So I wrote this back in 2017, before I started The Essence of Water, but it was one of the pieces that made me think I should put this on a blog. Remember I’m a father – in fact, I’m posting this from San Francisco, where the boy and I are enjoying the last couple of days of a fantastic west coast swing. When I wrote this, he would have been four. He’s now eleven. We actually talk about some of this stuff now, but when I started thinking about it, I just wanted to not forget it when he got older. Who knows where we’ll take this – but seven years later, it’s all pretty good.
Pour yourself a drink: I didn’t self-edit very well in 2017, and this is probably longer than it needs to be. And as always, thanks for reading.
Relationships run the gamut, from casual encounters on a train or a bus to the kind of life-changing, life-lasting loves that many of us have seen, however few of us actually experience them. Having recently been in a life-changing relationship that seems to have failed as a life-lasting relationship, I’ve been puzzled as to why we seek the intensity of the pairings that capture two individuals into orbit, either dynamically and eventually spinning apart, or in equilibrium, lasting for decades.
The long-forgoten ex-girlfriend and I talked about this quite a bit; she was convinced that people are simply not meant to be together, that we grow apart inevitably and that in a long lifetime we have to get comfortable with the idea of relationships intensifying and then dissolving. She further proposed that the idea of lifetime relationships was a convenient fiction created by “society” – in her parlance, the ultimate enemy. Society represented the combined weight of history, self-interest, human capriciousness, and fear that combines to destroy the individual and all one is capable of. By constructing a vision of relationships that by definition subordinated the role of the individual – who otherwise would grow in their own unique way, ultimately and inevitably away from the other individual as they too grew in their own unique way – society’s imposed ideal of marital and familial love has served to perpetuate an ultimately conservative and traditionalist world. In a radically new world, which ceases subordinating the individual, relationships would be fluid, with people moving from partner to partner – or amongst multiple partners simultaneously – given the mutual and cross-beneficial needs of individuals as they change and grow over time.
While there’s some merit to that line of thinking, ultimately, her argument struck me as being backwards. Society – if it really is so devious and insidious – would surely take advantage of a natural tendency in us and pervert it, rather than try to go through all the extra work of creating something that we have no natural need for and convincing “us” of its necessity. Society is, after all, human – or at least, it is an integral function of humans – and humans evolve towards success; they almost never evolve towards pointlessness. Of course, it can and often does happen that the “point” towards which we or our institutions evolve in the past becomes irrelevant and goes away, and we’re left with the appearance today of a pointless institution or tool. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a firm point to begin with. Indeed, I’ve yet to see human beings intentionally invent pointless things (even Dada had a point – the movement’s denial of a point was itself demonstrative).
Her vision also bothered me because of its historical determinism. Despite halcyon days in college as an anarcho-communist, I never liked that part of Marx, as I always felt it was informed by a version of human history which was demonstrably bullshit. Her history of society is marked by something similar – no points for guessing that reading “Das Kapital” as an undergraduate was one of her first academic epiphanies – namely the idea that we can posit a specific human objective as being at the core of metahistorical structures, be they human romantic attachments or the relative means of organizing production and political distribution of power. Mind you, I don’t dispute the basic point that human objectives drive human actions. However, I’ve come to realize that, when taken in concert across millions (or billions) of individual actions across decades or centuries of time, the objectives become unrecognizable in their manifestation as human systems or human institutions. The simultaneous impact of other human objectives acting themselves out in parallel – to say nothing of the changing physical environment of this blesse orb on which all human activities are staged – means that any one isolated objective or group of objectives is useless in understanding the ultimate shape of the big structural features of humanity.
The things that bothered me about her theory, though, weren’t just about historical determinism, or about theory overcomplicating things. My own experience of relationships suggests that we are powerfully drawn to bonding with other people, and that the intensity by which we are driven to bond increases with the intensity of the bond that we experience. Why is that, and how has it evolved to its expression in the institutions and moral and ethical lifeways of the present (even as we see those lifeways changing)? I’ll start with proposing a simple solution – not “society is screwing us”, but much more basic. We developed language as a means of furthering survival; having invented language, we need to talk to people; needing to talk to people, we form relationships. Sex helps seal the deal. But we inevitably get caught – by our environment, by our history, by our brains and our bodies – and things get complicated.
We now know that upright walking primates developed in lots of different ways – that seems to have been the first real shift away from other primates – and the evidence suggests that lots of pre-human primates evolved into pretty sophisticated toolmakers and many of them developed abstraction as a means of thinking more deeply. Even whales and dogs and pigs show evidence of consciousness as we think of it – an awareness of their existence, that is, and the ability to use things like marks and basic artwork to indicate to themselves their existence. But language seems to be the marker that separates human beings from every other species on the planet – the ability to share our awareness of the world with others.
I think language also sits at the root of why we crave relationships of any form. Having been given the ability to communicate in a sophisticated way, we need other people to communicate with. It’s telling to me that people in solitary confinement almost inevitably seek to find a way to speak – either by writing on the wall or finding scraps of paper to write their words on, or by tapping the wall in search of a response, or waiting for the food which will inevitably be delivered and divining messages from the arrangement of the food on the plate, and using their willingness to eat or not eat as a means of telling their jailer something about their state. Even in solitary confinement, we seek a relationship – we seek someone to talk to.
