There is a great deal of anger in America today, and it is a multidimensional anger…a neo-Hobbesian war of group against group, with the boundaries of the groups and the axes of their hostilities shifting constantly. I am reminded for the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s song There is a War.
And while much of the anger is politically-motivated, not all of it is. There are political assassination attempts…and approval for such attempts…but there are also incidents of very bad behavior on airliners and other public conveyances, and snarly interactions between customers and representatives of businesses…with the snarling sometimes on both sides.
Of course, there has always been a lot of anger–probably characteristic of all societies, certainly the case in American society. In the 1850s, a Senator was brutally caned by another Senator on the senate floor. Lynch mobs existed. There were insane attacks against German-Americans and all things German during WWI, in a toxic climate that had been established by Woodrow Wilson. And some of the same against Japanese Americans during WWII. But what is unique about present-day anger is both its multidimensional nature and its pervasiveness.
What are the reasons for all this anger?…what will be the consequences if it is not damped down?…and can it be damped down?
The first thing that will surely come to almost everybody’s mind as a reason is social media…and, particularly, the algorithms that encourage negative rather than positive interaction. There is some truth in this, but it’s too easy to treat it as the exclusive cause. Cable media is at least as bad, though cable news viewership seems fortunately to be on the decline.
Some of it is career and economic disappointment. There are strong feelings on the part of many college graduates that they did what they were supposed to do, and ‘society’ did not hold up its part of the bargain by providing them with the kinds of careers and incomes that they expected. And non-college graduates often feel disrespected as well an unfairly limited in their careers.
A friend once remarked that “if someone is bitter, then he is publicly announcing that in his own eyes he is a failure.” I thought this was a profound comment, and by that measure, there are a lot of people in America today who consider themselves to be failures–too often not leading them to seriously consider how they can do better, but rather toward envy and resentment toward others.
There is an expectation of perfection which leads to a continual sense of disappointment. For example: after the recent NYC helicopter crash, comments were flooded with accusations against the helicopter designers–‘how could anyone possibly design something that can fail like this?’ But things aren’t ever going to be perfect, and thus, there will always be something to be angry about. I’ve read that there are tribal societies that believe that nothing bad ever happens except through witchcraft…if someone gets sick or dies, well, bad things don’t just happen, he must have been witched. There is an unwholesome amount of this kind of thinking in America today.
The above is related to the myth of a golden age. I’ve seen many people asserting that there was some golden age in which Americans were naturally healthy, before we were poisoned by Big Food and Big Pharma. No historical memory of the infectious diseases that killed so many children before the age of 5, or the fact that women faced serious risk of dying in childbirth, or of a thousand not-so-healthy things. Of course, we should address problems with food and pharmaceuticals, but this doesn’t justify a denial of everything positive that has been done and from which we have benefitted. See Ruxandra Teslo on why she is glad she wasn’t born a century or two ago. See also the trend chart of words reflecting progress and future versus caution, worry, and risk-aversion–in English, French, and German–over the past four centuries at this Ruxandra post.
Indeed, the whole idea that people in earlier times have done things from which we have benefitted has been lost, even negated. We suffer from a malign form of negative ancestor-worship.
A huge factor is the focus on identity established through demographically–defined groups, identities usually emphasized for politically-tendentious reasons. I’m reminded of something Ralph Peters said:
Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characterized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.
Also see @alexthechick on Tribalism.
Roger Simon argues that a primary cause of the outpouring of anger is the decline of religion. Maybe to some extent, but I’m pretty sure that lynch mobs included a substantial complement of believing, church-going people; the hanging of witches certainly did. The decline of formal religion, though, does contribute to the increase in the number of isolated, disconnected individuals.
A lot of people are looking for a source of identity, and while some of this traditionally came from religion, much of it came from family, which has clearly had a declining influence. There’s an ad for a matchmaking service that’s recently been on tv a lot, in which a woman expresses her disappointment with online dating services and says she “just wants to meet someone she can introduce to her friends.” I thought this was interesting: a few decades ago, it would have been “someone she could introduce to her parents.”
There are a lot of people who get their incomes from stirring up anger. This includes not only political operators, and online influencers, but a large number of NGOs which are largely about attacking some set of organizations and/or people. And a significant part of American academia is endlessly busy manufacturing new and revised group identities, and stirring up resentments based thereon.
Rob Henderson says, speaking of much of today’s political rhetoric “Notice it’s always “smash the system” and “demolish capitalism” and “eat the rich.” It’s never “help the needy” or “feed the poor.” You’ll see a thousand communists say “billionaires shouldn’t exist” but not a single one who says “poor people shouldn’t exist.”
The politicization of absolutely everything is certainly a major factor in the metastasization of anger in our society. As I remarked in this post:
One reason why American political dialog has become so unpleasant is that increasingly, everything is a political issue. Matters that are life-and-death to individuals…metaphorically life-and-death, to his financial future or the way he wants to live his life, or quite literally life-and-death…are increasingly grist for the political mill. And where that takes us is that:
People who disagree with your agenda are “attacking” you or “robbing” you. How commonly do you hear dissent described in precisely those terms nowadays?
When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension. It all boils down to a “historic” election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome everything depends. They’re all going to be “historic” elections from now on. That’s not a good thing. (link)
I think it is also likely that therapy culture has done more harm than good as far as the climate of anger goes. Several years ago, the blogger called girlwithadragonflytattoo (no longer available) had a post on anger at which she argued that–contrary to the common belief–expressing one’s anger is generally not a good idea, from the standpoint of one’s own mental health. A lot of people today seem to feel the opposite, or they are so angry that they don’t care what effect their anger-expressions have on their own well-being. I suspect that therapy culture has often encouraged this attitude.
The post by Dragonfly Girl reminded me of a post by Grim, in which he discussed anger in a political context, and channeled Andrew Klavan to point out that anger can make you stupid.
Grim: We need to be cunning. We need to think and act strategically.
Klavan: You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard. Poverty programs are misguided, not because the poor are undeserving criminals, but because dependency on government breeds dysfunction and more poverty. Guns save lives and protect liberty. Property rights guarantee liberty. Religious rights are essential to liberty. Without liberty we are equal only in misery.
Anger of course does have a purpose. In politics, it is anger at bad policies and their destructive impact that can motivate one to get involved and work hard for positive change. In relationships, anger at mistreatment can motivate one to fix it or get out of it. But anger needs to be controlled and moderated or it becomes the enemy of judicious thought and effective action.
One of the reasons for the French loss in the campaign of 1940 was the internal angers and resentments which existed in French society at the time.
Another excellent example of the effects of uncontrolled anger can be found in that piece of military history known as the Charge of the Light Brigade. This unnecessary disaster took place during the Crimean War, in 1854, and seems to have been driven in considerable part by toxic emotions on the part of British officers involved. While the details of the Charge are still being debated by historians, 161 years later, the general outline was as follows…
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