Mark Alfano, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology
How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs, motivations, intentions) and our behavior? How are they influenced by our other mental states, our environments, and our cultures? What is the moral value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the causes, consequences, and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels (biological, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is devoted to a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to delve into a specific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en masse. Authors approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary angle (e.g., conceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, phenomenology, social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience) while connecting with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each emotion, evaluating both its nature and its moral properties.
Other titles in this series:
The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Kathryn J. Norlock
The Moral Psychology of Pride, edited by Adam J. Carter and Emma C. Gordon
The Moral Psychology of Sadness, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan
Forthcoming titles in the series:
The Moral Psychology of Disgust, edited by Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar
The Moral Psychology of Compassion, edited by Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price
The Moral Psychology of Regret, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Contempt
Edited by Michelle Mason
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To my family.
Acknowledgments
List
List
Michelle Mason
Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Acknowledgments
I would like to begin by thanking series editor Mark Alfano for the invitation that propelled the present work into existence. Most of the subsequent contributions began life as presentations at a two-day conference hosted by the Philosophy Department at Brown University, while I enjoyed a visiting professorship there. For logistical and financial support for the conference, I thank Bernard Reginster and the Program for Ethical Inquiry, Emma Kirby, Katherine Scanga, the Office of the Dean of Faculty, and Cogut Center for the Humanities director Amanda Anderson. Thanks, too, to the conference participants—Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Nomy Arpaly, Macalester Bell, Zac Cogley, Boyoung Kim, Bertram Malle, Ira Roseman, and David Sussman— and to audience members whose questions helped the presenters to improve on early work. Steve Darwall, Michael Pakaluk, and Mark Alfano complete a roster of contributors with whom it has been a true pleasure to work. Finally, for their guidance (and patience), I owe a debt of gratitude to my editor at Rowman & Littlefield International, Isobel Cowper-Coles, and editorial assistant Natalie Linh Bolderston.
List of Figures
CHAPTER 4
4.1 Timeline of Nietzsche’s engagement with contempt, laughter, and curiosity.
4.2 Treemap of Nietzsche’s engagement with contempt, laughter, and curiosity.
4.3 Relevant passages from The Gay Science
4.4 Venn diagram of Nietzsche’s engagement with contempt, laughter, and curiosity.
CHAPTER 5
5.1 Principal component scores of twenty-eight acts of moral criticism plotted in the first two dimensions of the threedimensional space. The acts are shown in four groups (derived from cluster analysis performed on the component scores), and their respective marker variables (medoids) and constituent acts are listed on the right. From Voiklis, Cusimano, et al. (2017).
5.2 Predicted component scores for five acts of contempt (scorn, disdain, despise, lose all respect, show contempt) plotted in the three dimensions of properties of moral criticism (revealed by principal components analysis of the ratings for
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List of Figures
twelve acts of moral criticism on ten properties). Symbols ×, +, ∆, and ◯ indicate the locations for acts of moral criticism, divided into four groups by cluster analysis (and represented by marker variables denounce, let X have it, object to, and admonish). Symbol and associated verb labels indicate locations for the acts of contempt. 98
List of Tables
CHAPTER 5
5.1 Content codes for classifying aspects of contempt.
5.2 Frequencies for targets of contempt in 200-entry sample from COCA.
5.3 Frequencies for sources of contempt in 200-entry sample from COCA.
5.4 Percentages (and raw frequencies) of sources of contempt by targets of contempt in 200-entry sample from COCA.
5.5 Frequency of contempt episodes in COCA classified as Mental (private events in the person’s mind) or Social (either nonverbal or verbal).
5.6 Percentages and (raw frequencies) of addressee types for social expressions of contempt.
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The Moral Psychology of Contempt: An Introduction
Michelle Mason
The eye roll, the smirk, the unilateral lip curl. These, psychologists tell us, are typical expressions of contempt. Across cultures, such expressions manifest an emotional response to norm violations—whether in the context of a marriage on the rocks, an encounter with a racist or demagogue, or a country in the grip of political unrest. Since some such violations transgress moral norms, one would expect contempt to be of interest not only to psychologists but to moral philosophers as well. The phenomenon of contempt naturally presses questions concerning whether we should, as a moral matter, attempt to regulate it: whether by attempting to cultivate or extirpate contempt as an attitude toward others’ or our own violations of the relevant moral norms.
For scholars of ancient ethics, contempt—and its correlate, shame—play a familiar role in policing violations of an ethical code. Witness, for example, Aristotle’s (1934) portrait of the contemptuous megalopsuchos (and, correlatively, his defense of the role of shame in the ethical cultivation of the young). If it is no longer fair to say, as I did fifteen years ago (Mason 2003), that contemporary moral philosophers have neglected contempt, affording contempt a role in the moral psychology of the mature moral agent still risks appearing objectionably retrograde. For some modern moral philosophers, it is obvious that contempt is never morally warranted because, as directed at persons, it violates an unconditional duty of respect for persons as such (see, e.g., Hill 2000a). Others might anticipate support from situationist psychology in arguing that a morally warranted contempt presupposes cross-situationally stable, globalist traits of character—traits whose existence we purportedly have reason to doubt (see, e.g., Doris 2002). Yet a third source of objection cites deleterious effects of contempt in order to mount consequentialist arguments against its moral propriety.
While modern moral philosophers’ worries about contempt are motivated by normative scruples, more vexing is the paucity of psychological work
xvi The Moral Psychology of Contempt: An Introduction
to build on Rozin et al.’s landmark CAD Triad Hypothesis (Rozin et al. 1999). According to that hypothesis, three emotions—contempt, anger, and disgust—are typically elicited by violations of, respectively, communal codes, individual rights, and purity/sanctity. Subsequent psychological studies employing verbal measures demonstrate that “contempt and its synonyms often cluster together with hate or disgust and also, on a more abstract level, with anger” (Fischer and Giner-Sorolla 2016). The data thus suggest that people find it difficult to agree on how to talk about distinct causes, characteristics, and implications of contempt versus hate, disgust, and anger. Moreover, despite Rozin et al.’s pioneering work, subsequent studies have failed to replicate a one-to-one association between contempt and violations of communal codes, suggesting that the unique characteristic of contempt does not lie in the type of eliciting event (Hutcherson and Gross 2011; Russell, Piazza, and Giner-Sorolla 2012).
