The idea of “love” generally means having deep affection for others based on some sort of personal ties. For example, familial ties cause us to love our relations, and sexual attraction can move us toward deep affection. Often, however, we use the term “love” to refer to how we treat other people, such that sometimes it is used to refer to a sort of charitable behavior.

To better understand these subtleties, it’s interesting to look at this behavior from a cosmic standpoint.

The dominant direction of the universe is towards disorder. Technically, this is described as a trend towards increasing entropy. It appears to be a natural law that every physical process must end up increasing the disorder of the universe overall. Thus, the ultimate end of everything must be a sort of complete disorder. ¹

However, it’s possible for local regions of the universe to reduce disorder as long as it still increases overall throughout the universe. This local reduced disorder may look like structure or order emerging out of widespread disorder. For example, crystal formation creates order and structure where there was none. This reduces disorder locally, but does so by taking heat from somewhere else in the universe, and that increases disorder even more in that other location.

Thus, the overall trend is still towards growing disorder even though there may temporarily be some decreased disorder in one location.

Another more significant example of increasing order is life. In this case, the emergence and growth of life works against disorder, aggressively battling the trend of increasing disorder by increasing order and complexity.

The engine behind this growth of order and complexity is the process of evolution. Through the process of natural selection, in which the most successful life forms become more dominant, life has become increasingly complex and successful in locally reducing disorder.

Ultimately, this works because the deepest, most fundamental, guiding force of all life on Earth is selfishness. This is probably necessary because anything else would result in less successful reproduction, losing the competition of natural selection and eventually disappearing from the tree of life.

Thus, selfishness is the fundamental force that results in life pushing back on disorder. ²

However, while this can be seen to be true on the basic level, it becomes harder to see when organisms are considered in groups because the selfishness force is really at the gene level, not the organism level. While the end result is the same, the process can be complicated with groups. A certain level of altruistic behavior, for example, might benefit a group of genes at the expense of some individuals. And some complex, social behaviors that evolve effectively in some settings, may still occur in other settings but no longer be effectively selfish.

For example, when people live in small groups, such as primitive tribes, there are strong genetic relationships with each other. As a result, helping anyone you run across would be a good strategy to evolve because one would very likely be helping the same gene pool. So the behavior of always helping those in need, works. However, when people live in very large groups, like cities, the genetic relationships no longer exist but the behavior may still be present. Thus, people may perform altruistic actions that truly do not help themselves, but in reality are doing so out of a hidden selfish motivation that has been triggered incorrectly. Not exactly what it seems.

As life on Earth, and humans in particular, evolved over billions of years, many of these types of behaviors developed and have become known as charitable, even loving. We might refer to the best of these traits as “evolved love”.

Nevertheless, behavioral scientists are often able to trace the seemingly nice behavior back to its inevitable selfish roots.

At some point in human development, we became self-aware enough to develop ideas of morality and ethics, and more generally, the concepts of good and evil. Although different societies grouped different things into each category, it became possible for us to consciously choose actions that we believed to be good, over those we believed to be evil.

In particular, we began to see that evolved love didn’t always have to have a selfish basis or be seen as a mistake, but that selfless actions could be the most good that a person could do. As a result, we could consciously choose to behave against our deepest selfish natures even when many other people around us, even society at large, disagreed.

While such selfless behavior may have been recognized as good in some circles of abstract thinking and limited social groups, it never really became widespread and was even deprecated in powerful societies like the Roman Empire.

However, Jesus took this idea of selfless love to such an extreme that he stated that people should even love their enemies, even to the extent of dying for them. This goes far beyond the nature of evolved love, and might be referred to as “agape love”. Jesus ultimately demonstrated this behavior himself, and his teachings and actions formed the foundation of Christianity.

This belief system went on to overtake the Roman empire, sweep across the globe, and ultimately redefine the very idea of human value.

Despite this success, agape love still remains more of a goal than a reality. The fact that we have the ability to consciously make such good decisions doesn’t mean that we will, for we are still based on the same life principles as the rest of creation.

Imagine, though, what it might be like if agape love became as fundamental to life as selfishness is now. In other words, what might existence be like if life’s very nature (human life, at least) was based on giving to those around us without regard to ourselves. If this was universal, one wouldn’t need to worry about giving too much because others would be giving to us. It seems such a world would have no need or strife.

This may seem like a pipe dream, and probably is as long as our lives are based on the same principles as the rest of this world. But perhaps we can look for something beyond this world that can point to the possibility of transformation, a hope of something that we now only sense dimly.

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1 This is overly simplistic, and the increasing quantity is something called entropy, different than disorder, but I think the basic ideas still work out the same.

2 See “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.