Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  shown that it is preferable when oppression is bad. What is really wrong

  with anger, even if another attractive way of conducting a revolution can

  be found?

  In response to this imagined challenge, Gandhi and King repeat-

  edly turn to religious metaphysics, giving us accounts of divine love.23

  Such metaphysical accounts were and are deeply appealing to those who

  hold one of the religious views in question, but they seem insufficient

  to answer our philosophical questions, and insufficient, too, to persuade

  citizens in a pluralistic society. In Mandela we get something more.

  IV. Mandela’s Strange Generosity

  In Mandela’s writings we find not a systematic theory of non- anger, but

  a self- aware human being of remarkable insight. I shall construct his

  responses into a quasi- theory, and I shall note the likely influence of Stoic theories on his personal development. But it is important to observe that

  in so doing I add nothing: I just point to the structures already latent in

  his thought and conduct.

  I have argued that anger leads down two paths, each of which has

  an unattractive error built into it. Either anger’s wish for ill to befall the wrongdoer is pointless, since payback does no good for the important

  elements of human flourishing that have been damaged, or it remains

  focused on relative status, in which case it may possibly succeed in its

  aim (relative abasement), but the aim itself is singularly unworthy. I shall

  now argue that Mandela instinctively comes to the same conclusion, in

  a way shaped by his long period of self- examination, which included

  daily introspective meditation (LW 200– 212), during twenty- seven years

  in prison, a time that he says was extremely productive in meditating

  about anger.

  What did Mandela realize, in those long hours of what he calls

  “conversations with myself,” alluding to the Meditations of Marcus

  Aurelius, a text that was almost certainly brought to Robben Island by

  Ahmed Kathrada, and read by other prisoners?24 First, he recognizes

  that obsession with status is unworthy, and thus refuses to go down that

  road. (Perhaps his royal origins helped him, relieving anxiety.) He never

  fussed about whether a particular role or activity would be “beneath”

  him. Through introspection, he pruned from his responses any hint of

  status- anxiety, even when it would have been defensible and natural.

  Thus, when a new prisoner on Robben Island was asked to clean the

  toilet bucket for another prisoner who had had to leave for Cape Town

  at 5:00 a.m., before buckets could be emptied, the new man objected,

  saying that he would never empty the bucket of another man. Mandela

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  intervened. “So then I cleaned it for him because it meant nothing for me;

  I cleaned my bucket every day and I had no problem, you see, in clean-

  ing the bucket of another” (C 149; the transcript reports that Mandela

  chuckled telling this story). Later on, he showed none of the reluctance

  about the Afrikaans language that bitter and angry black revolutionar-

  ies often evinced. So far was he from thinking it beneath him to speak

  Afrikaans that he took a course in the language while in prison and took

  advantage of every opportunity to converse in Afrikaans, for example

  with the warders (Inv 28)— having no sense that this was giving them

  a status victory, and thinking only of future utility and present respect.

  He repeatedly told his fellow prisoners that it was important to learn

  Afrikaans and Afrikaner history, in order to understand how their oppo-

  nents think: for the time for negotiation would come sooner or later.25

  Writing to Winnie from prison in 1975, he says that most people focus

  wrongly on status: instead, they should focus on their own inner devel-

  opment (C vii).

  Mandela knew, however, that most people did worry a lot about

  status. Leadership, for him, meant patiently training your capacities as

  an athlete trains, and one capacity he constantly trained was the ability to

  understand how other people think (Inv 138). He therefore understood

  that to disarm resistance you needed to disarm anxiety first, and that

  this would never be accomplished by expressions of anger or bitterness,

  but only by courtesy and respect for the other’s dignity. The key to good

  relations with warders— often burdened by class anxiety— was “respect,

  ordinary respect” (Inv 28). When his lawyer arrived on Robben Island

  during Mandela’s first year there, Mandela made a point of introduc-

  ing the attorney to the warders, saying, “George, I’m sorry, I have not

  introduced you to my guard of honor.” He then introduced each warder

  by name. The attorney remembers that “The guards were so stunned

  that they actually behaved like a guard of honor, each respectfully shak-

  ing my hand” (Inv 29– 30). He was told by one warder that the warders

  don’t even like to talk to one another because they “hate their status”

  (219). Mandela’s reaction was to get to know the man’s story: he was

  brought up in an orphanage, and never knew his parents. Mandela

  concludes, “The fact that they had no parents, no parental love, and his

  bitterness, to me was due to that. And I respected the chap very much

  because he was a self- made chap, yes. And he was independent and he

  was studying” (219).

