Saint Luke Brotherly Love

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again.
And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.
And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High Bible, Luke 6.27-6.35

Decidedly, Saint Luke asks us too much. To love those who hate us, when we are clearly incapable of loving the poor we meet, or the unfortunate gathered on the edges of our societies? To love those who hate us, when our daily life is full of indifference towards the unknown people we encounter? To allow others to rob us without reacting, and manage what we lend as if we were giving?

Decidedly, we don’t behave and love in the terms proposed by Saint Luke. We love in much more restricted and conditioned terms.

«Why do I love my own children so much and other people’s children so little? », asks Sponville, peeping into our hearts in a much more realistic way than Saint Luke. And the same Sponville answers: «Because my children are mine, and in loving them I love myself».

Egoism is in fact at the bottom of our hearts – even in our loves. And we can’t expel it. On many occasions we can sympathise, or be capable of generosity and solidarity with other people. But we shouldn’t have any illusions: we aren’t the saints that Saint Luke demands us to be, and we will never be able to love in the terms he asks for.

We are sons of the world’s cruelty. We are descendants of beings who have struggled and killed to survive. In order to survive our ancestors had to practise solidarity, indifference and aggressiveness.  From our distant fathers we have inherited parental and kinship love. We haven’t inherited – because there wasn’t such love in their hearts – the brotherly love proposed by Saint Luke.

We can ask: isn’t it possible to raise ourselves ethically, and to extend our sympathy and love beyond the inner circles considered by our instincts and animal nature? And shouldn’t we face the required love of Luke as a poetic and desirable metaphor?

Certainly. Appeals to brotherly love are always welcome. They can be exalting, and Saint Luke’s words are a good metaphor, in a sense. But we should also be realistic. In defending them, we also incur the inevitable risk of being ignored and our arguments compared to void words and mere rhetoric.

Love Cycles

Time To War And Time To Love on Our Daily Lives

One can read in Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
(…) A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

This vision of life as a cycle can be distorting and wrong. There are many other views in which life doesn’t spread out as a cycle but as one damn thing after another, or as an erratic snake, or as the coloured joy of a bird in spring.

But there is in fact a certain angle where life and its elements show up to us in a circular way, where love and war follow on from each other with regularity along time. There is a view in which the Ecclesiastes author is right.

Think of our everyday life, and its wars: the work war, the survival war. Isn’t there, in the interval of our daily wars, a space – perhaps brief, too brief – for a smile, for a calm conversation, for a kiss? There is indeed always an hour, a minute, to love. There is a cycle of war and love in our lives. And Ecclesiastes is right, in this view.

Even those responsible for wars, in the strict sense of the word, aren’t excluded from this cycle. Even those whose hands are dirty with blood – as the Nazis – need a space for loving their children, their spouses, their lovers (yet it may be considered as wretched and insignificant in face of the space dedicated to war and hate).

We all are involved in these cycles. In fact, what varies within the repeating cycles of our lives is the duration of the spaces they contain. In the better of us the space for the superior or for the good acts may be bigger. But in them there is also a large space for repetitive daily things, and for the evil present in the roots of every being. And that’s another perspective of seeing human’s lives as cycles.

Love, Egoism, Competition, Private Profit

Economic Liberalism and Communism

What commands our society? Love? Competition, market forces and private profit?

According to Adam Smith, the father of Economics, love has little or no importance in economic life:

 

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. 

More than a hundred years after Adam Smith, John M. Keynes, one of the top economists of twentieth century, classified in harsh terms the nature of the regulating rules praised by Adam Smith: «gluttony». It’s gluttony that commands our economic life. It’s not love.

Surely there have been some alternative experiences to the market system vindicated by Adam Smith, namely the communist experiences, and to a lesser degree the social-democratic experiments. But they have failed, or are in regression…

And we may ask: why have communism and other projects of collective love failed so clearly in their application to society and to economic life? Why does liberalism and the market system, with its profit motive and egoistic viewpoint, appear as incontestable winner?

Adam Smith gives himself the answer:

 

By pursuing his own interest [people] frequently promote that of the society more effectually than when [people] really intend to promote it.  Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. 

In other words: the promotion of the society’s interests within the principles of love fails because we are intrinsically egoist. Without constraints and our egoistic engagement, the economic system falls asleep.

But does this picture correspond to the entire truth? Does this mean that our societies can or should work merely or basically according to the economic market principles of profit and competition?

Love and Market

Critics to Economic Market SystemGreediness, Reason and Love

Misery remains in large regions of the world. Conflicts spread all over the world. Our planet is ecologically at a critical point…

There are many explanations for such a situation, of course. We can be rather vague – and yet touch the truth – and say that the problems of our societies are rooted in our ways of behaving and thinking. Or we can be controversial and blame the market laws, or, in other words, the rules that drive our economic systems and societies.

And that’s what Schumacher, an important economist and ecologist of the twentieth century, has defended. To him, «a man pushed by greediness and envy» - which is what is happening in the framework of economic liberalism - «looses his faculty of seeing things as they really are, or of seeing them in their proportions and in the whole, and his successes may turn into a fiasco».

Our environmental problems are a major example of the result of the functioning of market rules. Global warming and huge climate changes are menacing billions of people, and are a direct emanation of man’s greed and of the short term view and interests associated with market rules.

In an epoch where the mermaid chant of liberalism is largely dominant, it’s important to meditate on the words of the critics of that system. They may contain some utopia, or some disagreement with the near world, but they help us to be more critical.

