Anger, rage, fury: it seems like everywhere we look right now, we see rising temperatures, smouldering resentment, blood boiling, floods of emotion. From Trump to Brexit, Hindu Nationalism to Black Lives Matter, from Hollywood #MeToo to pandemic protestors, ISIS to white nationalists, Ukraine to Fox News, to my ongoing conflict with my unreasonably slow computer, it seems, as the historian Pankaj Mishra has argued, like we’re living in an age of anger.
The Atlantic has written that, ‘The politics of outrage is fast becoming a political norm’. Mother Jones has pinned the responsibility for our age of rage on Fox News, others have blamed social media, others racism, others inequality.
Turn on the television and you’ll quickly discover that the globe is red with rage. And that’s before we get personal. Below the political wrath there’s bar fights, mass shootings, domestic violence, road rage, and my irritation that the pizza’s turned up cold.
Every year Gallup produces a global emotions survey, asking 160,000 people around the world about their emotional experiences. Last year, the world was sadder, more stressed, and angrier than at any time since the report began 15 years ago. One in four people around the world reported feeling angry at some point in the previous day.
But what is anger? Does it have a point? Or would we be better off if we could eliminate it completely? I’m going to explore the history of anger – how it’s been thought about by people like the Stoics, Buddhists, Christians, the Enlightenment philosophers, and modern psychologists, look at its effects throughout history, a little bit of neuroscience, while trying to look at it personally too. I think we’ll come to surprising conclusions.
In many ways, when you think about it, the entirety of the history of civilization has been, at least in part, an attempt to overcome anger. The judicial system was developed to replace revenge. Politics is meant to be a replacement of the force of brute strength. Religion arose from the anger of the gods. Culture, music, and art, a way to come together, to channel our base instincts. Anger is likely contained in some way in every great work of literature, and much of philosophy.
Homer’s Iliad – the founding myth of the Western canon – has as its first line, ‘Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and murderous’.
And, I have to admit, I myself am an angry man. I rage at slow internet, my blood boils as I scroll through Twitter, I’m endlessly irritated by politicians, provoked by what I perceived as injustice, I think I’m hard done by, ask why it’s always me, I shout in traffic, got in scraps as a teenager, become infuriated with my video editing software, exasperated by the weather; I am an angry, stressed, over-worked, frustrated, self-involved, petty man.
Because while I’m well-aware that anger is dangerous, exhausting, and unnecessary, I’ve always had a suspicion that it also has its uses. That anger has also been used as a fuel, a motivator. I want to see if that is true.
When was the last time you were angry? What was it about? Do you think it’s always a negative? To be resisted? Or can anger be practical? Let’s take a look at rage.
Anger is complicated to investigate because it’s difficult to pin down. Its triggers vary, the experience of it changes from person to person, culture to culture, and interpretations of it vary. Anger is a continuum from mild irritation to red blooded murderous rage, from stubbing your toe to the psychology of warfare.
Social media, email, and phones mean we have new ways to be angered, to express anger, we have new triggers, new norms – technology shapes the way anger manifests.
And on top of this, for some anger can be righteous – god’s righteous anger, anger at injustice – and for others it is debilitating, unhealthy, or just never justified.
So with that in mind, let’s start at the beginning: the banishing of anger.
I love this book on oriental medicine that I read for a course on the history of medicine. It’s full of beautiful images, but this section on Tibetan medicine talks about the Buddhist belief about the three poisons – delusion, hatred, and desire – that are at the base of our suffering, and how that theory is also at the base of Tibetan medicine. I find it interesting because we know that stress and anger leads to heart disease, but we medicate. The basis of our medical system is pharmaceutical science. But thousands of years ago, Buddhists already knew that a healthy mind and a healthy body were implicated in each other.
Anger is fascinating historically because it is at the heart of the emergence of civilization. The Buddhists emerged around the 4-6th centuries BCE, and the Stoics the 3rd, and they were both suspicious of the external world, rejecting the idea that we should respond to things outside of us, outside of our control. It’s significant that these ideas were arising at the same time as the first large institutions: Greek democracy or the Mahajanapadas – the kingdoms of India.
