How Deep Is Your Love?

By LUKE SWIDERSKI

Review of Why Love Leads to Justice, by David A. J. Richards

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016

1.

Recounting the one time he had slept with a woman, the novelist Christopher Isherwood recalled trying to make sense of what that meant. Before this he had only been with men—should he now switch to women? The girl had certainly aroused him. But it was “a lust which was largely narcissistic.” Still, it would be “a lot more convenient” to go to bed with girls—“Society would accept you.” But no. “Girls are what the state and the church and the law and the press and the medical profession endorse and command me to desire. My mother endorses them, too.” “My will,” in contrast, “is to live to according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am.” And so: “even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another.” “If boys didn’t exist,” Isherwood concludes, “I should have to invent them.”[1]

This anecdote, from Isherwood’s memoir, Christopher and his Kind, receives no mention in Why Love Leads to Justice, David A. J. Richards’ book-length study of several prominent same-sex relationships, including Isherwood’s. Richards, the Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University Law School, describes his book as an attempt to answer the question: what leads people to resist injustice? And his answer is that “boundary crossing love” made possible the recent advances on behalf sexual minorities by liberating them from homophobic prejudices they had internalized.[2]

Isherwood’s is just one of several “gay love stories” that Richards recounts; his other character studies focus on Isherwood’s peers, Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden; the interracial same-sex relationships of James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, and the lesbian love of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who share a chapter with Eleanor Roosevelt (5). And if Richards is right, then the lives of this group are not just historical curiosities. They also serve as examples of how to confront injustice in our own time.

It is an interesting question, then, whether Isherwood’s anecdote complicates the story that Richards wants to tell. In what follows, I shall argue that Richards’ book, though remarkably learned and sensitive to the diversity of human experience, nevertheless fails to address the full scope of Isherwood’s ethical predicament. I conclude, however, that Richards’s moral psychology can nevertheless be expanded in fruitful ways to take those unacknowledged ethical possibilities into account.

We can think of the ethical, following Bernard Williams, as the domain of thought and action governed by the question “how should one live?”[3] Since at least Socrates, philosophers have debated whether one can supply an answer to that question that applies to everyone. Richards, I argue, attempts to supply one such answer on broadly Aristotelian grounds—in terms of basic human needs and psychological well-being. By resisting injustice, his protagonists were able to live lives that were in a universal sense better or more successful, and they found the courage to do so through the recovery of a once-silenced “loving gay voice” (7).

As I read Richards, this involves the implicit claim that, for sexual minorities whose erotic preferences include members of their own sex, a successful life requires more than just participation in loving same-sex relationships. It also involves resistance to homophobia through the public assertion of an identity defined, at least in part, by an appeal to one’s erotic nature, now unshackled by such love. That certainly was the point that Isherwood came to when, in his seventies, he published Christopher and his Kind in 1976 to help advance the then still-nascent gay rights movement.

Because of its universalistic ambitions, however, Richards’ philosophical approach invites one powerful objection. As Williams argued, any adequate moral psychology must avoid collapsing into a moralizing psychology—one that simply assumes the ethical concepts or principles it seeks to vindicate.[4] Richards, I believe, is vulnerable to this objection when he appears to dismiss, largely without argument, an alternative ethical vision for sexual minorities proposed by the French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault.

Foucault, indeed, serves as a wonderful foil to Richards’ account of ethical resistance. Though active in the gay community, Foucault rejected the very idea of innate human nature and remained deeply ambivalent until his death in 1984 about gay identity politics. Despite these differences, I believe that we can nevertheless reconcile their seemingly incompatible (if not downright antithetical) ethical visions. Rather than discard the idea of innate human needs (as Foucault, in his more radical moods, urged us to do), I shall instead sketch one way in which Richards’s moral psychology can be expanded or supplemented to account for Foucault’s motivating concerns.

2.

