The position I wish to take in this short article shall hopefully be quite clear; it is the fact that the principle of empathy is the single most important principle upon which the weal of a functioning democracy relies.
Several centuries ago, Montesquieu wrote that civic virtue was to be the most important surety for the preservation of the democratic state. In his view, a democracy required that its citizenry be educated to subordinate their individual self-interest to the interests of the state, whenever necessary. Individuals should always attempt to serve the common interest, as opposed to their private interests — perhaps Montesquieu’s view on civic virtue may thus be summarized roughly by Kennedy’s famous dictum, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
This spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of the higher interest of the state is all well and good, but the atrocities of the past century have undoubtedly left us a little contemptuous at the naïveté of this charming French thinker who did not even live to see the excesses of Robespierre and Saint-Just. The French sacrificed joyously in their attempt to create their “Republic of Virtue” — and yet the atrocities committed by that regime should tell us that civic virtue itself leads to nothing if first the civitas itself be not virtuous.
How then, ensure that the democratic civitas be virtuous? Presumably by ensuring that its leaders be so. How ensure that the leaders be virtuous? By assuming that its citizens be so. How ensure that its citizens be so? And here, we come back to the crux of the question — by ensuring that they be educated to know to practice virtue. We have circled back to Montesquieu’s initial proposition.
In order to break out of this vicious circle, we must move one step further and ask ourselves: what, then, is virtue in this day and age? It can no longer be, as Montesquieu claims, the willingness to put the interests of the state ahead of the interest of the individual, for such reasoning, as we have seen, is necessarily circular. To sacrifice oneself for the greater interests of the state can nowise be good, unless there be some guarantee that the so-called greater interests of the state be good. But I shall, for the moment, concede this one point to Montesquieu, and defer arguing against it until a later piece — thus, on the assumption that Montesquieu is correct in arguing that a functioning democracy should require of its citizens that they practice self-sacrifice for the greater benefit of the state, the problem then becomes as follows: who determines what the “greater benefit of the state” actually is?
Let the following two examples suffice to demonstrate the inherent problems in Montesquieu’s position in answering this question. Let us say that there is a country somewhere that is de jure democratic (there are free and fair elections), but which has been de facto ruled by elites for centuries. These elites instil the social and economic classes under them with a strong sense of “civic virtue,” arguing that they themselves should be continually voted into office and kept at the top of the political order and served by these lower classes, precisely because, let us say, the current social order has allowed the elite ample opportunity to produce great works in the arts and humanities, and make astounding leaps in extending the boundaries of human scientific and mathematical knowledge. In so doing, they have brought unprecedented prestige and wealth to the “state” — even if the majority of that state’s citizens do not enjoy any such advantages, because they are kept in subjugation to the elite, both physically, insofar as they are compelled to labor in the fields in order provide bread for the tables of the power elite, and mentally, insofar as they have been educated from birth to continue to vote to keep the elite in power, constantly swayed by appeals to “civic virtue” and entranced by the idea that their votes for the long-standing regime do serve, in some sense, the “best interests of the state.”
Or — to take an example closer to home — FDR signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, calling for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, presumably because doing so was to be considered conducive toward securing the “greater good” of the state. And yet, it would be an absurd — not to mention tasteless — argument that Japanese internment did in the end prevent America from attacks by home-grown saboteurs. Its implementation represented an infringement upon the basic human rights that we hold so central to the well-functioning of a democracy — and yet this very subversion of democratic principle was justified with recourse to that supposedly “higher” democratic principle, i.e. the “greater good of the state.” In order to safeguard democracy, many aspiring dictators have learned to claim, it is a beautiful and wonderful thing to suspend parts and increasingly larger parts thereof indefinitely, whereby they allege that enemies of the state may be beaten back from its borders and isolated from society, all in the interests of the greater good of the state. This process continues until nobody is left except for the civically virtuous population that would support the suspension of democracy indefinitely, in the first place. Thus are tyrants made — thus, tyrannies born.
