Tag Archives: philosophy

Bubbles, a Reading

– AI-generated art based on Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais (1886) –

A reading of the first few pages (17-19) of Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles:

The child stands enraptured on the balcony, holding its new present and watching the soap bubbles float into the sky as it blows them out of the little loop in front of his mouth.

Now a swarm of bubbles erupts upwards, as chaotically vivacious as a throw of shimmering blue marbles. Then at a subsequent attempt, a large oval balloon filled with timid life quivers off the loop and floats down to the street, carried along by the breeze.

It is followed by the hopes of the delighted child floating out into the space in its own magic bubble, as if for a few seconds its fate depended on that of the nervous entity. When the bubble finally bursts after a trembling, drawn out flight, the soap bubble artist on the balcony emits a sound that is at once a sigh and a cheer.

For the duration of the bubble’s life, the blower was outside himself, as if the little orb survival depended on remaining encased in an attention that floated out with it. Any lack of accompaniment, any waning of that solidarity, hope, and anxiety would have damned the iridescent object to premature failure.

But even when, immersed in the eager supervision of its creator, it was allowed to drift off through space for a wonderful while, it still had to vanish into nothingness in the end. In the place where the orb burst, the blower’s excorporated soul was left alone for a moment, as if it had embarked on a shared expedition, only to lose its partner halfway.

But the melancholy lasts no more than a second before the joy of playing returns with its time-honored cruel momentum. What are broken hopes, but opportunities for new attempts?

The game continues tirelessly. Once again, the orbs float from on high. And once again, the blower assists his works of art with attentive joy in their flight through the delicate space.

There is a solidarity between the soap bubble and its blower that excludes the rest of the world. And each time the shimmering entity drifts into the distance, the little artist exits his body on the balcony to be entirely with the objects he has called into existence.

In the ecstasy of attentiveness, the child’s consciousness has virtually left its corporal source. In the orbs, his exhaled air has separated from him and is now preserved and carried further.

At the same time, the child is transported away from itself by losing itself in the breathless co-flight of its attention through the animated space. For its creator, the soap bubble thus becomes the medium of a surprising soul expansion. The bubble and its blower coexist in a field spread out through attentive involvement.

The child that follows its soap bubbles into the open is no Cartesian subject remaining planted on its extensionless thought point while observing an extended thing on its course through space. In enthusiastic solidarity with his iridescent globes, the experimenting player plunges into the open space and transforms his own between the eye and the object into an animated sphere.

All eyes and attention, the child’s face opens itself up to the space in front of it. Now the plain child imperceptibly gains an insight in the midst of its joyful entertainment that it will later forget under the strain of school: that the spirit in its own way is in space.

Placental Relations: Theology, Viability, and Roe v. Wade

– Author’s sketch and revision of an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul,” from the Rupertsberg Codex –

In Receptive Bodies, the late literary and queer scholar Leo Bersani takes up the work of Peter Sloterdijk, especially the first volume of his three-volume Microsphereology, Bubbles. Sloterdijk persuasively argues that our first relationship is not with our mother, exactly, but with a “non-object” he calls our With — that is, the placenta:

[I]n truth, obstetricians know that there are always two units which reach the outside in successful births. The child . . . never emerges from the cave alone. . . . In terms of its psychodynamic source, the individualism of the Modern Age is a placental nihilism (387).

A serious analysis of Sloterdijk’s Microsphereology, especially as it relates to psychoanalysis (e.g., 349ff), must wait for another time. What interests me here is his engagement with an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul.” My amateur sketch of it appears above — and I genuinely cannot explain what possessed me to draw my own version.

Here is the original, from the Rupertsberg Codex:

According to Sloterdijk, pregnancy for Hildegard

repeats the creation of Adam: physically as the function of a solid from a liquid [cheese or dough are in the figures’ baskets] through concrescence, psycho-pneumatically as the inspiration of the soul through the descent of the spirit orb from the angelic space into the fetal body. According to the traditional view, the latter takes place around the middle of pregnancy — that is, at a point equated in earlier doctrines of female wisdom with the beginning of palpable movement in the womb (367).

This “middle of pregnancy” — roughly 20 to 24 weeks, give or take — is also the point at which modern medicine teaches us that fetal lung development has progressed far enough that survival outside the womb becomes possible, with significant NICU support. The fetus, in the middle of pregnancy, receives lungs/breath/soul. That is, by the way, an idea that stretches back at least to Aristotle.

This brings me to Roe v. Wade (1973) and its companion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which together regulated abortion access in America for five decades before being overturned — wrongly and foolishly, in my opinion — by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022).

Here is the argument I want to make: Roe was indeed an instance of judicial overreach. The irony is that its overreach favored the so-called “pro-life” position.

The Roe Court honestly confronted the originalist reading of the Constitution and concluded, in the words of legal scholar Katie Watson, “that fetuses don’t fit within the Constitution’s use of the word ‘person,’ and the opinion doesn’t paint the fetus as a character or personify it as an active agent” (Scarlet A, 42). As Watson observes on page 82, according to the Roe Court, “Constitutional personhood only begins at birth.”

The 14th Amendment says “born.” It means born. A strict originalist has no textual basis for fetal constitutional personhood — none.

And yet the Roe Court ruled that the Constitution allows states to ban abortions. The Court made up “viability” as a legal threshold — the point at which states may restrict or even ban abortion in order to protect what it called “potential life.” That threshold is similar to the one Hildegard (and Aristotle) identified as the moment of ensoulment: roughly the middle of pregnancy, when breath and life become possible outside the womb.

Roe is judicial overreach — but it was overreach grounded in “pro-life” logic. While Roe protects a woman’s right to abortion because she is an unambiguous constitutional person (conservatives clutch your pearls!) and the fetus is not — it doesn’t go so far as to assert that the fetus is pure “bare life,” or life outside the protection of the law.

Roe is a compromise — a significant one — and one that, as Watson argues, tracks with what women actually do. The vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester, long before viability. Later abortions are almost always the result of medical necessity or devastating fetal diagnosis. Roe and Casey reflect reality.

Now consider Dobbs. Its reasoning is, if anything, more extra-legal than Roe‘s. The Dobbs Court rejected a constitutional right to abortion on the grounds that the word “abortion” does not appear in the Constitution, but then justified state bans on abortion in order to protect “potential life,” an extra-legal concept they didn’t even try to define in the spirit of the actual text of the Constitution, but left it to the states to define.

Frankly, the Dobbs Court was not being more faithful to the Constitution. It was simply being faithful to a different set of extra-legal values, without acknowledging it.

If you are a genuine originalist, the honest conclusion is fucking shocking: the Constitution, as written and as historically understood, offers the fetus no protection whatsoever.

Not at viability.

Not at any point before birth.

The “born” language of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous.

I think Roe‘s extra-legal reasoning is preferable to that of Dobbs because it is manifestly less cruel.

Roe, like Dobbs, went beyond the strict text of the Constitution. But Roe at least tethered its extra-legal reasoning to something real, both constitutionally and historically. Almost all abortions occur well before viability. However, once the fetus reaches the threshold of ensoulment or viability, it becomes a potential person, a potential citizen that our society has an obvious interest in reasonably protecting.

Dobbs replaced the Roe Court’s wisdom with conservative Christian metaphysics. And we are all, especially girls and women, living with the consequences. The only thing worse may be a radical leftist vision of absolutely no legal constraints on abortion, damning the mother to the hell of individualism 

The Entangled Society

Pieter Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (1567), or the land, according to Byung-Chul Han, of “overstuffed” positivity–“an inferno of the same” (Agony of Eros [2017], 6).

I. Sows in a Crate

The dramatic conclusion of Byung-Chul Han’s gloriously terse The Burnout Society (2015) calls forth–for me–an image of a sow in a gestation crate.

The sow may be genetically engineered to produce upwards of 20 piglets a year. According to Big Pork, the gestation crate is necessary for the sow’s health. In her crate, she lives a healthy life, but a life without what Han describes as “livingness.” The sow lives a life–but not “the good life” (50, emphasis original)

The life of the industrial sow is a vestige of an earlier form of human society. Her health is required–and it is enforced/policed by the Master, by Big Pork. When age or disease makes health impossible–the sow is killed. She becomes what she can no longer (re)produce: pork.

Unlike the industrial sow, living as she does in a disciplinary society, Han argues that we live in an achievement society. In our case, we have returned to the wild, and the internalized imperative of absolute survival is our Master.

The distinguishing feature of the achievement society is self-regulation. Gone are the days of an external Master ruling over their sows. Nowadays, we enter the crate of (re)production of our own “free” will.

Our eagerness to (re)produce breeds burnout because closure or an end to (re)production is not forthcoming in our survival society. Ultimately, our inability to live up to our ideal–to endlessly live/produce–stuns us.

II. Humans in a Crate

The achievement society is a “capitalist economy [that] absolutizes survival” (50). The survival society is, according to Han, an active, multi-tasking society:

Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. . . In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. . . . The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produces a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal . . . . Concern for the good life, which includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival (12-13).

As driven animals, we do not require external motivation to (re)produce. “That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow” (46).

According to Han, I am “predator and prey at once.” I “exploit” myself (10, 19). I am unable to be unproductive.

Yet, we are not aware that we have walked into and are living entirely within the gestation crate. The achievement-subject “thinks itself free of all foreign constraint” but is “entangled in destructive self-constraints” (47).

III. Stunned

What our entanglement in the crate of our freedom achieves is burnout and depression. “Burnout . . . often precedes depression” (44).

