In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau posits an important distinction between self-preservation (amour de soi) and self-love (amour-propre). As he puts it, self-preservation “is a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity and virtue.” Self-love, by contrast, is a “purely relative and factitious feeling, which arises in the state of society, leads each individual to make more of himself than of any others, causes all the mutual damage men inflict on one another.” For Rousseau, corrupt forms of social organization are at the root of many of humanity’s maladies—the emergence of “self-love” is but one example. It is the desire not simply to stay alive but to persist as that “self” enabled by extant forms of inequality. In its more vicious manifestations, self-love leads an individual to want to appear better than others, to outdo others, and to demand to be recognized for their social standing, wealth, privilege, and so on.
Rousseau’s distinction provides a useful framework for rethinking the nature of racism today. The most pressing reason for such reconsideration has to do with racist appeals to “self-preservation” exemplified in the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who on August 3 shot and killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion,” wrote Crucius, who targeted Latino shoppers. “My motives for this attack are not at all personal.” Similar lines of thought also motivated the mass shooters behind the July 29 garlic festival massacre in Gilroy, California; the April 27 synagogue attack in Poway, California; and the March 15 assaults on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Thinking about racism as a form of Rousseauian self-love, I argue, can shed light on these cases and current race relations in the Unites States. It can appropriately describe the rationale and reason for why many “goodhearted” Americans support President Trump’s policies and attitude. It can also help snap us out of our ideological slumber when it comes to thinking about racism.
Although there is much philosophical debate on what makes an action or utterance “racist,” popular conceptions associate it with negative emotions such as hatred, malice, envy, and perhaps even callousness or indifference. While “hatred” (generally speaking) often inspires racism, the idea that racism is essentially a form of hatred or that it boils down to the intent to harm nonwhites is rather comforting thought for many people. This view projects racism onto the past or places it at the feet the KKK or Neo-Nazis holding tiki-torches. This distancing effect is paramount to conceptualizations of racism taking place in societies shaped by white supremacy.
The racism-as-hatred view oversimplifies the problem. First, it allows for a world in which there is obviously structural inequality along racial lines, but no or very few racist persons; only a “racist” person (read: a “hateful” individual) can lend support to a racist social structure. Thus, racist social structures persist despite the reportedly benign intentions of those of positions of racial privilege. Such thinking, while obviously held in bad faith, sheds responsibility for the implicit and unconscious biases that contribute to racial inequality. Those negative thoughts coming from without, as opposed to arising within an agent, cannot be ascribed moral blame. Behind most popular conceptions of interpersonal racism is the notion that one ought to be held accountable only for the crimes that they, as a locus of moral agency, bring into the world. Most Americans believe that being held accountable for the sins of one’s fathers and mothers is wrong (unless, of course, you’re the child of an immigrant desperately trying to enter the United States in which case being locked in a cage is appropriate). When it comes to responsibility and racism, one can thereby inhabit an unjust social structure and not bear personal responsibility for it.
Second, racism-as-hatred enables moral evasion by virtue of the fact that we lack access to an individual’s heart and mind. “I’ve also refrained from consistently characterizing him as a racist,” says House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) about President Trump. “Because at the end of the day, I don’t know what’s in his head, and I don’t know what’s in his heart.” This tendency provides an easy means of defense to Trump: To achieve doubt about one’s purported racism, all one has to do is generate enough second guessing, blame others for willful misrepresentation, or simply state “that is not what I meant” and the power of the charge of racism dissipates. (“How dare you claim to know what’s in my heart!”) Although this is obviously not what is intended by internalist approaches to racism, the reality of racism festers within such a framework. Insofar as the accused can claim that they do not maintain negative feelings towards an individual on account of their race, skepticism about this charge abounds. In a society like our own, where the presumption of innocence is interwoven with white identity, this skepticism is enough to get a white person off the hook.