The most basic relationship is between a mother and her child – and it’s the most basic simply because it is the first relationship any of us has. It’s the first time we communicate with another person, the first time we launch the program of learning how to communicate that we’ve been wired to be able to do. The mother inevitably and “naturally” seeks to teach the child – but in doing so, she’s just continuing a process that began when she was born, namely, she’s seeking to talk to someone. She craves the company. The child, being a fairly basic input-response object when born, responds far more positively to affection than to violence (although violence often occurs due to the clash of the more nuanced mother with the simplistic child) – and affection breeds more affection.
As we progress in life, we develop our own language skills and continue to grow in our need to talk with others. In a simple world, we have relatively few discrete opportunities to interact – but then again, in a simple world, our range of potential expressions are limited. Our language and our interactive world grow in complexity in parallel; as we have more to say, we seek out more people to express what we have to say – and we also seek more intense relationships with individuals. At each step, humans craved more interaction – but in particular, the complexity of language and the complexity of the ideas that it can express breeds the need for more intense relationships, and the more powerfully individuals were able to express, surely the more they craved a deeper, more powerful relationship so as to have the room to express ourselves. We can imagine that that craving has probably developed naturally over the existence of our species because of the nature of our language gift – more complexity, more need to connect; more successful the connection, the more we crave it.
This is exactly akin to what takes place in normal brain learning functions, and it would exploit the natural chemical learning pathways of the human brain that we would imagine would be taking place as language is learned over a lifetime. The craving would come from successful learning; we’d keep learning and our brains would keep rewarding us. That craving is what separates a “relationship” from an interaction, on the one hand, or simple sexual desire, on the other. Simple interactions (ordering a coffee at Starbucks, say) exchange information in a basic way, but only become relationships when the mutual exchange is mutually rewarding – ie., when both parties feel understood and receive the internal reward of pleasure at being understood.
The ex-girlfriend used to say that people learn and grow better in relationships. On the one hand I agree with her, but when I use “relationship” in this way, it’s a lot more diverse, and doesn’t mean “a sexual or romantic relationship” in the way that she did. I’d argue that we can only grow in relationships – whether friendships, adult-child relationships, master-student relationships, or (and?) more intensely bonded sexual friendships – because language learning only occurs in an exchange which has gone deeper than superficialities. The learning process – which in the brain involves actual chemical reward; our brains are so ingeniously wired that when we learn something new, we get a kind of biochemical cookie congratulating ourselves for the effort – is powerfully intertwined with our ability to speak. That’s why, I think, intuitively, historians and anthropologists have linked humanity’s unique linguistic skill with our evolutionary advantage – we not only have the skill, but our brains reward us for using it, and thus, encourage further learning.
On the other hand, sexual desire can happen in any context and without language – this is obvious as it occurs in animals without any language skills at all – and has its own reward outside of the learning system rewards that accompany language. Combine the two, however, and one can see how insanely powerful the reinforcement mechanism becomes. But the more intensely bonded sexual friendships aren’t necessarily the vessel in which we grow most deeply, and we don’t need to be in an intensely bonded sexual friendship to grow at our greatest capacity. And in fact, the nature of sex as a powerful physical drive, with intensely strong biochemical incentives that reward us with rushes of chemicals to our brain’s pleasure centers whenever we orgasm, makes me think that we might actually not learn better in those kinds of relationships without a lot of care.
What I find personally is that I’m happier when I’m in an intensely bonded sexual friendship, and that probably makes it easier for me to grow in general – I have fewer bad days – but it has to be a good one, or else I start having more bad days and I even can get to the point where I lose the thread on love. Sex, however, overpowers the learning centers which are also interpreting successful and unsuccessful relationship dynamics, and successful and unsuccessful intellectual and linguistic lessons. If I have sex while I’m also doing something damaging to myself and others, I end up thinking that those damaging things are somehow “good” – regardless of the fact that they have nothing to do with me having sex. It’s just the chemicals are too strong and too blunt; they wash my entire brain at once, not just the happy zones associated with sex or coupling. In other words, we learn more intensely while we’re in sexually supportive relationships – but we don’t necessarily learn the right things. We learn whatever it is we’re learning with more power and intensity, but if we’re learning to be jerks, we’re just going to learn to be more intense jerks with less incentive to become less jerks, because sex during the learning process told us that what we were doing was really, really right – even enough to overpower potentially offsetting signals we may have been getting in the language learning process at the same time that were saying being a jerk might not be the right or most successful lesson.
