnation could even happen, that was done. If they could be denied any public space for manifesting that attraction, that was done. If they could be denied any legal rights or standing from manifesting that attraction, that has been done. For people who should not exist have no claim on the rest of humanity, the rest of society. Error has no rights, even to exist. (Something that the politically correct, in their ardent wish to police public discourse, tend to believe quite strongly.) But freedom means nothing if it does not mean the right to be wrong (with the normal caveats about being limited by the freedom of others), for otherwise we are under the power of whoever gets to define “the wrong”.

And the notion that there are people who should not exist comes to Christianity via the marriage of natural law theory with the Holiness Code using a reinterpretation of Genesis 19 to make that marriage work. In particular, the notion that functions are defined by innate purposes which thereby preclude any other purposes or uses from having any claim. The natural law approach of concepts that judge the world, not merely in a moral but in an ontological sense, has a natural exterminatory logic to it. Hence reinterpreting Genesis 19 to make God the Virtuous Exterminator of the people who should not exist, a logic expressed so fully in The Golden Legend. But that history of brutality and violence is only a moral problem if its victims and their experiences have moral weight. If they are people who should not exist, it is all mere action in defence of “decency”.

To accept equality before the law, one has to reject the notion that there are people-by-category who should not exist, or who are otherwise not fully legitimate manifestations of the human. Hence the power of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s above-cited point about “accepting the public category of gay people”, which includes accepting their full humanity. Hence also the bitter resistance by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Evangelical Christians to granting them that full, public humanity: so many of whose adherents are clearly happy to engage in whatever level of contempt for others—and its concomitant sense of effortless virtue—that is required to maintain their sense of the authority of scripture, the authority of their church and of sex as something that—unless done in the right form—separates us from the divine. (Not a burden that animist or polytheist conceptions of the divine, which are often highly sexualised, generally labour under.) Hence monotheism’s strikingly insistent anathematising of same-sex attraction, regardless of whether the particular strain of monotheism adheres to natural law theory or not.

Which puts in perspective the transformative nature of the Gospel message, for the point of the rejection of the Old Law, of the Holiness Code, was that the Gospel message changed it all into a message of moral universalism, so not playing restrictive, priestly games with good forms and bad forms. But it is classical natural law theory which led Christianity to keep that one bit of the Holiness Code going, that one case of keeping form trumping human purposes (in violation of Matthew 15: 16-20 and Mark 7:1-20), to interpret Genesis 19 in an exterminatory way which justifies further extermination of the people who should not exist. A reinterpretation which also finds its way into the Qur’an’s presentation of the story of Lot.

Defining ‘marriage’ so as to exclude actual marriages is both characteristic of how classical natural law theory precedes and a manifestation of a very grim legacy. For just as it holds that some sex acts tells us about the proper nature of sex and others do not, some marriages tells us about the proper nature of marriage and others do not, it ends up with some humans tells us about the proper nature of the human and others do not and so—as with being the “wrong class” in Marxism, the “wrong race” in Nazism—those with the “wrong sexuality” are “surplus to requirements” and to positive consideration. With all the petty, and not so petty, cruelties that generates.

We should not need to ask what they consequences of such thinking are: they have long since become obvious. Though one case can stand for so many. In 1741, Jan Jansz, aged 17, was convicted in Amsterdam of sodomy. As a result of the authorities performing their duty in accordance with traditional Christian doctrine, he spent the rest of his life—fifty-seven years—in solitary confinement in his cell. Decades of torment in the cause of their consciences, just as C. S. Lewis identifies.

The question is why people refuse to face what such thinking means, despite the mountains of evidence? Because of the blindness of habit, the comfort of the familiar and the endless appeal of effortless virtue. It would be some grim comfort to think the tormenting of all the Jan Jansz’s were and are all just pointless barbarity. But such acts are worse, for they are purposeful and self-elevating barbarity, reducing one’s fellows to stick figure puppets in the self-serving passion play of our comfortingly righteous, effortless virtue. Let’s not go there any more, nor adhere to the false theories that take us there.