• Preface
• Letter 50
• Letter 57:
  The Healing Process and Sacred Texts
• Letter 60:
  What the World Needs Now
• Letter 61:
  Who Will Change the World?
• Letter 62:
  Concerning My Relationship to Ross Perot
• Letter 63:
  The Denkform of the Middle Ages or Como Ha de Hacer el Arroz
• Letter 64:
  Healing
• Letter 65:
  Let our Words be Acts of Love
• Letter 66:
  The Positive Erotic |
• Letter 67:
  What is Wrong with the Economy?
• Letter 68:
  Poverty
• Letter 69:
  What Love Could Be
• Letter 72:
  Sermon on Foucault, "Love's Truth"
• Letter 74:
  Fighting the System

What Love Could Be

One

Could love be - here I am searching for images -

the anchor
the fuel
the pleasure
the inspiration
the security
the bond

that would guide and shape the behavior of these rather recalcitrant and amorphous creatures, these human beings, these rather recalcitrant and amorphous creatures who need

a path with heart
a form of life
a home
a family
a community
an integrated self

so that their lives, our lives, would be functional and beautiful? Love?
That is a lot to ask of a poor and weak word, bruised and battered by history as the word "love" has been. It is a lot to ask of whatever institutions and natural tendencies that poor word might name. It is a lot to ask of God, Who, more than once, has been identified with Love.

But before even trying to say in reply what love might be capable of being or doing, it is necessary to consider what method of inquiry might provide results which would justify calling an answer to such a question true, or probable.

And added to this meta-question about whether I, or anybody, has any scientific basis for writing about what love might be, as if this meta-question about method were not daunting enough, there is the further complication that love is - whatever else it is - one of the central themes (I might have said, "one of the central obsessions") of the culture we are in. (Or, if you prefer, "of the language we are in" - nous sommes dans notre langue comme nous sommes dans notre corps.* (Sartre)) Because it is a central and basic element of our culture, love will not change from what it is to any of the things it could be independently of the rest of our basic cultural structure. I wrote in Letter 9:

Let me borrow again Saussure's image of the solar system, in order to depict how it is that each key element of a social formation can be a key and a lever, while being also a brake and a weight. If Saturn should change its orbit, Saussure pointed out, then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Plato would have to change their orbits too. Let us say that Saturn is rationality and give to the other planets some names which suggest other key dimensions of the interrelated whole that constitutes our social life. Mercury is human rights; Venus is desire; Earth is what it means to be a person; Mars is duty and obligation; Jupiter is property; Uranus dignity and sense of self-worth; Neptune freedom; Pluto shame. One cannot change course without the others, but if one changes course, the others must.

I have written in other letters about the restructuring of the economy (e.g. in Letter 60); about the transformation of rationality (e.g. in Letter 9); the redefinition of freedom (e.g. in Letter 49); the re-interpretation of desire (e.g. in Letter 20); and about changing the sign of the erotic from negative to positive (Letter 59) - always remembering that in a basic cultural structure no key feature changes without changing and being changed by the others. (Nor can we change a key part of our basic cultural structure without changing ourselves, for we are it and it is us.)

I want to write something now about the process and the result of the transformation of love, but it is not obvious that I, or anyone, could possibly have anything valid and verifiable to say on the subject.

Two

It may help to begin our inquiry by trying to find answers to an easier question, the question what love is. (I take the liberty of calling this "our inquiry" because I assume that you too have often asked what love could be.) It is easier to ask what love is than to ask what love could be, since although whatever is necessarily is a part of what could be (because if it were not possible it would not exist), the range of what could be extends over a wider domain (because many things are possible which do not exist). Moreover, in that wide domain of what could be, the subset consisting of what is has the advantage that it is relatively (but only relatively) accessible to scientific study.

Concerning what love is here and now, in the USA, a vast amount of research data has been gathered, through the use of what for better or for worse are the accepted methods for producing knowledge in the social sciences, such as interviews, surveys, and tests. I will take as representative of the state of knowledge about what love is here and now the studies by Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology at Yale, both because of the research he and his co-workers have done, and because in drawing his conclusions he has taken into account the findings of other researchers.

Plato would be pleased to hear that Sternberg has demonstrated that with respect to love knowledge is different from, and more reliable than, mere opinion. Research summarized by Sternberg shows that several common opinions are false. Five of them are:

1. False common opinion: One of the best predictors of how happy you are in a love relationship is how you feel about your lover. [Research shows that a much better predictor is how what you perceive that your lover feels about you compares to how you want your lover to feel about you.]

2. False common opinion: The way to help a lover with low self-esteem is to bolster his or her ego. [It turns out that people prefer partners who agree with their own opinions of themselves.]

3. False common opinion: Passion and sex are most important at the outset of a relationship. [Passion and sex actually increase in importance during the first several years of a relationship.]

4. False common opinion: Today religion is much less important to a successful match than it used to be. [No other single factor increases in importance over time in a relationship as much as religion.]

5. False common opinion: "Chemistry" is the unpredictable wild card in a relationship. [Physical attraction is not wholly unpredictable; people tend to feel passion for those who satisfy deep needs of which they may or may not be aware, e.g. for dominance, for submission, for affiliation, for praise....]*

Sternberg has also proposed a system for classifying the phenomena, somewhat (but only somewhat) as Linneaus classified the plants and the animals by natural species, or as Mendeleev classified the chemical elements by atomic weight.

The kinds of love, according to Sternberg's taxonomy, derive from the possible permutations of the elements of love, which are three: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy consists of feelings that promote closeness, bondedness, connectedness. Passion is an intense longing for union with the other; it is the expression of desires and needs. Commitment is a decision to maintain a relationship.

Given that there are three elements of love, and assuming that each of the three can either be present or not be present in a relationship, it follows that there are eight kinds of love, each one defined by the presence or the absence of one of the elements. Sternberg gives each kind a name.

1. No Intimacy, No Passion, No Commitment = Non-love, or perhaps pseudo-love.
2. Intimacy, No Passion, No Commitment = Liking
3. No Intimacy, Passion, No Commitment = Infatuation
4. No Intimacy, No Passion, Commitment = Empty love
5. Intimacy, Passion, No Commitment = Romance
6. Intimacy, No Passion, Commitment = Companionship
7. No Intimacy, Passion, Commitment = Fatuous love
8. Intimacy, Passion, Commitment = Consummate love

I wish to note in Sternberg's work in addition to the typically scientific activity of critically testing common opinions (noted above), and in addition to the typically scientific activity of classifying the phenomena (just noted) another typically scientific activity which I shall call, not without irony, composing a theory of the dynamics of love.

