Professing to be wise…

they became fools.

A member of the Chattering Class thinks that if you could just be more demented and irrational in your emotional life that would fix things.

No. Seriously.

Nehring yearns for a revival of a messier ardor. In her view, we have domesticated love past all recognition, turning what is rightly leonine, destructive, and majestic into a yawning, chubby house cat. Hers is no modest project. She wants nothing less than to radicalize our framework for love, mainly by restoring its chaotic potential: “Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing,” she writes. “Among the many rights we must reclaim in love is the right to fail.” A Vindication of Love is not a book that will persuade every reader to jump off the couch and into the arms of a dark, smoky-eyed stranger, but it will rearrange your tidily laid out mental furniture while you’re not looking. For at its core is a well-taken point: With its emphasis on equitable marriage, “choice feminism” has endorsed a tyrannical habit of trying to subordinate passion to reason. And along the way it has demonized obsession. What, Nehring asks, is so wrong with being crazy in love?

Once again, the Prophet Chesterton is vindicated when he points out that revolutionaries have a much stronger sense of what is wrong than of what is right. Modernities tendency to size up everything as a power struggle between race, class and gender has never understood love. So love relationships get stuffed into the category of contract law and the goal is, above all, “equality”.

The problem is equality is medicine, not food. It’s main function is to heal injustice, not give life. Love is what gives life, and love is exactly what a worldview which says “It’s all a power struggle between race, class and gender” has no room for at all.

So we go a few decades with deconstructionists, Marxists, various crazy feminists, and other Power Worshippers dominating the discourse until the day comes when some revolutionary says, “Screw this!” and all of a sudden there’s an explosion of revolt in which all the rationalist attempts to explain away love as a sublimated struggle for power are blasted away by a crazy Dionysian worship of raw irrational emotivism. It’s just as destructive, of course, because it is just as contemptuous of revelation. For the reality is that both love (in this case, eros, though there are other kinds as well) and Reason are both supposed to be joined together in Christ who is the Logos of the God who is Love.

For some sanity, read The Four Loves.