CHAPTER THREE
I ENDED CHAPTER 2 with suggesting that we critically compare the Bara’s use of ferocious anger, the Minangkabau’s use of shame, and the American use of a mixed bag of emotions to teach and maintain the normative order. What can we say about which is best that does not presuppose some value antecedently favored inside one form of life? Are there objective reasons external to all three forms of life under discussion that favor one way of normative socialization over the other? Suppose Minangkabau shame reduces fertility and that Bara anger causes early death, whereas Americans are fertile and long-lived. Such facts, if they were facts, would provide a reason for the Minangkabau and Bara, but not the Americans, to rethink their socializing practices so long as they valued fertility and longevity. Of course, there are no such facts.
When we evaluate competing norms and scripts for enacting anger, is there any escaping the internalist predicament of judging how we do anger (and the other emotions) in terms of values and practices of the form of life in which anger is done that way, with the functional role it already has? Do we—for any people, culture, or subculture—judge our own ways of doing anger (and the other emotions) more favorably than they deserve because they are ours, and judge unfamiliar ways less favorably than they deserve because they are not ours? Does “being ours” have value, perhaps the value of being identity-conferring or -constituting, which is independent of its normative value? Does “being ours” have value because, unlike every alternative, it incurs none of the costs that changing a practice would?
Contingent matters about the ways one is already doing a moral emotion deserve some weight in evaluating how one ought to do that emotion. And virtues such as tolerance likely entail that one ought to get used to different styles and scripts for doing emotions.
The analysis thus far might make a certain variety of ethicists worry, since it suggests that none of the main certified methods of ethics—universalizability, impartial observers, fully rational agents, narrow reflective equilibrium, or overlapping consensus—can resolve disagreements about how to do emotions and help us locate the right way to do them. The method of critique by way of philosophical anthropology provides a basis for rational conversation about the quality of the various ways of doing the moral emotions but does not provide a procedure to rationally resolve such disagreements. I claim that this is not due to a weakness in the method but rather to the complexity of the emotions, the historicity of moral ecologies, and the holistic character and path-dependency of every way of worldmaking; it is, in any case, a good result in multicultural worlds where debates about how best to do emotions are tied up with legitimate questions of identity and how best to live a human life.
Well-Being and Emotional Balance
There is an industry of happiness and well-being research, what I call “eudaimonics” (Flanagan 2011), after Aristotle’s idea that everyone aims for eudaimonia, the Greek word that means “to be a happy spirit,” to flourish, to be fulfilled. Eudaimonics is the study of which psychological and social conditions produce fulfilling, meaningful lives. It is normative in the way medicine or psychiatry are. The main instruments used to measure happiness and well-being are subjective well-being measures—asking people how satisfied they are overall with their lives, or asking them how satisfied they are domain by domain (at home, at work, and so on)—and objective measures of such things as income, years of school, availability of meaningful work, clean water and air, the quality of a social support system, sustainable development, and so on. The World Happiness Report uses both kinds of measurements and has been producing annual rankings of countries in terms of well-being since 2011.
Bhutan, a landlocked Himalayan Buddhist kingdom surrounded by China and India, has been involved in these efforts from the very beginning. It was a Bhutanese king who, in 1979, coined the concept of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) when he claimed it was far more important than gross national product. In 2008 GNH was formally written into the Constitution of Bhutan as the goal of government. One initiative the Bhutanese government has taken since then is to check on the emotional well-being of its own people. Emotions that are officially considered wholesome include compassion, generosity, forgiveness, contentment, and calmness, while unwholesome emotions are selfishness, jealousy, anger, fear, and worry.
Bhutan can make such a list, and have a wide social consensus on what is considered wholesome and unwholesome as far as emotions go, because it is a Buddhist monoculture; there is no need for internal bickering about which varieties of each are authorized. People know. One interesting thing about this inventory is that the wholesome emotions all have positive valence and the unwholesome ones have negative valence. But it isn’t valence—at least not valence alone—that makes these emotions wholesome and the others unwholesome. It is that these emotions feel good, and they feel good because enacting them is part of what makes for a good life as a Bhutanese Buddhist. The unwholesome emotions feel bad and have their sources in the Buddhist poisons of the soul: ego, unquenchable desire for things one doesn’t need and shouldn’t want, and anger when one doesn’t get what one wants.