Since this is a key point in my argument, I shall proceed slowly and number the paragraphs:

1. One might well have said, and I would not have disagreed, that the sort of thing Sternberg does with his interview data which could be called "composing a theory of love" is not aptly likened to composing a science of dynamics, in the sense in which physicists distinguish statics from dynamics; nor is it aptly likened to composing a "psychodynamics" in the sense in which Freudian theory (in contrast to behaviorism) is sometimes said to be a dynamics. Rather, one might have said, what Sternberg does could better be called "redescription." He and his co-workers start with interviews (and surveys and tests) in which the subjects of his research describe their love lives in their own words (or in words they identify as descriptive of their experience, among the choices offered to them by the researchers). The "theory" then redescribes what the subjects have already described, using words of the researchers which for one reason or another are more perspicuous than those of the subjects.

2. Instead of repeating verbatim what the subjects said, and instead of or in addition to coding the data (i.e. counting how many times subjects said things of certain kinds), the researcher (Sternberg) introduces his own way of talking about love. This redescription is the "theory."

3. My justification for calling what is admittedly redescription a "theory of the dynamics of love" is that the perspicuity that justifies the researcher introducing his own way of talking is mainly:

a. greater insight, as when redescribing in terms of the theory helps a person to see better why she or he fell in love, or why she or he fell out of love, or

b. greater generality, as when two people's relationship fits a pattern observed in many relationships, so that redescription in terms of the theory shows "our love" to be a "kind of love" which is quite likely to suffer the same vicissitudes as other relationships of the same type.

AND:

c. greater insight into why and greater generality are just what was supposed to be achieved by classical physics (expansively: "dynamics," ignoring here any distinction between statics and dynamics). Thus perspicuity in redescription plays the role of the classical efficient cause, i.e. it provides a causal explanation.

4. The part of Sternberg's work that I want to call a theory of the dynamics of love revolves around his use of the word "story." When two people develop a love relationship, they compose a story together. You have a story of your life; I have a story of my life, and when we fall in love there comes into being a love story, which becomes our story and an important chapter in your story and my story. Stories and relationships among stories explain why some relationships work and some do not. For example, if you are (i.e. if in your story, your self-interpretation, you imagine yourself as) a Pauline in Peril, waiting for a Prince Charming to rescue her; and if I am (i.e. in my story, my self-interpretation, imagine myself as) a Prince Charming looking for a Pauline in Peril to rescue, then we may well fall in love. Of course reality may interfere with your story, or mine, or ours; and other people may think we are loony; but as long as we live in our stories and are not persuaded to abandon them by reality or by other people, we will be good candidates to be lovers because our stories mesh. I walk into your story, and you walk into mine. If, on the other hand, your story is that you are an undiscovered Madonna, and my story is that I am an undiscovered John Wayne, then forget love; our stories are not compatible because we both imagine ourselves (and find pleasure in imagining ourselves) as dominant. In ways like this Sternberg uses the idea of "story," to identify the causal powers that produce love (in, I believe, Rom Harre's sense of "causal power," i.e. in a sense which endorses the idea that linking causes to their effects is central to science). The stories contribute to explaining why some relationships are intimate, passionate, and committed, while others are not.

5. The irony is this. At the beginning of modern science, Francis Bacon and others argued that progress in the production of knowledge required the banishment of what he called "idols" from serious mental work. Physics, conceived as a study of pure efficient causality, with no stories, was for centuries taken to be the most advanced science and the model for all the others. Now, however, it turns out that the fictions Bacon banned from science as "idols" are among the causal mechanisms which explain love, and much else.

6. It is not as though Bacon's followers made no effort to theorize love without idols. In Hobbes (who was, by the way, Bacon's secretary), in Hume's theory of the passions, in Spinoza's Ethics, and in many others one can read page after page about "love" construed as a vector force, in strict adherence to the Galilean and Newtonian paradigms that for so long defined what science was supposed to be. Perhaps the moral is this: if a subject is studied long enough, and carefully enough, the nature of the object of study will eventually prevail over even deepest and fiercest methodological prejudices with which the study of the subject began.

Three

But where do stories come from ? Sont-ils nos inventions, ou nous les leurs ?* Do the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves govern our acts and our feelings, or do we act and feel first and then make up the stories later ? If this last is the question, then the first alternative it poses is the more plausible answer, because most of the myths that act in our lives began hundreds of years ago. Our stories are older than we are.

There is further evidence for the proposition that our stories make us more than we make them in the fact that the passions of romantic love - however secular they may appear to be in their contemporary versions - are not known in cultures untouched by Christian religion. Love as the West has known it was not found at all in India, in China, or in Africa prior to western influence.

Their languages possess no such word; nor was there a word equivalent to "love" in the main older languages of the western tradition: Greek and Latin. The Greeks spoke of filia, a word designating generally sentiments of attachment and affection. When filia was parental it was fysike, natural, uniting people of the same blood. Xenike was a special filia for guests, reflecting the importance the Greeks assigned to the virtue of hospitality. Hetarike was the filia of friends, and erotike the filia of homosexual or heterosexual couples. Apart from the varieties of filia, eunoia designated devotion, agape disinterested affection, mania passion out of control, storge tenderness, and charis being friendly, obliging, and nice to people. There was no word playing the parts the modern west has assigned to "love." It follows that love must have a history. Love must have had a beginning in time, at some place. It must have undergone a series of transformations to become what it now is.

Sternberg's summation of the science of love is necessarily incomplete because it is about here and now. Most - probably all - of the subjects interviewed by Sternberg and his fellow researchers do not know (and therefore cannot tell Sternberg) the origins of the sentiments they express; nor do they know the sources of the words they use to express them. Sternberg's work signals its own incompleteness by showing how relationships depend on storytelling, from which it follows that they depend on culture, which implies that love has a history.

It would seem logical to conclude that we can increase our understanding of the institution called "love" by turning to studies of the subject written by cultural historians and philologists, such as Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont, and The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis.

But lest we conclude too hastily that love is just a drama based on stories told in western culture, which could be changed by rewriting all the scripts and teaching all the actors new parts, let us remember to consider the human body, the brute facts. Melvin Konner in The Tangled Wing gives examples to show that tendencies locked into the genetic coding of our species can override socialization.

