Banning Love.

The last time I talked about this, I was in the passenger seat being driven back to campus by my brother. I brought the topic up and we got into a fairly heated argument. He ended up saying, "This is why I don't debate. You guys always talk about thing that don't matter at all." I didn't bother pointing out that I wasn't debating, but putting forward an idea for discussion. I didn't really believe in what I was talking about, I just wanted other people to consider it and see what they can come up with. But after that response from him, I dropped it and moved on.

Reading Helen Fisher made me revisit. It was her idea (seen on her TED video) that sparked this particularly controversial idea and I wasn't surprised to see it in her book. I have to point out that she never said anything about banning love. She just came up with the research that I'm piggy backing. So, why ban love?

It stems from the finding that romantic love really is an addiction. FMRI scans of the brain indicate that the parts of the brain that light up when a love struck person looks at a picture of the sweetheart are the same as the ones that light up when cocaine addicts get their fix. Cocaine. That the stuff that not even Holland has legalized. The cocktail of chemicals that runs in your blood when you fall in love are just as dangerous as blow. We already have proof of this in the news. Crimes of passion happen all the time. And as Dr. Fisher observed, the withdrawal symptoms showed by cocaine addicts are hauntingly similar to the signs of heartbreak. Loss of appetite, inability to focus, the constant craving. They are all there.

We ban cocaine not because it gets us high. We ban it because its addictive. We ban it because it does everything that love does to us, admittedly with less destructive consequences. But on principle, love deserves banning just as much as cocaine. So on that basis, now that we understand it better and exposed some of its inner workings, it should stand trail the same way every other drug did. On principle, we need to look at it and decide if it really is doing enough harm to warrant it being removed. To ignore the effects of love just because we have never known life without it is being a tad hypocritical.

Some might argue that love is essential to reproduction and it evolved in us for a reason. I have said before that our physical evolution is taking place at a much slower rate than our changes in cultural ideas. I think that the same idea works her as well. When we were driven by primordial urges, and listened solely to instinct, love was essential to the continuation of the human race. But it isn't now, and the legacy of our past could very well be a burden.

Then of course comes the question of whether it can be done or not. Can we stop people from falling in love? For now, no. But our understanding of human brain and how it connects to all the aspects of life that makes us human is expanding rapidly. At some point, someone will find a way to put a roadblock on one of the processes that are involved in falling in love. As it is, we can turn promiscuous rats into doting fathers with one injection. And we can turn the most faithful species into uber playboys with the opposing drug. I think its no longer a question of if, but a question of when.

Okay, premise set. There is a problem, and there might be a solution. Should we do it? In my opinion, no. Most people will agree with me at this point I suspect, but for different reasons. I cannot accept 'We cannot ban love because we just can't do something like that. I mean do you have any idea what you are doing? We're talking about love here!' as a valid argument against the banning of love, although I'm sorely tempted to. I'm sure that kind of an emotional appeal would work nowadays, because the idea really is quite unthinkable. But humans change their minds really fast. Things that were unthinkable 50 years ago are quite commonplace now. Banning slavery was an insanity not too long ago. Now people who enslave are prosecuted and thrown into jail. A society in the future that sits down and has a serious discussion about the relevance of love to humanity is not really that far fetched an idea if you ask me.

But I am not too fond of the idea of messing with something like human reproduction. Of course the option of voluntarily blocking off love for yourself will always be open, but to treat it like cocaine could be dangerous. Science has screwed up before, and while that may not be a good excuse to stop applying the findings of science, this is too big a risk to take. Only absolute certainty is acceptable, and there can be no absolute certainty.