PART III
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Predicament
Let’s review. We, my fellow Americans, some or many fellow Americans, maybe other WEIRD people, are both much too angry and too prone to use anger as a tool for ego—to punish those who get in one’s way and to pass pain to others, including others who have no causal relation to the pain one is in. I’ve never before seen so much of this kind of anger, anger without hope and ideals, snarly anger, infantile anger, crush-you-like-a-bug anger, reactive anger, anger that conveys disrespect, cruel anger, sometimes sadistic anger.
If emotivism in ethics—the view that holding a value is pretty much only a matter of asserting it, stomping one’s feet, and then spewing disrespect, sometimes hatred, toward those we disagree with—wasn’t already true, then widespread modeling of moral and political speech that takes the form of inciting tribal animosities and alliances on social media, in meetings and rallies of antecedently polarized people, and in disdainful, “Can you believe it?,” moralistic grandstanding, might make it so. Moral and political agreement has the cognitive depth of rooting for the home team, while disagreement is a matter of booing, dismissing, and disvaluing some scumbag or douche bag other. Both are shallow, matters of asserting, not reflecting or engaging. Such skills—reflection, inspection, and discussion—can be lost, and they are in danger of becoming so.
A PEW report from 2019 indicates that 48 percent of Democrats and 35 percent of Republicans say they share “any values and goals” with members of the other party. Taken at their word, this means that a majority of both parties think they share no values and ideals with members of the other party. Think about that. Obviously, this is a false belief, because we know for sure that there are many shared values and goals—for justice and equality, for well-educated children, for a good economy, and so on. What could lead people on both sides of the political spectrum to have such a false belief? Tribal animosities, encouragement of payback and pain-passing anger, lack of critical thought, loss of skills of loving attention to the other, and patient civil discourse about matters of value.
Facebook, Twitter, sound bites, and short-form journalism invite assertions of value, not discussions of value. Sixty percent of news articles shared online have not been read by the person who posts them (Lynch 2019). This means that the coinage of emoticons, thumbs-ups, and happy, sad, or angry faces is paid as the informational equivalent of a headline or a haiku that contains a secret hint indicating which side it represents. Meanwhile, mocking, spewing profanities, and frenzied rallies have become an accepted style of speech, a way of expressing one’s values. The bully in chief, the former president of the United States, hurled almost daily insults in incoherent tirades on Twitter (until his account was closed), while the First Lady asked children not to bully each other. This inconsistency would be unsettling, except that, well, commitment to logical consistency and the truth are no longer exemplified as important values. This is shamelessness.
Shamelessness is modeled fairly reliably in national politics. There are hypocrites, liars, paid functionaries for K Street lobbyists, and sycophants. Shamelessness is also modeled in how the rich and the famous live. I’m sure that many artists and actors are actually upstanding people, but what magazine sold at the checkout counter at your local grocery store tells of anyone’s noble character traits, values, or deeds? Voyeurism, exhibitionism, addiction, rehab, cheating hearts, and Photoshopped lies are the currency of that realm.
There is no single cause of shamelessness. One factor that makes shamelessness less shameful than it ought to be is the view that all or most relationships are transactional, and thus not really to be governed by deeply held values. Promises and contracts are more akin to truces than to vows. When caught lying, one dissembles a bit, possibly apologizes a little, and suggests that we now return to our own little world of resource extraction from each other and play nice until the next time we walk over each other. A few years ago, an administrator at my university who broke a promise to my department explained to us that we had an old-fashioned conception of promise. We were Kantians, as far as promises go; he was a Derridean, postmodern ironist but certainly not a joker or a huckster, or what they called a “liar” in the olden days. On the transactional view of human relations, the default assumption is that we are all mean spirits, artful dodgers, and sensible knaves and knavesses beneath our hail-fellow-well-met facades.
The end of March 2020, like every other day, there was a front-page story in the news about one Bill Ackman, a major hedge fund operator, who bragged to his investors and on TV this week that he made a 9,500 percent return ($2.6 billion) on a $27 million investment that the coronavirus would tank the economy. The week before, we North Carolinians learned that one of our senators, Richard Burr, sold somewhere between $628,000 and $1.72 million in hospitality industry stock after receiving secret advance warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus (he was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee), all while reassuring his constituents that the virus was no big deal.
