Personal

I’m Dreaming of a Sterile Christmas

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I struggled a bit with figuring out what single adjective best encapsulates this year’s holiday season. I settled on sterile.

Here’s why:

  • Until yesterday, this winter has been unseasonably warm. Like temperatures in the 40s/50s, with total seasonal snow accumulation of less than an eighth of an inch. Dry Christmases are as lame as dry wedding receptions.
  • I didn’t put up decorations or send cards, and I haven’t really listened to much Christmas music. Shopping for gifts has brought no joy.
  • Things are a bit morose at work — no one seems to be in a holiday mood given transitions within the hospital. No potlucks, no decorations, no white-elephant gifts.
  • Family gatherings seem contrived, even superficial. Pleasant, to be sure, but … transactional.
  • I have been extremely inactive in church events this season.

So this year, Christmas is just another day on the calendar. Just like Thanksgiving was. Just like New Years’ Day will be.

It didn’t used to be like this. Once upon a time, the holiday season was magic. In fact, the entire fourth quarter marked my favorite time of the year. Kickoff coincided with my birthday in mid-September, continued with helping my grandparents reap their harvest and burn their leaves in October, and hit an autumnal high point with Halloween and its associated trick-or-treating (as a kid) or costume parties (as an adult). Then — as the cold set in — we prepared for Thanksgiving. Until my early 20s, we assembled for a lavish feast at my grandparents’ house; this long-awaited afternoon of food and football opened the door to the Christmas season.

With the arrival of Advent, the spiritual side received nourishment with the various preparations for the Christmas season. When Christmas itself came, the feast arrived with cold, snow, gifts, parties, choirs and Masses; the entire family convened at my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve, then we went to Midnight Mass, then my parents and brother and I did our own thing on Christmas morning. The period between Christmas and New Years’ Eve allowed for a bit of quiet recovery before an evening of revelry on the 31st.

Then, after a drying-out brunch on the morning of Jan. 1, it was all over but the fond memories.

So what went wrong? Probably a few things. First among them, I no longer welcome birthdays. Followed by substantial changes over the last few years to my circle of friends that has put Halloween parties off the table. Then the lack of a seasonal harvest. Oh, and don’t forget the fracturing of Thanksgiving into small, casual affairs. And something similar with Christmas. And over the last few years, I’ve been less attentive to my religious duties than I should be.

All of this is potentially correctible, of course. But do I give a damn? Not so much. The magic of the holiday season, this year and last, wasn’t the holidays — it was the extended vacation I scheduled to take care of things around the house and otherwise unwind and plan for the coming year.

Theologians talk of acedia — a sense of spiritual and emotional deadness marked by burnout bordering on apathy. I think the term fits. Since Medieval Christendom, acedia has been viewed as a sin, mostly because those poor souls afflicted by it suffer the double whammy of torpor and a profound lack of motivation to do anything about it.

The simple joys of the past, of family and security and that happiness that comes from being secure in one’s person and station, have taken flight. In their place are a sense of self-reliance and mission related to big goals that take big effort to execute. Yet the risk of walking your own path instead of conforming to the path set by family, friends and co-workers is that your only corrective comes from within. With acedia, there’s no corrective from within. Cue the vicious infinite regress.

Part of it, too, might be the lack of seasonality in the annual calendar. When I was a kid, we had the subtext of micro-farming to break up the year. Whether it derived from the different ways we took care of the horses in summer versus winter, or the cycle of planting, nurturing and harvesting from a large garden and from fruit trees, we had no choice but to respect that different times of the year had a different focus and therefore different associated joys and laments. Without that connection to the earth, and with the Catholic liturgical year subdued the further from the Church you fall, the calendar really is just one damn thing after another with no need to plan ahead or to enjoy the immediacy of now.

Maybe next year will be better. More meaningful. More seasonal. Less sterile.

Personal

I'm Dreaming of a Sterile Christmas

No Comments

I struggled a bit with figuring out what single adjective best encapsulates this year’s holiday season. I settled on sterile.
Here’s why:

  • Until yesterday, this winter has been unseasonably warm. Like temperatures in the 40s/50s, with total seasonal snow accumulation of less than an eighth of an inch. Dry Christmases are as lame as dry wedding receptions.
  • I didn’t put up decorations or send cards, and I haven’t really listened to much Christmas music. Shopping for gifts has brought no joy.
  • Things are a bit morose at work — no one seems to be in a holiday mood given transitions within the hospital. No potlucks, no decorations, no white-elephant gifts.
  • Family gatherings seem contrived, even superficial. Pleasant, to be sure, but … transactional.
  • I have been extremely inactive in church events this season.

