WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART THREE -- WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS -- A READER RESPONDS!

WHAT KILLED LOVE? PART THREE – WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?

A READER RESPONDS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2009

REFERENCE:

This missive on love was so long it had to be divided into three parts:

(1) PART ONE: Introduction (Shadow of the Times); Abstract (overview of missive); What is Love?; What Killed Love – Was it Science?;

(2) PART TWO: What Killed Love – Was it Freud: Was it Society?; Was it Religion?

(3) PART THREE: What Killed Love – Was it Philosophers?; Was it Nietzsche?; Was it Capitalism?; Love is Enough!

The reader makes reference to the first two parts but his major comments relate to PART THREE.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Thank you for undertaking this complex and challenging topic. To refer to love as a topic seems odd choice. Yet, for the lack of a better word the exploration of an inexplicable sense subjects it to a bit of dehumanization. And taking the human out of love, as philosophers often do, renders it moot enabling endless examinations of its meaning and demonstration.

Yours is an apt description of philosophers (i.e., observers) on a hi-rise looking down on teaming people below. It describes many philosophers’ dispassionate attempt to debate the meaning of esoteric concepts a safe distance from the chaos.

The philosophers who bring true value to that discussion are those who have lived, stripped down to bare essentials among the workaday masses. Eric Hoffer comes to mind.

Often I read your pieces two or three times before responding, taking time in between readings to allow the meaning to digest.

I enjoyed Parts One and Two. You are at your stimulating, thought provoking best in those discussions. It was nice to reflect on those. In the midst of Thanksgiving Day morning activities, after preparing the turkey and putting it in the oven, I checked my email and saw the first exchange. It led me to read Part Three. Only because I didn’t sense in the first two parts any of the anger referred to in your email response.

Maybe my perspective is altered by all the “love” in the air. I don’t get the pessimism.

A year ago, I followed a drawn out path to accepting that I am older and am no longer wanted by the world in which I once thrived. Denial, depression, anger, lots of anger, reflection and reconstruction through the realization that worth is not measured by what some CEO is willing to pay you to do his bidding.

There is a lot to be angry about. Maybe that is what has killed love. Not the anger itself, but the expression of anger. It’s so much more public these days.

My grandson was doing a grade school science project on tornados. Data showed a dramatic increase from the Fifties to today. Is this because many tornados touched down on farmland, destroyed some crops, but were never reported? Wheat, corn and soybeans have been replaced by homes and the tornado has risen in stature.

My parents owned a tavern in the middle of the block on a residential street. It was a place people would come to drink after a hard day’s work and vent their anger about their bosses, politicians, their neighbors, their kids or whatever else irritated them at the moment. They would leave, sleep and awaken the next morning with their harsh words forgotten by most everyone who was in earshot the evening before.

Today, those words are immortalized. Not that they deserve to be. Anger without the hope (sorry) of solution leads to more frustration and more anger. Words that once reached a few ears now reach many ears and eyes.

If anything has “killed” love, it’s the Internet and mass media. Both have enabled an accelerated growth of the worst in human nature. Name-calling, blame without proof, rampant unfounded speculation, and every type of despicable pornography one could (and couldn’t) imagine proliferate in the unregulated and voracious Internet.

Nearly every example you mentioned allowed us time to reflect and recover.

Yes, Hitler rose to power during trying times and whipped up the tempest that consumed by some estimates 12 million innocents. While Jews bore the disproportionate burden of that mass murder, gypsies, the disabled, and several other minority groups were targeted in the attempted mass erasure of those who were different.

In retrospect, people point fingers at Western governments and even the Catholic Church for allowing this to happen. The reality is the spineless German citizens allowed and even relished these despicable acts. They, over time, made us realize the sin of silent protest. We learned from the Germans’ poor example to speak up and act, when our government is irresponsible.

I believe you put this quote in one of your pieces, “Evil occurs when good men choose to do nothing.”

So, genocide continues in Africa.

Wall Street may have affected love by heightening anger and emphasizing the chasm between rich and middle class. It has contributed to the creation of an out class of homeless destitute people reminiscent of the dust bowl/depression era.

And what is their cry? Reduce taxes! Let us hold on to more of our ill-gotten gains!

Drive the markets and housing values down and they get tax dollars to bail them out. Suck everyone back into a stock market built on hope and government welfare to big business and they get huge bonuses as if they actually had something to do with the recreation of wealth. Then, in a classic bite the hand that feeds them they are moved to criticize profusely the government leader who enriched them.

The anger doesn’t end. Love continues to fade. And, like Tinkerbell, love needs nourishment. There is still love, and it can’t be killed, only weakened. Love is a human interaction. It can’t be lost as long as we continue to be human.

