European culture always emphasized that one must be transformed and become a new man, a new person. Europe was the laboratory of many innovations. Both the monotheism from Jerusalem and the humanism from Athens stressed that tomorrow will be better than yesterday and today.
Europeans were often pioneers of social change. The world still looks at European models. There was a time when Europe was the educator about marriage, private life, the nuclear family. The attention to the spouse, the time spent with children, the values of family life inspired generations of thinkers and artists. We have to promote a new reformation and renaissance in Europe.
Are Europeans tired of family life? The opposite may be true. Even if the present family culture in Europe is rather confused, European Unificationists have a message of hope to share.
Many revolutions are motivated by anger, resentment, and accusation. The true love revolution will not campaign against anything or any category of society. It will start as a quest of a greater happiness for all.
A vision of hope will stimulate people’s desire for a better existence. The true love revolution will work at three levels.
Intellectually, it will create tools to rebuild a marriage and family culture. We have to show, with clear evidence, that the choice of marriage and of family life brings many more advantages than all other choices. We have to show this with facts and statistics, testimonies, case studies, and the input of scholars from various fields.
Second, the revolution of true love should use the tools of culture. Aesthetics and ethics will reconcile. Some people say that art is unconcerned by morality, and that artistic inspiration is fuelled by the transgression of moral norms. Some argue that happy love is dull. Only extreme and toxic love is worth portraying, and artistic beauty can be created only when love is ambiguous, creates scars and traumas, destroys the lovers.
This “theorem” is illustrated in the Anna Karenina principle [1], derived from the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
It is true that artists have been inspired by tragic love stories, when love is broken by murder (Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story), illness (Love Story) or accident (Titanic), and more commonly by adultery (Mrs. Bovary and Anna Karenina).
We have to challenge these ideas and motivate artists, film-makers, writers, musicians, to express the beauty of true love, fidelity, marriage and family.
In 1927, the German director Friedrich Murnau (1888-1931) released his movie called Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which glorifies the marriage of simple people, with much poetry, humour, beauty, imagination. Immediately recognized as a masterpiece, Sunrise has been acclaimed by generations of film-makers. For some experts, it is simply the best movie ever made. It shows that the path of true love is a thorny one, but it also brings supreme happiness.
The British sculptor Henry Moore is another case. He was already recognized as a great artist before he met his wife Irina. First, she was his model and muse. Then, after the birth of their daughter Mary, Irina inspired the series of Family Group sculptures, as well as Mother and Child, considered by some as the most important sculptures of the 20th century. Claude Monet, the French impressionist, deeply loved his first wife Camille and was devastated by her premature death, which affected his style. He then married Alice Hoschedé, and the Giverny museum shows how important was family life for this painter.
Then, let us create a new paradigm and contemplate new forms of artistic creation which exalt marriage and family.
Third, we need to go for a political and legislative battle. It may take a certain time. It took much time for certain antifamily groups to influence our minds intellectually and through culture, before they decided to target our legislative chambers. It may not take that long to bring back balance in our laws. There will be a time when the public opinion will realize that the destruction of the family is just too costly, for the public finances, but also for our national cohesion. More fundamentally, a time will come when people get tired on nonsensical love, or the “love without qualities” [2]. Let us anticipate the quest of love with quality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
[2] The man without qualities is a famous novel from Austrian writer Robert Musil
Text: Laurent Ladouce
