Interview: Marriage And Society

The following is an interview with Paul McKinney, PA, discussing his secular reasoning for why marriage is good for society.

Thought Butter: Well, shall we begin?

Paul McKinney: Let’s do it.

TB: Ok, thanks for being here with me and being willing to share your thoughts on marriage and society. As you made clear in our email exchange you are not religious, or at least explicitly religious in the sense of any mainline religion, but you call yourself a…um,  idiogenic proponent of marriage? Is that right? That’s an interesting word, and I’m familiar with it because I am in the medical field, but it’s certainly not in the common vernacular. Can you start off by saying what you mean by idiogenic?

PM: That makes me sound pedantic. I wasnt trying to invent a category or anything, more just being clever, I suppose. It has nothing to do with idiocy or being an idiot.

TB: (laughs) Yeah, probably good to clear that misunderstanding up.

PM: I am also in the medical field, I’ve been a  physician assistant for a couple decades, and the medical field is stuffed with metaphors for society and so I find it a good way to help explain concepts to myself and others. And, we’ve talked, the conversations we have had at work, its been fun to exchange with someone who gets my metaphors, so I appreciate that. Um, so..when something is idiopathic that means we do not have a source for its cause. Like someone who has a rash that has no known cause we say it is idiopathic, where the prefix idio– means “unknown”, and then –pathic is the disease part. 

TB: So, just so we are clear, you’re not calling marriage a disease.

PM: Well, not all of them (laughs), but they sure can become diseased, I supposed. No, um, the idiogenic just means unknown origin. So I am a proponent of marriage and I see it as a fundamental good for society without retreating to religious origin for marriage. So idio, meaning “unknown”, and genesis for “beginning”.

TB: So you essentially see marriage as born out of society through millennia of social evolution and social contracts developing and evolving over time, and that…for that reason they are a benefit to society? 

PM: Yes. Think of marriage as a beneficial mutation of humanity just as the many beneficial mutations of ocular genes, for example, led to the development of the eye. There are myriad eyes in the natural world, some of them very different, but all of them have helped that particular species survive and it is that survival that is the good in itself. And so marriage, as it has evolved through humanity’s social history, is like the eye – it helps the organism of humanity survive and therefore is a good.

TB: Yeah, and I thought that was really interesting. I have, I have spent a long time studying apologetics, science, philosophy, religion and all that because I like to be able to say I have exposed myself to all the hard challenges to my faith, to Christianity. Not that I know everything, or even that I have an answer, but that at least I have spent time thinking about it and contextualizing it. So, when you told me your thoughts on marriage I thought, man, that’s a good analogy. And…

PM: But its not an analogy, I’m not saying eye development…

TB: Right, right, yeah, I..I misspoke, I’m sorry, you are saying the evolution of marriage is of the same kind as the evolution of the eye, both developments of organisms, one an individual and the other, a…

PM: A group. Yes.

TB: Right, so, the reason I find people like you so fascinating is that you are, what an atheist or agnostic?

PM: Yeah..I’m not much for labels but if you press me thats probably where I fit in. I don’t think there is a god or at least one that is very involved.

TB: Yes, but even still you are pro-life, pro-traditional marriage…

PM: Yes. Both of those things, and like..sixty seven percent conservative.

TB: An oddly specific number.

PM: (laughs) the math isn’t that hard, you just take all the major issues on the conservative party platform, figure out how many you agree with and divide by the total. 

TB: And its that easy!

PM: It’s that easy.

TB: Okay, well in that case I’m and still zero percent progressive. Anyway, you are not religious but still a proponent of traditional marriage, in that you think it is best for society and, contrary to the Respect for Marriage Act that is working its way through congress, you think this is bad news. So why don’t you take a bit and unpack why.

PM: Lots of people think that marriage shouldn’t be on the menu for governments, like they should just get out of the business altogether. I think Ben Shapiro, some of these other thinkers and commenters are of that mindset. And this is largely because of the idea that there are different spheres of governance in the world. You have the family as one area of sovereignty, religious as another area and then civil government as another. From this perspective each has a degree of sovereignty and immunity from the other areas. But this idea is largely drawn from Christian history. And I don’t have a problem with it, I think it is a good idea and it has worked out pretty good, as far as it goes. But I take issue with it because you necessarily have to fall back on religion or a god of some sort who called these boundaries into place in the first place. And I just don’t think that is the case.

