Marriage and Family Life

84:8.1The great threat against fam­ily life is the men­ac­ing ris­ing tide of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the mod­ern plea­sure ma­nia. The prime in­cen­tive to mar­riage used to be eco­nomic; sex at­trac­tion was sec­ondary. Mar­riage, founded on self-main­te­nance, led to self-per­pet­u­a­tion and con­comi­tantly pro­vided one of the most de­sir­able forms of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion. It is the only in­sti­tu­tion of hu­man so­ci­ety which em­braces all three of the great in­cen­tives for liv­ing.

84:8.2Orig­i­nally, prop­erty was the ba­sic in­sti­tu­tion of self-main­te­nance, while mar­riage func­tioned as the unique in­sti­tu­tion of self-per­pet­u­a­tion. Al­though food sat­is­fac­tion, play, and hu­mor, along with pe­ri­odic sex in­dul­gence, were means of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, it re­mains a fact that the evolv­ing mores have failed to build any dis­tinct in­sti­tu­tion of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion. And it is due to this fail­ure to evolve spe­cial­ized tech­niques of plea­sur­able en­joy­ment that all hu­man in­sti­tu­tions are so com­pletely shot through with this plea­sure pur­suit. Prop­erty ac­cu­mu­la­tion is be­com­ing an in­stru­ment for aug­ment­ing all forms of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, while mar­riage is of­ten viewed only as a means of plea­sure. And this over­in­dul­gence, this widely spread plea­sure ma­nia, now con­sti­tutes the great­est threat that has ever been lev­eled at the so­cial evo­lu­tion­ary in­sti­tu­tion of fam­ily life, the home.

84:8.3The vi­o­let race in­tro­duced a new and only im­per­fectly re­al­ized char­ac­ter­is­tic into the ex­pe­ri­ence of hu­mankind—the play in­stinct cou­pled with the sense of hu­mor. It was there in mea­sure in the San­giks and An­don­ites, but the Adamic strain el­e­vated this prim­i­tive propen­sity into the po­ten­tial of plea­sure, a new and glo­ri­fied form of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion. The ba­sic type of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, aside from ap­peas­ing hunger, is sex grat­i­fi­ca­tion, and this form of sen­sual plea­sure was enor­mously height­ened by the blend­ing of the San­giks and the And­ites.

84:8.4There is real dan­ger in the com­bi­na­tion of rest­less­ness, cu­rios­ity, ad­ven­ture, and plea­sure-aban­don char­ac­ter­is­tic of the post-And­ite races. The hunger of the soul can­not be sat­is­fied with phys­i­cal plea­sures; the love of home and chil­dren is not aug­mented by the un­wise pur­suit of plea­sure. Though you ex­haust the re­sources of art, color, sound, rhythm, mu­sic, and adorn­ment of per­son, you can­not hope thereby to el­e­vate the soul or to nour­ish the spirit. Van­ity and fash­ion can­not min­is­ter to home build­ing and child cul­ture; pride and ri­valry are pow­er­less to en­hance the sur­vival qual­i­ties of suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions.

84:8.5Ad­vanc­ing ce­les­tial be­ings all en­joy rest and the min­istry of the re­ver­sion di­rec­tors. All ef­forts to ob­tain whole­some di­ver­sion and to en­gage in up­lift­ing play are sound; re­fresh­ing sleep, rest, recre­ation, and all pas­times which pre­vent the bore­dom of mo­not­ony are worth while. Com­pet­i­tive games, sto­ry­telling, and even the taste of good food may serve as forms of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion. (When you use salt to sa­vor food, pause to con­sider that, for al­most a mil­lion years, man could ob­tain salt only by dip­ping his food in ashes.)

84:8.6Let man en­joy him­self; let the hu­man race find plea­sure in a thou­sand and one ways; let evo­lu­tion­ary man­kind ex­plore all forms of le­git­i­mate self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the fruits of the long up­ward bi­o­logic strug­gle. Man has well earned some of his pres­ent-day joys and plea­sures. But look you well to the goal of des­tiny! Plea­sures are in­deed sui­ci­dal if they suc­ceed in de­stroy­ing prop­erty, which has be­come the in­sti­tu­tion of self-main­te­nance; and self-grat­i­fi­ca­tions have in­deed cost a fa­tal price if they bring about the col­lapse of mar­riage, the deca­dence of fam­ily life, and the de­struc­tion of the home—man’s su­preme evo­lu­tion­ary ac­quire­ment and civ­i­liza­tion’s only hope of sur­vival.

84:8.7[Pre­sented by the Chief of Ser­a­phim sta­tioned on Uran­tia.]