Konner's examples concern jealousy and rage. Opinions differ concerning whether, at one end of the spectrum, jealousy and rage are love's constant companions; or whether, at the other end of the spectrum, their presence proves - by definition- that love is absent. But I think most people will agree that where there is love, then the prospect - the possibility - of jealousy and rage is at least a relevant issue.

Konner recounts the facts about two young men who killed their girlfriends. Richard James Herrin was a white American in Connecticut; Wang Yungtai a Chinese in Beijing. The socialization processes that formed their personalities, and the myths active in the traditions of the societies where the young men grew up, were very different. But the murders bore an eerie similarity to each other. It was as if at a certain point civilization was erased, and a pre-programmed instinct took control of behavior, leading to the deaths of two young women as surely as the instincts of certain birds lead to the building of nests, or to flying south in the winter; the homicides appeared to be hard-wired malfunctions of the nerves, like the malfunctions which led sparrows imported to New Zealand from England to fly south in winter, to Antarctica, where they froze to death.

One might complain about Konner's account that if it is true it should be kept secret, since its publication can only lead to excuses, while public safety, and especially the safety of women, requires us to pretend - whether it is true or not - that the violence of men is deliberate, and therefore punishable. But I believe that upon sober reflection, most people will agree that the facts of behavioral biology, whatever they might be, are less dangerous when they are known than when they are concealed.

My conclusion is that we must fault the methodology of Sternberg's psychology of love in two respects. It is not broad enough because it does not embrace the history of the institution called "love." It is not deep enough because it does not plumb the mysteries of the human body.

Four

As the market economy first established itself in France and England under the royal absolutism the 17th and 18th centuries, and only later came to be identified with democracy; so certain characteristic western ideals of love first established themselves as forms of adultery, and only later came to be identified with marriage. Several historians of love agree that courtly love was the forerunner and key source of modern romantic love, and that it was invented in Provence in the eleventh century.

The conditions making the invention possible were these: (1) a surplus of men of the noble (i.e. military) class, who flocked to the courts, having no place else to go; (2) a feudal system with a well-developed sense of hierarchy, and a well-developed series of emotions and symbols celebrating the allegiance of vassal to lord; (3) the existence of women of high feudal rank as queens, princesses, duchesses....; (4) an extremely well-developed religious life, which gave meaning to devotion, adoration, sacrifice, service, eternity....; (5) constant warfare, which enhanced the value of any institution which led to more victories in battle. These conditions were succinctly stated in an aphorism attributed to Marguerite de Bourgeois: "un gentilhomme ne vit que pour servir son roi et son Dieu." ("A gentleman only lives to serve his king and his God.")

Early courtly love texts develop the theme of the "religion of love." Love's religion is put forth as a self-conscious and half-serious parody of the real religion, substituting lady-worship for God-worship; and borrowing from the real religion the vocabulary of love; while borrowing both from religion and from feudalism the abject deference and infinite devotion, with which the knight served the lady.

Frustration was important to the strength of the passion, as in the story of Tristan and Isolde, where the lovers are forcibly kept apart; as was humiliation, as in the story of Lancelot and Guinivere, where in a jousting tournament Lancelot allows himself to be unhorsed and disgraced, because his lady so commands.

It was necessary that the knightly lover's beloved not be his wife. A wife, by definition, was an inferior; the lady the knight served was, by definition, a superior.

Medieval courtly love provided key elements of the mythology of romance; so that in a later century when a revolution in morals raised the banner, "marry for love," in opposition to the less romantic objectives which traditionally motivate conjugal ties; love was already inseparable in the popular mind from the mystical aura of romance. To marry for love was, of course, part of the new ideology characteristic of the rising bourgeoisie; another characteristic tenet of the same class was that it, the middle-class, was more virtuous than the aristocracy, and therefore more fit to rule. The result could only be, as it came to be in the 19th century in England, that it was the duty of the husband to love the wife with the same ardor with which the knights of legend loved ladies.*

A female character in Robert Musil's novel, The Man without Qualities, raises the question whether true romance, as it has been idealized in the West, can survive in the twentieth century. She muses that love, as a norm and as a passion, is more religious than sexual, and for that reason not likely to survive in a century when science continually demonstrates the absurdity of religious beliefs, each day more thoroughly than the last.

Whatever the prognosis may be for the tradition that began with courtly love, the history of love in the west provides part of an answer to the question, "What could love be?" because it shows that certain passions could be because they were.

Five

The contributions of behavioral biology to the study of love seem to be mainly of four kinds: chemical, developmental, physiological, and ethological. Chemistry describes the action of hormones and the like. Developmental studies show how events in early life shape love in later life. Physiology concerns the action of the body parts, the muscles and nerves, the genitalia, and, most importantly, the different parts and levels of the brain. Ethology studies mating and bonding in other species, among primates, rodents, mammals generally, birds, insects....

The chemicals responsible for infatuation appear to be dopamine, phenylethylamine, and noripeniphrine. They are naturally occurring amphetamines, which bathe the brain in unusually large quantities when elicited by erotic stimuli. The pleasure they produce is not unlike the artificial "highs" produced by synthetic amphetamines.

The cultural interpretation of these states of bliss; the imaginary life-worlds they fuel; pose many questions chemistry in an ordinary sense does not answer (although perhaps in some extended sense everything is made of chemicals, and therefore all explanations of every kind can eventually be translated into chemistry) . It is notorious that the same chemical injections produce different emotions - for example, an epinephrine injection will lead to happiness or to anger, depending on whether the person is with a group of people acting happy or with a group of people acting angry. It is also notorious that chemically-induced highs, natural or artificial, do not last; while it would seem to be a part of the definition of love, and a condition for properly applying the word, that it refer to an attachment that endures. Nonetheless, chemistry does help answer some questions about emotions. The chemical and electrical similarity of very different behaviors (e.g. lust and rage) helps to make a case for the social construction of reality, as well as a case for the human capacity to construct more than one set of behaviors with similar physical results. History and chemistry converge to endorse the proposition that images of self-denial, frustration, humiliation, and sacrifice can induce an erotic high as readily as images of self-affirmation, satisfaction, pride, and prosperity - which was, perhaps, known anyway without history and chemistry: a 1994 poll done by a young people's magazine among its readers found that 53% of its women readers and 43% of its men readers reported dominance and submission fantasies, while 32% of women and 31% of men reported dominance/submission experience. 29% of both sexes reported bondage fantasies, and 27% of both sexes bondage experiences.

