All the Rage

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Certainly you’ve never thought you might need help. You are familiar with the anger management industry that has sprung up to provide that help, but the whole process makes too easy a target for it to be taken seriously. After all, you’ve seen the Adam Sandler–Jack Nicholson comedy Anger Management.

Then you remember to think about spouses trapped in angry, maybe violent, marriages, about kids being warped by a parent’s misplaced rage. Ask one of them if the world is getting angrier or if they might not welcome some help for the scariest people in their worlds.

If that’s a little too much for you, just ask one of those poor mopes lying flattened under a snack machine.

As one of the seven deadly sins, anger holds an exalted place but is a bit of a misfit in the group. It is the only one of the seven that doesn’t pay off in our self-interest.

For people who have never been unusually prone to anger, that makes the emotion difficult to understand. There’s no obvious payoff to a fit of anger. Only an outburst, hurt feelings, or, worse yet, violence. Hardly ever any real resolution to the problem that started the whole thing. Where’s the temptation in that?

Lust we can understand. Gluttony we can understand. They may be wrong and hurtful, but we can acknowledge that it’s sometimes hard to ignore that extra slice of pizza, hard to say no to the noontime quickie.

In The Enigma of Anger (Jossey-Bass, 2002), Garret Keizer writes that his anger “has more often distressed those I love and who love me than it has afflicted those at whom I was angry.”

Knowing that anger doesn’t always pay doesn’t necessarily make it easier to control, which may help explain why anger is so prominent in our lives. The Christian religious tradition centers on a God who, when provoked, turned people to salt, drowned entire armies, and sent floods and pestilence as tokens of his wrath. The most famous episode of anger in the New Testament is Jesus lashing out at the money changers in the temple. It might be the most modern scene in the Gospels.

We’re also deeply suspicious of our anger. The Romans preached self-control, and Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne advised marshaling anger and using it wisely. He urged people to “husband their anger and not expend it at random for that impedes its effect and weight. Heedless and continual scolding becomes a habit and makes everyone discount it.”

That advice recognizes one of the paradoxes of anger: It’s often destructive, it’s often a waste, but every once in a while it works. It can fuel our drive to achieve, help us maintain our self-respect, stop the world from walking all over us.

The trick, apparently, is getting angry at the right times and not getting angry at the wrong ones. Sounds easy, right? Mark Twain suggested this: “When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.”

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