DIGEST October 2024
On the Necessity of Love, by bell hooks
How can we continue to believe in the promise of love when, everywhere we look, love is overshadowed by the quest for power and the stoking of hatred? This is the challenge that revered American feminist writer and cultural critic bell hooks (all lowercase) set for herself and her readers in her 1999 book, All About Love. hooks observed that many people yearn for love in their lives, “yet in the realm of the political, among the religions, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together.” It does feel that way, doesn’t it?I first read All About Love at a difficult time in my own professional life, and I found her work to be thought-provoking and healing on a personal level. Given the political season in which we find ourselves in the U.S. and around the world, I recently decided to reread it to help me think through what it could mean to center lovein politics. I must admit I hesitated to write about this. Would it be woo-woo, too “New Agey”? In the end, I decided it wasn’t. I think recentering love in public life is essential. I look forward to hearing what you think.
hooks posits that cultures of domination worship death and violence and shun love. She quotes Catholic pacifist writer Thomas Merton who said: “We discover our affluent society to be profoundly addicted to the love of death… In such a society, though much may be officially said about human values, whenever there is, in fact, a choice between the living and the dead, between men and money, or men and power, or men or bombs, the choice will always be for death.”
“This worship of death,” hooks writes, “is a central component of patriarchal thinking, whether expressed by men or women.” It is characterized by a constant resort to violence, and the insistence that the natural order of things is for the strong to prey on the weak. hooks also notes that, “ironically, the worship of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death’s power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of meaningless death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives.”
How do we break this hellish cycle?
In her rich meditation on the necessity of love in public life as well as in private life, hooks draws inspiration from the writing of Martin Luther King, notably his collection of sermons Strength to Love, where he championed spiritual life and critiqued the “capitalism, materialism, and … violence used to enforce exploitation and dehumanization.” You are perhaps familiar with this quote from King’s sermons, where he speaks of the necessity of love: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” [my emphasis]
But given the violence, injustice and hatred that King faced in his lifetime, what did he mean by “love” exactly? In a 1967 lecture opposing war, King noted that “when I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response.” In fact, King wasn’t focused on mere individual self-improvement (although neither King nor hooks were against that), but rather on love within the context of community, as a way of doing politics differently, of mobilizing to end oppression, exploitation, domination and violence, and of co-creating a kind and just world with others.
In All About Love, hooks urges us to reconsider love as a fundamental value of any social justice movement. She often made that point when giving lectures on ending sexism and racism, but she wrote that she often found her listeners, and particularly her young audiences, to be skeptical: “All the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic. Yet young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force. To them, love is for the naive, the weak, the hopeless romantic.” And who could blame these young people?: “Whether it is the ongoing worldwide presence of violence expressed by the persistence of man-made war, hunger and starvation, the day-to-day reality of violence, the presence of life-threatening diseases that cause the unexpected deaths of friends, comrades and loved ones, there is much that brings everyone to the brink of despair.”
Had hooks written this in 2024, she would have no doubt added the climate emergency and environmental destruction to this grim list.
hooks writes that she began thinking and writing about love when, in the voices of young and old, she heard cynicism instead of hope. She observes that “cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart,” rooted in doubt and despair. She instead proposes to overcome fear by “choosing courageous thought and action” to advance love.
hooks places the bar high for what she considers true love, whether in private or in public life. She describes it as such: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” a definition she borrowed from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, of The Road Less Traveled fame. It follows that love is “an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. [...] We do not have to love. We choose to love [emphasis added].” Therefore, love isn’t a feeling that comes without warning and sweeps us away, a mythical “love at first sight,” an instinct (for example, maternal or sexual) or a passion. Love is a practice.
In particular, hooks argues against what she calls “love mystification,” the idea that love is rooted in blood relationships, and that loving one’s family is inevitable. Because love is a choice and an action, it requires us to “assume accountability and responsibility.” And hooks notes that many families feel no responsibility for their members’ growth, and confuse daily care and presence with love. Her own family, she writes, while outwardly caring, was dysfunctional and often abusive.
