Chapter III. Family, love and marriage
The forming of family and monogamy
In the preceding chapter, the qualitative difference between man and woman was shown. They represent independent opposite integrities. Formally each of these integrities is independent, yet they can only reproduce themselves through unity. To use systems terminology, it happens in the following fashion: two independent integrities – man and woman – must turn into parts – husband and wife – in order to constitute a new integrity: family.[1] The latter is thus a system comprised of two elements-parts. I want to stress: outside the family-system they are integrities, inside the system they are parts. Or, in other words: one and the same substance (man/husband or woman/wife) differs qualitatively depending on location: outside or inside the “system.” That is – please pay attention – a metamorphosis takes place, or rather transformation of man into husband, woman into wife, and they acquire their new qualities in a new unity: family. This unity is formal, however, since it has not yet realized its true predestination, the purpose for which the objective phenomenon emerged: the production of progeny like themselves. This is only possible when husband and wife turn into father and mother. It is precisely at this stage that unity takes place, expressed in folklore in many sayings of the type: “husband and wife are one character,” or in the Bible: “So that they are no longer two, but one flesh.” (Matthew, 19:6) This transformation of woman into wife a priori presupposes her turning into a mother. This is indicated in the etymology itself of the Russian word «jena», which is apparently derived from the ancient Indian “Janis” (one who gives birth), acquiring in Slavic languages the common form “gena.”[2] Only in this case does the formal unity become real unity, or the formal family becomes a real family. However, the process is not yet completed. The transformation of husband and wife into father and mother means the emergence of new integrities (man and woman), who, fragmenting into parts in their turn (husband and wife), create a new family in the next spire, and so on without end.
These metamorphoses demonstrate very obviously the workings of the laws of dialectics. Looking closely at the scheme below, we see that the vertical captures the law of unity and struggle of opposites, the horizontal captures the law of negation of negation, while the law of quantity’s transformation into quality is illustrated by each batch of progeny with respect to their parents.
Presented above is the philosophical understanding of the formation of family through the means of systems logic. It is perfectly natural that the formation of family is due to social-economic causes that were described in detail in scientific literature in the 19th – 20th centuries. Described in the same literature is the reason for the inevitability of the monogamous family, the type which proved to have the best chance historically. Wherever older forms survived – polygyny (multi-wife), polyandry (multi-husband), or even earlier forms of family, characteristic of the eras of savagery and barbarianism - whole peoples and even states disappeared from the world arena or lagged substantially behind in their development. I mentioned in the Introduction figures that show a dramatic increase of humanity’s average lifespan since the time monogamy triumphed. It is fitting to add here some figures illustrating the growth of absolute population numbers in connection with family forms. Thus, the monogamous family did not exist among Indians in both Americas.[3] At the start of our era their total numbers were about 4.4 million. By the year 1600 their total population grew to 11.5 million. In the same time period the total population of the tribes in Australia and the Pacific islands grew from 250,000 to 500,000 – that is, by a factor of approximately two in both cases. Meanwhile in Europe and in Asia the total populations grew by a factor of three: in Europe from 31 million to 100 million people, in Asia from 115 million to 375 million (from 50 million to 150 million in China alone).[4]
Of course, there were many other factors that affected these dynamics. Still, the presence or absence of the monogamous family, apart from the fact that it influenced the emergence of these “other” factors, was in itself a supremely important factor in population growth. This assertion is confirmed by the current situation in advanced countries, which will be discussed later on.
So why is it that precisely the monogamous, or, as they sometimes say, nuclear family proved to have the best prospects?
On the fundamental level, the answer to this question is rooted in the economic dimension. The monogamous family triumphed together with the triumph of private property. From that time on “the family system is entirely dominated by the property system.”[5] This is sort of the basic aspect of the monogamous family which is ordinarily not particularly emphasized by the bourgeois science, although it is not disputed. Western scholars prefer to speak of moral causes, especially those philosophers who specialize in ethics. The already mentioned F. Kierchner, for example, wrote of family from the morals perspective, same as the Danish philosopher Harald Hefding, whose book was just as popular in Russia in its time as the German scholar’s book.[6] Judging by the content of their works, the main source for this type of scholars was the Bible. Contemporary sociologists don’t give much thought to the origins of the monogamous family, concentrating their attention on today’s problems of the family, primarily the psychological ones.
There is, however, a group of scientists who see the cause of the monogamous family’s emergence not so much in economics as in politics. They are the social-Darwinists, forming a noticeable school in science that came to be known in the second half of the 20th century as evolutionary psychology. They really did make many contributions to the development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection from the perspective of genetic science. Problems start when they attempt to apply the laws of natural selection to the world of man (they constantly compare the behavior of animals, fish, birds to human behavior). This method is discredited in principle, utterly non-scientific, and it leads them to naïve reasoning – in particular on the issues of monogamy.
