Political Emotions

Martha C. Nussbaum

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674728295
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

How can we achieve and sustain a "decent" liberal society, one that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all and inspires individuals to sacrifice for the common good? In this book, a continuation of her explorations of emotions and the nature of social justice, Martha Nussbaum makes the case for love. Amid the fears, resentments, and competitive concerns that are endemic even to good societies, public emotions rooted in love—in intense attachments to things outside our control—can foster commitment to shared goals and keep at bay the forces of disgust and envy.Great democratic leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., have understood the importance of cultivating emotions. But people attached to liberalism sometimes assume that a theory of public sentiments would run afoul of commitments to freedom and autonomy. Calling into question this perspective, Nussbaum investigates historical proposals for a public "civil religion" or "religion of humanity" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Rabindranath Tagore. She offers an account of how a decent society can use resources inherent in human psychology, while limiting the damage done by the darker side of our personalities. And finally she explores the cultivation of emotions that support justice in examples drawn from literature, song, political rhetoric, festivals, memorials, and even the design of public parks."Love is what gives respect for humanity its life, " Nussbaum writes, "making it more than a shell." Political Emotions is a challenging and ambitious contribution to political philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE

A Problem in the History of Liberalism

Lo, body and soul—this land,

My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,

The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,

And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,

The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,

The gentle soft-born measureless light,

The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,

The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,

Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

—Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

My Bengal of Gold,

I love you.

Forever your skies,

Your air, set my heart in tune

As if it were a flute.

—Rabindranath Tagore, “Amar Shonar Bangla,” now the national anthem of Bangladesh

ALL SOCIETIES ARE FULL OF EMOTIONS. Liberal democracies are no exception. The story of any day or week in the life of even a relatively stable democracy would include a host of emotions—anger, fear, sympathy, disgust, envy, guilt, grief, many forms of love. Some of these episodes of emotion have little to do with political principles or the public culture, but others are different: they take as their object the nation, the nation’s goals, its institutions and leaders, its geography, and one’s fellow citizens seen as fellow inhabitants of a common public space. Often, as in my two epigraphs, emotions directed at the geographical features of a nation are ways of channeling emotions toward its key commitments—to inclusiveness, equality, the relief of misery, the end of slavery. Whitman’s lyric is part of a poem mourning the death of Abraham Lincoln, and it expresses the combination of passionate love, pride, and deep grief that the speaker feels at the current state of his nation. “Amar Shonar Bangla” expressed Tagore’s capacious humanism, his aspiration toward an inclusive “religion of humanity” that would link all castes and religions in his society. Sung as the national anthem of a poor nation, it expresses both pride and love at the beauty of the land and (in subsequent verses) sadness at the work that remains to be done.

Such public emotions, frequently intense, have large-scale consequences for the nation’s progress toward its goals. They can give the pursuit of those goals new vigor and depth, but they can also derail that pursuit, introducing or reinforcing divisions, hierarchies, and forms of neglect or obtuseness.

Sometimes people suppose that only fascist or aggressive societies are intensely emotional and that only such societies need to focus on the cultivation of emotions. Those beliefs are both mistaken and dangerous. They are mistaken, because all societies need to think about the stability of their political culture over time and the security of cherished values in times of stress. All societies, then, need to think about compassion for loss, anger at injustice, the limiting of envy and disgust in favor of inclusive sympathy. Ceding the terrain of emotion—shaping to antiliberal forces gives them a huge advantage in the people’s hearts and risks making people think of liberal values as tepid and boring. One reason Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru were such great political leaders for their liberal societies is that they understood the need to touch citizens’ hearts and to inspire, deliberately, strong emotions directed at the common work before them. All political principles, the good as well as the bad, need emotional support to ensure their stability over time, and all decent societies need to guard against division and hierarchy by cultivating appropriate sentiments of sympathy and love.

In the type of liberal society that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all, there are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. One is to engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrifice—such as social redistribution, the full inclusion of previously excluded or marginalized groups, the protection of the environment, foreign aid, and the national defense. Most people tend toward narrowness of sympathy. They can easily become immured in narcissistic projects and forget about the needs of those outside their narrow circle. Emotions directed at the nation and its goals are frequently of great help in getting people to think larger thoughts and recommit themselves to a larger common good.

