I know
You love the song but not the singer.—"I Know", Placebo
I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and since then I've been doing a lot of thinking about Ayn Rand's philosophy. One of the weirdest turns she takes in her philosophy is how she applies her "no sacrifice" tenet to love and relationships, but as it turns out, I'm starting to see more and more how it all makes sense. In a nutshell, she outright rejects the idea of unconditional love and in its place believes in loving a person for their virtues.
Since her theory of love is a close parallel to her economic theory, let me say a thing or two first about her economic theory. She believes that socialism and our modern society try to completely separate productivity from incentive, and that the direct result is that people basically can't help but stop working hard, start cheating, and as a group destroy our economy. But one of her central ideas that I missed at first is that in her ideal society, more will be produced, and that in a society of free trade, both parties benefit with every transaction. That means that Medicaid and unemployment will go down, but that wages and standard of living in general will go up.
So how does that relate to love? Well, if all love were suddenly based on virtue rather than "choice", my knee-jerk fear would be that nobody would be "good" enough to deserve love. I recognized right away that it's the same knee-jerk response I had to her economic ideas (that nobody could be productive enough to survive), so I think the analogy runs pretty deep. I realized that if we punish "conditional" love so much and make it a black mark to love someone because you want to, if we make it a virtue to love someone in spite of their faults and horribly "selfish" to love someone because of their virtues, then what we're left with is empty, devoid of emotion, and based on guilt. If we love based on virtue, then I predict that our quality of love will increase, and there will be more love to go around!
As someone who always strives for sincerity and makes it a priority to live and love richly, I find a lot of energy and comfort in that thought. It's very hard for me to answer questions like "why do you love me?" when my love is based on sacrifice and guilt, but when I base my idea of love on virtue and mutual benefit, I'm coming up with new answers to that question all the time. I think how easily such a question comes to our minds in moments of insecurity should itself be a hint that love should not be based on nothing and that love naturally goes hand-in-hand with appreciation.
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1 comment:
With these caveats, I agree:
1) Brian pointed out on my blog last September when I argued an almost identical point as you argue here, that sometimes parents seem to have a truly unconditional love, or more accurately, great love with the only condition being the existence of the relationship of son or daughter.
I must admit that there is something to that. It is hard for me to imagine not loving Ethan, even if he turns out to be a really, really, really bad person who hates me and Rachel to boot. There's something genetically hard wired in me, I think, to love him.
2) Now, for romantic love, the actual subject of this investigation, various forces might make some people persist in loving another person even when the object of affection stops exhibiting the lovable traits that were attractive in the first place, qualities such as admiration, physical attraction, a desire to not be alone and to share our thoughts and experiences and to lighten our load, want of encouragement, the actual enjoyment of loving someone else, etc. For example, time itself can be a love-inducing element, though it has nothing to do with the object of affection -- shared life experiences and familiarity can breed empathy and emotional attachment with a person, just as we tend to become attached to pet after a time, even if the pet starts to pee all over the carpet in old age. Another force that tends to make us extend love grants or loans to attractively-bankrupt people is the fact that if we have already decided that we like someone we tend to look past deficiencies. (Of course, if we dislike a person we tend to hone in on them, so depending upon other factors this facet of human psychology will act as the opposite of a buffer and might therefore make you fuze or split emotionally more quickly than logically you should.)
In the end, extending love on loan because of empathy or the irrational tendency to overlook deficiencies can certainly wear out. And so we arrive again at the conclusion that for most or all, romantic love is not unconditional. It instead has more complicated elements that we see again have great connections with economic systems, in which customers build credit and cause us to extend credit, overdraft protection, and cash advances (with interest, though!) to them so that relationships are not as volatile as if we were loving paycheck-to-paycheck, a very rocky way to live. :)
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