Haters Gonna' Hate, Pt .3

(cont'd from here) Some quotes:

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.” Euripides, Medea

“["F]or it's not possible," [Socrates] said, "for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound and trustworthy, and then a little later discovering that this person is wicked and untrustworthy - and then having this experience again with another. And whenever somebody experiences this many times, and especially at the hands of just those he might regard as his most intimate friends and comrades, he then ends up taking offense all the time and hates all human beings and believes there's nothing at all sound in anybody.” Plato, Phaedo

“In time we hate that which we often fear.” Shakespeare, Cleopatra.

"Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. ... 

"The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. ... 

"In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is "the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!" What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, - seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy - mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; - have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough." Wm. Hazlitt, The Pleasure of Hating

“Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you're in love with.” Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“[O]ne captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.” Melville, Moby Dick

“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.” - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” - G. B. Shaw, The Devil's Disciple

"We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.” Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays.

“Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark−haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.” Orwell, 1984

“The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighting and killing are people—men, women and children—not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them.” Sydney J. Harris

"At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, what is hated are identical." Freud, The Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p. 136 (1915).

"Hate of the object involves hate of oneself, you suffer with the object you attack because you cannot give up the object and feel one with it. …

"What is the meaning of hate? It is not the absolute opposite of love; that would be indifference, having no interest in a person, not wanting a relationship and so having no reason for either loving or hating, feeling nothing. Hate is love grown angry because of rejection. We can only really hate a person if we want their love. Hate is an expression of frustrated love needs, an attempt to destroy the bad rejecting side of a person in the hope of leaving their good responsive side available, a struggle to alter them. The anxiety is over the danger of hate destroying both sides, and the easiest way out is to find two objects and love one and hate the other." H. Guntrip, "A Study of Fairbairn's Theory of Schizoid Reactions," p. 351, Psychopathology: A Source Book, ed. Charles Frederick Reed.

(to be cont'd)

Haters Gonna' Hate, Pt. 2

(Cont'd from here)

Like fear, hate is a powerful feature of human emotional life. [For a somewhat lengthy personal essay on the existential value of Fear, see my longish serial post "Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again." Remember, it's a blog, so you have to read from the bottom up, and you will have to scroll through several pages to get to the beginning.] Some might say that our very identities are defined by the things we hate.

And, like fear, because it is so fundamental to our identity, hate would seem to have evolutionary import.

Hate involves selection. We hate certain things and like or tolerate certain other things. These choices occur on a spectrum from the gut-level and pre-conscious to the active and rational(-ized).

Hate stems from distinguishing the things we like from the things we don't like. Our friends from our enemies, e.g. Things that are harmful to us from things that are benign or even benevolent. This is, of course, a fairly valuable exercise psychologically and evolutionary. 'Yes, you should hate wolfsbane. It will kill you if you eat it.' or 'Yes, you should hate saber tooth tigers. They will eat you and your babies.' or 'Yes, you should hate the Neanderthals. They will steal your food and rape your women.' Or whatever.

Hate involves a judgment of a certain kind. And it involves some object. It isn't a free-floating feeling. It is hatred of something.

But merely differentiating between things that are helpful and those that are harmful doesn't fully capture the sorts of things we recognize as hate. It is, that is to say, more than a mere judgment.

Hate is more than that. It has an intensity about it. An emotional component.

But is it simply an emotion? Or, stated differently, is it a simple emotion?

When we examine ourselves and what we feel when we hate, we discover that hate is a quite complex set of emotions and feelings. It involves elements of, e.g., fear, anger, fixation, blame, dislike, loathing, contempt, indignation, hostility, disgust, intolerance, aggression, demeaning or devaluation or objectification of the object, desire for schadenfreude (the suffering of the other brings pleasure), wish to harm/destroy the object, and even jealousy (success of the other brings resentment).

There is also the feeling that the object's very existence demeans/diminishes one's own and thus takes on a moral component (rightly or wrongly). The hater tends to see him/her self as somehow victimized by the object of hatred. And, thus, the hater's identity is, paradoxically, tied up/in with the hated.

(to be cont'd)

----------

Haters Gonna' Hate

Hate is a thing.

