Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  has a real, albeit limited, role to play. But most of the arguments are quite promising.

  Particularly valuable is the work’s reminder that the struggle against

  anger must be fought inside oneself, as well as in the social realm. In

  that sense, the Middle Realm is at times intimate, since people get angry

  with themselves over lots of things that do not involve major compo-

  nents of well- being. Perhaps, however, the constant self- scrutiny that

  Seneca’s method demands is too inquisitorial to be entirely ideal from a

  Transitional viewpoint. I’ll argue later that both a sense of humor (self-

  teasing) and generosity to oneself have an important role to play.

  III. Misattribution and Skewed Valuation in Casual Interactions

  Let us now assess the Middle Realm ourselves, armed with Seneca’s

  insights, but also with our own analysis— and the experience of life. First,

  Seneca is absolutely right to say that a lot of people’s anger in this realm

  is the result of mistaken attributions of insult and malice, and that these

  mistaken attributions, in turn, result from a hypersensitivity often caused

  by a morbid narcissism. His analogy to bodily fitness seems right: people

  in good psychic condition don’t weigh every minor occurrence as a pos-

  sible slight: they have more important things to occupy their attention.

  He is also right to say that a great deal of anger in this realm is the

  result of a socially engendered overvaluation of honor, status, and rank.

  When much is made of what seat at a dinner table each guest has, some-

  thing is amiss in the culture. What was true of dinner parties in ancient

  Rome is true now in countless spheres of contemporary life, but perhaps

  the Internet offers an especially keen example, offering people the possi-

  bility of spending their entire day searching for dishonor and insult, anx-

  iously scanning the world for signs of their own ego and its up- ranking

  or down- ranking. This is a distinct problem from the problem of misat-

  tribution, because people sometimes are really down- ranked by others.

  But the problems are closely related. The more you obsess about rank,

  the more likely you are to construe some innocent remark as an insult.

  And rank is likely to assume outsize proportions in the Middle Realm.

  In the intimate realm we choose people out of love, or family concern.

  Strangers don’t have these appealing properties. Sometimes they seem

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  to be nothing more than a set of tokens of our social reputation or lack of

  it. So the Middle Realm must above all focus on containing the inflated

  concern with rank that disfigures so much social interaction. The error

  of status- focus bulks large, and the payback- error, all by itself, is less

  frequently the problem— at least when central elements of well- being are

  not at issue.

  Seneca is right, as well, when he points out that a great deal of anger

  is absurd in two further ways. Some anger attributes malicious intent to

  things or people who could not possibly have such intent; other cases of

  anger concern things that are just too trivial to take seriously, although

  we do. Considering my examples of flying and driving, we can see that

  both errors abound: for many inconveniences are not wrongdoing at all,

  but we often believe that they are; and we also ascribe great importance

  to setbacks that are actually not worth serious attention.

  But here we reach a gap in Seneca’s analysis. For, although courteous

  and respectful treatment by strangers is not a major constituent of well-

  being, it does have enough importance that we are rightly concerned

  when it is absent. Society goes better when people are polite and helpful,

  and obey a long list of implicit rules of safety, courtesy, fair play, and reciprocity. Is anger appropriate when these rules are violated? On the one

  hand, we have Seneca’s correct contention that such things are not worth

  our serious emotional energy, and his ancillary claim that we would fill

  up our day with unpleasantness if we did get angry every time some-

  thing like that occurred. On the other hand, we have the need to enforce

  these rules in some way, and not to let things slide that are damaging to

  socially useful practices. This is a realm without law, for the most part, so isn’t anger a good enforcer?

  This is exactly where Transition- Anger comes in handy. Without get-

  ting sidetracked emotionally, or only a little, one can have a genuine emo-

  tional reaction whose content is “That is outrageous, and it should not

  happen again.” Expressing such an emotion is often useful as a deterrent.

  One must be careful, however. Sometimes calmly expressing outrage

  makes things worse. I’ve discovered that the men who grab your suitcase

  to put it in the overhead rack really hate it when a woman calmly tells

  them that this is not a good way to treat another person’s suitcase; such

  a reply does not promote social welfare, but only embroils one in further

  conversation with these people, which is unpleasant. So I have discov-

  ered a way of secretly expressing Transition- Anger without their know-

  ing it: I say, “I’m terribly sorry, that suitcase contains fragile items, and I’d rather handle it myself so that, if anything should happen, I would know

  that I’m responsible and not you.” Or, sometimes, I have a brief moment

  of real anger, thinking that they ought to be put in their place— but then

  head quickly for the Transition.

