Love and Virtue
Does love have anything to do with virtue?
Yes, yes and
yes
!
Love and Honesty
It is impossible to imagine genuine love in the absence of honesty. For love to be genuine, it must be an accurate assessment of particular traits within another human being. If the person that we claim to “love” constantly lies to us or falsifies his actions, then whatever perception we have of that person that causes us to love him are incorrect.
Since that which causes us to love
is incorrect, our “love” must thus be invalid.
To analogize this, imagine that you work for me and I pay you in cash. However, when you try to spend your earnings, you discover that I have paid you with counterfeit
bills. As a result, I have received value through your work, but you have not received value through my payment. My dishonesty has thus generated a false value for you, because if you knew that I was going to pay you with counterfeit money, you would not have worked for me to begin with.
Since the truth would have produced an opposite action in you – a rejection
of employment, rather than an acceptance of it – your diligent behaviour was as unjustified as your interpretation of my honesty.
In the same way, if I tell you that I am courageous, and virtuous, yet hide sordid aspects of my life from you, drink in secret and so on – and you believe me – then you will feel more positive towards me than if I told you the truth.
Since our emotions are so directly dependent upon our perceptions and are so foundational to our experience of the world, someone who lies to us is fundamentally manipulating our experience of the world.
Since our emotions
also alter our bodies biochemically, a liar who gets close to us manipulates our biochemistry as surely as if he were drugging us directly.
Thus our own emotional stability, which is a key part of a peaceful and happy life, requires as a bare minimum general honesty
from those around us.
Love and Courage
Fundamentally, courage is not bravery with regards to another human being, but rather with regards to moral ideals.
My wife, though wonderfully courageous in many areas, has a certain weakness when it comes to social gatherings.
For instance, she has an ex-friend who is involved in a highly dysfunctional relationship. Recently, when we were at a party, we were told that this woman had gotten married to her boyfriend. Christina exclaimed: “Oh, that’s
great
!”
I was somewhat surprised, to say the least, and really put my foot in it by saying to her in front of everyone:
“Really? I didn’t think you were such a big fan of their relationship.”
(It’s always good to have something to talk about during the drive home.)
Of course, I was not particularly concerned with Christina’s disavowal of her true feelings in company – particularly since the woman in question showed up at the party later on. I was more concerned with the fact that she placed the perceptions of others above the truth of her own feelings – feelings which were accurate and valid. I was most concerned, however, with the fact that she did not seem
conscious
of her reversal of values. If she had expressed approval with her friend standing right behind her, I would have understood her caution – however, there was no compelling and immediate reason to express approval of something she did not in fact approve of.
The reason that this troubled me, of course, was that I really didn’t like the idea that Christina
could betray her values – even in this minor manner – for the sake of the possible disapproval of the people we were talking to, who we see maybe once every year or two.
This also made me feel insecure, since Christina
and I both hold trusting our own feelings as a high value – as well as honesty of course. I really disliked the idea that the virtues we believed in and practiced were sort of a “private world” that had nothing to do with the “real world” of everyone else.
You know that feeling you get if you are dating a woman who never wants to introduce you to her friends
? You get this uneasy sensation that you are kind of “below the radar,” or something to be hidden relative to her life as a whole. You are, in fact, a sort of embarrassment, in that she obviously feels that she must be “slumming” in some manner. If she felt that you would enhance her status with her friends, she would drag you to see them against your will if she had to.
When I was 17, I worked in a day-care centre teaching a room full of kids. I became friends
with a woman who was slightly older, and was just going through a divorce. Over dinner one evening, she told me about her psychic abilities. Because I was 17, my hormones and I listened attentively.
Over a departmental lunch the next day, I mentioned her psychic abilities as part of a more general conversation. She became completely red-faced, and chastised me afterwards for bringing that up.
So many of us have this kind of “private world” that we openly disavow, scorn and reject when we are in the company of others. This is a form of cowardice, since we abandon what is precious to us for fear of the disapproval or rejection of others.
In other words, we reject ourselves rather than be rejected by others.
This avoids the pain of humiliation, but also keeps us trapped in an underworld of people we know will humiliate us if we are honest.
The reason that this habit is so hard to respect or love
is because it involves so many contradictions.
If a certain belief or habit is truly valuable, it does not lose its value in the presence of others. Real money
does not lose its value in the presence of counterfeit currency – quite the opposite is true in fact.
Conversely, if the opinions of others is the best methodology for determining our values
, then those values cannot exist except through the opinions of others – thus there should be nothing to hide in the presence of others, since no values have been accepted or practised without their prior approval.
It is hard to respect someone who wants to
“have his cake and eat it too” by holding private virtues that he consistently disavows in public. We tend to shy away from these sorts of people not only because of their hypocrisy, but also because these sorts of contradictory values make raising children enormously difficult.
If you ask a woman to evaluate a particular situation and she openly says,
“Oh, I have no idea, I’ll have to check with all my friends,” then there is no possibility of equality in her relationship with her friends. If all her friends hold the same values, then they will be empty echoes of endless cross-referencing, with no ideas or opinions being generated at all.
At least one of her friends
must be able to generate opinions, which everyone else then references.
Thus she both prefers and dislikes opinions – she dislikes having her own for fear of disapproval
, and so she must prefer that other people create her opinions for her.