Such results have led psychologists to propose that contempt differs from attitudes such as anger in its appraisal and typical action tendencies (Fischer and Roseman 2007; see also Hutcherson and Gross 2011). In particular, we are more apt to suppose that we can change those we are angry at and to relinquish all hope of such chance for those we hold in contempt. In terms of action tendencies: Roseman (2001) includes contempt among the “exclusion” family of emotions and anger, in contrast, among the “attack” family. Fischer and Roseman (2007) found that contempt, more often than anger, was associated with ignoring the other person, gossiping about him or her, and socially excluding him or her.
What counsel regarding contempt do these limited psychological studies support? Is there reason to be wary of admitting contempt to the class of reactive attitudes that, in their warranted forms, play an essential role in holding ourselves and others accountable to moral norms? If so, what are those reasons? Would an enlightened, prescriptive moral psychology constrained by an unconditional duty of respect for all persons necessarily be a moral psychology bereft of contempt? Or were ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle, perhaps correct in suggesting that there is a legitimate role for contempt in the fully virtuous life? If so, how might we best delineate that role in the lives of modern moral agents?
These questions about contempt are especially pressing in times of increased social polarization. It is especially fitting, then, to begin our investigation of contempt with Macalester Bell’s contribution. Bell places questions about contempt in the context of debates about how best to address racism, debates culminating in the removal of Confederate statues throughout the southern United States as this volume heads to production. Drawing on her distinction between a passive contempt “of indifference and inattention” and an active contempt that “presents its target as low while never ceasing to regard the target as a potential threat” (Bell, this volume, section “Apt
The Moral Psychology of Contempt: An Introduction xvii
Contempt and the Ethics of Honoring and De-Honoring” in chapter 1), Bell argues that active contempt is the best response to racism. Thus, her contribution defends the practical upshot that, for example, Confederate statues should not be removed and forgotten but, rather, recontextualized in ways that both inform and caution about the ongoing threat that racism poses.
Along with Bell’s chapter, three other contributions round out the first thematic grouping and provide practical and historical contexts for subsequent chapters. Michael Pakaluk provides historical context by probing the place of contempt in classical Greek literature and philosophy. Surveying work from the Homeric, Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian traditions, Pakaluk brings alive a world in which contempt functioned alternatively to maintain the authority of noble over commoner, to dismiss as unworthy of attention anything other than virtue, to spur ascent of the Scala Amoris, and to partly constitute the magnanimous person’s virtue. In short, it is a world populated by those who do not demure from embracing a place for justified contempt. Transported from classical Greece to the medieval context of Arthurian literature, Felicia Ackerman’s contribution juxtaposes the moral psychology of contempt suggested in Le Morte D’Arthur with that presumed by contemporary philosophical and bioethical attitudes that unjustifiably treat the ill and disabled with contempt. Rounding out Part I, Mark Alfano employs the tools of digital humanities to interpret Nietzsche’s views on contempt, concluding that contempt and contemptuous humor serve for Nietzsche the epistemic aims of fueling inquiry, abandoning error, and attaining knowledge.
Part II of the volume serves to familiarize readers with the state of the art in empirical psychological work on contempt and begins to introduce empirically informed contemporary philosophical work on the attitude. Psychologists Bertram Malle, Boyoung Kim, and John Voiklis investigate the folk concept of contempt, drawing on previous work on blame to differentiate the two. Employing the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to isolate natural linguistic contexts for the folk concept of contempt, Malle et al. report on original research that supports significant conclusions concerning contempt’s object, sources, expressions, and role in moral criticism. Approaching contempt from the perspective of appraisal theories of emotion, Ira Roseman situates contempt in the overall emotion system, where it joins with other members of the “exclusion” family of emotions to distance its targets from those who negatively appraise them. Surveying the causes, components, and consequences of contempt, Roseman concludes by venturing a normative judgment: that extirpating contempt would “leave a hole in the matrix of response strategies” (Roseman, this volume, section “Does Contempt Violate the Principle of Beneficence?” in chapter 6), whereas regulating unbridled contempt may be advisable in order to avoid possibly deleterious effects. Zac Cogley begins to bridge psychological and philosophical work on
The Moral Psychology of Contempt: An Introduction
contempt by defending a view of its characteristic evaluation and motivation according to which it assesses a person as “failing at a socially salient role” and consequently motivating withdrawal. Cogley then takes on the challenge of explaining how such an aversive motivational tendency can function to communicate to its characteristic evaluation to its target in a way that holds her accountable for violating the standards of the relevant social role.
