Love Is Not a Liquid Asset
“You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you this: love your enemies. Pray for those who torment you and persecute you—in so doing, you become children of your Father in heaven. He, after all, loves each of us—good and evil, kind and cruel. He causes the sun to rise and shine on evil and good alike. He causes the rain to water the fields of the righteous and the fields of the sinner. It is easy to love those who love you—even a tax collector can love those who love him. And it is easy to greet your friends—even outsiders do that! But you are called to something higher: ‘Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.’”—Matthew 5:43-48
Contempt for what Aristotle referred to as “the love of one’s own” is a central feature of twenty-first-century progressivism. Like Jesus (“It is easy to love those who love you”), progressives aren’t especially impressed by patriotism, filial piety, and other forms of in-group loyalty. Like Jesus (“you are called to something higher”), they maintain that good progressives, like good Christians, love outsiders just as much as insiders, whilst great progressives are called to love outsiders more than insiders.
Among other things, this explains why Ward Churchill, a radical professor many of my graduate school friends respected immensely, sneeringly decried the outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 (Why don’t you care about the helpless victims of American foreign policy as much as you care about the helpless victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?); why Aadita Chaudhury, an activist many of my colleagues respect immensely, sneeringly decried the outpouring of sympathy for Lindsay Shepherd in 2017 (Why are you uninterested in the silencing of students of color but outraged by “white girl tears”?); why Nora Loreto, a journalist I respect immensely, responded similarly to the outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy in 2018 (Why are you unmoved by the plight of the victims of the Mosque Massacre but devastated by the death of a bunch of “white, straight, cisgender male” hockey players?); and why so many progressives are so deeply annoyed by the outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine (e.g., “Europe has rediscovered compassion for refugees—but only if they’re white”).
Two faulty assumptions underlie all objections of this kind: love is a scarce resource and loving is a zero-sum game. Love is not a scarce resource and loving is not a zero-sum game. Like the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), whose “small heart grew three sizes” on Christmas Day, most of us discover that we have much more love to give when we become parents or fall in love. This newfound love isn’t a liquid asset that can be readily spent on anyone or anything; it’s inextricably tied up in a relationship with a specific person. Likewise, the love we feel for our friends and neighbors isn’t a liquid asset that can be readily spent on strangers; it’s inextricably tied up in relationships with specific people.
The same is true, alas, of the love we feel for members of our tribe or group. As such, loving is rarely if ever a zero-sum game. As Rousseau rightly observes in Émile (1762), the choice, more often than not, isn’t between loving x and loving y; it’s between loving x and loving nothing: “Every particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is estranged from the all-encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They are only men. They are nothing in his eyes. This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. . . . Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”
Look, if, like the author of the Sermon on the Mount, you’re capable of consistently loving everybody equally regardless of who they are or where they live, then I will readily acknowledge your moral superiority. If you’re capable of sustaining the kind of radical love described by Jesus, you’re a saint, a spiritually evolved person, a moral exemplar. But please remember that—if you really are that awesome—you’re a beautiful exception; you’re not the norm. Expecting everybody else to love like you is unrealistic. What’s more, as the Canadian psychologist Paul Bloom rightly observes in The Sweet Spot (2021), this kind of rational compassion “seems antithetical to being a loving parent, friend, or romantic partner. You’re not supposed to be distant and unbiased toward those you love. Being a good father, for instance, involves prioritizing one’s children over other people’s children; it means caring about them and loving them more.”
Should we strive to extend the boundaries of our circle of concern? Absolutely. But is it really all that smart to point out the obvious: namely, that people tend to love what’s near more than what’s far, and that people tend to love what’s familiar more than what’s foreign. The fact that we care about anyone other than ourselves, and those closest to us, is an everyday miracle that ought to fill us with awe. And yet it so rarely does.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2022)
