Supernaturalism, Tradition and the Law

Ever notice how weird it is that you can believe any crazy shit you want, implement it as government policy, teach it in public schools or whatever, so long as you scrupulously avoid referring to a supernatural being. Such a belief doesn't have to actually be rational or scientific, so long as you claim that you arrived at it through purely rational or scientific means. Conversely, if you want to enact a sensible policy, but make your appeal to the people on the basis of traditional attachment to some supernatural entity, you are an enemy of peace, order, and good government.

I remember sitting in one classroom in downtown Toronto during my practicum where a we watched a film that presented the case that the pyramids were the work of some alien civilization. I know that many teachers present Michael Moore documentaries in their classroom almost without comment. While subbing north of Toronto, I was given the film What the Bleep Do We Know? to show to the class. Its muddled and mystical pseudo-science was apparently perfectly acceptable fare for the students of York Region, though a similar propagandist film for Christianity would have brought howls of protest.

The effect has been to on the defensive all political ideas based on tradition, because most traditions have been expressed in religious form. We don’t do these things because someone has thought out all the extended details, but because it is the command of God. I would suggest therefore that the prohibition against entanglement of religion and politics has become wholly arbitrary and should be abolished. In our present context it is nothing except a club for liberals, left and right, to beat traditionalist conservatives over the head with. Policy enacted for religious reasons is just as likely, perhaps even, being based on tradition, more likely, to be of benefit to the vast majority of people. That the secular reasons behind such policies may have been forgotten or never even consciously articulated, does not mean they are not there. Asking religious social conservatives to produce explicit secular justifications for every aspect of their policy preferences is absurd. Furthermore, even when we can see that a particular policy is possessed of good secular justifications, sometimes it can only be expressed to the commonality of men in religious terms.

For example, there are several good non-religious arguments against gay marriage. Clio put out the primary one:

I am concerned about same-sex marriage because I believe that the purpose of marriage is to tie biological fathers to their biological children. Same-sex marriage confuses and confounds that primary purpose of marriage because it insists that biology is of no significance to marriage, and moreover that biological parenthood is also not important to the formation of families. It is one thing to say that gay people can be good parents, which I believe. It is another thing to say that biological parenthood doesn't really matter.

Right, marriage is there to convince masculine men to express their masculinity by sticking around and supporting their children, rather than in that other popular form of expressing your masculinity: screwing as many chicks as possible. Therefore, marriage needs to, in some way, celebrate masculinity as masculinity. Gaying it up isn’t helpful. Furthermore, extending marriage into a situation, male-male relationships, where monogamy is unlikely doesn’t exactly send the message to other men that society expects you to take your marriage vows seriously. But few people can follow the kinds of complex economic arguments necessary to make the case this way, and the core of people opposed to gay marriage do so for religious reasons.

To cite another example, there are several good arguments against our current sexual mores (i.e. sexual anarchy). For most people, having a clear set of rules about when you should and should not engage in sexual relations was a good thing. It brought some order to the sexual marketplace. The old rules weren’t perfectly fair to everyone, but they dampened down the sexual warfare aspects of courtship and had the virtue of clarity. You knew when you had stepped into the outlaw zone. But of course no one, except perhaps yours truly, thinks about the complexities of the sexual marketplace when deciding whether to sleep with someone. No one thinks of how living with someone in a stable long term relationship subtly undermines the bright line rule that you should only engage in sex once married and thus increases the likelihood that the less intelligent and the less restrained will truly get themselves into trouble. So, the only effective way to convince most people of the need for restraint is a firm “Thus Saith the Lord.” The alternative, which is to vastly overstate the emotional and physical risks of pre-marital sex for everyone, is ridiculous. Secondly, there is the collective action problem within the sexual marketplace. In an anarchic sexual marketplace, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for just one person to act with restraint. There are plenty of men and women out there willing to do double duty. (If a woman doesn’t put out, a man can go off to find someone else who will, while if a man restrains himself during dating while others do not, unless his dates come from a pool where chastity is the norm, chances are he will end up buying at full price the cast off of some someone like Roissy.) So, unless you ensconce yourself in a smaller religious community you have to put yourself out there to compete. But, in doing so, almost everyone ends up just slightly less well off. Most women are putting out slightly sooner than they really want to and sleep with a couple men they really wish they hadn’t, and most men are ending up with someone slightly more sexually experienced than they would prefer (i.e. with slightly more sexual experience than they have). Once again, most people are totally incapable of following the logic here, so the only recourse for convincing people is to proclaim morality by divine fiat and unapolagetically enact policy that reinforces this. (In this particular case, I’d suggest much tighter divorce laws (but not abolishing divorce altogether), stripping fathers of any rights over children unless married to the mother, ending the right to child support unless the mother is married to the father, and reintroducing criminal sanctions against adultery.)

As a side note, I don’t really get the fetish many people have about keeping opposition to Darwinian evolution out of schools. I myself am a firm Darwinian, but all sorts of absurdity is taught in our public schools, much of it with far worse social and public policy implications. Why the particular outrage over this particular variety of creationism? The only thing I can think of is because of its reference to a supernatural being. The ideas of economic and racial, and sexual creationism are just as absurd, but are nonetheless all but our official ideology. They have not, however, made the mistake of appealing to the supernatural.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:
Megan McArdle on gay marriage.
Mencius on pseudo-atheists. My response is here
Mencius further opines on how our supposed rationalism is really nothing more than one group of religious (though often non-theistic) sects persecuting another.
Pith comments on publicly funded religious education here, here and here