Love and Power

Love is one of those things nearly everyone agrees are important and hardly anyone seriously thinks about. Or at least, hardly anyone tries to go beyond the surface. Most of us are happy to echo the words of Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v Ohio, who, refusing to further define the category of hardcore pornography said: “I know it when I see it”. When it comes to love, it is similarly easy to content oneself with simply pointing out examples of it when one sees them in fiction, history, and one’s personal life. Jack preferring to freeze to death in the icy waters of the Atlantic to save Rose’s life. Penelope staying loyal to Odysseus during the twenty years he fought at Troy and journeyed back to Ithaca. Maybe more controversially, King Leonidas sacrificing his own life and that of his men for the sake of slowing down the invading Persians. But what is love? What is it that unites Jack with the mythical King of Ithaca, the real King of Sparta and all of us?

What is Love?

Trying to define love as if it were a chemical element or a law of mathematics is a fool’s errand. Wiser people than me have written libraries about this question. Fool that I am, I of course gladly accept this errand, so let’s see where it leads us. A good place to start is the novel Crime and Punishment. One of the many reasons why Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a real “great” is that he is never too “in your face” when getting his point across. Reading his books never feels like reading manifestos disguised as novels. His novels do contain powerful, even life-changing lessons. But their meaning reaches us obliquely, often in the days and weeks after one has read a certain passage. It feels like his stories plant seeds deep in the reader’s mind that in growing, transform the reader from the inside out. I suspect that Dostoyevsky’s seeds reach so far into people’s hearts, because his stories are so true. His characters are us, and will be us even in the year 2100, when we’ll be asking ChatGPT3000 to project live dating advice on our smart contact lenses. Even in that world, we’ll recognise in ourselves the self-destructive egoism of Raskolnikov and the healing love of Sonia.

Crime and Punishment is a novel about love, but it is not a romance. It doesn’t tell the story of how two passionate lovers overcome difficulties to finally live out the rest of their lives together- happy forever after. Love in Crime and Punishment is hard, bitter, and more often than not deeply painful. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about love in the hellscape of mid-19^th century industrial St Petersburg. But what else could love be, if not a pair of rose-coloured glasses? Don’t lovers idealise their beloved? Turning a blind eye to each other’s flaws and even to those of the wider world? Nietzsche certainly seems to have thought so. In his characteristically provocative style, he claims that what we call love is actually just the urge to possess, to “change something into ourselves”. He says that “love is a state in which man sees things in a way they most decidedly are not”, in which we want to make the beloved ours so much that we deceive ourselves about their true character. That’s why Nietzsche also believed that one should really become disenchanted with one’s beloved if they ever loved one back. After all, we all know our own flaws well enough- how could anyone be “modest” or “stupid enough” to love someone as broken as us? Dostoyevsky cuts through this paradox like a Gordian knot. Love on his telling is at bottom not premised on a delusion.

“Dostoyevski-Love”

The lover according to Dostoyevsky sees the beloved clearly as a person with serious, sometimes tragic, flaws, but he loves anyways. He sees the beauty behind the brokenness more clearly than the beloved can and gives himself to the beloved even though he knows it may bring more suffering, even though it may be unclear whether his love will eventually be reciprocated. For long stretches of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov seems positively disgusted at the love offered by Sonia. He treats it as a sign of weakness or stupidity. It is eery how closely Raskolnikov mirrors Nietzsche despite Dostoyevski never having read any of the German’s works. Only at the end of the novel (spoiler alert) does Raskolnikov realise that it was his own self-hatred that made him look down on the person that loved him most. Only after following the Nietzschean view to the bitter end, and all but going insane, does he see Sonia’s love for what it really was. We may all be deeply flawed and feel undeserving of anyone’s whole-hearted love. No one could look in the mirror and truthfully feel otherwise. Yet, at the same time we are entirely lost without it. The less of it we have in our lives, the more our lives turn into literal hell. That’s where Raskolnikov went, and where countless other young people, disillusioned with life have followed. But Raskolnikov escaped, and he did so by allowing Sonia to give herself to him, in other words, to love him. He opened his heart to the possibility that maybe Sonia wasn’t the deluded child he thought she was. Maybe her love was not just a glorified pursuit of someone that never really existed. Maybe her love was not an escape from reality, but the only the only way to find beauty and meaning in its brokenness.

