WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART THREE -- WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

WHAT KILLED LOVE?

PART THREE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009


WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

We have survived the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Revolution, Freudianism, and now are in the postmodern era with a decidedly dystopian aspect.

The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” have been busy. The twentieth century featured:

(1) The White horse of Conquest with first Adolf Hitler’s failure and then Lenin and Stalin’s more subtle attempt to spread global Communism leading to the Cold War.

(2) The Red horse of War ended the nineteenth century with the Spanish American War only to be followed in the twentieth century by WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, and several smaller bloody civil wars of ethnic cleansing across the globe.

(3) The Black horse of Famine made a wide swath across Africa due to drought, pollution, civil war, and the failure of government. Of the world’s six billion souls one billion go to bed hungry every day with a child dying of hunger every six seconds. Add to this the misery of the AIDS pandemic that cuts another swath across the globe, but never more fatally than in Africa.

(4) The Pale Green horse of Death saw over 100 million dying in twentieth century wars and tens of millions more dying of AIDS, numbers far in excess of the Black Death of the Middle Ages. There was the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. And then there was United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands perished but it ended WWII in the Pacific. As society has grown more technologically sophisticated, military and civilian casualties have grown exponentially. More died in twentieth century wars than the previous ten centuries of mortal combat combined.

Science is the new secular religion with technology its acolyte. The sacred cannot be separated from the profane. Philosophy is lost in this conundrum as philosophers are all too human. Although they see what others take for granted, ponder it, sense trends buried in it, their hard and soft wiring, experience and consciousness limit their ideas. We sometimes forget that.

Imagine a philosopher is looking out of a bay window on the top floor of a prominent building with darting humanity happily scurrying about below. In one sense he is separated from the heat and tension of the moment, but in another overwhelmed with its implications. Compelled by his nature to make sense of things, he paints the activity with the broad brush of his intellect and biases.

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein come to mind. They attempted to bypass man’s ambiguity, staying within the hygienic realm of mathematics. Alas, even there they couldn’t escape their roots. This leaked through their brilliance to reveal a common despair as both men thought of suicide. Wittgenstein once told a friend that before he discovered philosophy he endured nine years of loneliness and suffering. Russell hid his loneliness in being a bit of a rake.

* * *

Dsytopian philosophers have noted an increasingly loveless world. To widen consciousness of this fact they often chose poetry, allegory, fiction and science fiction as vehicles of expression.

Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” (1932) presents the bizarre world of cloning.

Yevgeny Zamyatin in “We” (1921) paints a portrait of a totally controlled environment (OneState) organized around mathematical precision. People no longer have surnames but are designated by numbers, and marched in-step while dressed in identical clothing.

Ayn Rand in “Anthem” (1938) has the personal pronoun “I” disappear from language. Individualism is extinct, as mankind has entered a new dark age of total communal collectivism.

Poet T. S. Eliot reduces man to a cipher in “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday.”

Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) visualizes the Republic of Gilead (a.k.a. United States) as a wasteland of nuclear, biological and chemical pollution after a terrorist attack. The population has been rendered sterile with leadership wiped out as the President and all members of Congress have been killed.

Kurt Vonnegut in “Player Piano” (1952) pictures a totally mechanized society that has eliminated the need for anyone to work. This creates a running conflict between the wealthy upper class of engineers and managers who keep society running, while everyone else, who have nothing to do, being replaced by machines.

George Orwell in “I984” (1948) introduces Big Brother who is watching our every move with audio and visual electronic devices. Big Brother has created a new vocabulary of meaning which is the flip side of what had meaning before: war is now peace, evil is good, and hate is love.

Anthony Burgess in “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) has criminals taking on the role of the police. Law and order are a thing of the past. Free will is neutralized and manipulated with chemical and visual programming. Burgess slang entered the popular culture of the time.

In Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” (1994) a utopian world spins off into dystopia. Jonas is selected to be the inheritor of the position of “Receiver of Memory,” where all the memories, of the time before “Sameness,” were stored. As Jonas receives the memories from the previous receiver (The Giver), he discovers how shallow his community has become and aborts the role.

