Morals from Nature: What about divorce?

Way back in 2012 I posted this article about the ethics of divorce. It makes a couple of points. First, marriage is a "school for character"; in that sense precipitate divorce can look like dropping a class before the first exam when you realize you haven't studied. Second, marriage is an environment for raising children. This means that if you can't raise them safely because there is a risk of physical abuse, divorce should be mandatory. But it also means that if you can't agree on how to raise them -- in particular, if you can't agree on fundamental ethical norms -- divorce should again be mandatory before any children are even conceived. On the other hand, I added, once the children are there you owe it to them to provide a safe and stable environment in which to grow; and this may mean making the best of a bad situation until they are older.

Now that I have argued for founding morality on Nature, do I have to change any of what I wrote earlier about divorce? 

Not really. Everything about our duty to nurture and protect growing children stands as-is, absolutely without amendment: I even reference our duty to children when I discuss the Leopold and Loeb case in Part Two of this post here. Most of the other points in the earlier essay are based on things we know empirically about how children respond to different kinds of situations in the home. We know that they need physical safety. And we know that in order to develop a kind of emotional security inside themselves, they need stability in the home environment -- the same people, more or less, over long years.

How would this argument have looked from the perspective of the Old Stone Age? Much the same, but perhaps in one respect a bit easier.

The thing is, divorce is particularly destructive in the context of a nuclear family where there are only two adults to begin with. If one leaves, that's a 50% reduction. If the other parent dates for a while before finding a new spouse, that can mean a cycle of suitors trooping through the house, each one trying out for the role of Step-parent. This is anything but stable.

But so far as I understand it, the isolated nuclear family is a by-product of the enormous material wealth of the modern day -- enormous by comparison with earlier ages, who were more likely to live together because it was too expensive to do otherwise. A couple of centuries ago this would have meant multiple generations of the same family under one roof. If we push back as far as the Stone Age, I assume that the basic living unit was probably the clan or the tribe.

On the one hand, this might have made the job of parenthood easier, because there would be more adults to share the work with. Infants and small children are a lot of work to look after. There are times during the day or during the week when even one child is too much work for two adults. But many hands make light work. While two parents can only with difficulty meet the needs of one child, ten adults can do a pretty good job of taking care of forty children. If we lived together in small bands instead of nuclear families, we would have had those uncles and aunts and cousins and friends around to help out when we needed the help, because of course we would also do the same for them.

On the other hand, I think such an arrangement might have made divorce easier too, except it might not have been called "divorce." But if father and mother began to hate each other, and if the whole tribe were already involved in raising the tribe's children collectively, then presumably there shouldn't have been much obstacle to the mother and father simply choosing to have less and less to do with each other. The children would be raised much the same as before, by the same collection of tribal adults. They would have the same adults in their lives, setting boundaries and teaching them to stay away from cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. So the stability of the children's experience could be ensured without the mother and father having to grin at each other through clenched teeth every morning. 

No doubt this picture is somewhat romanticized. And in any event I don't recommend it for the modern day. I don't see any pragmatic way to bring back genuinely tribal living in an age of cell phones and streaming personal media. The point of the thought experiment was just to check whether my recent arguments contradict my earlier ones. I don't think they do.       
    

Sex at Dawn, and the Republic

Name anything written by Plato. I bet the first thing you thought of -- maybe the only one -- was the Republic.

Tell me something about the Republic. Once we skip past "It's long," "It's boring," and "I think we had to read it in college but I just blew it off" the next thing to trip off the tongue -- the first remark that has anything to do with the content -- is probably "It's idealistic and impractical."

Plato gets that a lot. In the central books of the Republic, Socrates describes a made-up city, and commentators ever since (starting with Aristotle) have fallen all over themselves criticizing how silly his ideas are. It got so bad for so many centuries that in the late 1940's Leo Strauss proposed (and his students have later extended) the theory that Plato was just kidding. Strauss's student Allan Bloom, responsible for one of the most widely-used translations of the Republic, amplified this suggestion by saying that the Republic is really meant to expose the true nature of political life, and the true demands of political justice, so that we can all see just how problematic politics and justice are once we realize that the true demands of political community are impossible.