But it has become a rather trite observation that democracies are the only form of government that provide the wherewithal for their own downfalls — Napoleon and Hitler are only the most (in)famous products of democracies. The reason for this tendency has as its root this ingrained notion, expressed by Montesquieu, that the citizens of a democracy ought to be willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the state and that doing so is exactly what civic virtue in a democratic society is. Although there is nothing theoretically unsound with this notion, in actuality, adherence to it implies a simple disregard for the fact that a democracy is, by its very nature, organized pluralistically. There is no single “greater good” of a democratic society — one cannot even pretend that there is, the way one might in a dictatorship, for instance — in the interests of which the leaders of that society might persuade its citizens or a portion thereof to sacrifice their democratic rights. Rather, in a world of plurality — i.e. in a democratic world where everybody’s voice is supposed to be equal — citizens have a duty to discuss their different ideas as to what the greater goods of the state might be, instead of trusting blithely in the idea that there exist only a solitary greater good for which they ought to sacrifice even their own freedom, if need be.
Civic virtue — if indeed we define it to be that form of virtue which grounds democracy — must be taken as a general form of “open-mindedness,” to the extent that it creates an atmosphere conducive to the general discussion of these various greater goods of the state. An education which aims for the cultivation of civic virtue thus ought to aim more toward the form of thought, rather than at its contents. This is, incidentally, what a liberal education should aim to do
But, “since feeling is first” and makes life worth living at all, the open-mindedness at which this liberal education aims is possible only insofar as it aims first at the cultivation of the feeling of empathy amongst its students. An example close to Emory’s campus explains this point well. In the spring of this year, some people decided that it would be a good idea to chalk “Trump 2016” or other such slogans around campus. Shortly thereafter, some other people, in opposition of these actions, decided that it would be a good idea to petition the administration to levy sanctions upon those who wrote these slogans. The fact that some people thought to chalk slogans in support of Trump around campus, I found abhorrent. The fact that somebody decided that running to the administration in an attempt to stifle those individuals’ free speech, I found yet more abhorrent. The fact that I found both these actions abhorrent, I found most abhorrent of all.
Why this abhorrence at abhorrence? Because abhorrence is a feeling born from prejudice, and, as such, it precludes and shuts off the ability for one to feel empathy. I know that as a citizen of the United States, I ought to be able at least to have some basic level of empathy for Trump’s supporters. I ought, at least, to say, “I know that coal miners/fundamentalists/businessmen, etc. tend to support him, because…” and so on, because if I cannot do even that, I cannot have a rational debate with their side, and if I cannot have a rational debate, then we each retreat into the subjective world of personal opinion, and any discussion degenerates into a shouting match that leaves both parties more polarized than ever before. I am no Trump supporter myself — far from it — but I also recognize that I shall never convince anybody to cease to support him if I cannot reach even the smallest isle of middle ground with the other side. For the same reason, I ought to empathize with the people who protested to the administration about the chalk scribblings and asked that those responsible for them be punished — and yet I find that I cannot. Without, therefore, this common bond of empathy, by means of which we come to see matters from the other party’s point of view, the possibility for rational discourse is all at once closed off, and replaced rather with the circus into which American politics has devolved this election cycle. One can blame neither Trump’s, nor Hillary’s, nor Sanders’ supporters alone for this devolution concerning rational debate and discourse: the fault is on all our heads — at least, upon the heads of those of us who remain incapable or unwilling even to share some basic empathy with the other side.
I would like to end this article with two quotations which may perhaps express far better and more concisely what it was I have attempted to say. The first is quite famous and completely salient even to unbelievers such as myself: Matthew 5:44 “Love [ἀγαπᾶτε] thy enemy.” The second is from Virginia Woolf, who, reflecting on the horrors of World War I, wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, “As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”
Alex Chen is a College senior from Palo Alto, California.
Read More
Trending
