On Resentment, Indignation, and the Emotional Case for Political Diminution

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An understanding of the expectations of a given community helps inform where resentment and guilt ought to be targeted in times of crisis. This is hard when your community-of-reference is large.


In times of national crisis, emotions run high and influence policy debate at a disproportionate level to the norm. People who would otherwise consider themselves to be levelheaded, rational, and not influenced by their emotional feelings in matters of policy and reform are overtaken by rhetoric that plays on resentment, guilt, and indignation.

This certainly pollutes a lot of discussions, especially those in which the cost of broadcasting your opinion is essentially zero (e.g., on twitter of Facebook). It makes it feel like that the quality of debate has gone downhill and that we are marching towards a national Zeitgeist of immature pandering and childish accusations (although this is inaccurate). A few days after the crisis or tragedy, there’s usually a reactionary wave of people telling everybody else how valuable it is to be levelheaded and not allow ourselves to make rash decisions fueled by emotions.

The pendulum swings back and forth between these two camps — one fueled by righteous indignation and the other by cool rationality (or the desire to appear as such) — until the next crisis or tragedy changes the locus of attention to a new pet issue. It’s not uncommon to feel pigeonholed into one camp or another, forced to choose between appearing insensitive to watershed moments or looking like you can’t step back and stoically address serious issues.

What if both camps are wrong?


Emotions as Purposeful

There is no need to fall into a dichotomy of viewing emotions and rationality as being diametrically opposed. We can use the gut reactions we feel to events around us as being indicative of deeper values and expectations that we and the communities in which we live hold.

Emotions don’t just happen. They are the complex semi-instinctual responses to the world around us that arise out of an amalgamation of our upbringing and the continued flow of existence in the communities in which we live and work. Understanding from which points in the community they arose and how they are evolving is a useful tool for introspection and for interpersonal conflict.

This is especially true for a category of emotions that we can classify asreactive attitudes, those states of feeling and attitude which arise from the actions of another. Obvious examples are resentment, guilt, indignation, and a feeling of forgiveness.

Bishop Joseph Butler was one of the first to make this observation, albeit through a theological lens (as is the case for much of philosophy). In his Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel in 1827, he observed that emotions must have an end and a purpose if a purposeful God exists. Specifically, he addresses the issue of anger, an emotion commonly seen in Christian texts as sinful:

That passion [anger], from whence men take occasion to run into the dreadful vices of malice and revenge; even that passion, implanted in our nature by God, is not only innocent, but a generous movement of mind. It is in itself, and its original, no more than indignation against injury and wickedness: that which is the only deformity in creation, and the only reasonable object of abhorrence and dislike.

Anger plays a regulatory role in the community, Butler argues, and, so long as it is restrained and not allowed to grow into too sudden or strong an anger, can punish wrongdoing and disincentivize others form acting viciously. In Butler’s worldview, God has purposely given people an ability to feel anger to react with righteous indignation against sins and offenses. People are aware that others are capable of getting angry and thus regulate their behavior to minimize the probability of angering those near them.

Emotions as Mirrors of Our Expectations

Butler laid the framework for a new field of philosophy focused on the moral psychology of these emotions. More than a century later, British philosopher P.F. Strawson would explore the relationship between resentment and free will in his paper, “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson spends a good chunk of the paper focusing on the relationship between resentment and free will, which is a whole metaphysics debate unto itself.

Important to the discussion of emotions, Strawson observes (emphases mine):

The personal reactive attitudes rest on, and reflect, an expectation of, and demand for, the manifestation of a certain degree of goodwill or regard on the part of other human beings towards ourselves; or at least on the expectation of, and demand for, an absence of the manifestation of active ill will or indifferent disregard.

In other words, our reactive attitudes are reacting to expectations that we hold about the world around us. This is obvious enough through example. If somebody steps on your foot in the subway while clearly being aware of your existence, you feel resentment towards them because there’s an expectation of basic respect for personal space, even in places of public transit. If you see somebody step on another person’s foot in this fashion, you may feel indignation (resentment on their behalf). If you are the person doing the stepping and come to realize that you did it and that this is a violation of the expectations in the subway car, you may feel guilty.

This applies to the whole gambit of reactive attitudes (note that not all emotions are reactive attitudes, but all reactive attitudes are emotions). Forgiveness is a reaction to somebody atoning for their violation of expectations (there’s a whole slew of literature on the moral psychology of apology, forgiveness, and atonement and its implication in legal matters, I have an old article here).