In the Greek play-write Aeschylus’s play Oresteia, the goddess Athena decides to introduce courts to replace the cycle of revenge, bloodshed, and warfare that was plaguing Athens. Introducing a judicial system was a way to weigh evidence, to bring in third parties and juries.
Athena – the goddess of wisdom and war – comes into conflict with the Furies, the goddesses of revenge.
The Furies are depicted as doglike creatures, but they’re not exiled. In fact, Athena comes to an agreement with them; they’re to be incorporated into the system. The legal system must tame the passions. Athena promises that the Furies will be respected, honoured, and become a constructive force instead of a vengeful one.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes that the ‘Law gives a double benefit: it keeps us safe without, and it permits us to care for one another, unburdened by retributive anger, within’.
Nussbaum argues that anger is always problematic, emphasising the significance the Greeks placed on taming it in their myths.
For Buddhists, there are three poisons that cause our misery: hatred, desire, and delusion.
We hold onto these things as if they are justified, as if things outside of us – external events – cause them, but it is the poisons themselves that cause our unhappiness. If we let them go, if we live without attachment, without suffering, without desire for things that are material and fleeting, if we let go of our hate, we will find Nirvana.
The Stoics took a similar path.
For the Stoics, the problem with anger was that it corrupts our reason, distorts our judgement, that we should take the world as it is not how we want it to be.
Seneca said that, ‘some wise men have said that anger is a brief madness: for it’s no less lacking in self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of personal ties, unrelentingly intent on its goal, shut off from rational deliberation, stirred for no substantial reason, unsuited to discerning what’s fair and true, just like a collapsing building that’s reduced to rubble even as it crushes what it falls upon’.
For Buddhists, anger poisons. For Stoics, anger distorts. For both it has no uses. This idea, as we’ll see, has influenced a long tradition. And the idea that anger is irrational is probably the dominant interpretation still today.
This idea that anger is to be avoided completely was present in some surprising places throughout the 20th century. The Semai of Malaysia were described by anthropologists as a culture that put a premium on avoiding anger and violence. And the anthropologist Jean Briggs called her study of the Arctic Utku ‘never in anger’ because of their emphasis on never displaying anger in the harsh conditions they live in.
And I think the Buddhists and the Stoics have plenty of good advice.
Seneca said, ‘the wise man—calm and even-tempered in the face of error, not an enemy of wrongdoers but one who sets them straight— leaves his house daily with this thought in mind: “I will encounter many people who are devoted to drink, many who are lustful, many who are ungrateful, many who are greedy, many who are driven by the demons of ambition”’.
I find it useful to remind myself of this before I get in the car.
But I have always been suspicious that, while they have their uses, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of resignation.
For example the Greek stoic Epictetus wrote that, ‘It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united’.
Anger is, in a way, a yearning that what just happened was not present, that it didn’t happen. The key to happiness is to not yearn for what isn’t present. The cure is to be indifferent to the world, take it as it comes, accept the negatives.
But what happens when anger is triggered by injustice? What if anger motivates into us into action? What if yearning for something to be different is a powerful fuel for change? To begin to think about this, we need to ask what anger is.
Anger, like all emotions, is difficult to define. It is both near universal – a basic emotion, as psychologist Paul Eckman has influentially argued – and culturally, socially, geographically, and historically varied.
That is to say that the way anger is triggered, experienced, understood, and discussed differs from person to person and place to place, depending on whether you’re a Spartan or a 20th century priest, a king or a woman in the workplace.
But there are some near universals.
We often say things like anger ‘washes over me’, or someone was ‘overcome’ with fury, went ‘ballistic’, was incandescent and ‘flooded’ with rage.
When the experience of and causes of anger vary so much, when we have to describe a biochemical process with imprecise language, metaphors are a good place to start.
There’s an interesting reason the feeling of anger is often described with words like flood, overcome, fire, washes over, or has been described as a fuel.
It’s likely because our amygdala – that almond sized part of the brain that deals with emotion – does literally flood our body with chemicals that trigger a range of processes. It releases hormones, adrenaline, quickens the heart, signals norepinephrine to trigger the release of glucose to ramp up energy, sends oxygen around the body and tenses the muscles ready to fight or flight. In short, anger readies us for action.
