CHAPTER TWO
IN AN INFLUENTIAL anthropological review of child-rearing practices, Naomi Quinn finds two universals: (1) “Emotionally arousing practices are used in all cultures” to teach the normative order; and (2) such instruction “always includes norms for adequately expressing and regulating emotional behavior” (2005, 261).
It is common, but not universal, for anger to play the major “emotionally arousing” role in the acquisition, maintenance, and enforcement of the normative order, which includes etiquette, social conventions, and ethical rules. It is universal for anger itself to be subject to norms that contain and regulate its expression. Anger is vehement; it stings, calls attention to itself, and demands that my desires win. Anger’s wild form needs taming, domestication. Every culture builds anger to its specification, or tries to.
The psychologist Carol Tavris vividly captures the powerful, normative, ought-laden character of anger:
People everywhere get angry, but they get angry in the service of their culture’s rules. Sometimes those rules are explicit (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”); more often they are implicit, disguised in the countless daily actions performed “because that’s the way we do things around here.” These unstated rules are often not apparent until someone breaks them, and anger is a sign that someone has broken them. It announces that someone is not behaving as (you think) she or he ought. The “assertion of an ought” is, according to the psychologist Joseph de Rivera, the one common and essential feature of anger in all its incarnations. (1989, 49)
Anger and Culture
One obstacle to the aim of changing how we, for any “we,” do anger—for escaping the clutches of this “Age of Anger”—is the view that the way we do anger is natural and normal. The way anger is; the way anger is supposed to be. This view is defeatist. It judges that an angry world is just the way the emotional weather is nowadays. As with the real weather—global warming, the Gulf Stream, the prevailing winds, fires in the West, and so on—little can be done to change it. This view is easily defeated by looking at the extraordinary variation in cultural attitudes and practices about anger. Anger is already done in multifarious ways, and it can be done differently.
In some traditions, anger is seen as a reliable mark of a refined and righteous character. In others, it is seen as an infantile or bestial emotion, the rapacious, unquenchable ego’s handmaiden. The varieties of moral possibility, most of which are actualized, can help undermine confidence that our way(s) of doing anger is normal and responsive to universal features of human psychology. They can also unseat the belief that asking us to radically adjust our anger norms, or work on future generations to do anger differently, would be unnatural, too demanding, and, at the limit, impossible. Finally, the varieties of roles and statuses for anger invite the questions: Which ways of doing anger are the right ways? Which ways of doing anger are the wrong ways? Which ways of doing anger are better, which worse, which good, which bad?
Here is a sampling, a thirty-item partial inventory of the different roles anger plays in sustaining the normative order across cultures, as well as variations in how anger itself is judged.
1. At least two major ethical traditions, Stoicism and Buddhism, judge anger to be the most destructive emotion, worthy—as Seneca put it—of “extirpation root and branch” (Flanagan 2000, 2011, 2017).
2. The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, view marah (anger) “extremely negatively,” the work of pengaruh setan, the devil. Malu (shame) is the primary socializing emotion among the Minangkabau, and getting angry is something a good person ought always to be ashamed of (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 269).
3. The Bara of southern Madagascar use strong fear-inducing anger (seky; heloky) to teach the children hitsy, the norms of good behavior. Physical punishment, including beating, is one acceptable method for expressing seky/heloky (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 269).
4. Tibetan refugees in India consider lung lang = anger (a variety of she dangs = hatred) morally bad. One ought never to experience anger or act on it. Furthermore, anger can be transcended (Shweder et al. 2008).
5. When asked why anger is so bad, Tibetans describe bad moral effects: separation, alienation, and distance between people (Shweder et al. 2008).
6. When Americans describe the bad effects of anger, they report unpleasant effects on oneself (lingering resentment; “asshole pissed me off, couldn’t sleep”) and bad cardiovascular health effects (“She drives me crazy, gives me high blood pressure”) (Shweder et al. 2008).
7. The most common style of American anger (43 percent) differs from Japanese anger and Belgian anger insofar as it “is strongly associated with both blaming the other person and giving him a piece of your mind” (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
8. The most common American style results in escalating anger (anger being met with anger). Meanwhile, Japanese anger (55 percent) is conveyed without a similar ideology of personal blame and responsibility. It does not normally involve giving the other a “piece of one’s mind,” and it is commonly met with smiling, nodding, and acquiescence (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
9. A full 57 percent of Americans do not abide the most common anger style, and a full 45 percent of Japanese do not follow the dominant Japanese one (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
10. Americans and Australians experience and enact a lot of “road rage.” Japanese in identical types of traffic do not. This is true even for Japanese who are otherwise on the irascible side (McLinton and Dollard 2010).