The most common emotions we feel on a day-to-day basis are probably some form of resentment, indignation, and guilt. You see somebody not pick up after their dog on somebody’s lawn and feel indignation. You feel resentment at the thought of others not reacting in shock and disgust to a national tragedy. You feel guilt for saying something that contributes to a narrative that others expect you to contribute against. There’s also a positive flip-side in the reactive attitudes world — gratitude. You feel gratitude when somebody goes above and beyond the expectations you had for them. Theydid violate your expectations — just in a good way.

Expectations & Values: The Evolution of a Collective Moral Psychology

Our expectations are a reflection of the community in which we live and the values which we as individuals actively hold. They are, except in rare formal instances, not actively constructed by individuals. If you are playing a role, there are expectations that you are obligated to meet under threat of sanction, but these expectations are different from those informal ones that govern our actions on a day-to-day basis in the world at large.

These expectations are spontaneous orders — products of human action, but not of human design. They arise from many people carrying out their personally-held values in the world around them many times over. They are reinforced when people join, leave, and are ostracized from communities. The more exclusive the community, the more stringent and clear the expectations tend to be and the more closely they mirror the values of the people in that community. Expectations, then, are a reflection of the culture in which they develop.

FA Hayek observed this on his essay, “Cosmos and Taxis,”

the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims … are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented nor observed with any such purpose in view.

This is illustrated easily by comparing cultures. Two gay men joining hands and walking down the sidewalk garners different gut reactions from people in different parts of the world. In Venice Beach or San Francisco, these men hardly cause any different reaction than a man and his wife. In Mecca or Abuja, they would garner initial reactions so strong that others may act violently. These others acting violently see the men as violating an expectation of decency in their culture.

From the reinforcement of culture and individual actions and values arises a set of expectations that most people in a culture share. In fact, this is the defining characteristic of a culture. Members of the same culture share a set of expectations that lower the transaction costs for them to interact with each other. When two individuals share few or no values, it is very costly for them to interact with each other. The time and energy that it takes to figure out on which planes they can even discuss things is so high that they’re more likely to be drawn to stagnated disagreement before any discussion can even start.

It’s very easy for two people in the same church in southern Virginia to communicate with each other. It’s harder for two people from different parts of New York City to communicate with each other. It’s even harder for two Americans from drastically different parts of the country. They’re going to be more likely to disagree, to resent each other, and to make little progress than those with whom they share the same expectations about the world around them.

Understanding Emotions in a Political Context

The reactions of individuals and the collective reactions of communities to crises and tragedies are no structurally different than reacting to the jerk on the subway who steps on your foot. It’s no structurally different — but it can be a lot more complicated.

As soon as you extrapolate out from a very niche community of people who have chosen to be associated with each other (e.g., the church above) or out from a very generic context (e.g., bodily comfort on the subway), you run into the risk of conflicting expectations.

How you emotionally react to policy proposals and how your emotions influence your own policy proposals is a reflection of your values and expectations against the status quo set of institutions. If you find yourself angry at the legal system for allowing something to happen, your expectations of a legal system and the expectations reflected through the culture of the legal system differ. This is obvious.

But if you find yourself angry and resentful after a major event, it is more productive to take a step back and ask, “angry at whom?”

Where your anger is directed is indicative of your own expectations that you hold about that individual, organization, or group. If you don’t know at whom or what you feel anger, ask yourself what the expectations you hold about the given context are and how they have been violated.

Similarly, if somebody angrily disagrees with you about how to address the problem, chances are you hold entirely different expectations about the world around you. You are the two people mentioned above acting from foundations of entirely different reasoning and expectations. The cost of engagement for both of you is so high because of your lack of shared expectations.

And there’s the rub.


The Desire for Easy Answers in Times of Urgency & the Case for Political Diminution

For the two individuals above to have a fruitful discussion on issues of communal importance, they need to actually be members of the same community. There needs to be some kind of expectation they can both come back to that is less general than universals like “do not murder” and “do not steal” and from which they can work forward to recount where the wrongdoer did wrong and what led them to do wrong.

