Why bother to write?

A few different reasons :

• You like the idea of being a writer
• You want to think through an idea on your own
• You are being forced to write for school/university
• You enjoy the process of writing, creating fictional worlds, or delving into history or your own journal
• You want to persuade or argue a point - although nowadays, given everyone is on youtube/tiktok, you’ll reach far more people that way than through writing (which is a huge problem )

These are all valid reasons. I think I’ve been each of these people in the list at some point in my life.

But I’d like to propose there is a more crucial function that writing plays. That of becoming.

Essentially, to write down a set of ideas, words, stories, memes - you have to become the kind of person who would think those ideas, use those words, live those stories and believe in those memes.

For example, only you could provide the unique human experience and lens to whatever you have written. And you are the primary person who is transformed by creating it. If you write publicly and with a mixture of talent and luck, you can also get other people to read it and hopefully transform them too.

Joan Didion wrote :

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means”

I would add to Didion, that in writing it down, knowing what I’m thinking, seeing, feeling, I am transformed into the kind of person who knows what they are thinking, knowing and feeling. It’s meta.

I could get an LLM to write this argument out. But I won’t be transformed in the process. This is what LLM-aided writing misses. You’re not thinking the thoughts, having the opinions, putting down your own voice and stories, hence you are not changed.

It might be fine to use an LLM if you are being forced to write for school, or you are writing to persuade or to ‘churn out content’. But in doing so, you miss out on a tremendous opportunity to explore your psyche.

You miss out the opportunity to be transformed.

I came across this book whilst browsing the book stall in Spitalfields market on an autumn morning.

The first few sentences in the preface hooked me in

THE READING of this book would be a disappointing experience for anyone who expects easy instruction in the art of loving. This book, on the contrary, wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.

Love is a skill.

It is not a feeling that happens to us. It is not something we seek externally, and gain.

It is not dependent on the object (this person, this thing), but on the capacity within oneself to ‘be loving’.

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.

If you frame it as seeking love, wanting love (i.e. self-focused), that is an immature form of love. People chase it in different ways.

Men often chase social status, wealth, power. Women chase it by being attractive. Of course both genders do this. I love this phrase he says :

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

If you conceive of it, as “once I find the right person/object/thing, then love will be easy” you are missing the point. It is about your self capacity to be loving.

The former view of love commodifies the experience.

Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after

We see this in modern dating apps and the general sentiment around them. People are swiped on as commodities. Evaluated on whether they fit into my life. Evaluated based on crude metrics and signals (height, attractiveness).

How to learn any art?

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

What are the necessary steps in learning any art?

Like learning painting, medicine or carpentry, you first start with mastery of the theory and then mastery of the practice.

Using medicine as an example, you can learn your anatomy, but eventually you have to cut into the person. It requires practice.

Importantly, he says that a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art is “it must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art”.

And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

Theories of love

Fromm talks about how a fundamental problem that plagues all humans is a sense of inherent separateness. Since man is gifted with reason, he/she is aware - it naturally means that he/she is aware of themselves as a separate entity, of their short life span, of death, impermanence, loss. “Of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies”.

This sense of seperateness and non-union creates a tremendous existence anxiety. He even says that it is the source of all anxiety. “Man would become insane if he could not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside”.

the deepest need of man, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

Fromm goes onto talk about the myriad ways that cultures have addressed transcendence of one’s ‘self’ to achieve union, oneness.

A few he lists : animal worship, human sacrifice, military conquest, indulgence in luxury, ascetic renunciation, obsessional work, artistic creation, love of God, love of Man, ritual, drugs, sex.

Drug and alcohol addiction is a way to escape it. All addiction is fundamentally a spiritual problem; of the problem of separateness.

While they try to escape from separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity

Sex is another way, and approached without love, it is a temporary relief.

results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.

Union by conformity into a group.

Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness. The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity

Union through creative activity

Whether a carpenter makes a table, or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows his corn or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

Fromm however goes onto to say that in modern work rarely involves this. You hardly see the process of your effort, have little autonomy. You are a ‘cog’ in the machine.

The unity achieved in work, orgiastic fusion, drugs/alcohol, conformity is all only pseudo-unity, transitory, and only “partial answers to the problem of existence”.

He goes onto saying that the “full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love”.

He describes love as immature or mature.

Immature love

I love you because I need you

It’s based on a fundamental narcissism, loving the other person primarily for what they give or or make you feel. It’s based on possessiveness, wanting to control the other person. It’s conditional ; a love that depends on meeting your expectation. The initial ‘falling in love’ - the intoxication and sense of pseudo-union from letting down your constructed barriers, is powerful but ultimately unsustainable.

Fromm believed that most people never develop the capacity for mature love because it requires overcoming narcissism, developing one’s character, and learning to truly give rather than take

Mature love

Mature love has a few characteristics.

One is active giving. Not a form of sacrifice (I give and therefore I am impoverished, or I ‘must give’ out of an obligation to religion/society/external ), but giving as an expression of one’s aliveness and potency.

