In a television interview, I once heard a Shanghai woman say: "I used to want a husband, one is to have income protection, but my income is higher than my husband; the second is to have future risk protection, but I have financial insurance and investment; the third is for someone to do physical work, move coal, move things, or whatever, but now everything can be ordered online and delivered to the door; fourth, for a stable sex life, to have children, and now it has to be through marriage." Human marriages seem to continue to evolve, much to the concern of many.
Marriage and family in flux
For many people, as soon as they hear "marriage", they will unthinkingly associate it with "love" and "romance", and even draw an equal sign. Of course, this is an illusion, because human marriage and family from the very beginning is to solve the interpersonal intertemporal mutual assistance, reduce the risk of survival and construct the story, but compared with superstition, marriage and family, these two human inventions are not completely fictional, but have a real physiological and economic basis, and the practical effects of risk avoidance and mutual assistance brought about by them are also objective existence.
Professor Chen Zhiwu also mentioned in his latest book "The Logic of Civilization: The Game between Human Beings and Risk" that marriage was not invented because of love, but evolved from settled agrarian societies to promote the division of labor between men and women, achieve resource sharing, risk sharing, and childbirth.
However, today, all kinds of markets, especially financial markets, have been very developed, and the national welfare and contract system has become increasingly perfect, and people no longer need to use marriage to achieve hedging or resource sharing.
Time magazine reported in 2010 that in 1960, 27% of adults over the age of 18 in the United States lived a single life (including never married, widowed and divorced), 73% lived married life, and 5% of children were raised by single mothers; but by 2010, 48% of adults were single — that is, nearly half of the unmarried people, and more than 41% of children were raised by single mothers.
This trend is not unique to the United States, where 54.7% of children are raised by single mothers, compared with 29.2% in Lithuania and 20.7% in Italy.
The trend is similar in China, where 800 couples divorced every day in 1978 and 11,980 divorced every day in 2017, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
The nature of marriage is changing. In particular, in May 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States and cannot be prohibited in any state. According to Gallup polls, 27 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 1996, rising to 67 percent in 2018.
Same-sex marriage is also legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, England, France, Finland and other countries; in South American countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, australia and New Zealand, same-sex marriage is also legal.
Why is it that so many societies are increasingly less interested in marriage and are starting to support same-sex marriage? Is the human world without marriage what we want?
These new trends have caused consternation and crisis among conservatives around the world.
Love is triumphing over marriage
Stephanie Coontz, in A Brief History of Marriage: How Love Conquered Marriage, clearly tells us that love has never been a prerequisite for human marriage, but has only "conquered" marriage and become the core of marriage in modern times.
Kutz said: Whether it is ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or medieval Europe, because marriage is used for political marriage or material utilitarianism, marriage and love have always been two different things, and are considered incompatible with each other; for European aristocrats, extramarital affairs are the highest state of love, and it is fashionable to find a confidant or a promiscuous prostitute.
Professor Chen Zhiwu said in his latest book "The Logic of Civilization: The Game between Humans and Risks" that in the early days of human beings to the agrarian society, the financial market and other markets were underdeveloped, and state welfare and religious mutual aid organizations had not yet emerged, and people had to rely on the two systems of blood and marriage to solve risk challenges, especially relying on "raising children and preventing old age". In these two systems, children are the key, and the more the better, but the children must be pure blood "flesh and blood". Therefore, the marriage constraint must include the monopoly of sexual relations, the wife must not only be able to procreate, but also absolutely chaste, the so-called "filial piety has three, childless is big" "starvation is small, loss of temperance is big".
That is to say, in the absence of financial and other means of extraterrestrial hedging, the first priority of marriage is to have children, so that marriage of interest can only be between men and women of the opposite sex, and the same sex is contrary to the original intention of marriage and must be prohibited. Sexual relations between men and women are also only for procreation, and lusts that are not intended for procreation are not accepted by ethical rule-makers. At that time, people could not tolerate being single, having children without marriage, not having children for sexual life, not having children after marriage, or divorcing after marriage.
