Agape Anger

(2019. I took a great course on Martin Luther King and the broader Civil Rights Movement. The course asked a lot of tough questions about how to react to injustice. In this paper, I talk about the relationship between anger and love. I thought this essay turned out really well, and I’m proud of it. I think it is highly relevant today.)

“Agape Anger”

Discussions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and ideals of conscientious citizenship with regards to oppression inevitably come to a related set of seemingly irreconcilable positions: anger or acquiescence, hatred or love, violence or oppression. The perceived gulfs between these believed binaries has long undercut the African-American struggle for equality in America, dividing leadership on how to pursue the project of overcoming oppression. Facile history textbooks often create palatable narratives that place the “angry” Malcolm X in opposition to the “loving” Martin Luther King. This is unjust to the complexities of both thinkers, who both grappled deeply with the issues of anger, love, and oppression. Anger and love are both powerful human feelings that have the ability to motivate groups to take political action. However, at first glance these two feelings seem to be in opposition; anger is typically associated with violence and hatred, while love is thought to require nonviolence and forgiveness. In this essay I will complicate this binary view, and, as Martin Luther King liked to do, attempt to reconcile these two seeming antitheses into a creative synthesis. Ultimately, while anger and love can be in tension due to the all-too-human tendencies of anger to lead to hate and retributive violence, agape love is the greater power, which can co-opt and subsume morally justified anger into a constructive force in order to create the “beloved community” MLK dreamed of, in which all people democratically forge relationships free of unnecessary division.

The success of Martin Luther King in leading a nonviolent civil rights movement is evidence of the motivational power present in love. King’s famous philosophy of nonviolence is predicated on his central ethic of agape love. Agape love, for King, is a transcendent, universal, and disinterested love, a love that cares for every human being by their virtue of being a human being, regardless of reciprocity. Agape love is based in the truth of human beings’ social nature, their inherent existential interconnectedness and mutual responsibility. King writes in “An Experiment in Love” that “[a]gape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated… to the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself,” (Testament 20). Agape is “love in action… love seeking to preserve and create community,” which is essential for human flourishing because “[c]reation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community,” (20). Agape is thus both a universal and an active love; as Myisha Cherry writes, “[a]gape thus has an aim: restoration of the beloved community,” (Cherry 2). King is careful to note that, while his notion of agape is grounded in the tradition of Jesus Christ, one needn’t have a specific religious affiliation to believe in it; they must simply “believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness,” (Testament 20), some gravity that promotes greater manifold syntheses of the universe’s parts, some force or natural tendency promoting justice, progress, emergence, equilibrium; this does not require a specific god; this belief can be sparked by the beauty of physics and mathematics, or the magnetic power that pulls you into the eyes of an enchanting stranger across the room. Agape love can bring people together to work for progress, justice, and the creation of a more whole community, King’s beloved community free of division.

While anger and love seem to be in tension, there is no denying the natural emotional power of anger as a political motivator. Anger is a basic human feeling, and its purpose is to spur action against the aggravating object or force. We can see the political power of anger expressed in the Boston Tea Party, in the activism of John Brown, and in the racial backlash that helped motivate Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Anger is often an easier emotion to tap politically than love, because it speaks to our basest impulses to embrace tribal narratives, scapegoats, masculinity, and narrowly understood self-interested justifications for our actions. Malcolm X’s famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech effectively invoked anger in order to motivate his listeners, and it also reveals how anger can be in tension with agape love. While this later Malcolm had evolved significantly away from his earlier Nation of Islam phase where he expressed hatred for “white devils,” his anger still led him to conclusions that ran counter to the demands of agape love. His Black Nationalism, contra MLK’s nonviolent activism, abandons the dream of a beloved community: he says that “[w]hat you and I is for is freedom. Only you think that integration would get you freedom, I think separation would get me freedom,” (Ballot or the Bullet). His justifiable anger led to a desire to sever all hope for an integrated brotherhood of man, a rejection of MLK’s belief in the power of love to unite all. MLK, like Lincoln, recognized that true freedom comes from understanding and embracing our inescapable interconnectedness, rather than never-ending secession. Separation is an illusion; biologically, the survival of the species takes evolutionary primacy over survival of the individual; we are human before we are individuals. MLK believed that hatred, violence, severance from one’s fellow man, and similar impulses are all futile and destructive, running counter to the universal arc towards integration, justice, and love. He said famously that to “meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding,” (Experiment in Love 17). Hatred and violence, due to our inherent interconnectedness in agape love, harm the internal spirit of both hater and hated; they simply create more imperfections in the flow of nature, more wretched human divisions, creating a cascading tragedy; “[a]long the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate,” (19). Anger, as associated with hatred and violence, clearly has tensions with agape love. However, it is also undeniable that anger is a natural, justifiable, and human response to the evils of oppression; as James Baldwin said, “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time” (Baldwin 94). Can this natural and motivational force of anger ever be reconciled with the demands of agape love to constructively build the beloved community?

