Martha C. Nussbaum, "Fear and Anger in American Politics"
As in her new book The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, Professor Nussbaum discusses the atmosphere of fear, anger, and polarization that suffuses our political moment, and suggests that philosophical ideas about the emotions are useful in understanding and improving it. Professor Nussbaum is the winner of the 2018 Berggruen Prize, which is awarded annually to a thinker whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.
Recorded on May 3, 2019, at Reunion Weekend.
Transcript
This audio file is a production of the University of Chicago Law School. Visit us on the web at www.law.uchicago.edu.
Audience:
[applause]
Nussbaum:
Well, it's such a joy to be here with you all and I want to thank Dean Miles for inviting me to do this, but particularly to thank Alex for agreeing to introduce and then interview me. And it's such a wonderful delight to see Alex and her wonderful family here and, and, and to be with them. So on this beautiful and celebratory day, it's hard to ask you to think about the painful problems of our country, but I ask you to think about our own times by turning to history and to the ending of a tragic drama, The Oresteia of Aeschylus written in Athens in the fifth century BCE, a mythic allegory of the founding of democracy and legal institutions. I wish you all had seen the production of a very abridged version of this drama at the Law School a few years back, starring Dick Posner as Agamemnon and Tom Miles as the god Apollo dressed in a yellow cape.
Nussbaum:
This three part drama concerns revenge. To avenge the killing of her daughter, Clytemnestra, and that was my role, murders her husband Agamemnon. To avenge this killing, Orestes, the son, murders his guilty mother. But at the end of the trilogy, something very different happens. The goddess Athena introduces democratic institutions. Orestes will stand trial in accordance with rules of evidence somewhat laxly interpreted by Apollo, I'm afraid, but he will be judged by a jury selected by lottery from all the citizens of Athens. In short, democracy and the rule of law. The Furies, those ancient goddesses of revenge, are no longer in charge. Law is in charge. And even the character of those Furies has to change. As the final play begins, the Furies or repulsive and horrifying. They're said to vomit up clots of blood that they've ingested from their prey. They barely speak, they just make animal noises.
Nussbaum:
As Clytemnestra's ghost says, in your dream, you pursue your prey and you bark like a hunting dog hot on the trail of blood. Unchanged these bestial forces could not be part of a democracy dedicated to due process and legal justice, but the Furies do not make the transition to democracy unchanged. Lo to repose the bitter force of your black wave of anger, Athena tells them and they agree to drop their passion for payback and to look with kindly eyes upon the people of the city. They even described their new mood as a mindset of common love. Above all, they're asked by Athena to listen to the voice of persuasion and they be-- do begin to listen to arguments, debating about how to advance the welfare of the city. Aeschylus's drama is a parable of democracy and law and one with a very strong and controversial message.
Nussbaum:
It is that retributive anger is ugly and poisonous to democracy and especially dangerous when it's repelled by fear, as insecure people seek to assuage their own insecurity by making other people suffer. To succeed, democracy must restrain and if possible, reeducate through those passions, pursuing the voice of persuasion and that all too elusive mindset of common love. Like the US today, the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem. If you read the historians, you see some things that are not at all unfamiliar: individuals litigating obsessively against people they blame for having wrong them, groups blaming other groups for their lack of power, citizens blaming politicians and other elites for selling out the dearest values of the democracy, other people blaming foreign visitors or even women for their personal and political woes. Our current political moment knows these problems all too well, but there is a difference. The Greeks had a lot of anger, but they did not embrace or valorize it.
Nussbaum:
They did not define adulthood or Manliness in terms of anger and however much they felt and expressed anger, they waged a cultural struggle against it, seeing it as destructive of well being and democratic institutions. So what Aeschylus does is to show us first the ugliness of anger in the portrait of the Furies and its danger to democracy and then second, how it might possibly be overcome by sympathy, by the rule of law, and by a civil and rational discourse focused on the well being of all. I believe Aeschylus has it right: Anger is a poison to democratic politics. But we need to say much more about what we need to get rid of and what we need to keep. After all, many people think it's impossible to care for justice without anger at injustice, and that anger should be encouraged as part of the transformative process.
