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Hi Everyone,
At this point in the semester you could all use this gift of a very short essay to read instead of a long chapter or article. I have been thinking about writing a book on emotions and democracy, and this essay lays out some of the core ideas it would have. I would like to try to place this in a more popular outlet to see if it arouses any interest. My fear is that all this has been said by popularizers like Nussbaum, Goleman, and Haidt. But my aspirations also mean that your comments will be helpful even if they are rather sweeping, since they can inform the book.
Thanks,
Jim
The Compassionate Republic
James M. Jasper
Democracy is one of the keywords of modern politics: almost never challenged as an ideal, but never fully implemented in practice, and defined differently by various groups. Even monarchies and autocracies pay some lip service to it, arguing for delayed implementation but rarely against democracy in principle.
Throughout history democracy has changed along with social and economic transformations. People pursue the democracy they admire most. . Most obviously, new groups have been incorporated as citizens who had previously been dismissed as unworthy, or something less than fully human. Women, men without wealth, eighteen-year-olds, various minorities have entered the polity in the past century. Others – former felons, foreigners, even younger citizens, those who have recently moved – are often still excluded.
In addition, what citizens are allowed or encouraged to do in the political arena has also changed. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the emphasis has shifted from one dimension of democracy, the ability to participate in political decisions, to the other basic dimension, the protection of our choices about how to live our private lives. To the ancients, private life was an embarrassing necessity, preferably left to women, slaves, and children. Today life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are central, and we engage in politics mostly when these rights are threatened.
Democracy is changing in other ways. Feminists like Carol Pateman and Martha Nussbaum have tried to push “the frontiers of justice” to incorporate new ways of caring for others, and new others to care for, including the mentally handicapped, nonhuman species, and humans on the other side of the globe. These are beings who deserve our care and attention even when they cannot fully participate in our politics. This care ethic is moving slowly from the private realm to shape the public, political realm as well.
Political participation has also made a comeback in recent decades, led by a series of social movements since the early 1960s that have rallied around ever-evolving forms of “participatory democracy” and culminating in the talk movements of the World Social Forum and Occupy’s General Assemblies. These meetings grappled with issues about what consensus means, whether one person can truly “represent” others, and how fully current decisions should constrain future assemblies. In some ways these activists were rediscovering what the ancients knew about rhetoric, in others they were grappling with some of its limitations. Participation has its pitfalls.
Women have promoted many of these changes, simply by being incorporated into economic and political life over the last hundred years but also more actively through feminist criticism of dominant ideas and practices. Democratic debates over horizontalism, prefigurative politics, and process emerged out of what in the 1980s we called feminist process. Women have also brought with them a more self-conscious attention to emotions than we have seen in politics since Aristotle and the other classical theorists of rhetoric. Throughout the social sciences, women have dominated the ranks of scholars rediscovering the importance of emotions in human life.
Until recently, emotions in politics were considered a bad thing. For 2500 years, every elite that wished to exclude a group from citizenship explained that “those people” were too emotional to participate rationally: slaves and foreigners for the Athenians, children and women for almost every ruling elite since then. The Greeks bequeathed us tropes of reason as the master, and emotions as the slaves, in what was one of the earliest of many self-serving uses of emotional models in politics. The industrial working class joined the other suspect, emotional groupsas it emerged in the nineteenth century and demanded the dignity of citizenship. In debates over suffrage in the United States, women were said to be too compassionate, too driven by short-term impulses; immigrants were suspicious because they acted too much like women.
The mob was the vehicle of these dangerous folks. Euripides gave us the defining image of the mob, the Bacchantes who tore King Pentheus apart in their ecstatic frenzy, including Pentheus’ own mother, who proudly carried his head back to the palace in a hypnotic haze. Crowds were thought to drive people insane, pushing them from reason to passion, and women were thought more susceptible than men. Even two thousand years later, under the banner of science, crowd theorists like Sigmund Freud and Gustav LeBon described mobs as feminine in their suggestibility and excitability. The only dissenting view was even more pejorative: that certain kinds of – dangerous, misguided – people gravitated to crowds in the first place.
