Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  back in the form of capital punishment.

  In keeping with this norm, little boys in America are often encour-

  aged and not criticized when they manifest anger, whereas little girls are

  taught compassion and empathy.73 Even in infancy, children’s emotions

  are labeled in accordance with their believed gender.74 Thus, the crying of

  a baby labeled female is typically interpreted as fear, while the crying of

  a baby labeled male is typically interpreted as assertive anger. Babies are

  also held and played with differently, in accordance with their perceived

  gender, “girls” being cuddled and sheltered, “boys” being bounced in

  the air and treated as active. It is thus no wonder that many adults fol-

  low these cultural scripts. It is surprising, indeed, that there are so many

  dissenters. And yet, even in the Wild West, one finds heroes (like Jason

  McCord) who forgo revenge.75

  These gender norms, which connect anger to power and authority,

  womanly non- anger to weakness and dependency, make many women

  think that they need to school themselves in anger to right the balance

  and assume their full equality as agents. The female defender of non-

  anger is put on the defensive, as if she were defending foot- binding or

  corsets.

  It is with great interest, then, that the defender of non- anger turns

  to ancient Greece and Rome, where gender norms operated very differ-

  ently.76 These cultures do not go all the way to an Utku, or Stoic, commit-

  ment to non- anger. But many of their members do accept the full Stoic

  position that anger is never appropriate; and even dissenters are likely

  to view retributive anger as a danger and a disease, and a propensity to

  anger a corrigible flaw.77 Not surprisingly, gender norms follow general

  norms: males are understood to be rational beings who are capable of

  restraining their rage and rising above it, perhaps utterly getting rid of it.

  Females are taken to be inferior creatures who indulge in the doomed

  and fruitless projects of retributive payback, with great harm to both self

  and others. Indeed, the position for which I argue here, describing it as

  “radical,” is not at all radical in Greece and Rome, and anger’s futility

  and childishness is well understood. So males, who are understood to be

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  (normatively) adults and reasonable, are pretty non- angry (normatively,

  at least), and females, paltry and childish, show by their addiction to

  anger how silly and dangerous it is.

  These cultural differences show us that however hardwired a ten-

  dency to anger may be, social norms play a large part in giving people

  instructions about how to cultivate themselves. If anger is seen as child-

  ish and weak, that does not mean it will disappear; but people who aspire

  to dignity and rationality try to avoid its call.

  An insightful point about gender is repeatedly made in the Greco-

  Roman texts. Anger is conceptually linked to helplessness. One reason

  why women so often turn out to be the angry ones is that they are dispro-

  portionately unable to control the things they need and want to control.

  Thus there are far more openings for injury, and more temptations to

  seize upon revenge as an imagined restoration of lost control. Medea,

  whose anger we’ll discuss in chapter 4, is a paradigm of helplessness

  run amok. Alien, jilted wife, with no rights over her own children, she

  loses everything in one betrayal. Her outsize zeal for payback is related

  to the size of her loss, as she attempts to substitute retaliation for mourn-

  ing. Her story tells us that even where norms do not encourage female

  anger, asymmetrical female helplessness may breed it; and I believe this

  is true. The extent to which an American woman will focus obsessively

  on payback in divorce litigation, for example, may often be proportional

  to her lack of other avenues for moving into a productive future, such as

  a career and confidence in her own talents. This sort of anger, however, is

  hardly a sign of womanly dignity and strength.

  Medea’s story also suggests that where we encounter outsize male

  anger, we ought to ask whether helplessness lurks somewhere in the

  background. American males are certainly privileged by contrast to

  females: but they are by no means secure. What they are expected to con-

  trol, on pain of dishonor, is so vast. They must be high achievers, big

  earners, fit bodies. And they must always focus on status relative to other

  males. The competitive struggle is exhausting, and almost never win-

  nable. Shame is the almost inevitable result, and shame can feed anger.78

  All human infants are to some degree narcissistic, inclined to think

  that they ought to be omnipotent. Deeper even than gender is the phe-

  nomenon of human helplessness combined with the expectation of con-

  trol. The very status of human infancy— cognitively very competent,

  physically totally powerless— is a cauldron of anger. So both genders can

  be expected to have many occasions for anger, which gender norms vary

  and inflect but do not remove. One way cultures affect anger in male

  and female is by the creation of normative emotion- scripts. Another way,

  however, is by the differential manipulation of helplessness: what does

  each gender think it ought to control, and how reliable is its access to

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  that control? The apostle of non- anger can learn from this. One thing that

  needs to be done is to write new scripts for both males and females, in

  which anger appears as weak and childish, non- anger, and allies such as

  interdependence and reciprocity, as strong. (To some extent at least, the

  Greeks and Romans did this.) But another, very different thing that needs

  to be done is to give people access to the things they rightly value and

  protect those things from damage.