Nussbaum:
Many also believe that it's impossible for individuals to stand up for their self respect without anger, that someone who reacts to wrongs and insults without anger is spineless and downtrodden. But still let's persist for right now in Aeschylean skepticism, remembering that recent times have seen three noble and successful freedom movements all conducted in a spirit of non-anger. Those of Mohandas Gandhi, of Martin Luther King Jr and of Nelson Mandela, surely people who stood up for their own self respect and that of others and who did not acquiesce an injustice. They fought for freedom without seeking payback, and they achieved at least a part of what they fought for. So why do people so often think that anger is noble and important to the fight against injustice? I want to suggest that anger actually has two parts, one of which is indeed valuable and noble. The other of which is pernicious.
Nussbaum:
So let me turn to philosophy for a minute. Aristotle's definition of anger, about a hundred years after our play, has been accepted by most philosophers in the Western European tradition and is actually very similar to definitions in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India, which is the only non-Western culture I know enough about to talk about. But the agreed position is this: anger is a painful emotion reacting to a significant damage to someone or something that you care a lot about and the damage has to be seen as wrongfully inflicted, not just accidental. So so far I think so good. Of course we can get the facts wrong about who did what to whom and we can also get values wrong thinking that something is terribly important when it's actually trivial. Aristotle illustrates that point by saying that a common cause of anger is when someone forgets your name.
Nussbaum:
So you see the world has not changed all that much. But if we're right about the facts and the values, then it's right to notice the damage with pain and it would be right to protest it and to try to change things. Taking note of wrongdoing and protesting it is vital to democracy, as we see from the recent work of the Me Too Movement and for our own long unfinished and ongoing struggle for racial justice. But there's another part of anger that is not so benign. Aristotle says that an angry person typically looks forward with pleasure to some kind of retributive payback ,inflicting proportional suffering on the offender. This might not seem obvious, but in fact, all definitions of anger I know, including Ghandi's, do include this wish for payback as a part of normal everyday anger. Now we should understand that this wish for payback could be a very subtle wish. The angry person doesn't need to wish to go out and take revenge herself.
Nussbaum:
She may simply want the law to punish the wrongdoer or even some type of divine justice, or even more subtly, she may simply want the wrongdoers life to go very badly in the future. Hoping, for example, that that second marriage of your betraying spouse is a dismal failure. Well, I think if we understand the wish in this broad way, Aristotle's right, anger typically does contain a kind of strike back tendency and that's what differentiates it from compassionate grieving. This wish for payback arises in all kinds of situations. Parents who have lost a child to violence often do think that they will only achieve closure if the state executes the killer, a life for a life. But really capital punishment does not restore the life that was lost. Pretty obvious, I think. As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Or take divorce.
Nussbaum:
Betrayed spouses often feel entitled to seek punitive divorce settlements and child custody arrangements as if that somehow were there due and as if proportional payback somehow restored the balance of power or restored their damaged dignity. But in real life, the function of payback is usually far less benign. Two people become locked in a struggle from pain focused on the past and often it's like being great collateral damage on children and friends. In the end, the betrayer may get what's often called his comeuppance, but what does that achieve? Typically it does not improve the litigants life going forward and by focusing obsessively on the past, that person may become closed to new possibilities and often becomes bitter and unpleasant. Retaliation is ugly, as Aeschylus reminds us in his portrait of the Furies. What the payback seeker wants is future happiness and self respect. Payback by itself never achieves that and it often makes the world a lot worse for all. But hold on a minute.
Nussbaum:
We agree, don't we, that wrongful acts, if they're serious, should be punished and punishment typically is painful. Yes, I think we should agree that punishment is often usual, but why and how? We might, and we usually do, I'm afraid, see punishment in a retributive spirit as payback for what has already happened. That's the attitude I've been criticizing and I think it's done great harm leading in own society to a gruesome pile on the misery strategy of mass incarceration, as if it really made up for the damages of crime. But there's a better attitude, more like what happens at the end of Aeschylus's play. We might try to look to the future and produce a better society using punishment to express the value we attach to human life and safety to deter other people from committing that crime and perhaps even to reform the offender.
