Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Not So Different After All

Not So Different After All 



Frans de Waal On Animal Intelligence And Emotions 


For a long time the Dutch American ethologist and zoologist Frans de Waal was told by senior scientists that studying emotions in animals was off-limits. But while working with chimpanzees and other primates in the Netherlands in the 1970s, he observed behaviors that seemed to match human expressions of emotions — and why not? Chimps are our closest animal relatives. In the last twenty-five years many scientists have caught up with de Waal’s observations, and the notion that animals have emotions is no longer so controversial. Over the course of his long career he has conducted studies showing that our fellow mammals exhibit jealousy, grief, forgiveness, and more. He believes there “are no uniquely human emotions.” 

His latest book, Mama’s Last Hug, takes its title from an emotional display de Waal witnessed between Mama, the matriarch of the chimpanzee colony at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands, and de Waal’s biologist mentor Jan van Hooff, the cofounder of the colony. For decades Mama had been the loved and respected “alpha female” of her primate community, brokering reconciliations, soothing hurt feelings, and building coalitions. Before she died in April 2016, just shy of her fifty-ninth birthday, van Hooff, then seventy-nine, paid her a final visit. In a tender embrace captured on camera, Mama stroked van Hooff’s white hair despite the arthritis in her hands. The trust and love between these two elderly hominids was palpable. After Mama died, the other chimps washed and groomed her body. “For me,” de Waal writes, “the question has never been whether animals have emotions, but how science could have overlooked them for so long.” 

As he details in his book, de Waal had a close relationship with Mama, too. He was the one who’d named her in the 1970s, while studying primates at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo. He had said goodbye to her months earlier, before returning to his work at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, where he is director of the Living Links Center

De Waal earned his PhD in biology from the University of Utrecht before moving to the United States in the 1980s; published his first popular book, Chimpanzee Politics, in 1982; and has since become a world-renowned expert on the similarities and differences between human and other animal behavior. He has studied capuchin monkeys, elephants, the crow genus of birds, and other species — but most extensively our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. When we scratch our scalps while solving a problem, he says, or feel the hairs on the back of our necks stand up when frightened, or brush a loose hair from the shoulder of our spouse, we are exhibiting typical primate behavior. 

De Waal is also the author of The Age of Empathy, The Bonobo and the Atheist, and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? His articles have been published in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and professional journals specializing in animal behavior and cognition. In 2007 Time named him one of its hundred most influential people in the world. His TED Talks and lectures have been viewed and shared millions of times online, and he’s a frequent guest on radio and television programs. 

Now seventy-one years old, Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal — “Frans” for short — lives in Smoke Rise, Georgia, with his wife, Catherine. I had arranged to interview him in person before the COVID-19 pandemic made travel inadvisable, but he agreed to meet via video chat instead. We quickly overcame the awkwardness of relating through a computer screen and had a wide-ranging discussion interrupted by a few Wi-Fi glitches. He speaks excellent English, although at times his accent and sentence structures reveal his Dutch roots. At one point, while we discussed our childhood pets, he moved his camera to show me one of his many tropical-fish tanks. “The big fish do sometimes eat the little fish, so you have to be careful which ones you mix together,” he said. It wasn’t the last time he would point out that the natural world contains plenty of danger, along with great beauty and complexity. 

Leviton: Darwin wrote that the difference in mind between humans and higher animals is “one of degree and not of kind.” What do you think he meant? 

De Waal: I think Darwin meant that the way we think is not fundamentally different from the way other species think, and I’m completely in agreement with him, even though people have attacked him for it over the years and said this was one of the things he was wrong about. There are some elements to human thought processes that are special, but the whole structure of cognition — how it works, what we can comprehend, how we find solutions to problems — is not so different. Human cognition is a variety of animal cognition. 

Leviton: Why do you think some people have such a hard time accepting that idea? 

De Waal: It’s strange, especially at a time when neuroscience is showing us the similarities between the monkey brain and the human brain. For instance, there’s no part of a human brain that you don’t also find in a monkey brain. There are no synapses or transmitters that are different. Even the blood supply is the same. We do have bigger brains, it’s true, which is certainly important. 

Let me tell you a funny story about that. Five or six years ago some scientists were saying maybe we shouldn’t look at the brain’s size; the number of neurons might be a better measure of the brain’s power. And we thought humans came out on top in terms of neurons, so that was fine with everybody — until we found that elephants actually have three times as many neurons as humans. Certain people scrambled for an explanation of that, and now we don’t hear as much about counting neurons anymore. 

That’s typically the human attitude: we need to be on top, and some people don’t want to hear about any evidence that animals can do things we cannot do or have some abilities we don’t have. For example, bats use echolocation, determining position by sending out and receiving sound waves, which is extremely complex. Ask any engineer who designs radar systems for airplanes. But because we are, in our minds, far above bats in the hierarchy of species, they don’t impress us. 

Chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, and when they show extraordinary ability, some researchers get upset. Ayumu is a chimpanzee who lives at the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, and his memory puts human memory to shame. He can remember the location and order of numbers flashed on a screen better than most humans. And though humans become less accurate when the time they see the numbers is shortened to 210 milliseconds, it doesn’t bother Ayumu. When he competed against a British memory champion, who was known for his ability to memorize an entire stack of cards, Ayumu won the contest. 

We always look for traits that mark humans as special. Language is such a strong marker of humanity that in the eighteenth century a French bishop was ready to baptize an ape if he could demonstrate speech. In the 1950s we tried to teach language to apes, and it turned out they weren’t so great at it — not even at the level of a three-year-old child. But the apes still did much more than we thought they would, so the findings were hotly debated. 

Leviton: We know animals communicate. Why isn’t that considered language? 

De Waal: Linguists originally defined language as “symbolic communication.” Then apes showed the ability to use two or three hundred symbols, so linguists switched the definition: now language was not just symbolic; it had to be syntactical, meaning it had to have identifiable rules and processes governing structure. Even though we have a few studies that show a limited amount of syntax in animal communication, that’s still the dividing line. But it’s interesting that linguists had to change their definition as a result of the achievements of animals. 

Apes aren’t the only nonhuman creatures capable of using symbolic communication. Bees dance to communicate about things they cannot presently see. The duration of a dance indicates geographical information about food sources, for example. 

Leviton: It seems to me we don’t look at an animal’s life the way we look at our own. It’s like we don’t want to admit that bats are every bit as good at being bats as we are at being human. 

De Waal: Yes, it’s a very anthropocentric enterprise. People sometimes ask me about ape-language studies, which have never impressed me. They say, “Don’t you want to talk to your chimps?” Well, no. I personally don’t see what I would get out of that. I’m much more impressed by how they communicate with and relate to other chimps. 

We did experiments in which chimpanzees could work together on an apparatus, and we found they had ways of recruiting each other that we did not understand. We’d see a chimp approach another, and then they would walk to the machine we’d set up and start working together as if they’d agreed to collaborate. We’ve never figured out how they communicated the plan. 

All species have complex communication. Dolphins produce a signature whistle, a high-pitched sound with a modulation that is unique for each individual. Females keep the same melody for their whole lives, but the males adjust their melody over time, until all the calls within a male alliance sound alike. We haven’t yet discovered why. 

Leviton: Tools were once an important marker of human superiority. How do animals compare to us in their use of tools? 

