not unthinkable that a society might attain such a conscious-
ness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury pos-
sible to it— letting those who harm it go unpunished. … The
justice which began with “everything is dischargeable, every-
thing must be discharged,” ends by winking and letting those
incapable of discharging their debt go free: it ends, as does
every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-
overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has
given itself— mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains
the privilege of the most powerful man, or better— his beyond
the law.90
The idea that the ability to forgo retribution is a mark of both personal
and societal strength is a persistent leitmotif of the present book.
Everyday Justice
209
What is the relationship between Senecan mercy and forgiveness?
If we confine ourselves to the central case of transactional forgiveness,
mercy and forgiveness at first blush seem rather close. For don’t both
involve the suspension or waiving of angry feelings in the light of a per-
son’s remorse? Yes and no. Mercy insists on truth, so it never wipes away
or “forgets” a wrongful act, as forgiveness does in some accounts. That is
one very significant difference. But there are two others, of even greater
importance. Mercy doesn’t need to be preceded by anger at all: it can and
often does express a pure form of Transition- Anger, simply acknowledg-
ing the wrongful act, but in a forward- looking and generous spirit. To
put this point in a different way, forgiveness is all about how we deal
with the past. Senecan mercy is from the beginning about the future: it
looks ahead to reintegration. If anger is briefly on the scene, mercy turns
quickly to the Transition. And, finally, the third difference, transactional
forgiveness requires apology. Mercy just gets on with things, looking to
the next day. The past is past, now see that you don’t do this again—
and also, let’s see how our society can solve the problem better than it
has. It lies close, then, to the sort of unconditional forgiveness or, bet-
ter, unconditional love that some of our dissident religious texts embody
and that our examples of revolutionary justice will embody. It refuses
to play the “blame game” or to create a hierarchy of good (victim) and
bad (offender). For that reason it does not put offenders in an abased or
humiliated position. Instead, the idea is that we are all in this together,
and we had better try to live together as well as we can.
As we’ll see in chapter 7, this forward- looking spirit produces an
approach to revolutionary justice that is very different from a forgiveness-
based approach. The contrast between the two will be better understood
when we reach that case.
My focus has been the institutions of the “criminal justice system,”
not the emotions of actors within it. By now, however, we see that many
roles within the system have discretion built into them, and to that extent
require people who can inhabit those emotional roles well. People cannot
be good judges or jurors if they are robotic or unresponsive. However,
it is also crucial that they do not let their emotions wash all over the
place— that they inhabit the carefully demarcated emotional roles that
a decent system constructs for them.91 They need, then, both developed
emotional capacities and considerable self- restraint. This latter virtue is
especially important given the siren song of anger that is so alluring in
many societies.
The Eumenides will not be satisfied, and they should not be. For they
asked for “something that has no traffic with evil success,” by which they
meant success through payback. “Let there blow no wind that wrecks
the trees” can be understood to mean, let us bring up citizens with good
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Anger and Forgiveness
nutrition, good housing, good education, good health care, early and
late.92 “Let no barren deadly sickness creep and kill.” No modern soci-
ety has heeded these words (nor, of course, did that of ancient Athens,
a slave society that allowed great inequalities to persist even between
citizens, while waging brutal wars of conquest in the vicinity). We are
stuck with the mechanisms of incarceration and “punishment” as we
know them because we have failed at these other tasks. If we did our job
well, these institutions would probably still exist, but they would have
much less to do.
Recall Ebenezer Scrooge: Approached for a donation to give food
to the hungry at Christmas, he asks with surprise whether the prisons,
the treadmill, and the workhouses have ceased their useful operations.
Modern societies, and perhaps the United States more than others, are
like Scrooge— imagining that default institutions, on which no society
should rely for justice, are a permanent fixture of the way things must
be. The debate about the “justification of punishment” ought to be like a
debate with Scrooge about the “justification of the workhouse”— a debate
in which, in order to make a place for the workhouse, he would have to
convince us that everything possible had been done to prevent hunger
and misery first. “Punishment as opposed to what?” should always be
our question, and the “what” should be not some tepid alternative such
as therapy inside disgusting prisons, but a thorough transformation of
the way we look at poverty and inequality, particularly in dealing with
our youngest citizens. Nonetheless, we are very far from that goal, and
for the time being, tepid proposals, some of which I have defended here,
are the only ones that seem likely to win a hearing.