Nussbaum:
If we think that way, however, trying to improve the future, we probably will have a lot of other thoughts before we get to punishment. People don't do wrong nearly as often if they are basically loved and respected, if they have enough to eat, if they get a decent education, if they are healthy, and if they foresee a future of opportunity. So thinking about crime could lead us in the direction of designing a society in which people are treated with respect and given decent opportunities and thus have fewer incentives to commit crime. When they do, despite our best efforts, we take that seriously for the sake of the future. So retributive anger does not guide us well. When we're angry, we charge ahead toward payback without really thinking about what is best for society or even for ourselves. We should understand, however, that the two parts of anger can come apart.
Nussbaum:
We can feel outrage at the wrongfulness of an act or an unjust state of affairs without seeking payback for the wrong done to us. So protest without payback. Take parents and children. Parents often feel that their children have acted wrongfully and they're outraged. They want to protest the wrong and somehow to hold the child accountable, but they usually avoid retributive payback. They rarely think today, at any rate, now you have to suffer for what to have done, as if by itself that was a fitting response. Instead they ask themselves, what sort of reaction will produce future improvement in the child? Usually this will not be a painful payback and it certainly will not obey what's called the lex talionis, an eye for an eye. If their child hits their playmate, parents do not hit their child as if that were what you deserve. Instead, they choose strategies that are firm enough to get the child's attention and that express clearly that and how what the child did was wrong and they give positive suggestions for the future.
Nussbaum:
How to do things differently. So loving parents typically have the protest part of anger without the payback part where their children are concerned because they love them and they want them to flourish. This will be a clue to my positive proposal for democratic society where I fear we do not always love our fellow citizens and want them to flourish. It is indeed difficult to love one another and to live in hope and faith when society is profoundly unjust. Martin Luther King Jr said that people came to his movement for racial justice full of anger, wanting to strike back and do a lot of damage. What the movement had to do, he said, was to keep the good part of anger, the protest part, but to get people to abandon the destructive payback part in favor of an attitude of love, brotherhood and constructive work and a determination to work with others.
Nussbaum:
In an essay written in 1959, King said that racism could be met in two very different ways and I quote, one is the development of a wholesome social organization to resist with effective firm measures any efforts to impede progress. The other, is a confused, anger-motivated drive to strike back violently to inflict damage. Primarily it seeks to cause injury to retaliate for wrongful suffering. It is punitive, not radical or constructive. Very interesting that he says not radical and I think that's perfectly correct. It's just all too easy. He wasn't speaking hypothetically actually. He was describing his, the actual contrast between his own non-angry approach based on brotherly love, hope and faith and the approach of Malcolm X who, at least as King understood him, favored violent retribution. King insisted constantly that his approach did not mean acquiescing in injustice. There's still an urgent demand. There's still a protest against unjust conditions in which the protestor takes great risks with his or her body in what King called direct action.
Nussbaum:
Still the protester's focus must turn to the future. That all must work to create together with faith in the possibility of justice. It might seem very strange to compare King to Aeschylus, but I think it's not strange at all given King's deep learning in literature and philosophy. He's basically saying the same thing. Democracy must give up the empty and destructive thought of payback and move toward a future of legal justice and human wellbeing. King's opponents portrayed his stance as weak. Malcolm X said, sardonically, Oh, it's like some coffee that has had so much milk poured into it that it's white and cold and doesn't even seem like coffee, but that was wrong. King stance is strong, not weak. He resists one of the most powerful human impulses, the retributive impulse for the sake of a shared future. One of the trickiest problems in politics is to persist in a determined search for solutions without letting fear deflect us onto the track of rage and retribution.
Nussbaum:
The idea that Aeschylus and King share is the democratic citizens should face with courage the problems and yes, the outrageous injustices that we encounter in political and social life. Lashing out in anger and fear does not solve the problem. Instead, it leads, as has all too often happened in history, to a spiral of retributive violence. There is a better alternative. Aeschylus knew it and King both knew and lived it and indeed died for it. Making a future of justice and well being is hard. It requires self examination, personal risk, searching, critical arguments, dialogue with opponents who tell you that you were wrong, and uncertain initiatives to make common cause with those opponents in a spirit of hope and what we might call rational faith. It's a very difficult goal, but it is that goal that I'm recommending for both individuals and institutions. These thoughts are very pertinent to our celebratory occasion today. I believe that our law school exemplifies that Aeschylean spirit of constructive dialogue and rational listening, even at times that mindset of common love. And institutions like ours represent what I would call practices of hope, disciplines that help us all face the future with constructive reasoned strategies rather than fear and rage. Thank you.