Burnout is the fatigue experienced by the “entrepreneur of the self” (Agony of Eros, 9). It is the result of “voluntary self-exploitation,” of being a “flexible person,” of constantly changing to meet the current demands of the market (Burnout, 44, emphasis original).

The real ego strives to keep up with the demand, the ever-new market, now projected as the ego ideal. The problem is that closure/gratification is not forthcoming—one never arrives at their desired destination.

Thus, I turn on myself. “In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach” (47).

Depression is the deepening of fatigue/burnout. “The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down . . . it locks its jaws on itself . . . this leads the self to hallow and empty out” (42).

The depressive subject is characterless, formless, chaotic. The depressive lacks the strength to rebrand. It is stuned.

IV. Blood Bath

Han offers a promising antidote to the (re)production of the achievement society: the tired society. We may appreciate his constructive proposal more if we address an aspect of his analysis that I think is incorrect, in addition to some reservations I have with it.

My reservations are as follows:

First reservation: Is the split between an older disciplinary society and the contemporary achievement society (even more regressive than the previous disciplinary society) as clear and radical as Han seems to think it is?

The success of Donald Trump in the U.S. indicates that the distinction between the two societies is not so clear. Trump masterfully deployed the immunological imaginary of the disciplinary society, casting the Other as a contagion–a dire threat to the pure blood of the social body. Trump’s strategy would not have worked if the idea of otherness had been weak or powerless, as it is in Han’s achievement society.

It does seem like the old disciplinary logic is lurking in the background. Perhaps repressed, it erupts into view every so often.

Second reservation: It is also hard not to notice in Han’s writing what I call a mystical flair. In Agony of Eros, Han asserts that “[e]ros conquers depression” (4). The Other is salvation from what Han calls absolute positivity or “the inferno of the same.”

But at what cost? The self.

In his Forward to The Agony of Eros, Alain Badiou reminds us that the “vanishing of the self in the Other–has a long and glorious history: the mystical love of God . . . ” (xi). While Badiou cites Saint John of the Cross as an example, there are others, like Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete.

From them we learn that self-evacuation/immobilization tends to lead in one of two directions: either to 1) the reification of the self–i.e., to auto-eroticism–(e.g., Mechthild); or to 2) the evacuation of the self (e.g., Angela, Porete). The outcome is not guaranteed.

Moreover, the difference between them is not clear. The inferno of the same melts identity down, leaving it to suffocate in its blood, while the freeze(?) of the Other immobilizes the self, incapacitating it.

The idea seems to be that immanence/same without transcendence/Other is a kind of hell (or a deadly illusion) and transcendence/Other without immanence/same is a kind of heaven (i.e., the real). Ok, but if the same/self/Own is irrelevant in either case, why are the respective “destinations” evaluated differently?

Third reservation: Han does not consider animal development in his philosophy. Animal development is not a novel philosophical topic. For example, Rousseau observes that the infant begins in monarchy (i.e., the same).

Her Majesty then enters into a relationship with the maternal parent(s) (i.e., Other[s]). Only then, if she is lucky, does she begin to leave the family sphere and enter society–hopefully as a citizen committed to love and reciprocity.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum carefully considers human development in her work (see, e.g., Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice [2013] and The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis [2018]). One benefit of such an approach is a more supple history and theory of the relationship between the same and the Other.

For example, Nussbaum consistently points out the ongoing threat of monarchy, or what Han describes as “the inferno of the same.” However, what Han considers a return to animality, Nussbaum recognizes as an aspect of human animal development.

So much for my reservations. What do I think Han gets wrong? I think he is wrong about the status of psychoanalysis in the supposed era of the absolute achievement society.

V. In the Beginning: the Unconscious

In Burnout, Han asserts that “Freudian psychoanalysis is only possible in repressive societies that found their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commandments.” Han claims that the “late-modern achievement subject possesses an entirely different psyche than the obedience-subject for whom Freud conceived psychoanalysis” (36, emphasis original).

“The Freudian unconscious,” Han recognizes, “is not a formation that exists outside of time.” The unconscious is also not, pace Han, “a product of a disciplinary society . . . that we have long left behind” (36). The formation of the unconscious does not depend on society.

Jean Laplanche, for example, argues that the unconscious is formed by “enigmatic signifiers,” messages from adults (what I am calling the maternal caregiver[s]/Other[s]) that are untranslatable by the infant/child. Consequently, these messages are repressed–forming “a certain type of reality, called the unconscious” (“A Short Treatise on the Unconscious”, 92).

Han may respond that Freud ultimately rejected the seduction theory that Leplanche revives, giving primacy to the Other in the formation of the unconscious. Yes, Freud argues that the unconscious is formed in response to the instincts. In so doing, Freud makes otherness an intractable, internal feature of the human being (i.e., the biological organism, the human body, or the same).

Society, of whatever kind, need not play a (primary) role in the formation of the unconscious. The unconscious originates as a result of trauma, specifically the shock of human existence, starting at birth.

VI. Entangling/Entangled Desire

The formation of the unconscious does not depend on social organization–and this detail is significant because without the unconscious, there can be neither an achievement society nor a viable source of resistance to it.

The unconscious is the source of desire, and Han’s achievement society, it seems to me, is driven–not by instinct–but by desire. Desire is inherently unentangled. As such, it drags the subject of desire in various directions. In this way, meaning is (re)produced.

Desire flits from this to that, like a hummingbird, (re)producing meaning out of originally disentangled, unconscious materials. Desire perpetually entangles–that is, it (re)forms the unentangled chaos of the unconscious.

The unconscious is also an occasion, at least within a Lacanian framework, for the entanglement of desire. This is an important observation because Han’s achievement society is, it seems to me, both frenetically active and frozen in place.

In the achievement society, the hummingbird flits about in a cage. The cage is the death drive.

The drive captures desire, entangling it in a cycle of repetition. Now, the hummingbird returns to the same flower again and again. In this way, the drive tires desire.

Tiring desire, the drive, the cage in which desire is captured, potentially frees it from the confines of the crate in which it is unknowingly circulating. Slowed, desire is potentially forced to see the crate/the thing in which it has unknowingly constrained itself.

Han’s achievement society is entirely diagnosable, if you will, from within a psychoanalytic framework–and in a sense that is entirely consistent with Han’s argument. The unconscious is a powerful resource for rethinking–and even for refocusing–political desire.

VII. The Entangled Society

In my view, the Other is the figure of the death drive in Han’s Burnout Society. The Other entangles or tires (as opposed to exhausts) the same–potentially opening it up to a new relationship with the world, women, and men.

Han, commenting on Peter Handke’s work, “Essay on Tiredness,” locates a form of tiredness that opens up “a space of friendliness-as-indifference, where ‘no one and nothing dominates or commands'” (31). Han observes that “[s]uch ‘fundamental tiredness’ brings together all the forms of existence and coexistence that vanish in the course of absolutized activity” (32).

Handke’s “we-tiredness”–a tired with you, as opposed to “I-tiredness,” a tired of you–opens up a potentially playful space between Others (33, 34). Han defines the space between as the Sabbath.

Han notes that Sabbath “originally meant stopping” (33, emphasis original). It is a day to stop commanding and being commanded. Duty and/or desire rest. This is the single day God calls holy. “It is a day of tiredness,” Han writes, “a time of, and for, play” (34).

The religion of the entangled society is “an immanent religion of [fundamental] tiredness” (34, emphasis original). It is a society in the grip of a playful drive, one inspiring new connections, curiosity, and openness without yielding to the pressure to achieve anything.

The entangled society is not the society of no! or yes we can!–it is the society of see what happens when you (are) stop(ped) and you play.

In my view, Han comes very close to theorizing a society that recombines duty and desire, reality and pleasure principles. Isn’t that what play enables, relationships with Others that are also pleasing–and even potentially new? But at the last moment, Han dances away, escaping “the achievement-principle entirely” (24).

Gender Politics & the Indoctrination of Boys

Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America recently interviewed the inimitable Representative Sarah McBride (D-Delaware). Among McBride’s interesting insights and arguments is the idea that the two major U.S. political parties are gendered. Republicans are gendered masculine (or identified in terms of fatherhood). Democrats are gendered feminine (or identified in terms of motherhood).

Here’s their conversation (if you prefer to watch, jump in at 12:44):

Rep. McBride: I’ve been thinking about how do you fight back against Trump in a smart way . . . because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We’ve been screaming about democracy. . . rights and the rule of law for so long—and clearly, this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. . . .

The Democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It’s why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong—and why when [Democrats] scream and yell we’re seen as hysterical and shrill. It’s why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country—because we tolerate deadbeat dads, but Democrats can’t say anything about any voters that [impugn] their motives and their good faith—because a mom has to love every single one of her children. So, I’ve been thinking about how do you grapple with that reality that is a real double standard. . . .

Lovett: Let’s test this new way of talking . . . . You’re trying to make people understand how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is coming after basic academic freedom, but you’re worried it’s not going to resonate with people. How do you talk about it?

Rep. McBride: With all of these actions that we’re seeing against immigrants, against institutions, [the Trump Administration is] picking on the most unpopular, the most vulnerable. They’re picking on people who are easy targets. I do think . . . you have to go back to what we were talking about before, which is that if they can do it [to them], they can do it to you . . . . They can do it to my constituents . . . . I think we can do a better job by making the main character [of our story] our constituents.

Changing our political situation requires, McBride claims, recognizing how political party affiliation is gendered. For example, Republicans can get away with being angry, but Democrats must always be empathetic. “[A] mom,” McBride says, “has to love every single one of her children.”

