Neighborly Love in 2020
Keep your mind in hell and don’t despair. –Saint Silouan
Trust, solidarity. These are the essential elements of society. Over the last several weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, I have observed how much the concept of solidarity has entered public discourse. Most notably, journalist and commentator David Brooks has spoken about it on the PBS NewsHour and written about it in op-ed pieces for The New York Times like “Who is Driving Inequality? You are” and “Screw This Virus!” As with many things, one doesn’t appreciate solidarity until it’s gone. Right now we stand at the threshold of a pervasive “heart of darkness,” threatened by gun and knife violence, terrorism, potential nuclear war, and political divisiveness. All of these indicate our society’s absence of trust. Yet, only last year a bio-pic about Mr. Fred Rogers was produced and screened domestically and internationally. The simultaneous discussion of neighborly love and mass violence points to an important tension in modern life, brought to the foreground in discussions on community and solidarity in the COVID-19 crisis.
Jos Speybrouck The Good Samaritan
The love of one’s neighbor—or of the stranger, the enemy, the other, or humanity in general—has a complex genealogy in the Christian “West,” one that we could describe in the most sweeping terms as having three distinct phases: 1) hospitality 2) tolerance 3) celebration. “Hospitality,” in which the stranger is welcomed, is the biblical model. But, the biblical model assumes historically-embedded communities of conformity within in-groups. The phase of “tolerance,” which emerged in the late middle ages into the modern period, allowed a distanced coexistence between groups. Tolerating but also sidelining “strangers” was the characteristic experience, for example, of Jews in European-based Christian communities, as noted by social theorist Georg Simmel. Jews were increasingly a needed, but oftentimes reviled, part of what Durkheim noted as the “division of labor” or the cooperative workings of society. Alongside modernization and urbanization, Jews were seen as potentially threatening “others” in the Christian community.
The sociological theorist Ferdinand Tönnies described the nineteenth century’s relatively rapid modernization as the historical transition into industrial and urban life. Sociologically, culturally, and psychologically this suggests a change from a uniform existence of strong cultural ties and trust in small town life (Gemeinschaft) into pluralistic cities (Gesellschaft). For sociologist Emile Durkheim, this transition provided hope for organic solidarity, and historically this gave way to philosophies of pluralistic democracy and celebrations of diversity. But within this “celebratory” phase, the Gemeinschaft mindset still lingers.
Pluralism is good, right? Durkheim and Tönnies both observed that there is a degree of isolation, loneliness, and disconnect—or Durkheim’s concept, anomie—present in modern, industrial, pluralistic, mass society. However, lingering in the collective psyche of Western modern culture are the remnants of Gemeinschaft: both the tendency to absorb “others” into sameness, and the fascist element of the violent destruction of the “other” when they are seen as such and as the enemy.
Today’s populism, tribalism, and nativism (new iterations of Gemeinschaft) relate to “otherness” through celebration and often emerge with this violent response. Is it a denial of otherness that leads to a reaction of violence? Does this reflect the growing pains of social integration and progress? Or is it a reflection of an apocalyptic destructiveness? The humanist love of “humankind” seems to arise precisely alongside this kind of celebration—yet this very “love” of humankind, though rather winsome, may actually result in a naïve and potentially destructive Gemeinschaft tendency.
As Gillian Rose identified decades ago, there is a myopic, anodyne “love ethic” which pervades a lot of popular discourse, educational paradigms, and products of the culture industry that hypocritically claims to embrace “otherness.” This discourse forgets the annoying aspects of real love of neighbor, and the hard work of living in community. Gillian Rose importantly highlighted the discrepancy between what people say about this “love ethic” and its social and political realities.
What cultural narratives or outlooks work against this kind of disconnect? The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880) sheds light on these questions. The novel includes extended dialogues on the psychological, theological, and sociological dimensions of modernization. Relatedly, it was written at a sociologically significant time in Eastern European history—the liminal period of modernization and the debates about the eclipse of Christianity into the “optimism” of secular theories of societal governance via radical systems of thought. It was a time of both great suffering and intellectual vibrancy.
Dostoevsky reflects on an idealized humanism in the voice of the pastoral Fr. Zossima, who relays a story of a doctor in an early chapter of the novel:
“I love humanity,” he said, “but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,” he said, “I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity . . . and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom.”
Misanthropic humanism presents its own problem here: one can love “in the abstract,” but how can that energy be derived and sustained to extend charity in the messiness of the real love of neighbor?
In a passage that anticipates the problem with today’s “love ethic,” Fr. Zossima reflects on how the radical optimist and humanist, and lover of humankind, may become threatened by the very presence of the “other“:
In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.