Readings from Martha Nussbaum and Myisha Cherry point a way forward by unpacking our understanding of “anger.” These two authors are able to separate anger from hatred and violence. First, we can differentiate “anger” and “hatred.” Cherry cites Audre Lorde, who wrote that “[h]atred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change… Anger— a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred— an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else,” (Lorde). Hate wishes for elimination, destruction, separation; according to Nussbaum, it is the binary opposite of agape love, because it wishes for the elimination of the whole human rather than the bad action. However, anger is not necessarily destructive; grieving the distortions between peers, the angry desire change, not necessarily separation. “When anger does not show concern for the moral improvement of others, refuses to respect others, and excludes them from the moral community it communicates at best self-love and, at worst, hatred, including self-hatred. Then we have reasons to view such anger as morally suspect. However, truly moral anger in fact shows concern for the moral improvement of others, respects those others, and aims to reform and repair the moral community,” (Cherry 6). Thus, anger can lead to hatred, but “truly moral anger” avoids this trap. We can further refine our understanding of “truly moral anger” by using Martha Nussbaum’s framework. She distinguishes between “garden-variety anger,” which demands retribution, and “Transition-Anger,” which “has the protest part of anger without the payback part” because the “payback idea does not make sense,” since hurting the perpetrator never truly heals the victim (Nussbaum 107). Transition-Anger can also align with agape love because it is oriented towards construction rather than destruction, like a good parent’s anger at their child. We can see how this parallel’s Cherry’s “truly moral anger.” One last qualification Nussbaum adds here is that Transition-Anger must be “well-grounded,” which means that the “anger is right about what has occurred, about its wrongfulness, and about its seriousness,” (Nussbaum 109). This echoes Baldwin’s call to avoid useless anger.

This refined understanding of anger allows Myisha Cherry to argue that justified moral anger is not only compatible with agape love, but can be an essential expression of agape love. Anger at injustice can express agape love if the aims of anger are constructive for the whole, if the anger is oriented toward preventing future wrongdoings and reforming the wrongdoer. Well-grounded moral anger at injustice can express agape love for both the victim and the perpetrator of injustice in our messy and imperfect world. Anger “expresses respect for the wronged party” (Cherry) by refuting the wrongdoer’s implicit claim that the victim does not matter. It also is a form of respectful criticism of the wrongdoer, which urges them to improve as a member of the community; Cherry further argues that when we hold people to account with moral anger, “we recognize them as moral agents; as humans who have commitments and responsibilities and who act in the world.” We affirm that their actions matter to the whole, and, in the interest of that mutually participatory whole, encourage them to take responsibility. This all is productive of the “beloved community,” and it “expresses the interrelatedness of [our] lives,” (Cherry). As stated in paragraph 2, agape love essentially “means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated.” Anger can express agape love by inciting actions to improve relations within the imperfectly interconnected community of man.

Agape love and anger are thus ultimately not in tension; in fact, anger has an important role to play in the emergence of the beloved community of agape love out of our flawed and unjust human existence. This is exactly the synthesis Martin Luther King strove for— to subsume justifiable anger at injustice into the creative, loving channel of the nonviolent protest movement. Anger is a powerful motivator, but for King, it had to be corralled into nonviolent, non retributive expressions tempered by love; this is Nussbaum’s “Transition-Anger,” which she notes as present in all three major nonviolent protest movements of the 20th century (Gandhi’s, King’s, and Mandela’s). For King, agape love reminds the angry that they seek “to defeat the unjust system, rather than individuals who are caught in that system” (Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience) because an “element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy” (Strength to Love). The oppressor contains good as well as evil, and King’s agape wants to reach what is good in order to build the beloved community without excising any human from it. King believes that we “must look lovingly at our oppressors and say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” (Strength to Love). It is ignorance, rather than pure evil, that agape-tempered anger fights. This is clearly relevant to anyone today who feels anger at injustice, especially anger at those with whom we share a democratic system. Since only the oppressed can forgive the oppressors, and because forgiveness is an essential act of love that makes forging the beloved community possible in a world full of moral debts, King actually places a uniquely difficult burden on black Americans. He says that “[s]ince the white man’s personality is greatly distorted by segregation, and his soul is greatly scarred, he needs the love of the Negro,” (An Experiment in Love). This is a radical position that many black Americans may take issue with; as a white American, I, too, would feel uncomfortable asking my black fellow citizens to take responsibility for saving the souls of the very people who have oppressed them. A more straightforward, reactionary anger seems a more understandable reaction to oppression. It is hard to ask those who have been hurt by hatred to not hate in retaliation; it goes against basic instinct. Yet the burden King places on black Americans does ring with a certain narrative beauty, in the story of the “arc of the moral universe.” The group that has had to bear the brunt of humanity’s recent evils could finally, messianically, bear its greatest love, too, to the mountaintop; for someone who believes in ideals of love and democracy and human brotherhood, this would make black Americans the ultimate heroes of the American story, the story of the slow forging of the beloved community. “Blessed are those…”