大象传媒

I wanted to open a great big bag of popcorn when JD Vance and Rory Stewart started having a theological go at each other on social media. What fun 鈥� at least for people like me - to have a ringside seat as the Vice President of the United States, no less, and a former Tory Cabinet minister have such a lively falling out on so important a theological matter. 鈥淲ho is my neighbour?鈥� famously asked Jesus. And Vance answered: family first, then community, then nation, then everyone else. Our moral obligations are thus a series of concentric circles, radiating outwards from our most intimate associations. Love has a heirarchy.

Rory Stewart called this take 鈥渂izarre鈥� and indeed 鈥渓ess Christian and more pagan tribal鈥� quoting a famous passage in John鈥檚 gospel: 鈥淟ove one another as I have loved you.鈥� By which I understood Rory Stewart to be arguing that our moral obligations are to all human beings, irrespective of our relatedness. Because we are all children of God. Vance replied: 鈥淒oes Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?鈥�

To which I want to answer, well, yes and no. Certainly, I love my children more than I love yours. And I would expect you to do the same. Vance is right, to this extent. Love is partial. Love in general doesn鈥檛 really feel like love at all. Because you don鈥檛 love people in the abstract. Love starts with the specific and radiates outwards.

But Rory Stewart is also right because our moral obligations towards others are of a different order to the way we love people. I may love my children more than yours, but I don鈥檛 think they should have more human rights than yours, for example. And to this extent, all should be counted the same. Equal under the law, and so on.

All of which is why love is very tricky stuff in politics. Too little of it and you will be seen as passionless, uncaring, robotic. Too much of it and you will become overly partial, chauvinistic, inward looking.

These are terribly important questions, and, in a sense they underpin so much of what is now going on in the news 鈥� trade wars, America first, immigration, even (dare I mention it) our relationship with the EU. All sides of these debates leverage love for political purposes, the love of our country, our love for each other. It seems to me that Vance was right that love is partial. But Stewart was right too: sometimes the partiality of our love is precisely the problem.

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