let’s replace our fear with our faith

(All excerpts from All About Love taken from the sixth chapter, Values: Living By a Love Ethic.)

I love the way that bell hooks, in her book All About Love, like Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving, writes of the lack of love in many people’s personal lives not simply as an individual and interpersonal issue, but a cultural one.

Society’s collective love of fear must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes… Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable in both word and deed… To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love… When we choose to love we choose to move against fear–against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect–to find ourselves in the other. 

from All About Love by bell hooks

Come up to my place
And then let’s embrace
And then let’s replace 
Our fear with our faith

We are together now and love is our child
Born from the unity of our human hearts

Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love–“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”–in our everyday lives.

from All About Love

“Didja mean it, would you marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to." 
"Not because you love me or anything like that, huh?”
“I respect and admire you.”
“Isn’t that love?”
“No, that’s respect and admiration. I think that’s better than love.”
“How?”
“When people are in love, they do all sorts of crazy things. They get jealous. They lie. They cheat. They kill themselves, kill each other.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll be the father of a child you know isn’t yours.”
“Kids are kids. What does it matter?”
“Do you trust me?”
“If you trust me first.”
“I trust you.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”

“Then marry me.”
“I’ll marry you if you admit that respect, admiration and trust equal love.”
“Okay. They equal love.”

(Listen to this scene from the film Trust here on the blog of Masha Tupitsyn.)

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are daily bombarded with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge…

Were we, collectively, to demand that our mass media portray images that reflect love’s reality, it would happen. This change would radically alter our culture. 

We cannot talk about changing the types of images offered to us in the mass media without acknowledging the extent to which the vast majority of the images we see are created from a patriarchal standpoint… Individual women and men who do not see themselves as victims of patriarchal power find it difficult to take seriously the need to challenge and change patriarchal thinking… Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless… Naturally, anyone socialized to think this way would be more interested in and stimulated by scenes of domination and violence rather than by scenes of love and care. Yet they need a consumer audience to whom they can sell their product. Therein lies our power to demand change… 

This is not meant to be an argument for censorship… But everyone knows that all forms of violence are glamorized and made to appear interesting and seductive by the mass media. The producers of these images could just as easily use the mass media to challenge and change violence. When images we see condone violence, whether they lead any of us to be “more” violent or not, they do affirm the notion that violence is an acceptable means of social control, that it is fine for one individual or group to dominate another individual or group.

Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails… When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic. Concern for the collective good of our nation, city, or neighbor rooted in the values of love makes us all seek to nurture and protect that good. If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.

from All About Love

There are few realms of culture that provide as stark an indication of the stranglehold that imagery and subject matter that reinforce patriarchy and violence as social norms have on our society as video games. Whenever it is suggested, however gently, that such aspects of games should be viewed critically, many lash out, seemingly threatened by anything that might encourage them or others to challenge the notion that patriarchy and images of sexism and violence in the media (and the messages these images send and reinforce) should simply be accepted as the norm. The comments section on just about any article that raises even the slightest bit of concern about the messages sent by sexist and/or violent video games becomes a place where the notion that sexism and violence in media might be a problem is ridiculed, and, of course, where the person raising such concerns, if that person happens to be a woman, is insulted and sometimes threatened. In this way, sadly, as has often been said, the comments section on any article about feminism in the realm of video games illustrates the need for feminism in the realm of video games.

To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.

from All About Love

I am scared. I’m a bit damaged (like a lot of us), and maybe I’ve spent too much time alone. I know I have a lot to learn about love. But I want to.

Someone said to me recently that I deserve love and friends. But deserve doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Don’t we all deserve those things? Of course we do. And my life is not without them, not at all. I am not entirely alone, far from it. But still, there’s something missing

I hope you find friends with whom you belong

‘Cause you’ll never know the reason
Why the seas rise and fall
'Cause you’ll never know the reason
Or if there’s a reason at all, a reason at all

Make sure you stay when you find love in your heart
And as it lights up your way
Don’t let your friends fall apart
I said, I hope you find friends with whom you belong