Love and Politics - NYTimes.com You've got to be taught to hate and fear, You've got to be taught from year to year, It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully taught. The lesson of this song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific" is that a culture marked by hatred and contempt for those who look and think differently than you do doesn't come easy. You have to work at it. You have to firmly identify the despised other, and rehearse the catalog of his/her physical deficiencies, dangerous ideas, disgusting behaviors and suspect origins. You have to come up with snappy negative slogans that capture the essence of the other's perfidy, and then you have to market those slogans, fill the airways with them, turn them into the stuff of late-night TV jokes, weave them into the warp and weft of the society's fabric. You have to cast systematic doubt on the other's patriotism, whisper (with a megaphone) about foreign allegiances and illicit activities, speak darkly about unmerited accumulations of power and money, and prophesy the imminent end of everything that makes life worth living if the enemy is not vanquished In short, you have to act in ways that bring about our current political situation - armed camps facing each other in the conviction that truth, merit, reason, good will and virtue exist on one side only, and that the other side is driven by the basest of motives and is barely human. Once things have come to this pass -- once Democrats think that Republicans are bigoted know-nothings who serve only Mammon, and Republicans think that Democrats are bent on destroying the freedoms in whose name the American revolution was fought - is there a way out? Is there an antidote to the poison running through our political veins? Yes, says Martha Nussbaum. That may sound facile and a little sappy, but Nussbaum is quite serious. In her new book, "Political Emotions: Why Love Matters For Justice," she maps out the routes by which men and women who begin in self-interest and ingrained prejudice can build a society in which what she calls "public emotions" operate to enlarge the individual's "circle of concern": "If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions ... these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of "our" life in which these people ... matter as parts of our "us."" How is this to be done? Well, again, you have to work at it in much the same way those who have delivered us to a world of self-righteous and self-congratulatory partisanship have worked at it. But where the masters of divisiveness attach themselves to disgust, fear, envy and shame --emotions that narrow one's sympathies - those who would extend the sympathy individuals feel to include fellow citizens of whatever views, ethnicity, ability or disability must "create stable structures of concern that extend compassion broadly." Those structures cannot be exclusively rational and philosophical -- as they tend to be in the work of John Rawls and other Kantian liberals - but must, says Nussbaum, be political in the sense that they find expression in the visible machinery of public life. It is one thing to learn from Rawls that what is required is that citizens be "respectful of their fellow citizens as equals and ready to abide by fair terms of cooperation" (a lesson spectacularly unheeded by our legislators in this moment of crisis); it is another, and likely more effective, thing to have the sentiments of reciprocity and fellow feeling on display not abstractly, but in ways that make them accessible to all parties, including those disinclined to philosophical thought. What might those ways be and who will fashion them? The answer Nussbaum gives (and she is aware of the danger it harbors) is that a key role will be played by government; by the rhetoric of political leaders who call their countrymen to sacrifice and the pursuit of noble ideals (Winston Churchill is her chief example), and by state-sponsoring and -financing of artifacts and entertainments that promote the desired political emotions: "public artworks, monuments and parks ... festivals and celebrations ... songs, symbols, official films and photographs" and even sporting events (the World Series, the Final Four, the U.S. Open) that can, she reminds us, be shaped by government to play a "public role." Here one might think nervously of Norman Jewison's 1975 movie "Rollerball."