Can anger exist without a provocation? Can a provocation exist save by some omission in your own plan of self-protection? Yes. In its essence, anger is- as the Sanskrit proverb has it- a 'small pleasure'. To indulge in it is to betray your littleness. There may be a 'day of wrath' but God is essentially impassable. Still we can take a small pleasure in the prospect of the Eschaton so long as our labour sustains the Katechon and thus averts the Apocalypse.
Agnes Callard, taking a different view, writes in the Point-
Racism doesn’t tend to make me angry. You might think this is because I don’t belong to a marginalized race, but sexism doesn’t tend to make me angry, either. Nor am I reliably angered by elitism or abuses of power, despite the fact that they seem to rankle many around me. My decidedly Holocaust-centric childhood failed to instill in me hostile emotions toward Nazis, or anti-Semites generally.
This is perfectly reasonable. The truth is we don't take abstractions personally. So long as our own comfort or career is not in jeopardy, our emotions aren't greatly engaged by narratives of old, unhappy, far off things and battles long ago.
And yet I would not describe myself as blessed with a peaceable temperament. I can become furious over what others perceive as trivialities, and am liable to see profound betrayal where the other sees a simple misunderstanding. In the context of public speech, I am hypersensitive to rhetorical coercion, capable of experiencing even well-meaning generic advice as an attempted use of force.
So, Callard is much like you or I. She isn't a professional virtue signaler.
When your anger won’t play well with the anger of others—when it turns down invitations to surface, and persists despite the absence of company—you frequently find yourself on the receiving end of attempts at anger management.
Which does chop your onions and pours mustard on top.
Sometimes these conversations can be settled by the introduction of new information or the correction of a misperception,
in which case the cause of anger disappears
but when those strategies fail, they often devolve into a pure emotional tug-of-war in which you hear that your anger is unproductive; that it’s time to move on; that we are ultimately on the same team. Or, alternatively—for this, too, is “anger management,” though it isn’t usually called that—you hear that if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention; that unless you’re with us, you’re against us.
in which case anger is evaluated for its instrumental value
“If you don’t stop being angry, you’re irrational.”
“If you don’t start being angry, you’re immoral.”
Neither of these speeches tends to go over well—at least not with me.
It seems Callard understands that anger is something which has evolved in the same way that pain has evolved so as to alter decision making in a manner which could endow 'survival value'.
Could it really be that Callard, a professional philosopher- i.e. a cretin- could write an entire article defending the common sense view?
Of course not! Don't be silly.
●
After Cain, having murdered his brother, lies to God about Abel’s whereabouts—“I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”—God explodes at Cain: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.” God can hear Abel’s blood crying out, but Cain cannot.
Coz God has got super-powers.
God’s anger substitutes for the hole where Cain’s love for his brother should be:
No it doesn't. Anger doesn't work that way. Your g.f's anger at your dick's failure to rise to the occasion does not substitute for the cheating asshole who is now loving up her sister instead.
if Cain can’t fully grasp the wrongness of murdering his brother,
But Cain, in the Biblical story, does get that fratricide is wrong. That's why his isn't running around boasting about it and trying to sell the movie rights.
someone must.
God's job is to fuck up Cain for offing his bro. Whether or not God does this wrathfully doesn't matter in the least. Theologians are welcome to stipulate for an impassable God. Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides and so on took this route. On the other hand, those who want to cling to an emotional God have to accept that the dude seems to be cool with genocide.
The story makes clear, with remarkable economy, both that there are real, objective moral facts,
but only if you believe Eve was formed out of some Arab's rib
and that access to those facts is–even for God!—sometimes predicated on anger. Anger is a moral sense.
in a world where Darwin was completely wrong. Also dinosaurs never roamed the earth. The moon landing was faked. As for COVID- don't get me started.
Among humans as well, at times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice.
