Foreword
My motivation to write this small work came from three reasons. First reason: the monograph titled Society: Force and Progress (on which I am currently working) must necessarily contain a chapter on the problems of family and marriage. The second reason is the polemics started recently in the Western press on the topic of who is more intelligent – woman or man; this topic is likewise directly relevant to my monograph. Finally, the third and most important reason is the statistical data I stumbled upon concerning the relative numbers of marriages and divorces in Russia; namely, there were 800 divorces for every 1000 marriages in 2002. This figure shook me so greatly that I decided to put aside for a while the other chapters and concentrate urgently on researching the problems of family and marriage in Russia vis-à-vis similar problems in the West. As a result, the chapter on family grew into the small book which I am now offering to the reader.
The book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels was published over 120 years ago. In it the author substantiated the regularity of simultaneous and mutually-conditioned emergence of monogamous family, private property and state. This mutual dependency obtains to this day. It is just that the vector of development has been turned around: the process of destruction of marriage is underway and so accordingly the family and the state are decaying. (Private property is affected by this process to a lesser degree, due to the fact that many of its forms have acquired a transnational character.) The process is manifested very obviously in the Western world, to which Russia has aligned itself. The latter, having failed to develop the engine revolutions of prosperity, is already exhibiting wonders of decay and hurtling into a precipice. Nonetheless, the problems of family and marriage, even though they cause concern to the ruling circles of the West and of Russia, are relegated if not to the last, then at least the next-to-last place. At least they are not perceived as a crisis - or, in the case of Russia, catastrophe. International terrorism is considered a more urgent problem today; billions of dollars are expended to combat it. No one fully realizes that the detrimental effect from the collapse of the family exceeds by several orders of magnitude the damage from all terrorists put together. The consequence of the destruction of the family isn’t just population decrease in this or that state – the existence of the state itself is cast in doubt, will all the due consequences. This process is rather drawn-out from the historical perspective, therefore less noticeable. There is only one way to halt it: change the direction of development; move on to the next stage of history, namely socialism. The West, by the way, is indeed gradually shifting precisely to the path of socialism without realizing it, or rather without admitting it. This is manifested most obviously in the sphere of social-family relations, within which framework the policies of many Western states recreate the policies that used to be practiced in the USSR.
In this book the problem of family and marriage isn’t just analyzed on the basis of sociological science. Contrary to my preliminary intentions, the topic led me to reflect philosophically on such phenomena as “beauty,” “intelligence” and “love,” that are clear to all but incomprehensible to scientists. Not at all simple, from the perspective of philosophy, are also such phenomena - known to any reasonable person - as “family,” “husband,” “wife,” “father,” and “mother.” However, without philosophical interpretation of the above-listed “words” it would be impossible to interpret sociological data. For any phenomenon discussed, it is important to have criteria, clear definitions of terms, and their translation to the level of concepts and categories. Otherwise the inevitable outcome would be the kitchen assortment of arguments found in abundance in all contemporary books dedicated to marriage and family.
I did find a more serious approach used in the treatment of problems of love, which are discussed on a complex philosophical level. Actually, I had no intention of touching on this topic in the present work. However, one of my friends, who had read the original draft of the manuscript, knows of my penchant for formulating concepts, and he asked me to define in two-three words what love is. I obliged him: love is life. This definition did not satisfy him. Strangely enough, many people favor the mystical version of “defining” love: great is the mystery. Since this latter formulation is not operable, i.e. is not scientific, I was compelled to bury myself in literature on the topic, which, to my misfortune, turned out to be very vast. Naturally, I had to limit my circle of reading to a few scores of works, especially since most of them repeat each other. Amazingly, even after studying quite a few books I preserved the essence of my formulation of love as life, since it turned out to be the sole correct one, which will be proved in the corresponding part of the book.
This work in form and in style is not a scientific investigation in the strict sense of the word “science.” Apart from the section on “love,” the main text is written in the form of a publicistic essay, which implies, apart from stylistic liberties, a subjective view of the topics. My wife, involved as always in the editing, attempted to adapt many philosophical sections for the normal reader, as well as substitute acceptable words for the “vulgarisms.” This time she was thwarted by my determined resistance. I resisted because I have no desire to please the philistine reader, on one hand, and the purist reader on the other hand – the kind who is offended, for example, by the word “perversion,” preferring the word “deviation.” Still, for the sake of “scientific character,” I retained the minimum scientific apparatus (the bibliographical data), in order to avoid accusations of libel, such as had been leveled against me on several occasions.
The reader who is familiar with my previous works knows that my principal and sole assistant in my research is my wife, Valentina Battler; on this occasion, too, she participated most actively in discussing all sections of the essay. Although, as I mentioned already, I did not agree with all of her remarks, “in essence” I was compelled to reinterpret many things, add some, and remove some. In any case, this is precisely that version of the wife’s participation in the husband’s affairs which I describe in the section on “the ideal wife.” I am thankful to my fate.
Oxford, the United Kingdom, August 2005.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)