11. In free word association tasks, Americans associate anger with yelling, shouting, and hitting. Belgians associate anger with ignoring and withdrawing (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
12. Whereas German mothers tend to meet anger of children with their own anger, Japanese mothers meet children’s anger with disappointment and sadness (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
13. American children’s books depict anger much more frequently than Belgian, Romanian, Turkish, East Asian, and South Asian children’s books (Tsai, Knutson, and Fung 2006; Boiger, De Deyne, and Mesquita 2013; Vander Wege et al. 2014).
14. Anger is modeled in American children’s books as an emotion that is appropriate when there are obstacles in the way of achieving one’s goals, and as an emotion that “facilitates achievement and mastery” (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
15. Anger is not modeled as useful in children’s books that promote egalitarian ends, harmony, equality, and group success (Boiger et al. 2013).
16. American culture relishes efficiency (Taylorism) and treasures Horatio Alger success stories, and thus Americans describe what some other cultures conceive as leisure as a waste of time, and consider anyone who wastes “their time” as a legitimate reason for expressing anger at them (Clark 1997).
17. In business negotiations between European American businesspeople and Asian American and Asian businesspeople, anger elicits significantly bigger concessions among European Americans than no anger; whereas no anger elicits significantly bigger concessions among Asian Americans and Asians (Adam, Shirako, and Maddux 2010).
18. Indian college students experience lower overall intensity of anger than American college students, who find the world to be more filled with obstacles and sources of frustration (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016).
19. Luganda speakers in Uganda use the same word, okusunguwala, for anger and sadness. Luganda speakers who are English interpreters have a hard time understanding the Anglophone distinction between anger and sadness (Orley 1970 as cited in J. Russell 1991; Mesquita 2021).
20. Utku Inuits of Northern Canada live in small groups of approximately thirty-five individuals. They consider all forms of interpersonal anger vicious, although anger toward their sled dogs is common and acceptable. For Utku, “the maintenance of equanimity under trying circumstances is the essential sign of maturity, of adulthood” (Briggs 1970, 4). “Bad temper, stinginess, and unhelpfulness [are] three of the most damning traits” (195).
21. The Utku Inuits are Christians. When asked about Jesus’s anger with the money changers, the elders explain that it was (it must have been) feigned “as if” anger. Jesus could not have been really angry, because being really angry is wrong. Jesus is the role model, and role models embody emotional ideals.
22. An Ammassik Eskimo husband is a proper host only if he invites a guest to have intercourse with his wife. He signals that it is time for the sexual gift by extinguishing the lamp. A guest can feel legitimately angry if the invitation is not extended. And the husband can legitimately be angry if he finds his wife having sex with the visitor outside of the lamp ritual (Tavris 1989, 48–49).
23. Among the Ifaluk of the Caroline Islands in the South Pacific, most kinds of anger are disapproved of, especially anger about personal misfortune, inconvenience, or slights/hurt feelings (Lutz 1988).
24. Among the Ifaluk, the only kind of justified anger is called song, and it is used primarily in response to selfishness and stinginess. Sharing all material goods, food, cigarettes, and labor is obligatory among the Ifaluk. Song uniquely marks the moral violation of selfishness, induces fear of social exclusion in the violator, and invites amends (Lutz 1988, 156–60).
25. The Nepalese Tamang value harmony and self-effacement and strongly discourage anger, teaching children that being angry involves puffing oneself up, and that it creates disharmony (Cole and Tamang 1998; Cole, Tamang, and Shrestha 2006).
26. Unlike the Tamang, the Nepalese Brahmins, who are descendants of lineages associated with high-caste Hindus, encourage anger in their children and use it to mark their cultural dominance and high social status, and to express pride in their unusual ability to live in the morally correct way (Cole and Tamang 1998; Cole, Tamang, and Shrestha 2006).
