David Harsanyi, in the Denver Post has an editorial saying that the State should get out of the marriage business because the state doesn't care about marriage and it's just causing problems. He dates the origins of our problems to a "pestering theologian" in Geneva in the 1500s. I'm wondering if he's obliquely meaning Calvin, but I'm not looking it up because it's not important.
He says this is the start of state meddling in marriage. I'd say that's true, but misses the point. It's also the start of states.
The 16th century is an interesting time period. It's the end of the dominance of the Catholic Church, the end of the dominance of clan and fief, the end of the dominance of Kings and Feudal Aristocracy, and the end of the small world. It's the beginning of travel, the beginning of office-holding (OK, Athens had it in 1700 years earlier, but there was a heck of a hiatus), the beginning of the Reformation, and the start of professional states and bureaucracies.
The reasons for this are debated. My view is that Social Contract theory is basically wrong on the particulars and the states were created by the particular needs of the aristocracy given changing technology -particularly the ability to travel long distances. Basically, modern states are a tax-collecting system for a society where wealth is mobile. A feudal society works wonderfully if people can't move their wealth, much less well when they can. But I'm idiosyncratic.
This is important to marriage, though, because it relates to why states got involved in the first place, and it was one of the first things they did. My understanding of pre-modern marriage (this is intro-anthro, for what it's worth) is that marriages were arranged, held, and enforced privately. The Church, or whatever religious institution is present elsewhere than in Europe, is really only important for providing justification, witnesses, someone who can read for record-keeping, and then whatever religious meanings are required.
The marriages themselves are held together by social pressure, family contact, economic necessity, and so on. Again, state's not really involved. The accoutrements of marriage are also easy to take care of in a premodern society. Households? just count the number of married men in the village. Patrimony? everyone knows who's in whose bed. Inheritance? time honored tradition covers that.
These are very important goals, but not things the newly burgeoning states really cared about.
These are also things you don't need a state to enforce -but that only works so long as you aren't in a mobile, urban, cash-based, capital infused society. Once you are, households and villas and fiefdoms become complicated arrangements. Patrimony is easier to fake. Inheritances become subject to fraud. Would explain why the Romans had a fairly well established family law, but the Europeans didn't (except for the vestiges held onto by the Catholic Church).
Well, come the 16th century, suddenly families have need of the new states, and the states have new need of the families. The states, being tax-raising systems, tax households (left-over from feudal times). Military service, which the new states need, is also done by household. Financial security and maintenance -a major concern of the tax-collector state -depend on secure transmission of property from one person to another, secure estates, and non-fraudulent inheritances. The states and families make a trade. The states will secure families against dissolution, cuckoldry, fraud, and loss. In return, the state will keep records for military and tax purposes, which the households will provide.
So far as I can tell, subsidy for family formation -i.e. children -comes later, though it might be implicit in conscription requirements.
What's this got to do with David Harsanyi? Well, the situation is "worse" now than it was 500 years ago. The situations requiring state involvement in marriage are basically unchanged, or stronger now. Taxes are assessed on households, inheritance depends on strong legal systems, the financial system -in case you needed reminding -is a major government sector. The "problem" is that for 50-100 years, the states have not been keeping up their end of the bargain (admitting that maybe they hadn't been doing a particularly good job before that). States now treat marriages as a revenue source, or possibly as something to subsidize, forgetting that they didn't create it, they were given access to it to solve specific problems. Problems they've made worse, I'm thinking specifically of no-fault divorce and a sizable chunk of family law governing inheritance, custody, and asset distribution.
If we jettison the state from marriage altogether (assuming it could be done -the tax-collector state might stupidly kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but it's unlikely to let it go) we're back to the situation of 1500 which invited states to intervene in the first place. The question is whether those problems are preferable to the current ones.
For what its worth, I'm nearly convinced, held in place only by innate lawful goodness, over-interpretation of Matthew 22:21 and Romans 13:1-13, and lack of an alternative.
Now, consider if I'm doubting the wisdom of state-sponsored marriage (and note that my reasons for supporting it still have nothing to do with anything a state does or can do), think what is going on with everyone to the left of me in the Bell Curve (I'm presuming I'm unusual in my support for it, and hence in the right tail). And now you know why monkeying with this institution was a bad idea.
And for the benefit of my parents, et cetera, I'm not doubting the wisdom of marriage, I'm doubting the wisdom of getting the state involved -i.e. the benefit of the marriage license, not the marriage itself. I'm borderline "state can bite me, and I'll file separately."
