Oaths aren't about oaths, they're about performative speech acts

The Anglosphere has a rather cavalier attitude towards oaths. People make wedding vows “till death do us part” when they both know perfectly well that they’re willing to divorce if the marriage makes them unhappy. Doctors in America swear an oath when they graduate medical school but no one has coordinated about which oath it should be, and as of 1989 some medical schools still made their students swear to teach their teachers’ children for free. 800,000 people people swore the naturalization oath to become American citizens last year, and very few of them have any well-thought-out opinion on what it means to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution or how they would make sure they’re doing so. Worse, as written the naturalization oath appears to ban dual citizenship but naturalized U.S. citizens can have dual citizenship just fine.

Some of my friends (most of whom read a lot of fantasy novels at a formative age) are very irritated by the fact that people keep swearing oaths everyone knows they’re going to break. However, I think the Anglosphere’s casual attitude towards formal oaths is fine.

Sometimes, we want to do a particular kind of performative speech act where we officially put a person in some important category like Married, or United States Citizen, or Soldier, or Police Officer, or Doctor, or Government Official. But performative speech acts feel like they ought to be ritualistic and dramatic. In principle, you could become a United States Citizen with as little fanfare as renewing your drivers’ license. It’s just that, if becoming a U.S. citizen only required filling out an online form and sending in a small registration fee, it wouldn’t feel very important. We want people to unambiguously be either in or out of the category, not confused because they don’t remember whether they filled out the form; we want to push people towards believing these categories are important parts of their identity, that there is an ingroup they’re part of and there are standards they should uphold.

So we want to have a ritual, and we need to put some content in it. Traditionally, I suppose you’d pray for the gods to bless your endeavor, but this is the 21st century and we’re all secular and ecumenical. So instead we come up with some vague words about what you’re supposed to be doing with your new status, how spouses or citizens or doctors or U.S. presidents ought to behave, and you promise that you’re going to do that.

The content of the oaths isn’t literally meaningless: it would be extraordinarily avant-garde to exchange wedding vows in which you promise to hate each other, sabotage each other’s interests, and make each other your worst selves.

But these oaths shouldn’t be understood as literal promises to behave in any particular way. They should be understood as a statement of the ideals that people in this particular important category ought generally to live up to: spouses ought to try to stay together, doctors ought to share medical findings with other doctors, and naturalized American citizens ought to respect the Constitution.¹ Their primary purpose is to make the performative speech act more formal and theatrical.

Presumably this particular feature evolved from previous rituals, where people were put into an important category like Priest or Nun or formerly Married where they were absolutely expected to carry out their promises. You can’t take a vow of obedience and then say that what you really meant was that you like living communally and dressing like a penguin.

You have no obligation to pick up people’s meds from the store most of the time, but if you made a promise to do that, you should, because they’re counting on you. But if your spouse knows “till death do us part” means “until our marriage is a disaster”, she’s not counting on you not to divorce her. Since medical schools give dozens of different oaths, no one knows whether they should count on doctors to share medical findings or not. And surely naturalized American citizens don’t have a special obligation to respect the Constitution unshared by citizens by birth.

How do we tell apart fancy official promises people are supposed to keep and fancy official promises people aren’t really supposed to keep? As far as I can tell, the usual method is A Big List of Rules and Exceptions Laying Out Appropriate Behavior In Every Edge Case. “Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution” isn’t really defined anywhere, because it’s supposed to be more of a vague intention. But by the time you become a nun, you know exactly what the vow of obedience requires you to do. When you do jury duty, they spend several hours telling you exactly what your jury duty oath means. And when you get a therapist you get a thick packet of papers about therapist confidentiality laying out in exactly what circumstances a court can subpoena your therapy notes and whether the therapist has to break confidentiality if you pose a serious threat to the national security of the United States. (Not a made-up example.) If we want people to make fancy official promises they’re actually supposed to keep, we make it very clear and unambiguous what the promise means.

The nature of oaths was driven home to me when I took the Viable Paradise Oath at the end of the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop. I think if I said “wait, I’m supposed to submit to paying markets only, does that mean I can’t put up short stories for free on my Substack? If I write a story for a friend’s zine project for fun, would I be foresworn?” I would be entirely missing the point of the Viable Paradise Oath. The intent isn’t, actually, to force me not to use my best judgment about when putting up a free story is valuable cross-promotion for my paying work.

The intent is to mark my transition into the state of New Professional Writer. Being a professional writer is a bit of a reverse causality situation, because you will only ever earn serious money as a writer after you start treating it as your job: scheduling other things around your writing time instead of your writing time around other things; promoting your work with confidence; negotiating contracts. So—though I don’t know for certain—I imagine Viable Paradise staff deciding to make a big deal about us being New Professional Writers in order to give us the confidence to act like professionals, even if we’re only earning a few hundred dollars a year from our fiction. And how do you do that? Well, you do a ceremony and you have people make some promises about behaving in the way people in that category should behave but which you don’t expect them to literally keep.

The purpose of the line about paying markets isn’t literally to have me only submit to paying markets. The purpose is to say “this day, you are a professional writer, and professional writers go ‘fuck you, pay me.’”

Some of my friends don’t like this feature of society. Sometimes they think it would be more aesthetically pleasing if people only took oaths they actually understood and intended to keep; de gustibus non est disputandum. But sometimes they think that it’s disrespecting the sacred institution of oaths to have people running around taking oaths without intending to have them bind their behavior.

I think this is misunderstanding what our culture actually uses oaths for. We use them as the sacred institution for dramatically and ritualistically moving people into important categories. If we want people to reliably behave a certain way, we have different techniques, like the Big List of Rules, Exceptions, And Edge Cases. Since we don’t have any other institutions for the category-moving performative speech act, and we do have one for the binding-your-future-behavior performative speech act, I think it is reasonable to use oaths to put people in categories, even if we expect them not to follow the literal text of the oath.

1. That said, I’m glad we’ve phased out the medical-school-professors’-children-get-scholarships aspect of the Hippocratic Oath.