Why Elysium is a ridiculous movie, but the first 30 minutes is worth seeing (or, why I hope socialist film is making a comeback)

I saw Elysium about a week ago, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  For the first thirty minutes, it’s a devastating film, portraying a world that does not feel too distant from our own: a land where the one percent of the one percent of the one percent (literally) floats above most human miseries, safe in a space station from the chaos below.  Folks down on the ground still work for their distant overlords, but their lives are as bad as any third world ghetto: not enough food, no reliable medical care, and a brutal police force that seems more concerned about bullying civilians that stopping gangs.  In fact, the residents of our future Los Angeles (the year is 2154)  use the Brazilian term, favela, to describe their shanty-towns: full of stolen cars, run by drug lords and crossed via dusty roads.  Spanish is spoken as often as English, and either car designs have stopped changing much or people are driving frames that are about 150 years old (which, given other means of locomotion in very poor parts of the world, might not be out of the realm of possibility). 

What the surface looks like in Elysium

The movie’s plot is pretty stupid, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about it.  Matt Damon plays Max, an orphan raised by Spanish-speaking nuns who’s childhood best-friend and first-love, Frey (Alice Braga) manages to get out (not to Elysium though) and become a nurse.  Meanwhile, Max did some time for stealing cars for the local kingpin, Spider, and is trying to get his life back on track and maybe even convince Frey he’s worth another shot.  But then, conflict!  Max gets nuclear radiation poisoning, has five days to live, does a few favors for Spiders, and winds up with information that could literally save everyone on Earth with the push of a button.  Like I said, it’s pretty stupid, and if you’re going for the plot, don’t go.

But the first hour—well, really just the first 30 minutes—is spellbinding.  Director Neil Blomkamp has already proven his ability to portray abject poverty with compassion, even beauty, and yet somehow also without sentimentality.  In his science fiction apartheid parable, District 9, he flipped the typical alien invasion story, portraying  refugee camps full of mysterious aliens who brought terrifyingly powerful weapons without a lot of knowledge of how they worked, or, for that matter, knowledge about much at all.  They were unskilled migrants who just showed up, provoking xenophobic anger from the natives and setting nefarious corporate interests to work, figuring out how to exploit yet another mass of unprotected labor, or, if not labor, then just plain flesh.  Perhaps because that movie’s grand finale is a bit less ridiculous—and also because it’s just a lot funnier—that movie is worth seeing both for the plot and for it’s devastating social conscience.

That conscience is also what makes the first 30 minutes of Elysium so remarkable, given Blomkamp’s unapologetic insistence on throwing our fat American asses right into the deep end of global inequality.  It’s perhaps no coincidence that a director with roots in Africa doesn’t show us the perils of American prisons, the insecurity of inner cities, and the dangers of drugs.  Instead, he shows us the diseases that kill because their easy cures can’t be afforded, the homes made of cardboard, the very real possibility not of our kids being malnourished or diabetic or obese but, simply and slowly just not eating until they die.

That’s not to deny the very real problem of the North American inner-city, and it’s certainly not to claim that all of Africa (or the rest of the developing world) is that poor.  It is to say that such poverty actually exists in the world, with real people dying from it everyday, and it’s not just a welcome relief to have a director talking about something else but it’s also incredibly important for us to be reminded.  Because look, we might not have a magic ship in the sky that immediately cures our cancer, but we do have access to drugs and treatment that keeps us alive, access others lack, and so they die.  It is simply unimaginable to me that people in the United States still want to deny people this basic care, but we’re still a long ways away from having conversations about access to health care for everyone else in the world.

It’s not just conscience-pricking that makes the first 30 minutes great.  There’s lots of ways to prick a conscience, and most of them are annoying, sanctimonious, and cloying.  What’s remarkable about District 9 and Elysium is that their presentations of poverty are not cheesy feed-a-kid commercials: they’re real worlds, with decent people trying to make a living, and other people who aren’t so decent, but who still care about somebody else, and then cops who are nearly always mean, but not always, and then kids who try to steal your stuff but then you laugh about it with them, because honestly, what do you have to steal, and then everyone else.  I’m fascinated by the worlds Blomkamp creates, and, especially for Elysium, the rock-em, sock-em adventures distracts from our exploring it.  Frey has a house in what looks to be a lower-middle class suburban neighborhood.   What’s that like?  How do the pretty rich—but not rich enough for Elysium—live?  We see factory owners commuting between the space station and the surface, but we don’t know much about how the world works—either on a global level—there appears to be a one-world government but what that means is unclear—or on a local one.  How does Max get his life back together?  What would have happened if he had just tried a more straightforward unionization effort instead of the ridiculous idea (spoiler) that a reprogrammed computer could change everything?  While machine labor seems to be replacing just about everything—there’s a great scene in which Max’s parole officer is a robot—they clearly still need humans for something. 

