Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  fear of the hatred and punitiveness of whites, fear of a closed future, fear

  of the law itself. Although whites say they favor deterrence, they do not

  take reasonable strategies toward that goal, which would involve educa-

  tion, rural development, and job opportunities. Instead, their strategy is

  simply to pile on the punishment, exacting retribution for the fear and

  discomfort they feel, as if the very existence of the black majority were

  a wrongful act directed at them. Black crime, meanwhile, is a desperate,

  fear- inspired survival strategy, not an expression of hate, but the desire

  for payback is brewing. The most likely future would appear to be one of

  retributive violence on both sides and bloody civil war.

  The fathers, like their communities, are apparently launched on a

  collision course of obduracy, fear, and hate that would (the novel shows)

  not only prove counterproductive but would utterly fail to address the

  real social problems that need to be resolved if a nation is to prosper. The

  failure to think productively is above all a failure of the white minor-

  ity. “We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day,

  and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine

  fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tena-

  ciously… . And our lives will shrink… . And the conscience shall be

  thrust down: the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a

  bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some

  day not yet come” (111).

  Written in the mode of prophetic poetry, Paton’s novel is above all

  a parable of a nation. It calls calling South Africa to a painful reckoning

  and, eventually, gestures toward a distant future of hope. The intimate

  story of the two fathers unfolds against a background of social voices that

  speak, but refuse to listen, that opine, but refuse to think. To them, Paton

  addresses the urgent call for acknowledgment and genuine thought from

  which his title derives:

  Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheri-

  tor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not

  laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor

  stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with

  fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are

  singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley.

  For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. (111)

  This agonized voice speaks from afar, yet with intense love for the near.

  Its message is that the fear and hate of the white minority are killing

  a beautiful country— and it really does not matter whether the unborn

  child is imagined as black or white, for all are alike going down a path

  of doom.

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  The story of Stephen Kumalo and James Jarvis, both searingly

  particular and allegorically political, is the novel’s prophecy of hope.

  Defenders of anger would say that both fathers ought to be angry, for

  both have been grievously wronged. Doesn’t their self- respect require

  not being meek and gentle with the adversary?

  We learn early on, however, that neither man is prone to anger or to

  fruitless thoughts of payback. Stephen Kumalo has interpreted the job of

  a Christian priest to require forgoing anger— so that when he finds him-

  self yielding to anger against his brother John, who saves his own son

  through a tricky legal defense but abandons Absalom, he criticizes him-

  self relentlessly. As for Jarvis, as he reads his son’s manuscripts he finds

  himself wishing that Arthur had not gone downstairs to investigate the

  noise (of the break- in). “But these thoughts were unprofitable; it was not

  his habit to dwell on what might have been but what could never be”

  (186). Both, then, are ripe for the Transition, and it is a Transition story that Paton wants to set before us as his prophecy of hope— scattering clues on

  the way: the generosity of a white motorist, who defies the police to help

  blacks during a bus boycott (81– 82), the productive experiment of that

  white corrections officer, the generous philosophy of the urban black min-

  ister Msimangu, “Msimangu who had no hate for any man” (311), whose

  simple, “It would be my joy to help you,” lifts Kumalo’s depression (116).

  The Transition begins in solitary meditation, as Jarvis sits for hours

  alone in his son’s study, reading his son’s manuscript entitled “Private

  Essay on the Evolution of a South African,” and reading, too, the

  speeches of Abraham Lincoln that were Arthur’s inspiration. The Second

  Inaugural, in particular, rivets him. Paton does not quote the speech; he

  relies on readers to know that it contains a recipe for binding the wounds

  of a nation “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” (The novel

  was written in the United States.) Shortly thereafter, by sheer chance,

  Jarvis meets Stephen Kumalo: staying at the home of his daughter- in- law,

  he opens the door when Kumalo comes to inquire about a neighbor’s

  daughter who has been a servant there. Gradually, Jarvis, puzzled by

  Kumalo’s consternation and grief, becomes aware of Kumalo’s identity.

  “I understand what I did not understand,” he says. “There is no anger

  in me” (214). From that moment on, the fathers are joined in an uneasy

  but profound relationship; neither offers any apology, neither asks for

  or grants forgiveness. (Indeed the Anglican bishop who urges Stephen

  Kumalo to undergo penance and seek forgiveness by leaving his com-

  munity is shown to be obtuse and unhelpful.) They simply understand

  one another and share one another’s grief. And on the day when Stephen

  Kumalo climbs the mountain to be alone as his son is executed far away,

  Jarvis, passing him on the path, understands that, too.

