THE COMMENTER “N.W.” wrote the following in a post from December, 2009:

I believe part of the problem in coming to terms with [modern society] is the common tendency to skip over the concrete particulars and instead firmly ground oneself in the cloudy abstracts. I may be tilting at windmills, granted, but nonetheless I shall begin my campaign against that stalwart bastion of the Enlightenment “the imperative to love all of humanity.” Now, this is a tall and dark fortress with innumerable passages, corridors and gates from which sally forth many a foolish knave, crying their challenge, “Halt foe, dost not thou love all and equally so?” to which I reply with a quixotic “How? How are we to love all of humanity?”

To which the Knight errant replies, “Why, methinks thee are daft. Forsooth, thee must do so with actions and thoughts indisciminating! Hast thou not heard? Back then, if thou shalt not, banish thyself to dark nasty places in yon hinterland.” To which I reply, “No, you have not answered my inquiry, how am I to love all equally and indiscriminately? How is a woman in Timbuktu as dear to me as my mother? How is an anonymous bureaucrat in a distant capitol more authoritative than my father? How is a dark man in the southlands as close to me as my brother?” The foe angrily brandishes his spear, shreiks, “YamuddawazzaLizad!” and retreats within the bastion of universal brotherly love.

But that is the thing of it. How are we called to abstractly love all of humanity? If we are to love all mankind equally what becomes of the love of the particular, the love for one’s mother and father, the loyalty between brothers, the protection shown towards our sisters? If we do not love the particular, love itself becomes impersonal. It is only through coming to know and accept those around us in the particular that we begin to understand what it is to love.

This love of the particular starts in the home, and then slowly expands to include the community, and from the love of the community it expands to encompass a love of one’s people, and gradually emanates out to encompass a love of all creation. But there is a limit. The depth of our love deepens as we come to know that which is loved more fully. If we ignore a thing we cannot truly love it.

Now, it must be admitted that it is a curious situation that arises when an individual would abandon all that is close and familiar for the love of an outlander. What is represented in this action? How can a person ignore who they are and who their people are? Why would one abandon a thousand year tradition for the love of a stranger? What is so appealing in the outlandish character of another that couldn’t be found amoungst ones own people? Is this love between these two individuals so strong that it obliterates historical traditions of millenia? What kind of love is that destructive?

— Comments —

Bill R. writes:

Your commenter, N.W., has made an excellent and important point. I have debated this issue with those very close to me, who, with the very best and most loving of intentions, have insisted on standing by a principle they call “universal love.” An agnostic like myself is tempted to dismiss this as merely a sample of well-meaning Christian nonsense, except that I know it is not only just as much a secular and humanist nonsense, but indeed, its worst abuses, by far, emerge from its secular, humanist, and atheistic incarnations. The attempt — especially by governments — to uproot virtues, such as love or brotherhood, from the human, particular contexts and limitations in which they actually originate and manifest themselves, and view them only in their ideal form as pristine abstractions, and then — most disastrous of all — to ruthlessly insist that flawed, imperfect humans abide by them in that form, has a long, tragic, and horrific history. The French attempted to do it with their abstract “rights of man” and all it got them in the end was the Reign of Terror. This same project of attempting to impose by force abstract conceptions of virtue on whole populations led eventually to the most murderous regimes humankind has ever known, the secular and atheist regimes of communist Russia and China, who, let it never be forgotten, were utterly hostile to any Christian conception of love or other virtues. At least with Christian abstract virtues there is the hope of the one called “forgiveness.” The communists, on the other hand, forgave nothing. Indeed, when they had done, they had showed the world that the attempt to “love” all equally not only meant loving none, it looked more like hating all. This is also, most frighteningly, a path our own regime has now embarked upon, and is moving down faster everyday.

The notion of loving all equally was always impossible, of course, even on its own abstract terms, since love, in the purely abstract sense, is nothing more than a special form of valuation. By its very definition, therefore, it implies a hierarchy; so it makes no more sense to speak of loving all equally than it does to speak of valuing all things equally. The mere attempt, by itself, to do so, is to obliterate the very meaning of the word. Whatever there may be that human beings can do equally toward all people and all things, it is not loving or valuing.

It is also revealing how, in another sense, this supposedly idealistic attempt to love all equally really ends up being nothing of the kind. For, inevitably, these idealistic secularists, relativists, multiculturalists and other assorted totalitarians — placing, of course, like everyone else, different values on different things (but claiming not to) —will form out of this “equal love” their own brand of harsh, brutal, and unforgiving selectiveness and particularism, so that what ends up actually happening is what Orwell described in Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” One example of how this translates into 21st century American terms is seen in the area of race. When a Negro loves his own race, that indeed is love, but when a white man tries to do the same, that is to be regarded as hate. Similarly in the area of sexual morality. We are to be tolerant, accepting, indeed even applauding, toward the sexual values of the homosexual, but the sexual values of the Christian we are told to regard as bigoted.

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