27. In certain Indian Hindu communities, there is a complex virtue called lajja (lajya) that involves showing knowledge of and respect for social rules and roles in a way that sustains harmony. “Biting the tongue” or “ducking out” to suppress harsh words, anger, or rage, or to acknowledge and apologize for incipient anger displays (lajja), are endorsed and encouraged. Both men and women are expected to possess this disposition, but the decorous restraint from anger and associated conflict is expected more of women than men (Menon and Shweder in Markus and Kitayama 1991; Shweder et al. 2008).
28. When the Ilongot of the Philippines experience extreme intragroup anger, they plan a head- hunting raid on an enemy tribe (R. Rosaldo 1980; M. Z. Rosaldo 1983).
29. Tantric varieties of Buddhism that judge anger to be entirely destructive (“unwholesome”) live in worlds with abundant “wrathful deities” who, as it were, “metabolize” personal anger, thus taking care of the anger business (McRae 2015).
30. In economic games across cultures, angry and punitive responses, as well as generous responses, vary with such features as religion, group size, market integration, local norms about anger and punishment, and cultural history (Henrich et al. 2005).
This inventory reveals some of the vast possibility space that is actually explored and enacted by (mostly) living human communities. It contains a mixture of three kinds of norms:
1. Statistical regularities or patterns of anger enacted by different communities;
2. Norms of expected, acceptable, or tolerable anger;
3. Ideals regarding anger—both normative ideals such as “never get angry about personal misfortune” (Ifaluk) and ideal scripts such as “acknowledge and apologize when one starts to experience the first hint of anger” (Odisha, India).
This tripartite distinction between what is normal, statistically speaking, what is conventionally tolerated and acceptable, and what is endorsed as ideal upon reflection matters, and it is ripe for cooperative inquiry among comparative psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.1
Even without perfect sorting of the three different kinds of norms, the inventory provides resources for exercising moral imagination and exploring some of the varieties of moral possibility. One gets a glimpse of multiple ways to do or not do anger, as well as different functional roles for anger and other moral emotions. And one gets to see or imagine the internal reasons different cultures give for their practices, for why the Ammassik, Utku, Minangkabau, Ifaluk, Nepalese Tamang, Japanese, and Belgians do anger differently from “us.”
In the remainder of this chapter, I put the thirty-item inventory to use. First, I hone in on two societies discussed in the anthropological literature that have entirely different attitudes about anger and ask whether each is internally consistent (for philosophers this is asking about narrow reflective equilibrium). I ask what kind of good internal consistency is and answer that it is only a formal good, not a substantive good. Second, I begin to inquire into what sort of tools and standards, in addition to internal consistency, we can use to evaluate emotional norms and scripts. I invite the reader to engage in several imaginative exercises where we try to justify our anger practices against alternatives. These exercises will reveal that we likely have a fair amount of confidence in the legitimacy of the way we do emotions, but we often lack the ability to give objective reasons for the preference. This will position us in chapter 3 to ask whether there are any objective findings about human nature or human social relations that can decisively win the argument that both payback and pain-passing anger are wrong. It may surprise the reader to know that I do not think there are any such objective reasons. I offer instead some uncontroversial facts about what is hurtful, some observations about what kinds of emotional displays normally achieve their aims, and some reminders about the highest ideals that exist inside our tradition about emotionally charged relations.
An Anger Culture and a Shame Culture
Let us consider two cultures mentioned in the sampling, one Indonesian, one African, with entirely different views on anger as a socializing emotion. Assume for now that each is a monoculture, not part of a multiculture. Consider this to be an exercise of moral imagination with the aim of charitably understanding an alien way of doing emotions with alien rationales for doing them their way. Two standards for appraising how a culture or tradition does an emotion such as anger is (1) checking whether the norms and scripts for the emotion are consistent with its way of worldmaking overall; and (2) checking whether the emotion is working to accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish. Anthropologists distinguish between emotions that are hypercognized and hypocognized. When an emotion is hypercognized, one expects the culture itself to provide answers to (1) and (2) in its own ethnotheory. When an emotion is hypocognized, an observer or participant observer is called upon to check for consistency and good functioning. The fact that a mode of emotional expression sustains itself over time is some evidence that it passes tests for (1) and (2), even if these matters are not discussed. The reason for this is that there are normally ecological pressures to maintain consistency and do what works. Americans talk about anger, but I am not sure we could say we hypercognize anger, since there is little careful analytic or systematic thought given to its varieties. I want to say that our types of anger, some varieties at least, are not consistent with certain legitimate ideals that we value, and, in addition, don’t work reliably to accomplish what we wish to accomplish with anger. Hold that thought. On to the first example.