This is shameful. It is something that, in a culture that encouraged a mature sense of shame, Burr would not have done, and we would all be shocked by—not inured to—its everydayness, its utter predictability. In a world in which we had, as Confucians recommend, “rectified the names,” so that being a public servant meant that one serves the common good, Burr would not have done what Burr did. But we don’t, and he did.
The Intervention: Do the Emotions of Anger and Shame Differently
Anger: So here is the intervention I recommend. Turn the temperature down on anger and cease and desist with two kinds of anger. Just stop doing vengeful anger and pain-passing anger. Or better yet, reflect on what is wrong with these kinds of anger, and then stop doing them. Some on both the left and the right say that the amount and intensity of anger is natural and expectable, but this is not true. Expressions of emotions when posting on Facebook or Twitter increase by 20 percent the probability that the post will be shared. Specifically, news that is largely “just news,” and experienced that way when simply heard or read as reportage, can be weaponized to elicit outrage online by the simple indication that the person who shares the news is outraged by it. Tribal contagion does the rest. Molly Crocket, a Yale psychologist, writes, “If moral outrage is like fire, then social media is like gasoline” (2017, 771).
One source of evidence that anger practices are plastic comes from the ways other cultures do anger, both in everyday life and when the stakes are high and unusual. There is huge variation, and thus no necessity that anger needs to be done the way we are doing it now, especially if, as I claim, it is true that the ways we are doing anger are causing trouble.
Sometimes there is variation in our midst. In the case of anger, there are many individuals, communities, and subcultures inside multicultures that do not enact dominant scripts or, what is different, highly noticeable scripts, scripts that get the lion’s share of attention. Alternative scripts, and the alternative norms that govern them, are hard to see or hear in the cacophony. Cultural psychology indicates that dominant modes of doing emotions eventually defeat nondominant ones in three generations (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016; De Leersnyder, Mesquita, and Kim 2011; Jasini, De Leersnyder, and Mesquita, 2018). How do we keep this from happening? How do we keep anger, as we are increasingly doing it, from further securing its status as a legitimate tool to enact revenge on those who get in our way, and to pass pain on to others when we are in pain?
I examined reasons internal to our own tradition for and against anger. Anger comes in varieties: there is revenge anger, pain-passing anger, feigned “as if” anger, instrumental anger, recognition respect anger, righteous anger at injustice, and impersonal anger at fate or the universe. I examined the theory and practice of these kinds of anger in other cultures. One internal reason for changing how we do anger comes from the widely accepted view that the aim of ethics is to do good. We should watch especially for anger that aims at revenge or payback to others with whom we don’t share moral or political values. And we should beware the kind of lazy anger where we pass pain, sometimes even to people we love, because we are in pain.
I need to emphasize that this doesn’t leave the other varieties innocent. Recognition respect anger, instrumental anger, righteous anger for justice’s sake, and impersonal anger are often entirely justified. But they undermine their moral force and spread toxic effects if desires to pay back or impulses to pass pain are part of what produces them, colors their content, and affects the way the anger is expressed. The method of examining the ways other cultures do anger—sometimes with representatives among us—is offered to assist moral imagination and unseat convictions that we might have about our own practices, to the effect that there is no other way to do anger, or that this is the way anger is, the way anger works.
What is actual is possible. What cultural psychology, anthropology, and cross-cultural philosophy teach is that how we do emotions is almost entirely a matter of cultural learning. This should not seem the slightest bit controversial. Even basic emotions theorists will need to admit that almost all the causes for emotions as we do them are new—they did not exist when the basic anger circuitry evolved; the same goes for how modern anger feels, what actions it disposes us to, what is authorized, and so on. Different cultures teach different norms and scripts for doing anger. And there exist practices for doing anger that are psychologically, morally, and politically better than some of the ways we currently do anger.
