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c h a p t e r e l e v e n
How Love Matters for Justice
O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me, . . .
Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
Past, present, future, are you and me.
—Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”
I. Reinventing the “Civil Religion”
After the French Revolution, politics changed in Europe. Fraternity
came to the fore. No longer held together by fear of a monarch and obedience
to his arbitrary will, citizens had to imagine new ways to live with
one another. Because any successful nation needs to be able to demand
sacrifice for a common good, they had to ask how sacrifice and common
effort would be possible in the absence of monarchical coercion. Hence
arose many proposals for a “civil religion” or a “religion of humanity,” a
public cultivation of sympathy, love, and concern that could motivate a
range of valuable actions, from military defense to philanthropy (and, as
time went on, tax compliance). As new nations arose around the world,
the thought of non-Europeans contributed to the enrichment of these
ideas.
Part I examined this history, which reveals so much about the promises
and pitfalls of such an enterprise. Thought about civic emotion
quickly split into two branches. Both traditions sought extended sympathy
and opposed narrow egoism and greed. But one strand, represented
by Rousseau and by Comte, whose ideas had great influence around
the world, held that emotional efficacy requires coercive homogeneity.
How Love Matters for Justice 379
Partisans of this tradition advanced proposals for emotional solidarity
without creating spaces for critical freedom. This lack of concern for dissent
and critique affected, naturally, the type of political love to which
they aspired. Rousseauian/Comtean love was not quirky, personal, like
the love of one individual for another; instead, everything was engineered
so as to produce people who loved and thought alike and experienced
mass emotions.
On the other side, Mozart and Da Ponte, Mill, and Tagore agreed with
Rousseau and Comte about the need for extended sympathy, but they
conceived of this sympathy in a far more variegated and even antinomian
way. It is not surprising that their metaphors for the new political love
were drawn from lyric poetry, dissident music, and even comedy.
These two traditions, in conversation with each other and with political
leaders thinking about these questions, provide us with rich resources
for contemporary thought. Our argument strongly defended the
Mozart/Mill/Tagore tradition against its rivals, as capable of creating
and sustaining a more attractive type of society.
The Mozart/Mill/Tagore tradition, however attractive, still stood in
need of further development: above all, it needed a richer account of human
psychology. We can hardly solve social problems without understanding
both the resources on which we may draw and the problems
that lie in our way. Part II turned to that issue, laying the foundation for
contemporary proposals in the spirit of Mozart, Mill, and Tagore by taking
account of recent research in psychology, anthropology, and primatology.
In particular, Part II argued that narrowness of sympathy is not
society’s only challenge. Ubiquitous problems of discrimination and
group subordination require us to think about the role played in human
development by disgust and shame at the human body itself, a problem
that no other species seems to have. Promoting social justice, as Walt
Whitman saw, requires addressing the roots of human self-disgust by
forging a healthier relationship to the human body. Part II argued, further,
in a Millian spirit, that a healthy society needs to counteract the
tendencies all human beings share toward submissiveness to authority
and peer pressure.
The account of development presented in Part II made it clear that
respect is not the public emotion good societies require, or at least not
380 Pu blic Emot ions
the only one. Respect on its own is cold and inert, insufficient to overcome
the bad tendencies that lead human beings to tyrannize over one
another. Disgust denies fundamental human dignity to groups of people,
portraying them instead as animals. Consequently respect grounded in
the idea of human dignity will prove impotent to include all citizens on
terms of equality unless it is nourished by imaginative engagement with
the lives of others and by an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity.
Imaginative empathy, however, can be deployed by sadists. The type of
imaginative engagement society needs, Part II argued, is nourished by
love. Love, then, matters for justice—especially when justice is incomplete
and an aspiration (as in all real nations), but even in an achieved
society of human beings, were such to exist.
But if we agree that love matters for justice, we still do not have an account
of how it matters, how a decent society might arrange, compatibly
with liberal freedom, to invite citizens to have emotional experiences of
the sort that the theory imagines. Part III therefore turned to history,
albeit with further theoretical arguments, showing a variety of ways in
which this ideal theory might be and has been real. Through detailed
reflection on the cultivation of patriotism, the use of public festivals of
both the comic and the tragic sort, and a range of public strategies to
undermine several pernicious emotions, we saw a variety of different
ways to approach our problems, and we saw how powerful they can be in
promoting emotional experience, within a context protective of liberty.
