I was surfing around at relative random yesterday, waiting for TG to get ready for the New Years Eve festivities when I visited Jacob Levy’s blog (referencing l’affaire Althouse). I’m only mildly interested in the squabble, because it’s become about personalities much more than ideas – and if I wanted to deal with that c**p I’d work in Hollywood and make a lot more money than I do – but I clicked on Levy’s CV and then read the first chapter of his book ‘The Multiculturalism of Fear’.
I studied political theory as an undergraduate (with Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar)…that was a long time ago and pretty much ran from Homer up to Rawls (who had just published ‘A Theory of Justice’) and then stopped.
So it was with a lot of interest that in Levy’s work I read about and noted Judith Shklar (who I’d heard of but not read) et al who essentially write about a political theory of feelings and emotion, and appear to elevate hurt feelings – literally – to a parity with core human rights. Levy discusses Shklar –
Shklar subordinates the evil of ‘moral cruelty’ or humiliation to the evil of physical cruelty, but acknowledges the reality and harm of such moral cruelty. ‘It is not just a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else.’
This is interesting, and on first account worrisome. It legitimizes the views of such folk as Ahmed Sheikh (Editor-In-Chief of Al-Jazeera) who I cite as saying:
In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?
Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.
The problem with this, I note is
It’s impossible – or very damn close to it – to negotiate with someone who is interested more in his self-image than in any objective thing that may be achieved in the negotiation. Because no matter how the matter is settled, each party to a good settlement feels somewhat wronged.
And if that feeling of wronged-ness is the driver…well, getting to a negotiated settlement is going to be damn difficult.
On first blush, I’m frightened of a political theory of feelings. I need to do some reading because this is something definitely worth digging into a bit. Shklar sounds like a good first stop…(and I’d love some other suggestions).
Feelings are important insofar as they cause people to do irrational things. When deciding your position on matters of international policy, you can’t assume everyone is rational; that would contradict centuries of politics plagued by paranoia and self-destructive behavior.
For example, states have empirically learned that when they’re about to win a diplomatic battle, they have to give the loser a chance to save face. They’ve learned to do so in a way that gives the losing state no real victory, but still spares it the humiliation that might cause it to keep fighting.
Historically, the Treaty of Versailles objectively screwed Germany. The reparations largely caused the hyperinflation crisis, and later aggravated the Great Depression somewhat. But Hitler didn’t win by railing just against reparations; he railed against the national humiliation, against the Allies’ hurting Germany’s collective feeling. Even earlier, the nationalist right whined about the war guilt clause, not just because it wasn’t really true or because it implied Germany had to pay reparations, but also because it hurt their personal feelings as patriots.
It’s impossible – or very damn close to it – to negotiate with someone who is interested more in his self-image than in any objective thing that may be achieved in the negotiation.
Focusing on feelings is fine. That is what Grant did with his fine gestures to Lee at Appotamox. It worked. Lee spent the rest of his life as a healer, not a divider. Feelings can be win / win.
Because no matter how the matter is settled, each party to a good settlement feels somewhat wronged.
No. Not at all. It depends on how their feelings work.
It corrupts consideration of the issue to use Muslim examples. That culture, founded on the religion of Muhammed (pbuh) is extraordinary.
Remember how our Muslim friends deal with facts. The Jews are blameworthy for nearly everything, in very concrete ways such as being behind the 11 September, 2001 jihad attacks.
If we based our decision on what should be excluded from negotiations based on what Islam makes of it (ignoring the 800lb gorilla in the room, which is that Islam is truly different), we’d certainly have to ban feelings – and facts too.
I entirely agree about a politics of hurt feelings. Feeling that one has failed on some comparative evaluation, or that one isn’t getting recognized as much as one wishes– a politics of competetive amour propre– is domed. (I talk about this at a several other points in the book, often in commentary on Charles Taylor.)
But I do think (partly following the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, who’s written the most on this, though Shklar– Ordinary Vices, American Citizenship, The Faces of Injustice– is terrific on it) that one can talk about absolute rather than comparative humiliation. One can intentionally degrade prisoners without (or before) torturing them, trying to break their sense of humanity, not their sense of pride. One can adopt public language or symbols that’s intended, not just to show that one side has won, but to show that the other side is considered outside the body politic or outside humanity.
