Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  son’s attention to its presence.

  Closely linked with the idea of anger as signal is the idea of anger

  as motivation. The Greek Stoics were often charged with robbing society of motives to pursue justice by their insistence that anger is always mistaken. They responded that people can be moved by principles, without

  the emotion, and that such principle- based motivations are more reliable

  than anger, which is likely to run amok.57 In their own terms, their reply

  was unsuccessful: for they actually believed that injuries other people

  can inflict are not serious wrongs, so they really had no resources for

  addressing them, or motivating others to do so. The Stoics would have

  held that the values expressed in King’s speech are altogether erroneous;

  but then they are bound to hold that his protreptic to pursue justice is also inappropriate.

  Things are otherwise with my own critique. In my view, anger is often

  appropriate enough with respect to its underlying values, and the love

  and grief that focus on these same values are often fully appropriate; the

  problem comes with the idea of payback. That idea is, I argued, a concep-

  tual part of anger (except in the rare borderline case of Transition- Anger),

  Anger

  39

  and no doubt it is part of what motivates people, at least initially. The

  intensity of the emotion and perhaps, too, its magical fantasy of retribu-

  tion are part of what get people going, when otherwise at least some peo-

  ple might simply fail to act (or, without anger’s signal, even fail to notice the wrongdoing or its magnitude). Love is not always enough, though

  often it is. But once they get going, they had better not follow anger’s

  lure all the way to fantasized retribution. It does not make sense, unless

  one errs in a different way, focusing disproportionately on status- injury.

  Returning to King’s example, one might imagine a future of pay-

  back, in which African- Americans would attain power and inflict retrib-

  utive pain and humbling on white Americans. Society abounded with

  such ideas, despite the fact that payback of that type would have made

  things no better and a lot worse. King’s altogether superior stance was

  that the Transition is only a heartbeat away, since only cooperation will

  really solve the nation’s problems. Still, anger was a useful motivational

  step along the road— for a very brief time, and carefully managed. I do

  not believe that anger is necessary as a motivation to pursue justice, but

  I still believe it can often be useful, a part, probably, of our evolutionary equipment that usefully energizes us toward good ends— unless things

  go astray, as they so often do.58

  Non- anger, however, does not entail nonviolence. We shall investi-

  gate this issue in chapter 7, but I note here that, despite Gandhi’s stric-

  tures against violence, both King and Mandela more convincingly argue

  that violence in self- defense is justified, and indeed (in Mandela’s case)

  that violent tactics may prove instrumentally necessary even with-

  out a self- defense context. Nonetheless, as we shall see, both King and

  Mandela insisted that violence be wielded in a spirit of non- anger, and

  with Transition thoughts of future cooperation.

  Finally, anger may be a deterrent. People who are known to get angry

  often thereby deter others from infringing on their rights.59 Here one can

  only say that the way anger deters is not likely to lead to a future of stability or peace; instead, it is all too likely to lead to a more devious aggres-

  sion. And there are many ways of deterring wrongdoing, some of which

  are much more attractive than inspiring fear of an explosion.

  Anger, in short, has a very limited but real utility, which derives, very

  likely, from its evolutionary role as a “fight- or- flight” mechanism. We

  may retain this limited role for anger while insisting that its payback fan-

  tasy is profoundly misleading and that to the extent that it makes sense

  it does so against the background of diseased values. The emotion, in

  consequence, is highly likely to lead us astray.

  But isn’t anger an irreplaceable avenue of expression for people

  who are not especially verbal and conceptual?60 It might be objected that

  my proposal sounds all too much like that of the upper- middle- class

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  (ex)- WASP academic that I certainly am, schooled from childhood

  to “use your words,” and discouraged from strong direct emotional

  expression. I simply deny the charge. First of all, my proposal is not

  Stoic. As we’ll see, it does not discourage the experience or strong

  expression of grief, compassion, and a host of other emotions. But in

  any case it seems just wrong to portray lower- class or less educated

  people as inexpressive or crude, lacking avenues of communication that

  do not involve lashing out. The music and art of poor people through

  the ages, in many cultures of the world, is astonishingly expressive of a

  wide range of emotions. At the same time, in my experience it is people

  with an overweening sense of their own privilege who seem particu-

  larly prone to angry displays. In my gym, I will avoid mildly asking

  another member if I can work in on a piece of equipment, fearing an

  explosion, to the extent that I observe that this person is privileged,

  youngish, and male. On the road, it is drivers of expensive SUVs who

  tend, again in my anecdotal experience, to behave as if they owned the

  road. So I think the objector asks a good question, but one to which

  there is a good reply.

