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June 23, 2008
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The new anger
If you are like me, you keep up with the news, and you read (and perhaps write) blogs, despite the extreme ambient anger that circulates in the media and the blogosphere. I want to know what's going on, and I want to see what people think about events and art and ideas, and so I put up with the nastiness that often inflects reporting and commentary today. But the fact of the nastiness itself suggests that there are a great many people who enjoy it very much--and who seem to regard it as a legitimate way of doing interpretive business.
Higher ed--the central concern of this blog--is exceptionally prone to vituperative argumentation. In the six years since I started writing this site, it's become something of an armchair anthropological enterprise for me to watch the higher ed anger ebb and flow, and to see particularly nasty arguments, ideas, and personalities come and go from the ever-intense ongoing debate (and, at times, from my own humble comments section).
It's interesting to see what kinds of arguments inspire angry responses--to trace the line where reasoned analysis gives way to impassioned invective, and to watch, too, that line get energetically blurred, particularly when the blurring is being done by scholars, journalists, and other professionals whose jobs would seem to require them to maintain a clear distinction between the two. Snark--that quasi-analytical pose that uses the appearance of logical argument to deliver nasty, singularly selective fallacious attacks--is the modus operandi by which the more clever purveyors of distorted non-thought make themselves seem at once rational and wickedly clever. Snark, when done well, is so hip that it seduces its readers into accepting its swashbuckling rhetorical style as a fair substitute for impeccable analytical substance. But in reality, it's a real free inquiry killer--which is why, I assume, Rohan Maitzen's ground rules for discussion of The Valve's electronic discussion of Adam Bede included a plea to participants not to be "snarky." (I write a bit about snark in an upcoming piece for Academic Questions, by the way; I will say more when the piece comes out.)
Anyway. The armchair anger anthropologist in me was delighted to discover Peter Wood's 2006 study, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. It was a good and interesting read. Here are a few paragraphs from the preface:
A lot of Americans have noticed the excesses of anger in our midst, but we are having a hard time deciding why it has suddenly swarmed around us. Is it the consequence of two bitterly fought presidential elections? Are the news media to blame? Have we endured a slow erosion in civility that has finally exposed the raw feelings underneath? Have we developed a hair-trigger intolerance for one another?Some scholars assure us that this profusion of anger isn't really new. Americans, say these scholars, were always angry. We had an uncivil Boston Tea Party and an eight-year Revolution. We had a presidential election in 1800--Adams vs. Jefferson--at least as nasty as Bush v. Gore or Bush v. Kerry. We fought a bloody Civil War with over a million casualties. And we can't forget the 1960s, replete with protests, riots, teargas, and more protests.
Some scholars also argue that the angry "culture war" of recent years ("red states" vs. "blue states"; NASCAR fans vs. Volvo drivers; Sunday-morning-go-to-church vs. Friday night at the vegan Dean rally) is mainly an illusion. We are, they say, mostly in agreement on the important matters, and it is the political elites and the controversy-hungry media that conjure up the so-called "culture war."
I think these views are mistaken. The anger we see and hear around us differs in character from the anger of previous epochs, and it is no illusion. The anger of the present is, among other things, more flamboyant, more self-righteous, and more theatrical than anger at other times in our history. It often has the look-at-me character of performance art.
[...]
The anger in America now also differs from earlier epochs in that many seem proud of their anger. It has become a badge of authenticity, and holding back or repressing anger is often depicted as a weakness or failure of self-assertion rather than a worthy form of self-control. We have elaborated this view into several popular theories that encourage the expression of anger as a way for members of ethnic groups, women, political parties, children, or people in general to "empower" themselves. This is new. However angry Americans were in 1776, 1800, 1860, or 1963, they were not congratulating themselves for getting angry.
The people and situations that evoke our anger today also differ in some interesting ways from angers past. Today we don't pick too many fights over family honor; and we don't seem to get especially worked up over people who defy our authority. We can be calm in the face of insults that not so long ago would have led to armed duels. But then we flare into livid fury for reasons that would have baffled our ancestors.
What was the nineteenth-century equivalent of road rage on the Los Angeles freeways? Something has happened to us that allows hugely disproportionate responses to what are, after all, small provocations. We also can get furious if we feel disrespect aimed at our self-definition. "Take me seriously" is the message of much of our anger, where, in another time and place, a self-reliant American would have shrugged and walked away. Some of our contemporary rhetoric of anger is based on claims that our rights have been violated. Rights-based grievances are old, but our sense of what those rights are has ballooned beyond anything Jefferson, Lincoln, W.E.B. Du Bois, or even Justice Earl Warren might have imagined. And our anger is especially sharp at those who pretend to be one thing and are really another. A characteristic anger of our times enunciates outrage at the phony, the hypocrite, the liar, and the fake--so much so that we often reframe anger caused by something else into an accusation of phoniness, hypocrisy, lying, and fakery. They are the trump cards in our anger deck.
The performance-art aspect of anger; its merit-badge "I'm angry, therefore I'm real" quality; and road-rage-respect-me-rights-based-you're-a-liar fury are not the only characteristics of what I call the New Anger. They will do for a start, but a principal aim of this book is to provide an overview of the new emotional terrain in which anger has achieved prestige and a kind of celebrity. We have become, without really noticing it, a culture that celebrates anger.
Of course you can't judge a book by a few paragraphs from the preface. But these give a quick sense of how Wood is thinking about anger, and of the basic premises he elaborates in the course of his study. Thoughts on anger welcome in comments. Snark not.
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Comments:
My sense is that people (on average) are indeed angrier than they were even 10 years ago, but yet...when you read history, and see some of the things that people got stressed about back in the day, you have to wonder.
