Käthe Kollwitz, Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground, 1942.
I. How Did This Happen? Fear.
Donald Trump, a man who fomented an insurrection, was convicted of multiple felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and allegedly stole national security secrets, to name only a few of his past accomplishments, is now President-elect Trump, again.
How did this happen?! Fear.
Fear motivated millions of Americans to vote for Trump. Fear is what millions of Americans, especially the most vulnerable, are feeling right now. Their fear is amplified by the expressed commitments of Trump’s disturbing picks to lead government agencies to deport millions of immigrants, target trans* youth and adults, and otherwise embody the spirit of Project 2025.1
To claim that fear motivated Trump-aligned voters to go to the polls is not to trivialize their genuine concerns. Likewise, recognizing widespread fear among those who, like me, voted against Trump’s policies and cruel impulses does not mean looking down on them.
Fear can animate freedom movements and underly concerns about one’s pocketbook and safety. It is a uniquely powerful emotion that influences our actions far more than we would like to admit.
Sometimes, our fear is justified. Other times, it is not grounded in data, facts, or evidence. In either case, fear is self-protective in character.
Attuning ourselves to emotions like fear also helps us keep our shared humanity at the forefront of our politics. For example, focusing on our propensity to fear does not require vilifying any one group of voters.
We must think critically about fear. The goal of this difficult work is a more hopeful politics. Moving away from fear, we move toward honest conversations about who and what we love.
II. What Is Fear?
In The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks At Our Political Crisis (2018), a book inspired by Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Martha C. Nussbaum observes that the experience of fear is “genetically first among the emotions” (20). It is our first feeling.
Fear is born of vulnerability. You are born into the world in a state of need. Some part of the world around you must provide for your needs, or you will die. “The only way you can get what you need is to make some other part of the world get it for you. . . . Human life, Rousseau understood, begins not in democracy but in monarchy. The baby . . . has no way of surviving except by making slaves of others” (21-22).2
The infant knows nothing of trust and regularity. Infants live in the moment. Haunting each moment of an infant’s satisfaction is fear: the perception that some part of the world (a “bad object”) will harm them, and there is nothing they can do about it (26-28). Fear involves the perception of danger and vulnerability.
We experience fear from the start of our lives, and it persists because we, human animals, are inherently vulnerable. “Fear. . .persists beneath all [our emotions] and infects them all, nibbling around the edges of love and reciprocity” (20).
“In the experience of fear, we draw on a common animal heritage. . . . Fear goes straight back to the reptilian brain” (27). Yet, as Joseph LeDoux argues, fear is not “‘in’ the amygdala” (27).3 Primal fear sticks with us but is “followed, later, by complicated, learned forms of that emotion” (28, emphasis mine).
The consciousness of death is a significant lesson in our education. Our awareness of death is beneficially motivating. It inspires us to avoid disaster and to create societies and laws that help us do the same. The recognition of death “might produce, as Rousseau devoutly hoped, compassion and reciprocity: we band together to protect one another from hunger, disease, and war” (43). However, a beneficial awareness of death requires a “concept of our well-being and of what, and who, threatens it” (44). What constitutes a “bad object” may have been straightforward at an earlier point in our evolutionary history, but it is not as clear today.
If we are to avoid disaster, we require a clear picture of what threatens our well-being. Our snake brains, families, clergy, and political leaders all contribute to our understanding of what we should fear. Nussbaum summarizes Aristotle’s rules for political leaders who desire to “whip up” our fear:
- “[P]ortray the impending event as highly significant for survival or well-being”
- “[M]ake people think it is close at hand”
- “[M]ake people think that things are out of control—they can’t ward off the bad thing easily on their own.”
- “[S]peakers must arrange to be trustworthy” (44-45).4
Our government deploys an Aristotelian approach to effectively whip up fear when a hurricane is barreling toward a coastline. We tend to trust the calls of state and local officials to evacuate our homes before the hurricane arrives because the evidence, facts, and data support the conclusion that our fear is justified. Yet, “our basic propensity to fear [makes] democratic societies . . . highly vulnerable to manipulation” (45).