If that’s not enough, in response to charge that his words evoke racism, President Trump, and Republicans more generally speaking, have eagerly commandeered the discourse of “hatred.” They castigate Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.)—all women of color—for allegedly hating “America” and everything it stands for. A person who loves their country doesn’t criticize it as they do, so the rhetoric goes, especially when the President is trying to protect America with his tough laws and policies. For this reason, these representatives are “un-American,” should leave the country, and return to wherever they came. This attitude holds that there is an essential racial group, cultural attitude, political view, or moral demeanor that is central to national membership. At bottom, it articulates a logic of belonging and nonbelonging that serves white supremacy.
In my opinion, the best philosophy seeks out and questions ideology lending support to an unjust status quo. In order to snap us out of our ideological slumber, philosophers and social theorists must be prepared to challenge preconceived notions and ideas, even if this means identifying “love” rather than hatred as the source for racism, as strange as that might sound. My theory of racism as self-love gets to the heart of many morally questionable actions today, such as police shootings of black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and unabashed white supremacy. In all of these examples, the need for self-preservation (either individual or collective) motivates racist behavior. Fear and uncertainty drive human behavior in ways that make appeals to self-preservation and the politics of security attractive. It pushes many Americans to ethical compromise and reveals the limits of their so-called morality.
The absence of intentional hatred or ill will is not enough to avoid the charge of racism. People can be racist for loving themselves too much, especially when such self-love requires maintaining or preserving the social conditions that result in the continual denigration of racialized others. Self-love racism is partly a consequence of an agent being insufficiently motivated to think in “non-racist” ways about racialized minorities on account of an overriding concern for the self. They deliberately abide by racist stereotypes and harbor racist expectations while navigating the social world, showing little to no concern for the oppressive, totalizing, and dangerous nature of such ways of thinking. In another sense, self-love racism amounts to the desire to maintain a specific socioeconomic and racial status quo insofar as this perpetuates the economy of value and social privilege attached to racial identities; it is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, esteem, wealth, privilege, and identity.
The current immigration debate provides an excellent example. One the one hand, you have migrants who are desperately trying to enter developed nations like the United States. Their actions are generated by self-preservation (amour de soi). On the other hand, you have the anti-immigrant movement desperately trying to keep migrants out as a threat to their way of life. If we let them all in, the argument goes, will this not bring down the rights, goods, and quality of life that the United States uniquely provides for its citizens? Won’t it destroy or tarnish the American Dream? This second sense of self-preservation (amour propre) finds value in maintaining global inequality. It also finds a parallel in attacking those who promote racial equity, since this would detract from the socioeconomic, cultural, and political value of whiteness in the United States. Thus, “make America great again” works on two fronts both of which speak towards egoism. It’s the desire to maintain the elevated status attached to being “American” (in a global context) and being white (in a domestic context).
Most philosophical analyses of racism explore how it is introduced into the world—that is, the ways an agent freely chooses to serve as the source for racist behavior. Racism as self-love, by contrast, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. As example, take the debate over reparations. As Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) put it, slavery took place in the past and most African Americans who would benefit from reparations didn’t personally experience it. Similarly, those whites who profited from slavery are long dead. By granting reparations, so the thought goes, we’re punishing one underserving group in favor of another underserving group. Racism as self-love is made for this maneuver. It does not seek to allocate responsibility for the creation of racism or racial oppression but instead focuses on the maintenance and preservation of racial injustice and privilege.
This is why promoting racial equality and combating racial privilege is perceived as a personal attack on white America. But this is not an attack on white people but an attack on white supremacy. For many white nationalists, there is no difference between the two. For those enamored and influenced by the myth of “the great replacement,” whiteness cannot thrive if white people are a minority. They believe that the United States and other white-majority nations are fundamentally altered and lessened if whites do not play the role they have in these countries today. Changing demographics pose an existential threat to them. “It’s nothing personal,” the El Paso shooter wrote in a statement, implying that he was not motivated by hatred of individual Latinos, per se. But he targeted Latinos because he felt his identity was under threat. He believed he could not continue as the person he is absent the social conditions that makes his identity possible, revealing a pernicious conflation of the community and the individual. Without white supremacy and the exceptionalism that undergirds it, he cannot be himself.
