“Anger pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law,” eminent American philosopher Professor Martha C Nussbaum told an audience at Victoria University of Wellington. But she conceded that “for all its ugliness [it] is a very popular emotion”.

Nussbaum was visiting Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Law to present its annual Borrin Lecture. Titled ‘Anger, powerlessness and the politics of blame’, her lecture dealt with how anger can lead us astray in political and everyday life.

The climate of anger and fear that currently troubles many liberal democracies around the world is nothing new, and can be traced back to classical times, said Nussbaum.

“The Greeks and Romans saw a lot of anger all around them, but … they did not embrace or valorise it. However much they felt and expressed anger, they waged a cultural struggle against it, seeing it as destructive of human wellbeing and of democratic institutions.

“I believe the Greeks and Romans [were] right – anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse, especially I think today, when fuelled by a lurking fear and a sense of helplessness.”

Despite millennia passing, our views today toward anger and justice are arguably less enlightened, she said. “The most popular position in the sphere of criminal justice today, at least in the US, is retributivism – the view that the law ought to punish aggressors in a manner that embodies the spirit of justified anger. And it is also very widely believed that successful challenges to great injustice need anger to make progress.”

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