Motherhood is often the object of politics because the public sphere, the sphere of politics, is gendered masculine. The traditional story is that politics is for men; the management of the home is for women. For McBride, motherhood is the subject of political action.

But what is maternal politics, exactly? In her response to Lovett’s question about how to discuss maternal politics in the context of education, McBride attempts to clarify the character of partisan gendered politics. Her answer, namely that the mother protects “easy targets” of public abuse, isn’t specific enough–so it can’t inspire serious Democratic political action.

In what follows, I ask a revised version of Lovett’s question to McBride: How do you talk about maternal politics in the context of early childhood public education? To answer the question well, we need a definition of maternal politics that is specific enough to avoid confusion (e.g., terrorist organizations like Moms for Liberty claim to love all children) and to provoke serious liberal and/or progressive public action. I propose the following definition:

Maternal politics = public action(s) to secure and defend a boy’s right to become a man who desires like a woman/mother.

Why a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother? Consider recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding an opt-out option for religious conservatives who do not want their children exposed to readings that mention/feature same-sex desire in the public school classroom. It was a book about male same-sex marriage that caught the attention of conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

Conservatives are manifestly not as passionate or concerned about a girl’s public education. What they care about is the reproduction of traditional or normative masculinity. Hence their focus on male same-sex desire. Conservatives think that male homosexuality is especially threatening to the future of straight maleness.

I think my definition of maternal politics helps explain the recurring outbursts of straight anxiety about male homosexuality and the “indoctrination” of boys in our public elementary school. Furthermore, the specificity of my definition of maternal politics (one of many possible proposals) allows us to form a more direct and beneficially partisan answer to (the revised version of) Lovett’s question about gender politics and academic freedom in Trump’s U.S.

Here is the take I will explain and defend below: Conservatives have used the public school system to indoctrinate boys, and we have generally failed to resist it because we (unconsciously) agree with the “obvious” meaning of the conservative premise: boys should be boys. Instead, we should reform early childhood public education by securing and defending a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother.

A traditional public school education entails learning skills, especially (though it is never explicitly acknowledged) the skill (and appreciation) of straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity). Between the ages of 5 and 6, boys are forced by law to leave the sphere of maternal power (i.e., the home/family) and enter the public school system. It is in the public school classroom that they begin to learn, formally (i.e., curriculum) and informally (i.e., socially), to desire “proper” manhood or straight maleness.

The irony is that the reproduction of “proper” manhood necessarily requires/inspires homoerotic desire. Boys must be motivated to undertake an education in normative masculinity. Thus, they are taught to want men/manhood.

You may argue that what boys are taught is the protocols of normative masculinity rather than to desire adult males–but the foundation of straight logic is that sex, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked. Male/penis > masculine > heterosexual. In other words, a boy can’t want masculinity without also wanting men.

A second irony: the propagation of masculinity requires a boy to desire like a woman/mother. The transmission of normative masculinity from one generation to the next requires, at least initially, the misalignment of sex, gender, and desire (i.e., male/penis desiring man/masculine). It is at this early stage that normative masculinist logic shows its ass (= its vulnerability).

The vulnerability of normative masculinity is its unnaturalness. In other words, “proper” maleness does not inevitably proceed from being born with a penis. “Proper” maleness must be taught.

The fact that straight maleness is taught is not exactly the problem. The way normative masculinity is taught is the source of its tyranny. “Normal” masculinity is presented uncritically, and it requires uncritical acceptance to be mistaken for normal (i.e., natural) or, as the Trump Administration prefers, for “biological truth.”

Traditionally, this is why the acknowledgment of (male) homosexuality in public schools has been a source of straight panic. It exposes the hole of straight maleness: straight masculinity is not natural. It is optional.

Nowadays, homosexuality is not as often considered inherently opposed to straight masculinity. It’s an interesting development. Today, dudes sucking dick (homie head, brojob, etc.) is just another way for boys to be boys.

Straight ideology is flexible, and gay identity politics is clever. It’s a win-win situation: straight masculinity remains (if not natural) inherently desirable, and male homosexuals are welcome to enjoy its privileges–well, at least if they are good students, willing to learn/embody the protocols of “proper” masculinity.

So, recent arguments before the Supreme Court about readings in public schools that mention same-sex desire may be read as a form of social progress. Before books that acknowledge the reality of happy adult male homosexual relationships (happiness being what I think Justice Alito means by the “subtle” moral message of the book that offends religious conservatives) defiled God’s male children, the biggest threat to the “proper” education of our male children was the gay male English teacher. And before the English teacher became sus, the “gay” male philosopher was considered the corrupter of male youth.

“In a famous passage in The Divine Comedy,” writes David M. Halperin in “Deviant Teaching” (2007, 146-167), Dante represents himself as encountering, in the course of his journey through Hell, the soul of [philosopher] Brunetto Latini . . .” (146). Why did Dante put poor Brunetto in Hell? “His sin is tellingly not named in Canto 15, but other passages in Inferno remove any doubts about its identity. Brunetto is damned for sodomy” (146).

When Dante asks him about his companions in Hell, Brunetto answers that “all were clerks and great men of letters, in the world defined by one [and the] same sin” (148). “Sodomy,” Halperin declares, “is evidently a sin to which literary scholars, critics, and writers (such as Dante himself) are particularly prone” (148).

Halperin, a public university English professor trained as a classicist–and no stranger to controversy–reminds us of “how ancient is the association between teaching and sodomy, between paedagogy and paederasty” (149). “[T]he abolition of any clear or firm distinction between the relation of teacher and student and the relation of lover and beloved is,” Halperin writes, “one of the most notorious consequences of Plato’s metaphysical theory of erotic desire” (149). Teaching “has an extended history of association with deviance and has long figured as a deviant practice” (151).

If gender were a “biological truth,” as the Trump Administration claims it is, then straight anxiety inspired by the fantasy of homosexual indoctrination in public schools would be a genuine absurdity. The reality of old school straight anxiety exposes a glitch in the code of masculinist transmission: gender is a social–not a biological–reality. It must be taught and learned.

For a boy to become a man, he must leave the maternal sphere, the home. He must also leave his father’s side. A boy’s father “is too closely tied to the boy by blood and domesticity . . . so they cannot fully . . . incarnate the cultural ideal of male identity . . . ” (151).

“Every proper boy,” Halperin writes, “has to have at least two daddies” (151, emphasis original). Boys learn to become traditional or “proper” men in the public sphere (e.g., schools, sports teams, etc.).

The glitch in the heteronormative educational regime is further exposed by how it represents the social transmission of masculinity (154-155). Consider how the Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize the reproduction of strong warrior men.

Elder males take boys ages 8-9 off into the forest where they are forced to perform oral sex on adolescent males. Halperin observes that the young boys are taught to think of “cock-sucking as a kind of breast-feeding” (155).

Ingesting semen, the boys receive the nourishment they require to grow “into real men who will be strong warriors” (155). They continue to ingest semen until they turn 15, at which point they become “the breast” for younger boys.

Listening to social and religious conservatives today, one would never know that third and fourth grade boys in the U.S. are not being taught to suck cock in public schools. What they are being taught, and in ways not entirely different from how the Sambia “represent to themselves symbolically the means by which they reproduce themselves socially,” is how to become proper Western men (156, emphasis original).

Halperin considers the 1953 Western movie Shane an example of a Western form of masculine transmission. The movie’s focus on the mechanics of masculine reproduction makes it a standout Western (157).

Shane is about how a 9-year-old boy, Joey, is made into a man (i.e., taught how to shoot a gun and fight) by a mysterious stranger, “a gunfighter and a killer” (i.e., a social deviant), a cowboy named Shane (158). Joey’s father cannot teach Joey how to become a man because he is too busy managing and defending the family farm. For obvious reasons, Joey’s mother can’t possibly teach him how to become a man.

Halperin compares Shane to the Holy Ghost. “It is only when Shane’s potent shadow falls across the holy American family that the family succeeds in . . . reproducing masculinity . . . and ensuring its own futurity” (159–for my reading of the Holy Ghost, go here). And “[g]unfighting in Shane is,” Halperin observes, “like cock-sucking among the Sambia: both are cultural practices connected with initiation into the symbolic order of masculinity and heavily laden with phallic meaning” (160).

The relationship between Shane and Joey mirrors the relationship between Shane and Joey’s mother, Marian. It is not sexual, but it is erotic. Marian wants to play with Shane’s pistol, too.

Like his mother, Joey feels some kind of way about Shane. In desiring him, Joey gives Shane the “charismatic power necessary to enable those enamored of him (Joey and male viewers) to accede to manhood by means of identification, emulation, and endless, unfulfilled desire for him” (160).

Moreover, Joey’s desire for Shane is no accident. Like Socrates, Shane has a way with his young male students (160-161). Shane makes his manhood hot to both Marian and Joey (= it’s object a). He inspires Joey (and male viewers) to observe his gun obsessively. Masculinity is transmitted “ocularly” in Shane (162).

In seeing/receiving Shane’s manhood, the male viewers “make the supposedly identity-affirming, gender-consolidating experience of masculine identification coincide, as if nothing could be more normal, with the urgent and inescapable solicitation of homoerotic desire” (162).

Question: Did Shane indoctrinate Joey? Did Shane require Joey to accept his warrior manhood uncritically to begin becoming a “real” man? No. Joey wanted the manhood Shane offered him.

Masculine indoctrination requires boys to accept Shane’s manhood as “biological truth.” In that way, Shane becomes the “proper” man, the kind of man boys must become to be considered real men, the type of man women must desire and whose prerogatives they must support to be identified as pious/conservative/real women.

Shane’s “Republican manhood,” if you will, undoubtedly continues to appeal to women/mothers and their boys. I accept that, and I am prepared to secure and defend a boy’s right to want Shane and to become a man who either desires women/mothers or other men who desire men like Shane.

There is nothing inherently wrong with conservative masculinity. That is, I think, a liberal (if not progressive) position to hold–and it is consistent with McBride’s–and my own–definition of maternal politics. “[A] mom has love every single one of her children.”

Apparently, dads have a choice in the matter.

What I reject is the fascist spirit that often animates a traditional education in straight maleness. Republican manhood is manifestly not appealing to every boy. It is not even appealing to every boy’s parents, and there is no reason to believe it will appeal to all who will enter a boy’s life as an adult male.

Moreover, it is an offense to common sense and reason (and I, as a biblical Christian theologian, think it is an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ) to enforce, as a matter of (unacknowledged) policy or law, Republican manhood. If “biological truth” requires the enforcement of norms and/or the sword of law, just how biological–or true–is it?

The assertion of the biological truth of gender reveals that social and religious conservatives have, like a God, forgotten themselves:

For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago–and verily they had a good and joyful Gods’ end! Theirs was no mere “twilight” death–that is a lie!

Rather: one day they–laughed themselves to death!

This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself–the words: “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!” . . . a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus:

And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked their chairs and shouted: “Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods but no God?”

He that hath ears let him hear (Thus Spoke Zarathustra [(1883) 2003], 201, italics original).

In a gloss on this passage, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought he was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated) (Unforbidden Pleasures [2015], 42).

In another text–but in a similar context–Halperin describes how the “inner superiority” of straight maleness may work out in the context of sexuality and gender, nowadays:

If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer [remember: declaring “no homo” after receiving, e.g., homie head will protect you from appearing (too) queer] it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, italics mine).

As we discovered earlier, the propagation of straight maleness can accommodate a disconnect between sex and sexuality. Nowadays, being a homosexual doesn’t necessarily make you a sus male (i.e., gaaaaaay).

The chronic misalignment of sex/penis (male) and normative gender style (straight maleness) does, however, remain socially problematic. At some point, one must put childish ways behind them.

At this point, straightness has shown a lot of ass. It concedes that heterosexuality is not natural. No one (bi, lesbian, gay, straight, none) knows what determines one’s sexuality (or lack thereof). It also concedes that straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity) is not natural: it does not proceed naturally from having a penis. It must be taught (and even enforced).

And given that gender does not proceed naturally from sex or depend on one’s sexuality, it follows that anyone, of whatever sex or sexuality, can, if they so desire, learn a specific gender style. Women can, at least in principle, learn to embody normative masculinity.

What all this means is that the claim of straightness to have no other Gods before it is laughable. But the Gods before it need not laugh themselves to death! Instead, they can get on with baptizing newly persuaded converts.

The epigraph of How To Be Gay, a description of gay male masculinity, or masculinity that is gendered feminine because it is resistant to straight maleness, reads: “Let the pagans beget and the Christians baptize” (see also How To Be Gay, 532-533).

The epigraph of How To Be Gay echoes the central argument of Halperin’s essay, “Deviant Teaching”: The “introduction . . . to [non-sexual methods of instruction in maleness,] to non-standard ways of seeing, to distinctive ethical and aesthetic modes of relating to the surrounding culture, to a unique set of sensibilities, and to dissident ways of reading cultural objects (movies, opera, Broadway musicals, emblems of fashion and styles, embodiments of masculinity) [is] what I have been calling deviant teaching,” and what, in How To be Gay, is called gay male subculture (“Deviant Teaching,” 165).

Gay male subculture, as a deviant form of masculine propagation (i.e., it resists the allure of straight maleness), is similar to straight maleness in that it does not depend on either one’s sex or sexuality. It is a style that anyone who finds persuasive may learn to embody.

Gay maleness is among the gods a boy may reasonably desire. Accordingly, maternal politics entails defending and securing a boy’s right to become a man who desires women/mothers or other men who desire gayness.

As a non-normative gender style, a lifestyle misaligned with one’s sex, gayness is a form of Trans*ness (I use the * to indicate gender nonconformity in addition to sex nonconformity). However, Trans*ness moves us well beyond gender misalignment to sexual misalignment.

In her interview on Pod Save America, McBride addresses one of the challenges of Trans* politics (42 minutes in):  

I think one of the challenges that we have in conversations around Trans identities that’s different than conversations around gay rights is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust –and so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. People who aren’t Trans don’t know what it feels like to be Trans–and for me the closest thing that I can compare it to is a constant feeling of homesickness, just this unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed and live as myself . . . .

I imagine one reality that Rep. McBride is expressing here is that her body initially provoked a conversation: Is this you? She answered either “No” or “Not exactly.” I am guessing (because I am unfamiliar with the details of her experience) that McBride desired a new alignment of sex and gender–and one made possible by a radically new understanding of sex: sex, like gender, is not a natural fact. Sex is an opportunity for conversation rather than indoctrination.

Although Evangelical men really want women to have penises, male to female Trans* experience constitutes an upheaval of normative thought. It inspires intense—and, unfortunately, intensely irrational—emotions.

The animus directed toward Trans* women is a fruit of the fascist spirit that often underlies the commitment to the reproduction of Republican manhood–and one that more than a few fruits enjoy. We have only to think of Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is usually an interesting and nuanced public intellectual, but his screeds against “big trans” are becoming increasingly overdetermined (i.e., inspired by irrational forces). On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan comments:

I love the idea that Democrats should get back into building things, into making things happen, into deregulating, into supercharging the economy. I just think that until the Democrats address some of the core issues, they seem not to want to control immigration. They have extremist views about race. They think that boys should compete with girls in sports, and that children should be… have their sex reassigned. Until they grapple with that. . . .

We have not taught civics in this country. They’re too busy learning that America is white supremacist without learning that there are three branches of government. They’re all separate. They’re kept apart so that we can be freer than other countries. Why are we teaching that? We should be teaching that (italics mine).

The claim that Democrats “think . . . that children should be . . . have their sex reassigned” is blatantly false. I am curious, though, about the Levitical themes of Sullivan’s commentary: separation and purity.

Sullivan seems to think biological males should not be separated from their penises–even when they desire to be so separated. In his view, effeminate gay boys are being misled by “big trans” into thinking they are Trans* women rather than gay males. “Big trans,” again in Sullivan’s view, is “transing away the gay.”

The second of Sullivan’s falsehoods, related, I think, to the first, is: “We have not taught civics in this country.” Sullivan seems to believe that “we” have not learned anything about the separation of powers–and too much about the separation of racial groups enforced by those same powers for several centuries.

Is his argument that “we” would become less preoccupied with white supremacy if “we” were taught the philosophy of “separate but equal”? If I am not mistaken, “we” were taught in school that Sullivan’s approach is not unique in history. Hence the focus on white supremacy.

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read the argument of the unruly forces underlying Sullivan’s Leviticus-like political theology this way: In a good society, penises should remain attached to their original bodies; races, like the branches of the U.S. government (like the sexes?), should be separate but equal.

Maternal politics, at least as I understand it, entirely rejects Sullivan’s (unconscious) definition of a “good” society. Instead, it defends and secures a biological male’s right to discern who they are, really–including a woman/mother who desires women and/or men who desire a new alignment of sex and gender.

Maternal politics, as I understand it, is a form of deviant politics. Securing and defending the right of boys to become (wo)men who desire like women/mothers takes us into scandalous and fraught territory.

How do we talk about maternal politics across a range of issues that are important to our fellow citizens? In other words, how do we make it an electorally desirable politics? If we allow ourselves to have a real conversation about the political body, what is our answer to the question, Is this us?

If maternal politics appeals to us, it could be defined more broadly as taking public action(s) to secure and defend everyone’s right to have complicated conversations about the political body, especially now. Among the lessons Trump has (unknowingly) taught us is that we require a genuine upheaval of political thought.

How Fear Influenced the 2024 Election Outcome

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:

  1. “[P]ortray the impending event as highly significant for survival or well-being”
  2. “[M]ake people think it is close at hand”
  3. “[M]ake people think that things are out of control—they can’t ward off the bad thing easily on their own.”
  4. “[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:

  1. The U.S. of House of Representatives is even now, November 18, 2024, trying to change House rules to bar the first openly trans* woman elected to Congress, Delaware state senator Sarah McBride, from using the women’s restroom. The effort is being led by Nancy Mace. When asked if she has spoken to McBride, Mace declared, “Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man.” The next day, on her X account, she apparently called for respect and kindness. What is Mace afraid of? ↩︎
  2. See Rousseau, Emilie: or On Education (1762), Book I, 66. Nussbaum does not “follow the details of his views, but develops his initial insight in [her] own way” (22). ↩︎
  3. See Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1998). ↩︎
  4. See Aristotle, Rhetoric I.2,9 and II.5. ↩︎
  5. See, e.g., Cass R. Sunstein, Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and Environment (2002). ↩︎
  6. Trump does not make a distinction between immigrants and refugees. The essential difference being that refugees are seeking asylum and residing in the U.S. legally. ↩︎
  7. See also Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2018). ↩︎
  8. See, Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.2. ↩︎
  9. See also Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), dedicated to David Halperin, and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010). See the final chapter of the latter text for a rigorous defense of sex work and public sex. ↩︎
  10. It was reported on November 13, 2024 that Trump desires to deport one million immigrants a year. Just today, November 18, 2024, Trump promised to deploy the U.S. military in this operation. Hopefully, his demonstrated incompetence will stop him from implementing this and other cruel policies. ↩︎
  11. See Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be True in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Kant: Political Writings (1991), ed. Hans Reiss. ↩︎
  12. It is in the context of describing a reasonable love that Paul asserts that he “put an end to childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Perhaps he means that what constitutes love is not always clear, at least to adults. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly” (13:12). ↩︎
  13. See Nussbaum, Monarchy of Fear, 226-231. ↩︎
  14. “Defund the police” is a very powerful theological idea, at least to this gay white Christian theologian. As a politics, especially one attuned to people’s propensity to fear, it is toxic, especially to political campaigns that agree on the need for reforms in policing. ↩︎
  15. See Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999): “So although sex is public in this mass-mediatized culture to a degree that is probably without parallel in world history [esp. now, in 2024], it is also true that anyone who is associated with actual sex can be particularly demonized . . . . But some people are more exposed in their sexuality than others” (23). ↩︎
  16. “Cancel culture” has generally proven deleterious to the necessary task of creating environments wherein people may share disturbing thoughts, even and especially about what and who they fear. While I do not make an easy distinction between a person and their thoughts/actions, I do believe that a person can change their thought/actions, and so they can become a different kind of person. Honest, open, safe, and ongoing dialogue is, I believe, essential to this effort. ↩︎
  17. All references are to the Kindle edition. ↩︎
  18. Nussbaum writes, “(Winnicott made it clear that that ‘mother’ was not a specifically gendered person. . . .”) (34, emphasis mine). The “mother” is manifestly a gendered role. So, I have used sex in this context to indicate that “mother” can be either a male or a female person. ↩︎
  19. See Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (2017). ↩︎
  20. Foucault asserts that “[i]magining a sexual act that does not conform to the law or to nature, that’s not what upsets people. But that individuals might begin to love each other, that’s the problem. That goes against the grain of social institutions. . . . The institutional regulations cannot approve such. . . . relations: relations that produce a short circuit and introduce love where there ought to be law, regularity, and custom.” David M. Halperin cites Foucault’s comments made in an interview with Le Bitioux, et al., “De l’amitié come mode de vie,” 38, in Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography (1995), 98. See, further, now Halperin, “Queer Love,” Critical Inquiry, 45.2 (Winter 2019): 396-419. ↩︎
  21. See David M. Halperin, “What Is Sex For?,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Autumn 2016): 1-31, esp. 28. ↩︎
  22. See Halperin, “The Best Lover,” in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (2007), eds. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken, 8-21, esp. 12-14. Halperin again alludes to Augustine in How To Be Gay (2012). See the book’s epigraph. ↩︎
  23. See Halperin, “Platonic Erôs and What Men Call Love,” Ancient Philosophy 5 (1987): 161-204, esp. 163. ↩︎
  24. Halperin, “Platonic Erôs,” 168. ↩︎
  25. Halperin, “Platonic Erôs,” 168. ↩︎
  26. See Halperin, “Loves Irony: Six Remarks on Platonic Eros,” in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern (2005), eds. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer, 48-58, esp. 52. ↩︎
  27. Halperin, “The Best Lover,” 13, and Augustine, Confessions 4.4.7. ↩︎
  28. See the “Introduction to the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of a People’s History of the United States” (2015) by Anthony Arnove. ↩︎
  29. See, e.g., Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Judaism and Christianity: Two Fourth-Century Religions,” in Sciences Religieuses / Studies in Religion 2 (1972): 1-10. ↩︎

Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals, and the Ethical Problem of Animal Predation

I.

Animal predation is an ethical problem. Smart human intervention is required to address it. Or so Martha Nussbaum argues in Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022):

We need above all to convince people that predation is a problem. Too many people grow up excited and enthralled by predation, and this has had a bad effect on our entire culture. It’s important to keep pointing out that antelopes were not made to be food, they were made to live antelope lives. The fact that they so often do not get to live those lives is a problem, and since we are in charge everywhere we need to figure out how much we can and should do about it (252).

Nussbaum’s analysis of “the wild” comes late in Justice for Animals (see chapter 10, “The ‘Wild’ and Human Responsibility”), and there is a reason for that: the idea that we should somehow intervene in “the wild,” especially in “wild” behaviors like animal predation, will likely strike many readers as totally bizarre.

So, it’s important to step back and acquaint ourselves with the development of Nussbaum’s argument before we directly engage the character of animal predatory behavior as an ethical problem in chapter 10.

Below is an outline of what is covered in this overview:

  • What is justice? (chapter 1, section II. below)
  • Inadequate approaches to animal ethics (chapters 2-4, section III. below)
  • Nussbaum’s Capability Approach (CA) to animal justice (chapter 5, section IV. below)
  • Sentience and the subjects of (in)justice (chapter 6, section V. below)
  • When is death a harm? (chapter 7, section VI. below)
  • The Problem of Predation (chapter 10, section VII. below)

I conclude by considering a few serious philosophical and ecological objections to interference with “wild predation.” I ultimately side with Nussbaum. For now, our task is to trace the ecological and philosophical trajectory of Nussbaum’s overall argument in Justice for Animals, namely that animals are subjects of (in)justice.

II.

Nussbaum begins by defining what she means by justice. She defines justice largely by contrasting it with injustice. “[T]he general intuition should be emerging more clearly: injustice centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate” (7-8, emphasis original).

“Significant striving” means that particular animals move with intention to obtain what is significant to them (e.g., shelter, play, friendship, etc.). When significant striving, deliberate movement to obtain “what is reasonably significant” to a particular animal, is unjustly blocked, it entails more than harm.

An animal may encounter any number of harms in the course of their significant striving, harms such as illness or a storm that destroys their nest (or worse). These harms are no one’s fault. Wrongful thwarting entails fault.

We are right to think that when someone with the power to act does so in a way they know, or should know, will wrongfully thwart another animal’s thriving, we are dealing with unjust action. We are also right to think that when someone with the power to act fails to exert that power in a way they know, or should know, will prevent the wrongful undermining of another animal’s thriving, we are dealing with unjust inaction (i.e., neglect).

For example, a child destroying a bird’s nest is wrongful thwarting of a bird’s significant striving. Likewise, a parent standing idly by as their kid smashes the nest is inaction that constitutes a wrongful thwarting of a bird’s significant striving. Justice, by contrast, is related to laws, norms, and institutions that reasonably support and enable significant striving.

But how do we (human animals) come to understand animal lives in terms of (in)justice? How do we get beyond the view of someone like John Rawls, who thought that while animals are worthy of our compassion, “they could not be treated justly or unjustly” (9)?

The ultimate answer to those questions is animal sentience. But for now, Nussbaum emphasizes three emotions that “have the potential to help us beyond our daily context” (9). They are:

  • Wonder, “like love, is epistemic: it leads us out of ourselves and awakens a nascent ethical concern” (12).
  • Compassion is feeling “pain at the significant suffering of another creature” (12).
  • Outrage “is a form of anger . . . . [this] species of anger turns to face forward, and its aim is to create a better future. For that reason I will call it Transition-Anger [because it is without a retributive wish]” (15).1

When these emotions are ethically attuned and joined together, they lead us in the right direction: “Wonder arrests our attention and draws us out of ourselves, inspiring curiosity about an alien world. Compassion links us to the suffering animal in a powerful emotional experience. Transition-Anger prepares us for action” (16).

In addition to these ethically attuned and intertwined emotions, we need a good theory for comprehending animal lives as subjects of (in)justice. Nussbaum carefully assesses three major approaches to animal ethics, and she points out how they fail to adequately comprehend animal lives as subjects of (in)justice.

III.

The “So Like Us” approach to animal ethics is the first of the three approaches Nussbaum reviews, and it is the subject of chapter 2. The most influential advocate of this approach is Steven Wise.

The idea is that certain animals are like human beings, approximating human capabilities, and so they should be treated accordingly. Nussbaum contends that “[t]his theory is too narrow, unworthy of the alienness and sheer diversity of animal lives. And it is counterproductive as a strategy to expand animal entitlements” (19-20).

Yet, this approach has managed to move US judges with a basic Western education. Nussbaum defines Western education to further highlight why the “So Like Us” theory is too limited in scope and inadequate to guide our future efforts toward animal justice.

Underlying a basic Western education in animal ethics is the religious idea of the scala naturae: a fixed, natural ladder with humans at the top and other animals descending a scale of value/worth. This religious idea is often attributed to Aristotle. Nussbaum, however, is not convinced it is his idea, at least not in its popular, religious form.2

The “So Like Us” theory plays on the religious idea of the scala naturae, arguing that while apes, for example, have not risen to the level of human beings on the ladder, they have come up pretty close. So, it would seem reasonable to grant them legal rights associated with human personhood.3

There are many problems with this view. They are:

  • “[M]ost of the animal world still lies outside [as they are too unlike us] in the dark domain of thinghood” (31).
  • “The image of the scala naturae is not drawn from looking at nature, and it does not correspond to what we see when we look at nature . . .” (31).
  • “It leads to ugly projects in which humans imagine transcending their animal bodies by casting aspersions on the smells and fluids of the body” (32).
  • “[I]t leads to a focus on artificial performances that are not really characteristic of the species as it lives its life in the wild [i.e., (sign) language abilities]” (33).
  • Wise and others, like Thomas White, privilege “likeness over strangeness [although White has since adopted the CA approach]” (38).

The second view of animal ethics Nussbaum assesses is that of the British Utilitarians. They are the subject of chapter 3. While they emphasize “the commonality of all animals in our shared pain,” they still come up short of animal justice in some essential ways (39).