Note that I’ve avoided using the word love so far to refer to any of this language learning or sexual desire stuff, even though the point of this essay is to examine, as I say, “life changing, lifelong loving relationships”. I worry, though, that bringing the word “love” into the process is going to lead down a path where I’ll be accused of buying into older or Hollywood notions. To be absolutely clear: that is not what I mean by love. Love, in society’s normal usage, is really nothing more than a selfish act: I love you because I want something. That something may be something that the world views as an inherent good – I love you because I want to have children with you, say. The world may even view that statement as being self-less: if you love someone in order to have children, surely that’s noble as you will by definition sacrifice much in raising those children. And if you meet someone and they love you because they want to have children, surely, one would protest, that is a beautiful thing – you both share a goal, and that goal is selfless?
Hollywood love usually revolves around two people wanting “each other” – which we’ve come to endow with a similar nobility as wanting to come together for children, possibly more in a world where children are recognized as requiring far more sacrifice, for far longer, than has been the case in even the recent past. The movies involve two people adjusting their desires so that they come to realize that the other person is, in fact, even better than what they had thought they’d wanted in a partner (not just sexy, not just “fun”, not just smart and capable and successful), and at the end of the movie, the two people say to one another in effect, “I want you” and “I want you too”, and they sail off (sometimes literally, which really grates my teeth) into the sunset. Isn’t that romantic, the audience says as they dab their eyes and look at their partner next to them and try to justify that they, too, have come to realize that what they really want is right next to them.
Bullshit, I’d say. You both want something. You’ve found someone who also wants the same thing – kids in one case, the vice versa person at a given moment in time in the other. Watch “House of Cards”, or just hang around investment banks for awhile: plenty of couples also live (to them) very happy lives together built on mutually shared wants that are more starkly devoid of moral value. In fact, the virtue of seeing something like “House of Cards” is that it is a glaring satire of what we’ve come to engineer as romantic love: the mutual fulfillment of wants. Yes, it works as a shared objective, but it doesn’t produce happiness in a metaphysical way – it produces happiness in a physical way, and one is still left with the question of “why” (although admittedly, most people never ask that question). I’ll call this object-oriented love, which I think is a good “what it says on the tin” term: people who love one another for an object goal.
Just as some rail against the insidious torture of the individual by society as represented by traditional visions of love, my mom also rails against the evils of love as a sharing of wants. But she instead posits a pre-modern Edenic vision where – back before modernity screwed it all up – humanity really loved in the small town or clannish neighborhood or extended family clustering of olden days. Back in the day (in her eyes, when we were all Catholic – work with me), love wasn’t object oriented, it was directed towards a holy purpose, and the result was (at least at the village level where the Church had its most intimate purchase on the human soul) the emergence of a pure kind of love of family and kin. The historical record would say she’s wrong. People in premodern times – peasant or wealthy or noble – were as focused on material possession and wants as today, possibly even more so as the environment in which they lived forced them to hoard and focus even more intensely on physical, tangible needs. At least today we can “want” something as intangible as a shared love of birding, or a mutual desire to travel. Back before the industrial revolution, we all just wanted enough food – or, for the more wealthy, the physical capacity to continue to be not poor – and we bonded together out of that basic, grasping mutual want. There may have been less mismatching of wants between married or otherwise bonded partners – everyone wanted to eat – but the basic grounding of not loving for the sole purpose of loving, but loving as a shared want of an external object was no less true in 1600 or 600 AD or 600 or 1600 BC than it is today.
Whether it’s the Hollywood love of “Sleepless in Seattle” rom-coms or cynical “House of Cards” power couples, whether it’s the shared selfishness love of wanting kids or wanting better survival odds for the freehold or just wanting to bonk the person next to you after enjoying a day of mutually enjoyable hobbies, what we observe is the powerful intersection of fulfilling the need to talk to another person with fulfilling our sexual gratification. Both involve intense biochemical reinforcement mechanisms in our heads, and when they happen together, it’s like a cocaine heroin cane sugar sandwich, washed down by a dry martini with a Marlboro chaser. Yep, your brain loves me some of that shit, and even if the outcome is bad – for you, for the future, for your community, for the planet – it won’t matter. Now, in an evolutionary context, if it’s truly bad for you, it’ll become a dead end, and some other combination will emerge that’s more successful. But the thing is, it has been successful.
Keep in mind that most of our history as a species was in small bands that hunted and foraged for food – our evolutionary processes, even those that involve language (which we tend to think of in post-literate civilized ways), would have played out mostly in an environment where humans were exposed to dangers that we can’t really even imagine any more, with our 7000 years of agrarian-village programming. So the evolutionary advantages of object-oriented love – of combining language learning with sexual desire – would have been tested by “who doesn’t get killed and who is able to reproduce more successfully”. Object-oriented love would have brought together more resources and produced more linguistically skilled children; love in families would have enabled those families to survive by pooling resources, whether to fight off environmental dangers (weather by constructing safer shelters; animals by fighting off predators), or in acquiring relatively more resources to prosper.
