Honor reclaims boston review

I have infiltrated the patterns of your thought; I have my fingers on your heartstrings; I have even been put in charge of your sense perception: you see traces of me everywhere you look. You complain about me to anyone who will listen, and when no one will listen you shout at a mental effigy of me. Holding me responsible involves an embrace, albeit an adversarial one. Again, as with grudges, the point is not that, all things considered, one should take revenge. But insofar as one acts from anger, one pursues what is good for oneself by doing what is bad for another.

This is perfectly rational, justified, and intelligible. These two arguments—the Argument for Grudges and the Argument for Revenge—suggest it is not so easy to separate the idea that anger is a moral sense from the thought that we should hold on to grudges, or to embrace anger as a mechanism of moral accountability without endorsing vengeance.

I do not claim that these arguments make an open-and-shut case; objections are certainly possible, and a full defense of the validity of these forms of reasoning would be a big project.

My aim here has merely been to show that there is a case to be made for the conclusion that grudges and vengeance are perfectly rational—and that such a case is not an overly complicated one. The arguments I have offered are simple and intuitive, qualities that make their neglect in the philosophical debates—in the form of the unquestioned assumption, on both sides, that grudges and vengeance are irrational—all the more striking. Striking, but not inexplicable.

Perhaps the simple explanation for the neglect of these arguments is that we do not want to acknowledge the possibility that morally righteous anger provides rational grounds for limitless violence.

While it may seem, then, that the Stoics and sentimentalists are radically opposed, they share more than meets the eye. In particular, they share confidence—misplaced, I think—in a certain project of conceptual analysis.

This project aims to identify a purified form of moral response, one incorporating all of the virtues and none of the vices of anger.

I am not the first to argue that such a project is quixotic. Some version of my point can be found in a number of thinkers who approach questions of morality from a more historical and anthropological angle. We do not want to acknowledge the possibility that morally righteous anger provides rational grounds for limitless violence. The crucial sentiment guiding the new morality is ressentiment—a form of anger—felt by those previously oppressed and enslaved.

And might one not add that, fundamentally, this world has never since lost a certain odor of blood and torture? Girard begins from the observation that every form of human community is threatened by one basic problem: once one act of violence happens, it threatens to set off a chain reaction of limitless retaliatory violence.

The way we value freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and human rights is by taking those things away from people at every turn.

All three of these thinkers remain hugely influential despite having had the empirical details of their argumentation called into question by scholars from a variety of fields. I want to suggest that one reason for their enduring and even cult-like appeal is that they make a compelling and deep philosophical point that floats free of the particular historical-anthropological terms in which it is couched. What do these views have in common, after all?

Nietzsche says we have built our whole morality out of resentful bloodlust; Girard says that violence and the opposition to violence are one; Foucault says that punishment is crime. The common denominator is the observation that human morality has a tendency to turn in on itself. Being a good person means, at times, being willing to do bad things. Nietzsche, Foucault, and Girard have all argued that the darkest sides of anger—vengeance, bloodlust, and limitless violence—are baked into the very idea of morality.

If we abandon the anthropological distance and admit that we are the humans we are describing, grappling with this insight should produce nothing short of a crisis. We cannot climb outside of our own moral theory in order to assess it as bankrupt or broken; we must rely on it for the very terms of assessment. But who wants a society that is healthier or stronger unless those words are meant in a moralized sense—which is to say, a sense already shrouded by the darkness of our morality system?

There is no magic trick that lets us climb outside our own normative skin. Anger implicates all of us in moral corruption, then. Well, almost all of us. There is a certain Stoic so extreme that his position is represented by neither Nussbaum nor Flanagan, nor any modern thinker I know of.

This Extreme Stoic sees emotions as having no role in morality; in order to achieve this complete emotional detachment, he places no value on anything the world can remove from himself, including his children, his life, and his freedom from physical torture. Extreme Stoics take inspiration from Socrates, who claimed that a good man could not be harmed, and who correspondingly denied that the Athenians were harming him when they put him to death for crimes he did not commit.

Socrates died anger-free. Most of us are neither willing nor able to achieve the kind of detachment that this immunity from wrath requires. When people commit injustice against us, we feel it: our blood boils.

At that point, we have to decide how much we want to fight to quell our anger, how much effort we are going to put into repressing and suppressing that upswell of rage. The answer is rarely none. While we do not want to let our anger get away from us and drive us to its logical, eternally vengeful conclusion, if we quash it with too heavy a hand, we lose self-respect and, more generally, our moral footing. Inhibiting any and all anger in the face of genuine wrongdoing is acquiescing in evil. So, we are regularly faced with the complicated question of how much anger to permit ourselves under a given set of circumstances.

But notice that, if the arguments I have offered here are correct, this question is equivalent to asking: How much immorality should we permit ourselves? The realistic project of inhibiting anger must be distinguished from the idle fantasy of purifying it.

The multiplication of kinds and flavors and species and names for anger is designed to distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood. The morally correct way to respond to immorality is to do things—cling to anger, exact vengeance—that are in some way immoral. I believe that, when faced with injustice, we should sometimes get somewhat angry.

The consequences of acknowledging this point are sobering: victims of injustice are not as innocent as we would like to believe. Either these victims are morally compromised by the vengeful and grudge-bearing character of their anger, or they are morally compromised by acquiescence. Long-term oppression of a group of people amounts to long-term moral damage to that group. When it comes to racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, classism, religious discrimination, anti-neurodiversity, elitism of any stripe, this argument entails that the oppressors have made the oppressed morally worse people.

Of course, oppressing people is also bad for your soul, but we do not need to be reminded of that ; we are accustomed to the thought that wronging others makes you a bad person. My point is: so does being wronged, even if to a lesser degree. I could not enter the resort area—it was surrounded by a fence—but one summer, when I was around ten years old, I befriended a girl around my age who was vacationing there.

We had no common language, but we communicated by way of a marching game: we played soldiers and invented a complicated militaristic dance to which we would add moves day by day. We marched side by side, separated by the fence—until the day I was caught by my grandmother. My grandmother was a concentration camp survivor, so she was horrified by what she saw: her granddaughter, marching with one of Them.

I tried to explain that we were only playing a game, but to her it was clear: I was collaborating with the enemy. My protest only made her angrier, and I was forbidden from ever approaching the girl again. But how innocent was my game, really?

All four of my grandparents, in fact, had survived concentration camps; all of them lost almost everyone they knew in the Holocaust. My grandmother denied that the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy of her life, giving that honor to the fact that her first child, my uncle, was born with cerebral palsy.

But she even blamed that on the Nazis, perhaps not without reason: there are many stories of birth injury in the first generation of children born to women who had suffered malnutrition and other forms of abuse in concentration camps. My parents decided to leave Hungary when the synagogue on our block was blown up.

When we arrived in New York City, my parents pulled me out of public school after I was beaten up for wearing a necklace with a Star of David. They could not afford private school, but Orthodox Jewish elementary schools were willing to accept my sister and me for free, as charity cases. Because the Holocaust, of course—which, at those schools, was its own subject, alongside English, math, and science. Before high school, I hardly wrote a poem or short story that was not in some way about the Holocaust.

Anti-anti-Semitism was so much the theme of my childhood that it is simply impossible to believe I accidentally fell into playing soldiers with a German girl. Innocence was not a possibility. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support.

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