A few weeks ago, I woke up at 3am, for no particular reason, and lay in my bed listening to the city sleeping. My middle-class street in Tufnell Park was placid and at rest. Then I heard a woman sobbing, as she walked down the street. It was such a strange, piercing sound: in the middle of the night, outside the silent family homes, was an adult weeping like a lost child. I wondered if I should get out of bed, put my clothes on, go into the street and offer her help. Was I really going to intervene in the messy chaos of her life? I went to the living-room to see if I could see her. But by then she had disappeared, and I went back to bed, slightly relieved.
The problem, as I see it, is that just about every human in the world doesn’t feel entirely loved or lovable. We carry the secret wound of our unlovable-ness deep within us, all through life, and out of these wounds our feelings of self-worth leak out, drop by drop. So we are constantly trying to top up our self-worth. And we do this in inappropriate ways.
The most obviously inappropriate way we try to feel loved is by piling up honours or wealth, in order to win the approval of strangers. We bring each new triumph to lay at the feet of other people, like a cat bringing in a dead bird. The feeling of being unlovable is actually an incredible motor for achievement. Hey guys, guess what I did? I’m lovable, right?
A likeability scale, from Forbes magazine
Alas, success doesn’t really make us feel loved. Success gives you a quick intoxication, and we might blurt out, like Sally Field winning her Oscar, ‘You like me! You really like me!’ But just as many people will envy and dislike you for success. And admiration is not the same as love. Admiration keeps you at a distance and misses your flaws. Love holds you close, and accepts you despite your flaws.
We seek love through celebrities. If they notice us, if they follow us on Twitter, if they sleep with us, we feel validated, connected to the beautiful people like Gatsby when he holds Daisy in his arms. Have a look at any of pop-star Harry Styles’ tweets and the desperate tweets his fans send him, begging him to follow them, and you get a snapshot of all the lonely young people looking for love in the wrong places.
@Harry_Styles I’m trying since 2011 to get follow from you,but I think this will never happen please follow me ❤❤
— мś saja ραỵпĕ ♥ (@Saja_Payne) June 28, 2013
We seek love through substance-abuse. Heroin, Russell Brand wrote, fills a hole in people, and ‘transforms a tight white fist into a gentle brown wave…A bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb.’ Alcoholics are also seeking love. There is nothing more boring than an alcoholic, because they desperately want to connect with you, with everyone, they just don’t know how to do it. Alcoholism, the Russian writer Vladislav Zubok recently suggested, can stem from a misdirected desire for togetherness and unity. And then, when the drunk fails to connect, their mood rapidly turns ugly. They lurch from eros to thanatos, from trying to bond to shoving the world away.
We seek love through food. I sat in a McDonalds yesterday at 5pm, sucking on a chocolate milkshake like a baby pacifier, and watched various overweight Londoners lumber in and order their Happy Meals, for their first dinner of the evening. They were seeking a brief good feeling from their trays of sugars and carbohydrates. I do the same. McDonalds’ adverts even try to sell themselves as the nation’s social glue, bringing together alienated family-members and different races and generations. Their slogan now is ‘We all have McDonalds in common’. Really? Are you saying the only thing we now have in common is Big Macs and fries? My God, it’s worse than I thought.
We seek love through technology. We constantly scan our smart-phone screens to see if anyone has Liked us. We have invented an app for everything, except feeling loved. Scientists tried – in the 1970s, they developed a computer programme called ELIZA, which tried to give people the feeling of being understood and accepted. There was briefly an idea to have ELIZA machines on every street corner, to hear our pain. It hasn’t quite taken off yet.
We seek love through sex. We give our bodies to strangers to get the experience of being held for a few minutes in silence. We pay someone to hold us. Or we get the simulacrum of sex off the internet, without any of the messy intimacy. Can it be long before they start selling vibrating empathic robots to stroke our hair and tell us we’re worth it?
We seek love through therapy. We pay someone to give us unconditional acceptance, which the psychologist Carl Rogers said is the key ingredient in the therapeutic relationship. But is it really unconditional if you’re paying for it? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is often accused of missing out this crucial dynamic of the loving therapeutic relationship, but the grandfather of CBT, Albert Ellis, emphasised the central importance of Unconditional Self-Acceptance, and Unconditional Other Acceptance. Who or what gives us the power to accept ourselves unconditionally? Apparently, we have the power. We can simply choose to accept and love ourselves, through some Nietzschean act of self-acceptance. It doesn’t sound that easy.
