Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Leon Kass, The End of Courtship
The End of Courtship
By Leon R. Kass
In the current wars over the state of American culture, few battlegrounds have seen more action than that of "family values"--sex, marriage, and child-rearing. Passions run high about sexual harassment, condom distribution in schools, pornography, abortion, gay marriage, and other efforts to alter the definition of "a family." Many people are distressed over the record-high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, marital infidelity, and premarital promiscuity. On some issues, there is even an emerging consensus that something is drastically wrong: Though they may differ on what is to be done, people on both the left and the right have come to regard the break-up of marriage as a leading cause of the neglect, indeed, of the psychic and moral maiming, of America's children. But while various people are talking about tracking down "dead-beat dads" or reestablishing orphanages or doing something to slow the rate of divorce--all remedies for marital failure--very little attention is being paid to what makes for marital success. Still less are we attending to the ways and mores of entering into marriage, that is, to wooing or courtship.
There is, of course, good reason for this neglect. The very terms--"wooing," "courting," "suitors"--are archaic; and if the words barely exist, it is because the phenomena have all but disappeared. Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony. This is true not just for the lower or under classes.Even--indeed especially--the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage. To be sure, there are still exceptions, to be found, say, in closed religious communities or among new immigrants from parts of the world that still practice arranged marriage. But for most of America's middle-- and upper-class youth--the privileged college-educated and graduated--there are no known explicit, or even tacit, social paths directed at marriage. People still get married--though later, less frequently, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully. People still get married in churches and synagogues--though often with ceremonies of their own creation. But, for the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory: It's every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled upon it by accident.
Then and now
Things were not always like this; in fact, one suspects things were never like this, not here, not anywhere. We live, in this respect as in so many others, in utterly novel and unprecedented times. Until what seems like only yesterday, young people were groomed for marriage, and the paths leading to it were culturally well set out, at least in rough outline. In polite society, at the beginning of this century, our grandfathers came a-calling and a-wooing at the homes of our grandmothers, under conditions set by the woman, operating from strength on her own turf. A generation later, courting couples began to go out on "dates," in public and increasingly on the man's terms, given that he had the income to pay for dinner and dancing. To be sure, some people "played the field," and, in the pre-war years, dating on college campuses became a matter more of proving popularity than of proving suitability for marriage. But, especially after the war, "going-steady" was a regular feature of high-school and college life; the age of marriage dropped considerably, and high-school or college sweethearts often married right after, or even before, graduation. Finding a mate, no less than getting an education that would enable him to support her, was at least a tacit goal of many a male undergraduate; many a young woman, so the joke had it, went to college mainly for her MRS. degree, a charge whose truth was proof against libel for legions of college coeds well into the 1960s. (1)
In other respects as well, the young remained culturally attached to the claims of "real life." Though times were good, fresh memory kept alive the poverty of the recent Great Depression and the deaths and dislocations of the war; necessity and the urgencies of life were not out of sight, even for fortunate youth. Opportunity was knocking, the world and adulthood were beckoning, and most of us stepped forward into married life, readily, eagerly, and, truth to tell, without much pondering. We were simply doing--some sooner, some later--what our parents had done, indeed, what all our forebears had done.
Not so today. Now the vast majority goes to college, but very few--women or men--go with the hope, or even the wish, of finding a marriage partner. Many do not expect to find there even a path to a career; they often require several years of post-graduate "time off" to figure out what they are going to do with themselves. Sexually active--in truth, hyperactive--they flop about from one relationship to another; to the bewildered eye of this admittedly much-too-old but still romantic observer, they manage to appear all at once casual and carefree and grim and humorless about getting along with the opposite sex. The young men, nervous predators, act as if any woman is equally good: They are given not to falling in love with one, but to scoring in bed with many. And in this sporting attitude they are now matched by some female trophy hunters.
But most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused; hoping for something more, they are not enjoying their hard-won sexual liberation as much as liberation theory says they should. (2) Never mind wooing, today's collegians do not even make dates or other forward-looking commitments to see one another; in this, as in so many other ways, they reveal their blindness to the meaning of the passing of time. Those very few who couple off seriously and get married upon graduation as we, their parents, once did are looked upon as freaks.
After college, the scene is even more remarkable and bizarre: singles bars, personal "partner wanted" ads (almost never mentioning marriage as a goal), men practicing serial monogamy (or what someone has aptly renamed "rotating polygamy"), women chronically disappointed in the failure of men "to commit." For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties--their most fertile years--neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not; resenting the personal price they pay for their worldly independence, they nevertheless try to put a good face on things and take refuge in work or feminist ideology. As age 30 comes and goes, they begin to allow themselves to hear their biological clock ticking, and, if husbands continue to be lacking, single motherhood by the hand of science is now an option. Meanwhile, the bachelor herd continues its youthful prowl, with real life in suspended animation, living out what Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor of City Journal, has called a "postmodern postadolescence."
Those women and men who get lucky enter into what the personal ads call LTRs--long-term relationships--sometimes cohabiting, sometimes not, usually to discover how short an LTR can be. When, after a series of such affairs, marriage happens to them, they enter upon it guardedly and suspiciously, with prenuptial agreements, no common surname, and separate bank accounts. Courtship, anyone? Don't be ridiculous.
Recent obstacles to courtship
Anyone who seriously contemplates the present scene is--or should be--filled with profound sadness, all the more so if he or she knows the profound satisfactions of a successful marriage. Our hearts go out not only to the children of failed--or non-marriages--to those betrayed by their parents' divorce and to those deliberately brought into the world as bastards--but also to the lonely, disappointed, cynical, misguided, or despondent people who are missing out on one of life's greatest adventures and, through it, on many of life's deepest experiences, insights, and joys. We watch our sons and daughters, our friends' children, and our students bumble along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, wishing we could help. Few things lead us to curse "o tempore, o mores" more than recognizing our impotence to do anything either about our own young people's dilemmas or about these melancholy times.
Some conservatives frankly wish to turn back the clock and think a remoralization of society in matters erotic is a real possibility. I, on the other hand, am deeply pessimistic, most of the time despairing of any improvement. Inherited cultural forms can be undermined by public policy and social decision, but once fractured, they are hard to repair by rational and self-conscious design. Besides, the causes of the present state of affairs are multiple, powerful, and, I fear, largely irreversible. Anyone who thinks courtship can make a comeback must at least try to understand what he is up against.
Some of the obstacles in the way of getting married are of very recent origin; indeed, they have occurred during the adult lifetime of those of us over 50. For this reason, one suspects, they may seem to some people to be reversible, a spasm connected with the "abnormal" sixties. But, when they are rightly understood, one can see that they spring from the very heart of liberal democratic society and of modernity altogether.
Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock, who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as "the time of our lives," imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.
The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it? Contrary to what the youth of the sixties believed, they were not the first to feel the power of sexual desire. Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one's partner than for one's mother.
The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman's own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever.
Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates. For it is a woman's refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man's lust into love. Women also lost the capacity to discover their own genuine longings and best interests. For only by holding herself in reserve does a woman gain the distance and self-command needed to discern what and whom she truly wants and to insist that the ardent suitor measure up. While there has always been sex without love, easy and early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely--for both men and women. Everyone's prospects for marriage were--are--sacrificed on the altar of pleasure now.
Sexual technology and technique
The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control--the pill--which for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences. Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality--as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman's anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning.
Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage. Taking for granted, and thereby ratifying, precocious sexual activity among teenagers (and even pre-teens), most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS. While some programs also encourage abstinence or non-coital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for "safe sex"; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.
But perhaps still worse than such amorality--and amorality on this subject is itself morally culpable--is the failure of sex education to attempt to inform and elevate the erotic imagination of the young. On the contrary, the very attention to physiology and technique is deadly to the imagination. True sex education is an education of the heart; it concerns itself with beautiful and worthy beloveds, with elevating transports of the soul. The energy of sexual desire, if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings--not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings. The sonnets and plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley, and the novels of Jane Austen can incline a heart to woo, and even show one whom and how. What kind of wooers can one hope to cultivate from reading the sex manuals--or from watching the unsublimated and unsublime sexual athleticism of the popular culture?
Decent sex education at home is also compromised, given that most parents of today's adolescents were themselves happy sexual revolutionaries. Dad may now be terribly concerned that his daughter not become promiscuous in high school or college, but he probably remains glad for the sexual favors bestowed on him by numerous coeds when he was on campus. If he speaks at all, he will likely settle for admonitions to play it safe and lessons about condoms and the pill. And mom, a feminist and career woman, is concerned only that her daughter have sex on her own terms, not her boyfriend's. If chastity begins at home, it has lost its teachers and exemplars.
Crippled by divorce
The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue, wishfully against the empirical evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know how important it is to choose well. But the deck is stacked against them. Not only are many of them frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe, but they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; worse, their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world. Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives. (3 ) They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively; for good reason, they believe that they must always be looking out for number one. Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another and, their own needs unmet, they are not generally eager for or partial to children. They are not good bets for promise keeping, and they haven't enough margin for generous service. And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood, except in the purely biological sense. Even where they dream of meeting a true love, these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.
It is surely the fear of making a mistake in marriage, and the desire to avoid a later divorce, that leads some people to undertake cohabitation, sometimes understood by the couple to be a "trial marriage"--although they are often one or both of them self-deceived (or other-deceiving). It is far easier, so the argument goes, to get to know one another by cohabiting than by the artificial systems of courting or dating of yesteryear. But such arrangements, even when they eventuate in matrimony, are, precisely because they are a trial, not a trial of marriage. Marriage is not something one tries on for size, and then decides whether to keep; it is rather something one decides with a promise, and then bends every effort to keep.