In the more enlightened days of the mid-20th century, and under the supposed objectivity of social science, it was no longer particular genders, social classes, or racial-ethnic groups who were stigmatized as slaves to their passions. In what was known as mass society theory, almost anyone could fall prey to the emotions of the moment. All this required were rootless people who lacked any clear social position or personal identity (almost the definition of modernity);an absence of social bonds through formal organizations to the rest of society, and especially to the state; and a charismatic demagogue willing to stir up the passions of the mob. Now crowds resulted from underlying problems in the social structure, but crowds were still ruled by their passions.
Recently, emotions have been rehabilitated. Social scientists, led by psychologists, have discovered emotional processes at the heart of how we process information and make decisions, how we trust others and form social bonds, and how we identify with others, creating compassion but also collective identities. The passions are no longer the opposite of rationality, but part of it. They help us put together mundane routines but also the most special, admirable, heroic moments in civilization. Today we hear a lot about emotional intelligence, and about how women make better managers because of their empathy with their employees, better politicians because they can listen and compromise and do not rush so quickly into wars.
This new enthusiasm for emotions can sometimes go too far. Emotions help us do despicable things as well as heroic ones, they are part of mistaken strategies as well as winning ones, they help us mobilizeneo-nazi movements as well as animal protection movements. Emotions are ubiquitous. They are part of normal life and abnormal life, part of all human actions, good and bad.
Emotions are also part of morality, perhaps the central part. Far from a chilly Kantian calculation, morality moves us to action through our intuitions about what feels like the right thing to do. What action would make us feel proud, and what would we be ashamed of? We are outraged into action by situations that we feel are unfair, at a gut level, not through calculations of how rewards are being distributed. We feel indignant over injustice even when we can’t quite articulate the principles we’re using in our judgments. These intuitive feelings are why we are moved by symbolic individuals who embody our highest, or lowest, moral feelings. We admire Gandhi and despise Hitler because they move us emotionally.
Our morals, thoughts, and emotions are all assembled out of dozens of “feeling-thinking processes.” These include sensations through our hair follicles,peripheral vision, subtle and not-so-subtle changes in our biochemistry,muscle reactions, in our faces but also in our guts, innumerable nerve firings,all the way up through more conscious, even verbal, processing. Emotions seem to threaten irrationality because most feeling-thinking processes are beneath our full consciousness – but recent research has demonstrated that the same is true of our thinking and our moralizing. We would not be able to function without all these shortcuts. The time has come to put aside the metaphor of the brain as a calculating computer, and replace it with a feeling brain, absorbing signals and relating information through a variety of sensitive mechanisms, yet at the same time changing internally in response. Feeling-thinking processes help us interact constantly with our surroundings, especially our social surroundings.
Hundreds of recent books and thousands of articles have examined every aspect of emotions, but what does it all mean for democracy? We have had participatory democracy appropriate to Athens’ political animal, representative democracy suited to larger societies, a more liberal democracy for homo oeconomicus, a discursive democracy for twenty-year-olds with lots of time on their hands, and a nurturing democracy based on the way mothers care for their children, among others. What is the right democracy for humans who engage the world through their feelings, taking in information, initiating action, forming bonds, and generally feeling their way around through complex emotional processes? Is this the next stage in democracy’s evolution?
I believe that this new stage, emotional democracy, revolves around compassion, or empathy, namely the ability to feel what others are feeling. We smile when others smile, and share some of their happiness or amusement. We laugh together. We grimace and flinch when we see others in pain. We put ourselves in their place, since “com” passion means feeling “with” them. It acknowledges what it is like to be human, and reflects some wisdom about the many experiences we can “suffer” as humans, the many forms a life can take.
Compassion differs from pity. Compassion places us on the same level as the people we are feeling something for, as part of the same human community. Pity has an admixture of superiority and contempt, as if the objects of our pity lead impossibly different, inferior lives to ours. This is why we can pity animals, whose experience we can never altogether imagine. We can grasp that they suffer on a physical plane, and that is sufficient grounds for pity. Critics of the industry that has arisen in the media and charities to deal with “distant suffering” believe that pity demeans the objects of our concern, making them less human. But sometimes that is appropriate.
Compassion is the key democratic feeling, but pity has a role to play as well in a just society. After all, we would not want to give up our sympathy for other species, simply because they differ from us in so many ways. They are similar in enough ways – mammals are almost identical in their ability to feel pain – to form the basis for pity. And we may pity other humans at moments when they have indeed been reduced to nothing but the ability to feel pain, as when they are sick or starving or tortured. (Although for humans we usually mix pity for their physical suffering with compassion for their reduced humanity; we all siuffer at some point.)