Audience:
[applause]
Alex:
Thank you so much. That was fantastic. Um, I start out with you on the philosophical tradition of long prepared questions. So, um, I'll keep them brief. Um, I think for a lot of people, anger is something that feels like it happens to them and that they cannot control it. For this reason, it can sound unrealistic when people are asked to resist anger, as you do in the book and the speech. And I agree that in the moment anger is difficult to control, but this is why I think it's so powerful and important that you write about it being a habit and this is the quote to quote, treat that other person as a person having depth and inner life a point of view on the world and emotion similar to our own. The two are clearly related in my view. Understanding where someone is coming from and what she is going through can turn an offense into an understandable action or at least a less emotionally charged degree. Disagreement. Can you please speak a little bit more about what we can do when we're not currently angry to cultivate this habit so we don't see red when we're offended or hurt?
Nussbaum:
Yeah, thank you. I think the first thing to say is that it is something that we, it takes a long time to deal with because our society inculcates it very early. We have experiments with young infants where we find that particularly if the infant is labeled in the experiment as male, the infants very crying is labeled as anger and in a positive sense. So people, the experimenter will say, well, talk about this, hold this baby for me. And then the person will say, Oh, he's really angry. He wants to get what he wants. And that's supposed to be a really great thing.
Nussbaum:
If it's a girl, they more often say, Oh, poor thing. She's so frightened and so on. But anyway, uh, so, you know, we've got the habit of encouraging this anger, thinking it's manly and strong. So, uh, anything you learn in your early childhood, whether it's a mathematical fact or an emotional fact, is very hard to get rid of. And particularly because then it becomes so habitual, you don't even think about it. So I think the first thing is just to think. Stop and think, take note of that. And, you know, Nelson Mandela said that for him, he was very prone to retributive anger and he was in prison for 27 years. And he said he used a lot of that solitude to meditate on his own anger. So you're like, you know, let's hope it doesn't take us all 27 years of terrible deprivation and cold and hunger and so on.
Nussbaum:
But having some meditative time, I think that's very, very important. The Stoics emphasize that you have to kind of school yourself in habits of seeing and that's what you, your question gets to. Quite rightly, I think I practice seeing the other person as a real person. And um, I mean I have to think what are the occasions that make me lash out that made me good man. In my case, it's incompetent people that I deal with in routine interactions of daily life, like going on an airplane, getting my computer fixed, whatever. And of course reminding myself to things that, that's another person there who may or may not be doing very well, but they're there, they're a person, they're trying to do something, you know, and treat them like a person. And furthermore, it's not as important as you think it is. And really that's what the Stoics say again and again.
Nussbaum:
So I think you just have to zero in on the things where you're particularly vulnerable to that outburst and just keep telling yourself, you know, step back and think, is this really worth getting so upset about. The other night I actually lost sleep about something like that. And then I thought to myself, since I quite like my sleep, this is not worth getting upset about and losing sleep. So I was able to calm myself down and think, of course there are different techniques. I calm myself down by thinking in my head about Mozart arias that I love and, and so, so the non, that's not non-cognitive, but it's sort of not thinking about the problem. It's a difference that could help too.
Alex:
Very interesting. I get, since I'm from New York, I get very impatient and people don't do things really quickly.
Nussbaum:
Well, right, right.
Alex:
Um, so my second question is about social media. And in the book your discussion of social media is largely possibly entirely negative. Focusing on the ways that it can inhibit empathy. Um, but for example, at least anecdotally, Tumblr has, um, had, from what I know from my friends has had a profound effect on the transgender community because it has allowed people who are members of a small minority to can connect with each other. And I personally have found that following people whose lives are very different from mine on Twitter has expanded my understanding of their various struggles. This might not be the norm, but do you have thoughts on how social media could be improved to promote these aspects or do you think we should focus on increasing opportunities for face to face interactions with people who live, whose lives are different from our own?