  The Middle Realm

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  It’s good not to congratulate oneself prematurely, however. On my

  flight home from delivering the Locke Lectures, I was just hoisting my

  small carry- on (heavy luggage already checked) into the overhead rack,

  and it was already 90 percent in, when a very large man asked whether

  he could help me. I said, “No thank you,” and was about to thank him

  for asking— when, and by this time the bag was already in, he grabbed

  it and shoved it in further. I said, politely, “If you were going to do it

  anyway, why did you ask?” He said he was a German trauma surgeon

  and had “lots of experience with patients who …”— then he stopped,

  seeing something in my face, perhaps, that reminded him that I was not

  his patient. I said, somewhat less politely, that I do not spend hours lift-

  ing weights in the gym each day only to be insulted, and I bet I could

  overhead- press more weight than he could (since, though large, he was

  not in good shape). Obviously he was the sort of doctor, and surgeons

  are often of this sort, who has no interest in the individual history of

  the patient. He must have been thinking of all those faceless women—

  necks and shoulders merely— who had injured themselves in such activi-

  ties, very likely without daily weight training. Nonetheless I really was

  angry, and my response was pretty stupid. I was so mad that I asked the

  stewardess if she could change my seat, since I thought that flying home

  from the Locke Lectures I ought to enjoy my flight with no temptations to

  anger. But then it turned out that he had taken someone else’s seat any-

  way (he was that kind of surgeon), s
o, as he was replaced by a cheerful

  and amusing British man, my problem was solved!

  Still, such are the obstacles posed by one’s own psyche. I continued

  to seethe, even two weeks later. I found myself imagining little German

  conversations in which I pretend, ironically, that we simply have a lin-

  guistic misunderstanding, and I tell him in perfect German that in English

  when one says “no” that means “Nein,” and if one wants to say “Ja” one

  says “yes”— thereby insulting him, since his English was actually perfect.

  Clearly I was still angry, in a way that deserves teasing. But much though

  I would have enjoyed teasing by a friend, I found that I had no capacity

  for self- teasing in that instance, and no desire to undertake sober medita-

  tive exercises to get rid of my quite ridiculous and disproportionate anger.

  And notice this: had I chosen to forgive this rude man uncondition-

  ally, my forgiveness would have had, very likely, the moral difficulties

  I identified in chapter 3: a smug superiority, and a failure to think con-

  structively about the future (an easy failure, when you won’t be seeing

  the person again).

  One difficulty of the Middle Realm suggested by this story is that

  one’s sole encounter with a stranger may reveal irritating properties

  without ever showing other aspects of the person that might be good

  to focus on if one wants to achieve non- anger. (A surgeon with similarly

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  irritating characteristics who is a leader in my Chicago temple revealed

  a rich basis for non- anger when he repaired the hand of one of our most

  talented students.)

  What about a performance of anger? Sometimes, when anger is not a

  real temptation, a performance achieves good results, particularly in our

  litigious culture. One Saturday my hair stylist, as I was leaning back with

  my head in the sink for a wash, reached up for the shampoo, opening an

  ill- organized cabinet out of which various bottles fell, and one— plastic,

  luckily— hit me on the brow. I was startled but not really hurt or upset.

  But I thought it was useful to signal to others the significance of this event, since someone else could be seriously hurt in future (if a heavier bottle

  had fallen, or it had broken). So I gave a display of polite outrage, add-

  ing that they really should install a rack in that cabinet to hold the bottles securely. Yes, the hairdresser replied, we’ve told that to management for

  weeks. So, I repeated the performance with heightened vigor at the front

  desk, perceiving that this would help both the employees and the custom-

  ers, and relying on the usual American fear of a lawsuit. This case seems

  to me similar to the Utku interpretation of Jesus in the temple: giving the

  culturally expected performance, in order to produce good results. Let’s

  give Seneca credit again: the further it is from real anger, the easier it is to control and modulate. The performance achieved the result that anger-as- signal- to- others might have achieved, with more reliability. Even a

  brief moment of real anger could have inflated itself into an attempt to

  humiliate those people and make them feel awful. A performance aimed

  at good social outcomes carries no such risk. Transition- Anger, poised in

  the middle, is another reasonable response, but it is a little riskier than a mere performance, capable of sliding imperceptibly into real anger.13

  Here’s a case where I didn’t entirely avoid the risk. At the Frankfurt

  airport security checkpoint, being selected for an additional body

  patdown, which was then administered by some unusually rude and

  ill- trained staff, I decided to speak calmly in my best German and tell

  them that “Est is wirklich viel besser, höflich zu sein.”14 But when I uttered these words it came out sounding like a parody of German rigidity and

  obsessiveness, especially as I tried to bite out all the consonants in my

  jet- lagged state (I had just flown in from India)— and I realized that real

  anger was in there, since I evidently wanted, at some level, to mock them

  and put them down.

