Giving up the game

I've given up the game, I've got to leave
That pot of gold is only make believe:
Treasure can't be found by men who search . . . .
--Bob Dylan

Martha Nussbaum, according to the Wikipedia article on her, "is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department."  I've been reading one of her books, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, which I guess is based on the John Locke Lectures she gave, in the spring of 2014, at Oxford University.  She's not very keen on anger as an emotion, I can tell you that.  If you're normal, and hate stuff, people and things, here is William Hazlitt "On the Pleasure of Hating" to endorse and explain your enjoyable pastime.  Nussbaum recommends the hatchet be buried, but I wonder whether this isn't too much like advising people against throwing up.  Not trying to make a colorful overstatement: both are essentially reflexes naturally selected to advance the cause.  If you don't vomit up the poison, you'll die before reproducing; and, if you don't get mad, you'll be trampled by the competition, including the one for suitable sex partners, so, to keep your genes alive, get pissed and screw.  That's our lizard brains, not Martha Nussbaum and her Aristotle and her Seneca, talking.  

On the other hand, here is Nussbaum talking--it's not as if stuff like what I'm talking about hasn't occurred to her.  She's just finished advancing the idea that "asymmetrical female helplessness" is a source of rage in women--she puts forward Euripedes' Medea as the archetype--before continuing:

Medea's story also suggests that where we encounter outsize male anger, we ought to ask whether helplessness lurks somewhere in the background.  American males are certainly privileged by contrast to females: but they are by no means secure.  What they are expected to control, on pain of dishonor, is so vast.  They must be high achievers, big earners, fit bodies. And they must always focus on status relative to other males.  The competitive struggle is exhausting, and almost never winnable.  Shame is the almost inevitable result, and shame can feed anger.

If her analysis is right (and I think she's on to something), the conclusion seems too modest: since "high achiever" is a comparative concept, there will always be someone out ahead farther to the right on the bell curve distribution of achievement status, so no success is ever enough, and the competition is more than just almost never winnable.  If you think of the bell graph of "degree of human flourishing," the left-hand side is like the Darwinian struggle for survival that I was describing, and the right-hand side is reserved for the struggles of Nussbaum's colleagues and acquaintances who have been hired by, or admitted to, the graduate and professional schools of the University of Chicago.  But it's all struggle and unhappiness from one dwindling tail of the curve to the other.  Here is Nussbaum in a revealing passage, perhaps unintentionally so:

We live in what is often described as a "culture of apology and forgiveness."  A cursory Amazon book search turns up scores of titles.  Most are works of popular psychology and self-help.  Frequently they couple the idea of forgiveness with that of a "journey" or a "road."  Taking this journey, usually guided by a therapist, the wronged person moves from some terrible place of pain to a lovely place of transfiguring happiness.  My favorite such title is Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.  Imagine that.  From the horrors of homelessness, and the anger one can imagine that life evoking in a young person, this same young person, embarking on the journey of forgiveness, arrives, at last, at the most coveted of all earthly destinations.

It seems that Harvard represents a kind of apotheosis, unless you've been there, in which case the aspirations of this year's applicants appear quaint.  The formerly homeless author, having graduated from the Ivy League, will discover unhappiness in the boardroom and the penthouse, too.  Maybe she should just withdraw from the competition and strive only to become a kind of 21st-century American Bodhisattva, eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, and watching the Twins when they're on Fox Sports North.  Byron Buxton, who almost always occupies the number nine slot in their batting order, is leading the major leagues in doubles.