don’t love your enemies

painting: Joanna Kniaź-Hawrot

We all agree that the world would do with more love. But, to quote an accomplished musician and lyrics author Haddaway, “What is love”?

Obviously, we cannot command someone to love, this is not how it works. “Love your enemies” sounds like a great message on the surface, but can I really just decide that? And are “love” and “enemy” even compatible?

Imagine you want to learn how to roller-skate. Would it be helpful if your trainer told you: “Find your balance, do not fall, turn right and then stop”? Things like good balance are not something you can teach directly. Rather, they are natural outcomes or even by-products of more nuanced clues like “bend your legs slightly and look forward”. And of course, they don’t come on the first try. They are a result of extensive and intentional practice.

In much the same way, I see love as an outcome, a spinoff from other things, almost a side effect, and as a skill that needs to be trained daily.

There are many qualities that we can practice to be more loving. But there is one that seems to me to be fundamental. It could be called understanding, recognition, or insight. And while to love is a deeply felt experience, in this particular sense, it actually starts in our heads. Because how we see and apprehend others (and everything around us) will ultimately determine how we feel about it all.

Understanding will not automatically make us more loving, but it can be a crucial first step that removes barriers preventing us from loving. And that’s really what this post is about: recognizing and dissolving one of the biggest barriers to love – our ignorance.

To realize just how important understanding and deep insight are, perhaps it’s easiest to illustrate it with children. I’m taking these few examples from the most important book on parenthood I’ve ever read: Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté.

When a child resists our instructions to stay in his room at bedtime, it’s easy to see him as disobedient. What if we were able to recognize that this behaviour might be caused by a fear of separation or of darkness that children often have?

A tantrum? How about we focus not on the aggression but understand that a child might just not be able to handle the emotions and frustration she is experiencing?

Bad manners with an auntie? Or maybe an inherent and healthy shyness that prevents a child from relating to people he doesn’t know well enough?

A little liar that needs a judgment and a lecture on morality? What if we had the wisdom to realize that a child avoids the truth only because she is too insecure in our love to risk our anger or disappointment?

How would understanding all this change our attitudes and behaviours? Wouldn’t we do everything in our power to ease a child’s discomfort and address its causes in a loving and supportive way, rather than judging, correcting, or punishing her?

This can and has to be applied to adults too! Even though it can be much more difficult to get to the bottom of our behaviours as adults because their reasons become so multi-layered, so related to so much. In fact most of the time we will not be able to understand others (or even ourselves!). Therefore, what we need is an act of faith in inherent goodness that we all started with as children and will be always carrying within us. And we need a broad understanding that behaviours that are in any way unhealthy or harmful, ultimately are always coming from a place of being hurt and traumatized, or from other genetic, biological or environmental factors. In some ways, it all starts as a protective mechanism. The way we act at the moment could be seen as part of a huge domino rather than us making purely autonomous decisions.  

A podcaster and author Tim Ferriss has recently admitted publically that he has been repeatedly abused sexually when he was 2 to 4 years of age. However, what was even more shocking to me was his later remark. He said that out of his, roughly, 20 very close male friends, seven or eight contacted him after his confession. They opened up that they too were sexually abused, and never told anyone about that. And we are talking about men here, it’s just spine-chilling to think what can be the actual numbers in the case of women (in fact some say that gender might not matter and numbers are similar, men are just less likely to admit to such things). And how about a thousand other ways we might have been hurt and traumatized as children, despite all the good intentions in the world that we were surrounded with?    

This is the “nurture” part, but we should also add to this “nature” - genetic diversity.

We find it easier to show understanding to humans who received some kind of a diagnosis, like Autism spectrum disorder. And by the way, how it is called is a wise way to capture that there is a range to this phenomenon which is so troubling to our social norms and expectations.  But what about “dis-orders” and spectrums we don’t even know exist? And aren’t we all somewhere along various spectrums of what’s healthy and not, what’s regarded as normal and not accepted societally?  

To paraphrase Sam Harriss (neuroscientist, philosopher and meditator), no one authored or created themselves. We are all powered by the momentum of genetics, past experiences, our environment. It’s not exactly easy or often even possible to regulate this. Surely not merely just out of so-called “free will”. Our behaviours really are a domino of causations or a force of nature rather than carefully constructed decisions. This is not to say that we are not free. Actually, I don’t know an answer to this, or maybe it’s just the wrong question. But I think we should at least take a stab at rethinking the proportions between “free choice” and the extent to which various determinants affect our decisions.