For hooks, love must display the following key characteristics: justice, honesty, commitment, spirituality, and ethical values. I found that these resonate in personal as well as in public expressions of love.
Justice begins with children, hooks argues. In all of her writing, hooks is deeply interested in the plight of children, because she sees that, to change society, we must change the way we treat children. Love, as hooks defines it, requires parents and other responsible adults to recognize children as full holders of rights and to nurture these children’s own growth rather than suppress or control it. This means that, in hooks’ view (which is now shared by many human rights advocates and policy-makers, but was not as widely accepted in 1999), corporal punishment should never be used to teach children self-discipline and responsibility for their actions.
hooks doesn’t argue that overindulgence and laissez-faire (often only a step removed from neglect) are acceptable approaches, or that no punishment should ever be doled out: “Setting boundaries and teaching children how to set boundaries for themselves prior to misbehavior is an essential part of loving parenting. Loving parents work hard to discipline without punishment. This does not mean that they never punish, only that when they do punish, they choose punishments like time-outs or the taking away of privileges.” She encourages parents to teach and nurture discussion, critical reflection, problem solving, and ways to make amends as approaches that will foster their child’s growth and reduce reliance on punishment.
Ridicule, insults and shaming—which hooks endured throughout her childhood, as did so many of us—are also unacceptable forms of punishment. She states that “we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful or abusive,” since abuse will do the exact opposite of nurturing the other person’s (and our own) development: “When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice, there can be no love.”
Taking this into the political realm, justice for children requires ending child poverty at the family level by investing, for example, in adequate housing, clean water, accessible healthcare and sufficient, nutritious food. In the U.S. in 2023, ten million children still lived in poverty (i.e., 15% of all children aged 0–18), that is, in households without the resources to meet their basic needs such as food, housing and utilities. Of that number, in 2023, 20% of Black children and 22% of Latino children lived in poverty. This is shocking and unacceptable, yet it persists because, despite all of the right wing’s “pro-life” talk, love for children isn’t a top U.S. policy priority.
Justice for children would also require the U.S. to adopt a foreign policy that doesn’t consider the massive bombing of children and their families with U.S. weapons as mere collateral damage. The U.S. would reject the argument that mass killing of civilians in an occupied territory where more than 50% of the people are children is inevitable because of Hamas tactics. Justice for children would in fact require the U.S. to consider all explosives and guns it uses or distributes as potential child-killing weapons, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Lebanon. It would require the U.S. to immediately object to Israel cutting off water, food and fuel to civilians in occupied Gaza, rather than only bemoan this catastrophic situation months later. It would require U.S. foreign policy to place a high premium on the protection of hospitals and health personnel in times of war, as required by international humanitarian law.
And justice for children doesn’t stop there, because love requires that we support children’s growth, and not only their survival. Love means that we should ensure that ample resources are devoted to supporting children’s development in the community. Excellent, well-equipped and well-staffed public schools, libraries and out-of-school programs, safe and green neighborhoods, gun control, free broadband internet… those are policies that immediately come to mind. Resources must be devoted to supporting girls and non-binary children as well as boys, and ensuring that children from different cultural, ethnic and racial communities are able to enjoy access to their cultures. Children certainly shouldn’t suffer discrimination because of their background, but their self-growth requires more than mere non-discrimination. How about celebrating and showcasing their diverse identities, cultures and backgrounds?
hooks’ call for justice for children reminded me of U.S. Black feminists’ 1994 call for reproductive justice, which they defined as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Importantly, this definition connected the well-being of children to the well-being of their parents, caretakers and communities. It’s all connected.
