Scorched Earth: The Destructive Power of Righteous Anger

Tennessee Williams' shocking play Suddenly Last Summer is one of his efforts to confront, with an overwhelming amount of courage and honesty, the horror of sexual dissociation. Young Catharine, suspected of mental illness and under threat of lobotomy, is injected with a truth serum, and under its influence tells a terrible story. Her cousin Sebastian, who traveled with her abroad, exploited her to lure young men he could have sex with (as he had exploited his mother before her.) Eventually, a heated, incited mob of hungry, abused children, chases Sebastian in the streets of Spain and exacts a terrible revenge: they mutilate and murder him and even feast on his flesh. The story is too much for Sebastian's relatives to handle. It horrifies us, as well, and at the same time captivates us, as horrible things often do. There's a reason why cultural heritage is universally infused with stories of mobs and sacrifice. The classic, of course, is the Greatest Story Ever Told. The lukewarm religious veneer on the New Testament (this was all part of the plan/he voluntarily died for our sins) excises, for me, the real juice of the story: the horror of a mob's turn against a charismatic leader. And the materials are not original, of course--the similarities to the Sumerian grain god Tammuz, who is sacrificed every summer, are striking, as well as to the Dionysian rites of death and rebirth. Jewish tradition has us pin all our sins on a goat ("seir"), which we push off a cliff so it can take away our impurities ("seir la'azazel.")

The reason these myths have such powerful, enduring qualities, is that they speak to something very fundamental to human societies: the generative, infectious, and destructive quality of collective anger; the human need to Find Someone to Blame and then squeeze every drop of revenge and destruction out of the situation. To obtain what? Redemption? Peace of mind? It sometimes seems that anger is in itself a virtue, a sign of the person's well-functioning moral compass. The classic bumpersticker, "if you're not angry you're not paying attention", is the perfect encapsulation of this idea. I don't know where it originated-- neither does Metafilter--but it evinces the idea that not to be angry is to be compliant, to agree with a deeply flawed social order.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of reasons to be angry--one need not even make an effort. Just this morning, my Facebook feed is breathing a sigh of relief at the (temporary?) salvation of the Affordable Care Act, rescued from demise by three Republican lawmakers with some semblance of a spine. That denying people care for life-threatening conditions because of an accident of birth or circumstance--conditions that do not take political sides--is a goal that 49 lawmakers find laudable, and came close to becoming reality in the topsy-turvy world of Trumpistan is something that naturally evokes anger. It is a human, natural emotion, and one we have to learn to sit with and understand.

I remember feeling this kind of cleansing, cathartic anger the morning the Trump administration announced the first version of the travel ban. The sentiment that washed through my body was beyond words, beyond description (but I'll try to describe it anyway.) It was as if pure, clean red flushed through my veins, filled my body, hummed in my ears, pounded in my heart, blinded my eyes. Its power was so phenomenal and awesome that I could not do anything for few minutes but let it fill and rinse every cell of my body, before I rose, got out of the house, and took the train to the airport. Being amongst other people who felt like me was probably one of the top ten experiences of my life. Shutting down the airport was the first time I felt power since the election. When we come together, I thought as we marched from gate to gate, chanting, we can do more than shut down one of the nation's busiest airports: we can move mountains. It is for these reasons that anger has an intoxicating, addictive quality; however, more often than not I have found that its allure is also its great risk. Too often I see its power to motivate and awaken offset by its power to divide and destroy. This is true for any movement or community, but I want to spend some time talking about its manifestations in the progressive left.

A few--perhaps too few--brave progressive voices have drawn attention to the unfortunate tendency of the left to "go nuclear at the slightest provocation" as Freddie deBoer puts it. Some have commented on the toxicity of call-out culture (here and here.) Some have commented on the rigidity and purity of the movement, comparing it to a church. And as Jo Freeman reminds us, there is nothing new under the sun--radical feminism was characterized by the same dynamic, which likely contributed to Shulamit Firestone's mental illness and eventual death. And each of these thought pieces yielded angry response pieces, insisting there is no problem here, chiding the authors for their identity markers as if they were marks of Cain, explaining away their problems as "privilege," and in short, doing what passes in the progressive left scene as creating a united front.