The problem is that our amygdala is not a precise instrument. Sometimes it turns the tap on in the wrong situations. Stress is a short-term reaction to a scenario that has long-term health consequences. And anger, despite raising our energy levels, is meant to feel bad, because, as Spinoza noted, it’s a sign that we’re in a bad position, that the scenario we’re in might not be good for us, for our body, our future health, our well-being.
We can already see from the physiology that anger has its uses. Seeing injustice – police brutality, bullying, racism, a physical threat – ramps up our body ready to fight it, both physically and mentally.
And anger doesn’t just fuel us in the moment. The amygdala also encodes memories. Why is this important? Because if the amygdala sees something that makes us angry, fearful, happy, or sad we want to remember that, so that we can use that information in the future.
I bet you can think of many times you’ve been angry in the past, in ways that aren’t really relevant to your life anymore. Because evolutionarily speaking, we want to remember something negative happening to us, so that we can learn how to avoid it next time.
Okay, that’s the biochemistry. What about the psychology?
Psychologist Jerry Deffenbacher mapped out an influential model of anger in 1996. There is an event that sparks the anger – the precipitant. I got beeped at, my computer froze, I got a parking ticket. But there’s also the pre-anger state: I was tired, frustrated, in a rush, hungry, anxious, sad. Then there’s the appraisal, the way we think about what’s happened. Then the feelings in the body and mind. Then the way we express it.
Psychologist Ryan Martin talks about the precipitants of anger tending to come from three categories: injustice, poor treatment, or goal-blocking. Let’s run through what happens quickly.
The precipitant – a tweet, for example – hits your brain and amygdala, which then sends a signal to your hypothalamus – a small pea-shaped section at the base of your brain – triggering your sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as fight or flight.
Your hypothalamus then sends signals to the rest of your brain and body to start doing that ramping up. Energy is diverted from elsewhere.
But at the same time, a signal is sent from the amygdala to another part of the brain: the prefrontal cortex. This is the part responsible for planning and decision-making, advanced cognition, reason, and what’s called executive function.
All of this happens in a split second.
We then start thinking. Appraising the situation. Ruminating. We think about how unreasonable the situation is, how wrong it is, what words or actions we can use to respond, how to express the anger, whether to suppress it. What’s interested is that some of this seems to happen automatically, and at other times it feels very purposive.
Seneca agreed with this model. He thought the first impression, the precipitant wasn’t anger, because it could be calmed down. That there was an important, controllable, rational gap between the precipitant – the tweet – and the appraisal.
He said, ‘Suppose that someone has reckoned he was harmed, wants to take revenge, and then immediately calms down when some reason urges against it. I don’t call this anger, I call it the movement of a mind still obedient to reason; anger’s something that leaps clear of reason, that snatches reason up and carries it along’.
Seneca thought that anger was a judgement and so could be controlled. It would ‘yield to reason’ if we were patient with it.
He said, ‘we must struggle against the passions’ first causes. The cause of anger is a belief that one has been wronged, to which one ought not lightly give credence. One shouldn’t immediately assent even to what is clear and obvious, for some things that are false look like the truth. One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain’.
The great cure for anger, Seneca thought, was delay.
Martha Nussbaum agrees. While rejecting the usefulness of anger, she does acknowledge that, ‘I also recognize a borderline case of genuinely rational and normatively appropriate anger that I call Transition-Anger, whose entire content is: “How outrageous. Something should be done about that.”’
But if anger is so common, so universal, so biologically ingrained and evolutionarily useful; if, as Ryan Martin says, it’s a response to being treated unfairly, to seeing injustice, or to a goal we have being blocked, are there not instances when anger is justified? How could we interpret when anger is right or wrong?
Rather than dismissing them completely, Aristotle was one of the only ancient thinkers to take the middle road and accept emotions as part of being human.
Emotions, he thought, weren’t simply irrational, they were judgements about things that could be right or wrong.
He said that the trick with anger was to get angry ‘at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way’.
Mostly, though, he advised his readers to try to be unperturbed and to seek calm, ‘For the good-tempered man is not revengeful, but rather tends to forgive’.