Indeed, there are five or six locations at which cultures have a say in constructing what an emotion is and what it does. An emotion is defined by a schema comprising typical causes + inner phenomenal features/feelings + characteristic content + typical dispositions to act + typical action. There are culture-specific norms that govern which situations call for a particular emotion, at what intensity and valence the emotion ought to be felt given those causes, the content of the emotion, and what action is warranted.
If you think of emotions as happenings, as akin to reflexes, or as disturbances that are causally determined by external forces, then you hold not only a false theory of emotions but one that might seem to yield its own entirely unwarranted confirmation. If you think that emotions will be what they will be, that emotions are like pupil contractions to light or digestion—as encouraged byWEIRDideas about being globally entitled to one’s feelings—then one will take a pose of impotence with respect to the emotions. This will make it more likely that the emotional economy of one’s world will, as it were, just happen. But this will be due to the fact that one takes a passive pose with respect to emotions, not because emotions are causally ballistic and just happen as they are supposed to happen by nature’s design. I guarantee that, even if one takes the passive pose toward one’s own emotions, they do not take this pose toward the emotions of others. It is almost universal that one thinks others ought to be more present, more loving, more appreciative, less frazzled, less anxious, less nervous and shy, and more empathetic and compassionate. But “ought” implies “can,” so unless the judgments in such cases are idle fantasies, we think that other people can change in these ways.
Perhaps a person is in therapy to work, among other things, on their emotions. If such a person thinks that emotions are happenings and cannot be modified, moderated, tuned up or down, or cannot take different evaluative objects than they currently do, then the person is being performatively inconsistent. And in this inconsistency they reveal a partial, perhaps it is a halfhearted, commitment to the truth that emotions are not happenings. It may be that scripts for doing emotions once learned are, like other habits, hard to unseat. But that is a different matter altogether.
And so it is with all the emotions. They are plastic. All social emotions—anger, shame, guilt, joy, pride—are assembled to feel as they feel, and to do what they do, inside a human community. Different emotions are designated as appropriate responses to specific situations and to enjoin a certain class of appropriate behaviors, which are themselves governed by cultural norms and permissions.
Anger is something we do. There are norms for anger and scripts for enacting it. One familiar norm says that if you get in my way and slow me down (in an economy, in traffic) or obstruct my desires (in a relationship), I can get angry with you. Associated scripts give me permission to enact or convey my disdain and disregard—I can scowl, huff and puff, I can give you the finger, tell you to “fuck off,” try to crush you like a bug, wish you were dead. These kinds of norms and scripts are not rare, but they are not ones that a decent moral community should want to inhabit the hearts, minds, and souls of its citizens. But we have low standards, and we allow them, expect them, think—perhaps in some resigned moments—that they are normal.
I have offered arguments and reminders that what I have just said is true. Assembling the reminders can help, as can reflecting on what we expect from anger, as well as how, why, and when we think it is justified, and what functions we think it serves in the short run and in the long run. There are acceptable kinds of anger, where acceptability is assessed in terms of both ends, what the anger aims to accomplish (revenge, compliance to my will, positive social change) and means (its volume, whether it invites conversation and change, whether it is arrogant, overconfident, and cruel, and whether it is skillful and attuned to the needs of the other). Anger often does not hear. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it deliberately intends not to hear, only to be heard. This is a problem that may be, as it were, in its nature, and that norms to moderate and modify anger need to be alert to.
Shame: As for shame, the situation is different. Anger is overutilized. Shame is underutilized. There are many reasons why this is so. We are told that shame is not for us. It is an emotion that “oriental” others have or do. Shame is associated with hierarchies, patriarchies, and honor cultures, not with free, liberal, egalitarian, democratic peoples. Shame is superficial, a matter of the disapproving gaze of the hoi polloi. In philosophy-speak, shame is heteronomous, imposed from the outside, not self-chosen, not autonomous. I say none of this is true or, at least, none of it needs to be true of how we do shame.
