Choosing the biology of love
Living the biology of love, we feel our belonging in the web of life and act from that sense of responsibility
Dear friends,
I had intended to write about ideas and imagination in October, never mind that here we are in December! Instead I’ve been searching for what I could say in response to all the pain and unconscionable violence, horror and suffering being inflicted in Gaza (and all around the world for that matter, including my own back yard), so I will try to pick up that thread now. This entry is perhaps more challenging than usual, but I hope the effort will be worthwhile!
Previously, as war broke out in the Ukraine, I wrote this piece (What is Peace? Can Stories Teach Peace?). Looking at peace as an expression of values like honesty, respect, perseverance, courage, compassion and loyalty, I wrote: ‘When our best human qualities are nurtured and enacted with intention, peace is the natural outcome. In this sense, storytelling can be a catalyst for peace.’
Building on that essay, I now explore the idea of the biology of love as an orientation toward peace. The biology of love is a concept proposed by Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana Romesin1 and Gerda Verden-Zöller, a psychologist who studied early childhood and mother-child relations.
I had dipped in previously to their extraordinary and sometimes (I find) impenetrable short book The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (2012). Reading it again now with the knowledge of bombs falling on schools and hospitals, children being killed and entire families obliterated, escalating cycles of violence and trauma, I find a new sense of urgency and meaning in the authors’ inquiry of what it fundamentally means to be human.
Maturana and Verden-Zöller approach this question not from any moral or philosophical stance, but as scientists. This is how they summarise their argument:
'We are saying that we think the fundament of human living is love, and that cooperation in humans arises through the pleasure of doing things together in mutual trust, not through the manipulation of relations. We do not say that love is the only emotion under which we human beings live. Of course not. Certainly, we human beings flow or can flow in our emotioning through all the emotional dimensions that we can live. But we claim that it can be argued biologically that we are the kind of beings that we are because love has been the emotion that has grounded the course of the evolutionary history that gave origin to us.'
The authors essentially propose a human origin story that foregrounds the biology of love as a deep expression of who we are and how we evolved to become the species they call homo sapiens-amans.
For me, the work offers a possibility of meeting the horror of this moment with stubborn optimism. And with love. It offers a perspective from which to consider the current realities of violence, ecological and social collapse in the world, while looking towards the future and asking what I hope are generative (though certainly not new) questions:
How can we as human beings, with our immense capacities for love and care, resist succumbing to ways of aggression, dominance, hatred, denial of the ‘other’ and war? How can we humans work differently from within situations of intractable conflict? Living on such a beautiful, rich and abundant living Earth as we do, how can we safeguard rather than destroy what is most vibrantly and exquisitely alive? How can we repair the damage we have done to the Earth, the climate and the web of life in which we are encompassed? What regenerative story seeds may be sown for the future?
Maturana and Verden-Zöller acknowledge upfront that in our modern context of living at least partially if not predominately in cultures of ‘domination and submission, mistrust and control, aggression, competition, political manipulations, abuse and wars’, their claim that we are ‘the present of a biological history centred in love, trust, and cooperation seems preposterous and definitively wrong.’ Or if not outright wrong, then perhaps a bit rose-tinted.
The assertion underscores a paradox of our existence. We cannot deny that wars and conquests have been with us at least since the rise of complex civilisations in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere over the last ten thousand years or so. And yet, nor can we deny our loving nature as human beings. We experience this daily in our tenderness and care towards children and animals, friends and loved ones, rivers and forests. It is resonant in our words and gestures, ideas and conversations, poetry and music, architecture and dance, food and stories, and so much more. I don’t know about you, but when I find myself living in that flow of openness, sharing, connection and trust with others, it just feels right.
Living in the biology of love, as Maturana and Verden-Zöller conceive it, is what stirs in us those feelings of joy and happiness, wellbeing and belonging. Love is the emotion that stretches and enlarges us, as it teaches us to meet the other with acceptance. Love is:
‘… the only emotion that opens intelligence and expands awareness. One sees more, hears more, touches more, smells more, understands more when in the biology of love. And love does so precisely because it occurs as a relational domain in the behaviours through which the others, or better, all others, arise as legitimate others in coexistence with oneself.’
The biology of love, they argue, arose in our lineage not through any kind of genetic determinism but rather systemically and relationally. It arose as a complex and co-emergent dance of interplay between our bodies and physiology, our emotions, our ‘languaging’ and our conversations — with all these intricate feedbacks tuning our emergence with each other and with our wider world — our ‘medium’, if you will.
Maturana and Verden-Zöller explain:
‘We modern human beings have a languaging, loving, and cooperative brain, so to speak, because we belong to a lineage in which languaging, cooperation, and love were systemically conserved in an evolutionary trend in which all genetic variations were systemically co-opted in the conservation and expansion of that manner of living.’
In other words, these particular qualities and attributes of our ‘humanness’ emerged as key features of our existence that supported a particular way of life — living in the biology of love — which was then absorbed and perpetuated through the learning of children and thus conserved from one generation to the next.