The other related task for the cultivation of public emotion is to keep at bay forces that lurk in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others. (It is this tendency that, following Kant, I shall call “radical evil,” though my understanding of it will be rather different from Kant’s.) Disgust and envy, the desire to inflict shame upon others—all of these are present in all societies, and, very likely, in every individual human life. Unchecked, they can inflict great damage. The damage they do is particularly great when they are relied upon as guides in the process of lawmaking and social formation (when, for example, the disgust that people feel for a group of other people is used as a valid reason for treating those people in a discriminatory way). But even when a society has avoided falling into that trap, these forces lurk in society and need to be counteracted energetically by an education that cultivates the ability to see full and equal humanity in another person, perhaps one of humanity’s most difficult and fragile achievements. An important part of that education is performed by the public political culture, which represents the nation and its people in a particular way. It can include or exclude, cement hierarchies or dismantle them—as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its breathtaking fiction that the United States has always been dedicated to racial equality, so stirringly does.

Great democratic leaders, in many times and places, have understood the importance of cultivating appropriate emotions (and discouraging those that obstruct society’s progress toward its goals). Liberal political philosophy, however, has, on the whole, said little about the topic. John Locke, defending religious toleration, acknowledged a problem of widespread animosity between members of different religions in the England of his time; he urged people to take up attitudes of “charity, bounty, and liberality” and recommended that churches advise their members of “the duties of peace and good-will towards all men, as well towards the erroneous as the orthodox.”¹ Locke made no attempt, however, to delve into the psychological origins of intolerance. He thus gave little guidance about the nature of the bad attitudes and how they might be combated. Nor did he recommend any official public steps to shape psychological attitudes. The cultivation of good attitudes is left to individuals and to churches. Given that it was precisely in churches that the bad attitudes festered, Locke leaves his own project in a fragile and uncertain position. In his view, however, the liberal state should confine itself to protecting people’s rights to property and other political goods, when and if others assail them. In terms of his own argument, which grounds religious toleration in equal natural rights, this is intervention one step too late.

Locke’s silence about the psychology of the decent society is common in subsequent liberal political philosophy in the Western tradition—in part, no doubt, because liberal political philosophers sensed that prescribing any particular type of emotional cultivation might easily involve limits on free speech and other steps incompatible with liberal ideas of freedom and autonomy. Such was explicitly the view of Immanuel Kant. Kant delved deeper into human psychology than did Locke. In Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason,² he argues that bad behavior in society is not a mere artifact of current social conditions: it has its roots in universal human nature, which contains tendencies to abuse other people (to treat them not as ends in themselves, but as instruments). He called these tendencies “radical evil.” These bad tendencies lead people to engage in envious and competitive striving as soon as they find themselves with others in society. Kant felt that individuals have an ethical duty to join some group that will strengthen the good tendencies they have (tendencies to treat other people well), so that those tendencies will have a greater chance of winning out over the bad. He believes that a church of the right sort would be such a support structure for social morality, and he even argued that all people therefore have an ethical duty to join a church. Kant concluded, nonetheless, that the liberal state itself was highly limited in its war against radical evil. Like Locke, Kant seems to feel that the state’s primary job is the legal protection of the rights of all citizens. When it comes to taking psychological steps to ensure its own stability and efficacy, such a state finds its hands tied in virtue of its very commitment to freedoms of speech and association. At the most, Kant argues, government might give financial subsidies to scholars who work on the form of “rational religion” that Kant favored, a religion that would teach human equality and urge obedience to the moral law.

Kant was both drawing from and reacting against his great predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is the primary source for Kant’s view of radical evil.³ In On the Social Contract,⁴ Rousseau argued that a good society, in order to remain stable and to motivate projects involving sacrifice (such as national defense), needs a “civil religion,” consisting of “sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject.” Around this public creed—a kind of moralized Deism fortified with patriotic beliefs and sentiments—the state will create ceremonies and rituals, engendering strong bonds of civic love connected to duties to other citizens and to the country as a whole. Rousseau believes that the “civil religion” will solve problems of both stability and altruistic motivation in the society he envisages. It will achieve that goal, however, he argues, only if it is coercively enforced in a way that removes key freedoms of speech and religious expression. The state should punish not only conduct harmful to others but also nonconforming belief and speech, using means that include banishment and even capital punishment. For Kant, this price was just too high: no decent state should use coercion in these ways, removing key areas of autonomy. He does not think to question the belief (which he appears to share with Rousseau) that a “civil religion” will be efficacious only if it is coercively imposed.