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as over flowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

And its not materially giving, but also giving of yourself. I think a giving of attention (love and attention are of course the same thing)

The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the others sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy

This ability of love as an act of giving depends on the character development of that person. i.e. love is a skill - a process - a way of acting and being

It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself—hence of loving.

Other characteristics of mature love that Fromm talks about include : care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

1. Care

I prefer the word attention, but Fromm means the same thing. Care is active concern. It’s demonstrated through action, not just feeling. He gives the example of a woman who says that she loves flowers but forgets to water them - her actions reveal that she doesn’t truly care.

2. Responsibility

Not duty, or obligation imposed from the outside, but a true voluntary act of responding to the needs (both expressed and unexpressed) of another human being. ‘response’-‘ability’ : the ability to respond to another

3. Respect

Respect comes from the Latin “respicere” : meaning to “look at”. It is the ability to see a person as they are, to be aware of their unique individuality.

It means wanting them to grow and unfold as themselves, not as how we would like them to be. It therefore requires an overcoming of narcissism.

4. Knowledge

Knowledge is almost an outcome of having a caring, respectful and responsible attitude towards another. Fromm argues that we can only know someone through love - through the act of caring, being responsible and respecting them.

Knowledge comes from a deep need to ‘understand the other’. One way we do this, and an explanation of human cruelty, is to break people. To attempt to control them, torture, force them to “betray his secret in his suffering”. He says that children often see this as a path to knowledge, breaking things apart in order to know it. He “cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.”

The path of love, is different.

Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody—and I “know” nothing.

In knowing the self, one knows the other. He stresses that this doesn’t involve thought. Love is not thought. It lies in the act of love : “this act transcends thought, it transcends words”.

He parallels this with the problem of knowing God. As many spiritual and mystical traditions have said : one cannot know God through thought. Through statements made about God. But through the experience of union.

Fromm goes onto to talk about the different types of love : brotherly love (love for your fellow human beings), motherly love, erotic love, self-love, love of God etc. I won’t go into these.

He also talks about the importance of male-female polarity (with a controversial statement : “homosexual deviation is a failure to attain this polarized union, and thus the homosexual suffers from the pain of never-resolved separateness, a failure, however, which he shares with the average heterosexual who cannot love”).

He then has a chapter on the disintegration of love in contemporary Western society. He argues that modern capitalist societies undermine the capacity for genuine love.

These are useful chapters to read, but I want to talk about the practice of love.

The practice of love

Fromm doesn’t really give any prescriptions on how to practice it. “To love is a personal experience which everyone can only have by and for himself”.

Instead he discusses how to approach it with general principles. He lists a few pre-requisites for practicing any art

• Discipline : a regular practice and commitment. It must be integral to all areas of your life.
• Concentration : the ability to focus and be present with what you are doing. Even back when this was written, Fromm says that people struggle with this, constantly seeking distraction and entertainment rather than being alone with themselves. I can only imagine his response now…
• Patience : that mastery takes time and cannot be rushed.
• ‘Supreme concern’ : that the mastery of your art, is your ultimate concern, more than fame, money or success.

Specifically for love, he says that it involves

• The overcoming of narcissism. The ability to see people as they are, not through projections of your wants and desires. It requires humility and letting go of projections
• Faith : not a religious faith, but a faith in oneself, others and human possibilities
• Genuine inner activity : using your attention creatively. This means actively engaging rather than passively receiving (see my post yesterday!). Examples : passively scrolling social media, versus actively having a genuine conversation where you’re truly listening and responding thoughtfully. It’s an inner aliveness. You can see it in some people just through their presence.

He highlights that it is a practice one totally integrates. Not based on object, but on one’s attitude and view of the world. Learning to be sensitive, to listen, to become present and overcome vanity and the desire to exploit.

Reading this book, I was certain that Fromm was influenced by Buddhist ideas, and lo-and-behold, he was deeply influenced by Zen, and co-authored a book with DT Suzuki.

I will add to this idea of practice, that one can practice love through systematic training. Through meditation.

Meditation as a way to practice love

I hope to write a comprehensive theory of meditation later on in this November blogathon (influenced by Shamil Chanderia and the neuroscience of predictive processing).

But meditation is a way to systematically train certain faculties.

Mindfulness is one way of bringing care and attention to daily life. Care being one of those qualities identified in mature love.

Buddhist ‘metta’ meditation is a way to train ’loving’ faculties of the mind. To reconstruct the ways in which you see the world.

However meditation is also a way to see through the sense of separateness. Going back to the ‘fundamental problem of human existence’ that Fromm talked about : “the inherit separateness”. Meditation leads to awakening experiences. Awakening from what? From a sense of separateness - the sense of a separate and independent self.

This is not something to ’think’ about, but it is something one experiences.

Scientifically, we know the self model is generated. It’s illusory. There is no ‘fixed’ solid self that one can point to; it is constructed (predictive processing theory).

But experiencing that - is recognising that unity, transcendence, wholeness, is right here. It’s truly life changing - a deep sense of oneness, okayness.

