No, this isn't going to be an uncomfortably personal diatribe and certainly not a post-modernist aren't-I-so-clever analysis of love. Instead, this will be an overview of the Western concept of romantic love, with many borrowed concepts from the often (but not always) brilliant Culture and Identity by Charles Lindholm. The thing Lindholm wants us to understand is that while there is a concept of romantic love in all cultures, the Western take on it is rather unique and not nearly as widespread as you'd imagine. Love and sex are intimately linked in Western society. Weddings are based on love and consummating a marriage is a consummation of love, hence why sex is called "making love." But many societies do not see that "obvious" connection between sex and love that we do, or of marriage and love for that matter. The ancient Greeks and Romans apparently regarded love as a dangerous thing (not so different from us) that had to be properly vented. So the men would visit prostitutes and fall in love with them. They would make love to these women while they simply made babies with their wives. In many cultures, such as the Bedouins and Medieval Europe, love is chaste and unconsummated, just talking and holding hands, watching the sun rise and all that stuff.
One culture, the Marri Baluch of Pakistan, is highly patriarchal, the women have no rights and are treated as chattel. Marriages are unions between families—alliances and trade agreements. They are seen as a stabilizing force in society while love is considered an inherently divisive thing, antithetical to marriage. In fact, in their culture loving one's wife is considered unnatural and wrong. The wives still do have love affairs behind their husbands' backs, but again these are chaste loves and they are despised not because of any infidelity but because they see them as destructive to society. People from enemy families can and do meet and fall in love. Think of the destruction wrought by Romeo and Juliet, all the collateral damage and political repercussions and you can see why if they think that's what happens when two people fall in love why it would be thought of so dimly.
The Oneida cult, who advocated communal love and actively discouraged monogamous relationships, collapsed shortly after their leader died. It's usually figured that because toward the end many of the cult members had abandoned communal love for monogamous relationships ("special love") that the collapse was due to the separation of sex and love. I suspect that it's because romantic love was forbidden and, unlike the Marri Baluch, the people who were in love could always leave their society for a more accepting one.
The Western version of romantic love generally appears in "open, competitive, individualistic and fluid" societies whereas hierarchical, structured societies do not have such a concept. As such, it's rather unlikely for a love story in a society much different from our own to have actually played out. For example, in 300 Leonidas probably would not have loved his wife, not because he was such a tough soldier, but because the rigidity of society wouldn't have allowed the idea to cross his mind. With this in mind I wonder about the plausibility of the romances played out in various sci-fi/fantasy worlds that are not connected to the real world. Star Wars, Farscape and Battlestar Galactica come to mind where certain societies (not to mention species) are alien to ours yet romantic plotlines involving those characters progress exactly as if they were from a Western society. I'm not complaining, I just think it's funny how much we take it for granted.
And finally, I leave you with this: for all those cynics and post-modernists that say that love is just a neurochemical concoction devised by Nature into tricking us into reproducing, you are dead wrong. If love motivated people to reproduce then the West would have the highest birthrate. Instead, we have the lowest while societies that do not believe love, sex and marriage are the same thing have the highest. So, if anything, love actually serves to moderate population growth.
5 comments:
I liked it, except for the last bit. You know full & well that it's higher education & better availabily to birth control that keeps our reproduction rates lower than the rest of the world.
well, also bear in mind that "actually" loving one's wife tends to keep one from viewing them as just a baby factory.
But yes, you are correct, birth control and education do help us (or in some cases hurt us) a lot, but I don't think that's all of it. Remember there are a lot of people in the US who think birth control is a sin, but even with that our birth rate is nothing near the countries' in Africa.
I still don't really think love has anything to do with it. Children are more of a financial hinderance than a help here, whereas in poorer countries, they're a source of labor & care for parents in old age.
That's a generalization, not every non-industrial society makes babies as a retirement plan or to breed as slaves, but I take your point. You're suggesting that higher populations in non-Western countries doesn't have to do with love but with the fact that they're not open, competitive, individualistic and fluid societies, right? I'd have to agree with that, according to Lindholm anyway you can't have that concept of love without those criteria. But I still think that since Western romantic love has been around longer than birth control and public education that it cannot be entirely irrelevant to how a society reproduces.
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