by Rachel Robison-Greene
These days, there is a common unpleasant routine in the lives of well-informed, civic-minded individuals. They wake up in the morning, check the news, and are immediately bombarded with stories about events in the world that elicit strong negative emotions such as grief, fear, helplessness, and anger. In such disturbing times, it seems as if a person’s mental health cannot be maintained under the trauma assault to which they are subjected daily. It is unreasonable to suggest that we all simply feel different emotions than those that we feel—what we feel in a given moment is not something that can be consciously controlled. That said, though we may not be able to change the emotions themselves, it might be possible for us to change the emotional climate we occupy; we could feel fewer negative emotions simply by consuming less news. Is this something a responsible citizen can do? Is it a defensible form of anger management? Is anger an appropriate response to injustice, or ought we to try to banish it from our emotional repertoire?
The ancient Stoics maintained that anger is a destructive emotion that gets in the way of the thing that is actually important and, in a meaningful way, up to us: the cultivation of virtue. In his treatise, On Anger, Seneca writes,
Some of the wisest of men have in consequence of this called anger a short madness: for it is equally devoid of self-control, regardless of decorum, forgetful of kinship, obstinately engrossed in whatever it begins to do, deaf to reason and advice, excited by trifling causes, awkward at perceiving what is true and just, and very like a falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes.
In her book Anger and Forgiveness, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum also advises that we ought to avoid anger. She argues that anger is almost always normatively incoherent. She sees it as backward-looking insofar as it encourages the person who lingers in it to focus on some past perceived harm. She argues further that anger frequently involves a payback wish—a strong desire for the person who has done wrong to compensate for the harm they’ve done. She says,
The road of payback makes the mistake of thinking that the suffering of the wrongdoer somehow restores, or contributes to restoring, the important thing that was damaged. That road is normatively problematic because the beliefs involved are false and incoherent, ubiquitous though they are. They derive from deep-rooted but misleading ideas of cosmic balance, and from people’s attempts to recover control in situations of helplessness.
Nussbaum does not object to what she calls “transition anger.” In this state, we can acknowledge that wrong was done. However, she argues that we ought to move quickly from transition anger to a forward-looking state that is more productive. She argues that we ought, instead to be motivated by “unconditional love.” She counts among her influences in this regard figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On political anger, she says,
…when there is great injustice, we should not use that fact as an excuse for childish and undisciplined behavior. Injustice should be greeted with protest and careful, courageous strategic action. But the end goal ought always to remain in view: as King said so simply, “A world where men and women can live together.” Building such a world takes intelligence, control, and a spirit of generosity…[it requires] a patient and forbearing disposition to see and seek the good rather than to harp obsessively on the bad.
The position for which Nussbaum argues sounds lovely but some might think it misses what is important about negative reactive attitudes. If I wake in the morning to the news that human beings who are in my country legally have been deported for disagreeing with the current administration, is the appropriate response unconditional love? When I learn that my neighbor has arbitrarily lost her job as a federal worker, do I resemble the picture that Seneca paints of the angry person?
they burst into scarcely intelligible talk, they often clap their hands together and stamp on the ground with their feet, and their whole body is highly-strung and plays those tricks which mark a distraught mind, so as to furnish an ugly and shocking picture of self-perversion and excitement.
Or, instead, is my anger an appropriate responsible to the disrespect displayed for both the person I care about and the democratic institutions that have been designed to protect us?
When I come to work to learn that legislation has been passed mandating that, as a professor, I only teach certain “approved” material, or that our funding will be cut and some of my colleagues fired, or that support services for minority populations have been both eliminated and banned, am I obligated to move quickly out of “transition anger” into another state?
The philosopher Myisha Cherry points out that arguments such as those offered by Seneca and Nussbaum treat all forms of anger as if they are the same. Cherry suggests that there is a kind of rage—she calls it “Lordean rage” in honor of the poet and essayist Audrey Lorde—that is well-grounded, forward-looking, and crucial for social change. She describes Lordean rage,
As the title of Lorde’s influential essay “Uses of Anger” suggests, anger has its benefits. And Lordean rage is useful if it is focused with precision and translated into needed action. In this way, Lordean rage is metabolized anger—the “virtuous channeling of the power and energy of anger without the desire to harm or pass the pain.” It is a call to “fight injustice and respect the reality of one’s anger without being destroyed by it.”
As Cherry is careful to emphasize, the kind of anger present here is not Nussbaum’s transitional anger. Instead, it is transformative anger. This is the kind of anger that is often needed to motivate meaningful social change. One foundational feature of this kind of view is that there are aptness conditions for emotions, and for moral emotions in particular. This is just another way of saying that sometimes our emotions are appropriate and sometimes they are inappropriate for the circumstances in which we find ourselves. In cases of injustice, especially extreme injustice, anger and even rage are apt.
In fact, experiencing Lordean rage in response to injustice may be crucial to treating another person or group of people with respect and dignity. If someone does something horrible to you and I respond to that other person, not with anger, but with love, what message does that send to you? Lordean rage is important to expressions of solidarity. Through displays of Lordean rage, we can identify like-minded others who share the desire to fight for justice.
Indeed, it may be the case that the question of how angry a person, or, better, a group of people should get depends upon the severity and scope of the injustice. For instance, when an administration takes a sledgehammer to our democratic institutions, the citizens ought to get very, very angry.
Nussbaum and the Stoics offer meaningful and important advice about how to conduct ourselves in our personal lives. That said, the practical advice that is applicable for private behavior may not be equally advisable in certain aspects of one’s life as a citizen. Negative emotions are unpleasant, but there may be times when we’re obligated to experience them. The most popular dystopian novels involve placating the masses with a constant stream of happy-making devices. If citizens are always happy, it’s likely because, by some means or other, they’ve been convinced that it’s not their job to pay attention.
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