* * *

One might complain that these pedestrian philosophers unfairly attack a caricature of the technological revolution. Remember they are looking down from their elevated perch far above the commotion and maddening crowd.

Love is noticeably absent in these dystopian imaginings. They do however target the failure of religious fundamentalism, misguided technology, scorched earth environmental policy, teenage angst, indifferent parenting, precocious sexuality and juvenile delinquency, genetic modification and bioengineering, the relentless drive of amoral corpocracy, and the cruelty and wickedness that transpires when man’s humanity is unhinged from its roots.

* * *

WAS IT NIETZSCHE?

Nietzsche was different. He saw the rise of secular society and the problems likely to face a postmodern Western civilization. Well informed in Scriptural, historical theology, and doctrinal subtleties of the West, his account of Christian theology in the postmodern world has proven prophetic. As was the case with Freud in his psychological revolution, however, Nietzsche has been misread and misunderstood.

The son of a clergyman, he attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him. His philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct by violent contradiction his irresistible tendency to gentleness, kindness and peace. Often those most controversial and provocative have great affection for that which they attack.

At eighteen, he lost his faith in the God of his fathers in a calamitous cultural crisis. Left godless, he spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity. He thought he found one in the Superman. He wrote that he had taken the change from God to Superman easily. He didn’t. He had the habit of easily deceiving himself. In fact, he displayed his cynicism as if he had lost everything in a single throw of the dice.

This was so because religion was the marrow of his life. Now, empty of meaning and his once revered anchor, he was forced to go forward. As happens with great men, the struggle often mirrors the struggle of the times.

In any case, he escaped in writing, most poignantly about his new teacher, Zoraster, and his new god, Superman. Yet, in all of his writings, the soul can be seen to rise stubbornly and overflow with a desire for banal love and societal connection. He denied this, of course, but the shadow of the Christian God he abandoned was always there. That is most apparent in his famous but ambivalent report, “God is dead!”

Nietzsche has a madman running through the streets crying, “God is dead!” He presents the madman in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1961) as a sincerely religious and concerned man for the spiritual condition of the modern world. Nietzsche is affirming that the meaning of life is to be found in human terms, that spirituality was never more important. His claim is that it cannot be found in a church or in a god but in the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

The audience of the madman is of a scientific and material persuasion. This audience prides itself on having renounced religious superstition but is unaware of the brewing crisis. It cannot imagine it has lost anything as it rearranges its life around entirely secular goals. It doesn’t notice the lost, in part because it has maintained the habits that religion had always fostered, particularly the habit of faith, having replaced faith in God now with faith in science.

This new faith, Nietzsche is saying, is no improvement over the old. He combines his statement of “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith in scientific materialism. A knowing society imagines it has replaced fables with facts, but Nietzsche sees the dominance of scientific accounts as substituting one self-denigrating myth for another. If anything, he is saying, the scientific myth is worse. Faith in God eroded our confidence in our own human powers, he argues, which is the basis of his cynicism, but at least it encouraged the belief we have dignity as creations of God whom God took seriously.

The myth of science by contrasts, he insists, suggests the belief that our existence is accidental and that we are organisms on an obscure planet on the periphery of the universe. His problem with religion is its projection of our power onto God, that forces a sense of worthlessness without God, but this is nothing compared with the nihilism he sees that science promotes.

Nietzsche hopes for a rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature and man. The shift of the West from a Christian to a secular culture was inevitable, he claims, as the Christian account became more abstract and increasingly divorced from personal experience. Christianity lost connection with people. Failing to recognize man’s changing consciousness and requirements to cope in a more demanding world, Christianity declared war on the body, denounced man’s liberating passions and appetites and relegated them to sources of sin. This made man increasingly self-conscious, self-negating, and uptight.

His problem with Christianity is well known. His counsel for mending the spirit is not. He encourages the embracing of life experience, of asserting our individual virtues and powers, but offers no “how to” formula. He speaks of the “innocence of the senses” and for approaching the world openly, naturally, without trying to improve our wounded sense of inadequacy, but to learn to love the world and ourselves on its terms.