Nussbaum draws on psychological research to describe two “heuristics” of fear. The first is the “availability heuristic,” and the second is the “cascade heuristic,” which has two aspects: reputational and informational (47-51).5 These heuristics can function to overwhelm our ability to carefully consider costs and benefits, instead activating our instinctual impulses.
Donald Trump effectively deploys each of the heuristics of fear. Trump uses the availability heuristic, creating an image of danger that is readily available to voters. He imagines that our country is being overrun by dangerous immigrants. To make the image even more visceral, Trump raises the specter of contamination, stating that immigrants are tainting American blood, infecting our country, and even, like rabid, wild animals, eating our beloved cats and dogs.6
According to Trump, immigrants are violently transgressing our borders, stealing our well-being, and trashing our country. The unprotected hole(s) of the national body lead to further fears, such as the erosion of gender norms, especially the “weakening” of normative American masculinity, which is imagined as a potent threat to American military might.
The Trumpian image of a national body being raped by, for example, Haitian and Mexican intruders is immediately accessible to voters, and it inspires fear. Trump combines the availability heuristic with the cascade heuristic, motivating people to band together to overcome a(n imagined) threat to their well-being.
Trump’s base trusts him, and they believe immigrants pose an imminent threat to their personal security (the reputational aspect of the cascade heuristic). The threat is amplified by taking at face value new information linking immigration to the economy (jobs and housing costs), trans* liberty, race, national security concerns, and so on (the informational aspect of the cascade heuristic).
The heuristics of fear are highly motivating. They compel us to act together to avoid immediate danger. The problem arises when the fear they amplify is not based on a sober assessment of evidence, facts, data, or our experiences.
There are good reasons to avoid the path of a tornado and to act to stop or mitigate human threats like terrorist acts, acts of war, poverty, starvation, environmental pollution, and climate change. However, when our fear is unwarranted, it can destabilize democracy.
III. The Family of Fear: Anger, Disgust, and Envy
Fear, like anger, is sometimes well-grounded. However, anger born of unwarranted fear threatens to upend a democratic society.7
“According to Aristotle, anger is a response to significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted” (72). That’s reasonable enough, but what is often left out of our accounts of anger (although “[a]ll Western philosophers who talk about anger include” it) is the wish for retribution (73).8
What is most problematic about anger is the built-in desire for retribution. Retribution is problematic because we often get angry at actual wrongs that are not hugely important (e.g., someone forgets your name or cuts you off in traffic). Even when the wrongs are significant, retribution does not erase them or the pain they cause—and in some cases, there is no wrongdoer to punish. “The world is full of accidents” (82).
If we apply ourselves, anger and retribution can be separated, with the aim of ensuring a better future for everyone. Nussbaum calls this Transition-Anger, and she observes that parents know this type of anger well. Parents know that anger caused by actual wrongs can be turned toward ensuring better future outcomes that benefit the child and the entire family. Politically, peaceful protest and future-oriented punishments are examples of Transition-Anger.
Anger inspired by unwarranted fear leads us in an altogether different direction. When the world does not work the way we want it to, it is easy to blame others. “The act of pinning blame and pursuing the ‘bad guy’ is deeply consoling. It makes us feel control rather than helplessness” (82).
We compensate for our helplessness by believing that the world is just. Our faith in a “just world” leads us to think that the wrongs that happen to others are their own fault, while the wrongs that happen to us are the fault of others (82-83).
The Salem witch trials illustrate this point. Nussbaum notes “that a preponderant number of the witch blamers were young men entering adulthood, afflicted by the woes of an insecure colony in a new world: economic uncertainty, a harsh climate, political instability. How easy, then, to blame the whole thing on witches, usually elderly unpopular women, who can easily be targeted and whose death brings temporary satisfaction of mind” (83).
Retribution, whether inspired by well-grounded anger or not, does nothing to right a wrong or solve a genuine problem. It makes our lives worse. Therefore, we should be concerned about Trump’s manifest desire to be a figure of retribution. “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 anger’s errors” (93).
