Love Is Not Enough

Decades ago, when describing his approach to dealing with autistic youngsters, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote that, “love is not enough.”  Without providing these children understanding and discipline, they would never overcome their disabilities.

A few weeks ago I said something similar at a panel sponsored by the Cherokee County Republican Assembly.  I argued that love alone would never enable us to triumph over the social challenges we face.  Indeed, I claimed that we can never love millions of other Americans.

This may sound harsh—but I meant every word.  The term “love” is thrown around with abandon.  People use it when they want to sound kind or generous.  Nevertheless, anyone who has been in love knows this is a unique emotion reserved for a very few.

The experience of falling in love is totally different from being nice to a panhandler.  Giving a homeless person a spare dollar is not accompanied by paroxysms of joy.  Nor does it entail the intense commitment that sustains long term relationships.

I love my wife and willingly make sacrifices for her.  Most parents are similarly prepared to endure hardships to protect their children.  Nonetheless, while I like many of my KSU students, my devotion to them is far less robust.  I will not even lend them money.

Anyone who has been in love knows this takes a lot of energy.  They are aware of how it fills the mind.  They have dealt with their inability to focus on other matters and felt that special thrill which comes from being around the object of their affection.

As it happens, love is generally reserved for those with whom we are related.  It is earmarked for family members—including our spouses.  Evolutionary psychologists tell us it results from selfish genes that aim to reproduce themselves in the next generation.  Love thus generates an altruism that defends our biological legacy.

How different it is with strangers.  When I go to the supermarket checkout counter, I often joke with the clerk.  She frequently does the same with me.  But I don’t love her and she does not love me.  We are polite; we are even friendly.  Yet there is no passion in our transaction.

In our modern mass society, we deal with most others in terms of their social roles.  We know their jobs and they know ours and this shapes the way we treat each other.  At the supermarket I am a customer and the woman across the counter is a cashier.  As a result, she rings up my purchases and I pay for them.

In a world filled with interdependent strangers, how else could we get along?  Because it is impossible to know so many others personally, we make do with identifying their social niches.  Actually we often judge them by the symbols of their positions.  What a person wears, or where he is standing, alerts us as to how we are to approach him.

This may seem callous, but it is a practical solution to living in a mass society.  Back in the days of hunter-gatherers, strangers killed one another.  Because they could not be sure of an outsider’s intentions, they were wary.  We are less so because we judge other’s objectives by the jobs we impute to them.

In other words, when we talk about loving everybody, this is no more than an analogy.  We are being asked to pretend others are members of our family and act accordingly.  In fact, we are to conduct ourselves as if we belonged to a “loving” family.  Everyone knows authentic kin can be disagreeable.

So where does this leave us when dealing with strangers?  We need to be nice if we are to survive unexpected encounters.  We need to be responsible if we are to be economically inter-reliant.  One way or another, we have to trust unknown others.  Consequently, if we cannot rely upon love; we must commit to shared ground rules.  Morality has to substitute for genuine affection.

Morality may be cold.  It may be impersonal.  But if we are to respect others, we must honor the boundaries it sets.  This may not be love, but it furnishes some of the same safeguards.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University