by bell hooks
I am especially fond of the biblical passage in the first epistle of John, which tells us: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” From childhood on this passage of scripture has enchanted me. I was fascinated by the repeated use of the word “perfect.” For some time I thought of this word only in relation to being without fault or defect. Taught to believe that this understanding of what it means to be perfect was always out of human reach, that we were, of necessity, essentially human because we were not perfect but were always bound by the mystery of the body, by our limitations, this call to know a perfect love disturbed me. It seemed a worthy calling, but impossible. That is, until I looked for a deeper, more complex understanding of the word “perfect” and found a definition emphasizing the will “to refine.”
Suddenly my passage was illuminated. Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.
Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.
Since so many of us are imprisoned by fear, we can move toward a love ethic only by the process of conversion. Philosopher Cornel West states that “a politics of conversion” restores our sense of hope. Calling attention to the pervasive nihilism in our society he reminds us: “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses, it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.” In an attempt to ward off life-threatening despair, more and more individuals are turning toward a love ethic. Signs that this conversion is taking place abound in our culture. It’s reassuring when masses of people read literature like Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul, a work that invites us to reevaluate the values that undergird our lives and make choices that affirm our interconnectedness with others.
Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn. Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are daily bombarded with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.
Were we, collectively, to demand that our mass media portray images that reflect love’s reality, it would happen. This change would radically alter our culture. The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love. We all know what violence looks like. All scholarship in the field of cultural studies focusing on a critical analysis of the mass media, whether pro or con, indicates that images of violence, particularly those that involve action and gore, capture the attention of viewers more than still, peaceful images. The small groups of people who produce most of the images we see in this culture have heretofore shown no interest in learning how to represent images of love in ways that will capture and stir our cultural imagination and hold our attention.
If the work they did was informed by a love ethic, they would consider it important to think critically about the images they create. And that would mean thinking about the impact of these images, the ways they shape culture and inform how we think and act in everyday life. If unfamiliar with love’s terrain, they would hire consultants who would provide the necessary insight. Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains—we are all affected by the images we consume and by the state of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.
We cannot talk about changing the types of images offered us in the mass media without acknowledging the extent to which the vast majority of the images we see are created from a patriarchal standpoint. These images will not change until patriarchal thinking and perspectives change. Individual women and men who do not see themselves as victims of patriarchal power find it difficult to take seriously the need to challenge and change patriarchal thinking. But reeducation is always possible. Masses of people are negatively affected by patriarchal institutions and, most specifically, by male domination. Since individuals committed to advancing patriarchy are producing most of the images we see, they have an investment in providing us with representations that reflect their values and the social institutions they wish to uphold. Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless. To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means. Naturally, anyone socialized to think this way would be more interested in and stimulated by scenes of domination and violence rather than by scenes of love and care. Yet they need a consumer audience to whom they can sell their product. Therein lies our power to demand change.
While the contemporary feminist movement has done much to intervene with this kind of thinking, challenging and changing it, and by so doing offering women and men a chance to lead more fulfilling lives, patriarchal thinking is still the norm for those in power. This does not mean we do not have the right to demand change. We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy, or funds to support the production and dissemination of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic. This is not meant to be an argument for censorship. Most of the evils in our world are not created by the mass media. For example, clearly, the mass media does not create violence in the home. Domestic violence was widespread even when there was no television. But everyone knows that all forms of violence are glamorized and made to appear interesting and seductive by the mass media. The producers of these images could just as easily
use the mass media to challenge and change violence. When images we see condone violence, whether they lead any of us to be “more” violent or not, they do affirm the notion that violence is an acceptable means of social control, that it is fine for one individual or group to dominate another individual or group.
Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails. Jung’s insight, that if the will to power is paramount love will be lacking, is important to remember. When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic. Concern for the collective good of our nation, city, or neighbor rooted in the values of love makes us all seek to nurture and protect that good. If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.
Were a love ethic informing all public policy in cities and towns, individuals would come together and map out programs that would affect the good of everyone. Melody Chavis’s wonderful book Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to Survive tells a story of real people coming together across differences of race and class to improve their living environment. She speaks from the perspective of a white woman who moves with her family into a predominately black community. As someone who embraces a love ethic, Melody joins her neighbors to create peace and love in their environment. Their work succeeds but is undermined by the failure of support from public policy and city government. Concurrently, she also works to help prisoners on death row. Loving community in all its diversity, Melody states: “Sometimes I think that I’ve been trying, on death row and in my neighborhood, to gain some control over the violence in my life. As a child I was completely helpless in the face of violence.” Her book shows the changes a love ethic can make even in the most troubled community. It also documents the tragic consequences to human life when terror and violence become the accepted norm.
