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Love cannot be earned
By Patrick Deneen
Unorthodoxy
A woman holds Valentine's Day balloons to hand out on a street in Lisbon February 14, 2011. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante
When we think of love today, we tend to think of it in dominantly private terms. Love is that intense emotion between lovers, between spouses, between parents and children, between siblings and immediate members of family or close friends. Love is a private emotion, usually dyadic or extendable to very few close intimates.
This experience of love is understandable in the light of the dominant political philosophy that reigns today, liberalism. If, as many historians and political theorists have noted, liberalism was fashioned to make the public sphere safe from Christianity - that is, to transform religious belief from a deeply shared public concern to a private preference - then love, accordingly, had also to be safely secluded to the private realm. For, it was according to Christianity that love should be a guiding standard not only for private life, but should point toward the highest aspirations in our shared relations and the common weal.
In some senses, then, modern liberal society does not really know what love is. Liberal society is based upon the idea of the social contract, in which benefits and costs are closely weighed and balanced and we seek a rough equilibrium of inputs and outputs. Our social fabric is evaluated based upon private advantage - even where reciprocity is the result, the basic unit of analysis is the the individual's costs and benefits. By contrast, the Christian basis of society is ultimately traced back to the ideal of covenant, one in which the basic fabric of society has its ultimate basis in the gratuitous and uncompensated love of the divine Creator and Redeemer. Love cannot be earned or adequately rewarded - it is a free giving of the self.
Much follows from this basic distinction, but one major consequence is the abandonment of the ideal of love as a social and political norm. We expect our leaders and representatives to be vessels of our interests, rather than as exemplars of self-sacrifice. We pursue a lower standard of justice, which almost always becomes translated into economic terms of re-distribution and turns to the impersonal arm of the State rather than those forms of self-overcoming charity - gratuitous love - it sought to replace. We wage war upon nature that we understand to be an inert substance rather than part of the created order in which we have been appointed its stewards. A loveless modernity is increasingly childless, uncivil, self-interested, individualistic and destructive of the natural order.
Like Christmas and Easter, we observe today an ancient holiday whose central focus was once upon the self-sacrificial love of one for the sake of others. We celebrate all these Holy days today with an emphasis upon materialism and commerce, in the private reveries of lust-drenched popular culture in the shadow of a deeper and fuller understanding of love that has been largely forgotten.
By Patrick Deneen |
February 14, 2011; 5:45 PM ET
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Posted by: davivman | February 15, 2011 2:45 PM
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A hatchet job on liberals from a Donohue Catholic. What a surprise.
Here's some examples of what they think "love" is:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/02/south_dakota_legislator_defend.html
"The most disreputable 2010 child-sex-abuse SOL legislative "reform" law in the United States was enacted by the South Dakota legislature. For years, Catholic clergy inflicted horrendous abuse against Native American children in St. Joseph Indian School. A defense attorney for the school crafted SOL "reform" that actually retracted options the victims otherwise would have had, under prior law. Specifically, the new law prohibits any victim over the age of 40 from suing anyone other than the direct perpetrator. Thus, even if an institution knew an employee was abusing children and did nothing about it, the institution would still be immune under the new law. The new law has shut down many meritorious cases involving Native American victims, and it represents the first instance in which Catholic lobbyists have obtained SOL reform that targets a particular ethnic group."
http://christianchildabuse.blogspot.com/2010/12/statute-of-limitations_31.html
Posted by: areyousaying | February 15, 2011 2:17 PM
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I agree that love is not something that can be earned but must something that is freely given. I agree that many of the public interactions we encounter in society today are decidedly lacking in love. However, I disagree with a number of your other assertions.
First of all I would disagree that liberalism is the "dominant political philosophy that reigns today". Liberalism is one of those words that has several different meanings depending on context. If you mean the type of liberalism that people like Nancy Pelosi advocate and Sarah Palin reject, then I would say that liberalism is a dominant philosophy, but not the dominant philosophy. However since you talk about the purpose of liberalism as some sort of an attempt to marginalize Christianity, I don't really know what you are talking about. Certainly there are Liberal individuals who try to marginalize Christianity. However, that type of marginalization is not a precept of any type of Liberalism I have ever heard of before.
Secondly, just because people tend to associate the word love with the concept of romantic love more often than they do the concept of neighborly love does not mean that they are not concerned with the latter. They may just use different words to describe the concept of neighborly love, words such as social justice, civil rights, etc.
Instead of throwing our hands up and blaming the lack of love in this world on some abstract philosophical concept, let's all try to increase the love we show to others in small ways and I think people will be surprised how far that can go.
Posted by: davivman | February 15, 2011 11:36 AM
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Areyousaying, do you think you will ever leave a comment that is actually on topic? You seem content to steer all conversations towards sexual abuse scandals which is in most cases (including this one) not relavant at all. Do you like to troll other blogs too or is it just this one?