Of course, you never
do
meet people who openly tell you that they have no opinions, but must always ask their friends – and that is why these cowardly evasions are so odious. People always claim that their opinions are both virtuous and true, that they have integrity and are willing to stand up for what they believe in, and then they generally fold at the slightest sign of pressure or disapproval.
The fact that they fold – as we all do at times – does not warn them that they are not actually living their values
, and must more closely examine their companions. Since everyone has a general access to the self-medicating madness of instant mythology, all that people do when they act in a cowardly manner is redefine their actions as virtuous in some manner.
Thus a woman may say:
“I know that I said that, but I didn’t want to offend people (
I’m nice
), and besides, people don’t change (
I’m practical
), and we were enjoying their hospitality (
I’m not ungrateful
), and the person in question was going to show up (
I’m prudent
) – and besides, yesterday you said X, Y and Z (
you’re hypocritical
).”
This is why a lack of integrity
tends to make us uneasy – because it always ends up being an attack on truth in general and our integrity in particular.
Not too relaxing…
Love and Sustainability
We do not call a tire
“good” if it ruptures right after being installed. “Quality” has a lot to do with sustainability. A bridge is not of high quality if it collapses six minutes after being built.
In many ways, virtue
is fundamentally about
sustainable behaviour
. Clearly, lying is not very sustainable behaviour – particularly in a long-term relationship – because reality is always opposing the words of the liar. As “intimacy” grows in a relationship and more and more people get involved in the couple’s interactions, lies become less and less sustainable.
Similarly, cowardice
is also unsustainable in a relationship, since cowardice is always supported by justifications (lies) which reframe cowardice as “courage.” This creates an unstable situation where cowardly behaviour is both condemned and praised, resulting in highly inconsistent behaviour.
Integrity, of course, is all about sustainable behaviour – its opposite, conformity
, is all about seeking the approval of others, which produces highly inconsistent behaviour. People inflict a need for conformity on us as children by attacking us for independent thought and evaluation, because any such thought reveals their hypocrisy. Thus conformist habits always stem from the desire of those who hold power over us to blind us to their inconsistent and hypocritical actions. This is why conformity and integrity are so fundamentally opposed.
If we love
certain characteristics or virtues, then clearly our love will stabilize and increase to the degree to which those characteristics or virtues are stable, and increase.
Love and Security
Security is an essential ingredient for intimacy. Security results from a feeling of predictability and safety, which in turn arises from consistent benevolence on the part of others. If we are randomly attacked by our lover, we can never feel safe or secure. If we have to use a rickety old footbridge to cross a chasm, each wobbly step will be a fearful nightmare.
Why do we stay in relationships
where we do not feel safe and secure? One central reason is that we have a habit of listening to people’s
words
, rather than regarding their
actions
. The old adage “actions speak louder than words” has fallen out of favour in our modern age, but it is essential for evaluating potential relationships of any kind.
Abusive
behaviour always results from a lack of integrity.
If, on a first date, a woman tells you openly that she will attack you whenever she feels insecure, angry or vulnerable – and promises to blame you when you get upset about being attacked – you would be very unlikely to continue dating her.
No, people always tell you that they are acting virtuously, even if their actions completely contradict their stated values. If a woman has a habit of attacking others when she feels anxious, that behaviour can only be maintained
if she redefines her abuse as virtuous in some manner
. She will say that she is only defending herself, or that she has been patient for a long time but “enough is enough,” or that the other party started the conflict, and so on.
If her culpability can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, she then reverts to the secondary defence of abusers, which is to say that it is ignoble to point fingers and play
“the blame game,” that “forgiveness is a virtue,” and “we need to move on now.”
In other words, she will openly state that unjustly attacking others is wrong, and then will unjustly attack others.
This lack of integrity ensures that no one around her will ever feel a consistent sense of security or safety. (In fact, that is exactly what it is
designed
to do, since destabilizing people is an essential prerequisite for controlling them.)
Security and Values
If we accept that integrity
to virtue creates security – and that security is a necessary prerequisite for love – then we can understand why it is so important to have
values in a relationship that both parties can refer to
.
If an agreement can be reached that raised voices and name-calling are inappropriate to a loving relationship
, then if one person yells or name-calls, the other person can object to that behaviour based on values that both parties have accepted.
It is impossible to have security – or integrity
– without shared and objective values.
If I hand you $1,000 and think it is a loan, but you see it as a gift, then I will not perceive you to be acting with integrity
if you never pay the “loan” back – just as you will never perceive me to be acting with integrity if I demand my “gift” back.
Similarly, if a woman holds
“keeping others happy” as a core “value,” then she will view any emotional confrontation or uncomfortable honesty as “rude.”
On the other hand, if she holds
“honesty” as a core value, then she will view a consistent avoidance of necessary confrontations or honesty as “cowardice.”
If a man believes that verbal abuse
is “assertiveness,” then asking him to refrain from verbal abuse is the same as asking him to be a coward – which will never happen, since few if any people will ever voluntarily pursue an action they define as immoral or ignoble.
If a woman believes that nagging
is necessary to get what she wants, then asking her to give up nagging would be like asking her to give up having any needs or preferences, which will never happen.
Following our above methodology, when considering integrity
, we must next ask: “Integrity
to what?
”