The diversity of relationships that were found in pre-agrarian societies that stuck around long enough for people to write about them suggest that “love” found diverse institutional forms, and that small societies could channel that sensation in a huge variety of ways. Thinking about how evolutionary dynamics work, this makes sense: early man emerged on a planet that, for a revolutionarily new species with the sole power to communicate abstractly, was essentially without material constraint. The “object” of object-oriented love would have been to maximize resource extraction for personal benefit while not getting killed andhaving as much sexual gratification as possible. Pretty straightforward: when there was more than enough berries, fruits, edible weeds, and woolly mammoths for everyone, and all you had to do was avoid getting mauled and not freezing to death or running out of water in a desert, you can experiment to your heart’s content. So pre-agrarian man likely had an infinite variety of “relationships”, bounded only by what might have been a limited imagination (but who knows?) and a lack of personal hygiene products.
At some point, though, mankind basically exploited all environmental niches, including those occupied by prior hominids, and the free lunch of a bounteous Earth became the dog-eat-dog snack table at a bad artist’s reception. Agriculture – which can be seen as, among other potential theories, essentially an optimized resource extraction strategy once you’re unable to move to an unoccupied area to forage more easily – emerges, but once you’re stuck in one place, you have to think differently about your “object” for object-oriented love. You still want to maximize resource extraction, but now there’s a constraint: you need to do it without moving around. You still need to avoid getting killed, but now it’s more likely that you’ll be killed by your fellow man than by a tiger. And you still want as much sexual gratification as possible, but given that other people want it too and they’re likely to kill you, you have to organize to at least try to avoid crimes of passion.
Evolution kicks in on the level of societal institutions competing with one another in a new environmental space: that of agriculture. Different forms of agriculture emerge depending on climate and terrain, of course, and different forms of societal institutions emerge and dominate in those regions, but it’s interesting that some notion of marriage, limited polygamy or monogamy, and prohibitions or institutional channeling of extramarital and pre-marital relationships emerge everywhere agriculture takes a firm hold. Interestingly, this may be because of the language requirements of living together in close quarters. Agrarian societies required and generated more complexity than what was seen in hunter-forager societies – optimization is more complex than extraction. I’d speculate that family units provided the best mechanism for raising children who required far more linguistic skill to survive in villages than they required in small, mobile, flexible bands. Agriculture enables perpetuation in a world where resources are no longer free, but requires more sophisticated language to persist. Stable families provide the environment where those language skills can be taught. Combined with the diverse mechanisms of extramarital sexual release or moral punishment which channeled the object of achieving sexual gratification, the various forms of marriage and lifelong partnerships – which were never more than object-oriented forms of “love” – succeeded and came to dominate.
Kick forward 7000 years or so to around 1800 AD. Agrarian societies dominated for a long time, until the communications structures that they engendered eventually engineered their own downfall. What I mean by this is that, by creating an equilibrium which enabled people to survive and cultures to persist, agrarian societies gradually enabled more sophisticated communications forms to emerge. In a secular age, we’ve come to focus on a couple of recent revolutions which have changed the physical organization of our world. First, monetized commerce emerged slowly, reaching full flower by about 1500 AD and further innovating from there; later, industrial innovation sprouted up fairly rapidly in the eighteenth century AD. Together, they allowed for the innovation of forms of societal organization – across wider expanses of space in a given span of time – which made survival even more possible (in the form of more reliable food, less disease, and thus longer life spans – and by connecting the world with pandemics, culling the species with successive waves of disease which served to toughen up the genome).
But before either of those revolutions, there was a more basic intellectual revolution: language reached the point where its abstraction ability went “supercritical” (to borrow a term from physics). The ability to ask abstract questions began to be applied to the nature of human existence, and even the nature of language itself. That opened up a heretofore unknown existential crisis for us: why are we doing any of this at all? We know that prior to the existential revolution of the Greeks, the Semites, the Persians and the South Asians, humans everywhere simply answered the existential questions with concrete, physical answers: we were here because we were born here, and before there were any of us, there was a god (or set of gods) who gave birth to us, all in some way. The existential revolution of call it 1000 BC to 500 BC, followed by a second wave around the time of Christ and Buddha and subsequent waves thereafter, suddenly called into question purely physical answers to the meaning of existence.
That revolution worked itself on our language skill, continuing to advance our linguistic skill as a species and likely leading directly to the commercial and industrial/scientific revolutions of the last couple of centuries. Remembering always that commerce and science are just humanity’s attempts to understand and rationalize the world, not the actual world-as-it-is, we can understand that enabling a commercial and scientific worldview would first require a vast flexing of our linguistic-communications skill. This comes ultimately from the triggering of the human mind’s at first nascent, then eventually habituated and educated ability to be “meta-logical” – to divorce the physical object of thought and action from the concept of the thought or action itself, and to then plumb the consequences of that separation on the meaning of the thought or action.
Apply that new meta-logical skill to love.
If we stop seeing love as “loving something”, and ask the meta-logical question of “what is love” and “what does it mean to love”, we immediately see (and the ancients saw just as clearly) that love is not about “loving something” – it’s a completely different action entirely. Loving something is simply want or desire; love without object clearly exists, but it seems at odds with the notion of “wanting” something because love without object can neither be satisfied nor, really, can it be exhausted. It’s a kind of perpetual motion machine – and more than that – it’s an infinite motion machine, not just maintaining itself but actually increasing its output with no additional input required.