But they can also apprehend that the entire Federal Government is just a pedophile ring. The problem with getting mad is that you begin to apprehend all sorts of shit. Drinking enough anti-freeze on a regular basis can do the same thing to you.
For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric.
After which they storm Capitol Hill.
When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids
blind peeps have eyelids but they can't see. If somebody chopped off your eyelids, your sight would not necessarily be impaired. However, eyes can't see into the future- whether they belong to the heart or are securely lodged in the skull.
—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth.
The other guy is trying to change your 'synoida'. But, if we are paying her to teach us or cure us or give us expert advise, that's a good thing.
They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry.
Believe me, they are calling you worse things- behind your back.
On the other hand, there are also reasons not to be.
And reasons to both be and not be and to not be either or both or whatever the fuck
Aristotle says that anger is a desire for revenge,
but it isn't. Wanting to fuck up them wot dun u rong is a desire for revenge. This may involve anger. It may not.
and he is right,
no he isn't.
though angry people will tend to call it by another name.
I'm fucking furious with my remote control which has disappeared once again down a wormhole to the fifth dimension. I don't want revenge upon it. It simply isn't true that anger is a necessary or sufficient condition for wanting revenge. The reverse too is true.
Anger inclines people to apply exalted labels (“justice,” “accountability”) to acts of vengeance;
No it doesn't. Very few people, through recorded history, have ever applied 'exalted labels' to anything. But those who go in for that shite do so regardless of any emotions they might genuinely experience.
it is a fog in which bad things look good, just because someone else did bad things first.
The fact is 'tit for tat' is an eusocial strategy. That is why we punish those who don't apply it. Stupid pedagogues and preachers may pretend otherwise. But their job is to say stupid shit.
Consider, for example, how people who would otherwise think it patently immoral to mock others’ physical appearance often feel free to do so when the target has been deemed unjust.
In which case, they didn't think the thing immoral at all. They just pretended to for fear of sanction.
Anger also leads people to see victims of injustice in a noble light
Empathy causes us to feel for victims. If we see ourselves in a noble light, we will see the victims in a similar way. This has nothing to do with anger.
—as though being wronged morally improved a person, instead of distorting their psyche by reorganizing it around moral injury.
This is pure fantasy. Nothing of the sort has ever happened. We don't appoint Bishops or Judges on the basis of their having been kept in an underground chamber since birth being repeatedly raped and beaten. On the other hand, Judges and Bishops may go easy on an offender who had this unfortunate background.
Even as a child, I was wary of this bitterness, and resisted the pull of the anti-anti-Semitism that my family and teachers presented as my Jewish inheritance.
It is likely that they presented something more to Callard. Still, whining about one's horrible family is par for the course for female academics engaging in this sort of vacuous journalism.
Most of the people who would have otherwise been my relatives were killed by the Nazis, and so I can hardly call it irrational that those who survived kept saying “never forget”; nonetheless, I refused to always be remembering.
So did they. That's how come they had time to hold down jobs and raise families.
There is something very puzzling in the impulse to resist both forms of anger management.
No there isn't. We resist any type of 'management' which does not make us personally much better off. If you find this 'very puzzling' I suggest you hand over your wealth to me because I'm real good at Wealth Management.
Why don’t I hear the calm-downers as trying to dispel my bitter, vengeful fog;
coz what you want is ice-cream or cookie dough or cookie dough ice-cream.
and why don’t I experience the call to anger as directing my moral sense to truths about injustice?
coz that's not how anger works. Everybody knows this. Kant wasn't always slapping his students silly till they worked up enough anger to have their moral sense properly directed. Mahatma Gandhi did- but that's another story.
How can the question of whether anger is a form of ethical insight
and fear a form of scientific insight
—a moral sense—or a corruption of moral vision—a vengeful fog—depend on whether one is currently angry?!
It can do so if you are as stupid as shit and are writing a stupid article for peeps wot want to have a good laugh at a stupid Professor of a shite subject
This is the puzzle of anger management.