Economics may have constraints and rules. The market can’t be abolished, and can be a powerful mechanism of development. But we must correct it and oppose its evil sides. Love – in its diverse forms: love to others, to the earth, to high cultural standards… and reason, also have an important word in our societies and economics. We can’t leave the market so free of rules as the hard line liberals pretend.

LOVE & ECONOMICS

All living beings kill to survive and run away from death, struggling zealously for their survival. All living beings defend their interests and the interests of their relatives, many times against the interests of other more general interests.

Our daily life – and mainly our economic life – reflects the biological life and its laws. The market laws – linked to competition and to daily struggle - are, in their own way, a reproduction of the laws of biology (or the law of the jungle, if we prefer).

And yet our societies are not jungles, though sometimes it seems so. Our rationality (though limited), our intelligence, and our collective and cooperative side, give to our societies a very complex nature.

Our societies wouldn’t work just based on competition and private interests. Without the corrections introduced by the State, without interventions favouring the poor, the forests or the animal life, without rules of ethics and principles inspired in love and reason, we wouldn’t arrive at where we are. Our societies couldn’t exist. As Sponville says:

Who could possible believe that profit alone is sufficient to ensure a humane society? The economy produces wealth; we need wealth, we can never have too much of it. But we also need justice, freedom, security, peace, fraternity, hopes, ideals. No market can provide these things.

André Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Philosophy

In fact, market laws and human egoisms are extremely dangerous for our planet and our societies. The instability and dangerous imbalances of our world are mostly a result of the work of the spontaneous mechanisms of market forces, human egoism and short sighted views. And without the reinforcement of collective love forms – solidarity, cooperation, generosity, donation… - our future existence is largely uncertain.

Citizens Pride, Vanity and Love to Motherland

Patriotism and Nationalism Values
To love our country is part of our common sense. Politicians applaud that love, and promote it. Education, the scholar’s spelling-books and the historic data divulge the values and the examples of patriotism. Citizens feel it as good and desirable. There are nationalistic slivers in the common citizen.

We may say: it’s part of human nature. Nationalism is an extension of the love to family, to clan, to tribe, to ourselves. There are blood vows uniting patriots to their flag. The Motherland is formed by our equals, by those who speak the same language and share many common values, tastes, interests, and contribute to a common pool.

It’s natural, then. But not all of which is natural is good (hate is also natural)…

Obviously we have the legitimacy of liking our country. It’s not that that is at stake. What’s really at stake is to be a citizen of a country without being even more a citizen of the world. It is to have pride and vanity, it’s to think that the truth, the good, the reason and the most brilliant history is associated with the country where we were born, and that only our fellow-citizens deserve our solidarity.

In this view, nationalism is ridiculous and dangerous and is the cause of many wars and evils. And that may justify the words of Albert Einstein and Bernard Shaw: «Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind» (Einstein), «You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race» (Shaw).

Love, Sex and Politics

Politicians Love of Exhibitionism and Sexual Power 

We may doubt the politicians love to public good. But we shouldn’t doubt their love of power, with all it presupposes: exhibitionism, attempting to escape from our condition as humble and insignificant beings, and… as evolutionary biologists and historians state, sexual power.

What does that last feature mean, exactly?

Some facts may help us to understand it: Solomon, the great ancient sage, had a harem of a thousand concubines (and one consort); Mao-Zedong, the socialist Chinese leader, opposing everything he was ideologically proclaiming, surrounded himself by a harem of some dozen concubines…

And these are not isolated cases. Whenever they could, the powerful men of the past always gathered large harems… Sexual power has been a powerful motivation to many politicians.

Naturally, we may say that democracy and new ethical values have destroyed the harems. And that’s true. But have democracy and the new values destroyed the old searching for sexual power by politicians?

If we analyse the American political scene, it seems much so. President Clinton met with political disaster after his case with Monica Lewinsky, and the same happened before him to Harry Hart. As Matt Ridley says:

 

Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-tu once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.Matt Ridley, Red Queen

Yet we shouldn’t exaggerate. Sex and politics keep mixing themselves, yet in a more moderate and hidden way. Clinton, Gary Hart or John Kennedy aren’t exactly exceptions of what goes on in political meanders. There are at least a good half a dozen American presidents with known extra-marital cases. And many thousands of unknown cases, levered by political positions, at an inferior political level.

That’s a good reason to say, as Kissinger: «Power is a great aphrodisiac».

Politicians Love of Humanity and Public Causes, of the Poor and of Ideals of Better Societies

There is genuine love in politics: the love of public causes, of the poor, of ideals of more perfect societies. There are many revolutions inspired by principles of brotherly love, and we shouldn’t doubt the good intentions of many politicians. As Morin wrote:


It’s countless the political acts inspired by the love to citizenship and to humanity, and by the will to found a better world.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, As Grandes Questões Do Nosso Tempo


But as he also says:


As in the Goethe tragedy, where the good intentions of Faust causes the loss of Margarita, and the bad actions of Mephistopheles ends by saving her, also in politics the hell is full of good intentions.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, As Grandes Questões Do Nosso Tempo


And why, we may ask? 


The reasons are very diverse, obviously. Yet there is a powerful and general explanation: the nature of our loves, and the nature of the loves present in the politician’s hearts (when they exist and are not just trivial rhetoric). 


In fact, love isn’t a simple pure thing. Often it is mingled with pride, and vanity. Or mixed with ideas and utopias, or with ignorance of what men are and how our societies and economics work (which are other forms of love of ideas). 


And that – when applied to politicians – is a powerful step to failure. It quickly empties the political love, and closes each man in his world and his interests and ideas - which is, after all, the more natural human condition…

Love And Politics

Politicians’ love of public causes is often rhetorical. Even when such a love exists, it is mingled with the love of the exhibition and the love of empty words and false promises – a very ancient fact, intimately connected to the first steps of democracy.

