There is no upside to anger

How many readers are going to get angry after reading this?

Image from pixabay.com

Anger is a big deal for the Stoics. Seneca wrote a whole book about it, and it is still just as good—if not better—than the advice you find on the anger management site of the American Psychological Association.

The basic idea is that anger is one of the pathē, or unhealthy emotions, as distinct from the eupatheiai, their healthy counterpart, an example of which would be love for the proper objects or people (like virtue, or your children). In Stoic psychology, what makes an emotion unhealthy is the fact that it overrides reason, and nothing does that to the degree of anger.

I have written about anger rom a Stoic perspective before, and my experience is that a good number of people get really angry when they read something like what you are about to read. So, be forewarned!

The occasion to revisit this always controversial topic is an article published in the New York Times by Christina Caron, entitled “Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It.” It begins with what is now becoming a standard line in certain quarters: “There is an upside to feeling angry.” I doubt it, but let’s see.

Caron’s first volley is rather unconvincing. She tells us that recent research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that anger is more of a motivator for people than a neutral emotional state. Well, yeah, but that’s like saying that homeopathic pills are more effective than drinking water. They are, because of the placebo effect.

The proper comparison, I would have thought, should be between anger and other mental states that are known to be, or at least potentially may be, psychological motivators. For instance, what happens if one compares anger at an injustice against a well nurtured and developed sense of justice, which the Stoics class under the eupatheiai? Here is how Seneca puts it:

“‘What, then,’ asks our adversary, ‘is a good man not to be angry if he sees his father murdered or his mother outraged?’ No, he will not be angry, but will avenge them, or protect them. Why do you fear that filial piety will not prove a sufficient spur to him even without anger?” (On Anger, 1.12)

How did the researchers in question discover that anger motivates more than not feeling anything? As is often the case in social science, by recruiting a bunch of undergraduate students, in this case at Texas A&M University, and getting them angry by showing them images insulting their school. This, apparently, helped them solve some puzzles.

Using undergraduate students, often sampled from psychology programs, is a well known weakness of many studies in this field. It should go without saying, but that particular group isn’t exactly representative of the population at large, especially when they are actually studying the very same sort of things researchers are interested in, and are therefore aware of experimental protocols. Moreover, these studies tend to be conducted on a small number of subjects, which creates all sorts of well known statistical issues. On the upside, they’re cheap!

Caron goes on to make some dubious comparisons, clearly meant to instill the notion that anger can be a good thing. For instance, she tells us that for a long time people have thought that just being positive would lead to a good life, but experts warn that trying to be positive all the time and leaning on what she calls “happy platitudes,” is actually harmful and may lead to experience what is called “toxic positivity.”

Again, I’m surprised that anyone is surprised by any of the above. I would have guessed that it is just as naive and toxic to be positive all the time as it is to be angry all the time. Neither strikes me as a balanced approach to human psychology. The question at hand, however, is different: do we have any use for anger, especially if we can accomplish the same things—be them to do justice to parents who have being murdered or to help undergraduates solve puzzles—by different means? Again, Seneca:

“‘Anger is useful,’ says our adversary, ‘because it makes men more ready to fight.’ According to that mode of reasoning, then, drunkenness also is a good thing, for it makes men insolent and daring, and many use their weapons better when the worse for liquor: nay, according to that reasoning, also, you may call frenzy and madness essential to strength, because madness often makes men stronger.” (On Anger, 1.13)

The NYT article then picks up a different line of argumentation: we evolved to experience negative emotions. Yes, we did. Though that’s not the same thing as saying that negative emotions were at any time adaptive. They might have simply arose as a byproduct of other traits, a phenomenon well documented in evolutionary biology.

Regardless, there are examples of emotions that evolved, presumably for adaptive reasons, and that nevertheless we’d rather get rid of. Take xenophobia, for instance. It is a profound dislike, sometimes bordering on hate, of people who come from different places and cultures, especially if they look different from us. It is conceivable that xenophobia evolved because it provided an advantage: during the Pleistocene, the crucial period of human evolution, our ancestors lived in small bands of mostly genetically interrelated individuals. Which meant that anyone approaching from the outside was likely to be bad news. But today we live in a huge, highly interconnected world of billions of people, and xenophobia is only creating troubles for us. So, even if a trait evolved, it doesn’t mean it’s good for us, especially if the social environment is very different from those in which the evolution of the trait took place.

Anger, says the NYT reporter, is often the result of a perceived offense, and it can be energizing when we wish to react to the offense. Right, but should we react to an offense? The Stoics maintain that an offense is just someone opening their mouth and moving air. It has no effect on us, unless we let it. Here is Epictetus:

“Why, what is this matter of being insulted? Take your stand by a stone and insult it; and what effect will you produce? If, then, a man listens like a stone, what profit is there to the those who insult him?” (Discourses, 1.25)

When Caron invites her readers to ask themselves: “What am I feeling right now? What is this about?,” those are good questions. An even better follow up would be: “Should I feel that way?” We are often told that we don’t control our emotions, that they are what they are, that there is such a thing as emotional truth. But in fact, according to both the Stoics and modern psychology, emotions have a cognitive component. We feel this way or that because of some often unanalyzed inner discourse along the lines of: “He insulted me. Insults are bad! I ought to get angry!! I ought to punch the bastard!!!” But such inner discourse can and should be challenged. Perhaps insults aren’t a bad thing, they just are. And even if they were a bad thing, maybe I shouldn’t get angry at the misguided soul who tried to insult me. And I most certainly shouldn’t punch him!

Caron continues: “Anger can be set off when we sense a threat to our identity, for example that our beliefs or values are under attack.” Right, but once again, let’s dig a bit deeper. To begin with, why would anger be an appropriate response, in those cases? Why not try to engage the other person with reasoned discourse? Or simply endure the fact that the world has an abundance of fools and move on? Or, just maybe, we shouldn’t be so attached to our identity and values in the first place? Perhaps we should practice a degree of skepticism toward those things and be open to the possibility that they might be questioned? Imagine what a world that would be.

Interestingly, the NYT article finally gets around to acknowledging the downsides of anger. It can quickly get out of control and produce an outsize reaction, which may last an inordinate amount of time. Nevertheless, Caron writes: “Someone who didn’t receive the annual review or promotion they wanted [at work] could use that anger to plan out steps to do better next year.” Seriously? Anger doesn’t strike me as a good friend of careful planning.

She goes on to make a number of sensible recommendations that are outright incompatible with the cultivation of anger. She says that we should try to imagine what the other person is feeling and attempt to look at the problem through their eyes. When we bring up a problem, at work or elsewhere, we should always couple it with positive suggestions on how to improve the situation. When we express demands we should do it “in a thoughtful, considered way,” because “venting can feel good, but it doesn’t generally produce solutions.”

Right, but how on earth is any of the above—as reasonable as it is—compatible with anger, which is one of the most anti-reason emotions of them all?

Seneca called anger a temporary madness. His advice was to recognize its first signs and disengage from the situation as soon as possible. Once the anger has subsided we can begin the cognitive process of questioning it and of forging alternative behavioral patterns. That advice is, in my opinion, still by far the best available.