Tag Archives: Anger

Cancelling Anger

Culture, Freedom, Virtue, , , , , ,

Virtuous men are rarely, if ever, prone to propaganda.  That is because they can ascertain when to “fight the good fight”.  Vicious men, on the other hand, are extremely prone to it.  They have no idea which are the good fights and so they must be told.  But simply telling them is not enough.  Lacking any real control over their anger, they need someone else to stir it up for them by turning events that fit the narratives catastrophes.   Having no way to turn it off, they are absolutely unforgiving and must find offense around every corner.  Discerning ears will recognize this scenario for what it is—our modern society and its incessant need to cancel other people.

In truth then, at the heart of cancel culture, is the inability to discern the difference between wrath and anger.  These terms, even if they are often used synonymously, are not truly referring to the same thing.  Anger is, first and foremost, a passion or an emotion built into human nature to deal with the presence of evil.  More specifically, it is the emotion that provides an interior motor to fight against a specific evil that acts as an obstacle to achieving some good thing.  When a man discerns some good thing is being blocked, he wills to be angry in order energize him to fight the good fight.     

Fighting the Good Fight

The virtuous man knows the good fight when he sees it because he has the virtue of justice.  He is habitually desiring that each person receives what is due to him.  When some obstacle is placed in the way of that being achieved, he grows angry in order to move him to fight to restore justice.  This is why St. John Chrysostom thought that: “He who does not get angry, when there is just cause for being so, commits sin. In effect, irrational patience sows vices, maintains negligence, and encourages not only bad men to do wrong, but good men as well.”

Not only does the virtuous man grow angry when he should, he also directs his anger at the source of the injustice and does not just “vent”.  Likewise, he also filters it through the virtues of clemency and meekness to avoid becoming excessively angry and aim it at the injustice first and then the cause of it.  He truly knows how to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” because he is just.

Our Lord, Who referred to Himself as “meek and humble of heart” is the example par excellence.  When He cleaned the Temple, it was because His Father was not being rendered what was due to Him.  So, fueled by anger, the Just Man removed the obstacle.  With meekness He whipped the tables but with clemency avoided whipping the money changers.

The reason why anger is such a strong emotion is because it must often supply enough fuel for us to fight for justice for other people.  When that fuel turns inward and ignites a fire in us because of how we perceive we are being treated then it is truly wrath.  This is why wrath has been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins—it turns what should be an outward-facing passion into a selfish one.  The wrathful man sees red, not because of an offense against justice, but because he has been slighted in some way.  To use modern parlance, he has been offended by the words or actions of another person.  Because anger must always be justified, he must also search for a reason why his own personal offense is really unjust.  In essence wrath turns anger off of justice onto my feelings and directs it not towards rectifying an injustice, but mercilessly punishing the offender.

A simple example might help us discern the difference.  A man is getting on to a crowded bus and he steps on your foot.  You feel anger arise, but look at him and realize he had tripped over someone else’s foot a few feet ahead of you and it was merely an accident.  In that case the just response is clemency because it was an accident.  Now suppose that same man enters the bus looks you in the eye, smiles and stomps on your foot.  Now the anger is justified, but the meek man would temper his response such that it did not include punching him in the face.  But the anger would be directed towards the action and not just the fact that it was done to you.  The way to know the difference is by imagining after stepping on your foot he goes and steps on an old lady’s foot.  If you are just as angry (or more) about that as you are about your own foot being stepped on, then you know the anger is justified.

This scenario also highlights an important point that is often a source of confusion regarding anger.  The Christian in imitation of Our Lord, when He is the sole victim of the injustice, will often suffer it in silence and not be angry.  But when there are other victims, including those who might be scandalized by you not confronting the evil, then zealous anger will confront the wrong directly.  The “others” include the offender because he needs to know that he has done evil in order to repent—and will need to be justly punished as part of that repentance.

Back to the Cancel Culture

Every passion, when not properly wedded to virtue, needs increased stimuli in order to get an equivalent response.  Related to the question at hand, wrath needs to be constantly fed, especially when it is being used to keep the vicious fighting.  It no longer becomes about justice, but about keeping them angry.  There is no need to discern whether something is actually unjust or not, because the anger will make it “feel” that way.  There is no need to make the distinction between victim and perpetrator because the object of that anger will tell which is which.  There can be no forgiveness until the perpetrator is “cancelled” and is no longer exists, either literally or figuratively. 

Thankfully, history has many examples of cancel cultures that always end with the cancellers eating their own.  When there is no one left to be angry at, when there is no one left to cancel, wrath demands that you execute the executioner.  For those who are trapped in this vicious circle the only option is for the virtuous to step up and restore justice.  Fear, masquerading as prudence, is never the solution.  Neither is the ersatz anger that we call “outrage.”  Nor is any attempt at cancelling the cancellers.  Only true zealous anger for justice can repair our decadent culture.

On Rage Mode

Sin, Spiritual Life, Virtue, , , ,

On several other occasions (here and here for example) I have mentioned a particular distaste for the ubiquitous habit of theological hair-splitting perpetrated by the priest and lay alike.  One might even say it makes me angry—except for the fact that this post itself is about anger.  Specifically it is about the follicle-parting habit of saying that “anger is not a sin, but depends on what you do with it.”  As usual our armchair theologians are mixing just enough truth with error that it satisfies all but the most conscientious of interrogators.  The problem of course is that anger is one of the seven capital sins, that is, the seven vices that flow from our fallen nature and animate much of what we do.  Given that anger is a core element of concupiscence, it merits a more accurate and thorough response than the Reader’s Digest version we reflexively offer.