In fact, the first steps of Greek and Roman democracy were highly rhetoric, with citizens - mostly illiterates - using gaudy speeches bought from the professionals of rhetoric (namely, the so called sophists, a mixture of philosophers and word cheaters).

History records some of these characters, such as Gorgias of Leontini, a distinguished sophist who made his wealth creating speeches and selling the texts to those who wanted to plead in court or in political assemblies. There are documents describing Gorgias wearing purple tunics, skipping on stages, surrounded by stunned audiences, exhibiting his oratorical gifts and his gold wristbands.

When we compare characters such as Gorgias with what is going on today, it is possible to conclude that there has been progress. Today’s politicians are much more discreet. Today, nobody would dare to dress or use the language of Gorgias, or to write a Praise of the Fly, as Luciano did.

And yet there is another standpoint: present politicians have just sophisticated the resources of their predecessors. They haven’t discarded their old love of lying and rhetoric. In other words: it’s a pity they haven’t kept their old vices and gaudy speeches: it would be much easier to denounce them.

Love and Cruelty Concerning Animals

Conscience and Indifference

Man is capable of the worst and of the best. We are easily capable of loving and of hating, of being clear-sighted and blind. And our relationship with the remaining animal world is a big illustration of that very fact.

We are able to love animals profoundly. The attachment of children and the elderly to their dogs, cats and birds are a known illustration.

How would our world be without animals? How would our country-sides and woods be without birds? What would be of our world without forests and their inhabitants? The silence and the emptiness would smash us.

And yet we have always been hunters, we have always killed animals and destroyed woods and forests – to eat, to survive, but sometimes also cruelly, also unnecessarily or excessively.

And today, worsening past violence, we imprison animals in narrow poultry-yards and cowsheds, stealing their freedom, treating them as machines, slaughtering them in the millions on the automated lines of slaughter-houses, or subjecting them to the worst sufferings in our laboratories and our scientific experiments.

We are very far from some Asiatic traditions concerning the rights of animals:

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is a pure, unchangeable, eternal law.

Jaina Sutras, Acaranba Sutra, traditional religious Indian texts  

And at another level, blindly, turning nature against us, we are poisoning the earth and the sea with the chemicals of our industries, destroying forests and their milliards and milliards of species (maybe millions, if we count the insects and micro-organisms). Blindly, often in the name of progress, we kill and destroy.

Love and cruelty, conscience and indifference, are part of us. They are both in us, contradictorily. And that justifies a little mediation on the arguments of the animal rights defenders. 

Love And Birds

Human Ethics and the Insensibility of Other Animal 


When the guns stop their shouting, birds hasten to sing. In the midst of desolation and the horrors left by human wars, birds sing perched on the boots of the dead soldiers, inattentive to death. It’s a well known scene for those who have experienced war.

This indifference of birds sounds strange. It shocks us, hurts us. And may lead us to think: «How far and above other species we are. Only we are able to truly feel and have conscience. Only we are capable of thinking and loving in superior terms».

Well, maybe. But we can’t help being as the birds, insensible to the sight of a thousand and one massacres – at the human level, and outside it. Absorbed and used to the cruelty of life as we are, we don’t see how indifferently we behave towards the poor and the unfortunate of our species, and how cruel we behave towards other species.

Positively, we don’t think of the millions of animals we daily slaughter in our shambles, or of the many billions we keep confined in cruel conditions, before killing them.

In this view, it’s entirely out of place to become astonished with the insensibility of the birds that sing in the branches of trees next to the human corpses left by our own wars.

Love and Tolerance

The Worst Evils and Wars are Driven By Our Lack of Tolerance and Our Love to Some Ideas of God, of Truth, of Good
Tolerance is inseparable from love: we easily forgive the errors and the sins of those we love; we hardly forgive those we don’t love. Love makes us tolerant; it’s lack makes us intolerant.

But tolerance isn’t only linked to love. It’s also dependent on information. Only those we know themselves, and have a contemporary view of human nature, can be tolerant. If we value our reasons too much, or if our bad humours are taken too seriously, or if we don’t recognize the relative value of our ideas, or see ourselves as superior to others, or with a superior culture or God, or superior predicates, we become intolerant, and the intolerance becomes the cause of conflicts and wars.

That’s what philosophers such as Seneca proclaim:

We will be more prudent if we observe our interior, if we interrogate ourselves in these terms: Haven’t I done something alike? Haven’t I also sinned? Do I have legitimacy to condemn those faults?

Seneca, 4 a.C.-65 d. C., Roman philosopher and politician, Of Rage

Tolerance is indeed tightly connected to our ideas. Driven by our love to some ideas of God, of truth, of good, humans predispose themselves to the worst evils and murders. We become fanatics and blind, as the many past revolutions show: the French, the Soviet, the Nazi… That’s what François Jacob states:
 

History hugely shows that anything is so dangerous, so murderous, as ideologies, as fanaticisms, as the certainty of being right.

All the big crimes of our History have been a result of some fanaticism. All the big massacres were perpetrated by virtue, in the name of the legitimate nationalism, of the true religion, of the true ideology.

F. Jacob, 1920, French biologist, The Statue Within  

Love and Reason

The Intense Love to Causes, Ideas or God Feeds Hate 

Love doesn’t depend on our will. We don’t love on command. That’s what we often say, and it is true at first sight. But there is another viewpoint: a view where our love is commanded, where love depends on our reason, for our own good and for the sake of itself.

