The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases
But the Polyamorist will change his mind and leave you poor.
Yesterday over at Patheos I posted a short take-down of a New York Times Modern Love piece from someone likening her brand of free love to taking the clothes off of paper dolls. I didn’t say it over there, because I was trying to be delicate and fair-minded, but it was one of the more ridiculous pieces of writing I’ve read in several days. Her use of the word “ethical” quite drove me mad, also the word “care.” It seems like both of those groupings of letters ought to have a whole world of emotional, historical, spiritual, and practical resonance coursing through them. Instead, the sexual revolution has taken both those terms, hollowed them out, and is using them like two skin suits to cover their flimsy, paper-thin desolation.
I knew I had heard the term “ethical polyamory” or something like that somewhere, but couldn’t remember, so that when I was cleaning out my tabs, I was relieved to find this long series of Tweets. There was, if you remember from last week, a magazine cover that made the rounds, and the tweeter had some strong reactions. Here is the cover:
And here is his initial post:
In our latest installment of capitalist atomization and narcissistic individualism repackaged as progress I present to you…
and then he posted the cover. I am most shocked to discover that cats are some kind of thing among the polyamorous. I’m so sheltered, thankfully, that this is the first time I’m finding out about it. I am not curious enough to investigate why. In fact, I am not curious at all. Whatever it is, it sounds stupid and awful.
So anyway, Tyler Austin Harper followed up his prescient summation of the nature of polyamory with a thread of seven thoughts. Let’s take them one by one:
Here’s what I’m trying to get at about the new polyamory discourse: I’m not interested in whether polyamory is “ethical.” I *do* think that the normalization of polyamory that is currently underway isn’t a threat to, but is the ultimate expression of, bourgeois individualism 1/
I think he means “bougie individualism.” Bougie is easier to say and is more au courant. It is exactly the right word to describe the latest money-making opportunity. Isn’t it irritating how the only way to be interested in anything is to buy more stuff? Your wellness journey can’t be accomplished without a flowing stream of boxes from Amazon. Your spiritual proclivities require merch. And, of course, if you want to have sex with a lot of people and still feel good about yourself, you’re going to need to pay for it one way or another—probably with yet more boxes from Amazon.
The point isn’t that polyamory is/isn’t immoral. Rather, polyamory is a *symptom.* It’s downstream from a culture that is allergic to limits and personal sacrifice and that embraces the idea that human beings are fungible commodities to whom no permanent attachment is owed 2/
Yes, I agree, except that *also* it is immoral, and the fact that it is immoral is not a secondary issue. One thing about the law of God, if followed with the whole heart and mind and soul, is that it directs a person toward the hard but eternally profitable way of self-sacrifice, of actual love, of not using people as commodities.
I understand, though, that forever and ever until the earth goes up in a ball of fire, no one will agree to follow the law of God as a way of finding good things, and will always try to have those good things without the Person who gives them, and therefore, I will be one of those people who is irritated with everything until the day I die. I’ve made my peace with my lot in life. Don’t feel bad for me or anything. We go on:
Polyamory is the terminal cul-de-sac into which the culture of capital has always been rushing headlong. The self is a continual project of improvement. Other people are accessories to that project, onboarded only to be discarded when they no longer fit our sense of self. 3/
Yes. Isn’t it tragic? I’m so heartened that someone, even someone on the app formerly known as Twitter, is seeing even a small measure of the heartbreak and misery wrought by throwing away something precious—like limits on personal freedom. How exhausted we all are, trying to improve ourselves. Even those of us who aren’t trying to devour the souls and bodies of other people are still burdened by the constant, wretched messaging that you should be doing more, experiencing more, feeling more, fitting more into your sixteen-hour day. And in all of it, it is the sense perceptions of the moment that rule.
Remember the old days, when you could have a family who loved you and taught you who you were? Parents who might have sacrificed themselves for your good, who showed you, by word and example, how to sacrifice yourself for others? Those were good times. Now we have to live with stylized scoldings of people like Glennon Doyle who claims to love “all” the children of the world.
Then there’s the bleating about polyamory as a challenge to the repressive “nuclear family.” Yet no one seems to notice that the supposedly “bourgeois” and “conservative” vision of the nuclear family is precisely what capital is making impossible for large swaths of Americans! 4/
I mean, he’s not wrong is he. What a stupid time to be trying to buy magazines and find people to love:
Isn’t it at least a little suspicious that polyamory — which is supposedly a “liberatory” corrective to repressive family structures — happens to be exactly compatible with a mode of economic life that has made both traditional marriage and parenthood completely unaffordable? 5/
Suspicious, ironic, terrible, but exactly what you would expect of a culture that chucks God away and thinks it knows better.
Isn’t it the least bit odd that all of the trendy progressive developments of recent years — antiracism, polyamory, whatever — conveniently pose zero challenge to the economic status quo? And in fact are tailor-made for a world of soaring inequality and collapsing safety nets? 6/
I mean, I don’t think it’s odd. I think it was the sort of thing a lot of people saw coming down the pike, thirty or forty or even fifty years ago. Christopher Lasch, for one. C.S. Lewis. Tolkien. Chesterton. Ellul. Evelyn Waugh. The Bible. This is exactly what a person could have known would happen. Christians knew it would happen. Thinking people knew it would happen. It’s not odd or surprising in any way.
He has one final excellent insight:
The right and the progressive left have both installed personal freedom as the last god standing. They’ve just chosen different fetish objects. Both are a product of a Balkanizing culture that makes it impossible to imagine spending our lives in one place or now with one person.
Yep. That sure is true. No argument from me.
In Morning Prayer today, we got to the part in 1st Corinthians about whether or not you should get married because “the time is drawing short.” We had a commiserating discussion about what the word “short” means in that sentence. With God, everything is short. But with man—and woman—everything feels beastly long. It was comforting to hear Paul at various points consoling and admonishing the Corinthian Christians to think things through, to make wise decisions, to do their best not to fall into sin, but in everything to be willing to devote themselves to living in holy obedience to the commands of God. A God who, it turns out, loved them and loves you with the kind of love that never runs out, or fades away, or breaks up with you, or eats you alive. When you commit yourself to him, you never have to be alone or alienated, for he is always with you and will never forsake you.
Here’s my radical advice for the day. Instead of being curious about polyamory—a way of life that sounds boring, complicated, hurtful, naive, dumb, and, frankly, ugly—try learning more about Jesus. It’s the only thing that will actually solve your problems.
Have a nice day!…and come back tomorrow because I’ll be blogging about Satan. And the day after that, about Women, unless I change my mind and switch it around.
I am reminded of the brilliant short stories of the Catholic writer, Andre Dubus from collections like Separate Flights and Adultery and Other Choices. Perhaps because he was writing within the vacuousness of the first wave of the so called sexual revolution in the 1970’s.
Frankly, polyamory just sounds exhausting.
"You shall be as God, knowing (not mere cognizance, but defining and deciding) good and evil."
Secular society is like a ship without compass or chart; it knows (thanks to some vague remnants of Western, Christian culture) that there is such a thing as right and wrong, but has little idea of how to decide which is which, other than trying to maximize pleasure (almost inevitably sexual) while thinking that there is probably a possibility of harm that should be avoided, but not knowing where the danger zone is. In the meanwhile, secular society takes for granted the blessings produced by Western, Christian culture, even though they spit in its face and mock it.
But God's truth cannot be mocked; it always reveals reality.