On The
Conservative Implications of “The Aptness of Anger”
I. INTRODUCTION
Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Aptness of Anger” (The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 26, Number 2, 2018, pp. 123–144) is a good, solid, readable piece of philosophy. It is perfectly accessible to the layperson and I recommend it to you.
In what I write below, I intend to show that the conceptual framework that Srinivasan develops for considering anger as an apt response to injustice tends to support some rather more conservative – or perhaps even reactionary – conclusions than the ones she endorses in her paper.
I am not the first to notice that Srinivasan’s ideas open the door to far more conservative ideas than those she overtly espouses. In his interview with her, Tyler Cowen directly asked her, “is there some path along which you end up in a social conservatism, admittedly a feminist social conservatism?”, while Audrey Pollnow somewhat impishly suggests that “Perhaps she is already a fully convinced social conservative” using what are sometimes called Straussian techniques to provide plausible deniability of her true views. (Cowen is another well-known exponent of Straussian techniques.)
I, however, have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Srinivasan’s radical or progressive politics. I simply observe that Srinivasan is an accomplished thinker and her thoughts have applications beyond her own allegiances. I hope to show below that those who share her politics have good reason to reject the arguments she makes in her essay, while those who oppose her may find much to like in the intellectual tools she develops.
My comments are in four parts. First, I set out the structure and key points of Srinivasan’s argument. Second, I take issue with a point she makes about the argumentative burden that, she contends, falls on those who advise restraint of one’s anger: while Srinivasan argues that someone who advances such an argument faces a burden of showing why that advice might be the best course, all things considered, for the advisee, I seek to show that there is no such burden. Third, I argue that Srinivasan’s concept of “affective injustice” is one which applies more aptly to conservative causes than to the progressive or radical causes that she mentions in her essay. Finally, I make some more general comments about the kind of argument that Srinivasan is advancing and the potentially bleak consequences it has for future political debate.
II. SRINIVASAN’S ARGUMENT
Srinivasan starts by discussing a debate that took place at the Cambridge Union between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr concerning the civil rights movement and the people we would now call African Americans. Buckley, in essence, said that injustice had been done (“we have a dastardly situation”) but that anger, despair and bitterness were not the way forward because such anger would be counterproductive for the purposes of African Americans themselves. Srinivasan’s concern in her essay is with the content and uses of this counterproductivity argument.
I shall introduce some terminology of my own: I will refer to the interlocutor who advances this kind of counterproductivity argument – the “you are right to be angry but you should restrain your anger” argument – as the Outwardly Sympathetic Adviser (or OSA); and I will refer to the person who experiences the strong emotion (anger, for the most part, but I will also mention some other emotions) as the Emotional Person or the advisee.
It is also worth noting that we are granting, in favour of the OSA, that the advice to restrain one’s anger is either in fact prudentially correct (that is to say, it would in fact be counterproductive to the Emotional Person’s cause if she were to give vent to her anger) or at least plausibly prudentially correct. If it were simply bad advice, all things considered, then the dilemma that Srinivasan is concerned with does not arise.
Srinivasan first argues that anger on the part of the Emotional Person can be apt, that is to say there are circumstances in which it is appropriate for a rational human to feel anger when faced with injustice.
I think this is plainly right. If you doubt the point then perhaps the simplest demonstration is to think of a situation in which in you would say, in response to someone telling you that they feel angry as a result of an injustice, “you are right to be angry about that”. It is a common sentiment and, unless you are merely being polite or seeking to appease, you would say it only on the basis of having considered the situation and taken the view that there was indeed good reason to be angry.
Much the same might be said about other strong emotions, and I will come back to some of these below: we commonly say that someone is “right” to be sad about, or happy about, or afraid of various matters, or indeed that she “wrong” to feel those emotions. Fear is a particularly good example: we often talk about “irrational fears” (e.g., spiders, confined spaces) and contrast then with things “you really ought to be afraid of”. In each of these cases, we are able to make a rational evaluation of whether a strong emotion is apt in the circumstances.
I think we can go further and agree with Srinivasan that someone who is aware of certain matters but does not feel the apt emotion is lacking something important. Srinivasan cites a famous passage from Bernard Williams about the man who is faced with the choice of saving either his drowning wife or a stranger. That man “is not only justified in saving his wife, but should do so with no thought more sophisticated than ‘that’s my wife!’ Any additional, justifying thought—‘that’s my wife and in such situations it’s permissible to save one’s wife’—would be, according to Williams, ‘one thought too many’”. Similarly, I think we may fairly say that the woman who is directly affected by egregious injustice and yet feels no anger welling up inside her may have exactly the right number of thoughts, but she has at least one emotion too few.
Srinivasan comments that, “If anger is rationally evaluable—if it is something we do for reasons, good and bad—then it has at least a prima facie place in a rational politics.” I also agree with that. I would add that, similarly, joy, fear, disgust and so on have, at least prima facie, a place in rational politics. It is perhaps worth noting, for the sake of what follows below, that conservative thought has traditionally tended to be more receptive than liberal thought to the idea that strong emotions, e.g. of attachment to one’s homeland or of disgust for what is repulsive, have a respectable and valued place in politics.
Second, Srinivasan takes some time to discuss the difference between anger itself and expressions of anger. The target of her discussion here is the suggestion that the OSA is not really saying “you are right to be angry but you should restrain your anger”, as I phrased her advice above, but rather “… you should restrain the expression of your anger”. I suspect there is much more to said on this topic, but I am happy to accept Srinivasan’s approach to this, which is to say that this is a false distinction.
