I am not, overtly at least, a romantic, and have long suspected Valentine's Day to be a creation of Hallmark Ltd rather than a genuine occasion for celebration. Two articles do much to convince me otherwise.
Christina Hoff Sommers takes on V-Day, an attempt on American campuses (none here, yet, to my knowledge and with thanks to the heavens) to transform Valentine's Day into a day of awareness of male violence against womyn [sic - c'mon, you know they spell it that way]. She suggests that a small act of defiance in the face of such idiocy is to insist upon observing the day as a celebration of love, however modestly. She also provides sufficient information about the Vagina Monologues to persuade me never to attend a performance or read a script of it.
The second article is one that I found very moving when I first read it in Modern Sex, a compilation of essays edited by Myron Magnet. Scruton's second contribution to that book, Becoming a Family, struck me then as moving. In part this is because while Scruton is always erudite and eloquent, he is seldom personal, and so the powerfully personal tone of this essay is striking. Rereading the essay yesterday, I liked it even more than I had the first time. There are so many themes here that it is hard to know how to choose the best, or most pressing, or most important. Since this is a Valentine's Day attempt, I'll just pick the themes that held the most resonance for me, then.
There are a few people who, like Scruton, lived through the age of free love and immediate personal gratification, consciously rejected it, and have built better lives. There are vastly more, though, who to this day do not reject it, and view their semi-survival as a vindication of this ethos. What I find poignant in Scruton's essay is the idea of how much better the world might be, and how much happier these people, had they found the courage and integrity to examine starkly their worldview, and then the strength and fibre to change. And of course the real victims of the 60s and 70s weltanschaaung are those who cannot even be described as semi-survivors: the children aborted before their lives began, or ruined by chemicals at an equally early stage; the children abandoned by one or both parents, "brought up" (in the best case) by kind and involved teachers and nannies who are nonetheless a far cry from parents, or (in the worst case) by gangs, or peer groups who explicitly seek to destroy and not to built up, and teachers and babysitters who actively or passively abused their charges.
When Scruton speaks of his children idealizing themselves through play with tractors or dollies, and then links that to his discussion of marriage vows, he is exactly right. This is why the original marriage vows, institutionalised, bordering at times on cliche, are so powerful. Nobody can vow that they will succeed, in the next fifty years, in always, every minute, treating their husband or wife with love and honour, nor in cherishing without a single moment's anger or irritation. The children of the 1960s pointed at this inability and declared marriage to be a sham. Scruton rightly understands this as another form of idealization. By making these specific vows, and not, say, vows to make each other banana milkshakes we are connecting ourselves with those uncountable couples before us who embarked on this experiment, and putting our own stamp to it in the hopes that our children might do similarly. Just as children playing at being parents or workers cannot possibly, at that time, function in either capacity, they are nonetheless shaping themselves to be the kind of people who will be parents or workers. By sincerely promising to love, honour and cherish, even while we know how flawed we are, we are helping to create the circumstances that will lead us to become such people.
Scruton is too Anglican to be comfortable discussing faith with respect to his personal beliefs in much detail. The story he tells, though, strikes me as one about grace, about a God-given happiness and peace and fulfillment found by a man who had transgressed, repented, and hoped for but did not demand forgiveness. I find it instructive that for Scruton, grace came in the form of a good marriage, and in the births and education of his children. May all of us who believed, however briefly, in the ethos of the 1960s, find such redemption and peace through marriage, family and love.
Posted by Clio at February 15, 2005 11:52 AM