The case for anger

Dan Rottenberg, in a comment on a correspondent's recent letter, asks whether anything useful has ever been accomplished by anger. I would reverse the question, and ask whether anything useful has ever been accomplished without it.

To be sure, wrath is one of the seven deadly sins. But that notion comes from a Judeo-Christian culture in which wrath is an attribute reserved solely for a paternal deity, and submission and obedience the required response of his creatures. Even in this case, God's direct instruments and prophets— Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah— were permitted to embody his wrath to the errant Israelites.

Jesus, we are told, was exceedingly mild, and suffered the Cross at the hands of his wrathful tormentors. But he showed plenty of anger when he drove the moneychangers from the temple, and on a number of other occasions. Nor, if he tempered somewhat the wrath of the divine personality inherited from the Hebrews, did he by any means extinguish it.

We need not confine ourselves to otherworldly examples. The American colonists showed plenty of anger when they responded to the British Stamp Act, or when they threw the East India Company's tea into Boston Harbor. John Paul Jones was similarly angry when, advised to surrender, he told the British he had not yet begun to fight.

Anger need not necessarily be violent. Gandhi was angry enough at the British when he counseled his followers to renounce violence. So was Martin Luther King when he fought Jim Crow. If you can't feel the righteous wrath that fueled King's speeches, you aren't listening to them. Anger is constructive if it is focused on a good cause, and if it doesn't lose the ends for which it fights in the means it employs.

This country is full of wrath at the moment, the product of frustration at a predatory economic regime and a political system that seems more than ever in thrall to it. At present, it hasn't produced anything but the Know-Nothingism of the Tea Partyers. But anger channeled into genuinely progressive politics— not the faux populism invoked by Barack Obama whenever his poll numbers dip— could be a force for good indeed.

The alternative is the cynicism and despair into which much of the Left has fallen. When anger is left to be manipulated by power for its own ends, then it is truly to be feared.

Plenty of good causes have been kindled by righteous indignation. Few have gone far for long without it. It's time for a healthy dose of it right now.♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.