Twilight of the Emotions: Righteous Anger

As noted in the first post in this series on the emotions, Robert Trivers (1971) identified moralistic aggression, a.k.a. righteous anger, as one of the human adaptations that once helped to “regulate the altruistic system.” The altruistic system—reciprocal altruism—is, of course, what prevailed in hunter-gatherer times. In those times, the threat of retaliation by outraged parties was a significant deterrent to anyone who considered breaking the rules of the group. Here’s an example from Asen Balikci’s The Netsilik Eskimo:

...lazy hunters were barely tolerated by the community. They were the objects of backbiting and ostracism for a long time until the opportunity came for an open quarrel. Stingy men who shared in a niggardly manner were treated similarly (Balikci, 1970, p.177).

In The Forest People, Colin Turnbull tells a story about a young Mbuti man, Kelemoke, who is caught having sex with his cousin, which the Mbuti consider incest. He is chased into the forest by a crowd of band members, males and females, brandishing knives and shouting. Turnbull asks an older Mbuti man what would happen to Kelemoke:

“He has been driven to the forest,” he said, “and he will have to live there alone. Nobody will accept him into their group after what he has done. And he will die, because one cannot live alone in the forest. The forest will kill him” (Turnbull, 1961, p. 112).

Eventually, the other members of the band allow Kelemoke to return to the group, but he had been thoroughly chastised and “never flirted with his cousin again.”

Sometimes the behavior of a band member was so egregious that the entire band participated in an execution. One of Richard Lee’s !Kung informants describes the death of his brother:

“People said that /Twi was one who had killed too many people, so they killed him with spears and arrows. He had killed two people already, and on the day he died he stabbed a woman and killed a man... Then they all fired on him with poisoned arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then he lay flat. All approached him, men and women, and stabbed his body with spears even after he was dead” (Lee, 1979, p. 394).

Now that’s moralistic aggression!

It’s important to note that all these examples of righteous anger in hunter-gatherer societies were collective punishments for behaviors that undermined the agreed-upon norms of the group. Cooperation was critical to survival, and individuals who created dissension roused anger and indignation in others. The offenders had to be “regulated” for the good of the band.

As civilizations grew from Neolithic villages to city-states to empires, anger became less “righteous,” less connected with the good of the group; it morphed into a personal matter. Take, for example, the “anger of Achilles” in The Iliad. Achilles famously sulks in his tent below the walls of Troy, endangering his fellow warriors, because Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek force, took Briseis, his prized bride, away from him. Achilles is insulted; his importance, his worth, is not being recognized. By the eighth century B.C., the regulatory function of anger was already becoming history.

Vestiges of the regulatory function of anger can be found in most organized religions. They condemn anger but make an exception for righteous anger. In Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas writes that “he that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked...to be angry is therefore not always an evil." In the Old Testament, God himself exhibits plenty of righteous anger. He destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and kills everything in the world with a flood, save only Noah’s family and the animals Noah could fit into the ark. In the New Testament, Jesus, who preaches tolerance and peace, runs the money changers out of the temple in a fit of righteous rage.

In our time, personal anger is hardly useful as a device to regulate society. Besides the fact that our socio-political systems are not regulated by reciprocity, there are just too many things for an individual to get angry about, most of them having no particular significance for the rest of the population.

Currently, our nation is split into multiple populations which have no love for one another; anger just drives them further apart. The people who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6th believed that their anger was righteous, but, clearly, it was not useful as a regulatory mechanism.

Anger Essential Reads

The Buddha, Twain, and You: Wisdom for Taming Your Temper

The Best Ways to Manage Anger

Perhaps the fact that righteous anger was such an important adaptation in humanity’s early centuries is what makes the anger of people like the insurrectionists so intense. It feels really good to feel angry and righteous at the same time. Righteous anger has all the charms of certainty without the hard work of compromise. It’s an orgiastic type of release, and as society provides less and less gratification, controlling it may become more and more difficult.

Anger can still affect the behavior of people in groups today, but without the exigency of survival and the need for cooperation, the actions that arise from it are not likely to promote universally accepted group norms, much less peace and cooperation.