Impossible? How so? Well, there are plenty of fish to shoot in this barrel, but Bloom focusses on three specific proposals, which Socrates himself acknowledges are huge, saying they will provoke "three waves" of ridicule from his listeners: that the Guardians of the City should hold all their possessions in common, that they should hold their women and children in common, and that the whole show should be ruled by philosophers. Bloom says that every listener will naturally reject these proposals, because they leave us no fragment of private life, ... because everybody will naturally want to hold on tight to his own personal property, nobody will want to share his bed-partner with another (because of jealousy), everybody will be attached to his own children at the expense of all the others, and besides philosophers are ridiculous. Who would ever accept being ruled by them? The point, Bloom goes on to explain, is that real community -- if the word means anything -- is like that. Political groups, social groups, kinship groups ... they require everything from us, they ask for our total devotion. Holding anything back is invariably perceived as disloyal, as unjust, even (potentially) treacherous or treasonous. But since (Bloom concludes) we can't help but hold things back -- since it's a simple fact of nature that we won't give up our stuff, that we won't let our neighbors fuck our spouses, and that we'll always cheer for our own kids at Little League -- perfect justice and perfect community are impossible. There is and will always be a permanent tension between the demands of justice, of community, of the group, and the immutable requirements of human nature.



And ... well, that's fine, I guess. It's actually an impressive argument when he spells out all the details. Only, ... pause with me for just a minute to remember the argument of Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's delightful book Sex at Dawn. Ryan and Jethá argue a number of things, but foremost on the list is their claim that the way we organize sex and child-rearing -- all our presuppositions about chastity and fidelity, about infidelity and immorality, about legitimacy and bastardy and parental affection -- that all this is a product of the agricultural revolution, or at any rate of the introduction of food surplusses that can be saved. They argue further that among "immediate-return foraging societies" these concepts are unknown. And they wind up by pointing out that for most of human history, we grouped together into bands that lived by immediate-return hunting and foraging. Durable property was unknown, food storage was unknown, ... and so were most of the concepts we use today to think about sex.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you see that the first two of those three huge proposals actually describe the very same societies Ryan and Jethá write about. Holding all property in common? If "property" means rocks used for pounding, why not hold them in common? There are plenty lying around on the ground. Sticks sharpened to spears? There are always more sticks. Cars, computers, refrigerators, houses, money, jewelry, swords, metal of any kind? Nope, hadn't been invented yet. Look at the description of the Bushman community in the first few minutes of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" -- before the Coke bottle -- and you'll see what I mean.


What about "women and children"? Socrates says (at Stephanus 457 D), "All these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent." And right away his interlocutor (I think it is Glaucon at that point, though it is a little hard to keep track.) objects that this arrangement sounds both impractical and undesirable. But isn't this exactly the scenario that Sex at Dawn describes? That in paleolithic communities, men and women fucked whom they wanted when they wanted, and then the whole tribe raised children together, loving them all without caring who was whose? The whole discussion of "partible paternity" and of "intersecting webs" of mothers and fathers in Chapters Six and Seven are about exactly that. Again, so far from being impossible or impractical, this measure looks like something that may well have been the norm for most of human history.

The third proposal, rule by philosophers, we can probably write off as a piece of special pleading. But Bloom points out that in principle we would all like the wise to rule, more or less. We may disagree that philosophers are especially wise, but that is another point. Even here, though, I think there is not a total disconnect. Ryan and Jethá write that in the societies they study there is very little social hierarchy and a broad sense of social equality. Similarly, there is a reluctance to do what somebody else tells you, unless there is a better reason than that they said so. In a society like that, the most influential people are likely to be the ones who are most persuasive. And since these tribes are small and everybody has known everybody else forever, that doesn't mean someone who can run a slick propaganda campaign. Most often it will mean someone whose ideas have proven right before. Philosophers? Maybe not. But the wise? Maybe closer.