In a multiculture, such an inventory could not achieve consensus, let alone be understood, because each culture has its own consensus concerning what is wholesome or unwholesome. For example, there would be disputes about what kind of compassion and how much generosity is good. There is the generosity of the Sermon on the Mount Christian and the socialist, both of whom believe in equally sharing all of the earth’s bounty, and that of the capitalist and the prosperity gospel Christian who believe that they have the option to share some of the bounty after the economy delivers the rewards of mixing their labor with what they own. And in any case, in my multiculture no one is allowed to tell you which emotions to have, which ones are good for you, and so on. Even if this was allowed, there would be fights, possibly angry ones, about which varieties of compassion and anger were good, how much generosity is okay, and so on—and which are not.
The Bhutanese inventory that distinguishes wholesome from unwholesome emotions, where anger is on the unwholesome list, works because Bhutan is a Buddhist monoculture. Once inside this form of life, anger is unwholesome. It is objectively unwholesome given the form of life. Exactly which varieties are unwholesome? A Bhutanese person could tell you.
Are There Truly Objective Well-Being Reasons against Some Kinds of Anger?
We rightly treasure conclusions that logically follow from true first principles. The Pythagorean theorem says that the square of the hypotenuse in a right triangle is equivalent to the square of the other two sides. What are the axioms of ethics and politics from which one could make objective inferences about anger or any other moral emotion? Starting from Christian or Buddhist or Confucian or secular liberal first principles is to start with historically contingent truths. These first principles will be the first principles of a people. They might be self-evident to people committed to the relevant form of life, but they will not be self-evident to others who have different first principles in their own cultural genealogy. One might wonder whether there are any objective reasons for or against any emotion, for or against any way of doing or enacting it, that are not just the reasons for a people who make some varieties of anger bad. Call such reasons “truly objective reasons.”
Can the method of wide reflective equilibrium help ground a rational preference between the two regimens, the shame regimen of the Minangkabau and the anger regimen of the Bara, or between these two regimens and our mixed-method regime, or between these three and the Bhutanese normative ecology of emotions? Wide reflective equilibrium differs from narrow reflective equilibrium. Whereas narrow reflective equilibrium tests for internal consistency, wide reflective equilibrium goes further; it provides tools for both internal critique and principled comparisons by allowing us to bring to bear more than just normative information about actual practices, considered judgments, and ideals. Wide reflective equilibrium involves not merely equilibrating beliefs, values, and practices with one another, it requires that we also bring credible philosophical theories and empirical theories to bear on our assessment (Daniels 1979).
To see what wide reflective equilibrium allows that narrow reflective equilibrium does not, consider this analogy. Imagine several theories of folk medicine that achieve narrow reflective equilibrium; they are internally consistent, and some internal justificatory relations exist—for example, they were developed by trusted ancestors, a shaman hallucinated them, and so on. We now ask from a wider pose whether their respective theory and practice are consistent with the germ theory of disease, modern biochemistry, genetics, and immunology. A not very good folk medicine is inconsistent (either in theory or practice) with some or all of these theories, a good theory is consistent with them, and a very good theory incorporates them.
Is there any similar way to perform wide reflective equilibrium to judge the quality of three (or four, if the reader wishes to engage the exercise by adding the Bhutanese example) normative conceptions of how to theorize and do anger: the Minangkabau, the Bara, and our way, where “our” way is conceived as an anger-guilt system with (I assume) Aristotelian permission to pay back in certain cases of wrongdoing? What in the moral domain plays the role of credible and well-established philosophical and empirical theories akin to the germ theory of disease, genetics, and so on? Are there objective facts—for example, facts about morality, human well-being, and a fulfilling social life—that can help me win the argument that our anger practices are unhealthy, off-kilter, immoral, and ought to change? It would help my argument if I could find objective facts that reveal that both payback and pain-passing anger undermine well-being, period, not just for a people or a tradition that claims that this is so.
Psychology seems like a promising candidate discipline to play the role in my forced choice between the three emotion regimens that the germ theory of disease might play in evaluating competing folk medicines. Psychology is the science of the mind. Sciences seek to make helpful generalizations, and there are large areas of psychology devoted to the study of happiness and well-being. Thus, we might think we could at least exclude some anger practices when the evidence reveals that they objectively undermine well-being.
Martha Nussbaum tries this tactic (2016). She proposes that some people who aim for revenge assume, consciously or unconsciously, that they will get back what was lost—the marriage, the lost loved one, the self before the rape. But she points out that this is “magical thinking,” an illusion. Illusions are one kind of false belief. So if payback anger assumes restoration of what was lost, it involves an objective mistake.