Lacking the formalized and public ritual, and especially the vows or promises of permanence (or "commitment") that subtly but surely shape all aspects of genuine marital life, cohabitation is an arrangement of convenience, with each partner taken on approval and returnable at will. Many are, in fact, just playing house-sex and meals shared with the rent. When long-cohabiting couples do later marry, whether to legitimate prospective offspring, satisfy parental wishes, or just because "it now seems right," post-marital life is generally regarded and experienced as a continuation of the same, not as a true change of estate. The formal rite of passage that is the wedding ceremony is, however welcome and joyous, also something of a mockery: Everyone, not only the youngest child present, wonders, if only in embarrassed silence, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" Given that they have more or less drifted into marriage, it should come as no great surprise that couples who have lived together before marriage have a higher, not lower, rate of divorce than those who have not. Too much familiarity? Disenchantment? Or is it rather the lack of wooing--that is, that marriage was not seen from the start as the sought--for relationship, as the goal that beckoned and guided the process of getting-to-know-you?
Feminism against marriage
That the cause of courtship has been severely damaged by feminist ideology and attitudes goes almost without saying. Even leaving aside the radical attacks on traditional sex roles, on the worth of motherhood or the vanishing art of homemaking, and sometimes even on the whole male race, the reconception of all relations between the sexes as relations based on power is simply deadly for love. Anyone who has ever loved or been loved knows the difference between love and the will to power, no matter what the cynics say. But the cynical new theories, and the resulting push toward androgyny, surely inhibit the growth of love.
On the one side, there is a rise in female assertiveness and efforts at empowerment, with a consequent need to deny all womanly dependence and the kind of vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men, protection such men were once--and would still be--willing to provide. On the other side, we see the enfeeblement of men, who, contrary to the dominant ideology, are not likely to become better lovers, husbands, or fathers if they too become feminists or fellow-travelers. On the contrary, many men now cynically exploit women's demands for equal power by letting them look after themselves--pay their own way, hold their own doors, fight their own battles, travel after dark by themselves. These ever so sensitive males will defend not a woman's honor but her right to learn the manly art of self-defense. In the present climate, those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness. (4)
Even in the absence of the love-poisoning doctrines of radical feminism, the otherwise welcome changes in women's education and employment have also been problematic for courtship. True, better educated women can, other things being equal, be more interesting and engaging partners for better educated men; and the possibility of genuine friendship between husband and wife--one that could survive the end of the child-rearing years--is, at least in principle, much more likely now that women have equal access to higher education. But everything depends on the spirit and the purpose of such education, and whether it makes and keeps a high place for private life.
Most young people in our better colleges today do not esteem the choice for marriage as equal to the choice for career, not for themselves, not for anyone. Students reading The Tempest, for example, are almost universally appalled that Miranda would fall in love at first sight with Ferdinand, thus sealing her fate and precluding "making something of herself"--say, by going to graduate school. Even her prospects as future Queen of Naples lack all appeal, presumably because it depends on her husband and on marriage. At least officially, no young woman will admit to dreaming of meeting her prince; better a position, a salary, and a room of her own.
The problem is not woman's desire for meaningful work. It is rather the ordering of one's loves. Many women have managed to combine work and family; the difficulty is finally not work but careers, or, rather, careerism. Careerism, now an equal opportunity affliction, is surely no friend to love or marriage; and the careerist character of higher education is greater than ever. Women are under special pressures to prove they can be as dedicated to their work as men. Likewise, in the work place, they must do man's work like a man, and for man's pay and perquisites. Consequently, they are compelled to regard private life, and especially marriage, homemaking, and family, as lesser goods, to be pursued only by those lesser women who can aspire no higher than "baking cookies." Besides, many women in such circumstances have nothing left to give, "no time to get involved." And marriage, should it come for careerist women, is often compromised from the start, what with the difficulty of finding two worthy jobs in the same city, or commuter marriage, or the need to negotiate or get hired help for every domestic and familial task.
Besides these greater conflicts of time and energy, the economic independence of women, however welcome on other grounds, is itself not an asset for marital stability, as both the woman and the man can more readily contemplate leaving a marriage. Indeed, a woman's earning power can become her own worst enemy when the children are born. Many professional women who would like to stay home with their new babies nonetheless work full-time. Tragically, some cling to their economic independence because they worry that their husbands will leave them for another woman before the children are grown. What are these women looking for in prospective husbands? Do their own career preoccupations obscure their own prospective maternal wishes and needs? Indeed, what understanding of marriage informed their decision to marry in the first place?
Not ready for adulthood
This question in fact represents a more subtle, but most profound, impediment to wooing and marriage: deep uncertainty about what marriage is and means, and what purpose it serves. In previous generations, people chose to marry, but they were not compelled also to choose what marriage meant. Is it a sacrament, a covenant, or a contract based on calculation of mutual advantage? Is it properly founded on eros, friendship, or economic advantage? Is marriage a vehicle for personal fulfillment and private happiness, a vocation of mutual service, or a task to love the one whom it has been given me to love? Are marital vows still to be regarded as binding promises that both are duty-bound to keep or, rather, as quaint expressions of current hopes and predictions that, should they be mistaken, can easily be nullified? Having in so many cases already given their bodies to one another--not to speak of the previous others--how does one understand the link between marriage and conjugal fidelity? And what, finally, of that first purpose of marriage, procreation, for whose sake societies everywhere have instituted and safeguarded this institution? For, truth to tell, were it not for the important obligations to care for and rear the next generation, no society would finally much care about who couples with whom, or for how long.
This brings me to what is probably the deepest and most intractable obstacle to courtship and marriage: a set of cultural attitudes and sensibilities that obscure and even deny the fundamental difference between youth and adulthood. Marriage, especially when seen as the institution designed to provide for the next generation, is most definitely the business of adults, by which I mean, people who are serious about life, people who aspire to go outward and forward to embrace and to assume responsibility for the future. To be sure, most college graduates do go out, find jobs, and become self-supporting (though, astonishingly, a great many do return to live at home). But, though out of the nest, they don't have a course to fly. They do not experience their lives as a trajectory, with an inner meaning partly given by the life cycle itself. The carefreeness and independence of youth they do not see as a stage on the way to maturity, in which they then take responsibility for the world and especially, as parents, for the new lives that will replace them. The necessities of aging and mortality are out of sight; few feel the call to serve a higher goal or some transcendent purpose.
The view of life as play has often characterized the young. But, remarkably, today this is not something regrettable, to be outgrown as soon as possible; for their narcissistic absorption in themselves and in immediate pleasures and present experiences, the young are not condemned but are even envied by many of their elders. Parents and children wear the same cool clothes, speak the same lingo, listen to the same music. Youth, not adulthood, is the cultural ideal, at least as celebrated in the popular culture. Yes, everyone feels themselves to be always growing, as a result of this failed relationship or that change of job. But very few aspire to be fully grown-up, and the culture does not demand it of them, not least because many prominent grown-ups would gladly change places with today's 20-somethings. Why should a young man be eager to take his father's place, if he sees his father running away from it with all deliberate speed? How many so-called grown-ups today agree with C. S. Lewis: "I envy youth its stomach, not its heart"?
Deeper cultural causes
So this is our situation. But just because it is novel and of recent origin does not mean that it is reversible or even that it was avoidable. Indeed, virtually all of the social changes we have so recently experienced are the bittersweet fruits of the success of our modern democratic, liberal, enlightened society-celebrating equality, freedom, and universal secularized education, and featuring prosperity, mobility, and astonishing progress in science and technology. Even brief reflection shows how the dominant features of the American way of life are finally inhospitable to the stability of marriage and family life and to the mores that lead people self-consciously to marry.
Tocqueville already observed the unsettling implications of American individualism, each person seeking only in himself for the reasons for things. The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition, and custom, and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons. A nation dedicated to safeguarding individual rights to liberty and the privately defined pursuit of happiness is, willy-nilly, preparing the way for the "liberation" of women; in the absence of powerful non-liberal cultural forces, such as traditional biblical religion, that defend sex-linked social roles, androgyny in education and employment is the most likely outcome. Further, our liberal approach to important moral issues in terms of the rights of individuals--e.g., contraception as part of a right to privacy, or abortion as belonging to a woman's right over her own body, or procreation as governed by a right to reproduce--flies in the face of the necessarily social character of sexuality and marriage. The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.
While poverty is not generally good for courtship and marriage, so neither is luxury. The lifestyles of the rich and famous have long been rich also in philandering, divorce, and the neglect of children. Necessity becomes hidden from view by the possibilities for self-indulgence; the need for service and self-sacrifice, so necessary for marriage understood as procreative, is rarely learned in the lap of plenty. Thanks to unprecedented prosperity, huge numbers of American youth have grown up in the lap of luxury, and it shows. It's an old story: Parents who slave to give their children everything they themselves were denied rarely produce people who will be similarly disposed toward their own children. Spoiled children make bad spouses and worse parents; when they eventually look for a mate, they frequently look for someone who will continue to cater to their needs and whims. Necessity, not luxury, is for most people the mother of virtue and maturity.
The progress of science and technology, especially since World War II, has played a major role in creating this enfeebling culture of luxury. But scientific advances have more directly helped to undermine the customs of courtship. Technological advances in food production and distribution and a plethora of appliances--refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, etc.--largely eliminate the burdens of housekeeping; not surprisingly, however, homemaking itself disappears with the burdens, for the unburdened housewife now finds outside fish to fry. More significantly, medical advances have virtually eliminated infant mortality and deadly childhood diseases, contributing indirectly to the reduction in family size. The combination of longer life-expectancy and effective contraception means that, for the first time in human history, the child-bearing and child-rearing years occupy only a small fraction (one-fifth to one-fourth) of a woman's life; it is therefore less reasonable that she be solely prepared for, and satisfied by, the vocation of motherhood. Lastly, medical advances quite independent of contraception have prepared the drive toward our recently permitted sexual liberation: For the triumph of the sexual is a clearly predictable outcome of the successful pursuit, through medicine, of the young and enduringly healthy human body.