In approaching these questions, it will help to first situate the standoff between Richards and Foucault in a broader set of contemporary philosophical debates. Given that categories like “black”, “female”, or “gay” are still used to privilege some people and subordinate others, social philosophers and in particular philosophers of race and gender have led the way in asking: what reasons do we have to continue to employ certain categories in our lives? Perhaps we can do without them entirely?

One way to approach this question is to first ask whether the category in question refers to some natural kind, as studied in the natural sciences, according to a valid theory of meaning. Applying this strategy to race, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah concludes: “the truth is that there are no races.”[5] And because race (in this sense) does not exist, Appiah concludes, we should stop categorizing people in racial terms.[6]

According to an alternative, pragmatist, approach, whether we should employ some social category depends on what we want to do with it—whether or not that category refers to some natural kind. Thus Sally Haslanger, for instance, constructs a concept of race to pick out people that have been historically subjugated or privileged in a social order, and have some bodily features (real or imagined) that can be traced back to a shared origin.[7] Race exists, on this view, not as a natural kind but as a social product—one reinforced and sustained by our ordinary interactions. But because this account is motivated by a desire to fight injustice, it raises the following question: why, of all our values, should justice be thus privileged? Why not embrace identities organized principally around—as Foucault proposed—the aesthetic ideal of beauty?[8]

Richards gives us a novel way to answer that challenge by grounding the pragmatist’s concern for justice in human moral psychology. To do this, Richards draws heavily on the findings of his colleague and collaborator, psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose work has inspired a wide literature in developmental psychology. This research program is admittedly inimical to Haslanger’s aims, in that it treats males and females as natural kinds with unique developmental patterns. But that need not prevent the pragmatist from drawing on its general orientation to respond to the aesthete’s challenge at a higher level of generality. I take Richards’s central philosophical contribution to this debate to be the following claim: we have reasons to employ some social category if the individuals who happen to fall under it can identify with that category in ways that will make their lives go better. And we have reason to adopt social identities oriented specifically around resisting injustice because such identifications promote our basic psychological needs as naturally empathetic and loving creatures.

3.

To fully appreciate Richards’ project, I suggest we treat his moral psychology as embodying a broadly Aristotelian approach to ethics. For Aristotle, the right thing to do in any situation was, very roughly, whatever a person with an excellent character would do.[9] But because what counts as excellence is context-specific, we can define excellence in the abstract only by appealing to a negative criterion. That is: someone with an excellent character has developed a personality structure via processes maximally free of various structural and situational distortions.[10] If we are fortunate, however, we also get to see such people in action. And finding ourselves inspired by their ways of living, we can begin to identify in their behavior what Aristotle called the virtues—the broad patterns of thought and action that manifest excellence in responding to the various human predicaments that we must all, to varying degrees, face.

We need not accept Aristotle’s own catalogue of virtues to extend this approach in fruitful ways today. For instance, it is an aspect of modern life, as Jonathan Lear argues, that we are more or less conscious of the fact that we live under various forms of “pretense”—identities, social roles, and cultural forms of self-ascription.[11] We are, moreover, erotic creatures—creatures with needs, wants and fantasies, organized principally around others, which if fulfilled give us pleasure, meaning and delight.[12] But as a result, each of us has to live with the risk that our inner selves cannot be fully expressed in the conceptual schemes and social scripts that pervade our world. And though the predicament is universal, that distance may prove wider for some than for others.[13] Can the Aristotelian approach shed light on what it means to live well if our social roles are not just the sources of irony, but also subject us to injustice?[14]

Richards’s second philosophically interesting move is to answer that question with a resounding yes. If you are the subject of injustice or domination, human excellence involves challenging stereotypes (“blacks are lazy”) or implicit injunctions (“a woman’s place is in the kitchen”) that perpetuate such injustice.[15] When internalized, such stereotypes need not be verbalized. Indeed, describing them as pieces of prepositional knowledge should not obscure the complex cognitive machinery involved in their internalization and unconscious operation, or the complex affective states, attitudes and motivations that come about as a result.[16] And when Richards talks about resistance, it should be clear he does not mean mere non-compliance. He means, rather, the hard work of challenging and clearing away such stereotypes entirely—not just in one’s own mind, but also in other minds and indeed the broader culture.