This might work somewhat to pull the rug out from under the rationale beneath some kinds of payback. But it makes a difference whether we think the person who seeks revenge believes that the restoration will happen—or only entertains the thought, which may well not be enough for a belief—or whether they only wish to get back what was lost. For there to be an illusion, one needs a false belief. A wish can be an idle fantasy, and a hope can be unsatisfiable. But false beliefs are needed for illusions; wishes and hopes do not require beliefs at all.
Let’s allow that some people believe revenge will regain what was lost. Is it plausible to think it is common that individuals who enact payback anger believe, or seriously expect, that what has been lost will be regained? I don’t think so. This could be tested empirically, but I think this would be a waste of research dollars. This is, I think, a case where just a moment of reflection by you the reader about what you assume when you engage in payback anger will reveal that you do not typically believe or expect the magical result. The aim is to pay back for its own sake, to see the other hurt.
That said, there is a conditional standard that has objective grounding: If any individual desires revenge because they think it will get them back the romance as it was before the cheating, or will get them back their pre-rape self, or their intact family before Dad was killed by the drunk driver, then they are just wrong. They have an objectively false belief. For such individuals, if there are any, revenge will not bring back or restore what was lost. This is an objective fact, and it will be objectively disappointing for the person with the magical thought.
There is, as I mentioned earlier, a finding that revenge is not nearly as satisfying as people think it will be, and, in addition, there are costs involved, such as embarrassment, shame, regret, and guilt (Carlsmith, Wilson, and Gilbert 2008). This finding is not that there is a false belief that what was lost will be restored by revenge, but rather an incorrect prediction about the emotional satisfaction one will get from revenge. Like Nussbaum’s point about cases where there is a false belief about regaining what was lost, these cases involve an objective mistake about how one will feel when one tastes blood. Both findings chip away at some reasons for payback. Individuals who believe that revenge will magically restore what was lost and those who think that revenge will be very, or entirely, satisfying make objective mistakes.
How universal is the finding that an “eye for an eye” strategy is less satisfying than people expect or hope? We don’t know. Since the publication of the groundbreaking paper, “The Weirdest People in the World?” (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010), it is generally accepted that one should not make inferences about human nature from psychology, because most psychology is based on experiments with North American college students, and this is one of the most unrepresentative populations in history. Students are WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Thus, we cannot say that over world history and among all peoples, revenge isn’t deeply satisfying. But we can say this of contemporary Americans. So we have at least a local generalization about well-being or happiness that indicates that there are internal reasons to our form of life, not to enact payback. It might be that, in a monoculture firmly committed to “an eye for an eye” vengeance, revenge really is satisfying. And, in fact, the generalization just cited comes with a warning, a possible set of exceptions inside America: there is some evidence that among Scotch Irish settlers of the South, and thus of their descendants, lex talionis is endorsed and is satisfying (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). But suppose that, to a large extent, Americans are aware of and get arguments, both moral and practical, against payback.
One might expect or hope (I do) that we’d find similar negative effects of pain-passing anger in America. Despite widespread acceptance of the ventilationist view (Tavris 1989), most people I know really do not like to be the victim of another’s venting, especially when they are not in any way the cause of that anger. We tolerate to some extent the moods of the depressed and traumatized, especially when we love them. But it is no fun, nor is it helpful to the wounded person for me to serve as their punching bag, to be the one they vent at. If this is generally true, then there are objective reasons, possibly across cultures, to wish to get your pain-passing tendencies under control and to discuss them with your shaman or your therapist. But it won’t work out for either of us to indulge your desire to spread your pain in angry ways.
Objective Evidence about Bad Effects of Anger?
One could offer up a different kind of objective finding to criticize emotional norms and scripts of a more metaphysical sort. So, in the three-way face-off between the Minangkabau, the Bara, and us, one might claim that the Minangkabau make a mistake about the metaphysics of persons, since shaming assumes collective agents (it is not clear to me from the ethology that the Minangkabau actually assume this, but make believe they do). A well-respected philosophical theory is individualist. Therefore, the Minangkabau form of life fails an objective metaphysical test.
But this objection, as I have already said, will founder on the fact that the metaphysics that favors individual agents over collective ones is hardly settled; rather, it is contested across the very normative theories being discussed (see Flanagan 2017 for a discussion of metaphysical variations in views of the self). And, in any case, the Minangkabau do socialize individually, shaming individual children who do wrong. It is later, when there is evidence that the shame socialization failed in a particular case or set of cases—among “the youth today”—that the community feels shame.
