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That Four - Letter Word

That Four - Letter Word

As soon as upon a time, the philosophy of love was a high-quality topic for the man of ideas, like Erich Fromm or C. S. Lewis. In recent years, the topic has been relegated to self-help, a genre that many distrust for its propensity to propose easy solutions the place there are none. Self-assist has its uses, however: it neatly undoes the facile ideas of left (we're energyless victims) and right (we now have total company in our lives) alike, and it gives the calming reassurance that others on the market are as tousled as you are.

Now comes the feminist cultural critic Bell Hooks along with her new book of essays, ''all about love bell hooks About Love,'' written in a didactic fashion that will merge moral philosophy with self-help. It is a warm affirmation that love is feasible and an assault on the culture of narcissism and selfishness. ''We yearn to finish the lovelessness that's so pervasive in our society,'' she writes. ''This book tells us the best way to return to love.''

Her finest factors are easy ones. Group -- prolonged family, creative or political collaboration, associateship -- is as necessary because the couple or the nuclear family; love is an artwork that includes work, not just the thrill of attraction; desire might depend upon illusion, but love comes only via painful fact-telling; work and cash have changed the values of affection and neighborhood, and this must be reversed.

In Hooks's view, women have little hope of happiness in a brutal tradition in which they are blindsided because ''most males use psychological terrorism as a strategy to subordinate girls,'' whom they keep around ''to handle all their needs.'' Men are raised to be ''more involved about sexual efficiency and sexual satisfaction than whether they are capable of giving and receiving love.'' Many men ''will, at occasions, select to silence a accomplice with violence moderately than witness emotional vulnerability'' and ''typically flip away from true love and choose relationships in which they are often emotionally withholding when they really feel like it however nonetheless receive love from someone else.'' Ladies are also afraid of intimacy however ''focus more on discovering a accomplice,'' regardless of quality. The result's ''a gendered arrangement in which males are more prone to get their emotional needs met while women might be deprived. . . . Males are given an advantage that neatly coincides with the patriarchal insistence that they are superior and subsequently higher suited to rule others.'' Males must study generosity and ''the joy that comes from service.''

Hooks contends that she and her two long-time period boyfriends have been foiled by ''patriarchal thinking'' and sexist gender roles and by no means had a chance. She is true that many women and men, gay and straight, still fall into traditional traps, but she doesn't spend a lot time on why some dive into them, nor does she consider that such is just not everyone's fate. She takes her expertise, neatly elides her personal role in shaping it, universalizes and transliterates her frustrations into pop sociology.

Hooks's beliefs for love, her ''new visions,'' sound good, however there is something sterile and summary about them. The inventive ways the mind has to console itself, the truth that relationships do not grant bliss and perfection, the essential impossibility of satisfaction, how desire can conquer the will -- to Hooks, these are however cynical delusions that will probably be thrust aside in a courageous new world ready ''to affirm mutual love between free ladies and free men.''

Her invocation of master rhetoricians like Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton throws into painful relief the strange Pollyanna high quality of her prose; it's troublesome to imagine either of them starting a paragraph, as she does, with ''When I first started to talk publicly about my dysfunctional family, my mother was enraged.'' She ends the book as Sleeping Beauty, awaiting ''the love that's promised'' and speaking to angels quite than real people. Her book confirms fears about why jargon and prefabricated concepts, together with identity politics and self-assist, so usually flatten experience into cliché. Emotional waters run deep and wide. When one can not navigate them, it is possible to take refuge in a shallow, sentimental idealism.