bell hooks: A Love Ethic Is a Human Right

What’s a love ethic? Is everyone entitled to live meaningful lives?

In All About Love by bell hooks, a love ethic is described as the belief that all people have an innate right to live self-determined and meaningful lives. Additionally, she claims that our own well-being is wrapped up in collective well-being.

Below you’ll learn how to live by a love ethic.

Living by a Love Ethic

The beauty of adopting a love ethic, bell hooks says, is that it empowers us to transcend fear, which often serves as a tool to uphold systems of control and dominance. Cultures of dominance use fear to keep individuals isolated and on guard. Love, on the other hand, combats isolation by fostering connections and facilitating greater understanding, both of which act as powerful antidotes to fear. hooks argues that to transform our society we need love to become a foundational cultural value that informs all aspects of life, from individual actions to institutional policy to media production.

(Shortform note: In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt further explains that isolation is necessary for fear to take root. When people lack meaningful connections and a sense of community, they become more susceptible to fear and manipulation and are less likely to collectively respond to authoritarian control.)

hooks offers a roadmap to help people root their lives and decision-making in love. To start, she explains, you must first learn to love yourself.

Self-Love

According to hooks, living by a love ethic begins with practicing self-love. She explains that many of us find it challenging to cultivate self-love because of negative messages we’ve received about ourselves as children from our loved ones or the broader community. These are messages that we need to unlearn in order to fully accept and love ourselves. Therefore, she argues that self-love requires the cultivation of healthy self-esteem.

Citing the work of psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, hooks outlines five practices of healthy self-esteem: self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertion, and purposeful living.

1. Self-Awareness: Self-awareness is a practice that allows you to embrace practices that promote personal growth, connection, and well-being, while also looking critically at the world around you. For hooks, self-awareness requires you to question your beliefs, biases, and actions and to strive for alignment between your values and your daily life.

2. Self-Acceptance: Self-acceptance is the practice of embracing and acknowledging yourself fully without judgment or criticism, letting go of societal expectations and external definitions of worth, and affirming your inherent value and worthiness.

3. Self-Responsibility: Self-responsibility is the practice of taking accountability for your actions, choices, and personal growth and recognizing that you have agency to shape your life. hooks emphasizes that taking responsibility for yourself isn’t intended to negate the impact of systematic oppression but to emphasize the power in personal agency.

4. Self-Assertion: Self-assertion is the willingness to be your own advocate and speak your mind, confidently voicing your needs, desires, boundaries, and voice without apology or hesitation. hooks acknowledges that this can be especially challenging for women who’ve been socialized to believe that assertiveness is an undesirable quality.

5. Purposeful Living: Living purposefully is the commitment to identify and pursue your values, goals, and passions while continuously striving toward personal growth and self-actualization.

Romance and Friendship

hooks suggests that we must first learn to love ourselves before we can effectively love others. However, according to hooks, self-love is no guarantee of a healthy relationship, particularly when it comes to romance.

According to hooks, in the US, romantic relationships are often portrayed as the most important form of love. However, she argues, when we focus solely on finding romantic love or investing all our attention in a single loved one, we risk developing codependency and neglecting our other relationships.

Furthermore, hooks adds that the way in which we’ve conceptualized romantic love is flawed. We think of it as a force beyond our control, a passion that defies logic. hooks points to how the language of “falling in love” suggests that there’s no agency or intentionality in romantic relationships. hooks explains that this idea of love isn’t only false, but is also damaging. Idealizing romantic love can lead us to stay in unhealthy and toxic relationships that only appear to be loving. Instead of practicing a love ethic, these relationships are often where we play out the unhealthy dynamics from our families of origin, exerting power over others or seeking approval by neglecting our own needs.

hooks suggests that to practice healthy love in romantic relationships, we must first see it modeled. She argues friendships are where we’re best able to learn about love because friendships often allow us to be our most honest and authentic selves and to practice being in conflict while still loving each other. Love, if defined as a commitment to the spiritual growth of yourself and another, is equally valuable regardless of the type of relationship. While the relationship looks different, the love behind it is the same.

Community

hooks says that the primacy of romantic relationships has also inhibited our ability to nurture broader communities. The value of community in the US has been overshadowed by a focus on the nuclear family, with a romantic couple at its center. The nuclear family has been presented as the ideal structure to ensure personal well-being, but more often the combined forces of capitalism and patriarchy make the family unit a place of oppression rather than love.

(Shortform note: The nuclear family hasn’t always been the cultural norm. According to conservative political and cultural commentator David Brooks, in the 19th and early 20th century, extended households—with multiple generations and many children living together—were common. However, the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and the cultural shift toward individualism gradually led to the decline of extended households and the emergence of the nuclear family as the dominant family structure in American society by the mid-20th century.)

Being in community with other people is critical because it allows you to expand your practice of love. Once again citing Peck, hooks defines community as a group of people who’ve learned to communicate honestly and share a strong commitment to support and empathize with each other in joyful and difficult times, allowing them to build relationships that transcend superficiality.

(Shortform note: Others have also made the case that the cultural importance placed on romantic relationships, and more specifically marriage, has weakened social ties, leading to higher rates of isolation. Mandy Len Catron, author of How to Fall In Love With Anyone, argues that the American ideology of marriage assumes that the work of caring for someone should fall primarily to one person. But without the pre-eminence of marriage, care and support could be redistributed across networks of extended family, neighbors, and friends. Catron advocates for expanding our sense of what love looks like beyond the insular institution of marriage to benefit from a diverse network of close and loving relationships.)

Spirituality

If, as hooks argues, investing in the spiritual growth of another is the definition of love, then having a spiritual practice is core to living by a love ethic. According to hooks, spirituality is the belief in something larger than ourselves—an all-encompassing loving force, which she calls God or a higher power. This spirituality, she argues, affirms that love is our ultimate purpose and requires us to actively align our beliefs with our actions, living and acting in loving ways.

(Shortform note: In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes a similar feeling of being connected to something greater, which he calls “elevation.” It’s the awe and wonder we experience when we share moments of transcendence with others or witness phenomena beyond our understanding. Haidt notes that experiencing God’s love within a congregation is one of the most common forms of elevation, which is why religion exists in every culture across the world. Religions fulfill a basic human need to connect with something greater.)

While hooks believes that love is the foundation of all the major world religions, she doesn’t equate a spiritual practice with organized religion. She explains that while the two can be connected, they don’t have to be. In fact, she acknowledges that organized religion often fails to provide spiritual fulfillment, instead co-opting religious principles to justify discrimination or violence.

(Shortform note: In another book entitled The Righteous Mind, Haidt acknowledges that religion can become an accessory to violence, but he argues that on the whole religious institutions provide a strong social fabric and moral framework that strengthens communities. He objects to what he calls the “villainization” of religion by the political Left and the New Atheism movement, represented by authors like Sam Harris (Waking Up) and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion).)

Spirituality, according to hooks, reminds us that we’re a part of an interdependent community that can mutually thrive through loving action. It’s the necessary antidote to the persistent American narrative of secular individualism, which breeds a culture of self-centeredness and isolation that not only perpetuates inequality and reinforces systems of oppression, but leaves people feeling hopeless and dissatisfied, holding onto the myth that pursuit of their own desires will make them happy.

bell hooks: A Love Ethic Is a Human Right