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Burden of Proof
I cannot escape the idea that we have become a silly people. Silly both in the la-la sense and in the shallow, vain and dangerous sense. We have completely abandoned the notion that tradition has anything to teach us, except for the occasional flimsy nostalgia of the luddite for the good old days before combustion engines and modern health care techniques ruined a perfectly good world. But when it comes to issues of human nature, of the deepest understandings of who we are and what we ought to be, we have willingly and gleefully ignored the accumulated wisdom of human experience, substituting in its place sophomoric notions of self-invention and self-fulfillment.
To illustrate this ridiculousness, let us examine a couple of the silliest of issues we are grappling with as a society.
Lately, the idea that we ought to grant homosexual unions many of the same benefits we grant traditional "marriages" has gained a great deal of currency with the sophisticated and "tolerant". If one possesses an affinity for tradition, one will approach this issue by first examining what we can see of human experience. Has there ever been a human society that accorded homosexual couples anything approaching the same status as heterosexual married couples? Cast your eye far and wide. Social attitudes towards homosexuality have varied from absolute prohibition to relative acceptance, but nowhere, not in any society of which we have any record, has any society every so much as considered granting homosexuals the right to marry.
The modern progressive sees this and ponders the deep injustice. The traditionalist sees this and wonders why it is so. How could it be that the ever inventive nature of man, which has explicitly embraced ideas as odd as cannibalism and polygamy and the murder of wives of dead husbands, has never embraced the concept of "Gay Marriage"? The inescapable conclusion is that something in the very nature of marriage and what it means is of fundamental importance to human society, and that the notion of Gay Marriage is fundamentally at odds and probably corrupting of the societal benefits of marriage. One can speculate as to the nature of those benefits – that traditional marriage offers society benefits through reducing sexual competition, establishing a stable framework for socializing children, etc – but that is actually irrelevant to the point. The point is that it has never, ever been done. If we contemplate doing it, we must by definition think we understand something that our countless generations of forebears didn’t. We must be smarter or more insightful than our ancestors. That is either incredibly arrogant, ignorant, or both.
Also in the category of things that have never been tried is our current debate over the role of women in the military. Prior to the 20th Century, no society (putting aside the fabled Amazons) thought it in society’s interests to turn women into lean, mean fighting machines. Sure, there might be an occasional Joan of Arc or Molly Pitcher, but no society anywhere ever determined that women ought to be front line, grunt warriors. Those few societies that have tinkered with the idea in the 20th Century (e.g. Israel) backed off once they got to see the results. I do not wish to belabor the point, but why is this so? And why is it all of a sudden that we feel we have discovered that we have fresh answers to this question that have never been considered before?
I do not presume to have intelligent answers to these questions. The odds are good that none of us have them. But if we as a society choose to grapple with the idea of going against the sum of human experience, it seems that the burden of proof needs to be on those who wish to effect the change. It is not enough to say that we will legalize homosexual marriage because we can. We must demand of those who wish to tinker with the apparent basics of human nature and human society to prove that their ideas will not be irreparably harmful to our society. Too often, those who oppose such ideas find themselves on the defensive as the dominant culture attempts to force their vision of the good society down our throats. But we must realize that the burden of proof does not lie with those who are in tune with the vast tapestry of human experience. It is on those who would ignore the collected wisdom of the ages in favor of a new mythology whose roots stretch back all of 50 years..