nmyworld

Love. We cannot escape the word or its many transitive meanings constructed by both millions of years of evolution and hundreds of years of media and culture any more than we can escape pondering over its connection to family or our own mortality. Everything we take for granted is bound up in one or more of these fundamental elements of human psychology. But what do we get from seeing them all through the same lens–a lens admittedly colored a special shade of cynically skeptical, irritably empirical, and scathingly naked?

For one, we get a sadder portrait of human existence than I would like to admit. Most of us began our path toward immortality the moment we recognized our own mortality. The paths we all choose to take, however, lead astoundingly different paths, but all for that same reason: immortality. The haunt of Achilles touches all of us with at least a conscience and some recognition that we can alter to world in which we live. Death cannot be the end, we think, but the risk of an afterlife not existing is too great to take the chance of doing nothing.

So what do some do? We set out to fulfill a wanderlust that so captivated Hemingway, fight wars against barbarians and terrorists, legislate our names into history books, create so prodigiously that others cannot help but stumble upon our drivel, or an infinite number of other things that may–hopefully, someday, if some infinitesimal chance be willing–make us immortal. Nearly everyone tries and nearly everyone fails. Most, still, that seem to be on the correct path in their lifetime fail to transcend time.

Evolutionary psychology, however, has found a much simpler answer to immortality: family. Or to put it more specifically, genetics and DNA. It is easy, it is fun, and it is a time-tested winner in reaching immortality with the least amount of resistance and fewest number of failures. After all, aren’t we all a tribute to its astounding success? We settle down, spawn a large family, support them, the family grows, your legacy grows, and, at least to your eyes, you have become immortal. You may not be truly immortal like Mitochondrial Eve or Achilles, but small matter. No one who dies thinking they are immortal can be dissatisfied with the results of their lifelong struggle.

But there is a fundamental problem with family. Creating offspring has no gentle, passionate past replete with love and care for our partner or children. Mating for us animals is nothing short of animalistic, loud, wet, sticky, and a whole slew of erotic adjectives with little to do with our perception of love. That is because family and love are two entirely separate elements of humanity.

It may not surprise you to read that every animal can mate. It is fundamental to complex life. What every animal can not–and does not–do is create the type of bond formed between human males and females. There are biologically monogamistic animals and then there are humans. We are socially monogamistic, which means that single partners push against our biological inclinations (some more than others). But there has to be a benefit to this, right? Not necessarily, but in this case there most assuredly is.

Love–or, more importantly, our beautifully romanticized version of love–is a cultural device that serves to facilitate the creation of family for those who choose it, rather than or complimentary to the more difficult paths to immortality. Our version of love is constructed to prevent us from adultery, so that our partner’s quest to immortality may not also be hindered. In this way, it is a cooperative, almost contractual mechanism between males and females. Our version of love tells us that we must be affectionate toward our children; a difficult task for those of us biologically inclined to eat our young, I am sure. We must court, celebrate valentines, remember anniversaries, jump through the ceremonial hoops, and finally spawn offspring to please the love gods. Then, we make our children do the same, ensuring that the entitlement program known as love is eternally perpetuated.

Love and family are inseparable, whether we like it or not. They are both means to the same end: immortality. Love is the mechanism through which family is created, family the mechanism by which we hope to achieve our immortality.

To reconcile this, we have constructed love in such a way as to be completely inviolable for the sane. The film, book, music, toy, and television industries rakes in billions telling females that they absolutely must catch themselves a good man with which to start a family. Men, too, are told that they must snag a high-paying job to support their wives and future children, grandchildren. It is something we are not even aware of most of the time, and can and often does exist alongside perfectly trend-breaking individuals. Gender roles can be reversed or non-existent, but the key mechanism remains inviolable.

Family, too. Non-traditional forms exist, but it is always taken for granted that some form of family is better than none.

This is not to say that these mechanisms are mutually exclusive or insidious in any way. Many perfectly immortal individuals like Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein loved and had families. It is possible–perhaps more difficult, but possible–to do both. Both serve to perpetuate the species and fulfill our basic desire for procreation and companionship. But it is crucial to point out, however, how much they can limit the human species’ rate of geopolitical, technological, and social progress. Self-perpetuating systems of human interaction that biologically reward the easier but far less cooperative options are those that we have fought to remove since the beginning of human civilization and pre-human evolution: murder and war rather than diplomacy, rape rather than courtship, theft rather than bartering, etc.

Such notions worked well in a time with borders tall and barriers impenetrable. But as a new age descends upon us, more and more people begin entering the collective human experience, families and kinship networks grow to enormous sizes, and the entire world slowly comes together, such rigid, dated constructions of love and family must be cast aside. Immortality will no longer be about the individual, but about the species, about humanity. Thus, our definition of family will, I think, become increasingly inclusive, just as our definition of love will relax until little more needs to be done than cohabitation, if even that.

But that is no small hill for a stepper. We are constantly bombarded by media and ideology espousing the supposed joys and benefits of a century-old definition of love and family, the decrepit, immortal hand of generations past strangling the potential out of humanity in their cries from beyond the grave to preserve their own immortality.

In short, do not take your understanding of love and family for granted any more than your understanding of life, politics, and the future. It could mean perpetuating a string of bullshit so long that we are still looking for the end.