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| We are told that love is universal. Birds do it; bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Everyone falls in love. Apparently, love is built into our genes. We humans seem destined to rush into sexual relations with obsessive passion, often threatening the balance of their social relations in the process.
However, given the universality of love, we would do well to pause and think about the social consequences of love. What does it mean for human social life that love is ubiquitous. Let us consider first the impact of love on marriages practices in societies where descent is unilineal. In such societies, as for example the Yanomamo, love, while common, is rarely if ever a motive for getting married. For such people, living in societies where lineages provide clear pictures of their kin and clear prescriptions of their marriage partners, marriage is an arrangement that one endures.-.more often than not, for the profit and power of one's lineage. In these societies, where domestic units are extended families, decisions about any particular marriage are usually made by the lineage member in authority, usually an elder male, whose primary concern in arranging a marriage is the betterment of his lineage. Societies with matrilineages are no different from societies with patrilineages in this regard. Marriage, in other words, is a political act. It is a union instituted so as to enhance the "corporate interests" of lineage members. Like the activities of modern business corporations, marriage arrangements are public rather than private, and often energetically lobbied. Marriage, in other words, is a political gambit. The aim of lineage members with respect to marriage is to maximize the reproductive potential of women, thereby to increase and enhance the lineage. Once we understand that marriage is a contract for a woman's reproductive potential, we can better appreciate the high frequency of practices called levirate (according to which a man marries his brother's widow) and sororate (a woman marries her sister's widower) and we can also understand why it happens that women in such societies who fail to produce offspring are disdained. Besides being a political act, marriage is often part of an economic alliance between lineages. A marriage arrangement is often sealed with the exchange of valuables, brideprice in some societies, dowry in others. The contractual character of marriage is especially apparent in societies like the Yanomamo where marriage is one of a series of political and economic tactics. "Alliances between villages are usually the consequence of a developmental sequence that involves casual trading, mutual feasting, and finally, the exchange of women" (Chagnon p. 160). In sum, marriages function as public arrangements that maintain the larger system of political and economic relations. In functionalist terms, the actions of marriage partners unconsciously support the social system. What happened to love in such marriages? Don't love and marriage go together...like a horse and carriage? What of the very private feelings that men and women experience for each other? Are these feelings just crushed and smothered in Yanomamo life as a result of the functioning of the system? Does it not seem that modern Western societies are advanced well beyond the Yanomamo insofar as we air out this often smothered dimension of human life, allowing private and personal feelings to have priority in this most significant social relationships? I suggest that the answer to all these questions is not a simple "yes." Rather, we must examine the manner in which our own practices of love and marriage, including all the private and personal feelings associated with it, are themselves political and heavily lobbied. In the wake of such a study, we will find that our supposed private practices of love perform some very public functions within our own system of social life. Ultimately we will see, I think, that our marriage practices are just as political and economic as the Yanomamo's, but in a different way. Let us examine the historical source and development of our own notions of marriage, built as it is on love and oriented as it is toward the creation of a family, a "haven from the heartless world."* Western marriage practices, and in particular the privileged experience called romantic love are, at their roots, intensely, albeit invisibly, political. To understand the politics of Western love, we must return to the roots of Western concepts about marriage. These roots inevitably bring us back to the Christian theology and to the theocratic society that emerged in Rome in the third and fourth centuries. The Romans practiced patrilocal residence and reckoned kinship patrilineally. Marriages amongst the Romans, as amongst the Yanomamo, were arranged by male lineage heads with an eye to developing and enhancing the lineage. The earliest Christians subscribed to these traditional Roman marriage practices. But gradually the ranks of Christians were swelled with dissidents, especially women* who were systematically frustrated in their attempts to exercise autonomy in society and who began voicing their oppostion. Religious movements, under the label of Gnosticism, encouraged this dissent. These Gnostic movements were blends of Christianity, neo-Platonic philosophy, and Eastern mystery religions. They promised liberation from the suffocating domination of the traditional Roman