Why Marriage Should Be Privatised

I believe in freedom of association as the best way of dealing with most social and industrial issues, not state intervention. What we choose to believe, speak, write down, who we associate with, and who we choose to trade with should be almost entirely a matter of personal liberty, not government authority. It’s unsurprising I think this way, as I believe the state should take a step back out of many things in which it involves itself, given its mass inefficiency and stultifying mechanisms.

With this in mind, I want to turn to the subject of marriage. My view is that the state should recognise that marriage is a Christian union, and Christians should recognise that many people want to have a union that is not Christian. Consequently, I think there ought to be two distinct formal unions: one, a Christian marriage and therefore formally recognised under Christian principles, and the other a civil partnership formally recognised under whichever non-Christian principles the participants happen to value.

I’m a Christian, and given that Christian marriage is a private triangular affair between God and two beloveds (and by extension, the beloveds’ loved ones, friends and church congregation), I think it would be highly appropriate and far more spiritually liberating if marriage became privatised and was no longer under the thrall of the state. As long as the marriage contract establishes property rights, and as long as the law still protects children, in that you can only be legally married at 16, and there are sufficient legal contracts in place to address matters concerning children, the state is an extraneous element of the marriage bond. Marriage is a Christian unity; the bureaucratic elements are invented by the establishment.

Think about what Christian marriage is; it is two beloveds who love each other, and who love God and want to put Him first, and promise before Him to be devoted and committed to each other for the rest of their lives. There is nothing the state can do to ratify a union that is ordained by God. What legitimises the love is the relationship, not the paperwork. There are lots of couples who have the paperwork but not the love and high quality of relationship, and there are lots of couples who have the love and high quality of relationship but not the paperwork. If a couple has the mutual devotion and promise each other to put one another first for the rest of their life, then there is no reason why marriage contracts can’t be private affairs that are drawn up by the beloveds (or on their behalf if they choose), and instituted in the church before God.

On a wider note, the great thing about individual liberty is that there is room for diversity. There is no pressure for us all to think the same way, and through trial and error we get to shape society according to complex revealed preferences. In a society where marriage is private, people would be free to sign marital contracts that best suit their individual beliefs. But given that Christian marriage is a unique Christian concept, the church would be able to apply its own articles to the contracts the beloveds create, and the beloveds would tailor those contracts to the authority of their chosen church – one that they declare to be sanctioned under God’s authority.

It’s time that Christianity wrestled back control of its own institution and reclaimed it as a purely Christian spiritual union between beloveds before God. You see, the question must be asked; in the case of the majority of unbelievers - why would they even want to get married in a church? When the Christian church performs a wedding for couples who do not share the central beliefs of Christianity, they are engaging in ceremonies for couples for whom the central tenets have no intrinsic religious value (it seems these numbers are increasing all the time too). Of course, non-religious couples shouldn’t be legally prohibited from getting married in a church if the church consents – but that’s not the point. I can only wonder why those couples would want to if they don't have any beliefs that would naturally affiliate them to the church's ethos. That people still do is, I should imagine, a mere historical legacy of habit that is slowly dying in out in Britain as we gradually become more secular, and the Church of England gradually erodes into an even tinier minority.

If my beloved and I didn't believe in the central Christian tenets, there is no reason why we should have any desire to get married in a church, mosque or wherever - just as if we were vegetarians we'd have no desire to go to a steak house for our evening meal. In changing long-standing traditions and not seeking refuge in the unreliable legacy of the status quo, we are likely to have a society in which people choose things because those things match their views and beliefs, not because history dictates that ‘This is how it has always been done’.

 

When gay people or unbelievers seek to defend people’s right to not be discriminated against by any sectarian faction of the church, I think they are right to do so. But I think they are arguing in the wrong direction. They act like vegetarians trying to defend the vegetarians’ right to go into butchers’ shops, when what they would be better doing is trying to convince more vegetarians to give up butchers’ shops altogether and seek food stores that better cater their tastes. I think that numerous people are still getting married in churches simply because 'marriage' in a church happens to be the oldest ceremonial legacy in this country, or because society says a church wedding is somehow more exalted than a civil ceremony, or because of pressure from family, and other similar reasons. Why would they want to unless they have emotional, spiritual or analytical affiliation to the church's ethos? Realising this probably is the best the best way to forward the debate and culturally progress too.

Society needn't be so polarised anymore, and it will be much less like it in the future; just as we now have supermarkets in which meat-eaters and vegetarians can happily shop together choosing only the products that match their tastes, we probably will eventually evolve a cultural system in which people pick their ceremonial rites of passage in accordance with their views and beliefs. I understand non-religious funerals are rising in numbers; in 150 years (maybe sooner) they probably will outnumber church funerals. Fast forward 150 years and my guess is you'll find church weddings being almost exclusively chosen by Christians, and the majority of other lifetime commitments being non-religious civil commitments. We will probably escape the historical legacies of anti-church discord and well-worn religious clichés, and live in a society in which chosen rites of passage match people’s tastes and beliefs, and where those unions are a private affair and not under the authority of the state.