For example, during the Civil War, a scene like the following transpired in a Confederate office:
GUY 1 (entering the office): Would you happen to know where guy #3 is?
GUY 2: Find him yourself!
GUY 1: Why are you talking to me in such a discourteous manner?
GUY 2: It's not courteous of you to assume that I'm merely a doorman or something of that sort.
The interchange almost ended in a dual.
This really doesn't seem all that different from "road rage."
I recently finished Peter Ackroyd's wonderful *London: A Biography*, and he gives us countless tales of angry Londoners of all classes and in all ages bickering constantly and violently. And to say that Americans were never proud of their anger is to sentimentalize the real hatred we see in the country/city conflicts before the Revolution; in the anti-Royalist conflicts during and after the Revolution; in the anti-immigration conflicts; in various violent manifestations of Northern or Southern pride; etc. Long before women or minorities were told to be proud of their anger, Southerners were teaching them how to perform on the national stage as simultaneously violent and victimized, as proud and brutal.
I do agree that since, say, the 50s, we've seen worldwide a shift in how rhetoric works (or does not). Mass, instantaneous media, from radio to TV to the internet, seems to privilege a performative, highly emotive, and simplistically agonistic mode of self-presentation. But we musn't confuse a performance of anger with real anger: the Black Panthers may well have felt all sorts of real anger, but they were also masters of this sort of performance.
I rather suspect that the seeming increase in anger is actually a side effect of a decrease in civic solidarity.
Things in a tribe go better, socially speaking, when everyone in the tribe considers themselves to be on the same side.
But neighbors can no longer yell at your kids without fear of a lawsuit. Teachers now expect the parents to take the children's sides, against them. Marriage and divorce is now a carefully structured bloodsport. There are no more "accidents." Nobody just slips anymore... it's always someone's fault. And your economic well-being -- and indeed, your very freedom -- is always at stake every time you enter into interactions with other people.
We are not all in this together. And it's beginning to show.
There is also something singularly childlike about "the new anger," if new it is, insofar as it does revolve around Wood's contention that there is something "self-righteous" and "performance" oriented about it.
For instance, I am the parent of a three year old. Anyone who has now or has had a three year old understands that their moods are fickle at best. At once loving and generous, at another they throw themselves on the floor over nothing, or over what we think of as nothing. No ice cream tonight? Tantrum. Turn off t.v.? Tantrum. This is both a way of drawing attention ("performance") and a method, an attempt to have things their way.
Perhaps we are too used to getting things our way. Perhaps many of us are children in our orientation toward other people.
I was standing in a playground in Central Park over the weekend taking pictures of my kids. A little girl, about 2 1/2 or so, was standing next to me, playing with her toys. She said something along the lines of, "these are *my* toys," which I didn't hear very well. When I replied, "what did you say, sweetheart" (which I'm used to saying to my own daughters, she said, "I'm not your sweetheart and that's my daddy over there."
Her sass was, on the one hand, typical of someone her age. On the other, I was floored because the only three year old who had ever spoken like that to me was my own. And yet, over the last few years I feel as if many adults have taken that tone over absolutely nothing.
I think that we should also make distinctions between anger and rudeness. Frankly, in most situations I can put up with the former on occasion far more readily than I can the daily assaults of the latter.
This is kind of spooky. I’ve been using the term "Performance Art" for the last couple years as a way to characterize the self righteous, self involved outbursts that come from the left.
I firmly believe that the zealots who wring their hands about the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, racism, whatever the topic of the day may be, do so not to offer empathy to the victims they appear to be championing, but to be seen by their peers as caring, nurturing, righteous people. It is “Performance Art”, it’s not about caring, it’s about being seen to be caring. And it’s very important that the right people see how much they care. It’s also not about finding a solution to the problem at hand, a solution is completely off their radar. It’s self promotion, saying the right things at a party, protesting the right cause, making certain all your peers know how much you despise George Bush.
These are small people. They’re the most self serving, narcissistic fakes I’ve ever seen.
I see the issue as two-fold.
On one hand, anger is used as a substitute for reasoned, rational argument. As many cannot refute opposing views, using reasoned discourse, they replace intelligent argument with a disproportionate anger.
The practice, post-1960s, comes from the Maoist "Speak Bitterness" tactic - which, during the Cultural Revolution, allowed even children to show their concurrence with the group's norms by participating in cruel rituals of debasing adults deemed to have transgressed the boundaries of current political thought or action.
It continues in modern politics by impugning opponents as not merely wrong, but the very manifestation of Beelzebub.
The second facet of this out-of-proportion rage is when one self-esteem is threatened - generally in an environment that is out of one's comfort zone. Therefore, the highway, which is outside of one's home territory, becomes a battlefield where one must posture, gesture, and, ultimately, fight to gain one's "rightful" place in the social pecking order.
It also occurs in the classroom, where students who are "somebody" in their neighborhood, are not given the proper respect they feel they are owed. Many of the outbursts in urban classrooms are of this type. The anger is intended to cause the recipient to re-assess the importance of the rager.
This disproportionate rage is common in societies with mobile social pecking orders. In both the rural areas of the South, and in urban centers, many residents live their entire lives in the 'hood. Not coincidentally, both groups often demonstrate anger over not receiving their proper due.
"I hate, as the gate of hell itself, that man who holds one thing in his heart and says another." --Achilles (from memory, sorry)
Anger management should not be confused with Domestic Violence classes, which almost always are the result of a violent act between a man and a woman or involving children. Anger management, on the contrary, usually has to do with someone loosing their temper and becoming violent or destructive towards someone else or property. Examples of this might be a bar fight, a verbal dispute where the police where called, or cases of destruction of property.
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