Think, for instance, in the hate present in so many street manifestations and in the stones and threats escaping from infuriated mouths – legitimately or no, it doesn’t matter, in this case. The fact is that there exists hate, and hate moves hearts and crowds, all over the world.

And yet, at the same time, in those same crowds, and in each individual, there is love. Love to the partner in protestation, love to the God, to the motherland, to the cause and to the ideas that are being defended.

Love and hate are linked realities. The intense love of particular causes feeds the hate of the opposing ideas and people, and that turns these loves into particularly aggressive and dangerous realities.

The love accompanied by conceptions in which adversaries are considered demoniac beings, is dangerous. The love that gives voice to our genetic instincts, that is spontaneous, animal, independent of our will, based on passion, is not a good thing. The love that is not informed, where there is no meditation, humbleness or tolerance, is dangerous.

In fact, concerning love, we shouldn’t consider spontaneity as a well – either at political and ideological levels, or at a more personal echelon. The male chauvinism, the passionate crime, the human tendency to infidelity are natural and spontaneous and they often escape our consciences. They have a genetic bottom. And yet they are not good.

And they can and must be opposed – by way of values, by our conscience, by our intelligence. In other words, by way of our reason. After all, love isn’t necessarily independent of our reason

Love and Pride of our Nation, Race and Deeds

It’s usual to proclaim our right to pride: to motherland, to our deeds, to our race... And that pride is, deep down, a way of loving: of loving our nation, our race, our personal deeds. Our pride is not entirely separable from love.

But pride is usually a minor and poor way of loving, and a minor or negative feeling. It may be vanity, arrogance, presumption, racism (in the case of racial pride), silly nationalism (in the case of displaced love to the nation we belong to).

Love present in pride is built at the cost of more authentic loves. To love the country we were born in, or to be proud of what we have done can be rather reducing and a form of ignorance.

Yes. Pride is ignorance, or a cause of ignorance. Pride can blind us: those who feel proud of their deeds, beauty, intelligence or physical strength, are ignoring the other side of reality, valuing excessively transitory things of our lives, forgetting our inner condition of modest and humble beings. Pride is an expression of vanity, and vanity blinds us towards the fundamentals of our existential condition. Pride is to pretend to be more than what we really are, or what things we value are. 

Love and Humility

To Be Humble Is To Refuse Vanity, Hate, Pride

We all are deeply dependent on luck, and subject to the cruelties of life. We all need love. We all share the same existential conditions. We are all different, but also equals. And to understand this at the bottom of our hearts is to become humble, and to renounce vanity and pride. To be humble is not to give too much importance to our strength, power, or intelligence. Humility can be a major virtue.

That’s what Sponville defends: «Humility is the virtue of the man who knows that he is not God». And that’s why humility is a major virtue, and not a virtue of the weak and losers, as often seen. «The more generous human beings are usually the most humble» (Descartes).

We need humility. If Aristotle – of whose superior intelligence nobody doubts – had been more humble, he wouldn’t have expressed the shocking opinions he did about women or slavery: «Women are defective by nature (…). A woman is as it were an infertile male»; «There is little difference between using slaves and using tame animals: both provide bodily help to do necessary things».

Aristotle never revealed the humility that others of his time, or of some years after, revealed:
 

Isn’t it true that the one who you indicate as a slave was born from the same seeds and enjoys the same sky as you, and breathes, lives and dies as you, and that you can see the master in him and the servant in you? Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

You are my brother because you share the same conscience and the same destiny. Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts

To hate others is lack of humility:

It’s not suitable of the wise man to hate those we are going wrong, because in that case he should hate himself. There is nobody who absolutely can absolve himself, and if someone proclaims that publicly, he feels otherwise in his conscience.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Lack of humility may inclusively be a source of war and crime. Lack of humility makes men see their adversaries as inhuman and as enemies, and leads them to proclaim the right to vengeance, with all it may bring of evil.

Life ends up by being a long lesson in humility, but we seldom t learn some fundamental things. And that’s why we don’t love more, and aren’t more humble, and there are so many conflicts.

Revolt, Resentment, Disbelieving, Ingratitude, Unhappiness and the Medicine of Love

Revolt and resentment live within us, ready to reveal themselves. They are a response to pain, to the cruelty of life, to affront, to death, to disillusion.

And they may blind us. Revolt and disbelieving aren’t good companions and can lead us to ingratitude. A heart full of bitterness, unable to forget offences and grievance, is also unable to enjoy the good things of life, to recognize a friendly hand, a smile, or an act of justice.

Revolt and resentment are widow’s curses, poisoning life definitively. It’s ingratitude. It’s a way of madness, in Epicurus’ words: «The life of the folly is empty of gratitude and full of anxiety…»

Against ingratitude, resentment, and the unhappiness linked to them, love is the only big solution. Just the «medicine of love» can make us happy (Ecclesiastes). Just love can lead us to re-establish harmonious links with life, destroying our resentments and making us forget the world’s cruelty.

Philosophers such as Epicurus emphasised the role of love – as friendship - in the human struggle against tendencies of resentment and ingratitude. And emphasised the necessity of a serene acceptance of the facts of life, on the framework of an ancient but yet very actual philosophy of life.

It is worth reflecting upon the words of Epicurus and Seneca on this matter:

We must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been and by the recognition that it is impossible to make undone what has been done.Epicurus, 341-270 b.C., Greek philosopher, The Extant Remains

Everything hangs on one’s thinking. (…) A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
What difference does it make what your position in life is, if you dislike it yourself?
Not happy he who thinks himself not so.
What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, or of being unhappy now just because you were then? (…) When troubles come to an end, the natural thing is to be glad.
Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. 
A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear, while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

Love, Errors, Faults and Mercy

We do not appreciate mercy greatly. In front of the transgressor and the criminal, the devise «An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth» is much more pleasant to us than pardon. In practice, our justice doesn’t combine too much with love.

