Andrew Leigh

Martha Nussbaum:

... hungry children like Hansel and Gretel. Have to go out into the woods to find their food and their parents have to... one's a broom seller and the wife, I don't know what she does, a housekeeper of some sort. And they don't have time to spend with the children and they also don't bring home the food. So, the children go out into the woods. Now, that's a complicated social problem and you'd have to solve it with an institutional solution. Instead, the story tells you, "Oh no, that's not the problem. The problem is a witch who lives in the woods and turns little children into gingerbread. And once you put the witch into the oven, the world is fine again." So, we get our minds accustomed to that sloppy, easy way of thinking about real problems.

Andrew Leigh:

My name's Andrew Leigh, and welcome to the Good Life, a politics-free podcast about living a happy, healthy, and ethical life. In this podcast, we seek out wise men and women who have lessons to teach us about living life to the full with humor, pleasure, meaning, and love. We chat with musicians and athletes, CEOs, and carers about making the most of this one precious life. If you like this podcast, please take a moment to tell your friends or rate us on Apple Podcasts. Now, sit back and enjoy the conversation.

Andrew Leigh:

Martha Nussbaum is one of the world's top philosophers. The 71 year old professor at the University of Chicago has published more than 20 books and over 500 papers, and received more than 60 honorary degrees. Born in New York, she studied at Wellesley, New York University and Harvard, and has previously taught at Harvard and Brown. She converted to Judaism when she married Alan Nussbaum and remained in the faith after their separation. If there was a Nobel prize in philosophy, Martha would have won it. Evidenced by the fact that she was invited to give the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, and [inaudible 00:02:15] to the Kyoto Prize and the Inamori Ethics Prize. Her theme in Martha's work is political emotions. And her latest book is The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis.

Andrew Leigh:

Martha Nussbaum, thank you for appearing in the Good Life podcast today. I wanted to start with anger. Can you, for our listener, do your notion of transition anger from retributive anger?

Martha Nussbaum:

Okay. Sure. Well, let me just start with Aristotle's definition of anger because I think it's a good place to see the different components. So, Aristotle says anger is a painful emotion that responds to an injury or damage to someone or something that you care quite a lot about. And you believe that the damage was wrongfully inflicted, not merely accidental. And then he adds that the angry person also believes that it would be a very good thing for there to be a kind of payback or retribution. And it seems like that element is accepted by, I mean, everyone in the subsequent tradition where they all do follow Aristotle and furthermore, I've looked at Indian definitions of anger in Indian philosophy, and they all have the same thing.

Martha Nussbaum:

Now, what Gandhi points out and a lot of other people too is that you don't have to want to go out and take revenge yourself. The definition doesn't say that. It just says you have a pleasant wish or hope for some sort of payback or a balance. And you might want the law to do it by inflicting a painful comeuppance on the wrongdoer or you might even want divine justice to do it. And then I add that you might even just want the course of life to do it. I think a lot of people who get divorced and who blame their ex for the divorce, they wish that that person's life would go very badly in future. And that's a kind of comeuppance for the pain that they've inflicted.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, I think that's true that that's a part of most people's experience of anger, but it's a part that's very primitive, probably has an evolutionary origin, and it really does great harm. It's a kind of magical thinking where you think, "Oh, that person's pain will balance out the pain that I've suffered." And I think this is the main support for capital punishment or wherever people do, in fact, support it. They think, "Oh, well, there's been a death then there has to be another death." But, of course, as Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." It just doesn't do what you think it's going to do. It creates more trouble rather than taking it away.

Martha Nussbaum:

And so, can we separate that part of anger from the part that seems more healthy? Namely, recognizing that a wrong has occurred and protesting it. I think it's clear that we do that all the time when we're bringing up children. So, I want to start there. So, the children do wrong and let's imagine the children are old enough that we can really blame them. Parents think, "This is outrageous what my child has done. We want to protest against it." But then they turn forward. And this is what I mean by transition. They don't think, "Oh, what the child ought to pay back pain for pain." But typically parents think, "What am I going to do to fix the future? How can I make that child a better person through whatever punishment or other treatment I assign?"

