Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
bell hooks on moving towards a culture of love
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I thought this article in Lions Roar was interesting and worth citing, because many Buddhist teachers don’t really talk about love very much. She cites quite a few other authors and its light on implementation and heavy on concept, but I like the idea.
https://www.lionsroar.com/toward-a-worldwide-culture-of-love/
1
Comments
@Kerome , I took the liberty of capitalising the woman's name in the thread title, because it's a proper noun, and I'll be honest, I wondered what on earth bell hooks had to do with moving towards a culture of love... what, do we take the bells off, and hang little hearts from the hooks instead, or something...?
Personally, I had never heard of the woman, so I didn't make any connection with the title being connected to a person.
So... that's why....
Aha... I had left it uncapitalised because she is one of those people who doesn’t want their name to be capitalised... you will note in the article it is not caps either... I know, it’s a bit strange for those people who like their grammar proper.
Yes, bell hooks doesn't capitalize her name.
So it's a personally-spiritual decision, not necessarily a Grammarly-correct one. God save me from the precious politically-correct. Sheeesh... rolleyes.
"For many Western seekers, the feeling that we had failed to create a culture of peace and justice led us back to an introspective search of our intimate relations, which more often than not were messy and full of strife, suffering, and pain. How could any of us truly believe that we could create world peace when we could not make peace in our intimate relationships with family, partners, friends, and neighbors?"
"Dominator thinking and practice relies for its maintenance on the constant production of a feeling of lack, of the need to grasp. Giving love offers us a way to end this suffering—loving ourselves, extending that love to everything beyond the self, we experience wholeness."
Thanks for sharing Kerome!
I don't want to derail the thread but I like to make a distinction between politeness and political correctness. Politeness has to do with a personal attitude one has to treat others with kindness and respect, political correctness has to do with forcing others to act the way you want them to.
I'm pretty anti PC but I think since Kerome intentionally used the lower case version in his thread title and bell hooks actually wants her name spelled that way, the proper thing to do is to respect their decisions and leave it lower case.
Not really that strange. Like the celebrated poet, e.e.cummings.
I'm glad to know she's still around, sharing her thoughts and her work. Thanks for posting this, OP!
Regarding the article itself. I agree with the general gist of the piece, I like the terms respect and kindness better than love. Maybe its too gooey for me or it has all sorts of other connotations in English. What the world needs now, is love, sweet love. Its the only thing that there's just too little of. No not just for some, but for everyone. But I also want to note a few points of disagreement.
I think her narrative of love vs domination is a false dichotomy. I can think of one common third option, that of secularism. The idea that we all have a right to our own beliefs and that none of us has a right to impose those beliefs on another. You don't have to love someone to not dominate them.
The notion that 30 years ago western Buddhism was akin to being a leftist, like it isn't still that today. Western Buddhism is self selected left like gun clubs are self selected right. In that same vein, the left doesn't have a monopoly on love. All the ways she talks about love expressing itself are distinctly politically left. I'd say that the left puts a greater emphasis on it and draws a much wider circle with who is included, but I know lots of non leftists who are quite comfortable with expressions of love. I'm thinking about my Trump supporting redneck brother in law and some of his friends, he had his 40th birthday last summer and his daughter made a video of it, in it two of his close male friends unflinchingly expressed their love for him directly into the camera that they knew others would see. My Trump supporting Aunt is constantly posting on Facebook about taking care of the children and seeing disabled people as being fully human. Or videos of people being self sacrificial to help others.
More directly to the statement that Buddhist teachers don't really talk about love all that much. Maybe we're listening to different teachers because I hear it being talked about all the time. Perhaps Tibetan teachers talk a lot more about compassion rather than love specifically.
I'll end with a bit of caution about one of the ways I notice an overly focused approach of love with a quote by Lama Jampa Thaye, "Just because your views are compassionate, and the Buddha's views are compassionate, doesn't mean your views are Buddha's views".
Noted.
I enjoyed this article and the way it connects Buddhism, love, and social engagement. I think that what she's talking about is what led me to become politically and socially engaged in the first place. I think in many cases, developing compassion, empathy, and love will naturally inspire one to address the suffering of others when possible, and that many of the ways love is expressed coincides with what we'd label ‘leftist’ political and social movements precisely because such movements are often motivated by love and a desire to protect and uplift others. They're less focused on 'me' and more on 'us' in the sense of all of our lives and predicaments being interconnected.
Love compels us to move away from things like greed, selfishness, and competition and towards generosity, compassion, and cooperation. That's at least why I was drawn towards social engagement and more to left-leaning politics, because that's where love and compassion directed me. A mind suffused with love, for example, will see someone struggling with injury or illness within a system that makes it difficult for them to afford and access care and be inspired to help, whether through charity or through supporting a more accessible and universal healthcare system.
That doesn't mean I think that only people who are political active or on the left end of the political spectrum are capable of love, only that I see why she connects love to the end of domination, and how that tends towards movements and ideas that we associate with the label 'leftist' today. Alternatives to capitalism. Universal healthcare. Addressing climate change. Gender equality. Black Lives Matter. Etc. Because much of that domination is rooted in fear and anger and greed. Systems and institutions and cultures have been built to protect what we have from others and to maintain positions of privilege for certain segments of the population, and love compels us to confront and end those things because of the suffering they engender—from sexism and racism to imperialism and militarism and the profit motive.
I'd even go so far as to say that, after studying and practicing in multiple spiritual traditions, I've come to the conclusion a truly spiritual person who follows the underlying message of their respective faiths will necessarily be empathetic, inclusive, and ultimately, intersectional in their politics, but more importantly in their actions regardless of what their politics are. I think this can be seen from the lives of people like Giro Seno'o, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero, Malcolm X, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gustavo Gutierrez, MLK Jr., Rachel Held Evans, and countless others. As Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr puts it:
Love moves us to act against suffering and injustice, because love motivates up to try and heal rather than harm. Love moves us to swim against the current of what she terms "dominator thinking and practice," which "relies for its maintenance on the constant production of a feeling of lack, of the need to grasp"; and that conversely, "Giving love offers us a way to end this suffering—loving ourselves, extending that love to everything beyond the self, we experience wholeness" and through that "we are healed." And that love can be expressed in many ways, not just in the realm of the political. It can be expressed in any number of daily personal interactions and small acts of kindness and generosity.
Humanistic Buddhism comes to mind...
It reminds me of that basketball player Metta World Peace. The only time I've ever seen him was when he was in a punch up on the court.....Metta World Peace indeed......
Her article reminds me of the topic of the most recent episode of On Being, which I think is perfectly summarized by Vincent Harding's line: "Love trumps doctrine every time."
A well-written piece @jason, you’ve neatly summed up what drew me to the article in the first place, although I don’t think I could have articulated it as well.