In Breaking Bad, arguably the best television series ever made,38 Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, set out to chronicle one man’s descent from decency to decadence. The idea was to show how Mr. Chips could turn into Scarface.39 Gilligan succeeded, but not before he seduced and corrupted the viewing audience too: By the time the story ended, fans no longer minded that Walter White had become a homicidal drug dealer. They rooted for him anyway.
Many of these Knights of the Self, warriors for their own code, end up dying in these stories. They are martyrs to the idea of “I did it my way.” It would all look very familiar to the original romantics and their view on heroism from an inner-directed light.
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What was once considered the only noble motivation for a hero, a conception of good outside himself, has been replaced by what Irish philosopher David Thunder calls “purely formal accounts of integrity.” According to Thunder, “purely formal accounts essentially demand internal consistency within the form or structure of an agent’s desires, actions, beliefs, and evaluations.” He adds that, under purely formal integrity, a person “may be committed to evil causes or principles, and they may adopt principles of expediency or even exempt themselves from moral rules when the rules stand in the way of their desires.”40
In other words, if you stick to your code, no matter what you do, you can be seen as a hero. It’s this sort of thinking that has led Hannibal Lecter, a character who barbarously murders and eats(!) innocent people, to be seen as something of a folk hero. In the film The Silence of the Lambs, he’s a charming monster who has no problem with eating people but says that “discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.” In the TV series Hannibal, the audience marvels at the cannibalistic gourmand, who cares not a whit for bourgeois morality, preferring instead a Gothic-gastronomic overlay to the laws of the jungle and a simultaneously barbaric and noble savage who does his own thing.
THE ALLURE OF TRIBAL JUSTICE
Why do movies and other modern myths find purchase in our imaginations? Anyone who has experience in even high school theater probably knows the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” The term was coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his collaboration with fellow poet William Wordsworth on their groundbreaking work, Lyrical Ballads, widely seen as marking the birth of the English romantic movement. The idea of the willing suspension of disbelief, Coleridge explained, was twofold. Coleridge’s contributions were to give voice to the “inward nature” of our irrational imagination, to make the supernatural characters seem real enough to the reader. Wordsworth came at the project from the opposite direction. His task was “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”41
In other words, Coleridge was tasked with making the supernatural seem real, while Wordsworth was assigned the job of making the real seem supernatural. Combine these two approaches and you get not only pantheism but the whole gamut of romantic art. The workaday is magical, and the magical is all around us.
But what interests me about the willing suspension of disbelief is the unwillingness of it. No one walks into a theater or opens a book or plays a song only after rationally committing to suspending their disbelief. The “poetic faith” is already there as a feature of our inward nature. The poetic faith, in this sense, is no different from any other form of faith. When the faithful enter a church, mosque, or synagogue, they do not rationally argue themselves into believing; the program for belief is already up and running. Our faith is like our senses of sight or touch or hearing: We don’t turn it on and off; the engine is always running. It is primal, hardwired.
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What fascinates me is how our moral expectations in the world of art differ from our expectations in the real world around us. The people we are at work, at the grocery store, play by one set of largely artificial rules: the rules of civilization. But beneath—or perhaps beside—the person of manners, custom, and law resides a different being. We’ve all heard the expression that some movie, novel, or piece of music “transported” us. Perhaps “transported” is the wrong word. Perhaps “liberated” gets closer to the mark. Comedians and pop psychologists often talk about our “inner caveman.” The reason this stuff appeals to us is because we sense there’s a healthy dose of truth to the idea. Beneath the layers of outward civilization lurks our more primal self, who finds the world around us complicated and artificial. Our primal self isn’t a noble savage, but he does feel like a more authentic person than the one who works hard and plays by the rules of modern society.
The moral universe of cinema sometimes mirrors the real world, but just as often the actors on the screen play roles more consistent with the moral universe of our inner savage. It’s like a scene in some science fiction movie where the protagonist develops a roll of film and finds that the people he photographed are different from those he saw with his naked eye.42 Art captures a reality that we tend to deny in the “real world” around us. In novels, movies, TV, rap music, video games, and almost every other realm of our shared culture, the moral language of the narrative is in an almost entirely different dialect from the moral language of the larger society.
For instance, we are rightly taught not to hit, steal, or torture. These rules, and ones like them, form the bedrock of virtually every halfway decent civilization. And yet, almost every time we go see an action movie, we cheer people who violate these rules. I am a sucker for a heist movie, but I don’t think robbing banks is laudable. As a general rule, I stand foursquare against using violence to settle disagreements or respond to insults. But a John Wayne who didn’t deck someone who insulted him wouldn’t be John Wayne.
