John Taylor and Ben Bernanke on the Great Recession Who Was Right About What Went Wrong? Mikael Hemlin University of Gothenburg University of Oxford London School of Economics Author Hans Lei Leonardo Moraveg Neil Sehgal Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (8 pages) In the autumn of 2007, the United States’ housing market collapsed, pushing the world economy to the brink of disaster. In the US, unemployment rates soared, trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared, and millions of Americans lost their homes in what is generally considered the most severe recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In the aftermath, economists have diligently discussed the properties of the crisis, asking if it could have been prevented and if policymakers could have responded more prudently. The American economist John Taylor has accused US policymakers of paving the way for the housing bubble by conducting an excessively loose monetary policy in the years leading up to the crash, and of prolonging the crisis by responding with measures based on premises that were essentially misguided. Conversely, Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of the main targets of Taylor’s critique, offers an opposing view. According to Bernanke, the low federal funds rates during the years 2002–2006 were sound, and did not contribute to the inflation of the housing market to the extent that Taylor describes. Rather, Bernanke claims, it was mainly regulatory flaws that caused the financial collapse, and the actions taken by policymakers prevented the financial system from imploding completely. This essay makes the argument that although monetary policy played a part in the build-up to the crash, it was by no means a defining factor. What sets the Great Recession apart from other economic downturns is the regulatory setting in which the housing bubble developed and the crisis unfolded. As such, the governors of the Federal Reserve are not culpable for the crisis’ occurrence. They, along with the US Treasury, are nevertheless culpable for the misguided policies that were enacted to resolve the situation. Much like Taylor suggests, the measures that were undertaken by the authorities rested on the false presumption that it was lack of liquidity rather than the persistence of counterparty risk that protracted the crisis. The situation could have been dealt with much more efficiently were it not for these misconceptions. Neither Taylor’s nor Bernanke’s argument is convincing on all counts. Rather, it is a combination of the two that offers the most accurate account of what happened. One of the main points of disagreement between Taylor and Bernanke is the role of the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy during the years 2002–2006 in inflating the housing market. While Taylor is right in claiming that excessively low interest rates generally accommodate the creation of bubbles, he wrongly alleges that his rule for monetary policy, the Taylor Rule, is detailed enough to work as a reference point for how monetary policy should be conducted, regardless of context. Indeed, as Bernanke argues, the monetary situation in the US in the period 2002–2006 was complex in ways that are unaccounted for in the Taylor Rule. For example, the recovery after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 was rapid, but did not push down unemployment to the extent that conventional wisdom would suggest. The Taylor Rule does not explicitly account for unemployment, but instead expects it to follow inflation and output as described by Okun’s law and the Phillips curve. Taking into consideration the low inflation rates of the years in question, Bernanke’s argument that raising the FFR at that time would have been deflationary is hardly unfounded. Indeed, while mainstream economic theory would have predicted unemployment to diminish as the economy recovered after 2001, it would also have predicted inflation to fall to very low levels had the Federal Reserve raised the FFR over the period that Taylor suggests. Additionally, as Bernanke points out, the sharp increases in housing prices started in 1998, well before the period of the allegedly too loose monetary policy. Taken together, the evidence above indicates that while the low interest rates before the crisis played a role in inflating the housing market, it was not a major factor. The economic indicators of the time were ambiguous, and the Federal Reserve chose a policy path associated with avoiding the deflationary trap that had suppressed the Japanese economy over the past decades. Nevertheless, the Fed could have better appreciated the instability of the housing market and started raising interest rates in time to prevent the crash from turning into a worldwide financial disaster. If the FFR had been raised a couple of years earlier, the concealed risk in the securities markets could have been exposed without risking a system collapse. In such a scenario, it is plausible that the average creditworthiness of borrowers would have been higher, as lenders would not have had enough time to work their way down to the absolute bottom of the income/asset brackets. In Hyman Minsky’s words, financial practice would not yet have degenerated from “speculative finance” to “Ponzi finance.” As such, the mortgage default rates and banks’ leverage ratios would have been lower, and the recession more manageable. While monetary policy leading up to the crisis did contribute to its onset, the circumstances that magnified the crisis to a global collapse emerged as a result of the government’s exceedingly poor regulatory oversight. Taylor finds that the countries where housing prices rose the steepest were also the ones that deviated the most from his monetary policy rule. He argues that this serves as evidence that the Federal Reserve’s lax monetary policy played a significant role in setting the stage for the crisis. While this statement likely has some truth to it, it suffers from several shortcomings. As mentioned earlier, Bernanke underscores that the housing boom started in 1998 when the FFR was well over 5 percent. Against this background, it is more likely that the regulatory situation both in the US and elsewhere is to blame for the housing boom and subsequent crisis. In 1999, around the same time that Bernanke alleges the boom started, the Clinton administration partially repealed the Banking Act of 1933 (or the Glass-Steagall Act). The act was adopted after the Great Depression to improve financial stability, and essentially separated investment banks and hedge funds from commercial banks. After the repeal, it became legal for financial institutions of all types to merge, thereby making them “too big to fail” and allowing them to engage in larger-scale speculation. This paved the way for a moral hazard and exposed depositors to speculative risk in the process. In addition, the partial repeal failed to give the Securities and Exchange Commission authority to regulate and scrutinise financial institutions, thus allowing for the creation of riskier and ever-more opaque derivatives. As such, the abolishment of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act drastically increased the scale of speculative operations and weakened regulatory oversight, thus shrouding the securities markets in ignorance. Taylor elegantly compares the ensuing situation to a game of hearts, but with many queens of spades instead of just one. Everybody knew that most financial institutions’ balance sheets were riddled with queens of spades, i.e. toxic assets. The problem was that when the crisis hit, nobody could distinguish the toxic assets from the non-toxic ones, and thus, all assets of a kind sharply diminished in value. The indistinguishability of safe mortgage-backed securities from risky ones was in part due to the complexity of the financial instruments in question, and in part due to the failure of the rating agencies to accurately evaluate the risk of the constituent mortgages (Crotty, 2009). This is an issue of poor oversight as well; the rating agencies evaluated the riskiness of loans under the pressure of competition, and therefore consistently gave customers (e.g. banks) the ratings they required to sell off the loans as quickly as possible. Since there were no regulatory mechanisms in place to prevent this from becoming standard practice, it became hugely profitable for banks to grant loans to more or less anyone. The expansive access to credit led the housing market to boom. It is also worth mentioning that the expected future values of the homes that the mortgages financed were included as collateral in the risk evaluations. As such, the stability of the financial system was built on the premise that the US housing market could continue to boom indefinitely. This indicates that it was poor oversight, not lax monetary policy, that paved the way for the housing bubble and the subsequent crisis once the bubble burst. In the wake of the crisis, when the flow of financial transactions had frozen and market interest rates had skyrocketed due to the increased uncertainty and risk, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury set out to stimulate the economy to prevent it from collapsing altogether. Based on what measures the policymakers chose to enact, it seems they diagnosed the problem to be insufficient liquidity. Taylor correctly claims that they were mistaken—it was excessive counterparty risk, not liquidity, that petrified the financial markets. Among other things, policymakers tried to stimulate aggregate demand by giving out over 100 billion USD in cash to US households. The effects of these cash infusions quickly subsided and had little to no effect in terms of economic recovery. Next, they tried to reduce the financial friction in the system by adopting the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Programme of around 700 billion USD. As the name suggests, the programme sought to relieve troubled financial institutions of bad assets. However, the legislative text lacked a predictable framework as to what kinds of assets would be bought up, at what prices, and what the targeted institutions should do with the money. The consequences were that uncertainty and counterparty risk persisted, and that most of the money was used to buy US Treasury bonds and other safe assets that did not reduce the financial friction in the system (Taylor, 2009). Essentially, the mistake that the policymakers made was to conceive of the crisis as one of liquidity rather than counterparty risk. If counterparty risk in the system is high, then financial friction is high, and if financial friction is high, then neither monetary policy nor fiscal stimulus can restart the economy. This is because the increased risk offsets the effects of any lowering of the FFR or an increase in aggregate demand. Had the problem been diagnosed as excessive counterparty risk from the outset, then predictable and targeted quantitative easing could have been used immediately to remove the toxic assets from the system, thereby decreasing risk and uncertainty. Eventually, quantitative easing was used, but it could have been done much earlier (Taylor, 2009). Neither Taylor nor Bernanke provides a satisfactory account of what went wrong before and during the Great Recession. Taylor is mistaken in claiming that the Federal Reserve’s lax monetary policy in the years leading up to the housing bust is to blame for the crisis. While this might have played a minor role, the fact that the boom began under rather strict monetary conditions and that the Federal Reserve had a strong rationale for its chosen policy path suggests that Bernanke is right that it was inadequate regulation that paved the way for the crash. Nevertheless, Taylor’s critique of the interventions that Bernanke’s Federal Reserve undertook to resolve the crisis is justified. Had it not been for Bernanke’s and other policymakers’ misconception of the crisis as a liquidity shortage rather than an issue of counterparty risk, the recession would have been much less painful. Thus, on a concluding note, future policymakers should enhance the discretion of regulatory authorities to prevent a similar situation from emerging again, and improve the targeting of interventions in the event of a crisis to ensure that they are potent enough to produce the desired effect. Works Cited Bernanke, Ben S. “Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, January 03, 2010. www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100103a.htm. 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Kaufman, George G. “Too big to fail in banking: What does it mean?” LSE Financial Markets Group Special Paper Series, Special paper 22, June 2013. www.lse.ac.uk/fmg/assets/documents/papers/special-papers/SP222.pdf. Krugman, Paul. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Maues, Julia. “Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall),” Federal Reserve History. November 22, 2013, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/glass_steagall_act. Miller, Richard A. “Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis and the role of equity: The accounting behind hedge, speculative, and Ponzi finance.” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, vol. 41, no. 1, 2018, pp. 126–138. doi.org/10.1080/01603477.2017.1392870. Taylor, John B. “Economic policy and the financial crisis: An empirical analysis of what went wrong.” Critical Review, vol. 21, no. 2-3, January 2009, pp. 341–364. doi.org/10.1080/08913810902974865. 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The Influencer Issue: The Link between Commodification and Well-being on Social Media Enya Willems Author Xuanyu (Willard) Zhu Koda Li Hansae Lee Editors “Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. – when everything, in short, passed into commerce.” - Karl Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847, ch. 1) I. Introduction The phenomenon of the social media personality, commonly named influencer, has exploded over recent years. This individual has also been called the ‘micro-celebrity’ by academics, coined by Senft as “a new style of online performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs, and social networking sites.” In more recent years, this list of characteristics has expanded to include: increasing political power; performed authenticity and connection to the audience; and self-branding. Marwick has expanded on Senft’s original definition by defining micro-celebrity fame as “a self-presentation technique,” or “a set of practices and a way of thinking about the self, influenced by the infiltration of celebrity and branding rhetoric into day-to-day life, rather than a personal quality.” This definition clearly differentiates the micro-celebrity from other forms of niche fame and stresses the importance of appearance and relatability. Due to its unique conceptualisation, the influencer is the celebrity of the new age; a time in which the use of online platforms can launch an individual into stardom, making this process easier than ever before. The created online personas are not only used for personal gain, but are often exploited by brands for marketing purposes. This technique has shown to be effective, with a study done by Nadanyiova et al. reporting that 56% of respondents said they would buy products that were recommended by influencers, going as far as 42% claiming they would change their entire lifestyle based on influencer endorsement. Accordingly, we can no longer see the influencer as an entertainer only; it has become an entity that blurs the lines between the public and private sphere, in every respect. By effectively selling their personhood to be used as a marketing strategy, the influencer turns into a mere commodity. Capitalism has made the body into a product that can be sold and bought, and social media has accelerated this process. This commodification of the self and the body is closely related to self-branding and the public image, which is the construction of a specific public persona with a fabricated set of values and interests, used to create economic value. The influencer industry is one part of the digital landscape that arguably represents the digital age very well: authenticity, agency and persona online have become concerns that have gotten widespread attention. This article takes on the task of constructing an interdisciplinary framework that combines Marxist normative critique and social analysis, combining relevant theories together to illuminate how the influencer as the commodified-being is the key to understanding negative effects on well-being. After identifying the link between the commodified social media influencer and the philosophical concept ‘well-being,’ this article mainly argues that as a consequence of the endless search for authenticity and relatability, the commodification of the influencer necessarily infringes upon the influencer’s privacy and intimacy; therefore the self of the influencer is commodified, which eventually has a negative impact on well-being. To create a new framework to analyse the issue, this article will take an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical evidence with a normative approach; first introducing the Marxist analysis and expanding upon the phenomenon of the influencer, then combining the two to be able to explore the influencer-commodity and the questions that arise. II. The Marxist frame: commodification and digital capitalism A. Marx in the contemporary context The classical Marxist concepts of alienation and fetishism have been adjusted and expanded to fit the alternative forms of labour that have arisen over the last century. Due to the shift from the industrial to post-industrial society, Marxism can be contextually adapted as a flexible tool to utilise as opposed to a set of fixed assumptions. In the twenty-first century, the labour market has evolved and therefore diversified significantly. Undoubtedly, the last decades can mostly be defined by the digital age; automation, computers and the internet have led to the disappearance of several traditional jobs, while also creating other new ones. Taking the concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism directly from Marx’ original works allows us to justify our further analysis as it is grounded in theory. Therefore, this section will first briefly explain the core concepts and later adapt and develop it to fit the context of the influencer case. As Marx describes it in his 1867 work Capital Volume 1, the commodity is “first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.” When a good or a service is turned into a commodity, exchange-value is created; and this is the process of commodification. For an object to be considered a commodity, a social use-value has to be created through the process of exchange. Thus commodity fetishism examines how social relations are shaped around this exchange and therefore also the value of the commodity; this idea is essential for the understanding of how the worker and value are connected. As a result, social relations start to shape around the exchange of the commodity; the individuals who exchange their products do not have any relation to each other aside from their mutual interest in the commodity, meaning their interaction is centred only around creating economic value. Thus, the workers’ personhood becomes attached to the commodity, since its value directly expresses their labour, but when it is exchanged for the commodity of money this labour is made invisible. What follows is the process of alienation : the worker becomes estranged from their own labour, as well as from the other workers and their own human essence. This form of alienation therefore has major consequences on our mental state as the human being’s consciousness becomes “the self- consciousness of the commodity, ” in a situation in which every commodity loses their physical character. B. Digital capitalism and emotional labour To further connect the universal critique of labour under capitalism to the particular influencer case, understanding the concept of emotional labour is crucial. In her 1983 work The Managed Heart, Hochschild explores some of the complexities of capitalist labour by introducing emotional labour, in both the private and public life, and how this affects the emotional well-being of workers. Firstly, emotional labour is defined as labour that requires the worker to prompt or repress certain feelings, to be able to give a service that calls for a great amount of care. This type of labour is therefore exceptionally personal, as it calls for the worker to make use of a significant part of their identity. Therefore, there are similarities with heavy physical labour as in both cases this leads to alienation. In this case, the worker is likely to get alienated from their emotions and selfhood, as their job requires them to exploit their own individual personality as a way to perform well. This is evident in the service industry, where a worker is expected to smile at the customers, and their body and behaviour become an extension of the commodity they are trying to sell. Traits that are inherently personal therefore become divorced from their personhood, and a smile would be likened to something outside of the body, like the make-up or outfits worn. According to Hochschild, the effects of alienating emotional labour can be seen both in private and public life. It already starts in the private sphere that human emotions are taught to be repressed or brought out in a certain way. This emotion management is done through feeling rules, which are the ways in which we guide our emotions by setting up specific obligations or requests for ourselves during emotional exchanges; meaning when, where, and how we are ‘allowed’ to feel a certain way. In the case of emotional labour, these personal feeling rules become commercialised; when we are forced to act a certain way in a professional setting, this display of perceived fake emotions eventually becomes conflated with our real emotions. This leads to emotive dissonance, a process in which there is a discrepancy between real identity and forced identity, therefore affecting our mental state. When the worker is unable to maintain the distinction between real and perceived forced feelings, the lines get blurred. Then, since these forced feelings are used during the alienating practice of labour, the worker is more likely to feel estranged from their own personal feelings as well. More specific to the twenty-first century and the information age, Fuchs proposes we live in an era of digital capitalism in which we need to acknowledge the range of ways in which modern capitalism manifests itself and how they cocreate. Commodity fetishism stays relevant in the digital age, as it is displayed in the consumption of ideologies, both political and corporate, through modern mass media. In advertising on digital platforms, the mystification of the commodity is used by alienating the product from its labour, and replacing the void that is left with product propaganda. On social media, the commodity form of the platform is veiled by the social aspect, meaning it works invertedly to regular commodity exchanges where the social interactions are buried due to the obsession with exchange-value that overshadows it. The pleasure that is obtained when receiving a ‘like’ or message from a friend overshadows the distress of being endlessly bombarded with