Nussbaum:
Well, I do worry about the lack of face to face interactions with people buried in their phones. You go out to a restaurant and very often people don't care that the restaurant is too noisy to talk because they don't want to talk. They're all sitting looking at their phone. I think that's back and I think we do lose the sense of the richness and infinite depth of the human individual. Um, but I'm the last one you should really ask about social media because I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on Twitter, and I do that largely because I want to guard my time and have enough time for my, my friendships. I think more people should spend less time on that and more time for their friendships. I think it has the potential, as you say, for uh, connection among people who were isolated. Absolutely. And the internet more generally has that, the International Women's Movement has taken off because of the internet, but it does also have this echo chamber effect.
Nussbaum:
You can isolate yourself to a much greater degree than you could before with local newspapers, which always had a diversity of points of view. You can just hear again and again your own point of view. I have a family group that's very diverse and we have an email list that I'm part of and I can see that there are certain sites that they go to again and again and again, and they hear, they, they're not academics, hear what's happening on campus and then they tell me as though they know more about what's happening on campuses than I do. Oh, this bad thing. And so I always feel I need to reply. So they hear a real voice. And I think we should always try to have a dialogue. That's one reason I love the fact that our law school promotes dialogue both in the classroom, but then in these new, the new program of dialogue lunches where we have students talk about a controversial social problem with two contrasting faculty members and students come in with different viewpoints. And then there really is a dialogue. I love our students because they really have joined in on this and with great Goodwill subjected themselves to that vulnerability of having a live person disagree with you.
Alex:
That's great. Now, now we're ready to open it up to the audience. If there are any questions. Um, there are assistants going around with microphones.
Nussbaum:
And say your name and class if you could. I think stand up would be better.
Audience:
Uh, my name is Roger Stern and I'm in the class of 1989, or not in it anymore. It was my class. Uh, Martha, in your, uh, book, most recent book, The Monarchy of Fear, you are clearly an enthusiastic fan of Lucretius and of his, of the poem, the most influential poem ever written some 2000 years ago almost. And I'm very jealous of your ability to read it in the original Latin. I was hoping you could share with us some of your favorite, uh, parts of On the Nature of Things.
Nussbaum:
Okay. Yeah, we just had a wonderful conference on our campus about Lucretius last Friday where one of my PhD students gave an absolutely amazing paper. So, so anyhow, this is a big deal I think because he is a philosopher who should be taken much more seriously by philosophers than he is. And because he wrote... So Epicurus, his mentor, has works that were in prose, but they don't survive for the most part, just fragments and then, then Lucretius wrote in poetry, so a lot of times philosophers think that couldn't be real philosophy. So we should pay more attention to this because I think it's really important philosophy. Lucretius anticipates a lot of the deepest insights of modern object relations, psychoanalysis. He does identify unconscious emotions that drive us, but he also does think that those emotions are not simply drives, they're object related and that they all stem from the vulnerable experience of a young baby who comes into the world, he says, naked and unarmed, uh, all of a sudden realizing that having been quite comfortable before birth is now completely vulnerable, too cold and too solitude and lack of comfort and so on. And so he identifies some of our problems in life.
Nussbaum:
He traces them back to that early vulnerability, which then gets a lot worse when people learn that they're going to die. Then that ramps up the fear that it makes them get driven into all kinds of irrational pursuits. He traces a lot of social envy to the fear of death because you know, if you can be bigger and better than others, then maybe you won't even die. And I think that there's deep truths in a lot of what he says. So anyway, I guess that, so the infant lying on the ground naked and for is one of the important parts. I do think that the envy part is also quite wonderful where he talks about people who think that they're cast into the dark obscurity by the achievements of others and that makes them crazy. And then they want to spoil the enjoyment of those others. But he says they wouldn't do this if they really understood that you can be happy with simple pleasures of life and with your own body and if you accepted the, the finite body and the social pleasures that are characteristic of the human being and you didn't want to try and make yourself into some kind of other being. So there's like much more. But I think that's some examples. I hope you read it.