There is very little room, and little to no legitimacy, left for conversations about the proportionality between offense and reaction, about the measure and form anger takes. Efforts to ask about perspective of to debate strategies are frequently rebuffed as "tone policing." There is remarkable resistance to nuance, to internal debate, to disagreement, and offering anything to the contrary immediately gets reduced to ad-hominem attacks about the dissenter's assortment of identities and the legitimacy of their opinions.

It is understandable that people who are deeply traumatized and oppressed will respond like this (though many of those who do are not members of the oppressed groups themselves, but rather their self-appointed proxies.) A lifetime of indignities makes one's soul into a Petri dish of humiliation, dehumanization, and resentment, and sometimes all it takes for the cauldron to boil over is something that, to an outsider, might seem minute. "Microaggressions" are called that precisely because that's what they are: small-scale indignities of everyday life, each on its own seemingly not meriting a strong reaction, but drop by drop these approaches add up. Sometimes, the language activists use in this context can be jarring. For example, as someone who actually was in life-threatening physical peril (check me out, falling into my own trap of using my own victimization as a license to speak!), I find myself often bristling against the now common use of the phrase "I felt unsafe" to describe situations that might be more accurately described as "I was upset" or "I disagreed with the other person." But, to paraphrase a cliche metaphor, to someone who has felt like a nail all their life, everything looks like a hammer. And understandably so.

Therein lies the deep and profound paradox of the progressive struggle for civil and human rights: a fundamental condition for the movement--perhaps even its raison d'être--is for the people on the receiving end of indignity, hostility, and humiliation to be at the forefront of the movement, to speak for themselves in a clear, loud voice, rather than to be paternalistically represented by do-gooder proxies. And at the same time, as any of us who has been hurt and traumatized knows, the fundamental problem that we are not always the best judges of our long-term needs when we are in the heart of the trauma. It's hard to sit down and put together long-term goals, to carefully consider what we need, when we see red, burning in rage that cannot be calmly spoken and explained away. And because of this, too often the call to action revolves around vindication, revenge, or another punitive version of justice. 

In her book Lovingkindness Sharon Salzberg offers a brilliant analysis of anger:

There is a confusion in contemporary society about how to relate to feelings of aversion. For example, it is difficult to understand the difference between feeling anger and venting anger. When we undertake a spiritual practice, it is important that we open to all that arises, that we recognize, acknowledge, and accept everything we feel. We have a long conditioning of self-deception, of keeping certain things outside the sphere of our awareness, of repressing them. Overcoming our denial and repression and opening to states of aversion can be very healing. But in the process, we may pay the prices of becoming lost in anger if, though misunderstanding, we indulge it. 

Most contemporary psychological research shows that when one expresses anger quite often in one's life, it leads to the easy expression of anger. Expressing anger becomes a habit. Many people assume that we have a certain amount of anger inside, and that if we do not want to keep it inside, we have to put it outside; somehow if it is outside, it is not going to be inside anymore. Anger seems like a solid thing. But, in fact, we discover, if we observe carefully, that anger has no solidity. In reality it is merely a conditioned response that arises and passes away. It is crucial for us to see that when we identify with these passing states as being solid and who we truly are, we let them rule us, and we are compelled to act in ways that cause harm to ourselves and others. Our opening needs to rest on a basis of nonidentification. Recognizing aversion or anger in the mind as transitory is very different from identifying with them as being who we really are, and then acting on them.

It seems to me that Salzberg is contrasting two versions of anger: the popularly assumed Western version of finite anger and the Eastern version of regenerative anger. Finite anger is like having ingested something that does not sit well with us, suffering food poisoning, and vomiting. The act of vomiting cleanses us from the bad feeling and we are healed. But anger, she says, is actually more like inflammation in the body, like phlegm. The more phlegm you cough out, the more your body produces, and the more the body produces, the more you need to cough out. 

Even gentle efforts to point out the destructive side of anger are often rebuffed using more of the argot of the movement: "white fragility," "white tears." Expressing doubts about the productivity of anger-driven action is "tone policing." Opinions about anger that do not follow the bon-ton in the movement--the anger-is-good, anger-is-productive, we-are-angry-therefore-we-rise party line--lead to personal excoriation of whoever expresses them, frequently connecting them to the dissenter's supposedly privileged identity. 