advertisements. Through this process, the social character is used to mask the fact that the website is still a commodity, as it is actively being used to generate income, looking at for example the unequal ratio between advertisements and social content on these platforms. Users are being convinced that the main purpose of social media is communication and social interaction, therefore successfully hiding the fact that many platforms are set up in a way that favours constant product propaganda to increase economic gains for the company over friendly connections. Logically, this will lead to alienation, as the social interaction on the platform becomes shaped by the process of exchange-value being created constantly. Thus, the user's purpose of socialising is forcibly minimised, to make place for the profit maximising-interests of the companies, with constant advertising taking over the platform. This also takes on more sinister forms, with companies making use of consumer data, even going as far as creating a market for the exchange of it, to analyse behavioural patterns to then use this information for personalised targeted advertisement, to eventually impact the consumer’s choices. This is part of a process that Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. III. The rise of the influencer and the mechanism of internet fame A. Explaining the Influencer As made clear by now, the influencer is the symbol of the twenty-first century, which must be examined carefully to understand its role in the digital age. Chasing this form of internet fame has become a full-time job for many aspiring celebrities and was made big by social media websites such as Twitter and YouTube around 10 to 15 years ago. This shift in celebrity culture has made it possible for ordinary people to build a following quickly; a trend that was started by reality television in the early 2000’s. While more traditional celebrities have also used their social media accounts to reach out and build a more intimate interpersonal relationship with their fans, the micro-celebrity is a more unique phenomenon. These social media stars can build a niche audience in a certain subculture or interest group, leading to them amassing millions of followers while still remaining anonymous to the general public. This broad interest in public figures and celebrities stems from the mediatization of culture , the process in which media has become more and more important to society and has affected daily life and therefore culture. Nearly every aspect of life has become permeated by mass media, with engaging in celebrity culture now being a major aspect in regular people’s lives; a process that is called celebritization or celebritification by scholars such as Driessens. However, a more in-depth overview of mediazation must also incorporate how the microcelebrity operates under a unique mechanism of celebrity status, most notably enjoying more mobility from the origin and increasingly persisting relevancy. Modern fame generated on the internet has the advantage that it attracts a loyal niche audience, therefore impacting the degree to which a media personality is seen as easily replaceable. A link can be observed between relevancy of the micro-celebrity and commercialisation. Success can be found when commercial content is combined with personal, non-sponsored content, to the point where the two have become integrated. The influencer has to make sponsored content, while also linking this to a personal story or opinion. Thus, for the influencer to attract and maintain an audience, it must attach itself to a carefully crafted identity and commercial purpose. B. Branding and authenticity: the practice of building an audience The term influencer displays how the sole purpose of the celebrity has become to use stardom to promote a certain lifestyle. Attached to this lifestyle are products, activities, and experiences that they promote; making them a valuable instrument for brands who are looking for marketing opportunities.The role of personas is therefore exceptionally important, to make themselves as marketable as possible. Self-branding is the concept of individuals crafting a public image as a way to gain commercial attention and cultural capital, as Khamis et al. describes it. This is now often associated with celebrities and social media, however this practice dates back to the early twentieth century, and since then it is common for individuals to be marketed just as commercial products: their “unique selling points” that make them attractive to a specific target audience are exaggerated and developed together with the demands of the customers. However, this also illustrates the major issues that are raised when individualising branding. Parallels can be observed between brand loyalty between commercial brands and their customers and between influencers and their audience. The influencer therefore capitalises on the perceived devotion from their fans, as much as mainstream brands do. For big multinationals such as Apple or Starbucks, certain promises can be made regarding the quality and overall experience staying the same, wherever and whenever the product is consumed. Their ability to stay consistent is a major aspect of what makes a brand trustworthy and therefore lucrative in the long term. However, this consistency is extremely difficult to maintain for individuals who do not have large teams of employees to ensure their objectivity. As established earlier, influencer marketing depends greatly on the exposure of the private life, and due to the inherent spontaneity of life the quality cannot be consistent in the same way. Therefore, the influencer who has a certain image to upkeep faces the difficult task of having to be extremely strict to not diverge from the path they are on, as advertisers might withdraw their sponsor deals if the influencer’s brand is abruptly changed. The appeal of the social media influencer, in contrast to the traditional celebrity, is the fact that audiences can effortlessly follow and connect with their favourite influencers. Their personas are close enough to believable ‘real’ personalities, so the audience feels an attachment, although they might still be aware that this is not a completely accurate portrayal. A celebrity with a successful brand, one that has built certain associations and images around their persona, will be able to attract market value that interests advertisers. Due to this economic dependence on its following, the influencer’s persona is essentially tied to their audience; they both mould their audience around their brand and their brand around their audience. Hence, if there is a strong audience that is willing to buy the products endorsed by their favourite online personality, this means there is a lucrative business model behind the influencer marketing. The concept of ‘self-presentation,’ as originally used by Goffman, can be applied to influencer branding. He argues that the individual presents itself with certain goals in mind and therefore takes on a “role;” hereby comparing social interactions to performance, including the individual’s consciousness of the audience and being perceived. This exploration of identity through social interactions is magnified on social media, since on these platforms one’s image is extremely controlled through deliberate posts and engagement with certain content. This image created can change drastically when presented for friends or for strangers; there is no personal connection between strangers, meaning their profiles naturally become the sole determinant of one’s image, making it more likely that the social media user is more conscious of their presentation. This leads to influencers mostly coming across as more refined than the average social media user, as their audience consists mostly out of strangers. This can be recognised in, for example, the prevalence of photo-editing or the use of ‘beauty filters’ under influencers, displaying the importance of keeping up an appearance. This can be connected to character masks in Marxist philosophy; the idea that individuals are dehumanised and forced into a certain (social) role, therefore being “forced to put on a mask,” which then leads to alienation from their personhood. The same is done by the influencer, as they are also forced to only portray themselves in a certain way, to fit the “perfect” image they are supposed to. C. Agency and “meta-capital” Marshall argues that due to the emergency of public personas, everyone, including both public figures and regular people, has become more comfortable with the mediatization of the self. This has led to the normalisation of the celebrity as a form of “meta-capital,” meaning that they are recognised as a part of the structure of the attention economy. Their ability to move between fields, both online and offline, and enact influence on all these different platforms has led to their value increasing significantly. This, once again, has made marketing through the endorsement of big public figures, most notably the influencer, extremely attractive. However, this has impacted agency in a way that the concept has become hyper-individualised; influencers are the personification of agency in the contemporary attention economy. The formation of the celebrity into the commercial meta-capital, has given them power to enact change. They can affect the sales of a product by a simple endorsement, or even have a political or cultural impact, hence it is argued that this gives them agency. According to Papacharissi and Easton the structures in which the actors act are reinforced through agency; by doing the actions they believe they are bound to, they form the exact structures they are bound by. Therefore, while the influencer on one hand has autonomy over their life, it is also completely shaped by their understanding of society and their appointed place in it. IV. Influencers and commodification A. The celebrity-commodity on social media Overall, it is not a new or ground-breaking idea that the celebrity is a commodified being. Scholars before the twenty-first century have already theorised about the celebrity image being used as a tool in the marketing of products. This also means that celebrities have always been extremely careful to maintain their persona due to commercial reasons, as to not tarnish any future endeavours and profits that could be made. Furthermore, there are many political motivations attached to the formation of the persona, due to the close connection between public identity and politics, a classic argument made in Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 work The Image. He uses the example of American politicians engaging in televised debates, who eventually end up showing their ability to perform well when displaying an image to the media, instead of having actual political knowledge. This is what Boorstin calls a “pseudo-event:” an inauthentic, planned and somewhat ambiguous event solely made to be broadcasted. This is then extended to the celebrity himself: “The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. (...) He is the human pseudo-event. ” Hereby, Boorstin effectively critiques how the use of public images in the media has made audiences more likely to be willingly deceived; the image has become more interesting than the ‘original.’ Using Boorstin’s use of ‘the original’ and ‘the image’ to analyse the influencer, it is evident that the image instead of the identity is sold to the audience. When these celebrity personas are being marketed as perfect images of people, they become sellable goods and undergo the process of commodification as described by Marx. Thus, naturally, the alienation both from the audience and themselves is an inescapable result. Following Marx’ explanation, commodity fetishism will be affecting the influencer twofold: they are both the commodity itself and the maker of the commodity, since they are responsible for creating their own image. The biggest difference between this more traditional celebrity and the modern social media influencer is not the amount of influence they have, but the fact that the influencer thrives on their proximity to normality, as stated earlier. They started off as ‘regular people’ and work carefully to maintain the image that they still are. This however also means that it is infinitely more difficult to preserve the boundaries between persona and identity. Hochschild’s theory of emotive dissonance becomes relevant, as the emotions needed to make the social media persona believable become conflated with the true identity of the influencer, both by the audience and the influencer themselves, who can also no longer effectively separate their social-media persona and private personality. Lehto and Kanai have observed this same tendency in how influencers deal with feeling rules on social media, as they are in a difficult situation in which everything they express has to be in line with the persona they want to maintain. Thus, the influencer parallels the worker in the service industry that Hochschild discusses. It can be noted that in the case of the influencer there are also particular social dynamics at play, due to the general anonymity of the audience in contrast to the extremely exposed identity of the influencer. This could even be identified as a case of information asymmetry, in which the audience is able to access more information than the influencer. So, since the influencer is not familiar with who they are talking to, in contrast with how social interactions would typically go, they are unable to correctly handle their emotion management. Therefore, we can point to the influencer’s relationship with their audience as a critical aspect of how commodification affects the individual, through an analysis of emotional labour. B. The person or the product as the commodity As mentioned by Fuchs, social media websites actively try to hide the process of commodification from us, making it harder for us to recognise what we are truly being sold. This opens up an interesting discussion about whether, effectively, the influencer is selling the product or the person, which is herself. Increasingly, brands are less interested in the former, and more in the latter. Considering the influencer-commodity and its relationship to branding, it can be observed that it is more important for the influencer’s persona to fit in with what they are advertising, then for the product to fit the influencer’s persona, as self-branding knows hardly any bounds. Looking at the earlier discussed argument by Rojek that influencers can build certain associations around their personas to receive brand sponsorship deals, this makes it apparent that there is an incentive for the influencer to change their persona when it is more profitable for them. Examples of this have already been found in mainstream celebrity culture, in which it is common among former child stars to suddenly “rebrand” their personalities, to further their careers. Thus, the ease with which influencers are expected to mould their personas around marketing opportunities, essentially treating them as products that are changed based on consumer’s wishes, would logically lead to an increase in the effect of emotive dissonance. Since these humans are treated as malleable commodities, their personas become more and more divorced from their own identity and personhood. C. Digital authenticity: redefining the public and private sphere The now established fabricated nature of the influencer can be connected to the search for authenticity and the resulting carefully crafted relatability as ethical concerns. It is questionable if authenticity can even exist on social media, as Kadirov et al. note that the term itself has become a buzzword in marketing used to increase sales. The major issue that arises is the fact that to even appear somewhat authentic, influencers will have to expose their private lives to the public, which has to be in line with their constructed identity. This makes them more vulnerable for commodification, as every aspect of their life turns into something to sell. In Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour, she concludes that the effects of having to engage in emotional labour will end up affecting the worker’s mental state. She discusses many consequences of this, but it is most evident in the occurrence of emotive dissonance. Using the previously discussed concept of self-branding, it is evident that the influencer is very conscious of the persona they have to maintain and which emotions they have to portray to make it seem convincing. Jansz and Timmers claim that, to relieve oneself of emotive dissonance, quite some cognitive reconstruction of the person’s identity is needed. This would mean fundamentally changing one’s professional identity to correspond to the feeling rules that have to be followed in the profession. However, the inherent characteristic of the influencer as an individual that demands to be ‘authentic,’ leads to an inability to clearly differentiate between public persona and identity. It is therefore exceptionally difficult for the influencer to construct a professional persona that acts in ways that is detached from their own feelings; this would mean that the authenticity they have been striving for has to be compromised. D. Privacy in the digital age To further analyse how the merge of the public and private have led to an increase in the commodified private life, it is firstly important to examine how to define these spheres. Discourse on the boundary between public and private has been initiated long before the internet was even invented. But the rise of social media has made it highly relevant once again. Shifts between what is designated as private and what as public is what Marshall calls the “privlic ” culture. He describes the emergence of “commodity activism,” which is when activism that started with private action is now mostly recognised by how it is used in the public sphere, mostly in branding by commercial corporations. One important way in which this has manifested itself is in the rise in the use of endorsement as a marketing technique. We can regard the influencer as the link between the public corporation and the private individual, becoming essentially a public individual. It can be observed that due to social media bringing private life into the public, this has led to further commodification of the influencer and alienation from themselves. One interesting example is the effect of the reveal of personal relationships to the public. Certain intimate relationships, such as love, can only survive in the private realm. But, for many lifestyle influencers staying authentic will have to include revealing large parts of their love life to their followers. Thus, there is a lack of privacy that should be a necessity. In this “privatised-public sphere” the influencer’s lack of privacy can be observed in many aspects of their personal life. For the average social media user, privacy on the internet becomes a commodity, as personal data is sold to provide relevant advertisements. Similarly for the influencer, they create value by exchanging their privacy for authenticity, which will lead to their brand endorsements being more successful. However, as privacy is the foundation of the personal life, as argued by Arendt, this leads to further commodification of the influencer’s personhood. E. Parasocial relationships and the commodification of intimacy Expanding further on interpersonal relationships and privacy, a remarkable phenomenon that can be observed in the interaction between the influencer and their audience is the formation of the so-called parasocial relationship. Hartmann defines parasocial interaction as “about users’ illusionary feeling of being in a mutual social interaction with another character while actually being in a one-sided non- reciprocal situation.” This means that individual fans are being deluded into thinking they have a personal relationship with the influencer they admire, while for the influencer this individual is just one of many and there is no personal connection attached. The influencer is aware of this effect and therefore deliberately builds their marketing strategy around the concept of parasocial interaction, which once again connects with the authenticity claim, and the subsequent use of ‘relatable’ insights into the influencer’s life. Schmid & Klimmt claim that repeated parasocial interaction will lead to the formation of a parasocial relationship. So, for influencer marketing to continue working, they will have to continue these interactions, as once the fan no longer feels like they have a deeper connection with the influencer, they might end up not supporting them anymore. This includes oversharing about private affairs and overall being overfamiliar with their audience, to be able to feign an intimate relationship between them and their individual followers. Due to the, albeit limited, opportunity of mutual communication between the audience and the influencer, negative side effects of this connection extend from the audience to the influencer. While we can still not speak of the same amount of two-sided interaction as in regular social relationships, as the audience is generally too big for the influencer to converse one-on-one, there is still more perceived reciprocation by the fans. Thus, the parasocial relationship stretches further and further, meaning the influencer will have to continue giving their audience increasingly more privy information; hence also further violating their own privacy, which has already been established as harmful. In analytical terms we can see the parasocial relationship as the commodification of intimacy. Because mostly one-sided social interactions get framed in an intimate manner, the fans perceive these as individualised intimate gestures, while it is in fact a generalised form of communication. It is important to stress that the motivation behind this interaction is to generate more value. Since, as earlier established, the more the influencer is able to build a convincing personal relationship with their audience, the more profits they are able to generate. Logically, following the theory of emotive dissonance, the influencer starts to conflate the fabricated relationships they have with individual fans with actual intimate relationships offline. Forming real life relationships becomes more difficult due to the blurred lines between real and fake connection; if a declaration of love is a sales technique in the digital world, what magnitude does that same word still have in private? Hence, the creation of parasocial relationships further leads to the commodification of the influencer, as more and more parts of their selfhood are used solely for generating economic value and are turned into the commodity-form, in this case intimacy and relationships. This eventually affects the influencer’s actual personal relationships, as they become alienated from intimacy. This largely ties in with how the lack of privacy in the public sphere has made it difficult for the influencer to not suffer from commodification on all aspects of what is traditionally regarded as part of the private life. V. The effect on well-being A. The framework of subjective well-being Most countries strive to achieve good well-being for their citizens, which is defined by UNESCO as “a feeling of satisfaction with life, a state characterised by health, happiness, and prosperity.” Governments