Meditation is training the faculty to notice this, and it is by far the most important skill I’ve learned in my life so far. I’ll reserve a deeper exploration of this topic for another post.

Conclusion

Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving is a fantastic book. It’s a small book - you can easily read it in one sitting, but it’s one of those books that you have to chew on and digest.

Love is truly a skill, and one that we don’t emphasise enough.

It was written in 1956, in a radically different social structure. And yet, love is a perennial human struggle - we seek unity, transcendence, peace (perhaps all synonymous with love). The culture now feels like its promoting the opposite. Modern dating culture commodifies relationships, personal development focuses on creating the ‘perfect life’ and social media is narcissus’s wet dream.

It seems like the faculties that Fromm talks about : care, responsibility, respect are much harder today.

So working on love as a skill, a capacity to develop in oneself, to transcend egocentric tendencies, seems radical, even countercultural. But it’s needed, personally and societally.

If you need some motivation, look at yourself and ask if one feels whole? Really sit with it, without distraction. And maybe that will be the start of an interesting journey - one that begins and ends in love.

I recently read a couple of fantastic articles in the ‘Free Press’ : ‘Without books we’d be barbarians’. and ‘The Dawn of the Post-literate society..

The TLDR is that there is a massive decline in reading and literacy.

Instead of reading, we’re consuming short form video, youtube/TV and podcasts, and that has major implications for human flourishing intellectually, politically and morally.

A few reasons why the decline in reading and writing is bad :

1. The ability to read means the ability to follow a train of logical thought

There is only so much information you can convey orally or with video. In the article, he gives an example of complex philosophical arguments or scientific writing. This requires having the information on the page, in the form of sentences, that one can follow the logical trail of. You can go back, re-read and form concepts, that is simply not possible with podcasts.

If we cannot follow logical trains of thought, or complex ideas – which reading allows us to do, then we cease to understand the world.

When people stop being able to read—to make sense of the meaning of text on a page—they also lose the ability to make sense of the world.

2. The ability to write is the ability to collate thoughts and create coherent arguments

With a decline in reading, you also get a decline in writing. As many people have said : writing is thinking. If we lose the ability to write, we lose the ability to coherently form arguments.

This is compounded by the advent of LLM’s, where now instead of thinking through a problem (writing essays), you can outsource that to an LLM.

3. The ability to read and write is the foundation for democracy

To be able to articulate your views, without resorting to rhetoric or obfuscation with words is the basis of democracy. To read those thoughts and evaluate them based on the argument itself, rather than biases or rhetoric from the person saying it, is crucial for evaluating ideas independently.

If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video, you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. Such appeals are not rational. But human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now).

It’s why we see a rise in pundits, scam artists, populists - they argue based on rhetoric. It’s much easier to convince someone with bad arguments in person, than if the arguments were written down on the page.

Laid out on the page, their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

4. Cognitive benefits and learning

I rarely feel ’taxed’ or ‘cognitively stretched’ when watching a video or listening to a podcast.

But with reading a complex text, you feel a level of mental exertion.

This is good. Like reps in the gym create a strong and fit body that adapts to the increasing load (’thinking of Arnie talking about the pump’), mental effort and strain creates a strong mind.

We’re drowning in an ocean of passive consumption. Previously, when bored, we may have resorted to picking up an instrument, or a book, or socialising or myriad of other activities, now we can pick up the smartphone and passively consume.

In the article, they reference a drop in reading, writing, arithmetic scores in kids since the advent of phones. Similarly with IQ.

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone.

Reading is just a more active way of engaging with the material. I see this with podcasts. I’m a huge podcast listener, and when I think at the amount of information I retain when I listen versus when I actively read a book, it is miniscule.

 You may think you are learning from the podcasts you listen to. But I defy you to write down the arguments you heard a week ago, much less the evidence that was adduced in support of them.

You’re just not using the same cognitive muscles when you are listening/watching, versus reading.

It’s not even that we’re going to an oral society, that is predicated on memorisation. Instead, we’re going towards a broadcast society, where information is just passively broadcasted to the masses.

5. Living life twice

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence. The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading nonfiction—science, history, philosophy, travel writing—we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

There is something we get from fiction, poetry, travel writing, good science writing etc.

Reading and writing are tools to understand ourselves, the world and others around us. It provides a portal to feeling, emotion and the ‘wordless’. You can put yourself in the shoes of someone else.

It allows you to ’taste life twice’. It’s difficult to articulate what exactly we get from fiction (if it were easy, maybe it would be non-fiction), but I can say the wisest, kindest and most thoughtful people I’ve met tend to be extremely well read.

Actionable tips

• Delete all social media from your phone (use your laptop if you ever have to access)
• Carry around your kindle or a book and let that be the default thing you pick up
• Write something. For yourself, or publish it on a blog, substack. Whatever to get the habit of writing ingrained. If you do enough bad writing, you’ll eventually get good.
• ‘I dont have time to read’ - the average person has a screentime of 7 hours… use this argument anytime you find yourself strapped for time.