In fact, in his New Atlantis, Francis Bacon foresaw that the most likely social outcome of medical success would be a greatly intensified eroticism and promiscuous sexuality, in which healthy and perfected bodies seek enjoyment here and now without regard to the need for marriage, procreation, and child-rearing. Accordingly, to counter these dangers, Bacon has his proposed Utopian society establish the most elaborate rituals to govern marriage; and it gives its highest honor (after those conferred on the men of science) to the man who has sired over 30 living descendants (of course, within conventional marital boundaries). In the absence of such countervailing customs, as Bacon clearly understood, the successful pursuit of longer life and better health leads--as we have seen in recent decades--to a culture of protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license.
Technology aside, even the ideas of modern science have hurt the traditional understanding of sex. Modern science's rejection of a teleological view of nature has damaged most of all the teleological view of our sexuality. Sure, children come from the sex act; but the sex act no longer naturally derives its meaning or purpose from this procreative possibility. After all, a man spends perhaps all of 30 seconds of his sexual life procreating; sex is thus about something else. The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half-century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity's most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex had no necessary link to procreation, Kant redefined marriage as "a life-long contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia." If this be marriage, the reason for its permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity vanishes.
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. With adultery almost as American as apple pie, few people appreciate the awe-ful shame of The Scarlet Letter. The sexual abominations of Leviticus--incest, homosexuality, and bestiality--are going the way of all flesh, the second with religious blessings, no less. Ancient religious teachings regarding marriage have lost their authority even for people who regard themselves as serious Jews or Christians: Who really believes that husbands should govern their wives as Christ governs the church, or that a husband should love his wife as Christ loved the church and should give himself up to death for her (Ephesians 5:24-25)?
The natural obstacle
Not all the obstacles to courtship and marriage are cultural. At bottom, there is also the deeply ingrained, natural waywardness and unruliness of the human male. Sociobiologists were not the first to discover that males have a penchant for promiscuity and polygyny--this was well known to biblical religion. Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman's powerful and immediate link to life's generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deed, great quests, or sheer distraction after distraction. One can make a good case that biblical religion is, not least, an attempt to domesticate male sexuality and male erotic longings, and to put them in the service of transmitting a righteous and holy way of life through countless generations.
For as long as American society kept strong its uneasy union between modern liberal political principles and Judeo-Christian moral and social beliefs, marriage and the family could be sustained and could even prosper. But the gender-neutral individualism of our political teaching has, it seems, at last won the day, and the result has been male "liberation"--from domestication, from civility, from responsible self-command. Contemporary liberals and conservatives alike are trying to figure out how to get men "to commit" to marriage, or to keep their marital vows, or to stay home with the children, but their own androgynous view of humankind prevents them from seeing how hard it has always been to make a monogamous husband and devoted father out of the human male.
Ogden Nash had it right: "Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous." To make naturally polygamous men accept the conventional institution of monogamous marriage has been the work of centuries of Western civilization, with social sanctions, backed by religious teachings and authority, as major instruments of the transformation, and with female modesty as the crucial civilizing device. As these mores and sanctions disappear, courtship gives way to seduction and possession, and men become again the sexually, familially, and civically irresponsible creatures they are naturally always in danger of being. At the top of the social ladder, executives walk out on their families and take up with trophy wives. At the bottom of the scale, low-status males, utterly uncivilized by marriage, return to the fighting gangs, taking young women as prizes for their prowess. Rebarbarization is just around the corner. Courtship, anyone?
Why it matters
Given the enormous new social impediments to courtship and marriage, and given also that they are firmly and deeply rooted in the cultural soil of modernity, not to say human nature itself, one might simply decide to declare the cause lost. In fact, many people would be only too glad to do so. For they condemn the old ways as repressive, inegalitarian, sexist, patriarchal, boring, artificial, and unnecessary. Some urge us to go with the flow; others hopefully believe that new modes and orders will emerge, well-suited to our new conditions of liberation and equality. Just as new cultural meanings are today being "constructed" for sexuality and gender, so too new cultural definitions can be invented for "marriage," "paternity and maternity," and "family." Nothing truly important, so the argument goes, will be lost.
New arrangements can perhaps be fashioned. As Raskolnikov put it--and he should know--"Man gets used to everything, the beast!" But it is simply wrong that nothing important will be lost; indeed, many things of great importance have already been lost, and, as I have indicated, at tremendous cost in personal happiness, child welfare, and civic peace. This should come as no surprise. For the new arrangements that constitute the cultural void created by the demise of courtship and dating rest on serious and destructive errors regarding the human condition: errors about the meaning of human sexuality, errors about the nature of marriage, errors about what constitutes a fully human life.
Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, points to an end that is partly hidden from, and finally at odds with, the self-serving individual: Sexuality as such means perishability and serves replacement. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: Sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. This truth the salmon and the other animals practice blindly; only the human being can understand what it means. According to the story of the Garden of Eden, our humanization is in fact coincident with the recognition of our sexual nakedness and all that it implies: shame at our needy incompleteness, unruly self-division, and finitude; awe before the eternal; hope in the self-transcending possibilities of children and a relationship to the divine. (5 ) For a human being to treat sex as a desire like hunger--not to mention as sport--is then to live a deception.
Thus how shallow an understanding of sexuality is embodied in our current clamoring for "safe sex." Sex is by its nature unsafe. All interpersonal relations are necessarily risky and serious ones especially so. And to give oneself to another, body and soul, is hardly playing it safe. Sexuality is at its core profoundly "unsafe," and it is only thanks to contraception that we are encouraged to forget its inherent "dangers." These go beyond the hazards of venereal disease, which are always a reminder and a symbol of the high stakes involved, and beyond the risks of pregnancy and the pains and dangers of childbirth to the mother. To repeat, sexuality itself means mortality--equally for both man and woman. Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. "Safe sex" is the self-delusion of shallow souls. (6)
It is for this reason that procreation remains at the core of a proper understanding of marriage. Mutual pleasure and mutual service between husband and wife are, of course, part of the story. So too are mutual admiration and esteem, especially where the partners are deserving. A friendship of shared pursuits and pastimes enhances any marriage, all the more so when the jointactivities exercise deeper human capacities. But it is precisely the common project of procreation that holds together what sexual differentiation sometimes threatens to drive apart. Through children, a good common to both husband and wife, male and female achieve some genuine unification (beyond the mere sexual "union" that fails to do so): The two become one through sharing generous (not needy) love for this third being as good. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the parents' own commingled being externalized, and given a separate and persisting existence; unification is enhanced also by their commingled work of rearing. Providing an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names, our ways, and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testament to the possibility of transcendence. Gender duality and sexual desire, which first draws our love upward and outside of ourselves, finally provide for the partial overcoming of the confinement and limitation of perishable embodiment altogether. It is as the supreme institution devoted to this renewal of human possibility that marriage finds its deepest meaning and highest function.
There is no substitute for the contribution that the shared work of raising children makes to the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because of its central procreative mission, and, even more, because children are yours for a lifetime, this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from, but rather embraces wholeheartedly, the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by mistake did God create a woman--rather than a dialectic partner--to cure Adam's aloneness; not by accident does the same biblical Hebrew verb mean both to know sexually and to know the truth--including the generative truth about the meaning of being man and woman. (7)
Marriage and procreation are, therefore, at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life, if not for everyone at least for the vast majority. Most of us know from our own experience that life becomes truly serious when we become responsible for the lives of others for whose being in the world we have said, "We do." It is fatherhood and motherhood that teach most of us what it took to bring us into our own adulthood. And it is the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to our children that opens us toward a serious concern for the true, the good, and even the holy. Parental love of children leads once wayward sheep back into the fold of church and synagogue. In the best case, it can even be the beginning of the sanctification of life--yes, even in modern times.
The earlier forms of courtship, leading men and women to the altar, understood these deeper truths about human sexuality, marriage, and the higher possibilities for human life. Courtship provided rituals of growing up, for making clear the meaning of one's own human sexual nature, and for entering into the ceremonial and customary world of ritual and sanctification. Courtship disciplined sexual desire and romantic attraction, provided opportunities for mutual learning about one another's character, fostered salutary illusions that inspired admiration and devotion, and, by locating wooer and wooed in their familial settings, taught the inter-generational meaning of erotic activity. It pointed the way to the answers to life's biggest questions: Where are you going? Who is going with you? How--in what manner--are you both going to go?
The practices of today's men and women do not accomplish these purposes, and they and their marriages, when they get around to them, are weaker as a result. There may be no going back to the earlier forms of courtship, but no one should be rejoicing over this fact. Anyone serious about "designing" new cultural forms to replace those now defunct must bear the burden of finding some alternative means of serving all these necessary goals.
A revolution needed?