In addition to its philosophical critics, shame has its own bad rap inside WEIRD psychology. According to a powerful strand of psychoanalytic dramaturgy, shame is dangerous because it is rooted in the primitive shame that we experience universally as infants, when upon exiting (what seemed to be) the self-sufficient bliss of wombic life, we discover that we have needs, that Mommy doesn’t come on demand to satisfy these needs, and that we are not the only (self-sufficient) thing, nor are we omnipotent. This recognition produces a deep and abiding narcissistic wound, one we can never forget. Primitive shame is shame that announces from the get-go, “I am a failure.” Reactivating primitive shame, the original underlying shame, is then as easy as pie.
Some sort of hara-kiri is its natural next move. In the West, the hara-kiri is of a slow-burn sort, not the noble, ritualistic kind of medieval Japan. WEIRD people who experience shame, thinking that they are globally deficient, engage in unsafe sex, suffer low self-esteem, develop addictions or eating disorders, strike out in “humiliated rage,” are depressed, and contemplate (possibly commit) suicide.
The problem is that none of this about shame is true. The psychoanalytic theory of shame is unscientific, a production of overactive nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central European imaginations. The shame measurement industry in Anglophone countries—exemplified by and almost entirely beholden to the test for self-conscious affect, TOSCA—was originally inspired by psychoanalytic theorizing. Furthermore, TOSCA does not sensitively look for the varieties of shame. The true varieties, which are visible in a simple look-see, vary across a minimum of three dimensions, in terms of (1) the evaluative objects of shame, which include acts, habits, dispositions, and lifestyle choices, typically not one’s entire being; (2) the character of the feelings associated with the shame, for example, the shame mostly experienced as fear of social disapproval, or as sadness that a valued relationship will suffer, or as disappointment in one’s ability to live up to one’s own standards; and (3) the actions the shame enjoins—shrinking away, making amends, changing up one’s game, or not doing the action that would make one experience shame.
Instead, TOSCA defines shame as a crude, totalizing emotion, whose intellectual content is “I am a failure.” People who think and feel this way no doubt suffer bad life outcomes. But this has nothing to do with shame as such, only with a certain obviously unhealthy form of shame. Whereas the psychoanalytic view of shame is unscientific, TOSCA findings about the deleterious effects of shame are based on bad science. The global nature of shame and its damaging consequences are baked into the way shame is defined by TOSCA. Shame involves a “negative evaluation of the global self” (Tangney and Dearing, 2002).
What is the better view of shame? First, it is one that is attuned to the varieties of shame. When parents tell a child that they ought to feel ashamed because they lied, or hit their sibling, or behaved badly in school, they are not calling upon the child to think “I am a failure.” Context makes it entirely clear that the shame the child is being encouraged to feel is about the lying, or hitting, or bad school behavior. This simple point comports with findings that, when Anglophone speakers use the word “shame” in ordinary speech, it is rarely totalizing, as TOSCA insists it must be if it is to be shame.
In a perfect world, humans would be born as perfect angels; there would be no competition between personal and social goods, and the rewards of normative conformity and compliance would be immediately and universally evident. In such a world, there would be no need for the disciplinary emotions—neither the uplifting ones like pride, self-esteem, and self-confidence, nor the negative ones like fear, guilt, and shame. But we are not perfect angels; there is competition between what is good for the individual and the group, and sensible knavery can pay. Thus, every culture ever invented has deployed the disciplinary emotions to inculcate and then sustain its norms, ideals, and scripts for being a good human being. The background learning theory aims to have externally endorsed norms (both conventional and moral) that become internalized. When positive reinforcement—for example, building pride and self-esteem—is used, the aim is to have the child feel reinforced by what they were originally reinforced for. When there is even accidental good behavior—the child, we’ll suppose, experiments with sharing—the parents are all over him with positive reinforcement. When the tools are punitive, as shame and guilt are, the aim is the same but is more circuitous. First, the child is taught directly that such and such is something that they ought not to do, want to do, be disposed to do, or develop a habit of doing. Second, they are positively reinforced for substituting the normatively correct act, habit, and disposition for the wrong one. Third, as in the positive case, they learn that complying with the norm is its own reward.
