The Varieties of Love and Hate

Thanks for all the interesting conversation that is still ongoing about the What is the Opposite of Love? poll and post.

That conversation had me thinking hard about the relationships between love, hate, and apathy.

As a psychologist I like to think in models, so I created a model. I initially sketched out the interrelationships between love, hate and apathy like this:



I don't think "apathos" is a word. I just made that up. But basically, if you noticed, I pulled my thinking from my comments in the Opposite of Love post into this diagram. First, there is the "apathy" dimension, where our actions can be intense, engaged, and "hot" (pathos) versus when our actions are cooler, more disengaged, and distant (apathos). The vertical dimension charts our antisocial versus prosocial impulses. This dimension gets at Augustine's incurvatus in se (i.e., antisocial: the self "curved in on itself") as opposed to an excurvatus ex se (i.e., prosocial: a self curved outward).

Thus we have cold froms of hate like apartheid, segregation, and abandonment. This is the hate Chris was referring to (I think). Similarly, there are hotter forms of hate like genocide, hate crimes, and malicioius violence. This was the hate I was talking about.

In a similar way there are cooler and distant forms of prosocialness, like charity and tolerance. Hotter forms of prosocialness are social justice, solidarity and advocacy.

One of the points I was making in the last post was that the reason I thought that the "apathy is the opposite of love" formulation became so dominant was that preachers generally found their churches in the "charity quadrant." The congregations loved, but coolly and distantly. Thus, to call them to greater love the only move to make is to work the apathy dimension, moving a cool love into a more passionate engagement with the world.

After sketching this model I went in search of a better theological framework. As suggested by Daniel, I went to Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. Using some of Volf's categories I reworked the model into the following:



As you can see, I replace prosocial with embrace and antisocial with exclusion. I reframe the horizontal dimension as active versus passive. Consequently, we see Volf's discussion of abandonment as a form, a passive form, of exclusion (Volf makes this point). And, as Volf also notes, a more active form of exclusion is elimination (e.g., genocide).

We find the words "contract" versus "covenant" in the top two quadrants. Again, these are Volf's terms. Contract here is the agreed upon social contracts that govern peaceable human community. Volf notes that this is a form of embrace, but that it falls well short of what God calls us to. Love is more than living civilly, although that is a necessary prerequisite. Thus, Volf calls the church away from framing her relationships with the Other through politics and social agreements. Replacing contract should be covenant, the loving and passionate engagement (hesed) that God models for us as he remains faithful to His people.

Finally, as I reflected on all this, I noted a flow moving through the quadrants:



That is, if you are in quadrant i--elimination--it would be difficult to move you into quadrant iv directly. Rather, you'd probably have to move through each quadrant in a clockwise direction. As a data point in support of this model we can note that America moved through the quadrants in roughly that order:

Slavery to Segregation to Civil Rights to ....

We are still working on the final movement. And perhaps forever will be. We still dream...