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by Jeanette Winterson

Getting smarter won’t solve our human problems – any more than tech will solve our human problems. What’s faulty in us, to put it simply, because it is simple, is not about thinking at all. Our problem is love. We are smart enough to know this. It’s why every religion pitches a sky god, or gods, whose nature is unconditional love. Love is the highest value. Yet for all of history, love has also been seen as a weakness, as a diversion, as a spanner in the works in the fight between rationality and emotion. Love has been relegated as women’s work – the invisible mending that holds families together, that holds societies together, that gives a man something to keep him sane, at the same time as driving him mad. We have taken love and disembodied it – throwing it back into the air at our divine super-self, something for the gods to manage. But also, in a contradictory and compensatory gesture, we have fatally embodied love in women, who, as men are told, ensnare with love’s ties, at the same time as being the sacred keeper of love’s flame. Men, who have until lately written most of our literature, philosophy, and religious texts, have a tough time with love. We know they do because they have left an endless record of their struggles.