When small communities organize their lives around a love ethic, every aspect of daily life can be affirming for everyone. In all his prose work Kentucky poet Wendell Berry writes eloquently about the positive values that exist in rural communities that embrace an ethic of communalism and the sharing of resources. In Another Turn of the Crank, Berry exposes the extent to which the interests of big business lead to the destruction of rural communities, reminding us that destruction is fast becoming the norm in all types of communities. He encourages us to learn from the lives of folks who live in communities governed by a spirit of love and communalism. Sharing some of the values held by citizens of these communities he writes: “They are people who take and hold a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of nature of human culture and pass them on to their children. . . . They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed. . . . They know that work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good; it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it; and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done.”
I like living in small towns precisely because they are most often the places in our nation where basic principles underlying a love ethic exist and are the standards by which most people try to live their lives. In the small town where I live (now only some of the time) there is a spirit of neighborliness—of fellowship, care, and respect. These same values existed in the neighborhoods of the town in which I grew up. Even though I spend most of my time in New York City, I live in a cooperative apartment building where we all know each other. We protect and nurture our collective well-being. We strive to make our home place a positive environment for everyone. We all agree that integrity and care enhance all our lives. We try to live by the principles of a love ethic.
To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.
Seven
Greed: Simply Love
The fading away of greed and hatred is the foundation for liberation. Liberation is “the sure heart’s release”—an understanding of the truth so powerful that there is no turning back from it.
—SHARON SALZBERG
ALTHOUGH WE LIVE in close contact with neighbors, masses of people in our society feel alienated, cut off, alone. Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people. Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish. The emergence of the “me” culture is a direct response to our nation’s failure to truly actualize the vision of democracy articulated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Left alone in the “me” culture, we consume and consume with no thought of others. Greed and exploitation become the norm when an ethic of domination prevails. They bring in their wake alienation and lovelessness. Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess. While emotional needs are difficult, and often are impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill. Our nation fell into the trap of pathological narcissim in the wake of wars that brought economic bounty while undermining the vision of freedom and justice essential to sustaining democracy.
Nowadays we live in a world where poor teenagers are willing to maim and murder for a pair of tennis shoes or a designer coat; this is not a consequence of poverty. In dire situations of poverty at earlier times in our nation’s history, it would have been unthinkable to the poor to murder someone for a luxury item. While it was common for individuals to steal or attack someone in the interests of acquiring resources—money, food, or something as simple as a winter coat to ward off the cold—there was no value system in place that made a life less important than the material desire for an inessential object.
Whether poor or rich, in the mid-fifties most citizens in our nation felt it was the best place in the world to live because it was a democracy, a place where human rights mattered. This sense of our nation’s vision sustained its citizens and served as the catalyst empowering freedom struggles in our society. In the article “Chicken Little, Cassandra, and the Real Wolf: So Many Ways to Think About the Future,” Donella Meadows describes the significance of a visionary standpoint: “A vision articulates a future that someone deeply wants, and does it so clearly and compellingly that it summons up the energy, agreement, sympathy, political will, creativity, resources, or whatever to make that vision happen.” Our nation’s active participation in global warfare called into question its commitment to democracy both here at home and abroad.
That vision was diminished in the wake of the Vietnam War. Prior to the war, a hopeful vision of justice and love had been evoked by the civil rights struggle, the feminist movement, and sexual liberation. However, by the late seventies, after the failure of radical movements for social justice aimed at making the world a democratic, peaceful place where resources could be shared and a meaningful life could become a possibility for everyone, folks stopped talking about love. The loss of lives at home and abroad had created economic plenty while leaving in its wake devastation and loss. Americans were asked to sacrifice the vision of freedom, love, and justice and put in its place the worship of
materialism and money. This vision of society upheld the need for imperialistic war and injustice. A great feeling of despair gripped our nation when the leaders who had led struggles for peace, justice, and love were assassinated.
Psychologically, we were in despair even as economic booms opened up jobs for women and men from previously disenfranchised groups. Instead of looking for justice in the public world, individuals turned to their private lives, seeking a place of solace and escape. Initially, lots of folks turned inward to family and relationships to find again a sense of connection and stability. Coming face to face with rampant lovelessness in the home created an overwhelming sense of cultural brokenheartedness. Not only did individuals despair about their capacity to change the world, they began to feel enormous despair about their ability to make basic positive changes in the emotional fabric of their daily lives. Divorce rates were the primary indicators that marriage was not a safe haven. And mounting public awareness of the extent to which domestic violence and all manner of child abuse were widespread clearly revealed that the patriarchal family could not offer sanctuary.
Confronted with a seemingly unmanageable emotional universe, some people embraced a new Protestant work ethic, convinced that a successful life would be measured by how much money one made and the goods one could buy with this money. The good life was no longer to be found in community and connection, it was to be found in accumulation and the fulfillment of hedonistic, materialistic desire. In keeping with this shift in values from a people-oriented to a thing-oriented society, the rich and famous, particularly movie stars and singers, began to be seen as the only relevant cultural icons. Gone were the visionary political leaders and activists. Suddenly it was no longer important to bring an ethical dimension to the work life, making money was the goal, and by whatever means. Widespread embrace of corruption undermined any chance that a love ethic would resurface and restore hope.