CHAPTER FIVE |
The Morality of Intimate and Personal Relations |
THE PRECEDING CHAPTER addressed the morality of the self; this chapter moves outward from the self to deal with the morality of intimate and personal relations, that is, an individual’s face-to-face interactions with others. The following chapter, the third of the concentric circles in Part II, will deal with the morality of one’s relations with the larger society. Consistent with the general pattern, this chapter begins with sex and love, the intimate relations that lie closest to one’s sense of self, and next considers relations with one’s children and one’s parents. It then moves on to friendship and concludes with work relationships, which are most distant from the self and merge into one’s relations with society at large.
Sexual relations are a true human universal and can be safely said to be a factor in many relationships that can be described as intimate, that is, closest to a person’s basic sense of self.1 It can be said with equal safety that the rules and practices regarding sexual relations vary greatly from one moral system to another. The contours of the new morality’s approach to sex can be traced by contrasting it with Casti Connubii, the papal encyclical discussed in Chapter 2 that forbids nonprocreative sex and restricts procreative sex to a monogamous, heterosexual marriage.2 One essential feature of the new morality is to sunder the connection between sex and procreation. It does so by treating the concupiscence to which the encyclical refers as a source of pleasure, instead of either an affliction or an annoyance. In this as in other areas of life, the new morality recommends that people strive for self-fulfillment.
From the perspective of this new morality, the linkage between sex and procreation forged by “nature,” an authority Casti Connubii cites more frequently than Scripture, St. Thomas, and St. Augustine combined, is a coincidence, not a commandment. The new morality provides that people should satisfy their sexual desires in whatever way they choose and for whatever purpose they desire. None of the restrictions derived from the connection between sex and procreation remains applicable. Homosexuality, birth control, and abortion are all valid choices for the individual in achieving a fulfilling sexual experience or avoiding its undesired consequences.
Abortion raises an issue that is absent from homosexuality or birth control, of course, since it ends the existence of a potential human being and thus its chance for self-fulfillment. But the new morality’s concept of the self as narrative existence, a continuous process that extends over time and is shaped by individual or personal choice, means that a zygote or fetus is only a potential self, not an actual one. Thus the determinative issue, from the new morality’s perspective, is the woman’s self-fulfillment. This is the same rationale that leads to the idea, presently implicit rather than established in the new morality, that a pregnancy that will produce only a severely impaired child—that is, a child that has no chance of creating a fulfilling life path—should be terminated, as discussed in the previous chapter. Restrictions on late-term abortions either recognize that the fetus has become a self by this point or establish a zone of safety for the child that it will become.
As Anthony Giddens and other social theorists have noted, the separation between sex and procreation is in part a product of technology.3 New methods of birth control, such as contraceptive and morning-after pills, prevent coitus from causing pregnancy, artificial insemination enables people to procreate without coitus, and modern surgery provides virtually painless and risk-free abortions. Even techniques that most proponents of the morality of higher purposes welcome with enthusiasm, such as fertility treatments for married couples, contribute to this effect by transforming procreation from a mystery of the marriage chamber to a procedure in a doctor’s office. Clearly, technological advances have played a crucial role in shaping High Modernity’s attitudes toward sex, but as noted at the beginning of Chapter 3, the relationship is co-causal, not unidirectional. The willingness to accept technological innovations, and perhaps even the incentive to discover and develop them, is at least partially a product of evolving attitudes.
Casti Connubii’s rules restricting sex to a heterosexual couple joined in the publicly approved relationship of marriage are also rejected by the new morality. As described in Chapter 2, demanding that sex be limited to procreation does not, by itself, explain the old morality’s insistence that procreative sex be linked with monogamous marriage. One explanation for this further restriction is that cabining sex within the boundaries of a religiously legitimated marriage represented an additional way to defuse its power and de-emphasize its pleasures. But there is also a more pragmatic explanation for the traditional approach. Medieval and Early Modern society delegated many crucial functions to the family, in part because of the government’s limited administrative capabilities. These included education, local governance, and economic production. Restricting sex to marriage provided a biological buttress for this essential institution, the basic building block that was seen as serving the higher purposes of the centralizing monarchy’s stability and, by the Early Modern period, of its economic prosperity as well.
In High Modern society, both the moral and pragmatic motivations to restrict sex to marriage disappear. As Freud recommended, the power of sex should be recognized and celebrated, and many of its dangers reside in its denial. Pragmatically, the intensification of the publification process that accompanied the administrative state’s emergence has transferred most of the family’s social functions to administrative institutions. Education is now provided by tax-supported schools, local governance by an ever-expanding cadre of salaried officials, and economic production by business firms subject to governmental regulation. There is no longer an insistent need to recruit sex in the service of familial stability. Conversely, once the family’s stability was challenged by the new morality of self-fulfillment, the legal system was more willing to countenance its decline. As a result, marriage, which looms so large in Casti Connubii and the morality of higher purposes in general, is of only secondary significance in the morality of self-fulfillment. It is a preference rather than an obligation, one of the many choices that people are morally free to make in constructing their individual life paths. Consenting adults can get married if they wish, just as they choose their career, their religion, and their hobbies. Some people find marriage a much-desired affirmation of mutual commitment, while others regard it as an irritating intrusion on a relationship they prefer to define for themselves. According to the new morality, that choice is of no concern to anyone but the individuals involved in the decision.
Given its permissive attitude toward sex and its dismissive attitude toward marriage, the morality of self-fulfillment may seem to some like a region of Dostoyevsky’s netherworld, but of course that view is incorrect. The new morality places as many constraints on human sexual behavior as the morality of higher purposes; it is the nature or content of these constraints that differs. Instead of prohibiting nonprocreative and extramarital sex, the new morality forbids disapproval of other people’s sexual practices, any element of compulsion, and any inequality between men and women.
As the previous chapter indicated, the new morality’s secondary principle of noninterference forbids people from condemning the sexual practices of consenting adults on the grounds that such condemnation can impair their valid efforts to fulfill themselves in this essential aspect of their lives. As noted in the Introduction, this principle already operates in work environments consisting of, or dominated by, educated people, such as university faculties, hospitals, and law firms, among the student body on a significant number of campuses, and in a variety of urban social settings. It was recently affirmed in the United States by a Supreme Court decision that upheld a university rule requiring sponsored organizations to admit gay and lesbian students, essentially forbidding them from expressing disapproval of these students’ sexual preferences.4 From the perspective of the morality of self-fulfillment, Casti Connubii is thus an immoral document, to be condemned as vehemently as it condemns nonprocreative and nonconjugal sex.
E. M. Forster, the great English novelist, expressed this aspect of the new morality when he wrote, near the end of his long life: “How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.”5 There was simply no reason, in Forster’s view, why his particular path toward sexual self-fulfillment should have been declared illegal while other people’s were not only permitted but encouraged and rewarded. The National Basketball Association now agrees with Forster and implemented the new morality by fining two of its stars, Joakim Noah and Kobe Bryant, $50,000 and $100,000, respectively, for shouting out a term that disparages gay men.6 The danger of using this term fifty years before was the possibility of being sued for slander by someone anxious to assert his masculinity; now it is regarded as a forbidden value judgment, even in the macho environment of professional sports.7 When Jason Collins became the first NBA player and, in fact, the first athlete playing any major American spectator sport to announce that he was gay,8 all the other athletes who commented about it—including Bryant—were supportive.9
A second constraint imposed by the new morality is an absolute prohibition on the use of compulsion in sexual relations. This represents a partial continuity with the previous morality, but here again the moral rules result from different perspectives and thus display differing contours. In High Medieval and Early Modern times, rape was forbidden as a breach of the peace. In addition, since most women belonged to a man as either wife or daughter, it was seen as an intrusion on that man’s property,10 a view that represented a continuity with the Early Middle Ages and, indeed, with Ancient Rome. This meant, however, that a man was not seen as acting immorally when he compelled his wife to have sex with him within the confines of his home, which was simultaneously within the bounds of his property and the framework of a procreative marriage. When he compelled a servant, or a slave in the U.S. or Brazil,11 to have sex with him, he was committing fornication, but he was still within the insulating ambit of his home and property because servants and slaves were regarded, in this case to their detriment, as members of the family. Consequently, the government did not interfere and most people, including the clergy, regarded his action as an excusable lapse, even when performed with regularity. Soldiers who raped women in an occupied territory were seen as supporting the king’s war rather than breaching his peace, part of a conscious military strategy known in the Middle Ages as a chevauchée.12 They were invading the property only of men whom the king meant to invade and removing any threat to the higher purpose of their souls’ salvation by serving the higher purpose of royal aggrandizement or glory.
In High Modernity, rape is still seen as a breach of the peace, but it is also forbidden as unfulfilling sex for the victim and as a trauma that impedes future sexual fulfillment. Thus, the new morality condemns compelled sexual relations in all situations, including marriage, employment, and war. It does so, in part, by reinterpreting the sense of pleasure that sex produces from an inducement or a temptation to an essential element of sexual morality. Going well beyond the concept of marital rape, self-fulfillment morality insists that sex is moral only when both partners truly desire and enjoy it. By the early twentieth century, this led many people in Western society to reject the idea that a husband can insist that his wife comply as a matter of marital right and to champion what juvenile court Judge Ben Lindsey described as a “companionate marriage,”13 an approach explicitly condemned by Casti Connubii.14
Beyond even the requirement that sex must be genuinely consensual, the new morality addresses the actual performance of consensual sex. Sexual partners should try to gratify each other so that each participant finds fulfillment in the experience. While gratification was not ignored in prior times, it was sometimes regarded as improper, if not actually immoral. A countervailing view was the belief that the woman was more likely to become pregnant if she reached orgasm, but this was essentially an instrumental argument for gratification, not a moral one. As the new morality emerged, some early proponents of mutual gratification argued that the woman’s willingness would yield a healthier, more intelligent child.15 This bit of pseudo-empiricism was transitional to the view that gratification is a value in itself, and thus intrinsically moral, an attitude reflected in the proliferation of manuals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that instruct people how to get the most physical pleasure from sex.16 There is a tendency among those who find this attitude distasteful to scorn the consumers of these manuals as deficient people who cannot perform a natural act without instruction,17 a more socially acceptable position for many modern people than outright moral condemnation. The significance of sex manuals, however, is not that they are necessary but that they reflect a distinctly contemporary attitude toward sex. When National Lampoon satirized The Joy of Sex18—which can be inappropriately described as the mother of contemporary sex manuals—by retitling it The Job of Sex,19 it was capturing the sense of obligation regarding sexual gratification that the morality of self-fulfillment at least encourages and probably demands.
