The Art of Loving
When Practicing How to Love Becomes the Work of a Lifetime
Back in 2008, my old friend Sandra lent me a book — gamely purchased from a sidewalk vendor for fifty cents — that would change my life; fifteen years later, I wish this book would still change me more.
The Art of Loving, written by psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm back in 1956, stakes out in its first paragraph that it “wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.”
(Does anyone dare question whether the qualities of Humility, Courage, Faith and Discipline sit high on the endangered list in our culture?)
Fromm then delivers body blows to our popular conception of Love. Like this one:
“Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.”
Or this:
“In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all of our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to the art of loving.”
OF COURSE this is true. (And perhaps Capitalism’s primary collateral damage?)
Fromm goes on to suggest that unless you love everyone — including yourself — you can’t actually love anyone. That doesn’t mean you should board a bus and proclaim your love for the driver and the other passengers (especially in our heavily armed country) but you might emanate a proportionate regard for that driver for getting you where you need to go, while recognizing the inherent and deserved dignity of your fellow passengers, who — like you — are all just trying to arrive, safely and comfortably, at their final destination.
Once I accepted that Love is in fact a productive orientation, I then conversely wondered whether the same might be true of Hatred; might it be impossible to hate someone without also, on some level, hating yourself?
I received my answer like a baseball bat to the face.
I had spent my adulthood hating a mid-sized arena of people, people who were mostly (and luckily) in my past. Like the negative bedside-manner doctor who, without warning, brutally reset my broken arm when I was four. (And then gaslit me for calling out in agony.) Or the band of drunk teenagers that assaulted and terrorized me when I was eight. Or my high-school principal who came to symbolize the self-serving, surface-oriented values of our corrupt society. All of them (and a few other choice figures) cast long shadows over me. Meanwhile, I’ve always been a news junkie, which further generated a laundry list of hate-ees in the public sphere. The only people I hated more than the NeoCons for selling us the invasion of Iraq, were the Congressional Democrats who capitulated to their deadly boondoggle. So when The Art of Loving first cracked me open back in 2008, it stung to realize how my righteous anger (anger that I topped off and nurtured for years) led to my pathetically developing hate-filled, para-social relationships with so many of these figures — like some evil child watching Barney and Elmo and telling them through the TV that I hoped they get run over by a truck. I had misguidedly convinced myself that it was virtuous to maintain my garden of rage toward people fueling things like our Military Industrial Complex, or the environmental predation of our planet (by our corporate patriarchy that forever finds new ways to punish the weakest among us). While these are objectively important problems, that’s so not the point; Fromm’s point — reduced by a more contemporary philosopher — is that haters gonna hate.
values Success, Prestige, Money, and Power over Love.
I was raised Catholic. And while practicing that religion didn’t work out for me, reading The Art of Loving ironically reconnected me with the basic tenets of Christianity (which I might clarify as “Christianity Classic”) most especially Compassion, and most importantly toward myself. And once I opened the door to Compassion, I consciously felt — for the first time in my adult life — the crushing and corrosive weight of the anger I had been carrying throughout my adulthood. (Which is not something that people who love themselves typically do.) Once I could feel that accruing and exhausting burden, I literally couldn’t bear to lug it around any longer. Not even another minute. And so I sat down on my couch, closed my eyes, and began consciously forgiving — just in my own heart and mind — all of the people whom I felt had wronged me, moving through my life, decade by decade, until I just couldn’t think of anyone else to forgive. I’m not kidding when I tell you that I could literally feel that vileness draining out of me. Then I moved on to those public figures whom I felt had wronged our country and our planet. And when I was done, I felt light and airy but also edgily unsure of who I even was anymore. (It was another dull and concussive blow to accept just how much of my emotional landscape had been consumed by negativity.) Yet I took heart in knowing that I was clearing out space for better stuff.
I’d later come to think of this as my emotional recovery, and a form of sobriety. Unfortunately, relapse is sometimes a part of sobriety and mine happened in 2016 amid rushed and furious trips between construction projects in Beacon and Brooklyn, dealing with cost overruns and setbacks in both places. While I now understand how financial strain, stress and frenzy can create in me the perfect ecosystem to foster regrowth of a negative emotional landscape, back in 2016 I failed to tag my growing anger (again!) toward the Democratic Establishment for its persistent failure to properly assess and combat a grievous and rising threat. Drop by drop, that anger accumulated until it exploded early in the morning of November 9, setting off in me a blast furnace of rage. And when the Springsteen-like endurance of my own fury finally burned itself out, I just felt exhausted. And demoralized. And sick. That’s when I understood, in the most visceral and defeated way, that I had relapsed.