This thought literally destroyed the prior foundations of humanity’s notions of thought. In a sweep of about 1000 years – now referred to as the “axial age” – the entire sweep of Eurasia was revolutionized on every level (it would be interesting to be able to understand what happened in pre-Columbian Americas, but that’s probably no longer possible post the Columbian genocide). No empires survived, no pre-meta-logical thought systems survived totally untouched. It was an intellectual revolution not seen since the agrarian social institutions wiped out the vast majority of pre-agrarian societal bandings at the beginning of the agrarian era. Moreover, it set the stage for the upcoming revolutions of commerce (applying meta-logical precepts to the notion of value, and with better transport, integrating all of humanity in a connected market), and of science and industry (applying meta-logical concepts to the natural world and to humanity’s physical manipulation of it). It’s interesting to observe the sequencing; first meta-logic impacts the purest human expressions (in religion and philosophy: man’s interactions with his own sense of being), then in its expression to one another (in commerce: man’s interaction with other man), then finally in its expression outside of the world of man (in science: man’s interaction with the non-human world).
And yet, we persist in hanging on to an older notion of “love” which is about love’s object, not about the transcendent potential of loving-qua-loving. I’ve got three theories about why this is the case, none of them wholly satisfactory:
- Sex: Our sex drive is rooted in the physical, in the objective. Our biochemistry and neurochemistry conspire to ensure that we can never fully walk away from the object orientation of sexual desire, and our brain pathways which connect communications with love will forever entwine love – whether with an object in mind or in its meta-logical form – with the objective sexual desire we experience for real people.
- Shock: We are in a state of shock from the rapidity with which our physical circumstances have changed – disease conquered, lifespans multiplied, populations increased tenfold, physical distances made irrelevant, information distances made instantaneous. Our shock and awe of the physical changes of the world make us hungry for more, and blind us to the meta-logical implications of our shift in the ability to comprehend the world.
- Cynicism: While the meta-logical notion of love has been around for a very long time, it has failed to overcome the physical groundings that make us unreceptive to its implications. If the idea is so transcendent, why has it failed? Isn’t its failure to take hold and realize its own potential a kind of proof that we just aren’t capable of realizing that potential? In other words, regardless of why, experience demonstrates it’s failed.
There’s another possibility too. That notion is that until we realized the full implications of the axial revolution in thinking – including the implications on our experience with others (commerce) and with the world that we manipulate (science) – we were never going to be capable of realizing the full impact on our experience as ourselves (love). I’m almost prepared to concede this point, not just because my stated reasons are unsatisfactory, but because it would be aligned with what I’ve imagined happening back when the agrarian revolution occurred. I have a sneaking suspicion that the emergence of marriage and familial structures as the optimal form of agrarian societal base unit occurred due to its basic recognition of the fact that human beings almost intuitively crave a conversation that’s open ended. But that didn’t emerge as a dominant form of society’s expression of a loving relationship until other elements were in place: namely the language skills required to bond society successfully into fixed locations, and the intellectual advances required to perpetuate food and shelter in those fixed locations. It’s the convergence of language’s need for perpetuation, with language’s ability to perpetuate new bonds, with the mind’s ability to imagine new tools and solutions, that allows for the initial idea of love beyond simple interactions and sexual desire to emerge.
Let’s go back to the mother-child bond. As is obvious, it’s the most basic and also the first relationship any of us have. It’s also the beginning of what, in most cases, is an open-ended, lifelong conversation. Mothers almost never relinquish that conversation-relationship without tremendous anguish, and children are the same. I have an adopted cousin and she remains at her core in limbo because of the break she has had in that conversation, that relationship. As children, we have conversations and they come and go but that conversation with our mother remains; with luck, we start to see the conversation with other adults and eventually with our peers as existing in a kind of unrewarded zone of love, and we start to learn of love in the abstract, as one would say, as a meta-concept. And those conversations remain open, and we start to realize we don’t want those to end either.
But let’s say we live in a world where disease and injury is rampant, where most children die before age five and most adults struggle to survive. And let’s compound that further – let’s say we live in a small place, and we have no concept of what is beyond the next hill or over the next river or across the sea. Our boundaries are limited and our expectations are hemmed in. Maybe we have a village church where love is talked about, maybe we have stories passed down or poems sung that give us a glimpse of love without reward, but what we see daily distracts us, forces our vision onto the immediate and the tangible and that which will enable us to survive. Most of us – nearly all of us – would stumble at the task of orienting our thinking towards anything other than objects.
Even after a revolution in thinking emerges, we can imagine that the vast majority of people simply can’t engage in the revolution. The objects of survival are too immediate, and the likelihood of not gaining those objects is too great. But the Hobbesian world – nasty, brutish and short – is rapidly drawing to a close in much of the world. Between the material prosperity brought about by the commercial revolution, and the freedom from disease and accident and early death brought about by the scientific revolution, we now live in a world where nearly everyone has some modicum of leisure, and that free space keeps expanding. That time gives most of us the opportunity to start playing with the meta-logic made available by the expansion of our minds, with the foundations laid by the sages and philosophers and imaginers of the last 2500 years. We are finally at the analogous point of the agrarian revolution where notions of what we’d like to do with the conversations given to us by language – by our mothers when we first emerged from the womb – can be explored and put into practice. The linguistic revolution of meta-logic has run its full course, and we can finally start to see the transformation of relationships that will yield how we, as humans, love one another in the next era.
