Anger in public

Aristotle devotes to anger the longest development in Book II of the Rhetoric, and defines it as a desire for revenge accompanied by pain, caused by a manifest slight. He does not make it a disorder: in the Ethics, virtue consists in getting angry as one should, at whom one should, when one should.

The Stoics take the opposite position. Seneca devotes an entire treatise to the question and argues that anger is useful neither in combat nor in justice, and that it is a mistaken judgement one can be rid of. The disagreement between the two schools bears on the very possibility of a just affect.

Work in the history of sensibilities shows that the anger of the powerful long constituted a codified public act, whose deployment signalled a breach of order and called for reparation. Its gradual disappearance from official scenes is a dated fact, not a conquest of civilisation.

The analysis is disputed as to its causes and its extent. It establishes without difficulty, however, that the current norm is recent and local, and that it does not express a universal fact about the human relation to anger.

A rare experimental demonstration was provided by the work of Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen published in 1996. American students are bumped into and insulted by a confederate in a corridor; those from the South show a more marked hormonal rise, are subsequently less conciliatory and judge their reputation more damaged than those from the North.

The authors link the difference to an economic history of herding in a lightly policed area, where a reputation for retaliation protected the flock. The historical explanation is disputed; the difference in reaction is measured.

A widespread belief holds that expressing anger diminishes it, an idea that owes much to the medical use of the word catharsis at the end of the nineteenth century. Work conducted by Brad Bushman in the early 2000s compares participants who are provoked and then invited either to hit a bag or to stay seated.

Those who hit turn out to be more aggressive afterwards, not less. The interpretation proposed is that discharge sustains the state rather than exhausting it, and furthermore provides a rehearsal of the conduct.

Anger differs from other states in one property: it contains an addressee and a request. It bears on someone, about something, and implies that reparation is expected. That is what makes it politically usable and socially costly.

When the request is not formulated, all that remains is the display, and the interlocutor can only defend themselves. The difference between anger that obtains something and anger that damages almost always comes down to that point.