David’s “Wrath of Achilles” – but he doesn’t look nearly as angry as my friends.
Rage is contagious and addictive. I didn’t need the recent article in Time to tell me that. All you have to do is look at the social media, with all the shrill ridicule, the belligerent invective, the hectoring denunciation, the flared nostrils, the strong statements to one’s friends about how this or that cannot be tolerated, in the name of tolerance. These posts are immediately endorsed by other angry friends. No persuasion is occurring – it’s the far safer practice of preaching to the converted.
But the Time article about the (scientifically proven) nature of anger sure helps, and I hope it finds an audience. From Susanna Schrobsdorff’s “The Rage Flu: Why All This Anger Is Contagious and Making us Sick”:
Modern role model?
If we’re always ready for battle, any bit of breaking news can bolster the fear that things are out of control. And judging by the rise in violence at political rallies, some things are getting a bit out of control. But as Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, points out, our fears often don’t match actual risk. … “In a very fearful and tribalistic society, we run on emotion, which is the currency of social media. It’s emotive first,” says Levin. But all the sharing and venting we do has toxic side effects. One of those effects is the increased acceptability of crude or violent insults. They are now so commonplace that they fail to shock, whether they’re coming from the man in the Oval Office or a late-night comedian. And that ups the ante so that those trying get our attention have to go a little further each time.
Anger is particularly contagious on social media. Researchers at Beihang University in Beijing mapped four basic emotions in more than 70 million posts and found that anger is more influential than other emotions like sadness and joy–it spreads faster and more broadly. This is as much a physical phenomenon as a mental one. Anger gives us a burst of adrenaline and sparks a fight-or-flight response in our nervous system.
No wonder it feels as if the nation is a little sick. It’s as if we all have a virus and some of us are more vulnerable to it than others. That is in fact how some social scientists are describing the spread of rage and division. Violence and violent speech meet the criteria of disease, says Dr. Gary Slutkin, founder of Cure Violence and faculty of the University of Illinois, Chicago. Like a virus, violence makes more of itself. Rage begets more rage. And it spreads because we humans are wired to follow our peers.
The article was brought to my attention by a friend who lives in Charlottesville, John Murphy, who wrote: “As René Girard and others have pointed out, imitation leads to competition and competition leads to imitation. When we enter into tit-for-tat conflict with rage-filled people who say and do outrageous things, we end up eventually as rage-filled people who say and do outrageous things ourselves. It’s a moralistic arms race that can’t be won, with mutually assured self-destruction at the finish line.”
Schrobsdorff concludes:
More recently, big societal shifts, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage or the election of Donald Trump, have left segments of the population feeling profoundly destabilized. “People are experiencing a shock because they thought they knew who we are. Now they don’t. They think, Does that mean I don’t belong, or does it mean that I have to get rid of these other people?” says [author David] Berreby. “This becomes a big source of fear, and people get angry when they’re fearful.”
And if policy disagreements are described as existential threats to our identity, issues like immigration, climate change or GMO foods can feel like a clash of civilizations. Once it reaches that level, says Berreby, it’s no longer about the facts or the data. “It becomes a sacred conflict,” says Berreby. “If you don’t believe in this, then you’re not a good person.” Then it doesn’t matter what you say, no one’s changing camps. “At that point, it’s more important for you to stay with your team than it is for you to be persuaded,” says Berreby.
Tim
And therein may lie the problem. We don’t seem to have anyone capable of reminding us that we play for the same team.
One of the best antidotes is a poem by another friend, Los Angeles poet Timothy Steele.
It’s written in “sapphics,” named for the Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, 7th-6th century B.C.
Sapphics Against Anger
Angered, may I be near a glass of water;
May my first impulse be to think of Silence,
Its deities (who are they? do, in fact, they
Exist? etc.).
May I recall what Aristotle says of
The subject: to give vent to rage is not to
Release it but to be increasingly prone
To its incursions.
May I imagine being in the Inferno,
Hearing it asked: “Virgilio mio, who’s
That sulking with Achilles there?” and hearing
Virgil say: “Dante,
That fellow, at the slightest provocation,
Slammed phone receivers down, and waved his arms like
A madman. What Attila did to Europe,
What Genghis Khan did
To Asia, that poor dope did to his marriage.”
May I, that is, put learning to good purpose,
Mindful that melancholy is a sin, though
Stylish at present.
Better than rage is the post-dinner quiet,
The sink’s warm turbulence, the streaming platters,
The suds rehearsing down the drain in spirals
In the last rinsing.
For what is, after all, the good life save that
Conducted thoughtfully, and what is passion
If not the holiest of powers, sustaining
Only if mastered.
August 19th, 2017 at 10:42 am
Thank you, Cynthia. Poetry as tonic, as sustainer, as beauty that heals.
August 19th, 2017 at 10:52 am
You’re welcome, Melissa!
August 20th, 2017 at 3:18 pm
Love this. Thank you.
August 20th, 2017 at 3:20 pm
Thanks, Jennifer!
August 21st, 2017 at 8:43 pm
Do you know when the poem by Timothy Steele was written? Lovely.
August 21st, 2017 at 8:52 pm
Elizabeth, It was included in his 1986 collection, Sapphics and Uncertainties.
August 21st, 2017 at 8:52 pm
(And yes, it is lovely!)
August 23rd, 2017 at 5:30 am
Thank you, Cynthia, for posting this. Words of caution, of moderation, are so rare these days. Still, I have a problem with one thing. While I agree that same-sex marriage and the election of DT have made large groups of people feel threatened (groups that by the way see themselves as vast majorities), your quote conspicuously puts an equality sign between the two events. I somehow feel that there should be a Platonic, objective value of events which determines whether an event develops us as a (global) society, or pulls us back towards history, which we’ve already lived through.
August 23rd, 2017 at 7:28 am
I’m not putting equality signs between anything. I am talking about the medium, not the message. One can accomplish many things without invective and fury. In fact, I’d argue that one can accomplish much, much more. It’s often a replacement for real action. Often rage gives the illusory feeling that it is the action.
Your final sentence is in the passive voice. Who would determine such value of events? And how? And how do we define “development”? To make the decision global muddies things still further. Certainly ISIS has a very different idea of an “objective value of events” than I do. So does North Korea. But one needn’t get that extreme. Swedes have a different idea than Americans, and the Chinese think differently than the English. And older people think differently than younger people.
August 24th, 2017 at 2:24 am
I understand that the post is about the medium and I fully agree that more can be accomplished when invectives are relinquished. I also recognized that in one sentence I advocated progress and application of ideas 2500 years old. Still, the quote sounds false to my ears. In your comment, you say that Swedes, Americans, North Koreans, and Daesh all have different ideas. To me, it sounds as if these ideas were equivalent and this is what I rebel against.