Yet what was most exciting about the first 30 minutes was an insistence that good old-fashioned socialist cinema is still around.  In the United States (and in South Africa, I imagine), our class consciousness can too often be clouded by racial kumbayaism: because the U.S.'s many races are getting along a lot better (and they are, though, if you look at 1965, that’s not saying much), clearly class isn’t a problem.  Class and race are too easily conflated, and if we’re making progress on race, then by golly we must be making progress on class too, right?  Yet that’s obviously not the case, as our country’s (and globe’s) rapidly increasingly inequality keeps showing.  Elysium is part of a grand tradition of movies and books (War of the Worlds, Metropolis, among many others) to imagine a future in which the very rich mercilessly dominate the very poor.  Those works warned their audiences about what would happen if the workers of the world did not unite.  It’s a warning we still need.  And what’s nice about Blomkamp’s work (well, District 9 anyways) is that, unlike the terrible socialist realism of the mid-century, it’s actually good.

Yet we can’t be too smug watching the movie.  Like all those intellectuals and petit bourgeoisie and everyone else who’s neither living in a cardboard box nor on a yaught, we’re in a weird class position. The movie’s first thirty minutes was a knock-me-over-moaning punch in the gut, forcing me to think hard about my class privilege and what I can do to change this world.  Compared to that, getting nuked with five days to live is nothing, and unlike Max, there's no button I can push.

Remembering Robert Bellah

In their books, authors can appear wise and kind, with moral courage and keen aesthetic sense.  Yet in person, these same authors often disappoint: they can be lechers or snobs, mean spirits or simple bores.  A gifted writer is not necessarily a good speaker, and neither is a capacious mind necessarily a generous soul.  Margo Rabb wrote about this very problem in a recent New York Times article, and now, as I reflect on Robert Bellah’s death, I’m struck by a quote in the article from one of my favorite writers, George Saunders.  He said, “You can read Mailer or Hemingway and see — or at least I do — that what separated them from greater writers (like Chekhov, say) was a certain failing of kindness or compassion or gentleness — an interest in the little guy, i.e., the nonglamorous little guy, a willingness and ability to look at all of their characters with love.” 

Bellah had this very generosity, this concern for the little guy.  It’s what made him a communist and what made him a Christian.  He shares that move—from radical leftist to radical Christian—with another of my heroes, Dorothy Day.  The two had a lot in common: a gift for writing, a mysticism of quiet wonder, a sense that their lingering questions about community and meaning and God could be answered in a community of fellow travelers who cared about personal relationships and common meals and the idea that small steps like this could change the world.  They were also both brave.  Day stood up to her church and her government, and Bellah stood up to his government too, and the first church of every academic, Harvard University, going into Canadian exile rather than naming names during the McCarthy era.  Yet he eventually found his way back to Harvard, where he got tenure, and besides a brief controversy at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he finished his life and work at the University of California, Berkeley, where many of my most important teachers and mentors worked with him.

Bellah was an author who lived up to his beautiful books. And the books were beautiful: gracefully written, intellectual without being obtuse, full of moral urgency yet without didacticism or despair.  Newcomers should look especially at his books on America: Habits of the Heart, and its sequel, The Good Society. Look also at his work on civil religion and the relationship between religion and sociology in Beyond Belief and The Broken Covenant.  Here’s how we work, Bellah wanted to say, and he was a talented enough sociologist to convince many of us he was right.  His teacher was Talcott Parsons, who famously attempted an important synthesis of Weber and Durkheim (along with Marx, the two are considered the founders of sociology).  Parsons’s synthesis was criticized and then completely attacked just as Bellah was coming into his own as a scholar.  The tension put Bellah in an odd position as he was in many ways Parsons’s star student. Yet he was also a member of the new guard, and a friend since graduate school to celebrity anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who advocated, with Bellah, a new focus on interpretation in the social sciences, borrowing techniques from literary theory and hermeneutic philosophy.