calculate subjective well-being by using measures that can be self-reported, which allows individuals to evaluate their personal life satisfaction and other feelings on a scale. If the subjective well-being is considered high, this has positive effects on social relationships, health, income, and it further positively influences society. Shantz et al. found that alienation directly leads to emotional exhaustion and low well-being, along with being a major cause of burn-out. Thus, the earlier identified negative side effects of influencer culture have all shown to go directly against the desired high well-being. The observation can be made that due to the competitive nature of our current capitalist system and the resulting dynamic between the audience and influencer, the way influencer culture functions will always have negative effects on well-being; the influencer is burdened by alienation and commodification caused by how their private life is exposed to the public, hindering them from reaching full subjective well-being. B. Commodification and well-being Now the lines between the private and public have effectively blurred together and due to emotive dissonance these cannot be differentiated. The overwhelming presence of the creation of exchange value bleeding into the influencer’s personal life leads to them no longer choosing to decide in favour of their own well-being, leading to even privacy itself becoming commodified. Following this observation that there are no bounds to the commodification of the influencer’s private life, this analysis clearly supports the argument that this has a negative effect on well-being. Arguably the most unique way the influencer’s well-being is affected is the complete lack of privacy, as they have to use the technique of marketable relatability, that the traditional celebrity does not. This systematic lack of privacy has been linked to increased stress and decreased happiness. Moreover, multiple studies have found that emotional labour is correlated to faster burn out, such as Nam and Kabutey who found that the emotive dissonance that results from this type of labour more likely leads to burn-out than jobs where no use of emotional labour is made. A further finding includes that the risk of burn-out is higher in workers who fabricate their emotions, referred to as ‘surface acting’ by Hochschild, than those who participate in ‘deep acting,’ having trained themselves to experience the required emotions. Due to the fabricated nature of social media, influencers are most likely to participate in surface acting, therefore increasing their risk of burning out quickly. This argument is confirmed by Verduyn et al. who found that social media has negative effects on subjective well-being due to the social pressure attached to it. It is not rare for the negative well-being of influencers to be trivialised due to the fact that many earn significantly more than the average worker, with major influencers earning more than $2000 for an Instagram post. However, the assumption that monetary gain automatically nullifies the aforementioned negative effects of commodification is refutable. The evidence regarding the impact of wealth on well-being is mostly relative; for an impoverished individual receiving a small amount of money would significantly better their situation, while for a multi-millionaire it does not do as much. In the relevant context, it can be noted that due to the rapid nature of internet fame, the influencer often quickly moves from the former to the latter; while in the beginning of their career the rapid increase of income due to the increasing commodification of the self is likely to positively affect them, at a certain point the extra profits will no longer be enough to distract them from the fact that commodification is negatively impacting their personal lives. In conclusion, the poor well-being that is caused by the commodification of privacy and intimacy and the exploitation of emotional labour, overshadows the possible positive effects of the economic profits made. VI. Conclusion In the light of the dramatic increase in popularity in recent years, this article sought to analyse the influencer and how they are affected by commodification, to then establish the consequence of this on their well-being, through an interdisciplinary analysis. To do so, I firstly focused on linking Marxist analysis to the digital age. Hochschild’s emotional labour and the following effect of emotive dissonance, were repeatedly important during the analysis, as they linked together Marxist commodification and the influencer. Next, it was found that commodification is visible in all aspects of the influencer’s life, due to how authenticity, branding and agency are influenced by the marketability of the influencer. This has multiple consequences, but most noteworthy are the transformation from the person into the product as the commodity, the effect this has on the blurring of the public and private sphere, the following commodification of privacy, and lastly the parasocial relationship and the commodifying effect this has on intimate relationships. Thus, we are now able to answer the question asked in the beginning of this research: how does the commodification of the self on social media affect social media influencers’ well-being? This research can conclude that the influencer’s well-being suffers due to the negative effect of commodification, mostly due to the alienating impact of emotional labour and the inability to separate the public and the private. Well-being and alienation cannot co-exist, as they are essentially opposites: in the Marxist tradition, commodity fetishism leads to the alienation from the individual’s personhood, and would therefore never be able to live a satisfying life as required for well-being. Further empirical proof that shows the correlation between the emotional labour done by the commodified influencer and burn-out and unhappiness, exemplifies this theoretical finding. These findings can contribute to the existing literature, since the analysis gives a unique interdisciplinary overview into an under-researched phenomenon that is grounded both in the normative theory and the empirical evidence. 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How Political Instability Unravels Religious Commitment in the Face of Uncertainty: Navigating Uncertainty in Political Instability and Religiosity in Post-Arab Spring Egypt and Tunisia Abanti Ahmed Abstract This paper explores the dynamic relationship between political instability and religiosity in Egypt and Tunisia, with a focus on the period from 2012 to 2018. The central research question examines how individuals navigate uncertainty and address political challenges, influencing the role of religion in their lives. The argument posits that tangible solutions to political challenges diminish religious commitment, while a lack of such solutions fosters an increased reliance on religion. Drawing on a detailed analysis of events, protests, and economic conditions, the paper reveals that the perception of uncertainty can be controlled and the pursuit of tangible solutions demotes religion to a secondary role in individuals' lives. When addressing citizens' concerns during economic challenges, political repression, and societal grievances, policymakers should consider creating platforms for discussion, promoting religious tolerance, and offering practical avenues for positive change, which can be achieved through religious accommodation laws, interfaith dialogue initiatives, and religious endowments. These initiatives ease society’s broader challenge in engaging in open dialogue about the complex human response to political instability that encourages a reevaluation of how uncertainty is navigated. Introduction The periods after pivotal moments in American history, such as the September 11 attacks and the Great Depression, were marked by sharp, brief increases in church attendance as communities sought solace during troubling times. Religious communities are often the first place that people who feel like they have lost control seek refuge. Is this short-lived surge because they have found alternative solutions or because religion slowly loses its allure in the face of prolonged turmoil? Perhaps online communities provide a platform that empowers apostates to be open and therefore increases their visibility. Alternatively, escalating religious persecution and intolerance might contribute to a decline in religiosity, as individuals distance themselves from beliefs facing opposition. Yet, the root causes behind these shifts remain unclear. In this paper, I will explore the conditions under which political instability decreases religiosity. In the currents of geopolitical turmoil, economic upheaval, and rocky political transitions, one might expect religiosity to be a steadfast anchor, providing relief in uncertain times. Yet, as the Arab Spring swept across the landscapes of Egypt and Tunisia, leaving behind a trail of political transformations, the unexpected occurred: religiosity rather than standing resilient, underwent stark fluctuations. The Arab Spring marked a significant period of upheaval and change across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, characterized by widespread protests, demands for political reform, and calls for greater social justice. While Tunisia is often recognized as the birthplace of the Arab Spring, the movement’s mass protests and uprisings transcended national boundaries, influencing countries like Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Bahrain, each with its unique socio-political context and grievances. In Egypt, if the period from 2012-2018 was marked by political turmoil, while the period from 2018-2021 focused on economic reforms and stability, then why did religiosity decrease during turmoil but increase during more stable times? In Tunisia, the opposite occurred; religiosity increased during periods of relatively more political instability from ongoing democratic transitions between 2018-2021 than between 2012-2018. In these two cases, fluctuations in religiosity trends were very similar over the same periods of time despite having divergent political outcomes. This is not to postulate that the essence of religion is solely a response to political instability or repression, nor does it assert that religion solely arises from a particular type of uncertainty. Rather, it underscores that within the realm of political instability, a condition that inherently diminishes religious commitment is a type of uncertainty that invites competitive resolutions that take precedence over religious avenues. Despite fluctuations in non-religiosity within a specific sub-group of the Egyptian population over the past decade, it has not exceeded 25%. Consequently, religion consistently maintains a primary role in the lives of the majority within this subset, highlighting its enduring significance and resilience amidst societal changes. My central thesis posits that when individuals are confronted with tangible solutions to alleviate the challenges that they attribute to their political instability, this set of solutions will take precedence over religious commitment. Religious commitment increases when individuals do not have access to these solutions and feel disillusioned by the future. Their perception of the future is important here, and I will discuss in these cases how these perceptions emerge and are sustained during political instability. Consequently, religion assumes a secondary role in individuals’ lives as it is outcompeted by alternative solutions that best alleviate their uncertainties. One secondary argument entails that overall trends of secularization, driven by societal shifts toward modernization, play a central role in diminishing religiosity. As societies modernize and prioritize democratic values, religious influence tends to decline. This argument suggests that broader secularization, marked by the declining significance of religion in public and private spheres, has an impact on individual piety. An alternative argument delves into the role of political Islam during periods of political instability. It suggests that individuals may attribute their political and economic grievances to religious frameworks, especially when political actors weaponize religion for political gains. This attribution may lead to a decline in religious commitment as people scrutinize religion's involvement in political decisions and its consequential impact on their daily lives. This paper will be structured as follows: First, I will discern the type of political instability I will examine. I will explore the types of uncertainties that come with political instability, and how uncertainty is tied to religious commitment. Then, I will showcase what happens to the role of religion when individuals perceive particular types of uncertainty to be present. Finally, I will introduce my cases of Egypt and Tunisia following the Arab Spring and explore how my proposed conditions of political instability are present in both despite their divergent transitions and outcomes. Theory Political instability exhibits diverse characteristics in terms of duration and intensity, ranging from brief upheavals to prolonged disruptions. My focus extends beyond a general assessment of political instability, emphasizing instances of uncertainty directly impacting citizens' daily lives and their perception of the world around them. This perception has cascading effects on how the role of religion is viewed, so I seek to analyze the relationship between individuals' perception of uncertainty with their resulting course of action and religious commitment. Religion, despite being an ancient phenomenon, can also be a psychological response to uncertainty and turbulent times. Religiosity is measured by attitudes toward religious practices, frequency of worship, and overall belief in God. When religion is tied to self-identity, changes within the political sphere are least impactful on individuals’ religiosity. In Lebanon, for example, individuals tend to identify with their religious and ethnic identities before an overarching national identity. In countries where people prioritize nationalism, ethnic divisions, and plurality of religion, the secondary nature of religion in everyday life makes it more susceptible to change in response to changes in the political sphere such as regime change, citizen repression, economic hardship, and military and police brutality. For instance, in Turkey, there are reports of decreased religiosity among youth and even self-reported accounts of hijabi women who wear the hijab in the public eye, but have said to have already “left Islam.” The Republic of Turkey—whose founding father, Ataturk, had revolutionized Turkey as a “modern” state, adopted a Latin alphabet in place of Ottoman Turkish, and removed religion in state affairs—has consequently experienced decades of secularization. Now, with President Erodgan, Turkish society reaches a crossroads with religion and secularization; as Erdogan increases the role of Islam in politics, such as reducing interest rates because “Islam demands it” while inflation increases. As a result, Turkish citizens attribute their economic challenges to religion. While religion may not be the direct cause of these difficulties, the deliberate political weaponization of Islam can contribute to this perception among the population. I postulate that there are two types of uncertainty: controlled uncertainty and random uncertainty. Under controlled uncertainty, individuals have an optimistic outlook that they have the power and agency to pursue tangible courses of action to relieve their uncertainties. In contrast, under random uncertainty, individuals have the pessimistic outlook that their uncertainties are beyond their control. This perception is coupled with a sense of disillusionment regarding the future. In Israel, for example, women responded to random uncertainty by participating in palm recitation to better cope with the uncertain conditions of the Second Intifada and the threat of terror. They inhibited both an absence of control over their uncertain circumstances and disillusionment with the future, which increased their reliance on rituals as a coping mechanism. Trauma is particularly powerful in identity formation, as it brings out what attributes and experiences individuals have in common. While existing research suggests that instability can heighten individuals' religious commitment by reminding them of their shared religious beliefs, this study aims to delve deeper by considering not just the presence of instability, but also its nature and activity. The activity of instability (e.g. living in a constant state of poverty vs. experiencing escalating instability) determines the type of uncertainty individuals perceive of their circumstances. When faced with controlled uncertainty, where the level of instability remains relatively stable, individuals may rely more on their religious beliefs as a source of solace and guidance. However, in situations of escalating instability, where uncertainty intensifies over time, individuals may be more inclined to explore alternative solutions beyond religion to address immediate challenges brought about by political instability. "The consequential secondary role of religion is supported by the notion of secular competition—when economic opportunities or social norms conflict with religious obligations—that individuals face when considering alternative solutions. For instance, during the Great Depression, as conditions worsened, many Americans cataloged the failures of capitalism and voluntarism, emphasizing citizens’ basic responsibilities to one another. Even conservative religious leaders began to join social workers and hungry Americans in calling for more vigorous federal intervention as they faced the suffering before them and their own inability to alleviate it. Their efforts took off in the summer of 1932, when tens of thousands of out-of-work World War I veterans and their families marched to Washington, DC to demand early payment of promised service bonuses. Yet as the federal government extended its place in Americans’ daily lives, leaders of some religious institutions feared for their own status. This historical example illustrates how under conditions of political instability, individuals may perceive a sense of control over their uncertain situation and may prioritize tangible courses of action over religious commitment due to the perceived favorability of the outcomes they desire." To determine, then, the conditions under which political instability decreases religiosity, I argue that when individuals face controlled uncertainty, their reliance on religion becomes secondary as alternative solutions with the potential for immediate favorable outcomes take precedence, but random uncertainty results in the increase in religiosity that many might predict. The cases of Tunisia and Egypt offer valuable insights into the dynamics between political instability, tangible actions, and the evolving role of religion under political instability. Case of Tunisia: Controlled Uncertainty In the case of Tunisia, the Arab Spring catalyzed in December 17, 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor in the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, self-immolated. This came after market inspectors confiscated some of Bouazizi’s wares, claiming that he lacked the necessary permit. Bouazizi’s suicide was the result of desperation rather than symbolizing a political cause, though it was publicly interpreted as an act of protest. Several reward systems were activated after Bouazizi's suicide. Bouazizi was considered as a "hero for Tunisians and the Arab world as a whole" by Tunisian film directors, assumed a martyr by the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) of Tunisia, and named TIME magazine’s person of the year in 2011. The publicized suicide of Bouazizi made many people in similar situations believe that suicide was an appropriate action for them as well. Bouazizi was a university graduate distraught with the inability to financially support his mother and siblings, reflecting the vast majority of Tunisians experiencing soaring rates of unemployment. In 2009, the overall unemployment rate in Tunisia was 13.3%, but 30% among Tunisia's youth, who made up almost a third of the total population. The Tunisian government decreased expenditures from 45% to 29% from the 1970s to the 1990s, lowering the quality of public goods and services. Hence, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011, along with his family and other elites, created and strengthened the inner circle of cronyism—political elites appropriating economic resources and creating privileges by preventing outsiders. Controlling half the country’s wealth, the enterprises they owned produced 3% of total output and employed only 1% of the labor force. In addition, Ben Ali never allowed genuine political opposition to emerge and elections were manipulated: In 1989, he supposedly garnered 99.3% of the vote; in 1994, 99.9% and five years later, 99.4%. Political opponents — in particular Islamists— were persecuted, tortured or forced into exile. Tunisia's press was censored. According to the theory of suicide proposed by French sociologist Emile Durkheim, Bouazizi's self-immolation would be best categorized as anomic suicide. This type of suicide occurs when individuals experience a chronic state of societal disorganization, where traditional sources of regulation, such as religion and government, fail to provide moral constraints in the face of an unregulated capitalist economy. Anomic suicide is often associated with a sense of disillusionment about the future, leading individuals to see self-infliction as a way out. It's important to note that self-immolation directly contravenes Islamic law, as the Quran prohibits harm to oneself. Therefore, Bouazizi’s act can be viewed as a poignant illustration of the prioritization of social circumstances over religious beliefs. Despite the religious prohibition, Bouazizi saw self-immolation as a desperate means to escape his dire socio-economic situation. This conflict between religious doctrine and the perceived urgency of his socio-economic plight highlights how individuals may prioritize immediate material concerns over religious commitments. After years of severe economic hardship, during which most Tunisians were struggling to survive while President Ben Ali’s family, friends, and allies were getting richer, Bouazizi’s self-immolation marked the tipping point. Tunisians began to protest. Tensions heightened on December 22nd when another young man from Sidi Bouzid climbed up an electricity pylon and electrocuted himself on the cables, saying he was fed up with being unemployed. The new wave of strikes first erupted on December 17th in Sidi Bouzid, and came after the labor unions announced that they would organize peaceful marches to urge the government to improve its performance in development and employment. A few days later, a teenager was killed when police in Sidi Bouzid opened fire on protesters. An interior ministry spokesperson said police had been forced to "shoot in self-defense" from protesters who were setting police cars and buildings ablaze. The Tunisian government had been trying to manage the crisis politically before using force and the Tunisian development minister