De Waal: The first studies that dealt with animal cognition were about the use of tools by chimpanzees. These were done by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler a century ago. He was very much hated by the behaviorists — led by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner — who believed all animal behavior was the result of associative learning [a process in which a behavior is followed by a positive or negative stimulus that reinforces or discourages the behavior in the future — Ed.]. I’ve been at meetings where the behaviorists could not even pronounce the name Köhler, because they would be so upset. Köhler, Köhler! [Laughs.] He was the first to say animals could think, based on his work with chimpanzees. He’d hang a banana very high and give chimps sticks and boxes. And he would not train them. Behaviorists train their test subjects by giving them little rewards for every move they make. Köhler wouldn’t do that. And, after a half hour or so, one of Köhler’s chimps would stack the boxes, climb up with a stick, and get the banana. He concluded that this chimp had had an insight — in German, Einsicht — and solved the problem in his or her head. This was the opposite of what animals were supposed to do. They were supposed to operate completely on trial and error. 

Now we have “insight learning” studies on all kinds of species, not just apes. Edward Tolman, who studied rats and has a building named after him at the University of California, Berkeley, talked about rats’ “mental maps.” A rat doesn’t just learn to go right or left as a result of behavioral rewards, Tolman said; he develops a map in his head of the whole maze. 

The reason Tolman ended up in Berkeley was because the East Coast establishment were strict Skinnerians [followers of B.F. Skinner]. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we finally started to win the battle with the behaviorists, and those who talked about animal cognition got a foothold and got funding for experiments. We don’t yet have a grand theory of cognition, but at least we have abandoned Skinner’s reductionist idea that it’s all mechanical, a result of reward and punishment. 

Leviton: When I studied psychology in the 1960s, I remember it being very divided between behaviorists and those I thought of as humanists. The Skinnerians believed people, too, were like automatons. There was something almost fascistic about it. 

De Waal: Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, written in 1948, is a rejection of free will and posits that cultures and people can be engineered to be a certain way. So, yes, behaviorism had that element, that emphasis on control. I was trained in Europe, where Skinner was not nearly as strong an influence. In the U.S. behaviorism was almost a religion. My book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? has a lot in it about these battles with behaviorists. People who read it now may wonder what all the fuss was about, but it was a big deal at the time. 

How much we know now about animal cognition and animal emotions is uncomfortable for some people. It does mean we need to pay attention to how we treat animals. 

Leviton: In philosophical and practical terms, what’s the difference between studying animals in laboratory conditions and in the wild? 

De Waal: There used to be a tremendous amount of tension surrounding this. Initially we considered fieldwork nonscientific. Places like the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, which was established in 1930, were the standard. We worked with captive apes, and we did controlled experiments. When researchers went into the wild and saw glimpses of apes’ natural behavior, other scientists were not impressed. Then people like Jane Goodall went into the field in the early 1960s and stayed longer. They didn’t just see glimpses. They were living with the chimps. They watched their behavior develop over time, saw them raise their young, and started to recognize all the individuals in a community. Then fieldwork became more serious, and we began to respect it. The field-workers started to look down on work with captive apes and criticized the artificial environment the apes lived in as a kind of prison. 

Now the field-workers are encountering difficulties because ape habitats are under threat or have disappeared. And they need labs, because they want to analyze feces and urine and blood samples. They want to examine the DNA of animals or their hormone levels. So we have lots of collaboration between laboratories and field-workers. We’ve found a balance. 

Experiments with captive apes have also gotten much more advanced. We sometimes discover things field-workers don’t know about. For example, when I was a student, I found out chimpanzees sometimes reconciled after fights. It was only twenty or thirty years later that field-workers observed that process in the wild. So sometimes the knowledge flows one way, sometimes the other. We realize it’s basically different pieces of the same puzzle. I can solve in captivity some issues the field-workers can never solve, and they can see natural behavior I might never see in captivity. We need each other to arrive at a full picture of a species. 

Leviton: Don’t the field-workers in primatology have the same problem that anthropologists have — that their own presence influences the behavior of their subjects and skews the data? 

De Waal: Yes, in the field someone might work on baboons and conclude that they very seldom suffer predation, but it’s partly because the researchers’ presence scares away the predators. Pristine environments don’t exist anymore, and the human presence affects everything. 

It’s the same in captivity. We influence the animals there, too. But captive research has advantages in some situations. In the field, if there’s a big fight involving ten chimps, most of the participants will disappear for long periods, and researchers have to reconstruct what happened from clues. There’s a lot of speculation there. In captivity I can see the subjects at all times. If there’s a fight, I know exactly how it started and ended. 

Leviton: How is your facility designed to let you observe? 

De Waal: The chimps live in a large outdoor enclosure with grass and a climbing structure. We have a building and can try to call them in by name, but they come only if they want to come. We can’t force them. The building has food and air-conditioning, so there are certain incentives for them to come inside. They usually stay for less than an hour. Our big challenge is to get certain individuals to come in. Maybe we want A and B to do a test, not C and D. But A has a big fight with B, so that’s not going to happen today. 

Once they are in the building, we offer touch-screen tasks or a cooperation task, where they can give each other tokens or food. After the experiment, we send them out again. Our experiments never involve anything painful or problematic. If we did that, they would never come inside again! [Laughs.] We want them to leave in a good mood. 

Leviton: Can they decide to come in themselves when they want to? 

De Waal: We haven’t managed to do that. We have to let them in. But at the Kyoto Primate Research Institute, the chimps live in an open area and can come in anytime to work on a computer. And the researchers have a camera at the computer, so they know who is generating the data. The chimp might work for ten minutes, then leave. 

Chimps love computers. You don’t even need to reward them with food to get them to use one. When we first started using computers, we didn’t have touch screens; we had joysticks. We started very simply. For example, there would be a big red dot on the screen, and the chimps would use the joystick to move a cursor to the dot. As soon as they did, they got a reward. From there you move on to more-complex tasks. 

Some have argued that the move from a hunter-gatherer way of life to agriculture and the domestication of animals was the worst decision Homo sapiens ever made. It profoundly changed our relationship to animals. 

Leviton: The ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whom you call “the maestro of observation,” believed love and respect were necessary conditions for doing effective investigations of the lives of animals. What did he mean when he urged “holistic contemplation” of other species? 

De Waal: Biologist E.O. Wilson, who studies ants, has said there are two types of biologists: The naturalists, like Lorenz and himself, who want to understand the whole organism in all its ecological relations, cognition — everything. And the specialists, who want to know one thing — for instance, what is the best reward schedule for a pigeon to learn a specific behavior? The animal itself and everything that comes with it is of no particular interest to them. 

We have a lot of specialists nowadays, and I find it a little disturbing to meet a student who’s going into the field with a very specific hypothesis to test. I always ask, “Why would you have that hypothesis before you’ve even seen the animals? Why don’t you just absorb what they do, and then develop your ideas about them?” 

What Lorenz meant by “holistic contemplation” is the desire to know everything about another species: how they lay eggs, how they raise babies, what they eat — even if some of it isn’t part of your initial interest. Everything you learn, placed in the bigger context of the animal’s life, makes it more interesting, in my opinion. 

Most primatologists really love their animals and are passionate about their lives. But you sometimes also meet scientists who don’t particularly like their animals. These people do exist. They’re very rare among primatologists, though. 

It also helps to be open to surprises. That’s true of all sciences. People who keep their eyes open pick up on things that are new and are ready to dive into them. Other people go around with blinders. They have a theory, and everything has to fit into the theory. Everything that falls outside the theory, they don’t see. Most of us are open-minded. 

Leviton: Did you have that type of open-minded curiosity when you were a child? 

