Talking About Love, Part I

A different kind of democracy renovation

It takes courage to talk about love. Much more courage than to spread hate. That’s a sad and ironic observation to make in a season celebrating the birth of a revolutionary who taught his followers to love their enemies.

Still, it’s true. The point hit me while listening to Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson at a conference organized by our own Danielle Allen, entitled After Neoliberalism: From Left to Right (you can read Danielle’s reflections on the conference in her post here.) The goal, in Danielle’s words, was for the participants to “think in public,” to listen as much as talk, to be willing to take intellectual and political risks in conversation with thinkers, activists, and civic leaders across the political spectrum.

The conference swung back and forth between economic and emotional needs. Many panels and panelists hammered home the point that whereas neoliberalism privileged capital, a post-neoliberal economy must focus on good jobs for as many workers as possible. Jobs that provide dignity and purpose as well as a family-sustaining income. Others emphasized the “crisis of connection,” the national epidemic of loneliness and the destruction of communities once anchored by employers, employees, and their families interacting and supporting one another in the same physical space.

These themes are not either/or, but rather both/and. Indeed, as several former economic officials emphasized, the Biden Administration made investments intended to raise wages and increase labor power as well as focusing on communities and care. Yet as former president of the Roosevelt Institute Felicia Wong explained, it never added up to a coherent and legible “vision of the good life, of the good society.”

How to create or generate that vision? How to roll up the many different perceptions of what is wrong into one compelling account of what could go right? The professors in the crowd, myself included, are tempted to go deep. Danielle opened the conference with a reminder that the Constitution, like classical Republican documents, establishes a government to secure the safety and welfare of the people. Achieving that goal can never be a matter of economics alone, but rather of political economy: Mapping and understanding the politics that will make it easier or harder to achieve.

A political economy, however, like a political system, reflects a set of underlying values, which in turn require moral choices. Do we believe in equal opportunity or equal outcomes? Do we care more about economic growth or human growth? (For a broad overview of these moral choices and their consequences, see “Creating a New Moral Political Economy,” a Daedalus volume co-edited by Margaret Levi and Henry Farrell.) Those choices in turn, as I argued in my last column, rest on basic views of human nature itself: A conception of who we are and what we need.

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We could also get much more specific, which brings me back to Rebecca Henderson. After a long day of discussion on Thursday, Professor Henderson opened the conference on Friday morning by asking: “What if we started to talk about love, compassion, humanity, and the purpose of being human?” What if we asked people “what do you love?” or “why do you care about this community?” What if we pushed past academic theorizing and asked people how they are feeling and where those feelings come from? What if we engaged, all of us, in debates about “what it means to be human”? (Stay tuned – Rebecca will be writing about this for The Renovator in the new year!)

She got a standing ovation, the only one of the conference, for her courage as much as her content. She may well have been talking about a national “we,” but I heard her also challenging those of us in the room, asking us to practice what many of us are preaching and see our peers from across the political spectrum in a different light.

Duke law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy made a similar point by pointing out that a broader conception of what the economy is for, particularly in the context of meeting human needs for care and connection, requires an expanded or at least different role for government. That in turn requires greater trust among members of the polity to “put ourselves in one another’s hands,” to trust a government even when it is dominated by the other party to govern in good faith in the interests of all Americans.

We are far from that level of trust now. Rebuilding it cannot come from the top down, but from the bottom up. In my view, it is far less likely to come from efforts explicitly aimed at de-polarization or trust-building, as compelling as those efforts are, than from engaging one another precisely on the questions Professor Henderson suggests. What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose here?

The power of this kind of engagement comes from its foregrounding of our identity as humans rather than as political partisans. As humans who are uncertain, pondering the questions that philosophers, prophets, and ordinary people have wrestled with for millennia. Calling for a new “Great Awakening,” Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy and Paul Brandeis Raushenbush of the Interfaith Alliance argue that the American people must “recover a shared moral horizon,” not to win arguments, but to begin to heal a moral ecology.”

Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash

Each of us can participate in this work. It is hard, however, to move from suspicion to compassion and even to love in one step. I try to start with a simple presumption of good faith, an effort to think and listen hard, with an open mind and heart.

On the second day of the conference, I did just that. I had breakfast with someone I had never met, who disagrees profoundly with me on questions of abortion and same-sex marriage. I liked her immediately as a person; I also learned a great deal during our conversation, which we will continue.

I want to tell you the details, but we will have to wait until my next column. I will also speculate on why it is so hard to talk about love anywhere outside of wellness circles, meditation, church, temple, mosque, and other places of faith. It is a big part of why Jesus Christ was such a revolutionary.

For now, I hope you enjoy the rest of the holiday season and have a chance to spend time with those you love.