The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, are peasants who live in matrilineal extended families (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013). Malu (shame), along with positive affirmation of good behavior, is the primary socializing emotion among the Minangkabau. Malu marks the threat of social exclusion and induces an associated kind of fear. Malu is theorized, adults talk about it, believe that it is the proper response to the violation of any social norm, and small children start to reliably display malu when they violate norms. A nascent form of malu—where infants display shyness or hide behind their mother’s skirt (called malu-malu, a kind of infantile sprout of what will become mature shame)—is encouraged. And malu is thought to be properly contagious. One ought to feel malu for oneself (ashamed of oneself, as we say) at transgressions of kin, friends, and associates.
Marah (anger), on the other hand, is “viewed extremely negatively” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 269). Marah is considered to be the work of pengaruh setan, the devil. The Minangkabau understand that anger is natural and that children often experience and express it. But they work to overcome, suppress, rechannel, and possibly extirpate marah, both the feeling and the expression of it. The categorical badness of marah is explained in terms of an overall normative ecology that sees marah as inconsistent with a high social value. Specifically, marah “contradicts the central values of respect for one’s fellows” (ibid.). For this reason, marah should not be shown toward children nor “in their presence because caregivers are viewed as role models” (ibid.).2
Meanwhile, the Bara of southern Madagascar are agropastoralists who live in multigenerational patrilineages. While the Minangkabau learn the moral order inside an ecology that uses malu (shame) as the primary socializing emotion, the Bara use strong, fear-inducing (tahotsy) anger/wrath (seky; heloky) to teach the children hitsy, the norms of good behavior. The Bara know there are other ways to raise children but believe that praising children spoils them, and that fear induction (tahotsy) by way of anger, rather than shame, best secures the normative order. Physical punishment, including beating, is a common method for expressing anger (seky/heloky). Expressions of anger (seky/heloky) obey strict rules according to which only elders have permission to enact anger (seky/heloky), which reliably causes tahotsy (fear) and eventually yields good conduct (hitsy). Anger and associated physical punishment are considered to be necessary until a child is about fifteen. After the anger/beating regimen ends, easily enraged omnipresent ancestral spirits provide constant surveillance inside the patrilineage.
Narrow Reflective Equilibrium
Let’s continue with the assumption that these are homogeneous monocultures with no appreciable entry of peoples who abide different emotion norms and scripts. Assume further that the contents of the norms of both cultures are acceptable and would pass muster from some wider, impartial, or cross-cultural point of view.3 Both Minangkabau and Bara say things like, “one ought to tell the truth,” “murder is wrong,” but not that “one’s spouse ought to have sex with visitors,” or “nepotism is morally permissible.” This will keep us focused primarily on the norms governing the use of the main moral socializing emotions: shame (malu) for the Minangkabau and anger (seky; heloky) for the Bara.
This assumption that the contents of the morality are acceptable, even good by our lights—we can imagine that both the Minangkabau and Bara abide a morality comprising the Ten Commandments (which is logically possible since the commandments don’t speak directly about anger or shame or about how the commandments themselves are to be taught and enforced)—will help us think about two questions. If the contents of a morality are good overall or good enough—by contents I just mean what the morality says is good or bad and right or wrong—is there a basis for complaining, objecting to, or normatively disapproving of the socializing emotions that are used to secure the normative order? Are the ways we teach, maintain, and reproduce a morality themselves substantive markers of that very morality and thus open to critique?4
Among the Minangkabau, anger is unacceptable. This is indeterminate among three claims: one ought not to experience anger, one ought not to express anger, and one ought not to experience or express anger. Call the last option the “Sbuddhist” view since, in certain interpretations, both Stoics and Buddhists defend it. Sbuddhism might be compatible with “as if” anger or feigned anger of the sort that a schoolteacher might enact to get the children to behave, but only if one could make the case that this kind of anger is neither intended nor received as real anger—imagine that “the anger” only functions to get the kids’ attention, not really to frighten them.5
Among Bara, anger is the main socializing emotion; or, to speak more precisely, anger is the socializers’ emotion, which is intended to produce fear in those being socialized. Elders have permission to get very angry toward the youth about missteps during socialization and for norm violations once they have learned what’s right and wrong. But the youth are not permitted to get angry in return. Everyone knows that these are the rules. Elders enact anger. Youth receive it, and comply. The crucial role of anger in moral socialization is indeterminate between the view that anger (the feeling, the expression, the feeling and the expression) is a virtue or only that anger is instrumentally necessary to secure a good Bara life. In the first case, the right kind of anger is good in itself; in the second, it is good for something else, something important.