The volume closes with three contributions that emphasize decidedly prescriptive questions remaining about contempt. David Sussman shines light on a previously neglected perspective on the possible problems with contempt: that which focuses not on how contempt might misapprehend its target but, rather, how contempt might be objectionable on grounds concerning how the contemnor (perhaps implicitly) must view herself. There is near-consensus that contempt has a hierarchical structure, that is, a structure whereby the contemnor “looks down on” the target of her contempt, from a position of apparent superiority. Sussman argues that contempt thereby risks feeding a morally objectionable self-conceit. Yet, in an intriguing coda, Sussman proposes that such self-conceit need not always be morally objectionable, as preserving our integrity might require that our confidence in our own virtue sometime outruns our evidence that we are in fact superior to those we regard with contempt. In my contribution, I harness my previous work on properly focused contempt in intimate interpersonal contexts to explore its moral force in the public sphere. In both contexts, I argue, we can trace features of contempt that account for lingering doubts about its moral propriety to the attitude’s special place among the Strawsonian reactive attitudes. Specifically, I conceptualize contempt as straddling a border of accountability that separates reactive contempt, on the one side, from nonreactive objective contempt, on the other. Canvassing some reasons why the latter is subject to distortion and abuse, I conclude with a caution about the public expression of contempt in times of political polarization. The volume concludes with Stephen Darwall’s cautionary account of the “hierarchizing,” “other-characterizing” tendencies of contempt. These tendencies distinguish contempt (at least in its unfocused instances) from blame and other accountability-seeking attitudes. In doing so, Darwall argues, they render contempt an instrument of support for social hierarchies such as White Supremacy. We thus arrive, full circle, to the relevance of the questions about contempt addressed in this volume to some of the most pressing social problems of our day.
Part 1
INTRODUCING CONTEMPT: PRACTICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 1 Contempt, Honor, and Addressing Racism
Macalester Bell
In recent years, there has been an uptick in the number of student protests on college campuses in the United States and around the world. While their demands vary, many protesters are calling for the removal of building names and other memorials honoring those who are, by contemporary standards, generally regarded as racist.1 In a highly publicized case, students at Princeton demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from a school and residential college in response to Wilson’s history of defending segregation. Around the same time, protesters at Yale called for the renaming of Calhoun College because John Calhoun was a well-known champion of slavery; students at the University of North Carolina demanded that an iconic memorial to Confederate soldiers be removed from the main campus quad; and Bryn Mawr College students called for the renaming of Thomas Hall because M. Carey Thomas, the college’s second president, is deemed such a virulent racist that many students reported feeling uncomfortable attending classes in a building which honors her contributions to the college.
The calls for the removal of these memorials seem to be motivated by protesters’ sense that leaving them in place is profoundly disrespectful and tacitly condones, and perhaps unintentionally celebrates, the racism of those honored and memorialized. There has been much debate on campuses and in the popular press about whether specific memorials should be removed or should stay, but collectively these cases also raise several fundamental questions about protesting racism and the ethics of honoring: what attitudes should we take up and express toward those who are considered racist? Does it matter if the person is an historical figure who lived in a very different social milieu and is long dead? What attitudes are we expressing when we rename a building or take down a statue because we judge the person memorialized to be unworthy of the honor? What attitudes are we expressing when
we refuse to rescind the honor by removing the memorial, despite vocal protest from community members? Should we de-honor those who are now generally regarded as racist? If so, how?
In previous work, I have argued that contempt is an especially apt response to racism, and I think the protesters’ demands for the removal of these memorials are best interpreted as expressions of contempt directed at the persons honored and at the institutions honoring them.2 The protesters express what they see as the inferior moral status of the honored racists by calling on colleges and universities to remove the honor originally bestowed. The protesters are demanding that their institutions share and publicly express this contempt for the honored racists by the ritualistic removal of names from buildings and statues from quads.
I’m sympathetic to the position that the public honoring of racists, even long dead racists, poses a serious moral threat, and, given the nature of this threat, I think responding to this honoring of the dishonorable with contempt is apt. Moreover, I support the protesters’ insistence that their institutions publicly stand against racism. Yet, despite my endorsement of many of the protesters’ aims, I think their demands for the removal of these memorials are ultimately misguided. My reasons for coming to this conclusion are not the reasons widely cited in discussions of the student protests: I’m not concerned that we are acting unfairly in judging historical figures by contemporary standards or that in so doing we are “sanitizing history,” nor am I especially worried that we will have no one left to honor if we refuse to honor those we now judge to be morally compromised. Instead, my objection to these proposed processes of de-honoring is focused on the kind of contempt that institutions are being asked to express. My worry, stated most succinctly, is that the form of contempt the protesters are demanding their institutions publicly express is not the kind of contempt that is especially well suited to answer the ongoing threat posed by racism or the public honoring of racists. Considering precisely where the protesters go wrong provides a helpful lesson in how to contemn well, especially at the social level.
I will begin by summarizing my reasons for thinking that contempt is the best attitudinal response to the threats posed by racism. I will then outline the implications of my views for how we might think about campus protests and the calls for de-honoring racists through the removal of memorials.
CONTEMPT, SUPERBIA, AND RACISM
In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt I offered an account of what contempt is and the kind of moral work it can do. As part of this task I also considered ways in which contempt may go terribly wrong. Inapt
Contempt, Honor, and Addressing Racism
contempt is, I argued, at the heart of racism, sexism, and other vices I dubbed “vices of superiority.” I went on to argue that apt contempt has an important role to play in responding to these vices of superiority. Specifically, I argued that contempt’s downward-looking appraisal and withdrawal answers the “superbia,” or false attitude of superiority, at the heart of these vices. I think contempt does a better job than other attitudes in responding appropriately to these vices and mitigating their threats.
I will explain and elaborate on these claims in what follows, but first let me step back and give an overview of contempt.
According to my account, contempt has four central features.3 First, contempt involves a negative appraisal of the status of the object of contempt. The target is regarded as low vis-à-vis some standard that the contemnor sees as important. While resentment typically takes as its object a person’s actions, the object of contempt is the person herself; contempt is a response to perceived badbeing, whereas resentment is a response to perceived wrongdoing.
Second, I believe contempt is a globalist emotion; that is, not only is the proper object of contempt the person as opposed to her action, but contempt takes the whole person as its object.4 Like shame and disgust, contempt is a totalizing attitude—it presents the person, as a whole, as low. This does not mean that every trait of the target is seen as contemptible; having contempt for someone is compatible with the recognition that the person also has admirable qualities. However, when we contemn, we see the contemptible qualities as more important to the overall assessment of the person, given our relationship with the target of contempt.