traveled to Sidi Bouzid to announce a new $10m employment program. The Tunisian government’s concessions—often met with skepticism on its sincerity and implementation—were a response to the resilience and violence of the crisis, showing Tunisians that the government was reacting to their demands rather than solely resorting to violence. This instilled hope in Tunisians regarding the positive trajectory of their protests. Despite protests, the rich were getting richer, the poor were not only getting poorer, but also had no job prospects, no ability to express themselves, and no way of criticizing government policy. The protests that erupted in Sidi Bouzid were spontaneous, yet they were marked by a level of organization and sophistication that appeared grounded in the sheer determination of those who participated in them. Tunisians faced a more costly and risky path due to being the first country to protest, unlike Egyptians who benefited from the momentum generated in Tunisia. The cost of cronyism and corruption to Tunisia is much higher because it also hinders job creation and investment and contributes to social exclusion. The presence of cronyism exacerbates the costs of protest by increasing repression, legal and financial consequences, social stigmatization, and psychological toll for protesters. The fear of retaliation from security forces was high, and protesting carried significant risks, including arrest, torture, and disappearance. For Tunisians, the standard method of expressing dissent has been informally within the party framework, but the masses participate in riots and demonstrations. The first president of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987), carefully appointed members of the political elite and removed them from office in such a way as to prevent anyone from building up a political base to keep factions to a minimum. The Tunisian economy was heavily centralized around the ruling elite and suffered from widespread corruption and cronyism. Economic grievances were a major driver of the Tunisian uprising, and many protesters were motivated by frustrations with unemployment, poverty, and lack of economic opportunities. The economic challenges faced by Tunisians may have increased the perceived costs of protesting, as individuals risked losing their livelihoods or facing economic hardships as a result of participating in protests. In Tunisia, the uprising was driven by a broad-based coalition of activists, students, workers, and ordinary citizens who came together to demand change. Solidarity among protesters helped to mitigate some of the risks associated with protesting by providing emotional support, practical assistance, and collective action. From this, it is clear that Tunisians perceived their uncertainties as resolvable through risky actions, therefore partaking in actions that would immediately relieve their grievances rather than remaining disillusioned with their future, which ultimately decreased their religiosity during this period. On January 13, 2011, Ben Ali appeared on national television and made broad concessions to the opposition, promising not to seek reelection as president when his term would end in 2014. He expressed regret over the deaths of protesters and vowed to order police to stop using live fire except in self-defense. Addressing some of the protesters’ grievances, he said he would reduce food prices and loosen restrictions on Internet use. Ben Ali’s concessions did not satisfy the protesters, who continued to clash with security forces, resulting in several deaths. The next day, a state of emergency was declared, and Tunisian state media reported that the government had been dissolved, Ben Ali fled Tunisia, and that legislative elections would be held in the next six months. Ben Ali’s reign from 1987-2011 had ended and Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, appointed by Ben Ali in 1999, assumed power. The aftermath of Ben Ali's departure marked a significant moment for Tunisia, as protests persisted despite the regime change. Protesters had gathered in the area to demand that the interim government step down and the current parliament be disbanded. Demonstrators were also asking for suspension of the current constitution and the election of an assembly that can write a new one, as well as organize the transition to democracy. There were daily protests that members of Ben Ali's Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) party were in the new government and thousands of largely peaceful anti-RCD protests emerged.36 After persistent clashes between protesters and armed forces, Ghannouchi announced his resignation particularly following the death of three people in the country's capital, Tunis: “I am resigning today because I am not willing to be a person that takes decisions that could cause casualties," he told reporters Sunday. He also questioned "why a lot of people considered their main target to keep attacking the government, although a lot of its members agreed to join in this critical time." Ghannouchi’s resignation can be seen as a tangible outcome of the protesters' efforts. It signifies that their voices were heard and that their actions had a direct impact on the political landscape. Ghannouchi's acknowledgment of the need to avoid decisions that could cause casualties reflects a recognition of the legitimacy of the protesters' grievances and a commitment to avoiding further violence. Bouazizi's actions were instrumental in differentiating between controlled uncertainty and random uncertainty, providing Tunisians with a tangible catalyst that transformed disillusionment into proactive engagement with the future. Role of Religion Becomes Secondary As people sought to find concrete control over uncertain circumstances amid political instability, their dedication to religious beliefs weakened. Involvement in organized protests, the confrontation of severe repression, and the navigation of severe economic hardships became the focal points of their attention, demoting religious commitment to a secondary position. In 2012, the Pew Research Center surveyed Tunisians and found that though democratic principles were high priorities, as were the economy and security. 92% said that improving the economy ranked as the most important priority while 79% said that it was very important to maintain law and order. Also, people found democratic freedoms more important than religious divisions. This shows that Tunisians found these economic and democratic principles to take precedence over other grievances they faced. In this time period, a perceived resolution for these priority issues was through civil resistance, demonstrations, general strikes, and self-immolations, that were leading to visible outcomes and relieving uncertainty in a way that religion was not. Outside the party system, Tunisians became politically active, especially Tunisian women, who protested the draft constitution, the economy, and the ruling coalition. Within this political context of newly found political liberalizations, similar to Egypt, various religious groups started coming out of the underground in order to take advantage of the political openings. As these political openings were prioritized, trust in religious leaders went down from 38% to 35% between 2012 and 2018 and those who say they are not religious increased from 18% in 2012 to 30% in 2018. Tunisian Muslims that attend mosques at least some of the time decreased from 52% in 2012 to 30% in 2018. Tunisia’s troubled economy was the biggest challenge in 2017. The national unity government took some measures to stimulate growth, but it struggled to implement key reforms. High unemployment, a rising inflation rate, and tax increases plagued Tunisians. In January 2018, protests erupted in more than a dozen cities over price hikes. This further emphasizes the continued prioritization of addressing economic challenges by the Tunisian people. Secularization In Tunisia, the decades of Ben Ali’s secular regime had excluded religion from the public sphere. Its cascading effects have led Tunisia to have notably lower religiosity than other Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries with the proportion of people who said they were not religious increasing from 15% in 2013 to over 30% in 2018. The ousting of Ben Ali created political opportunities for Islamists, yet the secularizing impact of his two-decade-long regime remains a compelling explanation for the decline in religiosity between 2012-2018. Following the dissolution and drafting of a new constitution in October 2011, Tunisia no longer enforced secularism through repression. Surveillance, restriction, and harassment of Islamist activists that were previously practiced by the government ceased during the year. The new draft gave rise to Islamists to fight for power. In the months that followed the 2010-2011 revolution, several hundred imams were replaced, often by violent Islamists who accused the imams of having collaborated with the former Ben Ali regime. By October 2011, the Ministry of Religious Affairs announced that it had lost control of about 400 mosques.6 The “uncontrolled” classification means that a mosque’s imams were operating without the official authorization of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. In Tunisia’s new political landscape, the content of prayer services was also no longer controlled by government authorities, a step many Tunisians approved of and viewed as part of the new liberties acquired through the revolution. In 2014, secular parties edged out Islamists at the polls. In the October parliamentary elections, Nidaa Tounes, a secularist political party, won 85 seats compared to 69 for Ennahda, an Islamist political party. Veteran politician Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi, the head of Nidaa Tounes and a former prime minister, was elected president in December. But turnout was lowest among the young, who ignited the Arab uprisings; among cities, the turnout was lowest in Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the uprisings that spread across the Middle East and North Africa. In 2016, Nidaa Tounes, the ruling secular party in Parliament, splintered. Ennahda founder Rachid Ghannouchi declared the Islamist party was abandoning political Islam. Amidst competition between Islamist and secular parties, when asked whether Turkey or Saudi Arabia is a better model for the role of religion in Tunisia’s government, 78% of Tunisians prefer the more secular Turkey, seeing it as a model for religion and politics. While the trends toward secularization during this period seemingly impact individual piety levels, the dominant controlled uncertainty factor holds greater significance, given that secularization has not been exclusive to this period and has prevailed since the era of Ben Ali. Despite the freedom of Islamist parties to enter political life, the government’s loss of control over regulating mosques, and new liberties granted toward religious freedom, levels of non-religiosity still prevailed. Political Islam In contrast to secularization efforts during Tunisia’s political transition, the country simultaneously experienced concerted efforts from Islamists to increase the role of religion in politics. During this period, the presence of political Islam coupled with economic and political insecurities might have led individuals to deviate from religious commitments as they witnessed greedy power grabs from both Islamists and secular parties who employed religion as a political instrument. From January to October 2011, an interim government moved toward reform, recognizing new political parties and disbanding Ben Ali’s party. On October 23, Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party, won the national elections and formed a coalition government with two secular parties. Ennahda first emerged as an Islamist movement in response to repression at the hands of a secularist, authoritarian regime that denied citizens religious freedom and the rights of free expression and association. In 2014, the new constitution incorporated mentions of Islam as the religion and culture of the Tunisian people while also establishing a state role for protecting freedom of religious worship and expression. Ennahda, formerly an Islamist movement, transitioned into a party of "Muslim democrats," distancing itself from the label of "Islamism" due to negative associations with radical extremism. This shift reflects a strategic response to counter the misinterpretation and abuse of Islam by radical groups like ISIS, positioning Ennahda as a moderate political force advocating for democratic principles. Ennahda’s re-labelling as “Muslim democrats” reflects frustration with outsiders not understanding its supposedly true democratic nature which may have resulted in individuals associating their challenges with these religious changes in governance and frustration with religion being politicized. Today, Tunisians are less concerned about the role of religion than about building a governance system that is democratic and inclusive and that meets their aspirations for a better life. However, the interplay between political Islam and religiosity is tied to perceptions of uncertainty. The prevalent economic hardships—regardless of the presence of political Islam—left Tunisians uncertain about the future. In 2011, 78% of Tunisians expressed optimism that the economy would improve to some extent within the following 2-3 years. However, by 2018, this hope had significantly dwindled, with only 33% of Tunisians maintaining confidence in a better economic outlook over the same timeframe. Case of Egypt Egypt stands as a prominent example of a country profoundly affected by the events in Tunisia. The success of the Tunisian Revolution in ousting President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali provided a template for dissent, inspiring Egyptians to rise up against the longstanding rule of President Hosni Mubarak. The images and narratives of Tunisian protesters challenging authoritarianism and demanding change resonated with Egyptians, fueling their own aspirations for political reform and social justice. In Egypt, decades of corruption, police brutality, media censorship, unemployment, and inflation led labor and youth activists, feminists, and individual members of the Muslim Brotherhood to protest. From the occupation of downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square, to labor strikes, acts of civil disobedience, clashes with armed forces, and others, violence between protestors and the police resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. The wave of organized protests gained momentum following the oustings of Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi in 2011 and 2013, respectively. These pivotal events demonstrated to Egyptians that mass mobilization could be an effective means of addressing the longstanding issues they had endured. Despite Mubarak's lengthy rule from 1981 until his departure in 2011, previous protests had proven ineffective in leading to his resignation. However, the timely catalyst provided by Tunisia's Revolution ignited a sense of urgency among Egyptians, inspiring them to seize upon the pan-Arabist phenomenon sweeping the region. This newfound determination empowered Egyptians to confront their decades-long grievances head-on. Egyptians, seeking an immediate end to enduring abuse and corruption, embraced large, organized protests despite harsh governmental crackdown and threats of death. Their perception of the uncertainty faced during this period appeared to be remedied by protests and political changes, thereby diminishing the role of religion to a secondary position. The Egyptian case took advantage of the momentum that the Tunisian revolution brought, making it unique to examine the intricate relationship between their resistance and the decline in religious commitment, challenging the notion that religious avenues are the primary recourse during times of political instability. Controlled Uncertainty Egypt has been an authoritarian government since 1952 with periodic revolts and unrest. The causes of the 2011 protests against Mubarak also existed in 1952, when the Free Officers, who led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, ousted King Farouk. Issues such as inherited power, corruption, under-development, unemployment, and unfair distribution of wealth have persisted as constants in Egyptian life since 1952. Successive Egyptian regimes have systematically used repression to ensure order. The authoritarian barter “bread and security for freedom” has been widely disseminated along with the notion that the country was not yet ready for democracy. Egypt has long grappled with a systemic pattern of human rights abuses and repression embedded in its governance, prompting citizens to attribute their crises directly to the government. While these challenges have persisted since 1952, worsening economic conditions, government corruption, and Mubarak’s rule, coupled with the influence of the Arab Spring ignited by the events in Tunisia, led Egyptians to unite in similar protests in 2011. The momentum from Tunisia became a catalyst, empowering Egyptians to engage in hands-on initiatives challenging Mubarak’s authoritarian government. President Hosni Mubarak's regime was also repressive, but opposition groups had more space for political activism compared to Tunisia, which lacked a traditional history of political dissent. Mubarak’s regime escalated violence against protesters significantly as protests enlarged with the anticipation of Mubarak’s resignation. Pro-Mubarak demonstrators targeted journalists, and, in what became known as the “Battle of the Camel," plainclothes policemen rode into Tahrir Square on camels and horses to attack unarmed protesters. The issuing of laws restricting public assembly allowed security officials to ban protests up to their discretion and were consequently allowed to use indiscriminate force on defying protestors. Egyptians mobilized protests in diverse ways and when they were repressed through laws restricting public assembly or with increasingly violent police responses, organized protests grew larger and more inflamed. Messages were picked out in stones and plastic tea cups, graffiti, newspapers and leaflets, and al-Jazeera's TV cameras which broadcast hours of live footage from the square everyday. When one channel of communication was blocked, people tried another. Mubarak had grown fearful of the protestors’ relentlessness—first pledging to form a new government, then promising not to seek another term in the next elections, and later becoming increasingly defiant about not stepping down—all the while asking protesters to return to normal. Eventually, Mubarak was forced to step down and the Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces (SCAF) assumed leadership of the country on February 11, 2011. Protests still endured; during March and April 2011, SCAF granted a number of concessions to protesters’ demands in an effort to clear the streets of continued demonstrations. Human Rights Abuses Mubarak’s regime initially responded to the protests with brute force and tear gas, beating and arresting protesters. The regime responded to later increases in protest mobilization by shutting down internet service and mobile phone text messages, replacing regular police forces with the military, and imposing a curfew. This exemplifies a cycle of human rights abuses that not only heightened violent responses but also fueled additional protests, as Egyptians became increasingly outraged. Egyptians faced constant repression and abuse for decades under Mubarak’s rule, and used religious commitment as a coping mechanism before Tunisia catalyzed the Arab Spring, bringing newfound hope that Egyptians could better their circumstances. Since 2013, the military and security-led regime has reinstated its control over society and citizens with an iron fist, curtailing freedom of information and banning freedom of expression. Peaceful political participation and civil society activism, which were the pillars of the January uprising, have been de facto outlawed by the adoption of an arsenal of undemocratically spirited and restrictive laws. Protesting was costly and these laws banning public assembly made it much more risky for Egyptians to participate in protests, but the momentum of the revolution had assured individuals that there would be large turnouts, therefore bolstering their confidence in protesting as a means to confront the military and security-led regime. Egyptians, fueled by the momentum of their revolution and triggered by the ousting of Mubarak and Morsi, found empowerment in protesting. The logical nature of their efforts heightened hope for the future, as each overthrow or victory seemed to validate their path to stability. The move against Morsi deepened the political schism. Millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets against Morsi, but large numbers also protested the ousting of Morsi. A crackdown by security forces killed hundreds and Egypt declared a state of emergency. The emergency measures allowed security forces to detain people indefinitely for virtually any reason. They also granted broad powers to restrict public gatherings and media freedom. Gallup classifies respondents as thriving, struggling, or suffering, according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale numbered from 0 to 10 based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Egyptians gave their lives some of the worst ratings they ever have in the weeks leading up to former President Mohamed Morsi's removal from office. The 34% of Egyptians who rated their lives poorly enough to be considered suffering in June was up from 23% in January. Fewer than one in 10 rated their lives positively enough to be considered thriving. Role of Religion Becomes Secondary Fridays frequently became “days of rage” in Egypt and elsewhere because of the convenience of organizing would-be protesters during Friday prayers. Likewise, mosques themselves are often said to have served as organizational hubs for protest. Mosques functioned as a locus of anti-government agitation and logistical centers of preparation for demonstrations. While it may seem that protest activities at mosques contributed to an apparent increase in mosque attendance, thus suggesting elevated overall religious commitment, these places of worship primarily assumed roles as organizational centers during the peak of the protests, prioritizing logistics over prayer and religious services. Although, of course, mosques and Friday services were still attended for customary reasons, the dual functionality of the mosque introduced secular competition as highlighted earlier in the Theory section. Individuals are confronted with the dilemma of choosing between prayer and protest. Protest is a costly behavior that becomes progressively less risky as the number of participants increases. Hence, overall Mosque participation during the height of mass protests between the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 to the beginning of El-Sisi’s presidency in 2014, declined. Prior to the Arab Spring, strength in religious beliefs were at high levels: the belief that things would be better if there were more people with strong religious beliefs decreased from 89.8% in 2005 to 83.4% in 2013. Additionally, the percentage of individuals with the belief that