The Christian tradition generally inherited a synthesis of the Stoic and Aristotelian view.
In the 4th century, the Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus warned that there were eight destructive thoughts that came from demons and lead to vices. They were gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, and boredom, vainglory, and pride.
Monks, he advised, were supposed to battle these demons in their souls. Later abbots like John Cassian had monks fight these demons one by one. He compared the vices to companies attacking in an army. Once one has been defeated another would come. It was important to always be on guard.
But the Christian worldview led to a contradiction: if sin came from the devil, was it not okay to be angry with the sin? And what about god’s anger? In the book of numbers it reports that, ‘the Lord’s anger burned against Israel, and He made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until the entire generation of those who had done evil in the sight of the Lord was destroyed’.
These contradictions began to be synthesised into Christianity.
The medieval priest and philosopher Thomas Aquinas built on Aristotle’s theories, also arguing that emotions could be good. He said it is right ‘to rise up against things contrary and hurtful’, and wrote that, ‘He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. … Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust’.
The Christian tradition took a nuanced view of anger because on the one hand, a good Christian is forgiving and turns on the other cheek, while on the other, sin was to be battled against and certain types of anger were righteous.
John Warren, a puritan minister in England, said that we should be angry at the sin not the sinner, that, ‘Sin is the proper, formal object of anger. Gods anger is only at sin’.
But the unprecedented eruption of violence during religious wars of the 16th and 17th century renewed the European concern with anger. There was a concern not just with anger as a personal sin, but with its effects as it was unleashed across Europe through warfare.
The reformation that started in Germany in 1517 and led to the wars of religion open an important question: who has the right to interpret god’s will? The Church? The priests? The ordinary man and woman at home with a bible? Who has the right to decide what makes god happy and makes him angry?
The idea that there’s such a thing as righteous anger leads to another question: what is the right anger? And more importantly, who is right to get angry?
When theologians began to justify anger, a pandora’s box opened. The philosopher Peter Singer has talked about an expanding circle of rights throughout history. Once the rights of man were declared by American and French revolutionaries, it was inevitable that someone like Mary Wollstonecraft would ask why those same rights didn’t extend to women.
In the same way, once anger had been characterised as right, it was inevitable that the circle would expand from the limits of the righteous anger of gods and kings and priests.
Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that the just, avenging god of Judaism and Christianity left the West a ‘treasury of rage’ to draw from. In other words, once you open the door to some rage being allowed – in the same way some are allowed rights – people start to ask why they are not allowed to be angry.
Psychologist Ryan Martin writes that, ‘one clear and consistent finding across the anger research literature is that not everyone gets the same right to be angry. While some people may be rewarded and praised for their anger, others are told to be civil, to calm down, and even lose credibility’.
It is in this way that anger is an explicitly political emotion.
Being told to calm down and be rational can be used as a tool used by the powerful to sanitise the emotional and temperamental complaints of the powerless or oppressed, and to paint the one who has the luxury to be calm and reasonable as calm and reasonable.
Take the trope of the angry ‘black beast’ in the 19th century, or the deluded woke eco-warrior today. One study found that African American women are 3 times more likely to be sentenced to anger management than white women.
And, of course, if anger is a response to slights on status, goal-blocking, and injustice, then the ‘treasury of rage’ Peter Sloterdijk talked about is more likely to be experienced by those in poverty, who face injustice, who have their goals-blocked by the difficulties of everyday life.
Douglas Jacobs has noted in the New York Times how many studies have linked discrimination to long-term health problems like increased blood pressure, heart problems, and increased mortality. In fact, 700 studies have made this link.
The likelihood of experiencing anger is mapped out unevenly across the world.
It is interesting that powerful and comfortable figures like Seneca and, as we’ll see, Descartes could discuss the emotions calmly and deliberatively through their writing, while those who don’t have that luxury experience their anger in the immediate, somatically, experientially.
Is it any wonder that philosophical writing becomes much more, well, philosophical, taking a dim view on anything experienced out in the world by those busied and troubled and caught up in the problems of day-to-day life? When anger and reason are separated by philosophers in their ivory towers, is something else going on?
