 Recently
I've talked about love twice: First when I lamented society's
prohibition of loving more than one person without limit, in my reply to and recapitulation of Glenn Parton's essay Love Politics, and secondly in stating my belief,
obliquely last week, that to love, joyfully is our purpose for living. I thought
I'd try to bring the two threads together. After all, if we can save
the world, we should be able to figure out what love's all about.
First, a caveat. I'm getting old, and I don't love as well or as easily
as I once did, so if you're young and outraged by what I'm saying and know
that I don't know what I'm talking about, forgive me: Living
without a lot of love is a form of madness, so chalk this up to the
ravings of a lunatic. A blind man's memories of seeing are inevitably
imprecise and romanticized.
Now on to the theory, and the thesis which is: Love is an Evolutionary Addiction.
We tend to think of addiction as something to be overcome, but
addiction to love is positive, "devoutly to be wished". We need a lot more of it,
to be healthy, and perhaps if we hope to save the world.
The model for this theory is shown in the figure above. Explanation:
Our sensation (physical or pheromonal) of someone or something we love
both informs and stimulates our intellect and triggers positive
emotions. This sets up a feedback loop: Our charged emotions further
inform and stimulate our intellect, which triggers further positive
emotion. In the physical and pheromonal absence of the object of our
affection (and also if that object is pure invention or fantasy), we
instead remember or imagine it, sustaining the same feedback loop.
I know, this is pretty clinical, but it does explain how love can be so
overwhelming, pushing everything out of our minds and feelings and
awareness. This model also doesn't pretend to explain how we 'decide'
who or what to love, and why so often that love dies -- that's an issue
for another day.
Whether the sensation is hearing a piece of music or seeing a piece of
art we love, or watching a candle in the fading light, or smelling the
wind and rain on a rhapsodic evening, or listening to the voice of a
loved friend in conversation, the effect is the same -- positive
reinforcement between our intellect and our emotions. And the 'aha'
moment or experience of passionate joy we obtain from reading a poem or
fine expository work or in contemplation, is, though often more muted
by the lack of direct sensory reinforcement (depending on the memory
and the imagination of the contemplator), also a love experience
subject to the same positive reinforcement, but precipitated by conception instead of perception.
 Now when the love is reciprocated
(in fact or in our imagination), the impact is even more intense, and
doubly reinforced, as shown in the figure at right. Lovers literally 'feed off'
each other, as mutual sensations stimulate both their intellects and
emotions, and the food of love -- the physical and pheromonal sensation
of each other, is right at hand. The positive cycle of intellectual and
emotional stimulation can be sustained almost indefinitely, and can be
simply intensified almost without limit. In my opinion (and early
experience) such love does not even need to include sex -- although
imposed sexual fear and repression is very unhealthy, self-imposed
sexual abstention or, in younger lovers, unawareness of the sexual
dimension of love, need not in any way lessen or inhibit its depth and
intensity.
I would argue that such love is evolutionary. We get such positive
reinforcement from loving others, and loving beautiful and fascinating
things, that we tend to keep doing it, and want to do it more. It makes
our life joyful and gives us purpose and motivation to live longer, and
so when those without love give up and die, and those of us with love
procreate and live on, evolution yields species and individuals with
enormous instinctive capacity for, and desire to, love, and to protect
those we love. When I observe the flocks of geese out watching after
each other and the fluffy newborn goslings on their first swim, I have
no doubt they love each other with the same intensity as humans, if
not more. And these are communities
of geese, not just nuclear families -- the one on our pond has 10
adults and 14 goslings, and it's impossible to tell which of the adults
gave birth to which chicks.
I would also argue, as a corollary, that love is addictive. The more of
it we have, the more we want, and when we have it and lose it we go
through a withdrawal as agonizing as the withdrawal from any drug. But
unlike most addictions, addiction to love is healthy.
Now we get to Glenn's essay, and his argument that we should not
restrict ourselves to loving only one other person, and that our
cultural abhorrance of loving more than one, and the moral retribution
we suffer if we even think of loving many others without limit, makes
us mentally ill -- and underlies much of the world's 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 -- neurosis
and psychopathy. I think Glenn is partly right, though I would say that
it is as much our culturally-imbued reluctance and inability to love
and to show love without condition or restraint, to even one person, let alone many, that underlies this mental illness and its symptoms.
 Why
would civilization, our culture, want us and teach us to behave in ways
that are counter-intuitive, counter-evolutionary, and physically and
mentally unhealthy? One could argue that it is a form of
self-destruction -- as I've said in my environmental essays, I believe
that overpopulation and resource shortages lead to stress and
competition, and that normally leads to lower fertility, higher
mortality, and hence brings the population size back into balance with
the rest of life on Earth and its available resources. So perhaps our
reluctance to show love, and our moral taboo against loving many, are
Darwinian mechanisms to break our addiction to love, make us less
joyful, and hence restore ecological balance. If that's true, learning
to love openly and without reservation, and to love many and not just
our nuclear family members, could be 'against nature' and might
actually aggravate overpopulation and worsen the coming eco-collapse. That assumes of course we could even learn to do so in the face of all the opposing natural pressures and stresses and civilizational moralities we face today.
But I think there's another, equally compelling explanation. Glenn
wrote to me saying that "Sexual repression is the root of fascism."
While I prefer to use the terms 'emotional' and 'love' instead of
'sexual' and 'sex', I think he is right in arguing that fascists (and
today's corporatists, who want the world to be run by an integrated
all-powerful political and business elite, rather than democratically
by messy consensus) want and need to sustain physical, emotional and
intellectual control over the 'masses'. They cannot afford to have even
a minority of humans at the lower levels of the corporatist hierarchy
aware of better, healthier, more egalitarian ways to live, or restless
and discontented with their roles as passive consumers, or conscious of
the ecological crisis on the horizon caused by the corporatists'
obsession with perpetual and unsustainable growth. And they cannot
afford for more than a few to be emotionally independent of the
corporatist orthodoxy, lest they walk away and show others the way to
build a new culture that would cause the corporatist civilization
culture to crumble. A healthy ability to love, even one other person,
even ourselves, but, much worse, many others, could provide the
emotional liberation that would open billions of minds, hearts and
imaginations to better ways to live, and reveal starkly the insanity of
the corporatist, civilized world. That would critically threaten and
undermine the political, social, educational, religious and economic
status quo, and corporatists do everything they can to prevent it, including
invoking religious and moral taboos against free love, and politically
ridiculing liberal education and a liberal, open upbringing of children.
Which explanation do you prefer? Are we uptight about love because
nature's telling us to hunker down for apocalypse, or because the
powers that be are brainwashing us to be so, in their own
self-interest? Does it really matter which is the cause? And whatever
the cause, what can and should we do to break free from these
inhibitions, which are so obviously unhealthy and unnatural, and start
to love, once again, openly, without restriction or limit, as many
people as we can, and give in to our wonderful addiction to love?
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