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Currently, my thirteen-year-old granddaughter, an eighth grader, is reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953). She is a little mystified by the book’s theme, which incidentally, you touch on with your comment about the media and the Internet.

In "Fahrenheit 451," Bradbury makes clear, is not about censorship, but is a story of how television has destroyed interest in reading literature, leading to an obsessive interest in “factoids” or partial information devoid of real content, or relevant context, and I would add without notable attention to subtext.

The subtext is important as Bradbury wrote this book during the dark days of the "Cold War" when he thought, as it turned out correctly, that the next 40 or 50 years promised to be traumatic with reduced freedom and increased control in democratic republics.

The "Cold War" was a psychological war nourished by distrust, paranoia and fear. Books were burned in "Fahrenheit 451" because of that fear.

Today, with the proliferation of cell phones and constant texting along with ubiquitous and senseless entries into Facebook on the Internet, there is justification for your concern. For instance, I am amazed at how little our brightest children know about their own history or geography.

* * *

My general concern about love is not touchy-feely love, not “have a nice day” love, not love on automatic pilot, but love that breaks through all that somehow.

You only have to read your daily newspaper to know some kind of debilitating hate erupts in certain individuals with little provocation that results in murder and mayhem.

Yesterday, four young police officers in Parkland, Washington were ensconced in front of their laptops in a coffee shop, when a gunman came in and killed them. Their ages were 37, 39, 40 and 42. The four officers were having coffee and catching up on paperwork. I don’t know any of these officers, but I grieve for them, and in grieving for them, I grieve for us as well.

Something killed love in that shooter to cause him to go on a rampage. He wasn’t born with that killing hatred. We are part of the killer as much as we are part of the victims even though we would prefer to see it otherwise. We cannot detach ourselves from our times or our crimes. When love is killed in one of us, for whatever reason, it is killed in society as well, which means each of us.

* * *

While postmodern man is celebrating his achievements, we are at war on many fronts: shooting wars in Afghanistan and still so in Iraq, shouting wars in Congress, and splitting hair wars on the diplomatic and political front.

If I may be allowed a non sequitur, I use the terms “modernity” and “post-modernity” quite frequently.

By modernity, I am referring to the period after the Reformation or early fifteenth century to include industrialization, secularization, capitalism and the rise of the nation state. Modernity includes the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the American Civil War. Some would also include WWI and WWII as well as all the wars up to the 1990s.

Post-modernity is after the modern period, and as I use the term, refers to its arrival in late twentieth century, or during the early days of the Information Age, which we are now in, an age that is accelerating at such a pace that the past 30 years compare with the previous 300 years. Small wonder that love has suffered as humankind has been dwarfed by progress, incapacitated by it, and I contend, imprisoned by its many creations.

So, as you and I may have grown up in a much less hectic time, that was even truer of our parents, and of course, their parents. That doesn’t make any of it right, but it gives us some perspective on the problem. We are challenged to become self-responsible as never before against monumental distractions.

* * *

My thoughts regarding the German people are based upon my own experience. I cannot project my mind into the time of Nazism and imagine how I would have behaved were I a German citizen. If I were of the same temperament that I’ve been all my life, I would imagine blond haired-blue-eyed as I am I would have ended in a death camp for my mouth. But I don’t know how I would behave, do I?

* * *

As for Africa, you cannot program people for 300 years in colonial style subjugation and dominance, then withdraw the majesty and efficiency of the infrastructure of European efficiency, and expect the vacuum to automatically fill with a sufficient contingent of professionals to keep the ship of state on course.

No sin goes unpunished, and the sins of Western dominance of Third World countries are now coming home to roost.

* * *

I must admit this triad of missives on love has generated the least response from my email address book of any of my 450 posted missives over the years. I sense one of the reasons is that I’m hard on Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism.

I will leave this world as a Catholic writer whatever I write as Nietzsche could not escape the umbrella of his Protestantism.

I don’t write to please. I write to describe what I see. And I see Western Civilization has created the many problems it is facing today, and yet it will not face that fact.

* * *

Most readers – when they write – mention my “negativity.” I don’t see myself as negative in the least, but angry, yes.

Where I differ with you is that I don’t think anger kills love, but bursts it free of its prison to express itself. Don't disparage your anger, and you haven't. How do I know? Because if you had, you couldn't write these beautiful prose or the insightful thoughts that you do. Anger is the furnace of your ideas and springs alive in reflective commentaries. I thank you for them.

As for love, this is a love letter as all my writings are love letters.

Be always well,

Jim