Anger and Forgiveness by Nussbaum Martha C.;

Author:Nussbaum, Martha C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

IV.The Middle of the Middle: Colleagues and Associates

We are not finished with non-grave wrongdoing, however. So far I have focused on strangers and on people whom we see only casually and rarely. Life, unfortunately, is much more complicated than that. We work and associate with many people whom we know pretty well. They are not intimates, and we are not in any relationship of deep personal trust with them, but we have other sorts of interdependence and even trust, and we have institutional relations that define norms and expectations. These norms are frequently violated. Sometimes our associates are irritating in chronic ways, and we don’t have the option of not associating with them. Indeed, since good comedy is usually based on character, there’s more good comedy to be made in what we can call “the middle of the middle”—that is, neither deep intimacy nor casual interactions with strangers—than in the more casual domain, something that good sitcoms have known since the hilarious anger of Gale Gordon as high school principal Osgood Conklin on Our Miss Brooks.

The workplace is not very intimate, but in it we pursue some of the most important projects of our lives.18 So it’s an odd place: you don’t really have any reason to trust your colleagues with your life, and yet, in a real sense, you have to. That oddness adds to the comedy (and at times the tragedy, but we’ll turn to that later).

The comedy of the workplace is an old story. And indeed, although in his serious philosophical works Seneca focuses on the casual—one gets the impression of a very lonely individual with no colleagues around him—his one comic work, a satire written after the death of the emperor Claudius, focuses on characters he knew all too well—the emperor, his freedmen, his lawyers, and other personae of the imperial court. And it shows Seneca as a man who was irritated by many things: by Claudius’s boring loquacity, his limp and stammer, his flatulence, and so forth—before we get to the serious damages to public well-being that occupy most of the work.19

Colleagues are different from casual associates because we have fewer options of not dealing with them. They are different from intimates in that we don’t exactly choose to deal with them, and we may actually not like them. So we need to figure out what to make of our relationship with them in the light of the many occasions of anger that are sure to arise, in a context in which we almost certainly will need to deal with them again. Seneca is right to urge us to avoid the presence of irritating people, and that can be a legitimate factor in the choice of a workplace. (And it is certainly a reason to avoid spending time in that larger workplace the Internet, which is sure to give ample occasions for anger.) But only up to a point, since one can’t really police a workplace around one’s own taste, or move every time one feels excessively irritated (though some people try this).

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