De Waal: Yes, I always had animals as a child — fish and salamanders and birds and mice. I read everything I could about them, at a time when there really wasn’t that much to read — at least, in the Netherlands. When I went to the university as an undergraduate biology student, I was disappointed because all I saw were dead animals. They had us cut up rats and other animals, and plants also. I saw the inside of animals but not their behavior. For my doctorate I went to the University of Utrecht, where I began to study with Jan van Hooff, and I eventually wrote my dissertation about the behavior of macaques. 

Leviton: As a child I had pets like fish and turtles, but their deaths really bothered me. In some cases — like when my guppy gave birth and gobbled up her offspring — I was truly horrified. It put me off having pets for the rest of my life. You must have seen a lot of violent behavior studying animals. How do you deal with it? 

De Waal: It’s true. Chimps can be violent, even brutal, with each other. They can kill each other. We’ve had it happen. I see this as being part of nature. After my last book, Mama’s Last Hug, which is about animal emotions, I’m often asked if I eat meat. I do. I know very few vegetarian or vegan biologists. I think it’s because we see all kinds of animals eating each other. We don’t find it morally reprehensible; it’s just how nature works. Now, the treatment of farm animals — that I see as a problem. But the eating part, no. The lion eats the antelope. We like the lion, and we like the antelope. This is just the way it is. You have to get used to it. 

Leviton: I guess I see this as part of a larger question: Even if we evolved to eat meat, can’t we use our moral sense to overcome that part of our nature? 

De Waal: I could see a nutritional argument, an ecological argument, or an animal-welfare argument for vegetarianism, but the eating of meat is not intrinsically immoral, in my opinion. As a biologist, that’s how I look at the world. 

One of the convenient things about behaviorism was that it simplified the moral question by claiming animals were dumb. Animals didn’t have emotions, cognitive processes, consciousness. So you could do whatever you wanted with them: keep pigs in tiny lockups, put a bolt into the cow’s head. The moral convenience of behaviorism may be why it lingered for so long, even though it didn’t have much of a scientific basis. 

How much we know now about animal cognition and animal emotions is uncomfortable for some people. It does mean we need to pay attention to how we treat animals. 

With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet. Animal diseases can jump to humans with disastrous results. Turns out it might not be so good for us to treat animals like shit. 

Some have argued that the move from a hunter-gatherer way of life to agriculture and the domestication of animals was the worst decision Homo sapiens ever made. It profoundly changed our relationship to animals. If you think about it, the hunter has respect for the animals he hunts. He knows how good they are at fighting back, how good they are at escaping; that you will never find them if they don’t want to be found. The farmer, in contrast, is in a dominant position and loses perspective. Small farmers may still be close to their animals and know them by name and so on, but on these big factory farms? No. Agriculture has not helped the human-animal relationship. 

Leviton: We give a lot of attention to chimpanzees, but bonobos are just as close to us genetically. We share about 98.7 percent of our DNA with them. Some people find them more interesting to study. 

De Waal: They are equally as relevant as chimpanzees, because they are equally close to us. You know, I’m partly responsible for making bonobos so popular. I described their sex lives, the way they make up after fights, and things like that. Still, there is a group of scientists who want to put the bonobos to the side, because the chimpanzee fits much better with their violent scenarios of human evolution. According to them, the history of humanity consists of eliminating others, killing the Neanderthals, conquering the world, being aggressive. If you build your whole evolutionary scenario on the proposition that humans are violent, males are dominant, and women barely matter, what do you do with bonobos, who are sex oriented and female dominated? They are just too peaceful, gentle, and matriarchal to fit into the myth of humans as “killer apes.” For example, female bonobos rub their genitals, their clitorises, together. I used to hear researchers say, “You call that ‘sex’? That’s just affectionate behavior.” I’d tell them, “If that’s not sex, try doing it in the middle of Times Square and see how fast you end up in jail!” [Laughs.] 

Many female primatologists love bonobos. Among the general public, bonobos are popular especially with women and the LGBTQ community, and for good reason. But other researchers ignore bonobos and downplay the amount of cooperation in human societies. For example, Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argues that humans have become less aggressive over time, thanks to civilization. That story makes sense only if we were very aggressive to begin with. To make his point, Pinker uses the chimpanzee as his main example of inherent primate behavior. He describes all the horrible things chimpanzees do to each other. He pushes bonobos aside because they don’t fit his story line. But if we started our theory of human development with bonobos, it would refute his scenario, because we’d be seen as inherently more peaceful and cooperative from the start. 

It’s not all peace and love with bonobos, though. I recently went to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to visit the biggest bonobo sanctuary in the world, Lola ya Bonobo. The name means “Paradise for Bonobos” in the Lingala language. All the groups there are dominated by an alpha female. You might think these females would be pleasant and nice, but they are very strict. They punish bonobos who don’t act right. The males have a hard time and will get away to a different part of the sanctuary if the females are not in a good mood. 

Leviton: What does it mean to call a primate an “alpha”? Does it differ from the way the term is used in popular culture? 

De Waal: The phrase “alpha male” was introduced for wolves by Rudolph Schenkel, a Swiss ethologist, in the 1940s. In my book Chimpanzee Politics, I describe alpha males as leaders who keep the group together, keep the peace, and build alliances. They are empathic and often act as the “consoler-in-chief,” interceding in fights and sticking up for the underdogs. 

Now, in the business world, we see all these books about how to be an alpha male: basically, how to beat up your opponents, how to make them feel you are the boss, and how to attract women (who supposedly flock to these types). I sometimes speak to business groups and have to remind them that an alpha male or alpha female can have many different personality types. They can be bullies or coalition-building experts. They are not always the strongest physically. In my TED Talk about this, I speak about the chimpanzee Amos, an alpha male who got sick. He was liked by the other chimps, and while he was ailing, they brought him food and propped him up with the material they used to make nests. They respected him even when he was vulnerable and his days as the alpha were coming to an end. 

Not all alpha males have such an easy time of it. They might be violently deposed. That’s one of the costs of being the alpha: others want your position. Sometimes we see old males who are no longer the alpha but still have considerable power behind the scenes, so to speak. 

Chimpanzees who want to overthrow an alpha often become very generous in the months before their big move. To gain support within the group, they begin to tickle the infants, even though they’re not usually interested in them. It’s like politicians who kiss babies during the campaign. 

Leviton: The chimp you named Mama was a very successful alpha female. 

De Waal: Yes, for forty years she was the queen of the Royal Burgers’ Zoo colony in Arnhem, the Netherlands. My book Mama’s Last Hug is partly a tribute to how extraordinary she was. It’s true the males always dominate in chimpanzee colonies, but I make a distinction between dominance and power. You can have greater physical strength, but that doesn’t mean you have more power. The physically biggest male may not have the skills to be the alpha. He might not make the right friends or cut the right deals. Mama had much more power than many of the succession of alpha males who came and went during her time there. She and the oldest male — who was not the alpha — basically ran the group for decades. You might see this in an office: everyone knows who the bosses are, but one of their secretaries makes most day-to-day decisions. This is why I describe a chimpanzee colony as having “politics.” 

Leviton: You coined the word anthropodenial, which is the opposite of anthropomorphism. 

De Waal: I developed the word because anthropomorphism had become the insult of choice aimed at people like me, who talk about animal cognition and emotions. If I said a dog showed jealousy, they’d say, “Don’t be anthropomorphic. You’re always ascribing human traits to animals. Your dog cannot be ‘jealous’ — that’s a human term.” I always felt that, for apes, anthropomorphism is irrelevant. They are obviously human-like in their behavior, their anatomy, their brain structure. I don’t see the issue with using human terminology to describe them. So I had to find a counterword, to describe many scientists who were in denial about the similarities between species. 