Born of unwarranted fear, disgust, like fear-driven anger, “often leads us astray” (100). Disgust, unlike anger, “does not require wrongdoing or the threat of wrongdoing to get going.” It is an emotion inspired by our animality and mortality, “triggered . . . by bodily characteristics” that are or seem to be related to death and decay (100).9
According to researchers, disgust “is an aversion to contact that is motivated by the thought of contamination” (105). It is related to the fear of being tainted or infected by death and decay (106). Nussbaum points out that we are the only animals that try to sanitize ourselves through projects of transcendence, attempting to deny or forget our mortality/animality.
It is not easy to deny our bodies—their holes, smells, sounds, folds, secretions, excrement. So, we project our disgust onto others like Jews, trans* persons, Muslims, women, Black people, queers, people with disabilities, and immigrants. These groups come to figure change, animality, the erosion of tradition, and, if not controlled or eliminated, the infection of the traditional social body.
The way projective disgust works to stigmatize and isolate others is not predictable. For example, imagine a Mexican male—an immigrant in the U.S. illegally, working at a slaughterhouse—who supports Donald Trump. He argues that while he knows Trump is set on a policy of mass deportation, he does not believe Trump will deport family-oriented Latinos like him. However, many Mexican Americans fear being associated with Latinos like him, and they welcome his deportation.10
Envy is the third child of fear. It is the fear of “not having what one desperately needs to have” (140). It is “a painful emotion that focuses on the advantages of others, comparing one’s own situation unfavorable to theirs” (137). Again, there is a fantasy underlying this emotion, namely, a fantasy that “others have the good things and I do not . . .” (139).
Envy is dangerous because it combines feelings of powerlessness, inferiority, and despair. It works like this: Others have what you do not, and you are powerless to obtain those things. Not having those things makes you less than in the eyes of your neighbors who possess them. You will never be able to attain those good things that you desire.
Even when it is true that others have good things and you do not, envy functions like retribution: “it is destructive hostility” (140). Envy seeks to ruin the lives of those imagined to have all the good things you desire. In other words, envy-based fear does not contribute to a rights-based society that can provide the essential goods we all need to thrive and empower people to build their desired lives (163).
IV. Objects of Fear: Women
The family of fear gathers around the bodies of women. There is anger that “women have gotten out of hand” (169). There is disgust inspired by women’s bodies (a feeling not incompatible with male desire for those same bodies). There is envy related to women “enjoying unparalleled success in American life” (169). Nussbaum argues that “we don’t have to choose. All three are occurring, and they reinforce one another” (169). She also observes that this “same dynamic plays a role in hostility to immigrants” (171).
We have made progress: most men are no longer sexist. The idea that women are inherently inferior is just too obviously false. Nowadays, many men prefer outright misogyny: the act of putting women “back in their place.”
Men are not the only ones, of course, who support Trump. Women, especially white women, also support Trump. It may be that some women can put aside his explicit denigration of their bodies because they agree with many of his policies.
Other women may support Trump precisely for denigrating “those women,” women like Bette Midler, Carly Fiorina, Hillary Clinton, and Michele Obama. The status of “traditional women” is inextricably linked to taking care of and supporting the men and children in their lives. Traditional women “object on moral or religious grounds to women who pursue independence and career success . . . (185). Traditional women channel their anger at “uppity” women for diluting their brand.
Nussbaum argues, and I wholeheartedly agree, that “we should honor” any parent who chooses to stay home and care for children (and extended family). However, “the traditional model, which gave men free choice and told women that they had no choice, is surely wrong in a society of equals” (186).
Envy also plays a role in white male perceptions of women’s successes beyond the traditional family. “There’s no doubt that white men, particularly in the lower middle classes, are indeed losing out” (191). The problem is that some white men seem beleaguered by the fantasy that they are being replaced by immigrants, women, and others in, for example, the workforce.
This is a powerful and dangerous fantasy due to the role a deep sense of entitlement plays in it. Some white men feel that employment and other forms of social success are their birthright. In that case, hostility is the only maladaptive tool left for them to secure a good future, at least for themselves.
