No Time to Spare For Anger

(Image from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/200807/what-your-anger-may-be-hiding )

Today I want to explore a Brain Pickings article on one of my favourite writers, Ursula K. Le Guin, writing about anger's dark side.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/05/ursula-k-le-guin-no-time-to-spare-anger/

'Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that it is often “an alluring substitute for grieving,” granting us the illusion of agency in situations that bereave of us of control.

'Poet and philosopher David Whyte pulled on anger’s weft thread to reclaim it as “the deepest form of compassion.” But anger, like silence, is of many kinds and thunders across a vast landscape of contexts, most of its storms ruinous, and some, just maybe, redemptive.'

I have read Le Guin's thoughtful book No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (public library) and enjoyed it very much. Her essay within it On Anger does begin with the positive and terraforming side of anger, using the concrete example of the feminist movement: 

"In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury.

We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, the methodical mistreatment to which women were subjected, the almost universal disrespect of the human rights of women, and to resent and refuse it for themselves and for others. Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice. Indignation draws strength from outrage, and outrage draws strength from rage. There is a time for anger, and that was such a time.

Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon — a tool useful only in combat and self-defense."

It is important to understand the nature of anger as a weapon and tool for combat and self-defense. There are countless battles out there still to be fought, for the planet, if we can still save it, for the right of  people to be housed reasonably and to have clean water to drink, and for many other causes.

And self-defense is necessary both for women and men.

But if it becomes a sort of daily bread, there are negative consequences especially to the one carrying the anger.

"Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process."

Again, giving a concrete example which has become all-too painfully clear since the rise of 45:

"The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage."

Canada is not a republic of course, or even something presenting as such, but I hope we survive as well.

"Considered a virtue, given free expression at all times, as we wanted women’s anger against injustice to be, what would it do? Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective — anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger."

As much as anger can poison the heart and mind of an individual when carried on a continuous basis, it seems that it does the same for a community, a city, or larger group. Hamiltonians have had many legitimate reasons to be extremely angry over the past years and decades. But the cumulative weight and effect of all that collective anger is fierce.