What about objective empirical findings about the bad effects of harsh anger and/or shaming? Until 1950 many cigarette manufacturers recommended their brands for general health, especially for sore throats! But cigarettes are terrible for us, so we changed our habits. Maybe we are just confused about what good anger is, and learning this would lead us to change our anger habits. Again, one might hope that psychology, the science of the mind, could provide such findings. But this might not be so. There may be no such objective findings. Röttger-Rössler and others write:
Child-rearing practices such as shaming or corporal punishment have extremely negative connotations in Western cultures. Numerous studies in developmental psychology purport to show that they are harmful to healthy psychosocial development and to successful norm internalization (e.g., Hoffman 1983; Lepper 1983; Smetana 1997; see also Gershoff 2002; Tangney, Stuewig & Masjek 2007a). Studies in cultural anthropology (Briggs 1998; Chisolm 1978; LeVine & LeVine 1996; Levine & Norman 2001) have shown that numerous societies successfully apply the child-rearing practices of shaming or corporal punishment, which Euro-American developmental psychology classifies as being so counterproductive, for the internalization of norms without any indications that their children are impaired in their psychological development. (2013, 260–61)
There is a lot to unpack here. But the important empirical claim is that alleged objective harms of shame and anger as socializing emotions cited by WEIRD psychologists are not seen among the Bara or Minangkabau.1 Problems in “internalization of norms” and impairments in “psychological development” are not found in cultures if, or so long as, the anger or shame practices are widely and wholeheartedly endorsed.
Röttger-Rössler and others list the many alleged bad effects of shame cultures—passivity, low self-esteem, depression, and low empathy—and then write: “The aforementioned negative effects of shame experiences are generally not to be found among the Minangkabau or in Indonesian society in general. We consider that this is due particularly to the positive connotation of the emotion malu in the Indonesian context” (2013, 283).
In the case of the Bara, some of the bad effects that psychologists of the North Atlantic associate with angry socialization are seen (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013). But they do not have the normal bad effects they have in North Atlantic cultures because of other features of the Bara social ecology. Norms are in-group and not applicable to both the in-group and out-groups. So what might seem like a lack of internalization or superficial learning is actually something like nimble, perceptual acuity about when, where, and to whom norms apply or don’t. For Bara, it is bad to steal cattle within a patrilineage, but it is heroic to steal cattle outside the patrilineage. Likewise, what might seem in Europe or the United States as “proneness [of the Bara] to aggressive anger” is generally not proneness to anger or aggression toward equals in the in-group but is mostly highly scripted anger directed at normative novices for very specific norm violations. Bara anger displays might look like explosive or gratuitous or mean-spirited types of anger to outsiders, but they are normally legible inside Bara society as “a kind of sanctioning anger” (heloky) that signals communal, not personal, harm and whose aim is serious, namely, protecting the normative order. Furthermore, inside Bara society, scripted rituals of comforting and reintegration almost invariably follow episodes of terrifying fury, often by the very perpetrators of the severe punishment.
The point is this: Suppose one insists that there are objective findings, such as John Bowlby’s (1969) and Mary Ainsworth’s (1976), which show that children need to be raised in environments that are secure, and that teach and engender attachment to caregivers; otherwise the child fails to thrive, has no chances at eudaimonia, and so on. Accept that this is an objective truth across human ecologies. Still, it is not clear from the evidence that the Bara do not grow up in such an environment. Even if volatile caretakers in some environments do terrible harm, it may be that in ecologies like the Bara culture, where such anger is predictable and is always followed by rituals of loving reintegration, the effects disappear, or never appear in the first place.
If these points generalize, then even “nice” normative socialization practices like positive reinforcement and/or building self-esteem might lead to weak internalization and various impairments if the message is in the air that some elders worry that these practices might do so—for example, by engendering strategies for free riding when visible rewards are removed or impairments in personality depth due to the superficial coin of constant self-affirmation for simply showing up to life.
Self-Sustaining Normative Loops
We were looking for objective findings that might give us reason to favor North American–style anger (assuming, contrary to the psychological and anthropological evidence, that there is such a single kind) over Bara fierce anger or Minangkabau shame as socializing emotions. But the empirical findings suggest the possibility of a new variety of self-fulfilling prophecy effect that confers immunity from harmful effects on overall well-being to a range of socializing emotion practices—at least to wrathful anger and shaming practices—so long as they are widely assented to (not internally controversial), applied consistently, and so on. This means that, in fact, there might be no baseline objective truths about the effects of such practices on overall well-being.