religious faith is an important quality in children decreased from 47.1% in 2005 to 27.7% in 2013. Muslims who say they attend the mosque at least some of the time decreased from around 85% in 2012-2014 to 75% in 2018-2019. Secularization In Egypt, as the regime experienced waves of regime changes and upheavals, the period between 2012-2016 witnessed efforts toward constitutional reform emphasizing the protection of civil liberties, the separation of powers, and the establishment of a democratic system of government. While Islam remained the state religion, the constitution also guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited discrimination based on religion. The constitutional assembly was almost entirely composed of Islamists (Muslim Brothers, Salafis, and independent Islamists). Dozens of articles addressed individual rights and liberties of Egyptian citizens, which was more than the number of articles mentioning Islam. By enshrining these goals in the constitution, the government was held accountable, making failure to fulfill its constitutional obligations not just an act of inefficiency but anti-constitutional. Examples include Article 61, which demands to eradicate illiteracy within ten years; Article 66, which requires the state to provide opportunities for sports and physical exercise; and Article 184, which instructs the state to assimilate living standards across the country. While Islamist groups participated in the drafting of the constitution, the outcome reflected a broader commitment to democratic principles and social reforms driven by the demands of the people. In 2013, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ousted Morsi and campaigned for the presidency on an anti-Islamist platform. He deemed the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, imposing restrictions on their operations and political activities. Liberals called the Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt “totally contradictory with the Egyptian national character,” which they argued respected pluralism of religion and the separation of religion and politics. The banning of the Muslim Brotherhood has likely contributed to the loss of faith in Islamist parties. El-Sisi also claimed that ‘the religious discourse in the Islamic World has lost the values of humanity in Islam’ and rejected the idea of an Islamic state. When he won the presidency in 2014, many moderate Muslims supported El-Sisi because he had taken a clear stand against Islamist radicalism and expressed a genuine desire to support a peaceful understanding of Islam. And in 2018, when El-Sisi ran again, he was re-elected with 97 percent of the vote, although the turnout was low and he faced virtually no competition. The crackdown against human rights defenders and independent rights organizations have made effective monitoring of the elections extremely difficult, especially with the number of organizations that were granted permission to monitor the elections being 44 percent fewer than in the last presidential election in 2014. This has resulted in elections facing criticism for not meeting the standards of a free and fair democratic process. This can also suggest that through negative partisanship, or the phenomenon of individuals forming their political opinions based on their opposition to certain individuals or parties, people viewed El-Sisi as either the best among limited options or endorsed his secularization efforts. Political Islam When governments weaponize a religion that the majority of their populations affiliate with, it is reasonable to link political Islam and individual piety to assert that piety levels and overall religiosity may decrease. This is a competitive argument because perceptions of Islam are directly shaped by how their governments implement Islamic laws, often at the expense of neglecting the needs of the people. Individuals are increasingly witnessing religion being wielded as a political tool. On one hand, they are promised welfare services in the name of Islam, while on the other hand, their repression is justified through the manipulation of Islamic texts. While El-Sisi initially presented himself as anti-Islamist, appearing on stage with the Coptic Pope, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar (the country's most esteemed institution of Islamic learning), and Galal al-Murra, a prominent Salafist, following the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, he privately holds conservative Islamic views. In A 2006 paper that Sisi wrote for the U.S. Army War College, he argued that democracy in the Middle East could only be of an Islamic nature, and that Islam provides the intellectual framework for his political beliefs. In addition, in 2011, when crowds protested against the military for imposing “virginity tests” on female protesters, Sisi declared that it was his responsibility to “decide if [protesters] were honorable.” However, the fluctuating influences of political Islam in Egypt between 2012-2018 indicate that it is not a strong enough condition on its own for political instability to decrease religiosity. Even the most liberal Egyptian party in 2012, the Free Egyptians Party, publicly defended a constitutional clause making the principles of Sharia the source of legislation. Even when the dominant strategy of the incumbent government was to combat political Islam—as has been the case since July 2013—the formal discourse of President El-Sisi included frequent mentions of the Qur'an and Hadith.33 The Muslim Brotherhood witnessed a consistent rise in support from July 2011 to February 2012 at 63%, followed by a sharp decline in April 2012 to 42%. Prior to the Brotherhood’s rise to power, many believed that its political inclusion would lead to its democratization and moderation. Throughout the eighteen days of demonstrations in January and February 2011 that toppled Mubarak, Brotherhood leaders were aware that the protests were not dominated by Islamist ideas but rather oriented toward the broad goals of freedom and social justice. As a result, Brotherhood leaders were deliberate in their strategies to appeal to voters by not expressing their Islamist views too overtly. This deception was caught on by Egyptians. Nevertheless, between 2011 and 2013, the old state chose to cooperate with Islamists, including the Brotherhood, to neutralize the revolutionary mood in the country. After coming to power, the Brotherhood quickly lost support among the main recipients of its social welfare network: the poor. The Brotherhood’s relationship with the poor was entirely clientelist and was concerned exclusively with creating an electoral base as opposed to developing a more substantive ideological or political relationship. It preferred to reproduce poverty as long as it translated into welfare recipients and, by extension, loyal voters. However, the strength of the argument that the presence of political Islam decreases religiosity diminishes when considering the current scenario, where political Islam exerts even more influence, and yet, religiosity has increased. This discrepancy suggests that the dynamics between political Islam and religiosity are subject to evolving perceptions of uncertainty. During the height of the revolution, Egyptians may have perceived their uncertainties about the future differently, driven by a sense of optimism and the belief in activism. In contrast, the present disillusionment with uncertainties about the future may be contributing to an enhanced role of religion in their lives. The increased religiosity could be a response to the perceived inadequacy of political solutions to address current challenges, prompting individuals to turn to religion as a source of guidance in times of persistent uncertainty. Conclusion I have posited that the conditions of political instability that decrease religiosity are controlled uncertainty and the secondary role of religion. When individuals are presented with concrete solutions to address challenges they attribute to their political circumstances, these solutions will assume greater significance than religious commitment. And when individuals lack access to these tangible solutions and experience disillusionment about the future, religious commitment tends to increase. The pivotal factor in this dynamic is individuals' perception of the future, and this analysis delved into how these perceptions manifested and endured during periods of political instability. Consequently, the outcome is a demotion of religion to a secondary role in individuals' lives, outcompeted by favorable solutions that emerge from the uncertainties they face. It's noteworthy that Egypt has faced challenges since the Mubarak regime, raising concerns about the possibility of a new Arab Spring. Despite the ongoing deterioration of human rights conditions, the intensity that characterized the Arab Spring has diminished. Reflecting on the revolution has yielded diverse opinions, with some viewing it as a success while others perceiving it as a failure. Although repression in Egypt may arguably be more severe today, the period between 2011 and 2016 marked a distinct phase. The ongoing debates surrounding the success or failure of the initial Arab Spring make it seem improbable for a similar movement to occur. Despite the immediate changes following the revolution, both Egypt and Tunisia continue to grapple with longstanding grievances. Tunisia, in particular, is confronted with economic challenges, with approximately 6,000 Tunisians joining ISIS, marking the highest per capita rate globally. Tunisians became disillusioned with post-revolution politics, especially well-educated youths, who experienced unemployment at extremely high rates. Despite the gradual political progress seen over the past seven years, economic rewards have yet to emerge, spurring some to radicalize. Some remaining questions that emerge are: Do individuals revert to heightened religious commitment after resolving political instability, or does the influence of tangible solutions have a lasting impact on their religious commitment? 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The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics Volume IV, Issue I scroll to view articles Volume IV Issue I Philosophy Authenticating Authenticity Authenticity as Commitment, Temporally Extended Agency, and Practical Identity Kimberly Ramos Can Pascal Convert the Libertine? An Analysis of the Evaluative Commitment Entailed by Pascal’s Wager Neti Linzer The Growing Incoherence of Our Higher Values Aash Mukerji The Necessity of Perspective A Nietzschean Critique of Historical Materialism and Political Meta-Narratives Oliver Hicks Read More Politics The Unchurching of Black Lives Matter The Evolving Role of Faith in The Fight for Racial Justice Anna Savo-Matthews From Bowers to Obergefell The US Supreme Court’s Erratic, Yet Correct, Jurisprudence on Gay Rights Sydney White Predictive Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System Evaluating the Racial Bias Objection Rebecca Berman Read More Economics God Save the Fish The Abyss of Electoral Politics in Trade Talks––a Brexit Case Study Eleanor Ruscitti The Black Bourgeoisie The Chief Propagators of “Buy Black” and Black Capitalism Noah Tesfaye Breaking Big Ag Examining the Non-Consolidation of China’s Farms Noah Cohen Read More Applications for JPPE Now open! See Available Positions

Editorial board Foreword Volume I Issue II Introducing the second issue of JPPE Technological disruption has been a fact of the post-industrial world, producing the growth in productivity and efficiency that led to nearly unfathomable increases in opulence, standards of living, and wealth. It may, as a consequence, seem perplexing why so many of today’s leaders seem concerned about something so seemingly vastly beneficial as technological innovation. And yet, few economic shifts produce more anxiety than those involving the introduction of labor saving technology into the economy. This was true in the 19th century Britain, when the Luddites stood in such abject fear of the permanent redundancy of their labor that they took to murdering machine innovators and destroying designs. It was also true in the early 20th century, as agricultural innovations and new industrial designs dramatically reshaped the US economy. And it’s true again today, as artificial intelligence and digital technology make a wide array of occupations largely or entirely automatable. This has potentially profound implications for the world. As globalization, outsourcing, and the presence of winner- take all markets exacerbate income inequality in many countries, labor automation stands to make possibly significant numbers of jobs redundant, increasing returns to capital, and hastening the growth in inequality as productivity increases faster than wages. It’s the presence of these alarming trends that has driven us to dedicate the second issue of the Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics to the topic of technology and, specifically, technological disruption. We have done this by facilitating submissions from Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Brookings Institution President John Allen, both of whom have emerged as contemporary leaders on the front line to develop a politics that confronts some of the more perverse effects of technological innovation. As questions surrounding the effects of labor automation continue to garner more attention, the most popular solutions tend to take on at least one of two forms: education or social security. Ms. Sturgeon and Mr. Allen’s suggestions are therefore an apt encapsulation of the nature of the debate about how best to address technological displacement; the former discusses social security and the latter, education. Mr. Allen argues for a revaluation of modern education and training programs for workers and youths. He proposes that America’s continued dominance requires a strong investment in education programs that emphasize, for example, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and super-computing. Meanwhile Ms. Sturgeon provides a strong case for considering a universal basic income as a possible approach to curtail the effects of labor automation on inequality. She highlights Scotland’s experiments with such a proposal and underscores the need for bold leadership to develop a new approach to social security befitting of a modern and more technological advanced era. Although this semester’s issue of JPPE is centered on the question of technological disruption, it also features essays from undergraduates on a wide range of topics. One piece discusses the relationship between private companies and US cybersecurity policy. Another considers whether secession is a viable solution to the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict. And, in Moral Manipulation, a student considers the ethics of corporate advertising campaigns through a Kantian paradigm. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics is deeply proud of both the feature articles and student essays published in this issue. As students— from Providence to Beijing— begin to grapple with a rapidly changing economy and socio-political climate, the number of novel challenges the rising generation faces is great. And in the Journal you are now reading, students and world leaders around the world provide a great number of equally novel solutions.

The Mortal Futility of Contempt A Response to Macalester Bell’s Hard Feelings in the Era of Trump Jessica Li Swarthmore College Author Dorian Charpentier Galen Hall Nathan Mainster Ilana Duchan Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (15 pages) Abstract In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt , Macalester Bell argues that under certain circumstances contempt can be the appropriate—and indeed, even the best—response to answering those who exemplify what she calls the “vices of superiority.” But in grappling with our current political moment, this paper critiques Bell’s ethic of contempt. I argue that expressing contempt for those with whom we disagree is not effective in eliciting remorse or effecting change. In fact, contempt only further polarizes a body politic. Furthermore, I argue that contempt plays the role of holding others responsible less well than Bell thinks it does. Finally, I argue that a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. Theoretical Framework Contempt is in no short supply these days. In a politically turbulent era such as ours, contempt for public figures, institutions, and those with whom we vehemently disagree has become increasingly prominent. Calls to civility warn against this attitude, casting contempt as an ugly and corrosive emotion that damages our relations to one another and defies the respect we owe all persons. In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt, Macalester Bell argues intrepidly against this consensus. She contends that under certain circumstances, contempt can be the appropriate—and indeed, the best—response to answering those who exemplify what she calls the “vices of superiority.” Racism, one such vice of superiority, is best responded to with counter-contempt, she argues, because “contempt corrects [the racist’s] status claim and helps to restore the equilibrium between the esteem and deference he takes himself to deserve and the esteem and deference he actually merits.” Bell concludes that upon further investigation, contempt holds an important and essential place in moral life. The outpouring of contempt surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election and its aftermath calls into question whether contempt is the best way of confronting the vices of superiority. As I will demonstrate, contempt has done nothing to disrupt President Trump’s behavior, who, I argue, epitomizes many of the vices of superiority. Contempt has also made politics more divisive, Americans more narrow-minded, and public discourse more impossible. As many Americans have experienced, talking about politics with friends and family has become so strained that many have decided to avoid broaching the topic altogether. And increasingly, in a public discourse of contempt, people are curating their news and social media to avoid encountering viewpoints that differ from their own. In grappling with our current political moment, this paper argues against an ethic of contempt. First, I summarize Bell’s account of contempt. Then, against her account I argue that expressing contempt for those with whom we disagree is not effective in eliciting remorse or effecting change. In fact, contempt only further polarizes a body politic. After responding to Bell’s arguments on contempt’s instrumental value, I turn to her arguments on contempt’s non-instrumental value. Bell claims that contempt is non-instrumentally valuable because it plays an important role in our practices of holding others responsible; but, I argue that contempt plays this role less well than she thinks. Finally, I argue that a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. My arguments taken together do not defend a strict prohibition against contempt; however, they do demonstrate that contempt is much more morally suspect than Bell admits. In Hard Feelings , Bell begins by examining the nature of contempt. As she prefaces at the beginning of the chapter, contempt is difficult to define and make distinctive from other emotions like resentment, disgust, and anger. Nevertheless, she outlines four of contempt’s central features. First, contempt is a response towards persons who have failed to meet an important standard, and who have as a result compromised their status . Second, contempt is a globalist emotion, meaning it takes whole persons as its object. Third, the contemnor "sees the contemned as inferior to her along some axis of comparison.” And fourth, and most paradigmatically, contempt involves withdrawal. In contrast with neighboring emotions such as anger or resentment which motivate engagement, contempt motivates withdrawal. Withdrawal, she argues, can look like “refusing to invite someone to a gathering or declining to shake someone’s hand” on the one hand; and radio personality Don Imus’ contemptuous comments about “the Rutgers women’s basketball team, referring to them as ‘nappy-headed hos’” or the Egyptian protesters who waved their shoes at then-President Mubarak in Tahrir Square, on the other. The former examples she calls “passive contempt”; the latter examples “active contempt.” Passive contempt treats the target as non-threatening, as beneath notice. Passive contempt involves withdrawal in a literal sense: evading or dismissing the target. Active contempt, on the other hand, presents the target as threatening and involves a different sense of withdrawal. With active contempt, the contemnor withdraws from the target by casting her as dangerous and morally less than. Bell writes in a later passage, “contempt is a demoting emotion [original emphasis] that presents its target as having a comparatively low status.” In other words, the active contemnor purposefully distances herself by portraying the target as someone to be looked down upon, not as someone to be capitulated to or reconciled with. Thus, in expressions of active contempt, there is an aspect of communication : the contemnor tries to communicate to the target that she is being disengaged, and why she is being disengaged. Bell’s subsequent discussion focuses primarily on “active contempt.” Bell then turns to the looming question: What makes contempt morally valuable? Bell argues that contempt is the most effective way of confronting and defeating the vices of superiority, a term which encompasses a number of vices such as arrogance, hypocrisy, and racism. As she explains, those who exemplify the vices of superiority see themselves as entitled to more esteem and deference than everyone else, and insist that others treat them as such. Bell is skeptical that we can challenge their superbia by simply discussing or reminding them of the equal worth of all persons. She elaborates in a compelling passage: For those who evince superbia do not have false beliefs about others’ moral standing ; instead, their main fault is taking themselves to have a comparatively high status and lording this presumed status over people in a way that expresses ill will. Given this, reminding the arrogant or hypocritical that others are just as worthy of respect won’t answer their vices. Such people may concede the point but continue to harbor superbia and see it as justified. In order to properly challenge the target’s perception of his superior status, one must attempt to make his inferior status felt. That is why contempt’s characteristic demotion is such an apt response to the vices of superiority. Contempt best addresses the vices of superiority, she argues. As she sketches out earlier, contempt demotes the target and presents the target as having a comparatively low status. Contempt “thereby negat[es] his sense of entitlement and undermin[es] his attempts at dishonoring or exacting esteem and deference.” Moreover, being the object of contempt can “provide us with a morally valuable second-personal perspective and can shake us into the realization that we have failed to meet certain basic standards.” The paradigmatic example is Elizabeth’s contempt for Darcy in Pride and Prejudice . Darcy began reflecting on his arrogance and in turn, began changing his ways precisely because he felt Elizabeth’s contemptuous