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Consider an extreme example: torture. For the last two decades, America has been roiled by an intense and passionate debate over the use of what critics call torture and defenders call “enhanced interrogation.” Many opponents of torture implicitly argue that it is worse than homicide. After all, almost no one disputes that there are times when the state has the power and authority to kill. But torture? Never. Not even in a ticking-time-bomb situation. In order to hold to this extreme position, torture opponents find they must argue that torture “never works.”
This is dubious in what we call real life, but it is flat-out lunacy according to famously liberal Hollywood. Steven Bochco’s NYPD Blue broke a lot of television taboos, but the least appreciated is its open endorsement of beating the truth out of suspects. In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford shoots a man in the knee to get the information he needs. In Guarding Tess, Secret Service agent Nicholas Cage blows off a kidnapper’s toe with his service weapon. In Rules of Engagement, Samuel L. Jackson executes a prisoner to force another to talk. In Pulp Fiction, we delight at contemplating the “short-ass-life-in-agonizing-pain” of Ving Rhames’s rapist (“I’ma get medieval on your ass.”). In the TV series 24, Kiefer Sutherland would routinely resort to torture if it meant thwarting some impending threat. And each time the audience cheers.
When we suspend disbelief, we also suspend adherence to the conventions and legalisms of the outside world. Instead, we use the more primitive parts of our brains, which understand right and wrong as questions of “us” and “them.” Our myths are still with us on the silver screen, and they appeal to our sense of tribal justice. We enter the movie theater a citizen of this world, but when we sit down, we become denizens of the spiritual jungle, where our morality becomes tribal the moment the lights go out.
12
THE FAMILY’S LOSING WAR AGAINST BARBARISM
In the first part of this book, I discussed the vital role institutions play in a pluralistic society. Institutions are rules and customs for how groups of people self-organize and work together outside the state. Hence the term “mediating institutions”—the formal and informal organizations, customs, and rules that “medi
ate” the space between the individual and the state, often called “civil society.” This is the world of work, church, and community. Most of the work of civilization and of our individual lives is conducted in this space.
By any measure, the most important mediating institution in any society is the family. Healthy, well-functioning families are the primary wellspring of societal success. Unhealthy, dysfunctional families are the primary cause of societal decline. The family is the institution that converts us from natural-born barbarians into, hopefully, decent citizens. It is the family that literally civilizes us. Before we are born into a community, a faith, a class, or a nation, we are born into a family, and how that family shapes us largely determines who we are.
The healthy family is also the keystone of civil society. Many of the most important mediating institutions relate not simply to individuals but to the families behind them. If you ever explore the question of how any thriving school, small town, sports league, church, mosque, synagogue, or almost any other non-government-run civic event or tradition does so well, the answer almost always involves the involvement of certain families, usually led by a few determined women and reinforced by cadres of obedient husbands and fathers.
“Capitalism,” Joseph Schumpeter said, “does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; nor that the youngster may choose whether he wants to work on a factory or in a farm; nor that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce. It means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization…”1 This scheme of values, this attitude toward life and civilization, begins in the family, which is traditionally defined as a marriage between one man and one woman and their children.
And this system is breaking down. The family as an engine of civilization is in deep trouble. In a way, the breakdown of the family is an illustration of my larger argument in miniature. Many critics of bourgeois morality are indeed right when they say that the nuclear family—one man, one woman, married to another—is not natural. It’s not altogether unnatural either. But it’s true that the historical and anthropological record is full of different types of families. Combatants on both sides of the intellectual wars of the family often commit the naturalistic fallacy: assuming that if something is “natural” it is right or good. Many traditionalists insist that the nuclear family is the natural way, “as God intended.” Advocates for new ways of organizing and thinking about family point out all of the different ways families have been organized and say many forms are just as natural.
But whether it is natural or not misses the more salient point: The nuclear family works.
But before we explore that point, we should review—very quickly and summarily—the world we came from when it comes to families.
Non-human primates have a variety of sexual dynamics. In gorilla communities, the alpha male has sex with all the females. Among chimpanzees, it’s more like a free-for-all, with males competing with each other for sex with as many partners as possible. In both species, the difference in size between males and females is a symptom of these sexual politics. Males must defeat other males to become the alpha or even to get a first shot at the most desirable females. Around 1.7 million years ago, our human ancestors started to deviate from this norm, and the size differential between the sexes shrank (though it still exists). “This shift in size is almost certainly a sign that competition between males had diminished because of the transition to the pair bond system,” writes Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.2 The pair-bond is what you could call natural or primitive monogamy.