Disgust is mixed into this potent, anti-democratic mixture, justifying the control of women’s more animal-like bodies and the enforcement of their lower status. The critical point is that this mixture of anger, envy, and disgust does not solve serious social problems. It does not prepare white men for the economy of the future. It does not ultimately prevent women, gay men, immigrants, and people of color from achieving their dreams. The family of fear mix maintains the status quo by undercutting the spirit of reciprocity, the spirit we require to provide for our collective needs, strengthen our democracy, and defend ourselves from a very real threat to our well-being: tyranny.
V. Resisting The Monarchy of Fear: Hope, Faith, and Love
Fear reacts to uncertainty by controlling others or voting for a tyrant, someone who promises to control others for us (212). Hope reacts to uncertainty by trusting others “to be independent and themselves” (211). We hope for a desired outcome precisely because it is not assured; it is an outcome we cannot control or guarantee. Thus, hope is not based on “probabilistic beliefs” (202-206).
Fear constricts our vision, while hope expands it (212). Hope entails an optimistic outlook (even when facing dangers of which we are rightly fearful). Moreover, hope can potentially motivate us to work toward a positive vision of our well-being.
“Idle hope” is not connected to optimistic action. “Pragmatic hope” is linked to an action plan. It is hope determined to realize a “valuable goal” (206-207).
However, hope is not naive. Kant “believed that we have a duty, during our lives, to engage in actions that produce valuable social goals. . . . Kant also understood . . . that when we look around us it is difficult to sustain our efforts . . . . He said that if we ask our own hearts the question, ‘Is the human race as a whole likable, or is it an object to be regarded with distaste?’ we just don’t know what to say” (208).11
For Kant, hope is a “practical postulate.” We can’t exactly justify hope. We hope “for the sake of the good action it may enable” (209).
Nussbaum reminds us that Saint Paul relates hope to faith and love, teaching that love is the greatest of the three (213, 1 Corinthians 13:13).12 Martin Luther King, Jr. follows in this tradition, “albeit not in a theistic and theological way, but in a this-worldly way that embraces all Americans” (213). King advocated for this-worldly faith in the power of protests and marches to effect meaningful change.
Rational faith is the belief in “[r]eal human beings and real human life.” It entails embracing “something that flawed human beings are capable of and might really do” (214). It also entails believing that “our opponents [have the capacity] for reasoning and a range of human emotions, whether badly developed and used or not” (216).
“Philosophy by itself shows how we can respect our enemies; it does not show us how to love them. For that we need the arts, and many of us need religion” (233). By love, Nussbaum does not mean either romantic love or the kind that would pertain to friendship. She means “a love that simply consists in seeing the other person as fully human, and capable at some level of good and of change” (216).
Fear, whether warranted or not, is protectionist in character. It defends the self (personal or social, “the larger self”) against imagined and real threats. Hope does not discount the wisdom of well-grounded fear; hope is simply not beholden to it. Hope envisions a social world of openness and trust.
We know that the pathway from fear to hope is fraught with challenges. In 2024, hope and change did not work; fear and the same did. What steps can we take to start moving again down the road that leads away from fear and toward hope?
Nussbaum defines six practices that potentially speak to our fear and enable a politics of hope. They are the arts, philosophy (i.e., Socratic dialogue), religion, protest movements, justice studies, and compulsory national service. It is easy to see the appeal of many of these practices for Nussbaum’s students at the University of Chicago. They are immediately accessible to her students. However, several of the listed practices feel different here and now as I write on November 13, 2024.
To the degree that the Socratic method entails civilly attending to conservative arguments against gay marriage or abortion access, as scholars like Nussbaum and Katie Wilson, author of Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion (2018), believe it does—then it is likely that many of us will not become/continue as philosophers.13 After the fall of Roe and in a time of increasingly reasonable speculation about the possibility of Congress passing a national abortion ban and the conservative majority of the Supreme Court weakening or even overturning Obergefell, I don’t think many of us have the patience or the will to engage in this form of dialogue.