I hesitate to use these white nationalist terrorists as example. It’s easy to project “self-love” onto them, much like its easy to find examples of racist hatred in the past. The difficult question my theory poses is how to confront the myriad forms of investment many white people (and nonwhites too) have in the status quo today. I think that a majority of those in racially dominant positions love themselves aplenty. Proof lies in the unwillingness to take steps that would contribute to racial justice at the risk of losing some of their privileges. Racial justice cannot be cost-free. Most of the positive gains associated with white identity require the denigration of nonwhite peoples. They cannot, therefore, simply be redistributed equally to everyone. Disparities in salary and wage earnings, employment rates and opportunities, health care and general wellbeing, access to nutritious food and education, disproportionate incarceration rates, life expectancy, and more, would all be affected by efforts at engendering racial justice. Such a thought suggests that while glaring disparities in social, economic, and political statuses remain in place, perhaps “all lives [don’t] matter [in the same way].”
Is this to say that white people “shouldn’t matter” as much? Is the solution for white people to hate themselves? No. Self-hatred will get us nowhere. It is, however, a chance for white people to articulate what it means to be white absent any notion of supremacy. I have no idea what that looks like or if it’s possible, but I hope that by asking the question we are better off. On top of all this, it’s a chance for many poor whites, the overwhelming majority of America’s impoverished citizens, to reevaluate the value of white supremacy. Many poor white people would stand to do a lot better if they voted with their wallets or the future of their children (in terms of the environment) in mind and not from a standpoint of racial anxiety. Welfare platforms that benefit nonwhites would benefit them as well. But people are reluctant to let racial “privilege” go. What would it mean for them to “self-preserve,” in Rousseau’s sense of amour de soi, which, as he put it, can lead to “humanity” and “virtue” and learn how to love others, not only the self? We need to find an answer if we wish to confront the reality of racism today.
Photograph: First Lady Melania Trump holds the two-month-old son of Jordan and Andre Anchondo, as she and President Donald J. Trump pose for photos and meet members of the Anchondo family Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, at the University Medical Center of El Paso in El Paso, Texas. Jordan and Andre Anchondo were among the 22 people killed in a mass shooting Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
Grant J. Silva
Grant J. Silva is associate professor of philosophy at Marquette University. You can find him on Twitter @elprofesorsilva.
Published in Radical Philosophy – how about something from Counter-currents or the Council for European Canadians for a bit of balance?
I wonder, would you say sexism (or misogyny) is self-love?
Yes, self-love happens in gendered contexts as well. See the larger essay. Men wanting to persist as men, and therefore invested in existing gender/sex inequalities, is another form of self-love.
All my work/teaching on racism and criticism of whiteness is filtered through my participation in patriarchy. However, and I’m not saying you hold this view, to judge a theory of racism by how it works with sexism or misogyny can be problematic to say the least. Although there’s important work to be done at the intersections, I caution about expecting one theory to fit seamlessly in the other contexts.
Helpful, thanks!
‘Self-love’, in the case of Trump should read ‘psychopathy’. Such people often try to hide it behind a love of their nation but promoting their nation is only a front to promoting themselves. Hitler was a typical example. And another quote from Rousseau, which points to the origin of psychopathy, which is worth mentioning, is: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the founder of civic society”.
I agree. However, I’m not just worried about Trump. As I argue in the larger work, “self-love” is at the base of many morally questionable actions in our society today.
That is actually why people thought that Socrates was corrupting the youth. He was preaching a philosophy of self-love.
Yes, it is tonic to remember there is a world outside the White House (and the USA!) and that life will go on after 2020.
Solution? How about Plato’s ascent up the ladder of [self] love? As Plato wrote, if we are to do things in the right order, then self-love of a particular self (perhaps, one’s own self?) is a correct place to start.
However, we would remain somehow immature if we remained in that state. Hopefully, our thinking can become more elevated, and come to see that “others” are just as much selves as one’s own self, and that what is good and beautiful in our own selves is also similarly good and beautiful in other selves. This way, we can expand and grow our self-love to be more inclusive of all different kinds of selves.