I also think about Minnesota Governor (and current Vice-Presidential candidate) Tim Walz’s policy that provides free breakfast and lunch to all children in public schools, both to ensure that hunger doesn’t prevent any child from learning, but also to preserve the dignity of the children who arrive hungry by avoiding their being singled out as poor. Public policies based in love are not hard to imagine; they already exist.
hooks argues that honesty and truth telling are essential to justice and, therefore, to love. Interestingly, hooks analyzes the prevalence of lying in our societies as an outcome of patriarchy. Boys are socialized to lie, both to hide their emotions and as a way of establishing power, particularly over women and other “weak” people: “The very concept of ‘being a man’ and a ‘real man’ has always implied that when necessary, men can take action that breaks the rules, that is above the law. Patriarchy tells us daily through movies, television and magazines that men of power can do whatever they want, that it’s this freedom that makes them men. […] The ability to be dishonest and indifferent to the consequences makes a male hard, separates the men from the boys.”
Meanwhile, hooks argues, girls are taught to lie to avoid confrontation and violence, but also to hide their true desires and ambitions so they can be more attractive: “If patriarchal masculinity estranges men from their selfhood, it is equally true that women who embrace patriarchal femininity, the insistence that females should act as though they are weak, incapable of rational thought, dumb, silly, are also socialized to wear a mask—to lie.”
hooks further maintains that “the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving, we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling.”
When Donald Trump lies non-stop about his actions and previous statements, when he says he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue with impunity, or denies ever meeting the women he sexually assaulted, he embodies the behavior that hooks describes. But he is far from the only person who does. We are confronted daily with a deluge of lies by powerful individuals, and the seeming absence of consequences for this mass dishonesty.
Dishonesty and lies create mistrust and fear. To reassert love in our communities, social movements and politics, we therefore have to treat the disregard for truth and honesty in our public lives as an urgent crisis, not just the way things are in politics. This means calling out lies by political leaders, and yes, demanding truthfulness and fact-checking as the normal, expected standard for public debates.
But I think it also requires urgently rethinking the regulation of mass media and social media, something hooks didn’t discuss, since she wrote All About Love before Facebook or Twitter even existed. U.S. civil rights lawyers have traditionally argued that the solution to lies is accurate information that counters them. That approach served us well historically. But when the public arena is flooded by disinformation created by robots, pumped out by Russian-funded outfits at a volume and with precision targeting that are unprecedented in human history, it seems insufficient—perhaps even naive—to simply hope that accurate information will cut through the noise. This is all the more so when so many people now get their news solely from right-wing sources that deliberately spread disinformation. We no longer all watch the same news. Simply relying on corrective information also discounts the broader corrosive effects on the political system of lies about, for example, elections being rigged or non-citizens voting.
Regulation is possible. From 1949 to 1987, U.S. broadcast media (over-the-air radio and TV stations, but not cable) was governed by a modest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule called the Fairness Doctrine, which required holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. Sounds good, no? The Fairness Doctrine was widely credited with moderating the tenor of broadcasts and ensuring they remained connected to facts and reality. The U.K. still applies similar impartiality and accuracy rules to its broadcasters. Conservative activists and free marketers persuaded President Ronald Reagan to end the Fairness Doctrine, resulting in the birth of right-wing talk radio. (The FCC still enforces a fairly minimal prohibition on “news distortion” on over-the-air TV and radio, but even that minimal prohibition doesn’t apply to cable news channels). Right-wing networks like Fox News or Newsmax, which engage in biased reporting and news distortion every day, couldn’t operate the way they do if they were subject to the Fairness Doctrine. Shouldn’t we bring back fairness and accuracy rules, and extend them to all broadcast and cable news channels?