If Parsons’s fusion of Weber and Durkheim was conservative, focused on structural stability instead of change, then Bellah’s was reformist, describing how our symbols work and also how that work works to either bring us together or pull us apart.  Unlike his teacher, Bellah was more indebted to Durkheim’s later work on religion than his earlier work on social structures, and it was this focus on meaning that influenced a generation of cultural sociologists.  Perhaps most important was his essay, “Civil Religion in America,” which showed not only the late Durkheimian basis of our national life but also the Weberian contingency of our connections. 

Amidst a new generation—led by the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein—who insisted that economics and power were the only ways to understand sociology, Bellah insisted that meanings were more than just superstructure.  His sociology was neither quantitative nor especially variable-driven, which made him less popular as his field moved towards scientisism.  Yet it also made his work an early prophecy of a post-positivist future.  Along with a scattered few colleagues across the country, he was a voice crying out in the wilderness, making straight the way of culture.  Jeffrey Alexander, one of Bellah's most successful students, is not exaggerating when he says that "There is a sense in which every contemporary sociologist is Bellah’s child, niece, or nephew." 

Besides showing how we work, Bellah wanted to show us why that question mattered and how, by asking that question, we are able to imagine other ways we could live, ways that might provide greater justice, or compassion, or community.  That focus on community was not only theoretical. From everything I have heard, Bellah took his relationships very seriously—with his students, his colleagues, his friends, his family, and his wife of many years.  He was a remarkably happy man—I thought of Aquinas’s adage that “joy is the noblest virtue” when I met him—and the smile that you see on the cover of the Robert Bellah reader was surely not a pose.  I get the sense that’s often just how he looked.  I was lucky enough to be at a dinner for him after a talk he gave at Yale, and a former student of his asked him about his experience of graduate school.  “I really enjoyed it,” he said.  What about being a junior professor? “I enjoyed that too!” he said, smiling.  The former student asked him, “Was there ever a period of life you didn’t enjoy?” He smiled and paused thoughtfully.  “Well, my wife died recently, and that was simply a fact I had to endure.  But, basically, I enjoy life.”

I barely knew this man, and I had only managed to finagle my way into this dinner because I knew the organizers and I had recently written a review of Bellah’s last book, on the relationship between evolution and religion.  The book is an incredible achievement, not least for finally bringing Bellah back to his early interest in East Asia and evolution. As I describe in the review, I was struck by the intellectual breadth, the ethical sensibility and, the exuberant excitement in the many ways we've found to be human.  He didn't deny that we all might destroy ourselves, a worry Bellah had for some time.  Yet it was his deep appreciation for everything human culture can achieve that made his worries matter: for all the evil we can do, you got the sense from Bellah that it's good we're still here, and we should think hard about how to get better at it.

Unlike the authors Margo Rabb mentioned, I was struck by how similar Bellah's person was to his written work: the same optimism, the same combination of intellectual luminosity and straightforward, exuberant joy.  I’ve rarely met someone about whom I immediately thought, here is how I should live. Which is not to argue that I have anywhere near Bellah’s mind—or, for that matter, his soul.  But still, it’s nice to know that real people like him existed.  Even if for a time.

When we talked at that dinner, I told Bellah about a poet whose work I love, Marie Howe.  He hadn’t heard of her, and so I e-mailed a poem she wrote about her brother’s death, "What the Living Do." Here is what Bellah wrote in response: “Thanks so much--this is quite lovely.  Perhaps you know that I lost my wife of 61 years in 2010.  Anyway the poem strikes home and I want to read more of her.”  As I look over the poem myself, I find myself weirdly thinking of Bob Bellah, despite not having had more than two e-mails and four hours with him.  Nonetheless, to quote the poem’s last lines:

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep 

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

 I am living. I remember you.

A reflection I gave on the Good Samaritan at the DVUSA Closing Retreat

It is with humility and a deep sense of gratitude that I speak to all of you today.  As most of you know, my name is Jeff Guhin and I was a Dominican Volunteer in 2003-2004.  I served in the Bronx and I lived with Blauvelt Dominicans.  I’m now on the Board of Dominican Volunteers USA.  When I was reflecting on what I would say today, I thought how today’s Gospel is kind of old news for all of you: what has the last year been for you except to serve as the Good Samaritan, to serve our neighbor as much as we can, whoever (and wherever) that neighbor might be?

