A friend who is going through some difficulties told me that she was outside her house recently, sitting in her car, and she realized she had been angry for a long time: and all of a sudden that she was not angry anymore: it was all dissolving, and it was just turning to sadness – a great, terrible sadness. I am a believer in practicing the religious wisdom we have inherited, and so I told her what I had heard from my religious teachers: that this was good, that anger and sadness were the same thing, but that sadness was pliable, it could be let off as tears, it could be discussed, it was social and so could be healed: but anger was brittle, it was rigid, it was hard to work with and ultimately solitary.
Now whether all this is true is a good question. There is certainly some received wisdom of a secular sort which counsels precisely the opposite, that we should not be sad, but get mad instead. Preferring sadness to anger sounds like it could be the age-old Christian idolization of the doormat. But I was reading a book by the Dalai Lama, and he too preached against anger, saying quite simply that his religion sought peace and happiness, and the angry person is never happy and at peace, and so he felt it was always better to avoid anger.
I thought it was worth exploring. I began by asking the question: what might the evolutionary purpose of anger be? I thought the answer was bipartite. First of all, anger increases our energy level, and is designed to help us through times particularly when great strength is required, for example self-defense. In modern times this is only rarely useful; sometimes when doing demolition work or something similar a little bit of anger makes the work go more quickly. But more commonly anger is a social emotion, and its basic function appears to be to discourage certain behavior in others. A juvenile ape keeps poking the silverback with a stick, and after bearing as much as he is going to bear, the silverback erupts in anger, shows his teeth and whacks the little one in the side of the head: the juvenile never does that again. I think most of us can remember incurring the wrath of our parents or teacher for some misdeed or other, and thinking, “I never, ever, ever want to have to experience this ever again and I will never, ever, ever do that again.” Besides its initial purpose of deterring certain behaviors, for us primates with memory anger is also instructive: it burns the lesson into the memory. The anger of others is often particularly memorable, even years after the fact.
When I explained this inchoate theory to a friend – who is prone to anger and has been recently trying to reform – he said, “But that’s really not true. Anger doesn’t actually deter other people from doing things. It’s not effective. When people have to work with someone who gets angry, they don’t stop doing whatever angers that person: they just start working on ways to get rid of that person, or at least do stuff without telling that person. Anger is just a dumb social obstacle, and in the end the work that has to get done just goes around it.”
He then added a slight modification: “If a person is really powerful – like the silverback you spoke about – yes, you can push people around with your anger. But if you don’t have that power, then it always backfires. It makes you less powerful – it makes other people start scheming to cut you out entirely.”
I think everything he said was true, and I will add that people start scheming to cut powerful angry people out of the loop too: they just have to wait longer, to amass the resources necessary to get rid of the powerful person. “No one robs the house of the strong man, without first tying up the strong man.”
This was a decent start to what I felt was the problem: anger is natural, and sometimes useful, and so I am loth to simply label it a “deadly sin” and seek to get rid of it. But it is more ineffective than effective, especially as we age, and in particular it causes problems for the people around us. And the problems we cause others have a way of coming back to us.
Let us take a look at this social aspect of anger. Even to speak of an emotion with a purpose sounds odd, and anger I think is particularly paradoxical: is an inner emotion but its deterrent effect is generally elsewhere. Inside of us it feels like a reflex reaction, like something we can’t even help – we speak of someone else making us angry, as if we had no control over it – but to others it feels manipulative, because the anger is directed at changing their behavior. Hence one person’s anger often sparks another’s: when a person is angry with you, it feels like they are infringing on your freedom. They are not dealing with you as a mature, thoughtful person to whom appeal can be made. They are just trying to stop you from doing what you just did by making life unpleasant for everyone.
Anger has another social aspect – also aimed at changing the behavior of others – as a cry for help. We all know the situation: a group of people – perhaps a family – are working on a project together, and one person, unable to complete his or her task, starts getting frustrated and starts making angry sounds. The fact that anger tends to be vocal, even if it has no words, is a sign of its social nature. The others in the group hear these sounds of frustration, and the person in charge of the project either gives instruction as to how to do the job more effectively, or relieves the person of the duty of this particular task. In instances where the job requires extraordinary physical strength, the anger might make the job easier, but usually the anger is designed to manipulate the other people engaged in the task. Typically it is designed to reveal our hope that our job will be done by someone else. If we didn’t believe it was worth doing, we might just abandon it. But instead we get angry, publicly angry, and hope that someone will come to the rescue. It is more than anything else a kind of wish: a wish with a certain amount of manipulation built in to help it come true. “I hope whoever hears this is made uncomfortable enough to come to the rescue and do this for me.”
