Tag Archives: Tradition

Traditional Recourse in Marriage

I’m going to return to my previous discussions of the marital cross. In a decent traditional Christian society, there are be no grounds for divorce except for adultery or abandonment, because divorce is degenerate and harmful to society, but this does not mean there would be no recourse for the married but suffering.

For a woman (who is physically weaker) being abused,* the best traditional recourse is family. Having her father/brothers/cousins/etc. ‘pay a visit’ to an abusive husband and ‘demonstrate the error of his ways’ to him should be the most immediate course of action. If a visit or two doesn’t work, then the ‘he needed killing’ defence should be applicable. The widow is then free to remarry.

For the man being physically abused, the traditional recourse is to be a man and not let your weaker wife beat on you. There should be no need for more recourse in cases of physical abuse. Obviously, defending yourself from physical abuse is not abuse itself and should not be punishable by law.

In cases where family is not available/impractical to the woman or the man is being abused emotionally or through sexual withdrawal or restraint is not an option, the church has a traditional process of recourse given in Matthew: Bring it to your spouse, if that fails, bring it before a few brothers, if that fails bring it before the church, if that fails, then the abusive spouse should be expelled from the church. The marriage continues and the believing spouse should continue to love their spouse, but the expelled partner is no longer a believer and no longer a part of the church. If the now-unbelieving spouse, having been through the process of church discipline decides to the leave the beliving spouse, that is marital abandonment and is allowable grounds for divorce.

If the church fails do deal with physical abuse or the abuse is particularly heinous then the law should be employed. There is nothing more evil than a someone who abuses someone under their authority and the law should punish such abuse appropriately. The punishment** for a man who physically abuses his wife and/or children (or a woman who abuses her children and the husband is unable to restrain) should be a private whipping (not public so that he is not shamed before those under him); if a man has been whipped a few times and is still abusive or if his first offence is particularly heinous, then he should be executed as the criminal he is. The grieving widow is then free to remarry.

Sadly, we do not live in a decent traditional Christian society, so instead of a civilized response to abuse, we encourage more abuse through the dissolution of the family. Obviously, this is not all practical advice given our current degenerate laws, but  this is how a traditional society should handle domestic abuse: family, masculine leadership, church discipline, and, if necessary, corporal/capital punishment.

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* When I am speaking of abuse throughout this piece, I am not speaking of such things as the bitter, even mutually violent, arguments of a dysfunctional marriage or isolated incidences (unless the incident is unusually heinous). I am talking of a sustained pattern of cruel abuse. Isolated incidences and mutual dysfunction should be dealt with privately through forgiveness and love.

** Obviously, when I say punishment, I mean after a fair trial.

Euler and Tradition

Scott writes on what he calls getting Eulered: when someone tries to convince you of something or rebut something you believe using arguments (particularly mathematical ones) you are either not intelligent or not trained enough to understand.

I’ve never heard the term before, but I’ve thought of this. I am intelligent, but not exceedingly so, there are a number of things I won’t be able to understand, at least not fully or without much more effort and time than I am willing to put in.

So, I follow a simple heuristic: what does someone smarter than me who agrees with me on things I understand and is willing to put in time/effort think on the issue?

If you know he agrees with you on the things you understand for similar reasons as you, you know he reasons in similar fashion to you from similar presupoositions. If he reasons in a similar fashion as you, you then know that his thoughts on another issue you don’t understand will be the most reasonable approximation of what you would think if you were either smart or knowledgeable enough to be able to form an informed opinion on the matter.

No matter how smart you are you can’t know or understand all things. In the case where you can’t, the wise course of action is to fall back on those who think the same as you, but are either more intelligent or more knowledgeable on the subject matter.

All rational organizations outsource when it’s more efficient, so why not outsource your thinking when it is more likely to be correct if someone else does it for you?

Agreeing with someone because he generally agrees with you when you don’t understand the argument in question is usually the most rational form of action.

Of course, this is not an original heuristic, and is no different than asking, ‘what does my father, my priest, my teacher, etc. say?‘

But what if you move your intellectual outsourcing beyond a known individual to something greater. This is where tradition comes in: why outsource your thinking to a single individual when you can outsource your thinking to the collective reasoning of every single previously-existing mind of your society?

Is it not much more efficient and wise to follow the collective wisdom of thousands of minds much more intelligent and knowledgeable than yourself than to go through the intellectual labour of thinking something through for yourself and likely arriving at a rationally inferior position?

From this, is not the person saying, “I believe what my ancestors, the magisterium, my intellectual forebears believe” being more rational than the one who tries to reason everything out for himself?

Maybe, argument from authority, if the authority stands firmly upon a mount of tradition, is the most rational argument of all.