Martha Nussbaum:

And so, that's what I have in mind by transition anger. It's the kind of anger that lacks the retributive element, but still protests wrongdoing. Now, then I've done a lot of work on the political thought of Martin Luther King Jr. both in my book on anger, but also in a new anthology on Martin Luther King Jr.'s political philosophy. It's clear that he has exactly the same idea and probably through his own reflection on the uselessness of retribution. And so, he says, "Yeah. I mean, anger brings people to the movement, but when they get there, the anger has to be," he uses two words, "purified and channelized." And what it's clear that he means when you look at all the things that he says is that it can keep the determined, courageous protest against unjust activity, but lose the retributive part and instead of that, you got to have work and hope and probably faith in the possibility of some kind of improvement in the future. So, that's what he wanted to do in his movement. And I think this is entirely correct in the sense that the retributive part just breeds an unhealthy pile on the misery strategy like the mass incarceration in our society here, and it really doesn't solve the problem. So, you've got to get people together to solve the problem.

Andrew Leigh:

In our personal lives, you talk about how the notion of pain for pain is a false lure even when it comes to things like marital infidelity or being a victim of crime. Do you yourself struggle with that at all? Getting away from the notion of retributive anger when someone wrongs you?

Martha Nussbaum:

No, it's a funny thing. I think everyone feels anger in different places and has different struggles. And I find that if I've ever once loved a person and I haven't formed long-time relationships with people I don't love, then I don't have a strong retributive tendency. I just think, "Well, this has fallen apart and it's sad." And I grieve and I think, of course, I might assign some blame, but actually there's blame on both sides, and you can kind of wake up to that if you are bent on retribution. I think retribution often grows from weakness and probably the reason I don't do what I see a lot of other women doing is that I've got my own life. I've got a job. I've got my own friends. I don't have to think, "Oh, everything has been taken away by this person." No. I mean and I just go forward and I don't... So, I don't really have a trouble with that. People often say, "This is very unusual about you that you are great friends with your ex-husband and with your ex-lovers and so on." But I don't find that so hard. And in fact, I have to say, very often. And especially in a world where people don't always accept very happily the reality of a woman's career, it's a much better relationship when you don't have to live with the person.

Martha Nussbaum:

I mean, I love my ex-husband and I write to him every day. We're on this family email list, but he's got political beliefs that I find mildly irritating when it's at a distance, but if I actually had to live with him, I would probably go crazy. So, that's the kind of thing that I experience. Now, what I do find makes me angry and where I do have the struggle is the people I don't love that you're thrown together with at close quarters in daily life like incompetent computer technicians, rude people in stores, and especially air travel because you do a lot of air travel, I do a lot of air travel. It's necessary, but it's very irritating. I mean, you're at close quarters with people you never would have wanted to meet, and they're often very irritating. So, yeah. I mean, I have a lot of stories in my anger book about what I call the middle realm, this realm that's neither political nor intimate.

Martha Nussbaum:

And I do particularly get angry at rude people who insult me in a way that I perceive as either sexist or ageist like taking my suitcase out of my hands without permission and lifting it into the overhead rack. And I constantly encounter that. And I think part of it is the sexist belief that women don't have any strength and part of it is ageist, and you don't know really which it is, but often people who do it are very out of shape. So, I found different ways of doing it. And I've talked to other women about this. There's one judge in Australia that I recently talked to about this. And she says that what she tells the men who try. She says, "No, they're confidential judicial papers, and I must not let anyone else touch them."

Martha Nussbaum:

What I usually say is, "Oh, these are very breakable things in that suitcase and I wouldn't want you to be responsible if anything should break." And since most Americans are so frightened of litigation, that usually works. So, those are the things that make me go crazy. And with the people I love, not so much. It's funny. Yeah, that's just the way I am.

Andrew Leigh:

Moving to the realm of political anger, you talk in your latest book, Monarchy of Fear about the notion of the best response to the current climate of anger in the United States, which is as bad as I've seen it in the two decades. I've been visiting this country. There's being a call for a politics of hope. I couldn't help reading that thinking of David Axelrod's analysis of the rise of Donald Trump as being a reaction to Barack Obama. Aren't you, in some sense, asking America to ride the bicycle backwards?

