I remember seeing a film with Palinurus years ago, ‘Enemy at the Gates‘, and one of the lines that stays with me is from the end of the film. Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) the Soviet political officer renounces Marxist-Leninism after Tanya (Rachel Weisz) the love interest seemingly dies when returning to her love and expert sniper Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law). His words, before letting himself get shot by a Nazi sniper:
I’m such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man, there is no ‘new man’. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal, where there would be nothing to envy your neighbor. There’s always something to envy… a smile, a friendship, something you don’t have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.
Danilov accepts the futility of an egalitarian utopia at a fundamental level of human relations, but the concept of such a utopia interests me the way it interests parties who would have something to gain from it, ie Danilov and the poor in gifts and love. I have some sympathy for the idea of universal love - a world where everyone is loved by all equally, though my libertarian instincts object to the coercive nature of socialism in affections. Aldous Huxley imagines such a society in Brave New World, where ‘everyone belongs to everyone else’. According to Huxley, it is a society where no one belongs to anyone. Perhaps our concept of romantic love, eros, is inherently possessive-exclusive. Even spiritual love, agape, seems universal but unequal.
And like Danilov, we must accept that the world is an unequal place, that God has blessed us all - some are blessed more than others in different ways. Yet the markets in hearts are diverse and dynamic. Just as social mobility allows the have-nots to have more, so does a different sort of mobility - and the individual effort it demands - allow those poor in love to become rich.
The question is whether men are as upwardly mobile in affections as they are in class. I remain somewhat unconvinced of my individual capacity to move up the value chain here, and I am not content to let markets clear as they will in my social life.