10. The kiss of death
When I was in my twenties, if you had asked me about any human problem—poverty, hunger, religious strife—I would have told you that cooperation was the answer. Plus compassion, of course, because that’s the beating heart of cooperation. It seemed to me that if only we could feel deeply for each other no matter what our differences, then we’d be motivated to come together to take harmonious, healing action. And if we could do that, there’d be nothing we couldn’t achieve, including saving the world.
Life was simple back then: Cooperation, good. Competition, bad.
Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to believe in cooperation than to practice it. I got an A for intent, but an F for results, because as hard as I tried, and I tried really hard, I couldn’t make cooperation work like I wanted it to.
Then I came across The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. I was so thankful to find it, but at first it pissed me off. Here was this guy talking about cooperation, showing how it was a full-blown science with theories and experiments, and how it had been around for decades, but I was a longtime devotee of cooperation, so how come nobody told me about this sooner? Why hadn’t I been invited to join the club?
Once I got into the book, though, I felt like singing hallelujahs because if smart people were figuring out the secret to making cooperation work, this essential human force for good, then maybe we really could stop making a mess of things and save ourselves.
Ridley opens Chapter 1 by talking about insects, of which there are an estimated six to ten million species. But within that boundless abundance there are just a handful of standouts—the social insects—which because of their cooperative way of life have become stunningly more successful than all the other insects.
Ridley explains: “There are probably ten thousand billion ants on the planet, weighing in aggregate as much as all the human beings put together. It has been estimated that three-quarters of all the insect biomass—and in some places one-third of all the animal biomass—in the Amazon rain forest consists of ants, termites, bees and wasps.”
And then he says: “They are perhaps even more ubiquitous in deserts. Were it not for an inexplicable intolerance for cool temperatures, ants and termites would prevail in temperate climates as well. As much as ourselves, they are the masters of the planet.”
Cooperative social organization is the path to standout success among mammals, too. For example, us. We humans have the highest, most complex degree of cooperation of any mammal, though it’s radically different from the kind practiced by the social insects. They run their cooperation on instinct. We run ours on learning and moral decision-making, which is more challenging and unstable but more powerful. It’s our special cooperative ability that’s allowed us to take over the planet and use it for our own purposes.
So, here I was, charging happily through Ridley’s book, jazzed by his lively writing, when I cruised to the end of Chapter 7, turned the page to Chapter 8, and slammed headlong into six words dancing in italics: animals cooperate in order to compete.
Instant whiplash—YES but NO but yes.
YES! I get it! Here’s the missing piece. Cooperation is not what I thought it was. It’s a subset of competition, not its own thing. Illumination flooded in. No wonder it’s so difficult. For a split second I responded happily to the thrill of discovery.
But NO! Please don’t let this be true because if cooperation contradicts itself, that means it can’t save us.
But yes. Wrenching news, and yet if evolution is killing us, I want to know why. I just do. We’re talking about the death of my species, so I have a right to understand. Give me the truth and don’t pull any punches.
By the time I got to the end of his book, Ridley had me convinced that cooperation and competition are not independent adversaries at war with each other. They’re a unitary system. They work together. But I wanted the war.
I remember singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” when I was a child in church. As chilling as the militarism of that hymn is to me now, back then I wanted to give my life over to something bigger than myself.
Once I left home and was out on my own, cooperation was that thing because I believed it was love in action. I wanted so badly to be one of cooperation’s soldiers. I was eager to take on competition and defeat it. In the cosmic battle of good versus evil, I wanted to be on the right side, the bright side. I wanted to fight for the light.
But after reading Ridley, I understood there’s no such simple answer and never was and never will be. I had loved cooperation faithfully for so many years and now I was finding out that it belonged to another. And not some random other, it belonged to my enemy.
Once I grasped the unitary principle, that cooperation is permanently, deeply, intrinsically tangled up in competition, I saw this dynamic playing out everywhere. It was suddenly so obvious I wondered how I could have missed it for so many years.
Take basketball, for example. If everyone on your team plays well together in seamless cooperation out on the court, you have a big advantage compared to a team that’s torn apart by the petty strivings of big egos who hog the ball because they want to hog the spotlight. One or two big talents can sometimes carry a team, but on the whole, the more cooperative a team the better chance they have to win.