How reductive this is, how insulting to the very traumatized people at the center and forefront of the movement. That an angry reaction is part and parcel of being queer or a person of color, and that a peaceful reaction implies nonchalance or obtuseness of the privileged, is an offense to the many people of peace, serenity, love of the world, and collaboration in all communities, including communities afflicted by discrimination. It is absolutely not okay that the world penalizes people with aggressions--macro or micro--based on their color, size, gender, sexuality, or anything else, be it the product of biology, circumstances, or choice (more about distinctions of this sort in a later post.) But while one often does not have much of a choice about how the world treats them, one does have a choice how to react. Anger is one such choice. It is not a question of whether it is appropriate or not to feel angry. But whether expressing anger in certain ways is productive or destructive should be a topic of open conversation in a healthy movement, and in silencing anyone who deviates from the angry-is-good party line we miss out on important nuance that can strengthen and enrich us--regardless of who expresses the dissent.

Anger is primarily destructive to the psyche, because marinating in an environment of anger and hostility can lead to apathy and eventually to disengagement from doing good in the world. But it can also be a trainwreck of destruction, running over anything and everything in its path. One such example is the frightening witch hunt of Laura Kipnis, who published this essay and ended up facing a Title IX lawsuit by students who "felt unsafe" because of words she put on paper. But the example that is closer to my heart is the recall petition against Judge Aaron Persky, who convicted Brock Turner a while ago of felony sex crimes and sentenced him--in accordance with the probation report--to six months in jail.

Of course these crimes are upsetting.. Can you imagine ending up unconscious behind a dumpster and having someone whose morals were completely eclipsed by his momentary passions and proclivities take sexual advantage of you, as if you were not a fellow human being? What kind of person, divorced from feelings of empathy and care, devoid of respect, does this to another? What kind of culture makes this behavior an acceptable response? But now that we are enraged about the behavior, our anger begins to regenerate and inflame out bodies and souls. The natural place to seek recourse is the legal system. We feel like this decision, that will inflict suffering on Turner, will bring a catharsis, a reward, will return the moral harmony in the universe to where it was before. As Frank Zimring explains in the context of police violence, seeing the criminal justice system as the solution to moral wrongs is bound to disappoint.

The legal system fails to supply the product we wanted--never mind the fact that most of the people crying out against a six-month jail sentence have never even visited a jail, let alone been registered as sex offenders--and our anger is not satisfied. It must claim wider, larger fields. The gaze turns to the judge (and, by extension, to the probation system.) The camera zooms on Turner--a white, affluent athlete at an elite university. We now assume there's a racist/classist aspect to all this and get even angrier (this hypothesis is apparently groundless upon closer look at Judge Persky's sentencing record, which does not register this sort of bias at all.) Now there's a petition out there to recall the judge and every good leftist who hates rape culture must march in lockstep against rape culture by destroying the judge.

I joined a petition by dozens of law professors against the recall. A TV crew came to interview me about the case. They asked me the same question forty-seven times, because they wanted me to provide a soundbite of just the right length and punch. Any effort to clarify my position with some nuance was rebuffed. Eventually, what ended up making it to the news broadcast was the idea that mobbing judges about their sentences invariably leads to harsher sentences. Before you know it, strangers are screeching at me "white privilege!!!" on Twitter.

Has the notion that punitive judges--judges who are afraid to be lenient with people we don't like--tend to first and foremost victimize poor people and people of color because they are often at the receiving end of the worst of the criminal justice system not occurred to anyone? Has any of these strangers, as well as the architects of the petition, considered the punitive and hysterical climate that an angry assault on the judicial system is going to create, and its repercussions for the very people they purport to defend? Possibly; possibly not. But at this point, the giant machine of anger has already been set in motion. The anger swallowed the convicted offender and moved on to the next target. Whether or not it claims the career of someone whose judicial record does not reveal systematic lack of judgment remains to be seen, and I wonder whether the fire will rage on, with another victim in its sights.