This is a side of Nietzsche seldom captured, the side that would embrace life and love in deference to Christian sin and atonement. He had the madman crying through the streets, “God is dead,” but the evidence is equally compelling that love was dead as well.

* * *

WAS IT CAPITALISM?

Recently, a woman was interviewed on Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBCTV. She is a Bank of American credit card holder. She has seen her service charges increase from 7 to 15 to 30 percent on the unpaid balance of her credit card in a matter of months. She carries a credit balance of more than $10,000 on her card. Economic circumstances forced her to use her card excessively during this past year, and now she is being punished for doing so.

Bank of America, knowing that in February 2010, usury limitations are going to be placed on credit cards, a bank which took billions of taxpayer dollars in bailout funds, is willing to essentially extort money from those least able to pay while it can. This is not an isolated incident.

Democratic capitalism has become an oxymoron.

Democracy sponsors drift. It gives permission to institutions to do as they please, which means democracy lacks a coherent and interdependent approach in crisis in the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Democracy worships mediocrity and distrusts excellence. Democracy literally frustrates the possibility of responsible leadership, especially in crisis, as those elected represent the lowest common denominator of society, as voters vote with their hearts not their heads.

Capitalism encourages greed. Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital is privately controlled by an elite few. More than 50 percent of Americans may own stock, but the wealth creators or the top 10 percent control the economy. Labor, goods and capital are traded in free markets, and profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries. That is the comic book version.

The reality is that investment and commercial banks that handle electronic transfers take huge risks leveraging capital to the tune of as much as $45 invested for every $1 actually held in securities. With such leverage, Wall Street is able to amass gigantic profits justifying bonuses totaling billions, but with the potential of reeking havoc on the economy when it tanks. Then Wall Street falls to Main Street to bail it out, as in the recent subprime real estate meltdown.

* * *

Americans are paying for this directly, but also indirectly like that lady with the $10,000 credit card debt. She is going to pay and pay mightily for it, not the banks, not the big brokerage houses. They are safe. They have returned to their lair. They have sold taxpayers on the myth that they are too big to fail. Now, a year later, these banks are operating with the same amoral avarice and zeal as they had before. Lobbyists on Capitol Hill are ubiquitously pulling the strings for them with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government obligingly responding in puppet fashion. Have no fear, the more things change the more they shall remain the same.

Capitalism postulates the idea that the invisible hand of the free market forces self-interest, competition, and supply and demand to reallocate wealth and regulate resources in society. After repeatedly finding this to be false, the myth and the belief still hold as the puppet masters are in charge.

* * *

In the span of eighty years (1929 – 2009), we have had a Great Depression and a Great Recession. We are a debtor nation and have seen the U.S. dollar decline against foreign currency, especially the Euro. The national debt continues to balloon, the trade deficit to climb and seventeen million American workers are unemployed with another 10 million underemployed.

The economy has changed radically from jobs in manufacturing to information technology, from blue collar to white collar, something that was apparent thirty years ago. Yet nothing was or has been done systemically to deal with the drift other than to mount cosmetic changes. Gas guzzling automobiles were anachronistic decades ago, but Detroit continued to produce them. Medical insurance is the highest per capita in the world yet 40 million Americans are still uninsured. More money is allocated to education yet our students in math and science skills compare unfavorably with nations allocating far less to education. Given this, how do you suppose most Americans are feeling? The answer is apparently terrific!

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveys 1,000 Americans daily, 350 days a year to measure prevailing attitudes. It has found people are more optimistic today than they were a year ago (88% versus 84%). They have higher expectations in matters of finance and love (70% versus 61%) and 87 percent of those surveyed expect this holiday season to be happier than the last even though they will spend less money.

This defines COMPLACENCY in capital letters. Not a note of worry about joining the unemployed much less the underemployed. Be optimistic, man, think positively, wish for the best, have the audacity to hope! Sound familiar?

Will it be too late when we finally “get it”? Is our arrogance so impenetrable that we’re incapable of embracing reality? Freud writes in “The Future of an Illusion”(1961):

“An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error . . .It was an illusion of Columbus that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies . . .The part played in his wish is very clear . . .What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions . . .In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality.”