Third, contempt is comparative or reflexive.5 The subject makes a comparison between herself and the object of her contempt and takes the contemned to be inferior to her along some axis of comparison. This comparative element of contempt is so central that some commentators identify contempt with this comparative assessment. William Ian Miller writes, “What is common to all [tokens of contempt] is one’s relation to someone over whom one is claiming some superiority, the very assertion of the claim being identical with the manifestation of contempt. Contempt is itself the claim to relative superiority.”6 I don’t think we should reduce contempt to this claim of comparative superiority, but Miller’s assertion signals how central contempt’s reflexivity is to the emotion.
A final characteristic of contempt is the psychological withdrawal or disengagement from the target of contempt. Contempt presents its target as someone to be kept at arm’s length. Some psychological distance and certain forms of psychological engagement are incompatible with contempt. The types of psychological engagement precluded by contempt will vary depending upon the exact nature of the relationship between the contemnor and the contemned.
Macalester Bell
To summarize, in its paradigmatic form, contempt for a person involves a way of negatively and comparatively regarding someone who is seen as having utterly failed to meet some standard that the contemnor endorses. This form of regard is totalizing and constitutes a psychological withdrawal from the target.
While it is often derided as a nasty or morally objectionable emotion, contempt can sometimes be an apt response. In previous work, I have argued that it is a particularly apt response to superbia, especially the superbia that is evinced by racists.7
Superbia is an attitude of misplaced superiority. Someone evinces superbia when they take themselves to merit higher esteem and deference than they actually deserve. The person who manifests superbia makes a mistake about his status; he takes himself to have higher moral status than he actually merits. But in addition, he seeks recognition of (what he takes to be) his superior status. As a result, he attempts to exact esteem and deference at the expense of others.
Superbia poses a threat because the person who harbors it has the potential to exert a distorting force on the way deference and esteem are distributed within a moral community. The person who evinces superbia puts others down in an attempt to gain esteem and deference; those put down are vulnerable to internalizing these negative comparative assessments, and those harboring superbia may come to unfairly enjoy unearned esteem and deference.
The ways superbia can disrupt the distribution of status is especially clear in cases of undetected hypocrisy. Consider, for example, literature’s archhypocrite: Tartuffe. Throughout Moliere’s play Tartuffe enjoys increasing power and esteem as a direct result of his superbia. He presents himself as an especially pious person and others as comparatively impious, and as a consequence he is unfairly rewarded, and others unfairly punished, in terms of status goods.
Even if superbia does not alter the distribution of status in these ways, the person who manifests superbia evinces a character flaw because his beliefs and desires constitute an objectionable form of ill will. The person who evinces superbia wants his perceived higher status to be recognized in such a way that this recognition is achieved at others’ expense.
The moral failings at the heart of racism are best characterized in terms of race-based superbia. In virtue of their race, racists take themselves to have a comparatively high status vis-à-vis the persons they contemn, they desire that their comparatively high status be recognized, and they often attempt to exact esteem and deference from others by dishonoring members of the scorned race. What is morally objectionable about the racist’s attitude is that he has a seriously mistaken view about the proper grounds of status, and he attempts to exact esteem and deference at the expense of others on this basis.
Being a target of race-based superbia can have serious consequences. As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out, targets of anti-black racism often come to interpret themselves through the lens of inapt contempt. What Du Bois called the “double-consciousness” of American blacks is characterized by racist contempt. Double-consciousness marks a “world which yields him no true self consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”8 As Du Bois makes clear, this form of alienation can have devastating effects.
I’ve argued that, if certain conditions are met, contempt is a morally valuable response to the vices of superiority because contempt is uniquely well positioned to answer the superbia at the heart of these vices. This may seem a curious claim since superbia is itself a form of inapt contempt. But this is precisely why apt contempt is the best response to superbia. Contempt answers superbia by undercutting the target’s claim to merit esteem and deference. As a result, the target cannot, or at least cannot as easily, disrupt the distribution of status. When we respond with apt contempt to someone who evinces superbia, we attempt to diminish the threat posed by his vice by regarding him as low and unworthy of the esteem and deference he wrongly claims for himself. Regarding someone as low obviously does not have immediate transformative effects, but esteeming and deferring are activities we perform as social creatures, and if we collectively regard someone as unworthy of esteem and deference this will rob the person of their social power and, in this way, render their superbia inert.
Even if we are unable to act in concert in this way, responding to superbia with counter-contempt may still be ameliorative. When an individual person of color responds to race-based superbia with apt contempt, she ensures that she won’t be the source of the unmerited esteem and deference sought by the racist, and through her contempt she inoculates herself from the potential negative consequences that the racist contempt may have on her self-conception. She can’t be made to feel inferior in virtue of her race if she holds the person who aims to make her feel this way in contempt.
Contempt answers superbia and the vices of superiority in a way that is very different from how resentment answers wrongdoing. Resentment answers wrongdoing by focusing on the wrong done and it motivates the demand that the wrongdoer provide an account of her reasons for her action; offenders are to explain or take responsibility for wrongs done. Contempt answers the vices of superiority not through active engagement and demands for the target’s reasons for her actions but through withdrawal that both mitigates the threat posed by the target’s superbia and calls for the target’s character change.
My moderate defense of contempt as the best response to the superbia central to racism has not gone unchallenged.
Some have objected that contempt’s reflexivity undermines our moral humility; contempt always risks devolving into self-righteousness or smugness.9 The person who is liable to contempt enjoys complete, and misplaced, confidence in her assessment of other persons, and she can come to take pleasure in this sense of relative superiority.
In response, I’ll begin by pointing out that if we are focused on contempt as a response to race-based superbia, the concerns about self-righteous smugness seem misplaced. For whatever the moral badness of self-righteousness, surely everyone will acknowledge that self-righteousness is a far less serious vice than racist superbia. If I’m right, and apt counter-contempt answers race-based superbia in a way that mitigates its dangers, perhaps we should conclude that self-righteousness is a price we are willing to pay.