Another stricture that the new morality imposes comes from its secondary principle of equality and insists that men and women be regarded as equals in sexual as well as political and economic matters. This leads to a definitive rejection of the double standard. As described in Chapter 2, the double standard, an intrinsic feature of the morality of honor, continued to exist in uneasy equipoise with the morality of higher purposes, which, while prohibiting extramarital sex, maintained the man’s superior status as an element of the God-given social hierarchy. This superiority, which Casti Connubii celebrates as “the honorable and trusting obedience which the woman owes to the man,” gave men an implicit, albeit morally ambiguous license to engage in infidelities that the morality of higher purposes would have otherwise condemned. Because the new morality of self-fulfillment, with its ethos of equality, was becoming dominant by 1944, the Encyclical adopts a defensive tone about this topic, arguing that “false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery.”20
Within the morality of higher purpose’s confines, this argument is probably correct; as discussed, once the male-dominated family was established as a woman’s purpose, only the valorization of love that this morality created could rescue her from complete subordination. But the morality of self-fulfillment provides an alternative by dissolving the hierarchical structure of marriage and transforming it into an agreement between equals. Fidelity then becomes an optional or voluntary element of this agreement. A man and a woman can pledge loyalty to one another, or they can agree that each will be allowed to have affairs, or that one will remain loyal while the other strays—a psychologically difficult but morally acceptable alternative. In short, they stand in the same relation to each other, and thus have the same options, as couples consisting of two men or two women, where gender equality is not an issue. The demand that the morality of self-fulfillment imposes in this arena is that the parties to the contract must be honest with each other. Breaching a solemn agreement with one’s sexual partner is likely to impair that person’s sexual fulfillment, emotional well-being, and expectations for the future and may additionally engender regret regarding the failure of the relationship. It is a major disruption of the present, forward-looking, and retrospective aspects of the person’s life path, and this is what the new morality condemns.
The notion of sexual equality in marriage also depends on and produces changing views about male and female sexuality. In premodern times, when sexual desire was regarded as a moral weakness and the breeding ground of sin, men were anxious to portray women as lustful creatures, dominated and addled by desire. Once High Modernity redefined sex as a source of intense and fulfilling enjoyment but had not yet altered the hierarchical relationship between men and women, men seized the newly admirable status of the more passionate gender, consigning women to an inferior realm of tepid pleasure. It was only after the advance of the new morality had added gender equality to its validation of sex that people came to believe that men and women experience equivalent levels of desire and satisfaction. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that the relative level of desire between men and women is no longer regarded as a meaningful or interesting question. Rather, self-fulfillment morality sees sexuality as an individual characteristic and urges each person to find the modality and intensity that brings him or her the most enjoyment.
But the new morality’s more positive attitude toward sex does not mean that sex is now seen as free from danger. Sex elicits strong emotions, a dangerous potentiality in almost every moral system. The dangers that the morality of self-fulfillment sees in sex, however, are different from those perceived by its predecessor. In the morality of higher purposes, sex was not only sinful in itself, unless harnessed for the purpose of procreation and contained within a marriage, but also dangerous because it distracted people from saving their souls and serving their country. It was thus allied to other forms of carnal excess such as gluttony and sloth. The danger sex creates in the morality of self-fulfillment is about as far from gluttony and sloth as strong human inclinations can be from one another. It resides in the tendency to undermine the equality of men and women that, as the preceding chapter argued, is central to the idea that each individual should be able to fulfill himself or herself to the fullest possible extent. This tendency is partially due to the biological fact that only men can commit rape, but also to the social fact that sex has been the instrument and emblem of men’s dominance over women throughout Western history, a dominance endorsed by the previous moralities of honor and of higher purposes. Sex can readily reenact this male insistence on obedience, that is, the imprisoning enthronement of the woman as a man’s personal possession. Its close connection to the male dominance of the prior era renders it an engine for violating the morality of self-fulfillment and thus a potentially dangerous activity.21
Sexual relations between people obviously involve adults, but they are not limited to adults. They also include relations between an adult and a child and between or among children. Here as well, different moral systems vary greatly, but the specific beliefs about this subject that people maintained in the premodern Western World are not easy to discern. Sexual practices tend to be poorly documented and thus remain recondite without the assiduous survey efforts of modern sociologists. It would appear, however, that the morality of higher purposes imposed no specific prohibition against sexual relations involving children. Rather, the constraints in this area were subsumed under the general prohibition of sex outside marriage.
As Chapter 2 discussed, a major aspect of the shift described by Georges Duby22 from the morality of honor’s aristocratic marriage to the morality of higher purposes’ ecclesiastical one was the Church’s insistence that marriage must be based on the parties’ consent. This did not end arranged marriages, but it did produce the rule that people could become betrothed—that is, agree to marry—only once they reached the age of discretion, traditionally set at seven years. As the twelfth-century bishop and scholar Peter Lombard noted, however, betrothal was merely a promise to marry in the future. A legally binding marriage, in his view, required a promise in the present, which was not possible until the parties had reached the age of twelve, another continuity with Ancient Rome;23 thus, an earlier betrothal could be repudiated. The lawyerly Pope Alexander III adopted this position in the latter part of the twelfth century, setting seven as the age of valid betrothal and twelve as the age at which either betrothal or marriage would be binding.24 Twelve remained the age of consent in English common law until the late nineteenth century,25 while laws in the majority of American states compromised between the two traditional standards and set the minimal age for marriage at ten.26
What these precocious marital ages actually meant in sexual terms is less than clear. To begin with, marriages at early ages appear to be the exception rather than the norm. In his pathbreaking study of social practices in preindustrial England, Peter Laslett refutes the popular belief, derived in part from literary evidence such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Song of the Cid, that people regularly married in their early teens.27 His survey of marriage licenses in seventeenth-century Canterbury (of all places) reveals that the median marriage age was 25.5 for men and 22.75 for women—not very different from the contemporary figures. Subsequent studies, such as the extensive analysis of the Halesowen parish records, confirm these figures, although indicating that the median age dropped into the late teens during periods of prosperity.28 While the evidence is somewhat mixed,29 it generally appears that early marriage was practiced largely by the upper class, perhaps because more property or power was at stake, perhaps because better nutrition led to earlier sexual maturity.30
Second, it is necessary to distinguish between betrothal and marriage. Premarital sex between betrothed persons was common and generally not condemned, but it was certainly neither universal nor obligatory.31 Moreover, even if a man actually married a girl below the age of sixteen or seventeen, this does not necessarily mean that he had sex with her, given the primarily pragmatic functions of premodern marriage.32 The Lateran Council of 1215 declared that consent, not consummation, was the defining feature of a valid marriage,33 thus decreasing the motivation for a man to consummate his marriage to a child whom he chose for property-related reasons.
Nonetheless, during the period dominated by the morality of higher purposes, a significant number of girls between the ages of seven and seventeen were married to older men, and since the failure to consummate a marriage remained grounds for an annulment, a man who failed to have sex with his child wife risked losing whatever material advantages he had gained by marrying her.34 The important point, for the present, is that there is simply no indication during this period that there was anything immoral or even ethically questionable about a man’s having sex with his partner in a Christian marriage, even if he was an adult and she was still a child.35 In fact, according to a qualification that Pope Alexander III added to one of his decretals, if a man had sex with his betrothed when the girl was younger than the minimum age of twelve, the betrothal became binding; as James Brundage states, “Consummation thus outweighed the impediment of minority.”36
Whatever Shakespeare was trying to convey by making Juliet thirteen and Lady Capulet a married mother by that age, it seems clear from the text that he was not trying to scandalize his audience or suggest that his characters should have waited until they reached their twenties before falling in love. Chaucer may have been trying to shock his readers a bit when he has the Wife of Bath say “sith I twelve yeer was of age. . . . Housbondes at chirche dore I have had five,”37 but the text that follows suggests that it was the number of her husbands and her attitude toward them, not her age at her first marriage, that was intended to produce the impact. Similarly, as described in Chapter 1, El Cid expressed concern when King Alfonso ordered him to marry his two daughters, who are “still little girls, and very young,” to the Carrion brothers, but his main worry involved the brothers’ characters, not his daughters’ ages. After they are rescued, and still very young, he is delighted to marry them to the virtuous princes of Navarre and Aragon.38
The residual influence of these attitudes toward childhood sex can be observed in the decisions by contemporary Catholic Church officials to cover up reports that priests were molesting underage boys.39 In part, their response reflects the Church’s belief that it retains its historical position as a separate political entity, unconstrained by secular authority. But this view, which is, after all, demonstrably false, is amplified by less conscious attitudes. For laypersons, according to the Church’s morality of higher purposes, sex was permitted only within marriage, but once a marriage had occurred, it did not matter that one of the partners was a child while the other was an adult. For priests, sex is entirely forbidden, at least since the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century. Any sexual activity by priests is thus a grievous sin, and here again, it makes no difference whether this sin is committed with an adult or a child. In either case, the age of the partner is not the major consideration from the Church’s point of view. The crucial issue in the first situation is whether the two people are married, and the crucial issue in the second is whether the priest has had sex with anyone. This may be the reason why Church officials reacted in the same way to priests who had sexual relations with adult women and to priests who had sexual relations with underage boys. In both cases, they counseled the priest, transferred him to some other location, and kept the situation as quiet as possible for the sake of both the priest and the Church. What the Church failed to realize is that the attitudes of the surrounding community had changed. No one outside the Church itself cares whether a priest has sex with an adult woman, but sex with a child is now a serious crime. In its premodern innocence—its historic lack of interest in distinguishing between children and adults in sexual matters—the Church ran seriously afoul of contemporary attitudes.
Those attitudes are increasingly shaped by the emerging morality of self-fulfillment. According to this morality, sex between an adult and a child is strictly forbidden on the ground that it will be traumatic for the child and will impair his or her ability to develop a fulfilling sex life in the future. The premise of this principle is that childhood experiences shape one’s adult personality, an idea whose late-eighteenth-century origin and connection to modern morality has been described in Chapter 3. Marriage, once again, is of no particular significance, and any law or religiously based code that allows marriage between an adult and a child would simply be condemned as invalid by the new morality.
With regard to sexual relations between two children, the demotion of marriage from a moral requirement to a matter of personal preference means that sex outside marriage is no longer morally condemned. This includes premarital sex, of course, and premarital sex often involves teenagers. The predominant constraint that the new morality imposes on such relationships is its requirement of absolutely free consent. This follows from the prohibition against compulsion as being antithetical to self-fulfillment. The younger one of the partners is, the more questionable his or her consent will be. Consent also becomes questionable if the younger partner is a girl and the older one a boy, given the previously mentioned biological ability of males to force themselves on females and the continuing social inequality that encourages and augments male domination. Below the age of sexual maturity, which usually arrives at the beginning of a person’s teenage years in modern times, sex is always viewed as nonconsensual because the child is unlikely to be motivated and unable to make a considered and autonomous decision.