The examples in Part III yield at least three general lessons. First, our
hunch was confirmed that good proposals for the cultivation of public
emotion must be attentive to their place, their time, and the specific cultures
of the variety of citizens who are their intended audience. One way
of seeing this is to consider the relationship between two of this book’s
“heroes,” Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King  Jr. King emulated
Gandhi, and he studied his career very closely. But he did not use the
same strategies, or even the same type of self-fashioning. He understood
that some very general Gandhian norms might possibly be realized in
the U.S. context, but only through the adoption of some very American
and un-Gandhian modes of rhetorical self-presentation. In so judging,
he again followed Gandhi; for Gandhi, having lived a large part of his
life outside India, saw India comparatively, with both immersion and
How Love Matters for Justice 381
detachment. In consequence, he saw that a good strategy for India has to
be keenly sensitive to a range of Indian traditions and cultures. The
same is true with all of our proposals for public rhetoric and public art:
they must be situated in their place and time, although parks and monuments,
perhaps speeches too, also need to consider future as well as
present time. To the extent that artists of international stature and residence
are involved (for example, Frank Gehry and Anish Kapoor in Millennium
Park), it is extremely important that their work be coordinated
by someone who really knows the city and nation.
One interesting aspect of this contextualism is the question of cynicism.
Some nations are ready for an appeal to strong public emotion, but
in others events have made people disgusted with the public sphere.
The Vietnam War made a whole generation of Americans shrink from
appeals to patriotic emotion. The artist who would bring such people together
needs to grapple with this, as Maya Lin so brilliantly did, creating
an artwork that initially appeals to personal grief and detached critical
reflection—both stances that remained available after the war—and,
through those experiences, leads people toward an experience of reconciliation
and shared grief.
I have just alluded to Walt Whitman’s challenge to forge a less disgusted
and healthier relationship with the body. The second general
insight of the material before us lies here. From the very start of Part I we
explored the danger posed by rigid gender roles to the possibilities of
social cooperation, and Part II argued that some very common (and particularly
male) gender conceptions are linked to “projective disgust” and
social stratification. Through the normative analysis of emotions in the
book as a whole, and ubiquitously in the examples considered in Part III,
runs the invitation to think less rigidly about masculinity and femininity.
Cherubino’s male with a female voice, Gandhi’s androgynous maternal
self, Whitman’s creation of a poetic persona who expresses the emotions
of women, gay men, and racial minorities—all these ask us to think
creatively and flexibly about the self and its embodiment, not discarding
more traditional ways of being a male or a female, but understanding that
culture is richer when these traditions are challenged and supplemented.
The third general insight yielded by Part III is that political love is
and should be polymorphous. The love of parents for children, the love
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of comrades, and romantic love all are capable of inspiring a public culture
in different ways, and we should not be surprised or disappointed if
different groups of citizens react to the same public speech or artwork in
different emotional ways. A sports fan might think of her beloved team
as her children, in whom she takes pride and whom she wants to protect
from harm; a different fan might identify with the athletes and imagine
being them, loving what they love; yet another fan might have a romantic
attitude toward the athletes; another might think of them as friends or
comrades. These attitudes will naturally vary with age, gender, and personality.
How much greater is this variety in a nation—and yet all are
forms of love, and all efficacious, in different ways, in prompting cooperative
and unselfish behavior. The loves that prompt good behavior are
likely to have some common features: a concern for the beloved as an end
rather than a mere instrument; respect for the human dignity of the
beloved; a willingness to limit one’s own greedy desires in favor of the
beloved. But many types and instances of love can have these features, as
we have seen from the very beginning: Cherubino’s love for the Countess
is very different from the friendly love of the Countess and Susanna,
and both of these are different, again, from the reciprocal romantic love
at which Figaro and Susanna arrive at the opera’s end. All, however, are
altruistic, and all repudiate the obsessive search for personal status and
honor in favor of reciprocity and vulnerability.
In short, while the goals and ideals of the society we have imagined do
place constraints on the emotions that citizens should be encouraged to
feel, they permit and actively encourage different citizens to inhabit the
public sphere differently, as best suits each person’s age, gender, goals,
values, and personality. Even the most normatively charged works have
this sort of space. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does invite some
type of respectful and contemplative attitude, and it would be an inappropriate
response to gambol and play there as one does in Millennium
Park’s Crown Fountain. But the emotions that visitors have, responding
appropriately to the work, include personal mourning, communal or
national mourning, detached contemplation, personal self-examination,
and no doubt many others. Political emotions are the real emotions of
real people; because people are heterogeneous, having different opinions,
histories, and personalities, they can be expected to love, mourn,
How Love Matters for Justice 383
laugh, and strive for justice in specific and personal ways—particularly if
their freedom of expression is protected and valued, as it is here. And
some of them simply won’t like Cherubino or wish to emulate his gentleness;
they may prefer to play baseball, or cricket. Even so, they can find
their own ways to respect and reciprocity. Cherubino and his descendants
(the Bauls, Walt Whitman) are suggestive ideas, not a dictatorial
program.