Ian Hacking (1995) calls one variety of self-fulfilling prophecy effect the “looping effect.” In psychology, the “Rosenthal effect” or “Pygmalion effect” are names for related patterns, where a social practice encourages its own success by, as it were, endorsing itself, vouching for its quality and legitimacy. In the Bara and Minangkabau cases the effect is one where if a culture clearly, consistently, and confidently deploys certain socializing emotions, then this normalizes them in such a way that the youth are immunized from the usual bad effects of those socializing practices. Potential toxicity is diminished by ubiquity and wholehearted, public normative endorsement.
Ethical and Metaphysical Reasons against Anger
There is another tactic for trying to locate objective reasons for or against certain practices where one looks to metaphysics and ethics, to the nature of things and the nature and aim of ethics, rather than to the psychology of well-being. Stoics and Buddhists offer admixtures of these kinds of reasons against anger, especially against payback and pain-passing anger.
In On Anger, Seneca (first century) is responding to Aristotle, who he understands as defending the idea that payback anger is a virtue, or a potential virtue, so long as it is apt for the situation and abides the doctrine of the mean as regards expression and intensity. Seneca’s ethical challenge is straightforward:2
1. One ought always to work to build virtue and eliminate vice.
2. The aim of anger is transparent. Anger is the “desire to repay suffering.”
3. No virtue aims to cause suffering. Only vices do that.
4. Therefore, we ought to “extirpate [anger] root and branch.… What can moderation have to do with an evil habit?”
Śāntideva (eighth century), the Indian Buddhist philosopher, offers a similar argument:
1. The aim of ethics is to end suffering. (An enlightened Buddhist person vows to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings.)
2. Anger is caused by ego and aims at revenge or to pass pain, that is, to cause suffering.
3. Anger is incompatible with the aim of ethics, whose virtues are compassion (karuna), the desire to end suffering for all sentient beings, and lovingkindness (metta), the aim to bring well-being wherever there is ill-being.
4. Therefore, we ought to eliminate anger.
Both Stoics and Buddhists also offer metaphysical and psychological reasons against anger (Flanagan 2011, 2017). For example, Stoics instruct that the cosmos is indifferent to human desire, and thus it would be good to see one’s desires as less urgent than they seem, or even, sub specie aeternitatis, as not urgent at all.
In the Buddhist case, the argument is this:
1. Everything is impermanent.
2. I am one of the impermanent things (no-self).3
3. My no-self is an impermanent node in what unfolds, the mother of all unfoldings.
4. But I am the kind of node (no-self) that is endowed (by the mother of all unfoldings) with certain poisonous, egoistic tendencies and dispositions.
5. The poisons of ego make me want much more than I need, and to get angry when I don’t get what I want. When I get what I want, it gets old fast. I want something new. I remain always unsatisfied.
6. Realizing that I am no-self, that my ego’s satisfactions will not last, and that they are not ultimately important (this is part of what it means to be “enlightened”), I should want to tame my desires, my ego.
7. Doing this will align my ego with its relative unimportance in the greater scheme of things. I, such as i am, will no longer get angry when things don’t go my way.
These kinds of arguments are interesting, important, and worth evaluating on their merits (Nussbaum 1994, 2016; Flanagan 2000, 2011, 2017). One quick response is that, even if it is true that the ends of ethics require that we never intend to cause suffering, seek revenge, or pass pain, this does not provide an objective, final, or decisive reason against payback and pain-passing anger. One needs the additional premise that the moral good is sovereign, that moral reasons are overriding. One can think that the meaning of one’s life projects depends on seeing certain evil creeps who crossed me suffer, and that this trumps the demands of ethics (Callard 2020). Or one might not care that payback or pain-passing anger hurts others, claiming only that it works for me. I get to lick my lips in payback, and I get some relief from venting.
Furthermore, in the case where we set the task as finding a rational basis for the preference for the Minangkabau shame-based moral socialization over the Bara anger-based moral socialization, where neither culture approves of anger among adults, the Stoic and Buddhist arguments against payback and pain-passing anger are tangential. The reason is this: The Minangkabau are globally opposed to anger, so they are already, as it were, on board with the Stoics and Buddhists—they are Sbuddhists—before these arguments are offered. The Stoics, Buddhists, and Minangkabau have something akin to what Charles Taylor calls an “unforced consensus.” They all think anger is bad, but for different reasons, which are given by axioms at the center of their respective philosophies or ethnotheories. For the Minangkabau, payback and pain-passing anger are wrong because they embed disrespect for persons (no, they are not Kantian!). For the Stoic and Buddhist, they are wrong because they cause pain and suffering.