Assuming that both young people genuinely consent, judgments regarding their sexual activity depend, as they always do in the new morality, on whether this activity is fulfilling for them. The standard formula that modern morality approves any sexual relations between consenting adults reveals an uncertainty or ambiguity about the answer to this question—is consent enough, or should sex be deferred until adulthood? Once it is cast in terms of self-fulfillment, rather than the categorical judgments about right or wrong that characterize higher purposes morality, the answer might be seen as essentially empirical: it would depend on the particular circumstances of the relationship. Teenagers’ reactions to sexual experience seem to vary enormously; some find it exciting and edifying, some find it bruising or traumatic, and some are unaffected, one way or another. More data will certainly become available about this subject as time goes on, but it is almost equally certain that debates about the interpretation of this data will continue and keep the indeterminacy alive. What seems clear, however, is that the inclination to address this issue in modulated empirical terms, rather than in categorical moralistic ones, signals the increasing predominance of the new morality of self-fulfillment. As noted in the Introduction, opponents of the new morality now tend to frame their arguments in the same empirical terms. They assert that premarital sex will preclude a sexually fulfilling marriage, in contrast with the traditional assertion that it will condemn the participants to hell. Whatever the validity of this claim, it seems to represent a concession to the predominance of the new morality.
One major consideration that leads the new morality to approve and encourage sex between teenagers is that people are generally well advised to acquire a certain amount of sexual experience before entering long-term commitments in adulthood. Delaying sex until marriage often leads to misfortune according to the new morality, not only because sexual compatibility is an important element of this relationship but also because sexual frustration is an imprudent reason to enter into it. The man who realizes that he is gay only after he has had two children with his high school sweetheart, and the attorney who discovers that she does not want to spend the remainder of her life with the phys ed instructor who was attracted to her when she was a cheerleader and he was a college football star will have bruising personal experiences as they extract themselves from their impetuous relationships and will inflict equally bruising experiences on their ill-chosen partners and their mutual progeny.
A second and more controversial reason why the new morality regards voluntary teenage sex as moral is simply that sex is a source of pleasure, and thus of self-fulfillment, at any age past latency.40 The new morality endorses personal choice in this area, as in others, on the ground that each person must design his or her own life path in seeking self-fulfillment. Of course, many teenagers will make mistakes, but the way to reduce the number and effect of those mistakes, according to the morality of self-fulfillment, is through counseling and education, not through prohibition. In any case, there may be no particular reason to treat the errors of impetuosity as more serious than errors of timidity, and certainly no reason to shift the balance toward timidity, by invoking the machinery of moral condemnation. In fact, the reverse may be the preferable approach from the new morality’s perspective. Although the evidence is somewhat murky, it appears that in developed Western nations puberty now occurs at a considerably earlier age than in the past, perhaps due to improved levels of nutrition.41 Any demand that people abstain from sex during this extended period could be seen as frustrating, cruel, and, in a very real sense, immoral.
There is also, however, a countervailing consideration suggested by the morality of self-fulfillment: that children are not emotionally prepared for sex and that intense sexual experiences at this stage of life, as in the case of sex between a child and an adult, will be detrimental to their present and future self-fulfillment. Escalating concern about young children’s exploration of each other’s bodies, about sexual harassment among elementary school students, and about the availability of sexual material available on the Internet may betoken a developing moral demand that children be insulated from sexual experiences.42 Part of the impetus behind these concerns stems from those committed to the prior morality of higher purposes, who find appropriating the discourse of an emerging morality more effective than clinging to the discourse of a fading one. But concern about the traumatic effects of childhood sex also represents a genuine interpretation of the emerging morality, with its solicitous attention to the psychology of human development, and thus a countervailing argument to the idea that sex is a valid source of pleasure for teenage children. These opposing strands, both consistent with the new morality, might sort themselves out in one way or another as that morality develops or might continue as a source of uncertainty and contradiction, just as the conflict between the conjugal justification for sex and the double standard persisted in the morality of higher purposes.
As might be expected, the co-causal relationship between morality and governance operates with particular intensity in the laws and attitudes regarding sexuality. During the time that the morality of higher purposes prevailed, the Western World’s centralizing monarchies expressed their moral condemnation of nonprocreative and extramarital sex through their most coercive legal instrumentality, the criminal law. This was the same law that they used to prohibit and punish serious breaches of civil order, such as murder or theft.43 Both entry and exit from marriage were heavily regulated as well. In this case, only civil law was needed; because marriage is a publicly defined status, the government could deny entry to it or exit from without needing to resort to punishment. The new morality of self-fulfillment has produced a nearly complete transformation of the laws, one of the most significant legal reform programs in Western history. Co-causally, these reforms have validated, and perhaps advanced, the new morality. Such sweeping legal changes, as might be expected, have engendered opposition from those who remain committed to the older morality of higher purposes. As the era of High Modernity has advanced, however, the opponents have been increasingly unwilling or unable to rely upon that old morality and have sought to conscript the discourse of its successor to support their views.
Criminal laws against extramarital sex, including fornication, adultery, and prostitution, remained in force for most of the High Medieval and Early Modern periods.44 The difficulty with these laws, not so much for those officials who enacted them as for those charged with their enforcement, was the previous morality’s double standard, kept alive by the societal commitment to male dominance. To resolve the conflict—and, co-causally, because of premodern government’s limited administrative capabilities—enforcement was often delegated to the family. This allowed the paterfamilias to chastise his wife and daughters for actual or suspected sexual transgressions while exempting his sons and, of course, himself.45 Because the double standard was to some extent a holdover from the prior honor-based morality, this mode of enforcement largely resembled the mode of enforcing premarital virginity and marital fidelity that honor-based societies employ. Because that standard was attenuated by the morality of higher purposes, however, enforcement was somewhat less severe. Wayward wives and daughters were often beaten and sometimes exiled from the family, but they were less often killed by the paterfamilias and much less often killed by the extended family or the community.46
During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, laws prohibiting adultery and fornication, although not those prohibiting prostitution, were revoked through the co-causal operation of self-fulfillment morality and the administrative state.47 This was not, of course, due to any general reluctance on the part of modern governments to intervene in family matters, or the social system generally. Such intervention has been, in fact, a major arena of administrative action. Rather, abandoning the preexisting laws against extramarital sex stemmed from the articulated policy that people should be free to determine their own path for sexual fulfillment, provided, of course, that they do not violate the noninterference principle. This policy was simultaneously generated by the transformation of morality in society at large and the organically related reconception of government as a means of serving the needs and following the desires of its citizens.
Criminal laws dealing with nonprocreative sex, including prohibitions on contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, lasted longer and, although widely violated, were often seriously enforced.48 Perhaps they survived through so much of the High Modern era because they did not conflict directly with the still-operative double standard. In any case, the pace at which these laws have been revoked in recent decades has been striking. Throughout the Western World, contraception has become legal and readily available. Abortion has become available on request, at least during the first trimester, in virtually every Western nation.49 The main exceptions, other than small principalities, are Ireland and Poland,50 two nations where the Catholic Church, an insistent opponent of the new morality, derives enhanced legitimacy and influence from its connection to political liberation movements, quite the opposite of its role in other Western nations.51 Every Western nation has decriminalized homosexuality. These changes were generally implemented by national legislation. In the U.S., which has an unusual political configuration, the states moved at different rates, as William Eskridge has documented,52 and it was the Supreme Court that acted at the national level on all three issues.53
Sexual deregulation’s character as an articulated governmental policy, rather than a generalized reluctance of modern government to impose legal rules, is illustrated by the increased regulation of the family in other areas. As noted in the preceding chapter, traditional morality shielded the marital relationship from the criminal law, so that a husband was allowed to beat his wife, have sex with her against her will, and have sex with her while she was still a child. According to the new morality, however, each person is an individual with equal rights and social hierarchy is an oppression, not a benefit.54 As a result, the marital bond becomes transparent to the criminal law, which looks through it to view physical violence as assault, coercive sex as rape, and sex with a child wife as sex with a child.55 This expansion of criminal law into areas that were previously left unregulated contrasts with the contraction of criminal law in previously regulated areas and demonstrates that self-fulfillment does not represent the general decline of morality but the displacement of one morality by a different, equally demanding one. What is deregulated in High Modernity is not family relations in general, but sex or, more precisely, the choices among consenting adults regarding sexual fulfillment.
The civil law of marriage has undergone similarly rapid and far-reaching deregulation, as many observers have noted.56 In its purest form, self-fulfillment morality does not require any government-approved procedure involving intimate relations. What we now call marriage could be limited to contract, where people design whatever relationship they want and the government simply enforces their agreements to the extent that it enforces any other agreements between individuals.57 But just as the concept of honor persisted through the era of higher purposes morality, the institution of marriage, with its deep roots in Western culture, is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. It has been transformed, however; the new morality removes many of the prior limitations regarding entry into marriage on the ground that people are entitled, in seeking self-fulfillment, to choose their intimate partners for that purpose. In Europe, the previous distinction between the nobility and commoners has been almost entirely effaced, even for Britain’s royal family.58 Prohibitions against interracial marriage have now been eliminated in every Western nation. In the United States, where racial issues are so heavily freighted with the history of slavery, Supreme Court intervention was required to impose this standard on Southern states,59 but interracial marriage is now legally secure, and it is socially accepted in all but the most rural, traditional regions of the nation.
Most notably at present, legal prohibitions against same-sex marriage, one of the signature issues of the transition from the old to the new morality, are being rapidly abandoned. Nearly half of the nations in the Western World allow marriage between same-sex couples.60 In the United States, same sex marriage is currently recognized in thirty-three of the fifty states as a result of legislation, judicial decision or referendum.61 The U.S. Supreme Court, in an extensively argued case, refused to overturn a lower federal court decision that, in effect, authorized same-sex marriage in California, and then declined to review other federal court decisions that struck down bans in about ten more states.62 It has not ruled definitively on the issue, however, thereby leaving prohibitions in place in many of the nation's most conservative states. This somewhat indirect and evasive approach is widely regarded as the Court’s effort to advance an important principle while avoiding the condemnation and challenges to its authority that resulted when it imposed racial integration (Brown v. Board of Education), a ban on school prayer (Engel v. Vitale), and legalized abortion (Roe v. Wade) on every state.63 As such, it can be predicted that the Court will declare legal restrictions on same-sex marriage unconstitutional as time goes on and the remaining restrictions come to be seen as divergences from a new national norm.64
The deregulation of the rules regarding entry into marriage not only reflects general changes in morality that support individual choice but also specific changes in social practices motivated by that same morality. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Catholic Church’s rule basing marriage on consent conflicted with the hierarchical social structure that characterized the morality of higher purposes. Consequently, most marriages continued to be arranged during the High Medieval and Early Modern periods, particularly if property was at stake.65 Marrying on the basis of one’s individual choice became the norm only in the nineteenth century, once the morality of self-fulfillment began displacing its predecessor.66 Now that it dominates the Western World, parents’ efforts to arrange their children’s marriages consist largely of setting up blind dates for them and hoping for the best.
It is important to note, however, that some traditional restrictions on entry into marriage have not changed. Prohibitions on plural marriage and incest remain fully in force,67 perhaps because they do not seem to be derived from the morality of higher purposes whose strictures are now being so extensively rejected, but rather reflect more general standards and taboos reaching back to the origins of Israel, Greece, and Rome.68 Significantly, however, the current rationale for these prohibitions is less often grounded on the inherent nature of marriage or the sinfulness of the prohibited practices and more often on considerations that reflect the new morality of self-fulfillment. The prohibition of plural marriage tends to be justified on the basis of women’s equality,69 while incest prohibitions are regarded as a means of preventing birth defects, an obvious impairment of the child’s opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. Whether the new morality will ultimately lead people to challenge these deeply embedded cultural prohibitions remains to be seen.
