The Passionate Society

My current reading material for my Classics of Political Economy course is The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. The part I've been reading consists mainly of a survey or summary of the treatment of passions in mainstream philosophy from the very early says of Saint Augustine through (with a bit of a skimming over the Dark Ages) the eighteenth century. At least, that's as far as I've gone so far. And the thing I find really striking is that it is the almost unanimous opinion of the thinkers Hirschman has quoted that passions are bad. Augustine, for instance, defined three kinds of lust, namely sexual lust, lust for money/possessions, and lust for power, and, obviously, thought they were all sinful and bad. That continued to be the position of the more-or-less religious segments of the philosophical community until, well, the present day, really. Opposition to that view, that all passions are bad and people should abstain from indulging them because they're bad and people should want to be good, came from people who said, wait a minute, that's not realistic. Instead of just telling people their passions are bad, which won't work (even though it's true), let's try to discover which passions are less bad, and use them to control the others. For instance, David Hume is said by this author to have advocated restraining the "love of pleasure" through the "love of gain."

Now, when I read that sentence, my immediate thought was that it was simply insane. What's wrong with the love of pleasure? Pleasure is great! Almost by definition! It doesn't get much better than pleasure. If people were on the whole more devoted to pursuing pleasure, and less to pursuing gain, everyone's lives would probably be better. Sure, it would pose problems for our particular economic structures, but as the world gets more and more prosperous that becomes less and less of a problem, as seen in the general trend toward more leisure time. That's a straight-up gain-for-pleasure trade, and I think it a most sensible one. After all, what's the point of gaining stuff if not enjoying it? And if the point of gaining stuff is to enjoy it, why try to gain stuff if you could be doing other stuff that was more enjoyable than having the stuff would be? Now, stuff is nice, and can lead to lots of pleasure, so a pure love-of-pleasure agenda wouldn't exterminate the acquisitive interest, but on a very basic level it seems to me that Hume had it backwards.

But I think that's just emblematic of my broader point in this post, which is that the view that passions are bad has lost. Though I'm sure a lot of lingering religious institutions don't like this fact, it is unquestionably true that in modern Western society, people accept as a matter of fact that passions are basically good. We don't deny that they can have problematic consequences, and that one should avoid acting on one's passions if doing so will have problematic consequences, but fundamentally we just don't view the suppression of passions as an end in itself. Rather, we view the expression of passions as an end in itself, possibly the main point of life and at least one of the main ones. We live in the passionate society. The reading I'm currently doing is largely devoted to examining how the passion for material acquisition made the switch from being Bad to Good. Of, I think, at least equal importance and magnitude is the transformation in attitudes toward sexual and romantic passion. The passion for power is a somewhat different animal in the modern world than it was in the time periods I've just been reading about; for one thing, it's a lot less possible for one random person to gain meaningful political power except by holding office in the government of a nation-state, and for another, economic power becomes ever more important leading this passion to dovetail with the material-acquisition passion to ever-greater degrees. But even in the life of the American republic there has been a shift in attitudes toward political ambition. In the olden days, it was taboo to actively campaign for President. Yeah. 'Nuff said.

What I think is behind all of this is the basic hegemony of more-or-less utilitarian ethics. That's a very loaded word that means an awful lot of things, most of which I don't mean in this context, but what I do mean is that teleological and deontological ethics have become massively less influential over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps the best term for their competitor is consequentialist, but what really separates these kinds of ethics isn't their form. After all, one can express achieving one's telos as a consequence, and perform a pseudo-consequentialist calculus that will effect a teleological ethics, or express a pseudo-deontological ethical rule saying "don't harm other people" that would effect a consequentialist ethics. The difference is almost entirely that in consequentialist ethics, "good" is treated as almost synonymous with "advancing the interests of beings" for some class of beings and some class of interests. And the interests are typically things like pleasure or utility or happiness. Again, you can bend that structure back toward one of the old-fashioned kinds of ethics, but in practice people don't. Something is good if it makes people happy. Something is bad if it makes people sad. In that world, passions are the basic thing we're trying to satisfy. If two people meet up in a bar and go off to a hotel and have sex, and both enjoy the experience a lot, and then go their separate ways by mutual consent, that's great! They've both just satisfied their passions, and good for them. We only really discover "bad" when one person's passion interferes with another's.

Obviously I think this was a change for the better. But then I would: I'm a proud citizen of the passionate society. Good or bad, however, I do think that this wholesale shift in our society's philosophy of ethics and desire and pleasure is really interesting. I'll close this philosophical musing with a few lines from that great thinker, Angelus:

Passion. It lies in all of us, sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir, open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to all of us, guides us. Passion rules us all, and we obey. What choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love, the clarity of hatred... and the ecstacy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dark. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.