This way of looking at the subject casts a whole new light on Bloom's claim that Socrates here shows the nature of community and justice. If this is how we lived for most of human history, if this is (as far as anything can be) the way we evolved to live, then an immediate-return foraging community may indeed be the very kind of community we are built to live in. So far as we can infer purpose from long-term evolutionary development -- and I am bracketing a huge philosophical discussion here, about which let me say right now only that whatever you think of the idea of innate human purposes, it is pretty clear that cats have long claws and strong pouncing muscles in order to catch mice* -- I say, so far as we can infer purpose from this kind of evidence it seems plausible that we were meant to live in immediate-return foraging communities. But these are indeed exactly communities where all individual interest is subordinated to the communal interest, where there is no private property to speak of, where sexuality is not channeled to monogamous forms of expression, and where children are raised by the whole tribe as a huge pool of fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. In other words, the true nature of human community, the true nature of political organization, the true nature of justice ... at heart it really is this kind of communal life. Bloom is right about that. The only place he goes wrong is to say that it is impossible, when that's how we lived for most of our life as a species.

So is the tragic Straussian prognosis wrong as well? ... the gloomy story that says there is a permanent conflict (or "tension") between what is best for the individual and what is best for society? If a just society is possible because we lived that way in the Stone Age and they live that way now in the Kalahari, does that mean we truly can achieve justice and community in our lifetimes?

Sure. Move to the Kalahari.**

But short of that, ... no, I don't think so. Ryan and Jethá are really clear about saying that times have changed. With the introduction of agriculture and property, it becomes impossible to lead a life of the kind of sexual freedom they describe. And as sex goes, so goes justice. As long as we live around agriculture and property -- hell, as long as we can hoard resources for tomorrow, which may not take much more than salt and fire -- for so long we will live in an "ownership society."*** And for so long will the joy of true community in the deepest sense -- including (but not limited to) a social acceptance of promiscuity -- be unavailable to us. We can't get there from here. Sadly, Strauss and Bloom are right about that too.



* Six years after writing this post, I finally spelled out the beginnings of the argument I allude to here -- viz., the argument that there are innate purposes, and that what you evolved for is that purpose. You can find it here.
** Or Mars. This kind of society also looks exactly like the Nest that Valentine Michael Smith sets up at the heart of the Church of All Worlds in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, for some years I have toyed with the idea that Stranger is really an extended gloss on the Republic. If you're on your way to Mars, call me when you get there.

*** Stephen Snyder's review of Sex at Dawn is really good on this point, so I am glad that Ryan and Jethá posted it on their website.

No such thing, part 2: a political point

In my last post, I argued that there is no such thing as homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality is not a thing, an external, objectively verifiable condition or state of being, but only a badge of personal identity.  To put it another way, I argued that homosexuals are not a different category of person from heterosexuals in any way that can be measured: there is no DNA test or blood marker that you can test for in a lab.  And I added that I was not trying to make a political point.

You may ask, though, how is this not a political point?  The Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear two cases on the subject of gay marriage.  And the public argument in favor of gay marriage is precisely that so long as it is illegal, homosexuals are a special category of people who are forbidden to marry, unlike their heterosexual fellow citizens.  The argument continues that this prohibition is no different from the law that forbade slaves to marry in the antebellum South, and that it is likewise unjust.  If I argue that there is “no such thing” as homosexuality in the first place, am I not attacking the support for gay marriage?  Since this is a hot political topic at the moment, am I not thereby taking a political stand?

It looks like it, but no I’m not.  Explaining that will take a few minutes, however, because it requires several steps.  Please be patient as I work my way through this.  One of the risks of philosophy is that philosophers are often assumed to be taking a stand when they are just trying to untangle their own thinking.

To begin, let me insist on a minor point of terminology.  Today, only a few states in the Union have passed laws recognizing gay marriage; but in all the others, it is not actually illegal in the sense in which, say, the sale of alcohol was illegal during Prohibition.  If two men, or two women, find a clergyman who is willing to perform a wedding ceremony for them, nobody is going to drag them off to jail.  The only response from public authorities will be to ignore them when, say, one or the other applies for spousal benefits, or when they try to file their tax returns as “Married Filing Jointly.”  So the question is not whether gay marriage should be legalized so much as whether it should be recognized or institutionalized.  It’s still a valid question, of course, but we should make sure we are talking about the right thing.

