| In this article: * People are angry about different things. Maybe different kinds of things, but a taxonomy isn't important to the exploration. * Telling people they SHOULD NOT be angry and should calm down is common. * Telling people they SHOULD be angry (about some injustice) is also common. * These are both kinds of the titular "anger management". * Anger seems to involve moral insight: e.g., one is (at least sometimes) angry _in response to_ "reasons to be angry" that one perceives. * Anger seems to involve a corruption of moral vision: e.g., revenge and maltreatment of the offender seem good when one is angry. * Callard (the author) has an impulse to resist both kinds of "anger management" and believes others do, too. (And that we're not exactly wrong to.) Why does one not experience the call to calm down as help to dispel the corruption of vision, nor the call to be angry as help to see truths about injustice? * Callard argues we are split in our ability to respond to [in]justice: "the more perfectly one attends to the gravity of the wrongs done, the less sensitive one becomes to the gravity of the wrongs one is poised to commit in response. The perspective of the angry person is sharply divided from the non-angry one: each can see only the side of justice they are looking at." * "This anger divide lies at the heart of our political predicament, and structures our interactions with one another at the deepest level. And yet, for this very reason, it is itself difficult to recognize." * We can understand the society level anger divide better by considering the anger divide in oneself. * Personal story beginning with "A few weeks ago" illustrates the incompatible values of the angry self and the non-angry self: we can't really rank the values or even hold both at once, only switch between them. * No wonder people angry about issue A can't see eye to eye with people not angry about A. "There is no rational way to adjudicate their conflict—the best a third-party mediator could do is flip back and forth between who they want to side with." * "The anger divide is frequently experienced as a political disaster: How can we ever hope to get everyone on the same page? Why are people so impervious to having their minds changed, anger-wise? ...it is because they are rational, and care about justice, that ... [they] are refusing to allow others to banish them from their property, the truth." * There is truth in anger and in not-anger. Justice may be "something on the wrong scale to be taken in by a single human response." Instead of wanting (and trying to make) everyone to feel the same way, we should recognize we are not individually emotionally complete and be glad that others cover our blind spots. * Callard's personal story dilemma was resolved in favor of love, away from vengeance in part because her son was around, and she would have felt ridiculous explaining her vengeance to his impartial position. * "The very presence of other people can make us better, even when they don’t make us more like them, or change us, or even understand us. Sometimes other people help us exactly by not feeling what we feel, exactly by remaining resolutely who they are." |