Mohammad Memarian*: There seems to be a global move toward claiming the supremacy of love in politics, albeit in varying degrees and forms. Are we becoming collectively romantic on a global scale?

JEFFERY NICHOLAS: Interesting question. We’d have to begin by understanding what the word “romantic” entails. The common popular meaning would be some sort of sexual romantic: An impassioned desire for another, to be with another on a romantic level. I don’t know how to answer that except to say, just the opposite. Shows in the US like ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette’ are the opposite of what we mean here. It’s romanticism as a commodity and lacks humanness. Yes, people love to watch it – idolize it. But that interferes with everyday relationships. Okay, I was off on a tangent.

Another meaning with be the modern reaction to the Enlightenment: A return to nature, a balance of reason with emotion. I do see a large attempt, maybe even global attempt, to return to nature. The problem, though, is that this approach can denigrate reason and supplant it with emotion. That is what Alasdair MacIntyre has been concerned with. If you look at the Netflix show ‘The Ranch’, this show signifies a return to nature, but also a lack of reason in life. Everything is done through pure emotion. The main character, Colt, only shows a semblance of virtue, but never any real virtue. I’ve always felt that the Harry Potter franchise did the same thing. Harry is never rational. And there, nature is associated with magic, the mysterious, the non-human. We need something different, and I do think some movements approach a new understanding of nature and reason.

 

In human history, there had been a prime example of love serving as a radical emancipatory force, initiated by Jesus Christ. But in practice, especially in its contemporary understanding, it seems to be more of a force for reconciliation and altruism, if not actually a new “opium of the masses” as Laurie Essig argues in ‘Love Inc.’ (2019). How can love be put to a radical use to counter neoliberal capitalism?

This question really gets at the heart of the issue, the 21st century problematic. And thank you for the reference to Essig. I think what you report here parallels what I was writing on the first question regarding shows like ‘The Bachelor’, a capitalistic industry of romance.

So, how can love be put to a radical use to counter neoliberalism? Altruism, as I note in my book, is a modern invention, coined by August Comte. Comte realized that capitalism configures us as individuals pursuing individual desires in a competitive environment. He, like many social theorists, had to think of how to make society possible. Thus, altruism names the willingness to help another, to support another. Then, we get the great modern false debate: Can one be altruistic, sacrifice one’s own desires to help another? That’s a ridiculous non-question, and the best response is given by Mary Midgley in her ‘Beast and Man’. Yet, that idea feeds into this whole debate among evolutionary psychologists, like E. O Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who draw up mathematical models to show that altruism can be a selected for survival. It’s better to read something like Kropotkin’s ‘Mutual Aid’.

Of course, I’ve been avoiding your main question. First, we must educate ourselves and our children: Love is not first an emotion. It is first, an action. To give to another. In that giving we form, even if just for a moment, such as when we talk to a homeless person on the street, a community. Love becomes an emancipatory force when we begin to examine our communities and our politics through the lens of giving to another. This force is different than altruism. When Jesus Christ, your example, gave to others, he did so because he saw the other as in communion. Someone once said to me that the first thing Jesus does when someone comes to him is to ask, “What do you want?” He never tells the person what they want. He knows, of course, but that is not how he acts. He models for us that love in action: To ask of the other with whom I have a relationship, living in some kind of community, “What do you want?” Others such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi model a similar sort of love. The practical steps here will vary from place to place.

The first step, wherever we are, however, is always a rejection of capitalism to the extent possible in our lives. Capitalism is the opposite of asking “what do you want?”, except at Christmas time, and then only to boost sales. That means, then, building networks in your local community of giving and receiving. It may start very small. The Greeks had a chance to reject capitalism on a large scale when the people voted to reject the austerity measures and leave the EU. But Syriza didn’t know how to do that, as Kim Stanley Robinson points out in ‘The Ministry of the Future’. So Syriza caved. But there are lots of YouTube channels now discussing how to build these communities of giving and receiving. Watch them and ask, are they making love an action? Can you judge them by whether they make giving to another their principle of action?