Psychology has really changed, though. Neuroscience has shown that the brain of a rat and the brain of a human have similar qualities. So psychologists have shifted their position. 

But anthropology still emphasizes human specialness. Anthropologists hold meetings about what makes humans unique — they use the word successful, as in “Why are humans the most successful species on earth?” They don’t say “superior” because that word has negative associations now, but successful means pretty much the same thing. I don’t think humans are so successful, by the way. We’re destroying the planet. 

Leviton: Is this connected to why you don’t like to call other animals “nonhuman”? 

De Waal: I’ve never liked that word, as if they are unfortunate creatures who have the bad luck to be not human — as if we are the center of the universe. Why not refer to ourselves as “nonelephant”? [Laughs.]

Thursday, June 18, 2020

After Cosmopolitanism


After Cosmopolitanism


Stuart Whatley Hedgehog Review

The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal


Martha C. Nussbaum 

Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that “urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.” 

The cosmopolitan tradition has its roots in the fourth century BCE, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “citizen of the world” (kosmopolitês), and insisted on the dignity of all people, no matter their origin or rank. His example would go on to inform Greek and Roman Stoicism, conceptions of international and natural law and human rights, and much else in Western political philosophy. Yet as Nussbaum shows, cosmopolitanism, owing to its origins, has always been vulnerable to a critique from within. “Precisely because they are so determined to insist that the basis for moral duties is never effaced by life’s contingencies and hierarchies,” she writes, many exponents of cosmopolitanism refuse to acknowledge the extent to which penury can limit one’s capacity to exercise individual agency, moral or otherwise. As a result, to this day, cosmopolitanism—be it in the form of trade and capital market liberalization, the contemporary human-rights regime, or liberal internationalism—tends to make insufficient provision for the amelioration of poverty, inequality, malnutrition, and other socioeconomic deficiencies. 

Nussbaum’s journey through the cosmopolitan tradition begins with Cicero, particularly his final treatise, De Officiis (On Duties), which she regards as a foundational contribution to the Western tradition of political philosophy. In that work, Cicero makes a distinction between “duties of justice,” which he sees as strict and universal, and “duties of material aid,” which are far more discretionary. In practical terms, duties of justice oblige us to prevent, punish, or otherwise object to crimes such as torture, rape, and murder wherever they occur; that is, we must not only avoid such unjust acts, but also intervene to prevent them if we are able. Duties of material aid imply merely that there are instances when we should extend assistance to the needy, but with a preference for those in our own family, tribe, or nation. 

Nowadays, the Ciceronian distinction between duties is manifested in the difference between “first-generation” religious and political rights and “second-generation” economic and social rights. But Nussbaum sees this bifurcation as incoherent. If one has a duty to prevent aggressive war, torture, rape, and other crimes, one likewise ought to prevent hunger and poverty. And besides, upholding political justice costs as much money as, and usually more than, providing material aid does. Inasmuch as one accepts the universality of human dignity, one must acknowledge all assaults upon it, whatever form they take. 

Tracking the evolution of cosmopolitan thinking over time, Nussbaum finds a partial corrective to Cicero in the works of Hugo Grotius and Adam Smith, the founding fathers of international law and economics, respectively. Although Smith was thoroughly influenced by the Stoics, he broke from them in recognizing that economic and material conditions are indispensable ingredients of human dignity. Nonetheless, when it comes to upholding duties of justice and aid, Nussbaum notes, “Smith actually takes Cicero’s unhelpful distinction even further than Cicero did,” because he makes no allowance for positive duties (what one ought to do). 

For Smith, justice implies only negative duties (what one ought not to do), such that, as he writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.” Still, between Cicero’s recognition of both positive and negative duties and Smith’s acknowledgment of the importance of material conditions, Nussbaum finds a “moral starting point” for thinking about justice in the modern context. 

As for Grotius, she credits the seventeenth-century legal theorist with bringing Stoic cosmopolitan thinking into a modern world defined by diverse models of human and economic development and competing conceptions of the good. Grotius assigned significant moral weight to the nation-state, but also made an argument for international redistribution that remains radical to this day. In a Grotian system, Nussbaum explains, there are “certain minimum welfare rights for all world citizens, even when the wherewithal to meet those needs must come from another nation’s store.” 

But how such claims are to be determined and adjudicated remains unresolved. Nussbaum’s intent is not to argue for a world government; nor does she put much store in the modern system of foreign aid. Rather, her purpose is to determine whether cosmopolitanism can be made sufficient for a world in which it has already become necessary—that is, a world of nation-states comprising individuals on deeply unequal material footings, who are nonetheless more interconnected than ever. 

Nussbaum concludes that the cosmopolitan tradition “must be revised but need not be rejected.” She proposes that it be replaced by her own version of the “Capability Approach” to development. Conceived by the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen as an alternative to the prevailing mode of Western-exported market fundamentalism, the Capability Approach challenges the central tenets of economic globalization in its modern context: free trade, floating exchange rates, capital account and labor market “liberalization,” and so forth. In lieu of a sole focus on GDP and strictly monetary metrics of growth, the Capability Approach advocates a concern with the positive freedoms and opportunities that follow from investments in education, health care, leisure, environmental sustainability, and other factors. 

But does the cosmopolitan tradition have more to offer to Nussbaum than to her opponents, market liberals? “Insisting that all entitlements have an economic and social aspect,” as she characterizes her stance, implies some role for economic redistribution. The leading Stoics in the cosmopolitan tradition, however, seemed to oppose redistribution and, in many cases, even taxation. “Concord,” wrote Cicero, “cannot exist when money is taken from some and bestowed upon others.” Likewise, as Seneca wrote in his essay On the Happy Life, “The wise man…does not love wealth but he would rather have it...and what wealth is his he does not reject but keeps, wishing it to supply greater scope for him to practice his virtue.” 

No less instrumental to a market-oriented outlook is the Stoic view that material needs are irrelevant to the realization of human fulfillment. More to the point, this contention is inextricably bound up with cosmopolitanism’s conception of natural equality, because membership in the Stoic “polity of the cosmos” depends on the one thing we humans share regardless of wealth or status—the capacity for moral reasoning. Precisely because the existence of this common denominator is deduced by stripping away all “external” variables, any consideration of material means would call it into question. 

Stoic advice for conquering the “passions” and, as Marcus Aurelius put it, approaching “each action as though it were your last,” have long had a practical appeal, which is why Stoicism has been ransacked by corporate consultants and self-help gurus in recent years. But more broadly, Stoic thinking can easily become an alibi for iniquitous socioeconomic arrangements. After all, if true freedom is exclusively available within the self—through mastery of the passions and acceptance of the whims of Fortune—then it is consonant with the natural outcome of “free markets.” 

For the same reason, Stoic cosmopolitanism has long served as the basis for a particularly business-friendly conception of natural law. Proponents of this view believe that, like the outcomes of free markets, the conventions governing international commerce emerged naturally over thousands of years. Accordingly, the law of commerce is said to represent a higher authority than the laws of any single state. 

In the context of today’s global economy—which is in fact a concessionary political arrangement built for and by Western economic interests—that higher authority is now represented by multilateral financial institutions, sovereign bond markets, and the like. These entities decide on the metrics by which the outcomes of economic policy are assessed, and then set the limits of what governments can and cannot get away with when it when it comes to formulating economic policy. 

