Abstract
That the world is awash with resentment poses a genuine question for educators. Here, we will suggest that resentment can be better harnessed for good if we stop focusing on people and tribes and, instead, focus on systems: those invisible norms that often produce locked-in structures of social interaction. A “systems lens” is vast, so fixes will have to be an iterative process of reflection, and revision toward a more just system. Nonetheless, resentment toward the status quo may be an important element in keeping that otherwise tedious process going, with the caveat that resentment is only productive when it is combined with reason, and that, therefore, educators, rather than privileging participant reactive attitudes, ought, instead, to promote participant reactive reasoning, as the latter can be a genuine force for both personal and interpersonal growth, while the former might very well do the reverse.
Highlights
In his famous paper Freedom and Resentment (2005), Peter Strawson makes the case that we “mark” the freedom of others by evaluatively-tinged “participant reactive attitudes,” such as resentment (p. 8)
Resentment toward the status quo may be an important element in keeping that otherwise tedious process going, with the caveat that resentment is only productive when it is combined with reason, and that, educators, rather than privileging participant reactive attitudes, ought, instead, to promote participant reactive reasoning, as the latter can be a genuine force for both personal and interpersonal growth, while the former might very well do the reverse
All homo sapiens are born with the proclivity to divide those they meet into “us” and “them,” a fact supported by a vast amount of evidence in Joshua Greene’s book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2014). Greene argues that this finding should not be surprising, as tribalism affords humans a giant evolutionary advantage
Summary
In his famous paper Freedom and Resentment (2005), Peter Strawson makes the case that we “mark” the freedom of others by evaluatively-tinged “participant reactive attitudes,” such as resentment (p. 8). All homo sapiens are born with the proclivity to divide those they meet into “us” and “them,” a fact supported by a vast amount of evidence in Joshua Greene’s book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2014) Greene argues that this finding should not be surprising, as tribalism affords humans a giant evolutionary advantage. David Brooks, in his book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019) makes the plea that we ought to dampen down our tendency to cluster into tribes He argues that “Tribalists seek out easy categories in which some people are good and others are bad. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on a common foe.” Brooks describes tribalism as “a community for lonely narcissists” and that, these days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has better policies, but picking sides between “the saved and the damned” (p. 35)
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