Audience:
Hi, I'm Sue Cole-Lot. I'm Alex's mom. Um, I'm a, I've um, I graduated from the College in 1974 and I'm a psychoanalyst, so I wanted to say a few things about what you were saying from an analytic perspective. First of all, I really appreciate what you're saying about polarization. A psychoanalyst might call it splitting and projection where you see all the badness coming from the other person where and denying it in yourself. Um, on the other hand, I would say the number one issue I deal with in my clinical practice, particularly with women, is the inability to connect with one's anger, which leads to all kinds of, you know, eating disorders, addictions, all kinds of physical problems, interpersonal problems. So I just wondered what if you had something to say about, um, your perspective and in conjunction with an inability to connect with and express anger.
Nussbaum:
Okay, great. Thank you very much. Yes, I do talk about splitting. Well, I talk about Klein's view of persecutory anxiety in the life of an infant. So you will find in the book similar things that you, that might interest you, but um, I do think that sometimes people put your point in a way that I would deeply disagree with, namely thinking that what's needed is to let the anger loose as though that would make everything fine. I don't think it does make everything fine to let the anger loose. I think once you identify the anger, then the question is what are you going to do about it? Because anger often prevents you from solving the real problems. I actually draw a lot on Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger. I don't know if you know that book, but where her, her patients again and again, you know, went in this circle, you did it! No, you did it, I'm going to get at you!
Nussbaum:
You and so and so. And they go round and round and they never identify the actual problem because they can't calm down and actually talk about the actual problem. And I think that I see everywhere in our society today. We're too busy blaming other people or finding scapegoats for our own insecurities. And this happens particularly I think when people feel helpless with respect to some big economic issue and then they can't figure out what to do about automation or loss of status or health problems and working class men. So instead they create these scapegoats and they let their anger loose on immigrants or whoever. Uh, sort of like, I think, our youngest earliest fairy tales, where we're told, Oh, Hansel and Gretel are hungry. They need to go out and get food. But all of a sudden we were told that that very real problem is not real.
Nussbaum:
But the problem is a witch who lives in the woods. And if we can let our anger loose on that, which, and put her in the oven that uh, then the world is just fine. And I think human beings are all too prone to believe that if we can just let our anger loose against some target, then everything will be better. But usually the problems we need to solve are complicated. They require analysis and deep thought and constructive work from many different points of view. And that's not going to happen if we just let our anger loose. As King said, the anger needs to be identified. I think he was quite right about that because if you sit at home and despair and you don't really know what you're angry at, then you won't join a movement for racial justice. But then what happens next?
Nussbaum:
Well, what King thought, and I agree, is that once you get there, then you have to understand that the protest part of anger leads you to actually do something about the problem and to make common cause with others to solve the problem. The are retributive part actually doesn't do you any good at all. And so then that would be, I think, the next step. And I think that's true in personal relations too. Sure, I mean, people can suffer great wrongs in a personal relationship because they're, they're unhappy and they don't know why and they don't really feel there. And I think women particularly, uh, suppress their anger because they think they shouldn't feel it. But once the anger comes to light, well then what next? Now protest. Yeah. And trying to change the dynamic that's made them unhappy is also important. But instead of that, I, I'm afraid all too often people just want to go through their life, punishing the other person. And that's, I mean, you see this in so much of divorce and you spend your whole life looking into the past and bopping that other person and instead of making a new life for yourself, which is hard to do, of course, and much easier to have that crutch of punish that other person for the rest of my life. So that's my view anyway.
