Your Anger Will Not Save You
Further Thoughts on Coalition and Community Moral Lives
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Anger is one of the trickiest aspects of a Christian moral life, not only because anger is permissible and good, but because it’s also destructive and to be avoided. It’s both good to have zeal and rage against the machine, and it will corrupt your soul entirely. It’s both exemplified by the LORD against injustice, and adjacent to the deadly sins. In this post, I want to focus not on the dynamics of divine anger necessarily or anger among the virtues, though, but on the way in which anger operates in moral communities.
The Basics of Anger
To begin, anger is not bad in and of itself. Anger is a convenient index for our concerns, in that indicates to us that something in our relational world has been disrupted. The reasons could be something as mild as a headache or something as complex as a social phenomenon, something deeply intimate or something impersonal which implicates our daily living from a distance. But in any event, anger in and of itself is an indicator of generally two things:
Something is off kilter between at least two relational aspects: your vision of your life and your lived experience, or you and a loved one, etc.
The off-kiltered-ness is something you care about. Wrath and love are frequently paired together, in that wrath is a disproportionate expression of our anger, prompted by deep care for something.
To be wrathful at a subordinate at your job, for example, may be because of something unrelated to their performance (i.e. stresses elsewhere), or it could be because their work affects your own negatively: that you love your reputation or your income or a job well done. We care about something (rightly or wrongly), and anger is the sign that we care about that thing that we are being estranged from.
Thus far, the anger we’ve noted has been for interpersonal issues: when I get angry toward my kids, it’s usually one of those reasons above. If it’s because they’ve run out in the street, my anger is because I love them and don’t want them to get hurt. If it’s because they’ve been yelling about Legos for the eighth time today, it’s because Daddy loves writing and needs five minutes of quiet to do that. The former is indexed to good love, and the latter to a more selfish love that doesn’t have much to do with my kids.
But let’s apply this now to the way in which anger gets hashed out in public moral questions.
Anger Abroad: Coalitions and Cultivated Anger
Much of the anger which has been voiced in the last years sifts down into the interpersonal world, but has been generated out of this sometimes-tangible sense that our world isn’t right. Some of this is the consequence of having our moral sensibilities calibrated by the Internet, which thrives on outrage and people being impassioned enough to Say Something. But some of this—again, a consequence of the Internet, albeit a more positive one—is that we’re simply more aware of the vast number of things which shape and frame our world. The examples here are legion, but are mostly of the variety of what Bruce Rogers-Vaughn describes as a kind of third-order oppression: it’s not something interpersonal or even immediately social that’s amiss, but something structural. As we’ve looked at before, this kind of institutional relation dictate the terms of many decisions but yet have very little immediate relation to our daily existences.
You can point in a random direction and find these in The Discourse today: governmental overreach, SCOTUS decisions, gas prices, migration policy, Putin, ecological degradation—any number of third-order phenomenon are the sources of our anger.1 That these are third-order matters, because by definition these are not things which have either a specific source or a specific fix: they are structural and world-shaping, but not personal. And yet, they provoke a sense of dissonance between ourselves and the world we want to see: enter anger.
As we looked at last week, the differences between community thinking and coalition thinking matters here, not only in terms of being able to diagnose what is actionable about said structural issues, but in terms of being able to understand what our anger is doing in both of these situations. Most of the time, I think, anger at these third-order issues has become, I think, understood in a self-evidently justifying kind of way: to be angry is right and good, for the reasons I’ve identified above—something is out of whack in the world and that something is something which eventually will make a difference in the world you inhabit or the world you want to see.
The problem comes when the anger is directed at a third-order issue which has no specific source or single fix, meaning that the anger is generated perpetually: our anger can never be resolved, because the problem itself cannot be ended. If done in coalition-style-thinking, then, it means that not only is the anger perpetual, but (on the basis of how coalitions function) anger takes the form of abolishing that thing generating the anger: the end of a specific kind of injustice, the expansion of the Supreme Court, the reversal of inequitable economic conditions. I say “abolishing” here because coalitions, in organizing around a specific practical outcome, tend to operate in a mountain beyond mountains way: one injustice met leads to the next deeper injustice, an endlessly morphing pathology, and not one specific point of pain.2
Consequently, there is a ton of publishing money to be made in telling people to be angry—and not just by The Media: a legion of Instagram gurus and well-received titles in the last five years have the same message. The message is straightforward: Your Anger is Righteous and Good, because you are caring about the right things. I’m not naming names here, not only to impugn motives to people I don’t know, but because the examples are pluriform across political positions.
In these works, there is a half-truth: it is no prize to not be angry, in that anger is an index of our care. But anger in its coalition form requires us to be endlessly angry, and endlessly angry at an increasingly non-specific entity with no endpoint. At what point is America Great Again? How would we know when racism is indeed ended? Insofar as we do not have the energy to stay angry all the time, being coaxed into being endlessly angry but being unable to becomes a source of shame: have we lost the nerve, lost the ability to care about things that matter? Once one source of pain has subsided—once one form of injustice has been arrested or redressed—there is another specific instance of a third-order harm waiting to take its place. Such anger—as a cultivated virtue—is corrosive to us, not only because of the perpetual anger itself, but because of the form of thinking that comes with it: when anger is directed toward a particular shape, we lose the ability to be nuanced about what good might also be present within that target of our anger.