  The tendency to anger and retaliation is deeply rooted in human

  psychology. Believers in a providential deity, like Bishop Butler, find this

  fact difficult to explain, given its irrationality and destructiveness.61 For those who do not share Butler’s framework, however, it is much less

  difficult to understand. Anger brings some benefits that may have been

  valuable at one stage in human prehistory. Even today, vestiges of its use-

  ful role remain. But beneficent forward- looking systems of justice have to

  a great extent made this emotion unnecessary, and we are free to attend

  to its irrationality and destructiveness.

  VII. The Anger of God

  If anger is so compromised, why has it standardly been imputed to God

  or gods, who are supposed to be images of perfection? The first thing

  to say is that it has not, in fact, always been so imputed. Buddhism is

  non- theistic, but the most perfected humans, bodhisattvas, are free from

  anger. Hindu texts emphasize that anger is a disease that a pious person

  should strive to avoid.62 In both Epicurean and Stoic thought, the gods

  lie outside the mistakenly competitive and status- obsessed societies that

  spawn destructive angers. As Lucretius says of the gods, “Needing noth-

  ing from us, they are not ensnared by (our) grateful offerings, nor are

  they touched by anger.”63 In Greco- Roman religion the gods are not ideals

  for mortals at all, just flawed beings with outsized powers, so Lucretius

  is basically saying that this is what a truly perfect being would be like.

  Anger

  41

  This idea of a god’s impassivit
y is the mainstream one in Hellenistic and

  post- Hellenistic Greco- Roman thought.64

  Indeed, it is virtually only in the Judeo- Christian tradition that we

  find the idea that God is both exemplary and angry. The Christian author

  Lactantius (240– 320), advisor to Constantine, the first Christian emperor,

  wrote a work entitled On the Anger of God ( De Ira Dei), in which he attacks both Epicureans and Stoics, saying that there is no reason to worship

  a God who doesn’t need our attention and love, and doesn’t get angry

  when it is withdrawn. Moreover, he continues, if God never gets angry

  we don’t need to fear God, and that would do away with all religion.

  Such arguments do not address the Epicurean and Stoic contention that a

  perfect being would not have anger; they simply amount to the claim that

  religion as we know it requires the idea of an angry God.65

  But key texts in both Christianity and Judaism are inconsistent and

  complicated on the topic of God’s anger.66 For the most part, the Jewish

  God is imagined as a “jealous” God who wants to be ranked number

  one in the attentions and affections of the Jewish people, who have other

  options for their worship. Repeatedly, the relationship is compared to a

  marriage. There are other men, and a bad wife will allow herself to be

  lured away from her husband by the money and power of these rivals,

  forgetting to put her husband in an exclusive first place; so too God

  wants to be in an exclusive first place vis- à- vis the other gods, who are

  trying to lure the Jewish people away.67 Indeed, the text is suffused with

  very standard payback thoughts about the status- injury that either the

  other gods or the unfaithful people inflict upon God, and the gruesome

  comeuppance they will soon get. Those other gods and the goyim who

  follow them will get countless plagues and diseases, and the unfaithful

  people themselves will be tormented or even destroyed. All of this will

  constitute a lowering or humbling of these people or peoples, by com-

  parison to God.

  This is the status- focused thinking so common in anger, but with this

  difference: that God can make all these things happen. (And notice that,

  God being God, God cannot really be personally injured by a human

  act, except with respect to status. God cannot be murdered, or assaulted, or raped. So, insofar as God is angry, this anger is extremely likely to be

  status- focused anger.)

  There are, however, times when God focuses more purely on the

  intrinsic wrongfulness of harmful acts— particularly, but not only, in

  the prophetic books, and especially in their discussions of greed and the

  ill- treatment of strangers. These offenses are taken to be wrongful in

  themselves, not only as offenses against the status of God. In such cases,

  God is angry not because of a status- injury, but because what humans

  do and suffer is of deep and intrinsic concern to God. Lactantius

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  observes that when God gets angry at wrongful acts of humans to

  one another, this is a way of showing concern for the good and just,

  and promoting their interests. He makes two distinct points: first, that

  punishment as a result of God’s anger incapacitates wrongdoers, thus

  clearing the way for the good and just; and, second, that the fear of

  divine punishment deters wrongdoers, thus keeping the world safer

  for the good and just.68

  We can see that Lactantius— correctly summarizing one promi-

  nent strand in the biblical portrait of divine anger— becomes a proto-

  Utilitarian, thinking of the role of anger in forward- looking welfarist

  terms. We can agree that anger is sometimes a useful deterrent, and that

  punishment can promote welfare by incapacitating— although it is not

  so clear why anger is required, as opposed to well- designed institutions.