For convenience, I’m going to call this meta-love, love for its own sake – to offer others yourself as a gift, with no expectation of return. We’ve observed object-oriented love as acquiring, controlling, hoarding, and ultimately pointless because once the ownership has been achieved, there is nothing left. Meta-love is giving, surrender, releasing, and self-perpetuating because you can never stop giving – it is love for sake of the act and for the object of the immaterial, instead of for the object as an object. It is a mutually selfless act where each person surrenders to the other, gives up any notion of being anything but exposed and raw and open, and does so as a kind of practice every day, for all time. Again, it’s a love which is not just a perpetual motion machine, but an infinite creative force.
When thinking about relationships in this context, I mean any kind of relationship – from superficial friendship to lifelong exclusive partnership. I think what will change is that instead of having compartmentalized “relationships” – here are our friends, here are our family, here are our lovers, here is my spouse, etc ad infinitum – there will be some sort of a continuum, from superficial friendship to lifelong exclusive partnership, with a lot of clustering along that continuum. Importantly, though, meta-love lets people move in and out of categories without rancor. It’s not without pain – but in so doing, the individual who is “left behind” when the other’s needs change is given all the time and space and concern needed to move on in their own way.
In meta-love, friendships would be easy and last far longer than they do today. We would, of course, continue to lose touch with people, but technology means that happens less. I think, though, that if you love for love’s sake, you already find it impossible to stop “liking” someone who also loves in this more abstract sence. You might not have as much in common – they have kids, you took up some time-consuming hobby and got really into it – but you’d never stop loving them. Even if they hurt you, you’d know it was unintentional and you’d forgive them. And if you hurt them, you’d feel it deeply and seek to atone for the hurt, and they would forgive you.
While there would also be no hierarchicalizing of relationships – no one form would be supposed to be ideal – I do think there would emerge a few kinds of relationships which are more typical, however. One would be around raising children, simply because the training and love required to raise children who themselves can love in this all-encompassing, surrenduring, abstract sense is pretty draining. To make the obvious point, not everyone has that energy, but those that do would likely find one another and invest in it. And those that don’t have the energy – not that they don’t have the desire, but just not the ability to juggle their own self-fulfillment with the time and effort required to raise a child in its own understanding of this meta-love – will simply accept the fact, and not have children in what would otherwise be a half-assed way.
By the way – I’m imagining a society where meta-love is the ideal generally held by everyone most of the time. We are only human, and importantly, the complexity will only increase – which means there will be times we’re selfish and mean unintentionally, and there will be times where we encounter a new situation and we do something completely boneheaded in retrospect, but it was the best solution in the moment – those times when we are children. At those times it will not appear like anyone is loving in the manner I’m trying to articulate. But the notion is that most of society will be practicing meta-love most of the time, which enables forgiveness and vulnerability to “rescue” the rest of us (and I’ll include me) who aren’t being radically loving at a given time.
Sexuality would be critical in this, but meta-love would recognize and respect the deeply physical, almost pre-human dynamic involved with sexuality. For some, sex is “just an act” – but those people aren’t usually capable of meta-love, in my experience, because they fail to be open to the depth of meaning it can hold for others. And not being open to the pain that others can feel or the vulnerability of others is a sure sign that you don’t understand love. I think people who understand love in this way would move to a sexual relationship only after a lot of discussion and reflection, just as moving out of a sexual relationship would also only happen after a lot of discussion and reflection. There is a bonding that take place in sex when it’s between two people who are capable of meta-love that moves a relationship into a more “welded” condition. Breaking that much more firm bond takes energy, and if done too quickly, creates pain for all involved. Being respectful of the differential intensity of the bond that is created through sex is vital.
On that basis, once you connect two people who see love in this spectrum, I do think you would end up seeing a trend towards permanence in any and all relationships. As a result, I think you’d see a lot of lifelong partnerships – but you’d enter into them much later in life, much as has already been the case where people rarely seem to connect in their 20s anymore. The paradox right now is that people have sex a lot but don’t learn how to love; people who radically love would end up having a lot less sex earlier in life but once they entered into a sexual relationship, it would be with someone who was already a truly loved friend, and as such, there would be nothing, really, that that person could do to end the relationship – except the kind of random change in brain chemistry or desire or whatever that makes people sometimes turn to one another and say “you know what? we probably shouldn’t be together anymore” and the other person says “yeah, I get that”. But it would happen later, because developing the communications skill, and the skill at loving, to be at the point where the respect required to engage in loving sex could take place, takes a hell of a lot longer than the time it takes to physically develop into a sexually capable human being.
