All You Need Is Love?

 “All About Love – New Visions” by bell hooks, 2000

This book has been a constant best-seller over many years at May Day, so I thought I’d read it.  hooks is a well-known black feminist who took her pen name from her sharp, spunky grandmother.

hooks starts with a definition of love, a definition which is necessary, as having no definition she thinks is a dodge.  She borrows it from Erich Fromm by way of M. Scott Peck:  Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”  Breaking this quote down she uses more familiar words like "affection, respect, recognition, commitment, trust and care" to describe it.  She believes love is an act, not a feeling.  She does not really separate love into kinds - sexual, romantic, partner, familial, friend, community or class, etc. which seems odd.  But this is a pattern.

You’ll notice the first definition contains a contradiction and also leans towards spiritualism.  hooks denies it is religious, but then mentions it is connected to the soul.  As someone who doesn’t believe in ‘souls’ or understand what the euphemism of ‘spiritual growth’ is, it has a heavy overlay of idealism.  The contradiction in this definition is when ‘one’s own’ spiritual growth conflicts with another’s.  There is also use of the word ‘or’ which might mean one person is using the other.  This is a flawed and confusing definition.

hooks has a whole chapter praising liberal religion, charity, God and the divine as the true opponents of materialism, capitalism and consumerism.  She mentions the roles of New Age religion, meditation and prayer, angels, Thomas Merton and her upbringing in the Baptist Church.  Marxists are still waiting for this mass movement of ‘love’ to break with the pro-capitalist Democrats and Republicans and truly oppose this system.  After all, in the early 1900s, as depicted in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, Christian socialists were one large strand of the socialist movement.  Where are they now?  Cornel West, Chris Hedges and who?  Dorothy Day, liberation theology and who?  Religion has been eaten by the Right.  Perhaps it is because time has moved on and religion has lost credibility across the board, even among young dark-skinned people.

THERAPY

hooks says she grew up in a dysfunctional family, where care, humiliation and physical punishment were meted out equally.  She actually thinks the overwhelming majority of people grew up like this, though she provides no statistics or facts.  She also generalizes that most men lie, have no feelings and are invested in male supremacy and power.  ‘Lying,’ like love, is not broken down into ‘white’ lies and worse ones.  She claims she always tells the truth, which reminds me of a certain film.  She does believe that people have a right to privacy … another contradiction, as privacy sometimes involves ‘lies of omission.’

hooks goal is ‘true love’ – which seems to be a kind of mystical perfectionism unrooted in material reality.  But then she says she doesn’t believe in this perfectionism.  Kollontai in 1918 pointed out the rarity of ‘true love’ and ‘soul mates,’ and this seems at this point more of the reality.  After all, love, like everything else, is marked by its historical period.  Love as an overarching method might work in an evolved communist society, but before?

POLITICS

hooks wants ‘love’ to be a political slogan, but in the present context it’s really a moralistic one. So she advocates ‘communalism' i.e. community and small towns.  Yet the slogan of love is also the goal of every preacher, every Hillary Clinton, every Subaru© ad and a line of freeway gas stations, Love’s©. She writes of the detrimental affect greed, consumerism and commodities wreak on society, but never ties this to the market system.  Love to hooks becomes an individual moral choice like not watching television or refusing to buy certain products.  To me it becomes a form of virtue signaling, as those ‘Love Over Hate’ lawn signs attest.  Has anyone realized that perhaps ‘hate’ – class hatred - has a role in overcoming the market and war system, racism, sexism, capitalism, global warming and the rich?

This book seems to be a work of therapy by a woman damaged in childhood who had two long, unsatisfying relationships and was on her own and celibate for many years.  Perhaps writing this book was a way of dealing with trauma.  Especially for women and in opposition to the ‘patriarchy,’ she looks at self-love, affirmations, positivity, self-assertiveness, giving, community, kindness and finding a job you love.  For hooks, true love involves much work too, so that is another job to pursue.  She thinks joining an organization or a political movement is not the road to take.  Kindness is more her style.

The book is a compendium of quotes and self-help commentary.  Personally, except for the comment about love being ‘an act’ I was overwhelmed with pages and pages of love rhetoric.  I’m actually disappointed at how weak it is – this from an accomplished woman who was a professor at Yale, Oberlin, USC, San Francisco State, City College and finally Berea College in Kentucky and who wrote 30 books. I don’t really like trashing love, given its benefits – but when it functions as an all-encompassing solution to everything, it reveals its limits.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 16, 2022

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Love or the Alternative,” “Love and Information,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai,” “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs,” “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “What is To Be Done?” (Chernychevsky); “Hard Like Water.”