Beyond the Blood That Has Filled the Eyes of the World
Aydin Areta

“When the eyes of the world are filled with blood, we must look at the world with eyes that are open and clear.” — Gandhi, as rendered here.

The eyes of the world are filled with blood. How difficult it is, at such a moment, to look with open and clear eyes.

Martha Nussbaum, one of the major contemporary philosophers in moral philosophy, attempts in her book *Anger and Forgiveness* to answer an important question: what is the relationship between anger and justice? Is anger a fundamental necessity in the struggle for justice?

In my view, the question she raises is one of the most important questions of our time, and perhaps the great question of every generation that wants to struggle for justice within its society, because anger and the pursuit of justice appear to be deeply intertwined concepts in our minds.

When we experience injustice, a part of our being fills with anger and seeks “an eye for an eye” as the image of justice fulfilled. A bullet for a bullet. Death for death. Destruction for destruction.

The truth is that our anger before injustice is always directed toward retaliation: the desire to see the person who maliciously caused us suffering suffer in turn; the desire to destroy them so that we may be made equal to them and no longer stand beneath them. It does not matter that what was first destroyed cannot be restored. What matters is that we are not the only ones who have been destroyed.

Anger always has only one eye. Anger always sees one thing and wants one thing. For anger it does not even matter if everything is destroyed along the path toward what it sees and desires. Anger is profoundly incapable of seeing the larger picture that justice requires if a better world is to be realised.

Justice is a noble and expansive concept, and in my view great concepts cannot be emptied of their inner connectedness. Justice cannot be empty of love, freedom, magnanimity and compassion, nor can it take any path other than building a better world. Anger is one of our oldest basic emotions and belongs to what is described here as our ancient brain, a level we share completely with reptiles and animals. Reducing justice to anger diminishes human humanity and fails to understand the entire path we have travelled through evolution and the development of consciousness. Justice cannot be realised through destruction, and a justice that travels along such a path is nothing more than the infernal fruit of anger.

Continued… 👇🏻