Here lies the challenge this book takes up: how can a decent society do more for stability and motivation than Locke and Kant did, without becoming illiberal and dictatorial in the manner of Rousseau? The challenge becomes even more difficult when one adds that my conception of the decent society is a form of “political liberalism,” one in which political principles should not be built upon any comprehensive doctrine of the meaning and purpose of life, religious or secular, and in which the idea of equal respect for persons gives rise to a careful abstemiousness about government endorsement of any particular religious or comprehensive ethical view.⁵ Such a liberal view needs not only to watch out for dictatorial imposition, but also to beware of too much energetic endorsement, or endorsement of the wrong type, lest it create in-groups and out-groups, casting some as second-class citizens. Since emotions, in my view, are not just impulses, but contain appraisals that have an evaluative content, it will be a challenge to make sure that the content of the endorsed emotions is not that of one particular comprehensive doctrine, as opposed to others.

My solution to this problem is to imagine ways in which emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet imperfect society, an area of life in which it can be hoped that all citizens overlap, if they endorse basic norms of equal respect: the area of what Rawls has called the “overlapping consensus.”⁶ Thus, it would be sectarian in an objectionable way for government to engender strong emotions directed toward the religious holidays of one particular sect, but it is not objectionable to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. as a profoundly emotional public holiday that affirms principles of racial equality to which our nation has committed itself, and that rededicates the nation to the pursuit of that goal. The idea will be to think this way across the range of the “capabilities” that provide the core of the political conception: How can a public culture of emotion reinforce attachment to all of those norms? On the negative side, a decent society can reasonably inhibit the formation of emotions of disgust toward groups of fellow citizens, since that sort of repudiating and the related formation of hierarchies are subversive of shared principles of equal respect for human dignity. More generally, society may inculcate distaste and anger directed at the violation of people’s basic political entitlements. Basically, it should be no more objectionable to ask people to feel attached to good political principles than it is to ask them to believe them, and every society with a working conception of justice educates its citizens to think that this conception is correct. Antiracism is not given equal time with racism in the public schools. The careful neutrality that a liberal state observes—and should observe—in matters of religion and comprehensive doctrine does not extend to the fundamentals of its own conception of justice (such as the equal worth of all citizens, the importance of certain fundamental rights, and the badness of various forms of discrimination and hierarchy). We might say that a liberal state asks citizens who have different overall conceptions of the meaning and purpose of life to overlap and agree in a shared political space, the space of fundamental principles and constitutional ideals. But then, if those principles are to be efficacious, the state must also encourage love and devotion to those ideals.

If this devotion is to remain compatible with liberal freedom, it will be crucial to encourage a robustly critical political culture to defend the freedoms of speech and association. Both the principles themselves and the emotions they prompt must be continually scrutinized and criticized, and dissenting voices play a valuable role in keeping the conception truly liberal, and accountable to citizens. Room must also be made for subversion and humor: making fun of the grandiose pretensions of patriotic emotion is one of the best ways of keeping it down to earth, in tune with the needs of heterogeneous women and men. There will clearly be tensions along the way: not every way of poking fun at cherished ideals is respectful of the equal worth of all citizens. (Imagine racist jokes about Martin Luther King Jr.) But the space for subversion and dissent should remain as large as is consistent with civic order and stability, and that space will be a major topic throughout.

One way of addressing several of these worries at once is for the state to give ample space for artists to offer their own different visions of key political values. Whitman and Tagore are much more valuable as free poets than they would be as hired acolytes of a political elite, Soviet-style. Of course, government often must and does decide to pick one artistic creation over another—preferring, for example, Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial, with its winding black wall full of names, evoking the equal worth of countless unknown individual lives lost, to other more jingoistic conceptions; preferring the contributions of Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, and Jaume Plensa for Chicago’s Millennium Park to other submitted designs. During the Depression, as we’ll also discuss later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt hired artists and gave them considerable freedom—but also exercised careful selectivity in choosing photographic images of poverty to put before the American public. The tension between selection and artistic freedom is real, but there are good ways of addressing it.

The issue of emotional support for a decent public political culture has not been entirely neglected by liberal thinkers. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), for whom the cultivation of emotion was such an important theme, imagined a “religion of humanity” that could be taught in society as a substitute for existing religious doctrines, and providing the basis for policies involving personal sacrifice and comprehensive altruism.⁷ In a very similar way, the Indian poet, educator, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) imagined a “religion of man” that would inspire people to promote the improvement of living conditions for all the world’s inhabitants. Both thought of their respective “religions” as doctrines and practices that could be embodied in a system of shared education and in works of art. Tagore devoted much of his life to creating a school and university that embodied his principles and to composing roughly two thousand songs that influence public emotion even in the present day. (He is the only poet/composer to write songs that became the national anthems of two nations, India and Bangladesh.) The similarity between Mill’s and Tagore’s ideas is not surp...