The British Utilitarians Nussbaum has in mind are Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. She also includes Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and close follower of British Utilitarian ideas, in her analysis of Utilitarian thought applied to animal ethics.

Utilitarian thinkers advance animal rights in critical ways. Bentham, for example, compared “our treatment of other animals to slavery” (40). He also recognized that animals suffer; “suffering [is] a common bond among all animals” (56).

The key ethical facts for Bentham are pleasure and pain. “The aim of a rational politics should be to maximize the net balance of pleasure over pain in the universe” (40).

Bentham also challenged the idea of the natural ladder. “[Animals] should not be treated as things or property, and their interests should be treated with as much attention as those of humans, ‘allowance made for the difference in point of sensibility.'” In other words, “similar interests should be treated similarly, but something that is irrelevant to the interests of the creature should not matter in thinking about its needs” (43).

Utilitarians also recognize animal sentience and the importance of sentience as a threshold for defining the subject of (in)justice (see section V. below). The main problem with Utilitarian animal ethics is the singular focus on pain and pleasure.

While Mill takes a more nuanced view of pleasure (including the fact that we may take pleasure in terrible things, like killing animals), the singular focus on pleasure and pain ignores the fact that animal “lives have other relevant aspects: dignity, social capacity, play, planning, and free movement among others” (56).

The third theory of animal ethics Nussbaum reviews is that of Kantian Christine Korsgaard. Korsgaard fashions animal ethics in Kantian terms: animals are ends in themselves and not merely means. The difficulty with her theory is the character of and undue emphasis on human rationality or moral reasoning.

Kant did not hold animals in high esteem because he believed they lacked “the capacity for ethical choice” and so, citing Kant, they may be used “as we please” (58). Kant did, however, argue against the cruel treatment of animals. He thought unkindness to animals made humans unkind to one another. Nonetheless, Kantian ethics is important for its emphasis on the “inviolability and dignity of the individual creature” (58).

The central idea Korsgaard takes from Kantian ethics and applies to animal ethics is the second version of the Categorical Imperative: “So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (my emphasis). How this imperative applies to animals, and not just to “humanity,” requires further explanation.

Kant thought that humans, on account of our unique ability to reflect ethically and to make choices, are the only species “who can be obligated and have duties” (65, emphasis original). Korsgaard argues that it does not follow that “we are the only creatures who can be the objects of duties, creatures to whom duties are owed” (65, emphasis original).

Korsgaard is right, but for Aristotelian reasons. Aristotle thought animals are “self-maintaining systems who pursue a good and who matter to themselves” (65).

If we accept this view, as both Korsgaard and Nussbaum do, it follows that human animals are ethically obligated to respect and value the, to use Nussbaum’s term, “significant striving” of animals. We have an ethical obligation to treat animals as ends and not merely as means, that is, if we wish to be ethically consistent.

The fact that my cat is an animal with goals and purposes does not, however, collapse the difference(s) between my cat and myself, leading us back to a “So Like Us” approach to animal ethics. My cat is to be treated as an end and not merely as a means because of his catness and not because he resembles something approximating my humanness. Korsgaard, Nussbaum contends, “avoids most of the errors of the ‘So Like Us’ approach, but in the end she ties herself to a version of it: the value of animals is derivative from likeness to humanity” (67).

The significant difference between Korsgaard and Nussbaum is the line the former draws between special human rationality (i.e., autonomous will) and animal nature. For Nussbaum, “all of our capacities are part of our animal nature” (65).

So, human rationality, human ethical reasoning, may make me different from, say, my cat, but it doesn’t make me somehow less animal (to be clear, Korsgaard rejects human superiority), and it doesn’t make my cat a machine of instincts, a creature incapable of a cat-specific kind of ethical reasoning.

Animal studies alert us to the ethical capabilities of many kinds of animals. “[Sperm whales, macaws, chimpanzees a]ll have social mechanisms for teaching young members appropriate social norms, thus developing instinctual endowments in a direction that promotes group and individual welfare. And isn’t that really what all good parents are trying to do?” (75). In other words, good sperm whale parents teach their children how to be good sperm whales.

Nussbaum takes from Kant the emphasis on individual animal worth. She takes from Aristotle the emphasis on the dignity of all animals. Developing her own approach, she avoids all the pitfalls mentioned earlier: the split between rationality and nature, the myopic focus on maximizing aggregate pleasure, and the emphasis on animal likeness to human animal capabilities.

IV.

In chapter 5, Nussbaum describes her Capabilities Approach (CA) and begins to show how it applies to animal ethics. What is the Capabilities Approach?

The CA “argues that a society is even minimally just only if it secures to each individual citizen a minimum threshold amount of a list of Central Capabilities, which are defined as substantial freedoms, or opportunities for choice and action in areas of life that people in general have reason to value. . . it emphasizes material empowerment more than do many rights-based approaches [, and] it leaves spaces for individual freedom” (80, emphasis original).

Like Korsgaard’s Kantian-inspired theory, CA understands “each individual creature . . . as having dignity that law and politics must respect, treating that individual as an end, not simply as a means” (81). It does not, however, set human moral powers above “other aspects of animal living, and it sees all human powers as parts of the equipment of a mortal and vulnerable animal who deserves a fair shake in life—as do all sentient animals” (81).

CA moves beyond a simple, singular focus on GDP, a national measure of economic health. “Short-sighted development policies often aim to make people feel good rather than to empower them. ‘What are people (and what is each person) actually able to do and to be?’ The [CA] asks, and answers, that very practical question” (84, 86). Again, CA recognizes significant striving, in this case, the fact that we humans, each of us, are “active beings seeking a flourishing life that they themselves create” (87).

Each human being needs certain things, certain entitlements or rights, in order to flourish. The 10 central capabilities are listed below (see 89 for a full explanation of each). “One way of thinking about what all the items on the list have in common is that they all seem to be inherent in the intuitive idea we form of a life that is worthy of human dignity” (91):

  1. Life
  2. Bodily Health
  3. Bodily Integrity
  4. Senses, Imagination, Thought
  5. Emotions
  6. Practical Reason
  7. Affiliation
  8. Other Species
  9. Play
  10. Control Over One’s Environment

We don’t all need—or want—all of the above capabilities (at least not every aspect of each); each of us is free to choose among them to create the lives we want for ourselves. Yet, if any one of the capabilities were removed, we would rightly feel that human life is being treated as a means rather than an end.

The role of government, of law and policy, is to secure “the capabilities for all.” The capabilities list “is a list of fundamental tasks of government” (92).

Critically, “[t]his doesn’t mean that people always should rely on government to solve their problems. . . . But it does mean that the whole matter of justice depends on getting a stable political structure that is able, enough of the time, to deliver the capabilities to the people who chose and empowered it” (92, my emphasis).

Both Nussbaum and Korsgaard go beyond the Kantian focus on human dignity, incorporating an insight from the Utilitarian John Mill: “all sentient animals have a dignity of their own, which deserves respect” (92). Human dignity is, of course, different from the dignity of a dolphin, and the dolphin’s dignity is different from the elephant’s. But dignity is there, made manifest in each animal’s “pursuit of valued goals” (96).

What follows from this insight is an emphasis on a “characteristic form of life.” “Each form of life is different. . . . Being more like a human would not be good or pertinent for a magpie. We humans are similar to magpies, dolphins, and elephants in groping for survival and flourishing in a mostly hostile world; we differ in the specific nature of the goods we seek” (97).

If we concede that our human “strivings should not be thwarted,” why would we allow the thwarting of the particular strivings of other animals? While humans make laws, why must we make laws only for humans?

Animals cannot speak in Congress, but they do “speak” to us about their situation. Why should animals not have collaborators in Congress and in the courts, experts who carefully observe them and describe their situations to us? We do something similar when we hire an attorney to speak for us and make our case before a judge in a court of law.

There are many, intricate issues Nussbaum clarifies in this chapter, but I focus on only a few here. First, Nussbaum emphasizes individual dignity. Species-level thinking is helpful, and each species requires its own capabilities list (though Nussbaum’s CA list can act as a general guide for, say, what might be important capabilities for octopuses), but the individual, and their freedom to choose which capabilities are important to their own form of life, is privileged. Individual freedom within an entitlement structure is what is in view here. So, any one list may need to be modified to accommodate unforeseen capabilities.

Focus on the species takes on importance to the degree that, say, opportunities for affiliation is what individual members of a species need to flourish (e.g., for some octopuses, hanging out with their own species is not a big part of what they seek, although it is necessary for reproduction. However, many do seem to value community with different kinds of octopuses and with different species, with fish like groupers and with humans).

But are “rights” the right way to think about animal (in)justice? It’s difficult, for many reasons, to think animal rights, rights that can actually be reasonably guaranteed or supported. One reason is animals do not live neatly within local or even national borders. Nussbaum, following Kant, argues, “[a]t the base of our rights is a very simple idea: every human being has a right to be where he or she is. . . to having a share of control over what happens in the world” (114).

Extending rights to animals is a consequence of their dignity. They, too, have a right to be where they are, and so, like us, to have “a say” in what happens to them.

Animal rights are “‘imperfect rights’ . . . rights not against any definite person or animal, but, rather, against all human beings, against humanity imagined as capable of collective action” (113). Some animals, like dogs and cats, may be assigned specific responsibilities/duties to other animals (e.g., not to attack humans, other dogs, or birds), but animal rights are largely what human animals owe to all other sentient animals.

V.