4.

In order to defend this ambitious project, Richards sketches a historical account of how most cultures have lived in the grips of a patriarchal ideology that obscures our nature from us. Patriarchy here refers to a hierarchical system of authority that maintains a strict gender binary and organizes public and private life around exacting codes of manhood and womanhood. And though whatever functional survival value it once had has long expired, patriarchy replicates itself as a cultural form at the level of individual psychology. It manages to do this, Richards argues, through a vicious cycle of trauma that each generation unwittingly imposes on the next.

Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s work, Richards claims that premature breaks in emotional association between parents and children traumatize the child, which suppresses its “personal sense of emotional presence” and becomes susceptible to malignant cultural stereotypes (15). As a result, patriarchal cultures destroy empathy and the natural search for emotional connection undistorted by prejudice. Such cultures lead, moreover, to defensive violence when such stereotypes are challenged, particularly through the perceived shaming of manhood. And for people whose erotic preferences include members of their own sex, patriarchy results in “intrapsychic violence” against the expression of such erotic preferences (7). Such harm is unique, moreover, in that “homosexuals have long lived under a more total form of unspeakability” (7). As a result, patriarchy has the pernicious effect of rendering same-sex love literally unthinkable.

With this framework in place, Richards uses his character studies to show how his protagonists were able to overcome such harm through loving relationships. The benefits of this case-based approach are most evident when Richards focuses on the intersecting lives of Christopher Isherwood and his two contemporaries and (at one time) friends, the composer Benjamin Britten and the poet Wystan Auden. Though his focus is on their adult relationships, Richards makes clear that their success at resistance also depended in on their early relationships to their parents. Thus Britten, on Richards’s account, managed to go the furthest in resisting the homophobia of his time. With his life-long partner, tenor Peter Pears, Britten recreated the loving relationship he had enjoyed with his nurturing mother. As a result, Britten wrote some of the greatest operas of the twentieth century, daringly exploring the “intrapsychic ravages of British patriarchal homophobia” in works like Peter Grimes (1945) and A Death in Venice (1973) (33).

Isherwood and Auden, in contrast, had to contend with the “patriarchal controls” of their mothers (116). Both broke from those controls as young men—fueled, perhaps, by their early sexual affair. However, only Isherwood was able to sustain this resistance, and found his “resisting” voice after moving California in his thirties and meeting Don Bachardy, who became his partner for the rest of his life. Auden, in contrast, fell “disastrously” in love with another American, Chester Kallman, who spurned Auden’s demands for monogamy (47). Whereas Isherwood’s love for Bachardy encouraged his increasingly explicit gay writings, Richards argues that Auden’s unrequited love prompted him to revert to his mother’s rigid Christian attitudes to homosexuality upon her death. Richards concludes that Auden held desperately on to both Kallman and his mother’s prejudices as a form of self-punishment. As a result, Richards argues, the emotional quality of Auden’s later poetry suffered as well.

5.

Do these lives instantiate, as Richards suggests, a universal ethical template? Because Richards does not sufficiently distinguish between the biological and cultural bases of ethics, he is vulnerable to the charge that his egalitarian moral psychology smuggles in as universal culturally local concepts and self-ascriptions. Reviewing the now extensive literature on altruism and empathy, for example, the anthropologist Webb Keane concludes that while our pro-social brains underwrite our ethical impulses, the “descriptions and concepts with which people understand their actions are not simply built into human nature as facts of cognition or psychology.”[17] Thus, even as Richards grounds his moral psychology in the universal capacity for love, it is not clear why that capacity would lead to convergence on the particular self-understandings that Richards attributes to his protagonists.[18] And because Richards writes as if sexual minorities express their “ethical voice” most fully as a “loving gay voice,” Richards lodges the modern categories of gay identity too deep, so to speak, within human nature (50).