The Enlightenment philosophes didn’t quite know what to do with emotions. Rationalists like Descartes and Spinoza tended to classify them as bodily so that they could be controlled by reason. They were both influenced by the Stoics, but Descartes believed that emotion was sent around the body by the ‘animal spirits’, which ‘move the body in all the different ways it is capable of’, but were ultimately answerable to our rational thinking soul.
Spinoza took a different view. Emotions could be controlled, but they weren’t simply bodily. They were in the mind too – they were both mental and physical. But he had a dim view of emotion unless it was used calmly and actively and followed the command of reason. Of anger he said, ‘Anger is the desire by which we are impelled, through hatred, to injure those whom we hate. [Anger is the emotion behind aggression. It includes the desire for revenge.]’.
Others took the emotions more seriously.
David Hume and Adam Smith both argued the emotions were essential to humans. In fact, we needed them to be moral. We needed to feel anger or pity in order to judge right from wrong. Hume said that, ‘We recoil from the person guilty of [cruelty]’, and we feel ‘a stronger hatred than we are sensible of on any other occasion’. This leads us towards moral action.
And most famously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the passions were a part of being human. He said he could be wrong about facts, but ‘I cannot go wrong about what I have felt, or what my feeling has led me to do’.
And while the philosophes of rationalism and reason had the most influence, Rousseau sparked a counter-revolution. He influenced the Romantics and the French revolutionaries, who placed an emphasis on feeling.
For the Romantics it was important to consult the inner voice, the impulse, the intuitions within. The German Romantic Novalis said that, ‘the heart is the key to the world and life’.
During the Enlightenment, on the one hand there was great culture of progress, of new urban life, of science, of discovery, of excitement about possibility, while on the other, there were those left behind, serfs, the dispossessed, the unaccounted for, who tended often to identify with Rousseau’s prescription to feel – anger, jealousy, rage.
Historian Pankaj Mishra writes that, ‘What makes Rousseau, and his self-described ‘history of the human heart’, so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection’.
The frustrated men and women who felt left out of the processes of modernisation began to organise new ways of seeing the political world: nationalism, socialism, anarchism, terrorism, fascism. In countercultures, anger was justified as a way of rebelling, a way of fighting, a way of advocating for freedom.
For the first time, anger became a political right for anyone, not just for gods, kings, and priests.
Mishra writes that, ‘During the French Revolution between 1789 and 1794, the place of anger in French discourse swelled markedly. A sample of many of the materials produced during that period shows a notable increase in the use of the term colère, the French equivalent of the English word “anger,” as well as related words—ressentiment, rage, fureur, furie, and so on’.
The French revolutionary Mirabeau, for example, wrote that, ‘From their mountain top they should, god-like, “launch amid thunderbolts the eternal decrees of justice and the will of the people [. . .]. The hour of justice and of anger has arrived!”’.
Another revolutionary said in a speech, ‘The French people, bent over under the yoke of the most hateful slavery, worn out by the crimes and vexations of tyrants and their accomplices, rose all together on July 14, 1789, broke their chains, and, in their just anger, stormed the Bastille’.
The English conservative Edmund Burke admonished the revolutionaries, warning that ‘pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites’ led to destruction and ‘fury, outrage, and insult’.
Again, the reprimanding of anger could be used as a political tool, painting the colonised, the native, the other, the woman as angry, irrational, emotional.
There was a fine line between the defence of emotion as a potent political tool and the excesses of anger leading to mass violence.
Futurists and fascists of the early 20th century glorified violence.
The first line of the futurist manifesto – written in 1909 as an unapologetic call to modernization – read, ‘We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring’.
Italian author Giovanni Papini wrote that, ‘The future needs blood. It needs human victims, butchery. Internal war, and foreign war, revolution and conquest: that is history… Blood is the wine of stronger peoples, and blood is the oil for the wheels of this great machine which flies from the past to the future’.
They’d get their wish with the First World War.
But is it true that the excesses of the French Revolution, warfare, and genocide are the result only of anger? Why not greed, profit, nationalism, love of country, fear? Love and jealousy can lead to violence as much as anger. And psychopaths are known as cold killers. Answers to questions like this don’t come easily.
