Too much college
A household of three at the U of C
Long story short:
Woman is happily married with two kids. One day in office hours at her professor job she quite suddenly falls in love with a graduate student. Within days she works it all out: she has to get a divorce and marry this fellow. She runs it by her husband who is at first like “Buh?” but then gives it a think and decides the next day it’s a solid idea. She and her new man move in together but that whole shared custody thing is a bit of a drag. So, she decides to move back in with her ex along with her new husband and new baby in tow. Her ex-husband soon wins Most Agreeable Man in the Midwest tournament (one assumes). The whole set up is unconventional but from both couples POV— that is, from the members of both the extant marriage and the extinct marriage, with one person being the filled-in part of a most unique Venn Diagram—it’s all pretty great. New husband and ex husband get along. Ex wife and ex husband get along. New husband and new wife get along. Kids think it is cool. It’s all great!
Such is my summary of Rachel Aviv’s recent New Yorker essay, “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.” Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago (go Crimson Nerds) and her ex-husband is also a philosopher at the University of Chicago and hold on a second but get this her new husband is also a philosopher at the University of Chicago. So if anyone has it all thought out, it is this trio.
According to Aviv, Callard is “is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. ‘How has it come to pass,’ she writes, ‘that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?’”
This came early in the article and it is lucky I did not read it sitting at a marble desk. Otherwise I would have banged my forehead against it for an hour while muttering “No no no no no no no no” and only stopped when a pool of my own blood turned my noes into gurgles.
I admit, and the savvy reader can squint closely and guess, that mine was a hate-read. Oh, I hate all the shit detailed in the article. The sudden love; the agreeable ex; the everything-is-fine tone when clearly it is kind of fucked up, (from the pile: Callard has a three-hour live talk show on Saturday nights and interviewed her ex-husband on the topic ‘The Philosophy of Divorce,’ “Throughout the event, Ben seemed to recede.” Huh, no shit); the strong implication by the end that the new couple is (are? not sure, went to a shittier school) fucking other people too1; the flimsy, pretentious justification for it all— it drove me up the goddam wall. But, Rachel Aviv is great and it was a fun-read, if a hate-read.
Yeah, I disliked and liked the hell out of it, but in the end it gave me a good think. Like professional philosophers, I too enjoy thinking with my mind, so here is my argument in favor of adopting the same set of behaviors as most of the people you know:
First: our major traditions and conventions are not arbitrary. (The above quote is partly Aviv’s summary of Callard’s thinking but I will assume that it captures Callard’s argument since Aviv is an excellent writer and a trustworthy reporter.) Conventions and traditions are forged over centuries by many people smarter than us, even— gasp—smarter than U of C professors. You pair up and remain monogamous and try to make a stable home because it usually works out if you do. It’s even fun.
Second: the question “how do we think we know how to live” is easily answered. We don’t. We adopt templates and rules to keep us from struggling aimlessly. This is true for big and small rules, even arbitrary ones. Most of us eat pancakes at breakfast and roasted chicken at night and not the reverse because the distinctions of “breakfast food” and “dinner food” are worthwhile even if the determinations are arbitrary. It’s like how a pattern is useless but attractive to look at—so too with our behaviors. Our days are peppered with such wise rules (don’t sleep around, don’t drink too much) and arbitrary ones (don’t serve me Cheerios and call it dinner), and most of us tend to follow them because they give us an ethic and a rhythm.
This is probably a good time to say: if you are wearing a T-shirt that says Breakfast served anytime, you can go ahead and fuck off. You are not welcome on this blog.
Most people get married and copy other people, right down to rings, white dresses, shared checking accounts, and eventually his-and-her tombstones, because we need the help. The template of marriage is useful, its traditions and its rules are fulfilling, and without them we would be hapless and miserable.
Bishop Barron has periodically made a golf analogy for living a moral life. There are a million wrong ways to swing a golf club and one right way. If you want to be able to make a ball do whatever you want it to do, then you have to follow the laws of the swing— and that will take a lot of effort. If you think you can deviate from the normal swing, just whack at the ball, and still play well, you are woefully mistaken. What seems like something tedious and painstaking is in fact the very thing that makes golf enjoyable.
My use of Barron’s analogy is not an argument for the Catholic moral life, but for a moral life grounded in some tradition. What I like about Barron’s analogy is that it applies to many, many things. Golf, like home brewing and skyscraper building, is very very hard to do well. However, you can do it well, you can put the ball wherever you want, but only if you imitate the best in the game and work hard at your own mastery of it. Life is quite similar.
Tradition has its limits, of course. The spike in divorces in the late 20th century meant something was very wrong with many parts of the tradition. And certainly there are traditions that are cherished in some communities but that are nevertheless repellent (slavery; corn beef and cabbage). The trick is to discern which is worth cherishing and which is worth discarding.
Objection: If we are to discern which traditions to follow and which to discard, are we not the very arbiters of living which you herein claim, DENNIS, we are not capable of being on our own? How, then, can one decide?
Reply: Yeah… Yeah. I guess I didn’t think of that.
The method for discerning may be like golf— or homebrewing or pizza making or bridge building or heart surgering: model yourself on the best, trust the advice of others who have followed a tradition well or who have abandoned a tradition for sound and moral reasons, and you too will thrive.
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I admit it’s kind of hard to make an argument for conformity. Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson, (“Whoso would be a man,” etc), non-conformity is one of the most cherished virtues of modernity. The conformist is the square, the follower, the mindless consumer.
On the other hand, they sell AC/DC and Ramones t-shirts at Target. I think the sun set long ago on the non-conformist.
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A friend of mine is a firefighter in Hyde Park, the neighborhood in Chicago where U of C either lies or lays. (Can’t say which, can barely read.) He tells me they get the most annoying 911 calls from the students and faculty there— calls when light bulbs go out, when people feel tired, when they smell their own food cooking. Dumb emergencies are so common that the firefighters have an expression for them:
Too much college, not enough kindergarten.
Day-later footnote, or maybe epilogue:
Because I am a generous and naive person, the following part of the article was not blunt enough for me so wrote “strongly implied”:
“She wondered what it would look like if she and Arnold integrated new romantic relationships into their marriage. They would all keep talking about philosophy, but with fresh ideas in the mix. They asked each other whether it would violate the terms of their marriage if they became romantically involved with other people. ‘We didn’t think there was any good reason other than the usual conventions of marriage to answer that question with a yes,” she said. They referred to their new agreement as the Variation.’
Today did some Googling to see if that was a fair reading. Holy crap. Evidently she has written articles about her open marriage, if that’s the kind of moral philosophy you are into. I am not, so I am taking Ann Manov’s word for it in the New Statesmen. That (very good) article reminded me that there are tons more details I’d like to rant about, but I probably should not take a second bite of this apple.
Also, check out this incredible 294 word throat-clear by Rod Dreher on the American Conservative before his own rant about Callard. Oh boy…