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EllaAikenSecondPaper 3 - 05 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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This is a rewrite of Yinan Zhang's paper. | | | Perhaps one of the reasons for high-divorce rates is the unrealistic expectations we have of marriage. When we fail to consider that marriage is not always the best option and comes with many disadvantages, we may be disappointed that we are not living out hall-mark cards. A realistic approach to marriage could lead people not only to consider more fully marriage as the natural course of a relationship, but also address the possibility of divorce upfront. Pre-nuptial agreements are often shunned although they can address many of the financial risks of marriage. For many, this remedy arguably carries the stigma that a couple already plans for future disintegration, thus undermining the major element of dedication in marriage.
Marriage is obviously a life-altering decision, and even with the perfect partner, comes with disadvantages. When we view marriage as a natural stage of life, we may be disappointed in the extent of the disadvantages it entails, or lose out on the possibility of achieving greater happiness through an alternative lifestyle. In the end, whether we choose to maintain a complete sense of self through singlehood or strive to merge our identity with that of a life partner through marital union depends on a balancing of the benefits and risks of each lifestyle. Most choices that we make in life are fully considered. Before deciding to go to Columbia, we had to decide to go to law school at all. When we accept marriage as a social norm, we rule out numerous other lifestyles that entail their own benefits and risks. We have an obligation to our own happiness to ponder the full extent of each choice’s consequences, instead of blindly following the social norm. | |
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- Your view of the required edit seems to have been that the piece needed clearer writing and some basic facts. Not only the subject and viewpoint but the structure of the argument you seem to have accepted as given. Within those confines, I think your editing was mostly successful. You improved flow and made the language clearer. You provided some slight support for the propositions put forward.
- But I don't think this is an easy piece to edit, and I don't think merely smoothing the workmanship is sufficient. The more you live inside the argument, it seems to me, the more urgent it becomes to transcend. Issues of culture and society are too complex for us to treat this schematically. Why do we in this society in the post-Pill world marry unless we intend to have children? In the US, it is pretty evident that children do better in families with a strong marital relation at the center in substantial part because the society provides so little support to children that without two working adult caretakers they are in danger of suffering deprivation and harm. But in the post-marital European societies people do not have to marry in order for their children to have a secure safety net, and there are, among my Dutch or Icelandic friends, for example, many people raising children alone and many couples raising children and intending to be together for a lifetime who see no reason to get married. It appears from this perspective that in the US we force working people into marrying by threatening otherwise to impose poverty and hopelessness on their children.
- Where societies have decided to recognize that children have an equal right to housing, health care, education and training regardless of whether their parents are poor, marriage is no longer extorted from people in this way, and most of those in the present generation who marry seem to do so largely for reasons of religion and family tradition. Similar, though less voluntary, reasons underlie the behavior of their peers outside the West, whose cultures often place less emphasis on individual self-determination and more on family and other group interests. Separating the cultural strands and accounting for social policies differences without indulging in culture-specific rhetoric is difficult; it isn't accomplished by taking a "false neutral" stance and ignoring the particulars of social and cultural context as they operate just now, just here, with whomever is speaking.
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