Anger and Forgiveness Read online

  dichotomy is too simple, since the intense love and trust of intimate rela-

  tionships may still give legitimate occasions for painful emotions such as

  grief and fear, whether or not law has stepped in.) As Aristotle will later

  say, the gentle- tempered person (his name for the virtue in the area of

  anger) is not vengeful, but, instead, inclined to sympathetic understand-

  ing.15 Law gives a double benefit: it keeps us safe without, and it permits

  us to care for one another, unburdened by retributive anger, within.

  Notice, in particular, that law permits us to care about wrongs done

  to friends and family members, without spending our lives consumed

  with angry emotion and projects of retribution. Most of the anger in the

  pre- law world that Aeschylus depicts had little to do with the actual liv-

  ing people: it tracked past wrongs done to long- ago ancestors, or, occa-

  sionally, one’s parents or relatives. Thus the Agamemnon opens with the

  Introduction

  5

  past, in the form of the Chorus’s anguished depiction of the long- ago

  slaughter of Iphigeneia— which Clytemnestra will shortly avenge. And

  as soon as Aegisthus enters, late in the play, rather than speaking at all

  about himself or what he cares about, he launches into the gruesome

  saga of his father Thyestes, who was duped into eating the flesh of his

  own children by Agamemnon’s father Atreus. People don’t get to exist as

  themselves: they are in thrall to a past that burdens them. Anger about

  wrongs done to oneself is transformed by law too, as we shall see, but

  perhaps the largest change law effects is to give people a way of car-

  ing about others that does not involve exhausting vicarious retributive

  projects.16

  This book is not about ancient Greek ethics, but it takes its inspira-

  tion from the Aeschylean picture I have just sketched— from the idea that

  political justice offers a thoroughgoing transformation of the moral senti-

  ments in both the personal and the public realms. But I shall go further

  than Aeschylus, arguing that anger is always normatively problematic,

  whether in the personal or in the public realm.17 At the heart of my argu-

  ment is an analysis of anger, which I present in chapter 2. Concurring

  with a long philosophical tradition that includes Aristotle, the Greek and

  Roman Stoics, and Bishop Butler, I argue that anger includes, concep-

  tually, not only the idea of a serious wrong done to someone or some-

  thing of significance, but also the idea that it would be a good thing if

  the wrongdoer suffered some bad consequences somehow. Each of these

  thoughts must be qualified in complex ways, but that’s the essence of the

  analysis. I then argue that anger, so understood, is always normatively

  problematic in one or the other of two possible ways.

  One way, which I call the road of payback, makes the mistake of thinking that the suffering of the wrongdoer somehow restores, or contributes to

  restoring, the important thing that was damaged. That road is norma-

  tively problematic because the beliefs involved are false and incoherent,

  ubiquitous though they are. They derive from deep- rooted but misleading

  ideas of cosmic balance, and from people’s attempt to recover control in

  situations of helplessness. But the wrongdoer’s suffering does not bring

  back the person or valued item that was damaged. At most it may deter

  future offending and incapacitate the offender: but this is not all that the

  person taking the road of payback believes and seeks.

  There is one case, however, in which the beliefs involved in anger

  make a lot of sense, indeed all too much sense. That is the case that I shall call the road of status. If the victim sees the injury as about relative status and only about that— seeing it as a “down- ranking” of the victim’s

  self, as Aristotle put it— then indeed it does turn out to be the case that

  payback of some sort can be really efficacious. Lowering the status of

  the wrongdoer by pain or humiliation does indeed put me relatively up.

  6

  Anger and Forgiveness

  But then there is a different problem: it is normatively problematic to

  focus exclusively on relative status, and that type of obsessive narrow-

  ness, though common enough, is something we ought to discourage in

  both self and others.

  That’s the core of my main argument in a nutshell, but of course all

  these ideas must be unpacked and defended. Anger may still have some

  limited usefulness as a signal to self and/ or others that wrongdoing has taken place, as a source of motivations to address it, and as a deterrent to others, discouraging their aggression. Its core ideas, however, are profoundly flawed: either incoherent in the first case, or normatively ugly

  in the second.

  I then arrive at a crucial concept that I call the Transition. Most average people get angry. But often, noting the normative irrationality of anger,

  particularly in its payback mode, a reasonable person shifts off the ter-

  rain of anger toward more productive forward- looking thoughts, asking

  what can actually be done to increase either personal or social welfare.

  I explore the course of reflection that leads to this future- directed think-

  ing, which I prefer. (I interpret the transition undergone by the Furies to

  be this type of Transition, but that is not essential to my argument.) The

  Transition is a path that can be followed by an individual, but it may also

  be, as in Aeschylus, an evolutionary path for a society.