Is the situation hopeless? One would like to be able to offer more encouraging news than the great popularity--and not only among those 50 or older--of the recent Jane Austen movies, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma, and (on public television) the splendid BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. But, though at best a small ray of hope, the renewed interest in Jane Austen reflects, I believe, a dissatisfaction with the unromantic and amarital present and a wish, on the part of many 20- and 30-somethings, that they too might find their equivalent of Elizabeth Bennet or Mr. Darcy (even without his Pemberly). The return of successful professional matchmaking services--I do not mean the innumerable "self-matching" services that fill pages of "personal" ads in our newspapers and magazines-is a further bit of good news. So too is the revival of explicit courtship practices among certain religious groups; young men are told by young women that they need their father's permission to come courting, and marriage alone is clearly the name of the game. Various groups, including David Blankenhorn's Institute for American Values, have put marriage--and not only divorce--in the national spotlight. And--if I may grasp at straws--one can even take a small bit of comfort from those who steadfastly refuse to marry, insofar as they do so because they recognize that marriage is too serious, too demanding, too audacious an adventure for their immature, irresponsible, and cowardly selves.
Frail reeds, indeed--probably not enough to save even a couple of courting water bugs. Real reform in the direction of sanity would require a restoration of cultural gravity about sex, marriage, and the life cycle. The restigmatization of illegitimacy and promiscuity would help. A reversal of recent anti-natalist prejudices, implicit in the practice of abortion, and a correction of current anti-generative sex education, would also help, as would the revalorization of marriage as a personal, as well as a cultural, ideal. Parents of pubescent children could contribute to a truly humanizing sex education by elevating their erotic imagination, through exposure to an older and more edifying literature. Parents of college-bound young people, especially those with strong religious and family values, could direct their children to religiously affiliated colleges that attract like-minded people.
Even in deracinated and cosmopolitan universities like my own, faculty could legitimate the importance of courtship and marriage by offering courses on the subject, aimed at making the students more thoughtful about their own life-shaping choices. Even better, they could teach without ideological or methodological preoccupations the world's great literature, elevating the longings and refining the sensibilities of their students and furnishing their souls with numerous examples of lives seriously led and loves faithfully followed. Religious institutions could provide earlier and better instruction for adolescents on the meaning of sex and marriage, as well as suitable opportunities for co-religionists to mix and, God willing, match. Absent newly discovered congregational and communal support, individual parents will generally be helpless before the onslaught of the popular culture.
Under present democratic conditions, with families not what they used to be, anything that contributes to promoting a lasting friendship between husband and wife should be cultivated. A budding couple today needs even better skills at reading character, and greater opportunities for showing it, than was necessary in a world that had lots of family members looking on. Paradoxically, encouragement of earlier marriage, and earlier child-bearing, might in many cases be helpful--the young couple as it were growing up together before either partner could become jaded or distrustful from too much pre-marital experience, not only of "relationships" but of life. Training for careers by women could be postponed until after the early motherhood years--perhaps even supported publicly by something like a GI Bill of Rights for mothers who had stayed home until their children reached school age.
But it would appear to require a revolution to restore the conditions most necessary for successful courtship: a desire in America's youth for mature adulthood (which means for marriage and parenthood), an appreciation of the unique character of the marital bond, understood as linked to generation, and a restoration of sexual self-restraint generally and of female modesty in particular.
Frankly, I do not see how this last, most crucial, prerequisite can be recovered, nor do I see how one can do sensibly without it. As Tocqueville rightly noted, it is women who are the teachers of mores; it is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence, both before and after marriage. Men, as Rousseau put it, will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power. Is there perhaps some nascent young feminist out there who would like to make her name great and who will seize the golden opportunity for advancing the truest interest of women (and men and children) by raising (again) the radical banner, "Not until you marry me"? And, while I'm dreaming, why not also, "Not without my parents' blessings"?
Notes
1. A fine history of these transformations has been written by Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
2. Readers removed from the college scene should revisit Allan Bloom's profound analysis of relationships in his The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Bloom was concerned with the effect of the new arrangements on the possibility for liberal education, not for marriage, my current concern.
3. In years past, students identified with Hamlet because of his desire to make a difference in the world. Today, they identify with him because of his "broken home" -- the death of his father and the too-hasty remarriage of his mother. Thus, to them it is no wonder that he, like they, has trouble in his "relationships."
4. Truth to tell, the reigning ideology often rules only people's tongues, not their hearts. Many a young woman secretly hopes to meet and catch a gentleman, though the forms that might help her do so are either politically incorrect or simply unknown to her. In my wife's course on Henry James' The Bostonians, the class's most strident feminist, who had all term denounced patriarchy and male hegemonism, honestly confessed in the last class that she wished she could meet a Basil Ransom who would carry her off. But the way to her heart is blocked by her prickly opinions and by those of the dominant ethos.
5. See my "Man and Woman: An Old Story," First Things, November, 1991.
6. This is not to say that the sole meaning of sexuality is procreative; understood as love-making, sexual union is also a means of expressing mutual love and the desire for a union of souls. Making love need lose none of its tenderness after the child-bearing years are past. Yet the procreative possibility embedded in eros cannot be expunged without distorting its meaning.
7. I recognize that there are happily monogamous marriages that remain childless, some by choice, others by bad luck, and that some people will feel the pull of and yield to a higher calling, be it art, philosophy, or the celibate priesthood, seeking or serving some other transcendent voice. But the former often feel cheated by their childlessness, frequently going to extraordinary lengths to conceive or adopt a child. A childless and grandchildless old age is a sadness and a deprivation, even where it is a price willingly paid by couples who deliberately do not procreate. And for those who elect not to marry, they at least face the meaning of the choice forgone. They do not reject, but rather affirm, the trajectory of a human life, whose boundaries are given by necessity, and our animal nature, whose higher yearnings and aspirations are made possible in large part because we recognize our neediness and insufficiency. But, until very recently, the aging self-proclaimed bachelor was the butt of many jokes, mildly censured for his self-indulgent and carefree, not to say profligate, ways and for his unwillingness to pay back for the gift of life and nurture by giving life and nurturing in return. No matter how successful he was in business or profession, he could not avoid some taint of immaturity.
Leon R. Kass is Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and The College at the University of Chicago and author of The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (The Free Press).
Source: http://thepublicinterest.com/
Amy and Leon Kass, What's Your Name?
What's Your Name?
Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass
To name is to identify. But what this means depends on the meaning of names, the meaning of identity, and the relation between the name and the thing named. Most common names, unlike personal names, are merely pointers, holding no deeper meanings for the named. A rose by any other name would surely smell as sweet. The lion were he called a lamb would still be king of beasts. And human beings, whether known as anthropoi, viri, beney adam, or menschen, remain unalterably rational, animal, and just as mortal. Like the names that Adam gave the animals, these names designate but do not determine the thing. They are merely conventional handles for grasping the beings handled, which, because they are already naturally distinct and distinctive, beg only to be recognized with names peculiarly their own. In naming beings distinctively we do little more than acknowledge the articulated and multiform character of the given world.
Not all acts of naming are so innocent. Sometimes they actually shape and form the things they name. Such creative naming is, for example, especially characteristic of the biblical God, Who, in the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, names five things: light, darkness, the firmament, the dry land, and the gathered waters. As Robert Sacks observes,
We can best grasp the significance of naming by comparing the things God named with the names God gives them. Light was called day, darkness was called night. The firmament was called heaven, the dry place was called land, the water was called sea. Darkness is not light, water is not dry. What more does a name add? The Hebrew word translated "firmament" which God called heaven comes from the root meaning "to beat." Workmen pound copper until it spreads out into a thin amorphous sheet, then form it and cut it and give it shape. Light and darkness, wet and dry, like the thinly pounded sheet of copper, seem to be an indefinite morass, each having its own quality, but each spreading out beyond the human imagination. But the day ends when night comes and the seas end at the shoreline, and the firmament becomes a whole when it becomes the sky. Without names, there would still be distinctions. There would be love and there would be hate, but bravery would shade off into foolhardiness, and we would lose the clarity of thought.God's naming clarifies, delimits, bounds, shapes, and makes intelligible. Like the creation itself, which proceeds by acts of speech (which are in turn always acts embodying and producing separations), these acts of naming bring order to chaos, the discrete to the continuous, definition to the indefinite, shapely and recognizable form to the merely qualitative.
Human naming, though perforce an act of speech and hence of reason, is, however, frequently colored by human passions such as fear, pride, hope, and lust. The names Adam gave the animals may have been disinterested, but not so the names he gives to himself and to the woman when she is brought before him: "This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; and this shall be called woman (ishah) because she was taken out of man (ish)." Previously called (by God and by the narrator) adam, human being (adam is not a personal name but a species name), the man now names himself "male human being," ish, in relation to "female human being," ishah. It is her (naked) appearance before him ("before him" both literally and lexically, in his quoted speech) that makes him feel his maleness; the carnal remark, "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh," strikes us as the verbalization of sexual desire; the man looks upon the woman as if she were his missing half, to which he now feels powerfully drawn in a desire for fusion. At the very least, one must admit that his delight in her leads him to exaggerate the degree to which she is "his own," more same than other, and to see her as an exteriorized portion of himself. This is not the voice of pure reason naming; and the name, born of his desire, has consequences for their relationship.
Later, a different passion will lead the man to rename the woman, this time without reference to himself. Hearing in God's grim prophecy of the dismal human future (sorrow, sweat, toil, and death) the only good news, namely, that the woman will bear children, he grasps at this straw of hope, renaming the woman Eve (Chavah) because she is the mother of all living (chai). From Adam's hopefulness Eve gets the first genuinely proper name given in the Bible.
What, then, is the case with our proper names, our personal names, the names we carry throughout our lives? Are they merely arbitrary and conventional handles that serve simply to designate and uniquely pick us out of a crowd? Or do our names, like those given by God, have power to shape our lives? Which passions do and should govern acts of naming: when we name, do we express desires for ourselves (ishah) or hopes for the future of others (Chavah)? Is it a matter of substantial indifference what we are called, what we call ourselves, or what we call others?
