Episode 207 - Transcript
So today we’re talking about the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She’s one of the names that often comes up in conversations about the greatest living philosophers. We did an episode on some of her work… episode 190… and for whatever its worth that episode has been THE most listened to episode in the last year of the show. Pretty nifty. I’m sure she cares a LOT about that.
But if you don’t remember the episode we talked about her concept of Neo-Stoicism. We talked about how to Martha Nussbaum…the history of western thought has been FILLED with this MISTAKEN way of thinking, about emotions… where when we’re TRYING to learn more about the world around us…people have typically just assumed that there are TWO ways to be looking at it: you got CLEAR thinking on the ONE hand…this is RATIONAL thinking where we use LOGIC and DEDUCTION to figure things out…and then on the OTHER hand we have UNCLEAR ways of thinking that are more EMOTIONAL, more IRRATIONAL.
The assumption by SO many over the years has been that to base your understanding of something on an EMOTIONAL response you have to it…well, that’s just makes you a MORON. Emotions are IRRATIONAL…for the love of Christ, pull yourself together… and start thinking more RATIONALLY and LOGICALLY about stuff, that’s what a lot of people would say here.
But as we laid out on episode 190 to Martha Nussbaum this is the wrong way to be thinking about it.
That in reality, to HER: when you pay attention to what the emotions ARE…when emotions are properly examined…they are actually, extremely valuable APPRAISALS of our reality, and people are ALWAYS MAKING these sorts of appraisals…about things that matter to them…so if we DON’T pay close enough ATTENTION to the emotions…we run the risk of completely missing HUGE PIECES of what MAKES our societies, and our relationships with other people, even function at a basic level.
And to set the stage for the piece of her work we’re talking about today…let’s give a concrete EXAMPLE of the sort of thing she’s talking about here.
You may remember from the episode her comparing the two emotional responses of shame and guilt. The example I used in the episode was to imagine yourself getting into a car accident, rear ending someone where it’s 100% your fault. And when you get out of the car there after crashing into that someone…staring at the smoking cars…do you feel shame, or do you feel guilt when you’re in that moment?
And as we talked about to Nussbaum…the SPECIFIC emotion you’re FEELING there…actually matters a lot… and you NEED to EXAMINE it…because it can TELL you important THINGS… about the way you’re looking at the world.
So naturally in her philosophy: she EXAMINES these emotional responses pretty DEEPLY:
SHAME she says for example, when you look at it REAL CLOSELY, what you FIND is that it’s typically a pretty narcissistic emotion, more INWARDLY focused… shame is where you’ve set up this ideal STANDARD for yourself up inside your head…and when you don’t live up to being PERFECT in a particular moment…you start to have feelings of shame.
So she says the SOLUTION to shame then often becomes for people just in practice…to CONVINCE yourself…that you’re PERFECT again, at least for a while until the NEXT thing comes along in life and that whole self-obsessed illusion gets washed away yet again.
Whereas with the emotion of GUILT she says…you know if GUILT was your response to running into someone on the road…THAT’S an emotion she notices… that ALWAYS fundamentally acknowledges… the RIGHTS of the other PERSON, the rights that are being INFRINGED upon IN that situation.
So to CONTRAST guilt and shame as two possible emotional responses…she says NOTICE…that FIXING feelings of SHAME, is always about making YOURSELF feel better…while fixing GUILT…is a person DOING something that REPAIRS the wrong that was DONE to another person.
Now, BOTH of these are negative emotions, NEITHER of these are fun to feel. But if you HAD to feel ONE of them…and you EXAMINE EACH of them… they have two COMPLETELY different orientations towards reality, and attitudes towards the solution of the problem.
And to Martha Nussbaum: Guilt…starts to seem… like a FAR MORE constructive emotional response for people to be having, if you LIVED in a type of society where it was IMPORTANT that the relationships BETWEEN people in it need to be trusting and cooperative.
