What about love?
Can we talk about transformative change — or quantum social change for that matter — without mentioning love? The word may be seldom used, but it's often there. And it's essential.
Oh-oh, what’s love?
A group of experts from around the world sat in a circle after dinner, having a few drinks and talking. We were at an IPBES author meeting hosted by CATIE, a research institute in Turrialba, Costa Rica. It was a beautiful tropical night in May 2023.
Someone shared the news that the legendary Tina Turner had passed away. The group started singing her iconic song, What’s Love Got to Do with It. “Oh-oh, what's love? What's love? Got to do with it.” As the lyrics trailed off, we paused to consider the role of love in transformative change.
After an animated discussion, we concluded that transformative change for a just and sustainable world is all about love. Obviously!
Unfortunately, it’s not so obvious when you read the scientific literature. This includes the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. We often talked about the importance of love, and so much love went into writing it, but the word love does not appear in the summary for policymakers. What happened?
Sidestepping Love
If you look at most international reports, you’d never guess that love plays any role in solutions to urgent global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. Instead, there are often recommendations for lifestyle and behavioral changes, economic and policy changes, or changes in values or worldviews.
I did a quick search for the word “love” in some of the recent IPBES and IPCC summaries for policymakers. Nothing. To be fair, the acknowledgments section of two IPBES reports recognized that the love, support, and understanding of friends and relatives made the work possible. Does that count?
I then looked at some of the lists of “100 things you can do to save the planet.” With the exception of “learn to love leftovers,” there was no mention of love. What about loving nature, loving diversity, loving others, loving ourselves, or loving life as motivation for equitable and sustainable actions?
Finally, I searched for research articles on love and sustainability. In general, there were not many to choose from, but the more I looked, the more I found. Eventually I came across a 2015 special issue of the Journal of Sustainability Education on the theme Sustainability: What’s Love Got to do With It? In one article on The Pedagogy of Love, Joan Clingan recognizes that “in some way everything that is written about change, transformation, or justice is about love.” However, she also notes that the inclusion of love is still evasive in the scholarly literature:
This thing called love is often called anything but love—well-being, happiness, presence, respect, equality, liberation, ethic of care, altruism, prosocial behavior, positive psychology, compassion.
It seems that we sidestep any mention of love by using institutionally-acceptable synonyms. This rhetorical distancing doesn’t mean that love is unrecognized or absent; the word just seems to be strangely stigmatized in academia.
Connecting with the heart
Or maybe it is not so strange. Philosopher Freya Mathews writes in For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism that “The tension between love and knowledge in the context of science is exacerbated by the fact that the method most definitive of scientific empiricism, namely experimentation, is grossly antithetical to the spirit of love.” Experimentation, she notes, often involves confinement, control, surveillance, dissection, and destruction. It’s not surprising that the objective view of classical science downplays the significance of subjective emotions like love.
Still, we know in our hearts that love is often what motivates us, moves us forward, gives us hope, and holds us accountable to others, whether it’s other people, species, entities or future generations. It’s seldom a love of labor that keeps people working tirelessly for social change — more often, it represents a labor of love. Passion.
Maybe things are changing. In recent years, the science of heart-brain connections has has been getting more attention, and there has been a growing emphasis on connecting heads and hearts for transformative change. For example, in Getting to the Heart of Transformation, Coleen Vogel and I quote Terry Patten, author of A New Republic of the Heart:
“Transformation is, at its heart, a deeply holistic, reflective, and relational process. As Terry Patten (2018, 150) writes, “wholeness is the most primary, root quality of existence, and the heart is where wholeness is intuited—and love is its expression.” Patten also points out that wholeness is more deeply real than the fragmentation, separation, and division that cognitive minds perceive, and that “wholeness is transmuted at the heart into our wisest feeling-impulses – like care, appreciation, well-being, affection, strength, and courage” (Patten 2018, 73).
And then there’s power
You may be wondering where love fits into a world were so many people love power and wealth. The role of power and its consequences cannot be ignored. And it is not ignored; in contrast to love, power has received considerably more attention in many fields of research.
In Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, Adam Kahane argues that “In working on social change, love without power manifests in a feel-good connection that is impotent: it does not and cannot produce real change.” Power without love, he adds, is reckless or abusive, or worse. He calls, among other things, for developing the capacity to move fluidly between power and love, which means not treating it as a dichotomy or dualism.
If it is about oneness, then dualisms like “love versus power” will not get us anywhere. Recognizing and realizing the enormous power and potential of our intra-connection, especially when expressed with and through love, may be what is needed to move us in a different direction.
Quantum Social Change
Looking at You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World, I see that the word love is mentioned only a few times. Words like equity and compassion appear much more often. Sigh… I’m such an academic.
Still, I do recognize the significance of love:
The potential for quantum social change lies not in technologies, but in people, and it is expressed through love for ourselves, each other, nature, the planet, and future generations. From the perspective of quantum social change, [I/we] are the most powerful solutions to climate change.
The challenge for quantum social change is to love, regardless of the circumstances. As an expression of oneness, love has to be relentless. This is not easy, as so many things in the world today feel fragmented, fractured, and broken. As Susan Bauer-Wu writes in A Future We Can Love:
Our hearts break over and over at some fresh hell of climate or environment news or lived experience every day, and the losses we’re talking about are ongoing—past, present, and future. At any rate, we will not be done grieving. At the same time, we will not be done loving or done trying as long as we live.
As long as we live
“Trying as long as we live” strikes a mellow chord with me. Especially as we move into a year where people who love power have been given unprecedented power to influence the future. Regretfully, it feels very much like power without love. Whether we call it a lack of compassion, respect, equality, well-being, or ethic of care, power without love is likely to be reckless, abusive, or worse, as Kahane puts it.
It is easy to fear worse, which is why I am thinking a lot about quantum social change right now. In a fractured and fragmented world, we need a different quality of both individual and collective agency when responding to urgent challenges.
In The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes that “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.” Can we use the powerful force of love to bring together the fragments of the world, so that a just and sustainable world comes into being? The potential is there, and the best way to realize it is to keep working with love and passion. As long as we live.
“Work of seeing is done. Now begins the work of the heart.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Wonderful Karen, I think I will print it out to put inside your book. I work with creatives, but was a scientist myself some decades ago (microbiology) so I know how hard it was to transition from the science to the art world. But even in the art world, love is often missing. I've found it more in holistic education, transformative learning and with people looking at contemplative research and.. from the pioneering people who have written about the re-enchantment of art and learning. Thanks for these wonderful reflections Karen.
I think that humanity as a whole does not yet understand what love actually is; it's not an emotion but rather the force which holds universes together. All the other words used by scientists and researchers to describe it are basically synonyms. Perhaps the crux of this semantic inquiry is to understand fully that the power we each and collectively have is LOVE, in all its variations.
Thank you for this thoughtful article!