| By Raymond D. Boisvert |

One of my nieces helps publicize Maine cheesemakers. She invited my wife and me to an actual “cheesery.” Yes, it’s a cheesy name but one that says it all. Why bother with fancy, disguised labels like “creamery” or “dairy farm” when what you do is make cheese. The setting is lovely: The Belgrade Lakes region. The address is Pond Road and, sure enough, the land rolls down to a body of water. Strangely enough, its official name is Messalonskee Lake, not pond but, as we know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The cheesery is small, homey, artisanal. Milk comes from the farm’s own 60 or so goats. There are also sheep. Where there are sheep and goats, this is what a city dweller notices, there’s also a certain aroma, and bugs. Plenty of bugs. Bugs are central to the philosophical lesson to come, but that’s for later. A great number of the bugs are visible, hovering around the animals (and the human visitors). Others are invisible, in the soil, in the guts of the animals and the humans. Some bugs, though, come in neat packets and are carefully stocked. These have actually been sought after and, yes, paid good money for, by the cheesemaker.

The sought-after bugs are mostly bacteria. They have Latin names. Some of them are immediately recognizable, Penicillium roqueforti, or Penicillium camembertii. Other names are just enigmas, for example Brevibacterium linens. While the name may be enigmatic, its presence is not. Anyone who has smelled foot odor has noticed its impact. So has anyone who has savored cheeses like Munster, Pont L’Évêque, Port-du-salut, or Limburger.

Bugs are annoying. We try to avoid them. Bacteria are annoying and disease-causing. We try to avoid them as well. In other words, for quite a while now, we have been “Pasteurians.” We have succeeded, in the tradition taught us by the great Louis Pasteur, in eliminating unwanted, disease-causing bacteria from our foodstuffs and ourselves. The background scenario was fairly straightforward: bacteria = bad = must get rid of them. But now we are confronted with cheese makers who spend good money to acquire and then use bacteria. What is going on?

Louis Pasteur.

Well, several things about which a history of ideas can enlighten us. The general topics have familiar and very old labels: the one and the many, the pure and the impure. These labels can be matched with a historical one: the ancients and the moderns.

Interestingly enough, the ancients, it turns out, tended to embrace multiplicity and mixture. We often don’t notice because we read their texts through the interpretive lenses of later thought. Philosophers, influenced by Modernity, will tend to talk about the “good,” for example as if it were a singular thing.

Aristotle.

This can be a source of problems when life is a complicated adventure. The ancients like Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. One of the famous maxims inscribed at the temple at Delphi read “Nothing in Excess.” In line with this saying, philosophers recognized the need for some balance among multiple elements as defining the “good.” Plato thought in terms of an optimal society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the multiple and differentiated humans who made it up. Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.” A flourishing life involved multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends, some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, all accompanied by a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia was always a complex affair.

Epicurus.

Then, came a shift. After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of happiness and thus goodness. As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, would be the most pleasant life. The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn. Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium–all of these arose from what was outside us. The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasurable, minimally disturbed life. The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston: “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Mass grave at the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Religion added another ingredient. This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split. Manichaeism described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable. Each could be easily identified. Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become cloistered monks. Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats. Women labelled as witches felt this wrath, as did heretics. Later writers traced political problems to “parasites,” either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them), or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E. coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial. Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health. Better to work with them. This is where cheese making offers an object lesson. Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus casei – don’t eliminate them. Welcome them, cooperate with them. The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

Pasteurizing plant, from the McCord Museum.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics led readily to a fetish with eliminative purification. Cheese making returns us to a more complex, i.e. more concretely accurate, setting. It’s not one that is anti-Pasteurian. Its more accurate label is “post-Pasteurian.” The philosophical framework that accompanied the “eradicate to purify” move, the post-Aristotelian inward turn, was doubly problematic. (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence. (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode. It fostered, in other words, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered, unilaterally and unequivocally, evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus, lactobacillus, penicillium, we can work together. We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move. Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable. Viruses? Not eliminate, but integrate. (We call this vaccination.) Bacteria? Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix, and the responsibility for sorting things out that comes with it. Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize what will give rise to fruitful culminations. In other words, make cheese. Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger. The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.

Dr. Raymond D. Boisvert recently retired after 35 years of teaching at Siena College, near Albany New York. His early research was on American Pragmatism. This culminated in Dewey’s Metaphysics (1988) and John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time (1998). More recently he has concentrated on philosophy and food, publishing I Eat, Therefore I Think (2014) and Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016, with Lisa Heldke).

| By Avery Kolers |

I. What is Solidarity?

Suppose you are a white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. You look up from your newspaper to see Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She is expelled from the bus. What should you do?

On the one hand, you have paid your fare for a public service and are entitled to receive it. Justice supports your claim to remain on the bus until you reach your destination. A “Good Samaritan” might take an interest, but if you are on your way to work and need the job to pay the bills, you might look at your shoes and mind your own business. It’s not as though standing up for Mrs. Parks will enable her to keep her seat, it will only cause the bus to be late and might just get you ejected, as well – or worse.

Anyway, how sure can you be that she is telling the truth when she says she is tired and just wants to rest her legs? Perhaps the people accusing her of being ornery – people who are in your social stratum, people you know and like and trust – are right. So what should you do?

I submit that there is a single right answer to this question, and that, at least from our vantage point today, it is obvious to all decent people: you must not stand for this. You should insist that Mrs. Parks be allowed to keep her seat, and if she is ejected from the bus you should walk off alongside her. If her community then boycotts the bus company, you should boycott too.

Admittedly, it might be exceedingly difficult to make yourself do this.

Fast-forward to today. You reside in a neighborhood in which there is a monument to some minor Confederate figure. Local African American activists demand that the statue be removed, perhaps replaced by a statue of Rosa Parks. You might wonder whether it matters all that much; he was after all a minor figure and was rehabilitated into a philanthropist of sorts after the war. And the statue is quite lovely. Your neighbors, whom you know and like, view the statue as a landmark in a neighborhood that, though mostly white, is completely lacking in “Southern sympathizers.” They just like their statue.

It is not completely clear to you why the activists have descended on your neighborhood. This is hardly the most important issue in the world. Most people don’t even realize who the guy in the statue was. Why make such a big deal of it?

I submit, again, that there is a single right answer: the statue must go. Not because in some objective or eternal sense there is a rule that we should not honor people of dubious moral character or political leanings, but because there are victims of white supremacy who plausibly see in it a celebration of their oppression, and until they are satisfied that their society does not celebrate their oppression, their demands are compelling.

These cases pit solidarity against friendliness, civility, orderliness, and loyalty. It is not clear in either case whether the outcome will be better or worse by the standards of justice or overall well-being. After all, the white bus rider does not know whether the bus walkout will make things better or worse for African Americans, in Montgomery or nationwide, and the statue removal seems likely to upset people without making life materially better for anyone. In these cases, then, the only reason to act in the way I claim morality requires is that by doing so you act in solidarity with victims of oppression who are refusing to go on being treated and demeaned in habitual ways, and have chosen this site to express their refusal.

“Solidarity” is a popular idea these days, both in political life and, increasingly, in academic writing. But I suspect the popularity of this idea is due in part to a tendency to conflate it with other, less challenging notions.

Solidarity is not just acting together with others for shared political aims; that is an alliance or a coalition. Nor is it simply collective action for justice. For as we noted in both cases above, it is not clear that the action in question will enhance justice. For all the actors know in the heat of the moment, things may get worse, not better. In solidarity it’s not essential that you think the action likely to succeed. It’s not essential that it be directed at a just outcome. It’s not essential that you would yourself endorse the action if it were up to you. What’s essential is that you would act alongside the other even if you thought they were wrong. I call this attitude deference. When you act in solidarity with someone, you act on their behalf: as they would have acted if they could be in two places at once.

Solidarity can thus be defined, roughly, as political action on others’ terms.

That is a dangerous idea. What could justify you in acting contrary to your best judgment about what is strategically or even morally best; contrary to the best judgment of your peers and friends; contrary to the interests of your family and community?      

II. What could Justify Solidarity?

I suggest that solidarity is justified, when it is, neither by the ends you pursue nor by the means you use to pursue them, nor by your relationship with the larger group. It is justified not by justice as a goal of the action, but by justice as a duty that you owe to those who ask for your solidarity. It is in this sense “deontological”: a duty owed irrespective of its consequences.

Of course, people request your solidarity all the time. White supremacists are big on it. But surely it is only rarely if ever that white supremacists are entitled to your solidarity. So who is, and why?