  These stories raise a question: for anger is so much a part of the fabric

  of social life that responding non- angrily is often itself misconstrued as

  insult or disrespect. I’ve found that women are expected to react emo-

  tionally, so when they talk calmly and analytically guys get annoyed,

  and feel that someone is talking down to them (as indeed I probably

  was talking down to the German agents). We have two questions here: is

  The Middle Realm

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  non- anger therefore ethically problematic? And, can it sometimes make

  things worse? I think the answer to the first question is no, though one

  had better be sure that it really is non- anger and not anger with a rational surface; but the answer to the second, unfortunately, is yes. I’m afraid

  that I have to say that when men get mad because a woman is calm and

  analytical (particularly, no doubt, when she speaks with an unnatural

  accent that she could have learned only in Bryn Mawr), that is really their

  problem, and it is not my responsibility to behave like a child in order to

  avoid their annoyed response. But sometimes, knowing the likelihood

  of that response, it could be better to give a performance of annoyance,

  or some other emotion, in order to humanize the interaction, even if one

  does not wish to humanize the interaction. I think that this also helps

  avoid the genuine error of using one’s rationality to put them in their

  place, a temptation from which such encounters are rarely free.

  Still, I cannot avoid one more observation. Men in particular think

  that they have achieved something if they can make a woman mad,

  particularly if she is calm and intellectual. Often, they use the attempt to

  make you mad as a way of flirting, no doubt thinking that unlocking the

  pent- up emotions of such a woman is a sexual victory. (And note that

  they assume these emotions are pent up in general, not merely unavail-

  able to them!) This exceedingly tedious exercise shows that they have

  few or no interesting resources for flirting (such as humor or imagina-

  tion), and it really has the opposite effect from the one intended, boring

  the woman, who has certainly seen this before, and making them look

  very silly.

  As we know, however, the devil has many guises, and while I have

  learned to avoid anger in the suitcase- lift scenario, one virtually irresistible lure into anger is behavior in the Middle Realm that makes no sense

  at all. Of course this realm is filled with irrationality, and its forms are so manifold and so staggering that it is difficult to anticipate them, whereas

  the behavior of suitcase- lifters is boringly predictable. Internet service

  agents contradict themselves with stupendous inventiveness; bank offi-

  cials, besides being barely able to speak English (whether educated in the

  United States or not), parrot absurd policies that make no sense. Here’s

  one such occasion: I received an email notice of a possible fraudulent

  charge on my credit card. I called the bank, and, after being on hold for

  twenty- five minutes, was connected to an agent in the fraud department.

  The charge, we quic
kly agreed, was not mine. But it had also not really

  been charged: the number had evidently been random- dialed, and the

  party didn’t have the other information (expiration date, CVC code), so

  the charge was declined. Nonetheless, the fraud agent insisted on giv-

  ing me a new credit card, something that entails horrible time- waste and

  inconvenience. I resisted: If one number could be random- dialed so could

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  another, so I and the bank were getting no improvement in safety. But,

  says he, he is required by rule to give a new card whenever there is fraud.

  Actually, I said in my most legalistic manner, there was no fraud because

  the charge was declined: at best an attempted fraud. Because I was about

  to go on a long international trip, and all bookings had been made with

  the old number, meaning a slew of international phone calls, I dug in and

  argued, pointing out that (a) his decision was not entailed by the rule

  he cited, which mentioned fraud and not attempted fraud, and (b) his

  behavior was bad for business and had no purpose. After over an hour of

  this, I lost (and slept badly later).

  Should one yield immediately to the irrationality of life? The world

  often poses that question. But the belief that the world ought to be ratio-

  nal, and that simply pointing out that something is irrational will effect

  change, is a Senecan recipe for constant anger, and for dreams filled with

  irritating people who ought to be no part of one’s inner life.

  Sometimes, however, insults in the Middle Realm are not just personal

  slights: they target group traits that are used to stigmatize and subordi-

  nate. At this point they are not just slights, they can under some circum-

  stances constitute assaults on our equal dignity as citizens and on the

  terms of political cooperation, as in the torts of sexual and racial harass-

  ment defined under U.S. Title VII. At this point, insults implicate serious

  aspects of well- being, since political equality is very important, and some

  types of denigrating behavior constitute illegal discrimination. So I post-

  pone that type of insult for the next section, noting, however, that we see