It’s similar in business. Other things being equal, if each of your staff is a team player and each department is working in harmony with the others, you have a big advantage over a dysfunctional company riven with political infighting.
So cooperation makes you a more effective competitor. And if you’re in a competitive game, which basketball is, and business is, and life itself is, who do you want on your team when you’re up against tough opponents? You want fierce competitors—but competitors who know how to be fierce cooperators with their teammates.
The same is true for hunter-gatherer bands, which is the context in which we became the kind of humans we are. We needed to be both fierce competitors and fierce cooperators in just the right balance.
So forget light versus dark. Cooperation and competition are mutually interpenetrating like yin and yang where the mystery is how they can be so different and yet so involved in each other.
I had told myself this was what I had wanted, to get to the bottom of the human operating system, to understand how we are made, to understand why it’s so hard being us. But what hateful knowledge I had stumbled upon. The way human cooperation actually works, not our fantasy of it, not our hopes for it, but the real thing, that corruption, is the kiss of death for us as a species, because if cooperation can’t save us then nothing can.
So why not quit seeking answers? Why not throw up our hands and walk away from any further study? Because even though cooperation is hobbled and humbled, we can, through our moral determination, tug the obstinate unitary system more in the direction of the nurturing parts of cooperation. And by doing this, we can enrich our relationships and brighten our post-hope lives. So in this spirit of possibility, and in the spirit of playing against the game of human evolution, I continued my exploration.
Ridley says wherever there’s human cooperation there are cheaters. This is not true for ants. They don’t cheat on their colony-mates. But we humans cheat a lot.
The science of cooperation does not use the word “cheater” in a pejorative way. It’s an objective, technical term used to designate people who exploit the cooperation of others for their own benefit. They take more from their group than they give to the group, sometimes remarkably more. If there is such a thing as a social contract—the assumed agreement that everybody in a group is committed to working together for the common good—then this is what the cheaters are cheating on.
Ridley illustrates this principle with the classic example of the commons. Ten farmers share a field of good pasture. Every morning each of them brings ten cows to spend the day grazing and this arrangement has worked perfectly for generations. One hundred cows is exactly what this parcel of land can sustain without degrading.
But one morning one of the farmers brings eleven cows. This might not seem like a big deal in and of itself because it’s only one percent more cows, but it’s cheating and that’s always a big deal. That farmer is breaking the cooperative agreement.
Now only one thing matters. What will the others decide to do in response? If they do nothing except grouse and grumble and gossip among themselves, why wouldn’t the cheater bring twelve cows tomorrow and maybe thirteen the day after? Then he would have a significant competitive advantage in terms of accumulating wealth over the long term, and perhaps in consequence, he’d gain political power over the community.
And if one incident of cheating is tolerated by the group, then the other farmers might start thinking, “I’d be a fool not to do the same.” Soon everyone is bringing extra cows and the pasture declines and eventually it’s destroyed and then what?
The lesson is simple. If you want to sustain cooperation, you have to enforce it. Ridley says the science of cooperation tells us just how to handle a problem like this.
The other farmers need to take a stand and tell the cheater, “You may not do this again, and if you do we’ll expel you from our cooperative and you’ll not be allowed to bring any cows here ever again.” You give him one pass, along with a serious warning, and then you enforce your agreement. There are situations where you might give a person a second pass, if after you confronted him that second time he demonstrated enough genuine remorse. But no more than two chances because if you don’t immediately take a stand for your cooperative, it can disintegrate quickly.
So the issue is not that the cheater is trying to cheat. Humans do that. What matters is how the cooperative group responds. Do they care enough to do the gutsy thing and defend their livelihoods and their moral commitment to cooperation?
Of course this can lead to a serious confrontation. Suppose the cheater is a determined bully who doesn’t give a damn about the group, so despite the warning he’s been given, the next day he comes with twenty cows. The group expels him but he refuses to leave and pushes ahead with his herd. Now force becomes necessary, perhaps even violence—in the service of sweet, sweet cooperation.
Enforcement is not nice-guy stuff. The minute you join a cooperative group you become a competitor because you have to compete against cheaters.
