Most of us are so well-lubricated in the fine art of making people good that we feign surprise when studies reveal that "students expect female professors to be nicer than male professors and judge them more harshly when they are not." We lean into our maternal laurels and fetishize emotional skills as a new form of privilege, an asset in the serve-me economy.
It is not without a small degree of self-loathing that I express appreciation for recent paeans to "heartlessness as an intellectual style". Katie Fitzpatrick probes Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough, an exploration of the work of women intellectuals, writers, and artists known for their stoical, even "heartless," dispositions:
Nelson’s central goal in Tough Enough is to push beyond both the public outrage and the male condescension in order to better understand what these women hoped to achieve with their (often scandalously) unsentimental attitudes. Nelson argues that their coldness was neither a mere defect of personality nor simply a way to defy stereotypes about female emotion. Instead, she describes it as a deliberate ethical, aesthetic, and political strategy. For Nelson, writers like Arendt and Sontag were members of a distinct postwar intellectual tradition, built around the core insight that the best way to reckon with any social crisis was to dwell in the cold, painful light of reality.
Arendt, McCarthy, and Didion were known for their impermeable facades, their refusal to join feminist groups, their desire to remain somehow above the fray of all things feminine. But the rise of reality television and pop-cult media positions the anti-feminist intellectuals alongside no-feminism-for-me figures like Sarah Palin and Kellyanne Conway. It's not about ideas anymore. The currency of modern media is entertainment ideology.
And yet, when Fitzpatrick notes that "second-wave feminism, for Arendt, McCarthy, and the others, was just another form of misguided emotional politics," I can't help nodding a bit. For the life of the mind is not well-served by emotional politics. Despite our wombs, despite the rape culture, despite the consistent evolution towards kleptocracy, emotions will not devise policies that decrease the likelihood of emotional reactions.
What is a reactionary if not a person whose primary political views are emotive? How would Trump have come to power without the emotional backlash facilitated by stadiums and ethno-driven histrionics? The Arendtian "unsentimental approach" enables thinkers to stand apart from the social demands of group identification. Fitzpatrick goes further:
At times of crisis, intellectuals (like everyone else) are often called to relinquish their critical reflection and judgment in favor of expressions of allegiance to a particular group or cause. Those on the left will see unsentimentality as a useful strategy for resisting nationalism and tribalism — for stepping back from the demand to perform patriotic belonging (as in Sontag’s bracing critique of post-9/11 rhetoric). Meanwhile, those on the right will be — as many of these women were — similarly resistant to calls for identification with a historically victimized class. We can already see, then, how unsentimental style might attract practitioners across the political spectrum; if certain forms of affiliation already make you queasy, you will readily perceive the value of standing apart from their emotional excesses.
I disagree with the suggestion that McCarthy and Arendt were "those on the right." In fact, McCarthy's activism against the Vietnam war and Arendt's consistent defense of free speech and liberal values hardly puts them "on the right" of any political spectrum. It's important to recall that Arendt's opposition to the NAACP's fight against school segregation was not driven by a lack of empathy but rather by a privileging of pragmatism over emotional response. Obviously, Arendt was wrong about court-drive social change in the movement towards integration-- but it wasn't because she felt the wrong things so much as the fact that she failed to catch the pulse of the grassroots.
Fitzpatrick believes:
...[Arendt's] characteristic heartless style quickly becomes inappropriate when it is not supported by any evidence of a real commitment to, or empathy for, the cause in question. f heartlessness promises to banish illusion and well-intentioned hyperbole, and to bring us face to face with "the facts," then its success as an ethical posture depends entirely on a correct judgment about what the facts are. If heartlessness comes to mistake its own piercing style for accurate perception, then it is left with neither good intentions nor good insights.
There is an argument to be made for every public intellectual wandering down from their ivory tower and participating in the grovel of street protests. Much can be understood from the ground. The power of emotions is part of that. I would argue that Arendt's failure to document and study American human emotions-- a study that would have required her to engage the emerging civil rights movement in first person-- resulted in her bad scholarship on the school integration issue.
Arendt remains the preeminent thinker on fascism, totalitarianism, the rise of Nazism, the conditions of groupthink, and the dangers of illiberal nationalism. She was not an anti-Semite. She was not a racist. As a result, there are times when she overlooked the power of group identity to effect social change. Call her cold. Call her cerebral. But don't assume that empathy would have given her more insight into civil rights. What she lacked was the crucial information one only gets from standing as close to the fire as possible. And then telling the story.