Second, this objection to contempt’s reflexive element seems to suggest that we ought to avoid interpersonal comparisons altogether, but this strikes me as misguided: everyone will acknowledge that intra-personal comparisons are important for moral knowledge and motivation. How could we even hope to improve or gain moral understanding if we didn’t compare who we are now to who we were in the past and who we want to be in the future? But if we concede that intra-personal comparisons are important, why deny that interpersonal comparisons are also important?10 Interpersonal comparisons also provide moral knowledge and motivation. Admittedly, we are all prone to a host of self-serving biases and other limitations on self-knowledge that might potentially undermine or call into question the interpersonal comparisons that we make. But if we are limited and biased in these ways and I don’t doubt we are, that gives us stronger reasons to engage in interpersonal comparisons. If we are prone to self-serving biases, then we should do what we can to try to rid ourselves of these.
Finally, the smugness or feelings of self-satisfaction that some objectors point to as a reason to worry about contempt are not necessary features of the emotion; they are the subject’s meta-responses to her contempt.11 We can and we do respond, emotionally, to our first-order affects and the affects of others. We might respond with sadness to the content of a melodramatic film, while feeling pleasure at our own responsiveness; we can feel pleased that we are the kind of people who are able to be moved by others’ plights, and so on. It is possible, and perhaps even common, to take smug pleasure at the sense of relative superiority bequeathed by contempt. This is probably especially likely to occur when our contempt is shared by people with whom we antecedently identify, especially if we have the sense that they too have been targets of superbia. Under these conditions, we can become too self-congratulatory about what we perceive to be our relatively high-status
Contempt, Honor, and Addressing Racism 9
position vis-à-vis the target of contempt. This is a danger insofar as it has the potential to lead us to take up a contemptuous attitude when we shouldn’t; the meta-responses to contempt do not provide us with good reasons to contemn. Instead, we should respond with contempt when the target’s superbia is real and threatening, and in the cases under discussion here, these conditions are satisfied.
While many of the objections to contempt suggest that in contemning we go too far in the direction of smug self-satisfaction, others worry that contempt doesn’t go far enough. More specifically, it may be objected that contempt is an inapt response to racism because of contempt’s connection to the comic and the ridiculous.12 Racists are not silly buffoons, and racism motivates innumerable violent and unjust actions. When we respond to racists with contempt, we aren’t taking the threat posed by their racism as seriously as we should.
In response, I think it is important to stress that there is no deep tension between ridicule and acknowledgment of a serious threat. Mocking derision and ridicule are potent weapons to threats, as the history of political satire and cartoons confirms. Through our mocking derision we make it clear we think that our targets do not merit the social niceties that we freely give to others or the esteem and deference that our targets seek.
Moreover, mocking contempt is simply one form that contempt may take. Contempt presents its target as low, and one way of presenting someone as low is to present them as an object of derision, but people can also be presented as low in a humorless way. Consider, for example, attempts to shame those who are convicted of buying drugs by publishing their names and photographs in the local newspaper. Clearly the aim here is to express contempt for these offenders, but there is no obvious attempt to mock them or present them as ridiculous. In short, there is no reason to conclude that contempt is an inapt response to racism because it doesn’t take the threat posed by racism seriously.
APT CONTEMPT AND THE ETHICS OF HONORING AND DE-HONORING
Memorials “ritualize remembrance,” and they are one important way we honor the dead.13 Silent Sam, the statue on the main quad of the University of North Carolina commemorating Confederate soldiers who died in the civil war, honors the dead in a very different way from the way the name “Thomas Hall” honors M. Carey Thomas. The names of buildings become integrated into the minutia of day-to-day life in a way that may obscure that they were originally intended as honorifics. But while we may not always be cognizant
of it, marking the passing and publicly displaying a person’s name is a way of honoring the dead when the vast majority of people who die get no such public recognition.
In many of the recent campus protests, students expressed their complaints about the ethics of honoring racists using the language of comfort: they objected that they do not feel comfortable working or studying on campuses which honor and venerate persons who are notorious for their racist attitudes. At a campus-wide meeting at Bryn Mawr College, one student of color openly wept as she shared how distraught she felt going to class in a building named for a woman who would have despised her.
While these expressions of emotional pain and distress are troubling, I don’t think the ethical issues surrounding racism, contempt, and de-honoring are best conceptualized in terms of comfort and discomfort. Our social institutions, especially our institutions of higher education, cannot aim to create anodyne environments. Discomfort and pain are often ineliminable parts of the educational process, and comfort on campus cannot be the goal, or even a goal, of higher education. However, I do think social institutions have a crucial role to play in creating the conditions necessary for self-respect and respect for others, and because of this, people may legitimately critique the institutions and practices of their communities, including the practices of honoring and dishonoring, when these institutions undermine the social conditions necessary for full respect.
To be a fully self-respecting person one ought to recognize one’s equal moral worth and have a good sense of the esteem and deference one merits, but as Robin Dillon has pointed out, the recognition at issue is not simply cognitive; recognizing one’s equal moral worth is not just a matter of coming to believe that one has equal moral value.14 Dillon distinguishes between intellectual understanding and experiential understanding. As she points out, it is one thing to understand, intellectually, that a loved one has died, but it is another thing altogether to stand in front of a loved one’s coffin, see their dead body, and really feel and appreciate the loss. So too when it comes to self-respect, it is one thing to understand, intellectually, that one has equal moral worth, but it is another thing to understand this experientially. Dillon is especially interested in the nature of self-respect, but her insight generalizes to respect tout court: as I see it, to respect oneself or another experientially requires that we live in a society that reflects and expresses the fundamental equal moral worth of all persons and distributes moral status fairly; that is, the society publicly esteems those worthy of esteem and disesteems those worthy of disesteem. As social creatures, we come to have this experiential understanding of our moral worth and status when we live in a society with social institutions, practices, and traditions that reflect this back
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chains
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Title: Chains lesser novels and stories
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72326]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927
Credits: Bob Taylor, Aaron Adrignola and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAINS ***
CHAINS
LESSER NOVELS AND STORIES BY THEODORE DREISER
New
Copyright, 1927, by T D
Printed in the United States of America
FOREWORD
The inevitabilities of our fate are: Love and hope, fear and death, interwoven with our lacks, inhibitions, jealousies and greeds.
