Love to hate

Mike’s
Pith & Wind cont.
..made any sense; nothing had a name. All I knew was fear.
Not surprisingly, we were late for the appointment.
Some people on other drugs, like ecstasy for instance, report that they feel
that the universe is radiating love, and I suppose all this proves is that your
view of the world is very much prejudiced by your drug of choice.
But I don’t think my Durban Poison insight was wrong in this case, whereas
I do think the ecstasy perception is misguided. There’s a perfectly rational
reason why we should be biologically programmed to be fearful, whereas the opposite
is true of innate love. My contention is that, whereas fear is instinctive,
we have to learn love.
Babies have fear. Mothers have love.
There was a very good repeat of a show about the life of Richard Rodgers on
ABC TV a couple of weeks ago. I was brought up on the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein
in particular, and I have a great deal of time for their craft, not to say their
art. There was a moment in their career when they actually wrote a contentious
song, an angry and accusing song, a song that got banned in some American states.
It’s the one song from the South Pacific repertoire that I don’t
recall us singing around the piano with our grandmother, and it was called Carefully
Taught.

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

It still gives me a little thrill to hear it today, because it’s so
musically insistent and lyrically accusing, and it goes quite a bit further
out on a limb than any of the other songs from the show, even though the show
is about mixed race relationships and reflects some of the social turmoil
that was surfacing in the US after the Second World War.
But I would contend it’s wrong in its central premise. We don’t
have to be carefully taught to hate. That inherent reservoir of fear, just
a twist away from hate, is never far from the surface, and typically expresses
itself in a child’s desire to conform, and to reject difference in others.
We’ve got to be taught to love.

You’ve got to be taught
To forget your fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be unafraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To love all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
(with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein)

Maybe love’s overrated, or maybe it’s a phase we have to go through.
Maybe we need a new word for it, because it ‘s become so confused with
lust and the breeding cycle. Maybe it is a biological strategy afterall, but
one that is necessarily acquired in relationships, like the mother/child relationship.

Anyway, when you get to my age you realise that the most valuable thing in
life is actually companionship, and very often the really useful kind of love
is simply implicit in companionship…
Christ! How much further to go?

For some correspondence
on this subject, check the Correspondence
page