Those who rise to power by embracing ignorance and fear will only make their people more ignorant and afraid.

The State of Artificial Intelligence in 2018: A Good Old Fashioned Report – 156 page slide deck by Nathan Benaich [h/t Marcus Zillman] 

Review The monarchy of fear by Martha Nussbaum

When It Comes to Politics, Be Afraid. But Not Too Afraid.

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 The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum wants Americans to get in touch with their feelings; not in a fit of self-indulgence but as a righteous act of civic duty. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” she writes against a (mostly male) tradition of philosophical and political thinking that minimizes emotions as merely a source of irrationality and embarrassment.

With more than two dozen books to her name, Nussbaum has been here before. Her ample body of work casts feelings as not just worthy of study but essential for understanding our political selves.

But the 2016 presidential election made her realize she “hadn’t gone deep enough.” A self-described “liberal social democrat,” she was so shaken by Donald J. Trump’s victory — having been “reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated” — that she felt an overwhelming sensation of alarm. She believed fear was what had gotten Trump elected, and here she was, so scared that she was momentarily incapable of being “balanced or fair-minded”: “I was part of the problem that I worried about.”

An elegant and precise stylist, Nussbaum has always seemed a peculiar spokeswoman for bringing unruly emotions into the fold. She writes about gut feelings like envy and disgust with an air of serene lucidity. In “The Monarchy of Fear,” she insinuates that her postelection alarm felt not just uncomfortable but alien to her. She has spent decades parsing the role of negative emotions while resisting their seductive pull. Even her brush with political anxiety in 2016 lasted less than 24 hours. Once she realized she might be able to wring some insight from upheaval, she “went back to sleep with a calming sense of hope.”

Since we’re talking about feelings, I’ll confess to experiencing pinpricks of irritation when I came across that self-satisfied line, which appears on the second page of Nussbaum’s preface, before she has even started to make her argument. But one of the virtues of this slender volume is how gradually and scrupulously it moves, as Nussbaum pushes you to slow down, think harder and revisit your knee-jerk assumptions.

Which isn’t to say “The Monarchy of Fear” is an entirely successful deployment of her privileged perspective. The book starts out strong, as she breaks fear down into first principles in order to show how feelings of insecurity and powerlessness can render an otherwise useful emotion like anger, or a desire for fairness, into something more vengeful and poisonous. She’s a skillful rhetorician, gracefully navigating her way around partisan land mines by talking about babies and ancient Greece. She wants to show how the feeling of fear is primal and therefore universal, reminding us that we were all helpless infants once, dependent on the kindness and mercy of others.

This shared experience of “animal vulnerability,” she says, holds the biggest promise and peril for a democracy. It’s something everyone has in common, an incentive to cooperate and trust in one another rather than go it alone. In “Hiding From Humanity” (2004), she explicitly called for “a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable.” But this neediness is so elemental and terrifying that we can also insist on repudiating it, especially when we feel ignored or, worse, let down. Fear of our own vulnerability can make us mistrustful of the world, turning us into self-absorbed narcissists. “On the one hand, I am helpless, and the universe doesn’t care about me,” Nussbaum writes. “On the other hand, I am a monarch, and everyone must care about me.” Sound familiar? Can you think of anyone who pleads powerlessness one moment and demands fealty the next?