This isn’t simply the same as a victim and a wrongdoer getting together and coming to a point of apology and forgiveness. This is about institutional changes that affect both individuals on different ends of the seesaw. It’s about, “how do we arrange the rules of the game in such a way that make costs high in areas we want to discourage and costs low in areas we want to encourage?” If two groups don’t have shared expectations as to how people are supposed to act, they are not capable of asking the question, “how ought people to act?” beyond the universals.

Any attempt at discussion just leads to more polarization. As people go in to discuss the crisis and how to respond, their expectations that others share their basic assumptions are violated and they come to resent the other party. They view the other party’s proposals as an attack on their very way of life and culture. The other party views the attacked as bullheaded and backwards. The divide furthers.

There are no easy answers in this case. The disagreement doesn’t come down to simple policy differences — it comes down to a fundamental question of culture and the expectations set by culture. There are at least two answers, neither of which are particularly easy.

Change the Culture

The first is the focus of most theories of social change. Changing the culture to be at a point where the other parties share your basic assumptions is one way to go. Though they may not immediately share the same policy conclusions as you, if you share more expectations about how the community ought to operate, then you have less ground for disagreement and cut off the vicious circle of resentful policy argument.

Recall, though, that cultures are spontaneous orders, not designed orders. Changing culture takes a really long time and active attempts to design it usually result in worse-off solutions than allowing it to evolve through individual actions (recall the attempts at cultural redesign behind the French Revolution and The Great Leap Forward). Even cultures that look really, really bad are oftentimes the least-bad of all available options. Although one can imagine a better cultural option, there’s information wrapped up in the decades, of not centuries of cultural evolution.

This isn’t to say that one should not try to change cultures they view as harmful or bad — but that one should be skeptical of sweeping attempts at rebranding and redesigning culture. The best place to start is with oneself and one’s close circle of friends.

This is almost like recklessly redesigning code in a project with many others. If you move too many variables in one direction, you aren’t sure where new changes are going to pop up. It’s best to make changes on your section and show others how it is a better way of doing things.

Change the Size of the Community

The other option is to change the political community. This is only an option in disagreements where formal institutions like a government include groups of people with such radically different cultures that they cannot possibly come to agreement on issues.

Under this paradigm of change, we recognize that the disagreeing parties are too fundamentally different to cluster in the same policy discussions and instead group them into policy discussions with other parties more similar to each other.

This is one of the basic ideas behind the advantages of smaller political communities, balanced with a sense of federalism connecting them lowering the barriers to exit for those who disagree. Madison (rightly) argued inFederalist 10 that a large and diverse republic allowed for different factions to balance each other and out prevent any one faction from gaining strength. It also makes the political landscape so drastically diverse that no discussion can end fruitfully.

George Clinton (rightly) countered that such a large political entity would be useless as a tool for its constituents in Cato 3:

Whoever seriously considers the immense extent of territory comprehended within the limits of the United States, with the variety of its climates, productions, and commerce, the difference of extent, and number of inhabitants in all; the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and policies, in almost every one, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your posterity, for to these objects it must be directed: this unkindred legislature therefore, composed of interests opposite and dissimilar in their nature, will in its exercise, emphatically be, like a house divided against itself.

When two large groups in a large geographic political entity can make no progress in their discussions with each other, their cultures are so varied and different that it is best that the political institutions are split apart.

Breaking political institutions apart so that the base expectations of communities within the broader political community can be shared is not a call for violent revolution — in fact, it is a call to avoid any such violence. This allows groups to work to points of reconciliation and avoid the resentment of feeling like outsiders are undermining their culture and everything for which they stand. Assuming the barriers to exit are sufficiently low, people could leave a community that they feel does not share their own base values and join one that does. This doesn’t preclude changing the culture, but it puts institutional barriers into place that diverts the need to do so too early or too drastically relative to the mean of the culture.

This isn’t a radical vision of breaking apart states based on resentment and indignation — it’s a radical vision of creating communities that are more conducive to gratitude, apology, and forgiveness. It does focus on smaller political communities — but political communities where diversity of values and opinions contribute to institutional experimentation and progress. As time progresses, more ideas will have an opportunity to be tried out, allowing other communities to see what does and does not work and encourage a process of creative destruction. Rather than stalemate being the best thing that can come out of a discussion, institutional evolution will be.

It is a radical vision — but one that can only come once its recognized that our emotions are worth respecting in political discourse.


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