Nussbaum's Monarchy of Fear

Fear is similar to terror. It breeds caution, inhibition and dissimulation. A fearful man does not say he is fearful. He does not tremble or scream aloud. Why? Exhibiting fear increases danger. After all, if you are more frightened than others it must be because you have good reason to believe you will be the next victim.

One way of dissimulating fear is to pretend to be more stupid and gloomy than you really are.

Martha Nussbaum says she is very very afraid coz Trump got elected and he is bound to do very nasty things. Our instinct is to say 'if she really were afraid, she'd keep mum and emigrate- or else only speak up after setting up an underground railway to get her precious students out of the country and safely across the border to Canada.'

This may be unfair to Nussbaum. She may be genuinely fearful and this may have caused her to become more stupid and gloomy than would otherwise be the case.

However, her fears are unfounded. We give the name of phobia to such emotions. Democracy, under the Rule of Law, works because the random paranoia of the stupid and ignorant cancels out and the Courts can step in if the worst comes to the worst.

So far I have assumed that Nussbaum has ordinary rationality. But this isn't really true. She is a pedagogue teaching a worthless subject. Part of her job is to advertise the bankruptcy of Academic availability cascades and the adversely selective nature of its Credentials as Screening or Signalling devices.

In a recent Newsweek interview, Nussbaum gives a vivid account of her recent night terrors.

In Monarchy of Fear, you write of the epiphany you had on the night Trump was elected president in 2016.
I was in Japan, isolated from my friends and unable to express my upset and fear in the usual way—by talking to and hugging them.

Why did Nussbaum's nanny not pack her favorite teddy-bear in her hand luggage? Did she not realize that Nussbaum might suddenly get an epiphany and start screaming and wetting the bed and running around like a headless chicken? At such times, only hugging and talking to teddy can make things better.

There was this churning of panic as the news came in. I already knew the electorate was divided, so why was I so terrified? I realized people were feeling that way all over the place. Some fear can be good, but this was a seething current of emotion preventing people from getting together and talking to each other about what we should do to fix the nation’s problems.

Nussbaum can't fix her own problems let alone those of the nation's. The best we can hope for is that she has a nice teddy bear to hug and talk to when panic starts churning in her tum tum and explosive diarrhea erupts from her bum bum and she starts running around like a headless chicken screaming unintelligibly.

How do you define fear? 

It is the most primitive emotion, and the first one felt by an infant arriving in this rather painful world, in desperate need of someone to protect them.

 Poor old Nussbaum doesn't have access to Wikipedia. She does not know that pain is primitive, fear is evolved and learned and has a similarity to surprise. This makes sense. If you felt no pain, you'd have nothing to fear. But you'd probably have burnt yourself to death or got gangrene from a cut or suffered some similar accident. Pain exists because it has survival value. Fear is something learned- either at the phylogenetic or ontogenetic level- and selected for by the fitness landscape. Babies cry not because they are afraid but because they need a particular type of comforting lacking which they will experience increasing pain. However, if this does not work, this reflex may shut down.

Nussbaum, clearly, desperately needs someone to protect her and hug her and soothe her just in case she suddenly gets an epiphany about Trump or Modi or some other evil monster and her tum tum starts churning in panic and her bum bum erupts with volcanic diarrhea. This is nothing to be ashamed about. I myself exhibit similar symptoms when doing my taxes.

When we feel helpless later in life, fear makes us scapegoat others.

Sheer nonsense. Nussbaum may scapegoat people- she probably blamed all the piss and shit in her bed on the chambermaid at her Japanese hotel the night Trump got elected- but the rest of us don't do any such thing. Why? It would be foolish.

Instead of fixing the problems, we say, “Oh, it’s all their fault—those women or immigrants are infesting our country.” Rather than useful protest or constructive solutions, we get angry at these handy targets.

Why does Nussbaum behave so foolishly? Why say Modi is horrible, Trump is horrible, instead of admitting that Modi or Trump offered to help the very voters whom their opponents ignored and showed contempt for?

Ordinary people don't act like Nussbaum. Our species would have perished long ago if they did.