Audience:
Um, I'm a recent domestic violence survivor. Um, and this is a very interesting and relevant conversation. I'm also in the midst of a divorce, um, and it's a very interesting conversation to have, um, listened to partly because I was encouraged to feel my anger when I went to domestic violence counseling. Uh, you know, it was part of my recovery to get hold of my anger. And you know, probably was, I didn't really know. I was in shock. I had a concussion. I was-- My future ex, um, actually punched me in the face and I had a concussion, so I was very confused. But at the point I'm at now, which is a little over a year since the attack, um, I find I am much better off not feeling any anger and I find that I can for the first time understand Ruth Bader Ginsburg's comment in if anybody saw RBG and she says, anger is a useless emotion. I'm like, what? It's, it's a great emotion. Well, it's actually, it really does sometimes lead to the kinds of outcomes that, um, that you've been talking about. Uh, so there was something else. Oh, so my immediate reaction to being injured was to, um, go get an order of protection, um, at the DV courthouse. And that has now become an issue in the divorce. My husband's lawyer as a condition of settling our marriage or the dissolution of our marriage insists that I give up my order of protection. Apparently this just infuriates my husband. I've, part of it, I guess has to do with when you are under a, uh, an order of protection, um, you can't get a visa for some countries because they don't want a, they don't want violent people in their countries. And I'm like, well too bad, I guess you can't cancel, I guess you can't travel for a while. It's, it's time limited. It'll run out two years after his supervised probation ends in October. But, um, it was not, I didn't get it in anger. I got it because I wanted a little backup if he came after me again. So thank you.
Nussbaum:
Yeah, thank you very much. That's very important what you just said.
Audience:
Getting back to the title of your presentation, um, depending on what you listen to, probably 30 to 40% of the people in this country right now are acting somewhat irrationally and also with a great deal of mean spiritedness and I don't see any Martin Luther King or Mandela around. And if they are around, they don't seem to be in a position where they can influence events. So in practical matter, how do you see us getting out of this mess?
Nussbaum:
Well look, I mean, in the book I talk about lots of different things that people can do and one thing I think we always need to hold on to is the fact that our country is very large, very diverse, and there's so much that can be done at the local level. We are a Federalist, a federalized democracy. And if things at the federal levels seem intractable, there's lots we can do around here. A lot of us have been working for congressional campaigns. That's certainly something, I mean, I was, uh, just to give a personal example, I worked on the campaign of Lauren Underwood and I was very excited and happy that we were able to unseat an incumbent with a woman of science. And you know, both she and Sean Casten are people of science who displaced Republican incumbents who didn't care about science. So that I think is extremely important.
Nussbaum:
I think there actually is a lot to hope for, for our city. We have one of our alums who's becoming mayor next week. And I think she is certainly, it's very interesting because who would have thought that in this polarizing time, someone who really is very low key and very rational in her self-presentation would be elected by a landslide. So I think there are many reasons for hope. But anyway, what I do end up saying in the concluding chapter is there are certain things we can all do, which I call practices of hope to cultivate hope in herself in manual con said that he thought we were obliged to work hope up in ourselves because hope was a strong motive to constructive moral action. And we were obliged to do constructive moral actions, so we'd better work up the motives to do it. Well so how do we do that?
Nussbaum:
I do think political movements are one thing we can do. I do think very strongly that liberal education, whether it's in the Law School and continuing education, coming to the humanities weekend, you know, all of these things, uh, can, can help us get into the practice of arguing with each other and enjoying arguing about Shakespeare or about Aristotle or whatever. I think for many people religion is a practice of hope. It's not as argumentative, although certainly in my synagogue it is very argumentative I guess. Uh, and you know, we, we have great pleasure in one another and in arguing about justice and in singing and all these things. The arts are fantastic. And I, I do think one very major source of hope in Chicago is that we now have the extended public school day with arts programs in the afternoon. So kids are going to get like two dose, the two hour dose of arts program by such wonderful people as Yo-Yo Ma and Renée Fleming.
Nussbaum:
So you know, to do that instead of going out and engaging in strife is a really important thing. I think Lena Waithe's program, the Chi, which some of you may have seen on Showtime, it depicts these schoolkids as coming together in a putting on a play. And I think that is how often people come together. So, so Kevin, the rather vulnerable kid character strikes up what initially he and this rather a large imposing girl, uh, are hostile and he's making fun of her because of her size and she's trying to lord it over him. And now in this second season, they're best friends. They're cooperating together to put on a play. But I think the arts context is a very, very important part of that. So those are just some of the things, but I think the, the fact that we are a city where the arts flourish at many levels, not just on the big lights of Broadway, but in many more, um, humble context is a very important thing.