As we do not (generally) name ourselves, we normally do not encounter these questions in our daily lives. True, as Americans, sharing in the English common law of names, we have the right freely to change our names, as often as we please, and not a few young people take advantage of this privilege. But it rarely even occurs to most of us that we could change our names; we accept without question what we have been given and we unthinkingly regard changing our given name as like violating a sacred order. But this seemingly "given" order of names is, in fact, the product of conscious human choice. Thus, all the questions about the meaning of naming clearly do confront us, at least implicitly, when we name our children.
The first gift of parents to a child, after the gift of life itself, is its name. Like the given life it names, the given name is a gift for a lifetime-indeed, for more than a lifetime; when we are gone, our name carved in stone and the memories it evokes will be, for nearly all of us, all that remains. Here is a gift that is not only permanent but possibly life-shaping. Here is a gift that cannot be refused; here is a gift that cannot easily be put aside; here is a gift that must be worn and that straightway not only marks but constitutes one's identity.
On what basis does one select a gift, especially a gift of such importance? Generally speaking, one gives gifts that one thinks someone will like and appreciate, or one gives gifts that one thinks will be fitting and suitable, or one gives gifts that one thinks will be helpful and good. But in the gift of a name, even more than with other gifts to the newborn (as clothing or toys), one has no idea whatsoever which name will prove likable, which name will prove suitable, which name will be helpful to the human being who, at the time of naming, is virtually unknown and unknowable, and largely pure potentiality. The awesome mystery of individuated human life announces itself in this nameless and unknowable stranger, who must nonetheless be called by a proper name. Faced with our invincible ignorance, we parents are forced to consult our own thoughts and feelings, though, it is to be hoped, without in the least forgetting the future welfare of our child. Though we necessarily will be moved by what pleases or suits or inspires us, we do well when we remember that it is the child who must live with and live out the identity we thus confer upon him or her.
Parents who give the matter some thought will try to choose a name that wears well not only during childhood but, even more, also during adulthood; for we bear our names much longer as adults than as children. Some names that are cute when worn in infancy or childhood seem ridiculous when attached to mature-or elderly-men and women. Connected with this matter of fitness are also considerations of likely nicknames and diminutives, both those to be given at home and those likely to be acquired at school or at play. One feels for the little fellow in postwar Shaker Heights whose pretentious, upwardly mobile Jewish parents named him Lancelot, and even more because they could not refrain from calling him by the affectionate (and standard) diminutive-which resounded through the streets when they called him in from play- "Lancelotkele." ("Latkele," gentle reader, is Yiddish for a small potato pancake, eaten traditionally at Hanukkah).
But these considerations are largely negative and serve mainly to prevent mistakes. They do not guide the positive choice. How then do we choose?
Whether we know it or not, the way we approach this serious, indeed awesome, task speaks volumes about our basic attitudes not only toward our children but also toward life. For we can name, just as we can live, in a spirit of self-indulgence and enjoyment, in a spirit of acquisition and appropriation, in a spirit of pride and domination, in a spirit of creativity, in a spirit of gratitude, in a spirit of blessing and dedication. Consider a few of these possibilities.
One could give the child a name that pleases us. How could that be bad? You find your child a delight, so why not celebrate this fact with a name you find delightful? The wanted child is rewarded for being wanted by getting the wanted name, and now proves doubly pleasing to the parents. Granted, no parent who loves a child would choose for it a name he or she does not like. But is this sufficient? And what if the parent has strange tastes? A teacher of our acquaintance recently taught twin girls named-we do not jest-Lem"njello and Orangejello, after Lemon and Orange Jell-O, perhaps the mother's favorite food. The flavors of the parents are visited upon the children. But, on this principle of pleasing the parental palate, who can criticize? De gustibus non disputandum.
One could also give the child a name that pleases us because it pleases others, that is, because it is fashionable or popular. American fashions in first names change dramatically, especially for naming little girls. Rarely does one encounter anymore a young woman named Prudence, Constance, Faith, Hope, or Charity-though biblical names have come somewhat back into vogue. No one we knew-or had even heard of-through our first thirty years was named Tiffany or Chelsea. Yet the ten most popular newly given girls' names in New York City for 1992, as reported on records of new births, were (in order of popularity): Ashley, Stephanie, Jessica, Amanda, Samantha, Jennifer, Nicole, Michelle, Melissa, and Christina. (Challenge your friends who are over fifty, or who live in the sensible Midwest, to see if they can guess even three of the top ten.)
Curiously, the popular boys' names continue to be traditional: New York's top ten are Michael, Christopher, Jonathan, Anthony, Joseph, Daniel, David, Kevin, Matthew, and John. What this difference in boy- girl naming fashions means, especially in an age that purports at last to take women seriously, we leave for our readers to ponder.
Frivolity, self-indulgence, and love of fashion may not be the worst of attitudes. Other parents, more serious, will be moved by pride, not least by pride in the creation of a child. This may well be the paradigmatic natural attitude of parents, perhaps especially so with first-born children. Paternal pride in siring a chip off the old block leads fathers to name their first son after themselves, only Junior. But pride in childbirth is not the prerogative only of fathers. In the first (and, therefore, in our view probably prototypical) human birth presented in Genesis, Eve proudly boasts of her creative power in the birth of Cain: "And she conceived and bore Cain (kayin), saying, 'I have gotten (kaniti) a man [equally] with the Lord.'" (Most English translations have Eve say, piously, "with the help of the Lord," but this is an interpolation. The context, in our view, favors this meaning: "God created a man, and now so have I.") And, at first glance, why should she not be proud? She conceived, she carried, she labored, and she delivered, in short, she created a new life out of her own substance, a new life that is her own flesh and blood. Her pride in her creativity and "own-ership" of her son is celebrated in the name she gives him: kayin, from a root kanah, meaning to possess, perhaps also related to a root koneh, meaning to shape or make or create.
Cain, the pride of his mother's bearing, bears the name of his mother's pride, and tragically lives out the meaning of the name his mother gave him, the meaning, unbeknownst to her, of her tacit wish for him. He becomes a proud farmer, the sort of man who lays possessive claim to a portion of the earth, proud of his ability to bring forth fruit from the ground. He becomes a man who, his pride wounded, angrily kills his brother to reassert his place as number one. (When Eve, almost as an afterthought, had borne "his brother Abel," there had been no celebration or boasting; she gave to him, unwittingly but prophetically, a name that means "breath that vanishes.")
Eve, it seems, learns the folly of her naming ways. Chastened by the death of Abel and left bereft by the banishment of Cain, Eve renames her third son in a different, more humble, and grateful spirit: "And she called his name Seth, 'for God hath appointed [shath] me another seed in place of Abel, whom Cain slew.'" (Emphasis added.) With death and the need for replacement now manifest before her, Eve this time enters upon the act of naming and parenthood in full awareness of the human condition, in full awareness that children are not human creations, in full self-consciousness of what it means to give a name (the word "name" and the phrase "called his name" were not used in the report of the births of Cain and Abel).
Despite their differences, naming as self-gratification, naming as appropriation, naming as expressing pride, and naming as creativity have this in common: they all take their meaning from and refer back to the activities of the parents. They do not centrally consider the independent being of the child, or the meaning of the child understood as one who must someday stand forth as the parents' replacement. Considerations such as these at least tacitly inform the activity of naming for those parents who seek by means of the name to express, in full seriousness, their best hopes and wishes for the child. Such parents will choose a name that imparts personal or human meaning. They may stress continuity of family line, by naming a son for the father, a daughter for a grandmother. They may memorialize some worthy friend or ancestor, whose fine qualities they hope to see replicated in the child. They may name after prophets or saints or other historical or literary figures, in the hope of promoting emulation or at least admiration through namesake identification. In these various ways, parents identify their children not with themselves but with what they look up to and respect. In such namings, parents, at the very least, express their fondest hopes-blessing, as it were, their children through names of blessed memory or elevated standing. At best, they thereby dedicate themselves to the work of making good the promise conveyed in the good name thus bestowed.
The solemnity of such naming, and its meaning as dedication, is, of course, evident when names are given within religious ceremonies. At a baptism, the newborn child is symbolically purified, sanctified, and received by name into the Christian community, obtaining his or her name in an act of christening or baptizing. The child is reborn by being named in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, an implicit promise by the parents to rear the child in the ways of the Lord. Among its other intentions, baptism denies the parents' natural tendency to think of the child as property or as an object of pride and power. During the ceremony, the parents ritually hand the child over to the minister or to godparents, representatives of the church and community, literally enacting the meaning of naming as dedication. The name given is understood to be eternal, inscribed in the Book of Life.
At a brith milah, the Jewish act of ritual circumcision, male children on the eighth day of life enter into the covenant between God and the seed of Abraham, obtaining at this time their given Hebrew name (here, too, the boy is handed over to the godfather for the ceremony); daughters are publicly named in the synagogue soon after birth. Often, the meaning of the name and the reasons for its choice are publicly discussed as the name is given. The prayer for both Jewish sons and daughters that accompanies their naming is for a life that embraces Torah (learning and observance), Chuppah (marriage and family), and Maasim Tovim (good deeds). Names given in such contexts are, at least implicitly, understood to be sanctifications and dedications.
