Stop the love hype
One summer afternoon at St Hanshaugen in Oslo, I was sitting on a bench contemplating the sunset and life, when suddenly Erling, the furniture builder, jumped out from behind some bushes and sat down next to me. He was in an exceptionally good mood. This summer he had been out of town in his studio in Hønefoss working consistently on a log of oak, making tables and chairs for his affluent clients:
“Just work. That’s all I’ve been doing. There’s been no problems, no intrigues. All summer I have just worked, day after day on the oak. And the thing that’s given me peace of mind, more than anything else, is that I’ve just kept away from girls all together. I ought to have figured this out a long time ago. It began when I was a teen. Every time I started to go out with a girl, I was ecstatic. I met up with my friends and told them about this new girl, and how wonderful this particular chick was. I used to tell my mother that I was finally in love. Every time I used to say: ‘This girl is fantastic, she is extraordinary, I can’t imagine my life without her.’ You know, whenever I uttered those words I should have realised that something was fishy. It should have made me suspicious. Every time I start to talk that way about anything, it is always slightly hysterical. Because if this girl was actually that extraordinary and fantastic, I wouldn’t have to insist that she was all that - right? Whenever I insist that hard on something, it can’t be right. Why would I need to hype a relationship with someone that I love?”
The first verse of the Norwegian national anthem, “Ja, vi elsker”, goes:
“Yes, we love with fond devotion
This our land that looms
Rugged, storm-scarred o'er the ocean
With her thousand homes.
Love her, in our love recalling
Those who gave us birth.
And old tales which night, in falling,
Brings as dreams to earth.”
On every occasion when someone has concluded that the singing of the national anthem is appropriate, one has to mumble these foolish words. In addition, “Ja, vi elsker” is set to an intense melody, like a march. The commonsense way to sing it is either utterly ironic or embarrassingly nationalistic, either way it is sung in an insisting tone of voice. Only the Den Norske Studentsangforening on Universitetsplassen on Karl Johan on May 17th - wearing their traditional eighteenth century student attire - which I’m certain no student in the eighteenth century actually wore - are able to sing these words with the level of simple-mindedness that they require. The way the song starts off, with the bombastic proclamation that: YES, WE LOVE WITH FOND EMOTION THIS OUR LAND is completely counterproductive. No sane person who ever loved anything would every opt to burst out such an artificial pledge.
*
Love has such lousy ambassadors. Maybe it’s always been like this. Of course, one should cherish the fact that there are no instruction manuals for love. Millions of love-hungry people have followed the teachings of those who have claimed to be prophets. People have interpreted their allegories literally. “If I only follow the moral laws that my prophet laid down, I surely must achieve salvation and acquire the taste of universal love?” Yes, the so called prophets might have been sentimental people who had a lot on their hearts, they may have been able to arouse emotions in the masses, but what they did was hype love. And by claiming to have copyrighted love, they did love the greatest disservice.
*
The wedding ritual is supposed to be the ultimate celebration of love. Before you actually fall in love, the wedding is seen as an extremely romantic idea. But when you see a young couple planning their wedding, it’s logistics. For the in-laws, it’s all for show. For the guests, it’s an excuse to party. The wedding seems to have nothing to do with love. Why do we need a public pledge of allegiance to love? When it comes to love, there really is nothing to promise: Either you love each other, or you don’t. What you pledge that you love means nothing. Love is there, between two people, or it is not there. The wedding becomes love-imitation. Every once on a while we are invited to take part in the spectacle.
A few years back I attended the wedding of a friend. My girlfriend and I rented a car, we drove to our destination, we walked up to the church. There I was, again, in front of a strange, wooden construction with a tall tower, and a spear. It was as if the shape of the building implied that if I walked inside, I would raise the odds of being part of a community predestined for aviation to the heavens. A vibrating green landscape stretching out as far as the eye could see. Trøndelag. The Norwegian summer that far north doesn’t fully start until June. Standing outside the entrance, surrounded by gravestones, together with a hundred or so other, discomforted guests, one already starts to dread having to walk up those stairs, to step inside the church. But we were there, and as soon as we were spotted, people walked up to us.