It is an important thing. I've written about its institutionalization and employment in a political/editorial context. But it is often poorly understood.

Extreme examples are easy to recognize when we encounter them—genocides, pogroms, e.g, being obvious ones. Other instances are readily typifiable, especially in extremes —bigotry, racism, misogyny, misandry, gay bashing, political or religious extremism, etc.

We've probably all known someone whose entire being was eaten up with hatred for something or someone or some group. So much so that we begin to suspect there might be something comforting, if not rewarding, about it for that person.

But we also find ourselves saying something like 'I hate brussels sprouts,' or 'I hate those shoes', or 'I hate cocktail parties,' or 'I hate having to wake up early,' or 'I hate the Dallas Cowboys,' or even:



We all have our pet hates.

So, what does, say, a food aversion have in common with an effort to wipe an entire race of people off the face of the earth? Are they different in kind or merely in degree?

Let's investigate.

(to be continued)

Realisms and Beauty

Here’s a philosophical problem that continually plagues me as a writer:

Is the primary aesthetic goal of a work of art, specifically in this case literary works of art such as the short story or novel, (a) to accurately portray a feeling or (b) to make the audience feel?

Let’s expand and define:

The portrayal of the private, emotional life of a fictional character is certainly an, if not the principle, aim of literary fiction. The writer plunks an invented character into some situation and explores that character’s experience—inner and outer. The character becomes a sort of virtual field (or virtual mind) to whom and upon and within which this experience occurs, analagous, say, to the two-dimensional action space of a painting.

Accuracy of the portrayal of this inner experience, what we might call its 'psychological realism,' is a quality often and widely (though certainly not universally) admired (as, of course, is how well-realized a world the writer depicts and how compelling a situation s/he creates: what we might call its 'narrative realism'). How truly human does this character seem? How well does the writer present the fullness of this character's interior life and his/her emotional engagement with the given situation?

But is this all? No.

In the classic formulation, this imitation of life serves to bring about an experience of catharsis in the audience. This is the purpose of tragedy: "There but for the grace of the gods (or fate or serendipity or overcoming my own flaws or whatever) go I."

Aristotle identifies the emotions tragedy produces in its audience. In summary strokes, tragedy is the depiction of the downfall of a noble hero due either to some flaw (hamartia) in his nature (e.g., pride) or, certainly in the older tragedians, to the actions of the gods. Feelings of disappointment, guilt, anger, resentment, shame, etc. are the sorts of feelings that might be depicted in the tragic hero, and the lifelikeness of their depiction is part of the art of the writer.

But, for Aristotle, these are not the same sorts of feelings the tragic work produces in its audience. The purpose/aim of a tragic work of art is to arouse the emotions of fear and pity in the audience. As the audience, we fear for the tragic hero. Though he does not recognize it, we know he is heading for a fall. And we pity him because we see aspects of ourselves in him. Once we come to this realization, we are able to overcome the same sort of hubris that might very well bring us low.

But, and this is the point, the depicted emotions are not the same as the emotions aroused in the audience. The audience's emotions are reactive, responsive to those of the tragic hero (and, of course, his plight). Sympathetic, if you will.

This helps frame the issue for me: Does the accuracy and, let's say, poignancy of the depiction of the nobility of the hero and his/her situation, the nature of his/her flaw, and the violence of his/her downfall determine the nature and quality of the audience's reaction? Is there a direct causal relation between the verisimilitude of the psychological and narrative realism and the nature and quality of the sympathetic emotions evoked from the audience? The closer our identification with the hero the more profound our catharsis?

Again: As the writer is my primary concern the perfection of my depiction of the narrative, and more specifically the psychological, realism or should I focus principally on how I want the audience to feel upon reading the narrative?

Some might say there isn't any real difference. Just write well and let the audience respond how it will.

I want readers to identify with my characters. I want them to feel sympathy for my characters' predicaments and plights. I am less concerned with whether they like a particular character than that they find her interesting/intriguing. I want them to experience a character's complexity—emotional and otherwise. To this end, my aim is akin to that of realism, both narrative and psychological.