Which you'd have to be a fucking cretin to find puzzling.
I believe the solution
to a fake problem
requires us to acknowledge
something equally fraudulent
a split in our ability to respond to justice:
we have no ability to 'respond to justice'. Food that smells and looks scrumptious- sure, we respond to that fast enough. It may be that we are genetically hardwired to consider certain 'cake cutting' solutions fair- but in 'repeated games' we soon adjust to 'Shapley values'.
the more perfectly one attends to the gravity of the wrongs done, the less sensitive one becomes to the gravity of the wrongs one is poised to commit in response.
But, 'attending perfectly' to x means not attending at all to y for any x and any y. This has nothing to do with anger or fear or degree of sexual arousal.
The perspective of the angry person is sharply divided from the non-angry one:
Nonsense! They may have the same perspective. One guy is angry coz he's an irritable sort. The other guy has developed professional detachment.
On the other hand, two people in the same emotional state but whose interests diverge, may well 'see different sides of justice'
I'm against sexual harassment. You are against sexual harassment but are willing to ignore an instance of that crime if it means a guy you like gets a seat on the Bench. Anger won't change this outcome. Reason is about subordinating emotions to interests.
each can see only the side of justice they are looking at. When it comes to anger, and the lack thereof, we have reason to resist others’ attempts to transfer their reasons to us.
Only in the sense that we have reason to resist any type of transfer which does not benefit us.
This is why, although attempts at conversion may begin in rational discourse, they often devolve into bullying
anything at all can 'devolve into bullying' unless you possess a countervailing 'threat point' or, at the very least, can fart loudly or can vomit copiously over the other guy.
in which the “convert” is pressured into pretending to see what they cannot, or into pretending not to hear the cries ringing in their ears.
more usually these things end in a demand for oral sex. That's a good reason to vomit copiously on the fucker the moment she starts trying to gaslight you.
This anger divide lies at the heart of our political predicament,
Rubbish! Politics is about who pays for the Government and who benefits from its actions. Greed matters. Anger? Not so much.
and structures our interactions with one another at the deepest level.
Our interactions with one another are structured by biological and economic imperatives. No doubt, emotions act as 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' to aid decision making and social choice, but they have no survival value in themselves.
And yet, for this very reason, it is itself difficult to recognize.
It is difficult to recognize because it is entirely absent.
To get it into view, I propose we
play just pretend
reverse Plato’s strategy. Plato thought we would understand justice in the soul better if we first saw it writ large, in the harmonious, unified city.
So, we would never understand justice in the soul. A city which is harmonious and unified aint one that is innovating and adapting. It will soon be either depopulated or overrun unless it changes its ways.
I think we will understand injustice in the city—our conflicts with one another—better if we begin with a study of the conflicted soul.
Why think anything so foolish? Where the fuck are we supposed to find a 'conflicted soul' to dissect? Why not begin with a study of the discombobulated aether? How about researching the Aeon when subject to irritable bowel syndrome?
For there is an intrapersonal analog to the conversations that we cannot seem to have with one another, namely the conversations we fail to have with ourselves.
Conversations we fail to have with others may be an analog with conversations we fail to have with ourselves. But conversations 'we can't seem to have' with others are a function of what can be said and this has to do with Language as 'being for others'. But we don't converse with ourselves in language though, no doubt, we may put some of our thoughts into words within our 'stream of consciousness'.
Sometimes, the parts of a single soul speak different languages.
No. Some thoughts may be framed in 'different languages'. But Thought does not speak a language. This is because you need words to tell the Pizza guy what toppings you want. You don't need words to know that you want pepperoni and not pine-fucking-apple.
●
A few weeks ago, I was mailing my friend a gift for his upcoming birthday when I recalled that he got me nothing for my birthday. I experienced a flash of anger, and was tempted to trash the package instead of mailing it. Being torn between these two options is not like being torn between two delicious-sounding items on a menu, or between a vacation by the sea or one in the mountains.
