Veronica Alcanda -- The strange behaviour of the love offer

This past spring we have been forced to spend the whole of it in confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For many of us, this confinement has been spent in solitude, which has highlighted the lack of privacy to develop our most vital and human needs, especially that of love, either by defect or by excess.

This reminded me of a study I read some time ago by Freddy Canté, PhD in Economics, on the different points of view of various experts on love. In it he shows that there are many researchers, economists, psychologists and sociologists who have theorised about love, about what it entails, or simply about the need for it in humanity. Many call it the "supply of love" and defend various theories based on its behaviour.

For example, for the universalist thinker Hirschman (1985), love comprises: morality, compliance, trust and civic spirit. He insisted, against orthodoxy, that a social order can be more secure if it is founded on benevolence and love. He argued that the supply of love is not fixed and limited, and, especially, that love is not a resource but a skill (similar to knowledge or human capital).

Public virtue, and higher virtues such as love and altruism, at least in human specimens, are subject to scarcity. Hirschman showed that such behaviour is not depleted by use (as is often the case with exhaustible physical resources), nor could it be increased by persistent use (as is the case with skills and knowledge itself).

Love and similar virtues have a complex and compound behaviour: they tend to atrophy when they are not properly practised and, for that very reason, are prone to disappear in the pursuit of a market interest that expands to all corners of life. However, they can be exhausted when they are practised and invoked to excess. In short, according to him, vicious extremes such as savage capitalism or the Maoist cultural revolution can wither love.

However, for Elster (1999), passion is, in part, a visceral motivation, is beyond the control of the individual and/or the group, and drives directly to action. Passions include emotions (some more raw such as fear and anger, others with negative cognitive referents such as resentment, hatred and revenge, and positive ones such as love). The passions also include hunger, thirst, sexual desire, states of pain, states of drug intoxication, drug craving itself, and madness.

Elster has suggested that human beings are motivated by reason, passion and interest, and insists on locating love within the emotions. Emotions, unlike purely visceral factors (pain, bodily pleasures, thirst and hunger) have cognitive antecedents. Irrational love can therefore exist when we persist in loving someone or something in open contradiction to our beliefs (knowledge that would indicate that it is not worth loving any more).

Adam Smith (1976) showed that sympathy is an inherent capacity of human beings, allowing them to instantly identify with others, even at the risk of neglecting self-interest. Thanks to imagination we can compare ourselves with other human beings and therefore we can put ourselves in their shoes and feel something similar to what they may be feeling (so-called empathy). This is the first step in the formation of moral judgements and in the socialisation of individuals. But the interest of society is very vague and abstract, so individuals sympathise with other individuals or small groups nearby, but not with society as a whole, and this applies to love as well.

Professor Sen (1977) emphasised that sympathy consists of a concern for others, which directly affects our own well-being: for example, he states that knowing that others are being tortured makes the one who experiences sympathy sick. And he does not hesitate to point out that sympathy can be a selfish behaviour, since our well-being depends on the well-being of others, and can be understood as an externality.

Sen preferred to opt for commitment: the action of helping or fellowshipping, not mere sentimentality. He clarifies that commitment exists when a person acts to stop an injustice. Such behaviour is unselfish (involving sacrifice, acting against one's own welfare) and, in particular, is an ethical meta-preference. However, Sen insists, commitments are not universal, but rather fragmented into groups such as: family, community, guild, company, party, class, country, etc.

It is precisely in studying cooperation or solidarity in collective or public causes that authors such as Elster have shown the importance of altruistic individuals. For this philosopher, the Christian commandment to "love your neighbour as yourself" is basically equivalent to Kant's imperative (unconditional duty): not to treat other people as means to our ends, but to treat them as we would like to be treated ourselves.

Be that as it may, what is clear in Canté's work is the inherent need of human beings to love and be loved, as well as to be able to socialise and share our lives with those around us, and therefore, how the reclusion of last spring has made almost all of us rethink our pre-COVID-19 lives.

Hopefully this has not left us with emotional scars and will not happen again, but if it did, I don't think we would handle it in the same way on a personal level.

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