In Abrahamic traditions, morality is enforced ultimately by God. God, being good, could and presumably would prefer to love our unruly souls into normative compliance. But according to Scripture, God often turns to angry disapproval to produce compliance. The relationship between lawgiver and law-abider is vertical. Conscience internalizes and miniaturizes this metaphysically complex system, so that one’s own inner voice speaks proximately through the emotion of guilt, anger turned inward, which then induces fear, which then induces compliance, or, if not, then produces confession and amends after one succumbs to temptation. At least this is one standard model.
Shame, as a socializing emotion, can also partake of hierarchy, and thus verticality to the extent that a culture that utilizes shame is hierarchical. But the connection is contingent. Shame is also well suited to function horizontally as a disciplinary emotion. If we conceive of convivial social life as comprising discoveries made over world-historical time of practices and prohibitions that typically work for the common good, shame for violations is a perfectly sensible tool to serve such a way of living and being. Shame’s proper function is to mark values of importance and to communicate social disapproval for being careless with these values. In its ideal form, shame marks and prohibits violations of norms that a good community endorses, or would endorse if it were wise, reflective, and morally decent.
One objection to shame is that it is not metaphysically deep. It is grounded in natural features and consequences of human practices, thus the warrant of the norms endorsed is not transcendental, as is the Abrahamic anger-guilt-conscience system, but is merely social. But what has been thought to be a disadvantage of shame can be seen as an advantage for modern people who abide plural metaphysical foundations for their forms of life, including ones that are resolutely secular, and thus that judge social consensus about values, norms, and scripts as the best we can do. One hope is that there is an overlapping consensus about what values are the right ones, and worth protecting, and which ones are wrong and worth eliminating. Varied systems of value, various comprehensive philosophies and theologies, might each in their own way give reasons for deep commitment to certain shared values that describe how persons ought to be, and ideals that individuals and communities ought to embody, not simply for how persons ought or ought not to act.
I take it that worldwide commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948; since 1948 all 193 members of the United Nations have ratified parts of it) has been expressed even among peoples who have no natural way to talk about “God-given,” “inalienable,” or “natural rights,” as do we Western children of the Enlightenment. The unanimous adoption of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 is another example of an overlapping and unforced consensus about substantive goods (United Nations General Assembly 2015).
Another thought—which might be judged to compete with what I have just said if one concludes (which I do not) that multicultures require only a modus vivendi, nothing deeper—is that shame is the right emotion to address people who are expected to have deep normative commitments rather than superficial ones. It is widely said that shame faces the person, whereas guilt faces the deed. Shame, I’ve argued, asks a person to change or at least not to enact some habit, tendency, disposition, even a deeply held value commitment, if it is wrong or misguided. Shame calls on a person to do hard work. Guilt is, or can be, a one-off emotion, and thus a superficial safeguard on one’s character, a thin veneer. I do something wrong. I am guilty. You know I did it. I say I’m sorry. (I might be mostly angry with myself for getting caught in this game of hide-and-seek we play, rather than angry because what I did was wrong.) We get on with things.
In some respects, and seen in this way, guilt is a superficial emotion suited for a world in which relations are mostly transactional and themselves largely superficial. It is no trivial matter, as I discussed in chapter 7, that the Reformation begins with concerns that the Roman church’s divine anger-guilt-conscience-reparations system had become one in which money could get one indulgences, less time in purgatory, and no time in hell. Morality is monetized, and every sin has a price. The payment for a sin is a fine, nothing as existentially weighty and consequential as spiritual exercises (Hadot 1977), techniques de soi (Foucault 1988), the therapy of desire (Nussbaum 1994), or self-cultivation.
Shame runs deeper than guilt. It has higher expectations for the self. It calls attention to the self, not simply to doings and deeds. It asks that you be good, not just act good. It may, for this reason, be unattractive to us. We don’t want to hold any values deeply. This response would not surprise me, but it is indicative of, and thus confirmation of, the very shamelessness that I claim is the order of the day. But it is a terrible reason not to give shame a new look.
The sort of shame I recommend is a mature sense of shame. A mature sense of shame has the following features, abbreviated somewhat from chapter 7:
· It is largely internal and does not require, for its activation, being seen by others or imagining being seen or judged by others.
