Love and power

Happy new year! I’m back from our annual two week winter retreat and have been working with the Quinault Indian Nation this week in Washington State alongside my friend Sono Hashisaki. We’re working on a process to bring more integration to the work of the Tribal government by creating interative planning processes that involve community members, government program managers and political leaders. It’s a fascinating piece of work, and a very interesting community.

Over the break, and partly as a result of this work, I’ve been thinking a little bit about some of Adam Kahane’s current work in which he is looking at the need for love and power to work together in order for effective movement to take place. Adam has been using a quote from Martin Luther King: “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” That is a provocative quote and, since Adam first shared it with me last year, I have thinking about what it means.

It ties in deeply with the the questions I have been holding since June about the responsibility of love. I think it’s important not to see love and power as opposites – there may be a temptation to do so with this quote – but rather to see them as compliments. I think it important to see love and power as yin and yang, in the classic taoist sense. In taoism Yin can is a field and Yang is a force, there cannot be one without the other. Unlike night and day which are opposites, force and field are compliments. You cannot have force without a field upon which is acts, and a field without a force is nothing. I have been very much seeing love and power like that.

So since Adam first raised this language issue I have been more and more interested in the role that relationships play in te activation of both love and power. When power and love exist outside of a field of relationships they are inactive.

In love and power are separated, perhaps not aware of one another. Love that does not know its power is Romantic. Power that does not know love is Authority. What does that mean? It means that without acting in the field of relationships, both love and power are static. I am thinking of Romanticism as sentimental and stopped. It may not even be a force that acts on the world but rather a force that acts only on ideas. In this sense it is sentimental idealism.

Authority is power that is unactivated. When someone says they have the authority to do something, they are saying that in the absence of a field of relationships, they possess the potential to act in certain ways. It’s interesting that when authtority is activated what we have instead is action and not authority. It seems that there is authority and there is action. Acting with authority is the deployment of power.

When there is a field of relationships – between people, people and places or people and things – love and power mingle and become aware of one another. Love becomes powerful when it acts in relationship to something. Authority becomes power when it acts in relationship to something. Love is the vehicle of the relationship, power is that which can be done with the relationship. But without the relationship, we have romantic notions confronting authority (or lack of authority). In my thinking this is exactly what I have been getting at with the idea of the responsibility of love – love works when it acts, but the shadow of that action is love that is unaware of its power or the power that is unleashed when love is invoked.

When love and power are activated in a field of relationships, stuff moves.