Identity

2 THE THIRD PART OF THE SOUL

Theories of politics have typically been built on top of theories of human behavior. Theories tease out regularities in human action from the mass of empirical information we receive about the world around us and hopefully draw causal connections between these actions and the surrounding environment. The ability to theorize is an important factor in the evolutionary success of the human species. Many practical people scorn theories and theorizing, but they act all the time upon unarticulated theories that they simply fail to acknowledge.

Modern economics is based on one such theory, which is that human beings are “rational utility maximizers”: they are individuals who use their formidable cognitive abilities to benefit their self-interest. Embedded in this theory are several further assumptions. One is that the unit of account is an individual, as opposed to a family, a tribe, a nation, or some other type of social group. To the extent that people cooperate with one another, it is because they calculate that cooperation will serve their individual self-interest better than if they act on their own.

The second assumption concerns the nature of “utility,” the individual preferences—for a car, for sexual gratification, for a pleasant vacation—that make up what economists call a person’s “utility function.” Many economists would argue that their science says nothing about the ultimate preferences or utilities that people choose; that’s up to individuals. Economics speaks only to the ways in which preferences are rationally pursued. Thus a hedge fund manager seeking to earn another billion dollars and a soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies are both maximizing their different preferences. Presumably, suicide bombers, who have unfortunately become part of the twenty-first-century political landscape, are simply trying to maximize the number of virgins they will meet in heaven.

The problem is that economic theory has little predictive value if preferences are not limited to something like material self-interest, such as the pursuit of income or wealth. If one broadens the notion of utility to include extremes of both selfish and altruistic behavior, one is not saying much more than the tautology that people will pursue whatever it is they pursue. What one really needs is a theory of why some people pursue money and security, while others choose to die for a cause or to give time and money to help other people. To say that Mother Teresa and a Wall Street hedge fund manager are both maximizing their utility misses something important about their motivations.

In practice, most economists indeed assume that utility is based on some form of material self-interest, which will trump other kinds of motivations. This is a view shared by both contemporary free market economists and classical Marxists, the latter of whom maintained that history was shaped by social classes pursuing their economic self-interest. Economics has become a dominant and prestigious social science today because people do much of the time behave according to the economists’ more restrictive version of human motivation. Material incentives matter. In Communist China, agricultural productivity on collective farms was low because peasants were not allowed to keep any surplus they produced; they would shirk rather than work hard. A saying in the former Communist world was that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” When incentives were changed in the late 1970s to allow peasants to keep their surplus, agricultural output doubled within four years. One of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis was that investment bankers were rewarded for short-term profits and were not punished when their risky investments blew up a few years later. Fixing the problem would require changing those incentives.

But while the standard economic model does explain a good deal of human behavior, it also has a lot of weaknesses. Over the past couple of decades, behavioral economists and psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have attacked the model’s underlying assumptions by showing that people are not rational in practice, that they for example choose default behaviors over more optimal strategies or economize on the hard work of thinking by copying the behavior of others around them.^{1}

While behavioral economics has underlined the weaknesses of the existing rational-choice paradigm, it has not posited a clear alternative model of human behavior. In particular, it has not had much to say about the nature of people’s underlying preferences. Economic theory does not satisfactorily explain either the soldier falling on the grenade, or the suicide bomber, or a host of other cases where something other than material self-interest appears to be in play. It is hard to say that we “desire” things that are painful, dangerous, or costly in the same way we desire food or money in the bank. So we need to look to other accounts of human behavior that go beyond the economic ones that are so dominant today. This broader understanding has always existed; the problem is that we often forget things we once knew.

Theories of human behavior are built on theories of human nature: regularities that arise out of a universally shared human biology, as opposed to those that are rooted in the norms or customs of the different communities in which people live. The boundary line between nature and nurture is highly contested today, but few people would deny that the two poles of this dichotomy exist. Fortunately, one does not have to establish the boundary precisely in order to develop a theory that gives us useful insight into human motivation.

Early modern thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized at length about the “state of nature,” a primordial time before the emergence of human society. The state of nature is, however, just a metaphor for human nature; that is, the most basic characteristics of human beings that exist independently of one’s particular society or culture. In the Western philosophical tradition, such discussions of human nature go much further back, at least to Plato’s Republic.

The Republic is a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and two young aristocratic Athenians, Adeimantus and his brother Glaucon, about the nature of a just city. After debunking several existing theories of justice, such as Thrasymachus’ assertion that justice is nothing more than the self-interest of the strong, Socrates constructs a just city “in speech,” based on an exploration of the nature of the soul. The word soul (Greek psyche) is not much used anymore, but as the etymology suggests, the discipline of psychology essentially studies the same subject.