Fair enough, you might reply, but slaves in the antebellum South were allowed to “jump the broom” too.  They weren’t necessarily punished for it, but no law recognized them as legally married.  The master could sell one of a couple and not the other, with impunity.  So even conceding this terminological distinction, I haven’t addressed the main argument that today’s laws (in all but a few states) discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to recognize their marriages.  How is this fair?

I respond that at a literal level, the argument supporting gay marriage is simply untrue.  That argument, to repeat, is that a gay man or woman who lives in one of the states without gay marriage cannot marry in a way that will be publically recognized.  Suppose Fred is a gay man who lives in Alabama.  Then Fred (so says the argument) has no way to contract a legally-recognized marriage, and this is unfair.  But of course he can.  Suppose Fred goes down to the courthouse to complain to the local judge that he can’t marry; what does the judge tell him?  “Why son, sure you can marry. How about you pop the question to Suzie, who lives next door to you? She’s about your age, she’s a spinster and a good Christian, and she seems to keep a right tidy house. She’d make you a fine wife.”  Naturally this is not the kind of advice Fred wants to hear, nor is he about to follow it.  I get that.  My only point is that the laws don’t prevent him from marrying.  The only options they leave him are unappealling, but laws often do that.

In other words, at the level of public argument the opponents of gay marriage have the stronger case.  The advocates argue that all they want is “marriage equality” – that the marriage laws apply equally to gays the way they apply to straights.  But as Fred’s example shows us, they already do.  Fred doesn’t want to take advantage of the existing laws, but they do apply to him in just exactly the same way that they apply to his straight friends.  What Fred wants is something more fundamental: to change the meaning of the word “marriage” so that it includes the kind of relationship he has with his partner, Paul.  This is exactly what the opponents of gay marriage keep saying – that the real agenda is to change the meaning of marriage altogether – and at that level they are simply right.

Why are the advocates of gay marriage so reluctant to admit this?  It’s a rhetorical strategy.  In any political question, there are always a few ardent advocates on one side, a few ardent opponents on the other, and a vast swamp of the public in between who really don’t care all that much.  Neither extreme camp will ever persuade the other, so the political challenge is always to capture the indifferent middle.  But the middle is usually frightened of change – deep, substantive change, at any rate.  So if you want to advocate for fundamental change, you have to call it something else.  The Founding Fathers argued for a republic and independence from the British Crown by appealling to the traditional rights of free Englishmen – rights which were traditionally protected by the very King from whom they hoped to separate.  In the same way, those who seek to change the definition of marriage so that it includes same-sex partners as well as opposite-sex partners frame the conflict in terms familiar from other battles in the past, battles which have already been won and which the vast indifferent middle will therefore understand to be part of the status quo.  This is why they insist on drawing comparisons to slave times, even though the comparisons are untrue on their face.

At this point you may be more convinced than ever that I am making a political point, because I insist that the core argument of the opponents of gay marriage are truer and more accurate than the core arguments of the advocates.  But here is the rub: both arguments are completely beside the point.  After all, what difference should it make, from a philosophical perspective, whether the recognition of gay marriage constitutes a fundamental change in the meaning of marriage, or not?  New or old, who cares?  Surely the only important philosophical question is whether the recognition of gay marriages would be a good thing.  Surely the question whether it is an innovation is totally irrelevant.

Would the recognition of gay marriages be a good thing?  I’m inclined to think yes.  I’ve spelled out some of my thoughts about the meaning of marriage in another post.  Among other things, I called marriage “a school for character.”  Why should homosexuals be denied the benefit of such a school?  Why should they be denied the chance to become better men and women that is afforded by the burden of having to be decent to someone else every hour, day in and day out?  Of course it is true, as the judge said to Fred, that they are permitted to marry under the existing laws, so this “school for character” is strictly speaking not out of reach.  But we all know that Fred won’t ever marry Suzie.  What logical reason is there that should prevent Fred from getting the same education in character by marrying Paul?  I can think of none.  The only reason I can think of to stand still, to avoid extending the meaning of marriage so that it covers Fred and Paul, is a fear of change itself.  Fear of change is a powerful motive in the public arena, which is why opponents of gay marriage gabble so shrilly about a “slippery slope”: allow this change and the next thing you know we’ll have to allow more change, and still more.  But fear of change is not a philosophical reason for anything.  The only fair question is whether something is good or bad, and I see nothing bad in the public recognition of gay marriage.