But then I realized that the story hints at another challenge, one all of you face now—how do you be a Good Samaritan when the volunteer year is over, when you have a job, a rent payment, bills, a spouse, and kids?  I think there are answers here if we work together to uncover them, and I’d like to think about them by taking a few positions in the story.

First, let’s imagine we’re that man on the side of the road, unconscious and alone.  When we went down, we probably thought we were dying, and yet here we are awake, in a beautiful room, with all the food and medical care we need, and even some extra money to help get us home.  And we cannot even see the person who brought us these gifts!  We are only assured that it was someone with remarkable compassion, someone who insisted we were worthy of a truly unbelievable amount of love.  What do we do with this when we wake? How do we possibly repay this debt?  Of course, the similarity to God’s infinite compassion for us is obvious, not only for the gifts God has given us but the very fact of our lives, the facts of glazed apples and grain fields, of cellular mitosis and solar flares, of laughter and friendship and afternoon naps.  How do we possibly repay that?  Well we don’t.  We live in gratitude.  And that gratitude is easier from the experiences we have all had, knowing the contingency of it: we could easily have died on that side of the road, could easily have been the people we were serving this year.  And yet we were not.  We don’t deserve the gifts God has given us, and yet we have them.  Gratitude and mystery. And a desire to get back on that road that we ourselves were on—that we could have died on!—and help those who need that help.

And I think that’s where a lot of you are right now.  And that’s a great place to be!  So let’s think now about someone else in our story.  The Good Samaritan.  Let’s imagine that this is really the first time he’s done anything like this.  He saw the man dying on the side of the road and thought, you know what? That guy’s my neighbor.  I’m gonna help him.  And so he really does, he really goes all out.  And man, after he leaves that hotel, he feels great.  It’s unbelievable how good he feels.  But then—well, he’s out of money.  And he’s got to get home, because his wife and kids are probably wondering where he is (no cell phones!).  And how is he going to explain those missing coins to his wife, by the way? And let’s say he’s a manual laborer, and he’s got a lot of work to catch up on for his boss because he’s been busy with this man on the side of the road situation. And he’s thinking about all of this as he’s walking out of the inn, and a few miles on his was back home, he sees another man on the side of the road.  I imagine him looking up at God and saying, Seriously?  Didn’t I just do this for you?

I’m sure all of us have had something like this experience in our ministry work, or in our interactions with those experiencing homelessness or any other marginalized group.  You’ve all at this point figured out on your own some smart lessons about developing boundaries, about learning that our justice and charity work plants seeds for plants we may never see.  We all know this stuff is hard, that Jesus tells us “the poor will always be with you,” and that the struggle continues because it never ends.  And I hate to tell you, it won’t get any easier.  When I was an inner-city high school teacher, I made around 30,0000 a year, which for New York City was not that much and was a lot less than I knew I could have made if I had gone into some other field.  So did I still have to give 10 percent to charity?  If my work was a ministry, should I still volunteer?  Now, as a sociologist working with Muslims and Evangelicals to correct religious stereotypes and trying to improve the relationship between science and religion, should I be spending more day-to-day interactions with marginalized people like I used to?  Is it bad that I travel so often I can’t really have a role in my parish’s liturgy?  I still honestly don’t know the answer to these questions, and I don’t think there are easy answers.  But I think there’s a helpful perspective, which is to remember ourselves not as the worn-out Samaritan but as the man on the side of the road who wakes up in a beautiful room, incredibly grateful to be alive.  I think we might feel less overwhelmed by the needs of all of our neighbors if we can live out the non-attachment Sisters Margaret and Carolann have been telling us about.  Remember that we should have died on that road.  Everything from that moment on is a gift.  Don’t feel upset you can’t help everyone; feel grateful you can help anyone at all.  What can we do in a spirit of gratitude, in celebration for the wonder of our existence?  It’s an important question for us to remember, especially as we move forward in our commitments to justice and peace.  This is where the Dominican commitment to relationship is so central, and why it has to be paired with a sense of gratitude: it is our relationships that make us feel the need to act for justice, and it is our gratitude that helps us do so with patience, non-attachment, and a calm and loving awareness of our own limitations (and the limitations of those we’re serving).

