Why do we love where the lightning strikes, rather than where we will?
That out of evolution has come love -- not merely human love, but love among all sorts of creatures, in all sorts of forms -- is one of those great miracles that truly redeems the cosmos, in spite of everything that nature and Lord Murphy can do to screw it up. Love of one's children, of one's parents, of one's siblings, of one's friends, of lovers, of spouses, of community, of nation, of the other members of a military outfit to which one belongs -- love comes in all these forms and more, ever more. The Greeks believed that every form of love -- erotic, patriotic, filial, parental, and all the rest -- has its own God, its own divine source. As miraculous and healing as love can be, it's easy to see why. But how did these come to be at all?
It's one thing to pursue a genetic advantage inherent in one or another form of behavior. It's something else all over again to love. Love renders one helpless to resist pursuing the needs of the beloved rather than one's own. It lays the core of one's being open to the hideous emotional wounds that are so often the only reward of loving. And it shouts the reality of the subject, in the form of the one who loves, as nothing else can: for to truly love is to be fully aware of its disadvantages . . . and one's own inability to continue loving in spite of all the cruelties potentially attendant upon it.
Love isn't behavior. It is instead the origin of much of the behavior of living creatures, and it is the most incontrovertible evidence that in spite of the fact that all that is needed to generate behavior is reflexive response of the sort typical of non-sentient, unconscious, though highly complex robots and computers, the subject is always present in the lover, beyond behavior, beyond reflexes, beyond drives and all the other mechanics of behavioral psychology.
Love isn't pleasant. Love isn't nice. Out of love -- love of one's children, one's spouse, one's lover, one's family members, one's friends, one's community, one's nation, one's land, one's people, one's God and religion -- a man or woman or child may do terrible things to those whom they perceive as threats to the beloved. Polonius's insistence that "Men have died and worms have eaten them, / But not for love" is nonsense. Men have thrown themselves on primed grenades to protect their comrades. 90-pound women have lifted large automobiles up one-handed in order to pull their small child out from under their tires with the other hand. Dogs and cats have raced back into hotly blazing structures to try to rescue their humans, and human firemen have done the same to rescue cats, dogs, pet birds, and other creatures, human and otherwise, frequently coming to grief themselves in the process. Wolverines become deadly when their children and mates are threatened. So do mother bears. And plants -- plants have numerous strategies designed to give their offspring the best possible chance at survival and reproduction themselves . . . including, in many cases, poisoning the ground for large distances around themselves with secretions from their roots or their leaves or their stems, ensuring that no other type of plant will get a roothold there and that the ground has thus been cleared of potential competitors of their offspring.
Love is conscious, but can be so impelling that its demands can't be resisted by the lover. Love is ruthless. Love is utterly selfish, for its demands are absolute. And yet it is the crown of biology, that which gives a sweetness to life that cannot exist without it. It is a strange window on things beyond our universe, beyond our ken, beyond the limits on our lives, our mortality. It begs the question of everything else, and as long as we are capable of love, we are more than mere machines.