You’re on to something here. The Greek idea or term that resembles Rousseau’s “self-love” the most is pleonexia. My read of the Republic–and the general sense of “know thy self” that undergirds many Platonic texts for that matter–is that it is a response to the human tendency towards pleonexia, i.e. greed, avarice, and envy, all of which represent imbalance and disharmony. Thanks for the comment.
You’re right. I agree that imbalance and disharmony comes from ignorance — but a particular kind of ignorance, namely not knowing what a self is in the first place, and then not knowing that others are selves too.
I mean it’s like the activity of eating, right? Being capable of putting the food into your mouth in the first place is a good thing. But then, there’s other things that one must do usually, such as chewing, swallowing. And then allowing the stomach sufficient “opportunity” to digest the food (eg, not deliberately regurgitating, or exercising vigorously afterwards, or taking medications to prevent absorption of the food in the stomach, etc). There would be something wrong if we started out the “eating” process by injecting our food into our stomachs directly or something like that. But it would also be somewhat pointless to stop at the first stage of eating.
Staying alive and persisting are the exact first principles, one might say, of Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology in the Ethics as well. Some might say this idea of thriving to exist is actually also in Aristotle too. Either way, the references to Rousseau are interesting. I teach philosophy & race undergraduate courses & we use Rousseau’s Dissertation…as a way to critique the social contract of his through Charles Mills’ work on the racial contract. Rousseau has said some pretty terrible things about other cultures, including that Indigenous women of color enjoy breast feeding as a sexually pleasurable experience & he said this in a way in which he assumed he was correct & to ‘demonstrate’ the uncivilized vs’ those who were civilized. He has many more examples that are also not correct & pretty damaging. I wish more of us who like Rousseau, or who used to, would discuss the illogical & societally terrible things he also said…
I don’t defend the crazy stuff Rousseau says about nonwestern indigenous peoples. His use of self-love is the type of hook I needed to get many philosophers who might not think about race or racism on board. That being said, if I based my work on reading philosophers who don’t say racist or sexist stuff there’d be no one left (not a justification). The history of philosophy is horrible!
I teach a grad course on “the underside of modernity,” a notion that comes out of liberation and decolonial philosophy, and its about reading modern thinkers in contexts where there comments on Indigenous peoples and nonwhites are taken seriously. I demonstrate how these claims are not tangential but central to their views. In fact, the main thesis is that there’d be no modernity without coloniality. Thus, I welcome your criticism.
If “self-love”, in its more vicious manifestations, leads individuals to appear better than others, to outdo others and to demand to be recognized for their social standing , wealth, privilege, etc. what is the motivation of non-Whites who claim White privilege other than the desire to join the ranks of such individuals? Nowhere is such motivation more viciously manifest than in Africa where the “elite” do everything possible to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi.
@john: more proof that the category of “race” is not only obsolete (eg, so-called “mixed race” people, and also where to draw the line between “race” as biology and “race” a socio-political category and/or culture?), but also potentially harmful and divisive due to its tendency to pander to the undesirable aspects of our spirited appetites (eg, overweening pride). And though I think we can talk about personal histories (eg, ancestors coming from Ireland for as far back as records go) or appearances (eg, medium-toned skin or green eyes) or other descriptions pertaining to biology (eg, having a certain particular genes in regards to this or that allele set), I think that it’s nonsensical to talk about “race”.
It is inconsistent, for one thing. If I make myself a cup of coffee in the morning and go do something and come back, I don’t expect to find a cup of milk in its place. But this is what “race” is like. Whatever I think that I know what it is for a person to be “black” or “white” or whatever, it’s only a blink of an eye before I no longer know because what it is to be “black” and “white” has changed. And as it turns out, all I’ve done is limited my own capacity for thinking and seeing the world for what it is by categorizing a group of people as being a certain way (eg, in terms of their character) based on their appearances. And if the categorization fails, then I’ve only harmed myself epistemically.
