love
Regarding others like the self, while realising that others are not necessarily like the self, is comprehension. (Lu K’un)
Love is his business and aim.
(George Herbert, ‘The Country Parson’)
Simone Weil wrote, ‘To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love.’ In a STA world where our imagination can intuit the equality of all living things, our awareness is almost synonymous with love. It is the recognition of another being possessed of a reality equal to that which I know I experience, and of our common circumstance here, alive in the world. [Footnote: this may not be your idea of ‘love’, but I am not thinking here that I need to write a chapter about ‘love’ and wondering how to define it; I am instead trying to express the quality described above and, for want of a better word and encouraged by Simone Weil’s example, calling it ‘love’. The important thing is the quality which is real, not the word which is unreal.]
Love, in this sense, is the state of mind in which we live and move. We are primed like a pump and pre-disposed to love. But we are physical creatures in a physical, rather than conceptual, universe and these airy abstractions need to be embodied. Just as awareness is externalized as praise, and imagination as creativity, love is expressed as loving-kindness, triggered by the presence and perhaps the need of the other creature. Love is not engendered by the other person; it is already innate in us (just as the tap is already full of water, unreleased until we turn it). We do not love them because, depending on our taste or mood of the moment, we fancy them or are amused by them, but simply because like us, they are miracula Dei sive naturae and through them we can love the whole creation which, all of it being equal, we must surely do if we love any part of it.
‘When you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another,’ says Montaigne. All are equal, so there is no justification for favouritism or, of course, for selfishness, which is just an emotional illusion of perspective. As C.S Lewis realised, ‘To prefer my happiness to my neighbour’s was like thinking the nearest telegraph pole was really the largest.’ Love isn’t a sentiment or an opinion; we are not (in any belief-system I know) required to like everyone else – that would be impossible, there are some complete wankers out there – but there is no reason not to love: that is, perhaps, (and I hazard this very tentatively) to bear goodwill and no animosity, do no harm, be alert to need and be there if needed (which, I confess, admits of a wide interpretation. I acknowledge too that this all sounds rather bloodless, but it is particular circumstances rather than generalisations that energise love).
And what good comes out of it all? Peace, openness, confidence, warmth – it’s plain enough and hardly needs elaborating here. (Nor, I imagine, do the corrosive effects of lovelessness, suspicion and selfishness.)
Clearly it is a happier way to live. Traherne rightly says, ‘It is more to your happiness what you are than what you enjoy … an angel will be happy anywhere and a devil miserable.’ Angels don’t need comfort eating, retail therapy or to ‘get away’ for a holiday. But, in the end, we do not need to argue its value. Love is not merely good policy. It is very simply our natural (that is, pre-social, pre-cultural) attitude – our imaginative awareness of each other ‘soul to soul’.
Its naturalness does not, however, make it easy in our unnatural, competitive, social environment. Our hurt emotions and unrealised dreams, our sense of what is somehow due to us, the soft indulgence of sorrow – all these tempt (we might tell ourselves ‘entitle’) us to self-pity when the world turns out to be different from what we had hoped. But Blake is on hand to prevent any back-sliding:
The Angel that presided at my birth
Said, ‘Little creature, born of joy and mirth,
Go, love, without the help of anything on Earth.’
This sinister-sweet little verse teaches a tough lesson. You may not have a loving family, wife, husband, cat, dog or friend of any description. And STA cannot promise you a loving God. It may be that nobody loves you at all but, anyway, Go, love, without the help of anything on Earth. Love is not the outcome of a brokered deal, nor a commodity you trade. It is not a currency you can afford to spend only when you have accrued enough yourself. It is a gift you offer freely. Love received is a powerfully sustaining food, or a salve which lubricates the heart and makes the work of loving so much easier, but even a dry, unloved heart must still go on loving, clank and rattle as it may.
Love is an ecstasy – an ek-stasis (standing outside yourself). And yet, standing outside yourself, even emptying yourself (‘kenosis’), is not an auto-annihilation. Your true self, your haecceity, remains. It is the social, acculturated, concocted identity, the ‘personality’, the costume, wig and make-up, the ‘face to meet the faces that you meet’ which is left in the dressing-room. Your true self meets each situation without pre-conception, recognizing the uniqueness at every moment of every other creature which has been born with that same unprejudiced awareness (whatever its surface appearance may be now). There is no reason not to love and hope for the best for that creature ‘soul to soul.’ As Martin Buber wrote, ‘The inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man's relation to himself but in the relation between one and the other.' We are most fully ourselves, best prepared to be and do, when we are looking outwards and not hypnotised by our own fascinations.
