But to approach love with any concern for one’s self-interest is—he asserts—to negate the very essence of love. To love an individual is to feel care and responsibility for him; it is not to appraise his character or personality as a “commodity” from which one expects pleasure. To love “ideally” is to love “unconditionally”—it is to love a human being, not for the fact of what he is, but for the fact that he is—it is to love without reference to values or standards or judgment. “In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One. This being so, it should not make any difference whom we love.”25
It should not, in other words, make any difference whether the person we love is a being of stature or a total nonentity, a genius or a fool, a hero or a scoundrel. “We are all part of One.” Is it necessary to point out who stands to gain and who to lose by this view of love?
The desire to be loved “unconditionally,” the desire to be loved with no concern for his objective personal worth, is one of man’s “deepest longings,” Fromm insists; whereas to be loved on the basis of merit, “because one deserves it,” invokes doubt and uncertainty, since merit has to be struggled for and since such love can be withdrawn should the merit cease to exist. “Furthermore, ‘deserved’ love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases . . .”26
It is typical of Fromm that he should deliver what is in fact (though not in Fromm’s estimate) a deadly insult to human nature, without offering any justification for his charge. He assumes that all men, by nature, are so profoundly lacking in self-esteem that they crave a love which bears no relation to their actions, achievements, or character, a love not to be earned but to be received only as a free gift.
What does it mean to be loved “for oneself”? In reason, it can mean only: to be loved for the values one has achieved in one’s character and person. The highest compliment one can be paid by another human being is to be told: “Because of what you are, you are essential to my happiness.” But this is the love that, according to Fromm, leaves one with “a bitter feeling.”
It is the capitalistic culture, he declares, that inculcates such concepts as the “deserved” and the “undeserved”—the earned and the unearned—and thus poisons the growth of proper love. Proper love, Fromm tells us, should be given solely out of the richness of the spirit of the giver, in demonstration of the giver’s “potency.” Fromm nowhere reveals the exact nature of this “potency,” of course. “Love is an act of faith . . “-1 Proper love should raise no questions about the virtue or character of its object; it should desire no joy from such virtue as the object might possess—for, if it does, it is not proper love, it is only capitalistic selfishness.
But, Fromm asks, “how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love?”28 He does not declare that love is impossible under capitalism— merely that it is exceptionally difficult.
Commenting, in Who Is Ayn Rand?, on Fromm’s theory of love, I wrote:
To love … is to value; love, properly, is the consequence and expression of admiration—”the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.” [Atlas Shrugged] Love is not alms, but a moral tribute.
If love did not imply admiration, if it did not imply an acknowledgment of moral qualities that the recipient of love possessed—what meaning or significance would love have, and why would Fromm or anyone consider it desirable? Only one answer is possible, and it is not an attractive one: when love is divorced from values, then “love” becomes, not a tribute, but a moral blank check: a promise that one will be forgiven anything, that one will not be abandoned, that one will be taken care of.29
This view of love is not, of course, peculiar to Fromm; it is a central component of the mystic-altruist tradition—and is as prevalent among psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers as it is among religionists. Perhaps the simplest and most eloquent answer to this view of love is one sentence of John Gait in Atlas Shrugged: “A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.”
To divorce love from values (and value-judgments), is to confess one’s longing for the unearned. The idealization of this longing as a proper moral goal is a constant theme running through Fromm’s writing.
That the underlying motive is the desire to be taken care of, the desire to be spared the responsibility of independence, is revealed explicitly in Fromm’s socio-political “solution” to the problem of alienation.
In order that man may be enabled to conquer his feeling of aloneness and alienation, to practice love and to achieve a full sense of personal identity, a new social system must be established, Fromm declares.
Private ownership of the means of production must be abolished. The profit motive must be forbidden. Industry must be decentralized. Society should be divided into self-governing industrial guilds; factories should be owned and run by all those who work in them.
Why—according to Fromm’s social philosophy—should a janitor in an industrial plant not have the same right to determine its management as the man who happened to create the plant? Does not the janitor’s personality require as much self-expression as anyone else’s?
Under capitalism, says Fromm, men are overwhelmed by and are the pawns of a complex industrial machine whose omnipotent forces and laws are beyond their comprehension or control. Under the decentralized, “democratic” system he proposes—which is some sort of blend of guild socialism and syndicalism—industrial establishments will be broken down into units whose function is within everyone’s easy comprehension, with no “alienating” demands made on anyone’s abstract capacity.
Under this system, he explains, every person will be provided with his minimum subsistence, whether the person wishes to work or not This is necessary if man is to develop healthily and happily. However, to discourage parasitism, Fromm suggests that this support should not extend beyond two years. Who is to provide this support, whether they will be willing to do so, and what will happen if they are not willing, are questions Fromm does not discuss.
So long as men are occupied with the problem of survival, Fromm feels, their spiritual concerns—the concerns that really matter—are almost inevitably neglected. How can the worker’s personality not be impoverished, if he must face daily the necessity of earning a livelihood? How can the businessman develop his creative potentialities, if he is in bondage to his obsession with production? How can the artist preserve bis soul’s integrity, if he is plagued with temptations by Hollywood and Madison Avenue? How can the consumer cultivate individual tastes and preferences, if he is surrounded by the standardized commodities begotten by mass production?
If one wishes to understand the relevance of epistemology to politics, one should observe what is gained for Fromm by that “paradoxical logic” of which he writes so approvingly. If, as it it teaches, “man can perceive reality only in contradictions,” then Fromm does not have to be troubled by the conflict between his claim to be an advocate of reason and his enthusiasm for Eastern mysticism—nor does he have to be troubled by the conflict between his claim to be a defender of individualism and his advocacy of political collectivism. His disdain for the law of contradiction permits him to announce that true individualism is possible only in the collectivized community—that true freedom is possible only when production is taken out of the hands of private individuals and placed under the absolute control of the group—that men will cease to be objects of “use” by others, only when they are willing to renounce personal profit and make social usefulness the goal of their lives.30
Fromm calls his proposed system “Humanistic Communitarian Socialism.” Under it, he maintains, man will achieve “a new harmony with nature” to replace the one he has lost— man will enjoy the tranquillity and self-fulfillment of the animals whose state Fromm finds so enviable.
If, often, Fromm is more than a little disingenuous in the presentation of his views, he is, nonetheless, extremely explicit. This is what is unusual about him. Most writers of his persuasion twist themselves for pages and pages in order to obscure their advocacy of the ideas—and contradictions— which he announces openly. With rare exceptions, one will find comparable candor only among the existentialists and Zen Buddhists, many of whose premises Fromm shares.