Is love an emotion or an act? I recently asked this in a student working group where we discuss topics including whether men have a right to contribute to the shaping of public discourse about sexual harassment (appropriate as the #MeToo movement has emerged to inspire and to generate new questions) and how community college students can engage as agentive, conscious scholars even as they are frequently overlooked in discussions about higher ed (see here and here). The question came from a brief paper I’d read by Beth Ferholt, a professor at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, in which she reviewed a book in 2015 about Bakhtinian concepts (who I’ll admit I reference quite liberally) as they frame early childhood education in ambitious and creative new ways. Concepts like polyphony (the presence of multiple voices in a social context or even within an individual), authoring (the notion that each person is responsible for, and contributes to, their future-in-the-making), and answerability (an ethical claim that all people are responsible for their actions in our unique, “once occurrent being” in the world) all appear, and it’s nice to see philosophical approaches to education pave the way for new thinking. Love, according to the author, has an aesthetic (unifying) proposition in dialogic pedagogy, e.g., it is an act of lovingly being with another as this other learns.
So again, is love an emotion or an act? When I posed this question, a great starting point emerged when someone asked, “is this an either/or? Could it be both?” I wondered post facto whether it could even be a project, rather than a single experience. Intriguing and evocative for educational thinking.
This idea emerged back into my consciousness a few days ago when I read an article in Truth-out about a racially motivated and anti-immigrant attack that took place in Boston in May 2016. Characterized as a hate crime, two White men beat a Latino man with a metal bar and urinated on him. They were on record as making the following comment:
Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.
When asked about the attack, the response from President Trump was as follows:
People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.
A flashbulb went off in my head. I wondered: Can a love for one thing – one’s definition of country, for example, or one’s membership in a social group (which often overlap) – generate the predicate of hatred, even almost in a circular, self-sustaining way? Can this kind of love fall be an example of what Bakhtin meant? Is it possible to separate out the circumstances from the events, to challenge the inevitability of a cause-and-effect perspective in which a feeling of love and an act of hate can co-occur and, according to a White nationalist perspective, be raised to a higher value on some strange terms? To play demon’s advocate, this attack might have been less hateful in the assailants’ eyes and more a loving defense of their vision of home, country, and the way of life they see – however, myopically (sorry, my left-y side snuck in there) – is slipping away.
Piero della Francesca, Cupid Blindfolded — detail, c.1460, Basilica di San Francesco, Arezzo
Is this love? Is it love-as-act? It is also rancor, and it evokes violence as well as a dehumanization of the individual upon whom the violence was enacted. Can one make such judgment calls outside of politics? I would say yes, of course…but I wonder that these two criminals might not, however perversely it may sound, agree with me.