Most people in the country, from my experience at least, maybe yours is different, most people who share these beliefs cannot mount any significant defense of traditional marriage as a good in itself for society. And, you know, I just think that is kind of boring, to be honest. It’s unoriginal, it’s, it’s inconsiderate…uh, it does not lend any clues that it was arrived upon with careful observation. I mean, if you think that god came up with this idea for marriage, and that god is as good as you believe, then it shouldn’t be very hard to find some solid reasons in practice for why it is so good.

TB: Okay, so what are your reasons for why marriage is good for society?

PM: Traditional marriage, do you mean?

TB: Yes, sorry, we should first toss out the definition we are working with.

PM: Traditional marriage as defined as one man and one woman making a promise before witnesses and entering into a lifelong union that is predisposed to making offspring. That’s one I go with. 

TB: And, I hate that I have to even go one step further, but because of the current insanity, one biological woman and one biological man.

PM: Yes, sure, I also hate that we have to do that. There are a number of ways marriage as defined is best for society, and we can take these in no particular order. George Gilder once said that the biggest problem any society has to deal with is what to do with the sexual energies of its young men. They are rapacious and destructive if their energy is untethered. Marriage directs man’s sexual energies into providing and protecting. He isn’t going around spreading his wild oats and knocking up everything in sight. Also, men are tied to their future through their children giving them purpose and direction. Without this they are like salmon in heat, living to spread their seed and then dying. Basically, men want sex and women, who want protection and provision, say you can come and get it if you use your strength here to protect and provide for us and don’t go sleeping around. Without marriage to direct their sexual energies, men are destructive. It’s the difference between a shotgun shell ignited in the chamber versus one exploding in your hand. The energy is directed towards a goal, a target, where when it is outside, the shot just goes everywhere. And you don’t have to look very hard to see this in practice. I mean, it’s not the demographic of married men that are responsible for most homicides. Who is it? It’s the single men, the detached ones. 

TB: So just to sum up your first point, marriage is good for society because it essentially tames men to behave according to a sexual standard. And, I suppose this has some sort of, maybe not a positive effect in itself, but more mitigating a negative reality.

PM: You could put it that way. Just like DNA has mechanisms to prevent free radicals from mutating it, marriage protects against the free radicals of undirected males. It can be a very very good thing if done right or a very bad thing if let loose. And this is one a the big consequences of radical feminism, is that it essentially took the natural masculine sexual ethos which resembles something like the morals present on a pirate ship, and said that women ought to be free to have raucous, consequence free sex as well. But the only thing keeping society from becoming a pirate ship was the sexual restraint of women, the fact that they are not as much given to the act of sex as men – biologically they are not, which is provable – and because of this men had to submit their desires to the patterns of women specifically in marriage, which calmed everything down. 

Taking the opposite side of things, women build society. They need to make a space for offspring to grow in a safe and nurturing environment protected from danger, where the offspring can learn and develop. We call this a home and the home is the domain of the female. I know there are lots and lots of people who would hate me for saying that, but if you look in the animal kingdom or anthropologically throughout history, it is the female who does this and it has led to all the splendor of modern society. Women build civilization through raising children, through nurturing, moral teaching and training, civilizing the children to be a part of a community, etc. And men build civilization by protecting and providing for the civilization-building happening in the home by women. Like it or not, this is the best situation for children: a mom and a dad raising their kid together.

With the expectation of marriage lifted, not only are the men untethered and their sexual energies threatening to damage society, the women have decided to mirror the men’s sexual freedom, or at least perceived sexual freedom, it is not really freedom, but because of this society loses the building block which is the family. No families, no society. A town is made up of families, so are states, so are nations. Decouple the marriage, the family disintegrates and so does society. 

So there are a few tangible reasons why traditional marriage is good for society. 

