Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  They went down like tenpins. From where I stood I heard the

  sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. … At times

  the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into

  a bloody pulp sickened me so much that I had to turn away. The

  western mind finds it difficult to grasp the idea of nonresistance.

  I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost

  as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to

  being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs, and this

  despite the fact that when I came to India I sympathized with the

  Gandhi cause. (G 250– 51)

  The marchers were not simply acquiescing. They continue to march, and

  they chanted the slogan “Long live the revolution.” And yet, as Miller

  says: there is something in the mind, and not only the Western mind, that

  resists accepting this way of reacting to brutal behavior. (Interestingly, the police treated Ms. Naidu with the utmost respect, and when she asked

  them not to lay a hand on her they did not even touch her. Would the

  men’s commitment to nonviolence have held up had they assaulted her

  as well?) What do Gandhi and King have to say to people who think

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  anger the right response to oppressive behavior, and the only response

  consistent with self- respect?

  First, they point out that the stance they recommend is anything

  but passive. Gandhi soon rejected “passive resistance” as a misleading

  English rendering of his ideas. As Dennis Dalton documents in his impor-

  tant philosophical study, starting already in 1907 Gandhi repudiated the

  term “passive resistance,” insisting that “passive resistance” could be

  weak and inactive, whereas his idea was one of active protest; he eventu-

  ally chose satyagraha, “truth force,” as a superior term.10 Both he and King continually insist that what they recommend is a posture of thought and

  conduct that is highly active, even “dynamically aggressive” (K 7), in that

  it involves resistance to unjust conditions and protest against them. “But

  when I say we should not resent, I do not say that we should acquiesce,”

  says Gandhi (G 138). For King, similarly: “I have not said to my people

  ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal

  and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of non-

  violent direct action” (K 291). Both men hold, as I do, that anger is inher-

  ently wedded to a payback mentality: Gandhi says that resenting means

  wishing some harm to the opponent (even if only through divine agency)

  (G 138); King speaks of a “strike- back” mentality (K 32). That is what they

  want to get rid of, and we shall soon see with what they replace it.

  Moreover, the new attitude is not just internally active, it issues

  in concrete actions with one’s body, actions that require considerable

  courage (K 7). King calls this “direct action”: action in which, after

  “self- purification” (i.e., rejection of anger), one’s own body is used to

  make the case (K 290– 91). This action is a forceful and uncompromising

  demand for freedom (292). The protester acts by marching, by breaking

  an unjust law in a deliberate demand for justice, by refusing to cooperate

  with unjust authority. The goal? In King’s case, to force negotiation and

  move toward legal and social change (291, 294). For Gandhi it is no less

  than to overthrow a wrongful government and to “compel its submission

  to the people’s will” (G 193, 195). The idea of acquiescence in brutality

  is presumably what revolted Webb Miller, but he misunderstood: there

  is no acquiescence, but a courageous struggle for a radical end.11 (The

  Attenborough movie, in which the Webb Miller role is played by Martin

  Sheen, depicts Miller as understanding exactly what he is seeing, and

  reporting to the world that the dignity of Indians carried the day over the

  hapless brutality of the British. Certainly, whatever the real Miller felt, his dispatches did show people what was really happening.)

  What is the new attitude with which they propose to replace anger?

  King, interestingly, allows some scope for real anger, holding that dem-

  onstrations and marches are a way of channeling repressed emotions

  that might otherwise lead to violence (297).12 He even appears to grant

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  that anger may play a valuable part in motivating some people to get

  involved. Nonetheless, even when there is real anger, it must soon lead to

  a focus on the future, with hope and with faith in the possibility of justice (K 52). Meanwhile, anger toward opponents is to be “purified” through

  a set of disciplined practices, and ultimately transformed into a mental

  attitude that carefully separates the deed from the doer, criticizing and

  repudiating the bad deed, but not imputing unalterable evil to people

  (K 61, GAut 242). (Notice the striking resemblance to Braithwaite’s con-

  ferences with juvenile offenders.) Deeds may be denounced: people

  always deserve respect and sympathy. After all, the ultimate goal is “to

  create a world where men and women can live together” (K 61), and that

  goal needs the participation of all.

  Above all, then, one should not wish to humiliate opponents in any

  way, or wish them ill (K 7, G 315), but instead should seek to win their

  friendship and cooperation (K 7). Gandhi remarks that early in his career

  he already felt the inappropriateness of the second stanza in “God Save

  the Queen,” which asks God to “Scatter her enemies / And make them

  fall, / Confound their politics, / Frustrate their knavish tricks” (G 152).