It is, of course, not possible to gauge the spirit of the act of naming simply from the name given. The name of a beloved forebear may be perpetuated not because of what made him lovable but, say, because of benefits received by the namer or as a result of family expectation or as an expression of mere sentimentality. In a family we know, for example, a man named his son after his deceased father, a man of unrivaled goodness and gentleness, admired and loved by everyone who knew him, without exception or qualification. As it happens, the boy not only carries the grandfather's name; because he is and will be the only male child of his generation, the entire family name resides now with him. But such thoughts are alien to, even resisted by, his father, who believes that the past must be happily buried. No attempt has been made to teach the son anything about the grandfather-about his life, his character, his beliefs. Not before the boy was thirteen did he get to see a photograph of the man for whom he was named, and then only by accident in another relative's house. The boy's father, a radical, preaches and encourages distrust of tradition and authority, and now finds the teenage chicken coming home to roost. Here we have the name, ringing hollow, without a grain of the legacy. The name, like the grandfather, was liked, not revered or even properly appreciated. The child, not surprisingly, has grasped and inherited the paternal principle: "the past is dead, follow your likes." Already separating himself from his own past, he sets out to create his own identity, making himself into whatever he wishes.
Parents should, however, be mindful of the gap between hope and fact, between promise and realization. Especially when the dream implicit in the name is great, there is a danger that the name will be to the child more a burden than an inspiration. On this ground, a prospective name for our son (never born), favored by one of us, Abraham Lincoln, was vetoed by the more sensible spouse. Nature may not be cooperative, native gifts may be missing, serious illness or accident may deform and limit, and, even in the most propitious circumstances, parental plans and aspirations-even modest ones-often go unrealized, not least because well-meaning and devoted parents sometimes fail to recognize sufficiently the radical individuality of each child. For this reason, one names best when one names not only with dedication but also with modesty and humility, mindful of the child's separate identity and ultimate independence. The identity given by means of the given name de facto recognizes and celebrates the uniqueness of the life its bearer will live.
Naming a child thus anticipates exactly the central difficulty of child- rearing altogether: how to communicate unconditional love for the child- just-as-he-now-is, at the same time as one is doing all in one's power to encourage and to help him to become better (which is to say, more truly lovable). A name, likable here and now but also bearing hope and promise, fits the good-enough-but-potentially-much-better kind of being that is the human child (indeed, is the human being throughout life). Defining the child now but also for later, the given but independent name also looks forward to the time when-thanks to good rearing-he will be able to write his own named account in the Book of Life.
The given name, given seriously, thus provides identity and individuality but within family and community; recognizes continuity with lives of the past but bears hopes and promises for the new life in the future; embodies general aspiration but acknowledges individual distinction; reflects both present affection and desire for future improvement; acknowledges at least tacitly that one's child is to be one's replacement; celebrates the joyous wonder of the renewal of human possibility while accepting the awesome responsibility for helping that possibility to be realized; and pays homage to the mysterious source of human life and human individuality.
In all these ways, the naming of a child is, in fact, an emblem of the entire parent-child relation, in both its human generality and its radical particularity. Human children are born naked and nameless, like the animals; they become humanized only through rearing, the work not of nature but of acts of speech and symbolic deed, including praise and blame, reward and punishment, custom, habituation, and education. They become humanized, in the first instance, at the hands of parents, who, among other duties, try steadily to teach children how to call all things by their proper names and to show them how to acquire a good name for themselves.
As amateur observers of the American social scene, we are struck by how much more of our public social life is nowadays conducted on a first- name basis. The open-faced waiter in the yuppie restaurant begins not with, "Good evening. Are you ready to order?" but with, "Hi, I'm Sherman. I'm your server this evening, and I'd like to tell you about our specials." The gynecologist and all members of his staff (including the barely post-adolescent receptionist) call all the patients by their first names, even on first encounter. In the home for the aged, venerable ladies and gentlemen are uniformly called Sadie or Annie, Herman or Mike, by people who will never know a tenth of what some of the elderly have forgotten. Small children are not taught to call uncles and aunts Uncle Leon and Aunt Amy, but plain Leon and Amy. Children of all ages are generally allowed to call all grown-up guests in the home by their first names, even on first meeting. At social mixers, the typical tag is for first names only: "Hello, My Name is Steffie." Total strangers, soliciting for stock brokerages or the local police museum, call during dinner oozing familiarity, asking to speak to Leon or Amy (not knowing that they have thus completely blown their slim chance of success). Students introduce themselves to one another, to their teachers, or to the parents of their friends by first names only. Even some college professors and many members of the clergy prefer to be called by their first names, even when in class or in church and synagogue.
The motives for and reasons behind such increased familiarity are numerous and sometimes complex, and surely vary from case to case. A policy favoring forward but easy amiability, thought useful for putting everyone in a good mood and making them feel at home, is no doubt part of the waiter's conduct; but there is probably also calculation that guests will be more inclined to leave a larger tip for a named "acquaintance" than for a merely anonymous servant. The gynecologist may believe he is creating a homey atmosphere that will overcome his patient's anxieties and embarrassments; but he is culpably unaware that calling vulnerable strangers by their first names is patronizing, condescending, and unprofessional, that it contributes further to the indignity of being a patient, that most women receiving pelvic examinations will not be made more comfortable by a physician who makes himself improperly familiar, and that the patient's unavoidable exposure and shame are precisely what demands that every effort should be made to uphold the patient's dignity. Informality is thought to be a boon to equality and fellow-feeling; titles like Uncle and Aunt, or even Mr. or Ms., are distancing and hierarchical. They get in the way of easy sociability, made possible when everybody, regardless of age or station, is equally just plain Bill.
The change in usage, whatever one thinks of it, is symptomatic of a general breakdown of the boundaries between public and private life, between formal and familiar, between grown-up and childish, between high and low, refined and vulgar, sacred and profane. This leveling of boundaries is itself entirely American, which is to say, it is the result of the relentless march of the democratic spirit, under the twin banners of equality and individualism. But there is something novel and especially revealing-and also especially worrisome-in the self- identification of young students away from home at college.
When we were in college-at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s-our teachers called us by our last names, usually prefaced by Mr. or Miss; in class, we were taught to refer to our peers-even our friends-in the same formal way. This civil convention, by the way, applied equally to the faculty: no one was Professor or Doctor, everyone was Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. We did not then fully appreciate the profound good sense of these customs, but we liked them nonetheless. No longer patronized as we had been by our teachers in high school, we were being treated respectfully, like grown-ups; indeed, in name (at least) we were superficially the equals of our instructors. This was flattering, this was encouraging; this, accordingly, induced emulation and a higher level of speech and conduct in the classroom.
But the purpose of this formal nominal equality was not, in fact, to flatter the students but to mirror and encourage our shared human work. Though we were encouraged to think and speak for ourselves, speech was not personalized and the person of the speaker was not authoritative; what the teacher said, and what we ourselves said, was given weight not because of the rank of the one who said it-for we were nominally of the same rank-but only because of its truthfulness or reasonableness. Shared logos, and the joint effort to understand, made the classroom a community of fellow-learners, not just an aggregate of sometimes overlapping, sometimes clashing personal interests. Objections and criticisms of one another were muted and civil: the casual language of the street, "Leon, you dolt," was replaced by "Mr. Kass, what is your evidence?" Familiarity, not to speak of intimacy, between teacher and student (or even between student and student) was neither assumed nor promised; like all real friendships, it had to be earned.
But though friendships with teachers occasionally developed, our eye was not on such personal matters. We were courting the greater self-respect that comes with adult accomplishment. To hear ourselves called after the manner of our parents (in the case of males, exactly as our fathers were called) dimly reminded us not only who we were and where we came from but also that we were stepping forward to prepare to take our parents' place.
Now, teachers at the University of Chicago, we still continue these practices; we are known as Mrs. Kass and Mr. Kass, we call our male students Mr. and our female students Miss, Mrs., or Ms. (as they wish), and we insist that the students in class refer to one another in the same way. Our students do not protest, nearly all acquire the habit, and some have even told us how much they appreciate the contribution such civility makes to the atmosphere of learning.
But we are a vanishing breed. And we have noticed in recent years, outside of classes, a marked decline in student use of last names. If we attend a dinner in the dorms, if unfamiliar students come to office hours, if we overhear them introducing themselves to one another, we hear them give only their first names: "Hello, I'm Susie." To be sure, this is friendliness, this is informality, this is individuality. But this is also, we believe, in many cases, a tacit but quite definite denial of their origins, of their roots in families. "Hello, I'm Susie" implicitly means "I am Susie, short for sui generis." Changing usages regarding last names reflect changing mores regarding the meaning of last names, which in turn reflect-and may also contribute to-the changing structure of marriage and family life.
Only gradually, starting in the early medieval period, were many of these surnames turned into hereditary family names, beginning apparently in aristocratic families and in the big cities. A big impetus toward hereditary family names came after the Council of Trent (1563) decreed that every Catholic parish keep complete registers of baptisms, including the names of the parents and grandparents along with the name of the child. When Protestant parishes soon followed suit, this practice made nearly universal the spread and use of family names. It was not law but widespread similar custom which had it that a woman upon marriage would take the last name of her husband and that their children would then automatically bear the family name.
Despite many variations from country to country-about the order of family and given names, about middle names, about the incorporation of maiden names into a woman's married name, etc.-it is now nearly universally the case that one's personal name includes (at least) one's given or individual name and one's family name. The former, a matter of parental choice, marks one's individuated identity within the larger family and signifies one's path toward one's own unique life trajectory; the latter, a matter of heritable custom, gives one a familial identity in relation to the larger social world and expresses one's ties to and the influences of a shared ancestral past. Human individuation is contextualized within families, both families of origin and families of perpetuation. Last names are ever-present reminders that we were begotten and that we belong, and, later, that we belong in order to beget.