I. S
II. T H
III. C
IV S . C R
V. C
VI. K
VII. T
VIII. T O N
IX. P G
X. M O
XI. F
XII. T V
XIII. T S
XIV. T “M ” G
XV. T P W W T
CHAINS
I
SANCTUARY
PIRIMARILY, there were the conditions under which she was brought to fifteen years of age: the crowded, scummy tenements; the narrow green-painted halls with their dim gas-jets, making the entrance look more like that of a morgue than a dwellingplace; the dirty halls and rooms with their green or blue or brown walls painted to save the cost of paper; the bare wooden floors, long since saturated with every type of grease and filth from oleomargarine and suet leaked from cheap fats or meats, to beer and whiskey and tobacco-juice. A little occasional scrubbing by some would-be hygienic tenant was presumed to keep or make clean some of the chambers and halls.
And then the streets outside—any of the streets by which she had ever been surrounded—block upon block of other red, bare, commonplace tenements crowded to the doors with human life, the space before them sped over by noisy, gassy trucks and vehicles of all kinds. And stifling in summer, dusty and icy in winter; decorated on occasion by stray cats and dogs, pawing in ashcans, watched over by lordly policemen, and always running with people, people, people—who made their living heaven only knows how, existing in such a manner as their surroundings suggested.
In this atmosphere were always longshoremen, wagon-drivers, sweepers of floors, washers of dishes, waiters, janitors, workers in laundries, factories—mostly in indifferent or decadent or despairing conditions. And all of these people existed, in so far as she ever knew, upon that mysterious, evanescent and fluctuating something known as the weekly wage.
Always about her there had been drunkenness, fighting, complaining, sickness or death; the police coming in, and arresting one and another; the gas man, the rent man, the furniture man, hammering at doors for their due—and not getting it—in due time the undertaker also arriving amid a great clamor, as though lives were the most precious things imaginable.
It is entirely conceivable that in viewing or in meditating upon an atmosphere such as this, one might conclude that no good could come out of it. What! a dung-heap grow a flower? Exactly, and often, a flower—but not to grow to any glorious maturity probably. Nevertheless a flower of the spirit at least might have its beginnings there. And if it shrank or withered in the miasmatic atmosphere— well, conceivably, that might be normal, although in reality all flowers thus embedded in infancy do not so wither. There are flowers and flowers.
Viewing Madeleine Kinsella at the ages of five, seven, eleven and thirteen even, it might have been conceded that she was a flower of sorts—admittedly not a brave, lustrous one of the orchid or gardenia persuasion, but a flower nevertheless. Her charm was simpler, more retiring, less vivid than is usually accorded the compliment of beauty. She was never rosy, never colorful in the high sense, never daring or aggressive. Always, from her infancy on, she seemed to herself and others to be slipping about the corners and out-of-the-way places of life, avoiding it, staring at it with wide, lamblike eyes, wondering at things, often fearfully.
Her face, always delicately oval and pale, was not of the force which attracted. Her eyes, a milkish blue-gray with a suggestion of black in the iris, her hair black, her hands long-fingered and slim, were not of a type which would appeal to the raw youth of her world. Unconsciously, and ever, her slender, longish body sank into graceful poses. Beside the hard, garish, colorful, strident types of her neighborhoods—the girls whom the boys liked—she was not fascinating, and yet, contemplated at odd moments as she grew, she was appealing enough—at times beautiful.
What most affected her youth and her life was the internal condition of her family, the poverty and general worthlessness of her parents. They were as poor as their poorest neighbors, and quarrelsome, unhappy and mean-spirited into the bargain. Her father came dimly into her understanding at somewhere near her seventh or eighth year as an undersized, contentious and drunken and wordy man, always more or less out of a job, irritated with her mother and her sister and brother, and always, as her mother seemed to think, a little the worse for drink.
“You’re a liar! You’re a liar! You’re a liar! You’re a liar!”—how well she remembered this sing-song echoing reiteration of his, in whatever basement or hole they were living at the time! “You’re a liar! I never did it! You’re a liar! I wasn’t there!”
Her mother, often partially intoxicated or morose because of her own ills, was only too willing to rejoin in kind. Her elder sister and brother, much more agreeable in their way and as much put upon as herself, were always coming in or running out somewhere and staying while the storm lasted; while she, shy and always a little frightened, seemed to look upon it all as unavoidable, possibly even essential. The world was always so stern, so mysterious, so nonunderstandable to Madeleine.
Again it might be, and often was, “Here, you, you brat, go an’ get me a can o’ beer! Gwan, now!” which she did quickly and fearfully enough, running to the nearest wretched corner saloon with the “can” or “growler,” her slim little fingers closed tightly over the fivecent piece or dime entrusted to her, her eyes taking in the wonders and joys of the street even as she ran. She was so small at the time that her little arms were unable to reach quite the level of the bar, and she had to accept the aid of the bartender or some drinker. Then she would patiently wait while one of them teased her as to her size or until the beer was handed down.
Once, and once only, three “bad boys,” knowing what she was going for and how wretched and shabby was her father, not able to revenge himself on any one outside his family, had seized her en route, forced open her hand and run away with the dime, leaving her
to return fearsomely to her father, rubbing her eyes, and to be struck and abused soundly and told to fight—“Blank-blank you, what the hell are you good for if you can’t do that?”