Which brings us to another perspective in this story, Jesus’s audience.  Remember that Samaritans were not at all well-loved in Jesus’ s time, and the phrase Good Samaritan was an oxymoron, along the lines of all of just having seen Malala’a speech at the United Nations and someone telling us about the “good member of the Taliban.”  What, we might respond.  What could we possibly have to learn from those people?  And yet it was this person who was our model.  As all of you leave your volunteer year, it’s going to be harder to find a community of accountability, sadly enough right at the moment of transition when you most need one.  You might find that your Catholic friends are not the same as your social justice friends, and your religious friends are not the same as your intellectual friends.  That’s okay.  There are virtues to be learned from all of them.  Yet that makes it all the more important for you to have friends who you can call at any time and who will hold you accountable to your Gospel mission.  For me, I have three friends and my wife, and all four of those people inspire me constantly to ask myself hard questions about how I’m living out the Gopsel, and doing so in a spirit of love.  As with my friends, that sort of accountability will rarely be us asking each other the hard questions, like, is that job really doing God’s will?—though those questions are important too.  Instead, the accountability will be by the lives we lead, which inspire each other to challenge ourselves, and to remember our gratitude, to remember that this life, that our life, is God-soaked, to borrow a term from Sister Maryann and Sister Carol.

And it’s in that spirit of gratitude that I want to think briefly about another group in this story: those who aren’t there.  Where are the women here?  Where are the Samaritans who might hear this story, complaining that they’re being used as an example of how ridiculous it is they would do good?  Where are the non-students who might feel intimidated to be part of the conversation?  How are all of these people reacting?  Are they listening in on the boundaries?  What can we do to welcome them, grateful to be able to talk to anyone, and eager to share what none of us—including us—have earned, but all of us, being made in God’s image, deserve?

Which brings me to the last person in our story I wanted to talk about.  Jesus. Notice how, in Luke, it’s the member of the crowd that says the Greatest Commandment, not him.  Jesus can tell these are some people who can handle some heavy stuff.  And so he lays it on them.  What I’m most struck by in the Gospels is how differently Jesus reacts to everyone.  He tells some people to give up everything, and he tells other people to keep what they have and throw a party.  How to explain it?  I think the only answer is that Jesus recognizes we are all beautifully, wonderfully different.  Sister Joan Chittister reads the Tower of Babel story as ultimately about how God separated us so that we might come to recognize each other’s difference. I love the Gospel of Luke’s story of the rich man, you know, the young man who knew all of the law and asked Jesus what else he should do, and Jesus said give up what you have and follow me, and the rich man couldn’t, because he had many possessions.  In Luke, there’s this small addition where before Jesus tells him what he has to do, it says “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”  That’s so important. 

We need to remember—I need to remember—as we challenge ourselves, as we challenge each other, and as we challenge the world, to do so always in love.  And to accept that challenge with gratitude for the ability to act on the challenge, and the life to carry it out.  And then we can all try to live like these characters inside of us: the man on the side of the road, the Good Samaritan who saves him, the students who asks a question of the Lord, and the Christ who answers all questions the same way: with patience, gentleness, and love.  So while the details of figuring out how to save every neighbor might appear impossible, remember the answer is as much the peace of its telling as the mystery of its words. And make no mistake: this story is a mystery.  How to actually help everyone in the radical way Jesus asks us to do is quite literally impossibly hard.  So the key is the spirit of the answer, the peace of Christ’s response.  I hope that if we live in that peace—and in gratitude for the opportunity to do so—we will provide a space for that mystery to unfold.