  At any rate, this picture of God’s anger is quite different from the status-

  focused picture that Lactantius presented earlier (correctly summarizing

  other biblical texts). And we can see that this sort of benevolent anger is

  more likely than the other sort to move in the direction of the Transition.

  Thus, although payback of all sorts is imagined even in what we might

  call welfarist contexts, the texts frequently move, rather quickly, to an

  imagined future of peace, cooperation, and reconciliation, and God urges

  humans to make this future happen.

  In short, the Jewish God’s anger has all the varieties and complexi-

  ties of human anger, and all the same problems and prospects.

  When we move to Jesus we have the daunting problem already

  explored in our previous chapter: the texts give dramatically differ-

  ent pictures of Jesus’ attitude to erring mortals. Certainly many texts

  in the New Testament embody terrible payback wishes. The book of

  Revelation, for example, jolts uneasily from thoughts of the vindication

  of the meek and mild to the most gruesome fantasies of destruction

  visited on those who don’t acknowledge the new religion. But what

  about the Jesus of the Gospels? It has long been observed— and was

  compellingly argued by Augustine in The City of God— that the emo-

  tions of Jesus are genuine emotions, embodying all the vulnerability of a

  mortal human being for whom pain and loss matter terribly. Thus Jesus

  was not a good Stoic. Augustine, however, focuses on grief and joy, and

  a human being may have those without anger. So, does Jesus get angry?

  One key text, unfortunately, contains a textual crux at precisely this point.

  At Matthew 5:22, Jesus says, “I say to you that every person who gets

  angry at a brother is liable to judgment.” But some manuscripts add

  the word “randomly” ( eikēi) at this point, making Jesus condemn only

  ungrounded anger.69 And Jesus displays anger at least once, in the well-

  known scene in which he throws the moneychangers out of the temple.

  Even this, however, is not decisive.

  Anger

  43

  A remarkable account of this passage is offered by the Utku Eskimo

  people studied in Jean Briggs’s Never in Anger, one of the most compelling works of descriptive anthropology in the twentieth century.70 The Utku

  believe that anger is always childish, and a threat to the intense coop-

  eration required for group survival in a very adverse climate. Although

  anger in children is tolerated and even indulged, both the experience of

  anger and its outward manifestation are viewed as extremely inappro-

  priate in adults. Briggs was searching for a way of finding out whether

  they disapproved of the emotion itself or only its outward expression;

  so, given that they were devout Christians, she asked them about the

  money- changing scene. It was clear that the incident disturbed them. As

  good Christians, they felt that they had to endorse Jesus’ behavior; but

  it did not fit with their picture of adult good character. They adopted an

  ingenious solution. Jesus, the Utku chieftain told her, did scold the mon-

  eychangers, but not out of real anger: he did it “only once,” in order to

  improve them, because they were being “very bad, very bad, and refusing to listen to him.”71 Thei
r picture of Jesus as moral ideal was incompatible

  with ascribing real anger to him— although, notice, they allowed the ide-

  alized Jesus to use anger- behavior as a wake- up call.

  Were the Utku imagining our idea of Transition- Anger and distin-

  guishing it from (garden- variety) anger? I think it’s more likely that they

  are thinking of Jesus as giving a performance without having any emo-

  tion in the anger family— a possibility that is open to those who want to

  deter without risking going down a wrong path. (We’ll investigate this

  idea in chapter 5.)

  Biblical texts are written for people many of whom need simple mes-

  sages. The idea of an angry God may, in such cases, be not only a useful

  internal signal of where wrongdoing is located and a deterrent to wrong-

  doing, but also a useful source of motivation to correct social problems

  (imitating God in intensity of concern). Still, the potential for distortion is huge, when God and his anger are considered a moral ideal for humans.

  Therefore the texts that depict a brief anger leading to a constructive

  Transition are definitely to be preferred, as is the Utku’s sage interpreta-

  tion of Jesus.

  VIII. Anger and Gender

  Americans are inclined to associate anger with male gender norms. From

  athletes to politicians, males who do not display anger at an affront are

  denigrated and thought weak. A famous example took place during the

  presidential campaign of 1988. In one of the televised debates, Democratic

  candidate Michael Dukakis was asked, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death

  penalty for the killer?” Dukakis replied, “No, I don’t, and I think you

  know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”72 Dukakis

  was already under fire for his prison- furlough program, which famously

  led to the temporary release of convicted murderer Willie Horton, who

  committed a rape and assault while on furlough. Dukakis’s lack of pas-

  sionate anger in his response to the question about his wife reinforced

  a public perception that he was unmanly. (His relatively short stature,

  probably five feet, six inches, did not help.) The manly man would dis-

  play controlled and yet palpable rage, and would affirm a desire for pay-