And shouldn’t the fiction that social media companies are mere platforms, with no responsibility for content posted on their sites, be dispensed with once and for all? In fact, they do moderate their content, even if through clunky, after-the-fact algorithms. And Elon Musk’s X is now openly suppressing political content with which he disagrees, while promoting far-right conspiracy theories. Social media companies also choose which paid advertisements they will run. Given their particular nature and outsize impact, shouldn’t these companies be required to uphold standards of truthfulness, and refrain from spreading disinformation? Once we decide to place a high premium on truth in our politics, I think solutions could be devised without trampling on freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, once we acknowledge the link between patriarchal control and lying that hooks brings to light, gender education takes on an important additional dimension. Gender education entails working with children from an early age to teach them respect and equal consideration for people of all genders, to help them build their interpersonal communications skills, to show them how express their emotions, and to encourage them to shun violence and harassment as models for interacting with others. This isn’t far-fetched! Extensive work has been done by educators around the world under the aegis of UNESCO to craft curriculum and technical guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education that include lessons about gender roles, gender equity, self-esteem and non-violence from an early age. And this content is being implemented in dozens of countries, from Pakistan to the Netherlands to Nigeria.
Genuine love also requires commitment, a relationship of constancy, a daily practice, writes hooks. Commitment doesn’t mean staying in abusive situations, but it means staying through difficult or painful moments as partners or communities work through their own pain and shortcomings. According to hooks, love is neither a “place where we will feel no pain” or “a state of constant bliss.” While hooks believes that true love must be unconditional, that unconditionality has to rest on a sincere mutual commitment to the possibility of “being changed, to being […] more fully self-actualized.” In true love, we feel known, are in touch with each other’s core identity, and can help each other become the best version of ourselves.
Love therefore entails giving to others and rejecting selfishness. To express love, writes hooks, one must engage in “generous sharing of all resources,” whether it be time, attention, support, forgiveness, joy, material goods, skills or money. The practice of generosity ensures that “each person’s growth matters and is nurtured.” Learning to give also opens us to learning to receive.
This idea—that a sustained commitment to generosity and to supporting the other’s self-realization is at the root of love—is important in policy terms. One-off gifts or donations are not sufficient for a politics rooted in love. We must endeavor, as a society, to set up programs that give meaningful, long-term support to the young, the vulnerable, those with disabilities, and the elderly—programs that aren’t riddled with conditions and obstacles, or withheld as punishment for failure to meet a requirement. We must invest sufficient resources in programs that generate well-being for all, like quality public schools and public healthcare services—programs that the richest nation on earth can easily afford if it chooses the path of love and generosity, rather than that of artificial scarcity and withholding of resources. It also means that the wealthiest must be required to pay their fair share of taxes for the common good, rather than be allowed to deploy resources to avoid contributing to others’ welfare.
Since hooks’ definition of love is linked to spiritual growth, she spends some time unpacking what spirituality means to her. She is skeptical of formal religion, even though she found solace in religious practice at various times. She argues that “organized religion has failed to satisfy spiritual hunger because it has accommodated secular demands, interpreting spiritual life in ways that uphold the values of a production-centered commodity culture.” In particular, she points out the various New Age gurus who claim their teachings will lead to wealth, privilege and power. The same could be said about evangelical churches rooted in the “Gospel of Prosperity” that suggests the poor are poor because of laziness and lack of faith, while their pastors enrich themselves at the expense of their flock. hooks is also disturbed by the racial segregation ubiquitous in Christian churches in the U.S., about which Martin Luther King wrote, in his letter to American Christians, that “it scars the soul and degrades the personality … It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.”
For hooks, spiritual life resides in greater communion with the world. Rather than excessive attention to “individual self-improvement,” hooks calls for “a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness: "A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act.” This can involve communing with nature, supporting life-sustaining ecosystems, or providing service to others, writes hooks. “The choice to love is a choice to connect,” to welcome interdependency and mutuality.
What kind of community does she think most likely to foster this spiritual and personal growth? hooks doesn’t think that the “privatized patriarchal family” that replaced the extended family and neighborhood community is an optimal setting for children or women, since it “helped increase alienation and made abuses of power possible. It gave absolute rule to the father, and secondary rule over children to the mother.” While hooks recognizes that extended families can have their problems, she considers that, “by virtue of their size and their inclusion of nonblood kin […], they are diverse and so are likely to include the presence of some individuals who are both sane and loving.”