  IX. Anger and Other “Reactive Attitudes”: Gratitude, Grief, Disgust,

  Hatred, Contempt, Envy

  Because it has become common to treat anger as one of a long list of

  “reactive attitudes,” without much attention to finer points of difference

  among them, the next step in our clarification of anger must be to dis-

  tinguish it from its relatives. As we have seen, anger79 involves a belief

  that the target’s act has wrongfully inflicted damage on something within

  one’s circle of concern. I’ve argued that it also includes a wish for the doer to suffer, somehow.

  The first relative we must consider is anger’s first cousin, gratitude.

  The two emotions are typically held closely together in philosophical dis-

  cussions, from the Greek Epicureans and Stoics through to Spinoza, and

  beyond. Gratitude, like anger, has both a target (a person) and a focus (an

  act): it is a pleasant emotion responding to the apparently intentional beneficent act of someone else, which is believed to have affected one’s well-

  being in a significant way. Gratitude is typically taken to contain a wish

  to benefit the other party in return, so it is often classified, along with

  anger, as a retributive emotion. It seems to point backward, and it seems

  to treat the
beneficent wish as a sort of payback wish. One might then

  wonder whether anyone who criticizes anger as I have been doing is

  bound in consistency to repudiate gratitude. So thought the Epicureans,

  imagining the rational gods as free of both emotions.

  I address this question in detail in my chapters on intimate relation-

  ships and on the “Middle Realm,” coming to slightly different conclu-

  sions in the two cases about the normative propriety of gratitude. But

  we can make three preliminary observations. First, the primary reason

  for the repudiation of gratitude by philosophers from Epicurus and the

  Stoics to Spinoza is not its payback idea: it is, rather, that (according

  to these thinkers) gratitude and anger both betray an unhealthy need

  for the “goods of fortune,” which we cannot really control. But I do

  not accept that Stoic position, since I hold that it is right to care deeply

  about at least some people and things outside oneself, whose actions

  Anger

  47

  one cannot control. The second point to make is that gratitude wishes

  for good and anger for ill, and this creates a strong asymmetry between

  the two emotions. One may think that special scrutiny is needed for

  an emotion that purposes ill, without being so vigilant and censorious

  about the wish for good, given that beneficence is usually too scarce in

  all our lives. Third, gratitude, though in a way retrospective, is often

  part of a system of reciprocity that has important forward- looking

  aspects, and which, as a whole, contributes to welfare. Anger’s ongo-

  ing system, in the pre- Eumenides world of Aeschylus, did not create

  welfare; instead, it tied unwilling present- day people to a past that dis-

  served their interests. Thus, although gratitude and anger are cousins

  in a sense, there are significant asymmetries that may be used to justify

  differential assessment.

  Although grief is not standardly classified as a reactive attitude, it is so close to anger that we need to begin by commenting on its differences.

  Grief, like anger, focuses on a damage to the self (or the self’s circle of

  concern). This loss is painful, and that pain is a key similarity between

  the two emotions. Grief, however, focuses on an event— which may be an

  act done by a person, but may also be a natural event, such as death or a

  disaster in nature. And its focus is on the loss brought about by this event.

  Even if the event is thought to be caused by a person, the loss, not the per-

  petrator, remains its focus: it does not take the person as its target. If there is a target at all, it is the person who has died or departed. Nor is the idea of wrongfulness central to grief, since loss is loss whether or not wrongfully inflicted. For all these reasons, the action- tendency of grief is quite different from that of anger: grief seeks restoration of or substitution for

  that which was lost, whereas anger typically wants to do something to or

  about the perpetrator. Grief addresses the hole or gap in the self, anger

  the wrongful infliction of that damage by the target.

  Grief and anger may of course be co- present; at times it may be dif-

  ficult to separate them. Often a grieving person tries to blame someone

  for the loss, even when blame is not warranted, as a way of regaining

  control or asserting dignity in a situation of helplessness. Indeed, the turn to anger may function psychically as a way of restoring the lost person or

  object. In such cases, grief can be deflected into an unusual intense anger,

  in which all the energy of love and loss is turned toward persecution,

  as in the mania for malpractice litigation in American health care, or as

  in my Michael Jordan example, where the TV commentator suggested

  to Jordan that the death penalty might somehow functionally replace

  Jordan’s lost father and Jordan, rightly, rejected that suggestion, prefer-

  ring to acknowledge his loss. One source of excess in anger, in fact, is a

  reluctance to grieve, thus acknowledging helplessness. The distinction

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  between grief and anger therefore deserves the greatest possible atten-

  tion, and we shall return to this theme in the following chapters. The

  laborious transactions of forgiveness often substitute for the helplessness

  of mourning.