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, there is hope in a lot of our political history and I certainly don't think Obama is the first to use that word or for that matter to talk about the dangers of fear. I think FDR was a very similar politician, full of hope and optimism. He made people feel the hope. So, there's an oscillation. And I think what happened was that certain groups of people felt that they were left out and they felt Obama had not addressed what was wrong with their lives, working class men, especially. And these are real problems. And of course the economy is doing pretty well now. And it was doing well under Obama, but there's still a certain group of people, people without college education who normally would have been able to get well-paying jobs in construction or manufacturing, but those jobs have been replaced by automation. It's not women who have done it. It's not immigrants who have done it, it's automation, but they kind of can't get their heads around the fact that we have to think about how to extend higher education to these people so they can get the jobs that do exist, but rather than solve that very difficult problem, which is actually pretty expensive to make... Higher education costs a lot in the United States. So, to change our brutal system of higher education is expensive.So, people would rather find a handy scapegoat. "It's like women or the Democrats," and so on.

Martha Nussbaum:

And it's very hard to get people to change their views when they're sunk into this world where they read only the things that support their own viewpoint. That's the difference between FDR and today. That in FDR's day, everyone could listen to his radio chats and everyone read the same thing, but today... I mean, I know this from my own family. There's just a whole bunch of blogs that people read and then they circulate them around. It goes round and round and round, and they have an image of Democrats. It's like a handy scapegoat.

Martha Nussbaum:

And I do say to my sister-in-law and to my ex-husband's wife, who are the most vehement ones on this family list, I say, "Look, there's a Democrat here in the room. I'm a Democrat. This is what I think. And doesn't that form part of your empirical picture of what Democrats?" "No." I mean, the answer is basically, no. We've read this on some blog. So, it's resistant to truth. And then, of course, added to that is the fact that Trump has dumped invective on the media and on the very notion of truth. So, that is why I think it's so tenacious and sticky, but there is a human instinct to find easy, cheap scapegoats, which trials were all about that. And for that matter, fairytales are mostly about that. You've got hungry children like Hansel and Gretel. Have to go out into the woods to find their food and their parents have to... one's a broom seller and the wife, I don't know what she does, a housekeeper of some sort. And they don't have time to spend with the children and they also don't bring home the food. So, the children go out into the woods.

Martha Nussbaum:

Now, that's a complicated social problem and you'd have to solve it with an institutional solution. Instead, the story tells you, "Oh no, that's not the problem. The problem is a witch who lives in the woods and turns little children into gingerbread. And once you put the witch into the oven, the world is fine again." So, we get our minds accustomed to that sloppy, easy way of thinking about real problems through the fairytales we read, which probably also feed an evolutionary tendency.

Andrew Leigh:

Can you blame people on the left though for engaging in some level of retributive anger? I mean, there does seem to be a lot of anger, whether it's a Warren, Sanders, Corbin. It seems to be asking an awful lot coming from the perspective of what you call a gentle discipline of philosophy to ask those people to hold back their anger in the face of what they see is some of the greatest wrongs in their lifetimes.

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, I would not blame Bernie Sanders because I think he exemplifies what I would call transition anger that is vigorous protest without retributivism. I think there are others who are different and you don't need to name people, individuals, but... So, I think there is a problem, but it isn't so much. I have other problems with Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of his economic solutions are not realistic, but I think his demeanor is perfectly fine. In fact, he was a great disciple of King. He was an undergraduate at this university and I've written a new paper on civil disobedience, which includes studying the history of a lot of instances of civil disobedience inspired by King or not inspired by King. And Sanders conducted a sort of model kind of sit-in on our campus, which was fueled by the philosophical ideas of King, and it followed them to the letter and there was nothing retributive about it, and it had a very good cause which was housing integration in Hyde Park. So, anyway, I think we do have to... Everyone has to watch out for this tendency. So, I totally agree with that, but not that particular example.

Andrew Leigh:

Moving on from anger to love. You called for a broad kind of love, the agape notion of love. In which you say it doesn't even particularly require us to like the people involved. Isn't that a kind of unemotional kind of love? Isn't it a bit unrealistic to expect us to love people we don't like?

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, I think back to the parent, I think parents don't always truly like their children. They may think this child of mine is a real mess and teenage children are often not very likable, but they love them. They have a fundamental, underlying commitment to their welfare. And this is what King is really talking about, the goodwill. So, I think we could start there and think about how it's possible. How is it possible for King to tell his followers, you should embrace with love these Southern bigots. Even though you don't like them, you don't want to live with them, but you kind of embrace their human possibilities. I think it's that.

Martha Nussbaum:

The view includes the thought that no one is unchanging or unchangeable. There's a root of goodness and goodwill in everyone. So, you want to kind of... That's what you love. And if you don't like where they are now, you still have hope that they can change or even if they don't change, the world will change around them. And I think people who can project hope or what we badly need in politics. So, in thinking about who should the Democratic nominee be. I do think the capacity to work with people you don't agree with, the capacity to exude hope and joy. And these are very important characteristics.