Other times people get angry at things which in themselves cannot be changed – like death or weather or something similar – and here anger becomes most problematic. The anger has a physical effect on the person who feels it – causing blood pressure to rise, adrenaline to flow, and so forth – and it also causes discomfort to everyone who knows it is happening, but the wish that is expressed – “I wish I weren’t going through this” – cannot be granted. And here I think the received religious wisdom I spoke of at the beginning of this essay becomes relevant, even necessary. Here we have to translate our anger into its actual content – the wish – and acknowledge that the wish cannot come true. The closest we can get to its fulfilment is the comfort and consolation of the people around us. But anger – which puts other people on edge, and often makes them angry themselves – is not a good welcome mat to invite in the consolation of others. Sadness, however, is. Tears are far more likely to bring consolation than anger.
But of course there is a difference, a social difference, between anger and tears. Anger is lordly, it dictates to others, while tears acknowledge weakness. But when confronted with the things we cannot change, tears are more true. And for this reason we must, for our spiritual health, know when to convert our anger back into sadness. When news had to be rought to King David of his rebel son Absalom’s death, the messenger must have quaked with fear: the king loved his son, and never wanted any of what he experienced – first his son’s rebellion, and then his death. Would this desire be expressed as anger – “Cursed be you who bring this news to me” – or sadness? Anger, in traditional terms, is the more regal feeling: it expresses power not weakness. In countless Middle Eastern tales, the lordly king executes the messenger who brings bad news – that’s almost how you know he’s a king. But David wept for his dead son Absalom. This is the higher path with all we cannot change. There is a humiliation in grief and sadness, but it is the truth, and we must bow to it in the end. Ultimately you cannot have peace and happiness – and cannot help bring peace and happiness to the people you love – without acknowledgement, before them, of your own powerlessness. Each individual ego controls so very little of the universe – even so very little of his or her own life.
But David probably reacted to Absalom’s death honestly and instinctively – he was sad, rather than angry. It was not a choice. If he had been angry – could he have done anything? Is our anger really controllable? It feels so much like a reflex reaction, like the shape of our selves, like something we cannot change. You cannot stop your leg from kicking up, when your knee is struck in the right place. And similarly, the logic goes, certain things, or certain people, just make you angry: so those topics should be avoided, or those people need to stop coming to your social events. I know one woman who, it is true, can make me angry faster than any other person I know. She can do it just about every time. Shouldn’t I just avoid her?
Of course for a time the answer might be yes. But when you are ready to gain self-knowledge, and ready to grow as a person, then that is precisely the person to go to. All vehement reactions are doors into self-knowledge. The word-association experiments done by the early psychologists were all done with a stopwatch, because they found that people had more complicated reactions to certain words – whatever the word might be, “mother” or “pregnant” or “wrist” or “money” – and those words could typically be discerned with a stopwatch: the word-response would be slightly slower – or slightly faster! – for such words. The brain had more to process for such words – the reaction was a little more vehement – which could be perceived as a slowing or quickening of speech. The reaction was “complex” – the term we now use as a noun, a complex. A person or thing who can make you angry is touching on a complex – a bundle of associations which can be untangled, and dealt with thread by thread. A deeply unhappy person is often terribly knotted up in these complexes, and makes the people around him unhappy as well, because he is so brittle and vehement and unpredictable, having overblown reactions to small stimuli. This drives other people away, making the angry person even less happy. Unraveling these complexes is often the key to the peace and happiness the Dalai Lama spoke of as the goal of the spiritual life.
Sometimes anger can be unknotted very quickly, because beneath it there is often simply a frustrated desire. I think I know why that one woman gets me so angry: I want her to love me and be my girlfriend – you can’t be more demanding of another person’s behavior than that! – and when confronted with her unwillingness, my body resorts to anger to try to establish some kind of control over her. It doesn’t work, of course – which gets me angrier. This sounds terrible as I write it – and it is – but I think it is a normal dynamic of relationships. A person who feels less loved than they desire often responds with anger. But it is exceptionally rare that such anger really makes the other person respond with more love: when it does happen, it is because that other person senses or knows what the other person wants – which might just as easily have been sincerely explained. With a less sensitive lover, the situation often merely gets worse.
