Our Need for Love in a Black Pill Age

Commentary

In the age of the global village, it is the rare bird who would claim that we have been brought closer together by the ever-growing ease of travel and communication.

Half of marriages end in divorce. The young overwhelmingly opt out of this ancient rite of passage altogether. The birth rates are below replacement in all Western countries, while more than 60 million children have been aborted in the United States since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

No matter what your follower count says on Facebook or Instagram, everyone knows that genuine friendships are vanishingly rare. The young and old are locked into a dance of mutual suspicion. “Boomer” trips off the tongue of the young as a curse word, while “zoomer” and “millennial” have become bywords for laziness and entitlement, their shared pessimism condemned as that of the “doomer.”

Fewer and fewer practice any form of organized religion, once responsible for cultivating the spiritual lives of individuals and communities. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that rates of depression surge, the counsel of the therapist unable to provide the consolation and community once offered by the church or synagogue.

For the greatest popular theologian of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), news of this “black pill” state of affairs in our time would have come as no surprise. Lewis believed that family, friendship, romance, and the religious life offered the most important education there is: an education in love. Our whole purpose on this earth, he thought, was to learn how to love aright—to learn how to “order” our loves.

In a short book that he wrote toward the end of his life, called “The Four Loves” (1960), Lewis considered what he took to be the most important kinds of love: affection, friendship, “eros” or romance, and charity, the greatest of the four and lodestar of each.

While love may be classified in different ways, using the same word “love” to describe the affection between mother and child, old friends, new lovers, and God’s providential care for mankind was not a failure of language, for the Cambridge professor of literature. Somehow, the different kinds of love we find in the world exist on a spectrum and are related to one another. The lowest does not stand without the highest, Lewis argued.

But for all its universality, there is a tendency in us that shies away from love, whatever form it may take. If followed, the consequences in our collective and personal lives are catastrophic.

The great impediment to speaking and living the language of love is the desire for safety, Lewis warned. It is not for nothing that it is repeatedly said of Aslan, the Christ figure in Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” that “he is not safe.” Love creates terrible risks. A wife may die. A child is dependent on you. You may not be interesting or attractive enough to attract a friend or lover. Your local church is full of the strange and sanctimonious, the pastor too demanding. Why risk it?

For Lewis, the road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but rather by locking away your heart with, well, the “good” intention of keeping it safe from breaking. There is nothing more dangerous than living for safety. Such a philosophy belies the deepest truth of human nature, which is that each and every one of us exists in a deep state of need.

Yet if we are only needy creatures, what does any of us have to offer? What about us does Lewis think lovable?

A clue to the answer lies in our very power to opt out. We are able to refuse the offer of love. We can refuse to love our family or begin one of our own; we may refuse to have interests that may attract friends; refuse to ask the pretty girl out for coffee and return to the safety and comfort of the video game console instead; we can refuse to say “yes” to the wonder and gift of life itself. All in the name of safety.

It is our freedom to love—or not—that shows how much we resemble the author of our existence, whose love for us is not our right but His gift.

What is truly remarkable about the God Lewis worships is that he needs nothing, is owed everything, yet gives something He does not have: our freedom.

When we give ourselves over to love, we are most free—most like the God who made us.

But the way of love Lewis commends is full of risk, almost certainly portends tragedy, and assumes that there is such a thing as a Being who stands outside of existence itself as its source.

Unless and until we learn that we are creatures who are made to love, we will find ourselves in a global village full of strangers, in a culture that bears all the markers of decline, and mired in a personal life bereft of meaning.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.