 

Ironically, love is at once the most disagreed-upon and one of the most universally recognized concepts of human life. You observe that “love, Eros, moves everything; it is the foundation of movement, of change.” How do you propose Eros can turn love into a unifying concept at the foundation of a liberatory politics?

Thanks for this question, which is perhaps the most important and the most difficult to answer. Audre Lorde says that we cannot use the master’s tools to resist the master. We cannot use, that is, violence and power to unseat the master. In her 2015 book, ‘Stand Your Ground’, Kelly Douglas Brown argues that Jesus’ cross is important because, where Jesus had the power and the angels to use violence, he chose instead not to answer the world’s power with more power. He chose love. Aside from the Christian message, which some might not buy into, I take the point is that fighting fire with fire does not work. Thus, we have to use love to unseat oppression and domination.

Eros empowers us to rely on love to unseat power and oppression. One way it does so is through art – Herbert Marcuse may not have been the first to articulate this point, but he did so well in ‘Eros and Civilization’. Art has always been a means through which power can be resisted. Yet, we need not rely on the great masters to paint, sing, or dance for us. We can paint, sing, and dance ourselves, every day. That might sound like little consolation to those who live in poverty or under power. But imagine a prisoner in solitary confinement dancing! In the movie ‘Shawshank Redemption’, Andy Dufresne is in prison. He takes an album of classical music, locks the door, and plays the album over the loudspeakers. He knows he will suffer for this infraction, but he does it anyway because that few moments of music are freedom, not only for him but for all those imprisoned. Every day, too, we must love others, no matter what they do to us. I know I’m not asking people to do an easy thing. But we do not have the tanks to unseat the powers that be. What we do have are those moments that we can celebrate in community – in communion – with each other as resistance, just as our shouting will break down the walls around us, the walls of Jericho, the walls of the rich, the walls that seek to keep us apart. They cannot.

 

Do we really need to be Marxist to criticize and counter capitalism? What about MacIntyre? Why, and to what extent (if any), does he owe his revolutionary ideas to Marx?

The question is controversial because many, especially conservator commentators on MacIntyre, wish to ignore or deny his Marxist leanings. Moreover, a significant element of MacIntyrean interpretation – the organizational studies people – must ignore Marx because Marx undermines any attempt to rescue management, business, and business organizations from vice. MacIntyre has not been helpful here, denying Marxism as a political program in 1981’s ‘After Virtue’. More recently, in 2019’s ‘Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity’, however, MacIntyre makes clear that only Marx can explain why Thomism failed to bring about a better world. The rise of capitalism through the enclosure process and primitive accumulation more generally, undermine communities across the world so that the virtues could hardly survive, so that people were pitted against each other for their very survival, rather than having that land and those commons on which they’d depended for generations. Others have articulated these processes now, and given them historical backing that Marx could not at the time. But Marx began this process, and he did so in order to highlight the alienation that tears the human person from self, society, and nature.

 

How does MacIntyre’s conception of alienation differ from that of Marx? 

I believe that MacIntyre extended Marx’s conception of alienation. At the center of the concept is the idea that alienation is a denial of what is human as human. For Marx, alienation is saleability. We sell each piece of our selves – mind, body, will, labor – to the other in order to live. In doing so, we deny what is human; we make of it a thing to be bought and sold. The capitalism is no less guilty here, for the capitalist must also sell his will, at the very least, to capital in order to maintain profit. MacIntyre extends this concept to include our denial of agency. For MacIntyre, alienation is emotivism, the belief that moral claims are merely – only and nothing more than – emotional statements. In accepting emotivism, one denies one’s ability to make moral judgements about one’s self and denies one’s agency to be responsible for what one does. Everything is done under the direction of power and capital.

 

How does Aristotle’s philosophy, in your words, embody “a divorce of human from nature”? 