What’s it like to be inside a cooperative group that’s getting tested? What’s it like to have to stand your ground and keep standing it? Let’s take a look. Imagine there are seven nonprofits in your city which all work with at-risk teenagers. They decide to create the Coalition for Youth because they believe they can turn their separate programs into a coherent system, which they hope will triple their impact. In their first meeting they write out their working agreement and everyone signs. It says there are five foundations in town they’ll approach only as a coalition and no individual nonprofit will apply to any of them for a grant on its own.
Things go along fine for the first six months, then the news breaks that Nonprofit #7 has applied for a grant from Foundation #1. The foundation decides to stick with the Coalition, but still, the Coalition has a cheater in its midst.
Again, the primary question is not what the cheater will do, but what the group will do. They hold an emergency meeting to confront Blake, the executive director of the offending nonprofit, and tell him he can’t ever break their agreement again or his nonprofit will be expelled.
Now it’s four months later, and they find out Blake has not only applied for but received a grant from Foundation #2, which turned down the Coalition because, “we only fund one youth service program a year.” Another emergency meeting is called and the conversation goes like this.
Cecil: We’re here today to let you know that our coalition has decided to expel your agency. As of now, Blake, you’re no longer a member.
Blake: But why? But you can’t do that. But you didn’t ask us for our vote. You didn’t find out if we want to be expelled and we don’t. This is so cold kicking us out without notice.
Cassi: We did give you notice. In our first emergency meeting, when you applied for a grant from Foundation #1 we told you if you applied again to any of the five foundations reserved for the Coalition then you couldn’t be a member anymore. Didn’t you hear that? Didn’t you read the letter we sent you confirming our position?
Blake: I got the letter. But this is all moving too fast. We’re trying to do better. You have to give us another chance.
Clara: We thought giving you one chance was pretty darned generous, considering what’s at stake here.
Blake: Well, these things take time to develop, you can’t expect a brand-new coalition to work right out of the gate.
Carlo: We need it to work right out of the gate. Our plan is well designed. We’re making good progress. We’re on the road to delivering much better services to the youth in this city and their families. For the first time, we’re going to have a coherent system of services. This matters so much to us that we’re taking a stand for it. And we’re proud to take this stand.
Blake: You guys are being so mean. It’s like you’ve turned into some kind of tough guys without feelings.
Cecil: Oh, no, we’ve got feelings. First and foremost passion. We’re passionate about our mission.
Blake: I’m going to tell the foundations that you’re destroying the Coalition and that if my organization isn’t part of it not to fund you guys because it’s not a coalition anymore and it doesn’t count if we’re not in it because we’re a youth-serving agency and we have a right to be part of any coalition in this city having to do with youth.
Clara: What gives you the right to be part of a coalition if you don’t abide by the agreements the coalition has made?
Blake: You’re being so tight.
Carlo: No, we’re following the discipline of cooperation.
Blake: What the hell is that?
Carlo: It’s the thing that makes coalitions work. Cooperative groups can’t last if the people in them don’t cooperate. It’s that simple. If one agency breaks the agreement and goes after a grant on its own that’s called “cheating.”
Cassi: And there’s a big advantage to cheating. You get all the benefits of the coalition plus all the benefits of going it alone.
Cecil: As long as the group allows you to cheat.
Clara: And if the group allows itself to be ripped off like that, well, that group is a sad case.
Blake: But…
Cecil: Hold on, Blake. Let’s play this out. We want you to get this so you can understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you cheat on our agreement, then either we enforce it, which is what we’re doing today, or what would happen?
Blake: Well, I think you’re being too strict. We’d continue to get by okay.
Carlo: Not so. What would happen is the rest of us would see you had a serious advantage by cheating and why wouldn’t we decide to cheat, too?
Cassi: Then bye-bye coalition.
Blake: Well, you don’t have to do that. You could stick with the plan.
Clara: Wow, did you hear what you just said?
Blake: What?!
Clara: Are you saying you think you should get to cheat while the rest of us stick to the agreement?
Blake: Well, not exactly, but we have special needs.
Cecil: We could each make the case that we’ve got special needs.
