You are better than this.
You are not a hostile person, not a picker of fights. You're a Boy Scout troop leader,
Friend of the Library, volunteer at the PTA. Last year, you even called in and donated money
during one of those NPR fund drives.
And yet you have these moments when the worst parts of your nature come to the fore.
Moments when the world seems to be conspiring against you and the frustration builds inside
you and the frustration turns to rage.
This morning, for example, you were running late for an 8:30 meeting and you just
wanted to get your latte and a bagel from Starbucks and run. Of course the guy in front of you in
line had to spend 10 minutes talking to the woman behind the counter about that most fascinating
of topics, the weather. You're ashamed to admit it now, but you were on the verge of balling up
your 10-dollar bill, throwing it across the counter and screaming for service.
Actually, the whole day has been a little like this. At work, you had a tense exchange
with your boss about what he called "peculiarities" in your expense account.
Even now, on your way home, as you were inching toward a tollbooth on 294, it
happened again. You had 20 minutes to get home, pick up your daughter and drive her over to
her dance lessons. No chance, right? The traffic was going nowhere when suddenly, thank God,
another lane opened up. You went for it. So did the guy in your blind spot. A Hummer, cutting
right across your bow like you weren't even there. And off you went, laying on the horn,
screaming some embarrassingly unoriginal obscenities, spittle flying, face contorted. If you
could have caught a peek of yourself in the rear-view at that moment, you would have seen a
person who appeared utterly insane.
Here's the thing -- and maybe you'll find this comforting or maybe you'll find it
frightening. There are a lot of you out there.
The rage of rage
Rage seems to be all the rage lately. Look around; it's not difficult to conclude that the
world is getting angrier and angrier. Our politics is angry, dominated by Bush-haters and
Clinton-haters and even Nader-haters. Our popular music is angry, spiked with misogynistic
rants and paranoid fantasies. Our highways run like rivers of anger. As Peter Wood points out in
his book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, automakers are even making angrier-looking cars, with grills that seem to snarl at whatever gets in their way.
Are we really that angry? It's not an easy question to answer. There simply aren't a lot of
practical ways to measure how pissed off people are. Judging by the space on the nation's
bookshelves taken up by books about anger, we seem to be living in a golden age of Wrath Lit.
You can find books about the perils of anger, books about how anger can work for you, books
that relate personal battles with rage.
Does this Wrath Lit explosion indicate a growing level of anger in the world or just a
greater interest in the topic? Are we really angrier or just trying harder than ever to understand
our anger? For that matter, is there more anger being released into our world or are our camera-phones just capturing more episodes of angry behavior and Internet sites such as YouTube
making them more readily accessible?
"Have rates of public rage from seemingly normal people gone up, or has our awareness
of it gone up?" Colorado State University psychologist Jerry Deffenbacher asks. "We don't
know. But there are a lot of angry people out there."
Not even episodes of road rage are easy to quantify. In 1997, the American Automobile
Association Foundation for Traffic Safety released a study that detailed an increase in road rage
incidents of as much as 7 percent each year. Media outlets, already awash in trend stories about
the road-rage phenomenon, reported the study widely. USA Today described "an epidemic of
aggressive driving."
Then a piece by Michael Fumento in The Atlantic Monthly punched holes in the AAA
study, arguing that any increase in reported incidents of road rage was the result of increased
awareness. The newly coined road-rage label had become a convenient way to describe episodes
that might not have been reported at all in the past. The article quoted one researcher saying,
"You get an epidemic by the mere coining of a term."
Barry Glassner, in his book The Culture of Fear, asked why journalists became so
interested in the road rage "epidemic," when -- even using AAA's numbers -- angry drivers
accounted for not more than one in a thousand roadway deaths between 1990 and 1997.
Crime and vending machines
If measuring road rage is problematic, what about violent crime? Surely statistics on
assaults, batteries and murders would help indicate a welling of anger in the world. Here, too,
there is a problem. As Deffenbacher points out, violent crime figures seem to be going down.
Even though taking stock of our rage on the road and our angry assaults on others proves
frustrating, it is possible to quantify one particular kind of anger epidemic, directed at one
particular kind of victim. Call it Vending Machine Madness. A 1988 article in the Journal of the
American Medical Association reported 15 serious injuries, three fatal, as a result of irate men
kicking or rocking vending machines that had taken their money without giving them snacks.
