Rethinking the Meaning of Love

These days few ethical tenets go unchallenged by a world increasingly suspicious of absolutes. Yet in contemporary Western culture, almost everyone from the most progressive to the most conservative, is willing to accept that romantic love for another person is an absolute good capable of redeeming even the most lost of souls. I find it inexplicable that a culture willing to do away with so many reasonable and necessary rules of moral behavior should have picked romantic love as its one unquestioned value. Not only does the value derive from a conception that is purely Western and relatively recent, it is based on a gross misconception of what motivates love and of what virtue should be about.

That romantic love is a route to moral perfection is an idea that few civilizations have shared with our own. Arranged marriages are the norm in many non-Western cultures, and in India, for instance, contemporary young people have voluntarily returned to the tradition of arranged marriage because they believe such arrangements usually make for more stable families.

One of the oldest expositions of a philosophy akin to our modern glorification of love can be found in Plato's Symposium. We might be surprised to find the ideal associated exclusively with homosexual relationship. Most of the men who participated in these relationships were married and had children (or would later marry and have children), yet they regarded their marital life as completely removed from any romantic ideals and geared exclusively towards reproduction. In the entire Symposium, the only mention of heterosexual intercourse is in the context of adultery. The adulterous man was understood to be acting out of love.

In the Roman world, a man married a suitable woman in order to have children, and that was that. A man would love his natural family and usually grow to love his wife and children (as is the normal course of things), but there was little merit attached to this love, since it was considered his moral obligation to care for them one way or the other.

Stoic philosophy, which dominated moral thought in the Roman Empire, stressed that one should not become emotionally attached to the things of the world, whether they be wealth, honor or, or even one's own children.

A virtuous person, according to the Stoics, acts out of a reasoned sense of responsibility and virtue, not out of something as unreliable as emotional attachment. This theory is not exclusive to the Romans. G.M. Carstairs, a British psychologist working in India, reports in a 1967 book that a Brahmin told him the following:

"Great Indian souls, they ignore the things of this world. A tyagi, he is a man who lives in the world, but does not let his spirit become attached to things of the world--if some close relation dies, even a wife or a son, he is not too much distressed, because he knows that this is the rule of the world. He lives in the word like a pearly drop of water on a lotus leaf--it moves about the leaf but is not absorbed."

It is hard to understand exactly how romantic love came to be elevated to the position of privilege it now occupies in Western thought. It might have its roots in the medieval tradition of courtly love, which originated in southern France in the eleventh century largely as a reaction to the drabness and poverty of life at the time and to the oppressive rigidity of the feudal system. It eventually would become a justification for sexual activity outside the normative channels of marriage (see, for instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde or of Lancelot and Guinevere), something that might have motivated its subsequent popularity.

I hold the ideal of romantic love in low esteem. It greatly values physical beauty, which is transient and vacuous and often serves to justify sexual behavior that would otherwise be recognized as unacceptable. It breeds vindictive jealousy at least as often as it does altruism, and it hypocritically presents as selfless what is immensely egotistic. C.S. Lewis writes in the preface to The Screwtape Letters: "In human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own--to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as through oneself. His own store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish. On Earth this desire is often called 'love.'"

I am baffled by the concept that one should be ruled by one's passions, which are unstable, irrational and often contrary to one's moral and social duties. No culture in history has valued romantic love like our own, and yet there is every indication that this has not made for happier families or for more selfless individuals. The ancient Romans had the motto dux vitae ratio ("reason is the guide of life"). The claim that love can justify anything amounts to unconditional surrender before our own fickle passions and to the rejection of everything that moral thought should stand for. Alejandro Jenkins '01 is a physics and mathematics concentrator in Currier House.