So yes, I have an opinion on the political question.  The disclaimer in my earlier post just meant that my political opinion is based on my thoughts about the nature of marriage, and not on my thoughts about the nature of homosexuality.  You can agree with me that there is no such thing as homosexuality without committing yourself to either side in the debate over gay marriage.

Why are we having this debate now?  If I’ve understood the issues correctly, why didn’t someone else figure this out hundreds of years ago, and institutionalize gay marriage way back then?  They didn’t, because it is only recently – inside the last two hundred years – that we came to anything like the modern understanding of marriage.  In fact, marriage has been undergoing redefinition ever since the early nineteenth century; before that time, the whole question we are debating now would have been meaningless.  The only way that advocates of “traditional marriage” can talk the way they do is by not knowing the history of marriage.

The critical point is that marriage for us is not just a legal bond, but a romantic and emotional and spiritual one.  And this means that we want to marry only those with whom we think we can have a permanent bond on all those levels at once.  This is why Fred will never marry Suzie: he might appreciate that she can keep the house tidy, and I hear she bakes a mean peach pie, but he will never ever be in love with her.  His love is given to Paul, and so Paul is the one he wants to marry.

But three or four hundred years ago, the question would never have come up.  A seventeenth-century Fred probably would have married his Suzie, precisely because she was so good at cooking and keeping house.  The question of love would never have come into it, because marriage was much more a practical arrangement and much less an emotional one.  Fred back then would have seen no conflict between (1) marrying Suzie for her domestic accomplishments, and (2) turning to Paul for sexual ecstasy and deep emotional consolation.  Fred might even have been able to bring himself to bed Suzie once or twice in all the decades they lived together, just to get himself a child or two who could inherit whatever he left behind when he died.  Even Edward II got himself an heir, and there has never been any doubt that he preferred men as sex partners.

In short, the twenty-first century battle over redefining marriage to include same-sex partners is a direct result of the nineteenth-century revolution that redefined marriage as an emotional and spiritual bond rather than a merely practical one.  Once we had decided that it was personally unacceptable to marry someone with whom there was no “spark” just for the domestic benefits, it was inevitable that we would have to face the question, What about those who find a “spark” only with members of the same sex?  It was only a matter of time.  Change begets more change.  In that sense, ironically, you could say that the “slippery slope” argument is valid after all; only it was our Victorian great-great-grandparents who stepped onto that slope and left us with the inevitable inheritance.

Thoughts on marriage and divorce

My wife and I are separating – slowly and fitfully, but the plan is clear.  We have been married 28 years at this point, and have two sons in high school.  But in many ways the marriage has been very difficult for most of that time.  So I find I have been thinking about divorce more and more during the past few years.  And over that time my thinking has changed.

Back when I was young and things looked simple, I was dead set against divorce.  It looked simple: if you promise that you are going to stay with someone until death, then if your word is any good you honor it.  End of discussion.  If you had asked me to explain myself – why should it matter if you honor your word? – I would have had some trouble to answer.  When I was a kid, I took that as an absolute.

After I had been married for several years, I could have said a little more.  By then I would have said that marriage can be very difficult, but that it’s good for you to be able to endure hardships.  So to make the bond of marriage inviolable means that you can’t just quit when the going gets tough, that you have to come back and work harder and ever harder at it.  But I would have added that in the end it is worth it.  I really believed that.

But is it true?

In passing, I should note that the idea isn’t exactly crazy, or at any rate that others have had it before me.  That hardships build character is a commonplace; when I tell one of my boys that he’s not getting something he wants, he rolls his eyes and says, “I know, I know, it builds character.”  And the story is that Socrates married Xanthippe (proverbially a shrew) for much the same reason:

It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me," he says; "the horse for me to own must show some spirit" in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

But to say that it is always worth hanging in there is to say that there is something of supreme value in marriage itself.  Is there?  What is the point – the meaning, the value – of marriage?