Nothing wrong with categorizing people by appearances, but if I do categorize by appearances, then I think that I should just do that more precisely, I should think (eg, people with blonde hair and blue eyes have blonde hair and blue eyes). And this might help prevent myself from attaching other irrelevant and not-necessarily true descriptions to a claim made about an appearance category (eg, that people with blonde hair and blue eyes are Christians or White Nationals or are insecure and have inferiority complexes and need constant reassurance by putting others down and only feel sufficiently strong in mob-formation and are too cowardly to be individuals).
[pls excuse any typos]
I do not agree that it is nonsensical to talk about race because denying that a problem exists does not solve it. If I suffer a puncture caused by a sharp stone it is nonsensical to refute that by arguing that sharp stones and rounded stones are identical except in appearance. The relevant issue is the relationship between sharp stones and punctures not chemistry or geology.
Similarly, the race issue is practical not philosophical. Also, it seems to me that that the argument raised in the article defeats itself.
If White racism is caused by vanity, how can that be the cause of inequality or injustice if all races are equally vain and there is no distinction between them? I agree that vanity is a problem but there is a differences between vanity and pride, as also between envy and ambition and cunning and creativity, all of which are non-physical. If these distinctions are all dismissed as false because indiscernible under a microscope, what of morality and, hence equality/justice?
However, the point I raised is a different one. Put simplistically, I am saying that the race issue is analogous to two people eating steak in a restaurant where one hopes to gain a share of the other’s meal by arguing that eating meat is immoral.
@john: I’m not sure what the eating meat analogy is about.
But I’ll tell you that I don’t belong to any particular “race”, and if you want to box me into a category that I don’t self-identify with, then that is just the sort of thing that you do, I guess.
I’ll also tell you that I refuse to think of you or any other human being as being some “race” — even if it’s just for the sake of my own epistemic health and sanity.
Also, (in regards to the comment below) I’m not sure what improvement has anything to do with it. Look, I’m ALL for a self. I just think that I’m more than an interchangeable cell in a large “black” or “white” golem, that’s all. I’m an individual, and I am not a symbol and I don’t represent other people who are involuntarily “like” me.
Think what you want. Just leave me out of it.
We seem to be at cross purposes. What I wrote is not about you (as you seem to assume) but about the ideas propounded in the relevant article. If you fail to understand even that, further discussion is pointless especially as I do not accept solipsism as a rational philosophy.
Adding to my previous response, in my view, the general characteristic that distinguishes man from beast is the capacity for self-improvement. Blaming others for one’s lack of self-improvement is the antithesis of that and sympathizing with that strategy aggravates rather than solves the problem.
The article is very good, but it is a bit “funny” in quoting Rousseau’s idea of amour de soi and amour propre so boldly, and saying that to move away from racism, all one has to do is recognise racial labels as amour propre and then bin the feeling from our soul. I say it’s a bit “funny” because the consequence of figuring out how to do this caused Rousseau to recommend the very controversial of a totalitarian dictatorship of the general will. Apparently, Rousseau thinks that somehow people can come to terms with a legitimate general will through regular public discussions and simply enforce this general will above people’s individual desires. This seems to be the general thrust of the whole Western project of eliminating racism – through a series of ground-breaking public theatrics as exemplified by MLK & BLM that suppresses, above all else, the notion of white privilege in public discourse. I’m not disagreeing with the main conclusions of the article – that racism is a manifestation of amour propre – but I would also say that it doesn’t address the elephant in the room: the “how” of isolating our amour propre from our amour de soi. Envy of wealth, power, political legitimacy, prestige etc. are the stuff of republican politics, and with this envy-fueled struggle it’s natural for the “superior” to be separated from the “inferior”, whether that is by class, race, religion, nationality, or any other criteria. Thus, to the author of this article I would ask what I feel to be the much more important question – how to reduce envy to manageable levels, such that it doesn’t threaten republican democracy and bring down political order? Does the author think the clear separation of people’s true “nature” from our natural proclivities to group ourselves into communities of certain characteristics will automatically “fix” racism, even as we continue to envy as we did before? Does the author thinks that there is ,in fact, much more that can be done besides to fix racism in America/the world besides being more educated on how racism manifests within the soul?