The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis

by Martha C. Nussbaum

fear is connected to, and renders toxic, other problematic emotions such as anger, disgust, and envy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

wrote about the education of children with a deep understanding of the psychology of infancy and its dangers for the democratic project.

the emotion of fear has a particularly close connection with the amygdala,

Aristotle tells political speakers that they will be able to whip up fear only if (a) they portray the impending event as highly significant for survival or well-being, if (b) they make people think it is close at hand, and if, further (c) they make people feel that things are out of control—they can’t ward off the bad thing easily on their own. They also have to trust the speaker, he adds, so speakers must arrange to seem trustworthy.

for dissent to do its job, people have to be willing to stand alone without crippling fear. The achievement of the child who learns to “play alone in the presence of its mother” must be paralleled by that of the adult who learns to argue alone in the presence of powerful forces of conformity. Democracy needs to cultivate that willingness to take risks for the truth and for good ideals.

Fear always simmers beneath the surface of moral concern, and it threatens to destabilize democracy, since democracy requires all of us to limit our narcissism and embrace reciprocity.

Perhaps most fundamental of all, they must listen to the voice of persuasion.

Like modern democracies, the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem.

Lucretius even says that all political anger is an outgrowth of fear—of infantile helplessness and its adult cousin the fear of death.

anger requires causal thinking:

outrage part is personally and socially valuable when our beliefs are correct: we need to recognize wrongful acts and protest them, expressing our concern for the violation of an important norm.

The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that anger was a sign of weakness, and either childish or “womanish,” since they thought women were weak creatures. Strength, they thought, means not getting drawn into the “blood for blood” game.

Philosophy Richard Sorabji has shown that Gandhi’s views were very close to those of the Stoics.

Even when we are confident in imputing wrongdoing to an individual or a group, we can still firmly refuse payback,

King always said that anger had a limited usefulness, in that it brought people to his protest movement, rather than sitting in despair. But once they got there, the anger had to be “purified” and “channelized.”21 What he means is that people must give up the payback wish and yet keep the spirit of justified protest. Instead of retribution, they need hope, and faith in the possibility of justice.

German has a generic term for these: Ungeziefer. That is what Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s Metamorphosis finds himself turned into, and Kafka’s intention, which no translation can capture, is to leave the species of disgusting creature unclear. It is sort of like a cockroach, but it is much larger and has long legs. The main distinguishing feature of the Gregor-Ungeziefer is the disgust its presence elicits.

Here’s the “bright idea”: what if we could identify a group of human beings whom we could see as more animal than we are, more sweaty, more smelly, more sexual, more suffused with the stench of mortality? If we could identify such a group of humans and subordinate them successfully, we might feel more secure. Those are the animals, not us. Those are dirty and smelly, we are pure and clean.

projective disgust.

Projective disgust is called “projective” because it sends disgust-properties away from the self and on to other people, saying “They are smelly and bestial.”

30 percent of Hindu households still observe untouchability)

When people feel very insecure, they lash out to blame and scapegoat the vulnerable. We can now add that their tendency to project disgust outward is likely to rise to the extent that their own sense of bodily vulnerability and mortality rises.

It seems perverse to consider cutting federal funding for the arts and humanities, when we understand their role in bringing people together across divisions often made worse by social media. Really, and this is the heart of the matter, such mass media can bring us together with ourselves.

In his memorable discussion of envy in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls answers my second question.2 He suggests that there are three conditions under which outbreaks of socially destructive envy are especially likely. First, there is a psychological condition: people lack secure confidence “in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile.” Second, there is a social condition: many circumstances arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating, because the conditions of social life make the discrepancies that give rise to envy highly visible. Third, the envious see their position as offering them no constructive alternative to mere hostility. The only relief they can envisage is to inflict pain on others.

creation and competition are very difficult to separate, and it’s no surprise that pure idealists fall by the wayside in democratic politics.

democracy is an uncertain fear-suffused realm in which nobody has space to unfold creative powers without the anxious pursuit of competitive advantage.

rights protect democracy from envy. What every single person has by right, people can’t envy in their fellows. Moving some key economic goods into the rights category undercuts envy, to at least some degree.

those schools artificially hold down the number of women so that they won’t be required by Title IX to cut expenditures on male sports. (Title IX requires that the proportion of expenditure on male and female sports correspond to the proportions of men and women in the student body.) One football school told me that the ratio of women to men dictated by grades and scores would be at least 60 to 40, maybe higher. But they hold it to 55 (women)/45 (men) for the sake of the football program.

Ressentiment, for Nietzsche, is an envious emotion felt by the powerless toward the powerful, but then it becomes creative: it prompts the powerless to invent an alternative universe in which they are powerful and their competitors are pathetic.

Kant believed that we have a duty, during our lives, to engage in actions that produce valuable social goals—actions that make it more likely that human beings will treat one another as ends, not as mere instruments. (Central in his own thinking was the aim of producing world peace.

But if we ought to be pursuing valuable social goals, then we ought to motivate ourselves to pursue them—and this means embracing hope. So, Kant concludes that we should choose hope as what he calls a “practical postulate,” an attitude that we take on without sufficient reasons, for the sake of the good action it may enable.

Hope is vulnerable, fear self-protective.

fear is connected to the monarchical desire to control others rather than to trust them to be independent and themselves.

The spirit of hope, then, is obscurely linked to a spirit of respect for the independence of others, to a renunciation of monarchical ambition,

Real human beings and real human life are what we need to believe in, and that means that hope, bolstered by faith, needs to embrace something that flawed human beings are capable of and might really do.

If faith is, as Saint Paul said, “the evidence of things not seen,” then we need faith any time we engage with another person in a more than casual way. We need, that is, to treat that other person as a person, having depth and an inner life, a point of view on the world, and emotions similar to our own.

what are, so to speak, the schools of hope, areas of our common life that we should encourage and strengthen on the grounds that they help people sustain or embrace hope? Much of the work of sustaining or building hope is done in families and in personal friendships of many kinds. But there are five, at least, that we can look to as we try to sustain hope for a decent future: poetry, music, and the other arts; critical thinking (in schools, universities, and adult discussion groups of many kinds); religious groups insofar as they practice love and respect for others; solidarity groups focused on securing justice in a nonviolent and dialogical way; and (often closely connected to such groups) theories of what justice is, accounts of the goal that we can focus on to enrich our efforts.

Socrates said that democracy was “a noble but sluggish horse,” and that he was like a “gadfly,” waking it up with his sting.

the later Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius compared political discourse to a sports match, in which people were cheering for their own team, but nobody was seeking the truth.

Debating Climate Ethics by Stephen M. Gardiner and (my colleague) David A. Weisbach (Oxford University Press);

Immanuel Kant, who said that we all have a duty to embrace hope in order to sustain our actions toward love of others, morality, and justice.

If Germany right now, as I believe, is one of the more fear-resistant and balanced nations in Europe, it may well be because instead of snarky backbiting, politicians on both sides actually sit down and think.