(Aside: Thesis: I go beyond mere realism(-s) if I am able to depict a unique situation or a portray a new, or even fuller, emotional consciousness. But that's a point for another day.)

But this begs the main question. It is not just through literal, realistic depictions of situations or inner states of consciousness or even physical reactions that writers reach and, indeed, affect the emotions of their readers. Rather, it is primarily through techniques of persuasion.

As the writer, I want to show you how the overarching power of love can fulfill a life's course and make you feel the sadness of a missed chance at true love. (Love in the Time of Cholera). I want to show you how a selfish, adulterous act can be unwittingly cruel to an underserving character and can, in fact, destroy your own life—so don't do it! (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina). I want to show you how religious belief can have a positive/negative impact on your life and, in fact, on society in general and persuade you to convert your lifestyle. (Brothers Karamazov, Origin of the Brunists) I want to portray the presence of evil in the world in all its multifaceted, larger-than-life-and-death enormity and terror and leave you in awe of its abject beauty and power. (Blood Meridian, Omensetter's Luck) I want to show you the power that unseen conspiratorial forces exercise over our daily affairs and make you feel that perhaps it's reasonable to be afraid, very afraid—paranoid even. (Gravity's Rainbow, and A-game Pynchon) I want to show you how certain political/social/economic situations are manifestly unjust and ultimately untenable and move you to want to change them. (Disgrace, and anything from early Coetzee) I want to show you that fascism is a bad thing so you'll recognize its symptoms in yourself and be repulsed by its very presence. (Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Auto-da-Fe)

Affecting catharsis. Scaring. Shaming. Educating. Moralizing. Sermonizing. Proselytizing. Propagandizing. These goals are not different in kind, merely in degree.

And how do I achieve these types of ends? Rhetoric, affective language, figurative language—the tools of aesthetics. Blatant or subtle manipulations. The realisms of discursive language—psychological and narrative—are, on this view, subsidiary concerns.

Granted, situational poignancy and its accurate depiction can take us partially there, can move us—but only to a certain extent. It takes persuasive power to amplify its effect and make it stick. And these same techniques can either "beautify" or "ruin" the work. That is to say, the techniques of beautification can quite easily be used for purposes other than aesthetic.

Therein lies the dilemma. And the delicate balancing act of/for the writer/artist.

I know this post has been longish and a bit rambling, and I apologize. Yet it has helped me clarify the problem I began with: As a writer, should I be more concerned about trying to keep my characters' actions (and emotions) true to (that character's) experience as I've envisaged it or should I constantly be keeping in mind how I hope to move my audience by my depiction? Should I be more concerned about the realism of the piece or its aesthetics? Which is more important, the verisimilitude or the message? The depiction or the rhetoric?

There is a difference, an important one. Please feel free to weigh in.There are reasoned approaches and well-thought-out positions in both directions on this issue. I'd like to hear from you.

I don't think I'm any closer to a resolution of this issue as a writer, but I do think I have a better handle on what a resolution must entail. Of course, it might turn out that my formulation of the problem is faulty and there's no real issue here. If so, how might that look? Or maybe there's something other than emotionality at stake?

Separation of Reason and Emotion

Raphael, School of Athens

"We shall say that the imitative poet does the same; he sets up a bad government in the soul of every private individual by gratifying the mindless part which cannot distinguish the small from the large but thinks that the same things are at one time small, at another large. He is a maker of images which are very far removed from the truth.  ...

"...when even the best of us hear Homer or some other tragedian imitating one of the heroes sorrowing and stretching out a long speech of lamentation or a chorus beating their breasts you know that we enjoy it, surrender ourselves, share their feelings, and earnestly praise as a good poet the one who affects us most in this way. ...

"But when one of us suffers a private loss, then, as you know we pride ourselves on the opposite behaviour, if we can keep quiet and master our grief; this we think to be the part of a man, and the other behaviour, which we then praised, to be womanish. ...

