What role for anger? Part 1

Inevitably, there is much talk of anger. 

Robert Reich sees it as positive force for opposing the new bigoted dispensation:

The angrier we are and the more activated and directional — the more we can channel that anger into real constructive change and blocking things that are bad, so much the better.

On the other hand, a black female conservative commentator suggests that white people should be allowed to be angry, too. 

Almost everybody, it seems, claims a right to be angry.

Eminent liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum disagrees.  Anger, she says, is illogical. “If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life”.  Why? Because it is partly constituted by a “hope for payback”, and a desire for payback ultimately makes no sense.

Whatever the wrongful act was – a murder, a rape, a betrayal – inflicting pain on the wrongdoer does not help restore the thing that was lost. We think about payback all the time, and it is a deeply human tendency to think that proportionality between punishment and offence somehow makes good the offence. Only it doesn’t. 

According to Nussbaum, the only circumstance in which a desire for payback makes sense is where it concerns a matter of relative social status. If restoring my relative status is all I care about, and I am concerned to humiliate the wrongdoer by knocking them down a peg or two, then anger can achieve my aims. In this circumstance anger is not illogical – but only if I don’t have to worry that the “real well-being problems created by the original act have not been solved”.

However, most of the time this is not what we are after. We look to the future, seeking amelioration.  Nussbaum calls this the Transition: a move beyond ‘ordinary anger’ in which we:

turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, in the situation, and be really helpful. This may well include the punishment of the wrongdoer, but in a spirit that is deterrent rather than retaliatory.

According to Nussbaum:

We need the Transition badly in our personal and our political lives, dominated as they all too frequently are by payback and status-focus.

Nussbaum notes, however, another form of anger, different from the ordinary anger suffused with the desire for ‘payback’:

Sometimes a person may have an emotion that embodies the Transition already. Its entire content is: ‘How outrageous! This should not happen again.’ We may call this emotion Transition-Anger, and that emotion does not have the problems of garden-variety anger.

But, she says,

most people begin with everyday anger: they really do want the offender to suffer. So the Transition requires moral, and often political, effort. It requires forward-looking rationality, and a spirit of generosity and cooperation.

Nussbaum points to Nelson Mandela as a model for this notion of Transition. Faced with the humiliation and injustice of his imprisonment on Robben Island, Mandela “rejected not only the false lure of payback, but also the poison of status-obsession”.  He struggled with his anger on a daily basis, and was able to overcome it. Both in his personal circumstances as a prisoner as the Apartheid State, and later in his public role as President of the new Republic of South Africa, he asked only, according to Nussbaum: “how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?”

Nussbaum may be right about Mandela, but I think she is wrong about anger.

She is confusing anger with the desire for retribution.  Retribution concerns a particular (very simple) attitude to justice.  It requires simply that suffering be acknowledged or balanced by suffering. This may be reasoned, or it may just be unreflectively emotional.

But either way, anger is not this.  Anger is, at its simplest, a psychological means by which we forcefully point to the fact that suffering has occurred, or is occurring.  Anger points to a limit or a standard.  It says: something here has been infringed, and by my anger I am forcefully bringing it to your attention.  This is very close to what Nussbaum calls Transition-Anger.

This is what I would call, for want of a better word, natural anger.  Sometimes it is selfish – a mere brute reaction to a perceived wrong that has no basis other than my feelings, and without real justification. I’m just being a crybaby. I want you to know I'm suffering, and maybe (hopefully?) do something about it. 

But natural anger can also express legitimate claims. In this context, the legitimate psychological role of natural anger is simply to shock another into recognition.  Legitimate anger asserts a truth independent of both of us that I want or need you to acknowledge. It works by pointing not to me, but to a standard or limit that I feel (and think) is important to the relationship between us (or between you and third party who I care about), and which I feel (and think) has been breached by the wrongful act. In this sense, it is the opposite of egotistical.  Legitimate natural anger is, to a greater or lesser extent, moral.  And to the extent that an accurate and adequate account can be given of how the standards I am pointing to have been infringed by the wrongful act, it is also reasonable (provided, of course that we can agree that the standards are themselves reasonable).

In this sense, what I am calling legitimate natural anger has no necessary link to the idea of payback.  Rather, it simply and forcefully points to my claims to suffering, giving them psychological depth and immediacy in a way that calmly explaining them often cannot. It brings my claims to your urgent and immediate attention.  And in all this, it is my reasons, not my desire for retribution, that are constitutive of my anger.

But: legitimate natural anger is almost always personal and circumstantial. It is ‘designed’ to work on the level of individual psychology.  And as Nussbaum correctly intuits, it is transitional.  On the individual level, once my anger has forcefully brought to your attention my sense of being wronged, we must begin to move away from anger to the problem of finding solutions. Solutions must be based on cooperation. This first involves you acknowledging that the standard that I am pointing to is relevant.  You acknowledge (perhaps even tacitly) that my anger is justified and reasonable. Then we must agree on a different course of action, or way of behaving, that no longer infringes the standard that I have pointed to.  Cooperation in turn relies on a restored sense of trust. I must trust you to think and act in accordance with the standard we now both acknowledge.

Trust therefore marks something like the outer limit of anger.  As trust builds, so does anger diminish.  Trust signifies that the relationship has been restored (or that we believe it can and will be), and the original anger is no longer needed.  In turn, forgiveness is a sign of this restored trust. Forgiveness means that I am no longer angry.

But if this account is accurate, it still leaves some big questions:  Firstly, at what point in this journey from anger to trust does (or should) anger disappear? When does anger stop being productive? Put another way: when does forgiveness need to start? 

Secondly, what role can or should my anger continue to play if the legitimacy of my claim to have been wronged is not recognised by you, either because you don’t accept the standard I am pointing to, or because you don’t acknowledge that your behaviour infringed the standard?  

And third, what if my claim is not simply about something that is personal and circumstantial, but systematic and social? In what sense does it make sense to be angry at “the system”, or at the people who (wittingly or unwittingly) perpetuate it? 

In short, to tie these three questions together: is there a legitimate (and therefore productive) role for sustained anger?

In all of this, is Nussbaum still right?  Despite the difference between anger and payback, is anger still illogical? And is Mandela the best and only model for a better politics that we have?