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Всемирная история как приближение к любви и отказ от нее
This article, based on a wide array of sources, offers an original interpretation of world history, the key events of which are viewed as the approaches to and the realization of love – followed by periods of retreat, repulsion from it (after which the history charts a new course). The first such episode was, in the course of the evolution of Homo sapiens, the emergence of love as an unpredictable affective connection with a specific, unique person (first, through mirror neurons, in the gaze, and then in the flesh, in direct connection with childbirth). The reaction to this phenomenon and the suffering associated with it was the universal social institution of marriage, made by calculation and the parents’ choice, built on guarantees, a marriage where love was, as it were, put out of the equation. The second episode is related to Christianity, when the appearance of the incarnate and personal God, who not only preached love but was himself understood as love, caused a backlash – a denigration of love to lust, the devaluation of marriage, hostility toward the body as the source of evil. The paradoxical solution was the uncompromising prohibition on divorce, established in the West thanks to Saint Augustine – that is, the idea of eternal love, but not as an abstract Platonic idea, 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 foundation of the family. The radical idea of marriage for love spread, over 150 years, throughout the world, in the ways of globalization, but in the last fifty years it has been rapidly eroding. This process intensified after the spread of contraception, when the shift from monogamous marriage to serial monogamy and/or free relationships, capable of disintegrating at any moment, accelerated. The result was the third refusal: while traditional cultures looked for protection from the unpredictable power of love and the suffering associated with it in arranged and forced marriages, in the twenty-first century, the safety is sought in the abandonment of serious relationships, in the displacement of love by contractual “relationships” on comfortable terms, and in the practice of “living solo”, where any relationship (even a purely sexual one) is seen as too dangerous and traumatic.