Legal changes involving exit from marriage have been equally extensive. As described in Chapter 2, divorce was virtually impossible during the High Middle Ages. Although most nations that turned Protestant ended the legal prohibition on divorce, and devoted considerable effort to re-thinking the premises of marriage, the change in attitudes and social practices was modest, as Joel Harrington observes.70 People in these nations continued to regard divorce, unless justified by extraordinary circumstances, as a social scandal, in large part because it continued to violate the higher purpose of maintaining social order.71 The rules for divorce became more lenient only once the morality of self-fulfillment and the administrative state began to take hold, and only in Protestant nations. Here as well, these trends were strongly opposed by traditional beliefs, pragmatic interests, and the general inertia of the legal system. The real change did not occur until after World War II, but then it came suddenly and in all Western nations, Catholic as well as Protestant.72 At present, most Western nations allow divorce with waiting periods ranging from six months to six years, and many reduce this period substantially if the parties both consent. Thirty-one American states permit immediate divorce, and the waiting period in the others is generally short, with nearly half being less than a year and none longer than two.73
Whatever the private miseries of unhappy marriages may be and whatever indirect detriments they impose on society in general, there can be little doubt that divorce disrupts childrearing, property ownership, and employment—the very sorts of disruption that the morality of higher purposes sought to avoid. Its rapid and widespread legal acceptance thus demonstrates the gathering force of the new morality. People seek divorce because they no longer find their relationship with their spouse to be fulfilling. The state, in validating this desire, acknowledges its importance and declares that it should prevail over collateral considerations that previously loomed so large. The one consideration that remains meaningful to people is child welfare. Divorce is often justified in the face of the potential detriments to children by asserting that the child will be worse off, which is to say less self-fulfilled, in an environment of unhappiness and conflict than in two separate but more irenic homes. Determining whether this is true would be difficult, but the fact that it is asserted indicates that social policy is being debated and resolved within the conceptual framework of the new morality.74
Laws established by long tradition are often difficult to change, however, and the gradual nature of the transition between moralities meant that the declining morality retained vociferous adherents well into the period of High Modernity. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 two-year imprisonment for homosexuality under a statute criminalizing gross indecency might be partially attributed to his determined efforts to scandalize Victorian society.75 But as late as 1952, Alan Turing, one of the inventors of the computer, was convicted under the same statute, despite his having cracked the German Enigma Code for the British government during World War II, thereby saving untold numbers of Allied soldiers. His security clearance was revoked because of his conviction, he avoided prison only by agreeing to chemical castration, and he ultimately committed suicide in response to these events.76
Opposition to the deregulation of sex was not merely a matter of legal inertia or traditionalism, however, but a deeply felt response to the advent of the new morality. All the movements described in Chapter 3 as opposing self-fulfillment morality in general were united in their hostility toward its validation of sexual gratification and its deregulation of sexual practices. In the case of nineteenth-century antidemocratic conservatism, this hostility stemmed from the traditional Catholic doctrine that sex was permissible only when serving the higher purpose of procreation. With respect to Communism, the sexual license it inherited from its revolutionary origins was replaced by a quasi-Catholic emphasis on marriage and procreation, which was regarded as necessary for the higher purpose of maintaining national prosperity and military power.77 The Fascists, given their hypernationalism, were even more committed to these goals. Casti Connubii was promulgated shortly after the Vatican reached its first formal accommodation with modern Italy in the Lateran Pact of 1929. The Church and the Italian state had been discussing a connubio, or marriage, since Italian unification in the 1860s, but no agreement was achieved until the liberal governments that followed unification had been replaced by the Fascists.78 Now, the Encyclical could laud Mussolini’s regime as demonstrating the way “[g]overnments can assist the Church greatly in the execution of its important office if, in laying down their ordinances, they take account of what is prescribed by divine and ecclesiastical law, and if penalties are fixed for offenders.”79
In the United States, where neither antidemocratic conservatism nor totalitarianism has possessed much political traction, and in most of Western Europe after the World War II, political resistance to the florescence of the new morality has played out within the boundaries of democratic politics. It naturally associates itself with Christianity because the morality of higher purposes was specifically linked to Christianity at the time when it was dominant.80 Within each Western nation, the opposition to the new morality is strongest in rural areas, where both religion and tradition retain their appeal, and weakest in urban centers, where social change proceeds most rapidly. As noted in the Introduction, this has clearly been the prevailing pattern in the United States as the transition from the old to the new morality has accelerated and become more salient. The Republican Party, historically aligned with East Coast business interests and opposed to regulation on that basis, has been able to mobilize rural voters with quite different economic interests by simultaneously opposing the new morality’s deregulation of sex.81
This opposition expressed itself not only in efforts to oppose the deregulation of sex but also in periods of tempestuous reaction once that opposition was defeated by the increasing predominance of the new morality and its connection to administrative governance. In the United States, the past century’s reactions were the Comstock anti-pornography campaign of the 1880s to the 1900s, the anticommunism of the 1950s, and the Religious Right activism of the 1980s to the 2000s.82 Each was able to exercise significant political influence for a while, but the first two ultimately succumbed to the persistent progress of the new morality, and the third is undergoing a similar experience, as the Introduction’s account of the 2012 election illustrates.83 What appears to happen, is that, as new developments become familiar, the tocsins of social catastrophe ring hollow over time and then seem meaningless to the succeeding generation. The young people of the Roaring Twenties and the 1960s viewed the traditionalist crusades that preceded them with uninterest and incomprehension, and Generation Y seems to feel the same way about the opposition to gay marriage, birth control, teenage sex, sex education, and perhaps even abortion.84
The specific content of the opposition to the deregulation of sex provides further evidence of rapid moral transformation. As already noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 3, those who want to preserve the morality of higher purposes now tend to abjure reliance on those higher purposes and deploy the concepts and terminology of the morality of self-fulfillment to oppose the legal changes that this new morality engenders. In particular, they have adopted the Freudian discourse of mental health to justify traditional restrictions on sexual activity. Proponents of the old morality attempt to combat homosexuality with reparative or conversion therapy designed to cure gays and lesbians of their affliction.85 The leading organization that coordinates these efforts announces on its website: “We have a network of well-trained counselors who are equipped to understand homosexual struggles.”86 With respect to divorce and extramarital sex, various organizations committed to the morality of higher purposes offer marriage counseling exclusively designed to preserve the marriage.87 Their approach rests on psychological and sociological studies purporting to show that married people are happier than single people, cohabiting people, divorced but remarried people, and married people who have made the mistake of having sex before marriage.88 Even with respect to abortion, where the morality of higher purposes’ position remains a politically viable one, its proponents often rely on the argument that women who have abortions experience “postabortion stress syndrome,” a psychological condition that involves guilt, regret, and depression.89 They offer women who experience this condition therapeutic counseling, which they later try to turn into religious observance of some sort. The founder of one such organization—an undisclosed affiliate of the Catholic Church—asserts that many women who have abortions are victims of sexual abuse, then goes on to argue that abortion is itself a further form of such abuse.90
When opponents of the new morality adopt a mental health approach, they concede the validity of the worldview they are attempting to combat. Any short-term victories they achieve with this strategy only demonstrate the cultural power of the new morality and hasten its ascendancy.91 This has already occurred with the institution of marriage. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the justification for marriage shifted from serving the higher purposes of procreation and social order to fulfilling the desires and aspirations of the marriage partners. Stephanie Coontz notes that this retrofitted justification reached its apogee in the 1950s, when people used marriage as a means of restoring the sense of normality that World War II had shattered.92 It collapsed almost immediately thereafter as people—now convinced that self-fulfillment was indeed their essential goal—realized that marriage was not necessarily the best way to achieve it. Thus, the strategy of absorbing a fulfillment-based rationale into a traditional practice produced a temporary turgescence but ultimately caused that practice to explode from the inside. The borrowed therapeutic discourse that proponents of the morality of higher purposes are now deploying is likely to have the same effect on the practices they are attempting to preserve.
One particularly instructive example of this process involves sex education. This is an arena where the administrative state’s replacement of church and private home instruction with a government institution joins self-fulfillment morality’s belief that the consequences of teenage sex should be addressed by education rather than by prohibition and condemnation. Early versions of sex education were designed to support marriage as a source of sexual self-fulfillment, particularly for men who might otherwise follow the tempting trail of the double standard to find fulfillment in more remote and lurid places.93 The further progress of the new morality, embodied in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, changed sex education into a public health initiative, designed to inform teenagers about the dangers of sex and the means of avoiding them. This goal became more urgent, and sex education more widespread, in response to the AIDS epidemic of the following decade.94
The rapid proliferation of sex education courses represented a disconcerting defeat for those still committed to the morality of higher purposes. Now, the ethos of self-fulfillment was not only appearing in R-rated movies and sybaritic urban neighborhoods but was coming home in their school-age children’s backpacks. Recognizing that outright reversal of this policy would not be possible, proponents of the old morality, most notably in the United States, developed the interesting strategy of trying to redirect sex education from precaution to abstinence.95 Although this approach clearly tracks traditional morality, it was not presented as a moral imperative but rather as the only “one hundred percent effective way” to combat unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and as the best way to ensure a sexually fulfilling marriage.
Here again, proponents of the morality of higher purposes have relinquished their deontological position and attempted to combat the morality of self-fulfillment on its own territory by using instrumental arguments. This strategy has been partially successful, but it involves internal contradictions that presage its long-term instability.96 First, the claim that abstinence is the only one hundred percent effective birth and disease control strategy is unstable because abstinence is a result, not a strategy. The strategy is will power, which long experience reveals to be considerably less than one hundred percent effective. It is not particularly effective for middle-aged Catholic priests who have devoted their lives to the Church, and it is less effective for secular young people whose sexual drives are at their highest pitch. Moreover, as those young people will quickly realize, if pregnancy and health were the real motivation for abstinence education, its proponents would want sex education courses to encourage manual stimulation and mutual masturbation, two modes of satisfying sexual desire that never lead to pregnancy and reliably avoid disease as long as the participants wash their hands.
Second, as empirical studies of abstinence-only programs confirm,97 teenagers are unlikely to be convinced that abstinence is the only way to enjoy their teenage years and end up in a fulfilling, stable marriage. The message that premarital sex is misery will be refuted once their peers report sexual experiences that are generally exciting and frequently rewarding. The message that sexual experience leads to an unhappy marriage will be challenged by the general view that other choices, from buying a car to selecting a college, benefit from increased information. Once abstinence is severed from the argument that premarital sex leads to damnation, assertions that it is needed to avoid unwanted pregnancy, disease, and marital failure only demonstrate the ever-weakening hold that the morality of higher purposes exercises on the society that is emerging in this period of High Modernity.