· It is autonomous. The person with a mature sense of shame inspects, affirms, and takes as their own the values shame protects.
· The sense of shame applies retrospectively, as when one remembers past shameful actions, regrets them, and vows or recommits not to do them again, or not to be like that again.
· The sense of shame inclines one to make amends for shameful actions.
· The sense of shame applies prospectively—proleptically—as when one sees that some possible action would violate their sense of shame, and decides not to do it, or does not even feel inclined to do it, because it is wrong.
· The sense of shame inclines one to self-modify and self-cultivate. A person with a sense of shame is attuned to aspects of themselves, to dispositions they have, that make them tempted by, or prone to, a certain class of shameful actions, and they work on themselves to improve—possibly by trying to change themselves directly, possibly by working to change themselves indirectly by changing the people they associate with and the places they go, or by doing political work to change social and economic structures that support bad values in themselves and their community.
· A mature sense of shame sets boundaries that one should not cross lest one do something wrong; it also serves to make one want to do what produces positive good. A person with a mature sense of shame is sensitive to social criticism.
· A mature sense of shame is autonomous in the philosopher’s, Kantian-inspired sense of “autonomous,” according to which the person has, to some degree, inspected and accepted (in that order) the values that their sense of shame protects.
· The person with a mature sense of shame is not overconfident that they have everything right. Thus, they are open to challenges from others about their value assumptions, and, as necessary, about the worldview that supports their core value assumptions.
· In this sense, the person with the mature sense of shame is open to feedback about the quality of their character (based on judgments about its resiliency, reliability, strength, consistency), as well as to criticism of the values that their sense of shame protects, and any background theories that support and make sense of those values. This is to say that a mature sense of shame has several entirely positive, heteronomous features born of humility, acceptance of fallibility, and an awareness that one might be self-deceived or be an unwitting heir to bad values.
Critique and Philosophical Method in the Global Village and in Multicultures
Finally, a word about the method I’ve used to make my arguments, the method of using sources from cultural psychology, anthropology, and cross-cultural philosophy, as well as standard sources from the Anglophone analytic philosophical lineage. The earth, some say, is a global village. That is something of an exaggeration. What is true is that we depend for goods, relationships, and well-being on relations with faraway others. Others in China and Mexico make parts that we need to assemble cars in Detroit. Radioactivity from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster (caused by an earthquake and a tsunami) was detected almost immediately in Colorado. We suffer, and not just economically, when people in sub-Saharan Africa or Syria or Yemen suffer. I mentioned earlier that, in 2015, all 193 nations that make up the United Nations passed the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” Among those same 193 nations, 188 have coronavirus as I write. We are connected, even if not all of us or even most of us are living among people who are very different from ourselves.
These global dependencies, as well as instantly shared information about how others live, mean that there are more, and more varied, resources than ever to compare, contrast, critique, and learn from others about how to live well and how not to live well. As a boy reading National Geographic, I thought I would be an anthropologist. By the time I was old enough to choose to prepare to become an anthropologist, I thought it could be hard to get home quickly in an emergency—if Mom or Dad or a sibling fell ill—if I really went off to the kinds of locations I fantasized going to. So I wrote my graduate school essay application to philosophy departments, explaining my intention to study the nature of persons naturalistically by becoming what we called then a “philosopher of psychology.” It seems that the young man who wanted to be an anthropologist is still inside me. I have been lucky to have lived during a golden age of information about alien others where, thanks to the work of great anthropologists, primatologists, cultural psychologists, filmmakers, and novelists, there is more and more information about how others, sometimes very different kinds of persons, live. Recently, cross-cultural philosophy has become a thing and provides helpful resources for understanding non-WEIRD people. We are historical beings, heirs of philosophical and theological lineages that, even when no longer visible as such, are in the blood and bones of different people. Different people are oriented toward different values, prize different virtues, and conceive of ideal social relations in somewhat different ways. My simple idea is to use all this information about diverse ways of being human to facilitate moral imagination, as a tool for thinking about whether we are doing well at living well, and if not, why not, and for discovering resources to do better, to improve ourselves or, if not ourselves, future generations. Some of the many things that can be improved are the way we do emotions.
