Competing Anthropologies

A couple of days ago I was listening to NPR.  I like NPR because they often times manage to escape the trap that we humans often fall into of turning a thick, robust, so full of life that it is bubbling over sort of world into a thin, single-layered, reductionistic world in which we can explain how something happens and then manipulate this world that wouldn't be worth living in if it were true.  

That said, there was a show on marital infidelity and its causes.  They had psychologists, sociologists, even a guy who runs a website for married people who are looking for an affair with another married person.  However, don't fear, as he explained, he is only a business man.  He is not doing anything immoral.  I think his presupposition is that the free market is a sphere void of any worries of morality, only governed by unbridled cravings thanks to our split spheres of private and public.  He claims he is only allowing people who had this desire to connect in a safer way that doesn't tangle unwed folks into this mess as well.  However, just a couple of minutes before, it was stated that the incidence of marital infidelity increases greatly with opportunity.  Sure, there might have been an inkling before, but they can jump over all those steps of second guessing when the website will deliver extra-marital sex to them and then put the billing on their credit card under an alias, like GFI Media, or something like that.  That way, when our spouse looks at your credit card bill, she won't know.  Sadly, when the psychologists and sociologists were asked about what they thought about this guy, they had no recourse.  "He is smart, way ahead of me.  I never would have thought of that."  Of course, this "business man" also wanted to ask us to re-consider whether monogamy is an archaic outdated arrangement for us modern people.  I love that as consumers whose desires are endless, we never question our working anthropologies, only any external system that might limit our omniverous selves.  After all, the modern world tells us that nothing external or greater than us can tell us truth.  Truth is in us.  We are our own arbitors of truth.  

Studies show that the main causes for extramarital affairs are stess and boredom.  Never once was our assumption about what marriage is questioned.  The self needs variety and the self cannot receive too much stress.  If that happens, the self will look for a more interesting, or less known self, than the self that (s)he has already committed to.  What really got me was when the "business man" empathized with the millions of adulterers who are unhappy because they are not getting enough sex in their marriage.  "After all", he said, "these people did not agree to a sex-less marriage."  And that is precisely the point!  They did not agree to a sex-less marriage.  They did not agree to a marriage with an abundance of sex either.  They agreed (and committed to) in sickness and in health, till death do we part.   This is a peculiarly un-modern claim that is made on the life of an individual which presupposes an alternative anthropology than the one employed by the psychologist, sociologist, and business man.  All three of these people mentioned that the problem was that these people weren't happy , of which boredom and stress were merely manifestations.  Yet no one, despite the wealth of data and experience about the myth and bankrupt notion of perpetual, chronic happiness, no, not a single one of them said, "well maybe happiness isn't what it's all about."  Why?  Because the modern world says that is what it is all about.  Before any claim can be made on my life in the form of a duty or a respinsiblity, I, yes, I, must be happy.  Then maybe we can talk.  

I turn to Hauerwas and Willimon in Resident Aliens who tell us Christians that we live in a peculiar narrative, in which we are not called to be happy, but holy.  And to be sure, holiness makes a claim on the self not just at the expense of the self (though for modern people it will feel that way), but for the very sake of the self.  So if you're a Christian and you're bored or stressed...too bad.  Who told you that you were condemned to perpetual happiness anyway?  Is it good to be joyful sometimes?  Absolutely.  But when happiness is our ultimate ideal, and not the holiness of God, remember where you came from, and remember to where you are to go.