Typical articles I read

Example of a Slate article: "Actually, shooting kids in the face is great for them, and you're a terrible parent for not already doing it."
Example of a New York Review of Books article: "We need Trollope now"
Example of an Atlantic Monthly Article: "China!"
Example of a New York Time Article: "When the fromagerie is not fine enough"
Example of a Weekly Standard Article: "Soylent Green is Republicans!"
Example of a Harpers Article: "The World is Ending; also, Dostoevsky"
Example of a Mother Jones Article: "A Day in the Life of the Guys Who Punch Republicans in the kidneys because those same Republicans also punch people in the kidneys, and started it"
Example of a New York Magazine Article: "Is a Paris Timeshare Good for Kids?"
Example of a New Yorker Article: "Malcolm Gladwell on the economics of shaving"
Example of a Vanity Fair Article: "Holy Shit Guys, This Celebrity is So Awesome to Eat a Cheeseburger With"
Example of a Nation Article: "The World is Ending; also, Naomi Klein"
Example of a Cosmo Article: "Stop hurting your eyes and have sex with your man already"
Example of a GQ Article: "No, You're the Most Handsome Man! Stop! Stop! No, You!"
Example of a Economist Article: "If only Antarctica had Free Trade"

The problem with the problem with Creationism

Regarding the debate about creationism (the Sullivan link gets you to some other links that get you to the conversation in a variety of places), my dissertation work might have something to say. It's a comparison of Muslim and Evangelical high schools in the New York City area, looking at, among other things, evolution.  One of the things both groups tend to emphasize is the difference between micro and macro-evolution (which are terms working biologists use as well).  It's actually a very handy, pragmatic "out" for them, as any important thing evolution could do in their life-time--e.g. the evolution of insects, bacteria, viruses, etc.--can be explained by micro-evolution and is unproblematic as the species (or "kind") itself usually does not change.  Muslims are generally even more accommodating of evolution, but that's a separate conversation.

I find that most Christian creationists tend to have a very big problem with historical arguments but really no problem with falsifiable lab science. If anything, they're far too Popperian, convinced that only absolutely falsifiable science is real science.  They often cite Bacon--and sometimes even Popper--in their literature. (They also sometimes cite Kuhn--witness the weird marriage of the post-modern Steve Fuller and the Christian right).  Also, not all creationists are Young Earth Creationists.  And those that do disagree with geologists about the Earth's age still agree with them about kinds and types of rocks and whether you can build on them. The same goes for epidemiology and the study of infectious diseases more broadly. In other words, disagreement about the nature of evolution, from what I can see so far, has few real-world implication in that creationists accommodate so much of what evolutionary science has discovered into their own worldview.  It makes, of course, for a very convoluted explanation of how the world works, but it doesn't cause nearly the problems you'd think it does.  Also, many creationists are aware that they're viewing things from a "Christian worldview"--this term is is everywhere--and acknowledge that evolution makes sense from a secular one.  Creationists are much more perspectival (and, I think, Nietzchean) that they or their secular critics acknowledge.

Now if creationists started running biology and geology departments we might run into very different problems, but even then, I'm fairly certain diseases would still be cured and bridges would still work.  The difference that would worry me most would not be creationism (as, again, so much of what matters about evolution gets worked pragmatically into the narrative) but the introduction of God as a viable scientific hypothesis, making it possible to stop looking for secular solutions to real-world problems and explain them as God's will or some such answer.  It's this sort of perspective that would have stopped the research that discovered evolution in the first place, and that would stop continued research that might challenge orthodoxy. For me, it's the threat to methodological naturalism--rather than the threat to the theory of evolution--that is most dangerous.  And the importance of methodological naturalism is a conversation that I think creationists are more willing to have.

However, it's also important to recognize that there's not an inherent morality to science and that methodological naturalism--if it's not rooted in some sort of ethics--can lead us to dangerous places.  Of course, contrary to creationist claims, those ethics don't have to be Christian or even theist, but it's also helpful to remember that ethics aren't obvious and don't come hardwired into every human head (at least not the ethics that we like).  One could easily think of a society where humans destroy or harm other humans for the good of science, and one could imagine that the researchers in those cases don't feel particularly bad about it.  Nothing says they have to.  There's a compelling evolutionary argument to be made that they're advancing their own interests, particularly if the people they're researching are not members of their "group".  Now this is not an argument that such problems make, say, belief in Christ necessary.  It's only to argue that the ethics behind science won't magically appear within the science. Charles Taylor's critique of Dawkins et al. in A Secular Age is helpful here: ethics aren't obvious, and they don't simply appear fully-formed from evolution.  We create them, or they're revealed to us, or what-have-you, but naturalism by itself won't provide the rules for how we study and what we study for.  Creationists like Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson have been very sophisticated in this regard, but what they get wrong is (1) the ethics guiding research need not be theist to be ethical and (2) you still need naturalism to answer problems that can too easily be explained away by 'God did it that way.'  