It would not be true, in any case, to say that chemistry explains love, if to explain is to state the causal power that produces the result. The traditional aphrodisiacs turn out to produce relaxation, and are not different in their mode of operation from wine, (which, therefore, perhaps deserves to be called the oldest aphrodisiac). Neither wine nor Spanish fly of itself produces lust, much less love. Sternberg's account of the role of stories in love comes closer to being an explanation of it, since one can, to a certain extent, produce love by acting like a story-book lover, by asking a person out, sending chocolates and flowers, trying to be the kind of person the intended beloved wants to share life with, creating a meaningful world together.... (The fact that wooing does not always work, that the beloved does not always become enamored of the would-be lover, does not refute the claim that - given favorable background conditions, some of which are explained by chemistry - love is produced by sharing a love story; it tends to show, rather, that we do not write our own scripts; the stories that animate our lives were to a considerable extent already drafted before we were even born - a circumstance which justifies saying, on the one hand, that love is a gift of the gods which the lovers by themselves neither produce nor deserve, provided that one also says, on the other hand, that to have a good relationship with a person it is necessary to give it priority in one's life and to work at it.)

Thus the claims of chemistry and of philology to explain love are complementary; each contributes to explaining a side of love the other omits. But if one were to choose which, of these two, most studies the causal powers that enable a person to produce love, insofar as to produce love is humanly possible, one should choose philology.

Developmental studies of love open upon the question "What could love be?" an additional series of perspectives. Developmental studies chart the development of love over the life span of an individual, and they note patterns common to many individuals. Sometimes the studies are by psychologists, sometimes by biologists; sometimes they are of humans, sometimes they look at other species. They can be regarded as mini-histories, which track the growth of a person or animal, somewhat as history properly so-called tracks the growth of a civilization. Their root metaphor, "develop," suggests that there is a natural unfolding, constant in the species; which culture can help, hinder, or vary, but cannot erase. Thus the very idea of "development" suggests that the body's innate tendencies establish a range of possibilities defining and limiting what love can be. Developmental studies of love in humans, such as those by John Bowlby and those by Mary Ainsworth, show patterns also found in studies of other species. One such pattern is that lack of early bonding, in primates or in humans, with a mother or other major caregiver(s), leaves a gap in development that impairs later sexual bonding. Rhesus monkeys raised in social isolation, without mothers, turn out to be sexually inept; to withdraw into quasi-autistic behavior like rocking themselves, self-clasping, and self-biting; to threaten and attack others; and when females raised in social isolation were forcibly inseminated they proved to be negligent and sometimes brutal toward their own offspring.

Such findings in many human cultures and in species similar to ours tend to show that affiliation and bonding are both normal, given our physical constitution and our usual interaction with our environments, and also easily perverted.

Studies of imprinting (Pragung) among newly born animals are among the most dramatic. Certain early experiences imprint themselves indelibly on the neonate's nervous system, thus showing that the babies are genetically programmed to cling to or follow their mothers. The mechanism by which attachment is sometimes accomplished, in baby ducks for example, is such that any salient object, especially if it bears some resemblance to a mother (e.g. makes noises like one, or moves like one) becomes the object the duckling follows. If there is no mother around, the confused duckling will attach itself to an orange ball, to a striped box, or to the scientist doing the experiment.

Studies of imprinting show it not to be an isolated phenomenon, but rather to be an especially clear example of the effects of a broad range of powerful neural (i.e. brain and nervous system) and endocrinal (i.e. glandular) mechanisms which tend to produce, under the usual conditions of life, affectionate and affiliative behavior, in many species. Harry Harlow, a pioneer in the study of bonding in humans and in other species, thought there were, for humans, five developmentally overlapping kinds of love, each prompted by natural tendencies, and each later one growing out of the earlier ones: (1) Maternal love, that of the mother for the baby; (2) Infant love, the baby's love for the mother; (3) Peer love, the passionate friendships of children; (4) Sexual love, which is peer love augmented by sexual pleasure; (5) Parental love, the love of parents (of either sex) for their children.

Developmental studies also show connections between love and another great human emotion: fear. Bowlby's great work, Attachment and Loss, connects the need for love to a corresponding fear of abandonment. More than one study shows that in humans and in other species that babies will instinctively cling to the mother (or to a mother-surrogate, as, for example, the wires covered with warm terry-cloth to which monkey babies will cling) - presumably because for many millennia clinging to the mother was the most likely way to avoid danger, and therefore the genes of the infants who did it survived to reproduce. One monkey experiment connects love and fear in a way that might serve as a model for abusive relationships among humans: when a warm terry-cloth mother-surrogate emits a frightening blast of cold air, the baby monkeys cling to it still more. The punishment the warm terry-cloth administers increases the baby monkey's need to be comforted.

Physiologically, lust and fear are both associated with the limbic system of the brain, the brain's older, deeper regions and functions, its "stream of feeling;" as distinct from the neocortex, the "language" part, which evolved later in the many eons of evolutionary time, and which is much larger in our species than in the brains of our near relatives. Lust and fear are two emotions by which people are frequently "carried away" so that we "lose control," which is to say that the guidance of behavior by language is momentarily eclipsed by deeper and older mechanisms. The limbic system is also the seat for fighting and feeding instinctual tendencies - two other types of behavior where we humans often "lose it."

Knowing that love inevitably brings into play the more profound and the more primitive layers of the brain does not in itself yield any predictions about the behavior of lovers. But physiology does suggest that we should not be surprised to finding mating accompanied by madness, that is to say, accompanied by strong feelings that are likely to overwhelm two rather peripheral and rather naive newcomers to the government of human conduct, the cerebral cortex and its ally, society. We should not be surprised that lovers quarrel. We should not be surprised that the great majority of murders are crimes of passion. We should not be surprised that the bonds of love bind as much through fear as through pleasure. Nor should we be surprised that eating and drinking facilitate bonding, as when, for instance, a person invites a person for lunch, or to dinner, or out for coffee, or for beer.

Ethology, the study of the behavior of insects, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals ... has on the whole nothing to say about love. It has much to say about mating. The mating pattern among most mammals is what ethologists call the tournament. The males fight and the winners impregnate the females. "Tournament species tend to have large, florid males, high variability in male reproductive success (some garnering all the females, some losing out entirely), little or no direct care of offspring, high promiscuous or polygamous mating, and intense male-male competition." (Konner, p. 269) In a study of elephant seals off the coast of California, during one breeding season 4 percent of the males achieved 85% of the copulations. Typically in tournament species the males ignore the young; they may accidentally kill some pups while fighting for access to females.