Under these conditions, developing countries that have played by the rules of economic liberalization could adopt an economic program geared toward maximizing individual capabilities rather than GDP growth; yet they would likely be penalized by the market in the form of higher borrowing costs and withheld investment. But, on the other hand, anyone who truly wants to build a global market society on the foundation of the cosmopolitan tradition must also allow for a state—or something fulfilling the same function—large enough to police all forms of economic externalities and exploitation, including those based merely on asymmetric information. 

As Yale historian Samuel Moyn has argued, the modern framework for determining duties of justice—the human-rights regime—has “contributed little of note” with respect to social and economic rights precisely because it refuses to challenge “the neoliberal giant whose path goes unaltered and unresisted.” Nussbaum’s approach could pose such a challenge by rejecting the idea of “negative liberty” and insisting on an affirmative role for government in securing both first- and second-generation rights for all people. At a minimum, it reserves a role for nation-states that are genuinely accountable to their people, rather than to the “discipline” of international capital markets (much of which clear through Western financial hubs such as London and New York). Prudently eschewing coercion or interventionist overreach, Nussbaum has offered a promising first step toward a more rigorous framework for sustaining liberalism under modernity. 

We should wish her project well. Even if one believes in a “natural right” to pursue production, commerce, and exchange without hindrance, the basic fact of climate change refutes the notion that such activity exists beyond the prerogative of states. Regardless of whether we adopt “cosmopolitanism,” we are already living in a “polity of the cosmos,” where citizenship confers duties in addition to privileges. Indeed, not even Adam Smith would approve of free exchange that not only fails to ensure “the continuance and perpetuity of the species” but even threatens “its intire extinction.”


Monday, June 15, 2020

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In




Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In 

By David Marchese New York Times



For all the value Jon Stewart delivered as a political satirist and voice of reason during his 16-year-run as the host of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ it’s quite plausible to suggest that the political and media Bizarro World in which we live — where skepticism is the default, news is often indistinguishable from entertainment and entertainers have usurped public authority from the country’s political leaders — is one that he and his show helped to usher in. ‘‘Look, we certainly were part of that ecosystem, but I don’t think that news became entertainment because they thought our show was a success,’’ Stewart says. ‘‘Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11. There are very few events that would justify being covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So in the absence of urgency, they have to create it. You create urgency through conflict.’’ That pervasive sense of political and social conflict has only grown since Stewart left the air in 2015. It has also made Stewart’s post-‘‘Daily Show’’ silence — apart from a few guest spots on his old friend and colleague Stephen Colbert’s show, he has been mostly out of the spotlight — more intriguing. What has he been thinking about this country while he has been gone? Now he has returned with some answers. 

Stewart, who is 57, has written and directed ‘‘Irresistible,’’ a political satire about a small Wisconsin town that becomes engulfed in a political spectacle when a Democratic strategist and his Republican counterpart become fixated on the larger symbolic value and bellwether potential of the local mayoral race. The film, which will make its theatrical and video-on-demand premiere on June 26, is evidence that being away from the grind of a daily TV show has expanded rather than shrunk Stewart’s satirical powers. He’s well aware, though, that in this exceedingly polarized time, making a comedy that takes shots at both political parties, as ‘‘Irresistible’’ does, is an invitation to criticism. ‘‘You’re going to have people on the left who go, In the time of Trump, all you should be doing is a 


1Michael Moore’s typically scathing 2018 documentary about the election of Donald Trump. 

there is no purpose other than to destroy the mother ship,’’ Stewart says. And the other side’s possible reaction to his return? ‘‘There are people on the right predisposed to say, ‘[expletive] that guy.’ ’’ Some things never change. 

How strange is it, after having been basically out of the public eye for five years, to be coming back with something now? ‘‘The world is on fire, here’s my new movie’’ seems like an awkward spot to be in. It’s like showing up to a plane crash with a chocolate bar. There’s tragedy everywhere, and you’re like, ‘‘Uh, does anybody want chocolate?’’ It feels ridiculous. But what doesn’t feel ridiculous is to continue to fight for nuance and precision and solutions. 

You know, I’ve been trying to think of some precise, encapsulating question to ask you about what we’ve been witnessing over the last few weeks, and everything I was coming up with felt forced or phony. Maybe it’s better, because you’ve been eloquent during times of crisis in the past, just to ask what you’ve been thinking about and seeing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing?

I’d like to say I’m surprised by what happened to him, but I’m not. This is a cycle, and I feel that in some ways, the issue is that we’re addressing the wrong problem. We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that. 

I get that you’re saying that the police and policing are a mirror of societal power structures, but it doesn’t quite address police brutality. 

We can’t absolve that. Police brutality is an organic offshoot of the dehumanization of those power structures. There are always going to be consequences of authority. When you give someone a badge and a gun, that’s going to create its own issues, and there’s no question that those issues can be addressed with greater accountability. It can be true that you can value and admire the contribution and sacrifice that it takes to be a law-enforcement officer or an emergency medical worker in this country and yet still feel that there should be standards and accountability. Both can be true. But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police. 

Does the scale and intensity of the protests suggest some positive strides toward accountability? 

Maybe. Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing. You know, we’re in a bizarre time of quarantine. White people lasted six weeks and then stormed 



On April 30, protesters, some of whom were armed, assembled inside Michigan’s State Capitol building to protest a request by the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, to extend her emergency powers in response to the coronavirus. 

with rifles, shouting: ‘‘Give me liberty! This is causing economic distress! I’m not going to wear a mask, because that’s tyranny!’’ That’s six weeks versus 400 years of quarantining a race of people. The policing is an issue, but it’s the least of it. We use the police as surrogates to quarantine these racial and economic inequalities so that we don’t have to deal with them. 

Given all that has happened over the last four years — let alone the last month — is there any part of you that wishes you were more regularly a part of the conversation? 

No. I think there are different ways to be in the conversation. I consider a career to be a conversation. Action is conversation, and I’ve taken more action in the last four or five years than I ever have in my life. Sometimes that action can speak more profoundly than a daily monologue. So I don’t view myself as being out of the conversation: I view myself as not having a show. And if you’re asking, Do you wish you had a show? Sometimes I do. But not the one that I had. The one that I had is in 


Trevor Noah succeeded Stewart as host of ‘‘The Daily Show’’ in September 2015. and continues to elevate in a way that I couldn’t have. My efficacy for that kind of conversation has passed. 


What has stood out to you over the last few months about the political conversation or response around the pandemic? 

That the Trump administration has not changed its practices. You would have thought that somebody would have mentioned to Trump the idea of rising to greatness. Instead it’s: ‘‘Why don’t I tweet out that 


On multiple occasions the president has tweeted about the bogus conspiracy theory that the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, was involved in the death of a staff member in 2001. 

Would that be good in a pandemic?’’ I guess his behavior is understandable, because what’s he going to run on, his record? He’s just going to pick at scabs. 

How about on the other side? What do you make of the campaign that Joe Biden is trying to run in the middle of this? 

I feel like it hasn’t begun. I can tell you that without the pandemic, it would have been three months of ‘‘Will Bernie supporters ever forgive Biden?’’ And the questions to Biden would have been: ‘‘Do you think the Bernie Bros are out of control? What do you make of this statement that one of them posted on Twitter about a woman?’’ That would have been the majority of the coverage. The pandemic canceled that story line. 

But is Biden making a strong-enough case for why people should vote for him, as opposed to just not voting for President Trump? 

It almost feels as if he’s content to do that thing you see in sports in which teams play not to lose rather than to win, and it almost always ends badly. But there’s no oxygen for the campaign other than the oxygen that Trump’s Twitter feed puts into things. And no matter what, Trump has defined the terms of the fight. It’s going to be: What is America’s greatness? You have to fight on those terms, and that’s an opportunity to define what you believe is our greatness. Now, that’s not to say the political consultants won’t say to Biden, ‘‘You need to define your own lane.’’ But he doesn’t. The road is built. 

