Relationships
Between humans and the world
In The Art of Loving, Fromm takes the stance that love is an art, and not just love in the romantic sense. Love in the sense of love of man. Love of father, mother and partner. Finally, love of God. In all of these avenues, there are four key qualities.
Care
Responsibility
Respect
Knowledge
Underpinning these qualities is an understanding of equality, not in the way it is currently understood.
Equality
Today, the meaning of equality has been disfigured, torn apart and reassembled as Frankenstein would. Equality today means “sameness” rather than “oneness”. It is no longer accepting each person as unique, it is fitting everyone into the same box, moulding each person into a cog, fitting perfectly to keep the system turning.
In the words of Fromm, “Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms… all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires”.
A striking example of this is the education system. Instead of letting people explore what makes them unique, we see a defined guide and people must fit neatly into the syllabus to ‘excel’. Even in subjects such as Visual Arts, half of the work is literary and there are also implicit guidelines. Though not stated, you get a feel of what will mark better, and often go towards that.
There is even an argument that society today is the most patriarchal it has ever been, because people are all forced to fit into the atomised role of a modern factory worker. Assembling products that we find harder to afford, even as partners are both forced to work and combined do not have the same purchasing power as one of their parents.
As this definition is more nuanced, it is harder to express to people and thus people are polarised through the ‘equality vs equity’ debate instead of understanding the root cause.
Qualities
Understanding that equality means equally unique is a requirement for understanding the conditions for love.
Care: Love is the active concern for the life and growth of which we love.
Responsibility: To be responsible means to be ready to respond to the needs of people. One feels responsible for his fellow men and himself.
Respect: Seeing the other person as they are, limiting responsibility and allowing the other person to grow and unfold.
Knowledge: Understanding a person enough to acknowledge that you can never truly know them.
Responsibility without respect can lead to domination, where you feel so responsible for someone else that they must do everything you say. Knowledge without concern is empty facts, a dictionary of useless words.
These four qualities are mutually interdependent, and finding any of them lacking can affect the relationships we form with other people. However, developing these in isolation is the incorrect approach. These qualities come from growing up correctly.
Familial Love
In this section, I will refer to motherly and fatherly love. This is not perfectly accurate, however it is useful as stereotypically, the roles fall under these labels.
All babies are narcissistic. When we are first born, we know nothing of the world. We only know that our mother loves us. We need anything, she gets it and we are loved solely for existing. We learn that love is all-encompassing. As we grow, we internalise this love for existing, creating an internal framework for it.
As we internalise the mother, we look to the father. The father doesn’t just love us for existing. Instead, he loves us for acting correctly. We are guided by principles and values. Doing the right things, working hard. So we learn that love is also conditional, and doing the right things will result in more. Then, we internalise this as well, creating a structure where we are motivated to do the right thing.
This sounds healthy, but as you may be thinking by now, doesn’t seem quite right. This is because a lot of people are stuck, they haven’t learnt how to internalise one or both of these, thus can be physically mature, but emotionally immature.
These people could want someone to love them completely and utterly, no matter what they do, or ‘daddy issues’ where they need the reinforcement of doing the right thing. These people tend to project their issues onto their partners leading to the coining of colloquialisms.
Fromm articulately describes the divide between the stages of love in the following:
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved"
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love“
Immature love says:"I love you because I need you"
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you”
Mature love is achieved when both the mother and father have been internalised.
Religion
There is a direct parallel between the stages of love and the stages of religion.
The God of the Gaps is a theory that we used the idea of God(s) to fill in the gaps in reality we don’t understand with science. We don’t understand how life started, it must be God. The ancient Greeks didn’t understand lightning, it must be the wrath of Zeus. Ancient people didn’t know why they existed, it must be because we are children of Mother Earth.
In religion, we see a development along the same vein as we see in people. Early on, we knew nothing spiritually, thus it was enough to have faith that we were loved for existing, this is the period of matriarchal gods. This is the period when all people were equal.
Once humans internalised the mother, she was dethroned from her position as the father became the supreme being. This base did not leave however, an example being Gaia in Greek mythology. At this stage, the father makes demands, punishing and rewarding us. This is the principle of reciprocity, sacrificing towards the gods such that they would bless us.
It would seem that this is where the major religions are. We are given a code and to enter heaven or a better reincarnation, and we must abide by it. However, we have regressed.
The final stage is internalising the father. We codify that we can never know all of God, best shown in an excerpt from Nahjul Balagha.
“No imagination can fathom the reality of His attributes and no mind can grasp His entity. He is such a One that division or splitting into parts of His entity cannot even be imagined. No eye can see Him and no mind can imagine Him”
We have learnt enough, now we must understand. There’s no other option as we can not find the expression accurate enough. This sentiment is echoed in Carl Jung’s work where he writes:
“God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself. So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity.”
Many have not reached this point. In Bali, idols are used for worship not because they are necessary, the people believe that god is everywhere, but because the human mind wanders and a point is needed to focus it.
Energy givers vs Energy takers
It would be incorrect to write an article on relationships without explaining generators and absorbers. Used for defining activities or people, in this context, energy givers are those you are excited to be around, that make you feel better and impart energy to get stuff done. Energy takers are the opposite, they sap your drive, your creativity and leave you walking in a daze.
Coming from a scientific perspective, you’d think that one can’t exist without the other, where there’s a give there must be a take. This is true but not in the way you’d think. When givers get together, they all give and because each is giving to the other, they feel a need to give an increasing amount in return. This creates a high-energy self-sustaining loop of creativity and value which is enjoyable for all those involved.
You love without the expectation of anything in return, and you should not be surprised if all that happens is that it is continually taken. It can happen and it is disheartening. By loving you plant the seed of love. You may not see the blossoms however be assured that the tree will grow with water. You have changed a person’s life for the better.
Introspection
In our current world, everyone is focused on the secular, the material, the evident. Without focusing on introspection, it is impossible to become whole and we’ll continue to have generations of broken kids, pumped out of schools like damaged products directly into the factory line known as the workforce.
Hazrat Ali (p.b.u.h.) once stated that one hour of deep and sober meditation is better than a life of prayers without understanding. If you have one take away from all of this, I hope it is that most of us live our whole lives without understanding, and it is time to change that.