What’s undeniable is that social movements rely on emotion. Against the rationalists and the idea of a liberal, ordered, logical world, Freud and Nietzsche challenged the dominant view inherited from the Enlightenment. They argued that under the surface, people were motivated to act by forces they didn’t understand. Whether by the passions of the unconscious or by resentments – there was a hidden underside to human history.
Their ideas only became popular after World War One as Europe struggled to come to terms with the storm of twisted steel and incomprehensible death that had been unleashed.
Today demagogues appeal to anger, resentment, jealousy and fear. Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France, Trump in America have all shown how under the surface there is a treasury of rage to be drawn from. And it’s not going anywhere.
The trick then, is to mobilise it for good.
Today, psychologists usually reject the view of Descartes and Stoics, that the emotions are part of the body, irrational, unwieldy, a burden on logic and reason.
Instead, most think of emotions as purposive, as a way of engaging with the world, of doing something, appraising something. By the 1960s cognitive psychologists began to recognise that emotions were a part of our cognition.
Magda Arnold, the progenitor of this view, wrote that, ‘To arouse an emotion, the object [whether a thing or an event or a situation] must be appraised as affecting me in some way, affecting me personally as an individual with my particular experience and my particular aims’.
Emotions became intelligent. There’s no clear divide between passion and reason.
Emotions can be right and wrong. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has argued that emotions are a way of thinking quickly. They’re instincts. Short cuts. They ramp everything up ready to go without too much deliberation, which comes after.
And the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued the emotional memories can serve as markers to access information in the brain quickly, which is why the amygdala deals with emotion and memory. If we see a bear, fear a bear, run from a bear, see what to do in a bear attack on television we want to be able to access that information quickly.
This idea that emotions are intelligent leads to a more nuanced view of them. Like any other type of information in the brain they can be right or wrong. We often say things like he was right to get upset or wrong to get angry. In other words, we’ve adopted a mixed-view. Righteous anger is justifiable within limits.
Culturally, we tend to accept that people can be rightly angered, but usually only if that anger is delivered in a controlled way.
Martin says, ‘I think of anger as a fuel. It energizes us to do the things we need to do’.
He says, ‘Anger is a normal and often healthy response to a variety of situations. Anger can be understood, managed, and used in a way that is healthy, positive, and prosocial’.
So how do we separate the good from the bad? How can we channel the bad into the good?
If we accept that there’s such a thing as good anger, righteous anger, the next question to ask might be whether any anger we’re thinking about – ours or others’ – is useful, instrumental, in achieving a goal.
Anger might energise, but it also over-energises, obsesses, ruminates, causes long-term health problems. It’s clear that there’s a fine line between using anger and being abused by anger.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that there are two mistakes in anger. One is that it is a ‘road to payback’, but that payback does nothing to address the issue. This is the idea that it restores balance. She says this does nothing to improve the position of the wronged person though.
The other mistake is the ‘road of status’, and again she argues that getting angry at someone who has ‘slighted’ you, or embarrassed you, or has gotten in your way, mischaracterised you, does nothing to improve the position you were in.
In both cases, she says, addressing the problem is better approached by different means. The rational response is to focus attention on whatever solves a problem.
She writes, ‘So, to put my radical claim succinctly: when anger makes sense, it is normatively problematic (focused narrowly on status); when it is normatively reasonable (focused on the injury), it doesn’t make good sense, and is normatively problematic in that different way. In a rational person, anger, realizing that, soon laughs at itself and goes away’.
But does anger – brief and controlled – provide the fuel for solving the problem? Does it alert the reasonable part of your brain that something must be addressed? Does it cement the injustice in our memory so it is more likely to be remembered? The question is whether anger provides an ‘initial fuel’.
I think most everyday occurrences of anger don’t pass this test. That road rage, attacks on status, rudeness, computer problems are better shrugged off, dealt with stoically.
But there’s one area that anger has seemed to have had a positive effect and provided the fuel for action: injustice.
The French revolutionaries used anger. I am angry watching Putin talk right now. Even during Indian independence – which is remembered as peaceful – the British feared the increasing anger of organisations within Indian society. The British knew the game was up.