The Lockdown Luxury Our Forebears Wouldn't Understand

I’ve been relatively quiet on the subject of Coronavirus (just 3 blog posts, see here - which is quiet for me! Heh!). One reason is because I’ve been very busy; another reason is that articles on Coronavirus are fraught by being riddled with incomplete information (which we won’t know until after this is over) and are therefore full of pointless projections and comparisons; and a third reason is that whatever you believe with regard to whether or not domestic governments have handled the crisis well or poorly, I would prefer a spirit of kindness and encouragement on the grounds that I think, by and large, people are trying their best to get things right, and I commend them for that.

The more interesting point I want to make here is that our response to Coronavirus is a demonstration of capitalism at its finest, and a demonstration of socialism as a beneficial adjunct to the market when applied properly. This delineation is what I call the market economy and the socio-personal economy. The principal distinction is that the market economy has exchanges that are precisely recorded in terms of cash exchanged or increases/decreases in 1s and 0s on banks' computers, and the socio-personal economy has exchanges that are less-precisely recorded in terms of helpful gestures and voluntary transactions for the good of one another (there is lots of overlap between the two, of course - a financial economy has a necessary social economy woven into it, because it’s hard to be successful in business without good socio-personal qualities).

The key difference between their operations is roughly this. In the financial economy the demand almost always exceeds the supply (of a limited range of labour, goods and services), because suppliers maintain their status differential (principally income) by increasing their prices or their supplies (or a combination of both), and endeavour to become top of the supplier tree by out-competing their competitors. Whereas in the socio-personal economy, the potential supply (of a nigh-on unbounded range of actions) almost always exceeds the demand, and suppliers who care enough about others maintain their status differential (primarily their character and reputation) by trying to summon up new ways to improve their surroundings and become better people.

The key take home lesson of the temporary lockdown of much of the economy is that our ability to do so is testament to the success of capitalism and how well-off we’ve become relative to any time in history. We can afford to take 6 months off in ways that would have killed our progenitors in the fraction of the time. I’m not saying there won’t be dire economic consequences of the lockdown. But the fact that we can do it at all and pull through together is because our economic prosperity is so prodigious, our capacity to help each other (with time, with donations, with resources) is so plentiful, and our technological advancements (laptops, mobile phones, the Internet, Skype, Zoom, etc) are so impressive. None of our ancestors could have afforded a lockdown like this.

There’s no question that people living 100 years ago wouldn’t have been able to give up work for 6 months and survive; and people of 50 years ago would have done slightly better than them, but still would have only been able to give up a fraction of their work time compared to now. The consensus for a lockdown was equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of capitalism. And the consensus for the benefits of pulling together and voluntarily helping each other is equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of a socio-personal-kind of socialism (the one I’m always advocating) that doesn’t interfere with the fundamental beneficial mechanisms of the free market. 

And if you’re tempted to respond that the government’s financial rescue mission during the Coronavirus is a testament to the powers of a socialistic redistributionist economy, then your error is a bit like a man who sees a passer-by jump into the river to save a drowning boy and thereby concludes that it’s a good thing when we all jump into rivers, mess our clothes up and risk drowning ourselves in the process as we get tangled up in the reeds and stuck in the muddy river bed. 

Here’s why. The principal metric of a successful financial economy is in ascertaining value (which is consumer surpluses + producer surpluses). Created value helps us determine whether resources are being allocated well or poorly, and prices provide the information signals that help us determine whether resources could be allocated even more optimally. The sharing of ideas through competition is what helps us advance, not just in terms of improved allocation of resources, but also in terms of better products at cheaper prices and more readily available to meet increasing demand. The government hand-outs are a necessary act to help in a crisis – but they are an attempt to save trees that have already been planted, not to irrigate once barren ground in the way that capitalism does. It's only because of capitalism that there is any government or socialism at all.

 

This Stunning Picture Caught My Eye.....

The image above caught my eye when shared on Facebook. Its creators have called it a Bible Visualisation Graph. Here's Chris Harrison, one of its developers, describing how the image was developed and what the viewer is seeing:

"This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data. Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honoured and revealed the complexity of the data at every level. This ultimately led us to the multi-coloured arc diagram. The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in colour between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the colour corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect."

What are we to make of it? Is the pattern pretty? Yes, I’d say so. Is the Bible Divinely inspired? Yes, absolutely. But even with both of the foregoing being true, the kicker question is this; is the Bible arc pattern significant in any meaningful way beyond a lot of mathematical noise and pretty rainbow-like pattern? This is a complex matter, for which I'll attempt a cross-examination here.