  How can we assume that these opponents are “knavish”? he asks. Surely

  the believer in non- anger should not encourage such attitudes. The oppo-

  nent is a person who has made a mistake, but we hope he can be won

  over by friendship and generosity.13 This attitude can be called love, so

  long as we understand that Gandhi and King refer to an attitude that is

  not soft and sentimental, but tough and uncompromising in its demand

  for justice. It is an attitude of respect and active concern, one that seeks a common good in which all are included.14

  An important insight of Gandhi (present in Paton’s novel) is that

  anger is frequently rooted in fear. In Nehru’s shrewd diagnosis, Gandhi’s

  greatest gift to his followers was a new freedom from the “all- pervading

  fear” that British rule had inspired in Indians. That “black pall of fear

  was lifted from the people’s shoulders”— how? Nehru suggests that this

  massive “psychological change” (which he compares to a successful psy-

  choanalysis) had its source in Gandhi’s ability to show an exit route from

  the reign of terror, and to inspire people, simultaneously, with a sense

  of their own worth and the worth of their actions. This made possible a

  form of protest that was calm, dignified, and strategic, rather than fur-

  tive, desperate, and prone to retributive violence.15

  The ultimate goal of the protester must be a beautiful future in

  which all have a share: “the creation of the beloved community” (K 7).


  King’s famous “Dream” speech, which I have discussed as an exam-

  ple of the Transition, is also a sentiment map that turns the critical

  and once- angry protester toward a future of enormous beauty, and

  one that is shown as possible and shortly available, by being rooted

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  in concrete features of the real American landscape, all of which are

  now seen as sites of freedom.16 Belief in the possibility of such a future

  plays no small part in the Transition. King was really outstanding here,

  and Gandhi somewhat less so: because of his asceticism he kept por-

  traying the future as one of impoverished rural simplicity, which was

  not very inspiring to most people, and was quite unrealistic in thinking

  about how to build a successful nation. King’s prophetic description of

  the future, furthermore, repositions opponents as potential partners in

  building the beautiful future: so then the question naturally becomes,

  how can we secure their cooperation? How can we get them on our

  side, joining with us? King doesn’t just tell people they ought to try to

  cooperate, he encourages a cooperative frame of mind by depicting a

  compelling goal that needs the cooperation of all. Gandhi’s strategy is

  a little different, in that he wants the British simply to leave India, not

  to help build it. They had tried to “build” long enough, and not well.

  But he encourages the thought that a free nation can be constructed, not

  through hatred and bloodshed, but by negotiation. The British don’t

  have to be seen as fellow citizens, but they do have to be seen as reason-

  able people who will ultimately do the right thing and depart, remain-

  ing peaceful Commonwealth partners.

  I have linked some anger to excessive preoccupation with status.

  One very significant aspect of Gandhi’s movement was its renunciation

  of artificial distinctions of status through a detailed and comprehensive

  sympathy. The powerful must live the simple lifestyle of the powerless,

  thus beginning to forge a nation in which all can see their fate in the

  lives of all. Lawyers washed pots, upper- caste people cleaned latrines,

  breaking down lines of both caste and gender. As so often in our inqui-

  ries, non- anger is in this way linked to practices that support empathetic

  participation in the lives of others. This was also a prominent feature

  of King’s movement, in which blacks and whites associated together in

  defiance of law, and in which white supporters were constantly urged to

  imagine the indignities and hardships of a black person’s life.

  In trying to respond to likely criticisms of the Gandhi/ King idea, we

  must confront the objection that it imposes on people an inhuman set of

  demands. We have begun to reply by showing that, and how, they made it

  possible for people to accept and internalize non- angry practices. But this

  worry is certainly heightened by Gandhi’s views about emotional and

  sexual detachment. Gandhi was close to being a thoroughgoing Stoic. He

  repeatedly asserted that one cannot pursue satyagraha or non- angry resistance adequately without conducting a struggle against all the passions,

  prominently including erotic desire and emotion. Nor did he cultivate

  the type of personal love and friendship that would naturally give rise

  to deep grief and fear. If he is correct in insisting that Stoic detachment is

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  necessary for non- anger, that would give us reason to think it an unwork-

  able and also an unattractive goal.

