Nussbaum's Ενάντια κοπροφαγία.

 Some ten years ago Aeon published the following by Martha Nussbaum.

Beyond anger
Anger is the emotion that has come to saturate our politics and culture.

This is nonsense. Our society seeks to raise general purpose productivity and our politics and culture must either promote this end or else we are likely to decline relative to rival societies.  

Philosophy can help us out of this dark vortex

Philosophy turned to shit more than 50 years ago. If you recruit stupid students who become stupid professors, only drooling imbeciles will pay to attend classes. The subject has to accommodate itself to those cretins.  

There’s no emotion we ought to think harder and more clearly about than anger.

No. It is love- in particular love of knowledge for its own sake (philosophy means love of knowledge)- that is most important. Why? STEM subject research raises general purpose productivity. It increases affluence and security and enables people to flourish. Moreover, thinking hard and thinking clearly only matter in STEM subjects. Poets and Parsons are welcome to wax lyrical and to display overwrought emotions. But fine words butter no parsnips.  

Anger greets most of us every day – in our personal relationships, in the workplace, on the highway, on airline trips – and, often, in our political lives as well.

No. It is an uncommon occurrence. We do read about 'road rage' but seldom experience it. If we are highly productive, we are likely to live in places where everybody is super-polite and considerate.  

Anger is both poisonous and popular. Even when people acknowledge its destructive tendencies, they still so often cling to it, seeing it as a strong emotion, connected to self-respect and manliness (or, for women, to the vindication of equality).

This may be the case if you teach nonsense to imbeciles. But it isn't if you are doing path-breaking STEM subject work.  

If you react to insults and wrongs without anger you’ll be seen as spineless and downtrodden.

Not in Math. You will be seen as Terence Tao rather than as Mochizuki. Confidence in his result declined the more temperamental he appeared to be.  

When people wrong you, says conventional wisdom, you should use justified rage to put them in their place, exact a penalty.

This may be the conventional wisdom of the prison yard. It may even be true of those who teach nonsense on Ivy League campuses. It isn't true about those doing useful work.  

We could call this football politics, but we’d have to acknowledge right away that athletes, whatever their rhetoric, have to be disciplined people who know how to transcend anger in pursuit of a team goal.

Well paid athletes- i.e. those who are highly productive- can pay for 'life-coaches' to help them stay focused.  

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life. A good place to begin is Aristotle’s definition: not perfect, but useful, and a starting point for a long Western tradition of reflection. Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted.

Aristotle's pupil, Alexander, drank too much, got very angry, and ended up killing a close friend. The Greeks understood that he had messed up. At a later point, they embraced a Religion of Mercy and Forgiveness and developed a capable 'logothete' class of professional administrators. They turned their backs on 'Thymos' by embracing 'Logos'.  

He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback.

Emperors could get very angry indeed. But they were destroying their own people- like Ajax, maddened by fury, slaughtering sheep. It is foolish to kill your slaves just because you got into a drunken rage. Sell them if they displease you. Don't destroy your own wealth.  

So: significant damage, pertaining to one’s own values or circle of cares, and wrongfulness. All this seems both true and uncontroversial. More controversial, perhaps, is his idea (in which, however, all Western philosophers who write about anger concur) that the angry person wants some type of payback, and that this is a conceptual part of what anger is. In other words, if you don’t want some type of payback, your emotion is something else (grief, perhaps), but not really anger.

Aristotle was talking about how a politeia should manage both public and private emotions. Since our own general purpose productivity is much higher, our institutions do a much better job of this.  

Is this really right? I think so.

It isn't right. We have all seen angry people destroy their own property. The cause of the anger may be intoxication or boredom or some psychiatric condition amenable to medication.  

We should understand that the wish for payback can be a very subtle wish: the angry person doesn’t need to wish to take revenge herself. She may simply want the law to do so; or even some type of divine justice.

The Greeks eagerly embraced a religion which features a 'Day of Wrath'. But, in primitive societies, where a murderer can't be punished because his productivity is vital to the survival of the community,  Justice is postponed to the after-life. God can be jealous and wrathful. Pious people fear God, or Karma. 

Or, she may more subtly simply want the wrongdoer’s life to go badly in future, hoping, for example, that the second marriage of her betraying spouse turns out really badly.