Motivated by Trump’s outrageous policies and cruelty, protest movements saw some initial successes during Trump’s first term. However, they ended up being largely ineffective in the long run. One reason for this is that they were not consistently focused on building the kind of political power that can get people elected and that can lead to the implementation of policies and the passing of laws in Congress. In some cases, the ideas generated by these movements were manifestly political poison pills (e.g., “defund the police”).14
Religion is another sore spot, especially for many LGBTQ+ individuals. I sought ordination in the early 2000s, when Presbyterians refused to ordain openly gay and proud individuals. The PC(USA) changed its position in 2011, and at great cost to its unity and size. In 2004, a twenty-something-kid embracing his sexual freedom, I decided it was better for me to find a new spiritual home. Ultimately, I stopped going to church.
Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 inspired me to return to church life after a decade-long break from it (much to the chagrin of my atheist husband). I am now a member of and ordained in the United Church of Christ.
The church I attend is, at least for me, a source of hope. Our senior pastor is a lesbian, and our entire leadership staff is composed of women. My church is Christ-centered, high-functioning, and justice-oriented (e.g., the church regularly provides meals to people emerging from poverty, supplies hygiene kits and furniture to relocating refugee families, grows food for a local organization that feeds people living below a certain income level, builds homes with Habitat for Humanity, advocates for low-income housing, regularly participates in community service projects, and partners with two local churches, one historically black, to fight racism).
In the early 1970s, the UCC became the first denomination in Christendom to ordain an openly gay man. However, the UCC is not a utopia. Churches in the UCC do not share one mind on the question of welcoming LGBTQ persons, especially those more defined by our sexuality.15
Evangelizing Christians is still necessary work, and it is hard work. It is often dispiriting and emotionally painful work. Consider the unfortunate rise of Christian nationalism and the fact that the vast majority of Christian voters (Black Protestants being a notable exception) pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, while Jews, Muslims, and the religiously unaffiliated broke decisively for Harris/Walz.
Whatever their downsides, Nussbaum’s practices of hope are potentially beneficial to many people seeking to get moving again, to move beyond fear into hopeful, democratic action. Given her attunement to psychoanalytic thinking, particularly Winnicott’s object relations theory, I find it interesting that Nussbaum does not explicitly define psychoanalysis as a practice of hope.
Nussbaum clearly imagines each of her hope practices as a form of the “talking cure” (61). Each is, in its own way, a “facilitating environment,” a community in which one may learn to speak and speak to one’s fears, thereby enabling hopeful movement in the world.16
Nonetheless, I think psychoanalysis deserves its own place on the list. Psychoanalysis, as a particular way of listening and speaking that is related to but not synonymous with the arts, activism, religion, justice, philosophy, and service, is a messier, less reasoned form of hopeful (dis)agreement.
VI. A Practice of Hope: Thinking Psychoanalytically
On Wanting to Change (2021), an extended reflection on the discontents of conversion by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is an excellent example of psychoanalytic thinking as a practice of hope. In this case, the object of fear is change. Phillips writes,
Both psychoanalysis and American Pragmatism are driven by a desire to help the individual keep things moving. For both Freud and [William] James, the enemy of pleasure and growth was stuckness, addiction, fixity, stasis. They teach us about the temptations of stultification, of the allure of inertia, of the wish to attack our own development; and they suggest, as we shall see, that conversion experiences all too easily become the desire for a change that will finally put a stop to the need for change; change in the direction of what is, to all intents and purposes, a satisfying and reassuring paralysis (converts to religious fundamentalism are not supposed to convert again to something else). They suggest, in significantly different ways, that we are so ambivalent about changing because there is nothing else we can do but change (as though, paradoxically, the fact that we change is the biggest threat to our freedom). And so psychoanalysis and pragmatism try to make wanting to change both appealing and inspiring, as opposed to it being some ineluctable, evolutionary, biological drive, or fate (“Preface”).17
Conversion in psychoanalysis functions like belief in a just world: it is a fantasy of control. Paradoxically, conversion—again, in its psychoanalytic form—is a type of change that promises to end change. “We talk of serial monogamists, and serial killers, but we don’t talk of serial converters” (6).
Why, however, do we want to control change by putting an end to it? What are we afraid of?
