What Do You Love?

David Brooks is very worried that young people aren't passionate enough. This leads him through an account of when he first fell in love to rapturous writing about the importance of loving things:

Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.

“The deepest need of man, then,” the psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.” Picture a couple kissing, a carpenter rapt while working his craft, an astrophysicist at full attention gazing at the cosmos, a nun at prayer. Those are people transcending the boundaries of the self. . . .

To be loveless is to be on autopilot and disengaged from life. Love, on the other hand, fuels full engagement. “A person’s life can be meaningful,” the philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, “only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something.”

I am all for love; give me passionate people who care. But I disagree that love cannot blind us; I think it often does. Like, people who love pit bulls and insist they are no more dangerous than other dogs. Anyway I wonder if it is true that people are less passionate than they used to be:

I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. (Cohabitation rates are up, but that doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in marriage.)

Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades. The share of Americans who said they feel patriotic about their country is down, especially among the young. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by about half, and there is no sign of a recovery.

In 2023 a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey asked people about what values were “very important” to them. Since 1998, the shares of Americans who said they highly valued patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement have all plummeted. The only value Americans came to care more about, the survey found, was making money.

Not so long ago I would have waved all of this away. But I find the awful mood in our country, the rampant insistence that things are worse even when they are clearly better, to be so mysterious that I am willing to at least consider almost any explanation. Are we less passionate? If so, why?

Here's a thought to consider: if we are less passionate than we used to be, could part of the reason be that we are too safe and happy? Really passionate love, it seems to me, sometimes takes the form of a desperate stand against something bad: parental control, social disapproval, horror, death. 

Many Americans think we live in some kind of dystopian hellscape; could that be because they have no notion of what a dystopian hellscape would really be like? Because their lives have fundamentally been very nice?

I think about an old post of mine focusing on two Christian writers who found that the hardest thing is  not surviving a crisis but muddling through ordinary life.

I don't know. But I wonder.