Carlo: Here’s the bottom line. If we don’t have cooperation, not lip service but the real thing, then we don’t have a coalition. Then our coalition is a pretense. A lie, really.
Clara: And believe it, we’ve got ourselves a coalition.
Cassi: And that’s why you’re out. Is that really so hard to understand?
Blake: You shouldn’t be doing this. I’m going to make a bunch of noise about this.
Carlo: Really? That’s what you want to do?
Blake: I’ll complain to the City Council members and get them to take away City money from each of you and give it to us.
Carlo: Go ahead. Remember though, they already know our plan. We’ve met with each of them and they’re really happy about us turning our individual services into a collaborative system. So if you make a big stink, you’re the one who’s going to lose. That’s just a fact.
Blake: You guys are being so mean putting me in a corner like this. It’s not fair.
Cecil: Look, this is dirt simple. We had an agreement. You broke the agreement. We gave you a warning. You ignored the warning. So you can’t be a part of our group anymore. You made your decision. Twice. This is not rocket science.
Blake: We should get another warning.
Clara: Come on, Blake, think about it. If you were following the agreement and my agency cheated, you’d raise hell.
Blake: Well…
Clara: Come on, you know you would.
Blake: You guys are being awfully cold.
Cassi: No, we’re on fire.
Carlo: That’s right!
Cassi: We’re on fire about serving the youth in our city in a much, much better way than ever before. We’re not going to let anyone get in the way of that.
Clara: And there’s something else. If we let you stay and cheat, we’d resent you, maybe even start hating you, and do you want that? We don’t. We don’t do resentment.
Cecil: Our decision has two parts, Blake. Part one is that you’re out as of right now. Part two is that one year from today your agency can reapply to the Coalition. And if you can show us that you’re ready to cooperate one hundred percent, no exceptions, then you’ll be voted back in. But you’ll really have to demonstrate in tangible ways that you’ve changed. We don’t even know what that would look like, but you’re going to have to convince us with more than talk. You’re going to have to knock our socks off.
Blake: No, we’re ready right now. I didn’t understand before how serious you were. Bring us back in and we’ll see if we can do better.
Cecil: I’m sorry, but our decision is final. And now we’re done and this meeting is over.
Before I grasped the role of enforcement, I tried reasoning with cheaters. I tried talking them into behaving better. But they kept sucking off the work the rest of us were doing and when we objected they bullied us and accused us of not being nice, which we couldn’t stand to not be.
And I wondered, why are they acting like this? We share the same mission statement. They say they believe in all the same principles as us. So why don’t they want to play fair and be part of this lovely collaboration we’ve created? We’ve invited them in and treated them well, why are they turning on us? Is it our fault? Did we not explain this clearly enough? Have we missed some key point that would make them understand?
But the science of cooperation says this is just how humans are. If you can cheat while everyone else is cooperating that’s a significant advantage and hard to resist. Not that we can’t resist, but it’s harder than we wish it would be.
Sometimes you can talk people out of cheating because their relationship with you matters enough to them that they’ll clean up their act. But if that doesn’t work, you have to take action. And you have to really mean it when you make your move because cheaters will test you to see how committed you are. In my experience, talking people out of cheating only works when I’ve got enforcement in my voice, and in my bones. When I was still stuck in my nice-guy persona, cheaters could smell my hesitancy and thus had no reason to believe me, so they didn’t and they never budged.
But if I’m making it sound like enforcement is all tough-guy stuff, let me correct that. If you develop a reputation for being fiercely committed to cooperation, many bullies will steer clear of you and go elsewhere looking for easier prey. And there are times when the stand you’re taking is so clear and what you’re made of is so evident, that enforcement doesn’t even have to come up.
Evie, the executive director of a nonprofit doing violence prevention work, asked me to meet with her because she wanted to get free of her fear of conflict so she could deal with people in a direct, assertive way. And she was urgent about this because she had two difficult staff who were sabotaging her and sucking up way too much of her time and emotional energy.
In our conversations, she wrestled with her reluctance to set limits. She looked back into her childhood and saw she had never been allowed to say no to anyone. In the middle of our sixth meeting, as she was pushing hard to find her inner strength, she broke through. Her face lit up with surprise: “Oh, I’ve got it! This moxie thing. I can feel it now. Yum.”