And that, even in court. The impartiality of judges may be higher than that of our daily love, but they can’t open their hearts too much. It would be too disturbing.

A judge can’t speculate as Sponville does, concerning the offender’s faults:

How we know we wouldn’t have turned out like him, had we been brought up as he was in fear and violence? And if, having been brought up like him, we did not turn out like him, then isn’t it because, despite the similarities, we are different from him? Did he choose to be the way he is? And did we choose not to be that way?

The courts’ purpose isn’t to apply justice according to love duties to mankind. That would lead too often to mercy, which would be too damaging to social order.

What determines the harshness of many punishments is not so much the degree of offence, but the necessity of order and of discouraging crime. In the words of George Savile:

Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.

In the name of our social order, courts have to punish. The official justice can’t be based on love and forgiveness.

But that’s not the case of our everyday life. Outside courts love is fundamental, namely when we are the judges and feel tempted to act according to the principle of «An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth».

With love we forgive. Without it the errors and the sins of our adversaries become outrageous crimes – often a cause of our own faults and mad wars.

Love, Robots, Androids, Human Future

Genetics and robotics can alter mankind dramatically, as the many previsions about this matter suggest:

The more we learn about our brains, the more ways we will find to improve them. Each brain has hundreds of specialized regions. We know only a little about what each one does - but as soon as we find out how any one part works, researchers will try to devise ways to extend that organ's capacity. They will also conceive of entirely new abilities that biology has never provided. As these inventions accumulate, we'll try to connect them to our brains - perhaps through millions of microscopic electrodes inserted into the great nerve-bundle called the corpus callosum, the largest data-bus in the brain. With further advances, no part of the brain will be out of bounds for attaching new accessories. In the end, we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain - and thus repair all the defects and flaws that make our lives so brief.

Needless to say, in doing so, we'll be making ourselves into machines.

Does this mean that machines will replace us? I don't feel that it makes much sense to think in terms of "us" and "them." I much prefer the attitude of Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon University, who suggests that we think of those future intelligent machines as our own "mind-children." Marvin Minsky, American scientist, Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, Scientific American, October 1994 

Altering even a small number of the key genes regulating human growth might change human beings into something quite different.Gregory Stock, UCLA scientist, in Metaman.

When you die, you should have your brain frozen; then, in a couple of decades, it will get thawed out and nanobots will repair the damage; then you can start augmenting it with silicon chips; finally, your entire mental software, and your consciousness along with it (you hope), will get uploaded into a computer; and—with multiple copies as insurance—you will live forever, or at least until the universe falls apart.Jim Holt, in Slate (slate.msn.com), 16/5/2003, commenting Bill McKibben book My Son, the Robot 

These are bold scenarios, and we may legitimately consider most of them as largely unachievable. Yet we shouldn’t minimize the capability of our technology and the surprise packets science may bring with it – one of which, a big one, may be the end of our own species.

In fact, we incur the risk of stopping being homo sapiens,even in the framework of relatively small changes. By changing our genome and the existential conditions linked to it – extending our lives over dozens of years, and reducing strongly our pain, anguish and fears, as some scenarios predict – we may definitively transform ourselves into rather distinct beings. Largely disconnected from pain or fears, the future beings considered by many predictions would no longer have the ecstasies and the expectations, or the needs and capacity of love, or the joys and sorrows of today’s humans.

Love responds to the interests of Genes

But also to Intelligence, Conscience and Values
Love is mysterious, beautiful, divine. That’s a current view.

But this is not the position of modern evolutionist psychology and biology. To these scientists, love is largely an illusion. Behind the spontaneity of love are genetic mechanisms. Or rather: there are genes defending their interests, switching on and off some chemicals; parental love, for instance, is the way created by genes to make parents defend the copies of their genes, present in their children’s bodies. Parents are being manipulated by genes.

A terrible and negative vision? We shouldn’t precipitate. There is another way of seeing this same reality.

Look: it’s not novelty that love has a genetic ground. It comes from our inside, from our deepest I. It’s what we have always said. In a way scientists aren’t adding much. They are just focusing things in terms of genes (genes are our inner side).

Secondly: genes’ power isn’t boundless; genes may be defending their interests when switching on some passions or ways of loving. But we aren’t their handcuffed prisoners. In reality we are opposing them whenever we oppose instincts (related to love, or sex, or in other areas).

We are opposing genes when we restrict the number of our children (the blind interest of genes would be that we had as many sons as possible). We are opposing them when we practise sex out of its original function: the reproductive one. We are opposing them when we love beyond what is the genetic propensity (brotherly love is a good illustration).

In other words: our love has not to be seen as a mere emanation of genes and their interests. Why should we consider the mother’s love or lyrical love as a mere genetic and mechanical reflex of the interests of the genes?

Our intelligence, our conscience, our society, and our values can overlay the genetic impulses. Our brain isn’t a mere puppet in the genes’ power game. In evolutionary terms, it appeared and developed to solve multiple problems, and evolved in a way that largely surpasses the demands of genetic reproduction. Our genes aren’t diabolic forces, enslaving us. And our loves must not be seen as a mechanical resulting of the interests of genes.

It’s a reason to say as Tocqueville has said, though in another context: «It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free».