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5 comments:
What's the problem with no-fault divorces? I would think that the problem of trapping people in marriages they don't want to be in is worse than whatever problems could arise from a no fault divorce.
Problems are legion, but depend on how you want to look at it.
Financial: Divorces are wealth destroying. Divorce for cause accepted that as the cost of solving a worse problem. No-Fault divorce is just throwing money down a black hole. Normally, everyone ends up worse off than when they started.
Society-Wide: Divorces create social chaos. A very few no-fault divorces are ammicable separations. The vast majority are one partner walking out on the other, leaving the other partner destroyed. Slightly more than half of these, the woman is doing the walking from what I understand. This is true for cause divorces too, but again, the price is paid to solve a worse problem.
It dissolves functional marriages: The extent of this is not known -greater than zero less than all of them, estimates range from margins to most. When divorce is easy and doesn't require so much as a discussion, people walk out of them at the first sign of difficulty, rather than working to make marriage function.
It makes marriages themselves worth less: the rise of cohabitation coincides with the rise in no-fault divorce. Because of the previous problems, people avoid them by not marrying in the first place. The problem here is that cohabitation is even less stable than marriages under no-fault divorce, and in the event a cohabiting couple decides to marry, their divorce risk is much higher, and the previous problems come with a vengeance.
Divorce is, in nearly all cases, bad, and previously accepted only because it was less bad than the alternative. No-fault divorce made it easy. It was expected at the time that it would create a slight uptick in divorces that allowed "bad marriages" to dissolve. Instead it doubled the divorce rate two or three times over. There are not that many people trapped in bad marriages. We simply enabled fickleness in an institution that was supported initially because it provided stability (see: drafting and taxes).
Also, the formulation "trapping people in marriages they don't want to be worse..." starts too far down the chain. Consider, would you want to enter into a lease with a landlord where either of you could break the lease without reason, warning, or penalty -get out of the apartment now? Do you think that contract would be cheaper than one that required tenant and landlord to meet requirements, give notice, et cetera?
Marriages are given state support because they are stable. More than your relationship with the landlord. No fault divorce hamstrings that goal, and also makes the marriage contract inherently unstable.
It also has lengthy and bad interactions with things like child custody, probate, employment, et cetera -but that's for another time, and mostly beyond my knowledge (that is, I know the interactions exist, I know they're bad; the details beyond that are sketchy).
I looked it up on wikipedia and the arguments for no-fault divorce seem to contradict your arguments - especially when it comes to affecting divorce rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce#Arguments_For
Of course, I am not a scholar in the field and I recognize the potential for loaded studies etc.
From my perspective, I just don't see that many people would get married and then divorce frivolously. Let's break into people into 4 groups
Marry normally: think about it - make sure partner is a good match etc.
Marry frivolously: get drunk and marry in Vegas etc.
Divorce normally: Think about it - only divorce for serious reasons
Divorce frivolously: Divorce at first argument - walk out of otherwise normal marriage
The marry normally group is what society wants obviously but the marry frivolously group is inevitable and in most cases will probably get divorced or have a horrible marriage.
I don't think there are a lot of people who marry normally but divorce frivolously - if they marry normally they will only divorce for a good reason.
Keeping people trapped in a bad marriage is wrong - especially when you consider domestic abuse. I mean, that's a major source of social chaos
In the end, if one person wants to leave someone else, they either have a good reason or is a horrible person anyway. You can't stop them from walking out.
Short Response: that wikipedia article needs revision, badly, across the board. I'm not an expert on the subject, but none of those are reasons for or against that I see in casual research.
More pointed response: that article is actually non-responsive and could be entirely true -and still irrelevant. Suicide rates and domestic violence -assuming the latter is being measure properly -are wonderful things to decrease, but the question is whether those decreases are worth the increase in pathologies that come with wide-spread divorce and cohabitation. The cost of divorce litigation is the point of for-cause divorce.
Actual answer: http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
Preserved for posterity.
Most relevant point: if you'll compare today's date with the last significant date I mentioned to you and the lack of an intervening event you might imagine the reasons why I'm not really in the mood to debate the finer points. Particularly when the point of the original essay was that that -contra Harsanyi -the origins of states and state sponsored marriage would coincide, there's a reason for that, and its why removing state sponsorship of marriage -even if the state is sucking at its job -would be hard, if not impossible. For which the existence of no-fault divorce is simply a good indicator of the state's no longer doing the job of the institutions it replaced.
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