by Rachel Robison-Greene
In my youth I used to play in the wooded area behind my parent’s house in a space that seemed, from the vantage point of a child, to be vast. Those areas exist now only in precious cloudy corners of my memory. In the external world, they have long been replaced by housing developments and strip malls. Then, rain or snow may have threatened to keep me indoors. Now the children are kept inside by fire season, when the air is toxic, the sun is some new color, and the nearby mountains disappear from view. “Fire season has always existed”, I am told, and some people believe it.
I was taught that the structure of the government of the United States would prevent any one branch from exerting tyrannical power over the people. Elected officials craft legislation and well-qualified, appointed judges protect against the tyranny of the majority. “Judges can’t stand in the way of the will of the President” and “this country has never been a democracy”, I am told, and some people believe it.
The political climate is changing faster than many of us can absorb, and we are left wandering the woods during fire season without any visible and reliable points of reference to guide us home. We can only hope that we leave the fog resembling the people we were when we entered it. I find myself wondering which changes I’ll be willing to accept. Will I come to regard some of my values as relics of a bygone era and will I be forced into that position by a sheer will to survive? Is this change in myself something to be feared?
It is a painful but common feature of the human experience to be afraid of our own capacity for change. As Jean Paul Sartre puts the point, “if nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss.” I may experience fear at the prospect that I may be pushed from the cliff, but I feel anguish at the possibility that, when I find myself at the cliff’s edge, I might jump. Perhaps more disturbingly, I might find myself changing in fundamental ways that I currently find unacceptable. Should I spend my time fearing that possibility?
The philosopher David Hume argued that we do not experience causation. Instead, we experience constant conjunction and we become habituated to make causal judgments. We see that one event reliably precedes another, and we become disposed to think that one event caused the other. Causation itself is a phenomenon that we never experience.
One subset of this phenomenon is change on a personal level (since change involves cause and effect). A person may reflect over the course of their life and notice that change has occurred, but in doing so, they never observe the change itself. They only find themself existing on one side or another of it, no matter how significant it is. When we fear change to our identity, we fear something we will never actually experience. I find myself aware of new and different values and interests, but I never actually experience change.
What might this entail about how we ought to feel about changes to our fundamental identity characteristics? Insights from discourse concerning the fear of death might be useful here. Philosophers from all times and traditions have, unsurprisingly, reflected on this central event in human life. Stoics and Epicureans have argued that fear of one’s own death is irrational and ought to be habituated against. There are at least two reasons for this. First, death is unavoidable. Second, it is not something that we experience. A person is rational in their fear if and only if it might assist them in avoiding something that is genuinely bad for them. In order for that thing to be bad, there must be a subject who actually experiences the badness. Fear of death meets neither of these conditions and can get in the way of living a flourishing life. It can distract us from where our focus should really be which, for the Stoic, is on living virtuously.
We might think, then, that the same features that govern the rationality of the fear of death apply equally to fear of change on a personal level. Change to one’s identity is unavoidable. I may not know how I will change, but I can be certain that I will. A person also never experiences change to their character. They may simply go to bed one night a fan of punk rock and wake in the morning unable to listen to anything but jazz. The punk could spend time agonizing over their fear of change or they could instead realize that the change is something that they’ll never actually experience. Agonizing about the inevitability of change prevents us from focusing on other, more worthwhile things.
Some philosophers have argued that negative emotions such as anger and fear ought to be avoided in a broader range of contexts. For example, in Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, The Monarchy of Fear, she argues that fear is destructive to democracy. She describes it as primitive and asocial. She says “We do not survive it without being formed, and deformed, by it. Fear, genetically first among the emotions, persists beneath all and infects them all, nibbling around the edges of love and reciprocity.” Fear is an emotion that we share in common with non-human animals; we begin by fearing pain and then, when we have the concept, our own death. Later, we can be easily manipulated into fearing the faceless “other” who we can be led to believe is the source of all of our suffering. She argues that we should step back from fear to focus instead on forward looking attitudes and action such as “hope, love, and work.”
Philosophers don’t often think of fear as a moral emotion. As we’ve seen, some have argued that it is irrational and counterproductive, at least under many circumstances. But perhaps that is shortsighted. Negative emotions can be important for moral motivation.
We have very good evidence for the conclusion that our own values could change dramatically. By the time we reach adulthood, we have likely already experienced these changes in ourselves and we witness such changes in others on a regular basis. We also have good reason to believe that people who previously seemed to have strong moral characters have succumbed to significant social pressures and have changed their values. We admire change when it is grounded in good evidence and sound argument, but more often changes are motivated by self-interest, unhealthy other-directed fear, and in-group/ out-group dynamics. The reasonable conclusion is that, since I am not immune to the same cognitive biases that infect others, those biases could infect me. The apt emotion toward that possibility may well be fear. Fear may motivate me to remain steadfast.
As we stumble about in the impenetrable bad air of the current political environment, it is easy to forget how things looked at the starting point. As we squirm to soften the blows that we personally experience, it might be easier to distort our view of the facts. In doing so, we risk sacrificing respect for the humanity of other people, putting significant obstacles in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and justice, and dismantling forever our cherished democratic institutions.
It is inevitable that we will change, but the nature of that change remains to be seen. Perhaps it is best for me to retain a healthy fear of myself and what I might be inclined to do. If I find myself peering into a moral abyss, I should remain afraid that I might jump.
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