by BRIAN WONG
To those who say anger is destructive or pointless: Not so! Getting angry spurs and sustains us to take action for justice
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Greta Thunberg, 23 September 2019, New York
At her speech at the United Nations summit on the impending climate crisis, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg spoke with passion and anger, calling out those who have been apathetic towards bringing about global warming. Her speech was criticised by many for Thunberg’s bellicosity, which allegedly put off potential sympathisers to the movement. Anger is alienating, upsetting and even exclusionary under particular circumstances – yet one can’t help but feel that Thunberg’s anger is at least partially justified. After all, it is decades of unbridled carbon emissions and industrialisation that have led us to the mess we are in today.
Thunberg’s speech – and what we make of it – epitomises an age-old conflict between those who oppose anger for its seemingly counterproductive consequences, and those who find anger a natural and appropriate human emotion with value in both public and private spheres. From the righteous, worldwide anger that launched the 2017 Women’s March, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, to the nihilistic anger propelling the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, to the fearful anger emanating from the ongoing anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests across India – the question is the same: what is the value of anger?
For Aristotle, anger was ‘a desire accompanied by pain for perceived revenge caused by a perceived slight, of the sort directed against oneself or one’s own, the slight being undeserved’. Anger is thus reactive towards a perceived violation, and embeds within it a vindictive yearning for revenge. Think about that time your best friend lied to you, or when your cherished bike was stolen – it hurt, but it also made you feel as if you were owed answers.
The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings.
Anger is epistemically valuable not just for the individual, but also for those around them. The philosopher Alison Jaggar at the University of Colorado Boulder observes in Just Methods (2014) that ‘anger becomes feminist anger when it involves the perception that the persistent importuning endured by one woman is a single instance of a widespread pattern of sexual harassment’. It is an emotion that both transcends and unites people by providing context for an individual’s grievances. Those on the 2017 Women’s March found solace and reassurance in their shared anger, in knowing that they were not the only ones outraged by the country’s decision to elect Trump as its president. When co-opted skilfully by just causes, anger enables victims to identify similarities in their lived experiences, overcoming the superficial differences that drive them apart.
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