institutions. Liberation, according to the Gnostics, was claimed to consist of an "inward turn." The world with its contracts and obligations, its institutions and laws was essentially evil. This was the world Jesus had come to destroy. In its place there should arise a world of the spirit, a world where people relate to one another directly, sincerely, and authentically rather than through contracts and laws. That spirit, however, is able to arise only among persons who free themselves from civil life and who turn their attentions inward in order to "know" the divine gift of autonomy and free choice. (The word "Gnosticism" comes from a Greek word meaning knowledge as is visible in our contemporary words for medical knowledge, "diagnosis" and "prognosis".) Cutting oneself free of civil life had to be, from a Gnostic's point of view, radical. The ardent Gnostics flauted the laws, were persecuted as subversives, and often dropped out, becoming hermits (a.k.a. anchorites). The first community of communal drop-outs (a.k.a. cenobites) appeared at the end of the third century in north Africa, led into the Egyptian desert by a man named Pachomius. As part of their subversive preaching, these ascetics reinterpreted the earliest writings about Jesus. They said he was a God in men's clothes. He only seemed to be human. They launched programs of corporeal self-discipline and were sharply critical every personal and social practice that comforted and pleasured human bodies. They lobbied against laws, against government, even against churches. These ascetics were "the pure" for whom organized religion as much as organized society was a blasphemy. And, of course, they railed against all physical activities which might divert the inwardly directed gaze, especially alcohol, sex, music and dance. Noise, above all, was the devil's work. In the fifth century this buoyant program of subversion became organized and widespread under the name of Manicheism. In the eleventh century, the movement surfaced again amongst the Cathars (i.e. the pure, a.k.a. Albigenses) in southern France. Then and there the politics of Gnostic opposition to civil institutions focused on the matter of marriage. Troubadours' songs popularized the struggle of pure love against the venality of (i.e. money-grubbing motive behind) civil marriage. The early stories of Tristan/Isolde, Arthur/Guinevere and, later, the bard's Romeo/Juliet - indicate something of the tension that surrounded the matter of love-in-marriage from the late middle ages to the early modern period (see Paul Zweig's Heresy of Self-Love). These stories can be interpreted as attempts at damage-control in the face of the popular embrace of "love" as authority. Elsewhere (in Britain) the popular ascription of authority to each and every human individual's spirit rather than to the institutions of civic life surfaced during the peasant revolution of late 14th-century England. Dissidents called Lollards, fought for the right of the common man to read the Bible. Other social movements in the West picked up the Gnostic motto "question authority." The Protestant Reformation, launched by Calvin, Luther, and Henry VIII in the 16th century was a major force of de-institutionalization and de-ritualization of social life. For example, the Quakers, in the 17th century encouraged some startling forms of world-rejection.* In a similar vein, the Enlightenment, prompted in part by Descartes' inwardly-turned "cogito ergo sum," was a rejection of the superstitious civil institutions of "the ancients" and an embrace of true knowledge (i.e. reason). Indeed, it is difficult for us to understand the Enlightenment assumptions about the "agent" without being reminded of Gnostic theology. This study of Gnosticism in Western intellectual and social life suggests that "romantic love" in Western social life is ultimately just as highly political as a motive for marriage as anything to be found in Yanomamo life. Love in marriage is the ultimate authority not to be questioned. It is linked to the concept of conscience and will, and ultimately to identity, both individual and ethnic. Who I am and what I do in marriage and in politics is a function of my "inward turn" to the deep inner realities of "love." Just as marriages may split because of lost love so too political agreements may founder because the hearts of erstwhile allies turn sour. In other words, internal heartfelt commitments, at both the personal and public levels, are authoritative, and not to be second-guessed. Frequently enough, we can still hear modern nationalists voicing the argument used by Martin Luther nearly five hundred years ago: "God help me, I cannot do otherwise." We all embrace the aphorism "Make love, not war," assuming that love is the very antithesis of war. But, if romantic love in West social life lies at the very foundation of Western politics, and if war is politics by other means, then, one must conclude, romantic love and war are cut from the same cloth. Making war is a ferocious way of making love. |
edit by rvec: please use quote tags and add a source
Well I'd say trying to formalize, decsribe, represent, model love is not in the domaisn of the possible, of what our senses allow us to. We have been born, created like this. It is one of those things we know about, we are sure they exist, we hope for, like soul and the universe, but we'll never see them...you know about love cause you see it..but can't tuoch it nor command it. TThat's the way it is..