TB: I’d like to press you on something there, even though I agree with nearly everything you said. Haven’t you just proven that commitment generally, not marriage specifically, is good for society? I have asked a couple of women that I work with who were not yet married but living with their fiance, if they see any point in making it official and getting married, and they said no, they promised each other and that was good enough for them.

PM: Yea, I think that is bull****. That is just word play. In our society, marriage is a promise made between two people and witnessed by others. So if someone says to me they promised to stay together but don’t see the need to go through the process of a marriage ceremony, that is like renting your furniture because, why buy it? Its functionally the same, renting and buying, in both circumstances it is in our living room. Yeah, but there is a difference and that difference is a self evident one. Renting has connotations, it has an expiration date, its easy to get out of and you are not responsible for the furniture ultimately, maybe you will be charged a damage fee, but nothing lasting. Marriage and promise are the same thing, they are synonymous. And if it is not witnessed by others there is no social contract. That is the whole point of having a wedding or some kind of ceremony is to essentially ratify that union in the presence of the stakeholders of that union. Marriage must be accountable to the society it happens in because they benefit from it.

TB: But functionally how is that different? You have lots of people today who are living together for longer and longer with no formal exchanging of vows or legal documents. Why do you think the promise is important? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but from your perspective of this sort of darwinian approach to the benefit of marriage for the organism of humanity, a promise sounds a bit…it smacks of the religious, let me just put it that way. But I also heard you use the word stakeholders, can you also talk a bit about that idea, of how society are stakeholders in a particular couple’s union?

PM: Well this is really where the idea of marriage as the starting of a family comes in. As people group together, this increases the chance of survival; one person can’t do it all. Biologically, a man and a woman bring something unique, not only obviously biologically, but the means by which they raise offspring bring complimentary but vastly different benefits to the family unit. Ten thousand years ago if you had one person both hunting and tending to children very little can get done. Either you hunt poorly and starve or there is no one home to protect and raise the kids and they die. And just biologically it is self evident men are suited for the latter. As much as I am all for the modern development of female equality, they just aren’t suited for this task, and that is not something anyone should apologize for. The point is, if you want the best chance for offspring to survive and thrive, you need complementary pairs. This is so ****ing obvious that it makes me want to pull my hair out when we are trying to feminize the men and masculinize the women. This will not lead to a healthy society.

And this leads directly into the idea of stakeholders. I know we talked a few weeks ago about that Joe Rogan interview with Matt Walsh and how we both thought he mounted a pretty poor defense of marriage from a secular standpoint. Rogan kept asking Walsh “Why does a gay couple’s marriage affect you?” or “How does them getting married hurt you?” or something along those lines. And he didn’t have much to offer. He should have stuck with the religious arguments and I think he would have sounded more convincing. But anyway, what he should have said is “Do you want me to answer alphabetically or chronologically?”

A married couple’s immediate, local social setting is absolutely a stakeholder in the marriage between a man and woman. As I mentioned, it mitigates the destructive nature of single men, as well as all the economic flourishing that comes from motivated, driven men to produce for their family, which means building businesses and such, and all the tax revenue that comes from this which clearly benefits a local structure. Children of single parents live overwhelmingly with their mothers, and stats are very clear that kids without present, engaged fathers have higher crime rates, higher rates of poverty, lower education status, and become burdens to the community rather than boons. So, the local community absolutely is affected by solid marriage structure.

But even more than that, on a, I guess you could call it a meta-narrative scale, families are by nature an optimistic, future oriented enterprise. They are looking to clear the way and level the paths of the future for their own kids. This means rooting up the injustices or dangers they see that may affect their kids, they work hard to leave their kids better off than they were and by proxy the world benefits.

TB: Okay, but it seems like you merely made the case that a man and women are both necessary for the survival of the offspring. That seems like, it’s still quite a ways away from society wanting to protect the institution as between a man and women or even government, uh, protection of the status as such. I mean, especially when you have significant and increasing pressure from the populace, the people the government is in charge of, having a louder voice that this is what they want, for marriage to change definitions. 

