World History as the Approach to and the Rejection of Love

Abstract

On the basis of a wide range of sources the author offers an original interpreta- tion of world history, considering as its key events episodes of approaching to the understanding and realization of love, followed by periods of retreat, repulsion from it with subsequent discovery of other ways. The first such episode in the course of Homo sapiens evolution was the emergence of love as an unpredictable affec- tive connection to a specific, unique person, first through looking (thanks to mirror neurons) and then bodily (in connection with procreation). The reaction to this phe- nomenon and the suffering it generates was the social institution of marriage, uni- versal for humanity and built on guarantees (according to calculation and the choice of relatives or the community), in which love was, as it were, put out of the equa- tion. The second episode is connected to Christianity, when the appearance of the incarnate and personal God, who not only preached but was personally understood as love, caused a backlash — a mixture of love and lust, devaluation of marriage, hos- tility toward the body as the source of evil. The paradoxical solution was the uncom- promising prohibition on divorce, established in the West thanks to Saint Augustine, that is, the idea of eternal love, but not Platonic and abstract, but inscribed in the very concrete, corporeal level of social life. On this foundation, love first became the key theme of Western culture and then, in the course of the Romantic Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, the main criterion for choosing a spouse and the basis of the family. The radical idea of mar- riage for love spread around the world for 150 years along with globalization, but in the last 50 years it has been rapidly eroding. This process intensified with the spread of contraception and the shift from monogamous marriage to serial monogamy and/ or free relationships that can break up at any moment. The result was the third rejec- tion: while in traditional cultures protection from the unpredictable power of love and the suffering associated with it was sought in arranged and forced marriages, in the 21st century it is sought in the withdrawal from serious relationships, in the dis- placement of love by contractual relationships on comfortable terms, and the prac- tice of “living solo,” where any relationship (even purely sexual) is seen as too dangerous and traumatic.