Deeper still, perhaps, are Buddhism’s various techniques and practices for cultivating loving-kindness. We develop the practice of observing ourselves, with all our flaws, and not judging or condemning ourselves – because, after all, ‘you’ don’t really exist at all, so there is nothing to hate (and also nothing to love).
And then there is the weird idea of grace – the idea that, sometimes in life when we are particularly lost, God lifts us up, tells us it’s OK, and puts us on our feet again. Without earning it or deserving it, we have a sudden sense of our creator’s limitless love for us, a sense of reunion with Him after a long exile. Such moments are incredibly healing. After long wandering in a desert, you find a hip-flask of water on you, which never runs out. We feel replenished in our ability to love other people too, to care about strangers, rather than merely tolerate them.
Greek philosophy also talks about learning to trust the God Within, rather than scrabbling around in externals in a desperate attempt to feel loved. But in Stoicism, learning to trust the God Within involves solitary ascetic training and logical Socratic dialectic. It means obeying the dictates of the cold and impersonal Logos. In Positive Psychology, the search for happiness likewise involves endless strenuous exercises – keeping a Gratitude Journal, savouring a raisin, cultivating your strengths, perfecting your Duchenne smile. I don’t know if that really heals the wound we all feel, of not feeling entirely lovable. It seems more like a solitary workout regime in the gym. You scored 7 on the gratitude scale – keep going!
In Plato, there is more of a sense of connecting to the Divine through love. But in Platonic philosophy, both ‘love’ and ‘the divine’ are abstract intellectual concepts. To me, love is not a work-out regime, or an abstract concept. It’s a relationship. Love is a father sweeping up his child into his arms when she runs to meet him.
But if you believe in a God who loves, who intervenes, who sometimes sweeps you up in his arms, then you are left with the troubling question of why He sometimes doesn’t. Why is there so much pain in the world? Why do His children feel so unloved and alone? I think of that woman walking through the empty street at dawn, sobbing, and wonder why God doesn’t intervene more often. Then again, why didn’t I?
******
In other news:
A new ‘wireless philosophy‘ project from Yale and MIT.
The History of Philosophy podcast from KCL looks at Islamic philosophy’s ideas on music.
One of the weirder corners of American religion has come to light in the media this week – the ‘Christian Domestic Discipline‘ scene, or Holy Spanking. I’m not sure if this is a real thing or a send-up.
Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association asks why the decline of religion has not led to moral chaos.
In the Independent, Paul Mason looks at how and why revolution is sweeping through BRIC countries despite their rapid economic growth.
Meanwhile Martin Wolf gives a grim picture of how austerity policies have failed in the UK, in the New York Review of Books.
Tomorrow I wrote the cover story for the Telegraph Weekend – have a look and a laugh at the photo.
This week’s column was partly inspired by a book called What’s So Amazing About Grace, by Philip Yancey, which I’m reading at the moment. A great book, which also inspired a U2 song. Watch an interview with Yancey here.
Some book reviews. First, Tariq Ali reviews a new book on the bitchy side of Sir Isaiah Berlin. The Economist reviews a new book by a French writer who went to live in a shed next to Lake Baikal (no, not for tax reasons). And in the LA Review of Books, a review of Tao Lin’s ‘Taipei’, and the end of the dream of a psycho-pharmalogical utopia. Tao Lin also wrote a collection of poetry called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, by the way – one of the few instances I’ve come across of CBT influencing the arts.
Finally, it was very sad to hear about James Gandolfini’s death. The Sopranos is my all-time favourite TV show – I even considered writing a book about it last year, which gave me the excuse to spend most of August re-watching episodes. The show was about so many things, but particularly about the scarcity of love and the imperfection of families. Many of the characters love each other – Tony and Uncle Junior, for example, or Tony and Christopher. But their love gets lost under power, resentment and cruelty.
There’s no grace in The Sopranos – the two priests who appear are both weak and corrupt. Instead, the characters try everything from yoga to Prozac to psychoanalysis to search for fulfillment. I always thought Dr Melfi, the most famous therapist in literature, was a bit rubbish for waiting until Series 3 to offer CBT for Tony’s panic attacks, and the show itself is simplistically Freudian in making Tony’s mother such an out-and-out villain (unlike every other character). Still, what a show. Here’s the best article I’ve read on it, by Peter Buskind in Vanity Fair, which includes some amazing photos by Annie Liebovitz, like the one below.
See you next week,
Jules
Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -
