Chapter III. Family, love and marriage
Marriage and the state
Marriage is the legalization of family as a social institution with specific rights and duties to society and state. Marriage and family are not synonymous, as some people believe. This is even indicated by the different words used to designate two different phenomena. The transformation of family into marriage is accompanied by the simultaneous transformation of husband and wife into spouses. It is noteworthy in the table below that while in the system “family” the two subjects that constitute it are designated by different words (“husband” and “wife”), in the system “marriage” there is one word for both (“spouse”). This transformation means that marriage as a united structure is “turned” to the outside, toward interaction with society. It appears as an integrity with relation to society, one in which the internal structural differences don’t matter much. That is, it is an institutionalized social organism. Whereas in the family, which is a cell-within-itself, these differences are important, which fact is reflected in the different words: “husband” and “wife”. The exceptions here are the “Greek and Latin lines”, possibly for the reason that back then “marriage” was not yet duly institutionalized, although the word «conjunx» in the “Latin” line hints that the process had already started.
The other difference is this: family can exist without marriage, whereas marriage does not exist without family, since it is a reflection of the family, it is about the family. Marriage is a later development than family; its function is the regulation of intra-family relations and the relations of the family as integrity with the state. The forms of this regulation may vary widely in different periods of history and in different countries, yet there are certain features that are characteristic of all ages and peoples, i.e. they reflect the universal.
One of these principal features that reflect the universal is the regulation of family belongings, and in class society – of property. In the bourgeois society the property component of marriage is central; it determines the place and status of the spouses themselves in the family, and also that of the family in society. The flaws and merits of private property, including those in the family sphere, have been described sufficiently extensively both in fiction and in scientific literature, therefore I won’t touch on this subject here. What interests me here are the other components of the universal, which were touched on in literature, but, it seems to me, without due scientific justification.
I wrote above that the monophilogamous family is created on the foundation of love. Love, however, is a fickle phenomenon. Besides, “there is no law for love.” For marriage, however, there is. Marriage sobers feelings and brings them to orderliness: in the bourgeois society this order takes on the form of a marriage contract or agreement, in the socialist society – in the form of a voluntary obligation that is described in rather fine detail in the various legislative clauses on family and marriage. In theory marriage does not mean an “end” to love. Marriage simply arms love with legislated rights, according it a protection of sorts from the vagaries of fate. Hegel expresses what I think is the same thought, albeit phrased differently: “Hence, marriage is to be defined more exactly as legal ethical love. Thus is excluded all that is transient, dependent on the mood or simply subjective.” (140)
Nonetheless love alone, even that of the “ethical” kind, is not sufficient to keep the family in marriage. In principle love without marriage is a reserve of sorts for possible retreat; in such love elements of calculation are already present, therefore it is no longer love. As the Christian writer Larry Christenson writes with perfect justification, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Marriage is more than your love for each other. …Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal - it is a status, an office.”[1] What he meant, of course, is “service” to God. In actual fact, it is service to mankind… through reproduction. In other words, childbirth is not just “the game of love”; it is the family’s duty, the discharge of which is in the interest of the state and the entire human race.[2]
However, it isn’t just about bearing children; it is also about their upbringing. It takes many years (by law, until the age of majority at least). Marriage, however, compels parents to discharge their duty-service, based on the laws on family and marriage.
Another important aspect of marriage is that it captures the family as an integrity, it separates the pair husband-wife from the pair man-woman (for example, as partners). In the latter case the paramount thing is the satisfaction of sexual needs without the functions or obligations imposed by marriage. Co-habiting and family are two entirely different forms of interrelations with entirely different consequences for society. Co-habiting amounts to a return to the era of savagery, i.e. it is a leap backwards to a time before civilization and even before barbarianism (borderline concepts in the history of mankind’s development). I shall yet revisit the negative aspect of this phenomenon.
It is necessary at this point to draw attention to the fact that laws on marriage perform one extremely important function: it is to hold man back from anti-natural behavior and actions. In this case I am speaking of that increasingly widespread phenomenon: homosexuality (gays and lesbians), which was earlier mentioned in passing. This sexual perversion has apparently accompanied mankind throughout its history, and it was condemned by religion in its time. The Bible, for example, says clearly: “And you must not lie down with a male the same as you lie down with a woman. It is a detestable thing.” (Leviticus, 18:22)
It is detestable not only from the moral perspective, but primarily from the perspective of preservation of the human species. When servants of religion insist on this baseness and, moreover, extend patronage to it and join the perversion themselves, it becomes a perversion of the spirit as well. What kind of faith can they be talking about? This is debauchery acquiring an alarming scale - among so-called believers, by the way, even primarily among them. The marriage regulations in most countries are, fortunately, on the side of nature and reproduction of life. However, as already mentioned above, in some of the most “advanced” countries, such as Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, the United Kingdom legislation on marriage is following the lead of the “progressives”: there are now laws that legitimize same-sex marriage. The reckoning will come inevitably.[3]
Marriage has one more positive aspect to it that constitutes the universal: the formation of the personality. For the time being the discourse is about the spouses themselves, not about children. The duration of the family, as I said already, cannot be constantly supported by the feeling of love, even though love does constantly find support in marriage. The preservation of the family requires a more stable feeling, and that feeling, in my opinion, is respect for each other. Respect is already a social concept, more stable than the psychological concept of love. Respect reflects a relation to fellow man that is more than just the relation to the father-mother of your children. It is produced by the attitude toward the person as a personality in general, his position not only in family but also in society. For men, personality characteristics are defined to a greater degree by their status in the external social milieu, whereas a woman’s merits are tied rather to home, to family - on account of her female essence.
In this connection, once again, I can’t help but quote Hegel, since his judgments largely coincide with what I wrote in the chapter on man and woman. Hegel writes: “Hence the husband has his real essential life in the state, the sciences, and the like, in battle and in struggle with the outer world and with himself. Only by effort does he, out of this disruption of himself, reach self-sufficing concord. A peaceful sense of this concord, and an ethical existence, which is intuitive and subjective, he finds in the family. In the family the wife has her full substantive place, and in the feeling of family piety she realizes her ethical disposition.” (144) This is why the reasonable wife would not demand from her husband equal rights in household chores, forcing him constantly to do the dishes or something else along these lines. In the West, nearly all women have become crazed about “kitchen rights-equality” to the degree that men have turned into housewives, losing their manly qualities. A man’s functions don’t consist in the ability to cook, sew and mind the children; they consist in creating such conditions that the wife would willingly dispatch her natural duties, including those listed above.
[1] Christenson. The Christian Family, 9, 10.
[2] Naturally, I don’t touch here on the exceptional cases when the spouses health makes childbirth impossible. This topic relates to the problems of a nation’s health.
[3] At this point I may be reproached for being behind the times, behind “progress” which allows for test-tube conceptions to compensate for the parents’ same-sexness. Firstly, these are all still experiments. Secondly, these experiments have already demonstrated the tragic lot of the “test-tube” children who are obsessed with finding their sperm-fathers. Thirdly, they are historically non-perspective on the strength of the logic presented in this work.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)