Some extreme examples can further help with this mental exercise. And what else I could mention here than a well-known case of Charles Whitman, a mass murderer in the 1960s. In his suicide note, he said how lately he hadn’t understood himself anymore, and how it had required a tremendous mental effort to deter himself from harm’s way. He also requested that an autopsy be performed on him to see if there had been anything abnormal that could explain his behaviours. The autopsy found that toward the end of his life, he developed an amygdaloid tumour which became a critical factor in regulating his aggressive impulses, including an irresistible urge to kill people.

Or take an example of a certain Alex. Around his 40th birthday, he developed a massive tumour pressing his cortex. This caused a sharp turn in his behaviour and character from one day to another. Science is rather conclusive that his condition directly gave raise to him developing paedophilic tendencies. You can check more details on both cases in this captivating article. And when reading it, ask yourself what you could be doing if you developed frontotemporal dementia which makes us lose the ability to control our hidden impulses?! Oops.

Are we open to see psychopathy as a dysfunction in the brain much the same way we see diabetes as another type of biological disorder? Would we be open to trace back the lives of oppressors to understand that someone might have been destined to become a criminal when, say, he was deeply traumatized at the age of 3 or developed a tumour in his 30s? Can we draw a line and say: until here I can justify your behaviour and be compassionate but from this point on I have a right to hate or condemn you?  Of course, it is not possible to draw such a line. Therefore, why don’t we instead cultivate more understanding, forgiveness, and “perhaps-in-the-end-I-might-just-not-know-so-I-better-be-humble-rather-then-judgmental-here” attitude?

Likely, with time and scientific progress, we will be able to better understand and mitigate certain behaviours. Behaviours that will be seen as biological pathologies rather than something evil from a moral standpoint. Maybe one day we will have medical interventions that will make someone say – “I can’t believe I was that person, I’m horrified that I had been doing such things”.

The more we can understand the causes of behaviours and their underlying pathologies, the more this can help us to abandon definite moral judgments. It can help us to cultivate a more ethical, fair, and compassionate understanding of the imperfections of fellow human beings. And we can acknowledge that within us all, in every human heart, surely mine included, there is a capacity for evil.

Only on these grounds, can we take actions based on what is pragmatic, what can help and how we can discourage, disincentivise or eliminate dangerous tendencies or behaviours. Through this prism, the prison sentence seizes to be a punishment and a moral judgment. It becomes an intelligent and fact-based mitigation strategy orientated on our desire to first discontinue the harmful process, and then attempt to address and heal the root causes of the problem.

Coming back to the beginning, to cultivate love it can be helpful to first lay bare the reasons for which we hate, judge, condemn, feel contempt. In this way, we might discover that we cannot love our enemies because we don’t have any enemies in the first place. And it’s useful to use extreme examples here so that we can really understand the principles and then apply them to more down-to-earth situations.

Like arguing with my parents on why it might be a good idea to recognize homosexual people as a vulnerable group (at least in some cultures) that needs to be acknowledged and supported, rather than fill in the blanks. When getting emotional with my convictions laced with moral superiority, am I able to see through my folks and understand how their lives could make them think in a certain way? Can I see these different parts in them and remember that “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function?”

When I have around someone drinking heavily, how can I know if the drinking is not the last line of his defence mechanisms that separate him from taking his own life? Can I see past the visible behaviour and recognize who he really is? At the very least, can I become the only person on that day that didn’t judge him with my look or words?

Or when I get shouted at by a driver in a morning rush hour (a shouting that I might have actually caused by being inconsiderate). It’s so easy to get angry and reactive, I can feel the adrenaline rush just writing about it. So could I be prepared to face it differently because I anticipated that this can happen, because I cultivate daily an understanding practice, because due to intelligent decisions and day planning I am now not in a rush, have plenty of time to get wherever I’m heading and can respond out of a calm space rather than agitation? And when I know that it’s very difficult to have compassion when I’m sleep deprived ;) What would my response be if, in an instant, I could realize that this poor fellow must have had a horrible morning or maybe even his whole life is collapsing? Who knows, maybe in that very moment, with one gentle and understanding smile or gesture, I could soften his tension and make his day.

When our inherent desire to judge, accuse or blame others can relax through a deep understanding, we are ready to take the practice of I-love-because-I-understand to the next level. This could mean learning and cultivating a feeling that we are all connected, or recognition of how everything ends and how fragile life is. But these are topics for another time.

This post flows with DakhaBrakha - Baby (show me your love)