Living in the House that Culture Built

It has amazes me how much getting married has affected my life. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had no intentions of leaving or breaking off my relationship for some time now, so it isn’t an inclination of changed freedom. And our engagement period was almost a year, so I had all that time to think about the new direction in which my life would be heading post-June 27, 2009.

I guess part of what the surprise entails is that I was under the impression that after all the time spent thinking about proposing, all the time post-proposal getting ready to get married, and a small handful of breakdown/throughs about this step in my life, I didn’t expect that everything would feel so subtly and yet radically different.

But it does.

It is true that my step with marriage was twinned with the major step of buying a first home together and moving into that home shortly after the wedding, so there has been a lot of change going on in my life. All the same, prior to the event itself I didn’t think that anything fundamental was about to shift. I had lived with my wife for years prior, have been deeply in love with her for at least as long, have had conversations about children and pets and the like, admitted fears, shared dreams… what more was there to do?

And yet, I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a subtle but undeniable qualitative difference to our relationship that extends far beyond the legal signals of our decision.

What has occurred to me in the proceeding weeks is that the change I feel is our official entrance into the cultural institution and tradition of marriage. They are often unseen and unspoken (at least in a direct sense), but these institutions and traditions are at work behind so many conversations, images, interactions, behaviours,  and loci of meaning we encounter on a day-to-day basis. As someone who spends not an inconsiderable amount of time thinking about the roles of culture and tradition in the practices of politics and life, it was a bit… unnerving to have one such institution so thoroughly sneak up on me and apply such a strong undercurrent of influence to my own life.

It got me thinking about how many other such amorphous and translucent norms and undercurrents are constantly at play in our lives to which we scantly pay attention nor attempt to understand. I think probably far more than we actually care to admit.

Of course, we aren’t always wholly unaware of these cultural forces and some of our most epic and intractable battles are squarely rested on the impulse to either accept or reject such institutions and their attendant implications. But even in those epic battles, I think there is a degree to which we continue to fail in any real attempt to understand those institutions and norms in a deeper sense because we generally get caught up in the debate about their fundamental value to society or their underlying heinousness as a source of oppression and conformity before we’ve really sat in their current of their rivers like a Heraclitian dissenter.

A little time invested with those institutions will often reveal that the source of rancor in our culture wars emanates from the fact that to some degree both sides are right.

It is true that cultural institutions and social norms provide importance sources of value and meaning and operate as a vital interstitial glue to our atomistic wanderings. My own limited experience in the vestibule of marriage has already provided ample evidence about the kinds of opening to a vast swath of grounding, lineage, meaning, compassion, and presence to which such institutions can connect a person.

At the same time, it is equally true that there are elements of archaic thinking, biased and despicable reasoning, and outright brutality that are able to hide away from the light of day safely within the confines of such antechambers. I need think only of the dismay that my wife and I feel at the notion that many same-sex couples in the US remain incapable of experiencing the deepening of love and commitment that we feel because of so-called “traditional” views about what marriage is and isn’t. That this circumstance is on the change is, of course, heartening, but that change is and continues to be hard fought. This is only one such example of where traditions and cultural institutions can be as much harm as they can help in our social lives.

The seeming pendulum, though, is that one either comes to blindly trust in and advocate for the maintenance of such traditions and institutions, citing the usual litany of reasoning behind the position. Or, conversely, that one because a cultural warrior, determined to strike down the inequities and injustices perpetrated against the few by the many through these odious spells. The problem here, again, is that in either case, it seems like the positions there arrived become knee-jerk and, in essence, their own source of shuttered dogma railing against any attempt to circumnavigate an alternative perspective and understanding.

When it comes to culture wars, the real enemy is a felt and self-aware understand of that over which one wrangles.

All of which is decidedly troubling, not in the least because we have a great deal to learn about ourselves by really embracing those institutions in both a loving and critical stance. But also because such a willingness to open to these currents in a full-bodied sense — to inhabit these traditions with a focus on maintaining the brightness of a reflexive mind, heart, and spirit — could well do us a great deal of good in our political machinations as the last presidential election demonstrated. A willingness to set aside reactive sets of “accept” or “reject” and engage in actual discussion about different cultural institutions within the context of a twenty-first century world may well offer a surprisingly fertile ground for communication, cooperation, and mutual understanding between conservatives and liberals, perhaps even libertarians and progressives. In working our the nuances and intricacies of different cultural corporealities, we may well find that we work out the differences and come to a better understanding of one another at the same time — the seeming opaque differences that lie at heart of our lingua franca of venom.

Of course, we’ll never know if we remain fundamentally unwilling to try.

Image via Flickrer Gabriel Hurley

Tagged as: awareness, cultural insitutions, marriage, meaning, reflexive understanding, social norms, value