Love Is a Servant of Genes

As It Is Human Passions, Infidelity, Violence, Hate, Homicide 


Science seems to rejoice in destroying our illusions and dreams. Galileo has retired us and the Earth from the centre of the Universe, diminishing Earth and its inhabitants to a small blue dot lost between billions of suns and planets. In the same line, Darwin showed that we aren’t the beings created to the image of God we thought we were, but just mere animals, descendents of other species, involved in the cruel struggle of surviving.

Until now our love has always appeared protected from such attacks of science. Our loves, as our concepts of beauty and ugliness, our religions, our artistic tastes, or our goods and evils, are areas mainly created by our minds, linked to our values, apart from science.

But that’s not the vision of some modern evolutionary psychology and biology, at least concerning love. To some scientists there is no mystery or greatness in love. Love is connected to the mechanisms of passion, and these mechanisms are basically servants of the genes.

There are genes inciting us to infidelity (mainly male infidelity), to sexual obsession and violence, to hates, vindictive spirits and even homicides and wars (today’s Amazonian Indians, such as the Yanomano, still make wars to kidnap women)…

Why? Why do genes incite such conducts? Because through infidelity or the kidnapping of women, or sexual obsession, or homicides and crimes, the genes of the winner are transmitted (and the loser’s genes are not). In the natural struggle for surviving anything is good as long as it serves the main goal. Genes have no ethics. .

In the genes’ view, our body is but a vehicle at their service. Genes do not worry about good, or about our well-being and the survival of the individual whose body they inhabit. They are only «interested» in themselves, and in propagating. That’s their blind logic.

When genes activate some chemical substances of the human brain to make a mother or a father love their children, and to feel pleasure and become addicted to that, they are only defending their interests, or rather, defending the copies of themselves present in the bodies of the couple’s sons.

Once more, science contradicts our dreams of being more then mere animals, above the mechanical grounds of life. In this view, love has nothing to do with the transcendent, the romantic or the divine, and appears as a blind mechanism serving genes and their propagation. 

Humans Don't Love the True Knowing and Truth. We Love Myths and Dreams

According to Aristotle, we are a specie endowed with the thirst of learning. «All men by nature desire to know», he wrote, in his Metaphysics.

But the love to knowing can be seen in a much less extolling view. Frequently we are too absorbed with our ideas, illusions and dreams, or with our sons, consorts and business, without time or will to spy through the holes that give access to the other side of life and to other levels of knowing.

What we love most is not the true knowing, or truth. The knowing we like is the immediate and conventional one. It’s the knowing that feeds our capacity of survival and our relationships with others. A knowing often mingled with myth and dream.

To worsen our predispositions, when a stronger impulse comes into our life and incites us to peep through the holes of life to the other side of things, we often don’t like of what we see. We distinguish uncomfortable and threatening realities – weaknesses, limitations, emptiness, wars, death…- or realities too complex and incomprehensible. And we run away.

Most of the times we prefer the dreaming and the myth  - the myth that we are strong, that we are children of God (instead of descendants of apes), that we are at the centre of the universe, that our country is the best of all, or that man… has the love of knowing.

Love and Social Progress, Ethics, Education

I see the better course and approve of it; I follow, alas! the worse! Ovid, 43 b.C -17 a.C, roman writer,Metamorphoses 

Love can be a blessing, and can save us. But some of its forms are dangerous. The love of some political causes or of some ideas of good and progress are a source of fanaticism and hate, which can be a source of evil, conflicts and bloody wars.

Maybe because of this and of our conscience that abstract appeals to love are largely worthless, love is rarely presented as part of the solution to the evils of our societies. The solutions are mainly set in grounds of education, removal of poverty and elevation of social ethics.

But is this last standpoint consistent?

We may argue that levels of education have increased, as have global social wealth and our ethical consciences, yet our many social problems remain. We may even sustain that there are no sound progresses, as some distinguished thinkers support:
 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.Ralph W. Emerson, 1803-1882, America writer, Self-Reliance.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, Physician, in EinsteinQuotes.html, rescomp.stanford.edu, by Kevin Harris

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, American politician, Strength to love

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.Norton Whitehead, 1861-1947, English philosopher and mathematician, Adventures in Ideas.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.Will Rogers, 1879-1935, American actor, in New York Times de 23/12/1929   

Today we know how to measure, to weigh, to analyse the Sun. Science is elucidative, enriching, conqueror, triumphant. And yet this living knowing is the one which makes and threatens the annihilation of mankind.E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Legitimately we can still stand and believe in our social progress and in a better future. But whatever our position is, the dream of a truly fully balanced society, without major conflicts, is obviously just that: a dream. And in this viewpoint, Ovid is right: we may see the better, and approve of it, but we don’t follow it. Our nature does not allow it… unless we set up other more drastic paths, namely technological futuristic ones, involving modifications in our genome, or prothesis to our brain, or chemical drugs.

Friendship as Love and Brotherhood and Friendship as Play, Complicity and Shared Joy

We like to place friendship in its highest stage. «Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things of life», says Aristotle, illustrating our penchant to drive friendship to its top and most demanding expressions, where it mimics love.

Friendship may indeed be a form of love and fraternity in the deepest sense of the words. There are many definitions of friendship in these very terms:
 

A faithful friend is the medicine of life

Bible, Ecclesiastes
Friends cannot lend or give anything to each other. (…)  Everything should belong to each of them. 
(…)

The union of two such friends being truly perfect, it causes them to lose the sense of such duties, and to detest and banish as between themselves those words implying separation and difference – benefit, obligation, gratitude, entreaty, thanks, and their like.Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Essays

And yet friendship may also not involve love. Currently, friendship stands at a less demanding stage: the one of conviviality, of social interactivity, of shared joy. 

