The Terrible Purpose of Anger
The Terrible Purpose of Anger
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to focus our energies 😡
It's said that the tools with the most power and potential also harbor the risk to become the most fearsome weapons. Certainly, this is true of one of mankind's most potent resources, our anger. We are usually taught to see anger in a purely negative light. An outworking of various philosophical influences watered down and washed over the surface of our culture. But the source which makes our anger so potentially caustic and damaging also holds promise. The seeds or the keys of righteous action. The trouble, of course, is that like every other one of our instincts and drives, we have allowed unchecked anger to trample across our mental landscape. Redemptive anger is possible, but we have to start with humility. It is considerably tempting to simply blame our angry age, as we do with our anxious age, on the thin slabs of glass and silicon we carry around in our pockets. It would be very nice indeed if these talismanic sin-eaters could absorb full responsibility for our fretting neuroses and fomenting rage. But we know better.
The social graph does not have the power to create inside your heart emotions ex nihilo. It simply and stupidly performs a single action at disturbing speed, presenting you over and over again with opportunities to unleash the powerful rage contained inside you already. This is perhaps one of the reasons why it is so entirely modish to villainize technology for our present social ills. A tool that acts as such a potent mirror inevitably frightens us, we who are unused to our own soul's reflection. Each flick, flick, flick of our thumb, like the hair-fine blade of a razor gently parting skin cells, exposes just the right amount of our innards to oxygen. Gives us the perfect micro-dose of satisfying fury. We can lie to ourselves and others all we like; we do it because we want it. What then is our desire to unleash this terrifying force onto the world? And how could we possibly hope to use it correctly?
Asserted: Anger is a Compass, Fear is a Needle
If we are able to accept a voice older and more authoritative than our own, anger is primarily a fear and pride reaction. It can serve as a soulish compass, indicating unwaveringly those things we most deeply love. Watch your heart as you ply the eternal stream of the Angerverse. Which threats cause you instant alarm? These are your gods. In service to them, you are willing to take up the heavy sword at instant notice. What then is our desire to unleash this terrifying fury? I suggest that in reality, you are angry that anything would dare to come near what you truly love. The vapid superstar’s meaningless wealth would and should have no effect on you; if you did not harbor deep desire to possess it. The idiocy and mendacity of Their Politicians would mean less than nothing to you unless your unchallenged belief in your own capacity to rule had not swollen dangerously. The problem is yours. I wish the answer were more gratifying. But all I have ever claimed to offer is a return to the humiliating Way of Grace. It ought to be very clear to us that, whatever our current anger solutions are, they are not proving effective. Just as our love affair with distraction tempts us to escape, our romance with self tempts us to seethe.
You’ll often find that these things you fear for or desire are, in fact, good. Love, family, safety, joy. These are not evils, but they are also not good gods. And anger can often be a symptom of our consistent attempts to enthrone the common grace in lieu of the Good God. Knowing the scarcity of pleasures resulting from our puny idol, we desperately guard every dose. Better slaves addicted to the endorphin rush of each threat against our supply than face the yawning abyss, risk losing our pitiful treasures. And so we take one of our most noble emotions, a gift as part of the image of God we steward, and bastardize it into our own service. What if we wielded this fierce weapon properly?
Asserted: Holy Anger Exists
I cannot stress enough that what I’m proposing is not simple Stoic divorce from the emotional experience of anger. I am in fact intensely opposed to the current and historic Stoic project for a variety of reasons, spiritual and practical. I am suggesting that instead of suppressing our emotions, we learn to use them correctly. We call those who can only utilize alcohol for inebriation alcoholics. In a similar way, anger is not intended to be consumed as a stimulant drug to alleviate our boredom or assuage our guilt at our own failures. It is meant as the internal fuel for our greatest wars. We were meant to examine our reaction to situations and determine how we are being called to act in response, allowing the emotional response to overset our natural fear and acedia. Rather than simply coasting on the neural high, we are created to respond. When you feel abstract anger at news articles or passing drivers, take a moment to ask yourself a few questions. If you’re really anger at your own seeming powerlessness at work or the brokenness of a relationship, then fix that. Redirect your fury from a pointless (and likely innocent) target to the actual point of pain. Allow it to push you out of your passivity.