Thinking about the world outside the U.S., hooks identifies reliance on larger communities as the way most people can continue to thrive, and argues that promoting nuclear families as the desirable, more “modern” arrangement is unsustainable. She states: “Most world citizens do not have, and will never have, the material resources to live in small units segregated from larger family communities. In the United States, studies show that economic factors (the high cost of housing, unemployment) are swiftly creating a cultural climate in which grown children are leaving the family home later, and are frequently returning or never leaving in the first place.” And she wrote that in 1999!
For those for whom extended families have not been nurturing communities, or to add to them, hooks points to friendships. Although friendships have generally been considered second-class relationships in U.S. culture when compared to romantic bonds or family ties, hooks identifies “friendship [a]s the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.” In friendship, we expect respect and mutual commitment, hooks argues, and the lessons we learn there are important for how we expect to be treated in all relationships.
In fact, many of us have seen how circles of friends can become “chosen families” for those (notably in the LGBTQ community) who have broken away from relatives who refused to accept them or were abusive to them. Yet state policies often don’t treat these chosen families with love. Do they recognize these friendships as meaningful, or ignore them altogether? For example, are these friends allowed access to a sick or dying person in hospital, or is access limited to spouses and blood relatives?
Finally, hooks argues that “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination” and replace it in all dimensions of our lives with an ethic of love. This ethic “presupposes that everyone has a right to be free, to live fully and well,” and leads us to embrace “a global vision where we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet.” A love ethic teaches us to let go of material accumulation, to value relationships in our lives above all else, and to stand up for others even at some cost to us.
hooks pinpoints the glamorization of greed and wealth as a particular obstacle to ensuring that a love ethic governs state policy: “The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed. No doubt this explains our nation’s willingness to deprive poor citizens of government-funded social services while huge sums of money fuel the ever-growing culture of violent imperialism.” hooks is especially critical of those who live on inherited wealth yet also decry social welfare because “people should work for money in order to appreciate its value.” Ha!
hooks rightly bemoans the fact that the U.S. has actively exported this culture of greed, excess consumption and materialism: “The profiteering prophets of greed are never content; it is not enough for this country to be consumed by a politics of greed, it must become the natural way of life globally.” Yet she understands that many of us, even as we yearn for a life governed by love and compassion, are afraid to live by these values because it would require us to challenge the status quo. “Fear of radical changes leads many citizens of our nation to betray their minds and hearts. Yet we are all subjected to radical changes every day. […] For example, revolutionary new technologies have led us all to accept computers. […] Obviously, it is not in the interest of the conservative status quo to encourage us to confront our collective fear of love. An overall cultural embrace of a love ethic would mean that we would all oppose much of the public policy that conservatives condone and support.”
Reflecting on the reasons why love is discouraged, hooks notes that “cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.” This resonated deeply with me in these last weeks of the election campaign in the U.S. Fears and hatred of migrants, of trans and gay persons, of Black people, of Latinos, of “Marxists”—completely devoid of any connection to any actual threat—have been stoked relentlessly by the Republican Party.
Sexism is also a major obstacle to a love ethic, writes hooks, because it requires males to maintain control and avoid vulnerability. This prevents them from recognizing their own feelings and communicating them, and even from listening to their partner: “Usually, partners who are unable to respond compassionately when hearing us speak our pain, whether they understand it or not, are unable to listen because that expressed hurt triggers their own feelings of powerlessness and helplessness.”
In political terms, I believe the pervasive impact of sexist posturing is a major factor preventing many of our leaders from expressing compassion and understanding—for example, in the face of gun violence and mass shootings. How else can we explain so many elected officials at all levels only issuing “thoughts and prayers” platitudes when children are murdered by the dozens in U.S. schools? Or Donald Trump telling parents to “get over” a school shooting instead of taking action to ban assault weapons? Macho behavior rooted in sexism is a major obstacle to politics that are grounded in a love ethic.