  So the status path of anger was not only a path that Mandela care-

  fully eschewed, but also one that he understood with empathy and thus

  deftly undermined.

  As for the wish for payback, Mandela understood it very well, and

  felt it in his own life. He recalls incidents that made him extremely angry.

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  “This injustice rankled,” he says of an early incident at Fort Hare school

  (LW 62). Moreover, anger was not just a constant possibility, it was at one

  time a crucial motivation for deciding on a political career:

  I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth,

  but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand

  indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced

  in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that

  imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which

  I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my

  people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not

  do otherwise. (LW 109)

  But he recognized, he tells us, that payback simply doesn’t get you any-

  where. Anger is human, and we can see why wrongdoing might produce

  it— but if we ponder the sheer futility of the payback wish, and if we

  actually want good for ourselves and others, we quickly discover that

  non- anger and a generous disposition are far more useful.

  As he tells his own story, the early roots of these attitudes were

  taught to him in tribal meetings, where the regent listened calmly to

  each person’s opinion, and respect was shown to each (LW 25). Stories of

  heroes of former times stressed their “generosity and humility” (LW 26). />
  Whether this is strictly veridical or a reconstruction of African traditions

  suited to the present and future is of course unclear; what is important is

  the message for the living.26

  Mandela was no saint, and his tendency to anger was a constant

  problem with which he wrestled. As he records, much of his introspec-

  tive meditation in prison focused on his tendency to anger in the form

  of a payback wish. Thus on one occasion he concluded that he had spo-

  ken too sharply to one of the warders, and he apologizes (C 219). The

  deliberate choice to frame his conversations as analogous to Marcus

  Aurelius’s Meditations shows a determined self- watchfulness, which may have been directly modeled on Stoic sources, although his ideas also have

  deep connections with the African concept of ubuntu.27 (By contrast, he never reports trying to get rid of disappointment and grief, and indeed

  he always acknowledges such experiences forthrightly, although he also

  emphasizes that it is important not to lose hope.) Repeatedly he draws

  attention to the importance of systematic self- inspection. In a letter to

  Winnie, then in prison, from his own prison in 1975, he writes (encour-

  aging her to adopt this same meditative discipline): “The cell is an ideal

  place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the

  process of your own mind and feelings” (C vii).

  Notice that even in the early experiences of anger that Mandela identi-

  fies as formative, the forward- looking predominates. He wants to change

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  the system and to liberate his people, not to inflict pain or bad conditions

  on others. So his early anger, while it seems to be genuine anger and

  not Transition- Anger, still heads very rapidly toward the Transition. And

  even that anger was carefully pruned away through prison meditations.

  In general: Mandela never seems to have had the thought that mak-

  ing white South Africans suffer or inflicting on them any form of payback

  would be of the slightest interest. As he saw it, the goal is to change the

  system; but that would very likely require the cooperation of whites, and

  would at the very least be unstable and continually threatened without

  white support. Albie Sachs, an important (white) member of the freedom

  movement, and later one of the founding justices of the South African

  Constitutional Court, says that they always felt that they were strug-

  gling for the positive goal of political equality, a goal that in principle

  included all.28

  Non- retributive attitudes, in Mandela’s view, are particularly cru-

  cial for the person who is the fiduciary of a nation. A responsible leader

  has to be a pragmatist, and anger is incompatible with forward- looking

  pragmatism. It simply gets in the way. A good leader must move to the

  Transition as rapidly as possible, and perhaps for much of his life just

  stay there, expressing and even feeling Transition- Anger and disappoint-

  ment, but leaving genuine anger behind.

  A good summary of Mandela’s approach can be found in a little par-

  able he told to his interviewer Richard Stengel, as one he had previously

  used with his followers:

  I told the incident … of an argument between the sun and the

  wind, that the sun said, “I’m stronger than you are” and the wind

  says, “No, I’m stronger than you are.” And they decided, there-

  fore, to test their strength with a traveller … who was wearing a

  blanket. And they agreed that the one who would succeed in get-

  ting the traveller to get rid of his blanket would be the stronger.

