September 13, 2003
I picked her up because RageBoy, who often buries diamonds among his ubiquitous dreck, mentions her positively. I’m talking about bell hooks’ book All About Love: New Visions.
I’m thinking he must have noticed her statement about rage being “the failure of love’s promise” and assumed the rest of the book elaborated on that notion. In some ways it does – at least it does if you can eliminate all of her dozens and dozens of references to just about every pop psychologist’s tome published in the last twenty years.
Hooks does have (what I think are) a few semi-precious gems buried among her own dreck, however. And most of them stress the link between justice and love as these marry to forge stronger relationships in both the personal and global senses.
-- Justice between people is perhaps the most important connection people can have.
-- Loving justice for themselves and others enables men to break the chokehold of patriarchal masculinity.
-- ...love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility.
-- ... gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice, to realize these values and then create a more just society.
-- Healthy narcissism (the self-acceptance, self-worth, that is the cornerstone of self-love) is replaced by a pathological narcissism (wherein only the self matters) that justifies any action that enables the satisfying of desires. The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed. No doubt this explains our nation’s willingness to deprive poor citizens of government-funded social services while huge sums of money field the ever-growing culture of violent imperialism.
-- Were we, collectively, to demand that our mass media portray images that reflect love’s reality….this change would radically alter our culture. The mass media dwells on and perpetuates and ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love. …. The small groups of people who produce most of the images we see in this culture have heretofore shown no interest in learning how to represent images of love in ways that will capture and stir our cultural imaginations and hold our attention.
If the work they did was informed by a love ethic, they would consider it important to think critically about the images they create. And that would mean thinking about the impact of these images, the ways they shape culture and inform how we think and act in everyday life…..
Love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility.
While hooks doesn't have anything new to say, her writing is an honest reminder that, individually and collectively, we humans still have a lot to learn before we figure out how to stop crashing and burning ourselves and each other.
P.S. What's fascinates me about Nip Tuck is how it plays with the approach-avoidance struggles of various individuals to internalize that definition of love as a " combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility." It's as though, in their heart of hearts, they want to embrace that defnition; but the conflicting values imposed by competitive peers, individual personality, and cultural priorities keep getting in their ways.
And so it goes for all of us.
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Old Comments (3)
Indigo Ocean on 13 Sep 2003
"gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice, to realize these values and then create a more just society"
I think this is the meat of it for me. Love is not a theory, but rather an action. To think lovingly is one thing. But how we live our lives is either love or destruction. We must none of us make assumptions about which God we serve. We must know ourselves by our works.
Elaine on 14 Sep 2003
I'm with you on that one, Indigo. It takes a great deal of self-honesty and self-knowledge to truly see where one's actions are being destructive, though. Sometimes we fool ourselves even better than we fool other people. Our loveless national leader is a case in point.
polifoniczne dzwonki on 13 Jun 2004
Hmmmmm interesting !!!