In his elegant and moving book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, Republican Matthew Scully gets at why, in Nussbaum’s words, we need a “working boundary,” like sentience, when thinking about animal rights.

Scully cites animal rights skeptic, his friend and conservative, Joseph Sobran:

This would put us, the human race, in the position of policing the entire animal kingdom, making sure they don’t violate each other’s rights . . . . We would reduce our workload by allowing each species to police itself . . . even (if we mean business) the fly against the spider. . . (136).

Sobran’s intention is to mock animal rights, or, in Scully’s words, to mock “any notion of moral status for animals,” by showing that it “ends in absurdity” (136). The concept of sentience serves as “a working boundary” in Nussbaum’s approach to animal rights, and it is a critical idea, that is, if we want to avoid the absurdity of “policing” in the relationship between flies and spiders.

The subjects of (in)justice are sentient animals. Sentient animals are entitled to rights because they are animals capable of significant striving. But what does sentience mean more exactly?

Sentience means that the world looks like something to you. It relates to subjective experience, a way of feeling about the world and what is possible for you in the world.

Sentience means that you do not simply avoid pain and move toward pleasure. It means you pursue what you take as good for you and avoid what you discern is bad for you.

Sentience is, as Nussbaum observes, often reduced to the ability to feel pain (and pain is, as she notes and you know well, very bad for sentient creatures). But it also means that you have an opinion of yourself; you see yourself in a certain way, and you see others in your group, and other objects in the world, in a certain way. And you move accordingly, in a way that aligns with your sense of yourself and your sense of how the objects in your world conform to your understanding of what is good and bad for you. That is sentience.

“What I am saying,” Nussbaum writes, “is that my core notion of injustice can apply only to creatures who are capable of significant striving, and that involves [sentience]” (119). And most animals are, we know from scientific studies, sentient, “including all mammals, all birds, and teleost (hard-boned) fish . . .” (119).

Nussbaum goes on to lay out the reasoning, the evidence grounding the identification of sentient creatures, including humans. Nussbaum concludes, “Significant striving, then, includes subjective perception of things that are helpful and harmful (the world looks like this to the animal), plus a variety of subjective attitudes, such as pain and pleasure, and, in addition, numerous other subjective states that motivate behavior: desires and emotions. The sentient animals we are describing have all of these abilities” (140).

In existential terms, sentient species—and individuals—inhabit a world.

It is not always easy to identify sentient animals (and, in the age of AIs, sentience may no longer be limited to animals4). For example, there are serious reasons to doubt that insects are sentient. Thus, we need not worry too much about rights for flies or spiders (although flies and spiders [and trees and plants and sharks] merit other kinds of ethical concern). However, bees may be sentient.

What we know with certainty is that the most ambiguous cases need not keep us from identifying the subjects of justice. Those animals that are, just as clearly as we are, sentient and so capable of significant striving.

VI.

Is death an injustice? Or, is death a harm? Does killing constitute a wrongful thwarting of significant striving?

We know that pain harms the significant striving of sentient creatures. So, we might think that killing animals humanely, that is, in such a way that they experience little to no pain, and for “legitimate” human purposes (e.g., to eat), is acceptable.

While one may take such a view, which is far better than that of those who believe animals may be killed however and for any reason, this view does not live up to the demands of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Killing animals humanely and for legitimate human purposes is to treat them merely as means and not as ends.

The main subject of chapter 7 is the “fringe” case of humans killing animals that are reasonably healthy and have lived reasonably long, good lives.

Nussbaum also draws our attention to the fact that animals kill one another, a topic she takes up in chapter 10. Moreover, animals killed by factory farming are not killed painlessly, and so their deaths are not the topic of this chapter. Furthermore, killing a companion animal because their cancer is incurable is also unrelated to the topic of this chapter (see 156).

The main philosophical source of this chapter is Epicurus. He argued that death is no harm because when I die, there is no “I” to which to attach harm. The argument is compelling, but there is a problem: it does not take into account how our human lives actually unfold.

Nussbaum expands on what she calls the “interruption argument.” “[D]eath [not only ‘premature death’] interrupts activities that unfold over time,” activities like love and friendship, reading a long novel, planting a garden and so forth (160). “Death. . . cuts short the pleasant flow of life’s many projects. . . . Epicurus, then, builds on an impoverished picture of human life and value . . . many or most deaths are bad for the person who dies . . . in a perfectly straightforward way: they change the life that was lived, and for the worse” (160, 161).

The goal of this argument is to make a descriptive distinction (not a new ladder of worth) between those animals who undertake projects and those who do not undertake projects. “When a life contains a temporal unfolding of which the subject is aware and which the subject values, death can harm it. However, not all [sentient] creatures are like that. . . and therefore the argument does not establish that death is a harm to all creatures” (161, emphasis mine).

But allow me to underscore an important point: MANY creatures, almost all the creatures we kill and love to eat, are aware of a temporal unfolding that they value.

Temporal awareness is, in some cases, especially complex. For example, bony fish. Bony fish are sentient, but they seem to live mostly in the moment, moment to moment. So, a painless death may be no harm to them, as such a death does not interrupt a temporal unfolding of their species’s specific lives.

And much else follows from this. For example: “Even if it [painlessly killing and eating fish] doesn’t actually harm their being, it is still a kind of domination over that other life,” the very thing rights-based approaches are meant to stop (171).

The possibility then arises that while we are not harming fish when we painlessly kill and eat them, we may nonetheless be doing them an injustice. Humility and vigilance are required of us: “With our specific life-form comes responsibility” (171).

VII.

We are now prepared to grasp the sense of Nussbaum’s argument that our responsibility extends to animal predation and that it is a problem that requires a smart human response.

The following ideas are in the background as we work through Nussbaum’s thinking on animal predation in chapter 10:

  1. (In)Justice: Justice is bound up with the enablement of a creature’s significant striving, while injustice is the wrongful thwarting (actively or passively) of the same.
  2. The Subjects of (In)Justice: Sentient creatures, those who significantly strive in characteristic life-form ways, are the subjects of justice and so are to be treated as ends and not merely as means. Most animals are sentient.
  3. Harm, Injustice, and Death: Death is, generally, a harm to sentient creatures, as it interrupts their significant projects. While it may not constitute a harm to all sentient creatures, especially creatures incapable of significant projects, death may well constitute an injustice when it is a form of domination of one species over another.

The question framing chapter 10 has to do with what role humans are to play in “the wild,” if any. What role should we play in treating wild animal illnesses? Should we address starvation in the wild? What of zoos as a form of intervention? Should we fashion “a cooperative multispecies society, where wild animals are concerned?” (223-224). And, our question, what should humans do about animals killing other animals, if anything?

Concepts like “the wild” and “nature” are, Nussbaum points out, wildly Romantic. “The Romantic idea of ‘the wild’ is born of human anxieties, particularly about urban and industrial life. Nature, in this conception, is supposed to do something for us; the idea has little to do with what we are supposed to do for Nature and other animals” (225). “Other animals” includes rural humans; romanticism idealizes rural poverty.

As both Scully and Nussbaum point out, “the wild” is a great deal more “benign” than factory farming, but, as Mill thought, “Nature is cruel and thoughtless” (228). Moreover, ecological thought has taught us that there is no such thing as the “balance of nature.” There is no such thing as “the wild,” either.

Humans control everything: land, sea, air. And so, when we make a case for “the wild,” what we are saying is that we do not want to take responsibility for the world that our species, in every way, dominates.

And “it is not clear that we can ethically be standoffish, even in instances where we have not caused the problem. If we are looking on, in control and monitoring animal habitats, it seems like callous stewardship indeed if we permit . . . . thoroughly ‘natural’ types of pain and torment” (230). Human stewardship and animal autonomy are not incompatible, as “Nature is not a glorious site of freedom” (231).

The contours of (in)justice are starting to form: humans, in ways both deliberate and neglectful, thwart animal thriving. We either smash the nest or we stand idly by while it is smashed by another animal or disease or event.

So, just stewardship of “the wild” must not be avoided. It must be ethically principled (see 232). And it must be attuned to the kinds of animal capabilities we are responsible for recognizing and protecting (233-237).

It is a common practice (and widely accepted) for humans to intervene in “the wild” when there is starvation, drought, and so forth. We are likely to blame for all of that anyway. But something feels different to us about predation, about the act of animals killing other animals.

We are cautioned against interfering in predation for several reasons. First, instincts. Predators are not doing anything wrong when they attack and kill other animals.

That is true. What predators are doing is expressing something characteristic of their life-form. Our interference may, in fact, degrade their dignity, wrongfully impeding their significant striving by frustrating instincts important to them.

And, though Nussbaum does not make this exact point, it is equally possible that our interference in predation would frustrate the gazelle’s important instinct to recognize and to evade dangers.

Instincts, however, can be redirected in many different ways—ways that do not entail the unspeakable suffering of another creature or the end of a supposed thrilling existence of constant vigilance and escape.

We are cautioned against interfering in predation for another reason, too: we have no idea what impact such interference would have on animal populations. Yet, predation and hunting are not the only ways to manage animal populations. They are certainly not the most painless ways of managing animal populations.

And even if we think there are good reasons for not interfering in animal predation generally, we may think it unsavory for humans to enjoy it or to become predators in “the wild” themselves. Therefore, we will oppose sado-tourism, the practice of humans taking great enjoyment in scenes (and paying a lot to see them) of vulnerable creatures being torn to bits by, for example, wild dogs. We must also outlaw big game hunting, the practice of humans killing, for example, elephants with weapons of war.

