The Policing of Love

Comment published in New York Times online in reply to: “Now is the time to talk about the power of touch,” by David Brooks, January 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/opinion/human-touch-aziz-ansari.html?comments:

Love must be within "convenient protection" and consent is not enough? But there is in love transgression, risk, and excess. Want yet more policing of feelings?

You can touch, as you can speak to, someone with kindness or cruelty or both. The ancient idea of the Evil Eye, suspected by the suspicious, is hard to exorcise or avoid. Speech like touch can be kind or selfish, but also impersonal and true or false, the object of agreement or disagreement, of thought. 

Do not moralists like Brooks want the State to regulate everyone's desire for happiness and need to be loved? He is tacitly appealing to the idea of a therapeutic culture as basis of a governance that seeks to repair the traumatic childhood of all (in some sense, it is all) who had one. Surely the only cure for having been or felt unloved is to love. 

In a society like ours, one must deal with the realities of alienation in all its forms. Some degree of traumatization is the common heritage of all of humanity, though it is easily disavowed and treated as exceptional malaise, in order to more securely enforce what becomes "see no evil"/perfect-the-world-now norms. Because as adults we mostly have a sophisticated ability to construct and communicate meaning in language and through the imagination, a more complex moral sense, involving proximity and distance, care and criticism, can be more artfully interwoven. (As in Shakespeare.)

Mixing desire and care, this is Eros.

Addendum:

In civil societies, most people have a moral sense that interdicts many things that the laws and powers of the state will not enforce, or cannot.  (Even the Ten Commandments names several).  The ambiguities in so may situations constitute one reason why.  That love cannot be commanded and enforced is another.

There is such a thing as political narcissism.  Its importance in our culture today is insufficiently appreciated.  Political narcissists have a hair trigger for calling out injustice, especially and sometimes only when it concerns them, or their social group of identification.  They may be not wrong in what they claim or whom they reproach, abilities they may have honed. Narcissists are traumatized by the recognition that no one really loves them.  They punish people for that.

A society without love will of course be one where the paradigm of social life is war.  And a society of traumatized and readily traumatizable people will be one of a permanent free-floating state of exception that can be invoked at almost any moment and that will be understood in terms that are psychological.  

(I think here of Fassbinder's film "Fear of Fear," made during Germany's terrorism scare of the 1970s in a society that still had not come fully to terms with its Nazi past, in which a bored and lonely housewife who likes while home alone to play records with schmaltzy songs about wanting to be loved. Because she has an anxiety that like all true anxiety is unspecifiable, a doctor says she is schizophrenic and gives her valium.  It turns out the real madness, which others express merely and she also feels subject to, is the anxiety about "madness.")