It is exactly like that. You remember you got diarrhea the last time you ordered sea-food instead of duck and so you don't order sea-food- well, actually, you do coz maybe you were unlucky the last time. Anyway, duck is fattening. Something similar happens when we chose to vacation, once again, by the sea and are body shamed till we gorge on sea-food in the hope of shitting ourselves thin. Still, that's better than hiking up a fucking mountain- I mean, who does that? It's super thin couples got up in matching goretex. You can't tell me they're not all swingers.
In those cases, I can step back, survey my options and arrive at a preference-ordering that would, for instance, rationalize opting for my second choice if my favored dish or locale ends up unavailable. All the parts of me are ultimately on the same side.
As opposed to what happens when you get angry coz some dude forgot your birthday. In that case your asshole tries to swallow your head while your legs wrestle with your arms.
The birthday quandary doesn’t work this way: if love wins out over spite, but the post office turns out to be closed, that doesn’t mean it makes sense for me to revert to my second-best option and seek out a nearby garbage can.
Because your second best option is returning the thing to Amazon for a refund. After all, the guy really didn't get you a prezzie. It's not like he can go around bad mouthing for failure to reciprocate. Anyway, you've cooled down so the thing aint no big thaang.
The difference between the birthday choice and other kinds of choices is a deep one.
This simply isn't true. Believing otherwise will cause you to say stupider and stupider things.
Indeed, the split in the birthday case is deeper even than what we find in “tragic choices” such as Sophie’s choice between the lives of her two children.
There it is! The Holocaust wasn't really tragic compared to shit I go through in sending birthday prezzies to some guy I don't even like or know that well.
Being able to say 'I sent some rando a prezzie though he didn't send me one' is more important than genocide coz...urm... like that's what Plato said to Aristotle about Xenophanes and this caused Aristotle to give Plato a reach-around.
What makes a tragic choice tragic is that
either way the outcome is a turd fest
the two values are incommensurable:
but values may be equally incommensurable in slapstick comedy
the life of one person doesn’t compensate you for what you lose by way of the death of the other.
It isn't meant to. Sophie's Choice does not actually feature a cheerful game-show host saying- 'Aw! you lost your daughter. Bad luck. But guess what?! Behind door number two is your little son. Congratulations! You are our big winner this season! Lucky, lucky, you!'
One intensely wants
not to be facing a tragic choice. A comic choice would be so much nicer.
to have both, and is forced to choose between them. In the birthday case, by contrast, the difficulty is that one cannot want both—at least not at once.
Nonsense! One can want to both punish a guy for forgetting to get you a prezzie while also gratifying him. This could be done by an astute choice of gift. Incidentally, my books, available on Amazon, make excellent punishment gifts.
The point of view on value that makes trashing the gift look good—the so-called “friend” is actually a thoughtless jerk who doesn’t deserve me as a friend!—is one on which mailing it doesn’t look good at all; likewise, when I indulge in imagining his enjoyment of the gift, that mental activity is incompatible with the impulse to destroy it from spite.
But, a smart person, can find another gift- or even a sarky way of penning the enclosed note- to satisfy all their objectives.
I can vacillate between these points of view, but I cannot really occupy both at once.
Yes you can. Spiteful gifts are a real thing.
I can’t ask “all things considered, what should I do?” without begging the question as to what things are being considered: there is no “all” that includes both the spiteful pleasure of disappointing my friend and the joy of making him happy. These values are more than incommensurable, they are incompossible.
Says an academic with no emotional intelligence whatsoever.
Now let’s shift from the soul to the city, by distributing these incompossible values over multiple people.
In which case, the Chichilnisky & Heard condition for 'Goldilocks' preference diversity is not met. There is no agora and therefore no polis. Callard is describing a prison not a City.
Consider the conflict between the person whose sense of justice makes it impossible for her to give up on her anger, and the person whose sense of justice makes it impossible for her to become angry.
