A civilising circle?

Wednesday, 24th June 2009

John Heard finds that the best argument for gay marriage is not even an argument for love

Chaos into security, accompanied — in the poets and the movies, it is typically brokered — by singular, epitomic, often tragic love: this certainly describes one major, continuing, secular understanding of marriage. It is very close, in its broad contours, to some of the most striking pop culture definitions of happiness. But does this understanding really get at what is at stake in Australian laws on marriage and family? How should those with a competing perspective on the marriage debate answer a Phaedrus-like argument about gay marriage?

It is not that hard. The tools for a robust, secular rebuttal of the Phaedrus argument are already provided in The Symposium, under the contributions Plato attributes to Socrates himself. For love, Socrates definitively states, is not beautiful and good in itself, as some of his interlocutors (and Senator Brown) implied — and it is not sui generis, self-justifying. Therefore, love cannot, itself, found and justify law. Rather, love is the son of plenty and the daughter of need. Love needs good and beautiful things — a life of virtue, an effort at self-discipline — to bring about the politics of prosperity.

Just laws operate, in any properly ordered society, to extend the empire of virtue. They cannot create new categories of happiness. Australian marriage laws merely seal, then, and only in a hopeful way, something that is already important and noble about marriage. The law, like love, must serve some higher aim, and must take its cues from some virtue-oriented jurisprudence, otherwise it is meaningless, or worse.

Appeals to the primacy of love, indeed any of the most compelling Phaedrus-like claims, cannot overcome this basic fact. The most persuasive arguments for gay marriage sound noble, and they have inspired great and good men, but they are, after all, more aligned with superstition, on Plato’s reading, than the sort of clear-eyed thinking that should guide lawmakers. Australian politicians and activists need an account of the good life, then, one that clearly describes what moral good and social justice a man effects when he marries another man as he would marry a woman. In the meantime, they must leave emotive posturing to movie stars and poets.