Love and Nature

Love is not unique to human beings. Dogs love, elephants love, whales love. In fact, almost all mammals love their young (at least until they are grown and independent); many love their mates; and a number of them love their brothers and sisters. [note] Vicki Croke, “Animals Do Have Emotions, But What Should We Call Them?” 8/28/14, WBUR’s The Wild Life. [/note]

Animals of different species may also learn to love each other, particularly if they live in a protected environment.  For examples see “Animal Odd Couples,” from the television series Nature, on PBS. [note](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animal-odd-couples-full-episode/8009/.)


Love is the deepest form of interconnection that humans can experience because it involves not just intellect, but also emotion and a great sharing of time, effort, and wealth. Family love especially enlists our genetic drive to pass on our genes.  Love makes it possible for human parents to fulfill our children’s needs during their uniquely long period of childhood dependency.

 

While the sharing of time and resources is limited, human love in the forms of empathy, kindness, and emotional connection can flower and grow over an entire lifetime.  Ants or computers may succeed the human race as principal occupier of Earth, but it’s unlikely that they would have the same capacity for love as humans… or as dogs, elephants, and whales now have.

 

As a religious naturalist my vision of Love calls for different levels of love and concern for the different circles of each person’s acquaintance, and this is consistent with our biological Nature. Usually, we naturally have more love for members of our immediate family than we do for our extended family, and we have even less for strangers who live far from us.

 

True, a small minority of humans – including Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Mahatma Gandhi — may elect and succeed in manifesting universal love toward all human beings.  But their lives should not be held up as the model for the rest of us.  If we all became like St. Francis of Assisi, no Thomas Edison would have invented the light bulb; no Jonas Salk would have discovered the polio vaccine; (both standing on the shoulders of earlier inventors). Instead, Edison would have become, say, a missionary in Africa; and Salk would have become a monk or an officer in the Salvation Army.  Who did Continuing Creation most need: The inventor of the light bulb and the inventor of the polio vaccine, or one more monk and one more Salvation Army volunteer?
  — by J.X. Mason