This, then, is the path we have traveled. Several general theoretical
questions, however, still demand fuller comment.
II. Ideal and Real
We began with political ideals, imagining a nation that has made some
taxing commitments to the freedom and well-being of all its citizens.
Our examples, however, were drawn from history, and therefore from
the flawed reality of real nations. Are we, then, developing an “ideal
theory,” or dealing with people and institutions as they really are? This
dichotomy, common enough in philosophy, is oversimple and misleading.
Ideals are real: they direct our striving, our plans, our legal processes.
Constitutions are ideal documents in the sense that they are not
always perfectly implemented all the time, and also in the sense that they
typically embody a nation’s deepest aspirations. But they are also real,
supplying a basis for legal action when the rights they guarantee are not
delivered to a particular individual or group. The “freedom of speech,”
the “free exercise of religion,” and the “equal protection of the laws” are
all lofty ideals, yet they provide the basis for action and adjudication in
the real world, for the education of real people, and for progress toward
the amelioration of vexing social problems.
The ideal is real in another way: if it is a good ideal, it acknowledges
human life as it is, and expresses a sense of how real people are. Real
people are bodily and needy; they have a variety of human frailties and
excellences; they are, quite simply, human beings, neither machines nor
angels. Who can say what constitution a nation of angels would make?
Who can say what constitution would be best suited to a nation of elephants
or tigers or whales? The nation we imagine is a nation of, and for,
human beings (albeit in complex interrelationships with other species),
384 Pu blic Emot ions
and its constitution is a good one only to the extent that it incorporates
an understanding of human life as it really is. (John Rawls understood
this clearly, and that is why my project, although focused on aspiration
rather than achieved justice, lies close to and complements his.)
The ideal, then, is real. At the same time, the real also contains the
ideal. Real people aspire. They imagine possibilities better than the
world they know, and they try to actualize them. At times their pursuit of
the ideal can go astray, as people try to transcend the limits of humanness
itself. We saw that a lot of difficulties for political life come from that
type of self-repudiating aspiration. But not all pursuits of the idea have
this doomed and counterproductive character. People who strive for
this-worldly justice typically aspire to distant goals—prominently including
theoretical goals—and are moved by them. That’s a large part of
human reality, so any political thinker who rejects ideal theory rejects a
lot of reality.
Our project is about just such real ideals and real striving. It is motivated
by the difficulty of attaining and stabilizing lofty goals, but it understands
those goals as parts of real-life human politics. The emotions
on which it draws are real human emotions, and its psychology a nonideal
and realistic human psychology. Like the speeches of Lincoln, King,
and Nehru, it depicts a difficult task and a beautiful, distant goal—but in
ways designed to move real people, who are moved by (realistically) ideal
images of themselves and their world, as well as by the comedy of real
bodies and their idiosyncrasies. So it is not distant from the real world,
and it is entirely fitting that its examples come from real politics, though
from a kind of politics in which leaders are trying to make things a lot
better than they have previously been, correcting deep problems and
moving forward to new achievements.
To put it another way, all love has aspects of the ideal, and political
love no less than parental or personal love. When we love people, we
want to be good to them, and this typically means being better than we
sometimes, even usually, are. Personal love, like political love, is threatened
by narrowness, partiality, and narcissism, and love therefore involves
a continual struggle. There are certainly many ways in which
ideals can deform love—if, for example, one’s love for a child is conditional
on the child not having the flaws that are typical of children, or if
How Love Matters for Justice 385
one’s love for an adult is conditional on that person’s being somehow
beyond the human, an angel or disembodied spirit. So ideals can often
endanger reality, or express a refusal of reality. To make love conditional
on a human being’s not being human and mortal is bad. To want to extend
the life span and to think that death is a tragedy is humanly aspirational.
(Tragic festivals remind us of the finality and deep sadness of
death; they do not express a refusal of the basic lot of human beings.)
The ideals that we are imagining are anchored in the reality of the human
body and human psychology, so they simply reflect the undeniable
fact that human beings want progress, beauty, and goodness. Any picture
of the real that omits striving for something better brings an ugly
and unhelpful kind of cynicism to political life, as it also does to adult
love or the love between parents and children.