The core moral notion in my defense of solidarity is equity. This term explains both who is owed solidarity, and why: both the object of solidarity, and its justification.

Equity is the core of justice. It is recognition of each as an equal, and as entitled to basic fairness and coequal citizenship. Not all injustice is inequity; for instance, “mere” economic deprivation below some baseline does not seem to meet this criterion, but economic deprivation that is grounded in a “stacked deck” against, say, mine workers or undocumented immigrants clearly does.

Dr. Larry May.

Larry May connects equity to the basic Magna Carta rights, which are rights not to be “disappeared,” not to be answerable to unknown charges or accusers, not to be made an outlaw, not to be deported into peril. All of these, May contends, have to do with visibility – that each person be seen, and I would add be seen as a person and an equal. Systemic discrimination such as that faced by Rosa Parks in 1955 is a particularly vivid example of inequity in this sense.

My contention is that solidarity is owed to those who suffer inequitable treatment, when they are engaged in a struggle against those who treat them inequitably. We owe solidarity to victims of inequity, which means we should stand and act alongside them, on their terms, when they struggle against their oppressors.

But why does equity require solidarity? Here I distinguish three senses of equity. The first is traced back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, by way of contemporary followers such as Larry May, Anna Stilz, and Aaron James. Suppose you are treated inequitably. By responding to your call for solidarity, I not only do something but I also express something: my action in solidarity expresses my rejection of your inequitable treatment, and effectively rebukes your abusers. In so acting I see and recognize you as an equal, entitled to equal status and respect.

Immanuel Kant.

Notice that it does not matter here whether I am to blame for your inequitable treatment; innocent bystanders who fail to respond to the call for solidarity thereby fail to treat people equitably. They fail to rebuke the abuser, and continue on their way as though the abuse were an appropriate way to treat you: as if you were just another object on the sidewalk.

So suppose you are about to enter a hotel where you have a reservation, but there is a picket line outside. The custodial staff is on strike and asking you to refuse to cross the line. You can either deny their request for solidarity by crossing the line, or respect it by refusing to cross. You cannot, say, express your sympathies and then feel good about yourself as you go in through the back door. If you cross the line, you participate in their inequitable treatment; you see them as an obstacle rather than as equals.

You might object that just seeing the picket line doesn’t tell you all you need to know. Isn’t it fair, then, to take some information and decide for yourself whom to support? I can grant this for the sake of argument. Even so, you must still choose what to do now, while you are deciding. Cross the line and think about it once comfortable in your hotel room which was cleaned by replacement workers? Or refuse to cross the line? There is, again, no third option.

Unlike views that justify solidarity by appeal to the eventual justice that the cause brings about or aims at, the current view, which I call “Solidarity as Equity,” justifies it on the basis that it treats others equitably in the instant. Equitable treatment is an ultimate value: it is justified in itself and does not depend on any further justification. So if solidarity (partly) constitutes equity, then solidarity, too, is intrinsically valuable. It is valuable irrespective of anything else it brings about. Equitable treatment is not optional but is owed, to particular people at particular times, like a debt. We have no right to treat people inequitably unless they specifically release us to do so. (This might happen if, say, someone was having a heart attack and needed to get into the hotel lobby to receive CPR. Or more prosaically, if someone had checked in before the strike started, and now needed to get back inside to collect their belongings and check out.)

Dr. Martha Nussbaum.

There is a second sense of equity, one that derives from Aristotle, by way of contemporary interpreters such as Martha Nussbaum. For Aristotle, equity requires seeing people and their plight as particulars rather than as abstractions. Sometimes, general rules misrecognize or misrepresent particular people in distinctive contexts, and hence the application even of just rules would be unjust. Affirmative Action seems to be such a case. Justice Harlan’s famous dictum that “the Constitution is color-blind” expresses an abstract justice that, in the real world, hinders efforts to repair racial injustice. Equity requires partly setting aside the abstraction in order to do justice in the real world. The so-called “right to work” is another example of the same phenomenon. Freedom of association is an important right, but given the real-world bargaining advantages of owners over workers, the abstraction hinders workers’ real freedom of association. Consequently, equity supports relaxing the abstract fairness to achieve the concrete fairness for which effective unions are often required. Thus solidarity is not only about stark cases like Rosa Parks vs. Jim Crow; it can be about supporting unions and affirmative action, as well.

Aristotle.

Finally, a third sense of equity, also from Aristotle, is relevant to solidarity: being an equitable person. According to Aristotle, an equitable person not only “chooses and does [equitable] acts” such as the ones described above, but also “is no stickler for his rights in a bad sense but tends to take less than his share though he has the law on his side.” It may seem odd to describe someone acting in solidarity as taking less than his share, given that we associate solidarity with making demands. But recall the white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama. Solidarity in his case involves sacrificing the bus ride for which he has paid, and joining the ensuing boycott, even at some cost to himself, and even if he doubts the effectiveness of the tactic. Indeed, even if he strongly believes that the tactic is doomed to backfire, that is what has been chosen by a group that is struggling for equity. Insofar as he is an equitable person, I contend, he will participate in the boycott, accepting his share of the beatings and the fire hoses. He will not seek to exempt himself from the fate that befalls those who are specifically targeted for police anger. Moreover, given that this supporter is white, he may recognize that his presence has a political power that the bodies of African Americans are not accorded by Montgomery police, and hence use his body to shield others.

Aristotle’s concept of an equitable person thus has two roles in the moral justification of solidarity. First, on the front end, it counsels us not to do what we think best, even if we are right about that: not to stand on (our confident belief in) our own correctness, but to defer to the group. Second, on the back end, it counsels us not to take advantage of our own ability, within an unjust context, to escape the unjust treatment that others cannot escape. Rather, to be in solidarity is to share the fate of the victims of injustice.

III. Limits to Solidarity

All this may be plausible or even inspiring, but it might also be scary. What if it’s neo-Nazis who claim they are being treated inequitably? Or what if the victims of inequity demand that we jump off a cliff to show solidarity? Or what if I am a hotel guest with a particular ability to convince management to meet the picketers’ demands, but I have to cross the picket line to do so?

Let’s take that last question first. Suppose I come to the picket line and realize that I can do better for the strikers, but only if I cross the line to negotiate with management. Shouldn’t I, then, cross the line? The first response is that this kind of case is rare. Socially privileged and relatively wealthy people often believe that their individual intercession can and should make a difference in a way that even the collective action of the poor cannot. We are usually wrong about this. But suppose I really can make a difference by myself. In that case what I should do is check in with the strikers. If they want me to intercede I should do so. If not, then my doing so is an imposition on them, in fact a demonstration that their fate is determined by factors outside their control. My savior-like intervention is then an attack; even if it helps win the day today, it erodes the workers’ efficacy in the long term. Solidarity does not necessarily entail doing exactly as everyone else is doing; each of us brings to the table skills, talents, and, yes, forms of privilege that might be useful to the struggle. But the essential first step is to put these capacities at the disposal of the struggle, to be deployed at the behest of the group, not subject to our own ingenuous guesses.

How much can solidarity demand, though? The question of demandingness is a perennial problem for moral theories. At the margins it always seems more important to help out the desperate than to pursue our own private goals; and yet if we never prioritize our own goals we will not be able to have lives of our own. I have no firm answer to this question, but my view is that we can make sense of the idea – admittedly still fuzzy – of a person’s living for justice. When I take stock of my life I should be able to say that justice was the point of my life; that I evinced an abiding and genuine commitment to the struggle for a more just world and to the plight of people in it; that I was never complacent and self-satisfied; and that I could be relied upon when needed, when the struggle confronted me and I needed to choose a side. Moreover, if I am to live for justice I must be organized, for nothing can be accomplished alone. By pooling resources we become more intelligent, effective, and reliable, enabling individuals to cycle in and out of the fray as life allows, even as the esprit de corps helps build our capacity and resolve.

But finally, what happens if I am in solidarity with a group whose actions themselves treat others inequitably – say, by burning crosses or parading with swastikas? The answer is that I must oppose my erstwhile allies, and do so in the name of solidarity itself. Solidarity is justified by equity, and by equity it is also limited. Suppose the neo-Nazis are themselves socioeconomically disadvantaged: they have a legitimate complaint against the rich, but instead they pick fights with a minority ethnic group. They thereby turn themselves into the oppressors; solidarity requires switching sides to support the minority ethnic group. This is a crucial difference between solidarity and something like loyalty or tribalism, which might allow us to stay onside even when our group is the oppressor. But when solidarity does recommend switching sides like this, the reason for doing so is not the identity or even the beliefs of the neo-Nazis, but their actions and aims. If people (who happen to be neo-Nazis) are demanding a raise from an exploitive boss, then solidarity with them can, indeed, be required. But if they then start attacking their boss’s ethnicity, gender, or race, supporters must object.

IV. Conclusion

We live in perilous political times, where nefarious actors sow division and use both money and violence to foster the power of the few. Solidarity is the essential, and sometimes the only, tool of the oppressed. Yet those of us in the middle – philosophers, white activists and commentators, journalists, the “middle class” – seem to use our words, our money, our bodies, and our votes to punch downwards at least as often as we punch upwards. Or else we sit on the sidelines and treat political struggle as someone else’s problem.

This is wrong. We are morally required to treat people equitably, and solidarity – taking political action on others’ terms – is how we can do so. Consequently, solidarity is valuable even when we lose, and is owed to others not as a form of charity or generosity, but as a duty: as basic equity.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the editors and to the anonymous referee whose comments significantly improved this manuscript.

Dr. Avery Kolers is Professor of philosophy and Director of the Social Change program and Core Faculty Member in the Interdisciplinary M.A. in Bioethics, Health Policy, and Law at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize, as well as A Moral Theory of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2016). In 2012, his article, “Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands,” received the Journal of Applied Philosophy prize awarded for “the best article published in the year’s volume.”

| By William Irwin |

In A Fragile Life: Accepting our Vulnerability, Todd May asks whether invulnerability is desirable. Identifying Stoicism, Epicureanism, Buddhism, and Taoism as philosophies of invulnerability, May rejects what he says is their ultimate goal. His reasoning is that big things like loss, death, politics, and failure matter too much. He would not want to become invulnerable to their emotional impact.

The stoic, Epictetus.

To be clear, the invulnerability May refers to is emotional invulnerability, not physical or actual invulnerability. Even the most accomplished Stoic, for example, is still subject to the occurrence of loss, death, and failure. It is just that the perfect Stoic would no longer be emotionally vulnerable to such occurrences. Rather, such a person would notice these occurrences, account for them, but not be disturbed by them. The perfect Stoic would not lack feeling but would integrate that feeling within a properly ordered self. Granted, there are different conceptions and interpretations of Stoicism, but in general it is a philosophy that counsels self-control, detachment, and acceptance of one’s fate. Likewise, Epicureanism aims at acceptance of a life of simple pleasures taken in moderation, and Taoism aims to go with the flow, the Tao or way.

May finds much to admire and emulate in philosophies of invulnerability. Indeed, when it comes to small matters, May wishes he were more invulnerable. For example, it would be better not to be so disturbed when, due to circumstances beyond control, one runs late for an appointment. Likewise, it would be better to be less upset, or not upset at all, by one’s malfunctioning computer. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, it would be ideal to accept the things that one cannot change—especially the small things.

For May, though, part of what makes life worth living is emotional investment. If we derive meaning from our emotional investments in people, projects, and our own lives then we must pay the price of emotional vulnerability that comes with their fragility and uncertainty. If I spend my life committed to the cause of free speech, then fittingly I would be devastated if a tyrannical government seized power and deprived the citizenry of that right. As May sees it, a reaction of stoical indifference would be inappropriate and undesirable. Such a reaction might force me to wonder if I had ever really been deeply committed to championing free speech in the first place. Likewise, if I learned that my life was about to be cut short by cancer, a reaction of stoic indifference might throw into doubt how much I ever valued my life and its projects. Perhaps all the more so, a reaction of stoic indifference to the death of one’s child might seem to suggest that one never really loved the child. No, the people and things that make life worth living deserve deep emotional investment such that one is vulnerable. A life worth living is a life of vulnerability.

To a large extent I agree with May’s conclusion. Where I disagree is with his conception of the philosophies of invulnerability and with the desirability of invulnerability as an ultimate goal. May considers philosophies of invulnerability in such a way as to overestimate their potential success. The truth is that the perfect Stoic is a fiction. Also in the realm of fiction we can find the Buddhist, Taoist, and Epicurean who have achieved invulnerability. The philosophies of invulnerability aim at a goal that they never reach. So, contra May, we need to reformulate the question. Should we pursue the trajectory that asymptotically approaches invulnerability without ever reaching it? For myself I answer yes.

If there were a single pill that I could take one time to achieve emotional invulnerability I would decline the pill. I would not want to become invulnerable immediately, once and for all, even though the invulnerability is still worth wanting. Of course, Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Epicureanism offer no such pill. Rather, what each offers is a philosophy and a training program for approaching invulnerability. The training takes time; even life-long practitioners do not often claim to have reached the desired outcome. One way to think of the training is in terms of setting an aspirational goal. For example, a runner might set an aspirational goal of running a mile in under five minutes. That goal, that aspiration, might not be realistic but it could still be worth striving towards. Likewise, I could choose to strive for emotional invulnerability. As a middle-aged man who can barely run a mile in eight minutes, a sub-five-minute mile would likely be beyond my reach. Even further beyond my reach would be complete emotional invulnerability. But, in each case, training to reach the goal could itself be transformational, and it could help me to reach desirable levels that are short of the goal. The real value of the goal is in a sense already present in the striving towards it. Even if I never get to the point of running a sub-five-minute mile, I may get to the point of running a six-and-a-half-minute mile, which may help me to lose twenty pounds, improve my cardiovascular health, and finish near the top of my age bracket in the local three-mile race. I might also be the kind of person who is better motivated by grandiose goals than by more modest goals—like those actual achievements that result. Similarly, if I aim at emotional invulnerability as an aspirational goal, I will likely never get there, but the shining example of the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist may motivate me to work harder than would the more modest goal of becoming less easily disturbed by life’s everyday vicissitudes. By following the training program to become the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist, I may as a result reach a state of being undisturbed by traffic jams and malfunctioning computers. I may not reach the state of being undisturbed when my long-term project of protecting free speech crumbles, but I may be able to accept it and move on. I might even be able to accept the premature death of a loved one with a degree of equanimity such that my life is not destroyed by it.

Photo courtesy of Hermann via Pixabay, creative commons license.

Like most people, I enjoy earning rewards. I would much rather make a million dollars by the sweat of my brow than by the purchase of a lottery ticket. For that matter, I would rather earn a million dollars than win ten million dollars. Along similar lines, I would rather make modest progress towards the goal of invulnerability through hard work than take a single pill to arrive there instantly. The suddenness of the pill would be part of the problem. Complete emotional invulnerability seems undesirable to some people because it is a strange and far-off reality. But as I see it, such invulnerability can become more comfortable and desirable as we inch toward it. This has to do with the usual trajectory of a life.

Photo courtesy of NBC, public domain.

In my experience, young people rarely find stoicism attractive; they do not want to be like Mr. Spock. Humans, unlike Vulcans, are motivated by emotion. Passion pushes us to pursue our dreams and to be loving friends, spouses, and family members. Indeed, vulnerability seems to be an important teacher as we learn how to love. As young people, we may wish we were less bothered by little things, but we are willing to pay the price for the benefits that emotional investment yields. There are many things for which we want “the courage to change the things I can.” But moving through life, the invulnerability of stoicism can become more attractive as more in life seems to fall into the category of “the things that I cannot change.” Ultimately, to be like Mr. Spock, who is only half Vulcan, on one’s death bed might be more attractive than “raging against the dying of the light.”

Although I would not take the pill as I have imagined it, I would be tempted to take it if its effects were temporary. It might be nice to have a box of such temporary-invulnerability pills available for the next time I am stuck in traffic or stuck with a malfunctioning computer. Of course, many people do take pills (and drinks) to calm them in response to such circumstances, but those remedies are imperfect and come with other consequences. Stoic or Buddhist training is not fool-proof; it certainly is not as reliable as our imaginary pill. Yet it does work remarkably well when one practices it consistently. The problem is that we tend to want temporary or situational invulnerability. But if we do not practice invulnerability it will not be there when we need it. The runner who does not continue training will find herself cramping up. Likewise, the would-be Stoic who allows himself to get upset when his favorite football team loses, will likely be upset the next time he gets stuck in traffic. Training for invulnerability does not require perfection but it does require consistency to be most effective.

Photo by Ian Sane, CCO license.

An invulnerability pill might be tempting, but we should be in no rush to reach the goal. It is not the destination but the slow transformation of the journey that draws us forward.

William Irwin is the Herve A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA, williamirwin@kings.edu. He is also a member of the editorial board for Civil American and a member of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). He is the author of The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism (2015) and Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (1999), as well as of the novel, Free Dakota (2016). He has edited a number of volumes of philosophy and popular culture for Wiley-Blackwell and Open Court, such as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001).

| By Bertha Alvarez Manninen |

Theodor Seuss Geisel, known simply as Dr. Seuss, remains one of the most widely beloved children’s authors of all time. Yet not many know that his contributions consisted of far more than fun or educational bedtime stories. During World War II, Seuss drew many cartoon editorials targeting the Germans and the Japanese. One pervasive theme throughout these cartoons was the display of “our enemies” as animals. Seuss often illustrated the Germans as alligators, piranhas, sea monsters, dogs, and snakes; the Japanese were drawn as monkeys doing Hitler’s bidding, or as sly cats infiltrating the United States.^[1] In other words, our enemies were subhuman. This kind of sentiment permeated our culture at the time. In 1942, an editorial published in the Los Angeles Times argued in favor of the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, stating that “a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents — grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”^[2]

Photo credit: colorado.gov.

The tendency to describe “enemies” as animals is part of the process of dehumanization. According to social ethicist Herbert Kelman, in order to understand how dehumanization functions, it is important to first “ask what it means to perceive another person as fully human, in the sense of being included in the moral compact that governs human relationships” (Kelman, 48).^[3] Kelman notes that in order to perceive others as full members of our moral community, it is necessary to recognize them both as autonomous individuals who are “capable of making choices, and entitled to live his own life on the basis of his own goals and values” (Kelman, 48) and also as “part of an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other, who recognize each other’s individuality, and who respect each other’s rights” (Kelman, 48-49). In this sense, dehumanizing another person isn’t about literally denying their humanity (perpetrators of dehumanization would likely still view their victims as members of the species Homo sapiens); it is about denying their moral significance.

In this paper, I want to explore a more interdisciplinary approach to studying the problem of dehumanization. While existing literature on this issue typically focuses on the psychology of dehumanization, and the historical acts of violence often correlated with it, I am further interested in what ways philosophy can be used to combat the human tendency to rationalize causing suffering to others through the removal of their moral worth. More specifically, I want to explore how the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, and Emmanuel Levinas can help us re-humanize those who have been dehumanized.

A Brief Overview of Dehumanization

Immanuel Kant, who we shall discuss below, made it a cornerstone of his ethical imperative to respect all rational creatures. We are not permitted, Kant tells us, to treat rational, autonomous agents as mere instruments for our own ends. Because human beings can set their own end in accordance with the moral law, human nature commands respect. We are to treat all humans not as mere instruments, but as ends in themselves.

And yet, even Kant did not follow his own moral imperatives as well as he should have. He argued that women were incapable of acting according to rational moral principles; that when they did act in accordance with the moral law, it was solely due to aesthetic reasons (because “the wicked… is ugly… nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation!). Because Kant associated moral value and worth with the capacity for rationality, women’s alleged compromised capacity for rational agency entailed that their moral status is equally compromised. Women only have access to full moral worth via their relationship to the men in their lives (fathers or husbands), and, in marriage, men are to control their wives and tell her “what [her] will is.”^[4] In addition to his attitude against women, Kant also harbored incredibly racist views. He argued that Native Americans were not capable of being educated, and that persons of African descent were only capable of being educated as servants or slaves.

What this shows is that even those of us who may have claim to being more ethically aware are still capable of harboring morally problematic views, including ones that encourage the “otherization” of fellow humans. Kant encouraged the servitude and slavery of fellow human beings, which we know causes much suffering, because he did not attribute to them the properties that he thought were essential for moral status. History bears out that so many have done the same, often in a way that influences barbaric results.

Many historical instances of violence that were influenced by instances of dehumanization are painstakingly recounted by David Livingstone Smith in his book Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. One of the first steps towards ostracizing other individuals who belong to a different group from the one with which we identify is to find means of “othering” them; of creating a psychological divide between “us” and “them.” One very common away this is achieved, as abovementioned, is by referring to members of an “out” group as subhuman, or as animals. Drawing on examples from Nazi Germany, Smith writes that “[t]o the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies, and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats… [they] were represented as parasitic organisms – as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion” (Smith, 15).^[5] During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Hutus repeatedly referred to the Tutsis as “cockroaches,” and this kind of degradation helped justify “around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus [who] were shot, burned, hacked, and bludgeoned to death by marauding mobs” (Smith, 152). During World War II, while the Japanese depicted Americans and the British “with horns sprouting from their temples, and sporting tails, claws, and fangs” (Smith, 17), Americans, in turn, equally dehumanized our enemies. One soldier wrote: “It is very wrong to kill people, but a damn Nazi is not human, he is more like a dog” (Smith, 18). It was not uncommon for the Japanese to be “considered animals” and to be “portrayed as monkeys, apes, or rodents, and sometimes as insects” (Smith, 18).

These are not just mere images or words. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized how our language shapes the boundaries of our minds and thought: “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 5.6).^[6] Smith puts it this way: “[d]ehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking… [i]t acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable” (Smith, 13). Kelman highlights the connection between violence and dehumanization by focusing on how indulging in the latter decreases our sense of empathy and care for those we regard as “the other”:

Sanctioned massacres become possible to the extent that we deprive fellow human beings of identity and community. It is difficult to have compassion for those who lack identity and who are excluded from our community; their death does not move us in a personal way. Thus when a group of people is defined entirely in terms of a category to which they belong, and when this category is excluded from the human family, then the moral restraints against killing them are more readily overcome” (Kelman, 49).

When we dehumanize others, when we stigmatize them as either lacking in agency or individuality, or as not belonging to our moral community, we are less likely to develop feelings of empathy or care for them. There is even neurological evidence of this. One study noted that:

[M]embers of extreme out-groups are so dehumanized that they may not even be encodedas social beings. When participants viewed targets from highly stigmatized social groups who elicit disgust, the region of the brain typically recruited for social perception (the medial prefrontal cortex) was not recruited. Those who are the least valued in the culture were not deemed worthy of social consideration on a neurological level. … [T]here is a neurological correlate to extreme social devaluation and moral exclusion (Goff et al, 293-294).^[7]

It is harder to harm someone when we see them as “one of our own.” Therefore, when we cease to view “the other” as such, we erase them from moral consideration, thereby rendering their injury more morally palatable. Elliot Aronson writes:

[I]f we have done something cruel to a person or a group of people, we derogate that person or group in order to justify our cruelty. If we can convince ourselves that a group is unworthy, subhuman, stupid, or immoral, it helps us to keep from feeling immoral if we enslave members of that group, deprive them of a decent education, or murder them. We can then continue to go to church and to feel like good Christians, because it isn’t a fellow human we’ve hurt (Aronson, 127).^[8]

Gregory Stanton, founder and president of Genocide Watch, notes that dehumanizing language, thought, and behavior is a hallmark feature of genocide: “One group… denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or disease. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder” (Smith, 142).

Often, when we read about these historical acts of violence, we may be tempted to write them off as anomalous behavior, as something so horrific that the “average” person would be incapable of replicating. Smith warns against this – the Nazis, he argues, were neither “monsters nor madmen” (Smith, 133) – but rather unremarkable, rather normal, people (one important side note I want to emphasize is that the tendency to blame mental illness for horrendous actions not only serves to ostracizes already vulnerable members of our community, it ignores the fact that persons suffering from mental illness are ten times more likely to be victims of violence than the general population^[9]). Recognizing the “normal-ness” of those who commit horrific acts of violence, and noting just how common those instances of violence go hand-in-hand with dehumanizing language and thought, highlights just how easy it can be for any one of us to follow a similar path. Croatian journalist Slovenka Drakulic emphasizes this: “the more you know them… the more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become. Why? This is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any one of us could commit them” (Smith, 135). No one is immune from the phenomenon of dehumanization – “we are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are all potential objects of dehumanization” (Smith, 25).

Photo by Vas Panagiotopoulos, 2016. Creative commons license.

These examples should not be relegated to the history books; the phenomenon of dehumanization continues even in the contemporary United States. One of the latest incarnations of this kind of language can be seen in the speeches of Richard Spencer, one of the public faces of the “alt-right” movement, where he openly questions the humanity of Jewish persons: “one wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golems…” While most of us are not guilty of mass genocide, or bigoted violence, many of us have used racial or ethnic epithets or slurs which, in the words of Richard Delgado, “remains one of the most pervasive channels through which discriminatory attitudes are imparted. Such language injures the dignity and self-regard of the person to whom it is addressed” (Delgado, 135-136).^[10] Using such slurs contributes to the dehumanization of others, in a similar manner as we have seen above when referring to humans as animals, because it effectively serves to erase the individuality of a person and render him nothing more than a faceless member of a group one hates or derides. When one uses racial or ethnic slurs as a method of insult, “we are less likely to consider [the subject] an individual, and more likely to think of him only as an out-group member” (Allport, 91).^[11]

Randall Kennedy. Source: lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com.

We are all familiar with the most common uses of these terms (the “n” word, for example, is described by Harvard University professor Randall Kennedy as “the atomic bomb of racial slurs”). Yet let’s consider a more contemporary example that is viewed by many as innocuous: referring to undocumented workers in the United States as “illegals.” By taking an adjective and turning it into a noun, we are effectively taking an unlawful action and using it to denote an unlawful person. Many of us are guilty of legal violations to various degrees – I stole a box of crayons as a kid, a package of soap as a teenager when my family couldn’t afford it, and although I no longer steal, I have been known to definitely violate clearly posted speed limits. Yet I am never referred to as “an illegal”; my personhood is never questioned because of these infractions.

One common defense of the use of such a term is that it is an accurate depiction of a person’s immigration status – but so is the term “undocumented immigrant.” Yet there is a marked distinction in the attitude towards these individuals from the people who use the former term rather than the latter. In a New York Times op-ed, Lawrence Downes describes it well: “since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class.”^[12] It’s not about the accuracy of the term, but rather how the term is used. In Jane Elliot’s famous “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” experiment, where she puts her third-grade students through a two-day experiential trek through racism, the students wearing the collars for the day (a sign of their “inferiority”) were subjected to taunts from the collar-less, “superior,” students. In one incident, one child hits another because he was deridingly called “brown-eyed.” Although an accurate description of the boy’s eye color, the term effectively functioned as a kind of slur: it was used to demean him by emphasizing and mocking the trait that allegedly made him inferior.

From Debate.org.

Evidence that such disparaging language against undocumented immigrants is having an effect on the way they are treated is easily available. Consider how in 2014, the United States faced an influx of thousands of unaccompanied minors trying to cross the southern border. The children were mainly from South America, and were fleeing unspeakable poverty, hunger, and violence in their home countries. President Barack Obama, at the time, referred to this as an “urgent humanitarian crisis.” Not everyone felt the same way. The following is a sample of the language used against these children in public discourse (curse words have been removed):

“To hell with these scummy, smelly __ and send them back to where the hell they came from and take their diseases and drugs back with them!”

“… these ILLEGAL INVADERS are… easy to find, just go to the welfare office, the free clinics, schools, or Home Depot!”

“Come to my house I’ll take care of your illegal __ . NO questions asked. I’ve got a nice deep hole for you.”

“We are seeing the intentional destruction of America!! Wake up…. time to fight back. We won’t stop them with votes…..it will take bullets!!”^[13]

From this one example, it is easy to see Smith’s and Kelman’s concerns playing out: how easy it is to slide from dehumanizing language to calls for violence, even against children, whom, in general, society often tends to treat with a much gentler hand.

Even seemingly innocuous bigoted jokes have been shown to have a negative effect on a person’s behavior. One study noted that “disparagement humor fosters discrimination against groups for whom society’s attitudes are ambivalent. [For example], participants higher in anti-Muslim prejudice tolerated discrimination against a Muslim person more after reading anti-Muslim jokes than after reading anti-Muslim statements or neutral jokes” (Ford et al., 178).^[14] Another study noted that exposure to sexist humor increased tolerance of sexist behavior towards women in men who already displayed hostile sexist behavior.^[15] Interestingly enough, however, the use of racial humor as a method of challenging and exposing bigotry may result in an opposite effect – of undermining those prejudices instead of subtly (or not so subtly) celebrating them.^[16]

How Philosophy Can Help Re-Humanize the Dehumanized

Kant

Immanuel Kant.

Kelman notes that part of the process of rehumanizing the dehumanized is to see each human being as an individual, and to regard him as “an end in himself, rather than a means to some extraneous end. Individual worth, of necessity, has both a personal and a social referent; it implies that the individual has value and that he is valued by others” (Kelman, 49). Although, as abovementioned, Immanuel Kant failed to follow his own imperative when it came to anyone who wasn’t a white male, this does not mean that the imperatives have no merit. Treating human beings as ends in themselves, respecting the intrinsic value of their humanity rather than treating them as mere instrument for one’s own end, is the cornerstone of Kantian ethics.

Kant does argue that all human beings possess intrinsic dignity as a result of our rational nature (a nature in which all humans equally share, despite Kant’s erroneous contention otherwise). It is because of our capacity for rationality that we can create our own autonomous goals and ends, and part of respecting each other as persons is respecting those ends in others as we would our own (Kant, 6:392). ^[17] Moreover, we ought never to engage in any action that robs any one of us of our humanity. Instead, we should “act in such a way that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (Kant, 4:429).^[18] While loving all human beings can never be a duty, according to Kant (in contrast to Kierkegaard) because we cannot command feelings, acting beneficently is indeed a moral obligation, while its contrast, acting hatefully, is a moral infraction: “to do good to other human beings insofar as we can is a duty, whether one loves them or not… hatred of them is always hateful, even when it takes the form merely of completely avoiding them (separatist misanthropy), without active hostility toward them. For benevolence always remains a duty…” (Kant, 6:402). Kantian ethics, then, demands that we regard other human beings in one of the ways that Kelman argues is necessary in order to combat dehumanization.

Knowing what we do about the psychological effects of using racial or ethnic slurs to demean “the other” entails at least two moral obligations from a Kantian perspective. First, the slurs themselves are dehumanizing, and as such using them is a violation of Kant’s imperative. However, the fact that such language serves as a kind of “psychological lubricant” that makes harming others easier means that allowing yourself to engage in this kind of thinking increases the likelihood of engaging in demeaning and violent behavior against individuals whom are the target of such language, or, at the very least, of viewing such behavior against them as justified. As such, it isn’t just that the slurs themselves are harmful to others, it is also that the use of such slurs creates a predisposition in oneself to act in ways that violate the imperative to treat persons as ends in themselves. Kant argues that persons have duties of self-improvement, which includes cultivating your character to be of the kind that is inclined to follow the moral law (Kant, 6: 387). As such we should take great care not to allow ourselves to engage in any kind of behavior or thinking that makes it easier to dehumanize others. That is, we have a moral obligation not to engage in racist or bigoted thinking or language not just because it harms others directly, but also because it creates in us the kind of character that is more likely to either engage in, or overlook, dehumanizing treatment against others.

Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard.

Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio write that the tendency humans have to form “we/they” categorizations of other persons is exacerbated with “increased awareness of the intergroup boundary… at the intergroup level, people act in terms of their social identity… Outgroup members, in particular, become depersonalized undifferentiated, and substitutable entities” (Gaertner and Dovidio, 245).^[19] They also note that, in cases of racial tensions, one way to help overcome disdain is to emphasize a “shared group identity.…[This] development of a sense of partnership can eliminate manifestations of even subtle, indirect, and rationalizable forms of racism” (Gaertner and Dovidio, 249). In another of their writings, Gaertner and Dovidio argue that their research on racism and bias shows that “the recategorization of different groups into one group as a particularly powerful and pragmatic strategy for combatting subtle forms of bias. Creating perception of common ingroup identity not only reduced the likelihood of discrimination based on race but also increases the likelihood of positive interracial behaviors” (Gaertner and Dovidio, 7).^[20] In other words, refocusing attention on underlying commonalities, rather than emphasizing differences, decreases the perception of intergroup boundaries, which, in turn, decreases the tendency to “otherize” outgroup members.

Suppose there was a way to create the perception that all human beings are part of the same “ingroup”; that, despite our differences, our commonalties are much more formative in our identities. The writings of Søren Kierkegaard in his seminal book Works of Love attempts to do just this, with a focus on analyzing the Biblical commandment to love the neighbor as the self.

Kierkegaard spends a lot of time on the question of who, exactly, counts as a “neighbor” for the purposes of fulfilling this commandment; just who is the subject of the deep moral concern and divine love God commands of us. Kierkegaard’s answer is radically egalitarian – “the neighbor” includes “all men, unconditionally all… (Kierkegaard, 63). ^[21] Human beings, even our “enemies,” have a shared commonality and likeness because we are made in God’s image. Therefore, “to love one’s neighbor means equality… your neighbor is every man… he is your neighbor on the basis of equality with you before God; but this equality absolutely every man has, and he has it absolutely” (Kierkegaard, 72).

This kind of love, commonly called agape love, is of a higher quality than erotic love, or love between friends or family members. These kinds of love, Kierkegaard argues, are love based on preference and are, therefore, as D. Anthony Storm puts it, “temporal…mere shadows of” real, unconditional, love.” Kierkegaard writes:

All other love, whether humanly speaking it withers early and is altered or lovingly preserves itself for a round of time—such love is still transient; it merely blossoms. This is precisely its weakness and tragedy, whether it blossoms for an hour or for seventy years—it merely blossoms; but Christian love is eternal (Kierkegaard, 25).

It is this kind of love that is truly unconditional. Loving other based on their relationship to you (loving your children, your parents, your fellow countrypersons, members of your own race, or ethnicity, or religion) is inherently selfish because it still places the self as the center of the moral universe. You love others to the extent that they are like you or have a relationship to you. But such love is often fleeting – once the similarity to you is dissolved for whatever reason, once someone who was once in your “ingroup” becomes part of your “outgroup”, the love you had goes with it. Dissolving such a distinction, so that all human beings become part of your “ingroup”, makes your love for them stable and more permanent – for if the only criteria for being part of the “ingroup” is just being a human being, that is a similarity that will never go away.

If Kierkegaard is right, if I am commanded by God to love, in the agape sense, every single human being, and to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences, then this has radical moral implications for engaging in any kind of language, behavior, or state of mind that not only de-emphasizes similarities, but robs others of their humanity altogether. One of the functions of slurs is to “provide a simple but toxic shorthand for marking boundaries between groups… all of this talk helps draw lines in between groups, forming us/them boundaries” (Myers and Williamson, 11).^[22] This is the very opposite of what Kierkegaard argues God wants us to do. Rather, our differences should “hang loosely about the individual… when distinctions hang loosely in this way, then there steadily shines in every individual that essential other person, that which is common to all men, the eternal likeness, the equality” (Kierkegaard, 96).

I read Kierkegaard here as offering a recipe for the eradication of the bias, racism, sexism, and hate that permeates so much of our daily human interactions, and his suggestions are supported by the research that shows that focusing on a shared group identity helps to melt the distinctions that fuels such destructive behavior. One obvious limitation to applying Kierkegaard that he is speaking only to those who adhere to theistic beliefs, particularly Christian ones. It is the belief in God, and regarding all persons as being created in His image, that forms the foundation of Kierkegaard’s egalitarianism. However, it appears that his philosophy here can find a place in the secular realm, as seems evident in Gaertner and Dovidio’s research; humans indeed have fundamental commonalities that are not particularly religious in kind. In a beautiful analogy, Kierkegaard instructs us to view other human beings as pieces of paper that, while perhaps many kinds of writings are inscribed upon it, making each different from the other, all display a common watermark that you can clearly see when you hold it up to the light. Focusing on the differing inscriptions is what leads to “outgroup” prejudice, whereas emphasis on our “common watermark” is what will help combat it.

Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas.

As mentioned above, Gordon Allport notes that one function of slurs is that it allows us to depersonalize members of a derided group, which aids in viewing them in an abstract manner. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to feel empathy or compassion towards them. He writes:

One human being is, after all, pretty much like another – like oneself. One can scarcely help but sympathize with the victim. To attack him would be to arouse some pain in ourselves. Our own “body image” would be involved, for his body is like our own body. But there is no body image of a group. It is more abstract, more impersonal… this sympathizing tendency seems to explain a phenomenon we have frequently noted: people who hate groups in the abstract will, in actual conduct, often act fairly and even kindly toward individual members of the group (Allport, 92).

It is easier to hate persons when they remain abstract caricatures; to hate an actual human being, one who looks like you, acts like you, is just another version of you, is much harder. Confronting their humanity, being in a situation where one is forced to look the “other” in the eye, makes hatred that much harder.

This is one of the themes in philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ work Totality and Infinity, where he implores us to always keep “the face” of “the other” firmly planted in our mind’s eye. Focusing on “the face” immediately calls us into an ethical relationship with that person: “the face is a living presence; it is expression… the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation… the face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation” (Levinas, 66-201). Recognizing the humanity in “the other” by forcing oneself to look at “the face” will demand that we treat each other with intrinsic dignity and worth. The focus on the face forces one to acknowledge that humanity, and to see “the other” as another version of your self. Racial slurs and dehumanizing language effectively erase “the face” from your mind and therefore from moral consideration – it becomes a kind of mask that you used to avoid looking at your fellow human as a fellow human. But when “the face presents itself [it] demands justice” (Levinas, 294) and once you start earnestly acknowledging the humanity of “the other,” you “are not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the other has introduced to me” (Levinas, 219). That is, by looking another human being in the eye, by really looking at them, by refusing to engage in any behavior that paints them as anything less than another version of you, you will no longer be able to ignore their plight. When they become persons for you, looking out for their welfare becomes your moral obligation.

Photo by Geoffrey Fairchild, 2010. Creative commons license.

It is not easy, however, to have access to “the face” all the time; we are all familiar with the phrase “out of sight, out of mind.” While we readily ignore the horrible plights of persons in distant lands, we tend to be more sympathetic when a tragedy hits close to home. If Levinas requires access to “the face” to solidify moral obligation, wouldn’t that mean we are less likely to morally regard, say, others in distant lands to whom we have limited contact?

Here, our methods for disseminating images and information plays a crucial role. Fifty-three years ago, on March 7, 1965, African-American civil rights activists and protestors were severely beaten in their attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in their quest to secure access to equal voting rights. In what has come to be known as Bloody Sunday, 600 peaceful marchers were attacked by Alabama State troopers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The images of these beatings were televised and reached many in the United States who were largely unaware of these brutal treatments. Horrified, many Americans joined Dr. Martin Luther King and now-Representative John Lewis when they marched again on March 21, 1965, this time with federal protection. What started as a march of 600 people, grew to one of 3,200 when they started to march again, and to 25,000 by the time they reached Montgomery. The power of these images cannot be understated; from a Levinasian stand-point, these images provided “the face” that had for so many been absent, and those who were affected responded precisely in the way Levinas anticipates: by responding to their moral obligations towards people who were once the “other.”

Aylan Kurdi. Photo by Ur Cameras, Public domain.

In this sense, our contemporary technology can make up for the absence of “the face” in our immediate vicinity. Social media and “live streaming” is now a prominent way that people get their news, and we are we are more connected by these mediums than ever before. A contemporary example of the power of “the face” is that of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old toddler whose lifeless body washed ashore on a beach in Turkey after the boat he was traveling on with his family, while attempting to escape the violence in Syria, capsized. Aylan, his mother, and five-year-old his brother all drowned – only his father survived. A picture of Aylan face-down on the beach sparked outrage in many across the world, and put a face to the humanitarian crisis confronting Syrian refugees. British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to “do more” to help the Syrians after the picture surfaced. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, proclaimed that “we really need a wake-up call that children are dying, washing up dead on the beaches of Europe, because of our collective failure to provide safe passage.”^[23] In response to Aylan’s death, countries such as Germany and Austria relaxed their immigration laws for fleeing refugees. This example illustrates Levinas’ point exactly: the tragic “face” of Aylan forced many to acknowledge their moral obligation to him and other refugees; it called many into a “relation” with him and the persons he represented.

But we do not have to go that far to see Levinas’ words in action. Today, there are many stories of individuals who voted for Donald Trump because of his stance on illegal immigration, and now are surprised and bemused to be witnessing individuals they know and care for being deported. When they viewed illegal immigrants as an abstract group, as an “out-group,” Trump’s stance was not a cause for concern; indeed, it was a cause for support. It took those policies affecting people they actually know, “faces” they actually see every day, people who are members of their “in-group”, to call those policies into question. One wonders how they would have voted had they seen those “faces” in other immigrants all along.

Conclusion

Image by Dr. Seuss, courtesy of The Huffington Post.

I began this paper by highlighting the racist editorial cartoons of Dr. Seuss, a person so endeared in our culture that learning about this history often surprises many. I want to end with yet another Dr. Seuss story – one that magnifies the impact of focusing on “the face” and our common “watermark” as a method of battling bigotry and dehumanization. In 1953, Seuss visited Japan, and was guided there by Mitsugi Nakamura, the dean on Doshisha University. Seuss’ visitation with Japanese persons, particularly children, deeply impacted his views. In 1954, Seuss published the book Horton Hears a Who! in an effort to, according to one analysis, “redress the American image of Japan” (Minear, 264). Indeed, Seuss dedicated the book to Nakamura. In Horton Hears a Who!, Horton is the only one who sees the Whos as persons, and therefore is the only one who cares about their welfare as he struggles to save Whoville. To everyone else, especially to the “big kangaroo” and her joey, who lead to the push to discredit Horton and destroy the Whos, the Whos are invisible – they quite literally do not exist at all from their perspective. This can be interpreted as a literal exposition of the psychological consequences of dehumanization as emphasized by Smith and Kelman, where the “other” is, for all intents and purposes, erased from the moral community. Yet Horton’s insistence on saving the Whos, even at a great cost to himself, highlights Levinas’ point that “the face” of “the other” presents us with moral demands that we are not free to ignore. Indeed, towards the very end, when the kangaroo and the others finally do hear the Whos crying to them, they immediately react to save them as well. Horton serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of dehumanization, as well as highlighting the ethical relationships that we form with each other when we acknowledge our common humanity.

All of us are guilty, to varying extents, of the moral infractions discussed in this paper. While we may not have been a party to genocide or other acts of violence, many of us have biases that inform our behavior, and we have laughed, or made, the occasional racist joke, or used, or thought, the occasional racial slur. Many of us are guilty of ignoring the suffering of distant others, and of creating “in-group” versus “out-group” boundaries benefitting those we prefer. These behaviors are all different only in terms of gradation, rather than kind. Taking steps to catch ourselves when we indulge in these behaviors, trying to not repeat them, or call out others when they do in our presence, is part of the process of rehumanizing those we have, in one way or another, dehumanized.

Bertha Alvarez Manninen is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Arizona State University, bertha.manninen@asu.edu, Trustee of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA), author of Pro-Life, Pro-Choice: Shared Values in the Abortion Debate (2014), co-author of Civil Dialogue on Abortion (2018), and a writer for The Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/bertha-alvarez-manninen and Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-birth-wisdom.

Notes

[1] Minear 1999. Richard Minear. Dr. Seuss Goes to War. New York: The New Press.

[2] “What the L.A. Times Meant to Say.” Available at: https://densho.org/la-times-meant-say/.

[3] Kelman 1973. Herbert Kelman. “Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers.” Journal of Social Issues, 29 (no. 4): 25-61.

[4] Kant 2006. Immanuel Kant. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[5] Smith. 2001. David Livingstone Smith. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[6] Wittgenstein 1999. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

[7] Goff et al. 2008. P.A. Goff, J.L. Eberhardt, M.J. Williams, and M.C. Jackson. “Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94 (no. 2): 292–306.

[8] Aronson 1998. Elliot Aronson. “Causes of Prejudice” in Hatred, Bigotry, and Prejudice (RM Baird and SE Rosenbaum, eds). Amherst: Prometheus Books: 127-140.

[9] MentalHealth.gov. “Mental Health Myths and Facts.” Available at: https://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/myths-facts/index.html.

[10] Delgado 1982. Richard Delgado. “Words that Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name-Calling.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 17: 133-181.

[11] Allport 1979. Gordon Allport. “The Nature of Hatred” in Hatred, Bigotry, and Prejudice (RM Baird and SE Rosenbaum, eds). Amherst: Prometheus Books: 91-94.

[12] Downes 2007. Lawrence Downes. “What Part of “Illegal’ Don’t You Understand?” New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/opinion/28sun4.html?_r=1.

[13] Corsi 2014. Jerome Corsi. “Children Crossing Border: Obama will take care of us.” Available at: http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/children-crossing-border-obama-will-take-care-of-us/.

[14] Ford et al. 2013. Thomas Ford, Julie Woodzicka, Shane Triplett, Annie O. Kochersberger, Christopher J. Holden. “Not All Groups Are Equal: Differential Vulnerability of Social Groups to the Prejudice-Releasing Effects of Disparagement Humor.” Group Process and Intergroup Relations, 17 (no. 2): 178-199.

[15] Ford 2000. Thomas Ford. “Effects of Exposure to Sexist Humor on Perceptions of Normative Tolerance of Sexism.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 31 (no. 6): 1093-1107

[16] Saucier et al. 2016. Donald Saucier, Conor O’Dea, and Megan Strain. “The Bad, the Good, the Misunderstood: The Social Effects of Racial Humor. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2(1): 75-85.

[17] Kant 1996. Immanuel Kant. Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[18] Kant 1997. Immanuel Kant. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[19] Gaertner and Dovidio 1986. Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio. “Toward the Elimination of Racism: The study of Intergroup Behavior.” In Hatred, Bigotry, and Prejudice, edited by R.M. Baird and S.E. Rosenbaum, Amherst: Prometheus Books: 245-249.

[20] Gaertner and Dovidio 2000. Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio. Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model. New York, NY: Routledge.

[21] Kierkegaard 1962. Søren Kierkegaard. Works of Love. New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

[22] Myers and Williamson 2001. K. Myers and P. Williamson. “Race Talk: The Perpetuation of Racism through Private Discourse.” Race and Society, 4 (no. 2): 3-26.

[23] Morning Edition on NPR. 2015. “That Little Syrian Boy: Here’s Who He Was.” Available at: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/09/03/437132793/photo-of-dead-3-year-old-syrian-refugee-breaks-hearts-around-the-world.

| By Paul Croce |

Can academics support the democratic struggle not just to critique fake news, but also to engage the public in the stories that make those false facts appealing?

The Oxford English Dictionary named “Post-Truth” its Word of the Year for 2016. The dictionary cites “appeals to emotion or personal belief,” which have gained more influence than “objective facts … in shaping public opinion.” The sober scholars of the OED spotlighted this word not to glorify this way of thinking, but to call attention to a disturbing trend. In 2005, Stephen Colbert had already identified “truthiness” as the posture of public figures who “feel the truth” even in the face of contrasting facts and reasons. The particular items of recent history are new, such as the claim that Democrats have been managing a ring of pedophiles out of the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington, DC, but fabricated news has always been the exaggerating cousin of political spin. The multiplication of media outlets appealing to diverse clusters of people has made it particularly difficult to sort out corrupted truths from authentic stories.

Intellectual responses surely help identify the really true stories, but the problem of fakery runs deeper because of the way fake stories can seem plausible, at least to segments of the population, as a way to explain what’s happening around them. The political problem with “post-truth” is that, in its tendencies toward exaggerations of the truth, it reinforces already sharp suspicions about contrasting points of view. And it gets worse: people convinced by the fake stories, especially ones with lurid depictions of contrasting positions, tend to believe that the other side should not even get a hearing. At the righteous extreme of these extreme reports, fake news encourages the assumption that one side will simply need to defeat the other.

1. Making a Case for Listening to the Stories that Make Fake News Appealing

Post-truth statements are not hidden in dark corners gaining no attention. The kindred label, “Alt.Truth,” is in wide enough circulation to be the name of a popular Homeland episode. The wide appeal of these distortions, not their merits, makes them an issue. And it is our democratic culture and commitments that makes popular appeal significant. Respect for the voice of the people calls for attempting to understand how stories stripped of truth gain support. That suggests a special role for academics and teachers, as long as they do not get so caught up in their learned ways that they come to believe that they can’t learn anything from the thinking of the average citizen. One of our most intellectual of presidents, Thomas Jefferson, even believed that the tangible experiences of “a ploughman” would foster a better decision on “a moral case” than the abstract reasoning of “a professor.” Even when not learned, citizens can shed light on the lived experience of democracy, and those lessons travel on the wings of stories instead of the highways of scholarship.

In The Death of Expertise, professor of comparative politics Thomas Nichols honors the “specialization and expertise” that have produced the marvels of the modern world, and he laments the squandering of those achievements by the “unfounded arrogance” of citizens with “stubborn ignorance.” Philosopher Zach has issued a call to action for philosophers to help the public “recognize incompetence and poor argument.” Investigative journalists gamely try to bridge the gap between knowledgeable professionals and citizen indifference about expert insights. The organization Snopes evaluates public statements from True to Mostly False to downright Legends that circulate despite their lack of factual support. These experts do great work and deserve wide support. This approach shows great faith in the power of knowledge, with the tacit assumption that people just need to learn objective facts to correct the appeal of false facts.

William James.