How did it come to this? It's the kind of question that comes to you as you sit in your car
in line at the tollbooth once you have emerged from your meltdown and regained some self-control. Is there something in the way we live our lives -- maybe the frantic pace we set, maybe
our relentless emphasis on personal fulfillment -- that is bringing our rage to the surface? Or is
it, as Wood suggests, that we have made a virtue of expressing our anger, so appearing pissed
off, defiant and aggressive is all just part of being authentic, keeping it real? Or, as Glassner
argues, do Americans just have a knack for pessimistic panic-mongering so that we see
epidemics and crises wherever we look?
Certainly you've never thought you might need help. You are familiar with the anger-management industry which has sprung up to provide that help, but the whole process makes too
easy a target to be taken fully 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 classic seven deadly sins, anger holds an exalted place but is a bit of a misfit
among the group. It is the only one of the seven that doesn't pay off in our self-interest.
For people like me 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, some 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, Garrett Keizer writes that his anger "has more often distressed
those I love and those who love me than it has afflicted those at whom I am angry."
Knowing that anger doesn't always pay doesn't necessarily make it easier to control it.
Which may help explain why anger is so prominent in our lives. Our 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 of 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 Montaigne advised marshaling our 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, it can help us maintain
our self-respect, it can help 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, "When angry, count to four. When very
angry, swear."
A history of anger
Wood, in A Bee in the Mouth, argues that one of the most telling signs of a national problem with
anger is the hostile tone of our political discourse. Wood calls it a new style of anger. "For the
first time in our political history," he writes, "declaring absolute hatred for one's opponent has
become a sign not of sad excess, but of good character." As an example of political discourse
that delights in its own vitriol, he cites Jonathan Chait's 2003 essay in the New Republic, which
begins, "I hate President George W. Bush." For Wood, such language is typical of what he calls
our "Angri-culture." It's not just that people have such fury, Wood argues, it's that they are so
proud of their rage, so eager to broadcast it, so determined to assert their rage as a badge of their
identity. I'm pissed off, therefore I matter.
Wood recognizes the vein of anger that has always run through American history, but he
may not do full justice to the venom and the power of historical fury. Contemporary wrath-mongers like Ann Coulter are loud and all too visible. But compare her to self-appointed avenger
Preston Brooks, the South Carolinian who took a cane to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner
on the Senate floor in 1856. Clearly, extreme fury is nothing new in American politics.
Often it changed our world for the better. American history owes a great deal to the
motivational power of wrath. The abolition movement was largely fueled by rage and so was the
women's suffrage movement.
The abortion clinic bombers and schoolhouse shooters of recent decades may be the most
violent examples of contemporary American rage. But don't forget strident bloggers, finger-pointing cable-news hosts, brawling professional athletes, bullying grade-schoolers, and those
Little League parents who go after umpires, veins bulging. It's likely that more often than not,
anger plays itself out on the home front. The wife-beaters and screamers-at-kids are probably
doing more damage with their anger than any of the more visibly angry people. Once you start
looking for anger, you see it everywhere.
Then again, maybe we're not angry enough. Given war, environmental crisis, economic
injustice, maybe we should be out in the streets in force, demanding change. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently declared that the "anger quotient is much too low."
Too angry? Not angry enough? Not a single one of the sources I consulted suggested that
we, as a society, have arrived at precisely the appropriate level of anger for our circumstances.
Like perfect happiness, this "anger quotient" must be an elusive target.
So is there any hope for you and your anger? Is there any reason to believe that someday you
will be able to survive the afternoon commute without screaming or tailgating or displaying
choice fingers?
One option, of course, is to seek out some help with anger management. The very phrase
has become such a familiar part of our lives -- how often does a day pass without hearing of
some offender being sentenced to attend anger-management sessions? -- that it's easy to forget
that it is a relatively recent coinage. Raymond W. Novaco may have been the first to use the
term, in his seminal 1975 work, Anger Control. But the term didn't begin appearing in the
popular media until well into the 1980s.
One of the first and most influential popular books on anger was Carol Tavris' 1982 Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. Her book was a response to the then-popular
"ventilationist" strategies which suggested that merely loudly articulating our anger would free
us emotionally. Tavris insisted on a more subtle and complex approach to anger, one that even
acknowledged its constructive aspects.
"I have watched people use anger, in the name of emotional liberation, to erode affection
and trust, whittle away their spirits in bitterness and revenge, diminish their dignity in years of
spiteful hatred," she wrote. "And I watch with admiration those who use anger to probe for truth,
who challenge and change the complacent injustices of life."
Relax!
