by Hooks, Bell
When we think globally, we’re able not only to see how much we have (compared to others), but also to think about what goes into the production of what we have. I tell my students, “In the first two weeks, in order to not think with a First World context—if you eat a steak, you have to take out your pen and paper and write down what goes into producing that steak.” Thus you have a sense of being part of a world community, and not just part of a First World context that in fact would have you deny your positionality as an individual in a world community. It’s not enough to just think of yourself in terms of the United States.
Even friends on the “Left” would rather not discuss the Gulf War in terms of challenging materialism; using so much of the world’s resources, exploiting so much of the world’s resources. Because then we might begin discussing what it would mean to change our way of life … to realize that being against war also means changing our way of life. In his Nobel Prize speech the Dalai Lama said: “How can we expect people who are hungry to be concerned about the absence of war?” He also said that peace has to mean more than just the absence of war—it has to be about reconstructing society so that people can learn how to be fully self-actualized human beings, fully alive.
R/SP: Possessions become substitutes, covering up for a loss of meaning and connection (you are what you own). The things I love most don’t cost that much—yet have special meaning for me, such as gifts that link me to certain people or objects that remind me of a certain time period. Whereas Western industrial society promotes items whose original function has been forgotten: a car isn’t just a box on wheels that gets you around—it’s the expensive commodity you buy to “communicate” status.
bh: I think our materialism is often totally disconnected from the idea that aesthetics are crucial to our ability to live humanely in the world, to be able to recognize and know beauty, to be able to be lifted up by it, to be able to choose the objects in your surroundings … I’ve always been interested in Buddhist room arrangement: how do we place something in our house so that we can be made more fully human by glancing at it, or by interacting with it? And there’s so little of that in our culture.
For example, for some time I’d wanted this expensive coffee-table book on Amish quilts. And I was really sad when I got it and discovered it was just about the Esprit collection! On the one hand, we’re made to feel “grateful” that these wealthy people are buying these quilts and making them “available” to the public. But no one talks about how yuppie consumers have turned quilts into something that totally abandons the homes of the people who had them as historical or family legacies—all in the interest of money. There’s nothing that tells us, “Well, this is how we acquired this quilt.” There’s nothing about the process of acquisition in the context of capitalism, nothing about that whole process of collecting and what it implies …
R/SP: … which takes it out of the community. In certain American Indian tribes, spirituality and a profound community sense would be deeply integrated into the making of objects whose function was also necessary for the survival of the tribe … I grew up in New England where old ladies used to have sewing bees which gathered women together and provided a valuable sense of community. And then suddenly for this community craft to get shunted off into a collector status, you’ve just alienated and consumed that spiritual, cultural reservoir.
bh: I know that when I have the money to buy a thing, I struggle a lot with the question of the meaning of that thing in my life. Do I want to possess something just because I have the money to buy it? What would be the way that I or Esprit (or any group of people) could own a collection of something, and not be participating in this process of cultural alienation? Esprit seems to think that hanging the quilts in their offices is a way of sharing.
I was trying to analyze why I felt violated when I got this book entitled The Amish Quilt—thinking I’m going to learn something about Amish quilts, only to realize that what I’m really learning about is this Esprit collection of Amish quilts. This brings in the question of repackaging, as well as the question of this fantasization of Amish life that’s taking place in the United States. I think it’s not untied to White Supremacy, because if we think about the Shakers or Mennonites or other groups who have welcomed people who are nonwhite into their midst, we find that one of the groups which has stayed more solidly white has been the Amish. And when white people are looking at them with a kind of nostalgia and evoking this ideal of “the Amish way of life”—whether we see them being grossly exploited (as in the movie Witness) or in the many books that have been published recently …
There’s a new book by a white woman who went to live among the Amish; it describes the peace and serenity she found. I think we all have something to learn from the Amish way of life, their habits of being and thought … but it’s interesting that this particular group which is most white is the one that gets fetishized.
R/SP: How can exploitation in general be prevented?
bh: I always think that whenever there’s the possibility for exploitation, what intervenes is recognition of the Other. Recognition allows a certain kind of negotiation that seems to disrupt the possibility of domination. If a person makes a unilateral decision that does not account for me, then I feel exploited by that decision because my needs haven’t been considered. But if that person is willing to pause, then at that moment of pause there is an opportunity for mutual recognition (what I call the “subject-to-subject” encounter, as opposed to “subject-to-object”). This doesn’t necessarily mean the person will change what they intended to do, but it means that (at least temporarily) I am not rendered an object by their carrying forth with their objective.
To have a nondominating context, one has to have a lived practice of interaction. And this practice has to be conscious, rather than some sentimental notion that “you and I were born into the world with the ‘will to do good towards one another.’” In reality, this nonexploitative way to be with one another has to be practiced; resistance to the possibility of domination has to be learned.