However, today is different. Nowadays, there are many alternative financial products, many means of allocating resources based on the market, government welfare guarantees are becoming more and more reliable, religious groups also provide final relief guarantees, and modern people not only no longer need to "raise children and prevent old age", but marriage is not the only choice for settling down. In other words, risk protection and economic functions are being stripped from traditional marriage and family and left to the market and the government to realize, which liberates marriage, transforms marriage from focusing on economic interests to focusing on feelings, and allows love to triumph over marriage.
In the same way, once the market and state welfare replace the risk protection function of the marriage family, childbearing is no longer the first priority of marriage, and even marriage can choose not to have children, so after the transformation of interest marriage into emotional marriage, marriage does not have to be limited to the opposite sex. It is also because of this logic that many heterosexual, gay couples just live together, do not seek marriage, or are single for the rest of their lives.
The reason why homosexuals demand that same-sex marriage be legal is because the United States has more than 1,000 marriage rights, and marriage rights are not uncommon in other countries. Then, since heterosexuals and homosexuals pay taxes and fulfill their civic duties in the same way, the public services and welfare guarantees they receive from the government should also be the same, and they should not be different according to different sexual preferences, otherwise it will be unfair and just. In other words, because there are too many "marriage interests" left over from history, homosexuals have to be given a set of "marriage rights" derived from heterosexual marriage.
Traditional marriage in disintegration
In a television interview, I once heard a Shanghai woman say: "I used to want a husband, one is to have income protection, but my income is higher than my husband; the second is to have future risk protection, but I have financial insurance and investment; the third is for someone to do physical work, move coal, move things, or whatever, but now everything can be ordered online and delivered to the door; fourth, for a stable sex life, to have children, and now it has to be through marriage." Human marriages seem to continue to evolve, much to the concern of many.
If marriage is changing, the connotation of family and clan will inevitably change, the scale will become smaller, and the cohesion will become weaker, which makes the clan's risk mutual assistance and resource sharing ability worse and worse.
As Chen Zhiwu said in his new book "The Logic of Civilization: The Game of Human Beings and Risks", in history, the inheritance and continuation of family power has always been strong in various societies through the strict organization and maintenance of family clans.
One study found that in the Florence region of Italy, the rich surnames of 1427 were still more likely to be rich by 2011 after 584 years, engaged in financial occupations such as high-income banks; the long-term continuity of the family shows that the former family cohesion must be strong, otherwise the ability to pass on across generations will not be significant.
However, that kind of continuity is premised on the fact that there was little cross-regional movement of population in the past, and since the Industrial Revolution, especially after the fundamental changes in transportation and information technology in the 20th century, the cross-regional and cross-border movement of population has increased greatly on a global scale, and the phenomenon of ethnic groups living in different countries and different regions has become increasingly common, which has fundamentally disintegrated the blood relationship network; coupled with the extremely high price of urban real estate brought about by urbanization, the ancestral shrines and other physical symbols that unite the ethnic groups in the past are difficult to sustain. Scholars have also found that the intergenerational correlation coefficient of income today is nearly halved from 1427, based on historical data from Florence. Therefore, although the home order is still exerting some effectiveness, the trend is obviously gradually declining.
"Phoenix Reading Project" boutique recommendation
The logic of civilization
The Logic of Civilization: The Game of Humanity and Risk
Chen Zhiwu / Author
CITIC Publishing Group / 2022-04
buff
Faith, marriage, family, clan, commerce, finance... Why doesn't productivity fully explain the logic of civilization evolution? How do you measure whether civilization is progressing or going backwards? How to correctly understand some of the social phenomena we are facing today?
Productivity and risk resilience are two key dimensions in judging human progress, with the former addressing life under normal circumstances and the latter determining survival under extraordinary conditions. In the book "The Logic of Civilization", the author takes the "game of human beings and risks" as the clue, uses quantitative data analysis and literature research and analysis, through the familiar phenomena and history of innovation, business, finance, etc., uses detailed data and data analysis to explore the internal logic behind the evolution of civilization, and innovatively proposes a new yardstick for measuring civilization - "risk response" (that is, the ability to cope with risks), so as to help us interpret the process of human civilization more completely. The development of human social civilization provides a unique perspective.
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