This second view of friendship doesn’t truly diminish it. We need our spaces of conviviality, of play, of joy, of social interaction, as much as we need love. Our nature doesn’t dispense it.

Friendship feeds on communication.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Essays

Human beings also live of music, contemplation, flowers, smiles.

E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Método V

To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.Sallust, 86-35 b.C., Roman historian, Jughurta

To share the happy and sad moments, to confess secrets and intimate projects, all these is a major part of friendship.A. Rievaulx, 1109-1167, French religious, L'Amitié spirituelle

But that doesn’t alter much our way of seeing things. We persevere seeing friendship as having high standards of brotherhood, complicity and help. And when these last dimensions – very close to love, or mingled with it – fail, we regret it, and consider the very fact as treason:

What is commonly called friendship isn’t but a society, a combination of interests, a change of good intentions; a commerce, where self-interest wants to win something.Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680, French writer, Maxims

My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend.E. Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher, Fundamentos da Filosofia dos costumes

Extreme and delicate friendship can be wounded by a thorn of a rose.S. Chamfort, 1740-1794, French writer, Maximes et pensées

As love, friendship also involves jealously and susceptibilities.

Eric Blondel,  French writer, L'Amour   
A true friendship is as rare as a black swan.E. Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher, Fundamentos da Filosofia dos costumes

Sexual Love, God and Humour

One of the favourite expressions of the famous American actress Bette Davis was that "Sex is God's joke on human beings». And in fact sometimes it looks like that, if we take into account the foolish opinions over the matter. They are so divergent and extreme that there really seems to exist a superior and humorous being behind sex.
 

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex: you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. James Baldwin, American writer, Collected Essays

The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, Reason and Religion

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, The Sense of Beauty

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American Journalist, Mencken Chrestomathy

We desire not this particular woman, who is real, but the possession of her, which is not.André Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, A short Treatise on the Great Virtues

In our weakness we can face the question literally, and admit that God has indeed something to do with our sexual life and values. There are people who directly and anxiously appeal for divine intervention in their sexual lives.

Listen to Saint Augustine praying: «God, give me chastity and continence - but not just now». To Saint Augustine, «to love and to be loved was the sweetest thing, mainly if he could enjoy the body of the loved creature ». He didn’t admit the loss of sexual love.

And yet look at what the same Saint Augustine wrote some years later:

Release me, my Lord, of the enticement of concupiscence, so that my soul may follow You without rebellion even in the sleep. So that, infected by bestial images, I do not engage myself in the degrading torpidity of carnal lasciviousness, and not admit it.

We are indeed contradictory beings, and sex is undoubtedly at the heart of many of our contradictions.

Libertine and Romantic Loves vs Poetry, Fidelity and Dissolution

Romantic love involves fidelity, enchantment, dreaming. Libertine love is made of adventure, is lasciviousness, is unfaithful, and doesn’t cultivate the poetry or the elevation of the loved being. Romantic and libertine loves are at opposed poles.

It’s in these terms that we usually place the issue. But the reality isn’t always entirely like that. Things can be more contradictory than we usually admit.

Firstly, and as we all know, romantic love isn’t an asexual love. Sex is at the heart of most romantic loves, inspiring and giving them content. Even the very first great chanted medieval love – the one involving Heloise and Abelard – is a profoundly sexual love. Sex isn’t an exclusive of libertine love. 

Secondly, libertine love is not necessarily a dissolute love, without rules, without poetry, lyricism, reduced to sex and its quest. There are exceptions. An example? The Art of Loveof Ovid, the great classic treaty on libertine love.

The Art of Love is decidedly an unromantic work. It can even be classified as dissolute and amoral, with some fundament. Yet on the whole the love presented by Ovid is chiefly a game of adventure, surely involving seduction, adventure and infidelity, but without ever sinking to brutality, exploration or obscenity. On the contrary. The poetic element in the Ovid love is very strong.

Acts With and Without Love

Consequentialism and Utilitarism

«Act is everything. Glory is nothing », wrote Goethe. And Stuart Mill:
 

He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive is duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble; he who betrays a friend who trusts him is guilty of a crime, even if his aim is to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations.

This way of thinking can be applied to love, and to the acts inspired by it. We can argue that the acts inspired by love can have many negative implications: love of power can be harmful, as can the love of luxury, or even an excess of (immoderate) love towards our children (it can spoil them). The consequences and the utility are more important than the intentions (that's what «consequentialism» and «utilitarianism» stress).

We can also postulate that reason, or generosity, or charity (which does not necessarily imply love) can be more important than love itself. What’s important is the act’s worth, and not what is behind it, be it love or any other intention or feeling.

These arguments (philosophically known as «consequentialism» and «utilitarianism») are strong, but it’s folly to devalue love. Consequences aren’t always the most important. Love and other feelings behind consequences define us, and we can’t minimize love. To deny it, is to fall into an inhuman and abstract world, a world that is not ours. Acting without love can be very impoverishing. 

In a sense, Stuart Mill - a major exponent of consequentialism and utilitarianism - himself pleaded this position, when he wrote:

It is better to be a human being unsatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other, to make the comparison, understands both sides.

In other words: the good (happiness is a good) can’t be reduced to an abstract fact. And similarly we shouldn’t bet on a world without love, because in this case we would be vindicating the universe of the pig, or any other universe where life is a meagre reality.

Love and Pain

An Explanation to Our Lack of Love 

We love God because that gives us pleasure. We love music because it gives us pleasure. We even love our consorts or sons because of the pleasure that that gives us. Pleasure is a key mechanism of human behaviour and nature. We love pleasure, even if we sometimes deny it, or distrust it.