We also typically see anger in people who are discussing politics. This is normal enough, because politics ultimately is about control, and so is anger, so there is a natural harmony between the two of them. But in politics we see how brittle anger is – how difficult to work with, and how liable it is to defeat its own purposes. Even the victories it achieves often insult and demean the opposition so much that they are sure to persist in their opposition, and try to undo what has been done. And in the simple conversations people have about politics, an angry tone is generally a sign that the conversation cannot go anywhere productive. That’s the time to excuse yourself on grounds of needing to get up early the next day. The only way to save the conversation is to switch there from politics to psychology: “Why are you so angry? What do you wish would happen? What would your ideal solution be?” Sometimes if a person explains himself in this way, he can hear how irrational and petulant he is being with the world – sometimes.
Watching the way people behave, I think it is fair to say that anger is not one of the things the world typically needs more of. But this is not to say it does not have a limited role. People notice anger. Sometimes a person can be taken for granted for years and years and years, building up resentment but never expressing anything, and then suddenly there is an explosion of anger – and suddenly people notice that person as they never had before. Aquinas treats of anger when discussing justice, and in this context, anger can be effective. I remember one time in grade school I was part of a group of kids who were making fun of another kid whose last name was Schnorr. “Hey Phil do you SCHNORR when you sleep?” My father publicly exploded at me, telling me I was “stupid” and “bush league.” “You never,” he said, “make fun of someone’s name. They didn’t give themselves that name.” My father didn’t really get angry at me very much, and almost every time he did it was for a reason like this: it was because I was doing something that he felt was cruel, and hence below me. I’ve never forgotten this rule of his.
Anger, then, to correct injustice may be useful, but again we should be careful, because almost everyone who is angry believes he is being unjustly treated: a child can say “it’s not fair!” to just about anything. But the process of interrogating your anger, and understanding the wish which is causing it, is the first step. Once you have determined what you really desire, it can be discussed with others, and if you involve enough honest people you can probably find out if your desire really is fair or not. But always we can presume that an angry person has some need or other which is not being met. Desire in general is a connective feeling, and even a shared unfulfilled desire can be a bond between people. Sometimes the need may be a need for acknowledged grief – that conversion into tears of which I spoke. Grief is somehow far easier to bear when it is public and acknowledged, and even better when it is truly shared. You understand then that your loss is the world’s loss, and not merely your own; your grief is not merely your own. This is a consolation, as are all the things which bridge our individual boundaries and bind us back to the people around us. Wendell Berry notes that one of the reasons Mark Twain’s successful career was ultimately an embittering journey was that he took all of the deaths of his family around him – his brother, his wife, his daughters – as personal affronts, injustices to him. Nothing embitters us quite so quickly as selfishness. Attachment to a community redeems our grief, in a mysterious way. It becomes part of the pattern. Everyone born in the Nineteenth Century is dead now, just as everyone born before then is dead too. Yet the community goes on: it bears all this, and keeps going. Without this perspective, we remain forever infantile, and unadapted to life in this world. Christians painted crucifixion after crucifixion to hammer home this point: we do not get out alive, we suffer and die and are buried, and the living have to watch it, over and over and over again. Some of us suffer terribly, as God himself suffered, and the woman God chose above all women suffered, watching her son die, “with a sword through her heart,” as the hymns say. Twain might have found this depressing. I think it a necessary realism.
If we do not start this transformation of anger somewhere around the middle of our life, I think there is significant danger that we will head off on the same embittering journey Twain went on – no matter how great our talents or success may be. Ultimately most of our anger as we age is maladaptive – it seems nature did not really plan for our living past thirty-five or so – and we need to learn to manage it. This becomes one of the most loving, caring things we can do for the people around us. Our anger affects them, and our anger is highly prone to error. But if we recognize what we desire, and use that desire in us to connect with other people, we have some chance of putting our anger into its proper place, and making our little corner of the world more peaceful and happy.
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