Was the speech Biden gave 


On June 2, Biden lambasted President Trump’s handling of the protests. 

‘‘Donald Trump has turned this country into a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears.’’ He added: ‘‘Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Is this what we want to pass on to our children and our grandchildren? Fear, anger, finger-pointing, rather than the pursuit of happiness? Incompetence and anxiety, self-absorption, selfishness?’’ 

a possible inflection point for him? I thought there were things in it that absolutely needed to be said, but I’m old enough to have heard a lot of speeches and old enough to be dubious about our ability to overcome our defensiveness about racism. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be the generation to dismantle structural racism for good, but it takes effort. Imagine the anguish of living in a country that profited off the forced labor of your ancestors, and is still having this conversation: ‘‘Hey, do you think we should fly the flag of the people that fought to enslave your ancestors? What do you guys think of that? Good idea or bad idea?’’ And then you hear, ‘‘It’s history.’’ It’s not history! It’s hagiography. If you go down there and read the plaques on the Confederate monuments, they aren’t, ‘‘This [expletive] thought he could enslave people based on the color of their skin.’’ That’s not what the plaque says. The plaque honors them! Enraging doesn’t begin to describe it. 

Even aside from the pandemic or George Floyd’s murder, the political climate has changed so much in the five years since you left ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ It’s nastier and more extreme and more combative. Have those changes affected the nature or efficacy of political satire?

‘Satire’’ and ‘‘efficacy’’ are probably words that should not be in the same sentence. But in a way, Donald Trump’s presidency has been a positive, because it shows that American democratic exceptionalism is not a birthright. He’s like a white-hat hacker. You go: ‘‘I think we’ve done a great job of building a safeguarded system. Could you test the vulnerabilities?’’ The hacker goes — boop, boop, boop — ‘‘I’m in through the back door, and I stole all your information.’’ With Donald Trump it’s like: ‘‘We have a very fair and impartial judiciary. What do you think, Donald?” He goes — boop, boop, boop — ‘‘Actually, if I move some people around, I can turn it into a corrupt partisan affair.’’ And I used to talk about how ‘‘The Daily Show’’ was a refinery. We would take unrefined material in the morning and try to create something relatively palatable by the end of the day. Some days we created a beautiful blended whiskey. Other days we created rotgut. We had a system to try and address that challenge. And that’s just a dopey show! Within the government, they’ve instead created a system to insulate themselves and propagate their own interests. And I think the root of that is the for-profit incentivization of 


A term used to refer to the self-propagating, self-protecting complex of businesses — think lobbying and consulting firms — that have become entangled with political institutions. 

Which is the main target of your movie. Where did the idea to take that on come from? It arose from a couple things. One was the 


In 2017, Ossoff, a Democrat, narrowly lost a special congressional election — one of the first to be run after President Trump’s election — in Georgia to a Republican, Karen Handler. Ossoff is now running for Senate against a Republican incumbent, David Perdue. 

in Georgia; the incredibly outsize importance placed on this one little race that became emblematic of the future for red and blue. The national parties spent $50 million dollars in one district in Georgia on this weird off-year congressional race. The second was that a friend of mine had run for Congress in West Virginia. A little Jewish dude who had been in Afghanistan and Iraq. He held a campaign event in a townhouse in the Village in New York, and I was sitting there the whole time thinking, This is the problem. This guy had to come up here to try and scrounge a few dollars from this group of people who had absolutely no connection to West Virginia but somehow believed that West Virginia was connected to their larger political goals. The third trigger was 


Shrum worked in some capacity on eight different presidential campaigns, all of which wound up losing. 

and these guys who are viewed as the consiglieres of their parties. These older white guys who have failed almost at every turn and are still brought in as the old wise man. ‘‘Tell me, when you were 


Michael Dukakis, a Democrat, won only 111 Electoral College votes (as well as one that a faithless elector cast for Dukakis’s running mate, Lloyd Bentsen) to George Bush’s 426 in the 1988 presidential election. The race is often remembered for Dukakis’s disastrously dorky photo-op in an M1 Abrams tank. 

‘‘How’d you come up with that brilliant tank photo idea?’’ Those guys are always wrong! But that whole system has its own mass and momentum and has very little to do with its reputed purpose, which is to serve the public good. So the idea was to satirize that, to get people to step back and go, ‘‘Participation in this corrupt system is inherently a corrupting process.’’ Because until we view it from that perspective, we will find ourselves stuck in it. That was the thought process behind the movie. Whether or not it works, I don’t know. 

Attacking corruption seems fairly nonpartisan. Are you at all optimistic that audiences on the right who might be inclined to give you a thumbs-down will be open to the movie and its ideas? 

You don’t make things based on that. My perspective is, I’m trying to talk about what I believe is wrong systemically that gives us corrupted outcomes because the system is incentivized to do that. It is incentivized for conflict as well as for corruption in a more classic sense, which is money from larger sources pouring into a place not to help but to gain control. Those are your SparkNotes. Hopefully it’s a funny movie. Maybe at the end you go: ‘‘You know what? We’ve got a [expletive]-up permanent campaign system with too much money in it.’’ 

Don’t people know that already? The politicians don’t even know how [expletive] up their system is. 


A guest on ‘‘The Daily Show’’ in 2014 while she was House minority leader. The back-and-forth that Stewart describes here is his paraphrasing of the conversation. In retrospect, the interview looks like a preview of the themes of ‘‘Irresistible.’’ 

was on ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ and we were talking about how money has a corrupting influence in politics. I said, ‘‘You raised $30 million. How does that money corrupt you?’’ She said it doesn’t. So money corrupts, but not you? That’s someone within the system. And when I went down to Washington for the 


In June 2019, Stewart spoke before Congress in support of a bill authorizing increased funding of medical coverage for 9/11 first responders. The bill passed in July of the same year. 

I learned something that shocked me. We had a program that was working. Bureaucratically, it wasn’t broken. What is broken about Washington isn’t the bureaucracy. It’s legislators’ ability to address the issues inherent in any society — and the reason they can’t address them is that when you have a duopoly, there is no incentive to work together to create something better. Plus, you have one party whose premise is that government is bad and whose goal is to prove that, which makes them, in essence, a double agent. All these things coalesce to make problem-solving the antithesis of what we’ve created. We’re incentivized for more extreme candidates, for more extreme partisanship, for more conflict and permanent campaigning, for corporate interests to have more influence on the process, not less. The tax code isn’t complicated because poor people have demanded that it be that way. 

But my question was more about — You say, ‘‘Don’t people already think that?’’ 

I don’t think they think about the system as much as its outcomes. It’s like, I was in that congressional hearing for that 9/11 stuff, and there weren’t many people there. I was told: ‘‘Oh, no. It’s a lot of people. Twelve out of the 14 subcommittee members showed up.’’ But you’re credited for being present if you’re there for one minute! 


Republican members of the House of Representatives who serve on the Judiciary Committee. 

walked in, put their name plates up, and a minute later took them down and left. They weren’t there for any testimony! The 


At the time, the chairman was Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Republican. 

said, ‘‘You have to understand that our members are busy.’’ I’m there sitting next to a guy, 


Luis Alvarez was a former N.Y.P.D. detective and 9/11 first responder. He died in 2019 as a result of complications from colorectal cancer. The disease was linked to the time he spent working in the toxic rubble at ground zero. 

who’s barely able to function because his liver is in shutdown and who died two weeks later, and you’re telling me with a straight face that congressional time is too valuable for everybody to be present just to hear about these issues? Who makes the rules of your time? You do! 