Even if we do not all live in a global village, many modern people do live in multicultures, places where people from many different worlds come together to live together. We do not know how this is going to turn out. But there are some hints about how multiculturalism might go. In 1966, when I began college in New York City, we all read Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). The subtitle was The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. The book was a report of what I took to be glorious news, namely, that America’s then greatest immigrant city had not become, as many expected, a thin gruel of bland and homogeneous customs and habits. The thought that this might happen was based for some on the expectation that the dominant WASP culture would demand conformity to its normative regime, and differences would be thinned out, possibly remaining mostly in the form of ethnic restaurants, and such memorial events as Saint Patrick’s Day, Saint Anthony’s Day, and Chinese New Year for nostalgic Irish, Italian, and Chinese folk. Others did not expect so much that the WASP normative order would dominate and drown out all the other distinct and flavorful ingredients of several great migrations, as that all the ingredients would produce some entirely new, but nonetheless homogeneous normative order, a broth of one flavor. Why? Because that is just what happens in melting pots or blenders. But it didn’t happen, and I continue to hope it won’t happen. One reason I hope this is for the same reason that John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1848 Principles of Political Economy:
But the economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.… It is indispensable to be perpetually comparing their own notions and customs with the experience and example of persons in different circumstances from themselves; and there is no nation which does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior. ([1848] 1963, vol. 3, 17, 594).
Mill was speaking here mostly about business commerce as a resource for moral progress. Those of us who live in multicultural cities have opportunities in our midst to direct change in ourselves, to carefully consider and adopt ways of living, modes of being human, that exist in our midst but that are not “ours” in order to improve ourselves, “to borrow from others … essential points of character … in which [our own type] is inferior.” There is no guarantee that we will do this, since there is some evidence from cultural psychology that good ideas about value, or enacting the emotions, brought to us by immigrant groups—more communally attuned Nigerians and Mexicans, more respectful Chinese, more gentle and compassionate Thais—can be swallowed up by the dominant culture (if it is large enough) before any respectful consideration is given to these alternative ways of being human.
Many modern people, especially in progressive communities, recommend that we appreciate diversity. One reason is motivated by justice: many groups are not represented equitably in certain social institutions—government, clergy, higher education—because of histories of oppression. As Cornell West often says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
A different reason is that mixing diverse people will help us “get each other,” understand where the other is coming from, get why others value what they value, and learn about special challenges these others have as members of the groups to which they belong (by consent or attribution). This much will improve social relations and create conditions for a smooth modus vivendi in places where people of different kinds intersect. Both are good reasons.
An additional reason for appreciating diversity is so that we can all better understand who we are and what we ourselves are doing. It can be easier to see what we value, what emotions we enact to protect these values and how we enact them, when they are viewed in contrastive spaces. The ultimate goal is to gain social and self-knowledge, to learn from one another in order to make ourselves better, and to advance the common good.
If philosophical ethics is to remain relevant in multicultures, it will need to be increasingly more anthropologically attuned and cross-cultural. The days when ethics could be conceived as a conversation about human excellence inside a single tradition that is a series of footnotes to Plato is long gone. There is no longer any single tradition inside which that project is being carried out. We contain multiplicities. The good news is that the youth of today are being exposed to some of the varieties of moral possibility and stand a chance of not being trapped in their own upbringing. This is a good and hopeful thing. If we elders equip them with tools for honest, patient, critical imagination and tools for rational, patient self-cultivation, it could be a great thing. Time will tell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TWO RESIDENTIAL FELLOWSHIPS, some research funding, and many graduate students and friends helped with this book. In 2015–16, I was a Rockefeller Fellow at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, finishing up The Geography of Morals and starting this book, How to Do Things with Emotions. Then in 2016–17, I was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science (CASBS), Stanford, California, where I studied the cultural psychology and anthropology of anger and shame. Both centers are heavenly places at which to think, work, and converse with wonderful colleagues. I am grateful to Robert Newman, director of NHC, and to Margaret Levi, director of CASBS, for hosting me. I thank Dan Haybron and the St. Louis University/Templeton Project on “Happiness and Well-Being,” for some course relief support in 2017 and 2018. I am grateful to Duke University for giving me time off and for fully supporting my interdisciplinary research. I have been at Duke for almost three decades, and I feel blessed to work at an institution and in a department that has always prized teaching and research across disciplinary divides.