Additionally, we may think there are good reasons for not interfering in animal predation generally, but we may also identify some special circumstances where we think intervention is necessary. For example, we may seek to protect animals that have not evolved to recognize and evade the dangers posed by non-indigenous threats (think of the kakapo).

Speaking of the kakapo, predation may even be encouraged in certain circumstances. The CA allows for self-defense, so rats may be acceptable objects of predation, becoming a food source for creatures, like cats, also managed out of eating the kakapo. There may be other “nuisance animals” that fall into this category.5

Animal predation is not a simple phenomenon, one that requires little to no thought or concern on our part. Nussbaum’s approach to it is nuanced and cautious, and even so, we have identified instances of acceptable and reasonable human interventions in “the wild,” specifically in animal predation.

VIII.

We are now well situated to understand why most instances of animal predation constitute a serious ethical problem that require smart human responses.

To start, animal predation is not, not straightforwardly, an injustice. The lion, for example, is not somehow in the wrong for killing and eating a warthog.

Yet, the unspeakable suffering the warthog experiences as it is eaten alive by the lion—and the threats to life and limb the lion risks to kill it—should at the very least alert us to the possibility that predation is, nonetheless, a serious harm to the warthog and, potentially, to the lion.

Lions are not in a position to recognize that, and warthogs aren’t, either. But we are in a position to recognize it and do something about it.

It is also highly questionable that respecting the dignity of both lions and, say, gazelles requires predation as a capability, namely the capability to hunt and the capability to escape being eaten.

Must lions kill other animals to be (happy) lions? We have no reason to believe so. Moreover, we may grant that all creatures are, indeed, food (or are edible), but is that what sentient creatures, like the gazelle, want, at least while they have a say in the matter, while they are still living? Again, we have no reason to believe so.

Finally, death does harm to both the lion and to the gazelle, to each of their respective projects. And, as we saw in the case of fish, death may become an injustice when it represents a tool of domination of one species over another.

Predation seems to me to qualify as a form of domination. While the lion cannot recognize their eating of the gazelle as a form of domination, and while the gazelle, even if it could recognize the harm of predation, is powerless to do anything about it, we can both recognize predation as a problem and do something about it.

There are serious ecological and philosophical objections to intervening in animal predation. I have alluded to some of them above. The substance of these arguments extends well beyond a straightforward concern for what we do not know (e.g., how such interference will affect animal populations) or a respect for the dignity of animal lives.

One is right to ask: Are human interventions in animal predation a form of domination, a means of humanizing the entire animal world?

Another question: Would we fault a bat, for example, for using its capabilities to eliminate harms or to address injustice in human life? No, I don’t think we would.

Nussbaum’s argument, namely that we humans have an ethical responsibility to use our capabilities to enable and foster all sentient life, stands up well against serious objections. Even if you are not convinced, her argument is worthy of your sustained attention and serious consideration. Or so I think.

Footnotes:

  1. For more on anger, see Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. ↩︎
  2. While Ibram X. Kendi links the scala naturae to Aristotle, Stamped from the Beginning shows how the idea plays out in terms of the history of race and racism in Western thought. See Stamped, e.g., 15-21. See also Nussbaum, in the present context, on page 32. ↩︎
  3. There is a strong Western current in the other direction, however. See Hoshaw, “On The Urgent Matter of the Bible . . . .” ↩︎
  4. I have started to explore AI sentience and ethics here and here. ↩︎
  5. Although if we take lessons from Trash Animals: How We Live With Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species, we will approach the management of such “nuisance” animals with great care. Even in the case of rats, Nussbaum does suggest birth control efforts as a strategy of population control. ↩︎

Serious Reading

*

In her recent book, Who Is Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler asks us to think critically about gender. Thinking critically about gender entails actually reading texts that seriously investigate and explore the (dis-)contents of gender. Butler explicitly defines what is at stake in the practice of reading, namely “democratic life”:

Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.

Judith Butler, Who Is Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 18-19.

The specific point Butler is making is that when there is disagreement about a subject, like gender, reading the same texts enables community; reading the same texts enables a conversation about a shared set of terms or details. It is in that way that reading grounds and focuses conversation. Reading the same texts may not ultimately produce agreement or consensus, but the practice will likely produce space for further conversation and collaboration. Or so Butler seems to think.

**

Butler argues that reading common texts makes democratic life possible, is a “precondition of democratic life.” Sharing a text, much like sharing a meal, opens us to the experiences and insights of others. Reading gets us out of ourselves and into the world. Mark Jordan, in his book, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault, describes how reading a text, the words on a page, opens the reader to the experience of the O/other:

Some scholars, like some fans, end by substituting relics of a fetishized life for the work. Perhaps they were first impassioned by the work or by rumors of it. Then it slipped out of reach. So they began slighting the work to seize tokens of its maker. For old-school Hollywood fans, these were autographs and photo spreads. Scholarly fans of this species prefer journalistic interviews, dedicated blogs, tales of conferences sightings . . . . I skimmed the biographies [of Foucault], examined some photographs, heard or watched a few recordings, but I got little satisfaction from them . . . My pleasure in Foucault’s bodily life comes from reading what he wrote. I am lured not by his bodily life but by whatever lured him to write endlessly about the bodily production of our words for bodies.

Mark Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 2.

Jordan contrasts two kinds of “reading” habits, two kinds of “fandoms.” The first is a fandom that values the life of/body of the author more than the author’s text. The second kind of fandom is one that values the life of/body of the author for their text. And notice: the author’s words are of immense value not because they are the words of that particular author, in Jordan’s case, the word’s of Foucault. No, they are valuable because they incarnate what is Other than the author, namely the “whatever” that “lured” Foucault to “write endlessly about the bodily production of our words for bodies.”

Jordan’s devotion to Foucault is not about Foucault at all. “[Jordan] needs [Foucault’s body] only for what it writes. If [Jordan] mourns [the loss of Foucault], [he] regret[s] especially that there will be no more of his books . . . .” (4).

***

Jordan defines reading as an encounter with the “whatever” that lures an author to write. The “whatever” is related to the author; it is something the author expresses in their writing, but it is not reducible to the author. For Jordan, the shuffling between author (other) and “whatever” (Other) seems to entail another, related shuffling: shuffling between an author’s words, between, perhaps, their meaning, and the aesthetics of the “whatever” the words on the page incarnate or express:

Imagine authorship that forswears fame in order to attend only to the transient effects of it its textual surfaces. That strives only to register ripples on a skittish surface. That strives to be ripples, undoing its own propensity to become a closed object. Imagine writing that is only interested in the play of its light and shadow than in plots and personages . . . . Imagine above all writing that doesn’t secure its unity or its relations to bodies by appealing to the personage of the author.

Mark Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 6, emphasis is Jordan’s.

Jordan asks the reader to imagine the author’s writing as a piece of art (worth collecting?). He asks us to imagine authorship that gets lost on the surface of a moving, watery cavas/text. Jordan asks us to imagine writing as a sketch or photograph, “only interested in the play of its light and shadow.” He asks us to imagine writing that doesn’t need the ordinary artist/author to have an impact on the viewer/reader. Jordan further invites us to imagine the reader “as an event yet to arrive. From that meeting, surprising effects may follow–so long as they are not precluded by discounting in advance what a text may say or do” (Convulsing, 7).

The author’s writing, an expression of the “whatever” that also lures a reader to the watery surface(s) of the text, works on the reader. The effects of that working on the reader are not (necessarily) predictable. One possibility is that the reader will write. It is possible that reading is preparation for the event of writing (Convulsing, 7).

****

Reading, the encounter with the O/other, with the lure of the “whatever” the author’s writing expresses, may be the reader’s preparation for the practice of writing. Reading may harbor the event of writing. In other words, reading may disclose the connection between the reader and the author by provoking the reader to write.

Leo Bersani, in his reading of Proust, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, describes what is at stake in the practice of writing:

The pressures of daily life necessarily reduce a personality to a more or less simplified expression; but the particular privilege of literary activity is the leisure it offers to give play to a range of feeling, of being that would never be tolerated in ordinary life. It is, then, useless to look to the writer’s life for an explanation of what is in [their] books, for the conditions in which [they write] those books allows [them] the freedom to express desires, fears, and interests that are either not at all or feebly and confusedly expressed elsewhere in [their] life. . . . [T]he writer’s work is so deeply [their] life that it is foolish to expect [their] life to illuminate it.

Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 15.

We are by now familiar with the distinction between the author in “ordinary life” and the author’s work. We have already explored the idea that reading is practice in encountering the “whatever” that lures an author to write, that something at once related to and other than the extra-textual author. But now we can understand that insight from a different standpoint.

It is now possible to see that writing is preparation for reading. Writing harbors the event of reading. Writing discloses the connection between the writer and the reader, namely the “whatever” that lures the writer to create textual surfaces, the same “whatever” that lures the reader to those same surfaces. The “whatever,” the O/other, is the precondition for this textual relationship.

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We began with Judith Butler’s observation that “reading . . . .is a precondition of democratic life.” Butler does not draw out exactly what that means in practice. But it is possible to read between the blinds, to discern the light and shadow of her textual surfaces.

If we refuse to read (and reading about gender is, Butler contends, what anti-gender folks refuse to do), we are refusing to encounter a mysterious (maybe disturbing) sense of complexity and difference in the world. Likewise, and moving beyond Butler’s point, when we refuse to write (perhaps about gender), we are refusing an encounter with that same mysterious (maybe disturbing) sense of complexity and difference in ourselves.

Reading is certainly a precondition of democratic life. But we cannot live on reading texts alone. We have to write them, too.

What do you think write?