LOVE AND RESPECT -- WORDS OF SIGNIFICANCE AND CONSEQUENCE!

LOVE AND RESPECT

WORDS OF SIGNIFICANCE AND CONSEQUENCE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 11, 2014

OVERVIEW

They say. “Love makes the world go around.”  But what is love and what do we mean when we say I love you? 

Is love an instinct or a condition?  Is it a quality of our essence or an acquired tastes?   Is love limited to words or a precept of behavior?

Clearly, the best of human actions involves a spate of dissembling.  We cannot help ourselves from constant lying.  Unable or unwilling to confront these flawed ironies of our nature, virtue can easily be reduced to vice, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly. 

For this refusal to get inside what we mean by love we fail to recognize the limits of our capacity to be loving. 

We treat love as a commodity of instrumental (what it can do for us) or terminal value (what it means to us). 

In both cases, our human temperament finds love fragmented precarious in its configuration and power to differentiate good from evil, right from wrong, the desirable from the undesirable, or what is in our best interest and in the interest of significant others.

Of all human limitations man’s animal nature sets limits on his efforts to love, display dignity, forgive, order and elevate himself above his inherent selfishness, obstinacy, violence and inclination to self-hatred or self-deprecation.   Alas, the hardest person for us to love is ourselves, and we can thank our culture for that.

Man is an irrational being with a conscience looking for the modesty to admit that his natural interests are not always knowable or understandable to him.  Decency and civility are often buried in unsullied arrogance or hostility to others, which is actually a display of self-contempt.

Or could it be delusions of superiority (I have answers for you) that result in moral turpitude, or the opposite of what was intended with love in the first place? 

PENETRATING THE PHILOSOPHICAL THICKET OF LOVE

We are familiar with conditional and unconditional love.

A parent with a strong superego (Freud’s “Morality Principle”) would most likely display conditional love, or what the person should do or should not do; in other words, how the person is expected to behave not according to the person’s own lights, but the value system of that parent.

On the other hand, a parent with a healthy ego (Freud’s “Reality Principle”) would be inclined to display unconditional love, or love that understands that to be human is to be flawed, and to fail is part of nature, and that there is no other recourse than for a person to find this out for him or herself, which means to accept that reality and to deal with it accordingly.

Where both conditional and unconditional love can result in warp behavior, and drive the offspring into deeper confusion and greater danger is in doing too much (conditional love) for that person leading to excess, or too little (unconditional love) failing to steer the young person in the right direction. 

The right direction is a tentative destination as it involves the individual being in a climate where freedom and individualism are meant to display a modicum of moderation, are guided by a reasonable level of prudence, and do no harm to that person or to others.

Fear is the culprit that complicates matters.  It can drive a conditionally loved child to despair as that child is bombarded with a constant cacophony of negative forebodings, which paradoxically, can drive that child into becoming obsessed with behaviors most feared. 

Unbridled confidence that the child will do the right thing is the offender that drives unconditional love to unreality and nightmarish behavior as existence is without walls, road signs or limits.

 

It is no accident conditional love can lead to behaviors of societal shame. 

This is the subject of James Cleugh’s “Love Locked Out” 1963) where he shows a disproportionate number of young Catholic women go into prostitution or are compulsively promiscuous as a result of the stringent puritanical nature of their Catholic religious training, where the normal biological developmental functions of young women are ignored or denied.  It may well be a factor in the perverted behavior of celibate Catholic priests leading to child abuse.

Many parents unwittingly chase their children into sin and shame by acting the epitome of perfection sharing little or no sense of their own psychosexual confusion in the process of growing up, or indeed, of acting as pure as the falling snow, when a little candor might lead to a child’s self-tolerance and self-acceptance rather than thinking him or herself being spoiled good for simply feeling, thinking, imagining, and behaving in an exploratory nature of their being.

Unconditional love, in one sense, is comforting in that the person benefitting from such love knows that no matter what he or she does they can “come home again.”

Where the confusion occurs with unconditional love is that the young person is given little or no guidance, develops no rationale or prudence much less moderation in behavior knowing that parental love will always be there to rescue them from themselves. 

We have had at least three generations of this unconditional love, and as a result we have few mature adults in the conduct of society’s business. 

We see this immaturity displayed with implicit justifications, whatever the circumstances, from the President of the United States to the Chief Executive Officers of our major corporations, to the leaders of our academic and religious institutions, to the behavior of professional athletes, on and on.  Unconditional love as led to the “spoiled brat syndrome.”

Indeed, unconditional adulations, which is a form of love, finds a professional athlete making $5 million a year shoplifting a couple pairs of jockey shorts and a cologne, and fined $50,000 for the offense.  A Heisman Trophy winner for college football, walks out of a supermarket with a package of crab legs, as if entitled.  This young man, who seems constantly in some kind of trouble, has been coddled and loved unconditionally in his twenty years of life because he is a most gifted athlete.  He is being destroyed by this adulation, and as a consequence, may never grow up.

There is a man in my acquaintance who puts no restrictions on his children’s love.  They are not bad children as it turns out, but one is fortunately guided by her own lights with some authority, while the other seems to be lost in a little boy’s wonderland of electronic games that at the age, 20, should have been put aside or outgrown. 

This man, because of his success, has a beautiful lakefront home and two wave runners, a boat and other toys to be expected in such surroundings.   The two wave runners were stolen by two boys, but within a few days these lads were apprehended by the police with felony charges.

The boy’s father came to this man and asked that the charges be dropped with this rejoinder, “Don’t you remember when you were a boy?  Things like this happen.”

He did as the father wished, and the boys, who are criminals, got away with it this time with no learning taking place.

HOW DOES RESPECT RELATE TO LOVE?

Love can be conditional or unconditional, but respect can only be earned.  You can love members of your family or extended family, but that love will not always be accompanied with respect of that you can be sure. 

You can faint respect subconsciously but even the most forgiving of nature’s cannot abide someone who consistently lies about everything, is always late for appointments, seldom follows through with  promised action, borrows money or things and “forgets” to pay the money back or return the items borrowed. 

This person can be a mother or father, brother or sister, cousin or best friend, but after a while, and it differs from person to person, the respect withers and dies, and that person is avoided as much as possible. 

The irony is that the person is likely to still be loved, but not respected, preferring that the person be seen seldom if at all.

Respect, as it turns out, and this is a surprise to most people, is that respect is more powerful and more magnetic as well as more consequential than love.

Love, either conditionally or unconditionally is given freely.  Respect is only experienced when it is earned and not before.

Now, you might argue that is not true.  I respect my pastor, my teacher, my boss, my president, but again, it is not respect until that person displays in behavior a level of trust and confidence that generates respect.  If that person is inconsistent, if what that person says is found not to be true, then there is no trust, and without trust there can be no respect.

My sense is that love does make the world go around, but respect is at the fulcrum or that love goes off course.

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