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  A primary agent in the Transition is a small child— and this, too, is

  Paton’s allegorical intention, indicating that a mental disposition free

  from rancor must guide policy. Jarvis’s grandson, whose “brightness”

  reminds everyone of his dead father, visits Stephen Kumalo while out

  riding. He asks to be taught words of Xhosa— but when he asks for a

  glass of milk, he learns that there is no milk in Ndotsheni, because of

  the failed harvest and the dire effect on cattle, and that many children

  are dying because they do not have milk (270). Not long after this, milk,

  “in shining cans,” arrives at Kumalo’s door— with a message that it is

  for the children of the town. Jarvis’s emissary, delighted by his mission,

  drives away in high good spirits. And Stephen Kumalo “laughed … that

  a grown man should play in such fashion, and he laughed again that

  Kuluse’s child might live, and he laughed again at the thought of the

  stern silent man at High Place. He turned into the house sore with laugh-

  ing, and his wife watched him with wondering eyes.” Both fathers have

  started looking to the future rather than the past.

  The new future flows from that beginning: Jarvis hires a young
,

  scientifically trained black engineer to come to Ndotsheni and make a

  plan for the rescue of its agriculture. With the cooperation of Stephen

  Kumalo and the tribal chief, they persuade the people to adopt new

  methods of farming. The black engineer is already the product of a new

  type of interracial cooperation: for he credits his “love for truth” to a

  white professor, who also taught him that “we do not work for men,

  that we work for the land and its people” (303). A nascent freedom

  fighter, he brings the singing of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” to the village.

  But he listens, too, to Stephen Kumalo: “[H] ate no man, and desire

  power over no man… . For there is enough hating in our land already”

  (303). Instead of hatred, Ndotsheni gets hard work, rational planning,

  and hope.

  As the two fathers turn aside from anger to imagine, with generos-

  ity, a future of interracial cooperation and constructive work, they cre-

  ate, outside the corrupt legal order, a vision or allegory of a new legal

  and political order, one committed to justice, but generous and forward-

  looking in spirit, and grounded in historical, scientific, and economic

  truth. As the novel ends, hope is real, but its time has not yet come:

  The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the

  light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light

  will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has

  come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that

  dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage

  and the bondage of fear, why that is a secret. (312)

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  III. Revolutionary Non- Anger: Theory and Practice

  The revolutionary non- anger of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther

  King, Jr., is proposed not as a distant hope but as an immediate task, to be

  embraced here and now in the confrontation with injustice. It involves,

  ultimately, a set of psychological and behavioral practices that need to be

  both accepted and deeply internalized by the movement’s members. But

  because it is not personal psychotherapy, but, instead, a form of mass cul-

  tivation, it needs to be accompanied by an explicit theory, so that every-

  one in the movement can be aware of their aim and teach both attitudes

  and practices to new recruits. This is our good fortune: both Gandhi and

  King have left us a copious body of theory describing, and justifying, the

  emotional and behavioral aspects of non- anger. And Mandela has left us

  a remarkable set of more informal observations from which a compelling

  argument for non- anger may be extracted. I shall argue that Gandhi and

  King leave a gap in the argument, which they fill with resonant religious

  imagery that inspired many followers, but that does not answer all our

  philosophical questions. Mandela fills that gap.6

  First we must ask: non- anger, or nonviolence? The two are often held

  together, and many people who revere Gandhi and King believe that

  nonviolence is the primary concept, non- anger a supererogatory ideal.

  They feel that people can be held accountable for actions, but surely

  not for their emotional states, and it is too much to demand of people

  that they modify their inner states. Gandhi and King do not agree: they

  hold that a revolutionary movement will only be able to achieve a reli-

  able commitment to nonviolence through a mental revolution in which

  people look at their goals and at their oppressors with new eyes, in a

  spirit of love and generosity. They believe that this revolution is pos-

  sible through training and solidarity— although King makes important

  concessions to human frailty. And they also hold that in the end, in the

  creation of a new political world, non- anger is the main thing, since we

  must be able to work together in that generous and non- resentful spirit

  long after the occasion for violence has passed. Nonviolence could be

  merely negative: we refrain from something. It is only through the inner

  transformation involved in replacing resentment by love and generosity

  that nonviolence can ever become creative. I agree with this emphasis,

  and with the idea that this way of relating to others can be taught and

  learned, and that creating a public emotional climate is not unrealistic

  idealism. I shall also, however, agree with King that we must build in

  some concessions to the angry tendency in people— so long as it is stably

  channeled toward the Transition.

  But I have also insisted that non- anger does not entail nonviolence.

  Gandhi did not agree. It seems likely that he embraced a metaphysical

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  view of the person according to which a correct inner disposition

  entailed nonviolent behavior, and in which violence required an incor-

  rect inner disposition.7 (His speculations on meat- eating and violence

  in the Autobiography are just one sign of this idea.) As Richard Sorabji shows, Gandhi did make a few exceptions, primarily in connection with

  killing dangerous animals: but the constraint was always that physical

  violence is admissible only when it is for the good of the recipient. This

  constraint is almost never satisfied in human relations.8 We should not

  reject Gandhi’s views simply because they have their roots in metaphysi-

  cal views about the body that are not widely shared and that seem super-

  stitious to many of us. But we must ask whether Gandhi is persuasive

  when he holds that a person of a generous and loving spirit will never

  endorse or participate in violence.

  He is not persuasive. Gandhi’s views about war are not sensible. His

  idea that the best way, and a fully adequate way, to approach Hitler was

  through nonviolence and love was simply absurd, and would have been

  profoundly damaging had anyone taken it seriously. He made two grave

  errors. First, he equated a violent response to Hitler with “Hitlerism,”

  saying that “Hitlerism will never be defeated by counter- Hitlerism”

  (G 337). This is simply unconvincing: self- defense is not morally equiva-

  lent to aggression, nor is the defense of decent political institutions equivalent to their subversion. Second, he also held that Hitler would respond

  to a nonviolent and loving overture: “Human nature in its essence is one

  and therefore unfailingly responds to the advances of love” (G 340).9

  Responding to an imagined objector who says that all nonviolence would

  accomplish is to offer Hitler an easy victory, Gandhi interestingly backs

  off from this preposterous empirical prediction, and simply concludes

  that in any case Europe, behaving nonviolently, would be morally supe-

  rior, “And in the end I expect it is the moral worth that will count. All else is dross” (G 338). It is fortunate indeed that Nehru, who had observed

  German fascism in action while accompanying his wife to a sanatorium in

  Switzerland, had no interest in Gandhi’s proposal, and neither, of course,

  did the British, who were still there. Gandhi’s even uglier proposal not to

  resist the Japanese if they invaded India requires no comment.

  So Gandhi did not show that non- ang
er entails nonviolence. Mandela,

  as we shall see, has the right idea, thinking of nonviolence and negotia-

  tion as preferred strategies, but strategies to be abandoned if over a long

  period of time they don’t work. King, a more faithful Gandhian, is often

  understood to have had an unequivocal commitment to nonviolence. But

  in fact, King is with Mandela more than with Gandhi. He often acknowl-

  edges that there is a morally legitimate role for violence— self- defense

  being the general rubric he uses (K 32, 57). He does not oppose all wars,

  nor even all personal defensive violence. He does, however, argue that in

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  the particular situation of the freedom movement, leaving a loophole for

  the appeal to self- defense would be too dangerous, giving lots of oppor-

  tunities for self- serving blurring of boundaries and, ultimately, strength-

  ening resentment’s hand. If people can easily appeal to self- defense in

  justification of vengeful acts, they will be less likely to make the inner

  transformation he requires of them. Nor would such a movement, unpre-

  dictable and prone to outbursts, attain the coherence and stability King

  saw as necessary to win the respect of the majority and achieve the move-

  ment’s social goals.

  In what follows I shall draw heavily on Gandhi’s eloquent writings

  but shall pursue the Mandela line (at times that of King as well), treating

  nonviolence as instrumental and strategic, non- anger (and its positive

  correlate, loving generosity) as the main thing, and as having both strate-

  gic and intrinsic political significance.

  Philosophers and non-

  philosophers alike have seen anger as

  appropriate in situations of oppression, and as linked to the vindica-

  tion of self- respect. It is, then, not surprising that non- anger should

  have struck many onlookers as strange, unmanly, even revolting. Webb

  Miller, the UPI correspondent who reported the nonviolent protest

  action at the Dharasana Salt Works in 1930 (under the leadership of the

  poet Sarojini Naidu, since Gandhi was in jail), observed scores of march-

  ers getting beaten down by the police, and reacted with perplexity,

  as he records in a later memoir:

  Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows.