Did We Lose Love at Home?

Where society is made

A society is simply its families, multiplied. How people see themselves, how they treat a stranger, how they react when someone cuts in front of them: all of it is learnt first at home. The family is where a society gets its balance, or loses it.

I’ve written before that, as a society, we seem to have lost love. In a follow-up, I argued that you can only love others to the capacity to which you love yourself. It is really a restatement of an old instruction most of us know by heart: love your neighbour as yourself.

Today I want to go one step further back and ask where that love was supposed to come from in the first place.

The symptoms are on the road

If you want proof that something is missing, take a drive through Lagos. Nobody gives way. Everyone is in a hurry, and everyone else is in their way. Tempers flare in seconds. Windows wind down and curses fly out. We have done it so long that it feels normal, and that is exactly the problem.

Lagos is a microcosm of Nigeria, and the road is only the mildest symptom. Go further and it gets darker. People sell fake drugs. People sell fake drinks. People adulterate the food the public eats. Some will knowingly sell poison to make a few naira, at the expense of people they will never meet.

None of this happens in a society where love is present. It happens where love has gone missing.

You can’t pour from an empty cup

Here is where it all connects. Every fake drug and every poisoned drink has a way of coming back to the person who sold it. Call it karma, call it the law of nature, call it reaping what you sow. Most faiths and philosophies agree on some version of it: what you do to others with evil intent returns to you, often multiplied.

So a person who truly loves himself would pause before hurting someone else. Not only out of kindness, but out of self-preservation. His first thought would be: this will come back to me, so I won’t. I’ll be kind instead, because kindness comes back too.

That is why these behaviours tell us something deeper. Whatever the excuse, whether profit, revenge, anger or something darker, a person who hurts others that easily has no love to pour from. We don’t love ourselves, and so we cannot love the next person. And a whole society is quietly growing out of that emptiness.

We see it in the extremes too: rituals, killings, people destroyed so that someone else can get ahead. Whether the reward lasts a day or a decade, we don’t seem to care, as long as we get ours. For as long as that mentality survives, love doesn’t.

Wired for love

So how did we get here? Did love ever exist in the first place?

Love comes in many forms: agape, romantic, brotherly. But I’m talking about something more basic, the kind that is wired into us as human beings. We protect our own. We care for those around us. Anthropology and neuroscience tell the same story: we evolved in groups, survived in groups, and still live in groups. By design, we are built to care and to live in community.

And every community starts with a family. A mother, a father and their children. That unit is the most critical component of any society. It lays the foundation for how the people in that society will behave. So if love has been lost, the place to look first is the foundation.

A cracked foundation

Look at the family unit today. Many homes are led by single mothers, some raising children from more than one father, each doing her best with the experience and capacity she has. I say this with no prejudice to single mothers. Many are heroes. But a child raised by a mother and father who love each other, and who agree on where they want that child to go, starts with an advantage that one parent alone struggles to match.

When the father is absent, someone fills the gap: an uncle, a boyfriend, sometimes a house help. Each of them can only parent to the extent they were parented. It works the other way too. A single father needs a second pair of hands, whether a stepmother, a relative or a helper, and the child absorbs whatever values each of them carries.

We like to say it takes a village to raise a child. True, but that saying assumed a village pulling in one direction. A village with shared values and shared rites of passage, where every child moved through adolescence into adulthood along a path that worked. Today the “village” is a patchwork of people from different backgrounds, each pulling a different way. The values are inconsistent. And outside the home, the child sees a society that rarely rewards hard work and rarely punishes wrongdoing.

Even the two-parent home is no guarantee. A boy who watches his father hit his mother often grows up to hit his wife. A child who is treated badly carries the scar into adulthood. We replicate what we know. Nobody can pass on something better than what they received.

Nobody can pass on something better than what they received.

The new stalk

Picture a plant. The top of the stalk may be old, marred and scarred by weather, even if it still carries a flower. That’s fine, because new growth keeps coming from the ground. The fresh stalk rising from the base is supposed to be cleaner and stronger, so that when the old part withers, the plant renews itself.

Our children are that new growth. They are supposed to be better than us.

But what is coming up from the ground is not fresh. It is already marked by the same damage as the old stalk, sometimes worse. So instead of renewing, the plant simply reproduces its scars, one generation after another. That is how a society becomes loveless: not in one dramatic moment, but at the root, at home.

Fixing the foundation

If the problem starts at home, the solution has to start as close to home as possible. The real question is how.

I can tell you for free that we have not built the systems to fix this. Some of the institutions already exist. They just aren’t doing this job deliberately enough.

Think about who meets a child after the family. Our churches and mosques. Government bodies set up for exactly this purpose, like the National Orientation Agency. And above all, our schools. A child’s first step out of the home and into the world is usually a nursery or primary school classroom. That is where the shaping has to start.

It doesn’t need to lean towards one religion or another. It needs to be deliberate. Teach children, from the very beginning, why they shouldn’t steal. Why they should love the next person. Why caring and understanding matter. Give them the basic tenets of life, and let them experience life differently from the way we did, so that they grow into upright, responsible adults who can fix what we failed to fix ourselves.

Because if we carry on as we are, the damage is hard to even imagine. And if we don’t care enough to change things now, we should at least care enough not to hand this lack of love, which has become our norm, to a young and impressionable generation, or to the ones not yet born.