Only the vile language and the defensive soberness of her mother at the time saved her from a worse fate. As for the boys who had stolen the money, they only received curses and awful imprecations, which harmed no one.
Wretched variations of this same existence were endured by the other two members of the family, her brother Frank and her sister Tina.
The former was a slim and nervous youth, given to fits of savage temper like his father and not to be ordered and controlled exactly as his father would have him. At times, as Madeleine recalled, he appeared terribly resentful of the conditions that surrounded him and cursed and swore and even threatened to leave; at other times he was placid enough, at least not inclined to share the dreadful scenes which no one could avoid where her father was.
At the age of twelve or thirteen he secured work in a box-factory somewhere and for a while brought his wages home. But often there was no breakfast or dinner for him, and when his father and mother were deep in their cups or quarreling things were so generally neglected that even where home ties were strong no one of any worldly experience could have endured them, and he ran away
His mother was always complaining of “the lumbago” and of not being able to get up, even when he and Tina were working and bringing home a portion of their weekly wage or all of it. If she did, it was only to hover over the wretched cookstove and brew herself a little tea and complain as before.
Madeleine had early, in her ignorant and fearsome way, tried to help, but she did not always know how and her mother was either too ill or too disgruntled with life to permit her to assist, had she been able.
As it had been with Frank so it was with Tina, only it came sooner.
When Madeleine was only five Tina was a grown girl of ten, with yellow hair and a pretty, often smiling face, and was already working somewhere—in a candy store—for a dollar and a half a week. Later, when Madeleine was eight and Tina thirteen, the latter had graduated to a button-works and was earning three.
There was something rather admirable and yet disturbing connected dimly with Tina in Madeleine’s mind, an atmosphere of rebelliousness and courage which she had never possessed and which she could not have described, lacking as she did a mind that registered the facts of life clearly. She only saw Tina, pretty and strong, coming and going from her ninth to her thirteenth year, refusing to go for beer at her father’s order and being cursed for it, even struck at or thrown at by him, sometimes by her mother, and often standing at the foot of the stairs after work hours or on a Sunday afternoon or evening, looking at the crowded street or walking up and down with other girls and boys, when her mother wanted her to be doing things in the house—sweeping, washing dishes, making beds—dreary, gray tasks all.
“Fixin’ your hair again! Fixin’ your hair again! Fixin’ your hair again!” she could hear her father screaming whenever she paused before the one cracked mirror to arrange her hair. “Always in front of that blank-blank mirror fixin’ her hair! If you don’t get away from in front of it I’ll throw you an’ the mirror in the street! What the hell are you always fixin’ your hair for? Say? What’re you always fixin’ your hair for? Say! What? What’re you always fixin’ your hair for?”
But Tina was never cast down apparently, only silent. At times she sang and walked with an air. She dressed herself as attractively as possible, as if with the few things she had she was attempting to cast off the burden of the life by which she was surrounded. Always she was hiding things away from the others, never wanting them to touch anything of hers. And how she had hated her father as she grew, in bitter moments calling him a “sot” and a “fool.”
Tina had never been very obedient, refusing to go to church or to do much of anything about the house. Whenever her father and mother were drinking or fighting she would slip away and stay with
some girl in the neighborhood that she knew And in spite of all this squalor and misery and the fact that they moved often and the food was bad, Tina, once she was twelve or thirteen, always seemed able to achieve an agreeable appearance.
Madeleine often remembered her in a plaid skirt she had got somewhere, which looked beautiful on her, and a little gilt pin which she wore at her neck. And she had a way of doing her yellow hair high on her head, which had stuck in Madeleine’s mind perhaps because of her father’s rude comments on it.
II
It is not surprising that Madeleine came to her twelfth and thirteenth years without any real understanding of the great world about her and without any definite knowledge or skill. Her drunken mother was now more or less dependent upon her, her father having died of pneumonia and her brother and sister having disappeared to do for themselves.
Aside from petty beginners’ tasks in shops or stores, or assisting her mother at washing or cleaning, there was little that she could do at first. Mrs. Kinsella, actually compelled by the need for rent or food or fuel after a time, would get occasional work in a laundry or kitchen or at scrubbing or window-cleaning, but not for long. The pleasure of drink would soon rob her of that.
At these tasks
Madeleine helped until she secured work in a candy factory in her thirteenth year at the wage of three-thirty a week. But even with this little money paid in regularly there was no assurance that her mother would add sufficient to it to provide either food or warmth. Betimes, and when Madeleine was working, her mother cheered her all too obvious sorrows with the bottle, and at nights or week-ends rewarded Madeleine with a gabble which was all the more painful because no material comfort came with it.
The child actually went hungry at times. Usually, after a few drinks, her mother would begin to weep and recite her past ills: a process which reduced her timorous and very sympathetic daughter to complete misery. In sheer desperation the child sought for some new
way in her own mind. A reduction in the working-force of the candy factory, putting her back in the ranks of the work-seekers once more, and a neighbor perceiving her wretched state and suggesting that some extra helpers were wanted in a department store at Christmastime, she applied there, but so wretched were her clothes by now that she was not even considered.
Then a man who had a restaurant in a nearby street gave her mother and Madeleine positions as dishwashers, but he was compelled to discharge her mother, although he wished to retain Madeleine. From this last, however, because of the frightening attentions of the cook, she had to flee, and without obtaining a part of the small pittance which was due her. Again, and because in times past she had aided her mother to clean in one place and another, she was able to get a place as servant in a family.