I think that, in our ordinary moral lives, we can draw distinctions between the guy who says “I deserve to have you all declare me your better, and am offended that you haven’t”– the ego-driven competitive amour propre that couldn’t possibly be satisfied for everyone– and, say, the worker whose boss treats her like a child and an idiot, randomly belittles her, and tells her to leave a meeting to go clean the office toilets. Being able to think of oneself as the best (which is Ahmed Sheikh’s demand) is ungeneralizable and not a source of moral argument– but being treated like a human adult and fellow citizen rather than like a child, a machine, an animal, a sexual object, etc. *is* a generzliable demand, and I htink a source of both moral and political claims. Distinguishing the subjective limitless category from the objective limited category may be hard in practice, but it’s too important to just abandon the task and adopt an attitude of moral permissiveness to intentional degredation.
And– not parity. Like Shklar, I rank non-cruelty ahead of non-humiliation.
Jacob, thanks for visiting! I’ll note the addition of your book as well as Margalit’s.
I obviously see the role of empathy and humanization as fundamental requirements for a successful polity, and note the hierarchy.
But…it’s a kind of argument from richness, isn’t it? It seems to suggest that our polities are so just and have progressed so far in dealing with fundamental failures of power that we can now move on to a secondary concern with feelings and make that a priority.
In the realm of race relations, it seems – naievely (I haven’t thought about this) that there’s a specific quantum of societie’s attention that will be spent, and that it would be better spent dealing with objective failings by society rather than by emphasizing – as an example – self-esteem.
And it stikes me as ominously parallel to the pedagogic emphasis on self-esteem which has delivered a couple generations of narcissists – and that the last thing we need in the world is a politics of narcissism.
But that’s a reaction without research, so what I’d best do is shut up and read a bit. I’ll probably drop you a note, I’d love to discuss this more and to see if there’s an interesting public discussion to trigger.
A.L.
The ancient Greeks were also concerned with reputation, but with some important differences. First, they saw it as something to be won, not as a “right”. And second, it was attributed to individual heros, not to a genetic race, a religion or a tribe.
Which gave us both the insights of Greek tragedy (about overreach, willful blindness and hubris) and also an implicit call to strive for human excellence (arete).
The lack of both of these has held back the Muslim, and especially the Arab, world for centuries. It was visible when I did business in the Middle East in the 80s, with customers who simply were unwilling and incapable of collecting and reporting honestly the most innocuous information about e.g. maintenance. And the same deep-seated lack is at work in the Arab world today.
I agree with Jacob Levy that there is a big difference between a deliberate campaign of derogation and the simple disappointments of our own failures to excel, and that the acts of the state differ in kind from the acts of individuals with regard to feelings.
At the same time, tho, I share AL’s concern about the examples we’ve seen in our own culture that suggest it’s a slippery slope towards the state of the Arab world if we base our public judgement about rights on privately held feelings. We are all in need of more, not less, in the way of calmly evaluated empirical data on which to base policy.
I remember reading that if the part of the brain mainly responsible for feelings is damaged you can neither feel nor make RATIONAL decisions.
Pretty weird huh?
I’ll see if I can find some details.
In one study, a businessman, Elliot, suffered from a brain tumor that partially damaged his brain, specifically his prefrontal cortex—the emotional center of the brain. As a result, Elliot “lost the ability to experience emotion; and without emotion, rationality was lost and decision-making was a dangerous game of chance.” Without emotions, he could no longer analyze the experiences he had lived through, which left him with nothing to tell him whether a decision would be good or bad. Elliot’s lack of emotional response to anything that he experienced led to a lack of understanding what is good and what is bad. This case seems to emphasize the importance of emotions in “rational” decision-making. Emotions “are fundamental building blocks out of which an intelligent and fulfilling life can be constructed.”
Emotions and “Rational” Thought”
#4 A.L.,
I have been doing some reading on brain science (IQ specifically) and found that groups with lower IQ tended to have higher innate self esteem.
I’m still trying to wrap myself around that one.