Through these dynamics, we evolved to become homo sapiens amans: ‘cooperative animals dependent on love at all ages’. As the authors argue, the extension of loving mother-child relationships into adulthood and across the wider community, to include adults of all ages and genders, laid foundations for the biology of love to become the ground of our evolution. This neotenic2 trend encouraged ever-greater capacities for tenderness, playfulness, trust and physical closeness in our relationships with one another. Such hallmarks of the biology of love developed also in our anatomy and physiology: in the particular shape of the hand and timbre of the voice, both exquisitely adapted for caressing and intimacy. In tune with all of this, the rise of complex language further gave us tools to coordinate our behaviours, and thus reinforce our sense of pleasure in doing things cooperatively with one another.
Our lineage experienced roughly 300,000 generations, they say, of ‘living in language in the biology of love and intimacy’.
However if the biology of love reflects our past, it will not necessarily shape our future. We humans, like other animals, are flexible in our behaviours and open to change as new circumstances arise. Once language became firmly established in our lineage, the authors argue, new possibilities would have arisen for other emotional expressions, such as arrogance and aggression, to gradually displace love as the ground for our continuing evolution. They explain:
‘When arrogance or aggression occurred occasionally, without being conserved from generation to generation in the learning of the children, its happening was historically irrelevant for the conservation of our condition as loving human beings. However we think that due to some particular circumstance of daily living of our ancestors some twelve thousand years ago, arrogance and aggression began to be nurtured in the learnings of the children and became systematically conserved from one generation to the next as a manner of living. As that happened the relational dynamics entailed by these emotions replaced love as the relational grounding of group coexistence thus giving rise to a new cultural lineage centered on mistrust, control, domination and submission, appropriation and discrimination; namely the patriarchal culture that most humanity lives today.’
Patriarchy is the term given by the authors to describe this more exploitative, hierarchical manner of living that arose in complex human civilisations, and was eventually imposed on most of the world through violent colonisation. Let me say clearly that use of the word patriarchy is not meant to condemn or imply anything about men. The authors use the term to differentiate between distinct cultural ways of living. In a matristic culture, which they equate with the biology of love, both men and women orient themselves towards caring for the group and especially for the needs of children. In a patriarchal culture, focused on domination, hierarchy, ownership, separation and control, both men and women are co-opted into those value systems.
What exactly patriarchy is, how it happened and why it persists are huge inquiries in and of themselves that I won’t go into here. (If you are interested in the topic but like me know little about it, I can recommend starting with this excellent piece by Miki Kashtan).
Imagining the roots of cultural change that might have eventually propelled Indo-Europeans to invade the matristic societies of Europe thousands of years ago and impose patriarchal ways of living (for we can assume that few would embrace these willingly), the authors speculate that perhaps it began with something as simple as a family that followed migratory animal herds and started to prevent wolves from accessing that same food source, introducing a dynamic of competition over coexistence. Those adults, they observe, would have been aware that this sort of interference was a violation of the ‘natural coherences of life in which all animals and plants have a proper, legitimate place’.
If the practice continued, and the adults eventually stopped explaining their behaviour to children from a wider understanding of sacred relationship between species, those children may have then grown up regarding this exclusion of wolves from their natural food source as legitimate. And from there, this practice of exploitation and manipulation may have prompted other more controlling forms of behaviour to emerge over time across the spectra of relationships to other people and animals, land and water. Perhaps then as the stories heard by children (for this is often how cultural learning is passed from generation to generation) increasingly reflected the values of control and legitimized all kinds of violence and exploitation towards the ‘other’, we began to drift towards becoming something other than homo sapiens amans, which is the uncomfortable space we find ourselves in now.
This is a space of in-between, the authors say. Living the biology of love in some aspects of our lives, we also find ourselves co-opted into patriarchal value systems at odds with the biology of love. The authors enter discussions of how matristic values may be conserved in the raising of children at home, for example, yet children may at the same time be socialised into top-down patriarchal structures through education, other aspects of familial or societal conditioning and so forth.
So let me pause here to reiterate that this work is essentially a speculative story drawn from the authors’ consideration of scientific evidence. It is an argument, a theory, a story. None of it is provable fact, and frankly it is not ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ or ‘validity’ that interest me.
Rather, I am interested in this work as an incredible piece of sensemaking, of storytelling. I am interested in the potential of this work as a regenerative story seed in these times. The authors are attempting to make sense of our current predicament as a species through an intricate and complex understanding of our biological evolution. It is a speculative story attempting to explain this apparent schism in our nature, where we remain loving beings in so many aspects, yet also find ourselves acting from places of violence and aggression; acting in ways that go against the grain of our desire to live in the biology of love.