There’s not a lot said about marriage in classical philosophy, or at least not that I have found yet, outside of purely pragmatic discussions of marriage as just one more of a series of social institutions to be governed by the political order.  I am reasonably sure that Plato never discusses marriage as such outside the Republic and the Laws, although he allows Xanthippe a minor speaking role in the Phaedo.  I’m less confident of the other classical philosophers, but am willing to hazard a guess that marriage didn’t figure very large in their minds.  Certainly the centuries that separate us from them have also changed the institution of marriage in significant ways, so that we come to it with a whole different set of ideals and expectations (among them romantic love and fidelity for the husband).  In the Republic Plato famously abolishes marriage altogether, allowing his citizens to sleep with whomever they like so long as they restrict childbearing.  (He has far more rules about childbearing than about sex.)  In the Laws he reinstates marriage as a practical necessity; but while he gives rules for how marriages shall be conducted, he mentions divorce only once, in Book 6 at 784b:

Let the begetting of children and the supervision of those who are begetting them continue ten years and no longer, during the time when marriage is fruitful. But if any continue without children up to this time, let them take counsel with their kindred and with the women holding the office of overseer and be divorced for their mutual benefit. If, however, any dispute arises about what is proper and for the interest of either party, they shall choose ten of the guardians of the law and abide by their permission and appointment.

Considering the length at which Plato treats other topics in the Laws – think, for example, of the elaborate and lengthy discussion of drinking parties – such a brief mention suggests this really is not a point of interest for him.

But what can we figure out on our own?

I think that in its essence, marriage is about two different things, that it has two different points – leaving aside all the pragmatic considerations that two can live more cheaply together than apart, and that it is convenient to have a guaranteed Friday-night date. 

1. The first is that, as above, marriage is a school for character. 
2. The second is that marriage is an environment for raising children. 

 It’s possible to imagine other effective ways to handle both of these goals; but here in the modern West, none of these other ways is nearly as feasible or effective.  Compared to the available options, marriage really is the best practical way available today to achieve both these ends.*

What do I mean?

When I call marriage a school for character, I’m not being sarcastic.  Every last one of us is born selfish and self-centered.  It is only through interactions with others that we learn to be better than that.  Of course we learn a lot of the basic social skills growing up as children, or going to school.  We learn other skills in the workplace.  But our interactions in the workplace are highly specific, they are filtered to allow only certain kinds of activity.  What’s more, they end at 5:00, or whenever it is that you personally knock off to go home.  The personality you have to display at work can be a kind of role, a mask that you put on in the morning and take off at night.  It is a set of learned behaviors designed to get you what you want (such as not being fired).  As long as you can set it down when you leave work, it’s not really you.

But marriage changes all that.  Now you have to be social and civilized – kind, caring, and unselfish – at home, too.  And it’s not just while doing this one kind of task over and over, or while attending that kind of meeting.  It’s always, and it’s in all circumstances.  Even if your kindness and civility start off as a mask, it’s a mask you can never set down and after a while it becomes a part of you.  You really do have to adapt and change yourself – for the better – in order to live with this other person, and in order to handle all the unpredictable things life will throw at you.  Sometimes your spouse (even the best spouse, to say nothing of a Xanthippe) will make you want to tear your hair out.  But as long as you hang in there you have the opportunity to learn to become better.

What about children?  There has been a lot of research on what children need growing up, and I don’t pretend to be an expert.  But my sense is that much of it bears out what might be considered a reasonable common sense intuition: first, that children need consistency and stability, that they need to know the adults in their lives can be relied upon, that they need multiple adults in their lives so that they have the possibility to stand apart from any single one of them to observe and criticize; but also second, that children are pretty adaptable to any specific configuration of those adults in their lives, so long as all of them are sane, reliable, ethical, and so on.  The first point should be obvious, because how else are children supposed to learn if not by repeated experience?  And without sane, stable adults in their lives that they can trust, children cannot have any repeatable experience from which to learn ethical or moral structures for their lives.  The second point should be obvious because different peoples around the globe have structured family life in different ways, and their children have thrived.  It’s not that this or that structure is the only right one; but some family structure is necessary and no one parent can do it all alone.

