Passions and Emotions: NOMOS LIII

7. Reliable Democratic Habits and Emotions

212 7 RELIABLE DEMOCRATIC HABITS AND EMOTIONS CHESHIRE CALHOUN As I understand George Marcus’s project presented here as well as in The Sentimental Citizen and in Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment, coauthored with Russell Neuman and Michael McKuen, the central goal is to challenge the idea that the aims of democracy are best advanced by supporting and demanding higher levels of deliberation among the electorate.1 The normative conception of citizenship that Marcus challenges requires of good citizens that they be knowledgeable, well versed on public-policy issues, capable of applying general principles to particular cases, and able to articulate for themselves and to others their reasons for taking the stands they do. In addition, Marcus aims to challenge a connected view of the role of emotion in democracy. On that view, while both political conflict and political solidarities may inevitably cause emotions, emotions ought to play no role in rational political judgment and action. As Kant said of inclinations, so the advocate of deliberative democracy might say of the emotions: “it must . . . be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them.”2 And, just as perfect political deliberators should wish to be free from the influence of emotion, so, too, they should wish to be free from the influence of partisan loyalties. In Marcus’s view, this normative conception of citizens as emotionless , nonpartisan deliberators is fundamentally misguided. It Reliable Democratic Habits and Emotions 213 overestimates the role that conscious thought could possibly play in human life and underestimates the reason-subserving functions of “emotion systems.” Rationality, he argues, does not depend on all of our judgments, choices, and actions being preceded by and based on conscious, reflective thought. It, instead, depends on our having in place serviceable habits of judgment, choice, and action, as well as a preconscious system that monitors how well those habits are working and that triggers—via anxiety—reflective thought only when those habits fail or risk failing us. Marcus argues that anxiety plays a critical role in human rationality by alerting us to when gathering more information and deliberating about what to do or think is warranted. What Marcus calls “enthusiasm” also plays a critical role in human rationality by providing the motivation for action. Thus, autonomous thought ultimately depends on our emotional capacity for anxiety, and autonomous action ultimately depends on our emotional capacity for enthusiasm. What democracy needs, then, is not a citizenry that deliberates about every political choice. Democracy needs citizens who are neurologically designed to develop serviceable habits of political judgment and action—habits whose basis may not be articulable —and who are also neurologically designed to shift into conscious deliberation when reliance on habits seems risky. By adopting a dual-process model of human psychology, we need not pit reason against emotion or partisanship against deliberation. There is much to admire in Marcus’s view, particularly his attention to the much-ignored (by analytic philosophers at least) emotion of anxiety, his development of a conception of agency that does not require that only the privileged, educated classes be considered capable of autonomous thought and action, and his endeavor to overcome models of both reason and emotion that do not acknowledge the interconnections between the two. That said, I want to raise some critical questions about how far Marcus’s view in fact diverges from the Enlightenment opposition of reason to emotion and how far it can diverge from that view without giving deliberation a more central place in our conception of rational political actors. I then will briefly turn to the question of what a liberal democratic theory of emotions might look like. The Enlightenment view of emotion might be thought of as composed of two basic features, one descriptive and one norma- 214 Cheshire Calhoun tive. Descriptively, emotion and rational thought are to be understood in terms of contrasting pairs of descriptors such as biased-unbiased, nonrepresentational-representational, noncognitive -cognitive, caused by external stimuli-responsive to reasons, physiologically based-cognitively based, motivating-motivationally inert, and so on. On the basis of some such contrast between emotion and reason, it is then possible to conclude that emotions are not the sorts of mental states that ought to be permitted to influence deliberation, judgment, and action and that it is a bad thing if they do.3 Marcus does not disagree with the first feature of the Enlightenment view. Emotions of...