Social Love: Format

In this series of posts, I am doing research on the topic of "social love." The term has been coined by Irving Spring in his book The Pursuit of Love, 1994. It expresses the common sense notion that human loving is a social phenomenon, having important social consequences, not the least of which is new life.

As in the study of the social contract, which inaugurated this set of applying concepts to a variety of social contexts, the purpose of this study is to demonstrate how the concept's use, viz., social love, can make human conduct more rational, i.e., justified with good reasons.

The social situations that the term can be appropriately applied is open-ended. There are as many contexts that can fit the definition, as the creative mind can reasonably allude to! I will use the types of loving cast into certain life experiences as a guide for noting situations of loving---loving between a baby and a mother, loving between a child and his parents, friendship loving, and loving between (or, among) partners. I will present a paradigm of loving in that particular context. Because love is an emotional state, I will cast the experience in situ, depicting the experience as it occurs, wherever it occurs.

I have reviewed the literature on the topic of love, from Plato to modern times. There is a rich discussion, needless to say.

But I think by placing the experience in the social context, we can appreciate how the phenomenon functions in the culture. Fundamentally, it is a method for behavior modification. Companies, for one, have encouraged close relationships among their employees whenever they need especial effort to a) relieve the boredom of a job; b) make demanding deadlines of projects; and c) do the impossible by taking risks and by making sacrifices. Of course, the military promotes loving relationships for much the same reason. But enough of this so as to introduce the social dimension of love. On with the show!