As for the Bara, they are opposed to anger except when the youth misbehave. And then all hell breaks loose. But they can still, for all I have read or said, claim that they do not approve of payback, pain-passing, or downgrading anger, only corrective, instrumental anger. No Bara wants to make the children suffer because they personally hurt the elders. Imagine that the adults do not feel personally hurt at all. The Bara want to scare the youth into normative conformity. The stakes are high, nothing less than the economic order and social harmony depend on it, and this method is tried-and-true among them. This will give the Stoic and Buddhist pause, since both allow places for “as if anger” and, at least in the Buddhist case, they allow for real but instrumental anger, that is, anger that is phenomenally robust so long as it aims at what is best for the other. The aims of ethics are violated only when anger aims to make another person or community suffer solely because they hurt or harmed me or mine, or, even worse, when they did nothing but are simply a convenient, weak target for my impulses to vent or strike out. This leaves both instrumental anger, which aims to gain normative conformity, and anger at injustice, which aims to improve the moral quality of a society—both of which might hurt some individuals along the way but do not have such harm as their aim—entirely immune to the critique.
In addition, the Stoic and Buddhist arguments incorporate psychological and metaphysical premises about the cosmos, the self, the virtues, and the intrinsic badness of pain and suffering that are controversial. This matters because wide reflective equilibrium warrants confident challenges to a moral conception when there are strong, objective, empirical, or philosophical resources one can bring to bear against it. But in the present case, it is not clear that we can find any that are not contested, controversial, or possibly question begging.
The upshot suggests that it will not be easy to deploy the method of wide reflective equilibrium in making cross-tradition moral judgments by bringing to bear well-confirmed philosophical or scientific theories in the way that I am supposing can be done for theory choice in science or engineering, or in comparing folk medicine traditions.
Multicultures and Dominance
One reply at this point is that the exercise is notional, purely mental, not a real existential one. We don’t really have to choose in this three-way exercise (or four if one wants to include Bhutan), nor do we have to choose among the wider range of possibilities on the thirty-item inventory. “We” are WEIRD people, North Americans or denizens of Northern Europe, not Minangkabau or Bara, not Utku Eskimos, or Tibetan Buddhists in exile, not Japanese, Jain, Stoic, or Somalian.
Except, well, we kind of are all those things, and this gives the lie once again to methods that speak about how “we” do things and that try to equilibrate our actual judgments and practices with our best thinking. Even if some homogeneous culture in some isolated Waddington valley doesn’t face the prospect of having to change, adjust, and recalibrate its norms, the Minangkabau and Bara, the Bhutanese, and all the rest do face exactly this existential problem when we reach one another’s borders or shores and intermix.
Many modern ecologies—cities like Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Paulo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto—are multicultural, multiethnic, and cosmopolitan. How does the multiplicity of comprehensive conceptions interact, intersect, accommodate, and change in worlds in which there is sociomoral diversity and heterogeneity among them? How are norms governing anger changing? One thought is that these conceptions are duking it out for supremacy on their merits. One could imagine that one is in a situation where one converts to an entirely new form of life. For example, one could imagine “an eye for an eye” type becoming a Stoic or a Buddhist because vengeance isn’t working out so well for them. Or, just as plausibly, one could imagine a committed Buddhist finding that their patience, equanimity, and forbearance doesn’t advance the good, as they conceive it, in fractured and fractious social worlds. One could imagine the conversion situation as minimalist, as akin to the way a person might introduce one kind of foreign cuisine—tacos or pho, let us suppose—into their dietary rotation because they like it. Here, the picture is of a person who becomes a stoic (small “s”) or buddhist (small “b”) as far as anger goes but changes nothing else. I find the Stoic mantra “Be indifferent to indifferent things” very useful, but I am not any kind of capital “S” Stoic. Modern people sometimes do this sort of thing, borrow a cuisine or fashion or practice from an alien tradition because they like it or it looks good on them or it improves mental or moral health. Another possibility is wholehearted conversion in either direction, where everything changes—basic beliefs, morals, the economy of emotions. One becomes a different person or different kind of person, as we say. Doing this incurs large costs in identity and thus probably also in one’s important social relations.