Why should there be 'conflict' between them? Either can walk away if the other is being a cunt.
If we consider each of these people as the analog to one of the opposed ethical perspectives between which I vacillated in the birthday case, we can see why the interactions between the angry and non-angry turn into a tug-of-war.
No we can't. We often have conflicting impulses but move on to other stuff beneficial to us. Similarly, we sometimes get into an argument with a stupid cunt. But this does not entail mud-wrestling, or three legged races or tug-of-war.
There is no rational way to adjudicate their conflict—the best a third-party mediator could do is flip back and forth between who they want to side with.
Fuck off! A third party would say, break it up, bozos. The rest of us are trying to enjoy this orgy.
The anger divide is frequently experienced as a political disaster: How can we ever hope to get everyone on the same page?
By getting them to concentrate on the benefits that flow from united action rather than focus on the pleasures of what Obama calls a 'circular firing squad' of histrionic wokeness & virtue signaling
Why are people so impervious to having their minds changed, anger-wise?
For the same reason they don't want you taking a hammer to their skull so as to change the shape and consistency of their brain. If brain surgery can save your life or restore your sight- okay. But you want a properly qualified surgeon to do the job.
I have been suggesting an answer: it is because they are rational,
fair enough
and care about justice,
fuck off! People who don't give a shit about justice still don't want their brains tampered with or their minds changed by stupid cunts
that people resist the coercive tactics of anger management.
We oppose coercive tactics if possible because it is in our interest to do so. Even if coercion was for a purpose beneficial to ourselves, it would be rational to prefer to take the thing voluntarily- unless we were aware we had some sort of mental illness or dangerous addiction. But, in that case, the 'coercive tactics' would involve legal sanctions.
A case in point is Gandhi's deal with Smuts to voluntarily comply with the Pass Act. This failed because Smuts refused to withdraw the Act- i.e. the legal sanction remained.
Those who stick to their guns are refusing to allow others to banish them from their property, the truth.
No. They are merely sticking to their guns. They may allow others to banish them from all sorts of imaginary shite in return for lots of money and a blowjob. But guns are cool. Sell them if you have to but stick to them if it is safe to do so.
Perhaps justice really is something divine, something on the wrong scale to be taken in by a single human response.
Coz guys who work as judges can turn water into wine, right?
Instead of lamenting our inability to arrive at a unified response, we
could do something not utterly stupid and useless
should be grateful for the heterogeneity of human psychology: it affords us coverage of one another’s blind spots.
No it doesn't. It would be nice to think so, but isn't true. What affords us coverage of 'blind spots' is stuff like mirrors and cctv cameras and so forth. In other words, when we find there is an area we need more information about, then we find a mechanism to get that information. This may involve hiring a guy with a different psychological makeup but it is better to find an algorithmic solution which anyone can implement.
If no human being is emotionally complete,
no collection of human beings can be emotionally complete. Why? For the same reason that if no human knows Kryptonian, no collection of humans can know Kryptonian. It is true that, by luck, or by obeying instructions sent by an E.T who does know Kryptonian, a guy or a bunch of guys might appear to know Kryptonian. But that appearance would be deceptive.
We may say 'no human has the perfect physique'. We may further say 'by combining the ass of this Model and the torso of that Hollywood star and so on, we get to the perfect physique.' But that collection of Models or Hollywood stars would not have a perfect physique. They'd just be a bunch of people.
then real moral authority is collective,
Lots of people now living have 'real moral authority' for us. My Mum does and so does my Daddy and my Guru and so on. Moral authority derives from a track-record or a reputation for having made moral judgments which people found it highly beneficial to accept. There may be some 'collectives'- e.g. an Ecclesia or Sanhedrin or College of Cardinals- which had or have moral and legal authority. But the track-record of such things aint particularly good. In multi-dimensional policy spaces, McKelvey Chaos- an unedifying struggle for 'agenda control'- prevails.
and we need—and need to learn to recognize our need—for those animated by incandescent, unquenchable, focused anger.
