Passion play

How a passionate few capture conversations, with implications for how we do what we do.

My new book, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time is out now. Public health is fundamentally a story, and Within Reason is about how we can ensure that story is guided by our values.

Here is a reading from the chapter “The History of Soccer, the Butterfly Effect, and Public Health.” Thank you for supporting the ideas in The Healthiest Goldfish, and those in the book. Within Reason can be ordered here.

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During the recent Thanksgiving season, my historical reflections drifted towards a consideration of the French Revolution. This drift was inspired, perhaps, by the recent cinematic treatment of the life of Napoleon, whose career in many ways marked the apex and the end of that revolutionary era. In studying the French Revolution, one is struck by how many currents of thought were swirling around France in that period. The constant political swings—from radical to reactionary, from reformist to an embrace of violence and terror—reflect an era when anything seemed possible for society. In this sense, the period is representative of a characteristic common to many politically unsettled times, the present moment included. That characteristic is the presence of many voices speaking for movements and speaking within movements, all with the potential—with each sudden shift of circumstance—to become the guiding philosophy of masses of people or even of governments, with results both good and bad.  

This begs the question: what is the key factor in deciding which voices, with their attendant philosophies and approaches to politics, rise to the fore? As scientists, it is tempting to grasp for a scientific-seeming answer—a collection of political and social conditions which will invariably elevate ideas under the right circumstances with the predictability of one plus one equaling two. Such an equation is particularly appealing in times of political tumult, when so much seems a matter of chance and historical accident. Yet history itself suggests a different answer, and that answer is passion. It is often the passionate, the mobilized, who come to define movements and shape events. Even when the passionate may be the minority, their voices, amplified by their conviction, carry. This was the case in revolutionary France, when the Jacobin movement rose to power to impose sweeping reforms, their political momentum buoyed by their passionate conviction that they were shaping a radically better world.

This political dynamic was also seen in the early days of the 20^th century, when the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian Revolution, to steer the ship of state. A key intellectual architect of Bolshevism, Vladimir Lenin, addressed this dynamic in his theory of vanguardism. In this theory, transformative change comes through a revolutionary party dedicated giving the wheels of history a strong push. Such a party does not wait for the broader population to adopt revolutionary ideas organically, but instead moves forcefully to advance radical perspectives while seizing as much political power as possible, towards implementing its vision. While this approach failed to create a utopia in the Soviet Union, it remains a powerful organizing principle for revolutionary politics today and reflects something true about how movements work. Lenin’s passionate faction did manage to seize power in Russia, just as the Jacobins managed to seize it during the French Revolution; these are some examples of how passion can indeed play a key role in deciding who gets heard in the marketplace of ideas and who gets power in the political arena.

Why does passion play such an outsized role in shaping these outcomes? The answer is fairly intuitive. A small group of people feel very passionately about an issue. They speak up more than others do, which, in recent years, has been aided by social media, which creates a megaphone for passionate, engaged voices. This engagement helps push ideas forward. At the same time, there may be other voices in the conversation whose views broadly align with the passionate, but who may not agree with the pointedness of their tactics or the radicalism of their specific aims. Yet, because they generally agree with the worldview of the passionate, and because they may be less inclined to raise their voices and engage in scorched earth political combat, they are less likely to push back against the excesses of those who feel so much more strongly than they do. This results in the ideas held by the passionate few becoming the dominating ideas of a movement. When this happens, it can well mean that the radical excesses of these ideas become, in time, more clearly detrimental to the rest of the group, but by then it is much harder to raise objections when it seems like the passionate few—now entrenched in positions of prominence—may have gone a bit too far.

This dynamic has implications for the work of public health and for the present moment more broadly. Public health is a field, but it is also a movement. Within any movement, there are a range of voices reflecting different levels of passion. Core to my book, Within Reason, is what I see as the importance of addressing where public health has been captured by some of the more passionate voices calling for, in many cases, laudable goals while sometimes embracing illiberal methods to achieve them. Part of shaping a more liberal public health means tempering passion with the principles of free speech, open debate, and reasoned inquiry that should apply to all we do. These principles are by no means incompatible with passion, but they help place a check on some of the excesses passion can lead to and help ensure the vocal minority does not run roughshod over the less vocal members of our field who might not be comfortable with a maximally radical approach. I have long argued that for public health to be successful it needs to be a big tent movement. This is only possible when we make space for all voices to be heard, not just the most passionate.

This is particularly important in this chaotic post-war, post-COVID moment when so much is unsettled in our politics and culture. In unsettled moments, ideas can quickly rise to the surface supported by the passionate which ultimately lead to bad places. In the US, we have seen in both political parties how extreme viewpoints can quickly become ascendant. Living as we are in a moment when such ideas can fast gain a foothold, it is all the more important than we engage critically with passionate views, that we keep perspective when emotions are high, and that we make sure that when we do embrace ideas, we do so because they are better, not simply louder. I offer the following three suggestions, in the interest of maintaining this perspective.   

First, we should act under the assumption that most people are reasonable, and that they are themselves acting in good faith. This includes both the passionate few and the more reserved many. Even basically reasonable people do not always act in accordance with the better angels of their nature, of course, but it is fair to say, I think, that most of us aspire to do so. When we accept this, we can avoid the vilification and bad faith attacks that can come when passions are high, steering conversations toward an ideal of reason and respect that best serves our efforts.