It’s clear you’ve got things you wanted to talk about. Are you sure you haven’t missed having a platform? Is that part of what compelled your movie? 

I think everybody would like it to be as neat as, ‘‘I’ve been thinking about this subject, and here is the manner in which I present it to you — my masterpiece.’’ But this is all part of a conversation that I started having with audiences years ago. The enemy is noise. The goal is clarity. It’s not that I have one particular goal, and I sit and design things. It’s not Fox News, which does have one particular goal, which is purely ideological and partisan and has been remarkably successful. 

Fox, and Bill O’Reilly in particular, used to be your great foils. Now the emblematic Fox personalities are Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. What does their ascendance represent for the network? 

I think they’re just the next level. As things progress, to get the same dopamine hit, you have to push it further. Although O’Reilly pushed it pretty far. The question was always, Why would you talk to him? Why do you have him on the show if you can’t destroy him? If you want to talk about the worst legacy of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ it was probably that. 

That everyone you spoke to who you disagreed with had to be 


In what is probably the ne plus ultra of interview-as-evisceration, the CNBC ‘‘Mad Money’’ host was a guest on ‘‘The Daily Show’’ in 2009. Stewart took him to task for what he saw as dishonesty around the 2008 financial meltdown. Cramer did not acquit himself well. 

That’s right. That’s the part of it that I probably most regret. Those moments when you had a tendency, even subconsciously, to feel like, ‘‘We have to live up to the evisceration expectation.’’ We tried not to give something more spice than it deserved, but you were aware of, say, what went viral. Resisting that gravitational force is really hard. 

We used to have news and we had entertainment. Now those categories are totally intertwined — to the extent that it’s not far-fetched to say that we just have varieties of entertainment. And similarly, people are looking at entertainers, rather than politicians, as political authorities. I don’t think it’s too far off base to suggest that, unintentionally or not, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ played a part in that transformation. What do you think about those changes and what they’ve wrought? I think you have to look at what incentivized the system. The news didn’t become ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ because at its core, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ was a critique of the news and a critique of those systems. If they’d taken in what we were saying, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing now: creating urgency through conflict. Conflict has become the catalyst for the economic model. The entire system functions that way now. We are two sides — in a country of 350 million people. 

That reminds me of the old George Carlin joke about how in America you have 23 kinds of bagels to choose from but only two political parties. Politically in this country, you have Coke or Pepsi. Every now and again, Dr Pepper comes along and everybody is like, ‘‘You ruined this for everyone else.’’ Dr Pepper is Ralph Nader, let’s say. But getting back to your question — it plays into that scenario of looking for the scapegoat. ‘‘Well, it’s ‘The Daily Show.’ They popularized news-as-entertainment.’’ It’s the New York Times trend-piece thing of somebody getting hold of an idea and amplifying it even though it really has no breadth or depth to it. 

What do you think of the news media’s handle on this political moment more generally? 

I don’t think it has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement. It’s like YouTube and Facebook: an information-laundering perpetual-radicalization machine. It’s like porn. I don’t mean that to be flip. When you were pubescent, the mere hint of a bra strap could send you into ecstasy. I’m 57 now. If it’s not two nuns and a mule, I can’t even watch it. Do you understand my point? The algorithm is not designed for thoughtful engagement and clarity. It’s designed to make you look at it longer. 

Have there been any positive changes, though? Let me give you an example of what might be one: When you were doing ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ part of what made you unique was your last-sane-man-in-Crazytown quality. You would actually say that someone in power was telling a lie when the nightly newscasters wouldn’t. Now they will say that. Is that a step in the right direction? 

The media’s job is to deconstruct the manipulation, not to just call it a lie. It’s about informing on how something works so that you understand the lie’s purpose. What are the structural issues underneath the lie? The media shouldn’t take the political system personally, or allow its own narcissism to rise to the narcissism of the politicians, or become offended that the politicians are lying — their job is to manipulate. 

Are the controversial things that President Trump says structurally motivated? Do you believe he’s thinking on that level? 

I think he understands very well — and the right understands very well — that undermining the credibility of the institutions that people look to for help defining and making sense of reality is the key to bending reality to your will. It’s a wonderful rhetorical trick. He had a great one on 


On May 25, the president tweeted: ‘‘Great reviews on our handling of Covid 19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus. Ventilators, Testing, Medical Supply Distribution, we made a lot of Governors look very good — And got no credit for so doing. Most importantly, we helped a lot of great people!’’ 

‘‘We’re getting great reviews on our pandemic response. But of course, not getting credit for it.’’ The twisted logic of that: If you’re getting great reviews, I’m pretty sure that’s considered credit. It’s like saying, ‘‘I’m being praised, but of course I won’t be praised for it.’’ Language is utterly meaningless. Everything is placed into its category in the tribal war and who its real victims are: Donald Trump and his minions. Poor little billionaire president who can’t catch a break. It’s incredible. Are we all just extras in this guy’s movie? But I do feel as if his approach has worked for him his whole life. 

He did become president. 

Right. He’s a man who has suffered no consequences. His is a recklessness born of experience. He’s like a malevolent Mr. Magoo. He always knows the I-beam is going to swing down and the building is going to collapse — but who cares, because he’ll walk out unscathed. That’s what he has learned. 

How much might his administration’s response to Covid-19 hurt him in November?

That’s the question the media asks. What they should be focused on is, here’s what happens when you hollow out the pandemic-response team. You have to go after the case of competence and anticorruption. The media wants to prosecute the case of offensiveness. That doesn’t matter. But there were decisions about P.P.E. and the states that were made without any federal response, and that does matter. It’s really about, what is government? Are we the Articles of Confederation? Are we the Constitution? Are we the United States? What are we? If we’re just 50 states, and if New York can push Delaware out of the way and get masks, and now Delaware has got to pay 10 times what it was going to pay — are we being led or not? It’s the wildest thing. I’ve never seen anybody who can say in the same breath, as the president does, ‘‘I am in charge, only I can fix this, and I take no responsibility.’’ You cannot process that. So what you have to process is the actual process: How do masks help? Do they help? You have to really explain it to people, but we allow the mask-wearing to be reduced to its symbolic meaning. Things like masks can’t just become another avatar of political representation. That’s where we go wrong. 

Part of what you’re talking about is trust, which makes me think of this fundamental question that pundits used to have about how seriously people should take you. Sometimes you’d avoid that question by saying you were ‘‘just’’ a comedian. Which almost seems quaint now, doesn’t it? Because obviously you were being serious, with jokes added in. Why were people hungry for you to take an explicit stand about your politics when the truth was pretty clear all along? What was that about? 

I mean, I was a contrarian pain in the ass, so when people would ask those questions, I would argue with them. They said, ‘‘You’re falling back on being a comedian.’’ I’m not falling back on it. I have to stand by everything I say. But if I make a joke that you say is inappropriate, you’re then asking me, ‘‘Where do you stand in our system?’’ They were asking me to use their language, when the language of satire is different. I’m not Jonathan Swift, but it’d be like saying to him, ‘‘So you’re saying we should eat them?’’ ‘‘No. But my point — that we need to look at how we treat the have-nots — is valid.’’ Though I think I am guilty of not necessarily being very clear with my intention sometimes, like with 


Hosted by Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who was then the host of ‘‘The Colbert Report,’’ the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew more than 200,000 people to the National Mall in Washington. 