  I also recognize a borderline case of genuinely rational and norma-

  tively appropriate anger that I call Transition- Anger, whose entire content is: “How outrageous. Something should be done about that.” This

  forward- looking emotion, however, is less common, in that pure form,

  than one might suppose: most real- life cases of Transition- Anger are

  infected with the payback wish.

  In the core chapter and subsequent chapters, armed with this analysis,

  I then tackle three commonplaces about anger that bulk large in the phil-

  osophical literature, as well as in everyday life:

  1. Anger is necessary (when one is wronged) to the protection of dignity

  and self- respect.

  2. Anger at wrongdoing is essential to taking the wrongdoer seriously

  (rather than treating him or her like a child or a person of diminished

  responsibility).

  3. Anger is an essential part of combatting injustice.

  I grant that anger is sometimes instrumentally useful in the three ways

  I have mentioned. But this limited usefulness does not remove its nor-

  mative inappropriateness. Nor is it as useful, even in these roles, as it is

  sometimes taken to be.

  Four subsequent chapters (4, 5, 6, and 7) develop this core argument

  further in four distinct domains of life. A good inquiry into these matters

  Introduction

  7

  should distinguish several different realms of human interaction, asking

  carefully what human relations are proper to each, and what virtues are

  proper to each of these relations. The realm of deep personal affection

  (whether familial or friendly) is distinct from the political realm; it has

  distinct virtues and norms, where anger and judgment a
re concerned.

  My argument will be structured around this division of realms.

  First, in chapter 4, I investigate the role of anger in intimate personal

  relationships, where it is often thought that anger, though sometimes

  excessive or misguided, is a valuable assertion of self- respect, and that it should be cultivated, particularly by people (and women are the example

  so often given) who are inclined to have a deficient sense of their own

  worth. I argue against this line of thinking, suggesting that the values

  distinctive of personal intimacy not only do not require anger but are

  deeply threatened by it. Of course serious damages and breaches of trust

  do occur, and they are often occasions for short- term anger and long- term

  grief. But grief for a loss is preferable, I shall argue, to an ongoing determination to pin the loss on someone else— both instrumentally, being bet-

  ter for the self, and intrinsically, being more appropriate to the nature of

  loving human relations. Though short- term anger is understandable and

  human, it is rarely helpful, and it certainly should not dictate the course

  of the future.

  I next investigate (in chapter 5) what I shall call a “Middle Realm,”

  the realm of the multitude of daily transactions we have with people and

  social groups who are not our close friends and are also not our political

  institutions or their official agents. A great deal of resentment is gener-

  ated in the Middle Realm, from slights to reputation to that unpardon-

  able sin— mentioned already by Aristotle— in which someone forgets

  your name. In this realm, I make a different argument from the one

  I advance for the intimate realm, where I recommend strong emotional

  upset, albeit grief and not anger. Here, I argue that the Roman Stoics,

  whose culture was unusually disfigured by resentments in the Middle

  Realm, are entirely correct: the right attitude is to get to a point where

  one understands how petty all these slights are, and one not only doesn’t

  get angry but also does not grieve. The damage simply is not serious

  enough. Seneca never quite got there, but he records his self- struggle in a

  way that offers good guidance. (Thus I shall be following Adam Smith in

  holding that the Stoics give sound advice except when they tell us not to

  care deeply for our loved ones, family, and friends.)

  But that cannot be the entire story, for of course, although a great deal

  of daily anger does deal with trivia such as insults and incompetence,

  sometimes damages in the Middle Realm are extremely serious: stranger-

  rape, murder by strangers, and so forth. These cases are not like the petty

  irritations and insults with which Stoic texts and daily life are typically

  8

  Anger and Forgiveness

  filled. Here is where the insights of Aeschylus become so important.

  In such a case, the thing to do is to turn matters over to the law, which

  should deal with them without anger and in a forward- looking spirit.

  Although serious matters in the personal realm may also be turned over

  to law, they leave, and appropriately so, a residue of deep emotion (grief,

  fear, compassion) that are integral to a relationship of love and trust. In

  the Middle Realm, by contrast, there is no point to any ongoing relation-

  ship with the malefactor, and law can assume the full burden of dealing

  with the wrong.

  I turn next to the Political Realm. In this realm, the primary virtue is

  impartial justice, a benevolent virtue that looks to the common good. It

  is first and foremost a virtue of institutions, but it is also, importantly, if derivatively, a virtue of the people who inhabit and support these institutions. But what sentiments animate and support justice? Here, once

  again, it is often held that anger is important, as a sentiment vindicating

  the equal dignity of the oppressed and expressing respect for the human

  being as an end. I divide my treatment of the Political Realm into two

  parts: everyday justice ( chapter 6) and revolutionary justice ( chapter 7).