To be sure, there is considerable evidence that homoerotic dispositions have a biological basis, even as natural scientists debate whether it makes sense to describe such dispositions in binary terms.[19] At the same time, however, terms like ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ do not just co-refer to (purported) natural kinds. The use of such terms also locates people within a historically contingent matrix of harmful power relations. And because Richards slides so easily between the natural and the cultural, this places him in the crosshairs of those who, following Foucault, argue that we should for that reason do away with sexual orientation as the basis for our social identities. “If we are to prevent personal identity from becoming ‘the law, the principle, the rule’ of individual existence,” Foucault declared, “then ultimately sexuality itself will have to be resisted.”[20]

Richards addresses Foucault’s challenge in a few brief remarks at the end of his book. Richards, in effect, tries to explain it away. Richards argues that Foucault’s earlier work demonstrates “ethical empathy,” which he attributes to Foucault’s lifelong relationship to the political activist Daniel Defert (228). That clear-eyed empathy, Richard asserts, led to Foucault’s “most brilliant and well argued book”, Discipline and Punish, as well as his activism, with Defert, to reform the French prison system. (228) Richards contrasts this work with Foucault’s later work on sexuality, which is dismissed as insensitive to feminist concerns and inadequate to Foucault’s earlier ethical insights. Richards asserts, moreover, that Foucault’s later sadomasochistic sexual experimentation reveals that Foucault was not able to fully overcome, like Auden, the trauma that patriarchy inflicts on those with homoerotic preferences. Those who, like David Halperin, see “radical possibilities” in Foucault’s notion of resistance will surely protest here that Richards is himself silencing alternative “queer” voices.[21]

Whatever the merits of Richard’s treatment of Foucault, I believe the distance between Richards and Foucault is in fact considerably narrower than it seems. With some modifications, moreover, their visions of resistance can be reconciled. The point of convergence is this: Foucault, no less than Richards, recognized the value of shared identities in sustaining collective political resistance against injustice. As Halperin concedes, Foucault “considered the early homosexual emancipation movement’s discursive reversal of medical discourse to have been, at its time, an absolutely necessary strategic move.”[22] At the same time, however, Foucault was deeply skeptical that any such “discourse” could finally liberate; any set of concepts would, in turn, generate new forms of self-subjugation, which would then demand new forms of resistance.

Foucault’s skepticism is perhaps too easy to dismiss; even when taken seriously, it invites the classic objections to his account of power. As Ian Shapiro for example argues, Foucault failed above all to distinguish between its licit exercises and illicit exercises—that is, domination.[23] But to make that distinction, we need something seemingly missing in Foucault’s work: an account of basic human interests. Nonetheless, I take it that not even Foucault would deny, with his emphasis on bodies, that everyone has a basic interest in satisfying a need for nutrition. And once we accept that the human mind is also part of the body, it becomes hard to deny that any adequate account of basic interests will have to also include the satisfaction of basic psychological needs.

Were Foucault to make this concession, Richards can then give the following reply to Foucault’s challenge. According to Carol Gilligan’s work on “moral injury,” the harms imposed by patriarchy are, quite literally, a type of trauma (218). Richards refers to this literature at the end of his book, and suggests that sexual minorities can only overcome culturally internalized self-hatred through shared practices, rituals, and even myths to reconstitute their traumatized psyches. Richards might thus point out, against Foucault, that such “communalization” may well require, as a matter of satisfying basic psychological needs, that sexual minorities make their erotic preferences a central aspect of their identity (219). Resisting this healing process, as Foucault does, on this view only deprives individuals of a basic ethical resource.