Could Bara anger comply with the minimal norm I recommend, that all person-directed anger ought not to aim to avenge a harm, to pass pain, to cause suffering? Or, even better, could Bara anger comply with the maximal norm that it be done from the motive of love toward the person at whom it is directed? It seems a stretch. But it is conceivable that the Bara could claim that the ultimate aim of enacting wrathful anger is the good of the kids and the overall common good. Perhaps in-group anger causes pain and downgrades the recipient, but this is not its intention or aim. Bara out-group anger, however, is clearly aimed to pay back and pass pain, to make the outsider suffer. The Bara themselves say so. It is, of course, an eternally interesting, important, and contested question of ethics whether norms need to be consistent across communities of insiders and outsiders, loved ones and neighbors.
Imagine the Bara and the Minangkabau, respectively, raising internal questions about the roles they assign to anger and shame in teaching, maintaining, and reproducing their form of life, their comprehensive theory of a good life. Narrow reflective equilibrium, when it works well, secures, checks, and recalibrates local normative theory and practice. The Minangkabau might raise questions about whether shaming practices (malu) embed or enact what they themselves think is anger (marah). They might wonder in terms allowed by their metaphysics whether some instances of malu (shame) are in fact instances of disguised marah (anger), channeled by the devil (pengaruh setan). One can imagine discussion about whether shaming by way of mocking and humiliation is cruel and motivated by anger (marah), or something in its vicinity, and whether the youth experience shaming norm enforcement as embedding anger on the part of the adults.6 The conscientious Minangkabau might look closely at the emotional tone of adults interacting with other adults in situations where there are norm violations. Do they judge or sanction each other with anger (marah), which is prohibited officially, or only with a different adult version of shaming (malu), which is, or might be, allowed? If the Minangkabau are Sbuddhists, we can imagine them wondering whether, for any particular instance or episode or pattern, it has reached the ideal, where anger is neither experienced nor enacted. If it is experienced but not enacted, that is second-best and there is work to do.
In the Bara case, their educational psychology assumes that normative conformity (hitsy) can be accomplished by inducing strong fear (tahotsy) by anger (seky/heloky) and associated physical punishment—slapping, pinching, applying hot chili oil, beating, and the wrath of ancestral spirits. The Bara are correct that anger (seky/heloky) cause(s) fear (tahotsy), which produces good behavior (hitsy). Because we are making the simple assumption that the culture is homogeneous and settled, and there are no global challenges to the Bara’s comprehensive view—for example, there is no cohort of Minangkabau immigrants who might challenge the entire emotional-normative economy—then not even the question of relative efficiency is on the table. That is, if there was a mixture of Bara and Minangkabau, then the topic of whether anger or shame is the best method for gaining normative conformity would come up. But I am imagining that the topic is not coming up, is not a live option.7
Still, we can imagine internal discussion among the Bara about whether any particular episode of seky/heloky is justified, whether it is apt in terms of intensity of felt or enacted anger, and so on. And we can imagine, in terms of the complex schema and scripts that track audience effects and downstream social consequences, the Bara wondering among themselves whether it achieves normative compliance (hitsy) and some milder or more severe or differently targeted kinds of anger (seky/heloky) might.
