Love in context

Love in context Ah Stephen, perhaps it is not fair of me to use your record of your own feelings to call your attention to the larger pattern of our age, and possibly your responsibility to them. However…

We must love one another or die
and he nearly did die the night
he saw the periscope, minutes
before the ship sank, another
failure of love.

From humanity’s viewpoint, so to speak, we are truly at a turning point. Love or perish. The following quote puts the issue succinctly:

Some generation of mankind was eventually bound to face the task of abolishing war, because civilization was bound to endow us sooner or later with the power to destroy ourselves. We happen to be that generation, although we did not ask for the honour and do not feel ready for it. There is nobody wiser who will take the responsibility and solve this problem for us. We have to do it ourselves.
Gwynne Dyer

This description applies equally well to our environmental situation. All the major environmental indicators have been down for decades, and the adverse trend lines are getting worse. Ditto for corporate totalitarianism.

It is, however, not very helpful to say we must love one another. A far more useful language, I believe, is to note the difference between partnership/respect relating and domination/control relating (Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade). The terms are almost self-explanatory on the surface. Partnership/respect relating cares for committee well-being, whether that be the family or the social commons. Domination/control relating seeks power over others and willingly uses force and intimidation to achieve it. While most of our institutions are dominator institutions, today there is an increasingly strong counter-current of people with partnership values.

For those who have granddaughters, or who otherwise care about the well-being of future generations, it is worth noting that the fate of the world depends on shifting everything (a whole system change) such that the world operates on partnership values. Many of us, echoing the positive values of Christianity and Buddhism, are working for this.

People who oppose hitting children — and who in their own relationships with children treat them with great respect — are part of this positive change. Evidence from psychohistorian Lloyd deMause shows that in some pockets childrearing has been getting measurably better. Indeed many parents raise their children in ‘helping’ mode, helping their children follow the children’s own authentic inclinations. The undisciplined kids you are concerned about are presumably not raised by helping-mode parents. Disturbed kids, as you well know, become disturbed adults. George Bush is our most glaring example.

Improvement in childrearing, and consequently improvement in adult mental health, has been a generations-long process. We don’t have generations to make well-being rather than economic increase the primary goal of Western societies.

We can philosophise all we want. But I think the proper role of philosophers today is to deeply understand the Partnership/Dominator distinction (including how it plays out environmentally, psychologically and socially), and teach this to others so that we develop the consciousness that can support our shift to a world that works. I and others are working on this virtually full-time. I invite you to join us in some way. To ignore the needs of our time would be yet another failure of love.

Yours for a world that works

Andrew