So maybe ignorance is bliss.
A.L.,
A good first stop in any such discussion is a look at the brain and how it works.
If you jump into politics without understanding the underlying organic structure you are screwed. Testosterone and the aplha male is a very good place to start.
My favorite example of ignorance of the brain leading to bad policy is drug prohibition of course. However, it has to be aplicable to almost all politics.
Islam as a political system most closely conforms to man in a state of nature. A place like the USA is decidedly unnatural. It takes more effort to maintain. However, the benefits are immense.
“On first blush, I’m frightened of a political theory of feelings”
Yeah, AL, the water gets deep real quick.
M. Simon brought up some great research, and then somebody will have to dig up Chomsky and add him to the mix, and Worf-Saphir, and soon we’re talking empricism versus skepticism — and on she goes.
My opinion is that if you’re willing to anihilate a people, or blow yourself up along with a busload of children, simply because you feel bad? You have a culturally-learned emotional disorder. One of a criminal nature. One that calls for intervention from the rest of society.
You can do a little mini-history of the “my emotional state as political philosophy” by reading just two books (if you have the intestinal foritude to get through them), Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectics of Sex” (has been out-of-print in the past…not sure about now), and Iris Marion Young’s “Justice and the Politics of Difference”.
Just make sure you have plenty of Maalox and Advil on hand.
the guy who says “I deserve to have you all declare me your better…”
Isn’t that the Islamist position in a nutshell?
I recall something that Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, about a British officer who was explaining why the British in the Mandate of Palestine tended to side with the Arabs against the Jews. It was not so much anti-Semitism, he said, as sympathy for the Palestinian Arab who was such a helpless victim of his own rage and frustration, hopelessly outmatched and unable to recognize even his own self-interest. Not to side with such a perpetual underdog seemed unsporting. The Jews, on the other hand, were assumed to be able to take care of themselves regardless of the odds against them.
Of course Arabs don’t have this haplessness in their genes. They have it in their political culture, which is almost worse. This is one sense in which the West really is partly to blame for the Arab’s plight, because the West has encouraged (and daily reinforces) self-destructive Arab emotionalism. We’ve endlessly tolerated and rewarded it.
The rational Arab, on the other hand, has been turned into a bad joke. The Arab who appeals to reason instead of grievance is sure to be denounced as a tool of Westerners and Jews, and the Arab’s so-called friends in the West will lead the chorus. The proverbial Arab moderate is assumed to exist in abundance everywhere in spite of being hunted to extinction.
This is not unique to the Arab’s bad experience, either. Sartre called anti-Semitism the Cult of Mediocrity. It characteristically regards intelligence as a Jewish thing: deceitful, evil, Satanic. Victimhood, on the the hand, is seen as a state of purity, and the highest thing one can aspire to is martyrdom.
Two problems with the whole idea.
One, emotional issues are impossible to quantify. It’s possible (but difficult) to prove humiliation I suppose, but how do you quantify and compare it? And how are you supposed to assign physical worth to something you can’t quantify? And if you’re not going to assign physical worth to it, what’s the point, since it’ll make no concrete difference one way or the other.
On the low end of the scale, intra-national, it simply dumps all the power in the hands of whoever gets to decide what the quantification is, which, lacking any concrete basis in reality, will inevitably be used simply to justify pre-existing bias. On the high end of the scale, it seems mostly to be used for diplomatic smokescreens (see Korea, N).
Two, humiliation is the emotional analogue to pain. It’s a response mechanism designed to prevent repeat occurrences of damaging actions. As others above have noted, setting up a positive feed-back loop for it would not be a good thing. I suppose you could make the argument that, as we punish for inflicting pain, so also we should punish for inflicting humiliation, but given point 1 above, this is one of those nice ideas that runs afoul of implementation impossibilites.
Historically speaking, the best results have always come not from those who were rewarded for their humiliation, but from those who attempted to learn from it.
The Japanese are a good example. After Perry, they correctly drew the correct lesson and very rapidly began modernizing. Unfortunately they also tried copying imperialism, which led to humiliation #2, WWII. Again however, they picked themselves back up, learned the lesson, and are now a free, democratic, prosperous nation.