Ten days later she called me: “You know those two bullies on my staff who have been so mean and impossible? They’re gone!”
“Wow, what did you do?”
“Nothing. It’s just that every day since my breakthrough, I’ve been walking around the office feeling like I could burst into song. Neither of the bullies said a word to me in all this time. They slipped off somewhere whenever they saw me coming. And this morning I found their resignation letters sitting neatly side by side in the center of my desk when I came in.”
“What do you make of that?”
“They got it just from looking at me that it’s a new day around here. They could read the writing on the wall. Or the writing on the Evie. Too bad they didn’t step up to the challenge and get on the team, but if they’re not ready to do that, then I’m happy they’re gone. And I’m especially happy they took care of it themselves. I didn’t have to lift a finger, just my spirit.”
When does cheating work best? When you have a lot of cooperators and a few cheaters with the cheaters on the sidelines, taking a bit here and a bit there, but not threatening the sustainability of the group.
But what happens when the cheaters multiply out of control and take over the leadership positions of the group? What happens when cheaters take over a nation? What’s that like? Well, we know what that’s like because that’s the kind of nation we live in. It’s so familiar we’ve become habituated to it.
We can see this dynamic operating when elected officials use their position as a path to personal wealth and ignore what their constituents need. They get an A+ for cheating on their job description.
Or when investment banks gamble themselves into trouble then ask the rest of the country to bail them out. They get an A+ for privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Or when big box retailers pay their workers so little that they have to turn to publicly funded welfare and healthcare.
Or when individuals pay their taxes faithfully, because they have to, while giant oil companies awash in profits get lavish “refunds” from the IRS.
Or when Big Pharma uses its political clout to prevent Medicare from buying drugs in bulk, which would deliver big savings to ordinary folks and to our country.
Or when the stock market, day after day, transfers wealth from small investors to big ones because the rules have been rigged by the house for the house.
Or when Congress passes a reverse-Robin Hood tax plan that boldly robs from working-class and middle-class people to give to the very, very rich.
How do you keep a cheating society going when the cheaters are cannibalizing the economy by raiding the principle, not just taking interest off the top? Under such circumstances, the only way for cheaters to keep sucking up wealth is to drive larger numbers of people deeper into poverty, leaving islands of the superrich dotting a devastated landscape.
And the sad fact is, determined cheaters are usually much more savvy about how to exploit cooperation than dedicated cooperators are about defending it.
The science of cooperation is very clear. If you love cooperation you have to fight for it. Good intentions are not enough. What cooperation asks of us is discipline. “Discipline,” of course, can be a harsh term, implying punishment and suppression. But it can also mean love. You love something so much you become a devoted disciple. You study and learn and practice and develop mastery. Cooperation takes devotion because it’s way more challenging than competition and look how hard people work to be successful competitors.
As an activist, I did not like setting limits because then cheaters would test me with personal attacks. At first I set limits because I had to. I had to defend the work I was doing on behalf of children. But as the years went by and I kept practicing, I noticed that I began to secretly like enforcement. And then there came an afternoon when a messed-up jerk tried to pull a cheating move on me and instead of scaring me or making me mad, it made me really happy because I finally knew what to do and I got to enjoy the pleasure of shutting him down.
And if we need any more proof that cooperation is not one-dimensional and not purely positive, we can look at how it’s used in service of the worst of human evil. Nothing in the nature of cooperation prevents this.
For example, armies are masses of men working cooperatively to do mass killing. Julius Caesar bragged that his troops killed one million peasants in Europe and took one million more as slaves. The Nazi Wehrmacht slaughtered tens of millions. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia in the 1970s killed perhaps one-quarter of the country’s population. Human history is filled with stories of cooperative mass murder.
So it’s no wonder that experts in the past have declared that we’re born bad, red in tooth and claw, aggressive at our core, naked apes engaged in a brutish survival of the fittest, and eager to do violence in a war of all against all.
But of course that’s only half the story of who we are. In recent years, a spate of books has come out written by psychologists, primatologists, and evolutionists who are determined to show us in a much better light. They’ve gathered every bit of evidence that shows off our cooperative ability. Based on these findings they preach a gospel of optimism: if only we would maximize our cooperation and compassion we could save ourselves.