[Footnote: lest anyone reading this knows me, and is bemused by the contrast between the ardent soul brimming with love idealised here, and the amiable but inconsequential chap they see about town, I must acknowledge that I completely and utterly fail to approach the state of love I claim is natural to us. Laziness, shyness, grumpiness, suspicion, squeamishness, obliviousness and habit intervene like the seven malignant dwarfs of acculturation. Fine thoughts are not much use on their own.]
In some superficial ways at least, contemporary society encourages a close interest in ‘the other’. We exchange opinions (often with thousands of ‘friends’), try to persuade or impress one another, ingratiate ourselves and strive to be liked. Many of us spend our working lives studying people, albeit to see how best to make money out of them. Society is largely based on such currency but without the conditions of ‘doing no harm’ or ‘being there if needed’.
It is a tragedy that love has no standing in social or public life. Although in private we value the loving virtues of kindness, friendliness, generosity and good humour, in public, we (the same ‘we’ mysteriously transformed by aggregation into ‘society’) reward competitiveness and toughness, and admire ‘exceptional, driven’ figures, even as we admit that they ‘can’t be easy to live with.’ But isn’t living together – co-habitation, even con-viviality, acknowledging our interdependence – the first inescapable duty of every creature on earth? Are doggedness, obsessiveness and unyielding, insistent intelligence really appealing qualities? Is ‘achievement’ the point of being alive, as Ozymandias thought? Society will lionize a wonderful guitarist who is a shit person, and ignore a wonderful person who is a shit guitarist. We, however, with the freedom of our haecceity, can choose our own priorities.
I would quietly suggest that we do not need constantly to interfere with one another. Albert Schweitzer, noting that ‘none of us can truly assert that he really knows someone else,’ argues that ‘A man must not try to force his way into the personality of another … for there is a modesty of the soul which we must recognise, just as we do that of the body.’ It is at least important to shed a sense of dependency on the thoughts or feelings of others, which are changeable and conditional on so many unknowable factors unrelated to us. If someone hurts or abuses us we are not obliged to stay in harm’s way, mesmerised by notions of ‘duty’. Love is not acquiescence to a stronger will. As all of us are equally valuable, any abasement is a loss.
And who is it that we should love? Who is my neighbour? I can see no logical or scientific basis for human exceptionalism. That we must treat humans better than polecats is a social rather than a STA principle based on the egotistical notion of degrees of consanguinity – we must love them more because they’re more like ME! – the same dubious principle behind racism, nationalism, sexism &c. The fact that we can communicate more freely and deeply with other humans means that we are more likely to flock together (and also perhaps to argue and have wars), but quantity of time spent together is not the issue. Love is – and love feels the presence of all creatures, not just those who speak our language. [Footnote: good STA behaviour insists that I must feel love towards the rats who have moved into the cellar and up behind the plasterboard walls since Ipsy died. I am struggling with this. Awareness, certainly. Acute awareness. I have bought an electrical deterrent. ‘Piss off, you rodentine bastards!’ may not be a very STA axiom, but it is better than killing the poor things. They are simply being themselves and, until they threaten more than my squeamish sensitivities, must be allowed to keep on being.] And yet, if we are to treat all creatures as equals, how are we to survive when vegans and cannibals are morally equivalent? Personally, I opt for an uneasy, frankly hypocritical vegetarianism, all too aware that a lettuce is as fully alive and part of the unity of creation as a lamb, and suggest a ‘humane’ compromise – that we should not kill gratuitously, but only for need; that we should minimize pain and treat all others with respect, allowing all creatures their haecceity (which, for example, rules out factory farming, vivisection and wild-animal circuses). That sounds wanly reasonable to me but I can’t pretend that it’s the only valid course.
My choices are not, in any case, of much importance to anyone but myself and the creatures I kill or spare in keeping myself alive. STA is not a prescription. It is a world-view. It is a recognition of objective reality summed up in the (now) Seven Realisations and the equally grandiloquently-titled Four Natural Duties (though these Duties, as extrapolations from evidence, must always be a little more tentative than the evidence itself). It is, I hope, solid ground for us all.
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