So what about divorce?

In general, I’m still against it – or rather, more exactly, I would still urge caution.  Divorce as a way to avoid the inconvenience of other people still strikes me as too cheap and easy; as long as there is a chance for you to grow into a better, wholer human being, you should consider sticking in there and working harder.  Much as I hate to admit it, I learned a huge amount in the almost three decades that I have been married to my wife.  It has been a very rocky road; but I was so much less mature back when we got married that it is embarrassing for me now to think about it.  And what matured me more than anything else in that time was the struggle of my marriage.  If I had stayed single (a fantasy I sometimes indulge in), I would still be the same childish prat now at 50 that I was at 22.

The difference is that I don’t see myself growing any more, except possibly in the wrong direction.  For years my marriage made me more patient, more considerate, less selfish.  But now I am watching the trend reverse: I have finally gotten so fed up with my wife’s multiple crazinesses that I have thrown in the towel, and I am growing ever less patient, less considerate, and more selfish.  This is progress in the wrong direction.  I can’t guarantee that divorce will halt my moral deterioration, but I’m pretty sure that staying married is no longer going to help anything.

What about the children?  That’s still a concern.  It’s probably my biggest worry.  I have tried to cushion the blow.  In the first place, I waited till they were both in high school; and for both of them that has meant boarding school, so they are out of the house.  Until that time, I really did choose, quite consciously, to “stay together for the sake of the children.”  In the second place, … well, we still have to work out custody arrangements, and our state is famous for being unfriendly to fathers.  But they are boys (which should help my odds of spending time with them) and they are old enough for the courts to listen to their opinions.  I hope therefore that we can work out something reasonable.  Naturally if they choose not to spend time with me, there won’t be much I can do about it.  But I don’t really expect that and am hoping for better.

If you take seriously the two goals for marriage that I identify, one unexpected consequence is that there is at least one circumstance in which (I think) divorce should be mandatory.  Well, two. 

The easy and obvious case that everybody recognizes is when there is a risk of physical injury inside the family: if one parent is genuinely at risk of harming the other (or the children), then of course the second parent and the children have to get out.  (For the moment I deliberately bypass the question whether there has been a genuine risk of harm in all cases where there was an allegation of such risk. But if the risk is real, go.)  Sorry, that was a digression.

But the other time when divorce should be mandatory is if you come to realize that the two of you cannot agree on fundamental ethical principles and have not had children yet.  Since children require a stable environment with adults they can trust, the two of you have got to agree on the basics.  That doesn’t mean agreeing on everything – I like mushrooms and my wife hates them, but that’s not why we are divorcing.  But my wife and I disagree about far more basic things, like whether or when it is OK to bend the truth or outright lie, and this means that we don’t have much respect for each other.  (Elsewhere I have written a lot about her lying and how I think she harms herself with it, and some day I might re-post some of that here.)  Of course the boys have detected this lack of mutual respect, and it has been a problem.  The thing is, I saw these disagreements long ago.  If I had had any sense back then, I would have seen that this particular incompatibility (unlike so many others) was not simply a challenge to be overcome with enough love and work but a show-stopper.  But hindsight is often clearer than foresight, especially when the latter is befogged with love and hope.

Note the qualifier, "and have not had children yet."  Once you have them, of course, the whole calculation becomes more complicated because now you owe them something in the way of a stable environment to grow up in.  This is why I call it mandatory to get out before they are born -- or rather, before they are conceived; because afterwards you may no longer have the luxury of divorce, or at any rate not easily or right away.  It becomes a far more difficult calculation.  In my case, as you can tell, I stuck it out for quite a few years.  I tried to model better behavior than my wife did, but it has to be up to some Outside Observer to tell me how well I did.

I guess nothing valuable is easy....

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* When I say there are alternatives, I think for example of other societies around the world that have successfully organized family life in other ways.  I also think of the fantasy of communal life with Plato describes in the Republic, particularly because I don’t think it is so fanciful as many seem to believe.  But that, too, is a topic for another day.  In any event, none of these alternatives is very practical in the modern West.