Aristotle has many insights, and I believe that we must recover many of these for living a flourishing life. Yet, he also is human and also lived in a culture that influenced his philosophical claims. On the one hand, then, Aristotle’s concept of soul as that which moves any living body unites human beings to nature. All living beings – plants, non-human animals, and rational animals – have a soul, which entails that we all have similar capacities for sensing and moving, for nourishment. On the other hand, Aristotle adopts the Greek belief in the masculine as supremely rational, unlike other non-human animals. This distinction plays out in his account of epistemology – how we know – and his account of generation. I’ll just focus on the second point. In trying to explain why some people are born male (and rational) and some female (and less rational), Aristotle posits that the soul travels alongside the semen into the woman and that the woman contributes nothing of soul to the offspring. In making this claim, Aristotle separates the rational, and therefore, the male from nature. That is, he undermines his previous account of soul as something that unites all living beings. It’s a dialectical moment which must be unraveled.

 

You observed that MacIntyre insists that “we change our desires through our practices.” Do “we” actually do that? Is there a significant agency in that change on our parts?

This question is quite poignant. Does the chess player, for instance, already have her desires under control when she begins playing chess, or does she modify these through playing chess? We all can call to mind famous examples of people whose desires did not seem to change in the practice. I think if we look internally, however, we will find evidence that our desires have changed through practices. Those who take up running, as long as they don’t hate it absolutely to begin with, will change their desires so that they want to run more frequently. As a cook, I’ve noticed that my desires for food have changed over the years. This change in desire competes with my lack of energy at the end of the day and the ease of ordering pizza. Yet, the kinds of food I desire have changed over the years because of how I cook. I think what might be the case is that culture has a strong effect here. A person who sings but is embedded in a culture of drinking is not going to have their desires changed. But only through practices can these desires be changed.

 

You criticize a birthing system that “treats birth as a source of profit by cutting into women’s unwilling bodies,” which I assume refers to episiotomy, C-section, or both. That’s a piercing note. And my impression is that the phrase “unwilling bodies” serves to highlight your idea of alienation from nature. But our bodies are “unwilling” recipients of many (if not most) of the things which doctors do and we “know” are the right things to be done to our bodies. And this equally applies to many other things modern/scientific. How can we really examine our presumed ‘knowledge’ of such matters?

Thanks for that tough question, one which so far has not been asked of me. When I use the term “unwilling bodies,” I mean more than that the body itself does not want what is done to it. I’m not talking just about pain. This point takes us back to Aristotle. We are substances – mind-body-unities – and the will (or choice in my terminology) involves both. So, information is needed – will this medicine or this procedure help me and how – so that the mind at least can be willing.

Of course, our minds are unique in that we can choose to suffer in some ways rather than others, in ways that most non-human animals cannot. We can choose to have an operation in order to cure a disease. This choice does not imply that the mind and body are distinct substances. Rather, it recognizes that mind and body are a unit, for the mind would not choose the procedure if not driven to it by the body’s search for relief in suffering. Luckily, I have a physician who believes that much of modern medicine is too invasive. So what we “know” can be brought into question here.

To answer the second part of your question, viz., how can we really examine our presumed ‘knowledge’ of such matters, I think it requires more patience, better education, and an ability to step back from present desires. This second point is the first step in MacIntyre’s account of practical reason in ‘Dependent Rational Animals’. Doctors and scientists must be willing to step back from their desire to knowledge, something that is antithetical to modern society. And patients must be willing to step back from their desire for relief from pain. Yet, we also need more education about these issues that really matter – greater emphasis on scientific understanding of our bodies. That does not mean, and I want to emphasize this point given COVID-19 and especially the attitudes about it found in the US, that we each do our googling and count that as research. That is not education. I’m talking about being trained to understand statistics and science in a way that those in power do not want us trained. For us to be trained to really understand our bodies would call into question much of the status quo today. It might even require a little more art.

 

*Mohammad Memarian is a staff writer at Iran Daily.