For the prosecution

I'm not convinced that the internal cross referencing is as remarkable as many people jumping on the bandwagon are claiming. There is, no doubt, a power law of connectivity between the Old Testament and New Testament (and within the two Testaments), but the magnitude of cross-referencing is first and foremost because of the length of the book and its complex but cohesive narrative. Once we drill down into the accretive layers of the pretty pattern, what's most important here is not so much the number of connections, but the power and significance of those connections. After all, if we looked for all the cross-referencing of common themes in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, then we could likely find a similar pattern of connectivity as the Bible arc, especially if we studied the texts in a linear fashion (the same would probably be true if we looked for thematic connectivity in something like Derek Winnert's book of film reviews or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - we'd probably see something similar, albeit not quite as powerful).

The other problem with deciphering patterns of this kind is that they are only as meaningful as the imputations of the beholder. As I said in my essay on free will:

"Whether we are talking about information in Shannon terms, or even as a more generalised concept, information can't reasonably be treated merely as some kind of intrinsic property embedded in the system itself - it is necessary that information should be seen as an extrinsic property of a system too. That is to say, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. For example, a computer program, a set of songs, or a bunch of holiday snaps burned onto a disk is information only inasmuch as it consists of patterns that can be used by that computer as instructions. Likewise the Bible only contains information by virtue of its relation to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the meaning though cognitive instructions. We must always bear in mind that expending resources on information through interpretation and analysis requires a second descriptive sense, because it is "information" intrinsically and yet also "information + mind" extrinsically."

When it comes to the Bible, a seven year old boy might be able to determine meaning in the texts but distil no meaning from the cross-referencing; whereas a Bible scholar would incorporate profound evocation of meaning into the patterns that young boys would not. In other words, the real remarkability of text patterns is always likely to find its provenance in the complexities of human thinking and the associative psychology and culture that bootstraps the meaning behind the context. What might make the Bible arc patterns insignificant beyond their immediate attractiveness to the eye is that we could probably take any linear text (say the complete works of Shakespeare, or a set of historical encyclopaedias) and form links between parts of the text at random and generate a similar pattern to Harrison and Römhild's pattern.

For the defence

Even if all the above is true - and I think it is - there is no question that the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world in terms of its multi-layered connectivity and profound complexity. And whether you're a Christian or not (I am), let me tell you one thing with absolute certainty: if you don't try to evaluate the Bible through the starting lens of 'This is the most astounding book ever written', your interpretation of it will be grossly inadequate to the task of uncovering its deeper rewards.

I suppose for the contemporary mind such as ours, a good way to illustrate this is to think of it as a book of stunningly complex hyperlinked text. We all know what hyperlinks are in the modern age. If you surf the Internet you can traverse the digital globe through a vast nexus of connected web-pages, knitted together by hyperlinked functions (like this). The Internet is the world's most remarkable modern achievement - but what makes it remarkable is the collective bottom-up intelligence behind it. It is the best living example of evolutionary emergence of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer. Nobody sat down one day and planned the Internet as a fait accompli phenomenon - it is a global system of interconnected computer networks that evolved over time, and it is still evolving, in a cumulative step by step process of trial and error that tailors to our tastes and needs like a simulacrum of mind itself. It provides a microcosmic example of where the complex emergence of order occurs not from being designed top down, but by a long natural selection-type process.

In the manner that's most significant here, the Bible is the opposite of the Internet - it is the ultimate top-down work in nature. But it is also the ultimate bottom-up work too (a fact many Christians are woefully incompetent at grasping), as the writers are afforded the dignity and grace to colour and flavour the narrative with the intensity of human perspective - both positively and negatively, but always authentically humanly. The scriptural accounts involve the huge conceptual wiggle room to factor in the whole gamut of human qualities and flaws: they form the substrate of every future human narrative henceforward from its creation.

Regarding the mathematical function on the x-axis of Harrison and Römhild's pattern representing the 64,000 textual cross references found in the Bible - this leads us to the 64,000 dollar question, regarding to what extent this zooming in on the informational content gives good reason to think that Divine choreography is behind the process. I've already said that the patterns themselves probably aren't compelling enough on their own. But given that the Bible consists of 66 diverse books, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who often never met - the overarching narrative and nexus of connectivity seems to be remarkably too complex to have been fashioned by mere human insight, and with too coherent a narrative and interconnected, cohesive complexity to be written without the inspiration of God.

The information band-width of the Bible and its granular tenets that form the central narrative of the Christian love story between God and humankind (especially the prophecies about Christ's Incarnation, written hundreds of years before the New Testament) is too broad and ingenious for such a tapestry of complex, consistent, internally self-referencing, integrated thought and ideation to have been written by mere men. The fact that the 66 diverse books of the Bible, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who mostly never met can encapsulate the rich and diverse historical, cultural and psychological complex of the range of authors and contributors, yet also imbue the ingenious coherence of a single author and not of a contrived message between writers, is testament to its majesty.