To begin we should go to the heart of our apologist’s argument and make the necessary distinction between anger solely as an emotion and anger as an emotion that is willed.  Our emotional life in this post-lapsarian world is a source of interior conflict.  Emotions can rise within us without any engagement of the will.  But they always act so as to gain consent of the will so that they may endure.  Anger in this regard is no different.  Anger itself is a passion that is part of the irascible appetite meant to assist us in driving away an evil that is difficult to avoid.  It has two elements to it and it is the taking of offense and the taking of revenge.  Without the engagement of intellect and will, anger can arise when an evil is perceived.  Left unchecked or even consented to by the will, it can intensify making rational judgment difficult.  It can also be deliberately aroused.

Some examples might help us see how this works.  Suppose you are on a bus, keeping to yourself, when someone walks by and steps on your foot.  Without any thought, you feel angry.  You look up and see that it is an old woman who accidently put her cane on top of your foot.  You are now at the moment of judgment, should I be angry or not?  The emotion arose without any judgment or willing it, but the moment comes when you must decide whether it should persist.

Now change the example slightly.  When you look up it is a young man who is going up and down the aisle stomping on people’s feet.  You realize it was done deliberately and you must decide whether to allow the emotion of anger to persist or not.  In both of these examples the emotion of anger arose antecedently, but now you must “decide what to do with it.”  To multiply the examples, suppose further that when you get home, you begin to recall the actions of the young man and the more you think about it, the angrier you get.  As you will to reflect on the slight, you are deliberately willing the anger.

Using the three examples, we would say that in the case of the old woman once you judge it to be accidental your anger should dissipate.  With the young man your anger was probably justified.  But what about when you dwell upon it later on?  We clearly see that each of these examples highlights the inherent problem with “it depends on what you do with it”—it assumes that we know what to do with it.  That is, it neglects the fact that anger is more than just any other emotion, but also a capital vice.

Righteous Anger?

This is where the language of St. Thomas Aquinas is helpful because he speaks in terms of the “quantity” of anger and how it must be done according to right reason.  Anger may be justified (like in the case of the young man slamming your foot) but this does not make it righteous anger.  In order to be righteous anger it must seek to punish only those that deserve punishment and only in the measure in which they deserve it.  It must be moderate in its execution going only as far as is both necessary and allowed according to justice.  Finally it must be animated by motives of charity aiming at the restoration of order and amendment of the guilty.

The enumeration of these three conditions ought to give each one of us serious pause.  The only time we should “do something with our anger” is when all three conditions can be met.  Without the accompany virtues of meekness and justice, righteous anger is practically impossible.   St. James seems to be speaking in absolute terms when he says that “the wrath of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).

What then should we do with it?  According to St. Francis de Sales, we should mortify it, literally killing it when it arises— “better to learn how to live without being angry than to imagine one can moderate and control lawful anger… it is better to drive it away speedily than enter into a parley; for, if we give it ever so little leisure, it will become mistress of the place, like a serpent, who easily draws in his whole body where he can once get in his head…You must at the first alarm speedily muster your forces; not violently, not tumultuously, but mildly and yet seriously.””  Like all the vices, each time we allow our anger to go unchecked we create a bodily disposition that both increases the intensity of it and makes it easier to experience anger.  This includes not only full “rage mode”, but even seemingly small acts of impatience, flashes of temper, and harsh words.  Anger has a power to overcome reason, blinding it to every color but red, making it something that should not be lightly trifled with.

Mortification is one of those dirty Catholic words that needs to be understood, especially in this context.  The goal of mortifying our anger is not so that we will never be angry, but that we are able to bring it under the control of our judgment.  As St. Thomas reminds us, righteous anger is a “simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason” (ST II-II q.158, art 8).  This starts by doing as St. Francis de Sales suggests—“drive it away speedily”—but that is not the finish line.  We subdue our anger so as to unleash its goodness.

The Daughters of Wrath

If we are to drive it away, we must first recognize the effects of disordered anger, what St. Thomas calls the “daughters of wrath.”  These are the seemingly hidden ways innocuous ways in which we feed the beast of anger.  There are three sets of them that have to do with disordered thoughts, disordered speech and disordered acts (c.f. STII-II q.158, art 7).

The daughters of thought are with indignation and what St. Thomas refers to as swelling of the mind.  Indignation may be directed at “the person with whom a man is angry, and whom he deems unworthy.”  But it has a certain gravity to it that always causes the person to reflect on how vile the person whom he is angry at and how grave their injustices.  This leads to both a magnification and amplification of the actual offense.  Much anger is fed and expressed in our current political climate based upon the division of left and right.  “Swelling of the mind” is manifest in the angry man who “mulls over different ways and means whereby they can avenge themselves.”  So, while indignation causes focus on the imagined depravity of one’s “enemy”, “swelling of the mind” imagines ways in which one can gain vengeance against the evildoer.

The daughters of speech are clamor and contumely.  The former denotes disorderly and confused speech.”  This is essentially what we would call unintelligible ranting.  While the latter, is unnecessarily harsh and insulting language.  Likewise the daughters of acts are blasphemy (contumely directed to God) and quarreling.  Quarreling bears special mention because it means more than just “arguing.”  Argument is a good thing when it is in the service of the truth, but often degrades to quarrelsomeness as jealousy for our own ideas creeps in.  This daughter also manifests in the habit of having imaginary arguments in your head, with either real or imaginary foes.

With the awareness of the daughters of wrath, we can see how often we fall victim to them and why we may have so much difficulty in controlling our anger.  It is these daughters, because they are feeding our anger, that need to be mortified.  We need to mortify our imagination and memory not allowing it to dwell on real and imaginary slights.  We should mortify our speech by controlling our volume and tone of voice.  We should avoid arguments about things that really don’t matter and be willing to concede when arguments become quarrelsome.

“Anger can be a sin, but only if you don’t learn how to use it!”