Fr. Zossima gently counters this with the difficult journey of real love—which looks more like tolerance than today’s celebratory love ethic, or as Fr. Zossima characterizes it, a conflation of inconstant romantic allure and utopic “love in dreams”: “Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage.” Today’s sense of a thin “celebration” may corroborate with Dostoevsky’s sense of a “love in dreams”—it seems to require a spark of attraction, fascination, and entertainment. Real charity is difficult and requires “labor and fortitude.” Active love is the hard work of “striving” to love in the face of great annoyance, weariness, and fatigue, always pointing toward the good, hoping for the good, directing toward the good. As Rowan Williams has explored in Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (2011), it is the difficult and awkward embrace of neighborly obligation and responsibility, rather than instrumentalized connections of self-interest and convenience.
So, what does this mean for a sociology of trust and building community? The building blocks of civil society are trust, solidarity, and bonds/relationships. The mortar that holds these building blocks together are institutions like economics, culture, and religion. But from the point of view of a religious ethic, an orientation of “love” must recognize its own limitations. A humility about the limits of love is an important part of recognizing our need for a spiritual orientation. Our embodied and barriered nature that separates us from each other (original sin?)—something that secular ideologies of common humanity forget—may prevent us from being “good neighbors.” In Rowan Williams’s interpretation, Dostoevsky’s famous choice of “Christ before the truth” reflects the reality that it is the divine in us—not the human—that draws us to be responsible for one another in ways that are supra-human. This is our freedom from the realm of necessity and the viciousness of selfishness and ego. If we want to obey the divine spirit of connection and solidarity, we must disobey the selfishness in ourselves. As Fr. Zossima reminds us, when we acknowledge our human weakness then we are available to the Other’s face concretely displayed in our neighbor.
Dostoevsky had the reflective, and perhaps honest, wisdom to jot down in his final notebooks, “We are all nihilists.” Over the last several weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, we may have been shocked out of a sense of complacency and nihilism, and we are regrouping in a desperate need for neighborly love and solidarity. But this crisis has shown our previous absence of trust and solidarity and a very present threat of nihilism. These are symptoms of latent authoritarianism, disconnect, and conflict in late capitalist culture and have resulted in outright violence in our streets, houses of worship, shopping malls, and schools. Dostoevsky’s message reveals an understanding of the human capacity for good and evil. As Robert Bird (2012) reflects in his biography of Dostoevsky, “None of [Dostoevsky’s] protagonists are ever granted a final illumination of his ‘true’ face . . . [his] characters exist towards their images, but only as exempla of spirit-made-flesh and flesh-made-spirit.” Fr. Zossima’s miraculous divinity is that he is profoundly human.
The lessons drawn from Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky’s own life suggest that faith should never make us comfortable. We should be especially hesitant when that faith comes packaged in a haughty confidence in a naïve “love ethic.” Like the confession with Fr. Zossima, the moment we know we are so incapable of love is the moment we become truly loving. Symbolically potent, the words of Fr. Zossima are spoken by the brother Ivan (an atheist), later in the book to Alyosha, in the chapter just before the novel’s famous Grand Inquisitor section:
I must make you one confession . . . I could never understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance . . . For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.
In the reflexive and agonistic voice of Ivan, Dostoevsky criticizes the Romanticist preservation of a naïve version of Christian ethics in modernity. The “good intention” of charity undoes itself in its impulse for the benefit-driven “profit” of salvation. According to Robert Bird, this Romanticism “is an unsustainable consolation.” Dostoevsky calls us to a deeper charity, an engaged extension of an earthly understanding and compassion that is not instrumentalized into the (thin) exchange for salvation. In Fr. Zossima’s final homily before his death, he states, “he who has faith has faith in God’s people.” Faith moves out from the individual’s self-consumption, but not in a naïve way. Atheism is internally self-enclosed, self-obsessed. However, faith must also encounter doubt before it moves to active love. Active love counters atheism since active Christian love (in Zossima’s rendering) is able to see that the house has many rooms (John 14:2)—even doors open to those who deny Christ. The fact that the door is still open is the good news of Christ. Gracefully, the good news of the Christ affirms this greatest human principle of solidarity via Christian Love—that even those who attack Christianity still may come to practice its ideals. The Zossima Christian, challenged by the demands of neighborly love, may doubt, but never despairs.
Sarah Louise MacMillen is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Peace, Justice and Conflict Resolution Minor Program at Duquesne University. She teaches and publishes in the areas of culture, peace studies, theory, gender, and religion.