After all this discussion of sex as a morally relevant aspect of intimate relations between adults, it seems necessary to say something about love. As Chapter 2 discussed, a man’s love for a woman emerged as a theme, and perhaps even as a concept, in the Western World only in the High Middle Ages, when it was assimilated to the prevailing morality of higher purposes. Viewed as a perpetual quest, a yearning after the desired but unattainable love object, this notion of love could be readily applied to courtship but only with difficulty to marriage. The morality of self-fulfillment provides a different approach to the relationship between love and marriage. By regarding love as a source of self-fulfillment rather than a higher purpose, it can integrate love directly into the marital relationship. In other words, it domesticates this previously destabilizing motivation. Now Erec and Enide, the prematurely contented couple of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance, can live happily ever after once they marry. Erec’s love for his wife as both “his sweetheart and his mistress”—as a source of companionship and sexual satisfaction combined—is no longer seen as a dereliction of his duty but as a fulfilling intimate relationship.
This view of love confers a certain status on women, but it does not necessarily require that they be regarded as men’s equals. Rather, gender equality is an independent theme in the morality of self-fulfillment. It does not initially arise from a reinterpretation of heterosexual marriage or from any consideration of women’s relationship to men, but rather from their status as selves and the basic principle of the new morality that each self is entitled to strive for fulfillment by choosing its own life path. Marriage is then transformed, as a consequence of this reconception of life’s meaning and the secondary principle of equality, into a relationship between two equal selves, regardless of their respective genders.
This produces a transformation of marriage as a social institution. In the morality of honor, it was the man’s honor that was at stake in marriage and sexual matters; in the morality of higher purposes, it was the man’s purposes. The woman’s role, in both these systems, was to serve the man as a possession, housekeeper, and progeny producer. Men were entitled to love their wives but cautioned against allowing such tender feelings to interfere with their ability to exercise control over them and the family in general.98 While this was sometimes regarded as means of ensuring that people were not distracted from the more important love of God and thus the higher purpose of saving their eternal souls, it was also understood as a means of insulating the family from the intense and stormy emotions that love engenders, thus preserving it for the more pragmatic higher purpose of social stability.
The morality of self-fulfillment demands that women as well as men should be able to maximize the pursuit of their interests and the use of their abilities. As discussed earlier, it also means that women as well as men should be sexually fulfilled. Here, it can be seen as establishing an ethos of love that is in essence gender neutral. Domesticated, love is shorn of its association with traditionally male pursuits such as conquest, adventure, and crime, and absorbed into the confines of the home. As the new morality takes hold, love comes to be recognized as the essential ingredient of marriage. Being gender neutral, it can be applied to relations between two men or two women as readily as to heterosexual relations and serves as a further basis for supporting same-sex marriages. In the new morality, moreover, love replaces parental arrangement as the means by which men and women choose each other. The family-dominated courtship rituals of the preceding era were thus replaced with a new set of social practices, first centered on visiting each other’s homes, later on dating, and most recently on equal interactions in high school and college classrooms, coed dormitories, and a wide range of work settings. The egalitarianism of these practices allows them to accommodate gay and lesbian courtship as well, thereby further normalizing these relationships.
Modern novels, the most characteristic literary expression of self-fulfillment morality for reasons described in Chapter 3, present a narrative of love that adopts the woman’s perspective as often as it does the man’s. In part, this results from the developing notions of equality that gave women the opportunity to express themselves in writing and obtain an audience. But while the social novels of the nineteenth century written by women like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë rank among the pinnacles of world literature, it is also notable that many novels of this period that were written by men adopt a woman’s perspective, beginning with Richardson’s Pamela99 and continuing with Dickens’s Bleak House, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, Zola’s Nana, and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Something beyond the gender of the author is at work here. It is that the narrative action of the novel—the planning of a life path, the obstacles one encounters, and the ultimate success or failure one experiences, particularly when involving love—can be carried by a woman because the dominant goal of self-fulfillment can be conceived as essentially the same for women as it is for men.
In one sense, of course, premodern people were correct about the effect of love on marriage. As Stephanie Coontz and Denis de Rougemont have noted, the morality of self-fulfillment’s domestication of love inevitably destabilizes marriage as an institution.100 This is a major theme in nineteenth-century novels, particularly those in which women are the protagonists. The idea that love for one’s sexual partner is an essential form of self-fulfillment means that love should not only be the basis for entering a marriage but also the basis for remaining in it. If self-fulfillment is the moral standard, then a man who no longer loves his wife should leave her to find fulfillment elsewhere. In addition and even more momentously, a woman is morally entitled to act in exactly the same fashion. The new morality not only validates divorce as a response to loveless marriages but also empowers the woman to initiate it on the same terms as the man. The result is that the hydraulic pressure on the laws forbidding divorce began to build as the new morality took hold, as noted earlier, and the divorce rate itself underwent a gradual but ever-accelerating increase which then produced further effects upon the law.
Because the relationship between the sexual and social roles of marriage is inevitably co-causal, it also operates in the reverse direction. As already noted, the growth of the administrative state releases marriage from its prior role in sustaining social order. A stable home is no longer necessary for the production of goods and services, the education of children, or the governance of political localities. When a modern mother and father get divorced, they continue to work at the same jobs outside their home that they did when they were married. Their children continue to attend the same public school, and the paid professionals who run their local government are not even aware of their vicissitudes. With these and other functions transferred from the family to the state, marriages based on love and maintained only as long as love prevails cease to be socially destabilizing.
To put the same point in terms of belief rather than pragmatics, marriage becomes romanticized in the modern world. While its decreasing practical importance certainly does not eliminate the dreary details of household maintenance, the relationship’s center of gravity shifts from management to love. People are now less likely to be looking for a coworker or an infusion of resources when they get married. Assuming they are realistic enough to recognize that few relationships can sustain the sexual frenzy of romance for several decades, they aspire to find a soul mate, someone who can reinflame their initial passion with reasonable frequency while sharing a profound and ever-deepening affection. They may also, to follow Nietzsche’s suggestion, hope to find someone with whom they can converse.101 If none of that transpires, according to the new morality, they should seek self-fulfillment elsewhere. Given such high expectations, it is inevitable that they will want to do so rather often; in the automobile age when the morality of self-fulfillment flourishes, the words of the old 1950s song reverse, and marriage and divorce go together like a carriage and horse.102
From the perspective of the previous morality, which prevailed at the time when people actually used horse-drawn vehicles that required the horse to be in front, the morality of self-fulfillment involves a serious miscalculation. In putting the cart of romantic love before the horse of social obligation, it has dishonored romantic love in much the same manner as the punishment cart dishonored Lancelot. A number of modern authors who remain committed to the previous morality bemoan the domestication of love as its trivialization.103 The abiding passion of romance, the exquisite intensity that spawned so much poetry and drama, has been replaced by a contingent relationship that is inevitably beset by the abrading realities of quotidian existence. It becomes subject to negotiation by equal partners, vulnerable to threats of readily available divorce, and, perhaps worst of all, sustained by marital counseling characteristic of our psychologized sense of self. Donne may have said that one could no more combine love with marriage than one could “catch a falling star,”104 but Perry Como said that you can not only catch a falling star but also “put it in your pocket” and use it when loves comes and “taps you on the shoulder.”105 Domesticating love through marriage may not eliminate its poetry but certainly blends whatever poetry remains with a heavy dose of domesticity.
For most people in the Western World, parenthood represents one of their most important intimate relations, typically the only one that rivals their relationship with their sexual partner. Chapter 4 described the way parenthood, as an abstract matter, affects a person’s sense of self, and specifically the way it is perceived as a source of self-fulfillment for the parent. This has certain implications for the relationship between parents and children, specifically in the notion of quality time that Chapter 4 discussed. Here the question is how the new morality affects the content of the parent-child relationship, the beliefs and pragmatics of upbringing that not only reflect a society’s culture but also provide for its continuation over time.
Philippe Ariès, a leading Annales historian, has proposed the striking theory that people in the Middle Ages had no conception of childhood.106 Once children were no longer physically dependent on their mothers and could function by themselves, they were regarded as adults, according to Ariès. They were included in adult activities and expected to fulfill adult functions commensurate with their smaller size. The cultural idea that childhood constitutes a separate period of life in which the person has distinctive features and merits distinctive treatment, he argues, developed gradually in the Renaissance and Reformation eras and did not become fully established until the late eighteenth century.107
Criticism of Ariès has become a cottage industry among historians.108 His theory is vulnerable because of its somewhat theatrical quality and because it relies on iconographic and literary evidence. Demographic records of the sort that have become the mainstay of later Annales history are often invoked in opposition. Barbara Hanawalt, for example, relies on coroners’ records to demonstrate that children who suffered accidental death were typically involved in different activities from those performed by adults. It is important, however, not to caricature Ariès’s idea in criticizing it. Ariès does not subscribe to the “nasty, brutish and short” school of Medieval history.109 His point, as he says, “is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children; it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult. . . .”110
For purposes of the present inquiry, there is no need to resolve this controversy. Instead, three specific differences between premodern and contemporary views of parents’ moral obligation toward their children can be delineated, regardless of whether the global conception of childhood has changed as fully as Ariès suggests. These involve discipline, employment, and placement. First, premodern parents appear to have used corporal punishment more extensively and more severely. The various warnings in Proverbs not to spare the rod were taken seriously,111 and physical discipline was meted out on a regular basis.112 It is not clear whether a father’s socially recognized role in raising children involved much beyond physically punishing them, but it clearly involved that.113 In the High Medieval and Early Modern eras, as children began attending church schools and other educational institutions outside the home, this reliance on physical punishment continued.114 It is better documented in that setting because schoolmasters, in addition to being literate, were more self-conscious about their childrearing strategies, but parents would hardly have tolerated such treatment of their children if it had not reflected their own domestic practices.
Second, children were expected to be gainfully employed at fairly early ages. In agricultural families, which remained the overwhelming majority until the nineteenth century, this was such a common practice that official records and the parent reports on which the records were based often grouped children and servants together in a single category.115 From the age of six, boys were assigned to wood gathering, herding, fishing, waiting on table, and grain binding at harvest. Girls picked fruit, fetched water, and assisted with cooking and laundry.116 While these were somewhat different tasks than those performed by adults, as Hanawalt observes, the difference might have been motivated by the realistic observation that children are smaller and weaker, rather than beliefs regarding their essential difference in character. In any case, from the time they turned thirteen, rural children did perform the same amount and type of work as adults. An increasing proportion of male children throughout this period were apprenticed to learn a trade, generally beginning in their mid-teenage years.117
Third, many children were regularly placed out of their homes well before they reached maturity. This practice was probably regarded as a pragmatic strategy rather than a moral obligation, but the willingness of all classes of society, from the lowliest peasants to the most exalted nobles, to engage in it is certainly indicative. Peasant children were placed as servants in other people’s homes at the age of ten to twelve; apprentices typically went to live in the master’s home until they were adults; noble children were sent to other noble households to improve their status or gain entry to a wider social circle. One motivation for this practice was that education was generally participatory; children learned by working alongside their instructor, ascending from menial servant to junior colleague as their skills improved. But the outplacement of children extended to other types of training as well. Those attending school, whose numbers increased with each passing century, typically lived on or near the school premises, sometimes as official boarders but also as resident servants or day students renting their own lodgings.118 Military service might begin as early as eleven or twelve, with some of the officers in the seventeenth-century French army as young as fourteen.119 And in a hierarchical society, growing up in a more affluent, prestigious household could serve as invaluable social training. Jane Austen was certainly not describing an unfamiliar situation when she had ten-year-old Fanny Price leave her impecunious parents to live with her mother’s sister who “had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park.”120
While these practices provide partial support for Ariès’s theory that the premodern world lacked a distinctive concept of childhood, there is no need to go that far. A more parsimonious explanation is that premodern people simply adopted a different approach to childrearing. Specifically, they based their approach on the morality of higher purposes. Their predilection for corporal punishment was not motivated by cruelty, but by a firmly held conviction that children were sinful, untamed creatures who needed to be disciplined to save their souls—the higher purpose to which all human efforts were supposed to be directed.121 They put their children to work so early and so extensively for the higher purpose of family prosperity, which was supported in turn because it contributed to social stability. As Ariès notes: “This did not mean that the parents did not love their children, but they cared about them less for themselves, for the affection they felt for them, than for the contribution those children could make to the common task.”122 This same motivation led them to send their children away from the home for training. Regardless of any emotional affinity they may have felt, the prosperity and prestige of the family was more important.