  First of all, we must ask whether Gandhi was making an instru-

  mental claim (emotional and passional detachment is instrumentally

  necessary for successful satyagraha) or offering a stipulative definition ( satyagraha consists in nonviolent and non- angry resistance carried

  out with a commitment to emotional and passional detachment). The

  answer is unclear. For himself, Gandhi most likely meant the latter,

  given the evidence of his systematic self- discipline. For his movement,

  however, he does not appear to endorse even the limited instrumen-

  tal claims, since he made no attempt to convince Nehru and other key

  leaders to renounce particular love and other forms of strong passion.17

  Perhaps his idea was simply that the leader of a successful nonviolent resistance movement must (whether instrumentally or conceptually)

  pursue Stoic detachment. Even this, however, might worry a modern

  reader: if the path of non- anger demands an implausible and in some

  ways unappealing detachment of its leaders, how attractive can it be,

  as a path to justice?

  We can begin by looking at history, where the examples of King and

  Mandela (indeed also Nehru) seem to refute Gandhi’s theory. All three

  had lives of passionate devotion to individuals, and none renounced

  sexuality. Certainly King’s love affairs compromised the success of his

  movement by putting him into the power of J. Edgar Hoover. But that

  just shows that leaders had better obey social norms, or conceal their

  actions well if they don’t.

  The case of Mandela tells us something further and different, which

  he repeatedly discusses: that the leader of a movement may encounter

  great obstacles to the successful pursuit of love and family life. The long

  hours away from home in the early days and the long years of impris-

  onment later on made successful marriage impossible and successful

  fatherhood problematic. But the evidence (his prison letters to Winnie,

  for example) suggests that love was still an energizing force in his politi-

  cal life, nor does anything in his writings indicate that he would have

  been a better leader had he pursued detachment rather than love and

  family care. One can say much the same of Nehru.

  Moreover, if people sometimes like to be inspired by a leader like

  Gandhi, who seems to be apart from the common human lot, they also,

  and probably more often where politics is concerned, respond to a leader

  who is demonstrably human in need and vulnerability, albeit more self-

  controlled than many other leaders. Nehru, like Mandela, took great

  care in his Autobiography to emphasize his own vulnerable human side, including his passionate love of his wife and his grief at her death.18

  George Orwell speaks for many people when he concludes that “Saints

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  should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent”— a judg-

  ment that he applies to Gandhi with complicated results.19

  Psychologist Erik Erikson goes one step further, in his insightful book

  on Gandhi: he treats Gandhi’s attitude to human love in general, sexual-

  ity in particular, as one of self- anger, indeed of violence. Addressing the

  dead leader directly, he says, “You should stop terrorizing yourself, and

  approach your own body with nonviolence.”20 He then contrasts psycho-

  analysis, a nonviolent art of self- change through truth, with Gandhi’s

  punitive attitudes. There is much in Gandhi’s biography to recommend

  Erikson’s view that self- anger is continually expressed in his attitude to

  his own body. The genesis of his idea that all
sexual desire is destructive

  was, by his own account, a very specific experience. As a young married

  teenager, he was making love with his wife at the very moment when his

  father died. His father had long been ill, and he felt it was his duty to sit with him. Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be distracted by the lure

  of desire, and went to his wife even though his father’s state appeared

  dire. As a result he was not there at the moment of death. “It is a blot

  I have never been able to efface or forget… . It took me long to get free

  from the shackles of lust, and I had to pass through many ordeals before

  I could overcome it” (GAut 27). Erikson’s idea that self- anger is exacting

  a payback is extremely cogent, and of course even Gandhi’s retrospective

  narrative portrays his behavior in the most pejorative light. If we accept

  Erikson’s claim, we have a further reason not to hold that non- anger

  entails Gandhian renunciation: renunciation in this case, and perhaps

  in others, is itself an expression of anger. George Orwell agrees, saying

  of Gandhi: “If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would,

  I believe, find that the main motive for ‘non- attachment’ is a desire to

  escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or

  non- sexual, is hard work.”21

  So, non- anger not only does not demand an inhuman sort of renun-

  ciation, it is incompatible with (at least this form of) it. In that important respect, King, Nehru, and Mandela were more successful practitioners

  of non- anger than Gandhi, though all of them found it difficult to be

  adequate partners and parents, given the all- consuming demands of a

  political vocation.22 One may grieve and love intensely while avoiding

  anger’s specific errors.

  We now have a picture of non- angry revolutionary action, and we

  have some persuasive answers to some of the most powerful objec-

  tions that have been raised against it. We also have an appealing pic-

  ture of the non- angry revolutionary: dignified, courageous, and proud,

  but not emotionless or inhumanly detached. But perhaps we do not yet

  have enough to answer the normative question with which we began. If

  we have shown that non- anger is acceptable, we have not conclusively