Andrew Leigh:

You talk a lot about this great trio reformers; Gandhi, Mandela, and King. What if there are exceptions rather than the rule though? What if, actually, they managed to change not because of their appeal to a broad notion of love, but just because they got lucky? Can we look across the world and see most admirable changes as being brought about by people who didn't exemplify a politics of love?

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, remember that I am not a pacifist and I don't say that violent tactics in a limited way should never be used. So, Gandhi, in my mind, was wrong to endorse total non-violence. King was perfectly in favor of violence in self-defense although he thought strategically they shouldn't do it now in the movement, but he did think the second world war was a just war and so on. Mandela, as you know, shifted from non-violence to limited use of violence just to get people's attention and to bring them to the negotiating table, but it was all motivated by a non-retributive which was the wish for a new nation built by everyone.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, I think you can bring about change, of course, in many ways, but if you do it by ways that are retributive, it's likely to recoil back on you. If you look at the two movements that I have written about a lot in my career namely the movement for gay rights in the United States and then the women's movement, those are both non-retributive movements. And the gay rights movement has just zipped ahead, and the women's movement is bogged down. And I think this has led a lot of women to speak and react in retributive ways. I don't agree with that, but I do feel that both of those movements, by and large, they're not only non-retributive, but they're non-violent actually. And the tactics have been to manifest, in the case of the gay rights movement, that love trumps hate. I mean, people have not denied that. You've got some neighbors who want to get married. People just think, "Well, gee, why would I stop them from wanting to get married?"

Martha Nussbaum:

There are a lot of very conservative people that I associate with not in this law school where there's not one person who doesn't support same-sex marriage, probably not on the students or the faculty, although there might be a couple of students and so. But more in the daily life like my massage therapist is a very conservative Christian who certainly doesn't like the idea of same-sex marriage, but boy, the other massage therapist who is a lesbian actress, she had a wedding. And this [inaudible 00:22:23] says, "Oh, look at the pictures of Sharon's wedding. Isn't this fantastic?"

Martha Nussbaum:

So, there's some way in which human decency gets ahead of the ideology that people have. And I think this happens also with families. Oh, yeah, some parents do disown their children for 30 years when they come out, but it isn't so common and probably their relations were bad anyway. What happens is a temporary shock and then, "Oh, well, of course, I want my child to be happy," and so on. Yeah. So, that's the way that movement has gone.

Martha Nussbaum:

The women's movement is more difficult because it really does require males to change their lives in big ways. It requires a new distribution of labor in the household, new elder care, childcare, employment, and so on. And, of course, the gay movement doesn't require anything like that. You can just say, "Hello, neighbor next door," and I don't have to change at all. So, I think the women's movement is stalled and the whole issue of sexual entitlement that men sometimes have thought they had. It's slow for that to get better. And I think it will take women to keep coming forward and keep naming the wrongs in the spirit of what King calls direct action. Putting yourself on the line and naming the wrong, but the retributivism is not helpful, I think.

Andrew Leigh:

The emotion I probably disagree with you most on is envy. You talk about the envy particularly of lower income Americans as being driven by economic insecurity. And then you seem to almost blame the victim, to blame low-income Americans for being envious of what they don't have. Wouldn't we be better to deal with the root causes of that envy itself rather than with the emotion that's just an outcome? In some sense, the widening gulf between rich and poor.

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, I think, of course, the analysis that I build mine on, which was John Rawls's, does say the best way to keep envy from getting out of hand in politics is structural. And I accept that fully. Namely, if you have a good, strong social safety net because envy unlike anger requires despair, at least the way that Rawls and I analyze it. It's not just that the other guy has the good things, but it's that you believe that you yourself cannot get them by effort and hard work. So, I do say, and I don't know why you read me the other way that the problem does require a strong social safety net, and that's where I drag in the capabilities approach and all of that. But there's a part of the envy, which is directed toward women as successful because they have more college degrees, et cetera. That part, I think people do deserve blame for because they're asking for the wrong thing. They're asking for women to back off rather than saying, "No, we want a structural solution that will give everyone a college education." So, yeah. To not protest for the right thing is a problem.