PM:  Look, call it what you want, the family unit consisting of a man, woman who create a stable environment for offspring is the future of any society. The next generation of humanity is like the next generation of an individual animal couplet. If you don’t have kids you don’t have society. And so no, having a man and a woman raising offspring in an exclusive relationship is the same thing as society, because when you get a bunch of individual family units together in one place, that’s what you get, you get society. It’s not like these things are disconnected, the family unit is a brick in the building of society. And so a society that destroys this is the society that is destroying itself. It is socie-cide, as I have called it before – a society that is actively promoting ideas that will lead to its own death.

TB: Yeah, I really liked that term, mostly because it is clever and combines two interesting concepts. Bravo on that one. Any time I can make up a neologism, it’s a good day. One of the thoughts I had, and I suppose this may also be a bit abstract, but the idea of a marriage being a covenant. I will do this for you and you do this for me. It is a promise, but a covenant has some pseudo-legal connotations. Or maybe not even pseudo, just straight up legal ideas. HOAs have covenants, there are legal requirements quid pro quos or whatever. And from this covenant a family comes with kids who grow up within the boundaries of the covenant. From there they will leave the family and engage in a world and country that is, I suppose you could say, one covenant after another. My relationship with my work, church, my country is a covenant based – I have duties towards others and they to me. Even, America itself is based on a covenant, we are a federal union. Federal from the latin foedus meaning basically “covenant”. So the very practice of marriage that begets children which make a society is covenantal from bottom to top. One thing these covenants do is they act as connections between individuals, kind of like rebar in cement that gives the cement strength. And so when this is attacked at the root, there is no… the power of the federal covenant is informed and given its power by the million tiny covenants holding it up. It all falls down. 

PM: Yeah, man, this is your tax dollars at work, right? If the government cannot promote the simplest idea that will propagate the organism of a particular society, then what the h*** are they good for, you know? I mean, we pave roads because it decreases the chance of collisions and accidents, and we fund a military to protect the borders, protecting marriage is homeland security. Just like evolution is predisposed to life and survival, governments act as as sort of regulating mechanisms of the organism that is society, and it ought to be acting in concert with the organisms best chance of survival, whatever will bring life.  

TB: Ok, so let’s just sum up real quick. Marriage is good for society because it is the only mechanism which perpetuates the organism of humanity. It mitigates male sexual energies and channels them for the good of society instead of tossing a match on it. 

So just like any organism, humanity’s number one goal is to survive, and to do that it has to pass on its genetics. When an organism reaches the pinnacle of its evolutionary progress, nature has selected through mutation and through the fire of selection to be as predisposed to survival. The kinks have been worked out, so to speak and now it is humming along. Cheetahs have worked out to have claws that do not retract so they can grip the earth when they run, this is a finely tuned trait that proves it has tightened all the bolts or dotted all the ‘i’s or whatever you wanna call it. Now they progress by passing on the genes of a fully developed organism that has maxed out. If you introduce some massive mutation of those things which has brought such success, like some gross mutation in one generation, like it is born without a tail, this will kill it; it won’t survive. 

And so if you take something like marriage which has been honed through social evolution and introduce some massive mutation in one generation, the organism will die. But what about the idea of gay marriage? You have two committed people who happen to be the same sex and who can parent a child through surrogacy or adopting one of the many orphaned babies both in our country or abroad?

PM: I have no problem with gay people entering into a civil union. You know, they main things you always hear about why gay marriage should be enshrined is the visitation rights in hospitals and estate issues of who a person can legally leave their money to. First of all, I have worked in hospitals for my entire adult life all over the country and I cannot think of one time where a person has not been allowed visitation because they are not blood family. That doesn’t happen. There may be a number limit just because of the size of the rooms, but never because someone doesn’t share genetics. I mean, how would anyone ever know, first of all, and second, don’t people have friends that are closer, either relationally or geographically than immediate family? When I hear this argument for a reason gay marriage should be legalized, I mean it is legalized, through Obergefell, but you have heard this even as the Respect for Marriage Act but when I hear it I want to call bull****. It  doesn’t happen, its a total non sequitur.