This has not been a cynical book, but it has been a realistic book. It
has tried to face squarely the problems that a realistic human psychology
shows us, and its “heroes” are real people, not dreams. Martin Luther King
Jr., Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt—these people certainly could be called dreamers,
and this is a partial truth. All, however, were also highly strategic and
skilled leaders who turned dreams into workable realities, in part by using
the beauty of ideals to motivate real people. Like them, this book is
not pretending that we have already reached the promised land: it is a
book of motion and struggle, and it is rooted in history. But history does
contain surprising instances of productive dreaming, from the birth of
the United States and of the Indian democracy to a wide range of struggles
against prejudice and hate. So there is no need to apologize for the
fact that beautiful dreams are central to this book, and there would be no
reason, short of an ugly cynicism that is false to the complexity of history,
to think that beauty spells unreality. Indeed, part of what this book
is saying is that the real is more beautiful than the lofty unreal.
III. Particular and General
Throughout this book, and especially in Part III, we have grappled with
the problem that any appeal to love in the context of politics makes vivid:
how to balance love’s inherent particularism and partiality with the need
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to create and sustain policies that are fair to all. If purely abstract and
principle-dependent sentiments are too tepid and empty of motivating
content, as we have argued, and if a deeper and more powerful altruism
has its roots in and is modeled on personal particular love, then we have
to think hard about how this love can support justice, not subvert it.
(Rawls left this project unelaborated, and that is how I believe my project
complements his.)
One important fact about the conception of political emotion defended
here is that it is not totalizing: it leaves spaces for citizens to have
particular relationships with people and causes they love, in the part of
their lives that is carried out apart from politics, under the aegis of whatever
comprehensive view of life they favor, since the society I imagine is
a form of political liberalism. The political is in that sense narrow,
merely one part of what people are asked to care about.
But we have argued that the political too should be particularistic, in
the sense that it takes its cue from the Bauls and their way of approaching
general ideals through deep personal attachments. In the developmental
process, children learn to love symbolic surrogates for their nation
before they understand its abstract ideals, and the particular leads
them to the general. But adults too, through the tragic and comic festivals
that a good society offers, are also led, as on that long bridge in Millennium
Park, from particular experiences of joy or grief to more general
and inclusive sentiments. Both tragedy and comedy themselves create
many such bridges. Political love exists in an uneasy oscillation between
the particular and the general, in which the particular is never repudiated,
but is seen in a way that promotes inclusiveness, and in which the
general becomes motivationally powerful through its link to particular
symbols and songs and sculptures. Principle-dependent emotions such
as those envisaged by Rawls are thus reached by a route that tethers
them to the particularistic imagination and to personal love, and these
deep roots continue to infuse the principles even when we achieve them.
The dangers of bias inherent in particularistic emotion are kept in
check through the rule of law and through a strong critical culture. But
they are also checked by the specific way in which political ideals are
realized particularistically. Some works of art encourage us to see common
human predicaments and to reach out to others who are not like
How Love Matters for Justice 387
ourselves, and those are among the ones that a wise society will value
most. Since I agree with Rawls in valuing sentiments directed to core
political commitments, I have devoted particular attention to these
“bridges” and to the works of art that construct them.
IV. Civic Culture and “Political Liberalism”
The society we have imagined is heterogeneous. It contains different religions,
different ethnic, racial, and sexual groups, and a wide range of
political views. Respecting this heterogeneity, we have insisted, requires
practicing politics in the spirit of Rawlsian “political liberalism,” not
building institutions or the shape of the public culture around a single
dominant group and its ideas.1
This commitment has raised tough questions
throughout: How can the public culture of a nation that repudiates
all religious and ideological establishments have enough substance and
texture to be capable of the type of poetry, oratory, and art that moves
real people?
Political liberalism requires the public culture to be both narrow and
thin: narrow in that it does not comment on every single aspect of human
life, but only those of most pertinence to politics (including, however,
basic social and economic rights); thin, in that it makes no commitments
on divisive metaphysical matters, such as eternal life or the nature
of the soul. It must be such as to become, over time, the object of an
“overlapping consensus” among the many reasonable overall views of
life that the society contains. We certainly do not need to show that an
overlapping consensus currently exists: neither Rawls’s conception nor
mine requires this. We do, however, need to show that in time one might
evolve, and in order to show that, we need to show that the imagined
public culture does not create a hierarchy of religions or other views of
life, and does not demote or marginalize any at the expense of others.