So, for example, Srinivasan discusses angry political rhetoric – the sort of thing which might be regarded as peculiarly susceptible to the counterproductivity argument – and says that “We must also think of it as an act in itself, an act that—when apt—registers and communicates the badness of injustice”. This seems fair. At any rate, let us assume that when anger is apt then it is also apt to give outward expression to that anger in suitably heightened and emotional terms as a way of registering, recognising and/or communicating its cause. For that reason, I have used the form of words “restrain your anger”, which I intend to cover both the inward emotional turmoil and the outward expression of anger.
Srinivasan also mentions another form of outward expression of anger, namely violence. She explains that any argument on her part that the expression of anger may be justified should not be taken to justify violence. Again, I agree. I would however note one parenthetical remark she makes in the context of this discussion: “(Consider how many supposedly ‘violent’ protests involve only physical damage to property, not other persons.)” I shall return to this remark below.
There are various other points which are ancillary to Srinivasan’s argument and which I do not propose to explore here, subject to one exception. Srinivasan raises but does not pretend to answer questions to do with we might call the limits of aptness, i.e. what degree of proximity between injustice and the Emotional Person warrants a response of anger on her part. In the course of doing so, she states, “I am instinctively drawn to the thought that black Americans have a special, additional reason to be angry when a young black person is gunned down in the street; here it seems only appropriate for black Americans to cry out: another one of our children has died! But I am far less inclined to think that middle class white men have a special, additional reason to be angry when another middle class white man suffers a harm. Here it does not seem appropriate to cry out: one of mine! Not all forms of solidarity are equally just, and not all forms of emotional partiality of equal moral standing.”
Again, it is worth noting that the conservative would agree with the idea that some forms of attachment and partiality have a heightened value in the political context: the partiality that I feel towards my compatriots, or towards those who share my traditions, culture and values, for example, would be considered far more valuable and meaningful by a conservative than partiality towards those with whom I share nothing more than, say, a similar relationship to the factors of economic production.
I shall return to Srinivasan’s “one of mine” comment below. For the moment, I think we can assume that Srinivasan would accept that detailed questions as to precisely which injustices are ones warranting anger must be left to both a theory of justice and a detailed theory of warranted anger, both of which lie outside the scope of her paper and my own.
III. DOES ANY BURDEN LIE ON THE OSA?
Srinivasan seeks to argue that we should be suspicious of the OSA’s advice. One point she makes is that the OSA’s advice obscures a normative conflict. I would paraphrase her point as follows: the Emotional Person, we have established, is right to feel (and to express) anger, and hence to ask her to restrain herself from acting in a way which is right is not obviously the best or even justifiable advice; there is a prima facie case that asking someone not to act rightly is instead asking them to act wrongly.
Srinivasan makes a further point, namely that the OSA’s advice to the Emotional Person to restrain their anger risks obscuring the fact that the Emotional Person is the victim. Think, she says, of the advice to women not to get drunk in order to avoid rape: this may be good advice from a prudential standpoint, but it effectively supports or obfuscates the real and underlying problem, namely that rape happens.
Srinivasan concludes that it is therefore not obvious why the OSA’s reliance on the counterproductivity argument should be paramount. “We are due an account of why, in such cases, counterproductivity considerations trump all else. Without such an account, one might well be suspicious that the counterproductivity critique—as in the case of Buckley’s response to Baldwin—is more often an attempt at social control than a manifestation of genuine concern”.
In other words, Srinivasan suggests, we have at least reason to suspect that the OSA, by giving advice to restrain justified, apt anger, is in some sense (and perhaps unwittingly) supporting or reinforcing the injustice which caused that anger.
This is plausible and well put. I think Srinivasan correctly identifies the disquiet we feel about merely giving good advice about avoiding rape: we seem to see some element of ‘victim blaming’ hovering just out of sight whenever this kind of advice is given, no matter how loudly the perpetrators are blamed and the victims excused.
However, I intend to show that a more rounded approach to OSA-type “restrain your emotions”-type advice will dispel the argumentative burden which Srinivasan seeks to place on the OSA. Counterproductivity arguments do not, by their very nature, raise any suspicion; rather, any suspicion that we feel is the result of the circumstances in which the advice is given.
Srinivasan introduces the concept of “affective injustice”, which she defines as “where victims of oppression must choose between getting aptly angry and acting prudentially”. I shall adopt this terminology. The concept of affective injustice refers to something recognisably similar to the older concept of “adding insult to injury”: a further wrong, namely acting inaptly, is being urged by the OSA on the Emotional Person who has, ex hypothesi, already suffered a prior wrong (i.e. the injustice that caused her apt anger).
I would like to address the concept of affective injustice first by broadening the discussion to three equivalent instances of adding insult to injury in cases of strong emotions other than anger.
The Distraught Mother. Consider a woman who suffers the sudden death of her beloved husband who is also the father of their young children. She feels appropriate grief and distress. The hypothetical OSA (a friend or counsellor, for example) says to her, “you are right to be distraught and to grieve, but I advise you not to show too much grief in front of your children as that is likely to cause them additional distress”. (You must recall that we are to suppose, as we have done for the anger examples above, that the advice in question is prudentially sound, i.e. that demonstrative displays of grief or despair in front of the children will cause them distress.)