So this year, Christmas is just another day on the calendar. Just like Thanksgiving was. Just like New Years’ Day will be.
It didn’t used to be like this. Once upon a time, the holiday season was magic. In fact, the entire fourth quarter marked my favorite time of the year. Kickoff coincided with my birthday in mid-September, continued with helping my grandparents reap their harvest and burn their leaves in October, and hit an autumnal high point with Halloween and its associated trick-or-treating (as a kid) or costume parties (as an adult). Then — as the cold set in — we prepared for Thanksgiving. Until my early 20s, we assembled for a lavish feast at my grandparents’ house; this long-awaited afternoon of food and football opened the door to the Christmas season.
With the arrival of Advent, the spiritual side received nourishment with the various preparations for the Christmas season. When Christmas itself came, the feast arrived with cold, snow, gifts, parties, choirs and Masses; the entire family convened at my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve, then we went to Midnight Mass, then my parents and brother and I did our own thing on Christmas morning. The period between Christmas and New Years’ Eve allowed for a bit of quiet recovery before an evening of revelry on the 31st.
Then, after a drying-out brunch on the morning of Jan. 1, it was all over but the fond memories.
So what went wrong? Probably a few things. First among them, I no longer welcome birthdays. Followed by substantial changes over the last few years to my circle of friends that has put Halloween parties off the table. Then the lack of a seasonal harvest. Oh, and don’t forget the fracturing of Thanksgiving into small, casual affairs. And something similar with Christmas. And over the last few years, I’ve been less attentive to my religious duties than I should be.
All of this is potentially correctible, of course. But do I give a damn? Not so much. The magic of the holiday season, this year and last, wasn’t the holidays — it was the extended vacation I scheduled to take care of things around the house and otherwise unwind and plan for the coming year.
Theologians talk of acedia — a sense of spiritual and emotional deadness marked by burnout bordering on apathy. I think the term fits. Since Medieval Christendom, acedia has been viewed as a sin, mostly because those poor souls afflicted by it suffer the double whammy of torpor and a profound lack of motivation to do anything about it.
The simple joys of the past, of family and security and that happiness that comes from being secure in one’s person and station, have taken flight. In their place are a sense of self-reliance and mission related to big goals that take big effort to execute. Yet the risk of walking your own path instead of conforming to the path set by family, friends and co-workers is that your only corrective comes from within. With acedia, there’s no corrective from within. Cue the vicious infinite regress.
Part of it, too, might be the lack of seasonality in the annual calendar. When I was a kid, we had the subtext of micro-farming to break up the year. Whether it derived from the different ways we took care of the horses in summer versus winter, or the cycle of planting, nurturing and harvesting from a large garden and from fruit trees, we had no choice but to respect that different times of the year had a different focus and therefore different associated joys and laments. Without that connection to the earth, and with the Catholic liturgical year subdued the further from the Church you fall, the calendar really is just one damn thing after another with no need to plan ahead or to enjoy the immediacy of now.
Maybe next year will be better. More meaningful. More seasonal. Less sterile.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Heterosexual Fecundity: A Coda to the Gay Marriage Argument

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Of all the reactions I’ve seen to my recent blog post against gay marriage, the one that surprises me the most (besides Frankie Machine’s half-assed non sequitur) is the curious counter-claim that homosexual marriage should be permissible because straight people who cannot or will not reproduce can also get married.

I think people who raise the “sterile heterosexual” rebuttal believe they’ve advanced an intellectually serious counterfactual to my central claim, but I don’t think their logic holds.

Let’s begin by assuming that my central argument is correct and we all concede that by definition, marriage is no more and no less than a legally and culturally respected contractual framework that provides for the rearing of children and offers a socially useful infrastructure for protecting and privileging close-kin relationships while legitimizing the intergenerational transfer of property.

The state’s compelling interest in supporting child rearing — augmented by a series of tax benefits and an inheritance mechanism — confers publicly financed incentives, some of which are conditioned on the actual production of children and some which are latent in the structure of the marriage institution itself. People who take advantage of those financial benefits without producing offspring are functioning as free riders: They’re being unfairly enriched by participating within a system for which they aren’t entitled to membership, draining the state’s resources without upholding their end of the baby-making bargain.

A few observations:

  1. That heterosexual free riders unfairly benefit from marriage doesn’t mean that homosexuals also deserve a free ride. It’s illogical to claim that one abuse of a system justifies a second abuse; the logical solution is to limit heterosexual free ridership, instead of opening the floodgates to homosexuals. This counterpoint highlights the most significant deficiency with the “sterile heterosexual” rebuttal.
  2. In a practical sense, it’s very easy to see that homosexual couples are biologically incapable of procreation. Heterosexual couples, by contrast, are almost never obviously sterile; the only way to tell for sure whether a heterosexual couple is capable of procreating is to subject both parties to invasive and expensive fertility testing. Were the state to require fertility testing as a prerequisite to obtaining a marriage license, the result is either a very steep bill for the state (and almost surely, in the aggregate, failing a cost/benefit analysis) or the effective restriction of marriage only to the wealthy (which contradicts the purpose of marriage as the optimal family structure for child rearing). The least-worst outcome is probably something very similar to what we have today: Marriage open to heterosexuals on the belief that enough will procreate to justify the public expenditure on tax benefits without incurring extra costs assocated with new barriers to entry.
  3. In a cultural sense, admitting non-fecund heterosexuals into the institution of marriage serves a secondary purpose of reinforcing the desirability of marriage as a normative family structure. Socializing children to look to marriage as a bedrock social arrangement serves a useful public purpose in itself — enough, I think, to partially mitigate the free rider problem for sterile couples.

Thus, although sterile heterosexuals are certainly a problem, they’re not the problem that gay-marriage advocates think. The free-rider nature of non-fecund heterosexual unions is a defect that requires amelioration, not a systemic defect that therefore justifies gay marriage.

Indeed, it’d be more rational to exclude known sterile heterosexuals (e.g., the elderly) than to include homosexuals within the marriage institution, because as long as the state provides taxpayer-funded benefits to married couples, then the state incurs a cognate obligation to ensure that those tax dollars are expended for that purpose with as little “leakage” as possible. Free riders constitute a “leak” in the system — one that should be plugged, not enlarged.

From a purely public perspective, the only way to get around the free rider problem is to create an institution (e.g., civil unions) that don’t confer the same family-raising economic benefits as marriage.

If, and only if, the state removes all child-rearing economic benefits from the institution of marriage, does it make sense for the state to sanction marriage among the homosexual sterile or deliberately non-fecund.

Until then, no number of childless married couples will ever justify opening floodgates to even more free riders.