1: Prologue

We modern human beings frequently live in strife with each other, and suffer for it. War and peace seem to be basic polar elements of human relations, yet we are not happy in this manner of living in mutual negation; we dislike it. Moreover, in disliking this manner of living we become ill as individuals, or we think that humanity is ill and has been ill for a long time. In the midst of this unhappiness we discover, as we have discovered many times during the last five or six thousand years of our history that we have been living in blindness: about others, about nature, about justice, about collaboration. As we realize that we do not like this we invent, and have invented on many occasions, religious and political systems in which peace and love are to prevail, or humanistic philosophies and economic theories that are intended to save human beings from mutual exploitation and abuse.

Most of the time our efforts have failed, our humanizing paradigms have ended up being dehumanizing, and the religious and political systems that we invented with the intent of generating human wellbeing became sources of tyrannies. But we have always tried again. How does it come about that we try again? How is it that we fail and yet try again? How is it that we human beings have ethical concerns? How is it that we human beings care for each other, even though we live now, and have lived for the last five or six thousand years of our history in a manner wherein we frequently deny each other through competition, war, abuse, and mutual manipulation?

Our purpose in this essay is to answer these questions. Yet, in order to do so we want first to reformulate them in terms more akin to our immediate daily-life situations, because we think that they must be answered as features of daily life, which is where the conservation or loss of life takes place.

Clinicians say that a doctor begins to act in the moment in which he or she accepts a call for help, and indeed this happens. If a mother calls the doctor in anxiety because her child is ill, and the mother says, “Doctor, thank you for coming; I do not know what happened, but my child has gotten better since I spoke with you.” How did that occur? What happened that the child became better when the doctor accepted the call, and would have become worse if the doctor had not? Doctors also say that the first medicine is the bed, and indeed, when the sick person is put to bed, he or she begins to improve. What happens? Is this improvement merely the result of a reduction of metabolism through repose?

We know as part of European history, that Rasputin, a wandering monk related to the court of the last Russian Czar, had a great curative influence on the young hemophilic Czarevitch. His influence was so great, that on one occasion, when the boy was bleeding after falling off a horse, his bleeding stopped when Rasputin answered the Czarina’s request for help by sending her a telegram saying: “Do not worry, the child is out of danger and will get better, I come immediately”. How could this cure have happened?

We modern human beings frequently use war in our attempts to solve human conflicts. How is it that war never solves human conflicts; at best it only changes the domain in which the conflicts take place, so that they are eventually solved through mutual respect? According to us the solution in mutual respect, when it happens, belongs to our ethical concern as a feature of the biology of love. The Declaration of Human Rights by the newly created United Nations after the end of the Second World War is a milestone in ethical concerns in modern human history. How is it that we had ethical concerns then? How is it that ethical concerns remain an important part of modern human life? Are they a product of our reason or of our emotions?

Experience - that which we distinguish as happening to us - cannot be denied. Daily life shows us that even though we live in war and hurt each other, we are loving animals that become bodily and psychically ill when deprived of love, and that love is both the first medicine and the fundament for the recovery of somatic and psychic health. We are love-dependent animals at all ages. Indeed, most if not all human suffering arises in the negation of love and is cured through the restoration of love. How can this be so? What happens in us through love?

Our purpose in this essay is to explain how it is that we are love dependent animals, and how we have come to live our present culture as if this were not so. We intend to do so by presenting our view of the origin of humanness in the biology of love. However, in order to attain this end, we begin by saying a few words about the biological and epistemological fundaments on which our proposition stands. We do so by speaking first about explanations, then about our biological history, and finally, about language and emotions. After that, we consider our human biological origin in the mother/child relation and sexual intimacy, and we end with some reflections about our cultural present and about what we can do.