In closing, creationists are people who are a lot smarter than most secular folks give them credit for.  After all, it takes a lot of thinking to work you way around some of the extremely convincing arguments for evolution.  And some of the stuff coming out of the intelligent design community is pretty smart philosophy of science.  To be clear: I'm a theistic evolutionist, and the only way in which I believe in intelligent design is to claim that God guided evolution (how and using what mechanisms I have no idea, and I certainly acknowledge that evolution appears, from the naturalist perspective, utterly random and not goal-directed).  I don't agree with the pretty substantial amount of creationist and intelligent design literature I've been reading, but I think it's often quite smart and, even if ultimately tautological, pretty clever in how it goes about justifying itself.  The tension between reason and revelation is nothing new of course, and it's worth remembering that secular folks also have a priori truths they insist upon and empirical evidence that might not match.  That's not to justify or excuse creationist distrust of mainstream science.  It's simply to say that it's a human problem, and not simply a creationist one.

In which I try to be thoughtful about opposition to gay marriage

So quite a few of my conservative friends are not thrilled by Obama's support of gay marriage, just as my liberal friends are not thrilled by the recent vote in North Carolina. A good conservative friend of mine feels that references to marriage equality are too glib and do not pay sufficient attention to the claims of gay marriage opponents. It's a fair point, and I try to engage these arguments seriously here. (LATER EDIT: To be clear, I take my friend's critique to mean there is a liberal echo chamber that does not take seriously opposition to their views, and that certain individuals in these echo chambers act glibly.  I do not by any means intend to imply that advocates of gay marriage are glib, or that vast amounts of literature and conversations have not shown the seriousness with which advocates of gay marriage study their opponents' positions.  It's just to say that some folks, sometimes, can glibly assume anyone who opposes gay marriage is just stupid.  And that's what I'm trying to engage here. By the way, thanks Michael.  Now, to the the arguments:)

Claim 1: "By your fruits you will know them": e.g. there is little empirical evidence that committed gay couples raise children poorly or lead to illicit behavior (absent homosexual relations, which is a bit of a tautological critique, e.g. being gay is wrong because it will result in people being gay). There is something to the critique of gay marriage as tending towards less monogamy than straight marriage, though the empirical reality of heterosexual monogamy rarely lives up to its much-vaunted normative commitments. Indeed, many married folks, including men, do not even share these normative commitments, believing it entirely permissible to cheat as long as they don't get caught, provide for their wives, etc. Women cheat too of course, but for various reasons, men tend to cheat more and tend to more often believe their cheating is okay. However, if wer'e talking about raising children rather than strict monogamy, the situation changes dramatically: Vast evidence indicates that the foster system and other places where children need adoption are not raising those children well (including, by the way, heterosexuals whose marriages either do not exist or are falling apart and, sometimes as a result, are unable to provide for their children). All of this is to say that (a) there is (at least as of yet) no obvious, empirical reason homosexual couples make worse partners or parents absent the tautology that they are homosexual partners or parents (e.g. that they will be homosexual or teach children homosexuality is permissible) and (b) there is a sufficient case to show gay couples would be better parents than many of the heterosexual parents now allowed to raise children, often in situations such that the state has to intervene (or legally is required to but has not intervened)

Claim 2: Advocates of gay marriage tend to simply reject an argument from authority, which can come in two ways: the first, from most conservatives, is a relatively unsophisticated use of the Bible or Christianity without a real concern that this authority is irrelevant to their interlocutors. By the way, for me, talking to Christians or Jews or Muslims, it remains the best argument and one that's much more difficult for believers to dismiss than they often do. That's not to say there aren't compelling religious arguments, but they're often quite strained. However, the authority of a sacred text doesn't do a lot of good talking to agnostics or people for whom the scripture is not a truth source. The second, much more sophisticated argument from authority, from Robert George et al, is to claim that there is an Aristotelian telos to marriage grounded in natural law. It's an impressive claim, but it is not one I find sufficiently grounded in empirical reality. Normative heterosexual monogamy is simply a rare empirical phenomenon. Heterosexual marriage is certainly much more common (though by no means a human universal, witness vast anthropological evidence otherwise), yet, again, cultural expectations of true monogamy are incredibly rare and only recently and in certain cultures have men (and women too, in certain contexts, though their sexual lives tend to be much more policed) been expected to be faithful to one partner their entire lives. Most cultures in the world that do hold to heterosexual marriage still expect men to cheat, and the men do cheat, often with little repercussions. Other cultures expect women to cheat as well, or expect marriages to last a shorter period of time, or tolerate some or much homosexual behavior during the life course, with varying degrees of expected discretion. So the "natural law" claim is buttressed upon a claim of a natural order of things that might well make sense within a certain social community of humans (e.g. the modern Anglo-American nations), but certainly not as a means of understanding human ontology on a universal scale. Ergo, the term natural becomes complicated. Much the same thing happened to Scottish "Common Sense" philosophy in the late 1800's for Protestants, leading to an increased emphasis on the importance of presuppositions rather than natural law.