That a family name is centrally a sign of our connected and dignified humanity we see when such names are withheld-for example, in the practice of naming slaves in the ante-bellum South. Slaves were given only first names; if they had to receive a surname to distinguish one from another, it was John's boy, never John's son. The first name individuates, but separated from a last name, it is demeaning, even meaningless. By making one everywhere familiar, the practice of using only first names makes impossible both genuine public and genuine private life; as the slaveholders understood perfectly, it makes the childish station permanent.
Well before there were surnames as family names, the ties of blood and lineage were given expression in the form of patronymics. In their classical or heroic form, the patronym was even more important than the given name, with the son being under lifelong obligation to make himself worthy of his father and thus to earn, as it were, the title to his own name.
Homer, in beginning the Iliad, asks the goddess to sing the wrath of Peleus' son Achilleus, who is first of interest precisely because he is the son of Peleus, himself the son of Aiakos, himself the son of Zeus. (On his mother's side, Achilleus is even closer to the immortals; the goddess Thetis is his mother.) With lesser parents, in Homer's world of heroes, Achilleus would have been a nonentity, one from whom nothing much would be expected. But given his pedigree, he is under strenuous obligation to live up to his name, thereby winning great glory also for his father. When Hektor, bouncing his infant son Astyanax, wishes for him that he will become an even greater warrior than his father, this wish must be heard as narcissistic: the son's greatness will pile further glory upon his sire. Homer makes us feel immediately the tragic character of such paternal wishes for one's sons; the reader knows that young Astyanax's literal future is right here being sacrificed for his father's present thirst for glory, as Hektor refuses his wife Andromache's plea, in the name of family, not to return to the fighting. In these heroic cultures, the past casts a long shadow over the present and future; and most men die failing to match the recounted successes of illustrious ancestors. The patronym (or its equivalent family name), and through it the past, continued to exercise hegemony, albeit in somewhat muted form, in European aristocratic societies even into the present century.
We liberal democrats have mercifully escaped from this state of affairs. Our American society and its founding thought begin from the radical equality of each individual, including his inalienable right to practice happiness as he himself defines it. What counts for us is not birth or station, but one's own accomplishments, not who one's parents were but what one has made (and proposes to make) of oneself. Yet bourgeois democratic family life, with its naming practices, has preserved us, at least until recently, from the rootlessness and isolation to which such individuality might lead. The conventional identity of given name plus inherited family name, in the bourgeois family, represented a sensible mean between the heroic and the anonymous, between the aristocratic tyranny of the past (Peleus' son) and the servile because rootless denial of a dignified adult future (Jim NoName).
Times have changed. Both as a culture and as individuals, we today care even less about where we come from, and also less and less about where we are going, but more and more only about the here and now. The ways of the fathers and mothers are not our ways. The ways of our children are unimaginable. Full individualists, and proud of it, we increasingly look solely to ourselves, as Tocqueville remarked over 150 years ago, as the sole source and reason for things. In the present generation, such individualistic thinking is showing its power against the institution of the family and customs of the family name.
Some time ago, the New York Times (January 21, 1993) featured an article by Janice L. Kaplan entitled "Creativity Is Often the Name of This Family Game." In the article, Ms. Kaplan cites numerous examples of novel naming practices to illustrate her thesis that "for more and more of today's parents, choosing a child's last name is a matter of personal decision, a chance to be creative, even an opportunity to make a statement." A few of her examples provide the flavor of them all.
When Elyse Goldstein, a rabbi, married Baruch Browns, a calligrapher and school administrator, they discussed what name they would "pass on" to their offspring. Both "absolutely wanted a family name" but one different from their own respective birth names, "a creative alternative to passing on only the father's surname." The solution: "They took the gold from Goldstein, the brown from Browns, mixed them together and created Sienna, the legal last name of their children." As Mr. Browns explained, "Ocher, or those other muddy yellow colors, didn't seem like nice names."
Dean Skylar and Chris Ledbetter faced a similar dilemma, but not until the birth of their son. Opposed to "the whole patriarchal tradition," they too wanted a new name for the child, different from their own names but one that would "symbolize [their] relationship." Being residents of the state of Florida, which required parents to pass on the father's surname, it took a court battle to legitimize their choice, but they eventually prevailed: they combined Ledbetter and Skylar to form Skybetter, the name of their two children, now ages ten and five. "All of our names are in the phone book," said Ms. Ledbetter. "That handles most any problem that comes up."
Ms. Van Horn, a commercial photographer and clinical hypnotherapist, and Ms. Hershey, owner of a design and marketing concern, were the first lesbians in Los Angeles County to be granted joint custody of a child. They gave their adopted son both their last names: hence, Ryan Christopher Hershey-Van Horn. As Ms. Van Horn explained, "We're both his parents. We're both women with careers. And we both have definite identities. It's important that Christopher be real clear about his identity as well."
Whether they make up an entirely new name for their children (Sienna), or creatively combine their names (Skybetter), or hyphenate their names (Hershey-Van Horn), all these parents reveal the same fundamental belief: a child's last name is a matter of free, parental choice, no less than is its first name. Having liberated themselves from the "patriarchal tradition" of women giving up their names-none of the women interviewed took the man's last name-all of these parents feel perfectly free to "liberate" their children as well. For what they have creatively managed to "pass on" is a name with no past; and the so-called "family" name is in no case the name of the entire family, but of the children only. The children are thus, already from birth, nominally (in the literal sense of the word) emancipated from all links to their parents, nominally identified as being unrelated to either parent, let alone to a married couple whose common name would symbolize the couple's union in a new estate and its potential to be a unified family with offspring. These children have, in fact, been given two first names.
Ms. Kaplan observes that "sometimes, say experts and the children involved, the parents' choices, if not clearly explained, can result in confusion and identity problems." But the worries that are mentioned are superficial: children who can't fit their names on a page or on SAT forms, children who can't spell their last names, children at risk of teasing or ridicule by peers. For the "experts," who want only that the child "develop an appropriate and healthy identity," identity is entirely a subjective matter, but somehow one that yields to "rational understanding"; if the origin of the surname is "clearly explained" to the child (to be sure, "more than once"), there need be no confusion of identity.
But identity is not just a state of mind. All the explanations in the world cannot alter what the child's name loudly declares: my parents and I belong to different families. Because this is how the child is named and known, his lack of a true family name is now central to his identity, whatever he may feel about it. That these creative parents sometimes justify their practice by pointing out that children of divorced and remarried parents or children of "live-in relationships" also don't share the parental name, only proves the point: taking broken or unmarried homes as a suitable nominal norm, and insisting on their own radically individuated identity, they start their children off in life with a broken family identity. It is almost as if they are preparing their children not only for the liberated life they have chosen for themselves, but also for the family fragmentation that now takes its toll of so many of America's children.
These "creative" parents are, we suspect, still a very small minority. Far more common are families in which the children carry the name of the father, even though the mother has kept her maiden name. Here, too, the confusion of identity is obvious: it is not nominally clear who belongs to whom. A friend of ours, a mother of a highly popular first-grader, recently attended her first PTA meeting. Eager to meet the parents of the many frequent visitors to her home, she carefully scanned the name tags of all the people in the room. But on that night the room happened to be full of mothers only, none of whom bore the same last name as her child. Today, it is a wise child who knows its mother.
What's wrong with all of this? Leaving aside, for now, the rightness or wrongness of the old so-called patriarchal conventions whereby the wife necessarily takes and the children automatically acquire the husband's name, one can advance powerful arguments why, for reasons of truth and identity, a child's family name should be the same as that of both his parents. The common name identifies the child securely within its nest of origin and rearing, and symbolically points to the ties of parental affection and responsibility that are needed for its healthy growth and well-being. Given that the mother-child bond is the (most) natural foundation of all familial attachments and parental care, it seems especially absurd that mothers should be willing not to have the same last name as their children-unless, of course, motherhood is understood to be nothing more than a surrogate "social womb," unconnected with nature, the "mother" looking after the children simply as a job or as a form of self-fulfillment.
Responsibility for the child, who did not himself ask to be born, is accepted and announced by family naming: the child, freely individuated from birth (as marked in his given name), also belongs necessarily from birth to his parents, not as a possession to be used but as a precious life to be nurtured. Couples may choose whether to have a child, but they may not morally choose to deny familial responsibility for his care. A shared and transmittable family name, given and accepted rather than invented or chosen, stands perfectly for this shared and transmittable moral reality.
The common name of parent-and-child stands not only for parental responsibilities, but also for the child's security, filial regard, family loyalty, gratitude, and personal pride. We children are not sui generis, neither self-made nor self-reared; we begin as dependents, dependent upon the unmerited attention and care lavished on us by our parents. To carry the family name is a constant reminder of what we owe and to whom-and of the fact that what we owe can never be repaid (except, indirectly, by doing the same for our own children). Thus, it is, at least symbolically, a special kind of blindness-not to say ingratitude-that our college students hold themselves familially innominate ("Just Susie") precisely when Mom and Dad are shelling out $20,000 a year to enable them to become educated and independent.
But this backward-looking identification with our family of origin cannot be the whole story. On the contrary, life is forward-going and regenerative; in most cases, we children must leave our fathers and mothers and cleave to our spouses, in order to do as our fathers and mothers did before. The given family of origin gives way (not wholly but in very large part) to the chosen family of perpetuation, prepared for and legally sanctioned by the act of marriage. How should this new estate and new identity be reflected in our names? When we marry what surname or surnames shall we adopt?
