An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinian American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netanyahu was an “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden used his brief remarks concerning Tlaib, so as to refuse to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
But then I reconsidered. Tlaib might have thought that Biden had been condescending rather than respectful. For him to personalize what she and her famly were going through or to engage in the usual politics of politeness with a congresswoman who is, after all, a member of his own party, was to evade the issue about the Palestinian plight that Biden was trying to avoid. He was gracious because he knew that he had the upper hand, that the Palestineans would lose one more time, and so he may not in any way have been gloating over the defeat of her cause, but still he was just offering a hand across the net to someone who had lost the match. Whether she should be angry rather than gracious is the question, these two in opposition to one another, and that goes very deeply into the question of whether the circumstances require one or the other to be either gracious or angry and whether adopting one attitude or the other, Biden particularly known as a gracious person, is a deep matter of character rather than of circumstance.
A standard explanation of anger, which might lead Tlaib to sustain that feeling towards Biden, is that, however and whether or not Biden is or seems to be gracious, the abiding circumstances remain frustrating to Tlaib and that is what is important. People are angry when people feel boxed in, that they cannot plan or make forward progress, which is the case with the fate of the Palestinians. Abiding anger is what happens when people are bottled up. But it is also the case that the opposite psychological dynamics are also true. People who are bottled up can also turn themselves inside out and turn themselves into being compliant and sympathetic towards their oppressors. Winston comes to love Big Brother. The slave comes to love its master or at least understand the master well enough so as to sympathize with his plight. Palestinians might abandon Palestine so that they can be Americans, which happened to Germans during the First World War, but the supporters of Palestine remain true to that, perhaps because they see the cause as a larger call on justice for oppressed peoples, such as Blacks or native Americans. Or maybe, third of all, people remain reasonable and so are neither positive or negative against their superordinates, just knowing that their circumstances keep people in check for as long as is the case. It is no use to just hate all the slaveholders. Just being human will result in some of the house slaves, at least, finding some of the whites as being nicer people than are others. So some observers take extreme positions, whereby slaves were always calculating when to revolt, and that there really are Stockholm syndromes, Patty Hearst given over to their captors, or taking this third position, which is that Patty Hearst was always thinking that she would escape if there were a chance to do so. If those are the three possibilities-- to resent the situation that obtains, or to adopt it, or to bide one’s time-- then anger is the abiding feeling that allows the flame of injustice to prevail in spite of how circumstances change. A person has girded his or her self, armed his or her self, so that the person can not very well be rid of what had at one time been a compelling cause rather than anger being a feeling of the moment whose passion can be dispensed with when circumstance change, as happened when the American people stopped being angry against the Japanese when the War was over. It would now be unjust to invoke “Remember Pearl Harbor '' to a Japanese visitor or to refuse to buy Volkswagens because Germany is now our friend. Anger can mean just holding a grudge rather than standing for principle and is so serious a delusion as to be thought a kind of madness. It sometimes seems that Catholics and Liberals want to think of anger as something to be abolished, while Conservatives and Progressives think that sustaining their anger is righteous and productive. So when will the Palestinean cause become remote or boring, just repeated uprisings soon put down, or will the cause be sustained, turned into a movement that someday will achieve its historical objectives, whatever those might be?
Here are what some wise heads thought of that issue of anger and durability. Aristotle got anger as pretty close to the idea that anger sustains the awareness of an injustice even if anger is hasty in its judgment. Anger is the feeling and contemplation of revenge for the injustice. That is a very strong characterization because revenge implies pain or punishment so as to reverse the wrong. So if anger means what it says, it is that the Palestinens will get what they deserve which means, so I gather, a one state solution from the sea to the jordan river. They will not let go their anger just as a person does not let go the slights that let one to brek a friendship forty years ago. The feeling has to fester so that it is real rather than an illusion and this persistence in not making amends with the israelis is their cardinal virtue (or sin) given that the people have not become prosperous or well loved by their arab neighbors or achieved some kind of democratic rule. The hatred of the israelis abides and is their most potent weapon. They will not give it up, and so their quest for their own state abides.
Here is a different cut at the issue by looking at the circumstances where anger may arise. Rashida is angry at Biden because his politeness and graciousness are ways to cover his power to do what he will whatever the issues or rights that move her to speak up. Anger is not warfare with an opposition but the result of having had her point of view papered over with the supposedly prevailing emotion. People in that situation get angry even though they can express it only secretly, like Hamlet muttering about the ceremonies at court which covered up a real injustice he had felt and would discover. That is different, for example, from agreeing to be subservient in a ceremony or celebration of subservience as a matter of principle, as when Catholics pledge allegiance to Jesus and the Catholic Church as the embodiment of their best instincts even if some of those people in charge have been tainted. Anger is subordination when the ceremonies are forced, as happens when, for example, we are polite to the father of a girl friend who is verbally abused by him. He is reluctant to force a relationship where she has to break with her father and so he resents and feels angry towards her. If he buys into her father’s demeaning views of his daughter, then the boyfriend is either unfeeling or part of a culture that accepts the verbal abuse of women.
A much better, less mundane, example of this idea of anger is present in “Genesis” and so supports the idea that this theory of anger is very deep and sustained. Cain was angry at Abel in that Cain killed Abel without any other reason offered than that God had preferred Abel’s offering of meat to Cain’s offering for fruit. We might think that Cain had been jealous to be beaten out in a competition that only God had decided was so in that God decided to choose one over the other rather than to think well of both offerings. But Cain could have stewed about the insult God had done or excused God as a very unsophisticated or new God who had not thought deeply about what it means to give a blessing for having been given an offering. Cain could have resented God, but instead he was moved to kill his brother instead, which means he became enraged at Abel because a ceremonial occasion had covered up the fact that one person was preferred by God to the other. (The anger of Achilles also takes place in a ceremonial event in that Briseas was taken from him so as to show the power of the head King to assert himself, and Achilles, sulking in his tent, is to be associated with children and immaturity rather than with heroism or admiration.)
Aristotle, that wise head, defined anger as pretty close to what I have suggested about its association with durability, though Aristotle did not evoke ceremonial occasions as the social site where anger is inspired. His idea that anger sustains the awareness of an injustice even if anger is hasty in its judgment. Anger is the feeling and contemplation of revenge for injustice. That is a very strong characterization because revenge implies pain or punishment so as to reverse the wrong. So if anger means what it says, it is that the Palestinens will get what they deserve which means, so I gather, a one state solution from the sea to the Jordan River. They will not let go of their anger just as a person does not let go of the slights that let a person break a friendship forty years ago. The feeling has to fester so that it is real rather than an illusion and this persistence in not making amends with the Israelis is their cardinal virtue (or sin) given that the people have not become prosperous or well loved by their arab neighbors or achieved some kind of democratic rule. The hatred of the Israelis abides and is their most potent weapon. They will not give it up, and so their quest for their own state abides.
That very realistic assessment of anger is very different from the point of view of that other old head, Spinoza, who thought that anger was to be associated with a number of other similar emotions, such as disdain, vengeance, which are all to be regarded as evil, which means disordered and disorganized, and so to be extinguished rather than sustained for certain purposes. Anger is always demeaning, as it is to Tlaib, as well as to the few Jews alive who have not made peace with Germany, and so for Biden to applaud Tlaib is to be condescending in that her virtue of fidelity is much smaller than the need to go on and think, somehow, of a different future for Palestine than reclaiming what was Palestine in 1948. Rather than “Never forget”, the Spinozistic mantra is “Always forget when it is time to forget”.