  But isn’t grief itself tarnished by my critique of anger? Doesn’t it wish

  to change the past, and isn’t it to that extent objectionable? I believe the

  answer is no, though the question is important.80 The fantasy of restoration

  that often accompanies grief is irrational if it persists and organizes large stretches of the person’s life. But deep pangs of longing for the lost are ways of registering the immense importance of that lost person, and thus important ways of making wholeness and sense out of the narrative of one’s

  life. Moving on without grief means having a disjointed or patchwork life,

  and so the most important reason for grieving is forward- looking: it draws

  attention to a very important commitment that should remain embedded

  in the narrative understanding that a person has of her own life, and com-

  municates to others. It expresses a deep aspect of who that person is.

  Anger is also distinct from four other “negative emotions” that focus

  on other people: disgust, hatred, contempt, and envy. All of these emo-

  tions, unlike anger, focus on relatively permanent traits of the person,

  rather than an act. (To recall my terminology: the target of anger is a person, but its focus is a wrongful act. In these other cases, the target is a person, and the focus is a more or less enduring trait of the person.)

  So they immediately raise a question that anger in and of itself does not

  raise: is it ever appropriate to have strong negative emotions toward a

  person’s enduring traits? As we shall see, all three of these emotions are

  initially easy to distinguish from anger— but the distinction becomes

  blurred when anger is of the status- focused type.

  Disgust is a strong aversion to aspects of the body that are seen as

  “animal reminders”— that is, aspects of ourselves that remind us that

  we are mortal and animal. Its primary objects are feces and other bodily

  fluids, as well as decay (especially the corpse), and animals or insects

  that are oozy, slimy, smelly, or in other ways reminiscent of the repudi-

  ated bodily fluids.81 The core idea in disgust is that of (potential) con-

  tamination through contact or ingestion: if I take in what is base, that

  debases me. In a secondary phase, disgust properties are projected onto

  groups of humans who do not really have those properties: racial, sexual,

  religious, or caste minorities are portrayed as hyperanimal or hyper-

  bodily, and are then said to be contaminants on the grounds that they are

  (allegedly) smelly, germy, etc. Societies then devise remarkable rituals of

  contamination- avoidance, policing the boundary between the dominant

  group and the animal by refusing to share food, swimming pools, drink-

  ing fountains, or sexual relations with those who are cast as surrogate

  animals.

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  49

  So disgust and anger both involve strongly aversive tenden-

  cies directed at a target. Disgust does not exactly involve the idea

/>   of a wrongful act, but blame often creeps in: the contaminating per-

  son or group is resented for daring to claim space, or to contact the

  self- insulating person or group. Even when disgust and anger move

  close to one another in this way, however, disgust is fantasy- ridden

  through and through, in a way that anger is not. Anger can often be

  well- grounded, by which term I mean that all of its elements are correct apart from the wish for payback. There really was a wrongful act,

  the perpetrator really did that act, and it is as important as the angry

  person thinks it is. Disgust, by contrast, involves fantasy from the get-

  go: its core idea is, “If I avoid contact with these animal reminders

  I will protect myself from being/ becoming animal.” This is of course

  nonsense, though a type of nonsense that has been very important to

  people in many times and places. Disgust is thus suspect as a whole

  category in a way that anger need not be: it centrally involves false

  beliefs (“I am not an animal,” “I do not excrete and smell,” “Only those

  people have smelly animal bodies”). Anger may involve true beliefs—

  up to the point of the payback idea.

  Because disgust focuses on the person rather than a bad act, its

  action- tendency is also different from that of anger: the disgusted person

  seeks separation, rather than retaliation or retribution— although separa-

  tion may at times involve great harshness and coercion (such as that of

  the apartheid and Jim Crow regimes), thus bleeding into the harshness of

  the penal institutions associated with anger.

  Despite these differences, disgust and anger have a great deal in

  common— when anger is of the status- focused type. Anger heading

  toward the Transition (rational anger, we might call it) focuses on a bad

  act and seeks rectification in a way that promotes social good. Status-

  focused anger, by contrast, reacts to a “down- ranking” or ego- injury

  and seeks to diminish or lower the (alleged) perpetrator— not, note, the perpetrator’s deed— in order to right the balance. This common type of

  anger lies close to disgust. It sees the other person as a malefactor, rather than a slimy roach or beetle, but insofar as it wishes the “down- ranking”

  of the other, it often involves representing the other as low or base; thus