In pair-bonding species, on the other hand, the male's contribution to the success of the next generation extends beyond endowing it with good fighting genes; the male assists in the care and feeding of the baby and the mother. Among the species whose DNA inclines them toward pair-bonding are the African ringdove, the marmoset, the bank swallow, the coyote, the gibbon, the bat-eared fox, and the human being.

Six

Now that we have considered, however briefly, contributions to the study of what love could be from psychology, biology, history, chemistry, and philology, it remains to consider the subject of which John Stuart Mill wrote that it was "by a convenient barbarism, named sociology."

What I want to discuss under this rubric is the scientific study of my own society, that society which began in Europe in the 15th or 16th century, developed out of and distinguished itself from traditional western society, and became, in our time, the mainstream society globally. Anthony Giddens has remarked that differing accounts of the genesis of modern society define the three main classical sources of academic sociology: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. As we explain our origins, so we interpret to ourselves what we are.

If it be granted that the human being is a social construction built from materials provided by nature, then it follows that if one could identify a universal link between society and nature, one could found a science. Karl Marx identified such a link; he called it labor, "the metabolism of society, the exchange of matter and energy with the environment." Marx also identified the peculiar form that labor takes in the modern world: wage labor, labor as a commodity, for he thought it was the distinctive characteristic of modern society that in it everything took the form of a commodity. With his analysis of labor (the production process) and of the commodity (the circulation process) Marx inaugurated one of the major schools of sociology; the other main schools of that subject have been in continuous dialogue with it.

I agree with Marx that the forms taken by the production and circulation processes define, as much as anything does, the structure of capitalist civilization - which was all of modern civilization until some socialist experiments perturbed it. Our world, the world of the global economy, is capitalist. Modern love is capitalist love; it could not be anything else.

I will discuss love and social structure under three headings: traditional, modern, and postmodern. To express my intentions more precisely: I will offer interpretations of how love has been conceived in three contexts: caritas in western European Christendom; love in the modern world-system; love in the postmodern ideology characteristic of the present neo-capitalist new world order.

It could be said that the traditional western concept of love is not caritas, but romantic love, already considered above, which started as courtly love and through a series of transformations became the Victorian ideal of wedded bliss. But caritas represents an older and deeper tradition, one which had already been elaborated for a thousand years at the time when courtly love began, and one which is still alive today, remaining vital as a cultural substrate - somewhat as the behavioral traits of humanity's distant biological ancestors are still alive in the substrates of the brain and the spinal cord. Caritas is an indispensable starting point for the study of modernity, because it is modernity's other. And it was the real love, the love of the established religion, of which the courtly love of knights and ladies was a parody.

Seven

Caritas, the traditional epitome of love, is a social construction which elaborates the biological propensity toward bonding, and, generally, toward being a social and cooperative animal, more than it elaborates the biological propensity toward mating. Caritas is the Latin translation of agape, which was the Greek word used by St. John in the phrase, "God is love." (Ho theos agapen estin.) (I John 4:16). It represents a fusion of the Judeo-Christian and the Greek traditions, the latter especially in that caritas' canonical medieval definition declared it to be a species of friendship (amicitae, Greek: filia), and in so doing it built on the great development of the idea of friendship found in Aristotle. (Indeed the Gospels themselves, and the Epistles, even in their earliest versions, took on meaning in a world already influenced by Greek philosophy.)

The passions connected with mating are not, however, foreign to caritas, due in part to certain foundations of the western tradition laid down by Plato. In writing about caritas, St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval system-builder and creator of culture, stood on the shoulders of Aristotle and of Augustine, and they, each in his own way, stood on the shoulders of Plato.

The classic texts are Plato's two dialogues on love, The Symposium and Phaedrus. Both begin with speeches lamenting erotic madness. Lovers are irresponsible; they are not themselves. They humiliate themselves, throwing themselves at the feet of the objects of their passion. They throw away their money. They desert friends and family. They are ungovernable because seized by ungovernable lust. When eros enters, reason exits.

(The emotions Plato calls eros are presumably somehow offshoots or variations of biological mechanisms developed by natural selection because they promote the continuation of the species through mating. But they are not directly functional because in Plato's examples eros is homosexual. This fact serves as a reminder that sometimes a biological capacity for a certain type of behavior is most undoubtedly there, even though there is no obvious reason why evolution would select it.)

Plato rescues eros and reason both with this consideration: if you love someone, then you want what is best for her or him. What is best for a person is to live wisely. Therefore, if you love a person, you want to help that person to grow in wisdom.

This argument may not be valid; it may depend on some equivocations on the meanings of words. Plato himself does not clearly endorse it, since the precis I offer is from speeches in somewhat fictitious dialogues.

But, nevertheless, the related notions (1) that lovers want what is best for their beloveds, and (2) that what is best is to live a good and virtuous life according to wisdom; that is to say, Platonic love - first articulated in the 4th century BC in The Symposium and Phaedrus - is a respected part of the classical traditions of western common sense. Platonic love is an appealing ideal - no doubt one especially appealing to women, who need reassurance that friendly bonding is intended, in order to allay fear, sometimes terror, caused by male sexual advances. Platonic love is a well-known, appealing ideal regardless of the logical credentials of the arguments that support it; it is an ideal that links eros to friendship, and thus and thus links mating instincts to bonding instincts.

In a second way, too, Plato related mating to bonding. His interpretation of the mysteries of erotic madness synthesized and fused some emotions and passions probably physically related to the human capacities for mating and for bonding. Eros brings with it madness because in its throes the normal ordering of conduct by convention is suspended; the logistiche psuche (the part of the soul governed by language, by reason) loses control. But - Plato points out - not all madness is harmful. Society respects and finds helpful some of the ways in which people lose self-control and are lifted out of themselves into ecstasy. Plato cites being carried away by the beauty of poetry, and being carried away by enthusiasm in religious rites. Similarly, the feelings of erotic exaltation can be, in the right context, interpreted as divine love.

Saint Augustine (to cite just one classical source among many) made the next logical step: mystical union with the divine is a higher and better, a purer, and in every way more desirable form of ecstasy than the kind usually referred to as "pleasure." Augustine identified love, stability, and truth, and he prayed to that identification as to a personal God. "O cara eternitas, O vera caritas, O eterna veritas." Long before Audre Lorde discovered the uses of the erotic and the necessity of poetry, and long before Sigmund Freud discovered sublimation, the doctors and saints of the church (both male and female) had interpreted the elation of young lovers as but a signpost, which is not, but which points toward, true happiness.

