Unconditional Love: Can We Do It?

An interesting and prevalent, but little thought-on idea is that of unconditional love. As far as I can tell, this was originally a Christian concept, and in the primarily Christian society I live in it is accepted as an unquestionable truth that unconditional love is possible not only as an idea but also in practice. Unfortunately, I've never met an unquestionable truth I did not want to question.

My journey began in my Personality Psychology class. We were covering David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist who has many interesting theories on dating and attraction. The professor always asked us questions at the end of her powerpoint presentations, and one that she asked this day was "Is it possible to love unconditionally?" I immediately wanted to know how she defined "love" because it seems to me that it is important to know what it is. Neuroscientists tell us that we have two basic categories for love, short-term infatuation (such as lust), and longer-term commitments. These are distinguished by the type of neurochemicals released which allow us to feel the emotions. Interestingly, the chemicals which create the short-term infatuation are the same as the chemicals involved in OCD, one of which is dopamine. Long-term love involves the production of oxytocin, a sort of "bonding" chemical. My professor knew none of that, and couldn't answer my question, but it may be the most important question for this topic. Here is the problem: How do you know when you love someone? Perhaps you feel affection everytime you look at them, or feel the urge to protect them and give them stability. That's all well and good, but it seems to me that could just be affection, or the desire to help someone from your part of the gene pool. So what is love? A certain level of neurochemicals? What it truly is is unimportant, but the ambiguity helps my argument and leads to the second problem. No one feels the same way towards anyone else for their entire life. Most of the people I've talked to about this have children, and were adamant that they would always, unconditionally, love their children. While this may sound good in theory, its too easy to point out that sometimes they feel affectionate towards their children, sometimes angry when little Timmy breaks the new vase, etc. Where is the love? Is it simply that they continue to tolerate little Timmy?

Here, for me, is the clincher that seals the deal. Unconditional love is an absolute, meaning it can have no exceptions. Any condition which causes the love to change in any way has proven it to be conditional love. For the sake of argument, I will define a condition as any event, action or state of being which causes phenomenon A (love) to no longer be applied to the subject (your child, etc.). Say little Timmy, age 9, does not break the new, but replaceable and ultimately unimportant vase. Rather he brutally rapes, tortures and murders his little sister Sally, age 7, who you also loved unconditionally. Do you still love little Timmy? Even after waking up to him attempting to suffocate you with your own daughter's intestines? Because it is an absolute, any possible event which might cause you to stop loving little Timmy even for a nanosecond has made the love conditional. Keep in mind also that what the subject does is not the only thing which can change the love...What if you die? Do you still love little Timmy? What if you undergo a lobotomy, or any brain surgery and your memories of little Timmy are accidently removed so that you are not even aware of his existence. Do you still love little Timmy? Of course not. You simply cannot love something which you are unaware of.

As far as theistic unconditional love is concerned, I will be brief. If a god/gods/goddesses loves us unconditionally there can be no Hell, no Rapture, no Judgement Day. Throwing me into a pit of fire for ETERNITY because I didn't believe, even though I still led a good life, has nothing to do with love, and a lot to do with conditions. Were there unconditional love, I could rape, murder, steal, break every commandment every day and regularly piss on the pope, yet still be forgiven and go to live for eternity on the fluffy clouds.