Hello, I’m John Seigenthaler once again. Welcome to “A Word on Words.” My guest is bell hooks. Welcome, bell hooks. The word on words in this book is called “All About Love: New Visions.”

It is undoubtedly an accomplishment as I count her 18th book. With 18 books to her name, this one about love approaches the subject from a fascinating perspective. You say at the outset, maybe in the preface or the introduction, that you knew love, which was somehow taken from you as a small child.

You lost it, and in trying to rediscover it, you found it was difficult to do. When you would talk to people later on, and I’m moving ahead now, when you would talk to people later on about your search for love, they would say, “You know, you need to see a therapist.”

But you talk about it so eloquently, especially the need for children to have love if they will have it throughout their lives.

I start this book by saying that I felt as a child what it was like to be loved and recognized, and then I felt that love moved away. Talking about my relationship with my father, many people feel that our intimate connections with our mothers remain forever. Still, many adults have talked with me about their childhood experiences, how they held their father’s regard and love at a particular moment and then lost them. I’ve been amazed at the number of people who have come up to me after reading the preface and said, “That’s exactly how I felt as a child,” but they couldn’t tell anyone because we’re not allowed to talk about not being loved. In our culture, we’re made to feel that everybody knows love.

I mean, I talk in the book about all of these people who’ll say, “You know, my dad beat me, and my mom did this, but she loved me.” An essential chapter in the book is the chapter on children, where I’m saying that if we are being abused in any way, we are not being loved.

That love is antithetical to abuse and domination. A great moment for me in the book is when I’m talking about what we teach our children about love and the misinformation we give them. Part of the miseducation we give them is that you can violate someone and then say you love them. As we ponder why we are raising a nation of violent children, we must reflect on that miseducation about the nature of love.

You recite a cliché of a father with a strap or switch, saying, “You know this is going to hurt you more than it’s going to hurt me,” or “I’m doing this for your good.” And then you sort of challenge that thesis. Why, if that’s the case, is that happening? It is an act of violence, not an act of love. To put another coat on it covers up the myth rather than exposing it. Which doesn’t mean to say that we…

I’m not saying that discipline isn’t essential because discipline is crucial to any true love, with boundaries we set. So, I think part of what’s happened to us as a nation is we have confused discipline with a kind of blind obedience to authority, whether it’s children to parents or us to a government or a nation acting in an autocratic and wrong way.

So, the book doesn’t just try to look at our relationship to love but also what’s happening to us as a nation as we move away from the kind of ethic of love that many of us felt underpinned all the great social movements for social justice in our society. You say that we, as a nation and as a society, have forgotten what it is to love, to find true love and that it’s evident in our music.

We used to croon about the moon in June, and now we come up with lyrics from Tina Turner and others asking, “What’s love got to make? What’s love got to do with it?”

That’s right; the culture itself has hardened, especially the youth culture. I mean, one of the things that’s so disturbing about gangster rap—and let me say that I’m not attacking all hip-hop; there are many forms of hip-hop—but in its most brutal forms, it’s anti-erotic, anti-female, and promotes a cult of death. One of the passages that I often quote in this book is from the Bible, from the book of John, which says that anyone who does not know love is still in death.

And we’re at risk of being a culture that cultivates this sort of worship of death. It is fascinating that when I think about the defining movement for social justice in our culture, it was the civil rights movement. The fact is there could be no end to apartheid in South Africa today if there had not been a civil rights movement in the United States. Whether we’re talking about Aborigines in Australia or many people worldwide, they look to the civil rights and freedom struggle in the United States as emblematic of justice. But the heart of that movement was the ethics of love. When I began writing this book, I returned to Martin Luther King’s “Strength to Love,” a marvelous book. He was one of the first leaders in our society to talk about love, not as a sentimental emotion…

Many bell hooks readers who are used to the hard-hitting social commentary have told me, “Why talk about love?” You know, people sometimes hope we will keep that biting intervention. I said I wanted to talk about love and the relationship between love and ending domination, whether we’re talking about racism, homophobia, or class elitism.