Another thought is that in multicultures at any given time, and thus right now, a variety of anger norms are competing in the usual undisciplined, causal fray governed by multifarious relations of political power, economic power, status quo power, ethnic and racial alliances, gender power, and class power, but without reflection on the relative merits of these different ways. What happens in such multicultural worlds? What should happen?
There is an answer to what will happen. Batja Mesquita and her colleagues (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, and Kim 2011; Jasini, De Leersnyder and Mesquita 2018; Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016) have studied exactly this question. They write: “Consistently, immigrants’ emotional fit with the new culture’s emotions could be predicted from the number of years spent in the new culture and number of contacts with majority members of the new culture. This was true for Turkish immigrants in Belgium and Korean immigrants in the United States” (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016, 8).
Call this empirical regularity dominance. Dominance says, all else being equal, when there is competition among scripts for moral emotions such as anger, there will, in relatively short order, be dominance of the majority script,4 the one already in place. In research in Belgium, the findings are that in three generations immigrants abide the dominant scripts.
One worry about dominance is that anger in particular has certain specific features that can make the anger norms and scripts move in an angrier direction when a particularly fiery variety meets cooler kin (imagine that Buddhist and Bara meet at Ellis Island, enacting their particular anger norms). Anger is a particularly noisy emotion. It calls attention to itself like a thunderbolt or a tornado in a way quite unlike other emotions. Noisiness asks for the stage, and it sometimes wins all the attention. This is one reason why how we do anger, for any “we,” matters to public affairs and social philosophy. Other familiar emotions—including very powerful ones like sadness, sorrow, grief, happiness, and joy—invite others to witness or share empathically. But anger is different: it invites, often commands, the other to engage. It hopes in its payback and pain-passing modes to see the mayhem, the wound, the damage.
So, besides the worry that dominance is a purely causal mechanism, not a rational mechanism, one might worry that the angry folk especially, those who enjoy revenge and passing pain and making scenes that call more attention to themselves than they deserve, will win the battle of the anger norms in competition with those who think that revenge and pain-passing anger are bad. Why? Because they know the smirk of a satisfied predator, and that look has its appeal. Cruelty tantalizes. Extracting blood from the other is food for the ego. Bad behavior gets attention, and behavior that gets attention is normalized and emulated. We are animals that imitate, and norms are contagious (Christakis 2019).
The Moral Self Effect
Does dominance carry any moral weight independent of and in addition to whatever causal weight it carries? Here is an idea that might provide reason to assign some extra weight to the norms that are constitutive of the ecological landscape that one was raised in or now lives in—the one that one is “used to,” as we say. The idea makes use of recent work on the so-called moral self effect.
What makes for identity is complex. My identity consists of my autobiographical self, the story I know from the inside about the course of my life. Other aspects of my self include my distinctive personality profile, my career, special relations, my aesthetic sense, my “looks,” my body, and my moral sense. Nina Strohminger, Joshua Knobe, and George Newman (2017) find that, across several cultures (American, Russian, Indian Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, and Singaporean), a person’s sense of themselves as the same person over time attaches especially to the aspects of themselves that the person judges as morally most important, their core values, their moral compass. In experimental manipulations, a person is judged first and third personally to have changed more if they descend morally, that is, get morally worse, than if they become temperamentally chill after being a high-strung or anxious type, or if they lose a career or a spouse or a memory of their childhood. Interestingly, if the direction of the moral change is in the direction of becoming a saint or a bodhisattva à la Saint Augustine or Siddhartha Gautama, rather than a sinner, the moral self effect doesn’t kick in, and the person judges themselves to be the same person, just an improved version of themselves!
With respect to the present topic, one implication is that asking anyone who is well socialized in their morals to change their moral beliefs is a big deal, and thus it is a big deal to ask anyone, at least any adult, to change their heartfelt beliefs about the legitimate contours and norms of anger. Possibly, if one were to be convinced by my view that payback anger and pain-passing anger are bad, and if one also felt that this called for a self-change in the direction of the saints, one would not be subject to the disturbing, self-alienating kind of moral self effect the psychologists claim to find. But that is a lot of “ifs.”