The key discussion of the nature of the soul takes place in Book IV. Socrates notes that a desiring part seeks, for example, food and water. But at times a thirsty man pulls back from drinking because he knows the water is tainted and could lead to sickness. Socrates asks, “Isn’t there something in their soul bidding them to drink and something forbidding them to do so, something different that masters that which bids?”^{2} Adeimantus and Socrates agree that this second, different part of the soul is the calculating part, and that it can operate at cross-purposes from the irrational, desiring part of the soul.

Socrates and Adeimantus have at this point described the modern economic model: the desiring part corresponds to individual preferences, while the calculating part is the rational maximizer. While Sigmund Freud is no longer taken as seriously as he once was, this distinction corresponds roughly to his concept of the desiring id and the ego that kept those desires under control, largely the result of social pressures. But Socrates points to another type of behavior by relating the story of the Athenian Leontius, who passes by a pile of corpses left by the public executioner. Leontius wants to look at the corpses, but at the same time tries to avoid doing so; after an internal struggle, he looks, saying, “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”^{3} Leontius, while tempted to indulge his desire to see the corpses, knew it was ignoble; that he gave in to his cravings aroused his anger and self-loathing. Socrates asks:

We could transpose this into a more contemporary example, where a drug addict or alcoholic knows that another hit or drink is bad for him or her, but nonetheless takes it and feels a deep self-loathing for being weak. Socrates uses a new word, spirit, to refer to the part of the soul that is the seat of this anger against oneself, which is a poor translation of the Greek word thymos.

Socrates then asks Adeimantus whether the part of the soul that wanted not to look at the corpses was just another desire or was an aspect of the calculating part, since they both pushed in the same direction. The former view would be the perspective of contemporary economics, where one desire is limited only by the calculation that another, more important desire supersedes it. Socrates asks, is there a third part of the soul?

Adeimantus immediately agrees with Socrates that the spirited part—thymos—is neither just another desire nor an aspect of reason but an independent part of the soul. Thymos is the seat of both anger and pride: Leontius was proud and believed he had a better self that would resist looking at the corpses, and when he gave in to his desires, he became angry at his failure to live up to that standard.

More than two millennia before its advent, Socrates and Adeimantus understood something unrecognized by modern economics. Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two. Thymos is the seat of judgments of worth: Leontius believed he was above staring at corpses, just as a drug addict wants to be a productive employee or a loving mother. Human beings do not just want things that are external to themselves, such as food, drink, Lamborghinis, or that next hit. They also crave positive judgments about their worth or dignity. Those judgments can come from within, as in Leontius’ case, but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth. If they receive that positive judgment, they feel pride, and if they do not receive it, they feel either anger (when they think they are being undervalued) or shame (when they realize that they have not lived up to other people’s standards).

This third part of the soul, thymos, is the seat of today’s identity politics. Political actors do struggle over economic issues: whether taxes should be lower or higher, or how the pie of government revenue will be divided among different claimants in a democracy. But a lot of political life is only weakly related to economic resources.

Take, for example, the gay marriage movement, which has spread like wildfire across the developed world in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This does have an economic aspect, having to do with rights of survivorship, inheritance, and the like for gay or lesbian unions. However, many of those economic issues could have been and were in many cases resolved through new rules about property in civil unions. But a civil union would have had lower status than a marriage: society would be saying that gay people could be together legally, but their bond would be different from that between a man and a woman. This outcome was unacceptable to millions of people who wanted their political systems to explicitly recognize the equal dignity of gays and lesbians; the ability to marry was just a marker of that equal dignity. And those opposed wanted something of the opposite: a clear affirmation of the superior dignity of a heterosexual union and therefore of the traditional family. The emotions expended over gay marriage had much more to do with assertions about dignity than they did with economics.

Similarly, the massive anger of women embodied in the #MeToo movement that emerged in the wake of revelations about the behavior of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was fundamentally about respect. While the way in which powerful men had coerced vulnerable women had an economic dimension, the wrong of valuing a woman for her sexuality or looks alone and not for other characteristics such as competence or character would exist among men and women of equal wealth or power.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves in the story of thymos and identity. Socrates in the Republic does not argue that thymos is a characteristic shared equally among all human beings, nor does he suggest that it makes itself manifest in a variety of forms. It appears as something associated with a particular class of human beings in his imaginary city, the guardians or auxiliaries who would be responsible for defending the city from its enemies. They are warriors, different from shopkeepers, for whom desires and their satisfaction are the chief characteristic, as well as from the deliberative class of leaders, who use their reason to determine what is best for the city. Socrates suggests that the thymotic guardians are typically angry and compares them to dogs who are vicious toward strangers and loyal to their masters. As warriors they must be courageous; they must be willing to risk their lives and undergo hardship in a way that neither the merchant class nor the deliberative class would. Anger and pride rather than reason or desire motivates them to take the risks they do.