Once again, that realization left me not wanting to spend one more minute groveling on my hands and knees. So I forgave the necessary parties, (and party) and this time I also forgave myself for having not better rolled with this unprecedented blow to the public interest. I then understood — again on a visceral and self-protecting level — that I could never allow myself to hate the president-elect.
In the event you’re a fellow liberal now puking up your kombucha and kale, my refusal to descend into a pit of hatred wall-papered with his likeness hardly excuses the violent and destructive catastrophes he has unleashed upon us; rather his seeming total lack of any kind of loving orientation explains for me how he perfectly honed in, like a heat-sinking missile, on the white-hot center of our base, transactional society with its surface-oriented values. As a straight, white, male landowner, I further recognize myself as an outsized beneficiary in our corrupt society — that inarguably values Success, Prestige, Money and Power over Love — and that I bear some responsibility for reinforcing our grim status quo, including my consumption and underwriting of our corporate-media swamp out of which he rose.
Now, seven years later, here we all are, still scared, and polarized as fuck. If Erich Fromm (a German Jew who fled the Nazis) were here, I suspect he’d insist that each of us work to remain interconnected and compassionate, that our cancer of authoritarianism could never be fought into remission with an intellectual hatred overly steeped in The New York Times and All Things Considered. And that anyone who focuses solely on protecting themselves — or just their own family, clan, or Red or Blue team — will not only decimate whatever might remain of their own loving orientation, they’ll likely be left feeling (in a best-case scenario) comfortably numb. Any way forward not rooted in the indisputable fact that we are ALL brothers and sisters — most especially now, when the bell just couldn’t be tolling louder — is immature, reckless, and doomed to fail.
The sad and unfortunate truth is that practicing the art of loving goes against the negative-incentivized grain of our culture. For me, it required active deprogramming. And all these years later, nurturing and reinforcing my own loving orientation remains a work in progress. I still make routine forays to the lands of stress, pettiness, and sometimes even anger, but they tend to be day-trips and I’ve gotten better at allowing my true self to return before responding — instead of reacting. And whenever I become conscious of losing touch with my own practice, I retreat to the pages of The Art of Loving, searching for answers like a Christian turning to scripture. I can’t think of any angle of emotional higher consciousness that this slim book doesn’t address, and it has never failed to guide me back onto the path. If Catholicism once hammered into me that I am a sinner, (Talk about focusing on the negative!) Fromm more constructively helped me accept that I am — and can only ever be — imperfect, while forever doing my best to do better.
Okay. So right now I’d like to sincerely thank you for having read this far. I know what else you could be doing, and the fact that you are still here makes me wonder if you’d be interested in perusing The Art of Loving. If so, here’s a great place to get a copy.
If, like me, you’ve never studied philosophy, there are a handful of passages that might feel thick, and that you can totally skim. I further wish to call out one single passage that did NOT age well: Fromm describes “the homosexual deviation” as a failure to attain union, stating, “The homosexual suffers from the pain of never resolved separateness; a failure, however, which he shares with the average heterosexual who cannot love.”
In Fromm’s defense, The Diagnostic Statistical Manual would continue to list homosexuality as a disorder FOR ANOTHER SEVENTEEN YEARS. Since Fromm was commenting on an established bit of dumbfuckery in his field at that time, I’m unwilling to let this single sour note from 1956 consciousness cancel out his symphony of emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, a greater context from the 1950s translates amazingly well: Fromm’s critique of our collective obsession and worship of all that was newfangled during that era dovetails with our current obsession and worship of all that is newfangled and addicting from Big Tech that, on balance, appears hellbent on decimating what’s left of Humility, Courage, Faith and Discipline in our culture. Perhaps — like exhausted addicts who just can’t bear to cop any longer — we might ultimately slouch toward sobriety by erecting healthier boundaries with our smartphones, setting the intention of putting those necessary devices in the service of greater (and more positive) human connection.
Because in the end, after all that is built and demolished and built up again, after all of the laughter and pain and wild discoveries, after all of the diagnoses and recoveries, the head-on collisions and swerving near misses, the joy and the grief, the agony and exhilaration, the wild chances taken — even if we are now Icarus falling — my primary goal remains the same: Minimize the frequency and duration of ever losing touch with my productive orientation, while trying to better live the rich and rewarding ideals that come when moving through life with mindfulness, love, and respect toward everyone, most especially myself. For despite our misguided society’s relentless and punishing worship of the false gods of Success, Prestige, Money, and Power, I’m convinced that we could still fix our coordinates on survival if we elevated our human relationships, if we always recognized the inherent dignity in EVERYONE, and if we moved forward together, imperfectly, with love. Because at the end of the day — however many days we have left — there is, and can only ever be, Love.
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