One young man which I had never met before, a relative of the groom, started out by asking me how it was possible that my parents allowed me to sport such long hair on a formal event like this. (I was 31 years old). He then went on to explain his latest business venture to me: “I’m sure you have experienced the same problem as I have, when on a guttetur with your pals, the expenses are not evenly divided between the participants. Isn’t it annoying, that after a skiing holiday in the Alps, for example, you end up paying up maybe 10.000 kroner more than the worst cheapskate of your buddies? So I have invented this software for Palm and cell phones that you can use to keep track of all the expenses in real time. At the end of the trip everyone’s cut is already calculated – fair and square. Get it? When you and your friends return to Oslo, you could easily set things straight. Do you thing you would be interested in purchasing such a software? Huh? Wouldn’t you? No?”
I didn’t even get the chance to open my mouth to answer before a middle aged woman started a conversation with my girlfriend. “Do… you… understand e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g… that… they…are… s-a-y-i-n-g?” she asked. The woman obviously thought that she was a foreigner. My girlfriend, having a darker skin colour than most Norwegians, dreads these kinds of events. It is precisely because of such questions that she starts to feel a pariah. We were too far from the city. The middle aged woman – herself being from a rural part of the country, with one of these obscure dialects, taking pride in being the quintessence of the Ur-Norske spirit – started to lecture my girlfriend about the Norwegian wedding tradition. After a while, she paused briefly, and then – finally – had the nerve to ask the Question: “So, then. Where are you from?” Some people are unable to talk to strangers without first investigating every part of their official life, so as to calculate the probability of the person that they are talking to actually fits the description of a human being.
One of the drawbacks of being in a relationship that you are so often – physically – located next to your partner in a manner that makes the more curious observation of the other difficult. When you wake up in the morning, when you hustle out the door for work, when you prepare dinner, when you go to bed – you’re spinning around each other. “Going out” often consists of a lot of Siamese striding. You seldom get the chance to study your beloved the same way that you did when you started seeing each other. My girlfriend, standing there, in a off-white dress, her black, curly hair combed back, while she was calmly assuring the middle aged woman that she was not extraterrestrial – I couldn’t help being completely stunned by how much I loved her.
*
The subject of humanity’s debt to God seems to be the crucial component of every service in the Norwegian State Church. Just consider the following, obligatory vow that is voiced by the congregation:
“Dear God, Heavenly Father. Have mercy on me, sinner, that has offended you in thoughts, words and deeds, and that feels the lust of evil-doing in my heart. Please - for the sake of Jesus! - show me mercy. Forgive me my sins and let me fear you - and love you - only.”
And this proclamation of liability made by the parishioners:
“It is most certainly right and honourable, that we always and all places that you, Holy Master, Almighty Father, Eternal God, by the name of Christ our Lord, the one you sent for the salvation of mankind, so that we, through his death, would receive forgiveness for our sins and gain eternal life.”
Remember, this is the official Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway, recipient of more than 5 billion Norwegian kroner from the state, annually. The message of debt to God, though, is parallel to the old claim made by the Catholic church: You can find a similar passage in Pope Benedict's first encyclopaedical letter from January, 2006:
”Conversely, as we shall have to consider in greater detail below, the 'commandment' of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be 'commanded' because it has first been given. […] Yet to become such a source [of Love], one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God.”
In other words: The Christian churches claim to have copyrighted Love, and if you happen to be in love or otherwise have strong affection towards some other human being in a way that qualifies as love-like, or if you love life in general, you ought to pay back your debt towards the Church. You are told to follow the laws of God and Christendom. I don’t get it: Do you only qualify for God’s mercy or the Church’s charity in so far as you are willing to pledge your allegiance to its dogma? In the Norwegian Church, this dogma is: “God sent his Son to earth in order to be tortured to death as a sacrificial lamb for your sins. Jesus then rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven, like a Superman. Because of this event, you ought to hate yourself and love God.”
Generally, human sacrifice does not go down well in our societies, but somehow Christianity has used the narrative of the New Testament as a justification for it’s claim for impasse in society. It is as if the suffering of one poor man, Jesus, somehow ought to be regarded as a beautiful event that can be used as the basis for the most megalomaniac claims. In a classic S&M twist, the Romans’ gruesome method of execution, the crucifixion, was instantly fetishized by the Christians themselves. The torture instrument was adopted as the logo of Christianity, and when the crusaders and inquisitors went into action, with the moral support of missionaries, they wore the cross as their slaughter-heralding banner.