This is indeed a challenging restriction, but it does not doom our
project. Symbols that are resonant sometimes come out of a religious
tradition, but they can be appropriated into the general language of a
society without being exclusionary, if they are advanced in connection
with a robust pluralism. Thus King draws a lot of his imagery from the
prophets (though also from Shakespeare and popular music); he uses
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those references, however, as a kind of civic poetry, and he makes it very
clear that he looks to a future that includes everyone on a basis of equality.
Gandhi, similarly, uses Hindu symbolism, but surrounds it with
careful ritual gestures that emphasize the equality of Muslims and Christians.
Other examples in Part III—Central Park, Millennium Park, the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and many more—are free from even the
appearance of establishment. So political liberalism reminds us to remain
vigilant about the problem of pluralism and the dangers of hierarchy
and establishment, but it does not doom the public culture to banality
or silence.
In one way, the project attempted in this book is distinctly helpful to
the goals of political liberalism, for it shows over and over again that, and
how, real people of many different religions and other identities may be
brought together around a common set of values through the power of
art and symbol. Poetry, music, and art are great uniters: they take people
out of themselves and forge a shared community. When people laugh
together, whether at Bill Mauldin’s cartoons or at the reflected images of
their own bodies in the curved surfaces of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate,
they share something they did not share before, and their differences
become smaller. Shared grief—whether on the Gettysburg battlefield or
at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—has a similar uniting, and even healing,
power. Songs of national pride and aspiration have a similar capacity
to forge or reforge a national identity. “Jana Gana Mana” announces
explicitly that Indians from different regions and different religions
come together around a shared set of political ideals, but countless examples
of public art and rhetoric perform this same task implicitly. How
could the idea of e pluribus unum ever be real? The arts provide a large
part of the answer. Their allure invites real people to join together, where
without public poetry they might have remained apart.
V. Content and Freedom
Invite, not coerce. The society this book imagines, and its entire argument,
gives a large place to critical freedom. It is to be expected, then,
that some people will go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and others
will stay away, that some people will hate and criticize the artworks of
How Love Matters for Justice 389
Millennium Park while others will find them moving and playful, that
some will think King’s speech a shopworn set of clichés while others will
continue to find it inspiring. That disagreement is actually part of the
ideal. As we’ve seen, real public artists have many ways of dramatizing
the dignity and beauty of the critical spirit. Indeed, they often help a society
keep that spirit strong in a time of stress, by portraying it in an attractive
poetic light. The fact that India is a highly successful democracy,
in which critical freedom is real, owes much to Gandhi’s choice of
Tagore’s “Ekla Cholo Re” as anthem of the freedom movement. Chicago’s
choice of To Kill a Mockingbird as the first book read in the One Book,
One Chicago program reminds everyone that the capacity for risk-taking
dissent is a core value of American public culture, needed to solve society’s
problems.
But isn’t society jeopardizing critical freedom every time it urges citizens
to have strong emotions of one sort rather than the other? Surely
not. First of all, as I just said, the critical spirit itself is one thing toward
which it is important to cultivate emotional attachment, urging people to
care about it and fight to clear away the obstacles to it. Since critical freedom
is always under threat, it’s a good idea to bring children up to think
of Atticus Finch as a hero, or to sing “Ekla Cholo Re.”
Second, it is just wrong to think that an invitation to strong emotion
must be coercive. It all depends on what becomes of the person who refuses
the invitation, and that is why robust protection for freedoms of
speech, assembly, and religion must be a key part of the institutional
backdrop of this project. A prominent part of these protections, as we
saw in Chapter 8, must be protection for young dissenters in schools,
where peer pressure is particularly likely to be coercive even when law
is not. Teaching patriotism in the schools invites, but we are allowed to
rebel.
Most important, it is just mistaken to think that a society that protects
the critical spirit should be neutral or halfhearted about its own core
values. Any good society has definite ideas of what is good and bad: for
example, that racism is bad and equal respect is good. There is nothing
illiberal about that definiteness—so long as the free speech of dissenters
is protected. The freedom of dissent is not jeopardized by passionate
rhetoric directed at society’s most cherished goals and aims; dissenters
390 Pu blic Emot ions
remain free to contest those goals. Meanwhile, there is nothing illiberal
about the society trying hard to realize its goals, drawing on whatever
emotional support it can muster. It would be simply bizarre to suppose
that Martin Luther King Jr. was against the freedom of speech because
he passionately opposed racism and did not include a proracism argument
along with his antiracism arguments. And it would be equally bizarre
to suppose that it is illiberal mind control to ask children to hear
King’s speech on a solemn holiday and not to hear, on that same day,
with equal enthusiasm, speeches by racial bigots.