It was through ‘living in language’, and the levels of reflexivity this enables, that we humans developed what the authors call our ‘psychic identity’. By this, they mean that our experiences and emotions, both conscious and unconscious, in relation to others as well as in our self-reflections, shape the patterns and qualities of our psychic existence. Our psychic identity can change as our emotional patterns change. And when we are made consciously aware of these patterns that shape us, we can choose to change them. This freedom to choose arises out of the biology of love:
‘The emotional change that usually opens a space for such a shift is love, that is the acceptance of the legitimacy of oneself, of the others, and of the circumstances that one does not like and wants to change. Without love there is not emotional opening to act in responsibility and freedom.’
Patriarchy, on the other hand, seeds the emotions of mistrust and control in our psychic existence:
‘And with this new manner of psychic existence, there also arose the theoretical justification of the control and domination of the life of others through notions of hierarchy and authority, of good and evil, of superiority and inferiority, with the corresponding implicit blindness about those others.
In this process sex became degraded by being submitted to patriarchal authority as all relations in that political psychic space have to be, because the spontaneous enlightening presence of sexuality when lived in love could not be controlled, and the freedom of action and reflection that it brought to the relational domain was a menace to the patriarchy.’
Living the biology of love, the authors argue, we naturally feel our deep belonging in the web of life and the wider cosmos, and act from that sense of responsibility to life. We are intimate and open and trusting of life. We are woven into the fabric. Some speculate that the psychic existence behind patriarchy may have arisen as a response to trauma, perhaps related to natural disaster. Uprooted from that sense of trust and belonging in the cosmos, we become blinded to the depths of our interconnectedness. We feel separate and alienated. We feel a need to control because we no longer trust our belonging. Then when we blind ourselves to the animacy and legitimacy of other living beings and the web of life, we enable violence toward the other.
In our blindness, the authors observe:
we don’t see that it is this blindness that constitutes our difficulty in the conservation of loving humanness because we do not see that the biology of love is the biological operational foundation of humanness, nor do we see that control destroys the biology of love and intimacy. But even given this alienation, the fundamental emotional need for the biology of love is so present in us that we still yearn for it in our daily life, and as long as this is so we are not totally lost and we can still attempt to conserve loving humanness.
To me, this raises powerful questions of responsibility and agency. For if we choose to believe the authors’ premise that we arose from the biology of love but risk losing it through cultural adaptation, then let us consider:
How does this concept resonate in us? How might we understand this part of ourselves that lives in the biology of love and value and protect it? What circumstances support our living in the biology of love, and what circumstances prevent it? Are there ways we can make choices daily to live more in the biology of love, and less in the biology of separation and control? How do our minds and bodies experience and respond to these two divergent states? What emotions do they raise in us? What behaviours do we observe in ourselves as we navigate and move between these different manners of living? Is the biology of love something we want to pass on to future generations? If so, what kinds of cultural adaptations might enhance this possibility? How might our daily choices and actions collectively impact the future?
Our human predicament now, of course, is far more precarious than it was in 2012 when Maturana and Verden-Zöller’s work was published. The rapid acceleration of climate and ecological breakdown, the excruciating horrors of Gaza, the relentless march of extractive capitalism, from our smartphones to our breakfast cereals, and its ongoing destruction of communities, indigenous peoples and ecologies from the Amazon to the Congo — how much more harm can we endure, must we endure? (Yes, even I feel this, from my radically privileged position). Many experts see these all as different faces of a deeply entangled and interconnected polycrisis, and to some the polycrisis is rooted in this crisis of the human consciousness that I am pointing to in this essay. In our patriarchal sense of separation, we lose an essential part of ourselves as we become desensitized to the violence and destructiveness of living in separation and instrumentalism.
So when I see the images streaming in from Gaza, I cannot look away. I weep and want to scream in anguish, but I cannot look away. To look away would be to deny the biology of love that lives in me. I think choosing to live in the biology of love entails a lot of pain and anguish, as well as the beauty and joy. Because we are all of us interconnected in the web of life and there is a lot of pain in the world right now. This patriarchal violence too is entangled in the web of life, and that too is painful.
So how do we dance with it? How do we move with it? How do we build trust with one another to do the hard and painful work we need to do in order to make it possible for peace to emerge (and by this I mean a robust and vibrant peace, dancing with all the generative and juicy tensions and possibilities of life) as a natural outcome of the biology of love?
There is so much more I could say here — this is just scratching the surface. But I fear that if I do not end now I will never finish!
I would love to continue the conversation though. What do you think? How does the concept of living the biology of love chime with your thoughts and ideas, and what you’ve been reading and thinking about?
Please share in the comments, and share this essay with the people you think of when you think about the biology of love!
With love,
Megan
P.S. Want to dive deeper into the world of stories? You can work one-on-one with me for a deeper exploration of your own stories, or for storied support with your own creative projects. Have a look here to find out more!
Maturana, with Francisco Varela, developed the idea of autopoeisis to convey how living systems are continuously unfolding themselves in a dance between self-expression and response to their environment, which I touched on in this previous entry, Living Water.
Meaning the extension of childhood or juvenile behaviors into adulthood.