However at the same time… you can ALSO imagine how SHAME…in some OTHER kind of society, with a DIFFERENT kind of power structure, DIFFERENT social norms…shame you can imagine in THAT world…would be a FAR more useful emotion for the population to be feeling than GUILT!
So THIS is the kind of thing Martha Nussbaum DOES when examining these emotions DEEPER. And we’ll SEE how this kind of analysis of the specific emotions is going to be very important for our conversation here today.
But the LARGER point in episode 190 though, was this: that to Nussbaum instead of IGNORING our emotional responses to things…what we ACTUALLY need to be doing…is examining them even MORE deeply than we already DO.
And what if INSTEAD of these COMMON strategies people like to do to get AWAY from the emotions…say, turning cynical towards everything, denying the importance of things so you don’t have to FEEL emotions as much… or how bout turning more STOIC towards everything so you can have some kind of inner solitude AGAINST emotions where I don’t WORRY about external things they don’t even BOTHER me in my state of wisdom, Nussbaum asks what if INSTEAD of doing all THAT we accept that we’re ALWAYS living in RELATION to some external events that are going on, that we’re GOING to have emotional responses to the things that matter to us, and what if we saw EXAMINING them as one of the most CRUCIAL parts of a person’s development, and arrived at an understanding of the emotions NOT as USELESS, IRRATIONAL, animalistic SPASMS as they’ve been thought of in the past what if the emotions… can actually tell us a LOT of important stuff about how a person, or a society, is APPRAISING reality in terms of what is valuable to them.
Are we NEGLECTING… an EXTREMELY important aspect of understanding human THOUGHT and cooperation more generally?
So BUILDING OFF this portion of her work that we talked about before…KNOWING all this is so IMPORTANT to her…if you asked Martha Nussbaum about MANY of the problems we’ve been TALKING about on this podcast lately…she’s NOT going be an ANARCHIST that thinks we just need to remove forced hierarchical authority. She’s NOT going to be an anticapitalist where she thinks the answer is revolution.
No, SHE’S gonna be someone… who thinks these problems can be solved from WITHIN the current system as it exists.
And DON’T get her wrong…ABSOLUTELY she would say…structural changes, economic reforms, flattening the hierarchies, ALL THESE things may be a good THING for people let’s have a conversation about it, but what if a MAJOR factor that we’re completely overlooking here… that’s the REASON our democracies have been functioning so POORLY, the REASON so many people currently feel POWERLESS to be able to CHANGE anything…maybe what has changed in recent years is NOT that the system has proven to be a failure…but that maybe a TOXIC level of FEAR, as an emotion…has OVERTAKEN our political discourse…and it’s gotten to such an EXTREME LEVEL, that the democratic institutions we BELIEVE in and the ways they’re designed to work…essentially, CANNOT function from WITHIN this new climate of fear that we’ve created.
To put it another way: what if the problem is ACTUALLY…that anything political, is always emotional. And what if the PRIMARY EMOTION of our politics…has become FEAR. And that INSTEAD of inciting some total revolution…what if we already HAVE the system we need to be able to solve our political problems…but that what we NEED as citizens…if we want to be able to USE our democracies in the WAYS they were DESIGNED to work…is we NEED to be living a more EXAMINED LIFE when it comes to our POLITICAL emotions…so that we are not so easily CAPTURED by the media companies and politicians that USE our emotions…to keep us LOCKED in a Monarchy… of Fear. That’s the title of her book that we’re talking about today. The Monarchy of Fear.
I mean just to START making a case for that point, if ya WANTED to: FEAR… IS the emotion you would take ADVANTAGE of…if you were trying to establish or maintain…a MONARCHY. I mean Fear is a CURRENCY within a monarchy. When you can GET people…to CONSTANTLY FEAR outside THREATS that are going to come in, ruin their lives, TAKE everything they have…when you can EVEN GET people to fear EACH OTHER within a society…that is EXACTLY the point that people will start to gather together under a strong, absolute leader that is promising to keep them SAFE from all those THREATS. It’s a TIME TESTED STRATEGY from all THROUGHOUT human HISTORY.
So like she does with many of the OTHER emotions…Martha Nussbaum does a FULL examination of the emotion of fear. And to show how PRIMAL of an emotion we’re DEALING with when we talk about fear…she spends time looking at not ONLY the evolutionary ORIGINS of it, but the origins of fear in our psychological development as children.
Maybe you’ll remember from the LAST episode but she has a pretty provocative statement she’s known for: she says human babies are BORN into this world…as little TYRANTS. And it may SOUND there like she’s trying to come at the babies of the world and put em all on blast…but in FACT what she MEANS is that babies NEED to be little tyrants…in part because of this asymmetry between how physically HELPLESS they are, and how cognitively AWARE they are of what’s going on AROUND them.
Meaning we ALL start our LIVES…as this little meatball, just laying there, oddly AWARE of the stuff going on around us…but every PROBLEM we’re capable of NOTICING is something that some ADULT needs to FIX for us. To Nussbaum… this is the STAGE that the emotional response of FEAR starts to develop. We FEEL FEAR…and this goes for LATER in life as well…when there is SOME threat to our existence…that WE… are not CAPABLE of WARDING OFF all on our own.
And that very BASIC emotional response to things in the world…becomes a PRIMAL CIRCUITRY…that STICKS with us throughout our entire lives. It’s ALWAYS there… we just typically FEAR fewer THINGS as life goes on… because we become more capable of warding things off on our own, or with a support system.
To put this more in the language of organizing a society though: as TIME goes on people mature…and they develop MORE of an ability to find ALTERNATIVES to living in fear. We learn to calm down, we consider possibilities, we find a way to work things OUT by COOPERATING with the other people around us. And this is what the FOUNDATION… of a democracy is typically based upon.
But regardless of ANY of this, to Martha Nussbaum we ALWAYS gotta remember: that PRIMAL circuitry, that FEAR…is CONSTANTLY LURKING in the background, waiting to be stirred up by SOMEONE. And con artists, and abusive partners, and SALES people and SO many others out there: ALL KNOW this good and WELL and they’ll often try to USE this fear AGAINST people to get whatever it is they want.
But ANOTHER group of people that know this…that are IMPORTANT to distinguish here…are the people that CONTROL our political discourse: that is the politicians, the political influencers, the MEDIA companies.
ALL of these people understand…that fear…sells. Fear is something that gets people clicking. It’s something that gets people tuning in the next day so they can sell their viewers SOAP during the commercial breaks. FEAR…is a REALLY good way to move the needle, no doubt about it.
But as Martha Nussbaum is going to say…fear is ALSO an emotion that when left unexamined…is FUNDAMENTALLY TOXIC to the processes of DEMOCRACY in particular.
Because she says democracy…is a specific WAY of organizing society… that HEAVILY RELIES on trust and cooperation between people. It requires CIVIL DIALOGUE. It requires us mutually seeking the common good. It requires us to have HOPE for a future… and an ability to calm down and resolve these things among ourselves, EVEN if we don’t like the people we’re talking to. Now IF you wanted to live in a democracy…then to Martha Nussbaum: THESE are some of the things we NEED to make this type of system work.
And it needs to be SAID: maybe you DON’T want to live in a democracy.
That’s NOT me being sarcastic. It’s CERTAINLY a conversation people out there might be entertaining, and that SOME are HAVING. There’s GROWING discontent with democracy as a system lately… neo-monarchical thought has now OPENLY, crept its way into some of the HIGHEST levels of political office today… maybe covering the philosophy BEHIND this neo-monarchical philosophical trend is an episode you people would want to hear about, let me know, but the POINT HERE today is to Martha Nussbaum…if you’re WONDERING WHY, our democratic institutions seem LESS CAPABLE of SOLVING our political problems than they’ve been in the PAST…we HAVE to CONSIDER this fact that we have an emotional climate of FEAR…that’s BETTER suited to make a MONARCHY work well, than it is to make a democracy work well. So this ISN’T just a point from her that hey, wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody just wasn’t AFRAID of each other! No fear is PARTICULARLY TOXIC… to the system WE’RE trying to make work.
But let’s take a step back and look at some criticisms of this idea. Martha Nussbaum RESPONDS to a lot of them in the book. And she says one of the most COMMON ones she FACES… is when somebody comes up to her and says hey, FEAR, is not a BAD thing, in and of itself. You’re MISCHARACTERIZING it.
They say you know as someone who studies the EMOTIONS so much…it’s kinda surprising Martha Nussbaum that you don’t REALIZE… that FEAR…is something that ANY society, whether it’s a MONARCHY or not, NEEDS in order to operate well.
Very simple: the people FEAR bad things HAPPENING in the future… and then they take POLITICAL action to make sure those things don’t occur. FEAR is a natural, part of how anything GOOD ever gets DONE in a democracy ever, so how can you EVER say that’s a BAD thing?
And Martha Nussbaum would say back to this person: yeah. I agree that fear is always a part of it.
But WHEN you just so smoothly mention there…that fear leads to GOOD OUTCOMES within a democracy…you’re SMUGGLING IN the entire democratic process… that is EXAMINING that fear response… and then TURNING it into something productive. But let’s not forget: FEAR BEGINS in that PRIMAL state we talked about: unexamined. Reactionary. Toxic to democracy.
It’s ONLY through EXTENSIVE, RATIONAL deliberation that we EVER get to ANYTHING someone could consider to be remotely CONSTRUCTIVE.
Let’s break this point down a little deeper so we can understand where Nussbaum’s coming from: the POINT is not to GET RID of fear entirely.
No, like her work on the OTHER emotions…we just need to examine it more closely…and the TYPE of unexamined fear that WE’RE dealing with in OUR political discourse…is one where people are just panicking…and trying to control things– they’re NOT trying to SOLVE any of the actual problems.
She compares the way we’re talking to each other to what it's like to be in a bad relationship. She says what HAPPENS sometimes when things get sufficiently bad between two people…is the two of them get to a point where they AREN’T even really TALKING about the PROBLEMS anymore in good faith.
They’re not pausing and reflecting. They’re just being REACTIONARY and trying to assess blame for everything in real time. YOU…left the DISHES in the sink…because YOU just don’t care about our RELATIONSHIP anymore! Ok, BUT YOU only hate that I don’t do the DISHES right away…because it’s a negative reflection on YOU and your PERFECTIONIST EGO that you have. It’s like…at a certain point…you’re not even TALKING about the PROBLEMS anymore. And Martha Nussbaum thinks this type of interaction happens more and more OFTEN…when unexamined FEAR is allowed to CORRUPT this entire process.
In fact she says: to turn this away from arguments about doing the dishes to things more at a societal level…there are OTHER negative emotions that people HAVE living in a society, that in ONE context can be used as CONSTRUCTIVE negative emotions…but when they become infected by this primary FEAR UNDERNEATH them…they turn toxic.
The three examples SHE gives in the book are anger, disgust and envy. And if you’re wondering how ANY of those could EVER be used CONSTRUCTIVELY…
ONE example of when it comes to ENVY…is maybe the way that Nietzsche saw envy. How from ONE perspective during HIS time…envy is considered to be one of the seven deadly sins…one of the WORST feelings you can possibly have and act upon. But in ANOTHER sense he says from a more EXAMINED perspective…ENVY becomes this measuring stick you can use, that is COMPLETELY personalized to YOU…to figure out what it is that you WANT in life that other people have.
Again: HERE is an emotion that on the SURFACE seems to be PURELY NEGATIVE…that with just a LITTLE more examination to it…can become something that is CONSTRUCTIVE.
And there are constructive ways of using DISGUST when it avoids illness and disease. And there are constructive ways to use ANGER when it moves someone to change things in their life for the better. The QUESTION REALLY BECOMES then: WHEN do anger, disgust and envy…BECOME something that is TOXIC…to the democratic process?
And to Martha Nussbaum… the ANSWER is going to be when the more PRIMARY emotion of FEAR, becomes the driving FORCE BEHIND these emotions. For example: anger…corrupted by FEAR…becomes something that seeks retribution or PAIN in the people CAUSING the anger. Envy corrupted by fear can become something that leads to class warfare. DISGUST corrupted by fear can be something that gets PROJECTED onto entire GROUPS of people, their culture or their lifestyle. It’s NOT until FEAR…becomes a PRIMARY component of what is DRIVING these emotions…that politicians and the media can use them to MANIPULATE people in a way where they are TOXIC to our ability to trust each other and cooperate within a democracy.
And it just needs to be reiterated right here that this is an EXTREMELY common thing that politicians and media influencers are DOING…is stoking FEAR in the hearts of people. Like is this something you can relate to? Like have you ever been led to believe that the end of the world is just around the corner? The end of civilization? The end of democracy? Has anybody who’s a politician or in the media… ever made you feel that way?
Well to Martha Nussbaum building off the politics of Aristotle…STOKING FEAR like that in the population…is actually the OPPOSITE of what a politician or a public intellectual is supposed to be DOING…in a democracy. Should be said: It’s PERFECT if you wanted to live in a MONARCHY…but again a DEMOCRACY requires civil dialogue, deliberation, and an attempt to bring about the common good.
So she says if you were a politician or an intellectual that was trying to make the tools of a democracy work well…you wouldn’t stoke fear…you would act as that CALMING influence that SLOWS down, looks at the situation from several different angles, considers the possibilities, and fosters a HOPE in the people that need to deliberate within that democracy to SOLVE the problem.
THAT would be effectively USING the political system you have…not going out there and RILING people UP against their supposed political enemy.
Reminds me of that scene from lord of the rings where the orcs are invading…and the king just LOSES it and hes like run, run for your lives…and then gandalf cracks em, he’s like prepare for BATTLE! THAT’S what a politician should be doing…metaphorically of course dont go crackin people. We NEED people that are trying to get the GEARS of democracy TURNING…so that the system can actually WORK…and FEAR she says is an emotion that if you pay attention to it: Fear SHRINKS possibilities. It RETREATS people INWARD, it makes them feel like they have to REJECT the experiences of other people in order to save their own lives.
But people can say BACK to all this okay, look I’m ALL FOR a good bout of democratic participation, don’t get me wrong. But from MY perspective MOST of the problems were facing are best addressed at a STRUCTURAL level or at the level of legislation.
This person could say that the goal SHOULDN’T BE for us…to REASON with all these people that are holding society back. Look SOMETIMES in this world…society has to move forward through the implementation of LAW… and the people that don’t AGREE with that law sometimes… need to be dragged ALONG with the changing times. Otherwise you’re just meeting these horrible people at the dinner table, having conversations with them, and legitimizing their points.
To which Martha Nussbuam says: sure, that whole strategy may work well for people…in a MONARCHY. You know where you can use fear and intimidation to force people into submission. But that DOESN’T work as well in a functioning democracy. I mean if mask mandates during the pandemic showed us ANYTHING they showed us that it doesn’t matter if people in a government building somewhere create a new rule for everyone…if the people on the ground in a democracy don’t understand the rule or don’t think it should BE a rule…people are just not going to FOLLOW it.
Again, something that if you wanted to live in a monarchy…would be a very INCONVENIENT REALITY of us needing to have better conversations with each other and be on the same page.
But this TENDENCY Martha Nussbaum says, to FEAR our political opponents and turn them into the people that are DESTROYING OUR DEMOCRACY…IS ironically the very type of attitude…that is destroying democracy’s ability to function.
And importantly to her: it’s really only something that goes ON in a country that is overly segregated. In fact this is WHY one of the SOLUTIONS she offers to all this towards the end of the book, a very UNEXPECTED thing to hear from a philosopher at first: is that SHE’S in favor at least in the United States where she’s from…of a mandatory national service plan…for the YOUNG people of the country.
This is a good IDEA she says because if we WANT to fix the segregation in our country we HAVE to understand the two main reasons it's happening: One…is that we generally live apart from each other, geographically speaking. We just don’t SEE or have deeper interactions with many people of different classes, races or cultural backgrounds. That’s ONE element of it. And number TWO…is that, at least in the US…we’re typically raised to think as individuals. Or as SHE says in more of a narcissistic way where by DEFAULT we USUALLY start by considering: what’s good for MY family here? Not necessarily what’s going to be best for every TYPE of person OUT there.
For Nussbaum…this is something that obviously EVERY society faces at some level, but in the US…this is a little more pronounced than in other countries.
And it’s for THESE REASONS…that Nussbaum thinks a Youth National Civil Service program would go a LONG WAY towards letting young people get to KNOW about the COUNTRY that they’re a part of.
She says about the specifics of the program in the book, The program would be: “Modeled on the civil service arm of Germany’s former national service requirement… but entirely civil, and for all young people, my program would enroll young people preferably for three years… and send them to do work that urgently needs doing all over America: elder care, child care, infrastructure work, but always sending people into different regions, both geographically and economically.”
Again to Martha Nussbaum…a program like this would OPEN young people’s EYES to the very people and lifestyles that they’re turning into the “other” later on in life through the media. The thinking is: Getting people to have these toxic levels of FEAR about an ENTIRE group of people…almost always REQUIRES you to know almost nothing about them.
It’s ALMOST like… with it being SO POSSIBLE for people to insulate themselves into echo chambers through media, and with the deliberate CHANGE in media strategy as of late…maybe this kind of exposure… is just a WISE THING for a country to DO if it wants a population of people that can understand and SOLVE the political problems of the culture they’re living in.
On a more GENERAL note when talking about solutions…Martha Nussbaum says that if the emotion we’re OVERFOCUSING on is unexamined FEAR…then JUST like with the conversation about SHAME and GUILT from BEFORE…PART of how we need to be thinking about SOLUTIONS is by thinking about WHICH emotions are MORE productive for members of a democracy to be FOCUSING on. And to her…the answer is OBVIOUS. The flip side of FEAR…if you HAD to come up with one…is the emotion of HOPE.
Think about the relationship between fear and hope for a second. BOTH of them she says are reactions to uncertainty, but they REACT to it in opposing ways. FEAR sees uncertainty and shrinks back, HOPE on the other hand EXPANDS and surges FORWARD. Fear causes us to REMOVE possibilities, Hope seeks to bring about NEW ones. FEAR she says is self-protective, HOPE on the other hand is more vulnerable.
She cites the work of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and what HE wrote about the importance of hope. Nussbaum says one of the moral duties Kant believed that we have during our life is to DO things… that produce valuable social goals, the kinds of things that make it MORE LIKELY that people will treat each other as ends in themselves…not only as a means to some end they desire.
And to Kant: no matter HOW MUCH uncertainty we think we might SEE in the world… that might make us react with fear, or might tempt us to turn inwardly stoic, or turn cynical towards everything…we have to realize to Kant…for GOOD THINGS to be DONE in this world EVER…it requires SOMEONE… that has at least some shred of HOPE for a better future.
Think about it Nussbaum says: when you think about a con artist robbing old people out of their retirements, or some BAD ACTOR anywhere…when you’re thinking about that person sitting around PLANNING whatever it is they were going to do…you would WISH that they’d get to a point where they question themselves, get frustrated at the situation and lose all HOPE.
You would WISH that the WORST person in history was sitting around, disappointed about the way the world is around them saying stuff like ehhh it’s pointless…I’m a con artist..there’s so much oversight…civil regulatory agencies are just gonna get me anyway, meh I guess I’ll just do nothing instead. Well, sounds a LOT like the inner monologue CYNICAL cliche of postmodernism that would OTHERWISE be doing GOOD in the world.
The importance of all this for Nussbaum is that if we HAVE an obligation to do GOOD in the world…then we ALSO have an obligation to WILL ourselves to the kind of emotions that are going to SURGE FORWARD in the face of uncertainty. Or as Nussbaum says: “good works…need hope.”
Whether that’s caring for a child where you have NO IDEA how they’re going to turn out but you have to show up every day with HOPE and DO the work to ENGAGE in the process every day.
Whether that’s trying to make a relationship work…to continue her metaphor of the bad relationship from before, she says imagine being in a marriage…where every day you’re just foreshadowing the end of the marriage saying, “is the end of our marriage right around the corner? Find out when we ask again on the 6 o clock news.”
It’s like: being a member of a functioning democracy requires you to be someone who isn’t FANTASIZING about being the harbinger of doom in a cheap horror movie all the time. We have to WILL ourselves everyday…to HAVE the hope that’s NECESSARY…to GIVE the democratic process a chance.
And to sit around FORESHADOWING about the END of the WORLD all the time…again its great for clicks, its great for a monarchy, but its bad for a democracy.
And people will HEAR that and they’ll say yeah I get it…politicians and the media stoke fear in people, this is 101 level media literacy…but look have you SEEN the news? The end of the world REALLY IS around the corner this time! Listen guys… I’m super serious this time…it’s REALLY BAD this time…just ENDLESSLY getting played.
But to Martha Nussbaum…the world didn’t end in 2020. It didn’t end in 2016. It didn’t end in 2012. This RECENCY bias that the history of the world has somehow been this PRISTINE paradise where nobody had any serious problems and NOW all the BIG problems are here…she goes through the last 100 years of crisis after crisis in the western world, EVERY ONE of these were monumental challenges and DEFINITELY would’ve been used to stoke fear in the hearts of people ALL OVER today’s world…but somehow…we got through them each time.
Talking about the end of the world all the time…is not helping ANYBODY in a democracy. In fact, it actually makes you an ENEMY to the democratic process for reasons we’ve already laid out. And we need to stop giving these people that spread unexamined fear so much respect. We have to raise our standards… for what we ALLOW people to SAY for the sake of their own self-promotion.
And just for clarity: what Martha Nussbaum is SAYING here is NOT SIMPLY that you need to be holding your POLITICIANS and MEDIA more accountable. CERTAINLY that’s part of it…but don’t just stop and say, hey these people in government…these two parties are living in FEAR of each other and CAN’T COMPROMISE! But COME ON GUYS let’s get to work on some good old fashioned bipartisan LEGISLATION!” It’s like NO, that’s fine, but what she is TALKING about…STARTS with US! YOU might be part of the problem.
Martha Nussbaum says it was a tough thing to accept about herself at first…it’s tough in general: it’s SO TEMPTING to just WALLOW in all these videos or articles that come up on your feed, find the most CARTOONISH example of the people that disagree with you… and then to write a story where that’s the people that are running the world off a cliff. The work BEGINS…with the way that we are treating each other.
As far as more solutions go: Nussbaum thinks they lie in the areas that are the MOST EFFECTIVE at stimulating HOPE…and GENUINE understanding between different people. So for HER this is gonna lie in things like critical thinking…it lies in religious faith centered around love and respect…it LIES in things like the ARTS as a place where people can come into contact with the expression of OTHER human beings that are entirely DIFFERENT from them, as a way to further END this segregation.
She says, “The arts offer bridges to seeing human diversity as joyful, funny, tragic, delightful, not as a horrible fate to be shunned” She says we need to have more public spaces for people to LEARN about other ideas, and have conversations about them. Public libraries always come to MY mind for some reason. I mean they’re publicly funded. Barely ANYBODY ever USES them anymore. They’re indoors. You’re SURROUNDED by books. I would TOTALLY make time to go to a public library every week if there were people there whose wisdom I could glean just a little bit from. I mean those kinds of conversations are something I think a LOT of people are seeking more in their life in general. Why doesn’t somebody DO this?