Their enthusiasm gives me a sense of déjà vu. I remember how happy I was preaching that same gospel. All I had, though, was my own opinion, whereas these guys are using science to back up their arguments. At the same time, they’re doing exactly what I did. They’re taking one side of the unitary principle as if it’s possible to take a side. In reaction to the dark view of the old born-bad dogma, they go to the opposite extreme and insist we’re born good. They argue that the dominant core of our nature is compassion not competition. They say we’ve entered into the “Age of Empathy,” so there’s a good chance that everything’s going to turn out okay.
I understand why they would want to keep their science on the short leash of hope. But the hard truth is we’re not born either good or bad. We’re born human, which includes good and bad and everything in between in a maddening, dangerous mix. The good-news guys, in order to make their arguments work, have to block out too much of the bad news. If you study human evolution, not as you wish it to be, but as it actually is, it’s the most depressing study ever. It’s not that the positives aren’t there. It’s that they’re part of a bigger picture, and that bigger picture is damning.
But let’s say for the moment that you’re committed to making the case that cooperation can put us on the road to salvation. How do you do that? You focus on altruism instead of cheating.
Altruism is the word for your behavior if you’re deeply motivated by concern for the welfare of others. Different people demonstrate different levels of altruism, which is partly determined by our genes, partly by our upbringing, partly by our society, and partly by our own moral decisions about how we want to live.
The holy grail of cooperation is “pure altruism,” which is extreme selflessness where the person’s concern is entirely about the welfare of the other and none, really none, about himself. And the question is, does this actually exist?
Whenever people give examples of what they believe is pure altruism there are skeptics ready to object.
A believer might put forward this scenario: “A man is jogging on the path along the river when he sees a child upstream slip on a muddy patch and fall into the icy waters. As the child is swept down toward him he leaps in, battles the currents, gets the child in a firm grip, then struggles back to shore with her. He pushes her out to safety, but exhausted and weighed down by his water-logged sweat suit, he’s pulled under and drowns. Isn’t that selfless?”
And the skeptic replies, “Maybe that man was imagining his picture on the front page of the paper the next morning, hailed as a hero, with people sending money to his widow and daughter. Or maybe he imagined himself being taken up into heaven to everlasting bliss because of his sacrifice, and how could you beat that reward? Or maybe he was suicidal and saw an opportunity to end his life and have it mean something at the same time. So saving that child was not a totally selfless act.”
The believer says, “A woman finds out her neighbor’s child is very sick and they have no health insurance so she gives the family ten thousand dollars to help out and it’s way more than she can afford.”
And the skeptic replies, “Maybe someone gave to her at a crucial time last year when she was in need and she’s happy to have this opportunity to pay that gift forward. It makes her feel really good about herself, so it’s worth the sacrifice. Or maybe she relishes the idea that her reputation in the community will be enhanced. So her generosity is not selfless.”
Let’s say, though, that absolutely pure altruism were possible. Could we actually use it to save ourselves? Take for example the admonition of Jesus to “go, sell whatever you have and give the money to the poor….” As a universal piece of advice it’s a troublesome verse. Does Jesus really mean that we should sell all that we have and give away all the proceeds to those in need? Is this literal? Is he arguing for pure altruism? Because if so, then pure altruism is suicidal, because selling everything means you sell your clothes and your house and your food and donate away all the money you made. So now you’re naked and homeless and will starve to death if you don’t freeze to death first. Christ, himself, had he followed his own admonition in such a literal way would have died long before he could have been crucified.
But I can’t believe that Jesus intended anything so extreme. Living by pure altruism is no more possible than living by a literal reading of the Bible. There are too many verses in there that would kill you. And why would we think that a man who famously spoke in parables would want us to take everything he said literally? Maybe he was just trying to say, give great attention to the poor, to comfort them and lift them up.
And you can’t help the poor if you’re dead.
Even Christ’s sacrifice of his life on the cross can’t necessarily be considered pure altruism. Maybe his mission was so important to him that he was willing to die for it. And if he knew he was going to be resurrected and rewarded by his father and worshipped by people for two thousand years, then was his death a pure sacrifice or only an instrumental sacrifice returning greater benefits to himself and his mission?