Perhaps using the word "victim" here is jarring to those of us who are deeply conversant in the language of structural inequalities. When anger about what is considered to be a "right" target engulfs us, we tend to use techniques of neutralization to explain what we do. Two come immediately to mind. The obvious one is blaming the victim, who is unworthy of our sympathy because of their opinions or deeds. But even more so, I think there's a denial of injury going on. Because someone is deemed "powerful" and we speak on behalf of the "powerless" we assume that we can't really hurt the victim; that whatever pain they suffer as a consequence of our angry actions is nothing compared to what disempowered people suffer every day; and that the truly powerful are not easily scared or harmed by, say, a bunch of tweets.

There are several answers to this claim. One of them is that mob justice not only has the potential to cause real harm, to the extent of destroying careers and derailing lives, and has already done so. Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed details several incidents of this sort, in which blind rage on the Internet caused unbelievable damage to the person's life. I wonder if the people posting and tweeting blindly ever stop to think about what happened to the target of their rage after the mission--firing or recalling someone--has been accomplished. The threat to livelihood, including the livelihoods of people who are generally well-meaning and productive, is such that those of us working in academia or law or both are constantly wary of linguistic missteps, of inadvertently offending someone, and of the implications of that.

I'm going to take a risk now and talk about something deeply personal that had me seriously concerned about my career years ago, and might serve as an explanation why this is not merely academic. I taught criminal procedure and we came to discuss torture and confessions. This required presenting the classic "ticking bomb" dilemma and how states should approach the prevention of mass crimes through the extraction of confessions. There are, of course, some commentators who think that, when innocent lives are at risk, torture should be authorized. Then there are those who point out that the classic "ticking bomb" scenario is unrealistic and never justifies the moral problems inherent to torture (and there's the practical approach according to which, relying on empirical evidence, torture doesn't tend to yield useful information anyway.) To make the material come alive, I presented the case of suicide bombings in Israel, showing slides depicting the bombing at the Hebrew University Cafeteria in 2002, which I survived by mere seconds. I then showed a slide with a graphic from a B'Tzelem report, based on testimonies of tortured detainees, depicting a detainee in a "shabab" position, tied to a chair for hours. The latter was a drawing, not a photograph, because obviously such photos are not publicly available. For context, I should point out that I teach in San Francisco, where the vast majority of my students identify as politically progressive.

I was untenured at the time, and did not have my Green Card yet, and you can imagine my fear when my teaching evaluations included a screed from an anonymous student accusing me of "trivializing Palestinian suffering" by "showing a cartoon" depicting torture and not discussing in general "the evils of the occupation." In an environment that consistently vilifies Israel, and that makes no distinction between delegitimizing a country and deeply criticizing its actions, I could easily see this screed becoming a cry for justice on Twitter, making me into some kind of militarist oppressor, and calling for my dismissal. After agonizing for weeks about the proper cause of action (would I seem overly defensive? Would colleagues who were vocal activists for Palestine pick on this?) I ended up writing a long letter for my tenure file setting the matters straight, which was probably overkill considering the circumstances. In fact, even writing about this now makes me fearful and vulnerable, but my fear of generative, endless anger is a demon I feel compelled to exorcise.

I don't know for certain who the student was, but I have a pretty good idea. That student is now my friend on Facebook, and when they "like" my posts I always wonder if they ever consider how close they might have been to completely derailing my life because of a misunderstanding and black-and-white thinking. I also wonder about the ways in which this incident tamed me into thinking very carefully, perhaps too carefully, about every word I say in class, picking examples and topics that are less likely to polarize, and maybe inadvertently crippling the critical thinking of my students in the process. How many important and interesting debates have we avoided out of fear that someone will take exception and start a web campaign against us? How many moderate and conservative students with useful contributions to class are we silencing with intellectually evasive maneuvers?

Arguably, some caution in speaking is not a bad idea; several commentators have pointed out that silencing offensive speech is a positive goal, as it teaches those with social advantage to be more thoughtful and careful about what they say. Which is an interesting and worthwhile point--except for the fact that the expansive nature of our anger makes the definitions of problematic speech nebulous and unpredictable. Given the scary repercussions of public excoriation, this climate limits what people feel comfortable saying to the most anodyne and safe, offering them little in the way of helpful guidelines for behavior that still preserve the nature of a deliberative society.