And if your anger wells at true evils, boils when you see the pain and suffering of others, then perhaps you are being called beyond your own problems. You can vainly waste that anger in social media dustups or performative preening. Or you could go pick a fight with the real enemy. Beware, you won’t escape unscathed. Your emotions won’t so easily survive real-world engagement as they do trip after meaningless trip through the feed. You’ll find yourself humbled, learn your own limits. You won’t survive the true war for the souls of mankind. But at least you’ll die fighting on a field that meant something.
Resolved: I’ll Not Spend My Anger Frivolously
But when an entire parallel realm exists to nurture and harvest our anger things become…rather strange. Like any created impulse, technological disembodiment and efficiency doesn’t improve things. I’ll grant us the unique challenge of our moment. But the issue is old as the fratricidal bile welling up from the heart of the first woman-born human. We are creatures of immense power created to do good things, engineering fantastic systems harnessing that power to instead wreak evil. One of the greatest risks I can see from our computational outrage networks is their ability to wear down our good instinct for anger. Just as sexual pornography erodes the response of the body for a very specific activity within holy boundaries, so outrage pornography harms our ability to react to true evil. Spent by myriad tiny annoyances, by staring into the pan-anger of a planet, we know more than we can contain. It is easier to scream into your keyboard than to have one agonizing and productive conversation with your spouse. But stay plugged into the drip feed too long, and you’ll lose the ability to choose.
Who have you given the authority to anger you? Who holds the strings that play across your brainstem’s frets? It seems an important question, moreso by the day. Allowing unrestricted or unexamined world access to these emotions will damage you surely, if slowly. We all know someone we’ve lost entirely to the Angerverse. An otherwise normal individual turned into a slavering savage by the wrong subject matter or exposure to the perfect channel of stimulus. We mourn them as we watch the recognizable light fade from their eyes. But how close are you to their fate? Can you control yourself? No natural human truly can, for long. It is an impossible demand, only made by One who desires to fulfill it through you. We’d best learn how to accept His help then. A little conservation of resources wouldn’t be a bad start.
WGMI 😎
This place inside my mind
A place I like to hide
You don't know the chances
What if I should die?
A place inside my brain
Another kind of pain
You don't know the chances
I'm so blind
~ Korn, “Blind”
I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come. I looked, but there was no one to help; I was appalled, but there was no one to uphold; so my own arm brought me salvation, and my wrath upheld me. ~ Isaiah 63:3-5
And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it. And Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?” ~ Exodus 32:19-21
"The vapid superstar’s meaningless wealth would and should have no effect on you; if you did not harbor deep desire to possess it. The idiocy and mendacity of Their Politicians would mean less than nothing to you unless your unchallenged belief in your own capacity to rule had not swollen dangerously. The problem is yours."
I've been trying to find ways of putting this truth to words for a long time. "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention" is now completely wrong: if you're angry, you're probably not paying attention. At the very least you're refusing to accept the conditions of humanity that do not comport to your ideal of them. Many a ranting friend has revealed to me that they should never, ever be given political power, even as they rant about people who have political power and shouldn't either.
I found this often was the case for artists and filmmakers to: the industry and economics of it all are completely unfair, but many are angry at the system merely because it was not unfair in their favor.
Anyway, having struggled with anger my whole life, I have learned a lot about how to manage it, and from that management I have indeed gained a relationship to "holy anger," but have also learned to recognize its co-incidence with useful moments of release is in fact vanishingly rare, when you've sought to build foundations for yourself so as to to stride forth without fear. Anger is a desperate measure.