Against Love: Where It Comes From & Why it’s Overrated 

–Tom McBride

Against Love: Where It Comes From & Why it’s Overrated 

–Tom McBride

We study weasels. They do not study us. Why? Because we have learned to love one another. 

That is the main advantage of love. We can study weasels. We can also build bridges and recite poetry to each other. We can even make war on each other. 

Everyone thinks love is grand. Putin loves Russia. Trump loves tariffs. Hitler loved Eva Bruan, his dog Blondie, and Aryans. You will not go wrong if you say you like love. 

Love comes from the greatest human advantage: the capacity for communicative collaboration. We can work together; compare notes; achieve things (even children). If cooperation were not a competitive virtue, love would not be liked. If being totally solitary gave us natural advantages, no one would be in favor of love. It would be thought of as odd and foolish, maybe even evil. By contrast, we don’t think Ted Bundy was sufficiently loving because he was revealed to be uncooperative. He was a little murderous sneak. 

This is not to say that love isn’t a thing. It can add to the collaborative advantage. You can get to like or even love your office staff. In his last game Walter Payton told Bears fans that his real love was his teammates. This was honest, especially since he was always cheating on his wife Connie.  

Love is a lovely add-on to fundamental human cooperation. Parents who play well together often produce functional (and themselves cooperative) children. It takes a village to raise a child. This is a loving thing to say. 

Love is overestimated, but it is easy to see why. What stems from evolutionary advantage is constructed as an ultimate completion of individual lives, as when, in the 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, Ann-Marget told Jack Nicholson that she just wanted him (he replied that he was taken–“by me”).  Love is an ostensible cure for loneliness, boredom, and low self-esteem. Again, note that it is also privileged because its root cause, collaboration, has been such a tremendous human advantage. To believe that you don’t need love is to go against how we developed as a species. It is to do the tango when the biological universe is doing the box waltz. 

There are examples of extreme love or altruism, in which someone risks his or her life for another, even strangers. These things don’t happen very often–cooperation needs to pay off–but when they do, they sometimes make headlines. The ultimate example, perhaps, is Jesus dying for us on the poignant Cross. Nothing is more spectacular than the idea that someone, Christ, has ALREADY died so that you won’t have to. Even so, you still must believe the proposition and join a collaborative enterprise, the church, to affirm your conviction. The demands of social cooperation will not be denied. 

This is why love and hate are complementary sides of the same wooden nickel. To love is generally to hate: love of one group is defined as hatred of another. If I hate someone, I am likely to love not only myself and find approval in my group but dislike the hated one and put him in a vile category with others. If I hate X because X is a jerk, that makes no sense unless there is a group of cooperating jerks. 

 It is possible that when you and I are dying, some loved one will tell us that they wish they could die for us. But they can’t. We die alone, thanks to another feat of speciation: that of separate bodies. In fact, our living capacity for collaboration, the basis of love, is an attempt to overcome the problem of separate bodies and minds. We are good enough at it so that love comes to be one of our top values. 

Jesus had another great idea. He came from the small town of Nazareth and by implication valued it over big cities like Jerusalem, Rome, and Carthage. He was onto something. In small towns, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “they know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Small towns breed long-time associations, unlike the one-night stands of the cities. Long-term cooperation is much more likely, as you will see the person you might be tempted to betray the very next day. 

Little towns are loving places. 

Collaborative love is more possible in villages, so no wonder Jesus liked them. He not only knew his theology but also his demography–and biology. He wasn’t Jesus of Athens, but of Nazareth. 

Yet let us suppose one of us has had a vision of love: some blinding light in which all things in the universe became one super-loved entity, where everything turns into the affection of Bambi’s Mother. This is a way of saying that in this vision, everything was in collaboration, for that’s where love comes from. 

Given its natural origins, can it truly support such ideas as mystical wholeness and romantic completion? At the level of feelings and impulse, it surely can–social cooperation is bred in our bones. But if you think love comes from God or the stars or the ether, you might want to think again. Love is what allows us to study weasels, perhaps (who knows?) as a potential cure for cancer. 

And yet: suppose you believe that God in an act of Supreme Love raised Jesus from the grave. That’s an important belief, but it isn’t a factual one, as there is no empirical way to settle it. If you wonder if the umbrella is in the southwest corner of the living room, you can look. No way you can go back to see if Christ’s stone was rolled away. No, belief in the love of the Resurrection is a SOCIAL belief and entails what group you will join. If such belief makes you a certain type of loving person, then Jesus rose from the grave. 

But note: if you are a loving person, you are doomed to be a cooperative animal. Lovers don’t defect.  Biology rules; all else drools. Love is overrated. Groupthink is underestimated.