Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

by Martha C. Nussbaum

He must see the world through the lens of many types of vulnerability, cultivating a rich imagination. Only then will he truly see people as real and equal. Only then can he be an equal among equals, understanding interdependency, as democracy and global citizenship both require. A democracy filled with citizens who lack empathy will inevitably breed more types of marginalization and stigmatization, thus exacerbating rather than solving its problems.

a lively imagination, alert to the situations, desires, and sufferings of others is a taxing achievement; moral obtuseness is so much easier.

When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.

Education is not just for citizenship. It prepares people for employment and, importantly, for meaningful lives.

What we can agree about is that young people all over the world, in any nation lucky enough to be democratic, need to grow up to be participants in a form of government in which the people inform themselves about crucial issues they will address as voters and, sometimes, as elected or appointed officials. Every modern democracy is also a society in which people differ greatly along many parameters, including religion, ethnicity, wealth and class, physical impairment, gender, and sexuality, and in which all voters are making choices that have a major impact on the lives of people who differ from themselves.

We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. —Preamble, Constitution of the United States, 1787

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world.

The student’s freedom of mind is dangerous if what is wanted is a group of technically trained obedient workers to carry out the plans of elites who are aiming at foreign investment and technological development. Critical thinking will, then, be discouraged—

But educators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality. It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them.

Art is a great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists (unless thoroughly browbeaten and corrupted) are not the reliable servants of any ideology, even a basically good one—they always ask the imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways.

How else might we think of the sort of nation and the sort of citizen we are trying to build? The primary alternative to the growth-based model in international development circles, and one with which I have been associated, is known as the Human Development paradigm. According to this model, what is important is the opportunities, or “capabilities,” each person has in key areas ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education. This model of development recognizes that all individuals possess an inalienable human dignity that must be respected by laws and institutions. A decent nation, at a bare minimum, acknowledges that its citizens have entitlements in these and other areas and devises strategies to get people above a threshold level of opportunity in each.

At least the following seem crucial: • The ability to think well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue, and debate, deferring to neither tradition nor authority • The ability to recognize fellow citizens as people with equal rights, even though they may be different in race, religion, gender, and sexuality: to look at them with respect, as ends, not just as tools to be manipulated for one’s own profit • The ability to have concern for the lives of others, to grasp what policies of many types mean for the opportunities and experiences of one’s fellow citizens, of many types, and for people outside one’s own nation • The ability to imagine well a variety of complex issues affecting the story of a human life as it unfolds: to think about childhood, adolescence, family relationships, illness, death, and much more in a way informed by an understanding of a wide range of human stories, not just by aggregate data • The ability to judge political leaders critically, but with an informed and realistic sense of the possibilities available to them • The ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one’s own local group • The ability to see one’s own nation, in turn, as a part of a complicated world order in which issues of many kinds require intelligent transnational deliberation for their resolution

A child’s first sentiment is to love himself; and the second, which derives from the first, is to love those who come near him, for in the state of weakness that he is in, he does not recognize anyone except by the assistance and care he receives. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education, Book IV, 1762

No society is pure, and the “clash of civilizations” is internal to every society. Every society contains within itself people who are prepared to live with others on terms of mutual respect and reciprocity, and people who seek the comfort of domination. We need to understand how to produce more citizens of the former sort and fewer of the latter. Thinking falsely that our own society is pure within can only breed aggression toward outsiders and blindness about aggression toward insiders.

When a particular subgroup in society has been identified as shameful and disgusting, its members seem beneath the dominant ones, and very different from them: animal, smelly, contaminated, and contaminating. So it becomes easy to exclude them from compassion, and hard to see the world from their point of view.

People like solidarity with a peer group because it is a type of surrogate invulnerability, and it is no surprise that when people stigmatize and persecute others, they do so, often, as members of a solidaristic group.

What lessons does this analysis suggest as we ask what schools can and should do to produce citizens in and for a healthy democracy? • Develop students’ capacity to see the world from the viewpoint of other people, particularly those whom their society tends to portray as lesser, as “mere objects” • Teach attitudes toward human weakness and helplessness that suggest that weakness is not shameful and the need for others not unmanly; teach children not to be ashamed of need and incompleteness but to see these as occasions for cooperation and reciprocity • Develop the capacity for genuine concern for others, both near and distant • Undermine the tendency to shrink from minorities of various kinds in disgust, thinking of them as “lower” and “contaminating” • Teach real and true things about other groups (racial, religious, and sexual minorities; people with disabilities), so as to counter stereotypes and the disgust that often goes with them • Promote accountability by treating each child as a responsible agent • Vigorously promote critical thinking, the skill and courage it requires to raise a dissenting voice. This is a huge agenda. It must be implemented with constant awareness of local social circumstances, with rich knowledge of local social problems and resources.

When argument is not the focus, people are easily swayed by the fame or cultural prestige of the speaker, or by the fact that the peer culture is going along. Socratic critical inquiry, by contrast, is utterly unauthoritarian. The status of the speaker does not count; only the nature of the argument.

As we have seen, human beings are prone to be subservient to both authority and peer pressure; to prevent atrocities we need to counteract these tendencies, producing a culture of individual dissent.

“Education,” he wrote, “is that process by which thought is opened out of the soul, and, associated with outward things, is reflected back upon itself and thus made conscious of the reality and shape [of things].…

Our mind does not gain true freedom by acquiring materials for knowledge and possessing other people’s ideas but by forming its own standards of judgment and producing its own thoughts.”

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Nor should one grant that there is any way of adequately understanding one’s own nation and its history without setting that history in a global context. All good historical study of one’s own nation requires some grounding in world history.

The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, is what we can call the narrative imagination.1 This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.

Play teaches people to be capable of living with others without control; it connects the experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety.

We do not automatically see another human being as spacious and deep, having thoughts, spiritual longings, and emotions. It is all too easy to see another person as just a body—which we might then think we can use for our ends, bad or good. It is an achievement to see a soul in that body, and this achievement is supported by poetry and the arts, which ask us to wonder about the inner world of that shape we see—and, too, to wonder about ourselves and our own depths.

It is all too easy to have refined sympathy for those close to us in geography, or class, or race, and to refuse it to people at a distance, or members of minority groups, treating them as mere things.

One can hardly treat another person’s intellectual position respectfully unless one at least tries to see what outlook on life and what life experiences generated it.

Today we still maintain that we like democracy and self-governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference, and understanding of others.