Andrew Leigh:

I'm struck in reading your critique of disgust by the contrast with the work of Jonathan Haidt where he talks about five or maybe six moral foundations and speaks about how those on the left tend to focus just on a couple of the foundations, whereas those in the right focus on the full spectrum. So, he has the left focusing on care/harm and fairness/cheating. The right also bringing in loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Aren't there moments when those on the left should employ the notion of disgust? I'm thinking of... Given we just have the Kavanaugh hearings, wouldn't it have been appropriate for those on the left to employ a broad sense of disgust at fraternity houses that objectify women, for example?

Martha Nussbaum:

Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is that I think I build all my... The empirical side of my view of disgust is built on the early work of Haidt that he did with Paul Rozin. He's diverged from that and become in a way more pop and less tethered to the actual experimental evidence. So, to that extent, I don't follow him all the way, but I do owe quite a lot to the experimental work that he did with Paul Rozin. I think there's a long-standing argument of the kind that you mentioned. In fact, in my earlier book, Hiding from Humanity, one of my main interlocutors was a legal philosopher named Dan Kahan who had exactly the view that you say, namely that there is such a thing as moralized disgust, and you really need to call on it if you want to achieve social change. We should be disgusted by racial bigotry, et cetera.

Martha Nussbaum:

Now, I guess what I want to say about that is so long as you're using the word precisely and not just using it as interchangeable with anger, there's a difference between the two in what they're seeking. Anger, whatever it's problem, seeking some kind of rectification. I don't like the retributive form of that, but anyway, it moves forward toward rectification of some kind. Disgust seeks decontamination of the self. You want to get out of there. And I don't think that's ever actually very helpful politically. I think it would be better to just focus on how we fix the problem, but there's something more problematic that the triggers of disgust are bodily fluids, and bed smells, and all the reminiscences of our own animality, animal reminders is what Rozin says.

Martha Nussbaum:

And even when we moralize the disgust, there's often that whiff of the body in the... So, if you're disgusted at a frat house, it's often like, oh, the vomit, and the passing out from drink and all. And then that's neither here nor there. What's here is the harm that's being done. And so, it often distracts you from the thought that you should have, which is a thought of harm like in sentencing phases of criminal trials. When people want to whip up disgust, what they do is to describe the gory and gruesome features of the murder.

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, those we'll discuss to jury, but what really they should be thinking is how bad a murder is it in terms of the criteria that we have in the law like premeditation and was torture used or not? And is this a felony murder accompanying a bank robbery? And typically they will not find the shooting of a bank officer during a holdup very disgusting, but they will find something else discussing, which might not be as bad in the legal terms. So, I think it's a red herring. And even in the area of poverty where in this book that's sitting on the table here, The Empire of Disgust. It's a cross-cultural project and disgust that I've done with colleagues in India. My colleague here, Laura Weinrib, wrote a very fine article about disgust and class where she says, "Sometimes people can be motivated to improve the lot of working class people by pointing to the disgusting housing conditions that they're forced to inhabit." So, she takes you [inaudible 00:30:10], but I would worry about that because it rubs off on the people you think, "Oh, these cockroaches living in their little shit-hole." The words that Trump likes to use for people who are of other race and class.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, I don't really... I think the right way to do housing change is not by saying, oh, how disgusting, because it's so easy for people to say then, "Oh, well, that's where those people belong because they're dirty too." But rather just to say, we need a housing policy that guarantees everyone decent housing. So, anyway, I think this is an interesting argument. It should continue. And I do think Laura's paper is an excellent paper that goes in your direction, but I'm not convinced.

Andrew Leigh:

So, you advocate less retributed anger, less fear, less disgust, less envy.

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, not less fear. It's a different fear. That is whatever you love. You can't love a child, a country, a spouse without having fear for ills before that person. So, it's just fear directed at the right targets and fear that you don't permit it to get hijacked by irresponsible false rhetoric.

Andrew Leigh:

So, given all this, why aren't you a stoic?

