Loving calculations
Freedom as a matter of choice—and commitment
The following is the first in a series of posts about the relationship of love to the American Dream. Hope you like them. —Jim
Stripped to its core, the American Dream is little more than a license for selfishness. Or worse: selfishness wrapped in sanctimony, self-interest elevated to a national ideology. Insofar as it has ever had any legitimacy, the Dream has required countervailing forces to balance, if not neutralize, its indulgent impulses. Sometimes, they amount to countervailing pressures, like the need for food and shelter, that hold your ambitions in check. In other cases, it’s a matter of rules and limits, however imperfect, that regulate competition and protect bystanders. By some reckonings, such competition yields collective benefits for everyone in the form of better mousetraps, which contestants build in order gain the fame, fortune, and other benefits that both inspire and legitimate the American Dream. But the most effective hedge for the self-centeredness of the Dream is love.
Love is an emotion that can create and sustain any number of institutions in a society. Love of country will lead some people to sacrifice, even die, for the sake of their homes. Love is the electric current that surges through churches, binding people together and providing them with the energy to undertake any number of collective enterprises. Schools, workplaces, and even charitable organizations can function without love. But their success often depends upon the existence of people who pledge their loyalty and talents unstintingly and without calculation. They may be repaid, literally or figuratively, for such efforts. Such people labor in a spirit of love precisely because it’s often difficult or impossible to calculate any obvious benefit beyond the pleasure and comfort of participating in something larger than oneself, which are ends in their own right.
But most of the time, the love we have, the love we feel, is focused on particular people. And while the circle of such people can be wide, at the end of the day, it tends to be focused close to home. When we’re born, we’re dealt a familial hand: we don’t get to choose who our parents and siblings are (or, for that matter, who else may be hanging around). Later, we gain our independence, go off on our own, and do get to choose—to a greater or lesser extent—our partners, where we’ll live, and if or when we’ll have children. In so doing we sacrifice some of our freedom, because even when we end a relationship or our children grow up, we find ourselves with ties (financial or emotional, among others) that tend to be lifelong. The American Dream may be a license for selfishness, but having a license is not the same thing as having a vehicle of escape or actually driving away. The allure of the Dream is powerful in part because there are so many obstacles to hitting the road.
That said, one of the more notable features of American society from the very beginning is the degree of choice available to people when compared with earlier societies where arranged marriages and social pressures have tended to shape and limit the scope of individual choice in family life. That trend toward freedom has generally intensified in the centuries since. In our time—I’m thinking the last half-century—the imperatives of the American Dream have spurred even more fundamental reordering in the logic of romantic life. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that there has been a very significant deregulation of the private sphere. One obvious arena of collective loosening in the realm of matrimony. Americans have always married—and divorced—at a higher rate than other Western nations, a legacy of emphasis on personal choice so characteristic of Anglo-Protestantism that remains the bedrock of our secular, diverse, society. Rising marriage and divorce trends intensified in the decades following the end of World War II—followed by a sharp rise in unmarried cohabitation, something that had always been possible, but not always easy, in American life. Yet even as marriage rates were falling, gay Americans broke down the barriers preventing their access to the institution in the decades following the landmark Stonewall Riot of 1969, culminating in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case of 2015, which made gay marriage legal across the land. No society ever entirely frees its members from conformist pressures of one kind or another—in some important sense, society is conformity—but it seems safe to say that there have been fewer restrictions on what people can choose, or not choose, to do in terms of romantic relationships now than most places and most times in the history of the world.
One reason is the growing separation between sex and procreation in our national life. Contraception is as old as civilization. But with the advent of the Pill in 1960—and with the refinement of techniques for performing abortions and growing access to them—it became much easier for women, married or not, to control their reproduction. Sexual pleasure could now be divorced entirely from childbearing for men and women alike, one reason why gender identities have proliferated, untethered from biology. Technology aided even further separation between sex and procreation with the arrival of assisted reproduction techniques such as in vitro fertilization in the last quarter of the 20th century. Now, in addition to preventing human life, it was possible to create it entirely outside the womb. Aside from easily available sperm, men have become disposable in the process. It doesn’t seem like it will be long before women are unnecessary as well. For the moment, such scenarios seem most vivid as a matter of dystopian fiction. But it’s not hard to imagine them as a matter of indifferent routine.
Next: the loving logic of equality.