Those who know anything of the life of a domestic know how thoroughly unsatisfactory it is—the leanness, the lack of hope. As a domestic, wherever she was—and she obtained no superior places for the time being—she had only the kitchen for her chief chamber or a cubby-hole under the roof. Here, unless she was working elsewhere in the house or chose to visit her mother occasionally, she was expected to remain. Pots and pans and scrubbing and cleaning and bed-making were her world. If any one aside from her mother ever wanted to see her (which was rare) he or she could only come into the kitchen, an ugly and by day inconvenient realm.
She had, as she soon came to see, no privileges whatsoever. In the morning she was expected to be up before any one else, possibly after working late the night before. Breakfast had to be served for others before she herself could eat—what was left. Then came the sweeping and cleaning. In one place which she obtained in her fifteenth year the husband annoyed her so, when his wife was not looking, that she had to leave; in another it was the son. By now she was becoming more attractive, although by no means beautiful or daring.
But wherever she was and whatever she was doing, she could not help thinking of her mother and Tina and Frank and her father, and
of the grim necessities and errors and vices which had seemed to dominate them. Neither her brother nor her sister did she ever see again. Her mother, she felt (and this was due to a sensitiveness and a sympathy which she could not possibly overcome), she would have with her for the rest of her days unless, like the others, she chose to run away.
Daily her mother was growing more inadequate and less given to restraint or consideration. As “bad” as she was, Madeleine could not help thinking what a “hard” time she had had. From whatever places she obtained work in these days (and it was not often any more) she was soon discharged, and then she would come inquiring after Madeleine, asking to be permitted to see her. Naturally, her shabby dress and shawl and rag of a hat, as well as her wastrel appearance, were an affront to any well-ordered household. Once in her presence, whenever Madeleine was permitted to see her, she would begin either a cozening or a lachrymose account of her great needs.
“It’s out o’ oil I am, me dear,” or “Wurra, I have no wood” or “bread” or “meat”—never drink. “Ye won’t let yer pore old mother go cold or hungry, now, will ye? That’s the good girl now Fifty cents now, if ye have it, me darlin’, or a quarter, an’ I’ll not be troublin’ ye soon again. Even a dime, if ye can spare me no more. God’ll reward ye. I’ll have work o’ me own to-morra. That’s the good girl now—ye won’t let me go away without anything.”
Oscillating between shame and sympathy, her daughter would take from the little she had and give it to her, tremulous for fear the disturbing figure would prove her undoing. Then the old woman would go out, lurching sometimes in her cups, and disappear, while an observant fellow servant was probably seeing and reporting to the mistress, who, of course, did not want her to come there and so told the girl, or, more practical still, discharged her
Thus from her fourteenth to her sixteenth year she was shunted from house to house and from shop to shop, always in the vain hope that this time her mother might let her alone.
And at the very same time, life, sweetened by the harmonies of youth in the blood, was calling—that exterior life which promised
everything because so far it had given nothing. The little simple things of existence, the very ordinary necessities of clothing and ornament, with which the heart of youth and the inherent pride of appearance are gratified, had a value entirely disproportionate to their worth. Yes, already she had turned the age wherein the chemic harmonies in youth begin to sing, thought to thought, color to color, dream to dream. She was being touched by the promise of life itself.
And then, as was natural, love in the guise of youth, a rather sophisticated gallant somewhat above the world in which she was moving, appeared and paid his all but worthless court to her. He was physically charming, the son of a grocer of some means in the vicinity in which she was working, a handsome youth with pink cheeks and light hair and blue eyes, and vanity enough for ten. Because she was shy and pretty he became passingly interested in her.
“Oh, I saw you cleaning the windows yesterday,” this with a radiant, winning smile; or “You must live down toward Blake Street. I see you going down that way once in a while.”
Madeleine acknowledged rather shamefacedly that it was true. That so dashing a boy should be interested in her was too marvelous.
In the evenings, or at any time, it was easy for a youth of his skill and savoir-faire to pick her out of the bobbing stream of humanity in which she occasionally did errands or visited her mother in her shabby room, and to suggest that he be permitted to call upon her. Or, failing that, because of her mother’s shabby quarters and her mother herself, that the following Sunday would be ideal for an outing to one of those tawdry, noisy beaches to which he liked to go with other boys and girls in a car.
A single trip to Wonderland, a single visit to one of its halls where music sounded to the splash of the waves and where he did his best to teach her to dance, a single meal in one of its gaudy, noisy restaurants, a taste of its whirly pleasures, and a new color and fillip were given to hope, a new and seemingly realizable dream of happiness implanted in her young mind. The world was happier than
she had thought, or could be made so; not all people fought and screamed at each other. There were such things as tenderness, soft words, sweet words.
But the way of so sophisticated a youth with a maid was brief and direct. His mind was of that order which finds in the freshness of womankind a mere passing delight, something to be deflowered and then put aside. He was a part of a group that secured its happiness in rifling youth, the youth of those whose lives were so dull and bleak that a few words of kindness, a little change of scene, the mere proximity of experience and force such as they had never known, were pay ample for anything which they might give or do.
And of these Madeleine was one.
Never having had anything in her own life, the mere thought of a man so vigorous and handsome, one with knowledge enough to show her more of life than she had ever dreamed of, to take her to places of color and light, to assure her that she was fitted for better things even though they were not immediately forthcoming, was sufficient to cause her to place faith where it was least worthy of being placed. To win his way there was even talk of marriage later on, that love should be generous and have faith—and then—
III
Plain-clothesman Amundsen, patrolling hawk-like the region of Fourteenth and K streets, not so far from Blake, where Madeleine had lived for a time, was becoming interested in and slightly suspicious of a new face.
For several days at odd hours, he had seen a girl half-slinking, half-brazening her way through a region the very atmosphere of which was blemishing to virtue. To be sure, he had not yet seen her speak to any one; nor was there that in her glance or manner which caused him to feel that she might.
Still—with the assurance of his authority and his past skill in trapping many he followed discreetly, seeing where she went, how
