Abomination/indignant aversion

Finally, I turn to the last main type of normative threat. The mode of harm through abomination consists in what I shall call an affront to the status of the human being. This challenge to order occurs when some act, event or Other stands as intolerable against background assumptions about the proper parameters of human behavior. The normative order setting the stage here is not specific to one's own immediate political body but to the larger context in which humans perceive their collective entity to move (an order of orders). The intolerability of the act, event or Other does not derive from sensations of having been betrayed or of fearing infiltration because of a vulnerability in one's self. Rather, it arises in the face of an affront to more basic norms of human treatment, and is analogous to the logic of transgressing a natural law. One might question whether persons in political bodies will be mobilized to act against this type of threat. Body politics have a more obvious incentive to act against subversive or transgressive threats because these are more closely tied to the internal/external and past/future orders that anchor a particular political entity. If abomination pertains to the idea of human status itself, in what way will this move a collective body to respond?

This opens up many complicated questions I cannot address here, but I want briefly to comment on the role this perception may play in political threat. First, I have linked this form of normative threat to the sensation of indignant aversion. This enables us to describe a particular range of emotional response located with persons as members of collective political bodies rather than with individuals considered separately. Indignation and aversion taken together capture a unique reaction when persons face and judge the rightness of the world at large. People appraise acts, events and Others not only relative to the welfare of their own particular group, but according to often tacit conceptions of justifiability writ large, according to the measure of conceivable human life. Indignant aversion names the reaction against defiances of the most basic human norms. Taken singly, aversion connotes too physical or unarticulated a reaction; indignation on the other hand includes the element of a standard of some sort by which to judge, but devoid of the element of repulsion that we want to keep in the picture when describing rejection of abominations.31 I believe this concept of a compound emotion accurately captures some important political responses to acts and events. It could be argued that the decision by NATO to intercede on behalf of Libyan rebels against Qaddafi's bombardment of his own people was in part motivated by a sense of indignant revulsion against allowing this kind of behavior to be perpetrated on a world stage while everyone else sat mutely on the sidelines.

Claims about the nature of the ‘human status’ will be disputed. Nevertheless, they have served in history as a major source of mobilization to achieve new orders. Abominations may not pose a threat of undermining an entire body politic but they do stand as an affront which brings about indignant aversion in many people and which can consolidate groups to take up action. Slavery, ethnic cleansing, torture, child pornography, and incest are examples of some of the most profound abominations. And many people have felt that to not act against such threats is to allow a type of corrosion of human standards necessary for humane existence. Many (but not all) will feel that such normative threats cannot be allowed to continue unpunished, although they often are. Still, the incentive to build legal regimes to take on abominations of this sort testifies to their powerful political effects, which this perception of normative threat can bring about.

I presented three modes in which harm is conceived to happen to normative orders. The archetypal emotions elicited were described as grievance, insecurity and indignant aversion. Certainly this analysis of collective normative life remains a very reductive account of the complex cultural–ethical–political environments in which a people move – relating within and across groups – and it may appear as too neatly packaged. Nevertheless, these enable us to sort through the often vehement but ill-defined emotions and variety of arguments accompanying actions against threat undertaken by people in political groups, when normative orders appear to be on the line. Returning to one example with which I began the paper – the Oklahoma International Law Amendment passed by the people of Oklahoma in the last election (2010) – we see that explanations based on strategic thinking or identity difference do not seem at all sufficient, but we gain a greater purchase on the meaning of that case by using the concepts I developed here. Oklahomans were not afraid of physical or material dislocation. Very few Muslims live in Oklahoma. They were asked to consider and make a decision in a public political process on the impact to their state of what they perceived as powerful forces at work in the larger, global world. They acted as if subversion of their world were a possibility.32 This extreme and dramatic pronouncement via the mechanism of an election can be deconstructed at so many levels, but I believe the proposition that collective bodies see and feel their normative commitments to be at risk and will act to counter the threat provides an illuminating interpretation of a puzzling phenomenon. Normativity is ballast for a body politic, not a superficial overlay to more hard-core power and self-interest. In no way are the latter unimportant. The point has been to make the case for the equal relevance of beliefs about order in explaining human behavior.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have sought to make the case that we should conceptualize a distinct type of threat called normative threat that is not reducible to dangers of strategic confrontation, physical harm, or identity difference. Political bodies as complex collective agents, whether as states or as mobilized groups (maintaining power or seeking new configurations of power), must be grounded in some element of normative order, in terms of which people as members of the political body respond to situations of challenge and potential transformation. Normative beliefs embody more than symbolic public focal points. These beliefs, connecting and binding people to one another in a substantial reality, provide ordered expectations, standards of judgment, sources of emotion and attachment, and motivations and justifications for action. This is a type of concreteness even if it is not physical in the usual sense. Acts, events and Others are continually encountered that will not accord with one's normative order, but an elasticity between normative orders through belief and institutional flexibility enables interactions that do not turn into threats. So when will potential tensions metamorphose into threat? If we do not have an imminent military invasion, or face an expressed desire to destroy another's way of life, then the perception of threat by a body politic must be explained in some other way. I have argued that people may see and feel destruction happening to an important normative order. A premonition of harm at this level is not a mere conflict of beliefs but appears as a conflict over fundamental parameters holding together a specific political body and the terms of relationships among that body and others in the world at large. This explanation of a concept of normative threat throws light on the nature of complex political bodies in a changing world and indicates the consequences that may follow if tensions come to be portrayed in terms of normative threat. Because such beliefs allay chaos, undergird collective power, and provide meaning they are vital for a body politic. This also should be a warning to be wary of ratcheting up the significance of frictions and strategic conflicts to the normative level, or into normative form. Clashes of normative order can awaken deep fears and anger because of the constitutive nature of those beliefs.