An Unpopular Passion

Earlier this week, I took part in an evening event called “On the Humanities in Dark Times.” There were about eight or nine of us, all humanities faculty at Indiana University. We’d been meeting to discuss the challenges of our moment, and someone suggested we read Hannah Arendt’s “On Humanity in Dark Times.” There was enough interest to organize our event, as a set of responses in a way, but also as a community building opportunity. We each took words from the essay. I took passion.

Here’s what I did with it. [Imagine you’re in the back room of The Bishop, a bar in Bloomington, on a rather cold, wet, windy night in early March.]

I’m going to talk about passion. But first I want to recognize and acknowledge that the humanities are not popular.

I wonder sometimes if they are not, by their skepticism, critical orientation, and mode of inquiry distinctly, and perhaps by definition, unpopular. Most often when I hear someone arguing for the value of the humanities, I start to feel uncomfortable, or I find myself lapsing into a non-humanistic and rather passive mode of listening. We have left the humanities behind. We seem to have become popular, or wannabe popular, checked our depth and critical tradition at the door. Become one-dimensional, duller, poorer.

Passion is a good example of this process in contemporary practice. There is a popular sense of passion that we might be encouraged to discover and follow. Find your passion. Follow your passion. We enter cheerleading mode—what we are rooting for exactly is not always clear. 

First of all, to anyone with a religious background or training, (this would probably apply to those in attendance who recognize that we happen to have organized our rather dark meeting today on Ash Wednesday), passion might very well raise associations with the Passion, the suffering of Jesus. What would follow your passion mean in such a context? Follow your suffering?! What major would that be, I wonder?

But second, and more substantially, it suggests that there’s just one passion, one special thing that motivates each and every one of us, and all we have to do is find it. It’s the Hallmark version of passion. Rather than recognizing, as many have in the past, that there are lots of passions, many things that make us passionate, and that they’re not always good. Envy, spite, and love-of-power are all perfectly fine passions, and also powerful ones. What if I discover that one of those is my real passion? Hm, maybe my passion is envy. Eureka! Follow your passion! Which major would that be, I wonder? Which job skills would it give me? Would they be portable?

Not only are there lots of different ones, discovering what actually motivates you, let alone others, is often next to impossible, as one passion hides behind another and then another. We find ourselves striving for an ideal that is contrary to our nature, as Dostoevsky puts it in one of his notebooks. Whether you agree with his theology or not, it isn’t hard to recognize that humans can be passionately motivated by all sorts of crazy shit, often without being quite aware of it.

I should point out that this many-and-competing passions scenario was once seen as a huge social problem. A society filled with people and their leaders with passions constantly overflowing was understood as a recipe for disaster, endless fragmentation, conflict, war. The people who were concerned about this came up with a way to soften the myriad individual passions, essentially by identifying one passion to be the main one and provide a counterweight—one passion to rule them all—and they promoted it and shored up the social and economic foundations all around it.

Some of you know that I’m referring to the passion of self interest. It had only two problems. It had been a terrible sin for a long time, but people could get beyond that, and mostly they did. The sin of greed or avarice turned out to be not a sin after all, it was actually a virtue, a driver for social progress. Almost a kind of magic. “Sweet commerce” to the rescue.

But the other drawback, which was seen immediately by some people at the time, is more pernicious and more central to what we’re talking about here. This foregrounding of self interest tends to make people rather one-dimensional. This is ironically what it was supposed to do. Reduce their excesses, their passions, all of them except for this one—desire for gain, acquisition, love of lucre.

It’s just that it succeeded so well, maybe beyond the hopes of those who were advocating for it way back in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was supposed to make people simpler, more predictable. It did just that. It also made them more controllable, less critically aware, duller, poorer, and less fully human.

The humanities can help to cure this ill, but they will never, I believe, be a popular remedy.