Discussion on:

Q&A: Stephen Asma, philosopher, on why we can't love all humankind

No Room at All

How could I love her
And not love our kind?
How could I think
To put them out of mind;
The SOB's
Who cheated me last week at the market place,
The stinking rapper shouting in my face,
The righteous sinners, temples air conditioned year around,
Who proudly pray on holy ground?
How could I love and call my feeling true?
How could I love her, friend,
And not love you?

I'll have to show my passport at deaths border post;
They'll ask the same things that they ask of most,
How things are 'cross the line,
What folks are doing now to pass the time,
And would I go back if I had the chance?
It doesn't take a warning glance;
They want to know if now's the day
To press a button, make it go away.
Just how much hatred must they hear to make that so?
I vote for love, I do not want to know.

The Bible got it wrong, I'm told,
The story edited before it had got old:
Sodom was not a nice place to live,
But Abraham bet God to give
Them another chance if he could find
Ten refugees with something kind to say
About the bastards who chased them all away.
The Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth.
For what that's worth.

Now I don't know
If thirty six is going to do the job.
If I was one, I wasn't worth it, that's for sure,
But no one said a lammed vavnik* has to be all that pure;
He might just have to love the human race,
Not flinch from looking all its faults right in the face,
And if I loved her should I not as well
Love people only love could keep from Hell?
It seems to me of late,
That leaves no room at all for hate.

[author, myself] 2010 revision of a 2002 verse

*36er; Jewish tradition, one of 36 unknown righteous for whose virtue God permits the world to continue to exist.

..."that guy who leaves clever poems about the article in its comments section" I'll love you forever.

My heartbeat brother/sister. YaH theOne is TheInspiration that transcends.

I agree we can't love (or know) everyone. (see Duncan Number) But most folks (far more than half and probably closer to 90-95%) don't mean any harm (at least to total strangers--most individual aggression occurs between people who already know and interact with each other).

Education helps (although real life education into social resource issues such as pollution are painful lessons for the body politic over generations).

I think the idea of 'rights' enshrined in the US Constitution is a good start. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people who talk about rights nowadays talk about their own rights against everyone else; they never talks about everyone else's rights against their own.

Actually, Jesus was quoting from the Torah when he said that. When questioned about it, he responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Keep in mind that Jews and Samaritans in Jesus' day despised each other. Jesus wasn't saying, "Have feelings of love for everyone." He was saying, "Treat everyone with decency, respect, fairness, and kindness, even if you don't like them." The Torah quote (taken in context) says pretty much the same thing. Love as an emotion can't be extended to the whole world, but love as a principle of how to treat people can be.

Love is a word pointing to a reality far beyond that of emotions. The idea of 'equally' loving is one of misdirection. Trying to measure the substance of man in order to apply the mathematical concept of equal - we are all different and that fact makes us share in similarity. We are all 'similarly' confronted by our intrinsic behaviour patterns, ideas etc, at the same time able to apply qualities in response to our observations. Some may appear to have more or less than others. It would be impractical to assess and thus equality is a word perhaps to use with care.

Faced with a need - then meet it. Impartially. One'll unlikely be able to find much use in the ramblings of mankinds concepts at the time of need.

The 'bible' doesn't have to be understood as 'demanding' love, for if the precept of finding awe appreciation and a heartwrenching empathy for The One - Originator - Creator - love if you will, it is quite natural to understand ones fellow living soul equally as near to ones heart as the One, and onesself.
The living of this is 'perhaps' not easy. Forgive me. This is far beyond law assertions and systemised grasp. It is of the life soul.

The poem written, of love, indicates the living soul - the living love.
The mind may rebel and the reason and present setting may place a shade before its' deeper and essential expression, but its light is that at the core of the heart
- make a space in time to allow that inner resonance to yet again become familiar and the present day may become the beginning of the end of a lifelong nightmare of separation. Our oneness is manifest due to our all knowing the One - not that we spawn the conditions to a seemingly permanent need to be surrounded by 'weak'.
So our not being able to love the world is really 'cause we stubbornly will not get to know the one. Apart from our nature as it is, the conditioning of our lifetime, it is not difficult to realise that for the most, we just can't help it, and although not an 'excuse', I hardly feel there is a need for blame - blames and excuses present a side road Away from this issue!

369 - 751

I disagree with "empathy is limited resource". The philosopher is assuming that there is no loving feedback that nourish for other people. Love works in this way. When people receive a touch of love, they respond with love, not necessarily to you now, but they respond, so Love reproduces by itself.

My neighbour is a person I am likely to meet, or possibly even enjoy metting. My neighbour differs from the rest of humankind in that he/she is closer to me than most of the rest. There are varying degrees of closeness, but the reason that I have concluded "patriotism" is a superstition is that living in Northern Virginia, I see very little reason to consider the welfare of people in Ciudad Juarez less important to me than those in El Paso. I suspect that they have a worse government, so to the extent that I care about them, I should try to improve that. But the degree to which I can assist or avoid hurting my neighbour is greater than what I can do for distant persons. On the other hand, this planet belongs to all of humanity AND other life, and there are some things that have nothing to do with merely the benefits to my neighbourhood.
In "The Age of Reason", Thomas Paine condemned as foolish the idea of loving your enemies. I myself take malicious satisfaction from the fact that Hideki Tojo failed in his attempt at seppuku, and therefore died dishonorably, whereas Isoroku Yamamoto, who advised against attacking the USA, died honorably in war.

To base the potential of the human experience of love on genetics and neurochemistry, especially of infants, is to ignore the actual human experience of growing in the capacity to love throughout our lives. Taking the biochemistry of average people and saying that's the best we can do ignores the experience of human aspiration in creating human lives that love greatly. How shortsighted is that? How empirical is that? We are not limited by our biochemistry. There is a growing body of research indicating that our biochemistry is really more limited by our beliefs than the other way around. Shrink our idea of the potential of human love to the biochemistry of infants, or average people not aspiring to grow greatly in their everyday experiences of love, and you will get an infantile and self-limiting idea of love guiding our human experience. If philosophy is supposed to be a guide for our lives, I believe we can do better than that philosophy, Mr. Asma.

If you live in a prosperous environment with good education, jobs, and general outlook, then it's much easier to love thy neighbor. If you are competing for scant resources and every day is a struggle to stay warm, fed, and alive, then Maslow's hierarchy of needs trumps.

to behold someone without judgement and know there is an unseen connection is possible and very doable in fact but it is on a self evident basis only