Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Bricks And Mortar
February 25, 2004
No house can stand for long unless made of sound materials. The beams and joists, the bricks and mortar, the sheathing and the shingles must be made of robust stuff, not sediment the wind will easily wear away or tissue that dissolves at the touch of rain.
So it is also with society. Though it’s impossible to capture the abstraction we call society in a way that resists all ambiguity or change, there is nevertheless a continuity to it. There’s a group of threads that provide it with its character, and whose soundness determines its longevity.
Western society, in particular the American variant, has been called by Isabel Paterson and others the “Society of Contract.” Each man could move among other men fluidly, offering what he had to them in return for a mutually agreed payment, and so make whatever place for himself his energy and skills would support. In this it contrasts with the older “Society of Status,” where a man’s place in the world was essentially fixed at birth, not to be altered except by highly improbable accident, and where one’s place determined, fairly narrowly, what one would be permitted to offer to others.
Clearly, contract is a major component in the American social edifice. It’s not quite fundamental—we’ll decompose it further in a moment—but its integrity and reliability are critical to the perpetuation of our society as we have known it.
Contract is premised on the pervasiveness of trust. It’s not sufficient that there be courts empowered to compel specific performances, decree contractual penalties for default and enforce statutory penalties for fraud; individuals must be trustworthy to a high degree, and with near unanimity. No enforcement power would be adequate in the absence of that virtue.
General trust in the trustworthiness of others is composed of two elements:
- A uniform understanding of rights and their necessary concomitant, a system of justice;
- A common language, whose words have agreed-upon public meanings from which divergence is strongly discouraged.
Are any of the components mentioned above not under a withering attack at this time?
We can’t be confident about our common language. Not when a recent president—the chief law enforcement officer of the United States!—defends himself against charges of the gravest sort by quibbling about the meaning of “is.” Not when partisan commentators deliberately edit and misquote their targets to score points against them. Not when a Supreme Court decision entirely in conformance with the Constitution (for once) is castigated as an act of tyranny, while another court’s decision to set aside the explicit requirements of the written law to make room for the judges’ partisan preferences is hailed as a victory for democracy.
Nor can we be confident about the general understanding of rights, or the acceptance of a matching procedure for the administration of justice. It is now routine for the accused, especially the “politically incorrect” accused, to face two trials for the same offense: the first in a state court under the penal law, and the second in a federal court for violating the victim’s civil rights—regardless of whether the state court convicted or acquitted the defendant of having committed the offense. It is equally common to hear every sort of claim imaginable called a “right,” whose fulfillment is demanded of some level of government—even when, if not interfered with by anyone, the claimant would be utterly powerless to provide it to himself.
If U.S. English doesn’t get English proclaimed to be the official language of the United States pretty damned quick, there won’t be an English left for the position. If special interest groups don’t stop inventing new “rights” whenever their envy flares up, the legal and political significance of a right—that which may not be seized, abridged or infringed by others for any reason—will be entirely lost.
Without these things, how will contract be practiced? How will the Society of Contract continue?
The decline of trust relations among individuals has already given rise to both the coarsening and the balkanization of American society. The condition is not so far advanced as it is in other lands, but it’s getting there. We wouldn’t have a million lawyers, all busily drafting and filing and negotiating and suing and countersuing away, if we could trust one another to stand by our words and uphold the common understanding of right and justice.
As recently as twenty years ago, no one would have thought it needful to have an engineer inspect a private home before offering to buy it. Today it’s de rigueur. Only a few years earlier, the idea that a man had to be bound by law to support his children, or a woman had to be restricted by prenuptial contract from marrying and divorcing for riches, would have been laughed aside. Today no heterosexual couple entertains the idea of marriage without discussing both matters.
Ah, marriage. Remember marriage? President Bush does. That stands to reason; he has a meaningful one, to a woman who takes it as seriously as he does. He sees it as one of society’s indispensable building blocks. He means to guard it. Your Curmudgeon stands with him.
The Federal Marriage Amendment probably won’t pass. Amending the Constitution is extremely difficult. In fairness, there are also good arguments that the definition of marriage does not belong in our political infrastructure. But the president’s initiative has sounded a call to marriage’s defenders, and none too soon. It is critical that this institution, so central to the health of a growing nation, be protected against further assaults. No-fault, no-grounds, no-consequences divorce has already robbed it of most of its vitality. Further reduction of its significance would be its death blow.
For President Bush to have taken a strong and unambiguous stand in marriage’s defense is exactly what we need at this time. Perhaps if we can preserve the meaning and promise of this one word, this one covenant of trust between man and woman, we can summon the will required to keep our house from crumbling around us.
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