Claim 3: So what's left after natural law? I would argue it's precisely our presuppositions, grounded and made real through our traditions. I think the best argument that opponents of gay marriage have is from Burke and neo-Aristotelians like MacIntyre (whom I haven't heard take a position on gay marriage, but one could imagine he has one). This is about the importance of traditions, which liberals too often ignore. Tradition gives our lives meaning, and it empowers us to shape and understand what we take to be real and how we define existence. I would argue empirically against a concept of "natural law" but I find a tremendous power in the idea of tradition, and I think it winds up doing a lot of the things that George claims for natural law. The best things about tradition is that it maintains certain virtues and ways of imagining the good from one generation to the next, things we don't want to lose. Here, of course, is where there is room for legitimate debate. Importantly, there are virtues and there are conditions for virtues, such as, for example, the virtue of charity and the condition of spending time with people whom one finds challenging in some way so as to maintain that virtue. People like Andrew Sullivan would argue that the virtues that really matter in the marriage context--e.g. loyalty, fidelity, commitment to a future generation--can all be maintained in a different condition, e.g. homosexual marriage. However, some people might say the virtues are only possible given certain conditions (this remains an empirical question--see above). Others might say the conditions themselves are goods in themselves regardless of whether they can maintain certain virtues. This is not a silly claim. One could say the same thing about an attraction to a region: a community from France might well be able to maintain its virtues in another country, but there is something important about being in France that might be irretrievably lost if it shifts its tradition elsewhere. However, this becomes almost a matter of taste and very difficult to have a reasond argument about, particularly if members of the tradition agree that virtues can be maintained and only conditions cannot.

On one level, I guess I just don't mind separate communities deciding what marriage means to them and keeping the government out of their business, provided that gov. gives equal rights to all individuals and allows any individual the ability to declare any other a dependent, heir, end-of-life decision maker, and all the other legal ramifications of marriage. Besides that, believe what you want about marriage. Of course, one could argue that's already happening, and certainly the Catholic Church leadership (for example) does not need to (and clearly does not) accept the government's definition of the term. Yet this begs the question of why the fight matters at all: why make it a government issue?  Why not just agree to disagree?   This brackets the question of civil unions which the Church does not welcome either (in terms of insurance to partners, etc, etc) but this is somewhat more surmountable in that we can imagine a world in which I ask for help with my platonic life-partner and then move fairly quickly for that into my no-so-platonic life partner.  So let's bracket civil unions and focus on marriage.  Why fight about it? The first answer is obvious: it is already a government issue inasmuch as the government (with some exceptions on the state level) has an explicitly heterosexual definition of marriage that excludes the possibility of gay marriage.  Even if civil unions are allowed and the sort of legal equality I describe above is allowed (and that's an if), the fact that straight marriage is the norm makes these civil unions necessarily second best in a way that would not be the case if the government did no marriages at all.  So gay marriage advocates have much to gain and opponents have much to lose.

And this gets into the question of why the state does marriages, which, I believe, has something to do with a sense on all sides that marriages matter.In fact, both opponents (the Catholic Bishops) and advocates (various Catholic gay groups, for example) have pushed to change the state definition of marriage precisely because the institution of marriage is understood as a critical column for or point of entry into mainstream stability and acceptability.  Making marriage a private matter--whether private qua individual or private qua community--would certainly weaken if not the institution of marriage then at least the common sense of the institution among various participants in the civil sphere.  That's why people are so passionate and upset about it.  It's why the issue has stakes.