Symposium: The Greatest Social Cost

This article is in response to “The Social Costs of Abandoning the Meaning of Marriage” by Ryan T. Anderson and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

Eighty billion dollars a year: that is only an estimate of how much familial breakdown is costing the government of the United Kingdom.   In our own country, Mr. Anderson quotes a 2008 report indicating our costs are $112 billion a year.  Ideas and behaviors have consequences indeed.

While the consequences, at least the immediately apparent ones, may be material, the cause, like all causes, is something far greater: It is purely spiritual. Marriage revisionism, which leads to the creation of terms like “throuple” and “wedlease,” is the natural consequence of seeing marriage as a contract rather than a sacrifice.

A good economist will tell you that humans, rational creatures that they are, will form contracts for their mutual benefit. Each party comes to the table with wants and concerns and walks away better off than they were before. This is supposedly what makes the world go round. But once marriage is seen as a contract, as merely a fulfillment of individual wants, there is no logical basis why that contract should not be a temporary lease rather than a lifelong obligation.

Contracts rarely contain the words “till death do us part.” They are not based on sacrificial love, but on individual desire. Roger Scruton, commenting on this distinction, observed that “the difference between a vow and a promise is profound and metaphysical. For a promise is fulfilled in time. And when the promise is fulfilled it is also finished. But a vow is never fulfilled in time: it is endless and changeless, and there is no point at which the account is closed. Those bound together by vows are bound eternally.”

Permanency and exclusivity as marital norms are necessary for a stable society, and we abandon these norms because they are difficult and they demand sacrifice.  Seeing our relationships through a contractual lens wipes away any emphasis on duty and reorders the emphasis on desire. Yes, contracts bind us and we occasionally make concessions in the negotiations, but we only concede to get the greater good we want.

The greatest social cost associated with marriage reductionism, therefore, is not a measly hundred billion dollars. The greatest cost of our reductionism is living in a society without sacrifice: a society without love.