*
In the church, during my friend’s wedding ceremony, we sang a few Norwegian psalms:
“…God’s love is like the beach and the grass. It is like the wind and all the earth…”“…and still there are barriers between us, through the bars we join hands. Our cage is built by stones of fear. Our prisoner uniforms are our closed selves…”
“… God’s love flows like a spring, clear and clean. The jewel of life is hidden in it’s quiet and tranquil base…”
The psalms and the words uttered by the priest during the wedding ceremony were more appropriate to describe industrial production than sensitive love. All these metaphors about the flood of love... this fusion of the human souls of everyone present that was expressed in the psalms, a fusion into a new type of liquid love material... All right, then. I’m in this church, and I’m somehow supposed to melt when I hear these psalms, this music, observing the bride and groom up there, in front of the alter? Am I supposed to flow out of my eyes, should I pour out of my body, so that the shell of my body just sits there, while the essence of my being is transformed into love slime? And then, the obligatory recitation of Paul’s daft letter to the Corinthians:
“When I was an infant, I spoke as an infant, I reckoned as an infant. When I became an adult, I abolished the things of the infant. For now we see through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know as also I was fully known. But now remains faith, hope, love, these three: But the greatest of these is love.”
Just add a word or two, and this could be the catch-phrase of a multi-national brand: “Now remains faith, hope, love, these three: But the greatest of these is love. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.” The missionary project of Paul has been an inspiration for crusaders and imperialist leaders alike. Paul insisted on submission to the Church’s ethical remote control. Peace in the world could be achieved, he thought, if everyone submitted to the same values as Paul... One of humanity’s most tragic insights is captured in Sigmund Freud’s short reflection on Paul’s evangelisation:
“When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.”
Paul’s mission was to convert people into becoming someone like himself. Monotheism is also an attempt of conforming all people to be similar. That is why the psychological mechanisms at work in religion are so similar to fascism. The prophet can easily be replaced with Der Führer. Religion is the institutionalisation of Love Hype. The brothers and sisters of faith claim that their God and their prophet loves all of them with the same amount of intensity, and at the same time they claim that they themselves love their brothers and sisters of faith with equal love, even thought most of them have never met. Freud would answer: “Well - they can’t love each other”: Love and hate are emotions reserved for people who have a personal relationship. The religious could, of course, claim that they love each other – equally. They could repeat “love thou neighbour,” over and over to themselves until they actually might believe that they do.
Despite all this confusion, psychology, at least psychoanalysis, assumes that there is a phenomenon called love. You can repress the fact that you love someone, and you can fool yourself into believing that you love someone you don’t. But the presence of love is felt in most of us. The problem arises when love is made to be something that it isn’t, or when it is ignored all together. Out of these two delusions, love hype is perhaps the most damaging. Being ignorant of the presence of love seldom results in the establishment of churches or crusades. Love hype is the core of missionary activity, it is the thing one tries to convert people to.
*
Stepping out of this church after the wedding, exhausted by the madness of Christianity, I could finally exhale. I felt that I was slowly returning somewhat to myself. I gazed at the deep green landscape enclosing the church. The air was fresh. How ironic it is that the Norwegian Church, through its claustrophobic church services, are capable of mass-producing such numbers of atheists and agnostics? In a recent poll, only 29 percent of Norwegians said they believed in God. Of all the people that I grew up with, not one considers himself a Christian, even though all of us went through Confirmation and even though all of us attended the obligatory Church ceremonies at Christmas and Easter.
Ironically, I already feel somewhat nostalgic about this dull and ridiculous Church. Who is going to make us appreciate our meagre existence, when we have no clerics left to provide hysterical, alternative visions of apocalypse, eternal damnation and love slime? After all, even writing these sporadic words have given me a certain satisfaction. Of course, all religion is terrible. It destroys communities, cities, countries. It can be a pest for a whole region of the world. But what can one do? The origins of religious belief are so tragic that one cannot help but to observe a certain entertainment value in its presence in our societies. The fact that millions of people actually wish for the gloomy mythologies of the religions to be true, is beyond me. Humanity is desperate and fearful. It remains at war with its nature.