Anger is a red mist, which blinds us. It blinds us to the good in other human beings, and to the danger in violent or uncompromising action. Accordingly, expressing anger in public spaces is detrimental to the cultivation of mutual trust and to the pursuit of justice. Or so it is often said. In the early days of his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden told an assembled crowd in Philadelphia: \u2018Some say Democrats don\u2019t want to hear about unity. That they are angry, and the angrier you are, the better. \u2026 Well, I don\u2019t believe it.\u2019 More famously, Martin Luther King, Jr., once remarked that Malcolm X\u2019s \u2018fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettoes \u2026 can reap nothing but grief.\u2019<\/p>\n
Yet many seem to suggest precisely the opposite. For the poet and activist Audre Lorde, anger is a \u2018spotlight\u2019 which is \u2018loaded with information and energy\u2019. Or take William Lloyd Garrison, who insisted that, when exposed to Frederick Douglass\u2019s enraged anti-slavery rhetoric, the anger he experienced rendered his perception of slavery\u2019s injustice \u2018far more clear than ever\u2019. Anger, both are suggesting, is a source of knowledge. And publicly expressing anger is a way of spreading that knowledge.<\/p>\n
But how can Lorde and Garrison possibly be right, if\u2014as popular wisdom would have it\u2014anger blinds us? How can anger be both a red mist and a spotlight? How can it reveal truth, if it also obscures it? To make sense of this puzzle, we need to look more closely at emotions more generally. Emotions typically involve distinctive bodily feelings. When you\u2019re angry, you might feel hot, have an increased heart rate, or even tremble. But there\u2019s more to emotions than bodily feelings. Emotions also have a cognitive dimension. They represent objects in our environment as being a certain way. They modify the way we see, imagine, or remember things. They are, in other words, \u2018distinctive ways of seeing a situation\u2019.<\/p>\n
Distinctive how? First, emotions are sources of salience. They highlight particular features of our environment, and bring them into focus. Different emotions highlight different kinds of things. Fear, for example, puts a spotlight on potential sources of danger. <\/em>If I walk home at night and am afraid, my fear highlights the street\u2019s emptiness, the absence of lighting, and the footsteps behind me. Grief, on the other hand, fixes your attention on what you\u2019ve lost. This salience function of emotions is hugely important. We live in extremely complex environments, which bombard us with all kinds of information. By making some pieces of information more salient than others, emotions help us navigate these environments by processing information efficiently.<\/p>\n The second important cognitive property of emotions is that they can deliver information that we don\u2019t yet have a label or concept for. In this respect, emotions are similar to visual perception: just as visual perception allows us to discriminate between more shades of blue than we have words for, so too emotions can help us sense or appreciate normative issues (danger, loss, injustice) even whilst we lack the words or concepts needed to name them.<\/p>\n Consider what this means for anger and its public expression. The distinctive object of anger is not danger or loss. It\u2019s injustice or wrongdoing. So, as a source of salience, anger highlights potential sources of injustice. This matters, because injustice\u2014even grave injustice\u2014is often hidden or masked. For example, when the ideology of the American Dream asserts that success is within anyone\u2019s reach, this masks the injustice of egregious inequalities. Expressing anger is a way of inducing in others a state of alertness to injustice, which helps them see through such ideological distortions. Anger casts a spotlight on shrouded injustices.<\/p>\n The second upshot is that, as an emotion, anger can get us to register or sense injustices, even when we lack a word or concept for those injustices. This too matters greatly. We often lack the labels needed to understand specific injustices, and to communicate about them. There was a time when, although sexual harassment was rampant, the concept of sexual harassment did not yet exist. In such settings, anger serves as an alarm bell, which helps us sense that\u2014though we cannot yet name this wrong\u2014a wrong is taking place. And arousing anger in others, by extension, is a way of getting them, too, to sense that something is wrong.<\/p>\n So, there are good reasons to think that public expressions of anger constitute an important spotlight, which exposes injustice. But notice that this is actually consistent with the idea that anger also blinds us. It\u2019s not that Malcolm X is simply right and King is simply wrong. Far from it. The fact that anger blinds us is actually a flipside of the fact that anger selects information and renders it salient. Salience is comparative. What this means is that, when anger makes potential sources of injustice salient, it also makes other things unsalient. Anger therefore comes at a cost: when I am on the lookout for how others may have wronged me, I am more likely to overlook what there is to trust, love, and respect in them.<\/p>\n This cost matters. Tackling grave injustices requires social cooperation, which in turn depends on mutual trust and respect. So, while we shouldn\u2019t dismiss anger as a mere red mist, we should also recognise that spotlights too can narrow our vision. The lesson is that we need public expressions of anger, but we also need their opposite. Malcolm X and King may have disparaged each other publicly, but they depended on each other\u2014sometimes explicitly so. While King relied on Malcolm X to expose racial injustices in uncompromising terms, Malcolm X relied on King to make visible the possibility of progress and reconciliation. The same goes for the Democratic Party. Calls for anger and calls for unification may seem opposed. But we should steer clear of the temptation simply to choose one and reject the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anger is a red mist, which blinds us. It blinds us to the good in other human beings, and to the danger in violent or uncompromising action. Accordingly, expressing anger […]","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post on Open for Debate. \"SHOULD WE PUBLICLY EXPRESS ANGER?\" a great post by Maxime Lepoutre on the epistemic benefits and problems with anger","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[132,175,94,187,7],"custom_author":[188],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-for-debate","tag-american-politics","tag-anger","tag-emotions","tag-injustice","tag-politics","custom_author-lepoutre-maxime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8KPlM-bm","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":653,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/what-makes-arrogant-people-so-angry\/","url_meta":{"origin":704,"position":0},"title":"What makes arrogant people so angry?","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"April 22, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Arrogant people are often intolerant of questioning or criticism. They respond to genuine and even polite challenges with anger. They are bullies that attempt to humiliate and intimidate those who do not agree with, or explicitly defer to, their opinions.\u00a0The arrogant\u00a0feel superior to other people and arrogate for themselves special\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2019\/04\/light.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2019\/04\/light.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2019\/04\/light.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2019\/04\/light.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1756,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/i-hate-cyclists\/","url_meta":{"origin":704,"position":1},"title":"\u201cI hate cyclists!\u201d","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"August 21, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"True story: a friend who works for the NHS had to attend mandatory RESPECT training. The workshop convenor started the day with ice breakers, everyone was invited to say what they liked and disliked. 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Trump. People whose convictions are strongly opposed to each other treat discussions as duels or shouting matches. We are now used to\u00a0observing\u00a0debates where participants are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Changing Attitudes"","block_context":{"text":"Changing Attitudes","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/changing-attitudes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2017\/04\/stop-1616145_1920.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":149,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/arrogant-pride-and-alternative-facts\/","url_meta":{"origin":704,"position":5},"title":"Arrogant Pride and Alternative Facts","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"July 17, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Pride...is a very common failing\" (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice). 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