LOVE CONVEYS SURVIVAL BENEFITS

Psychiatrist: This is the most marvelous moment of humankind in which to be alive, despite all the calamities that surround us—poverty, pollution, the threats of nuclear war, injustice. That claim is valid. Now, sometimes when people hear me say things like that, they assume that my judgment must have slipped. That perhaps I have lost contact with the reality, which I am professionally dedicated to inculcate in everybody, including myself. 

I suspect that, Chancellor Ignatieff, in his marvelous speech, has never had to face quite the suspicions that a psychiatrist does when he makes the same claims. I’m here to tell you that Chancellor Ignatius is absolutely right, that not only must we do what he says, but we have every possibility of doing so. The reason why this is the most marvelous moment of humankind is that for the first time in our 4,000,000 years of evolution, we have the possibility of producing and distributing enough to go around, not just of things, but of imagination, of opportunity, and all that is required for a truly human fulfillment for every person on this planet. 

The only enemy that humankind has had to face in these 4,000,000 years has been scarcity. For the first 3,000,900 and some thousand years we faced that by mutually taking care of each other. Stone Age peoples, no matter what you’ve been told, became the virtuoso nurturers of this planet. And they remain so, those few that are left today that live by hunting and gathering, treat one another with the most tender loving care. It was only 10 to 12,000 years ago when the revolution of agriculture and animal husbandry introduced the first opportunity to generate surpluses that we became derailed from that loving human course. We began to hoard and then to steal from one another, and over the course of these millennia we have built the cutthroat world in which we now find ourselves. 

We are now faced with a situation when we can only do one thing, and that is to return to those nurturing values of the Stone Age, and once again begin to take care of each other. And of course, the reason is plain. When in the 9th or 10th century Robin Hood was annoying the establishment, there was precious little he could do then to shower Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham with a flight of arrows and then, grabbing Maid Marian by the hand, take off for Sherwood Forest for a cookout. But today, any Robin Hood with a handful of merry men, the information in the Toronto Public Library and a handful of plutonium from anyone of our power plants, can threaten a whole region and a dozen of them might paralyze the world. In other words, we can no longer afford the conditions which generate social revolutionaries who are willing to destroy in order to have their demands met. For that reason, we are being driven back kicking and screaming to the loving values of the Stone Age, and we will be forced soon to readopt them. 
Now when people say, and of course in my profession if they talk about me, they say, well, you know, probably he really has been under too much stress to have such optimism that our problems are soluble. You know he’s probably derailed himself. I am not a derailed shrink. I want you to know that. I am probably out of my country’s 37,000 psychiatrists; I am the only stretch.

Let me just add one thought. This love that we speak about, we should understand what it is. It is not just a feeling. It is not just a tug at the heartstrings. This kind of love is a deed. Ashley Montague has defined this kind of love as “the conferring of survival benefits on the loved one in a creatively enlarging manner. To love is to confer survival benefits in a creatively enlarging manner, sometimes at considerable cost to the lover.” It’s a deed.