Among the things that I am saying there and throughout this section of the book is that our use for the word “love” is so generalized and unspecific as to severely interfere with our understanding of love. I have no great expectation that the language will change in this respect. Yet as long as we continue to use the word “love” to describe our relationship with anything that is important to us, anything we cathect, without regard for the quality of that relationship, we will continue to have difficulty discerning the difference between the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the noble and the ignoble.
Using our more specific definition, it is clear, for instance, that we can love only human beings. For, as we generally conceive of things, it is only human beings who possess a spirit capable for substantial growth. Consider the matter of pets.’ We “love” the family dog. We feed it and bathe it, pet it and cuddle it, discipline it and play with it. When it is sick we may drop everything and rush it to the veterinarian. When it runs away or dies we may be grief-stricken. Indeed, for some lonely people without children, their pets may become the sole reason for their existence. If this is not love, then what is? But let us examine the differences between our relationship with a pet and that with another human being. First of all, the extent of our communication with our pets is extremely limited in comparison with the extent to which we may communicate with other humans if we work at it. We do not know what are pets are thinking. This lack of knowledge allows us to project onto our pets our own thoughts and feelings, and thereby to feel an emotional closeness with them which may not correspond to reality at all. Second, we find out pets satisfactory only insofar as their wills coincide with ours. This is the basis on which we generally select our pets, and if their will begin to diverge significantly from our own, we get rid of them. We don’t keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us. The only school to which we send our pets for the development of their minds and spirits is obedience school. Yet it is possible for us to desire that other humans develop a “will of their own”; indeed, it is this desire for the differentiation of the other that is one of the characteristics of genuine love. Finally, in our relationship with pets we seek to foster their dependency. We do not want them to grow up and leave home. We want them to stay put, to lie dependably near the hearth. It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.
Peck, M. Scott. (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. Simon & Schuster, New York. pp. 108-109.
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