HomeBell Hooks Affirms That Love Is Feasible, And Condemns The Culture Of Narcissism
Bell Hooks Affirms That Love Is Feasible, And Condemns The Culture Of Narcissism

Bell Hooks Affirms That Love Is Feasible, And Condemns The Culture Of Narcissism

As soon as upon a time, the philosophy of love was a positive topic for the man of ideas, like Erich Fromm or C. S. Lewis. In recent years, the subject has been relegated to self-help, a genre that many mistrust for its propensity to propose easy answers the place there are none. Self-help has its uses, nevertheless: it neatly undoes the facile concepts of left (we are powerless victims) and right (we now have whole company in our lives) alike, and it provides the calming reassurance that others on the market are as messed up as you are.

Now comes the feminist cultural critic Bell Hooks along with her new book of essays, ''All About Love,'' written in a didactic type that may merge moral philosophy with self-help. It's a warm affirmation that love is possible and an assault on the tradition of narcissism and selfishness. ''We yearn to end the lovelessness that's so pervasive in our society,'' she writes. ''This book tells us the right way to return to love.''

Her greatest factors are easy ones. Community -- extended household, creative or political collaboration, friendship -- is as essential because the couple or the nuclear family; love is an art that involves work, not just the thrill of attraction; need could rely on illusion, but love comes only by way of painful reality-telling; work and cash have changed the values of affection and community, and this should be reversed.

In Hooks's view, girls have little hope of happiness in a brutal culture during which they are blindsided because ''most males use psychological terrorism as a strategy to subordinate girls,'' whom they maintain round ''to deal with all their needs.'' Men are raised to be ''extra involved about sexual efficiency and sexual satisfaction than whether they're capable of giving and receiving love.'' Many men ''will, at instances, choose to silence a companion with violence slightly than witness emotional vulnerability'' and ''often turn away from real love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding once they really feel like it but still obtain love from somebody else.'' Women are also afraid of intimacy but ''focus more on finding a partner,'' regardless of quality. The result's ''a gendered association through which men usually tend to get their emotional wants met while women will probably be deprived. . . . Males are given an advantage that neatly coincides with the patriarchal insistence that they're superior and therefore higher suited to rule others.'' Men need to learn generosity and ''the enjoyment that comes from service.''

Hooks contends that she and her two long-term boyfriends were foiled by ''patriarchal considering'' and sexist gender roles and by no means had a chance. She is right that many women and men, homosexual and straight, still fall into conventional traps, but she doesn't spend much time on why some dive into them, nor does she take into account that such isn't everybody'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, but there's something sterile and abstract about them. The ingenious methods the thoughts has to console itself, the fact that relationships don't grant bliss and perfection, the important impossibility of satisfaction, how want can conquer the need -- to Hooks, these are however cynical delusions that can 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 is difficult to imagine either of them beginning a paragraph, as she does, Visit Website with ''Once I first began to speak publicly about my dysfunctional family, my mom was enraged.'' She ends the book as Sleeping Beauty, awaiting ''the love that is promised'' and speaking to angels somewhat than real people. Her book confirms fears about why jargon and prefabricated ideas, together with id politics and self-assist, so usually flatten expertise 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.