Being angry is a part of life. It is an emotion that cycles in and out of our psyche as a response to external stimulants. Its outward expression and the inner sensations associated with it are a universal human trait. We get angry about different things, but the experience of being angry is the same. In Practicing Peace In Times of War, Pema Chödrön tells the following story:

Jarvis Masters, who is a prisoner on death row, has written one of my favorite spiritual books, called Finding Freedom. In a chapter called “Angry Faces,” Jarvis has his TV on in his cell but he doesn’t have the sound on because he’s using the light of the TV to read. And every once in a while, he looks up at the screen, then yells to people down the cell block to ask what’s happening. 

The first time, someone yells back, “It’s the Ku Klux Klan, Jarvis, and they’re all yelling and complaining about how it’s the blacks and the Jews who are responsible for all these problems.” About half an hour later, he yells again, “Hey, what’s happening now?” And a voice calls back, “That’s the Greenpeace folks. They’re demonstrating about the fact that the rivers are being polluted and the trees are being cut down and the animals are being hurt and our Earth is being destroyed.” Some time later, he calls out again. “Now what’s going on?” And someone says, “Oh, Jarvis, that’s the U.S. Senate and that guy who’s up there now talking, he’s blaming the other guys, the other side, the other political party, for all the financial difficulty this country is in." 

Jarvis starts laughing and he calls down, “I’ve learned something here tonight. Sometimes they’re wearing Klan outfits, sometimes they’re wearing Greenpeace outfits, sometimes they’re wearing suits and ties, but they all have the same angry faces.”

We decry the anger and hatred of racism, imperialism, and environmental degradation--and with good reason. And because the reasons for our anger feel just and fair to us, we think it is a fundamentally different anger than that of others. But these are all the stories we tell ourselves about the world, about a universally felt experience. And the most important thing is that the dynamics of the anger sensation are always the same. Anger is generative and renewable. When it burns something in its path, its appetite grows, and it seeks the next target. Like fire, it looks for things to consume and destroy until nought is left - but by that time, our energy, our generative power, will be exhausted, and all that remains will be scorched earth.

How can we keep our commitment to making the world a better place, to fighting--yes, fighting!--ignorance, marginalization, and genuine dangers to the most disenfranchised among us, without letting anger govern and consume us? Salzberg and Chödrön will have us befriend our anger, sit with it, experience curiosity about its sensations and effects, and then respond from a place of understanding and thoughtfulness rather than react to the feeling itself. This is much easier said than done and at least for me, with my fairly hot temper, will likely take many more years to master (it's already considerably better than it used to be, but I have a long road ahead of me.) One thing I've done is soberly assess literature and cultural myths that involve stories of mob justice, like Tennessee Williams' aforementioned play and the other examples at the opening of this essay, and try and sit with empathy for both the pursuers and the pursued in each of these examples. The heat and passion that emanates from these stories (the persecution of Jesus is literary called "the passion") are an excellent exercise in empathy, and one that helps me understand these sentiments as they arise around me in real life. I also build on my own experience--like you, gentle reader, and as I told you in this post, I've been on both sides of this experience. I have experienced anger that feels like a purifying cleanse and I have been the target of (a fairly moderate) amount of this anger, in the form of student evaluations, twitter replies, and the occasional anonymous hate mail. Regardless of where you are in the sociopolitical scheme of things, you have experienced giving and receiving anger in your life, and this is a rich soil on which to grow empathy.

Another measure that I've found useful is to simply define genres of actions in which I categorically refuse to participate. For example, I made the peremptory decision that, no matter how justified or correct I feel my position is, no matter how deserving of scorn or anger the person is, I will never sign an online petition to fire or punish someone else. I'm no spiritual authority, and I have no gravitas to invite you to do the same, but I can report that making this decision has helped focus my activist energies on actions that I think might actually help improve matters, rather than at those that might satisfy my immediate thirst for someone's blood. It's been salutary and helpful, and I find that my efforts yield better fruit this way.

You are not a bad person for being angry, and you are not a bad person for evoking the anger of others. These are all opportunities to awaken to the wonder and weakness of being human, which is a condition that we all share.