There is, moreover, further evidence for Ariès’s thesis that he does not discuss: the practice of child betrothal and marriage that was earlier described. Parents who sent their twelve- to fourteen-year-old daughter off to be the wife and sexual partner of a twenty-, thirty-, or forty-year-old man must have been thinking of that child as an adult in some sense. The great majority of parents did not do this, of course, but they did not condemn the practice, which suggests that they shared similar beliefs. Even though girls of that age were probably not sexually mature in premodern times and may have been literally half the size of early teenage girls today,123 people did not seem to perceive them as children in the sense we do. In any event, the important point is that premodern people saw marriage as serving higher purposes, both social and religious. This moral stance either reassured a girl’s parents about her readiness for her conjugal role or suppressed whatever fugitive concerns may have occurred to them.
The change that renders all these childrearing practices unpalatable today, and child marriages anathema, was the advent of a new morality. It provides that the purpose of childrearing, the goal that must guide any person who wants to be a moral parent, is the child’s self-fulfillment. Parents must strive, according to this new morality, to enable their child to achieve that child’s own desires in accordance with the concepts of self and its fulfillment that were discussed in Chapter 4. They must regard their child as a person—a self in his or her own right who should be guided and nurtured to design a life path, to derive pleasure from experiences encountered on the way, and to avoid or minimize regret. In doing so, they must recognize Rousseau’s insight that childhood shapes adult life, Wordsworth’s image that the child is father of the man, and, most important, Freud’s theory that the child’s psyche is soft clay that is deeply imprinted by its experiences, then hardens into a rigid structure that controls adult behavior. To organize children’s upbringing around some higher purpose—whether their family’s well-being, their family’s honor, the salvation of their souls, or the good of the nation—is now regarded as profoundly immoral.
Consequently, the private morality of parenting has been transformed. Physical chastisement is increasingly regarded with suspicion, if not positive distaste, because it springs from anger and breeds resentment.124 The new morality favors discipline designed to instruct, rather than to intimidate, and focuses on removing privileges as a means of explicating the future consequences of undesirable action. Education replaces labor as the child’s primary activity, and parents feel an increasing obligation to equip their children to pursue personally rewarding and financially remunerative careers. Any remaining labor, whether within the family or externally for pay, is conceived as teaching work habits and useful skills, not providing needed income. The result is a more nurturing, protective home environment, and the new morality encourages families to keep their children within that environment until they have reached adulthood.
Alongside this basic reorientation of parenting toward the child’s self-fulfillment lies the stricture that children must be taught respect and solicitude for the self-fulfillment of others. They must be encouraged to be tolerant and empathetic, to avoid judging or condemning those whose attributes or life paths differ from their own, and to be understanding about other people’s needs and feelings. At the same time, they must be quick to condemn intolerance or insensitivity among their peers. In other words, they must internalize the norms that led to the enactment of various anti-discrimination laws throughout the Western World, the dismissal of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard, and the fines that the NBA levied against Kobe Bryant and Joakim Noah.
This massive shift in the moral aspects of childrearing is co-causally related to an equally extensive transformation of government policy toward children. In premodern times, as just discussed, the family’s pragmatic role in the economy and its moral role in securing social stability led the centralizing monarchies to view it as a miniature fiefdom ruled by the father. Its treatment of its children, who were sometimes literally regarded as servants or serfs, was left entirely to paternal or parental control. Any physical punishment of children short of murder was regarded as a proper antidote to sin, and any amount of work imposed on them was regarded as a desirable contribution to the family’s benefit. The morality of self-fulfillment has induced governments to cross the threshold of the family home and enact child abuse laws of increasingly severity, just as it induced the enactment of spousal abuse laws. Even more significantly, this new morality has led to child labor laws. As the advent of industrialism transferred families to cities and their daily work from farm to factory, it was natural to assign children to industrial employment, thus continuing existing attitudes toward children in these altered circumstances.125 But the children were now working for strangers in settings that replaced the familiar rusticity of the countryside with clattering machines or fuming furnaces that must have seemed to people like the landscape of hell. This change in children’s work, plus the gradually developing morality of self-fulfillment, induced Western governments to act. Within a century, a practice that had been nearly universal since before the dawn of history was redefined as a criminal offense.126
Solicitude for children, even with the new morality’s support, might not have been sufficient to effect such a dramatic change if there had been no alternative to labor. But the principle of self-fulfillment, combined with the realities of the industrial economy, led to the demand that children’s time be devoted to their education. This demand, ultimately enforced by compulsory education laws, was satisfied by the development of comprehensive public education systems in every Western nation, a development that is, of course, co-causal with the administrative state’s ability to operate and fund this massive enterprise. As time has gone on, moreover, these institutions have not only carried out the necessary task of equipping children to have fulfilling careers but have also incorporated other aspects of the new morality. Thus, physical punishment of children, a fixture of the privately run and more restrictive institutions of the premodern era, is strictly forbidden in most of the West’s public schools, with the U.S. once again lagging behind.127 In addition, public schools increasingly incorporate the new morality’s norms of tolerance and empathy into their treatment of students. Their increasing tendency to do so, as reflected by such varied strategies as the inclusion of nonwhite authors in the literary canon, the proliferation of anti-bullying rules, and the emphasis on noncompetitive sports designed to make all students feel good about themselves, has been virulently criticized by a number of writers.128 These writers are almost always social conservatives; what has incurred their ire, of course, is the ever-advancing morality of self-fulfillment as it applies to childrearing.
Not surprisingly, the approach to childrearing implicit in the new morality of self-fulfillment is closely related to that morality’s redefinition of the parental role. As described in the previous chapter, being a parent is now regarded as a self-fulfilling experience, an important and treasured part of the life path that many people choose. The natural consequence of this cultural attitude is that parents want to establish a personal relationship with their child, a relationship that centers on shared experience rather than discipline or instruction. Nothing ruins one’s evening—one’s quality time—with one’s child more than beating the child with a stick, and nothing ruins one’s year with a child more than putting the child to work or sending the child away from home. In other words, childrearing strategies that focus on the child’s self-fulfillment make childrearing a more fulfilling experience for the parent. As George Lakoff suggests, on the basis of cognitive theory, the new morality induces parents to approach their children as persons whose needs must be consulted and respected, not feral or sinful creatures to be tamed, domesticated, and restrained.129 It recognizes the parents’ caretaking and instructional role, an undoubted continuity from premodern to High Modern times, but redefines those functions according to the therapeutically-related standard that helping another person means assisting that person in achieving his or her own idea of self-fulfillment.
In some sense, the new morality supports the parent-as-friend approach that traditionalists condemn. But self-fulfillment morality’s emphasis on the self as life path creates a countervailing tendency. To return briefly to the subject of sex, modern parents may be more willing to adopt a nonjudgmental stance, so that older children confide their sexual experiences, and they may be more willing to share their own sexual experiences with their older children, but being solicitous of their children’s sexual self-fulfillment, they are equally anxious to prevent their children from being subjected to traumatic experiences. Similarly, modern parents tend to be highly conscious of the need for children, as persons, to plan their life paths so that they will not be tortured by regret in later years. Given the centrality of one’s career in the modern conception of a life path, this leads them to view themselves as coaches, tutors, planners, and motivators. Their insistence that children must be serious about their studies may overlap with earlier attitudes, but it is combined with modern beliefs that children must be given every possible incentive to ensure their success. Amy Chua’s portrayal of herself as a tiger mother may involve a level of disciplinary ferocity as great as any sin-obsessed Medieval parent, but it is explicitly motivated by the desire to ensure her children’s success in their chosen careers.130
The strength of this latter concern is co-causal with the administrative state, whose credentialism simultaneously depends on and encourages it. In the modern world, family connections are of little value in obtaining government positions and of increasingly little value for positions in private institutions that are designed along the same meritocratic lines, either by law or as reiterations of the dominant model. It will no longer do Fanny much good to know Sir Thomas Bertram; now she needs a professional or graduate degree to advance. On the other hand, parents who do not know Sir Thomas can nonetheless aspire to see their children reach the highest levels of society. Thus, a meritocratic world is also a competitive one, where the well-to-do are no longer secure, and the less fortunate no longer contented or resigned. Modern parents are not only required to nurture their children but also to equip them with the capabilities needed to succeed in this meritocratic environment. The standard for moral parenting in the modern era is: spare the good schools, the private lessons, the SAT tutoring, the intensive monitoring, and the sustained encouragement, and spoil the child. When all races are to the swiftest, parents are morally obligated to provide whatever vehicle their child’s chosen race requires and additionally motivated, as school officials disparagingly note, to hover like helicopters over their fast-moving progeny.
Although the morality of self-fulfillment thus imposes as many moral obligations on parents as the previous morality, these obligations attach to them in their specific role as parents, not as a married couple or a household. The married couple as husband and wife partake of the new morality’s subsidiary principle of equality; their moral goal is to fulfill themselves as separate people. As stated before, marriage is a matter of personal choice, not moral obligation, in the new morality, and each partner is fully entitled to seek his or her own self-fulfillment as a separate individual. But the new morality imposes on the members of the married couple more demanding responsibilities in their role as parents. On the philosophic level, the difference may be best explained by Robert Goodin’s theory that vulnerability, and only vulnerability, generates moral obligation.131 On the legal level, it is explained by June Carbone’s view that the modern legal system, although it treats a husband and wife as simply partners who may dissolve their partnership at will, regards parents as having undertaken a serious moral obligation. The state, particularly an administrative state, acts to ensure that they fulfill this obligation in a responsible manner.132 Parenthood is no longer a byproduct of marriage but “stands in its own right as the public status on which the law is rebuilding family obligation.”133
As marriage and parenting move in opposite directions under the new morality of self-fulfillment, they also increasingly detach. The crucial question regarding parenting, according to this new morality, is the quality of care that people provide, not their marital status.134 Thus, the state, deploying its growing administrative capability, intervenes more often and more aggressively in the parenting performance of married couples, ignoring the coverture-like doctrine that previously insulated these couples from external supervision. It requires that children be sent to school,135 demands that they receive certain types of medical care, and protects them from physical abuse. In the future, these interventions are likely to increase in both scope and intensity. At the same time, legal restrictions on parenting by people who are not married or are not traditional heterosexual couples have been largely rescinded. A significant percentage of children in the Western World are currently being raised in single-parent homes. Others are being raised by gay or lesbian couples, a circumstance to which more traditional authorities have become acclimated because it is legally impossible to distinguish from single-parent situations.
Before concluding this discussion of parent-child relations, it is worth briefly noting the obverse issue to the one that has just been discussed—namely, the way children, and specifically adult children, treat their parents. Moral questions regarding this relationship, although they appear at all stages of life, come to the forefront as one’s parents age and descend into decrepitude. Although modern adults are more likely than premodern ones to have living parents, premodern parents became decrepit earlier, so that the relative scale of the issue is probably similar in the two eras. Based on the foregoing discussion, it might be readily assumed that the morality of higher purposes would impel adults to remain committed to their aged parents, taking them into their own homes and caring for them until they died. Conversely, the morality of self-fulfillment might be expected to lead adults to divest themselves of this responsibility and induce the administrative state to develop public institutions that would cover the resulting gap in caring for the elderly.
In fact, neither assumption seems to be true. Married couples in the premodern West generally did not care for their aged parents in their homes, and the modern state has generally not established public institutions for the elderly. Rather, social practices in this area have remained surprisingly consistent during the thousand-year period from the advent of the morality of higher purposes to the present day. Our inherited image of the premodern family as gathering three generations under a single roof turns out to be mythology—either pastoral or disparaging mythology depending on one’s feelings about one’s relatives, but mythology nonetheless. Then as now, nuclear families were the norm, as the analysis of demographic records by Annales historians reveals.136 As long as the elderly can fend for themselves, they live in their own homes, relying on the standard sources of income that the economic and legal systems of their era provide—land or maintenance contracts in the premodern one, pensions and social security in the contemporary period.
When elderly people in premodern times reached the stage when they could no longer live on their own, they did the sorts of things that elderly people do today. Then as now, those with sufficient means hire caretakers to come to their homes. Premodern people had less money, relatively speaking, but there were also many more landless agriculturalists around who would take care of old people in exchange for the opportunity to raise their own crops on the old people’s land, rather than being day laborers.137 Alternatively, people can opt for assisted living in an institution. The institutions that provided this service in the premodern world were convents and monasteries; for a fixed sum of money, the elderly could enter into a contract called a corrody by which the institution provided them with food or food and lodging. As Frances and Joseph Gies report, a “10-mark corrody bought four ‘servants’ loaves’ and six gallons of beer a week plus a daily ‘dish’ from the monastery kitchen.”138 The Reformation closed the monasteries in Protestant countries, but religious organizations still provided assisted living to the elderly. Sometimes, as depicted in Anthony Trollope’s the Warden,139 this was by special provision, but often the elderly were simply included among the needy that the institution was designed to serve.140 A similar pattern prevails in this period of High Modernity. To be sure, the in-house helper is more likely to be a specially trained worker than an impecunious farmer, and the institution is more likely to be a nursing home run by a for-profit corporation rather than a church, but those differences are merely a means of translating the same basic practice into a different economic setting.
There have, of course, been some changes in elder care that reflect the transition to High Modernity. In all Western nations, government now provides social security, an enforced and subsidized pension program for retired people, and facilitates additional pension payments by private employers. Related government programs, such as public medical insurance, often pay for nursing homes or home health care providers. Programs of this sort are part of a general shift of social services from private to government institutions that will be discussed in the next chapter. They reflect the transformation of government into an administrative apparatus with an articulated structure—specialized agencies are required to manage the state’s massive payments—and articulated goals—these payments are consciously designed to meet the needs of elder citizens. In terms of individuals’ moral attitudes toward their parents, however, the shift is not as significant as it might appear. In both the premodern and the modern worlds, married couples were content to leave their parents living on their own or in the care of large, tax- or tithe-supported social institutions and focus their nurturance efforts on each other and on their children.
It is certainly possible to speculate why the moral transition that produced such dramatic changes in attitudes on other issues left treatment of the elderly largely unchanged. But it is perhaps more useful to treat this topic as a reminder to be cautious. No matter how significant a social transformation may be, and how many co-causal relationships it involves, it will not explain the entire range of human attitudes. As noted in the Introduction and the start of Chapter 3, many different forces are at work within society—technological, economic, and historical, as well as moral, religious, and political. In the human sciences, unlike the natural sciences, there is no theory of everything awaiting our next Einstein for its discovery.
The final section of this chapter moves outward from the family to consider the moral features of friendship and of interactions with coworkers. These are regarded as two different kinds of personal relationships, each of which is less intimate than relations with a sexual partner or child. Such distinctions are themselves the result of High Modernity, however. In premodern times, friendship and work relations were more closely connected, and both were merged with family relations or kinship. This section discusses the way that kinship, work relations, and friendship became separated in High Modernity as a result of the co-causal operation of self-fulfillment morality and administrative governance. Placing friendship and work relations at the outer edge of this second concentric circle, beyond familial relations, is itself a product of the modern mentality and a reminder that the mere act of categorization inevitably imports culturally specific modes of thought.
During the Early Middle Ages—the period dominated by the morality of honor—friendship, at least among the upper classes, was essentially a form of military and political alliance, and thus a basic mode of governance. In the absence of a state that could police its populace, each person needed to secure protection by forming or joining a fortified encampment. One’s primary and most essential friends were the persons in one’s own encampment: for the lord, his followers, and for the followers, each other and the lord. They were generally comrades in arms and often members of an extended family.141 The inequality between lord and followers, or, as they later became, vassals, was not considered an impediment to friendship. People were comfortable with social hierarchy and felt that they gained honor by serving a noble lord or by showing favor to noble subordinates. Indeed, the formal bond that secured the relationship between the lord and follower or vassal was fealty,142 which was regarded as a form of friendship. Beyond the limits of the lord’s domain, it was important to forge alliances with other lords for the sake of mutual protection. These alliances served as an additional form of friendship. They undoubtedly included a certain amount of social conviviality, but their defining feature was the more primal willingness to fight to die on behalf of the alliance, a commitment secured by the ethos of promise keeping described in Chapter 1.143
The spiritualization of Christianity, the increasing ability of Western Europe’s centralizing monarchies to maintain internal order, the revival of commerce and urban life, and the more general spread of literacy combined to produce new attitudes toward friendship. In essence, the military alliances of the Early Middle Ages were gradually transformed into social networks. Friendship, although no longer a matter of physical security, continued to function as a mode of governance on the local level, linking the small group of families that maintained order and provided services in each village, province, or city. At the central level, governments were now organized into official, as opposed to social, hierarchies, but kinship, patronage, and friendship continued to play an important, if not always crucial, role. While someone with few personal connections, like Cardinal Richelieu, or even none, like Cardinal Mazarin, could rise to prominence, kinship, patronage, and friendship were typically the basis for recruitment of officials. In addition, these relationships created and maintained alliances among those officials and supplied the connections between central and local government that the monarchies were striving to establish. Similarly, at the international level, kinship, patronage, and friendship served as a basis of recruitment for high Church office, for alliances within the Church and for communication between the papacy and its far-flung bishoprics. Friendship was no longer a matter of honor, but it continued as a guarantor of character. An established member of an organization could provide no better reference for a potential recruit than to say, “He is my dear and trusted friend.”
These practices regarding friendship sprang from a social and conceptual structure reflected in both customs and literary culture. Literary views were partially shaped by the enormous influence of Aristotle.144 According to Aristotle, friendship can be based on personal advantage, mutual pleasure, or shared virtue. Unlike Kant,145 Aristotle does not assert that virtue is the only basis for true friendship, but he does treat it as the most exalted or the purest basis. High Medieval and Early Modern people may have learned Aristotle’s categories and agreed that friendship should spring from free choice and from virtues such as trust and reciprocity, but they did not subscribe to a view that separated friendship from kinship or hierarchical relations.146 One’s relatives could not be excluded from the category of potential friends because kinship was too central to the Western European social structure. Moreover, even the conceptual distinction could not be maintained because kinship provided a model for all other types of personal relations, including the individual’s relationship to God. To cite one example, those chosen to be one’s children’s godparents would certainly seem to fit the category of friends, yet they were viewed as family members to whom the incest taboo fully applied.147 Similarly, superiors and subordinates could not be excluded from the friend category because hierarchy and patronage networks were also too central to the social structure. Nor could the conceptual distinction between these relationships and friendship be effectively maintained, given that people thought that hierarchy was divinely ordained through modalities such as the Great Chain of Being.
In other words, the reason people did not distinguish between the Aristotelian categories of useful, pleasurable, and virtuous friendship was that friendship was conceived as serving a higher purpose. Pragmatically, it held society together; conceptually, it did so according to the plan that God ordained. In this sense, its higher purpose was equivalent to the secular or political purpose of marriage, which was also regarded as essential to the maintenance of social order and, following the prevailing understanding of St. Paul, to the one way to have sex without going to hell.148 To be sure, friendship initially lacked the religious purpose of marriage because there was no underlying sin equivalent to sex that it needed to restrain.149 But Medieval thinkers gave friendship its own religious basis by drawing on Aristotle’s third category of virtue-based friendship. Aristotle asserts that good people achieve the most exalted form of friendship by appreciating each other’s goodness, but St. Thomas Aquinas amends this by saying that the friendship between good people consists in helping each other achieve the higher purpose of their souls’ salvation.150
With the partial secularization of philosophic thought in the Early Modern era, the idea of virtue-based friendship began to lose its religious orientation. Now friends were described as making each other better people, nurturing each other’s admirable qualities, and correcting each other’s moral errors.151 Although more mundane, this preserved the notion that friendship should serve a higher purpose. It was, moreover, readily combined with the political or social functions of friendship because good and admirable people were regarded as those who serve society and maintain its ordered structure. The linkage of these concepts is precisely the reason why friendship with a trusted official continued to be seen as the best possible recommendation for public office.
The advent of the modern administrative era and the increasing formalization of government positions transformed the premodern concept of naturally occurring social hierarchies into the modern concept of consciously constructed institutional ones. As a result, the functional features of kinship, patronage, and friendship began to decline, and a political and conceptual distinction between these relationships and officialdom emerged. Politically, more people were being recruited into the official hierarchies from the non-aristocratic classes, and more people were advancing through those hierarchies on the basis of merit. Conceptually and, of course, co-causally, the morality of higher purposes that linked friendship to social stability and salvation was waning, and the new morality of self-fulfillment was coming to the fore.