In the old days, you could curse the person or get a witch to put a hex on him.  

I think if we understand the wish in this broad way, Aristotle is right: anger does contain a sort of strike-back tendency.

So does cold hard calculation of a utilitarian type. We establish threat points and show that we can make good our threats. 

Contemporary psychologists who study anger empirically agree with Aristotle in seeing this double movement in it, from pain to hope.

or from boredom to masturbation.  

The central puzzle is this: the payback idea does not make sense.

To Nussbaum. But that is because she is stupid.  

Whatever the wrongful act was – a murder, a rape, a betrayal – inflicting pain on the wrongdoer does not help restore the thing that was lost.

It may do if what was lost was money or a fungible asset. Payback may involve getting exemplary damages.  

We think about payback all the time, and it is a deeply human tendency to think that proportionality between punishment and offence somehow makes good the offence.

It is deeply human to chuckle delightedly when your lawyer tells you that you can get 100,000 in damages from an enterprise which cheated you out of 10,000.  

Only it doesn’t. Let’s say my friend has been raped. I urgently want the offender to be arrested, convicted, and punished. But really, what good will that do? Looking to the future, I might want many things: to restore my friend’s life, to prevent and deter future rapes. But harsh treatment of this particular wrongdoer might or might not achieve the latter goal.

Nussbaum would be the sort of District Attorney Soros wants elected so that muggers and rapists roam free.  

It’s an empirical matter. And usually people do not treat it as an empirical matter: they are in the grip of an idea of cosmic fitness that makes them think that blood for blood, pain for pain is the right way to go.

This may be true of Nussbaum's colleagues in the Philosophy faculty. We imagine them to be ineffectual nerds who indulge in fantasies of themselves as vicious vigilantes. 

There is one, and I think only one, situation in which the payback idea does make sense.

Since she is stupid, we will soon see it makes no sense whatsoever.  

That is when I see the wrong as entirely and only what Aristotle calls a ‘down-ranking’: a personal humiliation, seen as entirely about relative status. If the problem is not the injustice itself, but the way it has affected my ranking in the social hierarchy, then I really can achieve something by humiliating the wrongdoer: by putting him relatively lower, I put myself relatively higher, and if status is all I care about, I don’t need to worry that the real wellbeing problems created by the wrongful act have not been solved.

This is crazy shit. You are angry because your senior colleague says your theory is crazy. Then there is a crucial experiment which shows you were right. You have been up-ranked. You no longer care about what your senior colleague thinks of you. When he comes to offer his apologies to you, you try to be polite but both of you know that this is indifference under the mask of courtesy.  

A wronged person who is really angry,

wants to be shown to have been in the right all along. If their theory is better and an experiment confirms it, everybody in the scientific community is better off. I don't suppose Grete Hartmann greatly cared when she was praised, 30 years after the event, for showing the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem. But she was pleased that Bell's inequality could be empirically confirmed. She would be absolutely delighted with the recent progress made in quantum computing.  

seeking to strike back, soon arrives, I claim, at a fork in the road. Three paths lie before her. Path one: she goes down the path of status-focus, seeing the event as all about her and her rank. In this case her payback project makes sense, but her normative focus is self-centred and objectionably narrow.

Only if she isn't, objectively speaking, a worthless tosser.  

Path two: she focuses on the original offence (rape, murder, etc), and seeks payback, imagining that the offender’s suffering would actually make things better. In this case, her normative focus is on the right things, but her thinking doesn’t make sense.

No. A court of law would say her thinking made sense and provided the motive for the action she is accused of.  

Path three: if she is rational, after exploring and rejecting these two roads, she will notice that a third path is open to her, which is the best of all: she can turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, in the situation, and be really helpful. This may well include the punishment of the wrongdoer, but in a spirit that is deterrent rather than retaliatory.

Only if she is a Judge and the case is assigned to her. But she will have to follow the law and must acquit if relevant evidence is not admissible.  

So, to put my radical claim succinctly: when anger makes sense (because focused on status), its retaliatory tendency is normatively problematic,

unless 'Tit for Tat' is the norm 

because a single-minded focus on status impedes the pursuit of intrinsic goods.

Retaliation may be classed as an intrinsic good.  

When it is normatively reasonable (because focused on the important human goods that have been damaged), its retaliatory tendency doesn’t make sense, and it is problematic for that reason.