In the first chapter of On Wanting to Change, entitled “Conversion Hysteria,” Phillips analyzes a policy change. In 2012, the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy (BACP) changed its policy on conversion therapy, the goal of which is to convert homosexuals to heterosexuals. According to reporting by the Guardian, the BACP told its members that it “opposes any psychological treatment such as ‘reparative’ or ‘conversion’ therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder, or based on the premise that the client/patient should change his/her sexuality” (4).
Phillips observes the forces of fear in BACP’s letter to its members. The letter implicitly reveals serious disagreement within BACP’s ranks. It manifests BACP’s desire to end the debate once and for all. BACP’s logic, if not its policy position, is entirely agreeable to those therapists who support conversion therapy, as it is the logic of conversion therapy itself. It is the kind of change someone or something demands of you.
Another irony is that BACP’s desire to end debate and force its members to convert to its official position is done in the name of liberal pluralism. “Like [John Stuart] Mill, the BACP believes that not only the individual but his whole society is the beneficiary of diverse sexualities, this being itself a judgement despite its promotion of supposedly ‘non-judgemental attitudes.’ Conversion therapies are opposed to diversity” (12).
An additional irony is that conversion is, like psychoanalysis, dependent on the power of language. Conversation makes us susceptible to conversion. “And, indeed, what do we think language is like, language being the primary medium of conversion, if it can have this kind of effect on people (language also being the medium of psychoanalysis and all the other talking therapies)? And one answer would be that, consciously or unconsciously, we think of language as daemonic. We think of ourselves as doing things with words, while language does things to us” (18).
Phillips, to be clear, is not defending conversion therapy, at least not the kind that demands homosexuals change into heterosexuals. Yes, sexuality, as Freud taught, can be converted—it can, that is, be displaced onto other areas of your life—which is to say it cannot be changed, only hidden. Phillips writes,
What [Freud] called “a capacity for conversion” was a capacity to change while remaining the same, a capacity not to renounce anything and replace what has been supposedly lost. “In neurosis,” Freud’s daughter Anna wrote in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), “whenever a particular gratification of instinct is repressed, some substitute is found for it. In hysteria this is done by conversion, i.e. the sexual excitation finds discharge in other bodily zones or processes which have become sexualized.” You don’t renounce the sexual desire, you sexualize other areas of your life: instead of being a voyeur, you love reading. Conversion, that is to say – in its psychoanalytic version – is a way of not having to change. It is the way the individual sustains the desires that sustain her (22, emphasis mine).
Conversion is often a form of aversion to conversation about your desire. It is a means of avoiding conversation about something disturbing, like who or what you love. Perhaps what the BACP does not want to talk about is the object of its love: namely, conversion therapists.
Phillips reminds us that the “word ‘conversion’ itself breaks down into a con version, ‘con’ meaning ‘to know, learn, study carefully’ or ‘to swindle, trick, to persuade by dishonest means. . . . I think psychoanalysis is best described as a form of honest persuasion. Or that, at least, is what it aspires to be” (19).
If we are lucky, our first honest “conversations” are with our mothers. Nussbaum notes that, for Winnicott, the “mother” represents a role and not a sexed person (34).18 She also recognizes that our moral character develops in and through this relationship or conversation. As the child begins to “relate to [their] parents as whole people,” they begin to develop “‘a capacity for concern’: the parent must not be destroyed” (34).
For Nussbaum, morality “operates in tandem with love, since it is love that leads the child to feel the badness of its own aggression” (34). What, however, if aggression is how the child tries to escape from the “conversation”?
“There is in [our susceptibility to change], whatever else there is,” Phillips writes, “a terrified misogyny; and a terror of our earlier, more dependent selves. A terror of something about love, and a terror about what the loss of love exposes” (15).
In psychoanalysis, the mother is “the woman who first, and hopefully often, converted us – the mother who was, in Christopher Bollas’s phrase, our first and formative ‘transformational object,’ the woman who, through her care, could radically change our mood; and ourselves as infants and young children desiring and depending on such benign conversion experiences as were possible” (15-16). According to Bollas, our earliest experiences of maternal conversions follow us into adult life. We seek an object that “promises to transform the self.”19
The subject of an honest conversation about conversion may be the disturbing power of maternal love “to transform the self.” Maternal love may be what we both fear and desire most of all, so we keep playing with conversion therapies.