And secondly, referring to the estate laws, that has to do with taxes, with the government getting their greasy fingers on taxes, which, in which case there can easily be legislation changing estate tax laws so you can leave you money to whoever you want, regardless of family ties. Neither of these two reasons are real barriers that legalizing gay marriage was necessary to overcome. So that is the first thing.

My particular perspective is that I don’t care who anyone shacks up with. Don’t care. You do what you want in the privacy of your own home, and even publicly, whatever. The problem arises when, and here I will hop back into my analogy, the problem arises with the intentional mutation of a functional gene. Not only will there be deleterious effects for the organism, but the gene will not stop mutating. The moment you remove the initial barriers and spell check mechanisms of a gene, then it prohibits any stopping mechanism and the gene can further mutate beyond recognition. This is called cancer. A cell turns off its “stop” mechanism, among other things, and it continues to mutate and proliferate becoming increasingly undifferentiated. In society we can trace this from gay marriage to trans to polygamy to pederasty, etcetera. There is no stop mechanism. 

TB: Yeah, so the idea there is, at any point when the state says we will allow gay marriage but not polygamy, people will rightly come forward and say “Hey, these two people got married based on the fact they love each other, we three love each other, why can’t we also have the same rights as others,” and then, God forbid but he probably won’t, an adult and a child can use the same logic. When the definition of marriage is taken out of the well defined boundaries of man and woman, it will not stop rolling until it reaches the absolute lowest energy state.

PM: And that is the slippery slope fallacy, right, that people flipped out when conservatives were prognosticating all sorts of licentious unions if gay marriage was legalized. But that is exactly what happened. As I said before, the institution of marriage helps society and survive and thrive and based on this fact alone governments ought to be in the business of protecting the definition of man and women, the only combination that can build a future. 

And, on an oblique note, but not really, one of the ways the destruction of marriage effects us all is declining population rates. China is suffering the largest demographic collapse in human history. Russia is not far behind, the EU, us here in the US – most developed nations are not going to be able to sustain their populations which has dire economic consequences. 

TB: So it is very literally socie-cide, as in the society may physically cease to exist. Um, I wanted to make a few other points that I had been thinking of to add to our discussion. You know, I think the thing that is the most irksome of this whole Respect for Marriage Act is, one, the name of it because it is actually quite the opposite…

PM: …it is respecting marriage to the same extent the Inflation Reduction act reduced inflation.

TB: Yes, that is very true. I think a pattern is emerging. Let’s just hope they don’t ever pass a Respect for Puppies Act or something. Um, so apart from that is the hubris of the administration to think it can redefine something older than it. Marriage is older than the country, it is older than western civilization, and from my perspective, it is the first institution ever introduced, by God in the garden before man fell. Its like an arrogant peasant crapping on the king’s carpet. So by redefining something it has no claim to be able to redefine opens wide the gate to reach into other places it has no business being and redefining those as well. It is a type of transgression that heralds other similar transgressions. What about private property, what about religion, or church or personhood? Nothing is outside its greasy, Cheeto-fingered, ham handed grasp. So that’s one thing. The other thing is the eroding of the importance of mothers and fathers. And you spoke about this earlier, I just want to maybe give it a different spin. Redefining marriage is to cast a shadow on the sexes. It is very true that man and woman individually have been under attack over the past few years, but here the attack is at the union of the two, what they are together.

Importantly, the fact that man and woman together forming a family unit, which naturally conjoins to form society is like an immune system that is preventative for totalitarianism. That may sound like a jump, but one of the keys to totalitarianism is atomistic population who has no significant relational connections and so glom onto the state to alleviate the free floating anxiety brought on by disconnection. Which is a whole other conversation, but certainly pertinent to this one.

PM: Yeah, and if I can quickly jump into that analogy of atoms. If you take a hydrocarbon like an oil, which is essentially a chain of carbons with hydrogens stuck on, the longer the chain the more viscous the substance. So olive oil would be medium length and fairly liquid, but the more you add on the more it retains its structure. Really long ones hold their shape, like axel grease. I don’t know if that helps anything, just a thought.

TB: I think that should just about wrap it up. I appreciate your thoughts and the interesting biological perspective you brought.

PM: Sure, thank you.