* * *

Reality, economists tell us, is that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be tougher years than 2009. The loss of American jobs to Europe and Asia is expected to continue, not decrease. Lobbyists can be expected to continue to promote corporate self-interest. Corpocracy, in defiance of the congressional agenda, will continue to cut jobs to improve its bottom line. If this is a recipe for happiness, my wonder is what constitutes misery? Apparently, our civil religion, money, remains the opium of the people.

How long can a false positive hold? How long are working Americans willing to take it on the chin? I don’t know the answer. The spirit lives in a body that has to be fed, clothed and housed, and a mind that needs the pride of some kind of life supporting work. Americans love to work. Industry is a romance of the spirit that cannot be denied. Take work away from Americans, and they might as well be dead. This is counterfeit capitalism. Are you listening?

* * *

In “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (2005), author Thomas E. Woods, Jr., gives the Church credit for capitalism and free markets. Woods makes reference to the work of fourteenth century Jean Buridan (1300 – 1358) who showed how money emerged freely and spontaneously on the open market, first as a useful commodity and then as a medium of exchange.

Fast forward to the sixteenth century. Capitalism truly took off in concert with the Protestant Reformation. Economist and sociologist Max Weber studied the influence of John Calvin and the French theologian’s idea of “The Elected,” or the chosen. Weber found the response to Calvin’s secular theology spectacular. He attempted to capture this in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”(1958). Weber writes:

“The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism . . . Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least the rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.”

There was little restraint evident with “The Elected,” as it came to dominate Europe economically changing the face of capitalism forever.

* * *

Fast forward again to the nineteenth century and the “Robber Barons.” They exemplified White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, and set the stage for the making of money to become America’s civil religion. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller showed no Weber restraint. In fact, they hired thugs as union busters, created monopolies and held the United States in economic hostage to their demands in steel, oil and timber as they had control of shipping and the shipping lanes, as well as the railroads and railroad lines.

* * *

Now, in the twenty-first century, the broken world cannot be mended with wishful thinking. Two questions come to mind with regard to material (economics) and spiritual (love) needs of man:

(1) What matters most: money or happiness, and are they mutually inclusive?

(2) What has freedom to do with love and happiness and economic success?


Earlier I suggested that we have no middle class; that the majority of us are members of the “the working poor”; that that includes those making as much as $350,000 a year. I sense that Weber’s bourgeois capitalism is on life support here, but not yet dead.

That notwithstanding, the working poor still sees itself as rich but suffering “Puritan anxiety,” or never being “rich” enough. Tempering the rational with the irrational impulse has faded to a dream, as the pressure to have more toys, toys it cannot afford, has not yet peaked. Voodoo economics and counterfeit capitalism now prevail.

The idea no one can ever have enough money is equated with happiness and tied to economic security. Consequently, want is made out to be need, optimism is preferred to reality, wishful thinking is substituted for purposeful action, and frantic cell phone and texting traffic is an escape from thinking.

Are statistical surveys arbiters of self-denial? Pollsters have yet to figure out that people are inclined to say what media has programmed them to think. Virtual reality has become reality without anyone noticing. Complacency is a trance as real as an acid trip in the 1960s that never ended.

* * *

There is nothing wrong with being rich if the price is not too high. Nor is there anything romantic about being poor. But when you are poor because you cannot stop spending, you kill your capacity to love, your freedom to do, and your power to have control of your life.

The proper goal of society is not to deify millionaires and billionaires but to distribute economic wealth so that wealth creators and wealth consumers are on the same page.

As to the matter of freedom, its price has been too high for most Americans to embrace. They have given freedom up without a fuss. We have become increasingly controlled and increasingly the same. Being daffy or dotty, or being out of step with others has disappeared in a culture of sameness. We have become true believers in being connected, and thus have lost our capacity for individual identity. The result? An amalgamated homogenous machine of mass mediocrity.

* * *

Isaiah Berlin has reduced this perplexing polarity to positive and negative freedom.

Negative freedom refers to freedom without constraints, without interference from other people. We display negative freedom to the extent that we have total control of our actions without encountering barriers. It follows therefore that negative freedom places strong limitations on the activities of the state.

