The New Religious Intolerance
In her new book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, Martha Nussbaum extends her distinguished body of work on liberalism, education, literature, and the emotions by turning to the growing anti-Muslim agitations in Europe and the United States. She spoke to Web Editor David V. Johnson by email from the University of Cologne, where she was lecturing on the themes of her book.
David Johnson: The idea for the book came from a column you wrote on burqa bans for “The Stone,” The New York Times’s “Opinionator” section dedicated to philosophy. Some academics and scholars shy away from such platforms for fear of dealing with public hostility and hyperbolic comments. Your column certainly garnered its share of both. Why do you think that, nevertheless, such outreach is worth your time?
…DJ: In chapter two you analyze fear as the emotion principally responsible for religious intolerance. You label fear the ‘narcissistic emotion.’ But why think that the logic of fear—erring on the side of caution (‘better to be safe than sorry’)—is narcissism rather than just good common sense, especially in an era of global terrorism and instability?
MN: Biological and psychological research on fear shows that it is in some respects more primitive than other emotions, involving parts of the brain that do not deal in reflection and balancing. It also focuses narrowly on the person’s own survival, which is useful in evolutionary terms, but not so useful if one wants a good society. These tendencies to narrowness can be augmented, as I show in my book, through rhetorical manipulation. Fear is a major source of the denial of equal respect to others. Fear is sometimes appropriate, of course, and I give numerous examples of this. But its tendencies toward narrowness make it easily manipulable by false information and rhetorical hype.DJ: In comparing fear and empathy, you say that empathy ‘has its own narcissism.’ Do all emotions have their own forms of narcissism, and if so, why call fear “a narcissistic emotion”?
MN: What I meant by my remarks about empathy is that empathy typically functions within a small circle, and is activated by vivid narratives, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown. So it is uneven and partial. But it is not primarily self-focused, as fear is. As John Stuart Mill said, fear tells us what we need to protect against for ourselves, and empathy helps us extend that protection to others.