Rather than the blind and primal urge to possess someone, to make someone into oneself, Dostoyevsky’s love is like an invitation to transform each other, for both lover and beloved to become something new and joint. The act of giving oneself to the other, which seems to be Dostoyevsky’s love, blurs the boundaries between people who each want the other’s good like their own. It requires the courage to endure the pain of seeing a loved one suffer, which sooner or later they inevitably will. It also requires the courage to deal with the risk of seeing everything one has to give be rejected. It doesn’t even seem possible to love this way at all without accepting the necessity of serious suffering. But why even have that courage if the risks are so great? To risk all this is impossible without faith in the power of love to heal broken lives, to turn that suffering into sacrifice. Anyone who experienced what it’s like to have loving parents has some reason to hope that Dostoyevsky’s love is possible. Others may remember situations outside their family life where they experienced how giving oneself transforms one’s life by making it more meaningful. We may never understand what someone who loves us sees in us, but with a little faith we may learn to trust them that there really is something worth loving inside us. And if we trust that we are worthy of love, our self-hatred dies, taking with it the arrogant view of the other as deluded. The way has then been cleared for the kind of loving relationship that transforms lives. Learning to love the other and learning to love oneself are then two sides of the same coin that reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle. Try it, Dostoyevsky seems to say, and find out for yourselves where this path will lead you. It may, he seems to believe, save the whole world. Try the other path, the one where you give yourself only to yourself, and see where that one leads. The courage and faith required for this kind of loving relationship, for the vulnerability inherent in it, are truly daunting. They are especially daunting in today’s context of an increasingly individualist culture and the technology it both generates and feeds on.

The Distraction Trap

The techno-cultural context of dating today is characterised by materialist individualism, confusion about worthy role-models, and the commodification of “love”. It’s a fast world and as relationships become more ephemeral, they are becoming more superficial, too. It’s not just our romantic relationships, but also our relationships with places and to locally rooted communities that match this trend. Technology accelerates our lives, warps time and presents us with ever flashier bits of information. Our attention spans respond by shrinking. Reading a book has become a counter-cultural act. The need for distraction from life is not new- in the 17^th century Blaise Pascal noted that people tend to cram their lives with as much “divertissement” as they can find. The problem then and now is that our attention is a limited resource and that some of the greatest goods in life can only be achieved by patiently focussing it over a long time. This kind of patient devotion is something we need to practice throughout our lives if we ever want to outgrow a state of childish impulsiveness and create something of true value. Patient devotion is essential not only to mastering a musical instrument, getting an academic degree, or learning a foreign language, but also, and for our purposes more importantly, for building loving relationships.

With limited time on our hands, and limited attention spans in our minds we cannot possibly have profound relationships with everybody we know. If we tried to do so, we’d end up having equally superficial relationships only. Of course, there’s enough people who are aiming for precisely that. No commitments, no ties, no obligations. Aiming for the freedom to do always anything, they forsake the freedom to ever build anything. Never taking the time for true devotion, they remain blind to their own true worth. Rather than breaking out of meaningless self-centredness by way of hard “Dostoyevski-love” they try to distract themselves from it. Sooner or later, however, the void reasserts itself. We run out of distractions. If there’s something very valuable to be found beyond the merely superficial and fleeting, we need to adjust our aim. But whereto? As humans, we are, according to René Girard, deeply “mimetic” animals: we inevitably imitate others, and in particular their desires. The question of who to imitate, is all important. And here we encounter another serious obstacle: the confusion about what makes a worthy role-models. Since I’m a man (and to limit the word-count of this post), I will focus on what this confusion does to boys and young men.

Role-Models Wanted

In the past decade the debate over “toxic masculinity” has picked up steam and is now waged throughout Europe and North-America. The mere fact of the debate shows that cultural shifts have shattered a previously broad consensus about what masculinity is. “Toxic masculinity” has been used as a label to denounce certain attitudes or types of behaviour, “stereotypically associated with manliness, that often have a negative impact on men, women and society in general” (WebMD). Examples of such unacceptable behaviours include objectifying women, rashly resorting to physical violence or men refusing to show vulnerability even at a cost to their own mental health. However, while the debate over masculinity has succeeded in drawing attention to the harmful effects of out-of-bounds behaviour, it has taken a wrong turn in some important ways. First, the label of “toxic masculinity” has been applied to attitudes and behaviours that are not in themselves harmful, and that might in fact be beneficial “to men, women and society in general”.