"If you reflect that the part which is forcibly controlled in our private misfortunes and has been pining to weep and adequately lament, as it is by nature desirous of this, is the very part which receives satisfaction from the poets in the theatre and enjoys it. That part of ourselves which is the best by nature has not been sufficiently educated either by reason or habit, and it relaxes its watch over the lachrymose part because it is watching another's suffering and there is no shame involved for itself in praising and pitying another man who, in spite of his claim to goodness, grieves excessively. Moreover, there is, he thinks, a definite gain, namely pleasure, and he would not welcome being deprived of it by despising the whole drama. Only a few will reflect that the enjoyment will be transferred from the spectacle of another's sufferings to one's own, and that one who has nurtured and strengthened the part of him that feels pity at those spectacles will not find it easy to hold it in check at the time of his own misfortunes. ...

"Does not the same argument hold about ridicule? You greatly enjoy on the comic stage, or even in private conversation, things at which you would be ashamed to provoke laughter yourself, and there you do not hate them as wicked. Indeed you do the same as in the case of the pitiful, for that part of you which wants to provoke laughter was held back by your reason, for fear of being thought a buffoon, but you let it loose in the theatre, not realizing that, by making that part strong there, you will be led to being a comedian in your own life. ...

"So too with sex, anger, and all the desires, pleasures, and pains which we say follow us in every activity. Poetic imitation fosters these in us. It nurtures and waters them when they ought to wither; it places them in command in our soul when they ought to obey in order that we might become better and happier men instead of worse and more miserable. ...

"And so, Glaucon, I said, when you meet those who praise Homer and say that the poet educated Greece, that he deserves that one should take up his works, learn from them the management of human affairs and of education, and arrange one's life in accordance with his teaching, you must welcome these people and treat them as friends, for they are as good as they are capable of being. You can agree that Homer is most poetic and that he stands first among the tragedians, but you must know for sure that hymns to the gods and eulogies of good men are the only poetry which we can admit into our city. If you admit the Muse of sweet pleasure, whether in lyrics or epic, pleasure and pain will rule as monarchs in your city, instead of the law and that rational principle which is always and by all thought to be the best."  Plato, The Republic. Book X [605b-607a] (trans. G.M.A. Grube 1974)

Through his annoyingly overbearing mouthpiece, Socrates, Plato asserts that rationality and law should govern political discourse, not the emotions—passion, pity, ridicule, hate, fear, etc.—inspired by poets. His primitive gynocomorphism© and stoicism aside, his ultimate appeal is to what is thought "by all" to be "the best". Plato's "all" was limited to those free, male, property-owning citizens who could vote in the Athenian assembly. And by "the best", of course, he means rule by educated aristocrats, philosopher-kings, the oligarchs, if you will, who have not succumbed to the shallow subjectivism, materialism, self-interest, and relativism taught by the political scientists of his day, i.e., the Sophists.

More Swarms

The profundity of my disorientation while in the midst of the swarming bait ball, I'm sure, was a function of the amount of fish, the intensity of their swirling behavior, and their proximity to me. Tens of thousands of silvery fish engulfed me in a flickering whirlwind of erratic activity. I panicked. What's more, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't follow them with my eyes, much less keep up with them. I was a radically alien species and could neither receive whatever signals kept them moving in unison nor react and move as efficiently through the clear blue Caribbean waters. My neurons did not fire nearly so rapidly.

Our premise is that these simultaneous behaviors in fish, swallows, and bats (and others such as lemmings, locust, jellyfish, bacteria, etc.) are somehow evolutionarily akin to human emotions. More primitive, perhaps. More direct. More powerful. But different only in degree, not kind.

The swarm, it seems, perceives and responds as one. It makes sense that in the human animal—whose responses are capable of being mediated by thought or imagination or memory, for example—for the response to come close to being so unified, the stimulus must be powerful and primitive. Put another way, the more direct and primitive the emotion stirred, the more unified the community of feeling (to borrow Scheler's term).

What are the more primitive emotions? Awe, surely. Fear, yes. Anger, likely. Lust. Pride. Distrust. Disgust. Sorrow. Joy. All these are good candidates. But we're not so much interested in a taxonomy of the primitive emotions as in the power of these intense emotions to provoke an unmediated response in us.

