Martha Nussbaum is one of those academics you love to pick on -- declaring that Nietzsche has nothing to contribute to political philosophy, puzzling over why Finland is such a model state (I don't suppose ethnic homogeneity, a tiny population, and no natural resources has anything to do with it), and generally trying to turn Aristotle into the jumping-off point for an aggressive love intervention into the lives of ill-off people everywhere. With Amartya Sen, she champions one version or another of the capabilities approach to human rights -- we should make sure all people can fulfill their true potential, and we can bring this about by showing Indian caste women, for instance, how many things Martha Nussbaum can do, carefully revealing the truth to them in ways they come not only to understand but to embrace, and finally to demand.
The flipside of all this is that Nussbaum is actually a brilliant, diligent, humane, and decent scholar, accomplished in a way that demands respect (she can write a book over 400 pages long, for instance). It's even sort of fun to seesaw between the head-nodding of good intellectual fellowship she provokes at her best and the exasperated moaning she triggers at her most preposterously maudlin. So it is with Nussbaum's CHE missive on the Threat to World Democracy coming out of the internal clash in India between the forces of Gandhism -- the people for peace, social justice, sexual equality -- and Gujarat's very own Religious Right -- hindumaniac, bloodthirsty, and (of course) intellectually imported directly from the Third Reich. (I almost laughed my coffee across my screen when I read this last one, but, as it turns out, Nussbaum has evidence. Neocons are so unpopular that leftist academics are turning into them.)
First Nussbaum gives us the good news:
On a visit to the elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why this ceiling glows the way it does?" I said I didn't, and I confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. "Fiber-optic cables," he told me. "We are the first ones to put this technology into a temple." There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.
This is damned right, and as you recall, I harped on this precise point when Bush delivered it as a 'foolproof' sop in his State of the Union address. What Nussbaum misses is that "utter docility" is as much a product of debtor-consumerism as it is of the lunkheaded religious practice of deeming one living man the Mouthpiece of God -- maybe even more so. Though some may trample their fellows for a Wii, few slit throats for a plasma-screen TV.
Having done a bang-up job heaping ridicule on the ridiculous, Nussbaum then proceeds to outdo them:
So what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a public culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization, and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu right. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash within each person, in which the ability to live with others on terms of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of being humiliated.
Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focused attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynous maternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashing others; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts to aggression and standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient to address it.
To be fair, Nussbaum bails out of her flaming biplane right at the last minute, but to be fairer, she splashed gasoline all over a perfectly good flying vessel and lit a match. One cannot, in this regard, have it both ways: you must not be surprised or have buyer's remorse when your secular messianic androgyne starts smiting the penis itself as an implement of violence. Second of all, the stark contrast Nussbaum draws between Public Pluralism and Raging Testosterone is just as overwrought and too-easy as the caricature of civilizational clash that you can find anywhere a war breaks out, or broke out, or might be breaking out. When one of World Academia's leading public lights boils down in all her essentials to the threadbare yarn about how They Hate What they Fear, and They Fear What They Don't Understand, someone needs to come along and insist that things cannot possibly be so dull as Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame makes them out to be -- that just possibly human beings are more complex creatures than that, even the ones without visiting professorships at Oxford.
The fact is, life is not a constant choice between kicking someone's head in or raping the first woman around and living in peaceable close quarters with strange strangers. Hobbes' case wasn't very convincing then, and it's even more of a dud in cosmopolitan drag. Because the middle ground which Nussbaum wants to ignore is that stable, peaceable, decent society which is quite comfortable and sexually balanced internally but quite stubbornly parochial and exclusionary when it comes to external relations. I will freely admit that this society I describe may appear, based on the global track record of human civilization, a rank utopia. What such society wasn't run at the price of exporting its masculine disgruntled, its various losers, even its excessively victorious, to the shipping lanes or the expeditionary forces? But I daresay this vision of mine is no sillier, and indeed, in its moderation and variety, far less silly than Nussbaum's false choice between manly sociopathology and metrosexual Bennetonism. Intense public pluralism, which inevitably encompasses an effete publicized pluralism of 'private' selves, is not the only counterforce on hand, and taming male aggression does not require of men that they become some godawful cross between Socrates and Robin Williams.
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