In speaking this way, Socrates reflects the reality of the classical world, indeed, the reality of most civilizations around the world that possessed an aristocratic class whose claim to high social status lay in the fact that they, or their ancestors, were warriors. The Greek word for “gentleman” was kaloskagathos, or “beautiful and good,” while the very word aristocracy derives from the Greek term “rule by the best.” These warriors were seen as morally different from shopkeepers because of their virtue: they were willing to risk their lives for the public good. Honor accrued only to people who deliberately rejected rational utility maximization—our modern economic model—in favor of those who were willing to risk the most important utility of all, their lives.

Today, we tend to look back on aristocrats with a great deal of cynicism, regarding them at best as self-important parasites, and at worst as violent predators on the rest of their society. Their descendants are even worse, since they did not themselves earn the status that their families receive, but got it as an accident of birth. We have to recognize, however, that in aristocratic societies there was a deeply rooted belief that honor or esteem was not due to everyone, but only to the class of people who risked their lives. An echo of that feeling still exists in the respect we citizens of modern democratic societies typically pay to soldiers who die for their country, or policemen and firemen who risk their lives in the line of duty. Dignity or esteem is not due to everyone, least of all to businesspeople or workers whose main objective is to maximize their own welfare. Aristocrats thought of themselves as better than other people and possessed what we may call megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior. Predemocratic societies rested on a foundation of social hierarchy, so this belief in the inherent superiority of a certain class of people was fundamental to the maintenance of social order.

The problem with megalothymia is that for every person recognized as superior, far more people are seen as inferior and do not receive any public recognition of their human worth. While Socrates and Adeimantus associate thymos primarily with the class of guardians, they also seem to think that all human beings possess all three parts of the soul. Nonguardians have their pride as well, a pride that is injured when the nobleman slaps them in the face and orders them out of the way, or when a daughter or a wife is taken involuntarily as sexual plaything by her social “betters.” While a certain group of humans always want to be seen as superior, a powerful feeling of resentment arises when one is disrespected. Moreover, while we are willing to laud people with certain kinds of achievement, such as the great athlete or musician, many social honors are rooted not in true superiority, but rather in social convention. We can easily resent people who are recognized for the wrong things, such as exhibitionist socialites or reality-show stars who are no better than us.

So an equally powerful human drive is to be seen as “just as good” as everyone else, something we may label “isothymia.”^{6} Megalothymia is what economist Robert Frank labels a “positional good”—something that by its very nature cannot be shared because it is based on one’s position relative to someone else.^{7} The rise of modern democracy is the story of the displacement of megalothymia by isothymia: societies that only recognized an elite few were replaced by ones that recognized everyone as inherently equal. In Europe, societies stratified by class began to recognize the rights of ordinary people, and nations that had been submerged in great empires sought a separate and equal status. The great struggles in American political history—over slavery and segregation, workers’ rights, women’s equality—were ultimately demands that the political system expand the circle of individuals it recognized as having equal rights.

Yet the story is more complicated than that. Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group’s superiority. This is a large part of the story of nationalism and national identity, as well as certain forms of extremist religious politics today.

A further problem with isothymia is that certain human activities will inevitably entail greater respect than others. To deny this is to deny the possibility of human excellences. I cannot play the piano and cannot pretend that I am the equal of Glenn Gould or Arthur Rubinstein in this regard. No community will fail to pay greater honor to the soldier or police officer who risks his or her life for the common good than to the coward who flees at the first sign of danger or, worse yet, betrays the community to outsiders. Recognition of everyone’s equal worth means a failure to recognize the worth of people who are actually superior in some sense.

Isothymia demands that we recognize the basic equal worth of our fellow human beings. In democratic societies we assert, with the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet historically, we have disagreed on who qualifies as “all men.” At the time that the declaration was signed, this circle did not include white men without property, black slaves, indigenous Americans, or women. Moreover, since human beings are so obviously varied in their talents and capacities, we need to understand in what sense we are willing to recognize them as equal for political purposes. The Declaration of Independence says this is “self-evident,” without giving us much guidance on how we are to understand equality.

Thymos is the part of the soul that seeks recognition. In the Republic, only a narrow class of people sought recognition of their dignity, on the basis of their willingness to risk their lives as warriors. Yet the desire for recognition also seems to lie within every human soul. The shopkeepers or artisans or beggars on the street can also feel the pang of disrespect. But that feeling is inchoate, and they do not have a clear sense of why they should be respected. Their society is telling them that they are not worth as much as the aristocrat; why not accept society’s judgment? For much of human history, this was indeed the fate of the great mass of humanity.

But while thymos is a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed, the belief that each of us has an inner self that is worthy of respect, and that the surrounding society may be wrong in not recognizing it, is a more recent phenomenon. So while the concept of identity is rooted in thymos, it emerged only in modern times when it was combined with a notion of an inner and an outer self, and the radical view that the inner self was more valuable than the outer one. This was the product of both a shift in ideas about the self and the realities of societies that started to evolve rapidly under the pressures of economic and technological change.