We love what gives us pleasure, and makes us happy...

And yet there is another, rather different side to the reality of love. Love can cause pain… And the reason is simple: pain, death, misfortune turn around our lives, and when they reach those we love, that touches. That demands sacrifices and pain. In contradiction, love isn’t only a cause of pleasure. Love may also be a reason of pain.

Accordingly, loving a lot, or loving many people, can be a source of pain, and not just a source of joy and pleasure. And that’s why not loving is a way of escaping pain. That’s what I-Hsuan, a radical Chinese Monk and Zen master states with his strange words:

Kill anything that you happen on. Kill the Buddha if you happen to meet him… Kill your parents or relatives if you happen to meet them. Only then can you be free, not bound my material things and absolutely free and at ease.
 

These words of I-Hsuan sound stupid. Or they are stupid. But still they portray some of our spontaneous refusal of loving, because of the pain it can bring – a refusal particularly visible in our lack of love to foreigners and to unknown people. In a world where misfortune and misery are so abundant, indifference is the easiest way of escaping pain.

In fact, loving vividly the poor people of the world would also be to suffer. To love the unlucky and the victims of the innumerable accidents and evils that surround mankind worldwide – a reality that is brought to us by television and other modern media – would be to suffer every hour of every day.

And that might indeed explain our tendency towards indifference and our lack of brotherly love.

Machiavelli Love

Machiavelli, Mark Twain, Pindarus Human Nature, Politics and Love

We all know: Machiavelli didn’t believe in politics inspired by love. Nor did he believe in human love. He wrote things like:

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.

But are we really incapable of loving and ruling our lives by ethical purposes, as his words suppose?

To pretend that evil is not within us is obviously foolish. It’s salutary to recognize our evil side and distrust ours pretensions. To believe too much in our good side is a cause of many fanaticisms, wars and crimes.

But is human nature the «fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain» stuff of Machiavelli?

It would be rather reducing. The Machiavelli terms are clearly inadequate to define men and human nature. We have in us primary reflexes and instincts that can both feed the bad and the good. We are more like a moon with two sides («Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody», Mark Twain). We are capable of the worst, but also capable of the best, as Pindarus said:

Men are a shadow’s dream. Nevertheless when a blessed glory shined on them, a clear light descends upon men, and serene life.

We can raise our human nature through our conscience and intelligence. We have a dark side, but we have also love in us. We can raise our capability of love, and deny Machiavelli. The moony dark side will always persist. But also the much more glorious other side. It's our nature.

Love Is a Game

The literary and lyrical love  
Love can be a game. An intensely lyrical game full of dreams, as the one described by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet:

O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

That monthly changes in her circled orb,

Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

No, no, there is more danger in your eyes than twenty of their swords.

Love can also be a game of flirt and coquette played by the woman, or a game of adventure, conquest and seduction played by the man, as the libertine loves told by Ovid:

You should follow Goddesses examples, and do not disdain the pleasures afforded by your lovers desires.

Love can be a sadomasochistic game, brutal and imposed, or freely allowed, played in the darkness of rooms and staging. Love can be fetishist, as Karl Kraus remembers: 

There is no unhappier creature on earth than a fetishist who yearns to embrace a woman’s shoe and has to embrace the whole woman.

But not all loves are games. Man is an animal who loves to play games, but when reality imposes itself, and our dearest beings are concerned, the game ends. There is no place to game, in the truer loves.

Quotations

Love, Beauty, Passion and Poetry

Lover's gift: W. CongreveBeauty is the lover’s gift.William Congreve, 1670-1729, English writer, The way of the world

Absolute: SantayanaThe lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise. Attributed to George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher

Poetry: Santayana and E. Morin
A dawning love floods the world with poetry, a lasting love floods daily life with poetry, and the ending of a love tosses us into the prose world.E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Attributed to George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher

Other eyes: Alberoni
To fall in love corresponds to our desire of seeing the world with other eyes.Francesco Alberoni, Italian essayist, Le choc amoureux

Symbol of beauty: SugerIt is only through symbols of beauty that our poor spirits can raise themselves from things temporal to things eternal Abbe Suger, XIII Century, cited in Os criadores, D. Boorstin 


Mysterious and terrible: Dostoievsky
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.F. Dostoievsky, 1821-1881, Russion writer, The Brothers Karamazov

Beauty and Love

Beauty can be a rather imaginary and arbitrary matter. «Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them», said David Hume in the eighteenth century. Scientists now confirm this: «There is not, external to us, hot or cold, but only different velocities of molecules; there aren’t sounds, callings, harmonies, but just variations in the pressure of the air; there aren’t colours, or light, just electro-magnetic waves», said H. Von Foerster.

Our concept of beauty may also be conventional and capricious, as is the modern cult of skinny models; or aberrant when mingled with the ostensive luxury of millionaires; or involve foolish preferences.  

We can also say that love passions, when based on beauty, are ephemeral and mostly illusory. «Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies», said John Donne.

And we can say that beauty isn’t all, and can be a secondary criterion: our old parents may be no more beautiful, but we love them; our sons may not be conventionally beautiful, but we love them.

But still we love the beautiful. We want the beautiful in our lives, in our houses, in our loves («Beauty is the lover’s gift», said William Congreve).

Beauty and love are intricate parts. «The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise», said Santayana. 

Yes. We love the beautiful, and we need it. It gives a greater meaning to our lives. «Only throughout the symbols of beauty can our poor spirits rise up from temporal things to eternal ones», said the Priest Suger, in the thirteenth century, commenting on music and artistic beauties.