The significance of human emotional responses, it seems to me, is governed by two factors: intensity and proximity. The more intense the cause, the less proximate it needs to be to arouse our sympathy. Thus, the shock of 100,000 instantaneous deaths in a flood or tsunami occurring anywhere in the world will affect us strongly and prompt a response, though the deaths of 10 or 100 or even 1000 occurring remotely might not. Whereas, one person killed in a swollen creek in our own neighborhood catches us up.

Similarly, intensity is a feature of two factors: time and presence. Thus, 150,000 deaths in England or France or China (any country which has a media presence and an ability to publicize its disaster—one whose affairs are deemed 'newsworthy') will affect us more than, say, half a million deaths in Rwanda or Congo. Or, 150,000 instant deaths in Southeast Asia will affect us more than, say, 150,000 deaths in the U.S. this year due to lung cancers resulting from cigarette smoking or 43,000 deaths due to automobile accidents in one year. Though, one death to a family member or close friend or work colleague due to any one of these causes affects any of us profoundly.

We end today with a quote from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power:

Men's feeling for their own increase has always been strong. The large numbers of the herds they hunted blended in their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large. They expressed this feeling in a specific state of communal excitement which I call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

Their excitement grows and reaches frenzy, until they are all doing the same thing. They all swing their arms to and fro, and shake their heads. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing, a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all acting in exactly the same way and with the same purpose. When their excitement is at its height, these people really feel as one, and nothing but physical exhaustion can stop them.

The fact that wars can last so long and may be carried on well after they have been lost arises from the deep urge of the crowd not to disintegrate; to remain a crowd. This feeling is sometimes so strong that people prefer to perish together with open eyes rather than acknowledge defeat and thus experience the disintegration of their own crowd.

[More to follow]

Swarms

Ever go snorkeling or diving and find yourself in the midst of a swarm of small fry? They swirl this way and that simultaneously. Dipping and diving, swerving and climbing, round and round. It's vertiginous. You find yourself enclosed in a dense ball and become disoriented. You can't see the light from the surface. You can't tell whether you're right-side up or upside down. And there's no foothold because you are swimming. You don't know whether you're moving through the water or whether it's moving around you. You don't know whether you're going to crash into a rock or mound of coral. You become still and begin to hold your breath or gasp for air waiting for the moving wall of fish to sweep past. Then panic sets in because it dawns on you that all these small fry could be fleeing some large predators that're going to emerge out of the dense cloud of silvery fish. After a moment of confusion, the mass of fish moves on and you regain your orientation. You head for the surface or breathe through your regulator and try to calm your heartbeat.

I have.

There was much to marvel at in this encounter. Once I got past my own personal experience of disorientation I started to reflect upon the swirling phenomenon of the fish: how were they able to move so rapidly and simultaneously? What form of communication could account for their instantaneous changes of speed and motion? I had no answer, though I had seen this same behavior in flocks of chimney swallows and bats—and I am sure there are others. But what about us? Humans. The, theoretically, most evolved creatures on the planet.

My conclusion: The feature in human beings that corresponds most closely to the fish swarm phenomenon is: emotion. Hear me out.

A quote from the Preface to Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds comes to mind.

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.

Disasters, like those of the Myanmar cyclone and the China earthquake, often draw our attention simultaneously and we automatically respond sympathetically. We saw similar simultaneous outpourings after the fall of the twin towers and after Hurricane Katrina. Max Scheler, German philosopher, identified this simultaneity as what he called a "community of feeling":

"Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the 'same' sorrow, the 'same' anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common, A's sorrow is in no way an 'external' matter for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who joins them, and commiserates 'with them' or 'upon their sorrow'. On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the self-same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it." The Nature of Sympathy, pp.12-13.

Humans are more complex animals than fish or swallows or bats and are capable of more complex, mediated, individual responses. A human emotional response might provoke any of a number or actions—or none at all. However, that doesn't mean there is no emotional response; it just means we don't automatically swarm when we have these simultaneous feelings.

I think it's safe to say that the more significant the cause, the more profound the emotional response, and, thus, the greater the likelihood of a herd/flock/swarm reaction.

[More to follow]

Perception, Emotion, Consciousness

[Insert Emotion Here]

We have, then, the following levels and types of emotions:

1. Emotions toward characters: (a) sharing the emotion of a character by identification, (b) reacting to the emotion of a character.