Or is it more that your intentions with the rally were misguided? At the time, you talked about it as an attempt to encourage some semblance of balance and civility in the way we talked about one another — that the left shouldn’t conflate Tea Partyers and racists, for example. But didn’t that downplay the larger problem of the lunatic fringe on the right being a lot closer to the party’s center than perhaps you wanted to admit? 

The rally wasn’t about being civil. It was about being precise. The intention was not to suggest that negative things don’t exist or that you shouldn’t fight them, but to be as precise as you can. It’s like the Levittown thing with Bill O’Reilly. He talks all about Levittown: ‘‘That’s where I learned my values. Bootstrapping it. I grew up in Levittown, and we learned that work does it.’’ Well, guess what? The deed to the properties said you were not allowed to sell them to 


The standard leases, which included an option to buy, for the first houses built by Levitt & Sons in the late 1940s for the Long Island community soon to be called Levittown included a clause barring the houses from being sold to or occupied by nonwhites. The clause was dropped in 1948, but the racial dynamics remained. 

Racism is built into this system. But not all the people in it are malevolent and active racists. There is an inert racism that exists, and it’s pernicious, but I don’t believe everybody who’s part of it is evil. So it’s more a question of trying to remove a right-left axis from the conversation and instead create a conversation around conditions. Poverty is poverty. The right will talk about poverty a certain way, and the left will talk about poverty a different way, but poor people are still poor people. They’re still without political power. 

What you’re talking about is looking for common ground. But does that come at the expense of addressing real divisions about race or religion? 

It would be nice if God would come down and go: ‘‘All right, I didn’t want to say anything, but the Lutherans are right. It has always been the Lutherans. They’re my guys.’’ That’s not how it’s going to go. Our system right now is set up so that minor disagreements become arguments. Arguments become conflagrations. Conflagrations become feuds. Feuds become wars. It never ends, and it sucks. If you say, ‘‘I know people whom I love who voted for Trump,’’ people will be like, ‘‘[Expletive] you.’’ I go, ‘‘I don’t think they’re racist.’’ ‘‘They are racist, and if they’re not racist, they’re passively participating in a racist system.’’ So am I. So are you. We all are. Have your lines in the sand, but understand: Do you have a phone? There are probably things in the way that your phone is made that are not the greatest in terms of workers’ rights. We all have [expletive] on us. Approaching it in that manner is not both-siderism, and it’s not asking for civility. You’re always going to demonize those who disagree with you and amnesty those who agree with you. But there has to be some measure of understanding that that’s what you’re doing. 

But by now is it still ‘‘demonizing’’ a Trump supporter to say that continuing to support him is to participate in perpetuating racism? And shouldn’t we demonize anything that perpetuates racism? 

This idea that we all have [expletive] on us — it seems beside the point. The moral high ground is absolutely there, but we can all achieve something higher. It’s too easy to point at the low-hanging moral fruit without doing the work that those who are supposedly on the side of the angels need to do. There’s all this talk of being on the right side of history, but what does that mean? ‘‘The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’’ Who’s bending it? What are we doing to further that? If you just get rid of Trump, that doesn’t end this. It’s too easy to say: ‘‘I support this other guy. Therefore, I’m part of the solution.’’ Or: ‘‘You support that guy. Therefore, you’re the problem.’’ Now, that is in no way exculpatory to the supporters of those policies or that regime. My point was: What does that judgment get you? What is the accountability that we have for those who really do believe this is unjust but still accept the tacit societal arrangements? 

This might be a little Civics 101, but I hope you’ll indulge me: A lot of your work has fundamentally been about interrogating certain truths or ideas about America and the American experiment. Things like: What does this country mean? What are its ideals and values? What’s its character? Over the last few years those questions have only become harder to contemplate in any coherent way, let alone answer. Do those questions still hold for you? 

Every society lies to itself to some extent. Every person does. And sometimes you have to face the truth. The truth of the American experiment is that government is messy. It’s hard to manage. We are melding cultures and religions in a way that most countries don’t. But we have an exceptionalism that we have taken for granted, and we get lost in the symbolism of who we are rather than the reality. The reality of who we are is still remarkable. You can’t take the anecdotal and pretend it’s universal. You can’t take a picture of the 

and people on top of each other drinking and say, ‘‘That’s how America responded to the pandemic.’’ Because it’s not. The boots-on-the-ground response has been phenomenally resilient and responsible and courageous. The sense that this could all turn into ‘‘Mad Max’’ tomorrow always hangs over everything — but it hasn’t. There are issues, but again, we point a spotlight on the anecdotal and pretend that it’s universal. What that does is feed the narrative for people who want to use it for their own purposes. That’s what drives me bananas. We’re basically having giant public fights about symbolism, while the reality of our situation goes unexamined. You’re talking to me; I made a stupid movie about this, but underpinning that movie is a real thing, and the real thing is the corruption and the incompetence that we don’t even think about. 

Let me ask a bit about your life. For years, all your rhythms were dictated by the demands of ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ Was it hard to change those rhythms when you walked away? 

My life became much richer. It’s as if I’d been walking around with a little toilet-paper roll cardboard tube over my eyes, to the point where I thought that was the view. It was black and white. But then you take them off your eyes and go, ‘‘Purple!’’ I found it liberating. 

What’d you start doing with all your time? 

I learned to play drums. 

That’s such a middle-aged-guy thing

Can I tell you a horrible thing? One of our neighbors came by and was talking to my wife. The neighbor said: ‘‘By the way, I heard your son practicing drums. He seems to be getting better.’’ I was like, Yup. I sound like a 13-year-old boy playing the drums. 

Do you make sure to practice your rudiments and paradiddles? 

I have a teacher, and I do my paradiddles and my rudiments, and then we throw a James Brown song on there. 


20The drum legend Clyde Stubblefield was a key — maybe the key — component of James Brown’s band from 1965 to 1970. 

When I get my left foot to do a thing independent of my right hand — it’s the opposite of death. You don’t get that feeling as much when you’re older. I also get to be present in my life. When I became less myopically focused, things became more fulfilling. I miss the conversations at ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ I loved going in and sitting in that room with smart, talented people and shooting the [expletive] about the world. It was an immense pleasure and honor. But, man, I get so many more colors in my life now. 


Stewart and his wife, the author Tracey McShane, have two school-age children. 

were young when you left ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ Do they have any sense of what their dad used to do? I mean, no. It’s not like they went, ‘‘Your deconstruction and your essayistic approach to comedy really changed the way people watch things for seven minutes at a time.’’ Nor should they. That would be weird. 

Apart from drumming and your family, the tone of this conversation has leaned toward dire. Are you hopeful about what lies ahead? 

Always. Because the view we get of the country is not accurate. We get the artifice of it, the conflict of it. I’m not naïve. I don’t think that true divisions and animosities and bigotry and prejudices don’t exist. We see that every day. But fundamentally, we are a resilient and strong and resourceful nation that has oftentimes overcome our worst tendencies — ‘‘overcome’’ is probably too strong a word. But our biggest problem as humans is ignorance, not malevolence. Ignorance is an entirely curable disease. 

How? Information and work. You need to talk to people. Ignorance is often cured by experience, by spending time with what you don’t understand. But I honestly don’t know. Well, you know what? I do know: In the same way that Trump’s recklessness is born out of experience, so is my optimism, because good people outweigh [expletive] people. By a long shot.


This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from three conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Kevin Hart about police brutality, Madeleine Albright about American intervention abroad and David Chang about the state of the restaurant industry.