Unless it is normative. Consider a rap musician whom another rap musician has insulted by saying he has a needle-dick. The norm is for the rap musician to retaliate in witty, but obscene, terms. Failure to do so suggests the guy no longer wants to be a rap artist. Maybe he has found Christ and will henceforth do Evangelical rap.  

Let’s call this change of focus the Transition. We need the Transition badly in our personal and our political lives, dominated as they all too frequently are by payback and status-focus.

Nussbaum's world features Professors incessantly knifing each other because they think Aristotle has been dissed.  

Sometimes a person may have an emotion that embodies the Transition already. Its entire content is: ‘How outrageous! This should not happen again.’ We may call this emotion

outrage or righteous indignation.  

Transition-Anger,

there may be no anger or transition. I find the recent tax on family farms outrageous but am not angry about it because I'm not a farmer. 

and that emotion does not have the problems of garden-variety anger. But most people begin with everyday anger: they really do want the offender to suffer.

Everyday anger is caused by frustration, boredom, intoxication etc. Few of us have criminal offences or torts committed on us in most of the years of our lives.  

So the Transition requires moral, and often political, effort.

No. The thing does not exist or is wholly 'immaterial'- i.e. Accountants would say money and time must not be wasted on such effort.  

It requires forward-looking rationality,

which we have. That's why we are able to save money and pay our bills.  

and a spirit of generosity and cooperation.

which we have. Few of us are hermits or sociopaths.  

The struggle against anger often requires lonely self-examination.

Not if you are doing useful work. That way, it is likely, examination is done by your colleagues and peers. Feedback, not payback, drives our workaday world.  

Whether the anger in question is personal, or work-related, or political, it requires exacting effort against one’s own habits and prevalent cultural forces.

Only if you have sort of medical condition. See a psychiatrist. There are pills you can take which will calm you down.  

Many great leaders have understood this struggle, but none more deeply than Nelson Mandela.

No. Mandela thought the same 'winds of change' blowing over East Africa would also prevail in South Africa. He overestimated what the Soviets or their allies could do. Strangely, Cuban troops in Angola helped the Apartheid regime. Once those troops departed Reagan & Bush could support transition to majority rule. But the head of South Africa's intelligence service had already been reaching out to the ANC. Mandela's first meeting with Barnard was in 1988. Cuban troops began pulling out the next year.  

He often said that he knew anger well, and that he had to struggle against the demand for payback in his own personality.

He knew that there could be plenty of anger between Zulus and Xhosa etc.  

He reported that during his 27 years of imprisonment he had to practise a disciplined type of meditation to keep his

sanity. He spent much of his first 18 years in solitary confinement.  

personality moving forward and avoiding the anger trap. It now seems clear that the prisoners on Robben Island had smuggled in a copy of Meditations by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to give them a model of patient effort against the corrosions of anger.

It wasn't a banned book but Mandela doesn't mention it. Apparently, he really liked 'Grapes of Wrath'.  

But Mandela was determined to win the struggle. He wanted a successful nation, even then, and he knew that there could be no successful nation when two groups were held apart by suspicion, resentment, and the desire to make the other side pay for the wrongs they had done.

He knew there were at least four groups who might go to war with each other if the Whites fucked off.  

Even though those wrongs were terrible, cooperation was necessary for nationhood. So he did things, in that foul prison, that his fellow prisoners thought perverse. He learned Afrikaans.

It is useful to know the language of your jailors. You pick up a lot of information that way.

He studied the culture and thinking of the oppressors. He practised cooperation by forming friendships with his jailers. Generosity and friendliness were not justified by past deeds; but they were necessary for future progress.

They were useful for him then and there.  

Mandela used to tell people a little parable. Imagine that the sun and the wind are contending to see who can get a traveller to take off his blanket. The wind blows hard, aggressively. But the traveller only pulls the blanket tighter around him.

He will get tired. The wind will win, if that is what it really wants to do.  

Then the sun starts to shine, first gently, and then more intensely. The traveller relaxes his blanket, and eventually he takes it off.

If it gets too hot, the traveler finds shade and sleeps on his blanket.  

So that, he said, is how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership.

But first, get out of prison. Do a deal. But be sure it is a good enough deal that your own people don't kill you as a traitor.  

Mandela was realistic. One would never have found him proposing, as did Gandhi, to convert Hitler by charm.

Bertrand Russell had suggested that previously. Russell went to jail during the Great War. Gandhi tried to recruit soldiers for the King Emperor.  

And of course he had been willing to use violence strategically, when non-violence failed. Non-anger does not entail non-violence (although Gandhi thought it did).

No. He only proposed that Britain surrender because he thought the Japs and the Germans were bound to win. He supported India's war in Kashmir.  

But he understood nationhood and the spirit that a new nation requires. 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 in the wake of outrageous and terrible deeds.

He wanted transition to majority rule. That's what America wanted but only after the Cubans fucked the fuck off. 

Again and again, as the African National Congress (ANC) began to win the struggle, its members wanted payback.

They wanted payola. They got it. Lots and lots of it. 

Of course they did, since they had suffered egregious wrongs.

Also, being a billionaire is great fun.  

Mandela would have none of it. When the ANC voted to replace the old Afrikaner national anthem with the anthem of the freedom movement, he persuaded them to adopt, instead, the anthem that is now official, which includes the freedom anthem (using three African languages), a verse of the Afrikaner hymn, and a concluding section in English. When the ANC wanted to decertify the rugby team as a national team, correctly understanding the sport’s long connection to racism, Mandela, famously, went in the other direction, backing the rugby team to a World Cup victory and, through friendship, getting the white players to teach the sport to young black children. To the charge that he was too willing to see the good in people, he responded: ‘Your duty is to work with human beings as human beings, not because you think they are angels.’

Mandela was nice man. Did he stab a lot of people when he became President? No! He read Aristotle who said 'Don't be stabby-stabby. Be a good baby. Also, don't eat your own shit. Plato was totes against coprophagy.'  

And Mandela rejected not only the false lure of payback, but also the poison of status-obsession.

Also the lure of stabbing peeps and then eating your own shit. If you read Aristotle and get PhD in Capabilities approach you too can overcome these bad habits.  

He never saw himself as above menial tasks, and he never used status to humiliate. Just before his release, in a halfway house where he was still officially a prisoner, but had one of the warders as his own private cook, he had a fascinating discussion with this warder about a very mundane matter: how the dishes would get done.
I took it upon myself to break the tension and a possible resentment on his part that he has to serve a prisoner by cooking and then washing dishes,

Mandela was worried the dude would piss in the soup.  

and I offered to wash dishes and he refused … He says that this is his work. I said, ‘No, we must share it.’ Although he insisted, and he was genuine, but I forced him, literally forced him, to allow me to do the dishes, and we established a very good relationship … A really nice chap, Warder Swart, a very good friend of mine.

Mandela did not knife Warder Swart. This is because he read Seneca.  He didn't read Aristurtle. You can't expect too much of Darkies, you know. 

It would have been so easy to see the situation as one of status-inversion: the once-dominating Afrikaner is doing dishes for the once-despised ANC leader. It would also have been so easy to see it in terms of payback: the warder is getting a humiliation he deserves because of his complicity in oppression. Significantly, Mandela doesn’t go down either of these doomed paths, even briefly. He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?

and ensure the screw doesn't put rat poison in my food.  

Mandela’s project was political;

prevent crazy Afrikaners start another Boer war maybe in alliance with the Zulus.  

but it has implications for many parts of our lives: for friendship, marriage, child-rearing, being a good colleague, driving a car.

Not stabbing peeps nor eating your own shit. Aristotle explains all this in his  Ενάντια κοπροφαγία.

And of course it also has implications for the way we think about what political success involves and what a successful nation is like.

No. A politeia is successful if it raises general purpose productivity as rapidly as its rivals. Otherwise, there will be tears before bedtime.  

Whenever we are faced with pressing moral or political decisions, we should clear our heads, and spend some time conducting what Mandela (citing Marcus Aurelius) referred to as ‘Conversations with Myself’.

Only if we are prone to stabbing people and eating our own shit.  

When we do, I predict, the arguments proposed by anger

e.g. you have a needle dick you shit-eating swine! 

will be clearly seen to be pathetic and weak, while the voice of generosity and forward-looking reason will be strong as well as beautiful.

Forward-looking reason understands that raising general purpose productivity is all that matters. You can't be generous if you don't have a pot to piss in.