Anyway…ALL of this I think would be a welcome idea to explore to Nussbaum…because ULTIMATELY she compares what is needed to the classic example of Socrates in the Athenian agora. The people of Athens during the time of Socrates she says…and ASK yourself if this reminds you of anybody you see today…but she says they were “careless, hasty, prone to overconfident boasting and to substituting invective for argument. The result was, and is, that people don’t know what they really believe: they just have not stopped to sort this out.”
People today…don’t often even KNOW…what they really believe. They BARELY think about it. They make FUN of people who DO think about it. And when they’re FORCED to give an ANSWER on their thoughts…they’re often absolutely CLUELESS about what to believe or why to believe it.
See because people can argue BACK to Nussbaum when she comes at you with this argument about HOPE. Well okay, that SOUNDS good…but Hope…for WHAT FUTURE in PARTICULAR, Martha Nussbaum? I mean, there’s so many futures to CHOOSE from. And MORE than that are we just supposed to sit around…twiddling our thumbs, HOPING all day, that someone will come and save us from our problems? How does HOPING accomplish ANYTHING there? That can start to seem JUST as bad as FEAR.
But this is where Martha Nussbaum would want to make an important distinction about two different kinds of hope. There’s IDLE hope which is the kind of hope that hypothetical person was just talking about…and then there’s PRACTICAL HOPE. Where to her hope becomes more of a SYNDROME than an emotion.
It’s an orientation towards the world…where hope she says is NOT ONLY something that we need to WILL ourselves into feeling each and every day…but it ALSO becomes something… that requires a reasonably concrete picture of what we want the future to look like. After all how can you HOPE for a FUTURE if you don’t have any clue of what it is going to look like? And the ONLY way THAT happens she says…is if you DO as the Athenians didn’t during the time of Socrates.
You need to be ENGAGING with the issues of your democracy in SUCH a way…that if someone like a Socrates came up to you and asked you to define what you think about some important issue and then he QUESTIONED you on it and he asked you to explain yourself further…that you WOULDN’T be ANNOYED by someone like that…in fact you’d maybe be EXCITED to talk about it because you’d be COMING from a place where being a citizen of a democracy is an important piece of your identity. And this is HOW the problems get SOLVED in the way we do things.
Hope, done correctly then, REQUIRES a certain amount of practical KNOWLEDGE and engagement.
And I STILL think there’s SO much more to SAY here about Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach…something that’s been HIGHLY influential over the years when it comes to NGO’s determining quality of LIFE standards all around the world. But the capabilities approach is ALSO something she thinks that can serve as a normative framework for measuring social justice in our OWN societies.
What I mean is: it can BE SO INTIMIDATING to think about trying to PARTICIPATE in the governance of the world around you…you can START to think: I know what’s going to happen if I go down to city hall and start TALKING to all these people…I’m gonna get embarrassed. I’m gonna OPEN my mouth…and I’m going to QUICKLY be exposed as someone that DOESN’T really have a theoretical plan of my own to oppose theirs. Well Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach she thinks can BE that theoretical COMPANION…for people that want to CHALLENGE the dominant, economically focused metrics that are CURRENTLY being used…she asks: what if INSTEAD we focused on what real CAPABILITIES people actually have in their lives, and then she lays out this Capabilities Approach…that ORGANIZES these IDEAS into something that can CHALLENGE the ways of thinking currently dominating the corridors of power, as she puts it.
I love the way she writes. Corridors of Power. She’s a big fan of literature. And everytime I get to READ Nussbaum I always end up taking two or three different phrases from her and using them to people in my life like I came up with them. I’m Shameless about it.
I’m SHAMELESS…but I do feel guilty.
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