What encourages compassion? Education and experience. A traditional liberal education was designed to broaden our horizons, through arts created by other types of people, remote in time and place, but also in cultural perspectives. Experiences of mixing with others can have a similar effect, such as national service, whether military or civilian. Compassion is linked to other feelings we have about ourselves and others: pride in our selves, respect for others, a recognition that our interests and others’ interests must be balanced. Scholars like Kristin Monroe who study those who risked their lives to rescue the Nazis’ victims find that they all had a generous, inclusive boundary of who is human, with no exceptions made. They did not stop and think about this boundary; it came from their gut.
What blocks compassion? The kind of disgust for other beings that is often based on their pseudo-speciation, when they are treated as not entirely human, or at least as an inferior version of humans. At the extreme, other castes or other races are seen as polluting, even to the touch. They must be avoided. Other groups can in addition be seen as dangerous, as malevolent, conspiring, and treacherous, enemies of the people. Disgust and fear are not always readily combined, as one stance dismisses the power of the other that the second feeling exaggerates. This kind of character work often combines contempt and disgust for individual members of the group with fear of large masses of them, perhaps led by an outside group or leader, in a version of crowd theory.
Inequalities of wealth and income inevitably erode compassion, as basic human capacities come to differ greatly. The affluent learn all sorts of skills useful to maneuvering in a democracy, such as public speaking, as well as developing the sense of mastery to use them. Their resources afford them all sorts of activities and influence closed to the rest of us.
Extreme wealth also breeds arrogance, a sense that the normal rules do not apply. In unequal societies like the United States, plutocrats send their children to different schools, vacation in different locales, travel in first class or private jets, and eat in different restaurants. They feel they can park in prohibited parking zones (and pay the modest fine if caught), or have their chauffeurs wait in those zones or circle the block. Most of all, they feel entitled to buy political influence. (Although even the notorious Koch brothers find it useful to hide their extensive contributions through chains of innocuous-sounding charities and interest groups, following a strategic logic if for no other reason that to avoid a backlash.)
The branch of emotions research known as happiness studies has interesting implications for inequality. Study after study finds that, above a certain level, more money does not make people happier. That point is a modest 75,000 US dollars, sufficient to provide basic necessities for a family and to avoid the stigma of government handouts. The redistributive implications are sweeping.
At most income levels, what you do with your money matters more than how much you have. People are happier when they buy experiences (such as travel) more than objects, when they contribute money to others. And they are happier when they volunteer, which costs nothing at all.
Compassion has traditionally been coded as feminine and thus weak, and anti-compassionate politicians and movements have exploited this view to recruit young men anxious to prove their virility. (Fascists are an extreme but hardly the only example.) Whether or not we can ever socialize boys in less aggressive ways, we may at least be able to establish incentives for politicians to avoid such appeals.
One objection to my call for compassion would be that we should not feel compassion for those who are truly evil, those who intend to harm us and have the means to do it. But even they are human, and thus susceptible to understanding no matter how different their perspective may be from ours. We can protect ourselves better from sociopaths the better we understand them. Our empathy for them (which will always be limited, given how abnormal they are) need not lead us to excuse them. In fact it may lead us to prevent and stop them.
But let me push further. Recognizing the childhood roots of Hitler’s insane anger or Pol Pot’s cool sadism may lead us to see them as more human without softening our fear and loathing. The opposite may be true: the more human they are, the more blameworthy. Traditional villains, like the heroes who opposed them, had a bit of the divine to them. No warrior could hope to emulate Achilles or Herakles, lacking their semi-divine parentage. In today’s world we must construct our villains and heroes out of human DNA, which may diminish them but places them in our world, players in our own political and moral arenas. This makes the villains more, not less responsible, by making them more human. And it offers all of us amodel of human heroism that we can actually hope to achieve.
Emotions complicate our vision of humanity in ways that demand new versions of democracy. Passions shape our means as well as our goals, and they are the way we are connected to one another. We have feelings, both bad and good, for one another that are an essential part of our politics. As we separate the bad from the good we can restructure democracy so that we become happier and more admirable. As always, we need a new democracy for a new world.