Audience:
So it's on? Solid way [inaudible] uh, my question is, uh, I guess following up on the gentleman's question over here on fear and anger, it seems to me that fear and anger are really the two big selling points, advertising for American politics. And what we're seeing is in many ways, nothing new, uh, that if I look back, you know, for example, to the, uh, to the 60s, uh, when I would see magazine covers from whatever it was, National Review, uh, issue after issue was the missile gap between the US and Soviet Union. And that was the strike fear. And you might see the magazine, American Rifleman, which was published back then when I was a youth and still firing guns, but, uh, uh, don't do that anymore. But again, it was stoking anger. Uh, and as recently as Bush's administration, when he quit the NRA over, uh, the labeling of their police as jackbooted thugs, uh, that is clearly something that pops up all the time. Fear and anger are what they use to get the vote out. So I'm wondering how the approaches that you've indicated are, are very good, but I'm just wondering how you counter that in the current political climate.
Nussbaum:
Yeah, well I fully agree that this is a problem and I think it's a problem with the media even more than it is with the politics because with politics you actually can meet people. And when Lauren Underwood campaigned, she stands there and talks very calmly about health care and she connects with people in a very warm and positive way. And so you can do that in politics, but publishing is about to go under and they're desperate and they are reaching out for strategies to attract people to buy books and so for about 15 years at least they wanted books that say everything is awful, it's the apocalypse, everything is terrible. And when I wrote my first book on liberal education, which was really an attempt to counter Allan Bloom's Jeremiah, which had said that everything is so awful, my book Cultivating Humanity was really about how the new developments in African American studies, women's studies, and so on we're very good faith, not always successful, but often successful efforts to broaden the reach of liberal education. So that book was much harder to sell and they, they kept encouraging me to be more apocalyptic, but I wasn't going to do that. So then the question is, what would be my strategy? My strategy turned out to be to talk to a lot of actual faculty members and students on these many campuses and to make it full of human variety, human interest. And so that was the strategy for that book. But it's always an uphill battle. And I worry about the current democratic, the heavy democratic field, because I think the media are looking for fear and anger and they're not giving as much time to candidates who have a calmer message. So I think we have to wait and see how this plays out.
Nussbaum:
But I totally agree that there's that problem. Now in our history, it hasn't always been this way. FDR was a master of working up positive emotions through the use of the arts. Dorothea Lange, all the other a WPA artists that he gathered who would show poor people in a way that elicited compassion and helping behavior. So I think there are such people on the scene today, but they haven't yet risen to national dominance and it's hard for them to get people's ear if they say something that's good and so, so, so that's the problem that we have now I think. And let's hope that we can all work to overcome that.
Host:
We have time for one more question.
Audience:
All right, well I guess I got the last one. I graduated law school 35 years ago. My name is Kevin Hochberg. Um, you used the words fear and anger in the title for this talk and in your book, um, it seems to me today that what we have is something a little more specific, which is, you know, president driven politics of resentment. And as a philosopher, I'd be really interested in how you sort of see the line veering from anger to resentment, how you distinguished between the two.
Nussbaum:
Uh, well, anger is a kind of generic term and as I said, I think it has two parts, the protest part and the retributive part. And although typically, and usually the two go together, they can be separated. Now the word resentment is usually used in connection with retribution. And so it, I mean it's tricky because different languages even have whole different family of words. So when I've overseen translations of this book, I always have to talk to the translator, like which German word do we use? And so I have no particular stock in using this or that word. So long as it's very clearly specified what the definition of it is and how one's using it. I didn't use the word indignation for the protest part, simply because although it often means what I mean, namely the protest part, without the retributive part, it doesn't always mean that. And people can use indignation in a retributive spirit. So I'm, I'm not big on this or that word, but more on the ideas behind the words, I guess.
Audience:
[applause]
Host:
Thank you everybody for coming to Loop Luncheon 2019. Welcome to Reunion 2019. I look forward to seeing many of you this evening and tomorrow at the Law School, and please join me one more time in thanking Alex and Professor Nussbaum
This audio file is a production of the University of Chicago Law School. Visit us on the web at www.law.uchicago.edu.