However, even chimps have a kind of stealth monogamy. The females may be obligated to have sex with all the males, but, once having fulfilled that duty, they tend to pick a favorite male “consort” they spend more time with. They even have trysts off in the forest with them for weeks at a time and delay their ovulation so they can increase the chances that their preferred partner succeeds.
Our human ancestors improved on this system with the pair-bond. Among the benefits of this adaptation, all the males—or at least a lot more of them—had a chance to reproduce, which introduced a good deal more social peace and stability to primitive societies. In this way, primitive monogamy may be the driver of mankind’s success as a species. By taking the need to fight with other males out of the equation and giving each male an incentive to protect the group (specifically his own offspring), males became much more cooperative and willing to make sacrifices for their tribe (or, more accurately, their band or troop). In evolutionary terms, the pair-bond was a mixed blessing for the females. “The females,” Wade writes, “must give up mating with all the most desirable males in the community and limit their reproductive potential to the genes of just one male. On the other hand they gain an implied guarantee of physical protection for themselves and their children, as well as some provisioning.”3
But here’s the problem: The pair-bond is not fully baked into our instinctual programming the way, say, the fight-or-flight instinct is. Monogamy is natural—except when it isn’t. It’s a tendency, not an imperative. Culture, law, material circumstances—and sometimes mere opportunity—can easily override this real but often weak evolutionary drive. Also, in a world where few humans lived past the age of thirty, the notion of being bound to one person for fifty, sixty, or seventy years seemed unimaginable.
Marriage, whatever form it takes, is a social construction, an artificial institution and cultural adaptation. For instance, in certain areas where resources are scarce, societies developed polyandry—the practice of one wife and many husbands. This was a common practice in the mountain communities of China and Tibet. Far more common is polygyny, the form of polygamous marriage where one man has many wives. Some 85 percent of human societies through history, according to one commonly cited estimate, have been formally polygynous, which is to say harems of wives were allowed.4 This practice is still widespread throughout much of the Muslim world and Africa.
So polygyny is natural—except for when it isn’t. As for what the God of the Bible intended, tell Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon that they were defying God’s will. (Meanwhile, Jesus was remarkably silent on the topic, though the few hints that exist suggest he opposed it.)
Now, back to the more important point. Monogamous marriage of the sort that defines the nuclear family works better for society (although I can’t speak to whether it works better for every individual). Societies where monogamy is the norm tend to be much more economically productive, politically democratic, socially stable, and friendlier to women’s rights.
Men in monogamous societies are more economically productive than men in polygynous societies because each married man is a stakeholder in his own family, and there are more families. Large-scale polygyny tends to destabilize the male population as young, poor men find themselves increasingly desperate for sexual relationships. Eric D. Gould, Omer Moav, and Avi Simhon, in their paper “The Mystery of Monogamy,” demonstrate that polygyny emerges in societies with high levels of inequality, where wealth is largely derived from natural resources, particularly land. In societies where wealth comes from human capital—ingenuity, innovation, etc.—the marriage market is defined by a search for quality (by males and females alike), while in societies where wealth comes from landholdings, the market is defined by the strictly male emphasis on quantity. “In particular,” they write, “skilled men in modern economies increasingly value skilled women for their ability to raise skilled children, which drives up the value of skilled women in the marriage market to the point where skilled men prefer one skilled wife to multiple unskilled wives.”5
This is surely too reductionist. Other historical, religious, and cultural factors must be involved in an institution that spans much of the globe and that existed in nearly every ancient society in one form or another. But Gould and his colleagues are also surely right when they wr
ite that it is no accident that monogamy is the norm in every economically advanced democratic society. It is impossible to know how much the traditional nuclear family is responsible for the social and democratic stability and economic growth of the last three hundred years, but there is little doubt that it played an important role. The institution of marriage as we know it on a society-wide level and a personal level requires work. Just as capitalism is sustained by how we talk about it, so is marriage.
As a practical matter, I don’t object to claims that monogamy is natural or in sync with God’s plan, because that is an important way civilizations talk about settled questions. Making the ideal of monogamy a matter of unquestioned dogma simply strikes me as a good idea, even if honesty requires us to acknowledge that is what we are doing. We talk about murder and rape as unnatural as a way to heap deserving opprobrium on the practice even though, as we’ve seen, neither is actually unnatural. Adultery is wholly natural, but we condemn it as a violation of important norms to keep the habit to a minimum. “Very often those things we have condemned as ‘unnatural’ are things that we know will flourish if we leave them alone,” writes Robin Fox in The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind.6 We ban and condemn polygyny because we know that, if we don’t, many men will imitate our gorilla cousins and our ancient human ancestors and form a harem.