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I’ve been reading and writing a lot about love and relationships, and have been disappointed with what the academic cannon has to offer on the subject. Love is perhaps the most important aspect of our lives, if not the most personally fulfilling. Why is there not an equally robust body of literature to master, as Eric Fromm puts it, “the art of loving”?
I posit that this lack of inquiry is because of a lack of artifacts to study. Academic disciplines, particularly the most respected, examine objects in the physical world. Biologists study living human bodies and remains found from past people. Geologists dig deep into the earth to understand how conditions on our planet have changed over time. Physicists do experiments in particle accelerators and can watch particles move and break down. In order to study a topic, there must be something to observe.
This is what the study of love lacks, there are few if any artifacts about love especially from the past. The closest thing to study is literature. Literature and art generally is an expression of the heart, it is an attempt to express and capture what we feel inside, and show others our internal world. But even that has only picked up in the last few centuries. This is nothing on the millenia of content other fields have to pick apart.
The issue with love is its ephemerality, you can’t see it or touch it and it doesn’t exist after the people who carry it. If someone made a clay pot thousands of years ago, archaeologists can excavate it. If two people share a great love, there is no way for us to know unless they wrote it down.
This brings me to a more tractable point on why we don’t have artifacts of love; most of the people who have lived on this earth could not read or write. Language only emerged ~100,000 years ago and the global literacy rate rose above 50% in the 1960s (currently it sits around 87%). Most people who had great loves had no means to express themselves beyond the people they were physically with in the moment.
Even if they were literate, in most societies there was no way to write things down. What are you going to do, workshop a love poem by carving it in stone every time you have a fleeting thought? China invented paper in ~100 CE, and it didn’t reach Europe until the 14th century. The printing press was invented in 1440. Even if people in antiquity could have written things down the way we do today, paper decays. It’s easy to find and study the foundations of buildings that are built in stone, we have no way to know if those foundations had wood roofs built on top of them.
I’ve been reading and writing a lot about love and relationships, and have been disappointed with what the academic cannon has to offer on the subject. Love is perhaps the most important aspect of our lives, if not the most personally fulfilling. Why is there not an equally robust body of literature to master, as Eric Fromm puts it, “the art of loving”?
I posit that this lack of inquiry is because of a lack of artifacts to study. Academic disciplines, particularly the most respected, examine objects in the physical world. Biologists study living human bodies and remains found from past people. Geologists dig deep into the earth to understand how conditions on our planet have changed over time. Physicists do experiments in particle accelerators and can watch particles move and break down. In order to study a topic, there must be something to observe.
This is what the study of love lacks, there are few if any artifacts about love especially from the past. The closest thing to study is literature. Literature and art generally is an expression of the heart, it is an attempt to express and capture what we feel inside, and show others our internal world. But even that has only picked up in the last few centuries. This is nothing on the millenia of content other fields have to pick apart.
The issue with love is its ephemerality, you can’t see it or touch it and it doesn’t exist after the people who carry it. If someone made a clay pot thousands of years ago, archaeologists can excavate it. If two people share a great love, there is no way for us to know unless they wrote it down.
This brings me to a more tractable point on why we don’t have artifacts of love; most of the people who have lived on this earth could not read or write. Language only emerged ~100,000 years ago and the global literacy rate rose above 50% in the 1960s (currently it sits around 87%). Most people who had great loves had no means to express themselves beyond the people they were physically with in the moment.
Even if they were literate, in most societies there was no way to write things down. What are you going to do, workshop a love poem by carving it in stone every time you have a fleeting thought? China invented paper in ~100 CE, and it didn’t reach Europe until the 14th century. The printing press was invented in 1440. Even if people in antiquity could have written things down the way we do today, paper decays. It’s easy to find and study the foundations of buildings that are built in stone, we have no way to know if those foundations had wood roofs built on top of them.
I just spent the day at Teotihuacan, the archaeological site outside of Mexico City that was one of the largest cities of its time. I love walking through places like this, wondering what people’s lives were like thousands of years ago. At the same time, the experience always fills me with a sense of loss. We will never be able to fully understand these people. All we have from the thousands of people who lived here are the foundations of their temples, even the facades have come off. I yearn to know what the lives of the people in that city were like; what did they mean to each other? What were their inner worlds like? Any artifacts that might inform our understanding of these people were either not created or lost to history. I feel a deep sense of human heritage lost.
But we only look forward. I have always been a big believer in writing to think, putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys?) helps me work through the mess of thoughts and emotions in my head. Viewing literature in this way gives me another motivation to write: to express to those who come after us who we are.
In a thousand years, our descendants may have what we do not: terabytes of content generated from us writing novels, short stories, poetry… etc that we do not have about our ancestors. This will allow them to have a richer understanding of who we were as a people, and it’s nice to be remembered. Practically though, they will also be able to study all this content in a rigorous way. With all that content, they can think about where we have been, what has changed, and where they want to go. Learning from the past allows us to better predict the future. It’s all in the cause of understanding the human condition.
So write everything down. Love is something worth thinking deeply about and if we all take the time to think it through and examine it, even pass on some of that onto later generations, we will be better off for it.
I just spent the day at Teotihuacan, the archaeological site outside of Mexico City that was one of the largest cities of its time. I love walking through places like this, wondering what people’s lives were like thousands of years ago. At the same time, the experience always fills me with a sense of loss. We will never be able to fully understand these people. All we have from the thousands of people who lived here are the foundations of their temples, even the facades have come off. I yearn to know what the lives of the people in that city were like; what did they mean to each other? What were their inner worlds like? Any artifacts that might inform our understanding of these people were either not created or lost to history. I feel a deep sense of human heritage lost.
But we only look forward. I have always been a big believer in writing to think, putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys?) helps me work through the mess of thoughts and emotions in my head. Viewing literature in this way gives me another motivation to write: to express to those who come after us who we are.
In a thousand years, our descendants may have what we do not: terabytes of content generated from us writing novels, short stories, poetry… etc that we do not have about our ancestors. This will allow them to have a richer understanding of who we were as a people, and it’s nice to be remembered. Practically though, they will also be able to study all this content in a rigorous way. With all that content, they can think about where we have been, what has changed, and where they want to go. Learning from the past allows us to better predict the future. It’s all in the cause of understanding the human condition.
So write everything down. Love is something worth thinking deeply about and if we all take the time to think it through and examine it, even pass on some of that onto later generations, we will be better off for it.
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