The American philosopher Agnes Callard seems to edge much closer to that logic in her essay ‘On Anger’ (2020), which sees the stubborn indelibility of anger as its defining characteristic. Anger, she argues, is as permanent as the offences that provoke it; steal from me, and you will have stolen from me irrevocably. Whatever restitutive efforts you might make to assuage my anger, the original theft cannot be undone; thus, ‘once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever.’
I have been crossing picket lines this week to teach my classes.
— Agnes Callard 🐘 = @agnescallard@zirk.us (@AgnesCallard) June 5, 2019
Am I in the wrong?
A philosophical emergency calls for an… EMERGENCY NIGHT OWLS
To paraphrase Socrates: let us try to understand the meaning of what is happening on our campus. pic.twitter.com/D2mk1eKw3U
Agnes was extremely upset that the divorce would harm their children, but she felt that the alternative was that she would become a bad person. “I thought that I would become sort of corrupted by staying in a marriage where I no longer felt like I was aspirational about it,” she said. Her friends and relatives suggested that she just have an affair, but that felt impossible. “It’s like you have this vision of this wonderful, grand possibility, and then you decide to just play at it, treating it like a vacation or something. It seemed like a desecration of that vision.”
Agnes has generally avoided speaking publicly about being autistic, in part because she worries that people will find it preposterous for her to use a label once closely associated with people who are nonverbal. But she feels that the diagnosis helps her understand her immunity to the pull of a certain received structure of meaning.
The consequences of the shift extend well beyond increased parental stress levels. When it comes to the question of whose job it is to conform to whom, the sign has gotten reversed. As a teenager coming of age in the 1990s, I watched the tide turn on homosexuality. From my vantage point, a lot of the change seemed to be driven by acceptance parenting: those who couldn’t stomach rejecting their children rejected their own homophobia instead. As acceptance parenting takes hold culturally, we find ourselves speaking more and more about what it takes to be a “good parent” and less and less frequently of the virtues of a “good son/daughter.” The more we expect the parents’ acceptance, the less concerned we are with children’s obedience.
As a birthday present to Robin we should all read his most recent blog post, which is outstandingly excellent even *for Robin.* https://t.co/tbWNyubAZ3 https://t.co/nXHFPjSzMa pic.twitter.com/nlctv5sFVJ
— Agnes Callard 🐘 = @agnescallard@zirk.us (@AgnesCallard) August 27, 2022