Thus, Robert Wright, who summarized the ideas of modern neo-Darwinists, stresses that polygamous societies correspond better to the nature of man that monogamous ones, as evidenced by these figures: of 1,154 societies that ever existed in the history of mankind, and only 60 – monogamous including the modern industrial societies.[7] Perhaps these figures are accurate. The matter, however, is not about quantity; it is that “human nature” changed over time, and the most advanced societies proved to be precisely those where monogamy prevailed. Arrangements that were natural in the times of savagery and barbarianism became less natural in the era of civilization. The neo-Darwinists keep ignoring these historical dynamics, as evidenced indirectly even by their non-historical comparisons of modern families to families of the Homo Erectus era (1.5 million years ago) or to backward tribes in our time, say the Trobriand islanders in Melanesia
And this is how Wright explains the emergence of monogamy, leaning on the works by Richard D. Alexander, Steven J.C. Gaulin and James S. Boster. It turns out that at some moment in history women in polygamous societies discovered that one husband cannot provide for two-three wives plus children. In order to dissuade the husband from taking other wives, the women’s parental families started offering dowries to chosen men. The arrangement became suitable to men as well, since this system supposedly introduced elements of equality between them in the sense that now each man only had one wife, not like previous times when some had two, some had three, etc. Wright argues: it is no accident that in the 7% of societies where monogamy prevailed, 77% had “dowry” traditions. His general conclusion: “This suggests that dowry is the product of market disequilibrium, a blockage of marital commerce; monogamy, by limiting each man to a single wife, makes wealthy men artificially precious commodities, and dowry is the price paid for them.” (96) Thus, man surrenders to captivity by one woman in exchange for her dowry.
This appears to be an economics argument, albeit a decidedly strange one. However, as noted already, politics become involved. The neo-Darwinists see this “surrender” as development of democracy, i.e. equality: each man has exactly one wife. Wright tellingly draws attention to the fact that in hierarchical societies, especially those of the despotic type, polygamy dominated, and it survives today only in non-democratic societies. For example, the king of the Zulus monopolized over a hundred wives; in the Inca empire officials had between 6 and 30 wives, depending on their rank, and in Morocco one of the Emperors owned 860 wives who bore him 888 children.[8] In democratic societies, on the other hand, monogamy was accompanied by a wider distribution of political power. As a result, “And the ultimate widths (apparently, those of this power. – A.B.) are one-man-one-vote and one-man-one-wife.” (99) The most important conclusion following from the neo-Darwinists reasoning is this: “Given human nature, monogamy is a straightforward expression of political equality among men.” (ibid.)
Arguing with such authors makes about as much sense as refuting the claims by some astrologers that a star which fell at the wrong time in the Andromeda galaxy caused the collapse of the USSR. I only presented their reasoning here to let the reader know that among those in the science community there are just as many charlatans as among those in the pseudo-scientific disciplines (UFOs, parapsychology and other such nonsense-ology).
It should be noted for fairness’ sake that the above reasoning is not typical of the majority of neo-Darwinists - for the simple reason that they simply don’t intrude into the area of social relations. They refuse even to use the term “sociobiology”[9] (which makes as much sense as socio-physics or socio-chemistry), preferring other names for their school of thought, for example Darwinist anthropology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, etc. Still, there are some among them who do attempt to mix “boots with eggs”, usually for the sake of “democratic” ideology. Naturally, they don’t realize that they thus discredit the entire current of thought relating to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Perhaps there is just one benefit to be derived from this sort of works: they contain a wealth of factual material that often refutes their own theories. We shall subsequently make use of such material as needed.
[1] In the chapter on Love a similar method was used, but it was different there: in the joining of two subjects into the whole WE, the subjects themselves, although changing their quality in force, retain their subjectivity. That is, woman stays woman, man stays man. In the event of forming of a family, however, the subjects themselves are transformed.
[2] Curious fact: in the Russian language the words for husband and wife – muj and jena – one ends, the other starts with the same letter J – accidentally, yet symptomatically. This letter connects two substances: muj + jena = muJena, and it is also the letter which comes first in an equally important word: jizn’ (life). There is something to it, I think.
[3] For more detail, see: Hemming. The Conquest of the Incas; Asimov. The Shaping of North America From Earliest Times to 1763.
[4] See: McEvedy and Jones. Atlas of World Population History.
[5] Engels, 26.
[6] See: Hefding. Ethics, or the science of morals.
[7] Wright. The Moral Animal, 90, 94.
[8] King Mongut of Siam had 9,000 wives, Emperor Yang-ti of China had 3,000 wives. This information, as well as many other curious cases dealing with “love,” can be found in the book by Lailan Yang (Love around the World.)
[9] This term was introduced by the title of a book written by the biologist Wilson. See: Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)