  So the wind started. It started blowing and the harder it blew, the tighter the traveller pulled the blanket around his body. And the

  wind blew and blew but it could not get him to discard the blan-

  ket. And, as I said, the harder the wind blew, the tighter the visitor tried to hold the blanket around his body. And the wind eventually gave up. Then the sun started with its rays, very mild, and

  they increased in strength and as they increased … the traveller

  felt that the blanket was unnecessary because the blanket is for

  warmth. And so he decided to relax it, to loosen it, but the rays

  of the sun became stronger and stronger and eventually he threw

  it away. So by a gentle method it was possible to get the travel-

  ler to discard his blanket. And this is the parable that through

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  peace you will be able to convert, you see, the most determined

  people … and that is the method we should follow. (C 237– 38)

  Significantly, Mandela frames the entire question in forward- looking

  pragmatic terms, as a question of getting the other party to do what you

  want. He then shows that this task is much more feasible if you can get

  the other party to work with you rather than against you. Progress is

  impeded by the other party’s defensiveness and anxious self- protection.

  Anger, consequently, does nothing to move matters forward: it just

  increases the other party’s anxiety and self- defensiveness. A gentle and

  cheerful approach, by contrast, can gradually weaken defenses until the

  whole idea of self- defense is given up.

  Mandela, of course, was neither naïve nor so ideological as to refuse

  reality: thus we would never find him proposing to drop armed resis-

  tance to Hitler or to try converting him by charm. His parable is offered

  in a particular context, that of the ending of a sometimes violent libera-

  tion struggle, with people on the other side many of whom are genuine

  patriots, wishing the future good of the nation. He insisted from the start

  of his career that nonviolence should be used only strategically. Still,

  behind the strategic resort to violence was always a view of people that

  was Transitional, focused not on payback but on the creation of a shared

  future.

  So Mandela has a reply ready for the imaginary opponent who says

  that the oppositional payback mentality is appropriate and a fine alterna-

  tive to non- anger. It is that payback just doesn’t do any good. That way

  of approaching his opponents would have set back the cause for which

  he was fighting. He readily accepts the criticism that his way of seeing

  opponents is only one option, not dictated by morality: so he advances a

  weaker claim than I do. His reply is that his way works:

  stengel: People say, “Nelson Mandela’s great problem is that he’s too

  willing to see the good in other people.” How do you respond to that?

  mandela: Well, that’s what many people say. That has been said right

  from my adolescence and I don’t know. … There may be an element of

  truth in that. But when you are a public figure you have to accept the

  integrity of other people until there is evidence to the contrary. And

  when you have no evidence to the contrary, and people do things which

  appear to be good, what reason have you got to suspect them? To say

  that they are doing good because they have got an ulterior motive? It is

  until that evidence comes out that you then either deal with that point,

  with that instance of infidelity, and forget about it. Because that’s how
<
br />   you can get on in life with people. You have to recognize that people

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  are produced by the mud in the society in which you live and that

  therefore they are human beings. They have got good points, they have

  got weak points. Your duty is to work with human beings as human

  beings, not because you think they are angels. And therefore, once

  you know that this man has got this virtue and he has got this weak-

  ness you work with them and you accommodate that weakness and

  you try and help him to overcome that weakness. I don’t want to be

  frightened by the fact that a person has made certain mistakes and he

  has got human frailties. I can’t allow myself to be influenced by that.

  And that is why many people criticize me. … So it’s a criticism I have

  to put up with and I’ve tried to adjust to, because whether it is so or

  not, it is something which I think is profitable. … And one has made

  a great deal of progress in developing personal relationships because

  you [make] the basic assumption … that those you deal with are men

  of integrity. I believe in that. (C 262– 63)

  To Mandela, the angry and resentful approach is simply not appropriate

  to a leader, because a leader’s role is to get things done, and the generous

  and cooperative approach is the one that works.

  He made the case this way to his allies and followers too. When

  a group of prisoners from the Black Consciousness group arrived on

  Robben Island determined to show resistance by rage and angry attacks

  on the guards, he gradually and patiently prevailed on them to see that

  militancy can also be expressed, and more productively, by non- angry

  strategies.29 Much later, in the first days of the nation, after the murder

  of black leader Chris Hani by a white man, there was a real danger that

  the payback mentality would derail unity. Mandela went on television

  expressing deep grief but appealing for calm in a paternal way, so that

  people felt, “If the father himself was not baying for revenge, then what

  right had anybody else to seek it?” (Inv 119). He then tried to redirect

  emotions by pointing out that the murderer was a foreigner30 and that

  an Afrikaner woman had acted heroically, writing down the hit man’s