attitude. Bell hedges, however, that contempt does not cause the target to feel remorse. Instead, “what apt contempt does is provide reasons to change: it puts those who evince the vices of superiority in a position to appreciate their reasons to change; the experience of being put down and disesteemed makes one’s reasons to change particularly salient.” Contempt is not only morally valuable as a means of answering the vices of superbia; it also holds non-instrumental value. According to Bell, contempt is “a way for persons to maintain their integrity,” and “a person of integrity is someone who not only does the right thing but also has the right attitudes toward her commitments.” Contempt is moreover constitutive of “holding persons accountable for their actions and faults” and ensuring that we hold ourselves to shared standards. In the brief paragraph in which she makes this argument, she writes: “While resentment demands that its target take responsibility for the wrong done, contempt demands that its target change her attitudes and overcome her superbia. Responding with apt contempt, then, is the clearest way of holding persons accountable for their superbia.” In short, contempt is part of the moral practice of blaming those who fail to adhere to certain standards. Bell is convincing insofar as she persuades us that contempt can, in some cases, help “put the target in a position to appreciate the reasons he has to change his ways.” The example of Darcy and Elizabeth in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that Bell gives in her fourth chapter asserts her point forcefully; Elizabeth’s contemptuous rejection of Darcy’s proposal prompts in him a new awareness and inspires him to reform his character. However, Bell is less persuasive as to whether contempt is the best way of responding to the vices of superiority, and whether we ought to prefer an ethic of contempt to an ethic of anti-contempt. Does contempt always serve to jolt a person out of vice? What do we risk in contemning others? The rest of this paper interrogates these infirmities. As observers note, contempt is rife in contemporary politics. Screaming heads on television, Twitter trolls, and angry campus activists have become commonplace in American life. Yet, contempt has not proven effective in the ways that Bell anticipates. Perhaps the most glaring and well-known example of someone who exemplifies the vices of superiority is President Donald Trump. For example, he boasted about the purported successes of his administration to the United Nations General Assembly: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” He played more than six rounds of golf in his first month in the Oval Office, despite previously criticizing President Obama for doing the same thing. And he routinely fraternizes with white supremacists such as David Duke. Even his own supporters attest to his arrogance, hypocrisy, and racism. Michael Cohen, former lawyer and supporter of President Trump, said of him during his historic testimony before Congress: “He is a racist, he is a con man, he is a cheat.” Treating him with contempt, however, has not precipitated the kind of change that Bell anticipates, or as she argues, has not provided reasons for him to change. Despite the press exposing his hypocrisy for playing golf and the public responding with contempt on Twitter and Facebook, Trump continued to visit Mar-a-Lago for golf course outings. In a Twitter thread rebuking his behavior, dozens of people tweeted at Trump a picture of him tweeting in 2011, “I play golf to relax. My company is in great shape. @BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” except they crossed out “@BarackObama” from the picture and named Trump instead. Despite the widespread contempt he earned for his performance as president, coming from even his closest policy advisors, Trump said that “nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president.” In an anonymous op-ed, a senior official in the Trump administration called the president’s leadership style “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” And despite the contempt he received from civil rights organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Anti-Defamation League, Trump continued to highlight crimes committed by black and brown people, therefore emboldening the alt-right. As just one of many instances, consider how Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, expresses contempt for Trump in an op-ed piece about the border wall “emergency” when he writes: Trump's emergency declaration is a blatant abuse of power in the service of his anti-immigrant agenda and a brazen attempt to subvert the constitutional separation of powers. The federal treasury isn't a bank account that the president can just raid whenever he's in a bind. It's taxpayer money that the Framers specifically left in the hands of Congress. Trump is seeking to thwart Congress' will. Now we are asking the courts to give Trump another lesson in how the Constitution works. In the face of overwhelming contempt, Trump incredulously persists in being hypocritical, arrogant and racist—not once expressing remorse for his actions. Against President Trump, contempt proves unsuccessful in confronting the vices of superiority. Bell might offer two responses here. First, she might respond that one counterexample does not defeat the instrumental value of contempt. In her account, she did not venture to argue that contempt is guaranteed to answer the vices of superiority. If we read her work charitably, sometimes contempt will work, sometimes it will not. But in order to maintain that contempt has instrumental value and that it is the best way of responding to the vices of superiority, Bell must insist that by and large, contempt is effective. Second, she might assert that Trump is incapable of taking up contempt, and therefore treating him with contempt is inappropriate. She explains in a chapter about contempt’s characteristic withdrawal: The target must be able to understand what it means to fail to meet a standard and must be able to change his ways if he comes to accept the claim implicit in contempt. If a person is unable to understand what it means to fail to meet a standard or is utterly unable to take steps to address his fault, then one could not morally address him through one’s contempt. Even if we concede both responses—that presenting President Trump as one counterexample is not fatal to her argument, and furthermore, that her account can accommodate for President Trump and exceptional persons who are similarly immune from expressions of contempt—her account still faces the fact that contempt is ineffective towards ordinary Americans. For example, much of America has treated Trump supporters, including those who voted for him more tepidly, with unbridled contempt. Here, I assume that those who adamantly support President Trump and the policies that he advocates also evince the vices of superiority. Take the following headlines: “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant—Literally” which has the subtitle, “Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?”; “Maybe They’re Just Bad People”; “Racist Americans, Not Trump, Are The Problem. There Might Be A Cure.” Trump supporters are seen not merely as incorrect or misguided, but as terrible human beings. They are cast as bigots, uneducated hicks, and even “deplorables.” But liberal contempt has done very little, if anything, to change their minds. In general, Trump supporters still hold the same positions on policy issues, the President’s comportment, and his fitness to lead. As his steady approval rating shows, Trump remains exactly as overwhelmingly popular among Republicans as he was on the first day of his presidency. I argue that by and large, contempt has not prompted the national reckoning that Bell would expect on her account, nor has it inspired Trump supporters to rise to the standards that we have accused them of not meeting. Why is this the case? I argue that a culture of contempt in American politics is not as instrumentally valuable as Bell claims because it does not take effect in the way that she describes. Bell argues that contempt answers the vices of superiority by providing reasons to change. To reiterate the quote I cited earlier, she claims that contempt “puts those who evince the vices of superiority in a position to appreciate their reasons to change; the experience of being put down and disesteemed makes one’s reasons to change particularly salient.” Contempt in American politics, however, does not seem to function in this way. Contrary to Bell’s account, widespread and strenuous contempt has failed to make white supremacists better “appreciate their reasons to change.” Why? I argue that white supremacists do not feel the withdrawing effects of contempt because—and this is crucial—they champion the approval of the President. Although they may feel contempt from liberals, white supremacists are not “put down” or “disesteemed” precisely because they are bolstered by Trump when they witness him repeatedly accusing illegal immigrants of ruining the country. They witness him repeatedly associating himself with racists and repeatedly demonstrating fealty to alt-right groups. Consider how Trump began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants, saying: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best—they’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Consider how he has retweeted white nationalist accounts with handles such as “WhiteGenocideTM” without apology (Twitter has since removed this account). In the face of contempt, white supremacists have refuge in Trump, a figure with immense social and political cachet who tacitly approves their actions, and shares their views. Bell argues that contempt is supposed to withdraw from the target and thereby ostracize them from the moral community. But withdrawal is not meaningful if the target has recourse in a president who supports and often urges anti-immigrant rhetoric. Therefore, under the aegis of the president, white supremacists do not feel the withdrawing effects of contempt. Furthermore, I argue that contempt in American politics has not just been ineffective against the vices of superiority—it has only made matters worse. On all sides of the political spectrum, a culture of contempt has only entrenched the vices of superiority and alienated those whom we want to reform. To illustrate this point with an example, consider Hillary Clinton’s contemptuously calling half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Ostensibly, this highly controversial remark was meant as a way to answer racist, sexist, and xenophobic behavior demonstrated by those who had vocally advocated for Trump. Instead, her comment was met with public outrage and retaliation. An avalanche of stories commenting on the striking phrase flooded the Internet, conservatives were incensed, and the divide between the Democrat and Republican body politic widened only further. Consider these tweets: “Treating people as subhuman—irredeemable/deplorable—is no way to run for POTUS,” by Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush spokesman and fervent Trump opponent, and "What’s truly deplorable isn’t just that Hillary Clinton made an inexcusable mistake in front of wealthy donors and reporters happened to be around to catch it… It’s that Clinton revealed just how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America,” by Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser during the Trump campaign. As she explained in an apologetic statement that draws parallels with Bell’s arguments for the instrumental value of contempt, she intended for her contempt as a way to stand up to Trump’s turpitude and to commit herself and her campaign to moral values: But let's be clear, what's really “deplorable” is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called 'alt-right' movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values. It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people. It's deplorable that he's attacked a federal judge for his “Mexican heritage,” bullied a Gold Star family because of their Muslim faith, and promoted the lie that our first black president is not a true American. So I won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign. But calling millions of people a “basket of deplorables”—people whom she wanted to persuade—only drove them further into Trump’s arms. The “basket of deplorables” gaffe only made matters worse, and not just because it was said by a presidential candidate trying to win over voters—in other words, not just because it was a bad political play. It was also because using contempt as a means to address the vices of superiority, in general, risks alienating those whom we want to reform. Interviews with dozens of lukewarm Trump supporters bear this out. A New York Times article reports that incessant attacks on Trump are causing his supporters to rally around the President. Ms. Anders, one of the interviewees, said that when she hears “overblown” attacks on Trump, “it makes [her] angry at them, which causes [her] to want to defend him to them more.” The Times reports that Trump supporters feel protective of the President when asked the all too common question “How can you possibly still support this man?”, as well as further removed from the contemptuous liberal. Contempt, instead of addressing the vices of superiority on the other side, has only polarized our politics and cultivated an atmosphere in which contempt is traded back-and-forth, to no end. Our contemptuous public discourse also casts doubt on Bell’s arguments for the non-instrumental value of contempt. Although contempt, I agree, is an important reactive attitude that is part of our practice of holding persons accountable, I argue that contempt does not play that role as well as Bell asserts. Recall that in Bell’s view, contempt holds persons accountable by demanding that its target overcome her superbia. How does contempt issue this demand? She explains, “Through contempt’s characteristic withdrawal, its subjects do not simply seek explanations or apologies; instead, the contemnor seeks the target’s character change. If the target does not attempt to change his ways, then the contemnor will see him as someone to be avoided altogether.” Elizabeth held Darcy accountable for his arrogance by withdrawing from him, and thus morally engaging him. Shunning a person who exemplifies the vices of superiority can serve as a sort of punishment, holding persons accountable, but I argue that it is a particularly ambiguous and precarious way of doing so. It seems to me that there is an inherent tension between contempt’s characteristic withdrawal and the demand that it makes on the target—and that this tension undermines, or at the very least severely limits, the non-instrumental value of contempt. By withdrawing from the target, the contemnor does not expressly communicate the demand. The target may misinterpret, or may even be completely oblivious of, what is demanded of him. Moreover, by withdrawing from the target, the contemnor does not enforce the demand. The target is not in any way compelled to comply with the contemnor’s demand, aside from being subjected to the sanction of her ostracism. And as I argued earlier, ostracism is rendered impotent when another person or group embraces the target instead. Bell anticipates some of these worries when she writes: “It is true that contempt’s withdrawal may be misinterpreted. Silence and withdrawal are multiply ambiguous in ways that other forms of address are not.” But she seems more optimistic about contempt’s successes than wary of its risks. She argues, “But while the ambiguity of withdrawal can be disorientating, this disorientation can also be constructive. As targets think about what elicited the withdrawal, they may, like Darcy, come to recognize contemptible aspects of their characters that they had long overlooked.” She is confident that “if a target of contempt believes that the contempt directed at him is apt, then he will [emphasis added] respond with shame and an attempt to ameliorate his character,” often arguing as though the target’s response of shame and the target’s attempt to ameliorate his character are empirical inevitabilities. But I contend that we should be more skeptical of contempt’s ability to hold persons accountable. The ambiguity and precariousness of contempt that I have been discussing are especially acute in public discourse. Amid the din of daily, back-and-forth contempt about whatever news is dominating the day, it becomes especially difficult to determine what claim an expression of contempt is making and to feel compelled to answer that claim, when instead the target can simply dig in her heels and meet contempt with counter-contempt. Bell insists that if we reject an ethic of contempt, we would lose “relationships of mutual accountability for our attitudes in which we hold persons to certain standards and are held to certain standards in turn.” This seems to me to be an overly pessimistic conclusion. Holding persons accountable does not necessarily require an ethic of contempt; holding persons accountable might involve a myriad of other emotions such as resentment, disgust, shame, indifference, anger, and disappointment. Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he responds to criticisms made by several religious leaders in the South regarding the nonviolent protests against segregation. At different points, Dr. King expresses disappointment, indignation, and anger. For example, he writes, “But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church,” and, “I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed …” Note however that he does not express contempt for the clergymen. He does not dismiss their concerns or cast them as unforgivable human beings—despite all the good reason he has to do so. Instead, he takes up every line in their statement and thoroughly refutes each concern. By holding the church responsible for its hypocrisy without appealing to contempt, and indeed while remaining charitable, Dr. King demonstrates that “relationships of mutual accountability” are possible absent an ethic of contempt. In fact, one might argue that it was precisely Dr. King’s willingness to engage with his detractors that held them responsible and crucially served the success of the Civil Rights Movement. By countering each of their gripes head-on, relentlessly, it becomes unequivocally clear that their criticisms of the Birmingham demonstrations were made in bad faith and hold no water. Lastly, I argue that we should reject an ethic of contempt because a culture of contempt encourages in lockstep a culture of moral superiority. In treating those with whom we disagree contemptuously, we make the assumption that we are in the morally superior position to judge whether someone has violated the community’s standards. We appoint ourselves as arbiters of what is moral and what is immoral. Seeing ourselves as morally superior and others as morally inferior not only compromises our own character but also ignores the complexity of disagreement. Indeed, in expressing contempt for the Trump voter, much of America failed to listen to the many issues that Trump voters cared about—issues that Trump was addressing and Clinton was not. Pigeonholing Trump voters as immoral and bigoted obscured a broader debate about jobs leaving, terrorism, and the nuances of immigration. Ms. Anders, the interviewee whom I cited earlier, laments, “All nuance and all complexity—and these are complex issues—are completely lost… It’s either, ‘Trump wants to put people in cages, in concentration camps.’ Or, on the other side, ‘Oh the left just wants everybody to come into the country illegally so they can get voters.’ We can’t have a conversation.” Contempt has reached a fever pitch in public discourse and has shown no sign of abating anytime soon. In the context of our present political climate, I have argued that contempt is not as morally valuable as Bell claims it to be. Instrumentally, I have demonstrated that contempt is not effective in getting the target to reflect on his character and to make reforms. Moreover, contempt risks further dividing a body politic. Non-instrumentally, I have argued that contempt plays a much narrower role in holding persons accountable, given how ambiguous and precarious contempt is for the target who exemplifies the vices of superiority. I have also shown that it is possible to hold persons morally responsible without appealing to contempt. And lastly, I have argued that a culture of contempt encourages a culture of moral superiority, which not only compromises our own moral selves but also ignores the complexity of those whom we contemn. Taking seriously the arguments that this paper advances requires that our public discourse guards against contempt instead of embracing it. Works Cited Anonymous. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” New York Times. September 5, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html . Accessed April 7, 2019. Barlow, Rich. “Racist Americans, Not Trump, Are The Problem. There Might Be A Cure.” wbur . November 30, 2018. www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/11/30/donald-trump-racism-supporters-rich-barlow . Accessed April 7, 2019. Bell, Macalester. Hard feelings: The moral psychology of contempt . Oxford University Press. 2013. Blake, Aaron. “Why President Trump’s frequent golfing is even more hypocritical than it seems.” Washington Post . February 22, 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/22/president-trumps-frequent-golfing-is-even-more-hypocritical-than-it-seems-at-first-glance/?utm_term=.0199a7da3d9a . Accessed April 4, 2019. Brennan, Jason. “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant—Literally.” Foreign Policy . November 10, 2016. foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-trump-clinton-election-republican-democrat . Accessed April 7, 2019. Bump, Phillip. “Trump: ‘Nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president.’” Washington Post . 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November 26, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/opinion/trump-supporters-bill-white-bryan-eure.html . Accessed April 7, 2019. Higgins, Tucker. “Trump’s approval ratings are low but steady — possibly a good sign for his re-election chances.” CNBC . January 2, 2019. www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/trump-approval-low-but-steady-possible-good-sign-for-2020-re-election.html . Accessed January 2, 2019. Holmes, Jack. “Trump’s Disgusting Retweets Suggest a Larger Problem is Brewing.” Esquire . November 19, 2017. www.esquire.com/news-politics/a13974149/trump-retweet-britain-first/ . Accessed April 7, 2019. King Jr., Martin Luther. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." 26 UC Davis L. Rev. 791, 1992, 835. Lima, Christiano. “Hillary Clinton walks back 'basket of deplorables' remark.” Politico . September 9, 2016. www.politico.com/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-basket-deplorables-227988 . Accessed January 9, 2019. 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Acknowledgements Thank you to Lou Chen for reading over the draft of this paper. And thank you to Professor Krista Thomason for being an invaluable interlocutor. Our discussion about Macalester Bell’s Hard Feelings motivated much of my thinking on contempt in public discourse.