The most plausible conjecture is that the moral self effect is real in WEIRD cultures and also in some non-WEIRD ones. If I am right that multicultures are often sites of competitions among multifarious norms, including in the present case, norms of anger, then some people are being asked to change their norms all the time. We know from dominance that, all else being equal, majority norms will win causally. But any equilibrium dominance achieves will be simply causal, not reflective, unless simply observing how dominance works is considered to be a species of reflection, which seems like a trick. If we assign weight to minimizing suffering caused by losing one’s moral self—or dramatically changing one’s moral self—per the moral self effect, then we could (I guess) say that dominance achieves that by the majority norms winning but only gradually. That is, dominance as a causal regularity shows a kind and gentle side, because it does not immediately demand assimilation. The first generation of a subculture or immigrant group is not required to instantly alienate themselves from their identity-constituting emotion norms and scripts. They are given generational time to make the necessary adjustments.
Superwide Reflective Equilibrium: A Method or a Kind of Madness?
Cross-cultural philosophy opens up horizons of possibility. Attention to diversity inside multicultures also opens up horizons of possibility. Often, in deploying the standard methods of ethics, we do not pay attention to the diversity in our midst, intracultural diversity, depending instead on the use of the royal “we,” which names the dominant cultural form of anger norms, or perhaps, even less representatively, the dominant philosophical tendencies in the academy.5
Can cross-cultural, empirically informed philosophy do more than this? One thought is that it permits us to see cross-cultural consensus if it is there, perhaps something like what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.”6 But in the case of anger, there is no such consensus.
Superwide equilibrium—if there could be such a thing—is the procedure of allowing all the best normative thinking across cultures, and all the best philosophical and scientific theorizing, to be brought into the mix in order to settle on the best way of living and being, or to settle on which ways of living and being are contenders for us, or “on a par,” and which ones are not good for us or not good at all.7 What exactly would superwide equilibrium be? How could it work? What would it do? I do not see how, from any cultural perspective in which there is great diversity of norms and diversity of rationale for those various norms, it could work either to locate an equilibrium or, what is a different matter altogether, to find the truth. The data are too much of a cacophony. And many sociomoral truths are created, not found. There are many truths about money and democracy, but both are entirely human inventions. Morality is also an invention. We created it to meet certain needs, especially the need to live convivial social lives.
What superwide reflection can do is something less than finding a universally acceptable equilibrium, or the truth about morals and how to do emotions, given the truth. What it can do is open up the possibility space for reflection on both our own anger norms and their rationale, and those of various others. For a people, and at a time, such reflection is an enormously useful tool. It is protection against being “imprisoned by our own upbringing.”
Conclusion: Changing How We Do Anger in Multicultures
This concludes what I have to say about anger here. Over the course of the first part of this book, I have offered a mix of considerations, reminders, and observations for why I think anger is causing trouble, and which kinds are especially problematic. I have offered some findings from cultural psychology, cross-cultural philosophy, and anthropology as a methodological resource for exploring and imagining ourselves into different and better ways of doing anger, even by our own lights.
Two final thoughts: I have tried to reveal how much variation there is in how different people do anger, and why they do it the ways they do. There is not even universal agreement about what anger is. Among WEIRD people, anger is an approach emotion (“I’m coming at you”) followed by escalation in some, but not all, WEIRD cultures, but it is an avoidance emotion followed by de-escalation in others (“You are angry, I’m leaving the room—possibly before I respond in kind”).
What is universal is that anger is unpleasant; it has negative valence for the person who experiences it, and it is unpleasant for the recipient, producing pain, fear, anxiety, and sadness. There are exceptions who find giving and receiving anger and the pain it embeds enjoyable: bloodthirsty sadists and masochists. But normally anger is negative. Good sense suggests, therefore, that the best world is one in which anger doesn’t arise—where I don’t want to hit you or leave the room.
There are two ways that anger could go extinct, or, if not extinct, go quiet. It could become obsolete in a world in which people found a way to do without anger altogether by developing other ways to call attention to obstacles, wrongs, and injustices. If the substitute was sadness or shame, we’d be saved from some of the noisiness of anger. But sadness and shame are still negative, so there is no gain in that regard. Anger would also be unnecessary in a world in which there were no obstacles, wrongs, and injustices to get angry about, or in which obstacles, wrongs, and injustices were rare. Neither world is in the immediate offing. In the meantime, both strategies can be developed. Extinguish the genuinely bad varieties of anger, payback and pain-passing, while raising standards on what we take as good reasons for anger (because you want something or because the cosmos is not attentive to your every wish are not good reasons), and, at the same time, work to reduce, and eventually end, the kinds of selfishness, inconsiderateness, wrongs, and injustices that reliably and reasonably make us angry. The moral arc of the universe is long. And we can bend it.