The Successful Candidate. A student at an educational institution secures a prize or position which is much sought after by her peers: a student at a drama school getting that season’s “big break” in a major film role, say, or a student at an elite university obtaining the most prestigious and competitive prize or scholarship. The hypothetical OSA (a tutor or perhaps the awarder of the role or prize) says to her, “you are right to be exuberantly joyful, but I suggest not celebrating too much in front of your disappointed peers or they might be angry or feel demeaned, as if you are rubbing their noses in your success”.
The Disgusted Traveller. A traveller is lost, far from home and has not eaten for days. She happens upon an isolated homestead and is welcomed in to eat a meal with the family. The meal that is served is highly revolting to her, perhaps because the ingredients are ones that she finds repulsive or are forbidden to her by custom or religious dietary laws, or simply because its smell and taste are disgusting. The hypothetical OSA (a friend on the end of a phone line, perhaps) says to her, “you are right to be revolted by this meal, but I advise you to eat it nonetheless, as you are hungry, you don’t know when you will next get the chance to eat and you might need to ask these people for another meal”.
In each of those three examples, our hypothetical OSA is asking the Emotional Person to do something which is psychically difficult for her, namely to restrain an emotion (either a positive or a negative one). Moreover there is affective injustice in play: in each case the emotion which the OSA advises restraining is one which is apt in the circumstances. The Emotional Person is being asked to pay the psychic cost of modulating a natural, human emotion in frank knowledge that that cost is one that she in some sense ought not to bear.
Nonetheless, it seems clear to me that the OSA is in each case giving reasons for restraint which are bona fide and good faith reasons for the Emotional Person herself. Srinivasan suggests that, “the counterproductivity critic faces the burden of explaining why, in such conflicts, reasons of prudence trump reasons of aptness; until this burden is met, there is no obvious inference to be made from the counterproductivity of one’s anger to an all-things-considered prohibition on one’s getting angry”. This supposed burden seems implausible in our three examples: the evident and plausible counterproductivity of the grief and distress, the joyful exuberance or the revulsion and disgust, as the case may be, seems in each case to lead to a ready and obvious inference that restraining that strong emotion would be the best thing to do, all things considered. We have no need to ask the OSA in each case for any further explanation or justification for her advice: the advice contains within itself the explanation for why it is the best advice, all things considered, for a person in the position of (i.e., with the aims, objectives, interests and desires of) the Emotional Person. That advice may turn out to be mistaken, but that is another matter: any advice may be wrong. It may be wrong, but it is not wrongheaded.
Let us turn from those cases to an example one step closer to Srinivasan’s. Not all anger is caused by injustice. One common trigger for anger is frustration caused by the annoyances of mundane activities such as travel delays. Consider then this example:
The Delayed Interviewee. A candidate is to be interviewed for a job which she greatly desires. Through no fault of anyone, a bus which should have taken her to the interview venue in good time is delayed and she instead arrives late, flustered and angry. The hypothetical OSA says to her, “you are right to be angry, but I advise you to restrain your anger as you will make a better impression in your interview if you are calm.”
Again, the Emotional Person is being asked to take on a psychically difficult task – the insult of being asked to restrain apt anger is added to the injury of the delayed bus – but the OSA’s advice plainly faces no justificatory burden: that advice presents a perfectly plausible reason why, all things considered, the Delayed Interviewee should bite the psychic bullet and suppress a perfectly reasonable emotion. The fact that it is justified anger, rather than any other justified emotion, that the OSA advises be restrained does not differentiate this example from those we examined above.
Is there then any reason to put the OSA’s counterproductivity advice in cases of justified anger at injustice in a different category from those examined above? I think not. It seems to be to be inherently of a kind with the advice to restrain emotions given in my other examples: it is similarly advice which contains within itself a psychologically natural and rationally plausible explanation as to why it is the best, all-things-considered advice for the Emotional Person. If there is any argumentative burden to consider then I suggest that it lies on the person who seeks to carve out anger in the face of injustice as a special case of affective injustice in which the advice of OSAs is to be suspected.
I think Srinivasan would try to distinguish anger in the face of injustice from my other examples by asking us to look at what it is that the OSA’s advice in each case regards as “given”. She writes, in the context of the rape-avoidance advice example, that simply treating it as good advice “obscures the fact that this advice is good advice only because men do in fact rape; the ubiquity of rape is treated as a fixed fact, rather than a contingency for which men bear moral responsibility. Similarly, the counterproductivity critique treats the counterproductivity of anger as a fixed fact, rather than as a largely contingent feature of social reality.” The Disgusted Traveller’s suboptimal dining options of the local area are also taken as a brute fact: the Traveller has to do the best she can given the food available. But, Srinivasan could argue, while it is one thing to accept without comment (and perhaps be taken to shrug one’s shoulders about or even excuse) a lack of supermarkets in remote parts of the world, it is quite another to accept societal injustice without comment.
As I have mentioned above, Srinivasan consistently gives politically progressive examples to illustrate and give progressive lustre to her argument. But I think we get a better insight into the strength of this ‘brute fact’ argument by taking two less politically progressive examples of an OSA giving counterproductivity advice to an Emotional Person. I shall give, first, what we might call a ‘centrist’ example and then a more obviously conservative one.
The Accidental Dissident. A member of an out-of-favour minority group living in a country governed by an unfair and oppressive regime is arrested, detained and deprived of her property. She has not sought to overthrow the regime and the only reason for her punishment is her membership of the minority group, which is a matter of sheer chance. The OSA says to her, “you are right to be angry, but I advise you to cooperate with the regime by signing this confession and making a public declaration of loyalty to the regime, as that will ensure your release from prison and the return of your property”.
The Cancelled Professor. A lecture given by an eminent professor was surreptitiously recorded and released on the internet, gaining widespread notoriety as it appears to show the professor using an offensive racial epithet and then refusing to apologise for doing so. In fact the professor did not use the epithet (she was misheard), which was the reason for her refusal to apologise. There is considerable public outcry and many calls for her resignation. The OSA says to her, “you are right to be angry, but I advise you to make a public apology, to make a donation of money to a fashionable race-based charity in which you do not believe and to declare that you will ‘educate yourself’, because taking those steps will cause the fuss to die down and allow you to continue with your work rather than be forced to resign”.
Each of these is a case in which an OSA gives counterproductivity advice to a victim. And I think these examples help elucidate why we might have a worry about such advice. In the case of the Accidental Dissident, the advice sounds like something that could be said by a sincere and loyal friend, but equally something that could be said by an interrogator of the Emotional Person, an enthusiastic supporter of the regime, who is perhaps playing ‘nice cop’ in the hope of a quick propaganda win. Equally, the Cancelled Professor’s adviser could be a respected colleague who sincerely hopes to allow her to return to her academic work with as little fuss as possible, but could instead be an insincere political activist looking to take a high-profile ‘scalp’.
Let’s return to Srinivasan’s first example, the Buckley/Baldwin debate, since this provides the framework for her argument. She writes: “in the end, Negro anger would be met, Buckley warned, with white violence: ‘If it does finally come to a confrontation, a radical confrontation ... then we will fight the issue, not only in the Cambridge Union, but we will fight it ... on beaches and on hills and on mountains and on landing grounds.’ Tolerance might be extended to Negroes, but not to their anger”. This is a curious passage. Buckley’s quotation is given with little context and the suspicion must lurk at the back of our minds that the “we” whom Buckley predicts will fight is the “white race” or something akin to it: what Buckley may have intended as a friendly warning could instead be read as a threat.
I am reminded here of the politely-phrased warnings given by fictional (and, for all I know, real-life) gangsters: “you should watch your step – I suggest you look over your shoulder in dark alleys”; “I wouldn’t do that if I were you”; or “nice place you’ve got here – shame if anything happened to it”. There is nothing in the literal words of these warnings that raises any suspicion; rather it is the scowl, raised fist or air of menace of the ‘adviser’ that makes them threats.
Buckley was not one to issue threats of race-based violence and I do not suggest that Srinivasan was insinuating anything of the kind. I merely point out that in certain cases of injustice, counterproductivity advice given by an OSA might be open to suspicion – but the reason for that suspicion is not the content of that advice, but rather the circumstances of the person giving it.
This is not a point that is restricted to counterproductivity advice in the context of societal injustice. Let us return to the Distraught Mother: the advice, although on its face meant kindly, might be an attempt by the Mother’s enemy to cause her to experience psychological torment. Or consider the Successful Candidate: perhaps the OSA in that case is someone who is annoyed by the Candidate’s success and wishes to take her down a peg or two.
These examples of hypocritical advice to the Distraught Mother or the Successful Candidate seem possible but surely highly unlikely. After all, who volunteers advice to grieving mothers or successful undergraduates other than people who have their best interests at heart? But politics is a different matter.
We have taken a circuitous route but I think we have now arrived at the real basis upon which counterproductivity advice might be considered more open to suspicion in cases of political debate than in the more homely cases of the Distraught Mother, Successful Candidate or Delayed Interviewee: it is simply much easier to imagine that advice given in the field of liberal political debate is not given by someone who has the Emotional Person’s best interests at heart. In my view, there is nothing inherent in the advice – nothing that arises as a direct consequence of its affective injustice – that should lead us to be suspicious of it or to regard it as needing to discharge some further argumentative burden. Sometimes an unjust political situation simply is a given and the best advice, all things considered, is to treat it as such. But equally, in the context of political debate, the person giving unwelcome ‘advice’ may be a person whose beliefs or interests are opposed to that of the advisee.
The Buckley/Baldwin example itself illustrates the point: the ‘advice’ was given by someone on the opposite side of a formal debate, a peculiarly artificial context and one far removed from the trusted friend or colleague we might imagine in other the examples above. The opponent in a debate is not one’s ‘adviser’ in any normal sense of the word.
Perhaps one further example will illustrate the point. Think of the familiar genre of newspaper article written by a supporter of the party in power (in a democracy) who purports to give advice to the opposition as to how best to win the next election. What is going on here? One might think immediately of three possibilities (and there may be more): (1) that the advice is genuinely the best advice, given, perhaps, out of a desire to show the writer’s persuasive powers and deep understanding of the electorate; (2) that the advice is given in bad faith, being an attempt to undermine the opposition; or (3) that the advice is the writer’s attempt to create an opposition which, should it win, will be more acceptable to the writer than the opposition currently is. The article itself will, if it is at all convincing, contain evidence and argument to support the view that the opposition should, all things considered, follow the advice given. But the very nature of its authorship and publication raises a suspicion – an argumentative burden that it must dispel – which would not be raised by confidential advice given by a sympathetic adviser (for example, a professional lobbyist or successful retired politician), even if the two sets of advice were word-for-word identical.
Indeed, advice of this kind is a common real-world example of OSA counterproductivity advice of the kind that Srinivasan discusses: say less about that small group of unjustly treated people, the political party is told, and focus instead on this much larger group of people who might be persuaded to vote for you. The reason that might be the best advice, all things considered, for the political party in question is apparent from the content of the advice.
I would also suggest that it is this kind of analysis that reveals exactly what the ‘given’ is in advice of this kind: other people. To be precise, the ‘given’ – the brute fact that the OSA takes as unchangeable when giving counterproductivity advice – is no more than the fact that political success in a liberal society necessarily involves persuading other people by argument, including by appeal to their (apt and rationally-evaluable) emotions. It is an inherent feature of politics in a liberal society that, even if you have been unjustly treated, your claim for justice will entail trying to persuade people whose interests are not your interests, whose values are not your values, whose emotions are not your emotions, and whose anger is not your anger. So long as that is the case, there is no reason to suppose that any OSA who gives counterproductivity advice faces an argumentative burden.
(Can we infer from the fact that there is an unjustly treated person or persons who are justified in being angry at that injustice that we are not talking about a reasonably fair liberal society at all? No. A reasonably fair liberal society is not a perfectly just utopia. The unjustly treated person (who is entitled to feel anger at her injustice) might not be the most unjustly treated of all persons, and a just society could reasonably prioritise the more severely wronged. Alternatively, the injustice might consist in lack of access to finite resources which are incapable of being shared in such a way as to satisfy all reasonable claims.)
In short, the kind of advice that the OSA gives when giving counterproductivity advice to an Emotional Person is fundamentally of a kind with familiar situations in which advice to do unpleasant things is given: it may be insincere or open to objections, but there is nothing inherent in the content of the advice that should make us treat it with suspicion. To put it another way, we distinguish between the doctor who says “drink this – I know it tastes horrid but it will do you good” and the stranger at a nightclub who says the same thing, despite the fact that their advice is word for word identical in both cases; and plainly the reason for our suspicion in the latter case is derived not from the words of the advice itself but rather from the surrounding circumstances such as the relationship between adviser and advisee and the context in which the advice is given. Equivalent considerations apply to political debate in a liberal society.
You may at this point be wondering why I have given so much attention to this point. Srinivasan argues that the OSA who gives counterproductivity advice faces an argumentative burden merely by reason of the inherent affective injustice of such advice; I argue that there may be such an argumentative burden in certain cases, but it arises not from the advice itself but rather from the surrounding circumstances. Be that as it may, is this a debate that has any consequences?
My answer to that is to point to the progressive political arguments that Srinivasan seeks to advance by means of her argument. Srinivasan’s framing of the point would might go somewhat like this: liberalism has traditionally proceeded by means of privileged white men in wigs (in the 18th century) or privileged white men employed by a small number of very old universities (more recently) taking it upon themselves to police a discourse which relies heavily on norms of calm argument, dispassionate debate and civility; but this kind of discourse therefore inherently disadvantages those who feel the righteous anger of the outsider, the dispossessed or the oppressed, by which we tend to mean women, members of ethnic minorities, people with minority sexualities and so on. We have at least some reason to suspect that an OSA who gives counterproductivity advice is denying the righteousness of the anger of these unjustly treated groups and unfairly favouring the unjust existing structures which are threatened by such anger. Having identified the affective injustice suffered disproportionately by these disadvantaged groups, we can start the process of righting it, which will involve giving more voice to (or at least tolerance of) the anger felt by members of these groups.
My conclusion, by contrast, is that such advice is of a kind with advice on how to approach job interviews or, in the political context, with David Cameron’s advice to the Conservative Party to stop ‘banging on about Europe’; it is simply normal advice, of a kind we are readily familiar with, which is just as likely to be good or bad as the surrounding circumstances suggest. It is inevitable in a diverse liberal society that there will be people whose views or interests do not command majority or elite support and who are right to be angry about that, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about advising them to restrain their anger in order to be more successful in their arguments. For a recent example illustrating precisely this point, take this quotation from “Outrage and Outliers”, an article in The Economist’s May 21st, 2022 edition concerning the leaking of the Supreme Court opinion that in due course reversed Roe v Wade: “Protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices have elicited criticism from pro-choice as well as pro-life Americans, in part because such action could be counter-productive”. Quite. That is appropriate advice given by one section of the elite who support Roe v Wade to another section of the same elite who share the same values.
If I am right in this section that the OSA faces no argumentative burden then it would seem that I have undermined part of Srinivasan’s reasons for supposing that identifying the potential aptness of anger, and elucidating the concept of “affective injustice”, is part of a progressive programme. On my approach, it is simply neutral.
That conclusion helps lay the groundwork for the next section in which I wish to take the argument further. It will be my thesis that the concept of affective injustice, particularly when considered in its most extreme form – which I shall call affective gaslighting – is one which inherently tends to support a conservative rather than a progressive programme.
IV. AFFECTIVE GASLIGHTING
As I said above, I agree that there is something which answers to the term affective injustice as defined by Srinivasan, i.e. being asked to feel the wrong thing in response to injustice.
Srinivasan’s examples of affective injustice are examples of someone asked to feel less of an apt emotion, hence my use of the word “restrain”. But I want to introduce the most egregious form of affective injustice, namely that of being told not to feel the apt emotion at all, or even to feel an emotion of approbation where anger is apt. This is the case in which the Emotional Person is advised not by an Outwardly Sympathetic Adviser but instead by an Outwardly Unsympathetic Adviser (or OUA). I intend to describe this injustice as affective gaslighting.
I hope an example will illustrate what I mean by affective gaslighting. I will return to the centrist and therefore, I hope, uncontroversial example of the Accidental Dissident.
