Emma Green: What is anger?

Martha Nussbaum: A good place to begin is Aristotle’s famous definition. The basic ingredients of anger are:

(1) You think you’ve been wronged,

(2) The damage was wrongfully inflicted, and

(3) It was serious damage to something you care about.

Aristotle also thinks the damage is always a kind of insult—what he calls a down-ranking, or a kind of slighting that puts you lower in the scheme of things. I ended up saying that’s not always the case. However, I think that’s an important ingredient in a lot of anger that people have.

The last thing—and this is the crucial one, I think: Aristotle, and every other philosopher known to me who writes about anger, says that part of anger itself is a desire for payback. Without that desire, it’s not really anger—it’s something else.

Green: When you look at this year’s campaign—something like a Trump rally, for example—do you see a kind of collective anger?

Nussbaum: Oh, absolutely. Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness. People—and I think this is particularly true of Americans—don’t like to be passive. They like to seize control. I think what Trump has found, and very cleverly so, is that there’s a lot of helplessness out there in the middle of America: People who feel they’re not doing as well as they want; people who aren’t doing as well as their parents did. Jobs are going to China; jobs are going to other countries. He makes them feel that if they turn their helplessness into rage, they will accomplish something.

Of course, they won’t. People have this illusion that if they strike out they’ll accomplish something, but of course they won’t. They only accomplish something by having a smart idea about direction and policy. The violence that’s being fomented is not helping to formulate smart economic policies. It’s just unleashing dangerous rage in a way that might do great damage to the American people in the long run.

Green: How should policymakers think about helplessness?

Nussbaum: I think you have to give people a sense of the future, and a sense of hope. President Obama has been obsessed with that question, ever since before he started to run for office. The whole reason he called his second book The Audacity of Hope is that he knows that’s the key.

Green: Yet, here we are at the end of the Obama administration, and we’re seeing a lot of collective frustration and anger—from the Trump movement on one side to the Black Lives Matter movement on the other. Does that warrant a degree of cynicism about the power of “hope”?

Nussbaum: No, I really don’t think so. I do think there’s a lot of frustration, but also, at a local level, there’s a lot of hope, and I think America is so big and heterogeneous that you really shouldn’t look for hope only at the national level. I do feel in Chicago, the very fact that the whole corrupt police structure has been torn down, and an African American chief has been chosen to lead this kind of reform—the Black Lives Matter Movement brought that about. The fact that people had a voice, and their voice mattered—that was huge. I think all around the country you see things like that.