This also means that one has to cultivate the capacity to wait. I think about a culture of domination as being very tied to notions of efficiency—everything running smoothly. I mean, it’s so much easier if you tell me, “I’m leaving!” rather than “I desire to leave and not come back—how does that desire impact on you?” and I reply, “Is there a space within which I can have a response?” All this takes more time than the kind of fascism that says, “This is what I’m doing—fuck you!”
I often think, What does “resistance” mean (our resistance against war, sexism, homophobia, etc.) if we’re not fully committed to changing our way of life? Because so much of how we are is informed by a culture of domination. So how do we become liberated within the culture of domination if our lived practice, every moment of the day, is not saying “No!” to it in some way or another? And that means we have to pause, reflect, reconsider, create a whole movement … and that is not what the machinery of capitalism in daily life is about. It’s about “Let’s do it all swiftly—quickly!”
I hope that what’s happening now for many people is that a lot of the denial is being cut away, because denial is always about insanity. So we know that the less we engage in denial, the more we are able to recover our selves. Hope lies in the possibility of a resistance that’s based on being able to face our reality as it is.
R/SP: And yet I see the denial getting more and more fierce, building up.
bh: There’s one way you can look at this: it’s like having a sickness in your body that gets more and more fierce as it is passing on to wellness. We don’t have to view that period of intense sickness as an invitation to despair, but as a sign of potential transformation in the very depths of whatever pain it is we are experiencing.
20
LOVE AS THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM
In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left.
The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.
Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle.
The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our concern about politics of domination and our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible. Civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King, Jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had “decided to love” because he believed deeply that if we are “seeking the highest good” we “find it through love” because this is “the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.” And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist effort, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice—and because it was profoundly rooted in a love ethic.
The sixties Black Power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. And it is not surprising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became central as the equation of freedom with patriarchal manhood became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quintessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X’s bold credo “by any means necessary.”
On the positive side, Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progress was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately, neither he nor Malcolm lived long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.
Black folks entering the realm of racially integrated, American life because of the success of civil rights and black power movement suddenly found we were grappling with an intensification of internalized racism. The deaths of these important leaders (as well as liberal white leaders who were major allies in the struggle for racial equality) ushered in tremendous feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair. Wounded in that space where we would know love, black people collectively experienced intense pain and anguish about our future. The absence of public spaces where that pain could be articulated, expressed, shared meant that it was held in—festering, suppressing the possibility that this collective grief would be reconciled in community even as ways to move beyond it and continue resistance struggle would be envisioned. Feeling as though “the world had really come to an end,” in the sense that a hope had died that racial justice would become the norm, a life-threatening despair took hold in black life. We will never know to what extent the black masculinist focus on hardness and toughness served as a barrier preventing sustained public acknowledgment of the enormous grief and pain in black life. In World as Lover, World as Self, Joanna Macy emphasizes in her chapter on “Despair Work” that
the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life … but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.
If black folks are to move forward in our struggle for liberation, we must confront the legacy of this unreconciled grief, for it has been the breeding ground for profound nihilistic despair. We must collectively return to a radical political vision of social change rooted in a love ethic and seek once again to convert masses of people, black and nonblack.
A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture. Many people feel unable to love either themselves or others because they do not know what love is. Contemporary songs like Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” advocate a system of exchange around desire, mirroring the economics of capitalism: the idea that love is important is mocked. In his essay “Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?” Thomas Merton argues that we are taught within the framework of competitive consumer capitalism to see love as a business deal: “This concept of love assumes that the machinery of buying and selling of needs is what makes everything run. It regards life as a market and love as a variation on free enterprise.” Though many folks recognize and critique the commercialization of love, they see no alternative. Not knowing how to love or even what love is, many people feel emotionally lost; others search for definitions, for ways to sustain a love ethic in a culture that negates human value and valorizes materialism.
The sales of books focusing on recovery, books that seek to teach folks ways to improve self-esteem, self-love, and our ability to be intimate in relationships, affirm that there is public awareness of a lack in most people’s lives. M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular because it addresses that lack.
Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the
purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Commenting on prevailing cultural attitudes about love, Peck writes:
Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are in fact not loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
His words echo Martin Luther King’s declaration, “I have decided to love,” which also emphasizes choice. King believed that love is “ultimately the only answer” to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet. I share that belief and the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good.
It is truly amazing that King had the courage to speak as much as he did about the transformative power of love in a culture where such talk is often seen as merely sentimental. In progressive political circles, to speak of love is to guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naive. But outside those circles there are many people who openly acknowledge that they are consumed by feelings of self-hatred, who feel worthless, who want a way out. Often they are too trapped by paralyzing despair to be able to engage effectively in any movement for social change. However, if the leaders of such movements refuse to address the anguish and pain of their lives, they will never be motivated to consider personal and political recovery. Any political movement that can effectively address these needs of the spirit in the context of liberation struggle will succeed.
In the past, most folks both learned about and tended the needs of the spirit in the context of religious experience. The institutionalization and commercialization of the church has undermined the power of religious community to transform souls, to intervene politically. Commenting on the collective sense of spiritual loss in modern society, Cornel West asserts: