On Anger, Disgust, and Love: Interview with Martha Nussbaum

> I argue that political love needs to be particularistic in this way, but that care must always be taken to harness that particular love to good moral principles and keep people moving back and forth. Good political rhetoric does this instinctively, and I study many cases. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. If Rawls had written it as an abstract structure of principle, the civil rights movement would never have succeeded. It was the soaring particular poetry, the rhythm of the language, its ability to capture Biblical images of love and justice, that made hearts leap out of their narrow breasts and soar toward something beautiful. Good thinkers have to do this each in their own context.

What? Never would have happened? So Malcolm X was totally lying when he described [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kf7fujM4ag ] how it was bubbling at every street corner, while King and others squabbled about money, and that it was for fear of people walking on Washington and shutting it down that suddenly it was channeled into some kumbaya style thing? I'm not a huge fan of his, maybe I find him racist, I don't know, but I can't deny the principledness and energy, and I find his version of events way more realistic than "an impassioned speech making people realize they didn't want to be treated like shit anymore".

But actually, I quoted the above because it reminded me of a thinker who might disagree:

> What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

-- Hannah Arendt, Letter to James Baldwin, November 21, 1962

"I think that Democrats are sometimes guilty of playing on fear and anger too, for example a resentful desire to smash elites without any realistic constructive analysis. I think that Sanders is admirable in many ways, but by inviting people to feel anger and in a sense fear of elites, and then offering them only hopelessly unworkable programs, he encouraged emotional irresponsibility."

I could never understand how anyone can find Nussbaum's writings as remotely interesting. "For those who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like."