Newspaper columnists, and other opinion-havers, love few things so much as bemoaning our “culture of outrage”. But we’re actually rather conflicted when it comes to the subject of anger. Sure, it’s bad when our political opponents express it, yet it’s amply justified when it’s us; we condemn some people for being angry, and others for not being angry enough. (And those tirades against outrage culture often appear in publications that rely on outrage for clicks.) The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her arresting new book Anger And Forgiveness, has no such qualms. Anger is essentially always wrong, she insists. It’s a mental error we’d do well to eliminate in ourselves and, if possible, in our kids. I can already hear some people responding to this notion with… well, outrage. But hold that thought.
Nussbaum endorses Aristotle’s idea that anger inherently involves an element of payback. If I’m honest with myself, that rings true: when I fire off an angry tweet about, say, a certain dead-souled presidential candidate, my secret wish is that he might see it and feel wounded. This wish can be subtle, as Nussbaum explained in Aeon magazine: maybe you just idly hope your ex-spouse’s second marriage will go poorly, for example. But you do want him or her to hurt. And, sooner or later, if you’re a rationalist like Nussbaum, you’ll have to confront an awkward fact: this desire for retaliation makes absolutely no sense.
Consider an extreme scenario: someone commits a horrifyingly sadistic murder. Naturally, lots of people think he ought to be punished. There are excellent reasons to put him in prison: to stop him murdering others; to dissuade other potential murderers; perhaps to rehabilitate him. But what useful goal is accomplished by his suffering, in and of itself? None. “Inflicting pain on the wrongdoer does not restore the thing that was lost,” Nussbaum writes. Nor does it prevent future losses. The best we can come up with is that it just “feels right”.
In other words, retaliation makes the urge to retaliate go away. But that’s like a smoker arguing that smoking is good because it calms you down, when really it’s nicotine withdrawal that causes the agitation to begin with. Anger’s only real effect is to make things worse, by turning your attention from what can be changed to what can’t: “It makes one think that progress will have been made if the betrayer suffers, when, in reality, this does nothing to solve the real problem.”
The jarring conclusion is that my anger is never justified, even when the person I’m sparring with is utterly factually wrong, filled with hate or causing harm to others. Is my anger understandable? Sure, I’m only human. Is it forgivable? Maybe sometimes. But it’s never an actively good thing. (You might be wondering about “righteous anger”. I think Nussbaum would say the angry part isn’t righteous, because it involves the desire to wound, while the righteous part isn’t really anger.) In short, it’s time to stop finding sneaky justifications for my own anger, while condemning other people’s. I won’t lie: that’s pretty infuriating.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