Because a lot of the book discusses greed and how greed has made us less loving as a nation, why do we think welfare is wrong? We should celebrate as a nation that we have the resources to provide for people with love. You say there that we now embrace welfare reform, not because there was a need for compassion. We use welfare abuse as an excuse to cover up the fact that we’ve lost our compassion for those who have not, exactly.

I have been so disturbed by seeing so many people of my generation who came out of radical thinking and moved into a mindset that says we can’t give to others; they should only appreciate what they work for. There’s a lack of compassion, a hardening of the heart.

Marianne Williamson began to talk about that in her book “The Healing of America.” It’s this sense that the love ethic (and people have to hear those two words in combination – love ethic, which means it’s about values) underlies a love ethic and respect. I ask people, “What does love have to do with respect?” When we look at children, particularly the violence of children against children in our nation right now, part of what we’re seeing is a lack of caring, a lack of respect, a lack of understanding.

Envy is a crucial emotion connected to greed. You want to destroy what you envy. When a ten-year-old kid wants to destroy another kid because that kid is more popular, that’s something profound; it’s a profound lovelessness. We can’t just talk about what parents are doing. We have to talk about it in terms of what we, as a nation, value.

You know, I knew that you had written previously on both feminist and racial themes. So, it didn’t surprise me to find in “All About Love” that you say gender has played a role and that the concept of how men look at love has inhibited our ability to meaningfully bring the search for love to an end as a society.

I talk a bit about the concept of the role gender plays. I recently talked about love at the LA Public Library, and a man in the audience said, “You know, growing up, I wanted to be loving, but I got the message that you could not be a man and be loving.” So, he wanted me to talk to him about how men in our culture can move into a space where they can have a healthy masculinity that is not the dominating patriarchal masculinity but one that allows them to claim the space of their hearts and their own need for love.

And one of the significant issues I think that feminism has brought forth is our emotional neglect of adolescent males. You know, the idea that somehow, when a boy turns 12 or 13, we suddenly decide he doesn’t need affection anymore; if he wants to be aloof and not speak, we let him. One of the stories I tell in the book I remember from childhood (I have five sisters and one brother) is when my brother was getting older. His patriarchal masculinity was developing. He came home from school one day, and we were all sitting around in the living room. He rushed past all of us, heading to his room. He dashed back out, and just as he was about to leave the door, my mom stopped him. She said, “We need to start this over. When you come into this house, and your sisters are here, and I’m here, you greet and acknowledge us, and then you can go.” It was an incident that stayed in my mind. Instead of allowing him to embrace harmful masculinity that says connection and intimacy don’t matter, all that matters is bonding with male buddies; she showed respect to both her daughters and her son, teaching that connection is essential. Many men have been falsely led into thinking that love is not vital to them.

Early on in the book, I talk about the fact that even though we live in a culture where we believe love is a woman’s issue, most of the books on love are written by men. The one I talked about and praised so much is Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving.” When I wanted to understand love as a teenager, I went to that book. It’s still a crucial book. But, in general, we don’t look at books by women. I even mention that if a woman had written “The Bridges of Madison County,” women would have said, “This is ridiculous.”

This woman is taking the initiative to take a photograph, and then initiative. You also give us a preface, just a glimpse; you know that’s what you.

You tell the story of your brother, sisters, and family. It is only possible to tell this story by personalizing it in some ways, and still, much of your writing seems to lean away from personalizing it.

But you talk about the end of a 15-year relationship, how devastating it was, and how it set you on your search to reevaluate your life in light of the love you sought.

You also write about romantic love and a relationship with a younger man briefly again, just enough to whet the appetite and make the point. Then, at another point, you talk after quoting St. Teresa of Ávila about spiritual love beautifully.

It is clear that this book, despite your efforts to depersonalize it at times, is a very personal reflection of what you’re about. It was a combination of trying to share the personal and saying our attitudes about love are tied to our culture’s politics, and what our nation tells us is essential.

I mean, that chapter on greed where I’m talking about the fact that one of the beautiful aspects of love is giving and that as we give to others, we grow in our capacity to connect.

The first significant chapter in the book asks, “How do we define love? How can we know love in a culture where most don’t understand it?” The book is dedicated to my ex-boyfriend, the younger man you mentioned, because we had these continual fights and still have them after eight years.

We broke up five years ago, and we kept talking about what love is. It was clear that he often felt that he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then I talked to other women who say the same thing about the partners in their lives, men who say, “Well, I don’t know what love is.” So, I try to echo the idea that gender does make a difference in how women and men look at love.

Well, most men feel they’re not looking at love at all. So part of what the book tries to say is that perhaps if we had standard definitions if we started from a particular common point, I mean, what would it mean for us as a nation to start off feeling that love is essential for males as much as it is for females? Because deeply embedded in our national psyche is an assumption that love can’t be necessary for men.

How will men go and fight wars if they are dedicated to love? Until we begin to recognize that love has to be essential to men if we’re going to end sexism and if men are going to reclaim the spaces where they can be connected to their feelings, to their fathers, to their mothers in different kinds of ways.

Partially, the book says that romantic love has been the myth presented as the only love that matters. It challenges that notion; that’s one of its new visions. It says that the foundation of all our love, like the foundation of a house, has certain principles that will make you have a sturdy house, and those principles are the same irrespective of the kind of love you’re building. The same is true of love; our culture overvalues romantic love. No matter how horrible and miserable your life has been as a kid or teenager, someday you’ll find this love. It’s going to come into your life, and it’s going to change all of that.

And many of us found that that was not so. Many men felt that one day they’d grow up and be humanized by a woman or a partner giving them love rather than thinking about what it meant and what it would take to become loving people.

I mean, I define, I use a kind of M. Scott Peck, whom I quote several times. It probably offends many people that this intellectual quotes M. Scott Peck, but I felt his books are part of mass literature. I love that we can have books like “The Road Less Traveled” like Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” that reach a wide audience with broad intellectual concepts. I mainly take his definition of love as “the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual growth” and link it to Erich Fromm, who says love combines care, knowledge, responsibility, commitment, and trust. One of the things that have happened in our culture is we equate love primarily with care, and that’s why we can say parents who brutally beat their kids still love them.

I look at my childhood, and I say in the book repeatedly my parents cared for me deeply, but they also wounded me in ways that violated my spirit. And I would be a different person today had they not given me care because I’ve met many adults who didn’t get care but did not feel loved.

You talked about how your family reacted to how your mother reacted, again just a glimpse when you began to discuss your own dysfunctional family publicly. It was as if she didn’t know what you were talking about. Well, John, I told you I saw myself as a Southern writer when we talked right before the show began. I see my sensibility as a Southern sensibility. One of the hearts of the Southern sensibility is that if anything is going wrong in your family life, you don’t talk about it.

You know, talk about it within the family, and you don’t talk about it outside the family. So part of what has been, for me, a radicalization of my being is trying to reclaim a new sense of a southern sensibility because I was going home from Nashville the other day to visit my folks in Kentucky.

I saw a sign that said something about the new South, and I kept thinking that part of this new South is because the South has a unique sensibility that informs my work: the courtesy, the kind of things.

I evoke the community that I write about and write about the community and how you can’t have love unless it goes beyond yourself and reaches out to a community at large.

And I write repeatedly that these were the lessons about love that I learned here in the South, in the southern black Baptist Church, that sense of what it is to care for the stranger, to move beyond yourself—all those things. But it’s a big challenge when it means telling the stories we’ve been told to keep secret.