2. Emotions toward the 'implied author,' the sense of life embodied in the text as a whole: (a) sharing that sense of life and its emotions through empathy, (b) reacting to it, either sympathetically or criticially. These emotions operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

3. Emotions toward one's own possibilities. These, too, are multiple and operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

All of these emotional responses (with the exception of those that involve a rejection of the work) are built into the work itself, into its literary structures. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions p. 242.

The creation of a fictional character is not simple. As noted in our previous post, it involves inhabiting and portraying the consciousness of a fictive being through the use of empathy and imagination. But the portrayal of simple perception is insufficient: human consciousness has an emotional content drawing from, among other things, memory, aspiration, and attitudes. The written depiction of perception must also bring this emotional content into play—whether through metaphor or simile or other form of figurative language or outright assertion. Fictional characters must be portrayed as inhabiting their bodies (as perceptual mechanisms) and as having a passably human range of emotional responses to their world (which Nussbaum does not address).

Failure to bring perceptual content into play—a flaw we've noted in the analyses of both James Wood and Jill Lepore—renders fiction a mechanical thing, an intellectual exercise; no different in form than history. Distant. Imprecise.

Failure, at the next level, to imbue perception with emotional content is a prescription for sterile fiction.

Socrates is wise

The whole politics thing is baffling to me. So much of what goes on in campaigning is based on emotional appeals. Images are created and marketed, or branded—think of the 'W' campaign, particularly in 2004, targeted particularly to the aspirant middle class—while opposing images are tarnished—think of the Kerry 'flip-flopper' and 'coward, hippie, war-protester' assault that same year. In 2000, George Bush was marketed as the guy most Americans would like to have a beer with, while Al Gore could never overcome the 'stuffed-shirt, policy wonk' image he was cast as.

Candidates must have policies. And they, or their retainers, must have thought these policies through (you'd think). There is a certain rationality to whatever policies they have; whether it is 'this is the policy we need to hold to correct a certain problem' or 'this is the policy we need to hold to get elected' or 'this is the policy that best serves the interests of our constituents and pleases our partisans.' These are all rational, practical political calculations. And, indeed, certain people pay attention to these things and make decisions based on them.

But it seems to me that the vast majority of the American electorate is ignorant of the actual policies and positions of the candidates seeking office. They are easily fooled by the emotional appeals of the images sold to them by those seeking office—if they care, or even vote. One partisan analysis of this feature of American politics struck me as spot on: Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas looks at the reasons rural, agrarian Kansans voted against their own economic interests and sided with plutocratic Republicans in the 2000 election. Another analysis, this one by a psychologist, Drew Westen's The Political Brain, agrees that emotional appeals to values—the use of rhetoric—has been a major factor in swaying elections in recent campaigns because our brains are hard-wired to be susceptible to our gut-level responses. And George Lakoff, a linguistics professor, has demonstrated how political marketers (can) use "frames" in their craft—the careful selection of words and terms for their connotations, allusions, and emotional appeal—to communicate subtle values that appeal not to the brain but the gut (or heart).

Lest you think I'm being overly partisan here, Frank Luntz, the conservative Republican pollster and consultant, has written a major book on precisely this topic: Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear.

If that all feels like too much reading, you can see Lakoff, Westen, and Luntz discussing these issues in a terrific forum from the New York Public Library back last November here.

But if you want to get back to the roots of this age-old issue, you need look no further than Plato's depiction of Socrates in his debates with the sophists—the teachers of rhetoric and political oratory of his day.

The opinion of the majority about knowledge is that it is not anything strong, which can control and rule a man; they don't look at it that way at all, but think that often a man who possesses knowledge is ruled not by it but by something else, in one case passion, in another pleasure, in another pain, sometimes lust, very often fear... . Protagoras 352b3-9.

Bottom line: The appeal to the emotions—to greed or fear, pleasure or pain, love or hatred—is strong medicine and often causes people to vote against their own rational interests (knowledge).

This leaves us with the question for future postings: Is demagogy the best or, indeed, the only way to win a heavily contested election in this country?