Again, though, if you’re in a relationship of this kind of love, in which you recognize the need to love others fully without a reward that you can understand in return, and in which you ask of nothing of the ones you love, then the biochemical reward from sex will be utterly transformative. You can be at once totally selfless and giving in your love, but be rewarded not only with linguistic understanding and the stimulative benefits that comes from that, but you’ll be rewarded with the chemical and transcendent rewards of sexual fulfillment. That would have to be the most powerful positive learning incentive on earth for a brain that’s been built at once to be rewarded for communications – that needs to talk and be understood – and for physical pleasure and reproductive success.
I suppose I could be optimistic on that basis, because the incentive structures built into our brains – which reward both learning and sexual connection – are brought together in an almost perfect way when meta-love is combined with sexual connection. That means there should be an evolutionary advantage to these kinds of pairings. Even those who don’t experience in its entirety would see the differential advantage that occurs when they do, and would be incentivized to chase that connection. If the evolution of relationships pivots and turns towards meta-love, then society will shift again and we’ll see what it can do – I’m confident that I have no way of imagining the limits of love, but I’m sure they exist somewhere and I’m optimistic that those who find those limits will find something better again over the horizon.
So rather than think that relationships will change, I think if we do make this work, we’ll end up by rewiring ourselves to evolve a new human capacity for meta-love. Once we do that, we can game theory out how we’ll continue to form relationships – to talk with one another and to join physically together – but imagining meta-love means throwing out our ideas of our needs, of what we need as individuals. It means living for the sake of life in general – the life of all of us, of others.
I’m reasonably sure a friendship (or any relationship) between someone who radically loves in this way, and with someone who doesn’t, would eventually fail, by the way – at some point even casual friendships will come up against a boundary, and the person who is looking to express meta-love would either appear as a martyr to the non-loving person, and thus be abandoned because the loving person was a kind of social loser, or the person who doesn’t radically love would misunderstand the radical loving person in some way, feel hurt by what is viewed as indiscretion or oversharing or whatever, and walk away. I’ve seen that personally, both doing the walking away before as me-not-able-or-ready-to-love and being walked away from by others who weren’t ready to be with me when I was being loving. So I’m pretty confident in the observation. I’d go farther, but with less confidence, and say that those who are capable of meta-love are even ineligible for a successful relationship with someone who doesn’t want to or can’t – eventually the person who has a capacity for meta-love will either try it out, and be rejected, or will need to reject the other so as to have the space to learn how to do it.
And that also gives me pause, because at least for awhile, people who see through to the concept of this meta-love will co-exist with people who love solely for an object. This is sort of similar to the beginnings of agrarian society, when families who settled down and started forming the societal constructs optimized for agriculture and village / town life did so in a wider context of hunter-foragers who didn’t have to optimize for that and thus had much wider freedom to come up with couplings or whatever. But importantly, back then, the two groups were physically and societally distinct: they interacted when the barbarians swooped down for plunder and slave raiding, but otherwise they lived apart. Now, those who radically love will be embedded within a society which does not; there is no physical or information separation between the two cultures. That makes the above observation, that those who radically love and those who love in a traditional sense probably won’t have lasting grounds for successful relationships, troublesome to say the least. I think we see this today with the boundaries between “traditional” thinking and “liberal” or “progressive” thinking – there is a disconnect in language, in meaning, that is preventing any new or fair equilibrium from coming into being.
Note that I’m not saying that “liberals” are those who radically love – in fact, I’d observe that most liberals and progressives are only replacing one object of love (gender, identity, ethnicity, you name it) for an older or more traditional object defined by a dominant culture. Progressive thinking serves to replace the needs of a narrowly defined community (family / village / clan / nation) with the needs of the individual. Meta-love is replacing need with service, replacing object with object-less action. Progressives today can’t communicate with conservatives because of the inherent dichotomy of individual versus group; those who radically love can’t communicate easily with either because there isn’t even a dichotomy between object-oriented love and love with object: they are just fundamentally different things.
In the interim, though, while those who radically love co-exist in an older world, they will appear to as some combination of martyrs, fools, and sages. Because they will throw open their hearts to all, and because they will feel the pain of others, they will hurt more, and be lonely often, and often be sad. But their friendships with others who love in the same way will be deeper, will glow with intensity. When they find one another in sexual expression, it will be deeper and more complete. And when they change, they will hold one another up and keep loving. That may provide the evolutionary “magic sauce” which enables them to outpace the older society and continue the rewiring exercise which creates a new human, one which loves without limit, and which then creates a sustaining society which can in turn handle the unknowable complexity of technology and interconnection which our minds have proven capable of creating.
Indeed, I think the only way for a society as complex as what we have to survive and reproduce is for us to effectively be that open and raw and vulnerable to everyone that is implied by meta-love. It won’t just be about relationships: it will be about all interactions we have as individuals in a completely interlinked world where the distances associated with all relationships – physical, informational, psychological, chemical – essentially collapses to nothing. Maintaining complexity requires incredible trust, and it also requires huge amounts of time to train the children who will sustain it. That training will be conducted on children who will inevitably fail – a lot – and moreover those children will be unintentionally destructive while they are learning: I witness this in my son and his schoolmates daily.