As for public artworks, monuments, and parks, it’s not even possible
for them to be emotionally neutral: they have to be organized in one way
rather than some other way, and if they have any emotional impact at all,
it must be of some definite type. So if you come near them, you make
yourself vulnerable to the invitation they offer. Even this, however, is not
an objectionable type of paternalism, because it does not remove critique
or choice. As the story of the Roosevelt Memorial showed, critique
can often even reshape the work itself; only time will tell. At most, then,
the invitation offered by a park or a monument is like the “nudge” depicted
in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism”:
it sets a default option, but it doesn’t prevent you from doing, saying, or
thinking otherwise.2
Most people who walk through the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial will find their emotions challenged in certain specific
ways. That’s how the artist has constructed the work. But one can always
simply not go there, or go there steeled against the work’s invitation.
Public artworks have to set a default option; the only alternative to
that is to have no public art at all, or only art of such stunning mediocrity
that it communicates nothing.
When art is not mediocre, it is in fact all the more unlikely that it will
impose a snoozy conformity and homogeneity. When we think of totalitarian
regimes that attempted to impose their vision through art, we always
find bad art: Soviet realism and its many soporific cousins. Real
artists are dissenters, like Tagore’s “madcap” Bauls. This book has sided
from the beginning with the unpredictable and idiosyncratic in art: with
the Crown Fountain and Cloud Gate, with Tagore’s Baul-inspired poetry.
Comte’s desire to control the artists and prescribe their content to
them was misguided.
How Love Matters for Justice 391
In short, there is nothing wrong with a nation’s taking a stand, including
an emotional stand, and a stand made vivid through the arts. Nations
should stand for something—indeed, for many things. And they should
impart this vision in many ways. The only thing that would endanger
freedom would be the suppression of divergent opinions.
VI. Intrinsic and Instrumental
But, we still must ask, how does love matter for justice? Are the public
emotions we have imagined simply instruments, tools that a just society
uses to achieve its goals and stabilize them once achieved? Or are they, as
realized in the real lives of citizens, part of the goal toward which society
is striving? To put it another way: If we once achieved our political goals,
and had well-grounded confidence that they would be stably sustained
into the future, would we have no further need of political love? Even
though our argument has been that stability is not in fact possible without
an emotional involvement that contains particularistic as well as principledependent
elements, we still need to pose this question, because it goes
to the very heart of what we are seeking. Do we want something that is
simply very useful, like a Swiss army knife (and let’s suppose that there’s
no other tool that can do various important jobs as well as this knife can),
or is it something with its own distinctive value and beauty, without
which our public lives would be incomplete? At the end of Figaro, the
chorus says that “only love” made their day end in happiness. But is love
like a ladder that might be thrown over once happiness is achieved? Or
is it part of any (public) happiness that we should acknowledge as such?
Much of the tradition discussing a “civil religion” is ambiguous on
this point. Mazzini, for example, imagines patriotism in ways that suggest
the instrumental conception, even using tool metaphors (it is a “lever”),
although he does not deny that patriotic emotion might also be part
and parcel of the good society once achieved. Daniel Batson’s research
on compassion, to which we have frequently turned to illuminate motivational
questions, values emotional experience to the extent that it promotes
altruistic behavior, and not to the extent that it leads to partiality
and unevenness—although, like Mazzini, Batson does not deny that there
might be a type of compassion that is part and parcel of a good person,
392 Pu blic Emot ions
without which a person who behaves very altruistically might be judged
to be incomplete. John Stuart Mill and Rabindranath Tagore, our two
primary theoretical guides, incline strongly toward giving emotion a
more intrinsic role, though both also acknowledge its usefulness. Mill’s
“religion of humanity” is not just a handy device for reconciling individual
and general utility; it is, he strongly suggests, an appropriate way
to relate to others, and Mill’s Autobiography insists on the importance of
emotional development for a meaningful life. Tagore’s contempt for
deadness and his evident love for richness of emotion leave little doubt
that he would judge any society that achieved distributive goals without
an inner enlivening of the heart not only impossible, but very unattractive.
Rawls’s treatment of political emotion in A Theory of Justice strongly
suggests the intrinsic conception: the emotions of love and gratitude he
describes are valuable parts of an ideal of the citizen. In Political Liberalism,
however, he appears to bracket this claim, and he offers no argument
that addresses the point.
