Are you saying all that with the emphasis on "I" and "me"? But the topic of marriage is not about the individual. It's about a couple, as a minimum. The value of marriage is not the value for an individual from the individual point of view, so the survival that I am talking about is not individual survival. It's the survival of society, people, country.

The intrinsic value of (heterosexual) marriage is that it solves the existential problem for society, people, country, etc. Individual is irrelevant.

There is no subject of "us questions" that can answer. We cannot answer; I can answer on behalf of us. Only an individual can, properly speaking, act.

And marriage is of course about me: it's just about what I am doing with respect to myself and another person and our family rather than what I am doing just with respect to myself. But none of that entails the complete occlusion of the individual. Perhaps you have a very dutiful marriage, but even if you were totally subservient to your wife, it is still you who is being a servant, not the couple.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/04/2015 9:32 am)

Not at all. I don't deny that families *are* but it simply doesn't follow from the existence of families that, *I* as a member have an intrinsic obligation to continue my family. Your argument as I'm hearing it amounts to little more than:

1. Gay marriage precludes reproduction.
2. We are obliged to reproduce.
.:  Gay marriage is prohibited.

Most people deny 2- priests included. And 1 stands in need of expansion. I'm not sure what throwing about empty names for me is supposed to do for that.

At any rate, I didn't ever know what that buzzword "atomistic/individualist" style criticism was supposed to imply when my leftist friends did it, and I shant bother to guess in your case.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

This is a good point, but​ it is important to remember that the role of intermediate associations, even in moral education. Certainly, ideas matter. They are probably the central influence on man and society. But social institutions, cuture, and even material conditions do have an influence on the moral and spiritual beliefs and value of a society. If society is atomised and works against the family and marriage, then this will take a toll on both belief and action.

[...]

The economy and industrialism (or the way industralisation has been directed - it is not necessarily machinary itself, but the way it has been deveoped, organised, and made use of) have also taken a toll. T.S. Eliot pointed out the way industrialism has struck at both tradition and religion, and Russell Kirk likewise noted that veneration (of our ancestors and the supernatural) tends to wither on the pavements. 

Of course, we must not make the mistake of the materialists. First and foremost must come ideas and beliefs. But we shoudn't neglect the role of social and material influences on religious and moral beliefs.=13px

Of course. I take the lesson well from a Hegelianized-marxism, DH Lawrence, and my interests in political and economic theory. I've mainly tried to lead my interlocutors to a space where they see that what was being done for 20+ years in the US was intrinsically flawed even from the purview of the very limited set of personal situational considerations that are usually within view both when widely discussing marriage policy and, unfortunately, even when discussing natural law on marriage. The point is that even if the correct conclusion that 'natural marriage is constitutional' or that 'natural marriage is right' at best the multitude will agree from reason (most won't even get that far) and lament that they have no way of finding happiness in the truth.

Nihilism is too broad a label for the problem, but "attack on traditional marriage" or any number of other popular conservative labels for the problem are far too narrow. Policy would have to take its direction from a vision of the greater problem, not merely a worry about the judicial status of marriage statutes.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The state has a role to play in society. Often this role is just leaving social institutions alone - one of the major reasons for the decline of marriage and the family is the continual usurpation of their functions, autonomy, and authority by the state. As Robert Nisbet liked to point out, the state has come increasingly to think only in terms of the individual. It neglects and marginalises intermediate asssociations like family, Churches, local community, voluntary associations, and so on. This has taken a toll on these associations. It is not just the state, of course.=13px

I'm not sure. I don't know if the kind of general global indifference to the local that abided before is sufficient to constitute the traditional family as it was and if its return is either (1) sufficient to return it or (2) worth the cost in other respects.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/04/2015 10:56 pm)

=13px

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I would not say that decentralism and the correct social and state policy towards the family and intermediate associations in general is sufficient to restore them to health. I would say it is likely necessary. The state, as Nisbet and other traditional conservatives have pointed out, has acted in a sort of pincer movement to undermine intermediate associations. On the one hand, it has pursued more and more centralism; and, on the other, it has encouraged more and more individualism. Up to a point, modernity has shown collectivism and individualism are compatible. I am not sure what you me​an about worth the costs.

I don't know what that would properly mean. The end of public education? The end of economic policy? If you mean something other than the facsimile of some pater familias that hasn't existed for a least 2 centuries or the empty social reassurance of fathers and mothers that they are very important, you surely mean to call for a massive social reorganization.

Some of the problem is that the dichotomy between collectivism and individualism, so much in vogue when the worry was communism, was never quite right in the first place and is simply no longer relevant. At the very least, modern *global* society is constituted by a bloomin' buzzin' confusion of actors brought into a kind of harmony by powerful bureaucratic organizational practices not only essential to the state but which are also essential to all large economic actors active globally today. If you insist on the individualist/collectivist vocabulary- the modern world is, structurally speaking, one in which every single living person in society is a publicly acting individual *on the basis of* a massive impersonal collective structures. I mean, generally speaking, getting away from the kind of world we're in would mean, today, living in the wilderness, and even that is probably a privilege of a greater social structure making that kind of living unattractive to the vast majority of actors. Even libertarian-supported ideas- for instance bitcoin -are simply attempts to further depersonalize a collective structure. This cannot possibly fix the situation such that a man must make his own life for himself.

The problem with trying to "end" these structures- "the cost" -besides the fact that the practical limitation of the time requires that actors on a large scale, which would be necessary to end the modern way of doing things, generally must be coordinated by the very use of the structures to be eliminated, is that society's modern biological being is entirely sustained by this level of development. You can't scale back what's been accomplished because you simply couldn't support the way we live otherwise. If you could change things by magic over night you likely would reduce the world population catastrophically by half and the world standard of living similarly.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/05/2015 12:25 am)