Caritas inherited from the practice and teaching of the early church agape as the indwelling principle of the good father, which inspired disinterested sharing of resources and mutual support among the brethren, and even toward enemies; it inherited from Aristotle (and from Jesus' words in John 15:15) filia as, in its highest form, the mutual goodwill of those who are virtuous and know each other to be virtuous; it inherited from Plato a poetic transformation of erotic madness that was simultaneously rational and mystical.

St. Thomas states that caritas is amicitia quaedam est hominis ad Deum. Love is a friendship of humans toward God. Here is a review of the passage (the responsio in Summa Theologiae 2a 2ae, question 23, point 1) which leads to this remarkable conclusion:

Not every love (amor) is friendship (amicitiae). There is friendship only where there the friends so love each other as to will what is best for each other. This mutual good will is founded on communication and sharing (communicatione). Thus while it makes sense to say one loves wine, or loves a horse, it does not make sense to say one is friends with wine, or friends with a horse. Now there is a special loving friendship founded on communicatione between humans and God, in which God shares happiness (beatitudinem) with us. Thus Saint Paul writes: "God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship (societatem) of his Son." This divine friendship by which we are called into a societatem sharing beatitudinem is caritas.

The word beatitudinem which figures in the definition of caritas is the Latin translation of the Greek eudaimonia, which is just the true happiness to which Plato raised eros. Eudaimonia, and therefore beatitudinem, is the higher developmental stage, the successor, the cultivated and improved version, the Aufhebung, of eros. Beati is also the Latin vulgate rendering of the Greek makarioi in the "Beatitudes" of the Gospel According to Matthew. Makarioi or beati is Englished as "Blessed are they ..." or "Happy are they ..."

In Saint Thomas' systematization of traditional western ideas, caritas figures as the source of joy (gaudium). Joy is not a virtue separate from caritas, but is rather caritas' act or consequence (actus sive effectus.) Peace too is produced ex caritate, because caritas is the rational love of God and neighbor. It is friendship for and in God arising from sharing in eternal happiness. God is vera ratione amicitiae caritatis - a formula which succeeds in synthesizing truth, reason, friendship, and love. As the greatest of the virtues, caritas supports and nourishes all the other virtues.

Eight

The modern world, Marx wrote, appears as a vast collection of commodities. In terms I have used, its basic cultural structure (i.e., that learned - not genetically inherited - structure which governs the production and distribution of the necessities of life) is the exchange of commodities. Inevitably, love is a commodity.

True enough. The woman is a sex object with a price. To the extent that there is gender equality, so is the man. The mating game takes place in a market, where each seller tries to make what he or she has to offer attractive, in order to strike a good bargain with a buyer who has a lot to offer. Winners in business, who can augment their personal charms with the additional pleasure and security that money can buy, win trophy brides. But those whose charms attract only poor offers are compelled to settle for less than they want. Marriage is, as Kant wrote, "a contract by which each grants to the other the exclusive use of the private parts."

I wish, however, to make four additional remarks about the love and social structure in the modern world, regarding points perhaps less obvious than the frequently-commented-upon tendency toward the commodification of sex and love.

1. The desperation. Juxtaposing two famous quotations: "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." (Thoreau) "Religion is the soul of a soulless world...." (Marx). Two revisions: "The desperation may have been quiet then; now it is deafening." (from The Tao of Pooh) "Love is the soul of a soulless world."

Now let me try to recast the remarkable flash of insight that these four juxtaposed quotations were supposed to produce in somewhat sober prose: We live in the modern world-system, the global economy, in which the basic cultural structure is the exchange of commodities. Hence: we are separated from each other as owners of commodities, bargaining for advantage. Hence: the rational calculations needed for survival measure exchanges with numbers, i.e. prices. We are creatures with a long evolutionary past, which has shaped our bodies and their needs, and which has left us inclined toward emotion, toward being-in-relationship, toward finding security and solace in sharing. Hence: the separation and the rational calculation required for survival in our current social structure are at odds with our deep needs. In the modern world we seek in love the satisfaction deep needs, needs hard to satisfy in a world of separate, self-interested, "rational" individuals. Hence: love is more important than ever because it is scarce; and the needs love seeks to satisfy are greater than ever.

"Every demand is a demand for love," wrote Jacques Lacan. I take this remark not as an assertion about human nature, sub species aeternitatis, but rather as a somewhat poetic way of naming our deepest unmet needs here and now. It reflects the desperation discovered in the course of analyzing his patients by a psychiatrist practicing psychoanalysis in a modern industrialized country.

2. The gap. It was Marx who first discovered the gap, but we of the next century after him have felt its empty space more keenly; and have plumbed, lost, its airy void.

The gap appears in the distinction Marx makes between the surface of society, the sphere of circulation, where everything is freedom, equality rights, and Bentham; and the depths of society, the sphere of production, where the worker takes his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but - a hiding. This is the nucleus of the idea: the difference between the socially constructed world as it is supposed to be, and the socially constructed world as it really is.

In modern society it is supposed to be the case that people are free, have rights, and own property. People are supposed to be the customers who buy the products offered for sale, and own them, and sell them; it is supposed, presupposed, that people have money.

In the socially constructed world as it really is, most people are in debt; most people - even if they have money at the moment - are insecure because they have no assurance that they will have enough money to meet their basic needs. Most people are fakes because they pretend to be good citizens of the world as it is supposed to be; prosperous, unworried, free, and successful. This fakery is not a conscious fraud; it is an unconscious acceptance of common expectations. It is expected, for example, that if two people marry, they will be able to make enough money to give their children the things children are supposed to have. One is a fake by just going along with the common expectation, the common assumption that everyone is living in the world as it is supposed to be.

Love is difficult because we meet each other on the surface, wearing our "we are the way we are supposed to be" masks, somewhat as the products for sale in the stores wear their packages. But the need for love is a real need; it is a need to care and be cared for as we really are. We hardly know who we really are; normality is pretense. We pretend so much - go along with common expectations so much - that the distance between what is supposed to be and what is real becomes an inner distance. An inner gap.

Perhaps pretense is normal in every society, because in the nature of things there is always and everywhere a certain distance between the socially prescribed norm and the real capacity of most individuals to live up to the norm. But the basic structure of our society gives a special form to this possibly universal tendency toward wearing a social mask. When we in our society pretend we are what we are supposed to be, we typically pretend we have money. More generally: we pretend we are more secure than we are.

3. The lie. A community based on the exchange of commodities, Nancy Hartsock shows (in her book Money, Sex, and Power) is necessarily fragile and false.

