Two years ago Bill Kristol interviewed Amy and Leon Kass, wise and well-read leaders of Great Books discussion-type courses at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. I found the conversation below worth my time listening to. (I just discovered that Bill Kristol has a whole list of interesting conversations available for viewing). Back in 2001 I remember President Bush chose Leon Kass to head up his Presidential Council on Bioethics. I greatly respected Leon Kass' high regard for human life and therefore his out-of-favor position on embryonic stem cell research. Consequently he has always loomed in my mind as one of the "good guys" of the modern era. (A few years ago I was intrigued to see that he published a "big book" on The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (2006) in which he adopts a philosophical rather than a theological approach to Genesis. I am finding it rewarding as I make my way through it).
Below at the 43:50 to 1:19 spot one can listen in on a discussion of Amy and Leon's course on "courtship" They subsequently produced a collection of readings related to the course titled Wing to Wing; Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (2000). It cemented in my mind the important role literature plays in the education of the sentiments.
One reviewer of Wing to Wing wrote:
“Reading this book is the next best thing to gaining a coveted seat in one of the University of Chicago seminars taught by Amy and Leon Kass. In an era when fashionable opinion speaks of courting and marrying in ironic tones or not at all, the Kasses do something unfashionable. They put us in touch with thinkers, past and present, who treat the task of finding and winning a marriage mate for what it is: a pursuit central to human life and happiness. At a time when young people are floundering and failing in their search for the right person to marry, this splendid selection of readings comes not a minute too soon.” —Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and the Family (1997)
Sean McMeekin wrote a personal essay on courtship based on the book. Excerpts:
On the current state of affairs compared to earlier approaches to courtship:
The difference today, the Kasses argue, is that an explosive cultural nexus of unprecedented prosperity available to both men and women, easy geographic mobility and consequently loosened family ties, contraception and abortion-on-demand, along with a "general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters," has de-stigmatized all of the old problems relating to sex and deadened our once-mystical appreciation of its social importance. Why worry about the imperatives of modesty (from the woman's angle) or the consequences of casual sexual conquests (from the man's) if there are no stigmas attached to any of the old sins?
Some of us, though, are still old-fashioned (or, in my case, merely confused) enough to devote lengthy thought to such matters. And the Kasses, frankly and unapologetically, have set themselves the task of helping us out, by assembling an astonishingly rich array of essays, novel excerpts, and poems which seriously explore the problems presented by love and the mysteries of married life.
Collectively, the effect of the readings can be stunning. Beth Bailey's historical essay "From Front Porch to Back Seat" brings to life the lost world of our grandparents, where hopeful young gentleman callers would meet virtually a girl's entire extended family before she might so much as entertain the thought of kissing him — a world that already seemed hopelessly quaint to our parents, whose own courtship system of on-the-town "dating" seems ever quainter to us with every passing year. What would our grandparents make of the casual couplings of the current college scene, so acerbically described by Allan Bloom here as the "passionless" sex of "souls without longing"?
I thought the following paragraph on "Language" illuminating.
Nowhere is the scale of our current impoverishment more evident than in the debasement of language. Where the ancient Greeks had, as the Kasses point out, close to a dozen words to describe varieties of love and friendship between men and women, we are stuck with a soul-deadening phrase like "relationship." So unerotic has sex become that we describe it with metaphors suggestive of an industrial process ("hooking up"), a law office ("my partner"), or of corporate drones drudging along in their cubicles (my own personal favorite, "getting busy.") Worse still is the sterile jargon of pop psychiatry and sex-ed, which, as the Kasses complain, reduces the transcendent longings of eros to a banal, and incredibly boring, "story about pleasure and safety."
How, exactly, did we reach this depressing state of affairs? Clearly our dilemma is rooted in the very freedoms that have allowed us to become so prosperous, to unshackle ourselves from economic want and oppressive social obligations. . .
As sexual beings, men are not naturally inclined to monogamy as are women; nor is there any conceivable economic advantage for a man who commits to support a woman and the children he has with her. Marriage civilizes a man precisely by demanding such renunciations of ego, asking him to forfeit independence and carnal freedom and assume countless social burdens in exchange for a woman's consent to love him and no other. . .
I found the reviewer's comments on his experience in Russia fascinating:
I have been brooding over the various consequences of the war on chivalry ever since I began spending time in Russia, a country where feminism has never existed. There isn't even a word for feminism in Russian, nor even, properly speaking, a word for political "equality" (ravnopravie, literally "equality of rights" is close, but this is not a phrase you'll ever hear anyone using, let alone getting excited about). If you try to explain feminism to Russians, and believe me I've tried, it comes out sounding like "lack of difference" between men and women, which sounds patently absurd to them. Why, an utterly baffled Russian girl asked me once, would I want to be like a man?
In so many ways, post-Communist Russia is a throwback to a bygone era, from its extreme social inequality to the tight-knit extended families that serve to protect both the young and old from the all-too-real dangers of the outside world. Nearly all Russian girls (and you'll have to forgive me here, you're not allowed to call a girl a "woman" in Russian, it's like calling her an "old hag") live at home until marriage. Due both to the strength of tradition and to a somewhat accidental legacy of Communism — ridiculously small apartments — most girls are also extremely close to their parents and grandparents, both physically and emotionally, and whether or not she works, a girl is expected by everyone in her extended family to marry, and marry well, by her early 20s.
The effect of this traditional social arrangement on the dating scene will be familiar to anyone who has read the great romantic novels of Jane Austen or Lev Tolstoy, which are smartly excerpted in the Kasses' book. When a Russian girl emerges from her warm familial cocoon into society, any encounter with an eligible man — especially with a foreign man such as myself in these times when so many Russian men are impoverished — is fraught with intense expectation. Moscow simply pulses with female desire, of a kind that would be incomprehensible to "emancipated" western women raised to expect sexual gratification on demand. I have been consistently astonished by the intensity of the Russian female gaze. Without apology, a girl will publicly scope me out from head to toe before we have even been introduced, sizing me up as marriage material.
This intensity does not dissipate after the initial romantic encounter, either. First and second dates in Moscow can be gut-wrenching affairs, as a girl continues her merciless evaluation. If she is shrewd, by the end of the first week she will have ascertained your current and future earning power; your relative social status in Moscow society and the country from which you come; your degree of chivalry, or inherent capacity to make her feel beautiful and precious and irreplaceable; and of course your ability to entertain her, make her laugh, make merry with a crowd, and share your accumulated wisdom of the world. If, after all this, she likes you, she will present forthwith you to her parents, and if you pass muster there, well...this is the part I've had a bit of trouble with. By this point, it seems she wants you to marry her.
Many American acquaintances who hear my dating war stories from Moscow mock these marriage-ready women for being desperate, but I think that only illustrates their own spiritual emptiness. What I have concluded from my experience in Russia, rather, is how much a truly romantic, non-feminist woman expects from a man — and how poorly my culture has prepared me to give it to her. . .