"Thy law's abridgement, and thy last command is all but love..."

It is really no surprise that modern economics prides itself on diversification. The tendency to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket defines the current era. Mankind has managed to establish a system of security (socially, financially, politically, &c.) by justifying non-commitment. At some point in the late 19th Century there must have been an underground declaration of war against vulnerability, because this is precisely what the current institutions are hedged against. We gained security not by seeking the higher ground, but by simply shoring up the railing from the “Great Below.” We simply decided to be complacent with where we were; as opposed to going any further, we resolved to simply not slide backward. We fortified our position by destroying vulnerability. We can avoid slipping by avoiding any significant risk. But you also avoid significant growth. Instead, diversification permits very slow, evolutionary trends to emerge; trends slow enough and small enough to be amply combated and rectified if the direction is found to be unfavorable.

All of these ideas have had far-reaching consequences into the psyche of Mankind. What diversification really breeds is a similar tendency and drive across the culture. Diversification is nothing more than disguised isolationism, a cloaked non-commitment, a pact toward neutrality. It says that spreading oneself out across the wide plane ensures overall success, or at least self-perseverance. It says monogamy is really bunk because polygamy, while it may not offer more, at least diminishes uncertainty. Diversification forgets that the only significant statistical change is from zero to one, while all the rest become interesting incidentals of lesser import. We prize peace-of-mind enough to wage war against the didactic and dynamic force of unfettered ambition and zeal. Content with baby-steps we forget how to stride out much beyond ourselves. We become contained by a wide, diversified world. The world we find ourselves in is one unwilling to rock the boat, tolerant and appeasing in the face of evil, complacent in the company of trial and injustice. Nothing is pressing enough to merit attention in this world because nothing can hurt us enough. We needn’t concern ourselves with anything because there isn’t anything we perceive capable of reaching us. We have managed not to be unified in the world but perfectly and painstakingly spaced out enough from everyone and everything else to give the illusion that distance is somehow a common bond. Diversification has amazingly sold the public on the bogus concept that to come together we must fall apart.

But what does it mean to live? We have created a world which never asks us to be vulnerable. In this world we have come to imagine freedom is about choosing and drifting whimsically according to these choices. There exist no proper aims, no clear directions. We have simply confused living with locomotion and license. But really, living is about loving. And loving asks us to be bound, to become vulnerable. To live is to love. And anything short of that is falling short of true life. Loving means pouring oneself out in a dutiful way to another. Yet this duty is not obligatory, but totally gratuitous. Love is a responsible action—it is ever-mindful of another toward who it is ever-prepared to respond to. To be responsible means you are capable of response. That you are poised, ready, and willing. But to successfully be responsible means making certain choices—it means focusing, it means binding, it means committing. Love is overwhelming because of its flattery, as well as its demands. Love doesn’t ask you to ignore the world for the sake of one; rather, it asks you to care for the world, to find the whole world within the one. It asks you to concentrate your efforts in the singular—to stop being a jack of all trades and master of none.

The virtue of Love compared to diversification is that Love is progressive. Diversification is content with the status quo and imagines the Kingdom of God may be found in the set of things that already exists. Love, on the other hand, imagines the Kingdom of God will only come by creating entirely new systems through relationships. Diversification seeks to alleviate the anxiety of uncertainty by retreating from it; but Love recklessly embraces the very anxiety. Love does so because Love knows that it can and will prevail against all it is put up against. Love is the universal acid that cuts through even our deepest fears of isolation, uncertainty, and insecurity. Diversity does not slay the dragon, but only builds a grand separating wall. The great economists have taken as an enduring truth the lesson taught the Third Little Pig—that bricks and mortar save. But Love does provides contentment by eradicating the very source of fear, not just isolating it (or us). It destroys the Big Bad Wolf, the anxiety in our hearts, by showing us the futility and negativity of an unholy imagination. Our great fears are no match for Love. And Love is willing to prove it not by saying, “I’ll remove you from all these scary things,” but, rather, by saying, “I will make you vulnerable, I will put you in the midst of the very demons and prove to you that you will survive because you know Me, because you know Love.”

Love binds us, hems us, attaches us, adheres us to a fixed mark so that our anxieties can find no personal venue, no moment for attention. Through Love we learn to step outside our own shallowness and triviality and into the deep mystery of another and be lost in something laudably worthy of wonder. In the life of another our imagination can nobly run wild in holy, fascinating ways. What is vice for the self-centered finds its virtue in the other-centered. We are encouraged to put all our eggs in one basket not because the secret to life is about having one basketful of eggs—quite the contrary, the secret to life has nothing to do with eggs or baskets, Love ultimately exclaims, “Load ‘em all in, who cares!” Because Love knows that joy is not derivative of woven crafts or poultry ovum, individually or collectively. Rather, it knows the truth to which St. Exupery directs us, “there is no joy except in human relations…Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations…Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free” (Wind, Sand, and Stars). And as Chesterton further articulates, “[if] his root horror had been isolation, [the] there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy” (The Man Who Was Thursday).

It is joy we seek. Not security. It is happiness we seek. Not certainty. Diversification has the wrong aims. Love will show us joy and happiness, if only by vulnerability. It will show us precisely how silly anxiety is compared to the riches found by loving another. What we discover is that which we cannot control has the most to offer to us and the world—that risk, while it can cause plummeting falls, can also permit soaring flight. Living is about traversing a world with few certainties and few safe havens. Souls and free will actually cut against this inclination toward absolute security. We must simply have faith that we may come to hope that we may ultimately learn to Love. To demand anything more will actually result in gaining less. “Thy law’s abridgement, and thy last command / Is all but love; oh let that last will stand!” (Holy Sonnet 12; John Donne)