Fuck off! Nobody needs a guy animated by an unquenchable anger against his wife who really shouldn't provoke him into beating the shit out of her every time he feels his fists need a bit of exercise.
They see what the rest of us cannot see, and we shouldn’t reflexively pressure them to calm down.
Angry people often see things which aren't there. Pressuring them to calm down may be less effective than medicating them or throwing them in jail.
We also need to recognize the virtue at the opposite end of the spectrum, of those who are preternaturally calm and judicious, and to stop thinking of such a person as improved or humanized by being able to get a little pissed off.
Why stop there? Why not say 'we need to recognize the virtue of people who fart noisily while those who can clear a Conference room with a single 'silent but deadly' may be more valuable yet to public discourse.
●
The story of the birthday quandary is true; it is something that happened to me just a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, however, it also fits the template of a fake example I constructed for my book years ago, of a bitter wife tempted to trash a letter that her thoughtless and demanding husband tasks her with mailing.
This too is an example of defective reasoning. The wife's best course is to alter her husband's expectations regarding how she will execute tasks he entrusts to her. Essentially, a marriage is an 'incomplete contract'. It is in the wife's interest to extort 'thoughtfulness' by creating the perception of a 'hold up' problem. Anyway, that's how marriages actually work till they really start working as God intended.
But life didn’t quite imitate philosophy. My Bitter Wife was left to adjudicate her internal conflict solo,
why? This stuff is dynamite. It should be properly thrashed out at the hair-dressers.
but when the thought experiment came to life for me, I was not alone. As I headed out to the post office, my son, who was bored from having been cooped up in the house all morning, asked if he could accompany me on the walk. He was by my side as I experienced the flash of anger—which wasn’t so much about the fact that my friend hadn’t gotten me a gift, but the fact that he had endeavored to explain it away, to make excuses for himself, and the larger pattern of behavior that was embedded in…—and that was when my eyes darted in the direction of where I knew the trash can was.
It wouldn’t have been the first time in my life I destroyed something in vengeance. And I might well have done it again, if my son hadn’t been there. But under the circumstances, how would I explain myself?
“What’s in the package?” my son asked me as we walked.
“A birthday present for a friend.”
“Tell him happy birthday from me—or actually, on second thought, he might not be so excited to get a happy birthday from some kid he’s never heard of whose mom just told him it was his birthday…”
The kid is wrong. Any guy would be delighted to be wished a happy birthday by a kid- more particularly by a kid who has no reason to feel kindly towards him. This is because on our birthdays we become like kids again and kids like being liked by other kids.
I told my son I would convey the birthday wish, in exactly those terms, and I did.
Good for you.
The very presence of other people can make us better,
the presence of kids does make us want to be better and to use fewer four letter words in our speech. Why? Coz kids are meant to imitate and learn from adults.
even when they don’t make us more like them, or change us, or even understand us. Sometimes other people help us exactly by not feeling what we feel, exactly by remaining resolutely who they are.
the presence of hardened ex-cons causes us to use more four letter words and to express aggressive and sociopathic thoughts. Why? Coz we want to establish a plausible 'threat point' just in case.
We act better than we are where our behavior will be imitated in a manner from which we personally may benefit. Thus, around your kids or employees or students, you act like you are smart and conscientious. But, to establish a threat point against people who may take advantage of us, we may act in a manner which suggests we are vengeful and highly irrational.
Interests matter and emotions- as signals of preference intensity or as methods to break concurrency deadlock- are subservient to interests because only the proper pursuit of interests endows survival value.
Currently there is an availability cascade re 'the aptness of anger' but it is worthless shit. Its premise is a stupid lie and what follows is pure ex falso quodlibet cretinism. Callard amply demonstrates this. This doesn't mean she is a bad Mum. It just means she teaches a shite subject. That's what should chop her onions.