I like the chapter in the book on honesty that says when we face as a nation, which goes back to our president, we cannot be loving and tell lies. When I heard about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, I first thought that this man violated not just his codes of morality but the idea of trust and honesty that should have been essential to the fabric of his familial relationships.

Because his actions didn’t just affect himself, they affected his family, who must live with the burden and consequences of those actions.

You know, I hadn’t thought of it until this minute when you brought up President Clinton and his relationship

with Monica Lewinsky, but in a genuine sense, the national public’s willingness to tolerate that and to forgive the lying is just making the case that love is a lost value in a society that will embrace a liar and a cheater.

Especially when we imagine what would have happened if this scenario were in our nation: if this couple had come together on national TV and said, “The essence of our marriage is honesty and communication. Whatever happened has taken place; it was discussed in the context of our marriage.”

That would have rocked the foundation of everyone in our society because it says that we all make mistakes and do things, and we’re not always faithful.

But the critical question in love is, did I hear you put the burden on the woman? Not at all. I meant that as a couple. I said they would come together as a couple and talk about the dynamics of their relationship because I still am proud of the Clintons in terms of their relationship as a public couple.

It’s tough to be a public person. I know that I know that. It’s hard to be a public couple. Still, I felt let down by the fact that this woman, a powerful voice whom many of us looked forward to and how she would progress in the White House, was suddenly silent. She wasn’t saying, “We have a marriage, and we have determined the terms on which we communicate.” Because the heart of love, too, that I talked about in the book, is forgiveness.

Indeed, do you say that it is, and it’s part of that larger community? In that chapter, forgiveness is crucial when you talk about a more significant community. You know, you talked about our nation’s ending racism.

You talked about forgiveness as crucial to how we, as people of color, as black people in particular, have to extend to those who have wounded us compassion and forgiveness or always end up in the same violence.

Well, you know, that reminds me of what he said to white liberals.

He said, “Those of you who are and aren’t able to say so, in the end, we will liberate you,” another act of love, not just to those who hated me but to those who supported him.

But I couldn’t tell them. In the few minutes left, let’s focus on that chapter that deals with spiritual love because our nation, after all we’ve said.

John, I want to say that our nation is yearning for love and community; people want to know how we can live more profound and meaningful lives, and they focus on the Dalai Lama.

The focus is on a Buddhist monk like Thich Nhat Hanh, who I might quote a lot in the book because we have been looking for those spiritual teachers.

Today, who can help us return to love and community? And part of what is interesting about us as a country is that the vast majority of people in this country still say they’re Christians when we know one of the heartbeats of Christianity is the idea that God is love.

We are realized more fully as spiritual beings through love, so the question becomes, if we think this is at the core of our beliefs, why are we not living it out in our actions? And that’s the political and spiritual question because we have to attend to the needs of the Spirit. The American left has never been interested in discussing the Spirit’s needs.

Its rhetoric is not loving exactly, and that’s part of why the conservative right-wing always reaches out more to masses of people.

Because it acknowledges emotional needs, it acknowledges the family needs. Now, listen to you, and you’re losing your reputation as a radical.

I’m talking about trying to make radicalism faithful to the Spirit itself, which is if you are thinking wrongly, you have to be willing to change that thinking. The left has to begin to talk about loving me. There was no more radical movement in our country than civil rights, meaning feminism is radical, but men and women have always lived together.

The civil rights movement, the end of a certain kind of white supremacist apartheid that was about love, changed us, and it changed us as a nation for the better. So, I’m not breaking with that tradition. I’m trying to revitalize it because by losing it, we are losing the kind of radical love of justice that has the potential to make this nation great always and not be a nation that’s false to its values.

Fall to that notion of believing in freedom and Justice; one of the things I say in the book is that there can be no love without justice. You know there’s a line in George Bernard Shaw, and I’ll conclude this: “Must another Christ die in every generation to save those who have no imagination?” As you talk, many of you have an excellent imagination, bell hooks.