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, precisely what I just said. The stoics think you should give up fear, you should give up love, you should not be attached to anything outside the control of your own rational will. Now, Gandhi actually was pretty much like that. And Richard Sorabji's excellent booklets on the shelf over there, Gandhi and the Stoics, shows in great detail how much like the stoics he was. But I think Gandhi's whole attitude to friends, to his family, and so on was unacceptable. It's not human. And I may have been part of the complicated personality that he had. Who knows whether it was psychologically necessary for him to give up love in order to have the political role that he had. But I think he was a very problematic person in the way that he renounced love of spouse, sexual love, love of children. He was a really bad father.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, I'm certainly not a stoic. And I think fear goes with love. You can only have love where you also are prepared to have deep fear for the wellbeing of [inaudible 00:32:38]. And I think the fear of death of one's own death is quite rational. You don't want it, again, to get hijacked by some political movement that says, "Oh, because you are afraid of death, let's keep the immigrants out of the United States," but it is rational to fear the loss of life. Life is good.

Andrew Leigh:

You seem to trust religious belief more than you do patriotic views. You said right at one point that love of one's country is not a good thing of itself, but you advocate in your work for a greater adherence to religiosity. Why is it that you think patriotism needs more critical examination than religiosity?

Martha Nussbaum:

Actually, I don't. I think that may just be a question of the rhetoric of my book or something, but I think I'm basically [inaudible 00:33:30] on both... You want the kind of attachment that you can rationally justify as part of an overall view. And in the case of patriotism, it would not be any. And every kind of patriotism that you would want to call on, but only a kind that you could show is based on a plausible account of the unity of a country and its citizens welfare and so on. So, too with religion [inaudible 00:33:55]. There wasn't a single church that was actually in existence that had a religious view that he would applaud, but he still did argue that you need a religious view in order to cement your devotion to the moral laws. So, I don't know that that's correct in every instance. Certainly. Probably not.

Martha Nussbaum:

But I do think that the basis of his view is essentially correct. Namely that people all on their own are pretty weak and they need to be together surrounded by like-minded people who are pursuing the moral ends. And how did they get that? Well, in our world, I think one primary way they get it is through religion. Now, a lot of that is bad, but I'm partly... What I say in the book is that you think about these things contextually and in my city, there's no doubt that religion has been a major force for good, for reconciliation, for non-anger and so on.

Andrew Leigh:

Martha, what advice would you give to your teenage self?

Martha Nussbaum:

I don't know. I would think... I mean, at that time, I thought I wanted to be an actress. So, I would tell, I guess, the teenage self, "No, that isn't really a good career and you probably really want to write and think," but I'm not sorry that I was a professional actress for a few years. I actually learned a lot about people and about myself from doing that. So, I think... I probably wouldn't really say don't... I would say, "Wait and see."

Andrew Leigh:

Dropping out of Wellesley was a good idea?

Martha Nussbaum:

Oh, Wellesley was a terrible place. So, I was certainly well advised to drop out of Wellesley. But to drop out for the acting job was fine because luckily the United States is a nation of multiple chances. 30% of our university students are over the age of 30. So, I wasn't doing anything irrevocable. And I'm very glad. I mean, all it meant was that I graduated with my age cohort rather than one year earlier, but I did go back after the experience of that profession. But now when I write about sexual violence, I know the theater world inside out, and I know why it's such a terrible problem to eradicate it there. And I also participate a lot. I write a lot about music and I write [inaudible 00:36:19]. If you should have time to go to the Lyric Opera, I've written the program note for Mozart's Idomeneo.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, my participation in that world, and I teach a class on opera, is made much richer because I did that acting stint. I also do plays in the law school. I engineer sort of dramatic productions with my colleagues as part of our law and literature conferences. So, I do some acting. I played Hecuba in the Trojan Women at our last conference, which was on war and law and literature. And that's actually a big, good thing for the law school. I think it humanizes the law school. Gets people to relate. When you have your colleagues playing women who have been raped in war, women who have had their children snatched away from them, and then the others are playing the guards and the war makers and the... It really uncovers levels of humanity in people that are very valuable when we meet together as colleagues.

Andrew Leigh:

I noticed that your favorite poets that you talk about a lot; Tagore and Wordsworth and Whitman and so on.

Martha Nussbaum:

No, Wordworth, I don't think I talk about so much. I mean, I'm fine with Wordsworth, but it's not somebody I read a lot.

Andrew Leigh:

Okay.

Martha Nussbaum:

Whitman is...

Andrew Leigh:

Well, certainly Tagore and Whitman seemed to be poets of hope. Do you find your desired [inaudible 00:37:40]? Your love of hope also translates into the [inaudible 00:37:43] that you love. You talk about Vaughan Williams [inaudible 00:37:47] has been a music of hope.

Martha Nussbaum:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Leigh:

Are they the sorts of arts you're engaged in?