Popular definitions of “toxic masculinity” usually include clearly abhorrent behaviours like “sexual aggression against women”, “refusing to help in household duties”, or “glorifying promiscuity (but only in men)”. Side by side with these, however, one can find attitudes like “Stoicism” or items like “risk-taking” and “violence”. These terms are so broad that they cannot be rejected wholesale as hallmarks of a toxic masculinity. To be charitable, it should be noted that there is an important kernel of truth in each. If what is meant by the label “Stoicism” is simply an unwillingness to seek out help in emotionally challenging times, it clearly denotes a harmful attitude. There is nothing glorious in hiding one’s pain, preferring to break rather than appearing vulnerable by asking for support. However, Stoicism primarily stands for a classical school of thought, the principles of which have helped inspire Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has been shown to be an effective way of treating a range of different mental health disorders. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or Seneca don’t advise readers to shut in their mental anguish or to refrain from calling help when needed. What their writings do provide are ways to build mental resilience and to deal with mental anguish when it arises. Being mentally resilient is not a weakness and it’s certainly not toxic. Violence, too, cannot be condemned as such, since unfortunately there is at times no other way to stop violence, than by responding violently. Should the Ukrainian soldiers currently fighting to defend Ukraine turn to non-violence? Hardly. Neither does emotional volatility or a total inability to be violent make a man an attractive partner in the eyes of most women.

Overly vague definitions of “toxic masculinity” risk leaving boys and young men without orientation. They are born with (on average) markedly higher propensities for physical violence and aggression but are told that both are inherently toxic. They are born with (on average) lower propensities for both negative and positive affect, or emotion, but are told that “Stoicism” is harmful. Certain sex differences in personality traits are well established across cultures and seem to in fact increase in more prosperous societies. Clumsy condemnations of “characteristically male” attitudes risks pushing boys and young men to either deny themselves or drift towards caricatures that proudly double down on the most toxic attitudes associated with manliness. 

Healthy Masculinity

The beliefs of these “manosphere” influencers come right out of the bronze-age. To them masculinity means having three things: money, fame and sex with as many women as possible. They exemplify a turn away from the pursuit of the good, and towards the pursuit of power. “Power”, like “love” is one of those words that we hardly ever really think about despite them being everywhere. If it’s the ability to enforce one’s will, making power one’s aim leaves no place for love, for giving oneself to the other; just for good old self-assertion. Here we can see the Nietzschean urge to make someone into oneself acted out. Its aim is not the good of the other, but the manipulation of the other for one’s own purposes. Humans living the Darwinian lives of bacteria in a petri dish. The relationship advice of these “manosphere” influencers is predictable. It amounts to making women submit to such an extent that they become little more than trophies in their lords’ (social-media) gallery. Trust is good, control is better. It should be clear by now, that these beliefs lend themselves to either sleeping around, or at most the kind of toxic relationship rightly feared by most sane people. Either way, they are incapable of resulting in anything that isn’t shallow and meaningless. By viewing every aspect of their life through the lens of power, they become immune to love. A deep bond based on mutual trust cannot develop as long as one views one’s relationships primarily through the lens of power and domination. It isn’t hard to see that this is no recipe for a fulfilled life. Neither denial of manliness nor its extreme caricature does any good for boys, young men or the women in their lives. The debate surrounding “toxic masculinity” must therefore move on to the positive question of what a “healthy masculinity” looks like.

We need to start focussing on the attitudes and behaviours that make for a healthy masculinity, so as to provide boys and young men with the right kind of role-models. Healthy masculinity makes for healthy men in healthy, loving relationships. Rooted in an understanding of the foundational role that love is meant to play in our lives, it requires men to view their relationships through the lens of love first, turning power into love’s faithful servant. As long as one aims for power, one will never find love. Where both partners view love as primary, the power-balance between them is uninteresting. Where they don’t, it becomes everything. I don’t know exactly where this debate will lead us, but I know that it must centre around the meaning of love and its relationship to power. It matters that we start talking about these questions now, because it will not get easier to find answers as time goes by. Many areas of life have become easier over the past 500 years because of technological innovation- building loving relationships is not one of them. If we truly believe that its worth fostering such relationships, that they in fact are at the heart of a fulfilled life, we need to start today.