  In the case of everyday justice I shall argue that the pursuit of justice

  is ill- served by a narrow focus on punishment of any type, but especially

  ill-served by criminal law retributivism, even of a sophisticated sort.

  Above all, society should take an ex ante perspective, analyzing the whole problem of crime and searching for the best strategies to address it going

  forward. Such strategies may certainly include punishment of offend-

  ers, but as just one part of a much larger project that would also include

  nutrition, education, health care, housing, employment, and much more.

  Although I shall not be able to carry out, here, the wide inquiry into social welfare that is really demanded, I offer at least an idea of what it would

  look like, and I then look more narrowly at criminal punishment as one

  tiny sliver of that enterprise.

  But what about revolutionary justice? Here it is often believed that

  anger can be both noble and essential, helping the oppressed to assert

  themselves and pursue justice. I argue, however, following the theo-

  retical writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., that

  anger is not only not necessary for the pursuit of justice, but also a large

  impediment to the generosity and empathy that help to construct a future

  of justice. Anger may still have limited utility in the three instrumental

  ways I have identified (as signal, as motivation, and as deterrent), but

  it is crucial that the leader of a revolutionary movement, and many of

  the followers, be strange sorts of people, part Stoic and part creatures

  of love. Nonetheless there have been such leaders and followers, as the

  thought and life of Nelson Mandela demonstrate. And maybe they are

  not so strange after all, since human life does contain surprising stretches

  Introduction

  9

  of joy and generosity, qualities that go well with the project of building

  something better than what exists already.

  This clean division of realms is too simple, of course, because the

  realms intersect and influence one another in many ways. The family is

  a realm of love, but it is also a political institution shaped by law, and it contains many wrongs (such as rape, assault, and child abuse) that the

  law must take extremely seriously. Slights in the workplace (for exam-

  ple) are Middle Realm wrongs, but they may also be instances of racial

  or gender discrimination, of harassment, or of tortious negligence, thus

  bringing them within the ambit of the law, and of the sort of carefully

  limited Transition- Anger (the Eumenides in their new basement abode)

  that is proper to political wrongs. Moreover, our relationships with col-

  leagues, unlike relationships with strangers on airplanes and on the road,

  are ongoing relationships that have at least some weight and significance:

  so they lie between the full intimacy of love and friendship and the for-

  gettable encounter with a rude seatmate. Furthermore, as I have already

  emphasized, serious crimes against the person, such as assault, rape, and

  homicide by non- intimates, are serious wrongs and also legal offenses

  in the Middle Realm. The proper attitudes toward these wrongs, in their

 
different aspects, will take a lot of sorting out.

  Equally important, the Political Realm is not simply a realm of

  impartial justice. If a nation is to survive and motivate people to care

  about the common good, the public realm will need some of the generos-

  ity and the non- inquisitorial spirit that I think of as proper to the personal realm, where keeping score of all one’s wrongs may be carried too far

  and poison the common endeavor. That, really, is the core of Aeschylus’

  insight: that instead of exporting to the city the vindictiveness and blood-

  thirstiness of the family at its worst, the city should draw on the bonds of

  trust and the emotions of loving generosity that characterize the family

  at its best.

  Although my central topic is anger and its proper management in the

  three realms, my project also has a subtheme, which involves a critical

  examination of one prominent candidate to replace anger as the central

  attitude in the area of wrongdoing. This substitute attitude is forgiveness,

  and its candidacy is vigorously championed in modern discussions. The

  concept of forgiveness is strikingly absent from the Eumenides, as, indeed, (I would say) from all of ancient Greek ethics,18 but it is so central to modern discussions of anger that one cannot approach the topic without grap-

  pling with it extensively. I therefore propose to do so here, addressing

  the familiar contention that forgiveness is a central political and personal

  virtue. At the end of the day we will be close, in at least some crucial

  respects, to where Aeschylus left us— but after clearing away a great deal

  that intervening centuries have bequeathed. Thus we will be able to see

  10

  Anger and Forgiveness

  more clearly what the insights of the Eumenides might offer to a modern world. Let me now introduce that subsidiary theme.

  We live in what is often described as a “culture of apology and for-

  giveness.”19 A cursory Amazon book search turns up scores of titles. Most

  are works of popular psychology and self- help. Frequently they couple

  the idea of forgiveness with that of a “journey” or a “road.” Taking this

  journey, usually guided by a therapist, the wronged person moves from

  some terrible place of pain to a lovely place of transfiguring happiness.

  My favorite such title is Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.20 Imagine that. From the horrors of homelessness, and the anger one can imagine that life evoking in