And we can see the disagreement about the uses of anger in the contrasting positions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X during the Civil Rights Movement.
Martin Luther King famously preached calm and restraint. He wrote that his speeches tried be ‘militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervour within controllable and Christian bounds’.
Malcolm X took a different view. When travelling around Africa he noticed that where countries achieved their independence, ‘someone had got angry’.
Of the famous March on Washington in 1963, Malcolm X wrote, ‘Whoever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome… Suum Day…” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against?’.
But despite these seemingly contrasting positions, Malcolm X said he never let himself get ‘over-emotional and angry’. Likewise, King had said that segregation ‘makes me almost angry’.
So again, where’s the line? How do we find it?
The stoic philosopher Epictetus divided the world into internals – things you have control over – and externals – things you have no control over. He said it only made sense to focus our attention on the things we have control over. The weather is not worth getting angry about. But injustice? We might have no control over it directly, but we certainly have control over how much we contribute towards bringing awareness to it, discussing it, fighting it.
Take Picasso’s painting Guernica. It is one of the most famous anti-war paintings in history, and Picasso produced it because of his outrage at the bombing of Guernica by fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
Anger at injustice has clearly affected change. Whether it is necessary, more powerful than calm, able to be tamed or productive, I think varies from person to person, situation to situation. But if we can learn when anger is detrimental to us and when we might use it as fuel for engagement with the world, then we can mould our anger, utilise it, control it, tame it for the good.
Because as the cognitive psychologists of the 1960s argued, if anger is intelligent it can be cognitive, factual, right and wrong. So it is a tool. In a similar way, anger is never distinct. It can mixed with empathy, passion, sadness, even joy, in the way that for Picasso produced a powerful piece of art.
A term that comes up often is ‘channelling’ or ‘transition’.
Martin writes that ‘Anger is alerting you to a problem. Channel your anger into identifying and solving that problem. Creating art, literature, poetry, and music’.
And Nussbaum says, ‘Transition-Anger does not focus on status; nor does it, even briefly, want the suffering of the offender as a type of payback for the injury. It never gets involved at all in that type of magical thinking. It focuses on social welfare from the start. Saying, “Something should be done about this,” it commits itself to a search for strategies, but it remains an open question whether the suffering of the offender will be among the most appealing’.
I think transition anger mixes anger with creativity, with logical thinking, with mobilisation, and coherent argument that focuses on the issue that made you angry. And I think, and I can only speak for myself, that if anger at injustice is a universal, then ‘transition-anger’ or channelling that anger is an existential impulse. We can’t help but engage in it.
Historian Barbara Rosenwein has written that, ‘If anger is natural—if it is part of human nature—then there is no point in imagining that we may reject it. There is not even much sense in endowing it with ethical value, whether good or bad. If anger is natural, then the best thing we may do is understand it: where it “resides,” how it is produced, how it works, how we might control it’.
I’ve learned a lot about anger here. I’ve learned a lot from the Stoics, from psychologists, from history, a lot of practical useful advice. But I like Aristotle’s take: ‘when human beings are angry, they feel pain, and when they avenge themselves, they feel pleasure; those who fight for such reasons are warlike, yes, but they are not courageous: for they do so not for the sake of what is good or in the manner dictated by reason [logos], but rather out of emotion [pathos]’.
He said anger must be made reasonable: ‘Anger is necessary, nor can any struggle be carried to victory without it: it must fill the mind and kindle the spirit, but it must be employed as a foot soldier, not the general’.
And the great philosopher Robert Solomon tells us that we cannot forget that, ‘We live our lives through our emotions, and it is our emotions that give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us—all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are’.
Sources
Faith Harper, Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science To Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-Outs, and Triggers
Barbara Rosenwein, Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion
Ryan Martin, Why We Get Mad: How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change
David Ost, Politics as the Mobilization of Anger: Emotions in Movements and in Power
Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-and-politics-anger/573556/
Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice
Seneca, On Anger
Aristotle, Rhetoric
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/american-anger-polarization-fox-news/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/opinion/sunday/sick-of-racism-literally.html
David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks
William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
John Sellars, Stoicism
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy
Brad Inwood, Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Epictetus, Handbook and Discourses