Another way to talk about altruism is to call it “unconditional love.” This is the ideal we’re all supposed to aspire to. It gets all the best press. But I’ve long had a nagging suspicion that it doesn’t really measure up to its accolades. Once I could see the problem with cooperation, I was able to see the problem with unconditional love. Because if you intend to practice unconditional love in the real world, do you really mean no conditions? Not any ever?
Take Amanda, a battered wife, who wants to get out of a bad situation, but her minister and the elders of her church insist that she practice unconditional love. They tell her she must submit to her husband, no matter what, because he’s been designated by God to be the head of the household. They tell her she must not just obey him, but love him with her whole heart till death do them part, even if he threatens her or injures her, or even if he’s the one who causes her death.
“Unconditional” means you never get to say no, you never get to set limits, you never get to practice self-defense. It means you will be victimized. So how can we call this love?
But maybe Amanda goes to a see a therapist who understands about conditions. Over the next three months, she attends sessions with him faithfully. Then one day when she’s ready, she takes her kids and moves into the shelter. She calls her husband to tell him, “I’ve left you. First, because I’ve finally come to care about myself enough to stop submitting to your abuse. And, second, because I care about you enough to stop enabling your abuse by suffering in silence.”
And maybe she’s still fond of the idea of unconditional love, so she adds, “Even though you’ve abused me for years, I understand your childhood history and how badly you were treated and how you became an abuser. And because I understand all this I will continue to love you unconditionally—but you may not be part of my life anymore.” So she’s loving unconditionally but living conditionally. I get that.
Then there’s Penny. She’s a single mom who says she loves her son unconditionally, and I’m curious so I ask her, “What do you mean by ‘unconditional’? Do you mean he can get away with anything? Do you let him disrespect you? Do you let him abuse you?”
“On, no, nothing like that. It’s okay if he gets angry, everybody does, but I draw the line at abuse.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because I want him to learn how to be responsible to his relationships. That’s the most important lesson I can teach him.”
“Why?”
“If a child grows up with no limits, always taking, never learning how to care for the people who love him, how would he ever learn how to sustain a long-term relationship as an adult? If I don’t set limits on him, if I don’t teach him the value of giving to others, then I would be hurting him, undermining his future, and that’s not love.”
“Doesn’t that mean you’re setting conditions? And if you are, doesn’t this mean you’re loving him conditionally?”
“Maybe, but I still like the phrase ‘unconditional love.’ Something about it feels right.”
“Tell me about that.”
“There are days when I find it really hard to love my son. Sometimes we’re so at odds I don’t even like him—but I still love him. Which means I still care about him and take care of him. Parenting is really, really challenging. To me ‘unconditional’ just means that I’ve learned how to push through the hard times and keep the relationship going strong.”
“Okay, I understand. So would it be fair to say that you’re setting conditions, but they’re very loving conditions?”
“Yes, that’s fair, but something about that still rubs me the wrong way, like conditional means it’s second-class love.”
“Is there any way the conditions you’re setting actually make love stronger?”
“I know they make our relationship better, so I guess that means they make our love stronger. I have a neighbor, Isabel, who lets her son get away with anything and that drives me crazy. I think she’s failing him. If ‘unconditional’ means you get lazy about love, I’m not for it.”
It can be very hard to pin down “unconditional love” in any concrete way because it wasn’t designed to be pinned down. Quite the opposite. Foggy vagueness keeps its magical aura humming. But what makes me most skeptical about unconditional love is how very many more people want to receive it than to give it.
I don’t want any of us to be sacrificial in our love. I want it to be a two-way street—I do my part and you do your part. I want each of us to take responsibility for putting in our maximum effort. There’s nothing sensational or mystical about this, it’s just the down-to-earth work of mutuality.
Conditional love, in what it can promise, is so much less than unconditional love, but in what it can deliver, so much more.
And then there’s this: The better I get at setting limits so I can stop any cheating, bullying, or abuse I encounter in the course of my daily life, the better I get at saying no to the operating system inside me that runs me but does not love me.
