 When I agreed to
publish Glenn Parton's essay Love
Politics on this blog last week, I warned Glenn to expect a
firestorm of response. While I was very intrigued by the ideas in the
essay, I was disturbed by the way
he broached some of these ideas. Several respondents have complained
about the essay, with the loudest criticism being about his
overromanticizing of the 'free love' movement of the 1960s (which Glenn
and I both grew up during), his apparent misogynism and homophobia, and
his preoccupation with the sexual aspects of relationships over the
emotional ones. I will confess that I share readers' concerns on all
these scores. At the same time, I believe the underlying message of
Glenn's essay is fundamentally valid, and extremely important. Rather
than debate the concerns, I'd prefer to try to restate what I learned
from the essay, hopefully in a less provocative way than Glenn's, and
focus the debate on the core ideas and their implications:
- Our society, our civilization, morally permits each of us
to love, passionately and without limit, only one other person. If we
violate this moral rule, we are called 'unfaithful', and this is
considered a sin, fully justifying jealousy by the first person we
loved. If this love manifests itself sexually, it is called 'adultery'
and is illegal as well as immoral. People who do love more than one
person, passionately and without limit, are demonized and shunned in
our society.
- This limitation of permission to love is unnatural, and
renders us psychologically ill, stunted, and repressed. This
psychological illness manifests itself in anger, violence, hatred,
neglect of others, depression, withdrawal, lack of emotional
resilience, self-loathing, disconnection from our senses and from the
Earth, and emotional detachment, emotional retardation, emotional
isolation, emotional shallowness and emotional immaturity. In
psychologists' terms it makes us neurotic and psychopathic. This is not
inconsistent with Prescott's
thesis that human violence stems from a combination of neglect or
abuse in early childhood, and sexual repression as we grow older.
- Our political and economic systems promote and perpetuate
this emotional trauma because it weakens and divides us, makes us
politically meek, intellectually lazy and emotionally disconnected from
our true wants and needs, and hence more malleable as passive students,
workers, and consumers of commercial products and political rhetoric,
all against our better interests.
- This emotional 'closing-off' is entrenched and reinforced
by our society's, our civilization's, indoctrination of the absolute
need and reverence for private, restricted property. Land and chattels
'belong' to a nuclear one-male, one-female family unit, we are
repeatedly told that they are what, along with 'exclusive' love, gives
that family unit substance, value and meaning, and in turn, the
emotionally co-dependent spouses in the nuclear family 'belong'
absolutely to each other ("til death do them part"), and the children
'belong' absolutely to the parents until they are "given away" in
marriage and enter into a new, limited, co-dependent relationship.
Homosexuality is abhorred because it doesn't 'fit' this model.
- As a consequence, the community is destroyed in favour of
the isolated, helpless, insecure, competitive, self-interested family
unit and the all-powerful corporatist State. Our co-dependence on our
exclusive partner and our dependence on the corporatist State are thus
deepened, an inescapable emotional, economic and political prison.
- Our ability to love and be loved is unlimited. It is a gift
that grows and seeds itself and is enriched when it is reciprocated.
There is no such thing as too much love, and until civilization imposed
its brutal restrictions, it 'cost' nothing. It is liberating, and arguably the
true source of life's meaning.
So what does this all mean? If you can accept these six Principles
About Love, what are their implications? What does this tell us about
how we should live?
I think it's safe to say that this kind of emotional openness would
only work in a community whose members were self-selected, and where
there was substantial trust among the members. That describes lots of
tribal cultures, but in our culture, only communes even come close. My
guess would be that most communes have failed either because they tried
to live idealistically, completely cut off from the rest of
civilization (instead of taking the best technologies and the best
aspects of modern society and melding them with the best of communal
life), or they lived on the periphery of civilization and didn't know
enough about business and economics to operate successfully 'partly
within the system'. And many communes were pretty liberal at allowing
new members and visitors in without limits, which would certainly
strain trust. The new terms Intentional
Community and Bioregional Community are similar to,
though somewhat broader than, 'commune', but they are vulnerable to the
same failings. With the right mix of pragmatism, economic and business
understanding, and rigorous review and unanimous approval of new
members, however, there is no reason why these types of community
shouldn't work well, and they would provide a perfect laboratory for
the kind of emotional openness that Glenn espouses.
Glenn makes a point of saying he is not
advocating promiscuity or a culture that compels the
acceptance of unwanted, coercive emotional or sexual advances. What he
is saying is that people in a trusting community should be free to
love, passionately and without limit, more than one person, and to
express that love in any way that is mutually agreed upon, and that
such love should in no way diminish the love that either partner feels
and expresses for others in the community. He is saying that exclusive
pairing is not 'hard wired' into us, and that we could learn to permit
ourselves, and those we love, to develop deep, guilt-free,
jealousy-free, loving relationships with many people within a trusted
community. And he is saying that if we could allow ourselves that
freedom we would be happier, more peaceful, more respectful, more
attentive, more optimistic, more connected with each other, our senses
and the Earth, more emotionally resilient, self-loving, emotionally
balanced, more feeling, and more emotionally mature. And with that
emotional health would come the clarity, strength, and vision needed to
tackle and overcome many of the intractable problems that bedevil
civilization. I think this makes a lot of sense.
I don't believe we need this kind of emotional liberation to save the world, but I don't think it would hurt.
If you didn't get this from Glenn's essay, this may be due more to my
imagining of what he meant than your misunderstanding. As Daniel
Dennett says "On any important topic, we tend to have a rough
idea of what we believe to be true, and when an author writes the words
we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the
arguments." And I expect that Glenn will weigh in himself on what he really meant. But now that I've
delineated what I
got out of
his essay, and why I think his basic idea is very sensible and very
important, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Naive? Idealistic?
Wrong-headed? Insensitive? Or is there something here that bears closer
scrutiny, and maybe a real-world trial?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