What does this book itself say? The question of political liberalism
makes this a hard rather than easy question. If we want a political conception
that can ultimately become the object of an overlapping consensus
among people who have many different religious and secular views
of life, it had better be thin in certain ways, not making too many controversial
claims about what is ultimately worthwhile in life. When we enter
the contested terrain of emotions such as compassion and love, when we
talk of tragic grief and comic celebration, we have an easier time bringing
everyone on board if we say that these forms of public observance, and
the emotions they cultivate, are like that Swiss army knife, useful for getting
a job done, but not necessarily valuable in and of themselves. As to
that deeper question, each person must judge for him- or herself, in accordance
with his or her overall conception. There is a lot of evidence
that public emotions are instrumentally useful in this way, and that they
are not dispensable so long as stability is a problem to be grappled
with—which is to say, so long as nations are governed by fallible human
beings, and most certainly in nations where the aspiration to justice is as
yet incomplete. So it is easy to be tempted to quit while we are ahead,
saying something thin and uncontroversial rather than something deeper
and more potentially contentious.
How Love Matters for Justice 393
Is it, however, more contentious, when we are thinking of nonideal
societies arguing about and aspiring to justice? So often people are not
satisfied at all with their nation as it is, and yet they are bound to it deep
in their hearts. That’s the sort of love this book has tried to describe,
embracing imperfection while striving for justice. Just as personal love
and friendship are at their best when they are directed not at ideal images
of the person, but, instead, at the whole person with flaws and faults
(not, of course, without criticizing or arguing), so too with love of a city
or country: it gets under one’s skin, is undeterred by imperfection, and
thus enables diverse people, most of them dissatisfied with reality, but in
many different and incompatible ways, to embrace one another and enter
a common future.
And now we see something that might not have been evident before:
this project’s demand for love, rather than ratcheting up the demands
imposed by the political conception in a way that makes “overlapping
consensus” more difficult to achieve, actually ratchets the demands down,
by imagining emotions that do not presuppose full agreement on principles
and institutions or even agreement that these lack major flaws. Just
as two people can be friends and even lovers when their religions, their
political views, and their ultimate goals in life differ, so citizens in the
society we are imagining, or many of them at least, can share the heterogeneous
experiences we have described—at least some of those experiences,
and some of the time. So what we’re asking, when we ask whether
these emotions are intrinsically valuable, is not as threatening to political
liberalism as it might at first have seemed.
What, then, are we asking? Let’s put the question this way. Suppose
we had a society of liberal New Deal–ish body snatchers: people do all
the altruistic things that we hope for, and sustain the nation’s institutions
by exactly the same sorts of actions that might have been done out
of real feeling—only they are not really feeling anything. They are just
shells of people, feeling nothing in their hearts. It’s telling, in the movies
on that theme, that the body snatchers betray their nonhumanness by an
inability to appreciate music, and particularly jazz, which demands a
responsiveness to improvisation and eroticism that both Whitman and
Tagore would have understood as hallmarks of the passionate citizen. In
our experiment things are made more complicated by the fact that we
394 Pu blic Emot ions
have to concede that these people may be feeling many things in their
personal lives—they are not body snatchers all the way through—but it’s
just a range of civic emotions that are mere form and show on their part,
not sustained by real feeling.
Now of course the first thing we want to say is that the approach taken
in this book does not require real feeling all the time. It just wants
enough people to feel enough, enough of the time, and that is not even
supposed to be a precise metric. But it is totally to be expected that
some, even many, people will not be moved by the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, will never enjoy their trips to Millennium Park, et cetera.
Some people are more like body snatchers (just going through the motions)
than others, particularly in their civic lives. And even emotionally
responsive people are fickle, with pockets of deadness and inattention.
Moreover, there are many types of love, and we are therefore imagining a
family of sentiments, not a single emotion.
Next we can say that in fact such a body-snatcher conception of public
emotion will not work. We don’t need to get to intrinsic value to have
strong reasons for wanting a culture in which people are not just going
through the motions of caring about one another. What holds people
together must be more real than that or the power of self-interest will
take over. Our question, then, is more theoretical than practical.
Still, it seems important. Ideals are real. Even if we don’t attain them,
they direct our search. So, what is our ideal of the good citizen? Do we
imagine a good citizen as an impeccably right-acting sort of body snatcher,
or as someone who really has love? The question Iris Murdoch asked
long ago about personal virtue also has importance for political life.
Murdoch imagined a mother-in-law, M, who resents her daughter-in-law,
D.3
She finds D pert, vulgar, and annoying. Being a very well-bred
woman, M conceals these feelings and judgments, and Murdoch stipulates
that this concealment is totally successful: so far as outward conduct
is concerned, M behaves exactly as if she loved D. But she has no
love in her heart. Nonetheless, realizing that her judgments are prompted
by less-than-admirable facts about herself (class prejudice, personal
envy), she sets herself the task of seeing D “justly and lovingly,” so that
over time she comes to have within the attitudes that she has successfully
feigned without.