Whether we like it or not, choosing surnames at marriage is in today's America almost as much a matter of choice as the giving of first names at childbirth, a reflection (and perhaps also a cause) of novel conceptions of marriage, an institution the meaning of which is itself increasingly regarded as a matter of choice. The traditional bourgeois way-the husband gives and the wife accepts the husband's family name- customary for at least four hundred years in the English-speaking world, is no longer secure as customary; "because that's the way we've always done it" is, for young American ears, a losing reason. Besides, the true reasons for the old custom having been forgotten, the practitioners of the custom are impotent to defend it against charges of "patriarchy," "male hegemonism," "sexism," and the like. Thus, with no certain cultural guidance, the present generation (in fact, each couple independently) is being allowed-or should we say compelled, willy- nilly?-to think this through for itself.
We, the authors, accept the challenge, as a thought experiment, imagining ourselves as having to do it over again, but with the benefit of our now longer views of marriage and of life, and on the following additional condition: to think not on the basis of what pleases us, but on the basis of what we believe is appropriate to the meaning of marriage and hence, in principle, universalizable.
If marriage is, as we believe, a new estate, in fact changing the identities of both partners, there is good reason to have this changed identity reflected in some change of surname, one that reflects and announces this fact. If marriage, though entered into voluntarily, is in its inner meaning more than a contract between interested parties but rather a union made in expectation of permanence and a union open (as no simple contract of individuals can be) to the possibility of procreation, there is good reason to have the commitment to lifelong union reflected and announced in a common name that symbolizes and celebrates its special meaning.
Whether they intend it or not, individuals who individualistically keep their original names when entering a marriage are symbolically holding themselves back from the full meaning of the union. Fearing "loss of identity" in change of name, they implicitly deny that to live now toward and for one's beloved, as soul mate, is rather to gain a new identity, a new meaning of living a life, one toward which eros itself has pointed us. Often failing to anticipate the future likelihood of having their own children, and, more generally, unable or unwilling to see the institution of marriage as directed toward or even connected with its central generational raison d'etre, they create in advance a confused identity for their unborn children.
The irony is that the clear personal identity to which they selfishly cling (in tacit denial of their new social identity) is in fact an identity they possess only because their parents were willing and able to create that singular family identity for them. We are, of course, aware that massive numbers of our youth stem from parents who divorce or remarry, and that the insecurity of identity already reflected in their having different names from their birth parents may lead them to cling tenaciously to their very own surnames, lest they lose the little, painfully acquired identity they have left; yet if they truly understood their plight, they would be eager to try to prevent such misfortunes from befalling their own children, and would symbolically identify themselves in advance as their (unborn) children's lifelong parents.
It is ironic that the same young people who, in their social arrangements, live only on a first name basis, forgetful at least symbolically of where they come from, should at the time of forward- looking marriage turn backward to cling to the name of their family of origin. Faced with the "threat" of "losing themselves" in marriage, they reassert themselves as independent selves, now claiming and treating the original surname as if it were-just like their given first name-a chosen mark of their autonomy and individuality.
The human family, unlike some animal families, is exogamous, not incestuous; it is exogamous not by nature but by the wisest of customs. The near-universal taboo against incest embodies the insight that family means a forward-looking series of generations rather than an inward- turning merging and togetherness. It keeps lineage clear-in order, among other reasons, to distinguish spouses from progeny in the service of tranquil relations, clear identity, and sound rearing-above all, to accomplish the family's primary human work of perpetuation and cultural transmission. The legal sanctification and support of marriage, a further expression of the insights embedded in the incest taboo, makes sense only on this view of family; were sex not generative and families not generational, no one would much care with whom one wished to merge.
Thus, when entering a marriage, the partners are willy-nilly bravely stepping forward, unprotected by the family of origin, into the full meaning of human adulthood: they are saying good-bye to father and mother and cleaving to their spouse. They are, tacitly, accepting the death of their parents, and even more, their own mortality, as they embark on the road to the next generation. They express not only their love of one another but also their readiness to discover, by repeating the practice, how their own family identity and nurtured humanity was the product of deliberate human choice that affirmed and elevated the natural necessity of renewal. A common name deliberately taken at the time of marriage-like the family of perpetuation that the marriage anticipates and establishes-affirms the special union of natural necessity and human choice which the exogamous family itself embodies.
This is, perhaps, an appropriate place to observe that we are well aware that family or social identity is not the whole of our identity, that professional or "career" identity is both psychically and socially important (as are civic and religious identity). The loving-and- generative aspects of our nature are far from being the whole human story. Yet the familial is foundational, and it cannot without grave danger be subordinated or assimilated to the professional. Our arguments for a common social name for the married couple is, however, perfectly compatible with having one partner or the other-or both-keeping a distinct professional name. Some have argued that in today's world of rampant mobility and weakened family ties, and with both husband and wife in the work place, much is lost and little is gained if professional identity is submerged in a common family name. But precisely to affirm and protect the precious realm of private life from the distorting intrusion of public or purely economic preoccupations, a common social name makes eminent sense-one might say especially under present conditions.
The argument advanced so far does not, of course, yet reach to the customary pattern of the bride taking the groom's name. If anything, it might even call into question the wisdom of allowing either partner to keep the surname of origin. To provide the same and new last name for the married couple, a name that proclaims their social unity and that will immediately confer social identity to their children, they could devise a hyphenated compound that both partners then adopt or they could jointly invent a totally new surname that leaves no trace of either family of origin. But these alternatives are both defective. The first is simply impractical beyond one or at most two generations; because of the exponential growth of life, one would have an exponential increase in names-to-be-hyphenated-in-new-marriages-and-in-newer-marriages-and- so-on-and-on-ad-infinitum. The structure of life itself makes impossible the universalizing of one's maxim to add-and-hyphenate.
The second alternative, in our view, too starkly severs the new social ties from the familial past (quite apart from what it means to the public individual identities of each of the partners) and to still living and remembered grandparents. It would be to further accentuate the unraveling of intergenerational connections, symbolizing instead each little family's atomistic belief in its ability to go it alone. In contrast, a family name that ties the new family of perpetuation to one old family of origin reflects more faithfully the truth about family as a series of generations and the moral and psychological meaning of lineage and attachment.
This leaves only the hard question: shall it be his family name or hers? A little reflection will show why, as a general rule, it should be his. Although we know from modern biology the equal contributions both parents make to the genetic identity of a child, it is still true to say that the mother is the "more natural" parent, that is, the parent by birth. A woman can give up a child for adoption or, thanks to modern reproductive technologies, can even bear a child not genetically her own. But there is no way to deny out of whose body the new life sprung, whose substance it fed on, who labored to produce it, who wondrously bore it forth. The father's role in all this is minuscule and invisible; in contrast to the mother, there is no naturally manifest way to demonstrate his responsibility.
The father is thus a parent more by choice and agreement than by nature (and not only because he cannot know with absolute certainty that the woman's child is indeed his own). One can thus explain the giving of the paternal surname in the following way: the father symbolically announces "his choice" that the child is his, fully and freely accepting responsibility for its conception and, more importantly, for its protection and support, and answering in advance the question which only wise children are said to be able to answer correctly: Who's my Dad?
The husband who gives his name to his bride in marriage is thus not just keeping his own; he is owning up to what it means to have been given a family and a family name by his own father-he is living out his destiny to be a father by saying yes to it in advance. And the wife does not so much surrender her name as she accepts the gift of his, given and received as a pledge of (among other things) loyal and responsible fatherhood for her children. A woman who refuses this gift is, whether she knows it or not, tacitly refusing the promised devotion or, worse, expressing her suspicions about her groom's trustworthiness as a husband and prospective father.
Patrilineal surnames are, in truth, less a sign of paternal prerogative than of paternal duty and professed commitment, reinforced psychologically by gratifying the father's vanity in the perpetuation of his name and by offering this nominal incentive to do his duty both to mother and child. Such human speech and naming enables the father explicitly to choose to become the parent-by-choice that he, more than the mother, must necessarily be.
Fathers who will not own up to their paternity, who will not "legitimize" their offspring, and who will not name themselves responsible for child-rearing by giving their children their name are, paradoxically, not real fathers at all, and their wives and especially their children suffer. The former stigmatization of bastardy was, in fact, meant to protect women and children from such irresponsible behavior of self-indulgent men (behavior probably naturally rooted in mammalian male psychosexual tendencies), men who would take their sexual pleasures and walk away from their consequences. The removal of the stigma, prompted by a humane concern not to penalize innocent children by calling them "illegitimate," has, paradoxically but absolutely predictably, contributed mightily to an increase in such fatherless children.
The advantage a woman and her children gain from the commitment of the man to take responsibility and to stay the course-the commitment implied in his embracing the woman and her prospective children with his family name, now newly understood-is by itself sufficient reason why it is in a woman's interest as a married-woman-and-mother-to-be to readily take the bridegroom's name.
But there is a deeper reason why this makes sense. The change of the woman's name, from family of origin to family of perpetuation, is the perfect emblem for the desired exogamy of human sexuality and generation. The woman in marriage not only expresses her humanity in love (as does the man); she also embraces the meaning of marriage by accepting the meaning of her womanly nature as generative. In shedding the name of her family of origin, she tacitly affirms that children of her womb can be legitimated only exogamously. Her children will not bear the same name as-will not "belong to"-her father; moreover, her new name allows also her father to recognize formally the mature woman his daughter has become. Whereas the man needs convention to make up-by expansion-for his natural deficiency, the woman needs convention to humanize-by restriction-the result of her natural prowess. By anticipating necessity and by thus choosing to accept the gift of her husband's name, the woman affirms the meaning of her own humanity by saying yes to customizing her given nature.
William Butler Yeats said it best, in "A Prayer for My Daughter":
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
The authors are respectively, Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago. An earlier drat of this paper was presented at a meeting on the Ethics of Everyday Life, sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Public Life and supported by the Lilly Endowment. The authors wish to thank their colleagues for helpful criticisms and suggestions.
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