The point is that it seems pretty clear that both the Minangkabau and the Bara could locate, respectively, a narrow reflective equilibrium that would justify and recalibrate their practices and norms regarding shame and anger. Reflective equilibrium normally requires internal coherence plus some sort of explanatory relations among various values and beliefs that make up a way of worldmaking. Anthropology makes clear, in the case of the Minangkabau, that there is a high good, a major value, that explains why anger (marah) is not used in normative socialization; namely, it “contradicts the central values of respect for one’s fellows” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 269). Why exactly they believe both that respect is the highest good and that anger (marah) is disrespectful would involve an archaeology of Minangkabau philosophy and moral psychology that I am not equipped to perform. But there is clearly no logical or conceptual necessity, since many traditions that also prize respect (although perhaps not as the Minangkabau conceive it)—for example, various enlightenment views—do not judge anger, especially of the righteous sort familiar from the Abrahamic religions (the Minangkabau, interestingly, are Muslim), as a vice or as incompatible with respect.8 It is also a question entirely internal to their indigenous philosophy why shaming (malu) is thought to be a respect-preserving and respect-promoting socializing emotion, given that it is definitely so understood (Minangkabau ethnotheory asserts it). One idea is that shame (malu), unlike anger (marah), is not cruel; it intends neither payback nor downgrading, and it enacts social solidarity by making the entire group both agent and patient of the normative harm. That is, among the Minangkabau, a violation of an adult instruction by a young person is not simply a matter between these two individuals; it is a group violation. The violation is one that the individual who commits it should be ashamed about, as well as one that the teacher and the community they represent should be ashamed of. Individualists find this bizarre, but this might be a question-begging effect of what individualists metaphysically take for granted and that nonindividualists deny, namely, that individuals are the proper unit of agency, responsibility, and blame.9
As for the Bara, their view on anger easily passes internal coherence tests. The anthropology doesn’t reveal that there is any central unifying value that explains all Bara practices other than living well, as the Bara conceive it. This is enough to internally justify their practices, since the Bara can say truthfully that anger works to socialize the kids into the normative order; that’s all there is to it, and that’s enough.
Both views—the Minangkabau view that anger (marah) is a vice, and the Bara view that anger (seky/heloky) is either a virtue, a “burdened virtue” (Tessman 2005),10 or an unpleasant necessity at a minimum, not a vice (unless used in unauthorized ways by the wrong people, and so on)—will pass tests of narrow reflective equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium requires only that cultural values and beliefs, and ordinary moral judgments, can be brought into equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium demands internal consistency plus some kind of credible justification for values, norms, and ideals, in terms such as that they are aligned with our values, they work, and they are “ours.”
Two Thought Experiment Variations
One could now vary the exercise and imagine the Minangkabau and Bara mixing in some new, neutral place in a 50–50 proportion. There is a causal question: How will normativity get duked out between the Minangkabau and Bara, imagining implausibly that the content of their respective moralities are not inconsistent? Maybe one is Hegelian and believes there will be some new third way, a new improved hybrid culture that develops a new regimen for normative governance, “shmangering,” which involves a new socializing emotion and rules for governing it. People call it “shmanger” because it has elements of Minangkabau shame and Bara anger but is produced by the moral alchemy of their intersection. But the philosopher will want to know whether the shmanger world is better or worse, or only different from the Minangkabau shaming (malu) world or the Bara angry (seky/heloky) world. There are negative dialectics—Theodor Adorno’s apt name for situations in which mixing ingredients produces worse results than either ingredient taken alone—after all. For every excellent synthesis—sweet and sour soup, say—there are many ice cream and tuna fish combinations that are best discarded by imagination and never actualized. In reality, neither the Minangkabau nor the Bara are actually closed communities, although the eight million Minangkabau are more intermixed with the diverse and dense population of Indonesia than are the half million Bara who live in more sparsely populated lands in southern Madagascar. In both cases, therefore, it is interesting, and worth noting, that they have each been able to maintain their respective ways of doing anger and shame, despite being subject to the forces of globalization and multiculturalism.
Next, let us introduce a morally serious, independent observer into the evaluation of how the Minangkabau and Bara live, and let us imagine a forced choice about which is better, or what is different, among whom one’s children or grandchildren will be raised. The forced choice I am imagining is interesting, because one group of people with whom I discuss such matters (American academics) are down on shame as an emotion for teaching, maintaining, and perpetuating the normative order. But everyone I have asked chooses the Minangkabau shame culture over the Bara anger culture as better, and also as the culture in which, if forced, they would prefer their children or grandchildren to be raised. We are down on shame, and for that reason, we don’t find the Minangkabau form of life deeply appealing. But Bara anger is over the top, beyond the pale, vicious (plus they are not kind to strangers). So, although we Americans often favor anger as the emotion with which to judge and enforce both bare preferences (we get angry when the line is long at the coffee shop) and considered norms (when there are lies or injustices), we are not unequivocally on board with using anger to teach expectations and norms to the youth, preferring carrots to sticks in the socialization phase of life.
According to the anthropological literature, the Minangkabau and Bara are not at all unusual. So we might wonder what we are doing when from the outside we state a strong preference for one alien form of life over another alien form of life. Are we stating a bare preference or a considered one? One worry is that the strong choice reaction can be explained largely by the external observer’s identification with their own comprehensive view of the good life, plus a measurement of the distance between it and the alien form. Such a response intended as a final response is question begging. It is simply a judgment of which tradition is nearest to ours, its closest continuer from among the options.
What about American Anger?
Both the Minangkabau and the Bara pass tests for narrow reflective equilibrium. One might wonder whether our American anger practices can pass tests for internal consistency. There are reasons to worry. One is that America is a multiculture, not a monoculture. We contain multitudes. Multicultures, by their nature, involve a multiplicity of normative orders. The adults believe in monogamy; the kids are polyamorous. The New Yorkers are honest, which the rest of the country calls “rude.” The Southerners are polite and restrained, which the Northerners think is passive-aggressive. Many think morality requires religion; many others say it doesn’t. And so it is with emotional norms and scripts; there are regional, religious, country of origin, and racial differences in norms and scripts.
Even the idea that our morality is an anger-guilt morality, rather than a disdain-shame morality, is contested. Recent work in cultural psychology indicates that Americans and Northern Europeans are very familiar with using shame—especially the kind that involves “how one looks in the eyes of others” as a major socializing emotion (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016; Henrich 2020). We, especially Americans, are officially down on shame, but we are adept at using it.
Furthermore, when cultural psychologists describe three different anger styles found inside the three developed nation-states of America, Belgium, and Japan as the American, Belgian, and Japanese styles, they do not claim that these are the kinds that they find distinctively in those three nation-states (Mesquita, Boiger, and De Leersnyder 2016). In fact, all three kinds or styles—the American, Belgian, and Japanese styles of anger—are found in all three countries but in different ratios.
The American type of anger assumes sharp boundaries between individuals, that individual agents are the proper unit of blame and responsibility, and that payback and pain-passing are legitimate. This is the dominant type (43 percent) in America. But the “American” type of anger is not the majority type even in America. Relatively large percentages of Americans also abide the “Japanese type” (which by other measures looks like a “disdain-shame” morality, rather than an anger-guilt morality) and the “Belgian type.” That is, all three types are found in all three cultures, but to different degrees. Japanese anger is experienced and enacted in a way that is not confrontational, vengeful, or pain-passing, and that harms “relationships with others least.” Some Americans, and not only Japanese Americans, display this kind of anger.
So one point is that there is not, even now, normative consensus about how to do anger inside nation-states such as the United States, Japan, and Belgium. Instead, there is variation in judgments about acceptable reasons for anger (“wasting my time” is a uniquely good reason for Americans), appropriate expression, felt intensity, and duration. Furthermore, if one imagines, as is not entirely implausible, that there are representatives from all the cultures listed in the thirty-item inventory—plus several hundred more—in great multicultural cities like New York, Brussels, and Tokyo, then it is a fiction that in such places there is some stable or univocal set of anger norms and scripts that a people know and enact. What is more likely is that there are subcultures (organized along socioeconomic, age, gender, educational, ethnic, religious, etc., dimensions) that define one’s primary normative community in which one enacts (at least prior to assimilation or homogenization) the emotional norms favored by that community. There are norms—for example, governing who has permission to enact the first move in an anger game. First-move norms are monadic; they provide permission for the angry person to get or be angry. There are also dyadic and n-person norms or scripts that provide permission, norms, and scripts for the “to and fro” of angry exchanges. These differ vastly across traditions. In a very hierarchical culture or subculture, dominant persons can initiate anger episodes, but subordinate persons may not have permission to respond with anger.
In addition to the identity constitutive norms for emotional expression, practiced especially in personal or familial spheres—the way we Irish Catholics “are” or do things—there may well exist a separate set of practices for doing the emotions that maintain a modus vivendi among people of different worlds in the places where they intersect, on public transportation, at work, and in commercial relations. Once again, we see variation in different spheres of life, in family and friendship, in the marketplace, and in government.