Even if this reply were to succeed, however, I believe Richard’ moral psychology still fails to account for what I take to be Foucault’s motivating concerns. That is: as sexual minorities secure legal protections and public recognition of their relationships, we can ask how collective identities born out of such efforts connect to other human motives and desires. By doing so, we can identify new psychological pressures and ethical challenges that Richards’ own account, because it is so tightly tied to resisting injustice, does not sufficiently acknowledge.

6.

I have in mind the possibility that individuals can embrace identities that promote collective political freedom while at the same time sacrificing their individual psychic freedom. This is not, to be clear, due to any inherent features of such identities or the innate needs they express. It is due instead to the defensive ends any form of psychological identification can be made to serve. This line of thought receives its clearest statement, I believe, in the humanistic psychology of midcentury psychoanalysts like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm. And though this approach now enjoys a certain vintage, Richards’s synthesis of psychology and history resembles in striking ways Fromm’s project, especially his classic text Escape from Freedom. Several of Fromm’s insights, I want to suggest, can be easily incorporated into Richards’s account. 

For both Fromm and Richards, modern liberalism should be viewed as both a political and a psychological achievement.[24] That is, the freedoms made possible by market economies and a liberal state have created the cultural conditions for greater and indeed unprecedented psychological individuation. Fromm, however, also argued that the benefits of such so-called negative liberty come at a psychological price. With no necessary social roles to occupy, our social order cannot give our lives an inherent purpose or direction. And this carries profound political risks.

Because this predicament can create a profound sense of psychological anxiety, modern life creates its own ethical dangers. Those who have not developed adequate psychological resources to deal with the freedom of modern life, Fromm argued, will feel the pull of social collectives, indulging in the fantasy that by submitting to a larger whole, one can find who one really is. But because this sought-out unity is indeed a fantasy, such self-submission does not liberate. Instead, Fromm argued, it either creates unconscious resistance or deadens the psyche. If Fromm was right, then the avowal of an “authentic” gay identity may paradoxically involve, for individuals caught in this position, the construction of what is from this perspective a false self.

The task of psychoanalysis, for Fromm, was to help individuals recover a spontaneous sense of self that promotes loving relationships without self-submission, whether organized around race, nationality or—perhaps we can now add—sexual orientation. I propose that we read Foucault as seeking this very goal in his books on the “care of the self.”[25] Moreover, even if one regards Foucault’s ethics as an expression of neurosis or even pathology, we do well to consider another point that Fromm makes. Individuals who suffer from mental disturbance are often best placed to identify certain aspects of the human predicament that the rest of us tend to minimize or ignore.[26]

As an example, recall the young Christopher Isherwood’s claim, in Christopher and His Kind, that even “if boys didn’t exist,” he would have to invent them. Isherwood effectively admits here that he could very well have embraced the conventional life of a heterosexual man. Isherwood was clearly also aware that his choice to be with men can be read as extrinsically motivated behavior—a defensive response to his controlling mother.[27] “Psychologists might find Christopher’s admission damaging to his case,” Isherwood admits, noting Auden’s prediction that, as a repressed “heter,” he would “sooner or later defect.”[28] Of course, writing this in his seventies as a proudly gay man, Isherwood concludes with understandable glee that Auden turned out to be wrong. However we understand his motivations, I believe Isherwood points to an important and often neglected possibility: what we come to see as cultural progress can occur not despite but because of the unhappy socialization of some people into our world.

Now, as Fromm also recognized, there are plenty of people, including happily coupled gay men and women, who manage to adapt to the world and thrive within its social parameters. Moreover, Fromm’s approach only reinforces Richard’s central and abiding insight: it is thanks to the healing power of love that one can “win wisdom from illness” and turn reactive non-compliance into constructive ethical action.[29] But that also means that we cannot know in advance what insights even the oddest forms of resistance may still inspire. The right response, I think, is to embrace the contingency of our concepts, and keep faith that true love will, in the end, see through them all.

Posted on 20 October 2017

LUKE SWIDERSKI is a J.D. Candidate at New York University School of Law.

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