Positive freedom is less an individual proposition than a group norm. The state has essential control of our life within a network of constraints and barriers meant to protect us from others and ourselves, or from disturbing or threatening interferences. Homeland Security is an organ of positive freedom.

No surprise here, the rich favor negative freedom. The poor favor positive freedom. The rich prefer as little interference as possible from government regulators. Wealth creators – entrepreneurs – believe positive freedom or regulation neutralizes their efforts. The poor expect support from unions, government agencies, and the United States Congress for their socio-economic welfare. The poor seek protection from those that would exploit them and are willing to give up freedom for such guarantees.

Positive freedom thrives in a climate where there is a disinclination to take charge or responsibility for outcomes. Security is considered more precious than freedom, failing to realize that security so realized is a recipe for counterdependence and subjugation.

On balance, negative freedom is precious but few believe they can afford it. Positive freedom, if not inherently paternalistic, involves external manipulation and control. Working in a corporation in a hierarchically structured organization with managers and workers precisely defined along sacrosanct lines is the epitome of positive freedom. Ironically, managers and engineers think of themselves driven by negative freedom when the workplace climate is the antithesis of such freedom. The command and control hierarchy of corpocracy is a reactive rather than a “take charge” environment. That said it is sobering to realize we all live in a corporate culture. We are a crisis-managed society ever reacting rather than anticipating our problems.

Currently, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and National Security are pointing fingers as to why nobody picked up on Major Hasan’s religious fanaticism before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood. This failure was consistent with a pattern. Nobody apparently saw the terrorist attack coming on the Twin Towers, the economic meltdown coming, or even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. My wonder is why this is not more troubling.

* * *

The rich are inclined to be inner directed; the poor outer directed. The poor tend to abandon their power as a rule to union leadership and corporate management. There was a time early in the last century, however, when workers had control of their work, but unions persuaded them to give up control for pay and benefits. Now, most of these jobs are gone and the freedom surrendered for job protection and security with them.

* * *

In the perpetual struggle between security and freedom, workers stand in the front line. Now in the era of Homeland Security, surveillance has been ratchet up so that not even the affluent can escape Orwell’s “Big Brother.”

Disembodied voices boom out their futile admonitions at shopping malls, airports and workplaces. Cameras track out our every turning as we walk the streets, looking down from tall buildings, while cameras at traffic lights register vehicles going through stop signs. Then there are always unmarked police cars roaming the streets and sitting on hills waiting to tag vehicular violators. It is also possible that cell phones and Internet activity is monitored. Yet, still more sinister than these irritations is the creeping privatizing of security to corporate contractors. Life appears to be increasingly imitating Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Americans are not happy with these countless checks and regulations but they are not alone. It has become a condition of urban life in Europe as well British author Anna Minton shows this in her new book, “Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City” (2009).

The affluent, and now many moderate earners have embraced positive freedom by migrating to gated communities or luxury condominiums. These are controlled, and pan optically spied on by private companies whose rules, regulations and sub-clauses prescribe behavior as tightly as a prison. Similar private companies keep a watchful eye for vagaries and eccentrics in commercial malls that might threaten the ethics of consumer conformity. Such segregation is carried out in the name of security. But does it work; do barriers, guards, and cameras make people feel safer? Minton says they don’t. In fact she claims they make people more fearful.

* * *

The paradox of the times is the more we seek security the less secure we are; the more dependent we are on mobile electronics the greater the barriers between us; the more physically we isolate ourselves from each other the more afraid we are to open our doors to strangers; the more we accede power and control to others to alleviate our fears the more fearful we become. Positive and negative freedom is not mutually exclusive but a complementary proposition.

It is a matter of balance. That is where love comes in, self-love, as it will not tolerate unreasonable intrusion. Self-love will embrace its insecurity not run from it; self-love will say, “No, thank you,” when unwanted protection is offered but not asked for; self-love will say, “No, I won’t go,” when what is asked of us is contrary to our self-interests.

Modern walls are being built around us because it is profitable business. The old saw still holds true, the more others do for us, whatever the nature of the doing, the less we are free. Yes, there is crime on our streets but there is much more peace. Remember that.