How Love Matters for Justice 395
Murdoch’s claim, which I endorse, is that this inner moral effort
makes a difference: M has been active, has done something morally valuable,
even if nothing out in the world of action is different as a result. It is
this same contrast that I have in mind in the political case. In one case,
citizens might be like empty automata, with no feelings at all, or they
might, like the early M, be dutiful and self-controlled, feeling the wrong
things but doing all the correct things. Contrasted with both of these is a
picture in which citizens are emotionally alive, really reacting to one another
with political love, at least sometimes and in some ways. Let us
stipulate for the sake of the argument that the empty alternatives are stable,
and that they successfully motivate altruistic action, although this is
not likely to be the case.
Murdoch argued persuasively that the M with a rich inner life of
imaginative and emotional effort is preferable to the dutiful M, for she
has been morally active, trying to see D clearly and without prejudice.
We can imagine many similar cases: for example, racists who behave
impeccably, as contrasted with racists who sincerely engage in inner effort
to see the world in a less biased way, even if they don’t fully succeed.
It seems clear that in the citizen case too, the citizen who really feels love
of others is very different from the merely law-abiding dutiful citizen, in
ways that make a difference to our analysis. Loving citizens are likely to
be much more resourceful in action, but even if this is not the case—even
if somehow or other the dutiful citizen were to do all the same things—we
still should admire and prefer the citizen whose imagination and emotions
are alive to the situation of the nation, and of its other citizens. As a
political goal to strive for, the Tagorean/Whitmanian/Mozartian citizen
is simply much more appealing than the inert dutiful citizen.
It would be surprising if we (I really mean, if I) found otherwise. After
so much sympathetic discussion of love, imagination, and compassion,
is it really likely that this book would have concluded that these parts of
the personality are mere tools that could be deployed for limited ends by
people who are content to be empty within, once their goals have been
stably achieved? Still, even though this conclusion may have the air of a
parti pris, the Murdochian argument is sound: the inner world is relevant
to normative assessment, and it makes a difference to our conception
of what we should be like as citizens, even where it doesn’t make a
396 Pu blic Emot ions
difference to any actual conduct. In our other significant roles in life we
readily grant this, granting that imaginative M is better than dutiful M,
that the parent who really loves is better than the parent who simply does
all the right things, that the racist colleague who is struggling to overcome
racist perceptions and reactions is superior to the one who merely
acts impeccably. Why, then, would we suppose that in one of our most
important roles in life, that of citizen, an empty shell is all we need to be?
We simply don’t accept that picture as an attractive goal. Indeed the very
success of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as political horror movie—
whether its target is Communism or McCarthyism or both—testifies to
the alarm and queasiness with which we contemplate the citizen who
has become an empty shell. It also affirms our embrace of the quirky,
unpredictable humanity of the citizen who really feels and imagines—in
the movie, the citizen who responds to music.
To the extent that we are embarrassed by the idea of an emotiondriven
politics (and Americans are more likely to be embarrassed than
Indians, or indeed citizens in many other parts of the world), it is in part
because of the legacy of post-Vietnam cynicism and alienation I have already
mentioned, which has left its mark on all citizens of a certain age,
at least to some extent. Other forms of alienation and cynicism also exist
in the United States, in particular among racial minorities who have
come to feel that politics offers them little hope. But this alienation—
which at times in our history has given rise to a very passionate politics
of dissent (both the civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War
movement are such cases)—is not a cultural universal. And insofar as
alienation is present in a given society, public artists and orators need,
as we said, to take it into account, producing public artworks such as
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which honors the critical and introspective
stance and finds a remarkable way to turn this very stance into
community.
It will be said, and frequently too, that the demand for love made in this
book is a tall order, and unrealistic given the present state of politics in
more or less every country. But think what this objection really says.
The objector presumably thinks that nations need technical calculation:
How Love Matters for Justice 397
economic thought, military thought, good use of computer science and
technology. So, nations need those things, but they do not need the
heart? They need expertise, but do not need the sort of daily emotion,
the sympathy, tears, and laughter, that we require of ourselves as parents,
lovers, and friends, or the wonder with which we contemplate
beauty? If that’s what nations are like, one might well want to live
elsewhere.
Speaking of his imaginary republic, as yet not fully realized, Walt
Whitman wrote that “America is only you and me.” We should aspire to
nothing less.