7
The Political Realm
Revolutionary Justice
But when I say we should not resent, I do not say that we should
acquiesce.
— Mohandas Gandhi, regulations for the Satyagraha Ashram
in Gujarat, 19151
I. Noble Anger?
But isn’t anger noble, when society is corrupt and brutal? When people
are kept down, they all too often learn to acquiesce in their “fate.” They
form “adaptive preferences,” defining their lot as acceptable and acqui-
escence as fitting. But if they acquiesce, change is unlikely. Awakening
people to the injustice of society’s treatment of them is a necessary first
step toward social progress. And don’t we expect that awakening to pro-
duce justified anger? If people believe they are being wrongfully abused
and don’t get angry, isn’t there something wrong in their thinking some-
where? Don’t they, for example, seem to have too low an opinion of their
dignity and rights?
Anger seems to have three valuable roles. First, it is seen as a valu-
able signal that the oppressed recognize the wrong done to them. It also
seems to be a necessary motivation for them to protest and struggle
against injustice and to communicate to the wider world the nature of
their grievances. Finally, anger seems, quite simply, to be j
ustified: out-
rage at terrible wrongs is right, and anger thus expresses something true.
When the basic legal structure of society is sound, people can turn
to the law for redress; the Eumenides recommend this course. But some-
times the legal structure is itself unjust and corrupt. What people need
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to do is not just to secure justice for this or that particular wrong, but,
ultimately, to change the legal order. That task is different from the task
of preserving daily justice, albeit continuous with it. It appears to require anger, even if daily justice does not.
On the other hand, if we examine successful struggles for revolution-
ary justice over the past hundred years, we see immediately that three
of the most prominent— and stably successful— were conducted with
a profound commitment to non- anger, though definitely not in a spirit
of acquiescence. Gandhi’s noncooperation campaign against the British
raj, the U.S. civil rights movement, and South Africa’s struggle to over-
come the apartheid system were all highly successful, and all repudiated
anger as a matter of both theory and practice. To the extent that any of
them admitted anger as acceptable, it was either our borderline species of
“Transition- Anger,” a sense of outrage without any wish for ill to befall
the offender, or else a brief episode of real anger, but leading quickly to
the Transition. Mohandas Gandhi, utterly repudiating anger, and appar-
ently successful in not feeling it, showed the world that non- anger was
a posture not of weakness and servility but of strength and dignity. He
expressed outrage, but always in a forward- looking and non- angry spirit.
Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Gandhi, espousing both non- anger (or
at least a quick Transition to non- anger) and nonviolence. It appears
that King, less saintly than Gandhi, both experienced anger (or at least
expressed it in speeches) and encouraged it to a degree in his audience—
but always with a quick move to the Transition, and with a strict empha-
sis on nonviolence— although he granted that violence in self- defense
could be morally justified. Nelson Mandela urged the African National
Congress to drop nonviolent tactics when they were not working and to
use violence in a limited strategic way; but he never ceased to look at any
situation he was in, even the worst, in a generous forward- looking spirit.
Though a man evidently prone to anger, he was also impressively capa-
ble of moving rapidly beyond it, through an unusual freedom from sta-
tus- anxiety and an equally remarkable generosity. Studying this record
will help us to see why the idea of “noble anger” as signal, motivator, and
justified expression is a false guide in revolutionary situations, and why
a generous, even overgenerous, frame of mind is both more appropriate
and more effective.
A subtheme in this chapter will be the role of forgiveness in such
situations. As before, I shall argue that forgiveness of the conditional,
transactional sort is not the only alternative to anger; an unconditional
generosity is both more useful and, at least in many cases, morally more
defensible because less tainted by the payback mentality.
Finally, we must focus a lot of our attention on the issue of trust, as
a necessary part of the stability, hence the legitimacy, of any society. In
Revolutionary Justice
213
situations of profound oppression and systematic injustice, trust is non-
existent. It is very easy for the oppressed to believe that trust is impossi-
ble, and that they can win their struggle only by dominating in their turn,
or perhaps by establishing a grudging modus vivendi in which each side defends itself from incursions by the other. Such an uneasy and trustless
compromise is not likely to be stable. The three revolutionary movements
this chapter studies all understood, therefore, that the creation of political trust is a very important part of their job. I shall argue that, whatever the appeal of revolutionary anger may be for many revolutionaries, strategies
based upon non- anger and generosity prove their worth in this essential
area, making it possible for formerly hostile groups to have confidence,
going forward, in political institutions and principles.
I begin with a case (in historical fiction) where individuals have no
secure path forward. Injustice is ubiquitous, political mobilization is
only nascent, and institutions are deeply corrupt. Here, just where we
might have thought that anger shows a way forward, a future- directed
non- angry perspective commends itself as far more productive— and
as amply expressive of the equal human dignity of the oppressed. Next
I analyze the theory of non- anger behind the movements of Gandhi and
King.2 I find in their work an appealing picture of revolutionary non-
anger, and some good rebuttals of objections to non- anger, but nonethe-
less there are some crucial gaps in their argument against anger. To fill
those gaps I turn to the career of Nelson Mandela.3 Though informed
by theory, Mandela did not produce deeply theorized writings. His
whole approach, however— as recorded by others and in two volumes
of autobiography— gives a compelling account of the reasons support-
ing the choice of non- anger in the struggle for justice. In the light of the critique of anger, I then turn to the role that forgiveness might play in
revolutionary movements, and conclude with some remarks about truth
and reconciliation commissions.
II. A Transition Story: Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton’s 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country is the outcry of a passionate and immersed protester.4 Paton was a liberal juvenile justice reformer
who later formed an illegal racially integrated political party. A primary
purpose of his novel, written and published abroad, was to make the
world aware of race relations in South Africa and their devastating toll
on the nation.
On its face, the novel is an intimate personal tragedy. Two fathers
lose their sons. One, James Jarvis, is rich and white. The other, Stephen
Kumalo, is poor and black. One is the father of a murder victim, the other
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the father of his killer. Absalom Kumalo, who killed Jarvis’s son Arthur
during a burglary, is technically guilty under the felony murder rule,
but, firing wildly in panic without intent to harm, he is far less morally
guilty than the two older and more hardened companions whose pliant
henchman he was.5 (They are acquitted through clever legal maneuvers,
even though one of them intentionally assaulted Jarvis’s servant Mpiring
with a clear intent to cause grievous bodily harm.) The reader feels that
Absalom is never taken seriously as a person, in a thoroughly racist sys-
tem of criminal justice; and his plea for mercy, which clearly has merit,
falls on deaf ears.
Awaiting his only son’s execution, father and Anglican priest Stephen
Kumalo has, in consequence, valid grounds for anger against white
society. On his side, James Jarvis has reasons for extreme ange
r against
the killers, and perhaps, too, against a family who let their son move
to Johannesburg with no supervision and without sufficiently preparing
him for the lure of crime and bad companions. “ ‘I hope to God they get
them. And string ’em all up,’ ” says Jarvis’s friend Harrison (182).
On the other hand, why has Absalom Kumalo left his home? The
novel from the beginning draws attention to the lack of livelihood in
Ndotsheni, as erosion dries up the river valley and causes everything to
wither. Jarvis and other rich whites who live in the area are aware of the
problem and its causes, and yet have done nothing to address it. Why did
Absalom fall into crime? Much blame no doubt attaches to a racist society
that has not educated him or provided him with employment opportuni-
ties. That is what Arthur Jarvis was writing, in an unfinished manuscript
found in his study by his grieving father. Absalom does encounter some
good treatment: a reformist corrections officer modeled on Paton himself,
who in real life created a pioneering juvenile corrections facility that was
all too successful for white prejudices and was therefore quickly disman-
tled by the government. But Absalom also encounters incentives to crime
in the form of his hardened criminal cousin, and his sheer fear of the city
and his reasonable mistrust of law make him a submissive accomplice.
He would not have had a gun at all but for the fact that he is afraid of the
city, and decides that he needs to learn to defend himself.
Early in the novel, then, we see that payback, in the form of “string
’em all up,” will do no good at all. South Africa is a society in the grip
of terrible fears and hatreds, which feed off one another. Fear of the
black majority drives white society to escalating strategies of punitive-
ness and enforced separateness. (As the novel was being published, the
Nationalists, architects of apartheid, were just winning their first elec-
toral victory.) The law is an expression of that fear, and its retributive
zeal simply expresses the desire of the surrounding society to keep fear
at bay through increasingly harsh treatment. On the side of the black
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215
majority, there is also tremendous fear: fear of the dangers of the city,
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