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changed Western beliefs about the relationship between man, society, and
government. Yet the French Revolution also had a deeply personal aspect,
known as the Romantic Movement, which changed the way we think about
something even more fundamental: love. Before the modern era, love had an
objective element inextricably bound up with various social duties. In the
modern era love means the subjective, intense desire at a particular moment
for some other person. Lets explore the subject of pre-modern love, and
see whether it was inherently defective and deserved to be discarded.
If we go back far enough, pre-modern love becomes primitive love, which
was the same as modern love. One person had an intense desire for another
person, they had sex, and when they no longer desired each other intensely
they ceased to have sex. This might sound agreeable to some of us in
theory, but it created serious problems when it involved a man and a
woman:
1. If a woman was free to have sex with multiple men, then there was no way
of determining who the father was when she became pregnant. Thus,
children were born without paternal support and were abandoned.
2. A womans fertility and attractiveness usually decline much faster than a
mans. Men would consistently abandon women after a few years for
younger partners, leaving older women and their offspring to fend for
themselves for the rest of their lives.
3. When free love is permitted, it quickly becomes an obsession. Men and
woman spent an inordinate amount of time pursuing sex with each other.
This lead to violent conflict over mates, and emotional drama consumed so
much time that nobody invested much effort in developing high culture or
improving technology.
These and countless other problems meant that any society wishing to
advance beyond the most primitive state had to attach a set of socially
enforced rules to sex between men and women. Across the world, very
similar sets of rules developed and eventually became known as the
institution of marriage. What were these rules? A woman would devote her
most fertile and attractive years to one man, who could be confident that
any offspring were his. Consequently, he was obligated to support them
materially and emotionally. In return, the man was not permitted to abandon
the woman as her attractiveness declined. He was obligated to support her
and their offspring. Some cultures permitted powerful men with extra
can only come from a profoundly spiritual, rather than merely erotic love. It
also demonstrates how much even a strong warrior like Odysseus values the
emotional and domestic support of a devoted wife.
Christianity only reinforced the objective definition of love as self-sacrificing
mutual support: The Church entwining the duty to support ones spouse in a
worldly sense with the duty to support ones spouse in a spiritual sense.
Christianity then strictly prohibited all other forms of romantic love. If all this
sounds a bit dull to the modern mind, I have to ask what a better basis for
love is? There is no reason why sharing a mutual, deep attachment to the
same religion and/or culture, coupled with the adventure of struggling
together to survive in an uncertain world while raising children in the face of
it all is not a wonderful basis for passionate love. What else is there? Shared
hobbies? Looks? Charm? Cultivating a sexy persona? After a few months or
years these shallow foundations to a relationship will wash away.
If some people were unsatisfied with pre-modern love, then there was
something wrong with them, or something wrong in the execution of premodern love. But there is nothing inherently wrong with the ideal of premodern love. As this blog moves forward Ill be considering the topic of love
further, particularly through the romance novels that emerged at the
juncture of pre-modern and modern love like War & Peace, or Pride &
Prejudice. I hope youll follow along.