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Posted to the Cauldron; copied to my journal so I could keep it.
I really, really, really am all about the marriage lately; this is sort of dubious on the sanity front because of the density of it all, but I'm muddling through.
>> I'm also curious about when marriage became "the most fundamental institution of civilization"... <<
This may come out weird -- it's personal philosophy in part. Also, my A key is currently broken, so there my be As in weird plces or missing in relevant ones; please bear with me. :}
Okay -- let's start out looking at "civilisation". This strikes me as necessarily being property of a number of people. Bunches of people working together for X, Y, Z purposes, whtever. So whatever "civilisation" is made up of, it's made up of many people.
Humans are social creatures, which tend to form social units -- families, communities, tribes, cultures, nations. These units are generally fairly long-term consistent, though their population and distrubution does shift over time even if one just considers a set of the same individuals.
Further, all of these levels of human interaction are interconnected. They have relationships with each other. It isn't just the individual and their community; the family is an involved part of the interactions that individual has with the community. It isn't just the culture and the family; individuals enact the rituals of their culture alone or in community. And so on.
So what is marriage? Basically, it's a ritual for forming families. But it's not a ritual just for forming families of individuals with no outside interaction -- it's a ritual for forming mutual support and recognition between those families and the surrounding community. (Some religious marriage ceremonies have this explicitly in the text of their rituals.)
Now, blood relatives (by whatever calculation 'blood relatives' are figured by in the culture) don't need a ritual to create a family; they're already defined as such by those cultural rules. Some cultures have rituals that allow people to join an existing family and be considered a blood relative -- the one I expect most folks around here to be most familiar with is called "adoption".
(So what distinguishes "marriage" from these other family-forming rituals? Basically, I would say that adoption and related rituals are intended to add members to a household, and marriage creates a new household. One also notes that people who join a household via adoption or a sibling-creation ritual re tabu for marriage in their new families.)
So what does marriage do, functionally? It establishes a means by which members of different groupings may form a household nd family together. It may define the result as a member of one group or another or it may not. (Consider the tradition of surname-change and modifications thereto in this light.) It does so in a way that forms ties between that established household and its local community; this is one of the major purposes of many rituals.
Now bck to civilisation. I would say tht civilisation depends in significant part on the various levels of human social organisation interacting with each other. Of these levels, the individual-family-community bond is the one that is in mny ways the most personal and the most intense; that particular arc of the flow is what marriage is governing. So yes, civilisation depends on marriage, because it depends on the healthy interactions of individuals with families with communities, and marriage is one of the core rituals of that balance.
.
So now, to veer off politically, where does this leave things like this amendment?
People will be forming their families and making those commitments. However, there is a discontinuity in the rituals -- only some of those people will be able to perform the ritual to bind family to community. You hve people who are missing an important tie to the larger social structure, who have less invested in it, who may wind up opposing it entirely. You'll also get some people who will recognise those families and some people who won't -- and your community divides on the subject, creating factionalism.
Basically, I see the whole marriage debate as being fundamentally about those people who think that the way to prevent that factionalism is to let all families (or at least a larger fraction) participate in the ritual, join their communities and strengthen them by their involvement and full presence, and be mutually recognised, and those people who think that the proper thing is that those people who are not behaving according to a specific conceptualisation of the ritual should not have any desire for the ritual in the first place, not causing disruption by simple means of not forming groups that need recognition.
I -understand- the latter group -- I'm traditionalist enough at heart to be mostly a recon, after all -- but I feel that the ritual is not changed by expanding it. It is the major ritual for forming families; the only qualification I see as being required is that there is a family there. I also feel that including more people in the general community is good for the whole (and for civilisation, heh), and that excluding families can only create factionalism, because the families will not stop being formed whether or not they can join the community properly.
I likewise get crotchety at "nothing the government does should be called marriage" because it does not address my core concern -- factionalism. (It also buys into the popular lie that marriage is fundamentally or originally a religious ritual.) One of the core valuable parts of marriage is that it's something that everyone owns, one of those basic human building blocks of community. Letting some people define some families as married and other families as not when they're constituted under the same ritual destroys the possibility of community.
Okay, that was long and pontifictory, and all full of Ma'at nd probably Herw-Wr.
I really, really, really am all about the marriage lately; this is sort of dubious on the sanity front because of the density of it all, but I'm muddling through.