I have known Rob Tempio, the philosophy editor at Princeton University Press, for more than a decade. Rob, always probing for good ideas, helped me develop the thesis of this book. Rob and Matt Rohal, the other philosophy editor, did old-fashioned editorial work to help me find the right voice to write in for a wide audience across disciplines. I am grateful to Rob and Matt, and to Kathleen Cioffi, Cathy Slovensky, and Karen Carroll for the professional work they did for the Press to edit and produce the book.
Over the past three years, I have had the good fortune to be involved in two projects with Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, and Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, on “Ethics in Action” and “Science, Ethics, and Happiness.” Both projects involved bringing together people from different countries and different religions, including no religion at all, to think about the connection between ethics, norms for emotional expression, emotional balance, and well-being. My friendships with Jeff and Sonia Sachs, Tony Annett, Sharon Paculor, Jesse Thorson, Monsignor Sorondo, Vittorio Hoösle, Scott Appleby, Bill Vendley, and Gabriella Marino are special gifts of these initiatives, as is their wisdom.
In addition to these colleagues, I could not have done this work without many other family members, friends, colleagues, and students: Lynn Ainsworth, Kent Berridge, Robert Bingle, Tal Brewer, Gregg Caruso, Myisha Cherry, Ruth Chang, Felipe de Brigard, Richie Davidson, Helen De Cruz, Dan Dennett, Ronald de Sousa, Donald Dryden, Paul Ekman, Michael Ferejohn, Jennifer Frey, Alison Gopnik, Tayfun Gur, Jennifer Hawkins, P. J. Ivanhoe, Chaihark Hahm, Dan Haybron, Lisa Heldke, Jianping Hu, John Kekes, Richard Kim, Brian Knutson, Kristján Kristjánsson, Daniel Jacobson, Hanqi Jiang, Joshua Landy, Dan Lapsley, Joe LeDoux, Béatrice Longuenesse, Botian Liu, Tanya Luhrmann, Terry Maroney, Alan Moore, Cecilea Mun, Darcia Narvaez, Karen Neander, Batja Mesquita, Hazel Markus, Shaun Nichols, Peg O’Connor, Hanna Pickard, John Protevi, Songyao Ren, Kelly Shi, Mark Risjord, Andrea Scarantino, Bongrae Seok, David Shoemaker, Nancy Snow, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Gopal Sreenivasan, Eleonore Stump, Nina Strominger, Larisa Svirsky, Will Tiemeijer, Justin Tiwald, Jeanne Tsai, Candace Vogler, Robin Wang, Danny Walkowitz, David Wong, and Wenqing Zhao.
Three of these friends require special commendation. This book is dedicated to Lynn Ainsworth. Lynn’s favorite saying to me when I say insightful things, which she calls “going-on,” is “Wrap it up, Socrates. Wrap it up.” This book would have been longer were it not for Lynn. Thank you, Lynn.
Peg O’Connor is a fellow philosopher and a dear friend. We joke that we are from the same litter, and we talk almost every day in the summer and fall when we both find ourselves on the coast of Maine. We agree about a lot of things philosophical and otherwise. But not shame. Although I have not tried out all my arguments in favor of a mature sense of shame on Peg, I wondered after every paragraph in this book where I defend shame: What would Peg say? Thank you, Peg. You kept me honest.
Batja Mesquita is a cultural psychologist and a leading expert on emotions. I met Batja at CASBS in 2016–17. I thank my lucky stars that I have been able to talk regularly to Batja about her work and mine on emotions across cultures, and to think together about whether and how cross-cultural psychology and anthropology might matter to cross-cultural philosophy and vice versa. It was Batja who gave me the courage to insist that emotions are things we do, and whose work confirmed my conviction that if and when emotions cause trouble, we can do them differently. Thank you, Batja.