THE UNPOPULARITY OF SOCIAL LOVE
(An Edited Excerpt from Beyond Denial)
The late sociologist Robert Bellah, a keen student of religion, once said that when it comes to social policy, “love is not a popular idea” among Americans. One place we see this is in the repeated public support given to America’s long list of wars since WW II (including this country’s attack against Iraq in 1991, in the aftermath of which this essay was originally written). Sadly, “sending in the Marines” is almost always highly popular within our population.
It should be clear to any honest observer that unleashing a major war is hardly a “loving” approach to international problem solving. Doing so shows how much more faith we Americans place in war and violence than in love-based social policies. Our trust in force and the fist is clearly much more prevalent among us than any supposed national “faith in God.”
The real question presented by America’s frequent military actions is not whether any particular action is in our national interest. (That is the argument that is often presented.) A much more important question is whether our choice to wage and support armed violence is a love-based action. Is it loving to burn people alive—whether civilian or soldier? Is it loving to blow off people’s legs? Is it an expression of love to explode whole truck-loads of human beings and then call it a “clean” strike? Are we following the law of love when we paralyze people or render them terrified to the point of insanity, crippling their minds, often for life? For anyone who lets their heart stay meaningfully open, and whose worldview includes a belief in kindness and compassion, the answers to those questions can only be a resounding “no.”
When the Bible says that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it is affirming that what we find at the very heart of the universe itself is fundamentally divergent from the kind of energy we see in such military approaches based on domination and violence, which American culture clearly reveres with such unthinking and unconscious trust. By contrast, this universal divine Power—this God that is Love—is a force for unity and life-enhancement, and for the kinds of growth that unity fosters. That is what love most essentially is: a force that creates, unifies, and propels living things to grow and to achieve their fullest possible development.
There is a strong strand in American thought by which many of us think that our country is a notably religious. And many have even convinced themselves that we live in a highly “Christian” nation. But it is important to notice that today’s American disdain for bringing love to bear in framing social policies is directly at odds with the core teachings of its own central Judeo-Christian tradition.
The biblical prophets, for example, were quick to condemn ostensibly pious kings for their harsh treatment of the poor. A later Jewish prophet, Jesus from Nazareth, also spoke against the powers that be of his era for their hardness of heart toward the poor and the sick, and toward the various despised minorities of his time, including foreigners (such as Samaritans), lepers, children and women.
Such support for embedding love-based behaviors into the structures of society, was at the very heart of the mission of Christ. (And this approach was paralleled, we might also note, in the Buddha’s far-ahead-of-his-time condemnation of the profoundly unloving caste system in India). One important theme the Hebrew prophets and Jesus—and the Buddha—all have in common is this: their advocacy for embracing the idea that love should and must be the main guide not just for individual life, but also for the structuring of society as a whole.
To that end, may we keep working for a world in which compassion is not just a sometime hope, but the emerging norm for how we do the ongoing work of structuring, and healing, human life on all its levels, whether individual, societal or global.