That doesn’t condemn them, but it means they require even more unreciprocated love during the process. Meta-love is required to bear through the long time in which children aren’t yet trained. And that should serve to remind us, as adults, that we are always immature in a way, and also require non-reciprocating love from one another as we learn. None of us are fully “developed” in the sense that we are always aware of what we “should” do in a given situation – and in the exponential complexity of the world that we’ve created, none of us can anticipate what situations will emerge. In that sense, we are all children when we encounter something new – and at those times, there are no adults to teach us. Meta-love is the only thing that can bear up to the challenge of children teaching one another.
Before we get all optimistic and starry-eyed, though, we should remember that when the last revolution of this magnitude took place, what really happened was multiple revolutions, relatively isolated in space and time. Mesopotamia and Egypt evolved different responses, although both ended up with similar marital and familial bonds. China was different still – again, with similar outputs, but plenty of localized differences in detail. The western tradition of Greek philosophy and Aramaic Christianity and pre-Phoenecian Judasim laid a groundwork that also admitted plenty of divergent alternatives. That diversity was great, because it also allowed for isolated failure: if a society developed a format which didn’t work, it would fail, likely be taken over by a neighbor or defeated by internal self-contradictions, and that was that.
We don’t have the opportunity to experiment with failure this time. We have a single world civilization, connected instantaneously by the internet and with most people on the globe physically separated by no more than 24 hours travel time (putting aside the fact that most people still can’t afford the travel, it is still possible). If we go down a dead end, it may literally be a dead end for the species: we can transmit failure just as rapidly as we can transmit innovation.
And we live on the cusp of change, but with failure instantaneously transmittable – and with technology allowing an accelerated realization of the self-contradictions that made prior societies fail – we sit at a dangerous crossroads. I’m not saying global warming will kill us, or that we’ll run out of resources faster than we can evolve into a self-sustaining culture of love for its own sake. But I do observe that the vast majority of us still cling to an object-oriented view of love, which causes us to pursue inherently selfish and self-consuming goals instead of opening up to serve selflessly and release ourselves from perceived material need.
Simple example: one of my friends sees 3D printing as a potentially revolutionizing concept, freeing us from the need to build massive infrastructure to supply our needs and giving us endless creativity in satisfying our material desires. On the one hand, he’s right – but coupled with a still object-oriented sense of meaning, it’s also potentially the worst and most addictive thing to ever happen to humanity. What if you could have an object that would satisfy your every material desire, as long as you could imagine it and ask for it from the AI-governed printer in the right way? Isn’t that the curse of the Djinni’s lamp? Doesn’t that always end poorly, unless the wisher realizes that only by relinquishing his or her desires entirely will he or she ever be truly satisfied – and that satisfaction will come by embracing love in its meta-form, in embracing a selfless surrender to the concept of love? Well, how many of us will realize that before we all use up all the material in the world? Not too bloody many, I think, based on a casual observation of people as they are today.
Hell, even based on a casual observation of myself, I’m not optimistic, and I like to flatter myself that I think about this stuff and I internalize a lot of it. I’m still human – I’m still emerging from the struggle for survival – and I still struggle to put down my cigarettes and my martinis and to stop thinking about buying another book, a newer car, a better kitchen. My friends – gravitating towards one another partly out of our shared desire to not be so materialistic – still live firmly within a material world. And we’re the ones who think we’re ahead of the curve!
So thinking dispassionately, and putting aside my desire to be optimistic and to bask in the potential of a world which puts aside the notion of love for the sake of obtaining a goal and instead embraces love for its own sake, I have to think we have already moved past criticality. Humanity is still accelerating into its embrace of material consumption, before the ability of love-in-itself to temper our desires and bring us into balance has become strong enough to be sustainable in the long term. We’re like a star that’s got too much matter: at some point, fusion runs away, consuming first all the hydrogen (primitive man fills all the ecological niches), then all the helium (agrarian man emerges and quickly reaches its point of expansion), and then consumes the carbon-oxygen and finally the iron (unreformed man keeps consuming without end) and then collapses on itself.
I don’t like ending on a gloomy note. It’s not hopeless, it’s just that the trendlines aren’t in our favor right now, and while the opportunity is amazing, I go back to the beginning. Nature – and society – doesn’t evolve pointlessly: it evolves in response to changes and opportunities which open towards a potential new success. But the potential new success is sometimes superceded by new opportunities, while the evolution of a given species or society or idea continues relentlessly towards its own conclusion. In this case, we’ve evolved as a society and as a species towards a single, common, universal expression. If the opportunities and changes which sent us in this direction have, fundamentally, changed to our disadvantage, we’re screwed. If they’ve changed more neutrally, then anything’s possible. And heck, circumstances may have changed in our favor – we may even have tilted the deck in our favor by our own actions.
And there’s no way for me to know. So all I can do is love, without object, without hope of return but with faith that it will infinitely grow only because I love. That’s all.