Martha Nussbaum:

No. I mean, I think it's important not to choose sort of facile examples, of course. My latest essay... Well, there are two works of art that I've written on and both of them are, I think, hopeful in the end, but in a very complicated way. One is Joyce's Ulysses. I've just written an essay about the treatment of death and the disgust toward the corpse and so on in the Hades episode of Ulysses for a collection of essays on philosophical essays on the novel that OEP is doing. And Ulysses, I love it because of its rich humanity and the way that... Even though there's a lot of very bad stuff that's portrayed in Ulysses antisemitism, in particular, but a lot of just brutishness.

Martha Nussbaum:

Nonetheless, the character of Leopold Bloom is one of my favorite fictional characters, I guess, because he does retain with all of his difficult life and all that he's subjected to. He retains this sense of hope, which I think Joyce identified with very deeply. At the end of the Cyclops episode where all these boozy Irish nationalists sort of started attacking him in an anti-Semitic way, and he gets more and more [inaudible 00:39:17] reject intolerance in any shape and form. And they kind of booed him out, but the way Joyce describes it is that as he was kind of sent up into the air by the kick of this anti-Semite, it was like the ascent of Elijah, ben Bloom Elijah. And of course it's comic, but it's really true as well.

Martha Nussbaum:

So, anyway, that's one work. And the other one is Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which... Of course there are many complicated things about that because I think Britten should not have used a poetry of Wilfred Owen that was written about World War I to commemorate World War II because I think he should not have been a complete and total pacifist as he was. He should have understood there was a difference between the two wars. So, I take issue with Britten along the way in a quite vehement manner, but I do think in the end, what he was trying to achieve in that work was [inaudible 00:40:16]. And so, this is 1960. It's way after the war. 1962 was a spirit of reconciliation in Britain, not only bringing the nations together since he insisted on having a German, an English woman and a Russian woman all singing the main roles, but also a spirit of reconciliation about sexual orientation.

Martha Nussbaum:

This was the period when the Wolfenden report had been published, and yet there was not yet the decriminalization, but he could see the beginning of the end of the suffering that he had experienced. And he and Peter Pears had experienced at the hands of homophobic Britain. And so, he was actually starting along the path that pretty soon became the [inaudible 00:41:02] music festival. So, now, in my home, in the roots of Suffolk, there's going to be this festival that celebrates Britten and Pears. And it was like a happy triumph of love over hate. And I think you do get that. And so, of course, the work is pretty dark, but I'm arguing that in certain parts of it, it really does gesture to this victory of love over hate.

Andrew Leigh:

And finally, I have to ask you about the importance of running to a good life. Tell me what running does for you.

Martha Nussbaum:

Well, I'm a very untalented runner. So, not I'm sure like you. I was always the worst athlete in my class because I have very little natural muscular strength, but what I never realized until later was that I could go a long distance very, very slowly. Discovering that was great because I find it's a contemplative time. It's a time when I can... I used to think about operas in my head. That was one thing I... But with the advent of the audio book, instead of listening to music because there's too much background noise to listen to music on an iPod. So, I listened to audio books and that's also a good time to catch up with novels and histories and so on. But I just adore getting outside in the beautiful lake shore of Chicago. I never ran longer than 10 miles at a time until I moved to Chicago, but it's such a great city where you have the path for 16 miles of public land. And so, I love getting to know new places by running in them.

Andrew Leigh:

Martha Nussbaum, a runner, actress, and a philosopher. Thank you for taking the time to speak on the Good Life podcast today. And for the one feature that I'm sure our listeners couldn't see, which is that you have been the smiliest person that I've interviewed on my podcast. So, thank you for your never-ending smile.

Martha Nussbaum:

Okay. Thank you very much. I mean, actually, it's funny because when I was about to apply to graduate school and I was facing an interview with some committee that was going to give me a fellowship, the dean said, "Don't smile so much because they might take that as a gesture of submission." Well, there was one person on the committee who was a primatologist. I'm sure he would [inaudible 00:43:30]. But I think I've learned when my smile suggests an inappropriate reflex like women should be very nice. And when it really does express joy and friendship and so on. And I certainly hope that's what you were seeing.

Andrew Leigh:

Absolutely. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Good Life. We love getting feedback. So, please leave us a rating or a comment on Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes. Next week, I'll be back with another inspiring guest to discuss living a happier, healthier, and more ethical life.