Divisive Identities: Exploring the Interplay of Personal and Social Identities Ella Neeka Sawhney Author Aimee Zheng Faith Li Editors I. Abstract Personal and social identity, whilst existing as two different entities, combine and interact to form our overall individual identities. Personal identity centres around how an individual’s fundamental beliefs and commitments are shaped by their personal experiences, whilst social identity arises from one’s belonging to various social groups, including one’s social relationships. This essay juxtaposes arguments from Amartya Sen and Bikhu Parekh to argue that our personal and social identities are profoundly intertwined and thus should not be viewed as separate from one another. By drawing on theoretical frameworks and real-life examples, I demonstrate how Parekh’s model offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of individual identity which encompasses personal and social dimensions as dynamic entities. Thus, through a critical examination of Parekh’s model and Sen’s respective criticisms, this essay concludes that Parekh’s model, by acknowledging the plurality and diversity of identities as well as the complex interplay between personal and social identities, provides a robust defence of individual identity as comprised of personal and social identities, expertly addressing concerns raised by Sen. II. Introduction Classical problems within this idea of personal identity can be categorised into families. For instance, the persistence problem and the personhood puzzle both focus on questions regarding the continuity and ethical implications of self-identity. I choose to concentrate on ‘The Characterisation Question’ which delves into what comprises our personalities. This question is important as it is one that we grapple with daily, permeating all aspects of our lives. Specifically, I focus on the debate between Parekh and Sen, as I find this debate to have strong implications for understanding individual identity In this essay, I investigate Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, scrutinising its effectiveness in addressing the concerns raised by Sen. My thesis contends that through his emphasis on plurality and diversity, Parekh efficiently responds to Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities, ultimately undermining Sen’s criticisms. First, I explore the intricacies of the concept of philosophical (including both personal and social) identity. Next, I explain Parekh’s model and juxtapose it against Sen’s criticisms. I then evaluate whether Parekh’s theory can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. Lastly, I debate Sen’s critique of over-conformity to social roles as a result of combining social and personal identity. Prima facie, our identity addresses the ubiquitous question ‘Who am I?’, encompassing the beliefs, ideas and qualities that shape a person’s character. Yet, philosophical identity, namely individual identity, explores the intricacies of how an individual may deduce their identity from their various distinctive features. This individual identity is what “distinguishes” (Parekh, 2009, p. 267) agents, functioning as a “predicate” (Sollberger, 2013) used to describe specific attributes of a subject and identify its differentiators. Individual identity comprises two components: personal (shaped by one’s personal life experiences) and social (arising from one’s belonging in groups or a relationship), according to Parekh (2009). By examining personal identity one can better understand and analyse ‘The Characterisation Question’: ‘What is it that makes me the unique individual I am?’, a question originally termed by Schechtman (2007) who presented ‘The Characterisation Question’ as: “The question of which beliefs, values, desires, and other psychological features make someone the person she is.. [it] concerns identity in the sense of what is generally called… an ‘identity crisis’” (p. 1) My analysis of ‘The Characterisation Question’ throughout the remainder of this essay investigates the features which define one’s personal identity and how they render a person differentiable from others. Moreover, viewing personal identity as “contingent and temporary” (Olson, 2023) suggests that one’s definition of self changes throughout one’s lifetime. For example, an only child’s identity shifts when becoming an older sibling, following their younger sibling’s birth. Hence, personal identity evolves alongside changing exogenous factors and is influenced by introspective processes, such as changing religious beliefs. III. Parekh’s model Parekh’s (2009) model of “overall” (p. 268) identity, alternatively referred to as individual identity, encompasses both personal and social identity. Parekh’s concept of personal identity centres around how an individual’s “fundamental beliefs and commitments” (ibid., p. 267) shape their perceptions of the world and their role within it. This recurrent journey of “self-definition” (ibid., p. 268) permits individuals to make sense of their convictions, including values, beliefs and opinions, thus developing their inner comprehension of personal identity. Moreover, Parekh describes social identity as a key aspect of individual identity, arising from one’s belonging to various social groups. He interprets social identity as “inherently plural” (ibid., p. 267), acknowledging its multi-layered influence on a person’s identity. Social identity includes relationships and groups a person feels they belong to, which play a crucial role in shaping their self-perception. Hence, these interconnected layers contribute to one’s personal identity, allowing social identity to, more broadly, impact individual identity. Yet, an interpretive challenge lies in Parekh’s vague explication of the relationship between personal and social identity, leaving the permeability of the boundary, and the extent of their interaction unclear. These ambiguities in Parekh’s model make it difficult to interpret how personal and social identities coalesce. This is showcased in Parekh’s example of the two teachers: “For one it is nothing but a job that she would readily give up if she got a better one”, for the other “being a teacher means a great deal to her. She identifies with it, sees it as an integral part of who she is and would not even dream of giving it up” (ibid., p. 274) Here, the first teacher is mechanically fulfilling their role, while the other integrates teaching into their personal identity. This quote illustrates the challenge of unravelling the complex, and deeply intertwined web of overlapping personal and social identities. The interpretive challenge concerning Parekh’s claim that may arise here is how individuals navigate their identities and to what extent their social identities integrate into their overall identities. Thus, I acknowledge that there are some tensions within Parekh’s view that are slightly contradictory. Namely, when comparing this difficulty in interpreting Parekh’s view of the interaction between personal and social identities with Parekh’s persistent assertion that our personal and social identities are inherently linked, inconsistencies arise. This is something that I shall discuss further in my discussion of ‘dogmatic sectarianism’. IV. Sen’s concerns Sen (2009) presents three key objections to Parekh’s model of personal and social identity which I outline below: The proposition that “a change in social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” is flawed. Our personal identity shouldn’t be “combinable” with our social identity as our social identities can change, without our overall identity changing (p. 286). “One’s personal identity is not threatened by one’s decision to depart from the activities of others belonging to the same group.” Moreover, over-emphasising our social identity results in a lack of reasoning and mutual understanding between members from different groups (p. 287). “Once the priority of a social affiliation is accepted as an integral part of one’s ‘overall identity’, something substantial is lost.” This leads to a person’s lack of deviation from their group’s views and affiliations (p. 288). Sen critiques Parekh’s viewpoint on the combinability of personal and social identity. Specifically, he faults Parekh for overemphasising the impact of social identity on overall identity, asserting that his view is likely to foster dissent hence contributing to societal divides. Sen (2007, pp. xiii-xiv) further encourages the separation of our social influences from our personal decisions. This derives from his argument that a singular or “dominant” social “classification” may hinder deviation from one’s societal or cultural norms, impeding personal decision-making abilities. He stresses that acknowledging our “pluralit[y] of identity” prevents rigid adherence to social groups so that our personal decisions are not entirely dictated by them. A. Dogmatic sectarianism A key feature of Sen’s (2009, p. 286) first criticism is that Parekh’s model is illogical in strongly combining personal and social identity because this view suggests that a change in social affiliation will result in an entire change of personality. Thus, Sen reasons that, according to Parekh’s model “a change of social affiliation would make one a different person altogether” (ibid.). From this, Sen asserts that a likely consequence is the emergence of “dogmatic sectarianism”, meaning that individuals unwaveringly adhere to a strict set of beliefs which often leads to ignorance towards the views of other groups. This creates a lack of willingness to deviate from these norms, as well as ignorance towards and dismissal of other groups’ perspectives, breeding intolerance and hindering understanding between groups. I applaud Sen for identifying the dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Specifically, he recognises a person’s reluctance to stray from their group’s collective views can foster strong antagonism towards outsiders with different opinions. For Sen, one must separate their personal and social identities to prevent this phenomenon. He asserts that through uncoupling one’s personal and social identity, one can retain a part of their social identity and remain associated with that social group without sacrificing one’s entire personal identity. Hence, Sen warns against Parekh’s model which arguably sees individuals as rigidly tying their personal identity to their social identity. An example supporting Sen’s reflections involves the separation of personal identity from religious affiliations, which falls within social identity. The consolidation of personal and social identity can lead to “sectarian violence” (ibid., p.287). Per Sen’s second criticism: individuals overly emphasise their religious identity and struggle to find areas of agreement or understanding with other religious groups. This is evident in the Northern Ireland conflict; a strong ethnoreligious divide which created a divergence between Catholics and Protestants (Ferguson, 2016). For the Northern Irish, this rigid adherence to religious groups blurred the lines between religious and social identity, fuelling violence and hostility between them. The entrenchment of religious identity within personal identity demonstrates the risk of overly combining personal and social identities, creating a scenario where separation becomes nearly unattainable. Moreover, one must acknowledge that Sen does not assert that dogmatic sectarianism is an inevitable result of combining personal and social identity. Instead, it is only a possibility that poses a significant threat and should be avoided. Thus, he envisions more than one potential outcome of combining personal and social identity, demonstrating his open-mindedness and nuanced analysis. However, I find that Parekh’s flexible and plural model can escape Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism. This is because Parekh’s (2009) emphasis on plural identities and his encouragement towards the usage of “plural perspectives” (p. 276) prevents the dominance of one single identity. Parekh’s interpretation allows a person to recognise different aspects of themselves, which combine to influence their overall identity. Sen fails to recognise the potential of Parekh’s model and emphasis on “plural identities” to counteract any dangers of dogmatic sectarianism. Under closer examination of Parekh’s model, his awareness of plural identities can provide an alternative solution to Sen’s criticisms, thus demonstrating his model’s versatility and robustness. Parekh’s ability to respond to Sen’s criticism can be demonstrated by applying his model to the aforementioned example of the Northern Irish conflict. Taking a more pluralistic approach, one can see that his model does not succumb to the pitfalls of dogmatic sectarianism. If Northern Irish citizens embraced a pluralistic understanding of their identities, recognising their shared nationality in addition to their differing religious affiliations, conflict might have been reduced. Thus, mutual recognition of plural social identities allows Parekh to maintain his argument of multifaceted and inter-connected personal and social identities, defying Sen’s criticism that Parekh’s model encourages rigid and unfaltering social divides. Therefore, Parekh expertly responds to Sen’s criticism of dogmatic sectarianism as his pluralistic emphasis and encouragement to recognise our own diverse social identities counteracts Sen’s concern that tying personal and social identities fosters inflexibility. B. Over-conformity and Combinability of Social and Personal Identity Sen’s third point criticises Parekh’s model for its over-emphasis of social identity when combined with personal identity. He argues that excessively coupling our personal identities to societal and cultural norms, renders our personal identity secondary. Consequently, people become compelled to strictly adhere to their social norms, constituting a loss of their personal sense of self. Sen (2009) criticises the apparent “reductionism” of a person’s identity to one aspect of their social identity such as their ethnicity or nationality, (p. 288) which, as Sen believes, arises from combining personal and social identities At first glance, Sen’s argument seems logically valid as over-conforming to one affiliation could correspond with disregarding other aspects of one’s overall identity. Sen terms this “epistemic failure” (ibid.) whereby people cannot understand certain aspects of their identity because one affiliation has taken priority. He illustrates this with the example of different groups such as ‘British Muslims’ in which over-emphasising religious identity “miniature[ises] human beings and their many affiliations” (ibid.). This leads to a neglect of plural identifying elements beyond religion, whereby people are reduced to this “single category” (ibid.). Sen further demonstrates his argument by referencing British Bangladeshis who are merely “defined” (ibid.) as ‘British Muslims’. Although a majority of Bengalis in Britain are Muslim, this reduction disregards the distinct culture of Bengali individuals, which may be secular and not solely defined by their religion, demonstrating how combining personal and social identities oversimplifies the manifold nature of individual identity. Moreover, Sen’s argument is further developed by his assertion that over-simplifying our identities leads people to seemingly lose their innate autonomous abilities. By “reducing” (ibid.) one’s identity, it becomes very difficult for one to perceive their identity outside of their social categorisation, thus obfuscating decision-making and threatening individual autonomy. When an individual’s social affiliations determine their overall identity, they confine themselves to making decisions only within these affiliations. For example, women forced to conform to their societal gender role as homemakers may have to forgo personal endeavours that exist outside of the home. This demonstrates how over-emphasising gender as a social affiliation can confine women and prevent them from exerting their agency. However, I believe Parekh’s model withstands Sen’s criticism by recognising the complexity of our identity, where combined aspects of our identity influence decision-making. Particularly, he acknowledges that there is great “variation” (Parekh, 2009, p. 273) in our perception of what constitutes individual identity. Here, Parekh emphasises the diverse interpretations of our social identities which can be assigned varying importance to different aspects. He specifies people can “define and relate” (p. 274) to their societal roles in various ways, demonstrating an awareness that people may choose to identify with different social identities to varied extents. In the above example, British Muslims can challenge their simplistic categorisation by prioritising their religious identity differently. Consequently, Parekh’s model evades Sen’s criticism of over-conformity by acknowledging social identities as qualitative, rather than objective, with some holding greater significance. Sen argues that, in order to prevent over-conformity, individuals can and should completely separate their personal and social identities. Yet, I cannot deem this as feasible, as I believe that personal and social identity cannot be viewed as two separate entities; instead, they constantly combine and influence one another throughout our lives. Specifically, our personal values are often shaped by our social context and so aiming to separate this largely oversimplifies our complex human identity. For example, growing up adhering to the Sikh faith, I was taught the importance of seva (selfless service) and helping those less fortunate than myself. These values instilled in me a passion for charity and volunteer work, which have become an integral aspect of my personal identity. I thus find that my social identity as a Sikh is deeply intertwined with my personal values and I therefore find it inconceivable to attempt to separate them. Therefore, I find Sen’s proposed alternative to Parekh’s model–in which an individual must divide personal and social identities–incomprehensible in practice. V. Conclusion My essay explored Parekh’s twofold model of individual identity, focusing on its capability to respond to Sen’s criticisms. Firstly, I disputed Sen’s point of dogmatic sectarianism, articulating the ability of Parekh’s pluralistic framework to evade Sen. Next, I asserted that Parekh’s acknowledgement of the differing importance of each social identity refutes Sen’s claim that Parekh’s combined framework leads individuals to over-conform to their social identity above personal identity. Ultimately, I conclude that Parekh’s framework expertly responds to each of Sen’s concerns about the divisive potential of social identities. References Ferguson, N. a. (2016). Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Conflict in Northern Ireland. In Understanding Peace and Conflict Through Social Identity Theory (pp. 215-277). Springer, Cham. Olson, E. T. (2023, June 30). Personal Identity . Retrieved from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/identity-personal/ Parekh, B. (2009). Logic of identity. Politics, philosophy & economics , 267-284. Schechtman, M. (2007). Introduction . In The Constitution of Selves (pp. 1-3). Cornell University Press . Sen, A. (2007). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Penguin Books India. Sen, A. (2009). 285The fog of identity. Politics, Philosophy & Economics , 251-352. Sollberger, D. (2013). On identity: from a philosophical point of view. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health volume , Article number 29.