>> I'm also curious about when marriage became "the most fundamental institution of civilization"... <<
This may come out weird -- it's personal philosophy in part. Also, my A key is currently broken, so there my be As in weird plces or missing in relevant ones; please bear with me. :}
Okay -- let's start out looking at "civilisation". This strikes me as necessarily being property of a number of people. Bunches of people working together for X, Y, Z purposes, whtever. So whatever "civilisation" is made up of, it's made up of many people.
Humans are social creatures, which tend to form social units -- families, communities, tribes, cultures, nations. These units are generally fairly long-term consistent, though their population and distrubution does shift over time even if one just considers a set of the same individuals.
Further, all of these levels of human interaction are interconnected. They have relationships with each other. It isn't just the individual and their community; the family is an involved part of the interactions that individual has with the community. It isn't just the culture and the family; individuals enact the rituals of their culture alone or in community. And so on.
So what is marriage? Basically, it's a ritual for forming families. But it's not a ritual just for forming families of individuals with no outside interaction -- it's a ritual for forming mutual support and recognition between those families and the surrounding community. (Some religious marriage ceremonies have this explicitly in the text of their rituals.)
Now, blood relatives (by whatever calculation 'blood relatives' are figured by in the culture) don't need a ritual to create a family; they're already defined as such by those cultural rules. Some cultures have rituals that allow people to join an existing family and be considered a blood relative -- the one I expect most folks around here to be most familiar with is called "adoption".
(So what distinguishes "marriage" from these other family-forming rituals? Basically, I would say that adoption and related rituals are intended to add members to a household, and marriage creates a new household. One also notes that people who join a household via adoption or a sibling-creation ritual re tabu for marriage in their new families.)
So what does marriage do, functionally? It establishes a means by which members of different groupings may form a household nd family together. It may define the result as a member of one group or another or it may not. (Consider the tradition of surname-change and modifications thereto in this light.) It does so in a way that forms ties between that established household and its local community; this is one of the major purposes of many rituals.
Now bck to civilisation. I would say tht civilisation depends in significant part on the various levels of human social organisation interacting with each other. Of these levels, the individual-family-community bond is the one that is in mny ways the most personal and the most intense; that particular arc of the flow is what marriage is governing. So yes, civilisation depends on marriage, because it depends on the healthy interactions of individuals with families with communities, and marriage is one of the core rituals of that balance.
.
So now, to veer off politically, where does this leave things like this amendment?
People will be forming their families and making those commitments. However, there is a discontinuity in the rituals -- only some of those people will be able to perform the ritual to bind family to community. You hve people who are missing an important tie to the larger social structure, who have less invested in it, who may wind up opposing it entirely. You'll also get some people who will recognise those families and some people who won't -- and your community divides on the subject, creating factionalism.
Basically, I see the whole marriage debate as being fundamentally about those people who think that the way to prevent that factionalism is to let all families (or at least a larger fraction) participate in the ritual, join their communities and strengthen them by their involvement and full presence, and be mutually recognised, and those people who think that the proper thing is that those people who are not behaving according to a specific conceptualisation of the ritual should not have any desire for the ritual in the first place, not causing disruption by simple means of not forming groups that need recognition.
I -understand- the latter group -- I'm traditionalist enough at heart to be mostly a recon, after all -- but I feel that the ritual is not changed by expanding it. It is the major ritual for forming families; the only qualification I see as being required is that there is a family there. I also feel that including more people in the general community is good for the whole (and for civilisation, heh), and that excluding families can only create factionalism, because the families will not stop being formed whether or not they can join the community properly.
I likewise get crotchety at "nothing the government does should be called marriage" because it does not address my core concern -- factionalism. (It also buys into the popular lie that marriage is fundamentally or originally a religious ritual.) One of the core valuable parts of marriage is that it's something that everyone owns, one of those basic human building blocks of community. Letting some people define some families as married and other families as not when they're constituted under the same ritual destroys the possibility of community.
Okay, that was long and pontifictory, and all full of Ma'at nd probably Herw-Wr.
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This is an excellent point, and very well said, too. I see much of my Father in this whole post, actually (I can say this now, whee!)-- the whole "it's justice, and damn the practicalities-- and actually, it's practical too!" of it. BTW, you're talking about the floated constitutional amendment, right? (I *still* think that's empty calories, but I could be wrong on that.) I really do wish people would just get what you said here, it would make things much simpler.
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I think that is true of contemporary Western culture, but not necessarily of other cultures. In cultures which do not have a nuclear family model, the perception is often that one spouse joins an existing household, the head of which is the other spouse's parent or grandparent.
Generally, though, I agree with your reasons.