Understanding Anger: Reflections on an interdisciplinary discussion

Today, I had another session of my Evil, Retribution, and Forgiveness honors program discussion. We talked about Martha Nussbaum’s exploration of Anger in her book Anger and Forgiveness. My class was somewhat divided. The sections we read, the introduction and her chapter on Anger, assume that anger is connected to the desire for payback and retribution.

Throughout the chapter, she argues that this desire for payback is irrational because it assumes a form of magical thinking that by seeking payback the wrong will be undone, which it won’t.

I was hung up on both parts of this:

• The assumption that payback or retribution is directly connected to anger,
• And that desire for payback is tied to the idea of magical thinking that the wrong will be undone.

During the session, I spoke a bit about both of these. Nussbaum then goes on to offer a different kind of anger which she considers to be a more appropriate expression of anger, which she calls transition anger. Transition anger is directing negative emotions that come from actions, or wrongs either to yourself or those you are concerned about, and directing those emotions to changing the circumstances that make these kinds of wrongs possible. An example of this would be if someone you know was shot, and you used your negative emotions to fight to change the conditions that made the shooting possible in the first place.

The idea of transition anger sounds much more productive than the eye-for-an-eye kind of payback she contrasts it with or the irrational belief that payback is like an undo button.

But this session left me wondering about where and how I experience anger in my own life. I think back to the people who have wronged me and there are few of them that I wanted to inflict any kind of payback on. At most, I wanted acknowledgment that they harmed me, but in plenty of cases, I never sought that.

It reminded me a bit of Joan Didion’s article for Vogue, “On Self Respect” and an article a member of this group sent us last semester about the way womxn are culturally conditioned not to express anger. I will have to track down the article, but both Didion’s article and this other one made me wonder about my own experiences, or lack thereof, of anger in my own life.

• Do I not get angry because
• I don’t care enough?
• I lack self-respect?
• I was conditioned based on my gender assigned at birth do not express anger?

This last point about the expression of anger ties into another concern I raised in the discussion that was echoed by several of my peers, does repressing or trying to alter the expression of our anger help or hurt us as individuals? Does it help or hurt us societally?

My argument is that with the transition to courtrooms, law and order, and justice, we have shifted from the honor-bound, eye-for-an-eye forms of payback and retribution in many contexts. I argued that instead, we rely on that. We all operate under this implicit social contract that we adhered to certain norms and expectations—I used the example of kids playing a card game or a sport. We want to make sure everyone is following the rules so everyone can assume fair play (in life and in a game). If someone is breaking the rules, we want them to be encouraged to follow them or eventually removed from the game—or society in the case of imprisonment.

Any form of encouragement—usually in the form of a deterrent such as a fine, being scolded, or anything of that nature—and eventual imprisonment or removal from the game if we stick with the kids playing cards, lets the other, honest people or players know they are behaving appropriately, and they can carry on under the assumption that everyone is playing, or living, fairly.

At the end of the day, we want order and fairness more than we want to see other people suffer. I would like to think that is why I do not feel anger at people who have wronged me. I would like them to understand what they did caused me harm and hopefully learn from it and not do it again to me or someone else in the future—the encouragement to play by the rules so to speak. Sometimes, I try to communicate this.

But there are times where I don’t. That is another area of exploration. I wonder if it is because I don’t care enough to invest my time in it or if it comes back to those other questions of self-respect or gendered expression of anger. There may be a reason I haven’t thought of.

I remember being angry as a kid. My anger scared me because it took hold of me. I tried to morph it, control it. I am not sure if I was successful, or if I just repressed it and it comes out in different forms. Maybe this is why I am so intense, determined to control my immediate environment, or have so much anxiety.

That was something else some of my peers brought up, when we try to repress our anger, we often express it in other forms, sometimes less healthy forms.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I entered this program because I wanted to learn more about forgiveness. Forgiveness is an area in my life I have not figured out, but instead, I find I am developing an interest in the topic of anger. I look forward to exploring it further through this program and in my own life.