Two decades later, researchers were still probing for the constructive aspects of anger. A
January 2000 article in the journal Health Psychology suggested that calmly discussing angry
feelings and working toward solutions with others can have health benefits. But the emphasis,
the researchers pointed out, must be on solving problems, not merely venting feelings.
Anger management specialists usually work from a menu of strategies that include
everything from deep-breathing exercises to muscle-relaxation techniques to visual imagery
exercises which help people regain their calm. Other interventions may stress cognitive
approaches that aim to change unhelpful patterns of thinking. And there are, as always,
pharmaceutical options. Dr. Emil Coccaro of the University of Chicago has explored using
Prozac to treat explosively angry people.
Psychologist Deffenbacher urges, among other things, using humor to defuse anger. The
idea is that the next time you find yourself tempted to call someone a dumb-ass, you can merely
picture them as, say, a burro wearing a dunce cap. The image might be amusing enough to get
you through your angry moment.
Whatever successes anger management professionals can claim, they are clearly dealing
with new realities that make it all too easy to vent rage. John Duffy '86, a Chicago-area
psychologist and life-coach (and, full disclosure, an old friend of mine), says many of the
teenagers he works with use text-messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace to lash
out at classmates or authority figures who have crossed them. Part of the appeal is being able to
spew bitter thoughts at targets without having to confront them and deal with them as human
presences. Just as road ragers may find it easier to flip someone off when the gesture is mediated
by a windshield, information technologies allow us to vent at a digital remove. And this spring The New York Times reported on the popularity among high school students of "hit lists" --
sometimes posted online, sometimes scrawled on a school wall -- of people an angry student
would like to harm.
Anger has been called a sin. It has been called an emotion. Alexander Haig once called it a
"management vehicle."
Disordered thoughts
One thing anger cannot be called, not yet anyway, is a mental disorder. The Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, psychiatry's official guidebook to mental illness,
offers multiple varieties of depressions, anxieties and phobias, but no specific category of
disorders for which anger is the defining characteristic. The closest it comes is a mention of
Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which is marked by "aggressive impulses that result in serious
assaultive acts" in which the "aggressiveness is grossly out of proportion" to the immediate
provocation.
Anger experts want more. "We need probably a half-dozen anger disorders," says
Deffenbacher. Such an array, he argues, would help legitimize the study of anger, and help
researchers to understand it better and doctors to improve their interventions.
Not everyone agrees. Domestic violence advocates argue that making anger a disorder
would give abusers an out-of-jail card, allowing them to plead that they were at the mercy of
their disorder when they lashed out. Others simply object to the idea of labeling more and more
behaviors as disorders, which they say only feeds the therapeutic and pharmaceutical industries.
For Deffenbacher and other specialists in anger, however, recognizing dysfunctional
anger as a disorder would help more troubled people recognize their own problems and seek
help. That's not an argument which should be too easily dismissed. For most angry people, the
real problem is not their anger. The problem is the endless series of people and things that keep provoking their anger. "Want me to stop being angry?" the angry guy asks. "Then tell the world
to leave me alone."
Even the most patient of us can put together a long list of things that piss us off in the
course of a day. What does it for you? People who fail to say "excuse me" when they run over
your foot with their baby stroller? Drivers who drift across your lane when they make a left-hand
turn in front of you? Bellicose vice presidents of the United States? Litterers who toss cigarette
butts and Big Gulp cups out of car windows? Movie-theater talkers? Cell-phone loudmouths?
Email non-responders? Wise-ass journalists?
What if they could all be convinced to disappear? What if all the things that pushed your
buttons just went away? You're a decent person. At the core, your nature is good. Remember
how you stayed late to clean up after the book group meeting last week, even though it wasn't
your turn? If you could just avoid the jerks, the rude bastards, how much calmer would you be?
In his Enigma of Anger, Keizer writes about Abbott Ammon, one of the early desert
fathers who lived in the fourth century as a hermit in a remote and desolate region of Egypt.
Keizer points out that Ammon, while doing his monk-ly spiritual exercises, never ceased praying
to be delivered from his anger. Which raises the question: What exactly does a hermit have to get
angry about?
Ammon, whatever hardships he had to endure in the desert, was spared "Dixie"
ringtones, was spared telemarketers, was spared traffic jams. He was spared Bill O'Reilly. Yet
he continued to struggle with his anger.
Maybe Ammon's problem was that he was left, in the end, with the one thing that not
even you -- well-meaning and kind-hearted as you are -- can escape.
Your own angry self.
Andrew Santella (www.andrewsantella.com/) has written for The New York Times Book
Review, Slate, GQ and other publications.
(July 2007)