Second, we should engage in conversations with the understanding that we may not always be heard by the passionate few who turn a deaf ear to arguments critical of them, and that this is OK. Even if the passionate few do not listen to us, those in the middle likely will. Their doing so helps them to see how they too might speak up—respectfully, with compassion, but also with the force of their convictions—to engage in a critical dialogue with the passionate few. This helps us to act on the knowledge that we need not surrender the work of promoting health to those who would bully their way into the driver’s seat of our movement. Passion can be a virtue, but it can also be detrimental when it becomes dogmatic and blind to views it does not like. We should have the courage to call this out, to speak in defense of what we believe to be true even when we are called unvirtuous for doing so. The work of public health is too important for us to do otherwise. There is a time for embracing passion and there is a time for saying “No, you have gone too far. You do not get to dictate the terms of our work.” I think most of us know these moments when we see them; the challenge is in speaking up when circumstances call for us to do so. It is never too early, or too late, for us to practice raising our voices in such moments.

Third, those of us who are in positions of privilege within our field and within the broader society—particularly those of us privileged to have a platform for our thoughts and ideas—should be mindful that our voices carry in the public conversation. For this reason, we have an extra responsibility to take care that we do not uncritically accept intellectual positions based on passion alone, given our capacity to sway the broader public debate. There is a concept, well established in psychology and sociology, known as “elite capture.” The concept is that elites (which include those in academia, the media, government, etc.) have an outsized influence on the public conversation. As Freddie deBoer recently said, speaking of the spread of ideas in elite progressive spaces:

“The left controls cultural spaces that are fundamentally oriented towards the transmission of ideas, like academia or think tanks, as well as those oriented towards the transmission of art, like Hollywood or the entertainment industry. The left creates culture... As a result, the left has a remarkable ability to set the terms of debate. Look at the world of American institutions in the past 15 years or so. Incredibly obscure and extreme academic jargon went from being housed in Brown University’s faculty lounge to being used in Chase Bank’s statements on LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion.”

This can mean that when elites embrace an idea, much of the public can follow because they want to be like those with status in society, or simply because elites play such a central role in “creating culture.” This can create challenges when elites embrace ideas that turn out to be wrong or even destructive. I worry about this, and have written before about how our own perspectives, our lenses, can result in biases in how we think, trying to ward us off allowing our role as elites (whether we admit to being elites or not) to capture public conversations. We should proceed with care, so that we do not find ourselves embracing and amplifying intellectual trends which then filter into the broader population, only later to be revealed as wrongheaded.

By this same token, the ideas that circulate in elite spaces have the powerful capacity to shape a better world when they are the right ideas, supported by rigorous public debate that intersects with our knowledge and values. This capacity, this power, is exactly why we do what we do. In our engagement with the public conversation, we work to advance ideas that shape a healthier world, doing so in a context of free and open discussion that allows us to test, probe, and ensure the ideas we embrace are not likely to lead us astray. We capitalize on the concept that what we think and say in our spaces does matter, that we can help generate ideas that change the world. It is the faith that we can indeed do this that animates much of my thinking and writing. It is why I subtitled my book, Well, “What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health.” It is why I write these essays, and why I wrote Within Reason, understanding that ideas that emerge in our circles in time penetrate and influence. That is to the good, and much progress has come of a shifting of conversations that started in elite circles. The much wider acceptance of, for example, LGBTQ rights is one such idea of many. But with this power comes the responsibility to ensure that the ideas we embrace reflect a process of deliberation and reason. Passion can, and should, inform this process, but we should be wary of letting it lead it.

Such wariness can help ensure the proper functioning of the systems we rely on to support progress and the day-to-day functioning of a small-l liberal society. It deeply informed the creation of the US, which was designed as a democratic republic, where the passions of the multitude might be tempered by the judgement of those elected to represent the people. In this sense, the country was designed with the understanding that, while the march of progress can be slow, it will eventually get to when it needs to go and may even be better for having moved at a more deliberate pace. An unchecked slide into tyranny, on the other hand—tyranny of people or ideas—can happen suddenly and from that there may be no recovery. Our system, which can seem to unduly favor elites and often does overly privilege entrenched power, evinces a healthy respect for the power of passion and the need not to stifle it but to subject it to a reasoned process of debate and democratic input. It also helps to protect the rights of the minority, ensuring than even those who are currently out of power have a say in the face of impassioned majority opinion.

This aligns with public health’s responsibility to speak with—and, when appropriate, on behalf of—those whose voices are not often heard in the public conversation. When passionate voices are amplified, the challenge of often-overlooked inequities can continue to go largely unnoticed. It is on us, then, to always engage with passion from a place of reason and to ensure that no one’s voice gets lost in the shuffle. It is particularly important to do so when engaging with passionate voices who claim they are indeed speaking on behalf of overlooked groups. Sometimes they are, but sometimes their protestations, when viewed dispassionately, benefit those who already have much power. In recent years, we have, for example, seen questions emerge about how much renewed national conversations about issues such as race, class, and climate change have actually made a meaningful difference on these issues and to what extent they, in fact, mostly served those who already have status and influence. It is our responsibility to ensure that the passion of our field always serves the best ideas, working to support populations who most need impassioned advocates. To do less would be to waste our energies, or, worse, to channel them in counterproductive directions.

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Also this week.

I had the pleasure of joining Bloomberg Businessweek to discuss Within Reason.