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Notes
All quotations from Political Emotions will be given simply with parenthetical page references.
On Nussbaum’s understanding, “projective disgust is disgust for a group of other humans who are segmented from the dominant group and classified as lower because of being (allegedly) more animal. Members of this group are thought to have the properties of disgust’s primary objects: they are found dirty, smelly, slimy” (184). For a critical response to this theory from a psychologist who is otherwise sympathetic to Nussbaum’s work on emotions, see Bloom (2013), 149–50).
The difficulties I discuss here to do not represent an exhaustive list of what Nussbaum sees as the challenges to effective compassion, but merely those (beyond the problem of narrowness, addressed above) that she thinks tragic spectatorship is particularly well-suited to address.
Nussbaum’s most compelling example of how tragic spectatorship can strike this balance between eliciting compassion and tempering fear is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s use of public photography to elicit compassion from a skeptical public during the Depression. Images showed people in line for unemployment checks and bread, but Roosevelt’s agents consciously “forbade photographers to show images of strikes…since this would scare viewers and make them think of the poor as troublemakers who brought their misery on themselves” (283). I leave the question of whether or not this state control over public imagery is equally possible or even desirable today for others to judge.
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Bloom, P. (2013). Just babies: the origins of good and evil. New York: Crown.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Burke Hendrix and Martha Nussbaum for comments an earlier draft of this essay.
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McQueen, A. Compassion and Tragedy in the Aspiring Society. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 651–657 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9390-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9390-y