The More Unfortunate Accidental Dissident. The Accidental Dissident suffers the same unfair treatment from the oppressive regime as previously described, but in this example the OUA instead says, “you are wrong to be angry about this treatment. You thoroughly deserve this treatment because you are a member of such-and-such group, which therefore means that you are inherently a parasite, worthless person and enemy of the glorious regime that now runs this country. Indeed, you deserve to be treated more severely than you have been. Nonetheless, the regime is kind and forgiving and I advise you to cooperate with it by signing this confession and making a public declaration of loyalty, as that will ensure your release from prison and the return of your property”.
The similarities between this case and that of the original Accidental Dissident are striking:
- The practical content of the advice given by the OUA is the same as that given by the OSA.
- The reasons why that advice it might be the best advice
for the Emotional Person, all things considered, are identical in each case.
- In both cases, one can imagine the same advice
being given either by an agent of the regime or by a sincere friend who wants
what is best for the advisee.
- In both cases, one can imagine the advice being
given insincerely, by someone who really does not (or really does) believe in
the justice of the Accidental Dissident’s anger. The Adviser’s sympathy or lack
thereof is in each case only outward.
But despite these similarities, it is apparent that the More Unfortunate Accidental Dissident has suffered a further and greater insult – a more serious affective injustice – than the original Accidental Dissident. In the case of the original Accidental Dissident, whether sincerely or not, the OSA recognised and acknowledged the injustice that the Emotional Person faces. The OSA at least paid lip service to the correct moral order, and did so by reference to the Emotional Person’s own situation. The starting point for the counterproductivity advice was a stance of reassurance and agreement. That was surely superior, both morally and psychologically, to the advice given by the OUA who starts by dismissing the advisee’s complaint out of hand.
To put it another way, Srinivasan asks us to be wary of counterproductivity advice given by the likes of Buckley. But imagine how much worse it would have been if Buckley had not described the injustices faced by African Americans as “dastardly” but instead as de minimis, imaginary, self-inflicted, or deserved. The OSA, whether sincere or insincere, offers something towards the aptness of the victim’s anger, while the OUA denies even that.
This recognition of the correct moral order on the part of the unjustly-acting person is also seen in other contexts. Think, for example, of Holocaust deniers: why would one deny the Holocaust if not because one knows (or least must pretend) that an event of that kind is wrong? Or think of the way in which the current Russian invasion of Ukraine is described by Russia as de-Nazification: that terminology accepts and, at least to that extent submits to, a common moral framework in which we all agree that Nazis are bad. There is a cause for hope (we might call it ‘moral hope’) in these examples: someone who attempts to justify Nazism by saying “they were not mass murderers” is at least potentially open to argument on a shared moral ground, but someone who attempts to justify Nazism by saying “they were indeed mass murderers – and rightly so!” appears to be a lost cause: we have no ‘way in’ to the thinking of the latter person.
Having outlined the affective injustice committed by the OUA, namely affective gaslighting, I want to return to some of the points discussed at the end of the previous section.
We might read Srinivasan’s essay as an attempt to take certain archetypes – the angry black activist, the powerless but complaining woman – who, we might think, are dismissed by the dominant liberal discourse as being whiners, moaners or overly-emotional, and give them the dignity and value denied to them by an over-emphasis on calmness in rational debate.
But now let us think of some other commonly dismissed archetypes. Take the grumpy old man – Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells in the British context – who thinks the country is going to the dogs and everything is worse than it used to be. Or the comfortable middle-aged woman who is aggrieved when things do not go her way and asks to talk to the manager – a “Karen”, to use a modern slang term. It seems to me that these latter characters are likely to the subject of affective gaslighting: while the angry black activist is normally regarded as having a cause for complaint even if she ‘goes too far’, the angry old man is normally regarded as simply a bitter loser whose views can be dismissed or ignored. The latter treatment is clearly a more egregious affront to the moral emotions being experienced by the person in question. Moreover, that treatment, I would suggest, is suffered far more often by those whose anger is conservative in nature.
To illustrate this point, I shall give three further examples.
The Transwidow. A woman is told by her husband that he is and always has been a woman, and intends to live outwardly as a woman from now on. She is told that she is now married to a woman and must treat her husband as being her wife. Much of what she regards as the history of her marriage is said to have been ‘living a lie’. She feels hurt and is angry at the person she formerly regarded as her husband. The OUA says to her, “You have no reason to be angry: no one has wronged you. On the contrary, you must be happy that your wife is now able to live her true life and express her true nature: that is a wonderful thing that we should all celebrate. Expressing hurt or anger would be transphobic and therefore wrong.”
The Father of an Aborted Daughter. A man is in a long-term relationship with a woman. She is pregnant with their daughter. The couple starts to plan a life as parents to their daughter together, for example they choose a name for her, buy baby clothes for her, and equip and decorate a nursery. The woman then starts a new project which she considers of value to her, she considers that having a baby would interfere with that project and she therefore decides to have an abortion. The father feels hurt and angry as a result. The OUA says to him, “You have no reason to be angry: no one has wronged you. On the contrary, the only person who has any right to make any decision in this matter is the mother. If you were to express anger or disapproval of that decision you would be undermining the absolute nature of that right; you are not permitted to have or express a view on her decision other than one of support and approbation.”
The Child of Divorce. A child finds out that her parents are getting divorced and starting new relationships. She is hurt by their behaviour and feels angry that they have let her down. The OUA says to her, “You have no reason to be angry: no one has done you any wrong. On the contrary, you should be happy that your parents are moving on to new and more fulfilling relationships in life. Your parents love you just as much as they ever did, plus you now have two homes and two sets of toys – isn’t that wonderful!”
It is apparent that in each of these cases the Emotional Person has not received even the degree of recognition or acknowledgment of their anger from the OUA that the OSA giving counterproductivity advice provided the Emotional Persons in the examples we considered earlier. Assuming that one or more of these Emotional Persons has suffered a wrong, they have accordingly suffered greater affective injustice: they have suffered the wrong of affective gaslighting.
Of course, it is open to progressives to deny that any of these Emotional Persons has suffered an injustice. It would be hard for anyone to deny that they feel hurt and upset, but it might be argued that they have not been wronged: it might instead be said that their expectations have been disappointed without fault on the part of anyone, rather in the manner of someone whose hopes or plans are thwarted by a change in the weather or an unexpected reverse in the financial markets. If that were right then there would be no affective injustice to consider: the OUA may be undiplomatic but is strictly correct.
But such a response would be simply to re-state or repeat the affective gaslighting. In each of my three examples, the advisee has suffered hurt as the result of a legitimate and reasonable expectation being disappointed by the deliberate act of a person or persons who encouraged or created that expectation, who yet took the decision to disappoint it with no (or no apparent) regard for the advisee’s interests or desires and purely for their own benefit. That is normally a situation in which anger is justified: it is the description of when a promise is broken, for example. To claim that there is nonetheless no cause for justified anger would be to take a strictly ideological approach in an attempt to foreclose the argument. I would invite the reader instead to consider whether it is possible that at least one case of the kind I outlined above is one where anger is apt and whether readiness to dismiss that possibility is but a further indication that I am right that ‘conservative’ injustices of this kind are more likely to be subject to affective gaslighting.
A different response that I anticipate to this line of argument is to say that I have not identified a problem more likely to be faced by conservatives but rather a problem which is simply more likely to be faced by those whose values are on the fringes of respectable opinion: surely, it will be said, it is always more likely that people with ‘extreme’ or minority views will face an OUA who, whether sincerely or not, upholds received opinions and dismisses more unusual ones?
One can understand this argument. Let us take the example of the transwoman living in a society which does not recognise transgender persons. The transwoman declares that she is and always been a woman, to which the OUA responds, “you are a biological male, and therefore a man, and always will be. Take off that dress, wipe the lipstick off your face and behave like a man.” Is this not just the same sort of thing, but this time more likely to affect those on the progressive or radical end of the political spectrum?
I think that is a fair comparison. However, my point is not that affective gaslighting is always and everywhere more likely to affect conservatives, merely that it is more likely to affect conservatives in modern liberal societies of the kind that Srinivasan is discussing. In order to construct the transwoman example above, we had to posit an illiberal society, but my three earlier examples were all from liberal societies.
My thesis is that it is a peculiarity of liberal societies that it tends to be the demands of those whose values have been rejected (such as the people in my examples above) that are treated by affective gaslighting. Such people are those whose values are now old-fashioned and who are therefore regarded as conservative or reactionary. By contrast, those whose demands have never (or not yet) been accepted are granted at least paid the lip service of being told that they ‘have a point’.
To see what I mean, let us think of political activists whose demands are so much at the fringes of modern liberal societies that they are often on the receiving end of legal action, either criminal or civil. At the radical/progressive end of the political spectrum we find various environmental, animal rights or anti-racism activists while, at the conservative end, there are not only pro-life protestors but also anti-lockdown protestors or the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, all of whose demands are rejected by society in much the same way that pro-life campaigners’ demands are. I think it is reasonably evident that there is a much greater readiness to accept that the environmental protesters have a point but are taking it too far – the OSA approach – while the pro-life campaigner is someone who may be regarded as sincere, but no recognition of the justice of their cause will be given. We might, in this context, consider the famous CNN on-screen description of Black Lives Matters protests in 2020 as “fiery but mostly peaceful”: we would be surprised to see any protest by pro-life activists which involved burning cars described as “mostly peaceful”. To similar effect, Ross Douthat makes the point that “left-wing protest movements tend (yes, not always, but very often) to receive a lot of immediate positive feedback from important institutions - press, corporate, academic. That makes it harder to convince activists that they're actually hurting their own cause” while “No similar reinforcement loop exists for protests on the right, to put it mildly.”
The reason for this asymmetry, it seems to me, is a latent belief in moral progress: the rejected mores of yesterday are, we at some level feel, rightly discarded, while the not-yet accepted mores of tomorrow are entitled to a degree of deference either because they are new or perhaps because they are the mores of the young and coming generation.
A belief in moral progress may be based on various grounds. But one justification for the open rational debate valued by liberalism is that it leads to moral progress: there is a marketplace of ideas, so to speak, in which the better ones will thrive at the expense of the worse, and someone espousing last generation’s values is the moral equivalent of the Betamax user who refuses to use the better products now available on the market for watching films at home. A belief in moral progress – the Whig theory of intellectual history, we might say – is, if neither a core tenet nor necessary corollary of liberalism, at least a belief that finds a happy home in liberalism.
But even if one believes in moral progress, it is not entirely rational to accord automatic deference to the coming beliefs of the future. Even if you believe that the arc of the universe bends towards justice then you surely must accept that the direction of travel is not all one way: the beliefs rejected by one generation may be wrongly rejected by the next before being ultimately vindicated when the arc has travelled its course. A hundred years ago, the coming beliefs of the future were fascism and communism, and an older generation of liberals adhered to even older beliefs in resisting them, for all that many of them saw the appeal of the shiny new ideologies on offer. Or, to put it another way, just as the financial markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, the intellectual marketplace can surely maintain the wrong moral values for a period longer than your intellectual lifetime.
But whether I am right that there is a latent belief in moral progress in liberal societies is not essential to this argument. My central point, which I hope has been adequately demonstrated above, is simply that (for whatever reason), the wrong which I have been calling affective gaslighting is one which is more likely to be suffered by those who hold conservative beliefs.
V. THE PLACE OF ANGER IN FUTURE POLITICAL DEBATE
I think a reasonable conservative would go as far as I have gone in my previous sections in employing the core of Srinivasan’s argument to conservative ends. But no one, I suggest, should follow her all the way.
Srinivasan’s essay ends by focussing on those who “were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither state nor the sword”. I take it that the underlying purpose of her essay – the reason that she seeks to vindicate anger’s place in the world of rational debate – is further to include people, such as women and slaves, whom she regards as excluded from the traditional forms of liberal political debate. But, unfortunately, in her desire to achieve this aim, she provides intellectual covering fire for unsupportable ideas.
Her model, I think, is something like this: traditional political debate consists of the calm and polite exchanges of views of people who, by reason of their secure position in the comfortable upper echelons of the social structures of their times, have no reason to find themselves consumed by impotent rage. At the end of a day’s calm and rational debate, they can put aside their political differences and converse instead about art and literature. But because that is their idea of what political debate looks like, if they find a woman or slave whose face is pressed up against the window of their smart salon, howling in anger at the injustice she experiences, they will dismiss such a person as overly emotional and they will give too little weight to her arguments or demands. That is wrong and needs to be redressed.
There is clearly something to that model. As I have said, anger can be apt and people with valid claims can find themselves excluded from debate for reasons of style as well as subtance. We should perhaps not expect the victims of injustice to express themselves as dispassionately or eloquently as those who have had the advantage of not suffering grievous injustice.
But we should also not overlook the worrying implications of Srinivasan’s approach, particularly as demonstrated in her revealing asides.
- Recall her comment “Consider how many supposedly ‘violent’ protests involve only physical damage to property, not other persons.” This is not a sensible comment. Acts of looting, arson, vandalism or other criminal damage that result “only” in damage to property may be less serious than damage to human beings, but they are acts of violence and disorder nonetheless. They can be profoundly distressing to the innocent people caught up in them, and they can be disastrous for the livelihoods of those affected.
- Srinivasan suggests that racial solidarity and differences between races might be justifiable: recall her comment that I quoted above that “I am instinctively drawn to the thought that black Americans have a special, additional reason to be angry when a young black person is gunned down in the street … But I am far less inclined to think that middle class white men have a special, additional reason to be angry when another middle class white man suffers a harm.” Promoting differential treatment of people by reference to their racial characteristics is not an idea with a happy history either in theory or in practice.
These asides occur in the context of an essay which is intended to be a justification of (at least plausibly) counterproductive anger; a justification of the kind of impotent rage which tends to alienate potential allies and fire up one’s enemies. In that context, I find these kinds of aside to be disturbing. Srinivasan is an eminent philosopher with a seat at Oxford: comments of this kind cast an intellectual veneer of respectability over some of the worst tendencies that can be found in society. I do not believe that Srinivasan wishes to valorise outbursts of impotent, race-based rage that result in looting and arson. But it is not difficult for someone to take her words and use them to do so.
Srinivasan’s examples have been chosen to suggest that her arguments tend to favour progressive causes. As I have tried to show above, there is no good reason to think that is true: the counterproductivity argument faces no argumentative burden of the kind she suggests; and affective injustice of the kind that she identifies will be most keenly felt by those of a conservative disposition, subject to the greater injustice of affective gaslighting, than the progressive examples she gives.
Let me take my points and apply them to the model of polite salon liberalism. If there is to be impotent, counter-productive, race-based rioting, surely those rioters are likely to be the people least often invited into the salon and given the chance to explain their position to the powerful people within? That is to say, those who hold the least fashionable views. That, I hope progressives realise, will not be progressives who speak on behalf of women or ethnic minorities from seats in Oxford University but rather those reactionary protestors whose views are so far beyond the pale that they rarely or never enjoy a hearing in polite society. To the extent that Srinivasan’s arguments provide intellectual support for impotent, counter-productive, race-based rioting, it is the worst extremes of the political right which receives that support.
Liberalism, in all its flavours, appears to be on the way out, and thinkers such as Srinivasan are among the reasons that is so. I hope that we do not lose what is valuable in liberalism when we lose what does not stand up to scrutiny. One of the features of liberalism that I and many like me find most appealing is the ideal of rational debate among individuals who strive to rise above their emotions, or at least to channel and refine them. While that kind of polite liberalism of the salon may well have been exclusionary in practice, it was in theory open to all rational beings, and theory guided practice a great deal.
Or, to put it more starkly, the thought “one of our own has been harmed and I wish to vent my rage in a destructive manner” is one which may occur to any number of people, and we have much better reason to be suspicious of the person who has that thought – and of the person who seeks to justify the having of that thought – than we have to be suspicious of the person who advises that such rage will be counterproductive. Anger may indeed often be apt, but there is much wisdom in the old idea that anger, even in its most righteous form, is a something that needs to be restrained and guided by reason in the political context.
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