Accuracy of facts is surely important, and they can sometimes be persuasive, but the appeal of misinformation persists. American psychologist William James offers helpful insights for addressing this challenge. He formed his thoughts in the late nineteenth century, just as the age of information abundance and expertise was taking on its modern shape. His psychology both helps to explain the appeal of false facts and suggests ways to respond to them. Without understanding the appeal of fakery, the responses won’t get very far. His insights can actually support the goals of the experts and fact checkers.

First, James points to the formative role of selective attention in the establishment of sharply different views. In the vastness of experience, there is not only room for different interpretations of facts, but also for selection of different facts. To make sense of situations, James observes, we select portions of the abundant facts to construct likely stories, which provide guidance within the complexities of experience based on prior assumptions. The most basic elements of false information can generally be corrected rather directly with true information. But the false is often not simple; more complex settings call for deeper inquiry into the sources of those likely stories.

Second, when facing the resulting cacophony of different points of view, James acknowledges the complexity, and suggests the humbling effect that awareness of this range of interpretations can have for coping with this diversity. In reminding that “to no one type … whatsoever is the total fullness of truth … revealed,” his point is not that there is no truth, but that truth is immense and complicated. Even with his awareness of human limitations in the face of the vastness of experience, he firmly critiques those ready to use the elusiveness of truth as a cover for active promotion of untruths. In recognizing the rich complexity of truth, he points to the need for constant inquiry and cooperation among us mere mortals who each have portions of truth in degrees. Attention to the truths of others can even shed light on one’s own truths.

James’s insights about selective attention and the overarching complexity of experience suggest the importance of looking at problems of fabricated news not just as reported (false) information, but also as storytelling, people’s efforts to find meaningful truth in their experiences. Every claim to fact is embedded in a story, which enables that fact to be accepted or not based on the plausibility of the story surrounding it. Awareness of the power of stories is not an endorsement of the sometimes false facts within them, but an acknowledgement of their significance in the human mind, and this awareness can also serve as a resource for addressing their unsavory power. This is especially important when the well-informed voices of experts are not enough to persuade citizens. And this is most especially important in a democracy that values the voice of the people.

2. Learning from People We Disagree With

This essay could end here, with a message about listening for the appeal of stories embedded within the fake news. In fact, an earlier draft, “Telling Likely Stories,” effectively ended at this point. That essay, attempting to bridge from scholarly thinking to public discussion, ran the gauntlet of a major bastion of scholarly work, the Peer Review. Designed to ensure quality, this process of review by experts in the field helps to prevent the publication of errors and of sloppy thinking; as a result, the finished work tends to be more authoritative and trustworthy. In addition, because Peer Review involves multiple views from within the profession, it also tends to hive off points of view that stray from mainstream interpretations. The anonymity of the readers reinforces the tugs toward consensus because without having to reveal their identity, they can critique different perspectives at liberty.

My reviewers both helped me improve the composition of the essay and took issue with my departure from mainstream views. Most helpfully, they pointed out that, despite my intentions, reference to “telling likely stories” can seem like an endorsement of those stories of fakery, or at least a casual disregard for the intellectual and public problems they involve. The first reviewer said, “Your argument does not recognize how problematic ‘alt truth’” is, and urged addressing “the latest [President Donald] Trump nonsense” by pointing out how wrong it is. This helped me to realize that I needed to make clear that understanding fakery is not instead of outrage for its problems, but a step toward undercutting the power and appeal of post-truth talk. For those who have focused only on outrage, until that first step emerged clearly, my argument could be perceived as consorting with the enemy.

My professional reviewers went further, taking issue with the very attempt to address how false information can seem plausible and my depiction of the storytelling roots of the problems of misinformation. Instead, they maintained that the misinformation is simply and literally wrong, by confusion or from deliberate manipulation. Call them out! About one half of the country, from water coolers to talk shows, are taking just this approach to scold the other half. But many people are not listening to the professors’ proposed corrections, except those who already agree. This seems a formula for amplified polarization. Mow down the latest “nonsense,” and more will soon sprout until we address those stories at their roots. Identification of the trends is not a celebration of them, but a blueprint for action against them.

“No way,” declared my second reviewer, who stated firmly that in my openness to hearing out different views, “you appear to deny that there’s any such thing as truth.” It’s fine to care about other people, but “you can’t mix the idea of caring with the road to understanding.” Without adopting “independent standards for truth,” this professor said, my argument “seems magical and hard to take seriously.” This view represents a school of thought that does not reckon with the work of recent psychologists and philosophers who, in the spirit of William James, have emphasized the relationship of caring and other non-rational factors within the process of knowing, including Antonio Damasio, Catherine Elgin, Nel Noddings, and Martha Nussbaum. Without considering these perspectives, my reviewer colleague regarded my James-inspired proposition as a species of relativism. Then, “if all facts are relative, the facts of those we disagree with are at best useless to my own mind, or we are left to surrender to someone else’s facts becoming my facts.” This position would have been familiar to James whose pragmatism mediated objectivist and relativist philosophies, frustrating both sides. And he came to expect scolding from advocates of each, respectively, who called him a roader for the other side.

My reviewer seemed so confident, but I wondered, How would this perspective address the endurance of different points of view? As James’s student Walter Lippmann noted a century ago, “Knowing how unjust other people’s inferences are when they concern us,” can help us to understand how “ours may be unjust to them.” Considering the unprecedented superabundance of information and interpretations now available to so many people, add in the complexity of the world, and now what? The confident assertions of my peer reviewers seemed like a declaration of constant warfare, with the tacit hope that one set of standards will triumph or face “surrender.” This is the conventional wisdom of our time, even as there are variations on the ultimate source of triumph. With enough persuasion, the victory will be intellectual; with enough conversion, the victory will be religious; with enough proof, the victory will be scientific; with sufficient electoral majorities, the victory will be political; with enough force of arms, the victory will be military.

I planned my essay precisely because I don’t see much evidence that these plans for total victory have been working very effectively. Every victory brings a defeat for others; and those others, especially those with views that one side finds appalling, have not been ready to surrender. This has not stopped the insistence that my reviewer colleagues represent, and this insistence comes with great fear as one of them went on to explain: “Without independent standards, no one can be wrong or foolish. If no one is wrong or foolish, society is utterly adrift.” Yet I wondered, who among us in this democracy will remain content when called wrong or foolish? And when called so by a smarter set, aren’t those very people ready to wear that scorn with pride?—and prepare a fighting response.

Bring on more shirts and bumper stickers like the ones saying “I’m a deplorable!” after Hillary Clinton’s painfully quotable critiques of working-class citizens. When these slogans appear—brashly declaring “I’m wrong and foolish!”—the listening and learning will have stopped. In addition, the insistence on standards, planted firmly in the fluid world of political debate, offers an either-or contrast: either standards with certainty or rudderless drift. James suggests a third way. He calls for inquiry in pursuit of truthful directions emerging not by prior absolute plan, but in response to particular concrete experiences.

I read my reviewer comments feeling that I had just gone through a bracing scholarly seminar review of my work. My thoughtful colleagues represent the posture of many academics impatient with the contemporary level of public discourse. Their work has the benefit of encouraging constant intellectual vigilance about public claims to truth. In his call for just this kind of work, Zach also urges intellectuals to avoid “complacently call[ing] their [surrounding] culture ‘anti-intellectual.’” Beyond avoiding this slur, the next step is to understand how average citizens think. In fact, and ironically, despite their intellectual merits, sophisticated critiques of public understanding, can seem like tit-for-tat responses to the impatience that many average citizens feel for the thinking of intellectuals.

Academics can up their game as contributors to the work of democracy. Other political systems have found effective but cruel ways to deal with distasteful positions or unwelcome people, through imprisoning, banishing, or killing the outliers. In living with the voice of the people, a democracy calls for getting along, even with people holding views that many, for many good reasons, call outrageous. James’s awareness of the role of selective attention in the formation of wildly different views and of the elusive complexities surrounding these and all views, suggests ways to get along without endorsement of any particular position, outlandish or otherwise. And in the openness to different people’s stories that he encourages, we may even learn new layers of truth that had remained out of view when in the comfortable embrace of discoursing with those who share our own perspectives. By letting go of our attempts to seize victory for any one of our positions, when we attempt to see the world through the eyes of others, we may achieve an even larger victory, not for any one position, but for the whole democratic community.

Paul J. Croce is Professor of American Studies and History, Stetson University, pcroce@stetson.edu, author of Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), and writer for The Public Classroom, and The Huffington Post.