A true community would be a source of mutual support; it would be organized to meet the needs of its members. (Using the word "community" in this way is, I believe, justified by common usage, and by the terms classical antecedents, communitas in Latin and koinonia in Greek.)

Hartsock's argument relies on Marx's distinction between production for use and production for exchange. Production for use is identified with producing goods and services for the purpose of meeting human needs. Production for exchange is governed by the rules of accounting and bookkeeping; in Marx's terms, it is governed by the inner logic of surplus value, which is continually reinvested and augmented, and which thus continually accumulates.

Although market economies have undoubtedly produced a great deal of prosperity for a great many people, the overlap between meeting basic human needs and the outcomes of production for exchange is irregular, imperfect, unreliable, and - most important for Hartsock's argument - accidental.

A true community would be deliberately organized to produce for use, to meet needs. Hence a community not so organized is a false community.

The lie could be avoided (at every level, from the street corner to the global modern world-system) by not even pretending that there is a true community uniting human beings. It could be avoided if modern society could collectively admit that it has no collective intention of working to meet the vital needs of human beings, and is not organized for any such purpose. But this is a difficult admission to make. Now that the global economy has replaced, physically, everybody's mother, by becoming the source of the sustenance that our mothers provided for us when we first came into the world, it is difficult to admit that it has no benevolent intentions - however incongruous it may be, logically, to affirm or deny the attribution of human attitudes to a vast worldwide network of interlocking economic relationships. In addition, the human tendencies toward love, i.e. bonding, sympathy, friendliness.... cannot be eradicated. Hence, inevitably, institutions and persons to some degree claim to be benevolent. The victims of the system justifiably feel that both society as a whole and the passersby who smile at them on the street are lying to them. They (the institutions and the comfortable people) are pretending to care about meeting their (the poor's) vital needs, but the social structure is organized (and individual behavior is organized for the most part) according to a different logic: that of production for exchange.

4. The maze. A maze, according to Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary,* is a confusing, intricate network of winding pathways; a labyrinth. It is also confusion of thought; perplexity; uncertainty. It is a characteristic of a maze that when one thinks one is going in a certain direction, one is in fact going in a different direction; one may think one has found a way out of the maze, when in fact one is being led deeper into the maze.

The maze is a good image for the ideologies, the structural traps, the systematically misleading common sense, the systematically misleading social theories, and the positivist/empiricist philosophies of science characteristic of modern society. It is not a perfect image, since it suggests a deceptively organized labyrinth, and it is a characteristic of much of modern thought that to a considerable extent it is not organized at all, neither deceptively nor perceptively, but simply disorganized - as Gramsci said, "fragmented." Both the deception and the fragmentation serve to stabilize the system, because they impede the construction of viable alternatives.

Given the premise that the basic structure, the means of livelihood, has a pervasive influence on everything else in a culture; it would not be surprising to find that the maze, regarded as a cause and as a consequence of the basic structure, its intellectual defense against the construction of viable alternatives to itself, is at work in science. Nor need we go far to find an example. At the beginning of this letter, out of perplexity over the question, "What could love be?" we turned to what seemed to be a simpler question, "What is love;" and in order to answer that question we turned to the work of Robert Sternberg; that is to say, to the state-of-the-art application of currently generally accepted research methods to the study of this particular subject. That is to say, to science.

Yet Sternberg's studies, and legions of other psychological studies, show themselves to be products of our modern social structure, based, as it is, on the exchange of commodities. They define their object (love) and their method (interviews and surveys) in ways the scientist does not so much choose as presuppose. The scientist is semi-consciously the agent of the milieu which has formed his or her mind, and also the minds of the lovers studied; in at least two ways:

1. The focus of the study of love is on couples. But history shows that it is by no means necessary for a society to take as its paradigm of love the efforts of two individuals to build a good relationship with each other.

2. The main methods for producing knowledge about love are those of individual psychology.

Those of us who believe in conceiving of the global economy as an historically evolving cultural structure, do not just claim that mainstream scholars like Sternberg practice social and behavioral science with characteristic biases in their choice of objects of study and in their choice of methods. We claim also that their characteristic biases are part and parcel of modern society's ideological defenses. That we are more scientific than they, even while they think they are more scientific than we, I shall not argue here - since that is a subject on which I have already in preceding letters written more than most people will ever find time to read. I note only that the Methodenstreit which rages throughout the social sciences, rages also here, in the study of love.

Nine

"Postmodern" I take to be a synonym for "now." Whatever else "now" may be, it is the site of our responsibility. What love could be now depends to a great extent on what we decide to make it.

But what love could be is limited by the history of the word "love" and its cognates. A practice different from any of the things that have been called "love" in the past might be a good thing, it might even be better than love, but it would not correctly be called "love." Other limitations on what love could be are imposed by biology. Whether biology has culture on a short leash or on a long leash, it surely has it on some leash. It is surely impossible for education to produce humans with any and all virtues that might be desired, overriding DNA.

My conclusion, considering such limitations; considering history; considering biologically given propensities, and the variety of ways in which individuals and cultures develop those propensities; and considering what we should decide to make of love in the light of humanity's present needs, is that love could be community outreach and passionate friendship considerably more than it is now.

The concept of possibility at work in my assessment of what love could be is more Aristotelian than Kantian. For Kant, and for modern philosophy generally, anything is possible that is not self-contradictory. For Aristotle, on the other hand, what is possible is the development that can be expected from the nature of a thing; and what is contrary to nature is impossible. Thus Aristotle says that it is impossible for a woman to lactate without having been pregnant. What I want to say is that the erotic energies of the human species could drive beauty and cooperation more than they do (and could drive pornography and obsession less than they do) not just because such a reorganization of motives is thinkable without contradiction, but because it would revive roots somewhat dormant but still very much alive in western culture (and in other cultures), and because it would actualize potentials present in the tissues of our bodies. Cette conversion de l'energie d'Eros se revelera peut-etre un jour plus importante, pour l'avenir de l'humanite, que l'actuelle domestication de l'energie nucleare et solaire. (de Rougemont, Mythes, p.31) (This conversion of the energy of Eros may one day prove to be perhaps more important, for the future of humanity, than today's taming of nuclear and solar energy.)

James Redfield writes a pro-social myth that re-interprets and thus converts the energy of Eros, a myth which is profoundly true even though its physics is fanciful, when he has his character Father Sanchez say in The Celestine Prophecy (p. 116), "Love is not something we should do to be good or to make the world a better place out of some abstract moral responsibility, or because we should give up our hedonism. Connecting with energy feels like excitement, then euphoria, and then love. Finding enough energy to maintain the state of love certainly helps the world, but it most directly helps us. It is the most hedonistic thing we can do."

