On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative

Conclusion. Anger and Outrage

Conclusion anger and outrage The worst attitude is indifference. “There’s nothing I can do; I get by”—adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage. stéphane hessel, indignez-vous! I started this book before the Arab Spring, the European antiausterity protests, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since then, however, people around the world have transformed their frustration at capitalism, political repression, and explicit or implicit rule by the wealthy, or the 1 percent, into political and moral outrage. This shift was sparked by the global economic recession, the material result of the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few over the past several decades. Although the problems had existed previously (Muammar Gaddafi had been in power for forty-two years, and U.S. median middle-class wages had been falling for decades), the catalyst into outrage was sparked by massive unemployment and economic stress, as well as developing collective articulations of group norms, such as democracy, human rights, equal opportunity, and a living wage. This continuing articulation of the norms being violated played an important role in making people angry because it provided them with focus (agency attribution, coping potential, group norms). This shift helped us move from the cynicism and complacency of the 1990s to widespread political mobilizations. Furthermore, it reminds us that anger—like all emotion and cognition—is not only culturally and historically situated, but also materially and ideologically determined. In these transitions, we can also see more clearly the distincKim -final.indb 175 Kim-final.indb 175 7/9/13 2:52 PM 7/9/13 2:52 PM 176 on anger tion between frustration and outrage. Frustration is the sense of being balked from goals without a clear agent to blame. The goals in question may be individual or collective (or both). The subject may be aware of how to achieve the goal but prevented from doing so, or the subject may not even be aware of how to achieve that goal, a situation we see particularly with bureaucracy (e.g., The Wire’s Carver Ellis and the child welfare agencies). Moral outrage, however, is based on a perception that a group norm has been violated, whether or not one as an individual benefits; or rather, moral outrage unites individual and collective goals, so that individual goals and hopes are concomitant with collective goals. Stéphane Hessel’s 2010 Indignez-vous!, translated into English as Time for Outrage, has been sweeping across Europe for the very reason that it reminds us of the definition and role of moral outrage. In cognitive psychological terms, because our goals have seemed so distorted and limited, the external agents unclear, and our coping potential so limited, we have been in danger of losing our basic human faculty of outrage. Hessel writes, It is true, the reasons to get angry may seem less clear today, and the world may seem more complex. Who is in charge; who are the decision makers? It’s not always easy to discern. We’re not dealing with a small elite anymore, whose action we can clearly identify. We are dealing with a vast, interdependent world that is interconnected in unprecedented ways. But there are unbearable things all around us. You have to look for them; search carefully. Open your eyes and you will see. (11) Hessel exhorts young people to look around them and engage, rather than giving in to indifference, “the worst attitude.” Such passivity, he argues, stunts a basic human capacity to engage with the world. Seen in light of Hessel’s insights and the examinations of On Anger , appraisal theory is problematic not necessarily because it is incorrect in identifying the mechanics of anger, but because its focus is individual—or rather, it limits itself to the description of the individualistic conceptions of goals and emotions that we tend to live by. This model, however, does not account for a different kind of anger, an outrage based on ethics, compassion, and justice. Outrage is, technically speaking, a form of anger, but the texts examined in this book repeatedly point to two elements that distinguish political, ethical Kim-final.indb 176 Kim-final.indb 176 7/9/13 2:52 PM 7/9/13 2:52 PM conclusion 177 outrage from the cognitive...