* * *

Finally, capitalism has become counterfeit because:

(1) The economic level of consumer confidence has tanked;

(2) Consumers have lost trust in producers, in banks, and elected politicians as custodians of the economy; they expected them to play fair ball and they haven’t;

(3) People in general have had their fill of predatory corporations such as Enron and predatory capital managers such as Bernard Madoff; this bad faith has translated into being fed up with financial institutions in general;

(4) Ordinary wage earners and small investors feel let down and exploited by a Federal Reserve too chummy with Wall Street at Main Street’s expense. It has allowed the dollar to continue its decline and jobs with it;

(5) The narrative of economists has been cheery before, during and after the economic meltdown. The story line has been replete with mathematical models these economists favor, which have proved to be as reliable as reading tealeaves. What is more confusing is that many American economists have won Nobel Prizes in Economics parading these mathematical models.

China and India are showing there are many routes to growth and development. Americans have always trusted the system, but now are not so sure. They don’t know the answer or whom to trust. They feel as if left in limbo. They need guidance, but please, no more explanatory models! Tell us where we are, no more claptrap! If forecasting is voodoo economics, tell us. If you don’t have a clue, tell us that, too. Stimulate our spirit with a little candor. That is where love resides. Behavior will follow including a synergy usually only reserved for wartime or national disaster.

* * *

LOVE IS ENOUGH

Man has left the cave but the cave has not left man.

Man no longer fears the beast of nature because he can make machines stronger, faster and more killing.

Man can explore the depths of the oceans, and the remote planets of our universe. He sends satellites into space, and instantly communicates with people across the world by cell phone or the Internet. He can control planes and trains by remote control, clone life by genetic manipulation, tear down or create mountains. But he cannot stop the killing, the unnecessary starvation of millions of innocent people.

Man cannot rise above war, or rapacious crimes against humanity. Nor can he stop himself from heating up the planet or persuade himself to live in harmony with nature. Who does he blame? Not himself. Not his excesses. Not his lifestyle. Not technology. Man blames God and religion for his twisted soul.

Yet, God and soul emanate from instinctive love, a love that makes the world go around. Nature is bridged by science and religion by love, complements that make this hostile planet a tolerable earthly home. Science solves one mystery and creates ten others. Technology takes science and creates wonders at breakneck speed failing to note, much less measure, what has been lost for what has been gained.

Science is important but love is enough. Love gives meaning and balance to life. Without love, man is a runaway killing machine with an incessant appetite for war.

Rogue nations fueled by hate threaten the very survival of man. Secular society has replaced religion with science, looking past its abuses to create bionic man and woman, impervious to growing psychic depression.

The soul cannot be quantified nor can God or love. A billionaire cannot buy love, but a homeless person can possess it, as it is priceless.

Love is to the soul what nourishment is to the body. If you look at the great religions, God and Love are intertwined and interchangeable.

* * *

There is much talk in this secular age of romantic love, sexual love, possessive love, but these are but expressions of lust, not love. We speak of marital love as being a 50-50 proposition, as if love were a capitalistic expression. Marital combat is the result, which is a zero sum game that leads many to divorce. Marital love is a 100-100 proposition, or agape love. It involves respect, trust and acceptance of each other, unconditionally. Anything less is Eros in disguise looking for a replaceable love object to beef up a waning libido. Viagra is part of love’s great deception.

* * *

We live in a paranoid age. We accuse the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of atrocities when we have no familiarity with our own. We see Islam as a satanic religion and label anyone to question Christianity an anti-Christ. Most religions are fundamentally based on love. Something we sometimes forget.

Will love as it once was appreciated come back? Not in my lifetime. We are too enamored of things, too dizzy with technology and global configurations to realize everything, the world over, are local.

But is there still love? I don’t see it; I don’t feel it; I don’t hear it; I just hear noise. I hear noise in music, I see it in art, I read it in literature. I don’t think our best days are ahead of us. I don’t think we are through our worse.

Consider these sobering words of Anton Chekhov in “The Wife and Other Stories” (1985):

“There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him – disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others”

* * *

PS. Forgive me for how clumsy my attempt has been to convey the critical nature of love. Hate is so much easier to express, love so difficult to convey.