Today is the beginning of Labor Day weekend. It is also in the middle of the #BlackLivesMatter convergence in Ferguson. As I sit here I am aware that I am working through Labor Day. And I am aware that I am not attending any local solidarity actions, because I am ‘busy’… working on Labor Day. And yet, while I am spending Labor Day working, I am spending it working on crafting my courses for the upcoming semester, courses that are all grounded in seeing and challenging inequality across race, class gender and sexuality. Sitting in the midst of this complexity, I am reflecting on how we find our way as social justice activists in the midst of our complex lives and the confines our concrete logistical positions. I may not be at a Labor Day rally or on the ground in Ferguson, but I am going to going to spend Labor Day crafting pedagogy in the service of social justice and liberation.
In my own path, I am drawn to exploring the interconnections between spirituality- or love or faith or sacredness- and social justice. This semester, I have the opportunity to explore these interconnections formally in the classroom for the first time. The new course I am working on titled Sociological Mindfulness explores the intersections of knowledge, power and consciousness. It explores how the terrain of the mind, the discipline of the intellect and the expansion of the loving heart are all interconnected dimensions of critical education and liberatory struggle.
In looking for ways to engage this terrain with thoughtful students this semester, I was reading Erich Fromm’s 1963 book “The Art of Loving” where he explores love as an essential dimension of both personal and social wellbeing. I found several passages in his chapter on “The Practice of Love” that speak to how love is connected to and essential for political and social change.
Passages that speak my sense of solidarity with the activists on the ground at the #BlackLivesMatter weekend of action.
Passages that speak to my vocation as a teaching professor and the hope that I find in the classroom.
Passages that strengthen my own faith, my own commitments to the art of love and the practice of struggle.
Erich Fromm (1963): The Art of Loving. Bantum Books
Chapter: The Practice of Love
“It follows that the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities, which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power. There is submission to it or, on the part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has provide it to be the most unstable of all human achievements” (105-106).
-Erich Fromm (1963): The Art of Loving
“To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values of ultimate concern-and to take the jump and stake everything on these values” (106).
-Erich Fromm (1963): The Art of Loving
“This courage is very different from the courage of which that famous braggart Mussolini spoke when he used the slogan “to live dangerously.” His kind of courage is the courage of nihilism. It is rooted in at destructive attitude toward life, in the willingness to throw away life because one is incapable of loving it. The courage of despair is the opposite of the courage of love, just as the faith in power is the opposite of the faith in life.” (106).
-Erich Fromm (1963): The Art of Loving
“The courage of despair is the opposite of the courage of love, just as the faith in power is the opposite of the faith in life.” (106).
-Erich Fromm (1963): The Art of Loving
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