When we think of love today, we tend to think of it in dominantly private terms. Love is that intense emotion between lovers, between spouses, between parents and children, between siblings and immediate members of family or close friends. Love is a private emotion, usually dyadic or extendable to very few close intimates.
This experience of love is understandable in the light of the dominant political philosophy that reigns today, liberalism. If, as many historians and political theorists have noted, liberalism was fashioned to make the public sphere safe from Christianity - that is, to transform religious belief from a deeply shared public concern to a private preference - then love, accordingly, had also to be safely secluded to the private realm. For, it was according to Christianity that love should be a guiding standard not only for private life, but should point toward the highest aspirations in our shared relations and the common weal.
In some senses, then, modern liberal society does not really know what love is. Liberal society is based upon the idea of the social contract, in which benefits and costs are closely weighed and balanced and we seek a rough equilibrium of inputs and outputs. Our social fabric is evaluated based upon private advantage - even where reciprocity is the result, the basic unit of analysis is the the individual's costs and benefits. By contrast, the Christian basis of society is ultimately traced back to the ideal of covenant, one in which the basic fabric of society has its ultimate basis in the gratuitous and uncompensated love of the divine Creator and Redeemer. Love cannot be earned or adequately rewarded - it is a free giving of the self.
Much follows from this basic distinction, but one major consequence is the abandonment of the ideal of love as a social and political norm. We expect our leaders and representatives to be vessels of our interests, rather than as exemplars of self-sacrifice. We pursue a lower standard of justice, which almost always becomes translated into economic terms of re-distribution and turns to the impersonal arm of the State rather than those forms of self-overcoming charity - gratuitous love - it sought to replace. We wage war upon nature that we understand to be an inert substance rather than part of the created order in which we have been appointed its stewards. A loveless modernity is increasingly childless, uncivil, self-interested, individualistic and destructive of the natural order.
Like Christmas and Easter, we observe today an ancient holiday whose central focus was once upon the self-sacrificial love of one for the sake of others. We celebrate all these Holy days today with an emphasis upon materialism and commerce, in the private reveries of lust-drenched popular culture in the shadow of a deeper and fuller understanding of love that has been largely forgotten.