This process is adumbrated by Hobbes. With his corrosive cynicism about human nature,152 he argued that true, virtue-based friendship is impossible because people seek their own advantage in any human relationship.153 A century later, as the transition to the administrative era was occurring, Adam Smith was able to rehabilitate the idea of disinterested friendship by separating personal feelings from economic advantage. In the Wealth of Nations, he famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.”154 Thus released from the grip of pragmatism, friendship could be based on the sense of sympathy or fellow feeling for another person that Smith described in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. There, he began: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”155
What Smith perceived, and High Modernity effectuated, is that friendship no longer serves a higher purpose but now functions, like family relations, as a means of self-fulfillment. It is conceived as a purely personal relationship with another human being that offers the pleasures of camaraderie, shared experience, and mutual affection. Friends are supposed to like each other for their own sake, not because the relationship will be beneficial to their careers or even because it will serve to elevate their personalities. Consistent with modern morality, they are also supposed to regard each other as equals. Mutual assistance remains an element of friendship, to be sure, but it is usually seen in terms of small conveniences that are clearly subordinate to the affective bond—getting tickets to a show, watching the kids for an evening, recommending a good plumber. The attempt to use friendship for career advancement tends to poison the relationship and implies an inequality that is inconsistent with its contemporary character. The attempt to use friendship as a means of moral instruction implies a similar inequality and is likely to be regarded as condescending and obnoxious. As Eva Osterberg observes in her recent study of the subject, “Friendship, like love between adults, came increasingly to inhabit the private sphere according to the discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What happened en route to modern society was that the ideal of friendship that once aspired to greater things—the greater good, or God—tended to become an end in itself, a concern for the people directly involved, but scarcely any higher purpose.”156
Here again, the modern morality of self-fulfillment divides or articulates life into a set of separate categories, rather than uniting it into a general pattern that supported higher purposes morality. The question is not whether one is saving one’s soul or serving the king, but whether one is fulfilling oneself in the various elements of one’s life path. This generally consists of a rewarding career and spiritual experience, as discussed in the preceding chapter, and good sex, love, and parenting relationships, as discussed in this one. Friendship fits comfortably into this pattern. It does not substitute for work, spirituality, sex, love, or childrearing for most people, nor does it assist them in these areas of their lives. Instead, it represents a separate source of psychic reward and personal fulfillment. In other words, friendship has become privatized. That process, occurring at the same time as an intensified publification of governance, definitively separates these two previously conjoined realms of human interaction.
The High Modern articulation of life into separate categories not only divides friendship from governance but also is co-causal with the articulation of governmental structure into separate departments and the articulation of its goals into separately defined policies or programs. To be sure, a co-causal connection between friendship and governance occurred under the previous morality as well, where different parts of an individual’s life were unified by their commitment to shared higher purposes and government was viewed in unitary terms. But the two relationships produce different results. The similarity in the structure of private life and public governance under the older morality generated a substantive connection between the two because they shared related purposes and reinforced each other’s actions. Personal relations had public significance and were thus directly relevant to public office. In contrast, High Modernity’s parallel articulation of life and government into separate components precludes any substantive connection. Once individual life is articulated, its various activities are no longer linked to each other as they were under the morality of higher purposes. Some aspects of life, most notably one’s employment, become part of what is now conceived as the public sphere, while others, notably sex, love, and friendship, migrate into the private one.157 This is the driving force behind the privatization of friendship. Socially, friendship is no longer seen as contiguous with work relationships or indeed with kinship; conceptually, it is no longer regarded as the sort of tutorial in virtue that justified these former imbrications.
The privatization of friendship contributes to, and is facilitated by, a process that can be described as the officialization of work.158 Recruitment and advancement in modern government rely on merit. Modern institutions, as Weber notes, are certainly hierarchical, but the hierarchy is based on the articulated goal of efficiency, and people are distributed throughout it on the basis of earned credentials and demonstrated capacity, not on the basis of their social status.159 The assurance that a person has a good character, that he—and this indeed meant “he” in premodern times—is the right sort of fellow, is no longer regarded as relevant. Rather, the question now is whether he or she has the particular capacities and credentials required for the articulated task. This stance is co-causally related to the increasing specialization of both governmental and commercial work, because increasing specialization requires more specific abilities, and, conversely, a meritocratic mentality makes increasing specialization possible.160
According to the modern view, the intrusion of employment-related preferences into friendship undermines the disinterested character of modern friend relations, and the intrusion of friendship into employment undermines the meritocratic system that is crucial for modern government and commerce. When contemporary employers ask a job candidate for references, they are generally looking for statements from supervisors or colleagues that attest to the person’s abilities and work habits. They may seek evidence that the person is friendly or gets along with other people, but the character trait in question is a generalized affability, which the candidate should be able to display to any coworker or client, not a preexisting bond to a particular person. A reference that ends with the comment that the candidate “is my dear and trusted friend” would no longer be regarded as the essence of the reference letter, but rather as an admission of partiality that would tend to discredit whatever else was said.
As Chapter 4 discussed, the meritocratic ethos of modern government and commerce is directly connected to the moral idea that one’s career is an essential source of self-fulfillment. Selection or advancement on any basis other than merit necessarily impairs the opportunities of the meritorious individuals who have lost out as a result of non-meritocratic standards. Thus, it is a tenet of the new morality that private relationships such as friendship should be deemed irrelevant to work. When asked to promote one of her subordinates to a higher and better-paid position, a modern supervisor is expected to choose the most talented and effective person, not the one she likes the best. When asked to justify her choice, she would refer to work-related characteristics such as past performance or current skills, not to personal characteristics like good family or a prior personal relationship.
But the High Modern separation between work and friendship generates inherent tensions. Just as the premodern friendship-based system of recruitment came under pressure from the need for meritorious performance, the current system comes under pressure from the inevitable development of affective bonds among coworkers who spend so much of their day together. To some extent, the friendships that form in this setting are seen as expressing themselves outside of work. They are conceived as belonging to a separate realm and are not supposed to influence the worker’s judgments or performance. This standard of conduct, however, is likely to produce complexities and conflicts that did not afflict the morality of higher purposes, with its sense of continuity between personal and work relationships. Friendships formed at work inevitably exercise some influence on people’s work-related judgments. Superiors want to choose assistants they like, and can justify that choice on the quasi-instrumental ground that the result will be a more smoothly functioning work team. Business people want to contract with opposite parties for whom they feel affection, and can offer the quasi-instrumental justification that the element of trust increases transactional efficiency. Thus, the relationship between work and friendship becomes another area where the new morality must police the individual’s behavior more intensively than its predecessor did. In other words, modern developments require the elaboration of a new moral code governing work relationships. This code can be expected to evolve over time, generating the sorts of complexities along the way that are characteristic of any operative moral system.
Consideration of work relations approaches the border between people’s personal relationships and their relationships to the wider society that form the subject of the following chapter. But it also returns to this chapter’s earlier discussion of sex. In the premodern era, most work—and certainly most women’s work—was carried out within the family. When women worked outside their homes, it was generally as servants in someone else’s home. Sexual relations between master and servant, typically between male family members and female servants, were common. Despite the obvious inequality in such relationships, they do not seem to have been regarded as oppressive. Rather, the morality of higher purposes condemned such sexual relations as extramarital or adulterous sex, merging them into a general potpourri of sins that denied them a unique identity. The subsidiary and subterranean double standard, however, tended to excuse the men, ignore the women, and dismiss the relationship as harmless dalliance. When it could not be so dismissed because it led to pregnancy, the servant girl was often treated as a seductress or a liar, and expelled from the household without support, and certainly without regard for her future employability.161
As the modern era dawned and people began to be employed outside their homes, the issues involving sexual relationships at work became more varied and complex. The factory floor or office bullpen replaced the village green or parish church as an acceptable setting for courtship. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as noted earlier, working women almost always occupied subservient positions as personal assistants, clerical workers, factory hands, and nurses. Thus, men were still in a position to demand sexual favors, as they had been when women worked as servants in their homes. Again, this does not seem to have been regarded as a moral issue separate from extramarital sex. An unmarried woman was expected to either resist the advances of a concupiscent supervisor or snare him into making her his wife. Consequently, the entry of women into the labor force did not produce a major change in the morality of sexual relations at work.
But the new morality’s egalitarianism and officialization of work have now produced a major moral transformation in this area. With the relatively recent recognition that women must enjoy exactly the same career opportunities as men, a male supervisor’s sexual aggression ceases to be regarded as either an annoyance or an offer and instead becomes a form of immorality.162 If the woman resists at the expense of her career, then the man has interfered with her ability to fulfill herself through work, a serious offense. If the woman complies to preserve her career, then the man has committed an act of compulsion, the essence of sexual immorality in the modern world. Here again, a new moral offense, separate from adultery and extramarital sex, has been created by the morality of self-fulfillment; the very concept of sexual harassment is a product of modern moral attitudes. Co-causally, that offense has been established as a legal wrong in many Western nations; in the U.S., courts have declared it to be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,163 and Congress has followed with supplementary legislation.164
According to those attitudes, harassment is not only an act of immorality toward its victim, but also toward the employer. The officialization of work, with it concomitant credentialism, makes the use of one’s superior position for sexual purposes a violation of the separation between one’s public and one’s private life. A person in a position of authority is supposed to confer benefits on those who have earned them through their own work efforts and is expected to rely on his private resources, whatever they may be, to satisfy his sexual desires. This credentialism is, of course, organically related to modern morality’s ethos of equality. It provides a means by which all people, regardless of their gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, can find fulfillment in a career. Once again, the two principles are co-causally related. The credentialism generated by the modern, impersonal, and instrumentally oriented hierarchies that operate governmental and commercial institutions induce and encourage the evaluation of people according to their talents and acquired skills. Conversely, the modern notion of equality makes possible the creation of these credential-based hierarchies.
At present, concerns about sexual harassment focus on the relationship between male superiors and female subordinates because very few men had female superiors until recently and because we have inherited from the prior era a gender-based interpretation of sexual aggression and victimization. As advancing egalitarianism enables women to obtain leadership positions, and as the new morality’s general reinterpretation of gender roles proceeds, women will be increasingly held to the same anti-harassment standards. Similarly, as discrimination against gays and lesbians fades, it will become possible to distinguish between their behavior and their status and thus to condemn a gay person for demanding sexual favors from a gay subordinate without condemning either one of them for being gay.165 This is not only consistent with the new morality but demanded by it.
None of these many constraints on harassment in the workplace, however, forbids sexual flirtation and dalliance in those settings. According to the new morality, there is nothing wrong with such behavior if the people involved find it self-fulfilling. Work is an increasingly important setting for finding both sexual partners and lifelong relationships, given the amount of time that modern people spend at it.166 For the same reason, many people want their working environment to be enlivened by the mildly electric sense of sexual flirtation, even if they are happily married or have no serious intentions for some other reason. This leads, of course, to a highly complicated topography of permitted and forbidden behaviors, but it is precisely the nature of a true morality that it produces such complexities.167 In this area, as in the areas of sex, love, parenting, and friendship, the new morality is redefining the meaning of relationships and replacing the morality of higher purposes with a different but equally distinctive set of rules.