Anger and Communities: Two Cheers for Communities
Communities are smaller in scope, and so, by contrast, are not able to abolish the sources of third-order pain, but do better with helping mitigate the immediate effects: bearing the burden of its members, providing resources which help with specific issues. Their imagination tends not to be endless, and the accusation of whether their vision is quietist—”do what is yours to do”—is one worth taking up.
Anger within communities is cultivated—or rather, it happens— because anger happens whenever we love things. But because its concerns are more tangible ones, the anger is specific, though aware that there are real third-order causes. But the approach to anger is specific, and moderated. This is not to say that somehow communities don’t have endless anger or that communities can’t harbor resentments for great periods of time, but the difference is that the anger is both generated and sustained is indexed to particular harms: grudges associated with this family, or caused by that event. Insofar as communities enlarge and involve new persons, the set of concerns—and with it, the objects which arouse anger—offer a particular vantage to both see the harm and redress it.
In emphasizing the care of the members, and letting that specific care generate the specific form of common concern, third-order oppressions are not uprooted, but like Augustine saw with the Manicheeans, abolishing evil may not be the point. The choice to bear the effects of evil is not so much quietism as it is about two things: 1) acknowledging both what kind of care our ability to care is—that love can do great things in particular ways, and diluted things in general ways3—and 2) the real limits of human agency. We are finite creatures with much to care about, and there are a great many worthy things that I recognize as worth my love but exceed my finitude. This is not to say that communities do not care about third-order harms, but that the way they care extends outward from these internal forms of care. Anger has a limit to it, in that we can be angered about specifics which may have a specific end in sight.
The anger which we undergo is endless, prior to knowing about these third-order harms about which no one thing can be done, and prior to the Outrage Generators. There is no end to it, except that we are counseled to, in our anger, not sin. And anger can and is an index to something being wrong. But anger in itself is neither enough, nor self-justifying: in the same way that emotions do not “tell us” what is wrong, but are signs of another thing, so anger too must give way to something else, something specific, acknowledging that there is always another mountain and another source of anger and that if we cultivate anger, it will always find something to oppose.
At some juncture, we learn to turn it into a cold anger, a loving flame built to burn slow and occasionally burn out. This kind of anger is appropriate to a slow building of life in good and holy directions. We remain fully aware that the storms may set everything back. We know that injustice crucified in one form will appear again: even the memories of the martyrs can be used against the living saints, to stifle their holiness and snuff out their joy. We know that suffering remains the surd of a life in creation, and that some forces exist to cloak their actions behind incantations of inevitability: “if Amazon didn’t exist, someone else would be eating all the little fish.”
The question, it seems to me, is how to make anger our friend, our guide, and an indicator to seeing specific wrongs within a graced world, rather than anger making us its obsequient servants, rending our clothes taht we might offer it daily oblations, that anger and its acolytes Outrage and Everywhere might reign eternal with us its living sacrifices.
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Reading: Still plugging slowly through Confessions, as well as various things related to my summer/Fall writing project on apostolicity. Began Robert Meister’s After Evil, which articulates some of what I’ve put here as a kind of anti-political ethos: by attempting to do away with evil as an entity, we find ourselves implicitly endorsing an anti-politics, in which specific goods and specific harms can never be discussed—there is only banishing the unbanishable. Started Ember Falls, the next book in the series, which reads super fast.
Of Note: A few stories that I’m paying attention to:
—the Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta SCOTUS decision, issued in June, which grants much broader rights of prosecution in Native American communities. Will be very worth paying attention to.
—Chris Green is writing a book about Mary as a disciple. Chris’ work is great, and this will be a great read.
Coming Soon: for paid subscribers, we’ll kick off a few things in July, including a Zoom hangout, and a book club. Again, the twice-weekly format will resume in July as well: this would normally be located partly as a paywalled option.
Rogers-Vaughn rests a lot of this at the feet of neoliberalism. There’s a lot to be said for this argument, but not here.
Some points of pain are central, and are in that way, worth addressing. My concern here is two-fold. First, after a particular node is addressed, the apparatus for addressing that injustice turns its attention to a disproportionate injustice ill fit for the apparatus we have: we turn the bazooka on a fly, former allies becoming suspects. Second, it is a real theological temptation to identify pathology with a particular source, such that fixing that source means fixing the injustice. This was the Manicheean temptation: that evil could be denoted by certain physical entities, that evil had a locatable source that once locked up abolished all evil. This is the Hollywood blockbuster version of evil, that Thanos is our real threat, when in actuality, Thanos is a distraction from asking why Tony Stark has billions of dollars to burn while Ant-Man had to steal to support his family.
The phrase “random acts of kindness” is, for this reason, one of the worst phrases ever invented, and anti-loving: to love is to have a particular object in view which requires our response and care. It requires intention and particularity and frequently sacrifice, and is not distributed without seeing or concern. Kindness in this phrase means something which doesn’t cost anything of us, nor binds us to the object of that banal act in any kind of meaningful way.