self-perpetuation

• self-perpetuation

82:1.8As an in­sti­tu­tion, mar­riage, from its early be­gin­nings down to mod­ern times, pic­tures the so­cial evo­lu­tion of the bi­o­logic propen­sity for self-per­pet­u­a­tion. The per­pet­u­a­tion of the evolv­ing hu­man species is made cer­tain by the pres­ence of this racial mat­ing im­pulse, an urge which is loosely called sex at­trac­tion. This great bi­o­logic urge be­comes the im­pulse hub for all sorts of as­so­ci­ated in­stincts, emo­tions, and us­ages—phys­i­cal, in­tel­lec­tual, moral, and so­cial.

68:2.3So­ci­ety is con­cerned with self-per­pet­u­a­tion, self-main­te­nance, and self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, but hu­man self-re­al­iza­tion is wor­thy of be­com­ing the im­me­di­ate goal of many cul­tural groups.

69:1.42. The in­sti­tu­tions of self-per­pet­u­a­tion. These are the es­tab­lish­ments of so­ci­ety grow­ing out of sex hunger, ma­ter­nal in­stinct, and the higher ten­der emo­tions of the races. They em­brace the so­cial safe­guards of the home and the school, of fam­ily life, ed­u­ca­tion, ethics, and re­li­gion. They in­clude mar­riage cus­toms, war for de­fense, and home build­ing.

82:3.2There al­ways have been and al­ways will be two dis­tinct realms of mar­riage: the mores, the laws reg­u­lat­ing the ex­ter­nal as­pects of mat­ing, and the oth­er­wise se­cret and per­sonal re­la­tions of men and women. Al­ways has the in­di­vid­ual been re­bel­lious against the sex reg­u­la­tions im­posed by so­ci­ety; and this is the rea­son for this age­long sex prob­lem: Self-main­te­nance is in­di­vid­ual but is car­ried on by the group; self-per­pet­u­a­tion is so­cial but is se­cured by in­di­vid­ual im­pulse.

68:2.9The func­tion of mar­riage in evo­lu­tion is the in­sur­ance of race sur­vival, not merely the re­al­iza­tion of per­sonal hap­pi­ness; self-main­te­nance and self-per­pet­u­a­tion are the real ob­jects of the home. Self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion is in­ci­den­tal and not es­sen­tial ex­cept as an in­cen­tive in­sur­ing sex as­so­ci­a­tion. Na­ture de­mands sur­vival, but the arts of civ­i­liza­tion con­tinue to in­crease the plea­sures of mar­riage and the sat­is­fac­tions of fam­ily life.

84:0.2Mat­ing is purely an act of self-per­pet­u­a­tion as­so­ci­ated with vary­ing de­grees of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion; mar­riage, home build­ing, is largely a mat­ter of self-main­te­nance, and it im­plies the evo­lu­tion of so­ci­ety. So­ci­ety it­self is the ag­gre­gated struc­ture of fam­ily units. In­di­vid­u­als are very tem­po­rary as plan­e­tary fac­tors—only fam­i­lies are con­tin­u­ing agen­cies in so­cial evo­lu­tion. The fam­ily is the chan­nel through which the river of cul­ture and knowl­edge flows from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other.

84:0.3The home is ba­si­cally a so­ci­o­logic in­sti­tu­tion. Mar­riage grew out of co-op­er­a­tion in self-main­te­nance and part­ner­ship in self-per­pet­u­a­tion, the el­e­ment of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion be­ing largely in­ci­den­tal. Nev­er­the­less, the home does em­brace all three of the es­sen­tial func­tions of hu­man ex­is­tence, while life prop­a­ga­tion makes it the fun­da­men­tal hu­man in­sti­tu­tion, and sex sets it off from all other so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties.