[BRIEF NOTE] Lithwick on Nussbaum on empathy

[rfmcdonald]

Some days ago, Towleroad linked to a Dahlia Lithwick review essay in Slate that examines Martha Nussbaum's arguments in her recent From Disgust to Humanity, a book (drawing on her earlier 2004 Hiding from Humanity) that takes a look at the relationship between imagination and human rights.

New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.) Last month at the trial over California's ban on same-sex marriage, one witness who supported the measure testified that homosexuals are "12 times more likely to molest children." And recently, while addressing the proposed repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council warned Larry King if gay soldiers could serve in the military, "we might have to return to the draft" because other soldiers would refuse to serve. Perkins noted that he had showered together with 80 other men during his own time in the military, and he'd feel threatened by a gay man showering there with him.

Welcome to Martha Nussbaum's politics of disgust: an America in which national policy can be discussed at the level of Beavis and Butthead, chasing each other around in circles with a stick that once touched poop.

Why? Lithwick's central point is that Nussbaum thinks that bigotries and their remedies are the products of imagination, the key difference (I suppose) being the existence or otherwise of empathy with the person being imagined. Do they want to rape you and your children and destroy everything you cherish? Or not?

As she traces the genesis of the fear and disgust American feel toward homosexuals, she describes what she calls "projective disgust"—the magical thinking that allows us to believe that things that disgust us (i.e., male homosexuality) are contagious and that heterosexual sex is somehow better and less messy than it really is. So the reason male (as opposed to female) homosexual sex is ultimately experienced as so revolting and so terrifying, Nussbaum contends, is that it is viscerally threatening; it raises the possibility of being penetrated and violated. The very "gaze of a homosexual male is seen as contaminating because it says 'you can be penetrated.' "

What Nussbaum is really saying here is that Perkins experiences discomfort at the prospect of showering with 79 straight men and one gay one because in his imagination, "the very look of a gay man can be contaminating." In his imagination there has been an assault, even though nobody really wants to assault Tony Perkins in the shower. Elliott, too, lost in her fantasy of being personally assaulted by excrement, cannot help but experience gay marriage as a physical assault of herself. This isn't rational. It's fantasy and magical thinking, and that's what makes it so initially counterintuitive to claim that this type of irrational logic—the abundance of wild imagination that leads us to conclude that every gay man wants to invade our homes and assault our kids—can be conquered only by yet more imagination.

What Nussbaum really means, I think, is that we must replace one set of fantasies—about homosexuals as aggressive outsiders who seek to defile us—with the reality that they are just like us, people with aspirations and dreams and desires. In a sense she is using the word imagination in the first instance to describe a solipsistic experience: the subjective fear that the misunderstood "other" is coming to defile you. At the cure stage, however, imagination stops being a solo sport and becomes a way to reach beyond your own experience. Instead of dwelling on the other as other, you find some point at which his dreams and yours look similar. It's a profound idea: that we might use empathy and imagination to see people as they really are.

As Lithwick points out, the growing ability of straight Americans to empathize with their queer fellows and recognize their inherent rights to happiness has deconstructed those noxious myths. It's not all about bodily fluids, theirs' or others'.

Recent polling has shown, for instance, that 75 percent of Americans now support allowing openly gay Americans to serve in the military, a massive jump from the 44 percent who supported it in 1993. And one of the most reliable predictors support for gay military service is personal acquaintance with an openly gay person: Among poll respondents with a gay friend or family member, 81 percent are now in favor of allowing them to serve. In a country more polarized than ever on virtually every social issue, we have been curiously willing to take gay rights seriously.

Perhaps that's because, as Nussbaum suggests, we have been so willing to hear compelling personal narratives, ranging from the fictional Will of Will and Grace to the stories of politicians and athletes and friends. She especially credits the arts—such as Sean Penn's exuberant portrayal of Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's film Milk—with sentiment-shifting power. She also assigns a catalytic role to the courts. Nussbaum invokes the dawning public awareness of how black schoolchildren experienced "separate but equal" as an assault on their self-image in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She cites the striking down of anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia as another turning point, spurring a broader recognition that the pursuit of passion, fulfillment, and happiness belongs to all couples. It has often been the judiciary that has pushed Americans to imagine a reality, and a dream of equality, larger than their own experience.

I'm sure that Nussbaum would say that her model of bigotries ("They seek to claim privileges which aren't theirs, to intrude on our territories, to destroy the things that we most cherish for inhuman reasons") and their legal remedies ("They're doing things the way that we do them, they're people we like, they're people who care") would apply far more generally beyond queers in the United States, to relationships between groups all around the world in space and in time. If you're a Xhosa or a Tamil family wanting to move into a white-only neighbourhood in South Africa under apartheid, you're contaminating their territory; if you're Avi wanting to marry Samira in Israel, you're disrupting the ritualistic continuity of at least two communities; if you're from Turkey and you want to join your husband in Denmark, you want to destroy the country you're moving to; if you belong to a First Nation in Canada and you keep suffering in social exclusion, you're claiming too much when you want something to be done.

It's easy enough to ignore these issues; it's only a bit more difficult to say them and pretending that the saying changed something. I wonder what Nussbaum has to say about praxis.