One upshot is that it is unlikely that there is a philosophical consensus among ordinary Americans, or even among American philosophers, to the effect that moral anger is anger authorized from a special standpoint of “full and impartial engagement” (Gibbard 1990, 127), or that payback or pain-passing is acceptable when there is wrongdoing, or that the wise are permitted to get angry at the crude and unenlightened. There are Dominicans, Taoists, Hopi, Sicilians, Jains, Maasai, and Confucians in our midst. It seems likely that claims about “our morality” and what “we think” are rhetorical conceits in ethics, disguised ways of excluding unwelcome moral data. If so, this is a problem, because the legitimacy of the method of reflective equilibrium counts on the existence of a relatively homogeneous community recalibrating its practices with its considered judgments and ideals. But when there isn’t homogeneity, consistency checks and recalibrations of norms inside subcultures that make up the multicultures is the best we can do.
Real Patterns
I don’t mean to overstate the problem. Multicultures are made up of cultures that are comprised of subcultures. Because these cultures and subcultures interact, there are various kinds of normative assimilation and accommodation. And there are also zones of life in which the norms and scripts of some power subculture reign supreme. Sometimes these are the norms and scripts imposed by a subculture who first controlled a domain—WASPS in New York finance, Jews in the diamond business, the Irish in fire and police departments. And in public spaces where everyone comes together—parks, public transportation, businesses—there will often be an overlapping consensus for how we do emotions in those spaces. This establishes mutual legibility and efficiency in those spaces.
Even if there is no unified code for doing emotions across all spheres that are “ours,” there are nonetheless patterns about how we Americans do anger that deserve a closer look in the contrastive setting that evidence from cultural psychology and anthropology provides.
When we ask whether some practice is good, it helps to ask, compared to what? Here are some patterns from the thirty-item inventory given earlier that describe some features of American anger and provide contrast with other styles:
· On average, Americans associate anger with the behaviors (and the associated desires) of yelling, shouting, and hitting.
· American anger (unlike Belgian anger) is strongly associated with “blaming the other person” and “giving him a piece of your mind.”
· When Americans are asked about the bad effects of anger, they tend to mention bad physiological (“she’s causing my blood pressure to go up”) and psychological effects on oneself, not bad moral or interpersonal effects.
· American anger is scripted to escalate. Japanese anger is scripted to de-escalate.
· American (and German) mothers meet a child’s anger with anger; Japanese mothers meet a child’s anger with disappointment and sadness.
· Psychology books describe anger as an approach emotion: yelling, shouting, hitting, and giving someone a piece of your mind.
· Japanese-style anger involves the desire to leave the room and escape the interaction. Leaving the room and escaping an interaction involve avoidance. So is anger an approach emotion or an avoidance emotion?
· American children’s books depict anger much more frequently than Belgian, Romanian, Turkish, East Asian, and South Asian children’s books.
· American children’s books model anger as an appropriate response to frustration (or meeting an obstacle) for achieving one’s goals and achieving mastery.
· Anger is not modeled—in any country—as useful in children’s books that promote egalitarian ends, harmony, equality, and group success.
· American college students think the world is filled with obstacles and sources of frustration, and that these are reasons for anger; Indian college students see fewer obstacles (although there may well be more in India than America), and generally feel less angry than American college students.
· The wide acceptance of the ventilationist view in America legitimizes a certain amount of pain-passing anger that is simply unacceptable in other cultures.
· There is cultural permission in certain quarters in America for vengeful, payback anger. Perhaps this is because we have some Aristotle in our blood and bones. Recall, Aristotle in his Ethics authorizes payback for slights, and in the Poetics he also gives license to catharsis, emotional release of negative emotions.
So consider this a scorecard on American anger, extracted from the earlier inventory. I promised to exemplify how the method of examining findings in cultural psychology and anthropology can prevent us from being “imprisoned by our own upbringing,” while at the same time inviting reflection on the “varieties of moral possibility.” I have done what I said I’d do. The final exercise for this chapter is your homework: think how much you fit this profile of the angry American (or angry European, Canadian, etc.) and ask yourself whether you think the American way of being angry is good. If the American way is unappealing, or has unattractive features, then think about what makes it so. Is it that it is inconsistent with other high values and ideals you hold? Is it that enacting it undermines your flourishing, and that of those with whom you share a common life? I think the answer to both questions in moral ecologies that I live in is “yes.” If so, the next questions concern what aspects of anger, or which varieties of anger, are the problems and how to make necessary changes. In chapter 3, I will proceed to clear up a few (of many more than a few) loose ends about anger, and about the method I propose for thinking about it.