Fear is also behind disgust, a visceral reaction to our own mortality and animality—feces and bodily fluids and such.

Sheer rubbish. Disgust is learned and associated with pathogen avoidance. It also has a signalling and screening function. Thus if you come into class with spunk dribbling from your mouth, your students may form a surmise, unfavorable to your scholarship, as to how you secured tenure.

This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste.

Which racial or gender subgroup is Martha projecting grossness onto? Why won't she stop? The thing is foolish. She may believe that every society does the same. But if every society jumps off a cliff, will she too jump off a cliff? I am not saying she ought not to tell stupid lies. After all, that is part of her job description. Still, why not tell different, albeit equally stupid, lies which don't involve projecting grossness? What I mean is, though I picture Nussbaum as being always just a moment away from an epiphany which involves panic churning in her tum tum and diarrhea exploding from her bum bum, there is nothing particularly gross about this representation. Indeed, in Japan, the thing is an art form somewhat less vulgar than kabuki albeit without the cachet of Noh.

A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.

Fuck off. There is plenty of social subordination and discrimination on University campuses. But this is done on the basis of the stupidity and meager earning power of serfs to failed Research Programs. There may be some people who say 'Social Choice theorists are donkeys' or 'Poli Sci majors fuck like bonobos because they have about the same I.Q'. However, those people are just meanies. Ignore them. Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. Give teddy a nice hug and go to bed. But do keep your diaper on just in case Trump or Modi gets re-elected and you have another one of your epiphanies.

And then we feel better about ourselves; we can be the angels, and they can be the animals.

Yes dear, you can be a sweet little angel when you are not having epiphanies and shitting all over the place.

Women, with their menstrual periods and childbirth, have always been targets of this in all cultures.

Nussbaum is American. She says periods and childbirth are a target in her culture. The menstruating maidens of Bryn Mawr are taught to dress themselves in sack cloth and ashes and to toll a great bell and cry out 'Unclean! Unclean!' when hastening to lectures on QMT. No Daughter of the American Revolution is permitted to give birth in a hospital. Rather they undergo labor in roadside shacks attended to only by drunken midwifes grown too old to make a living at the world's oldest profession.

Why is Nussbaum telling us stupid lies? The answer is that she is a Professor of a shite subject and has a worthless book to sell.

They have come to stand for the disgusting body. There’s the long-standing trope of racism, that black people are more animal. And Jews were often compared to insects; Kafka’s Metamorphosis was about how a man suddenly turns into a cockroach.

Long standing tropes are used by everybody against everybody. So what? Tropes they remain. There is no point pretending they correspond to something real. I may picture Nussbaum as constantly spraying diarrhea on her surroundings. However, I'd be delighted if she transferred one or two of her more desirable residences to me. Why? It is because there must be rich Japanese perverts who would pay a premium to possess her thoroughly shit stained domiciles.  Pecunia non olet.

Disgust is something that rears up at times when we feel helpless or fearful. All of a sudden, you find people talking in ways that we thought we had given up. Consider Trump, who talks about African nations as shitholes and immigrants as infestations, like insects.

Or consider Nussbaum who talks about America as a shithole where menstruating women are shunned and made to feel they are objects of disgust.

What is behind the disgust we are seeing toward women today?

Nussbaum says American women are seen as disgusting because of their menses. She is too old to suffer any such thing. Thus, we may reasonably surmise that it is her own inability to have periods which causes her to see younger American women as disgusting.

Men are angry at women because they aren’t doing what they are supposed to do, which is support men.

Not Trump. He won the election precisely because so many women supported him, not Hilary. But they did so because they thought Hilary was shittier than Trump.

They are in the workplace claiming their own rights and often outdoing men. They are daring to bring charges of sexual assault and harassment. They are just not behaving themselves! And so the desire to beat them down for being disgusting becomes powerful.

But only Nussbaum, who doesn't have periods, is doing so on the basis that younger women do menstruate and are therefore disgusting.

But it’s a new era. My own senator, Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran and amputee, wanted to bring her second child to the floor of the Senate. They haven’t changed the rules to [explicitly] allow breastfeeding on the floor, but that has happened in other countries. In New Zealand, the prime minister delivered a first child and made a big point of breastfeeding.

Tammy Duckworth is half Chinese-Thai and grew up speaking Thai and Indonesian. She studied in Singapore and Bangkok and then finished her High School in Hawaii. In other words, she was exposed to South East Asian and Polynesian cultures where no taboo attaches to menstruation or child birth or breast feeding. Nussbaum, an elderly WASP convert to Judaism, is showing that there are some Americans- those from Hawaii or of Asian or Black heritage, for example- who don't think fertile women are disgusting in any way. I doubt, there are many American males who won't kiss their Mommy or their wife just coz she's on the rag. But Nussbaum probably moves in different circles where more primitive notions prevail.

If, for Nussbaum, the newborn baby is the incarnation of Primal Fear and the menstruating woman the symbol of disgust, what is the opposite pole?

In his review of her book, Jordan Jochim writes-

Central to Nussbaum’s account of the negative effects of fear is the figure of the absolute monarch, whom she positions as an analogue to the helpless infant. Citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, Nussbaum explains how absolute monarchs are like infants insofar as they ‘have no way of surviving except by making slaves of others’, and thus must either ‘rule or die’ (p. 22).

Nussbaum is talking absolute shit. Slavery is not necessary for an absolute monarchy to exist. The reverse is also true. Slavery can exist where there is pure anarchy.

The infant-like monarch does double work for Nussbaum. Primarily, this figure serves to illustrate the irrational experience of fear, and how a feeling of powerlessness can lead people to ‘grasp for control’ in a way that promotes narcissism and scapegoating (p. 8).

Very true. New born babies are notorious for grasping for control by scapegoating others and praising themselves incessantly.

Nussbaum also analogizes the ‘imperious baby’, who forces ‘others to do his bidding’ by, for example, feigning cries of hunger (p. 31), to a demagogue, who uses fear-mongering rhetoric to stir up concerns over potential political enemies, and who thus turns the irrational fears of others to his personal advantage.

Did Nussbaum hate and resent her daughter? Would she surprised to learn that you can hire a nanny to look after your 'imperious baby' and then the inconvenience would immediately end? Better still, you could sell the little cherub or put it up for adoption.

Babies are not horrible dictators. Nor is her gracious majesty the Queen gorrbless'er. Why is Nussbaum pretending otherwise?

Nussbaum finds an example for this kind of demagoguery in the ‘fiery populist’ Cleon from Thucydides’ The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (2013), who, while not fearful himself, provokes the Athenians to grasp fearfully for control when he urges them to murder and enslave the citizens of their rebellious tributary state, Mytilene (p. 45). Claiming that Cleon’s efforts to ‘other’ potential allies ‘should strike us as familiar’ (p. 46), Nussbaum treats as evidence of the narcissistic, exclusionary, and ultimately anti-deliberative effects of such monarchical fear recent increases in Islamophobia and Trump’s 2017 ‘clash of civilizations’-style speech in Warsaw.

It is foolish to compare a contemporary politician with some guy who lived long ago under very different circumstances. However, Nussbaum's comparison is more than foolish. It is illiterate. The Cleon of Aristophanes is nothing like Trump. Perhaps Nussbaum genuinely believed that Trump and Modi were genuine Islamophobes who would preside over pogroms and endless wars. But such a belief does not speak well for her intelligence.

According to Nussbaum, Trump’s appeals, much like those of Cleon, aim to provoke an ‘amorphous fear’ among their audiences, one ‘generated in a climate of ignorance and fed by imprecise and alarmist rhetoric’ (p. 60).

Nussbaum seeks to create an amorphous fear in her readers against politicians she does not like- people like Modi and Trump. The former was disliked by her former partner, Amartya Sen, while the latter is not liked by her present significant other who served in Obama's White House.

Instead of urging deliberation about potential solutions to actually endemic sources of violence, such as gun deaths, Trump’s speeches, she maintains, distort the nature of the threats facing American citizens. Notably, despite her reference to the ‘imperious baby’, and her figurative use of the monarch as an exemplar for the experience of fear, Nussbaum does not consider how those in actual positions of power might fear-monger out of their own sense of fear. Her analysis of fear’s dangers in this chapter remains pitched in the register of the ruled.

This is because she has no analysis. She doesn't know, anymore than Trump or anybody else knows, how to solve the problem of gun deaths or the rise of China or anything else. Eggheads have been 'deliberating' for decades and achieved nothing. Trump delivered on tax cuts and jobs and pushed back on China. That may be enough to get him re-elected if the Democrat's circular firing squad terminates with a candidate even worse than Hilary.

Nussbaum’s treatment of fear’s irrationality is illuminating.

I suppose it does shed light on the stupidity of savants.

At the same time, there is an important difference between the kind of fear experienced by infants and monarchs:

no kidding!

unlike infants, monarchs are not powerless. In fact, to the extent that monarchs experience fear, this may be precisely because they are powerful. They have a vested interest in maintaining their power, and thus fear losing it. At least, this is how Nussbaum’s ancient Greek interlocutors, Aristotle and Thucydides, understand absolute monarchy, which they treat as tantamount to tyranny.

This is because they had no personal experience of the thing. Even Persianized Greeks hadn't experienced a genuine untrammelled absolute monarchy.

Illustrating the kind of fear experienced by rulers, a dynamic about which Nussbaum has less to say, are their treatments of the fear felt by tyrants.

The US is under the Rule of Law. Why talk nonsense about ancient Greek politics? Why not speak instead of Robin Hood's valiant struggle with the Sheriff of Nottingham?

Aristotle maintains, in the Rhetoric and Politics (2013), for example, that in tyrants, who are always oriented to protecting their power (Rhet. 1366a; Pol. 1314a37), fear is not anti-deliberative but rather motivates deliberation (Rhet. 1383a; Pol. 1314a15-26): about how to undermine their subjects’ capacities to trust one another, their subjects’ desire for self-rule, and thus their willingness to act collectively against tyranny.

Aristotle was Alexander's tutor but he himself learned nothing from his illustrious student. Guys who conquer a lot of territory and establish cities and laws and protect trade routes can become absolute monarchs. Such monarchies may be constitutional and democratic. We know this. Aristotle didn't.

Nussbaum is telling us a bunch of stupid lies- viz. babies are born full of fear and this causes them to become imperious, narcissistic and inclined to scapegoat Jews and Blacks. Hitler was a baby. He launched a world war and killed lots of people. Women are disgusting because they have periods. That is why White women preferred to vote for Trump. But he is very evil and so Nussbaum had an epiphany and panic started churning her tum tum which caused diarrhea to explode from her bum bum. Someone should have given her hugging- or at least teddy bear.  That way she wouldn't have soiled whatever chair her University has awarded her.

Aristotle also illuminates the practical interdependence of the ruler’s fear and that of the ruled, showing how the fearful tyrant promotes a similarly rational fear among his subjects, who deliberate, however, not about protecting their power, but about their well-being and that of their loved ones (Pol. 1313b16; Nicomachean Ethics2012, 3.1).
The rational kind of fear experienced by rulers with power is also on display in Thucydides’ account of the Mytilenian debate. Indeed, it plays a central role in Cleon’s appeals to the citizens of imperial Athens, whom he exhorts to make an example Mytilene to safeguard the power of their empire, which he identifies as a tyranny for their subject cities (III.37.2). Irreducible to populist demagoguery, Cleon’s appeals also represent a realist’s strategic reaffirmation of the (less-demagogic) Periclean claim – made earlier in the war – that Athens is ‘like a tyranny:’ its power may be wrong to take, but is nevertheless too ‘perilous to abandon’ (II.63.2).

Why is all this irrelevant? The answer is because we have a highly professional, wholly independent, Judiciary as well as a Legislature jealous of its rights and privileges. There are two independent checks of the Executive.

Nussbaum might as well talk of Robin Hood or King Arthur's magic sword.

Noticing how fear informs rational, interest-driven anxieties brings more clearly to light nuances already implicit in Nussbaum’s especially strong chapter 6, which considers how misogyny, defined as ‘a determined enforcement of gender privilege’, may have secured Trump’s popularity among white male voters, anxious about defending their economic and social privilege (p. 177).

Saying that poorer people of whatever color or gender have some great 'privilege' makes them anxious because they don't want to be made worse off. They vote against anyone associated with this type of talk. They vote for someone who promises to make them better off- at the expense of foreigners in distant countries.

There can be no question that having a female candidate boosts a party's share of the female vote. In this case, clearly, Hilary's supporters had spooked White Males by banging on about White Male privilege. But, this also spooked women whose economic fortunes were tied to those men. Thanks to idiots like Nussbaum, poor people voted for a Billionaire while Hilary- whose husband had presided over a boom- ended up taking the fall for the misdeeds of the elite.

As Nussbaum aptly puts it, misogyny’s ‘primary root is in self-interest, combined with anxiety about potential loss’ (p. 177).

Nonsense! Self-interest militates against misogyny- even for male homosexuals. Saudi Arabia wants women to come into the workplace not because misogyny has declined but because it wants to continue to be rich after the oil runs out.

Telling stupid lies like this is wholly self defeating.

Considering America’s history of patriarchal exclusion, Nussbaum notes that misogyny ‘is not symmetrical to female hatred of men’ (p. 177). Since women lack the kind of ‘entrenched interests’ (p. 180) of misogynists bent on protecting their power, misandry, ‘to the extent that this exists’, would be closer to a sense of grievance or a desire for retribution (p. 177).

Presumably, 'patriarchal exclusion' means paying women less than men so that a monoposonistic employer, or cartel of employers, can extract a surplus.  But this sort of market power means there will be higher prices, or discriminatory rationing, for the common man. Thus, it is in everybody's interests to curb restrictive practices.

Nussbaum’s account draws attention to how misogyny emerges from a context in which men, who possess disproportionate political and economic power, strive to defend that power out of a fear of losing it.

People who have something utile don't want to lose it even if they have disproportionately little of it.  If a rich man loses his wallet he experiences annoyance not fear. For a poor man, the same thing could be a catastrophe. Being more fearful, he may be more vigilant and inclined to use violence of a fatal type.

Misogyny may emerge because of sour-grapes type deprivation or fear of sexually transmitted diseases or the fear of economic ruin caused by having a family. It may be reinforced by monastic religions which, for a Malthusian reason, absorb a population surplus whose reproduction might lead to a 'tragedy of the commons'.  I suppose it could also arise because women behave horribly to men. But, there are certain biological reasons why this seldom obtains across any large class of people.

Still, it is possible that high status males will be misogynists so as to enjoy large harems or droit de siegneur or something of that sort. However, lower status males will then have an incentive to collectively impose the rule of law. Women could certainly assist in this. If they could achieve this result for themselves, then misogyny would not have a political complexion. Women would have kicked the shit out of it wherever it showed its face. Consider my own hatred of muscular martial artists. Whenever I try to discriminate against them, they punch my lights out. So, this behavior disappears. That's also the story about tyrants and autocrats. The abuse was tempered by salutary assassination.

In this way, they are not unlike the tyrants and tyrannical cities described by Aristotle and Thucydides

misogyny, unlike the tyrants of Aristotle, is not as dead as the dodo. If women can't kick the thing to death on their own, they need to ally with lower status men to do so. Trump won because smart women like Nussbaum spooked lower status American males because it sounded like they were going to make them poorer and weaker because of some supposed 'White Male Privilege' they enjoyed. Interestingly poorer White women were equally spooked because their fortunes were tied up with those men. This was the politics of fear with a vengeance. What was the upshot? The pretense was dropped that academic feminism and queer theory was any different from racist or homophobic shite.

In the final chapter, Nussbaum considers how hope might counter the fear-driven desire for absolute power.

Utterly foolish. The thing can only be done with constitutional checks and balances, not everybody holding hands and wishing upon a star.

Here she draws on Adrienne Martin, Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela to underscore how hope can inspire constructive action, and how, by keeping faith in the capacities of others to do good – especially those with whom we disagree – those others might ‘try to live up to that expectation’ (p. 218).

To mention Adrienne Martin in the same breath as Immanuel Kant suggests mind boggling provincialism. It's like saying ' Sushila Yadav draws upon the philosophical works of Adi Sankara, Umasvati, Nagarjuna and Pappu Yadav to underscore how nice it is to be nice.' 

Actually it is even more foolish. In a review article, Ben Sherman writes-

The orthodox definition holds that hope is “a combination of the desire for an outcome and the belief that the desirable outcome is possible but not certain” .

This is okay because it links hope to Knightian uncertainty- i.e. the real world.

Martin’s own account of hope is as follows: “to hope for an outcome is to desire (be attracted to) it, to assign a probability somewhere between 1 and 0 to it, and to judge that there are sufficient reasons to engage in certain feelings and activities directed toward it” .

This is not okay because almost everything we encounter outside a casino features Knightian uncertainty. We don't know what the possible states of the world are and can't assign a probability to the hoped for outcome.

It is very foolish to say that only a professional gambler or particular sort of actuarial scientist or Fin Tech professional can hope for anything.

Nussbaum concludes by considering a series of potential ‘schools of hope’, including the arts, critical dialogue, religion, protest movements, theories of justice, and a national service program.

There are already plenty of schools and a lot of bogus 'critical dialogue' and many religious organisations and protest movements and theories of justice. Why? It is a matter of supply and demand. America does not have a 'national service program'. There is no demand for it and, because the job market is tight, no supply for it either.

Demonstrating a robust appreciation for how entrenched economic inequalities might hinder an education in hope, Nussbaum returns to her capabilities approach as a theory of justice that seeks to ensure hope’s material preconditions.

Clearly, Nussbaum's 'education in hope' uses up resources. If people want it, they can pay for it themselves. But, they don't want it. It is useless. There are things it is useful to learn so as to overcome the 'entrenched economic inequalities' which keep one poor. Nussbaum's shite does not qualify. It isn't Law, it isn't Economics, it isn't even Philosophy. It is mere wishful thinking.

While Nussbaum’s closing account of these schools of hope is arresting, it left me hoping for more examples from the present day, especially in the section on protest movements. Here, Nussbaum alludes to King and the Civil Rights Movement and briefly mentions the Movement for Black Lives, which seems like it would be an especially productive case for Nussbaum to engage with in greater depth.

How could Nussbaum engage with anything in greater depth? She isn't a lawyer nor does she have any experience as a political organizer nor is she a good fund raiser or even an effective spokesperson.

She is simply an elderly pedagogue writing silly books.

For example, in her discussion of justice, Nussbaum could have drawn on the commitment to economic justice contained in the Movement’s platform (2015).

Because economic justice will certainly be achieved by them.

Similarly, as examples of policies that are in line with her capabilities approach, she could have highlighted the Movement’s demand for the reallocation of federal funding away from policing and incarceration and towards employment and universal health care.

The problem here is that Obama was in the White House for 8 years. If he wouldn't do these things, who else will? Biden? He doesn't have the mandate. He was actually anti busing and was 'tough on crime'. Who else is there? Kamala Harris? Also tough on crime.

Nussbaum claims that ‘we often think better, and relate to one another better, when we take a step back from the daily, where our immediate fears and wishes are likely to be at stake’ (p. 16).

Nussbaum would think better if she stepped back from writing nonsense.

Her account of fear demonstrates the value of maintaining such a distance.

Her account is wholly foolish and breeds foolishness in others consider how Jochim ends his apple polishing review-

At other points, particularly in Nussbaum’s discussion of misogyny, The Monarchy of Fear also demonstrates that insightful analysis can be accomplished by doing otherwise.

Visceral fear should be examined from up close. Misogyny should be examined from an Economic and Political perspective- i.e. at a distance.

Consistently lucid and insightful, Nussbaum’s book offers a generative perspective from which to assess our social and political moment.

Generative? Generative of what? Nussbaum's style of scholarship created the impression that politics should no longer concern itself with raising up the condition of the median voter. Instead it should concern itself with righting historical wrongs to the detriment of people already on the edge but who supposedly had some historical privilege. This created a climate of fear which ended when it was discovered that the 'P.C' brigade were just a bunch of stupid bullies whom everybody could safely ignore.