“Conversion experiences all too easily, then, have a mixed but not actually a bad echo, both historically and personally,” Philips argues. “We want to get over them, and we don’t. We crave them, and we fear their failure or their unavailability. They link us to our losses, and they remind us of extraordinary boons and benefits. We crave them as opportunities and we fear them as tyrannies” (16, emphasis mine).
Freud was a Jew; he knew that sometimes one must convert to stay alive—to sustain their Jewish life in a hostile Christian and/or Nazi world (20-21). It is not the change they want; it is the change that is demanded of them, the only “change” available when honest conversation is a legitimate source of fear.
The change we genuinely fear is of a different variety because it is genuine change. It is the conversion we experience, if we are lucky, in conversation with our good enough “mothers.”
The recognition of the power of maternal love as a source of fear is reason to hope. We may learn that our fear of her love is not warranted. Thus, we need not hide our desire for it in aggression toward it.
Laura Vazquez Rodriguez, Inseparable, 2019.
VII. A Vision of Hope: The Maternal City
Nussbaum argues that “[p]olitics begins where we begin” (21). Where we begin—again, if we are lucky—is in the good enough love of our “mothers.”
The politics of love is not and has never been fashionable. Remember, Hillary Clinton wanted to talk to you about love and kindness in 2016. Again, a majority of my fellow citizens living in 3 electorally significant states listened to what Donald Trump had to say instead.20
Hate did not win in 2016 or in 2024. Fear of maternal love did. To understand why maternal love frightens us, we have only to think about the religious practice of loving God.
For example, Christians claim to love God. They allegedly demonstrate this love in and through their love for their fellow human beings. Typically, Christians believe that Jesus Christ unites the two loves. For Christians, Jesus is both fully God and fully human. This means that, to love people, Christians must love what they can neither see nor possess, at least in this world, in people: God or the Other.
David M. Halperin observes that the “notion that all desire for the Other is really desire for God goes back to the origins of Christianity or at least to its Platonic roots in Augustine (Friedrich Nietzsche said that Christianity was simply ‘Platonism for the masses’ . . . ).”21 Halperin argues that the moral implications of how Augustine loves mortal objects are made clear in Book 8 of On the Trinity, “by which time Augustine had found the perfect boyfriend in Saint Paul, a lover who is not only dead but who died long before Augustine was born. What Augustine prizes now is the love with which he loves the goodness of Paul, which makes the practice of loving something you can do all by yourself or at least outside the presence of another living person.”22
Notice that Augustine does not love Paul. Augustine, in Platonic fashion, “loves the goodness of Paul.”
Plato, according to Halperin, thought that “erôs is . . . an irrational—or, rather, supra-rational—passion, a mania . . . erôs [qua erôs] . . . is ultimately a transcendental force.”23 Halperin argues that, for Plato, the “ultimate aim of erotic desire [erôs qua erôs] . . . is the lover’s perpetual possession of the good . . . and its ultimate object is the beautiful.”24 In other words, “[the value one pursues] cannot be possessed by possessing . . . things: it transcends the objects that are the media in or through which it constitutes itself.”25
Christian love of the other entirely depends on their loving the Other, God or Goodness, in the muck of the other’s flesh. Halperin observes that “Plato’s transcendental theory of desire offers . . . a cure to our suffering, a cure shaped from the start by the reality of the suffering it would spare us, but it can provide this cure only by abolishing the epistemic tension in love . . . by saving us once and for all from love’s irony”: we desire an ideal that we can never possess so long as our love is for a mortal object.26
Halperin strongly implies that the goodness of Saint Paul is a replacement for Augustine’s dead boyfriend: “a nameless boy of his own age, a fellow Manichean heretic, who got sick, was baptized while unconscious, renounced Manicheanism and returned to Christianity, resisted Augustine’s efforts to talk him out of it, and died when their friendship, ‘sweeter to me above and beyond all the sweetnesses of my life at that time,’ had barely lasted an entire year.”27 The experience of losing (what or who we) love disposes us to love what can never be lost because it is ultimately absent, at least in this world: God or the ideal.
Augustine is the ancient poster boy of conversion therapy. He learns to love another man, but only the one in his head. He learns to hide his love for another man in his love for God.
In the context of describing the conversions of both Paul and Augustine, Phillips asks, “[W]hat do we want to be converted away from? And can conversion really do the trick?” (70). Is the benefit of conversion worth the cost?
The final chapter of (third) Isaiah gives us reason to believe that the benefits of conversion are not worth the costs. Isaiah 66:1-24 is brimming with the spirit of hostile destruction: anger, disgust, and a future replete with envy. This is the final word, literally the final sentence of (third) Isaiah: “And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me [i.e., God]; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (66:24).
Does loving God give us the life we want? Do we want to love God, or do we love God because the alternative feels too frightening?
In the midst of the tragedy that is the final chapter of (third) Isaiah, there is what historian Howard Zinn describes as the “past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than . . . its solid centuries of warfare.”28 At the center of Divine retribution is a fugitive moment of compassion, the maternal city, we may desire and desire to center in our analysis:
Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,
all you who love her;
rejoice with her in joy,
all you who mourn over her—
that you may nurse and be satisfied
from her consoling breast,
that you may drink deeply with delight
from her glorious bosom.
For thus says the Lord:
I will extend prosperity to her like a river
and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream,
and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm
and bounced on her knees.
As a mother comforts her child,
so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice;
your bodies shall flourish like the grass . . . . (Isaiah 66:10-14).
Centering the city may seem like an unfortunate choice in an essay that seeks, in part, to make sense of the appeal of Donald Trump, whose passionate supporters live mostly in rural towns and counties across the country. In The Country and The City (1975), Raymond Williams writes, “‘Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand in for the experience of human communities” (1).
For me, the city is an especially powerful word. In the early 2000s, I moved from rural Idaho to Chicago. It was in Chicago that I learned how to be gay—that is, how (not) to love.
The city was, for me, a “consoling breast,” a place to “drink deeply with delight.” Chicago carried me on “her arm, and dandled [me] on her knees.” I cried a lot in Chicago, and I was always “comforted” by her. I met the man who became my husband in Chicago, and many of my closest friends still live there or are from there.
Williams also observes that “[p]owerful hostile associations have . . . developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation” (1). As novels like Balzac’s Lily of the Valley, and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights make clear, the city and the country have much more in common than we often imagine they do.
Chicago is, as conservative media likes to point out, full of “worldliness.” Like many small towns, it is filled with anger, disgust, and envy (just watch The Dressmaker [2015]). Just as my small hometown is beset by social challenges like cruelty, racism, poverty, boredom, and provincialism, so is life in Chicago made precarious by high taxes, high rents, high crime, racial strife and segregation, economic inequality, enormous potholes, smelly El cars, corrupt politicians, a troubled public education system, and the hubris of union bosses.
Loving God may seem like the just solution to these seemingly unsolvable, maddening human problems. Or, it may be an all too common way we avoid having a hopeful conversation about who or what we want to love.
An alternative to loving God may be found in an unlikely place: the letters of Saint Paul. Halperin hedges his bets when he argues that the “notion that all desire for the Other is really desire for God goes back to the origins of Christianity or at least to its Platonic roots in Augustine” (emphasis mine). Halperin may be implying that Paul is to blame for all our problems, but the fourth century is, in fact, “the [origin] of Christianity.” Paul was long gone by then.29
Paul, for his part, collapses the dual commandment to love God and to love one another into one simple, straightforward command: love one another (e.g., Romans 13:8-12). The radical character of Pauline love is often entirely lost on religious people (and on many of Paul’s cultured despisers).
Religious people, in particular, may be susceptible to Donald Trump’s message because the politics of love and kindness is a genuine threat to the monarchy of fear. It actually threatens the self-protective self. It represents a project of self-transformation, represented by the (theological) cliché, “Open your hearts.” Yet, if we really think about it, the benefits of (re)creating a maternal city seem to outweigh the costs of giving up on our fear. At the very least, it is a possibility worth talking about.
Notes:
