Media’s Fascination With Grotesque Love Defies Basic Laws of Survival

Most of us believe that love is tenderly nurturant, while some argue that it is essentially cruel. Who’s right?

Current broadcast and film entertainment mainly comes down on the love-cruelty side. The game show “That’s Amore” features “lovers” who try to best each other with bitter insults to the guffaws and cheers of the audience, which votes to decide who wins. “Love Connection” and “Studs,” though they focus on dating, presumably the prelude to love-nurturance, also seem to spotlight cruel put-downs. Not much different are “Married . . . With Children,” “In Living Color” or “Roseanne.”

Even children-oriented films such as “Home Alone 2” or “Drop Dead Fred” center on hurtful verbal and physical acts. Howard Stern’s sadism and crudeness, the subject of numerous Calendar articles, requires no comment, nor does that of the rock music that emphasizes brutality.

Painful derision of the handicapped, various ethnic groups, women and homosexuals is as prominent in broadcast entertainment that is ostensibly dealing with love as it is in the grisly necrophiliac lyrics of marching songs sung at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Most explanations of how and why we have come to such grotesquerie, in entertainment as well as “real” life, blame only underlying biology common to all humankind, or only variable current stresses such as war, unemployment or AIDS. Some focus on pop culture, such as sitcoms or rock lyrics. A few discuss early experience, such as an abused child’s tendency to become an adult child abuser. But nowhere do I find a clear and understandable integration of all factors, which is attempted in what follows:

First, fundamentals: As condensed by renowned anthropologist Ashley Montagu, the basic law of all life is cooperation within and between species in the service of survival. Cruelty is the deliberate injury of a living being or species to the detriment of its survival, a clear violation of this law.

In contrast, Montagu explains, love is the “conferring of survival benefits in a creatively enlarging manner” and is, therefore, the human expression of this basic law. Rather than jeopardizing life, love provides all the supports and stimulations needed for survival of the beloved. So love must consist primarily of a series of nurturant actions, which in themselves are not cruel.

All normal human beings inherit the biological potential for nurturant or cruel behavior, but what converts a potential behavior into an actual one is learning. Speech is an apt example. Humans inherit the biological potential for speech. But which language one speaks, or whether a person ever learns to speak at all, depends on learning.

Because human babies are helpless for so long, we have become the most dependent of all species on nurturant love. We are also dependent on learning, which selects which of our biological potentials are to reach expression and how. One illustration is the strong tendency of abused children--out of dread of ever being helplessly dependent again--to “identify with the aggressor” and thereafter revenge themselves by abusing children themselves. Conversely, children who have been comparatively well-loved tend to “identify with the lover” and thereby become lovers themselves.

Yet since the best nurtured of us sometimes suffer in growing up, ordinary as well as disordered people all tend to have a resultant fascination with cruel behavior and entertainment. When adults who have suffered excessively in growing up are confronted with social circumstances, such as deprived ghetto life, that deny them even hope of adult fulfillment, they are ripe to learn the ghastly violence we see boiling up everywhere in the world.

There is abundant evidence that entertainment can teach both nurturant and cruel attitudes, values and behavior--whether spectacles of throwing Christians to the lions, bulls to matadors or “guests” to talk-show hosts.

So if we wish to reduce the cruelty that menaces our future, we must first minimize the actual painful experiences, and increase the fulfilling ones, of every baby, child and adult. Then we must renounce the revenge we all want to take later, at least unconsciously and vicariously, for our early agonies. And as well as implementing actions to ameliorate homelessness, AIDS and military tyranny, this also means acknowledging the impact of popular culture, including entertainments that we adults concoct, market and consume and thus contribute to the learning experiences of ourselves as well as children.

We must accept that we not only make the reality in which children must live, but we also offer them, and us, accepted models of how to convert biological potentials into actual behaviors. And we must admit that the nurturance or cruelty we permit ourselves to learn through such diversions shapes children much more than what we forbid them to learn.

Presuming that we want to survive on this lovely planet, each of us must voluntarily give up experiences that induce cruelty or desensitization to it--including cruel entertainments we may otherwise enjoy.

In sum, we must make the test of all things whether they “confer survival benefits in a creatively enlarging manner.”

For that is amore!