The possibility and the need for reinvigorating the pro-social powers of the erotic instincts now, in our time, are increased as personal insecurity is aggravated by economic trends. Love has always been, in one way or another, a source of material security - starting with the love of the mother for the baby, which assures the baby's food supply. The French sometimes say that the a in amour stands for abri, shelter. At a time not long ago in western culture, women sought security in marriage; man's role was to be the provider for the wife and children. Love was the name of the man's commitment to work to support the family. Love was the name of the woman's commitment to change the diapers, mop the floor, fry the eggs, and scrub the pots.

It never was possible for most men to earn enough money to fulfill the obligations of love, so defined, and recently men have become less willing to commit themselves to supporting a wife; while, at the same time, women have sought equality and independence. (Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men)

Love in marriage has come to signify mutual support, where each partner commits herself or himself to the emotional, practical and financial support of the other.

In the "postmodern" evolution of capitalism, since the collapse of Keynesian macro-economic policies characterized by dirigisme and the welfare state, the economic trends have been toward more part-time employment, white collar as well as blue collar unemployment, weaker labor unions, loss of fringe benefits, and loss of tenure and other guarantees of continued employment - in a word, toward greater insecurity. (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity) For this and other reasons, it is increasingly clear that the couple, the two-person team, is, in most cases, too small a social unit to provide material security for its members. Most people need a larger support group, just to get by. As a consequence of the evolution of the global system's basic cultural structure (the market economy), we see in our times a multiplication of multi-person survival strategies - of which the second-most-famous is the cult; and of which the most famous is the gang. "I love my gang," says the Hispanic teenage woman in Los Angeles, who has just gotten the tattoo on her hand which signifies that she has done enough for the gang to become a full member, and that is true. That is true.

I wish to close this somewhat theoretical letter on love by recounting a practical experience in Santiago, Chile, which has inspired it, starting with an explanation of how I met Manuel Bastias, who, with his companera Rosa Saavedra, led it. Manuel was a working class young man from the slums of the city, who was able to go to college during the time of the socialist government of Salvador Allende because of the government's special efforts to send working class youths to college. When the military junta deposed the president, Manuel's scholarship was canceled, he was expelled from the campus, and his transcript was amended to erase every academic credit he had earned studying under Marxist professors. I met Manuel when he applied for a job working in the Parents and Children's Project (PPH), which I was directing, a project premised on the concept that among campesinos and urban slumdwellers, the love of parents for their children could be a starting point for community building and social transformation. I was able to hire him with some money provided by the American Friends Service Committee (through Father Patricio Cariola, the head of the institute which sponsored PPH).

As it turned out, the Parents and Children project was mainly a program for mothers and older sisters; it was hard to get the men to participate. As it turned out, Manuel was able to finish his degree in sociology with the help of the Holy Cross fathers. I used to say to Manuel that when he became a sociologist he would be in a position to write the definitive work on alcoholism among Chilean working class men, since his own ties and background would give him insights other sociologists would not have. But as it turned out, instead of studying alcoholism, Manuel, together with Rosa, came up with a rather different project: a sex education program for couples. Their program solved a problem that the Parents and Children project had not solved, the problem of motivating the men to attend. Manuel explained to me that alcoholism was only a symptom; the problem was sex.

Some years later, when there were several thousand participants in Manuel and Rosa's program (which was called "We got Together ... And ?"), Caroline (my wife and companera) and I visited several sites where it was functioning, and we enrolled as participants in a group of couples, which met in one of the side rooms beside a chapel that was headquarters for a base community in a working class area on the south side of Santiago.

We were seven couples, of different ages. The age differences among us immediately implied role differentiation, since the older couples had memories to share about the experiences the youngest were about to have. A couple who had participated in a previous "We got Together ... And?" course were the leaders; the woman and the man took turns initiating our group's activities. During the first of the weekly sessions we played board games together that induced us to reflect on our relationships; who, the woman or the man, decides what to buy? who chooses the children's clothes? how does each feel about the other's friends?... The process of engaging together in reflections on life as a couple constituted already a process of moving beyond the couple's isolation from the rest of the community, if only because being a couple was recognized in the group as a status shared with the others, who were also couples, and who faced similar problems.

In later meetings, we took up the explosive topics, physical defects of women, impotence of men, orgasms or lack of orgasms, domestic violence, infidelity, frigidity. Set in a dialogue among friends, and illumined by the calm light of the logos, the explosive topics were defused and constructively dealt with; nothing exploded; it was as if each couple's hidden tensions had come out of hiding and been released. And then the social circle strengthened the social motives; for example, the man's good intentions regarding prostitutes or wife-beating were more likely to be implemented because his promises were known to an audience greater than one.

The "We Got Together ...And?" course that we took served as a community building tool. It fitted into a plan and a process for strengthening the existing community bonds - bonds wider than those we felt connecting us with the six other couples in our group. Ours was just one course - one of many activities of the parish. But the parish base community where the course took place was a permanent institution which was part of a larger permanent institution; an institution which for centuries has told and retold the story of Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child; and which has for centuries baptized people so that they will share forever in the love of that story -and also in the love of that other story, also retold year after year, about the innocent man who was condemned and humiliated, who carried a heavy cross to the top of a hill, who died for us, and who yet triumphed over death. Many of the members of the base community were, in this life, old friends. It was a singing, hugging, and sharing community whose ritual life centered around a chapel where joy happened, as is frequently the case in the churches of the poor. If all the embracing, shouting, music-making, and undulating bodily movements that went on there had taken place, instead, in a whorehouse, they would have cost a pretty peso, and it would have taken eight weeks of penicillin four times a day to cure their consequences. The chapel was also the neighborhood meeting place, for any purpose whatever, for any fiesta, for uniting so solve any problem. For example, it happened that this particular neighborhood was ignored by the police. The police were not welcome there - their presence stirred bad memories - and they did not want to come. It was therefore necessary to organize some sort of volunteer patrol or vigilante system, and in a meeting at the church hall it was decided that every neighbor would carry a whistle, and would blow it when attacked. Everyone would then come out of their houses to help. I actually saw this system work once, at about five a.m. on a Sunday when some drunks from another neighborhood began to make trouble outside the house where we were staying.

I think of the "We Got Together ... And?" program, and of its context, the base community movement, as contributions to the construction of true love in our postmodern time. They refocus vital energies in ways that make people less fragmented, less isolated, and less insecure.