One boiling summer day I went into a grocery store on a desperate quest for ice cream. The ravaged freezer shelves were almost empty, except for a few unappetizing rejects. Then I saw, partly hidden, on a lower shelf, an enticing carton of peach ice cream. “Look! I see peach,” I said to the person who was with me, and pointed.
At that moment, a middle-aged woman swooped in front of me, swung open the glass freezer door, made a swift grab, and dashed off with the last carton of peach ice cream. I was later told that her face had “lit up” as soon as I said “peach.” I was not in love with humanity on that day. “Who does that?” was my response.
But maybe I over-reacted. The woman had been annoying, true, but it was not like she had invaded Czechoslovakia or dropped a bomb on anyone. I disliked her because she had taken something I wanted. Erich Fromm, a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, might have said my dislike for her was not objective.
I discovered Erich Fromm in college. I read a thin book by him, a best-selling classic called The Art of Loving. It was not a book about how to be more romantic; in fact, Fromm questioned whether romantic love was love at all, since the thrill of infatuation is fleeting and depends on uncontrollable factors like beauty, which fades.
According to Fromm, love was not something that you “fell into,” but a decision you made, and it was primarily giving. It also required objectivity; that is, the ability to see another person in their own context, apart from how the person might benefit or harm you.
Fromm also thought that “mature love,” unlike romantic love, was not exclusive. Love was a “faculty” like the ability to see or hear. It was a response to a pattern of qualities that were “essentially human.” Fromm insisted that if you were able to love at all, you should be able to love anyone, no matter how annoying or even cruel the person is.
The last part felt uncomfortable, but having grown up in a Christian household, I could see in his philosophy an echo of the words, “Love your enemies.” His definition of love could easily have been called “brotherly love” and Fromm did call it that at times.
But he was far from being religious. He was an atheistic secular humanist, a Jewish intellectual whose writings largely grew out of the Western society of the forties through the sixties, a society reeling from the after-shocks of World War II.
But there it was, in print, a bold espousal from a religious skeptic of the idea of loving everyone. Though I had broken away from the religious doctrines of my childhood, I was fascinated.
To Fromm, brotherly love was a human idea, not a religious one. Fromm saw love as the most rational – and sane – solution to the central problem of being human, a kind way to know someone while relieving the anxiety of separateness.
Fromm contrasted what he considered “love” with other methods of “overcoming the anxiety of separateness” that go under the same name, such as conformity, infatuation, domination, or the “narcissistic” dependent love of an infant for the mother.
At times, Fromm described the ability to love as almost an enlightened state, requiring remarkable patience, dedication, and concentration. He believed it was an art that was difficult to master, to the extent that those hoping to achieve it would have to dedicate their whole lives to it.
He insisted that the effort was worthwhile, since he considered the need to “overcome separateness” to be the most powerful force driving human behavior.
I read all his books like they were fast-paced criminal suspense novels, sometimes staying up all night. I was swept up by his beautiful clarity of expression and I was in awe of his probing insights, many of which came from his clinical experiences as a psychoanalyst. At the time, I believed everything he said. I could not imagine why his books had not changed the world.
But, despite being a world-wide bestseller, The Art of Loving did not change the way people interacted with each other. It did not produce a more loving society; did not make world hunger go away; did not make people less racist or more accepting of immigrants. Maybe it was because it is hard to sell an idea by telling people how extraordinarily difficult it is to carry out. But maybe there was another reason. Maybe he was wrong.
Recently I glimpsed The Art of Loving on my book shelf and decided to reread it. I wanted to see how time might have changed how I viewed his ideas. In college I had read his book uncritically, but now I wondered: Was he right? I no longer believed he had been right about everything. In fact, I saw many sweeping assumptions where before I had seen insights.
For one thing, his belief that “overcoming separateness” was the primary force driving human behavior was debatable. What about physical survival? Plus, he seemed to attribute all human behavior, including mental illness, to early childhood experiences – a stern and disapproving father or a life-hating, domineering mother.
Modern research has shown that mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder – which I have – are heavily influenced by genes, hormones, and even the physical anatomy of the brain.
Mental disorders can be treated successfully with drugs. While environmental factors are not ruled out as triggering mental illness, they are certainly not the sole, or even primary, cause. While the philosophical system of Erich Fromm was persuasive, I thought my hero had become unmoored from some of the realities he was trying to describe.
There was also some discord between his ideas and my own experiences and observations. I had discovered in the intervening years that I was bad at loving everyone. In fact there were times I was ready to head to a remote cabin in the mountains hundreds of miles from any human.
It was not just learning about the depths of cruelty humans could reach in my history classes; I was annoyed with people who did annoying things, like spitting out gum in the parking lot. But, aside from annoying people, there were also people who were truly cruel and dangerous, who tortured, maimed, raped, and dismembered. Was it wise to even try to love those types of people?
Maybe if I knew about their childhoods or environmental influences, I could achieve a certain amount of empathy and understanding for them. But love? It was asking too much.
Despite my criticisms, the idea of love as a conclusion of reason was one I was reluctant to let go. And it must have been compelling to a lot of other people, like early Christians or the many thousands of people who bought his book.
On the other hand, what good is it to strive for the ideal of loving everyone if it is outside the bounds of what human nature will permit? And if it is, why does the ideal remain so compelling?
So many reasons people give for loving other people are shallow, such as because they are family; or because they are on your religious or political team; or because they are physically attractive; or because they are rich and powerful. In all of these cases, love seems to have little to do with who a person really is.
It is a “love” without objectivity.
That is why I keep returning to The Art of Loving, why I still want to believe Fromm. He made an argument in favor of rational love, whereas love is usually seen as the opposite of reason. To Fromm, love was not something you “should” do because a deity commanded it.
It was a decision you made because it led to understanding; because people were worth knowing for who they really were; because the alternatives made no sense; and because, beside the alternatives, loving felt better.