Oedipus and Ion as Outsiders: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship Oedipus and Ion: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship An Analysis of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles and Ion by Euripides Claire Holland University of Chicago Author Marysol Fernandez Harvey Tathyana Mello Amaral Antonio Almazan Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (12 pages) Introduction In ancient Athenian society, the collective myth of autochthony[1] provided the basis for social order, determining who got the benefits of citizenship and who was excluded from the polis [2]. According to their autochthonous myth, the citizenry of Athens did not emigrate from elsewhere, but instead arose from the earth upon which ancient Athens stood. Theirs was not a city of immigrants; from their very origins, the people of Athens believed themselves to be the only population that had always belonged to Athenian soil. Thus, each true-born Athenian carried within them the essential spirit of the Athenian people, passed down from generation to generation. To determine and confirm their citizenship on an individual level, each Athenian had to demonstrate their autochthonous familial descent when they came of age in a dokimasia, an examination wherein citizen tribunals collected testimony from friends and family members in support of one’s claims to citizenship[3]. In this way, one’s lineage became the sole factor determining one’s inclusion in the polis . Once blood became the basis for citizenship, citizens who were established as autochthonous could not be excluded from the polis on the basis of class. The poorest citizens had the same right to participate in Athenian government as the elite, although in practice the higher classes enjoyed special privileges, such as training in rhetoric, which poorer citizens did not. For ancient Greek city-states, this level of inclusivity was groundbreaking; most city-states did not consider their lower- or even middle-class members to be citizens, even in democratic systems of governance. However, this is not to say that Athens was entirely without social divisions, for more than just fully-privileged citizens lived within the city walls. Overall, inhabitants were sorted into three groups: citizens, metics, and slaves. While citizens enjoyed all the rights and benefits of the polis , including the right to vote and to participate in public forums, metics were an in-between, catch-all group, not subjugated like slaves but not as privileged as citizens. They could not participate in government or vote, for example, but were still able to participate economically in Athenian society. Metics were what we today might call a migrant class, as they did not meet the full requirements for blood-based citizenship but were still free. Metics were not confined to only the lower classes; like citizens, metics existed in every economic stratum, from the poorest to the richest. However, regardless of economic class, citizens, being true-born Athenians, were more socially vaunted. While lauded by political theorists for its groundbreaking inclusivity, the Athenian genealogical grounds for inclusion, like any other such system, necessitated that some be excluded so that the polis might be defined and unified rather than indistinct and anarchic. This exclusion, at least theoretically, was to be on the grounds of blood-based requirements for citizenship[4]. However, as Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the second in his trilogy about the eponymous protagonist, and Ion by Euripides make abundantly clear, this distinction did not always play out as it ought. In fact, the existence of exceptions to the rule of blood-based citizenship reveals that its apparent legitimacy was, at its core, fallacious. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is in that the knowledge of their parentage, which should have moved them out of their marginal social positions and into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually prevented them from claiming their rightful places within society. This is due to the fact that in practice, blood did not stand alone in determining membership to the polis . Athenian society instead relied upon adherence to socially-codified, secondary behavioral implications of blood-based membership, as shown through a further examination of the Athenian city-state and the plays Oedipus at Colonus and Ion. What’s more, the rule of descent necessarily meant that any violations of these secondary behaviors were inheritable and thus contaminated an individual’s entire genetic line from their transgression onward. In examining the social structures as they are presented in these two works, in light of the historical context of ancient Athens, it is clear that the lineage-based autochthony myth was only the beginning of the implied social order. Literary Background Before diving into the social structure of Athens, a short summary of each play is in order, which will highlight the most relevant plot points. Thanks to Freud, most are familiar with Oedipus, or at least with his infamous acts: killing his father, marrying his mother, and fathering her children. Once he discovers all that he has unknowingly done, Oedipus blinds himself and is outcast from Thebes, his home and onetime kingdom. All of this takes place in Oedipus Rex , the first in Sophocles’ trilogy of plays about Oedipus and his family. Following these events is Oedipus at Colonus , which shows Oedipus in exile from Thebes as he approaches the Athenian acropolis. During the course of the play, Oedipus encounters a pair of Athenian citizens, who fetch Theseus, the Athenian king, to determine if Oedipus will be allowed to stay in Athens. After a lengthy debate, Theseus decides to accept him, thanks in part to the pleading of Oedipus’s daughters, who have been helping him in his blindness. At the conclusion of the play, Oedipus is led away into the forest of Athens where he dies without leaving a trace, with Theseus as his sole witness swearing not to say a word about what happened to him. The themes of Oedipus at Colonus reach their pinnacle in Antigone , the final play in Sophocles’ trilogy, wherein Oedipus’s children are all killed, save Ismene, whether it be by their own hands or those of their political rivals. Ion by Euripides centers around another family drama, although perhaps not as well known as that of Oedipus. In the play, Ion is an orphan like Oedipus, raised in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The play starts when Creusa, forebear and Queen of Athens, and her husband Xuthus, a war hero and metic, visit the Temple to ask for a prophecy concerning Xuthus’s prospects of having any children. There, the couple meets Ion, and the prophecy leads Xuthus to assume that the now-grown orphan is his true-born son. By the end of the play, however, Creusa and Ion discover his true parentage: that it is she who is really his mother, and that his father is actually the god Apollo, who raped her before she married Xuthus. Following council from the goddess Athena, they choose to keep this knowledge secret from Xuthus for reasons that will later be discussed, and Ion goes on to eventually found the Ionian race. The Athenian City-State With the above summaries in mind, we will begin our analysis of the Athenian city-state. Athenian democracy, while more inclusive of lower classes than any prior sociopolitical structure, necessarily imposed limits on those allowed into the privileged citizenry. Voting could only be meaningful if it were limited; absolute freedom to participate in the polis would be, as Jacques Derrida says of unconditional hospitality, “a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, for short.”[5] For order and social duty to exist, there must be a specific group to whom these imperatives apply, or else all is unordered chaos. The necessary trade-off in this collective unification is the creation of an out-group against which the citizenry can be defined and assert its exceptionalism. In this way, the social order itself creates the outlaw, the metic, the orphan, and the bastard: broad, inferior social categories designed to include those who do not adhere to the implied social code. Those considered “outside of the law” are not actually so, for they fall into categories created by the social order. The only individuals truly outside of the law are those who cannot be defined by it, which we shall see is the case for Ion and Oedipus. The social rule creates the social rulebreakers, and at the same time the rule-breakers throw the rule itself into relief. Each is the inverse of the other’s positive assertion, becoming a co-constitutive axis. They provide legitimacy by means of a relation of difference through which to define themselves, while in reality neither category exists outside of the artificial, dyadic social construction. In order for a society to function, however, it must be able to overlook the arbitrariness of social delineation and instead see it as legitimate, even inherent to its subjects. To that end, Athens turned to a system of social order that on its face seemed absolute, inherent, and infallible: blood-based citizenship dependent upon genealogical descent from an autochthonous original populace. In the way of legitimacy, autochthony appeared acceptable to its citizens because it could not be disproven, even though it was just as much of a social construct as any other conception of citizenship and justification of exceptionalism. Because the mythical original autochthonous population from which Athenians claimed citizenship was ancestral, its supposed existence could not be called into question based on facts, since there were none to confirm or deny its existence. Like the founding myth of any society, the lie at the core of Athenian structure not only persisted but, interestingly, added legitimacy to the regime. Autochthony also provides a reason to see status as inherent to the citizen, since it “grounds difference in claims of nature—specifically, in earth and blood—[which gives] these categories the appearance of an ontological status.”[6] That is, Athenian exceptionalism appeared justified since it was traceable back to inherent natural differences between people. The lie of one’s social status being inherent, especially in a system based on blood, means that both adhering to its standards and violating them are not seen as merely shifting status, but are actions sublimated into the person themself. Oedipus, answering the question the Chorus poses as to his identity, does not say, “I am in exile”—that is, inhabiting an external, imposed state—but “I am an exile” (italics added).[7] His status has become his being, since blood determines both. Just as Thomas Kuhn conceives of paradigm shifts in science as not only incorporating past scientific information, but also as proclaiming past paradigms unscientific, so too do new information and actions that cause a change in status retroactively re-write one’s entire self. Everything that previously signaled one’s status becomes a lie, and, in a world where statuses can change, passing becomes both possible and inevitable.[8] This is the unavoidable fallout of the idea of social status as inherent and blood based. While autochthony’s claims of being inherent certainly rested on shaky ground, these were not the only fallacious premises upon which Athenian self-conception depended. Because autochthony was meant to order, it centrally imposed its structure down to even the level of individual family, and in doing so, manifested itself as a myth of unity. Above all, genealogical claims were meant to be objective and clear, “largely to guard against the kind of mingling and confusion of identities that blurs discrete lines of demarcation in the social order.”[9] The ideological primacy of a clearly-ordered and unified family structure was designed to make orderly life possible, with a cohesive overall clan structure which mirrored the internal structure of the family. In this way, the polis functioned ideologically as a single entity, its uniform organization all the way down to the individual level supplementing its unifying claim to one collective heritage. This ideology is far from abstract, and is in fact visible in much of the literature Athenian citizens produced. In Pericles’ Funeral Oration, for example, “the ‘populus,’ in the general sense of the term, is not politically divided,” and, indeed, “is never divided in the works of the tragic poets.”[10] This broad claim of unity is seen in Oedipus at Colonus as well, when Theseus, reacting to Creon’s abduction of Oedipus’s daughters, proclaims, “Your [Creon’s] behavior is an affront to me, / A shame to your own people and your nation,” and that “the whole city [Athens] / Must not seem overpowered by one man.”[11] In a unified citizenry, any citizen exemplifies that citizenry, and thus the actions of one man can impact the reputation of the entire polis . In this way, the citizen is metonymic of the polis , and conflating one with the other is both an easy and powerful move in a mythically-unified city like Athens, especially by its figurehead Theseus. What this means, however, is that the broad-reaching social order determines not only social status, but behavior. One must act in accordance to its social prescriptions, or else one endangers the social ideal of collective unity. Thus, those who violate the social norms, especially those important enough to be codified into law, must either be expelled from the polis by being placed into one of the excluded classes—in extreme cases, such as with Oedipus, this meant being expelled from the city itself and branded an exile—or eliminated entirely. In a society founded on absolute, broad-reaching, inherent order, any person whose very presence defies that system of order threatens the entire conception of the polis, a conception that must be kept in place so that democracy and the state as a whole can function. In order to see why Oedipus and Ion are not able to take their rightful places, then, it is necessary to examine exactly which secondary social prescriptions they violate that threaten the order and unity of the polis .[12] The Social Implications Of Blood While the primary concern of a genealogical social organization is creating a clear order, it must also be a self-sustainable system. What this means is that in order to reproduce viable citizens, and thereby the entire social order, secondary behavioral prescriptions become necessary. A system meant merely to determine whether or not one was citizen (i.e., pure lineage) became instead a guiding social principle, dictating not only social standing but also desired social behavior. To borrow a term coined by James C. Scott, the requirement of pure lineage in a genealogical society set into motion “a process by which ‘a measure colonizes behavior’”—that is, what is meant to be descriptive becomes prescriptive.[13] In the quest to create social order and obtain clarity through kinship organization, a blood-based society generated secondary regulations that helped further its own existence. No longer did it merely order society, but the desire to adhere to the blood standard now shaped the ways Athenians lived their lives. For example, the stringency of claims to autochthony biased societal perceptions of preferable marriages. Athenian-Athenian matches, or, more generally, marriages between members of the polis with clearly-defined statuses were considered more appropriate in ancient Athenian society. These biases played into the need for social order: if one was certain who one’s parents were, one’s own status was clearly defined. Conversely, if one was uncertain about their parentage, their social status was diminished due to the social order. We see this bias throughout history, with orphans and bastards historically being treated as lower-class citizens, inferior to those of straightforward lineage. With unclear parentage, one is not immediately stateless, per say, but one experiences a sort of social statelessness. As Creusa says of Ion, “It was for your good that Loxias settles into a noble house. If you were called the god’s son, you would not have had a house as your inheritance or a father’s name.”[14] Because Athenian women could not hold property, Ion must pass as the son of a metic in order to inherit a name of any meaning. Indeed, we see at the beginning of the play that Ion has no name at all until Xuthus gives it to him.[15] Naming is a familial claim, but as a bastard of Apollo, Ion has no name to claim whatsoever. While his Athenian mother ought to make him Athenian as well, revealing his true parentage would render Ion not only destitute, but without any form of social identification. To have a subordinate place in the social order is better—at least as Ion is coerced to believe by Xuthus and Athena—than to have no place at all. While his parentage is clear, Ion’s social status is not, revealing one of the major failures of a blood-based system. Inheritance can only deal with facts that it was built to incorporate for it is based on the grounds that it stems from absolute fact. While being the son of a god ought to have positive effects on his social standing, the fact that Apollo has entered the social order from a place completely external to it means that Ion and all of his progeny are also unable to fit into the social system at all. Ion cannot even be defined by one of the catch-all categories such as “orphan” that have been built into society for extreme, non-standard cases. A social order based on genetic lineage “expresses a demand to repeat (over generations) what can only happen once (the original birth).”[16] Genealogical in-grouping made both citizenship and violations of its reproductive practices iterative: if one’s ancestors made a mistake in marriage or reproduction, it would be reproduced throughout the entire genealogical line with no chance of correction, save through covering it up. Once revealed, Apollo’s original sin of impregnating Creusa—or, as it was more likely to be seen in this society, Creusa’s original sin of giving birth to Ion—would haunt Ion’s family line forever. Ion therefore must follow Athena’s advice and pass as a metic until the end of his days, his knowledge of his true parentage keeping him from fully joining the polis lest he become disenfranchised and lose his social classification of orphan, along with the protection that classification affords. While Ion’s crime against the social order is his very birth, Oedipus’s crime is more nuanced, hinging on his transition from ignorance to knowledge of his own parentage. Oedipus at Colonus thus explores what happens when that which goes against the social order is revealed, instead of staying safely hidden. While Ion confounds orderly overall social classification, Oedipus hopelessly confuses the internal family ordering upon which the whole of Athenian society was based. Oedipus not only confuses this order by killing his father, upending the proper power dynamic and sinning against the polis ’s conception of the ideal family, but also by marrying his mother and having children by her. This creates social positions untenable within Athenian society: sister-daughters, son-brothers, father-siblings, grandmother-mothers, etc. In his ignorance, Oedipus commits crimes that, upon coming to light, make both himself and his entire family socially unclassifiable, for the social order has no way of coping with the complications of incest. Just as Ion’s potential outing could contaminate the legitimacy of his entire line, Oedipus’s revelation does contaminate his entire family structure because of the supposedly inherent and unifying qualities of blood. This inherited contamination is evident in the ill fate of Oedipus’s daughters in the following play, Antigone . What brings people together in the social order can just as quickly spread social contamination. Oedipus and his family, especially his offspring, each inhabit multiple social categories, which contradict each other in their implications of exclusion and inclusion. Despite Oedipus and by extent his children being at least doubly Theban, the revelation of Oedipus’s parentage means they cannot be allowed to remain in the polis . Society has no outcast category in which to put the members of this family, so they must be expelled. They have violated the social order and thus cannot stay in the city since their continued presence threatens the myth of broader social unity. While the concept of unity was not as important in Thebes as in Athens, at least from an Athenian perspective, incest was still taboo. To some extent, Oedipus’s family had to be Theban since Thebes served as Athens’ dramatic foil, a place where scenes were allowed that couldn’t play out in Athens, even mythically.[17] Thebes was a place to explore social possibilities. If Oedipus’s stories took place within Athens’ idealized system, even in fiction, they risked exposing too directly its fragility. The slight distance between the two cities, both physically and ideologically, was what made such socially-shattering myths as Oedipus palatable. They were allowed to explore the potential effects that taboo events such as incest could have within Athens without threatening the social order with its intense emotional baggage. Conclusion The Athenian social order tolerates certain types of aberrations as long as they fall within the outcast categories it has created so that its myth of unity can persist despite inevitable anomalies. If an individual falls outside of these catch-all categories then they must be eliminated. Indeed, we see this occur through the plays as Oedipus’s children—who break no laws but whose very existence as daughter-sisters and brother-sons exposes the fragility of blood-based social order—eventually kill themselves and each other. The sin must be cut off at the source or else it will grow exponentially with every following generation. All of Oedipus’s family must end to cleanse the blood and the city. Unlike with Ion, Oedipus’s familial social transgressions are known, precluding him from the approved social order. Therefore, Oedipus faces no other socially-viable option but to be expelled from the polis . He threatens the polis ’s behavioral unity, the myth of unity that the entire polis is founded upon, and therefore, the polis itself. The mythically-unified polis, for whom all included individuals are metonymic representatives, cannot include an individual who has violated its secondary socio-familial prescriptions even if those transgressions are not intentional. Interestingly, Oedipus is asked to conditionally rejoin Thebes after his expulsion because the metonymic power the polis has over its citizens supersedes all other considerations. The claim which Athens newly asserts over Oedipus infringes upon that primary consideration, and so his secondary sins can be overlooked in favor of his primary birthright. Oedipus’s parentage is revealed, while Ion’s is not, and these revelations are what shaped their tragic fates. However, in a genealogical system that gains legitimacy based on the claim that blood is objective, inherent, and unfakeable, how is it possible that either of their lineages, at any point, not be revealed? The answer, in short, is that despite its apparent objectivity, blood does not speak for itself. One cannot look at someone and tell who their parents are, and, like Ion, individuals might be mistaken about their true parentage. This opens up the possibility of acting and passing as a citizen, even unintentionally, when one is not. This possibility threatens the autochthonous myth of blood being self-evident and inherent—thereby threatening the entire Athenian social order. As the bastard child of a god and an Athenian, Ion, while objectively an Athenian, does not fit neatly into the social narrative. Revealing his parentage may lead to questions about his autochthony. To secure his high position of power, a palatable lie must be constructed to ensure the propagation of his own line and the social order as a whole. Blood in this case is a performance, willing or not, for the sake of the social order to which his own exceptional circumstances must be subsumed. Because the autochthonous genealogical citizen myth is founded on the basis that it has no exceptions, having a questionable figurehead at one of the most important family lines might incite social crumbling from the top down. As an inevitable consequence of the need to preserve the mythical unity that this society was founded on, Ion, whose familial transgressions can be subsumed into pre-existing social categories, is able to be a metic as long as he hides his familial transgressions under a socially-acceptable genealogical narrative. Oedipus, on the other hand, who reveals his familial transgressions under extreme emotional duress[18], must necessarily be evicted from his polis for his violation of its secondary prescriptions since the assertion of his status along family lines implicates his other behavior. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is that the knowledge they gain of their parentage, which should shift them from their marginal social positions into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually means that they cannot claim their rightful places in society. The knowledge of their parentage is inextricable from the knowledge that either they or their parents violated the secondary prescriptive norms of their genealogically-based society. Despite its claims to being inherent, providing clear order, and unifying the polis , (blood) autochthony failed in almost every one of these respects, as does any other basis for social organization and delineation of citizenship. In order to preserve and reproduce this order, the reproduction of individuals needed to adhere to secondary behavioral prescriptions that blood-based membership entails, lest their entire family lines be contaminated. Due to the different natures of Ion’s and Oedipus’s social crimes, as well as the secrecy of sensitive information or lack thereof, Ion is able to pass within the polis while Oedipus must be expelled in order to preserve the social myth. However, neither is able to claim what is rightfully theirs: the title of citizen. Endnotes [1] Autochthony: n., The quality, state, or condition of being autochthonous; an instance of this. Autochthonous: (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists. Oxford English Dictionary, “autochthony” and “autochthonous,” OED Online, December 2018. [2] Polis refers to a Greek city-state. Here, more specifically, it refers to the people allowed within government in Athens, the people who constituted the voter base and who were included in all aspects of civic life. [3] Dokimasia : n, The term δοκιμασία and the related verb dokimazein were used in various Greek contexts to denote a procedure of examining or testing, and approving or validating as a result of the test. Oxford Classical Dictionary , 2016, "dokimasia." [4] At the time in which Ion is set, the requirement for citizenship was having one Athenian parent, not two, as it was after Pericles’ citizenship law. For Oedipus, the distinction is irrelevant because both of his parents are Thebans—or, in his father’s case, a naturalized Theban ruler. [5] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond , Trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83. [6] Demetra Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion,” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013), 15. [7] Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus , trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 92, line 9. The exact blood-based social conventions Oedipus violates that lead to his expulsion from Thebes will be explored later. [8] Passing, or being perceived and accepted as something other than what one actually is, is certainly an important part of any strictly-delineated social order. For example, in the post-Jim Crow era, certain people who would legally have been considered African American could “pass” in their daily lives as white. Passing is especially important in relation to Euripides’ Ion, but further discussion is not within the scope of this paper. [9] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 15. [10] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus,” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 331; 334. [11] Sophocles, 132, lines 8-9; 136, lines 14-15. [12] Ion is the son of the sun god Apollo and the Athenian princess Creusa; Oedipus is the son of two Theban monarchs. Thus, both theoretically should be included in their respective poleis on the basis of blood, especially since it is the blood of the elite. [13] James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. [14] Euripides, Ion , trans. H.K. Lee (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997), 503. [15] Euripides, Ion , 403. [16] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 13. [17] Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities,” 334: “There is one place where stasis [social division] finds a special home: It is Thebes,…an anti-city.” [18] Euripides, Ion , 104, lines 17-18: “Nothing so sweet / As death, death by stoning, could have been given me.” Oedipus’s distress comes from his internalization of the prescribed external social standards, which hold so much weight as taboo that he, as a metonymic citizen, feels anguish from actively breaking these rules, even if unaware he was doing so. References Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Euripides. Ion . Translated by H.K. Lee. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997. Kasimis, Demetra. “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion.” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013). Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2014. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus . Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus.” In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Edited by Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

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