last names
“Always remember that there was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name.”
-The Avett Brothers (“Murder in the City,” The Second Gleam)
Content Analysis isn’t much for values, but two separate ideas — one personal, one public — have been swirling in my head. I feel that they are connected, but my brain hasn’t figured out how.
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Content Analysis is getting married soon and seriously contemplating taking my partner’s last name. Of course, there many good reasons not to do so. We’re both independent people with our own histories and traditions attached to our last names. Why should one of our heritages trump the other person’s? And, frankly, inventing a new last name seems to reject both traditions (and give any potential offspring a hell of headache). Moreover, we both have careers and even if I keep my pre-marital name for publication, it creates a lot of boundary questions (which name do I have on campus? with colleagues?).
That said, the above quote by the Avett Bros. puts a mighty ache on my heart. The point of marriage is to develop a new family union, to share a love bound together by shared experience and commitment. Isn’t sharing a last name a powerful and permanant reminder of that? I remember many times in the family of my youth, disliking everybody in family, but also loving them in a more enduring, primal way. Having something as fundamental to one’s identity as your name in common with another person (or persons) is a very potent symbol of how you share a love that can rise above some nasty moments of dislike.
Isn’t “the love that let us share our name” something I want both me and my partner to share with our children some day? But, by the same logic, to abandon my last name is a sort of symbolic betrayal of the love of the nuclear family of my youth. Which I guess I’m okay with. Despite elaborate fantasies on the part of certain members to the contrary, we’re a small, careerist family that no longer shares much of a connection beyond buying Christmas gifts and calling to announce our achievements and far-left political attitudes. My partner’s family is big, loving, and values family more than anything else in this life. They’re the kind of people with whom you’d like to share a last name.
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Of course, I would never tell another person what to do about marital naming. Why would I want to impose my social and political values on their personal choices? That would be a behavior wholly out of line with my loosey-goosey, culturally relativistic, feeble liberal commitments.
And that’s how most of us, sociologists, think, isn’t it? It’s no longer the Journal of Marriage and the Family, it’s the Journal of Marriage and Family because we don’t want to imply — even for one second — that one type of family structure is better than another. We say that David Popenoe is a dick when he claims that the American family is in decline.
We constantly preach relativism, encouraging students to respect people of different cultures, belief systems, and demographic characteristics. That is noble of us, but let’s not pretend that these responses don’t come from a place of moral conviction. And when moral beliefs rear their head, eventually the laissez-faire notion of “anything goes” goes out the window. A principled person inevitably comes to a moment where we draw a line in the sand and reject some behavior. Perhaps we say no to extending free speech to those who spew hatred. Or maybe it’s a rejection of the burqa imposed on Muslim women, with our commitment to gender equality overriding our respect for cultural diversity. Moreover, isn’t the fundamental assumption of sociology courses everywhere — that we should care about poverty and something beyond our own self-interest — an imposition of morals.
So, here we come to a national debate about Bristol Palin, a teenage girl suffering under the unkind gaze of the national press. Remarkably enough (as the Daily Show writers have repeatedly pointed out), the Republicans have brilliantly stolen our language of respecting personal choice. It’s the family’s personal choice to keep the baby and we should butt out, they tell us.
Are they right though? Isn’t it irresponsible of us, knowing what we do about the burdens of teen motherhood and the failure rates of shotgun teenage weddings, if we don’t say that the Palins are setting a bad example. Sure, Bristol’s unborn child will probably be fine being born into an affluent family that can pay for day care while she takes college classes. But shouldn’t we have the conviction to point out that most 17 year-olds in that position would be better off by having an abortion? Can’t we just say that Bristol really needed to some pregnancy prevention courses other than abstinence?
Yeah, I get it, let’s not gang up and shame a 17 year-old. However, sociologists are too quick to veil our moral commitments and traditions behind relativism. Unlike Popenoe, I’m not calling for us to be more conservative. I am simply suggesting that we spend too much time asking empirical questions (what is the world like?) when we should be asking moral questions (how should the world be?) As Marx wrote, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.”
