Many thinkers and psychologists have given their views on anger, claiming the destructive impact on both the angry people and their target. They suggest that anger aims at retaliation and should be repressed and even eliminated completely (Cherry, 11). Myisha Cherry extensively argues the opposite around the positive aspects of anger, or rage, that are fitting, appropriate, and even required to bring about changes. Her approach could be very significant for racial injustice and grand-scale unfairness, but should we expect the same in more trivial arguments? Does anger destroy a relationship? This unanswered puzzle will follow us throughout our life. I would first lay out the foundation for this discussion based on Cherry’s notion of Lordean Rage and describe its fittingness, appropriateness, and representativeness. Then, I would try to argue why this formulation of rage may not work within our relationships.
Firstly, let me introduce Lordean rage as a distinctive and comparatively righteous type of anger. Usually, when those acclaimed virtuous thinkers talk about anger, they are exclusively pointing to the destructive aspects. However, Cherry argues that although we ought not to deny those, there are some cases where anger promotes desirable effects like racial justice (Cherry, 14). We must not banish anger wholesomely and ignore the promising types of it that we can employ (Cherry, 12). Some features of Lordean rage, as an example of righteous anger towards racism, would tell us why anger can be righteous. It mainly targets racist attitudes and actions rather than just the racists themselves (Cherry, 23). It aims at the change from injustice to justice—changing the racist beliefs, stereotypes, attitudes, and more—not anything inherently destructive like many other types of anger. The action tendency, then, is to use Lordean rage itself for the racially suppressed to gather their energy for actions to combat racism. This formulation makes this type of anger less destructive because it does not aim at hurting people, physically or mentally, but eradicating the phenomenon of racism as a whole.
I should also discuss the appropriateness of anger. When we face wrongdoings, it makes sense and is fitting to feel angry unless, perhaps, someone likes to feel happy about this, which is very rare. However, Lordean rage is not just fitting but appropriate. Just by fittingness alone, we cannot tell whether a type of anger is morally appropriate because it is also natural to feel like destroying someone. The appropriateness comes from the respect toward the humanity of wrongdoers and the attitude of non-destruction (Cherry, 34). Instead, when it starts to direct at the innocent or aims at destruction, it becomes inappropriate. On the other hand, we should still explain why it is a valuable type of emotion to exist (Cherry, 52). What is behind the aim of Lordean rage is not only recognizing injustice but eliminating injustice as well as promoting justice. Its value is to promote the positive and reduce and eliminate the negative. When people with Lordean rage recognize injustice, they want to eliminate it because they appreciate justice, the positive. That is essentially what distinguishes Lordean rage as a valuable one among many destructive and usually less desirable types of anger.
In this section, I try to apply the formulation of Lordean rage to relationships and examine whether it could adapt. Why are we angry about who we love? This question might sound silly. We feel angry because they hurt us, and it is fitting to be angry when faced with wrongdoings. However, we are afraid of being angry with our friends because we fear the destructive consequences, which renders anger inappropriate in our view if we want to continue with the relationship. In this case, we assume that anger targets the other person, motivates us to approach them and harm them physically or mentally, and aims at destroying that person under particular circumstances. When we cool down and think about anger rationally, we understand very clearly that we do not want to become angry because those previous suggestions will stimulate us to cause all sorts of unwanted consequences in a relationship. We always struggle to balance out these contrasting attitudes, which are cognitively control our anger or not.
Lordean rage, on the other hand, would not aim at destroying anything and seems promising in a relationship if adapted to it. If we try to apply a similar conception of Lordean rage, I would argue that the idea is keeping your friend’s identities as themselves and, in particular, the identity as your friends intact. By keeping identities as themselves, I mean broad identities like humanity, capabilities, virtues, etc. Lordean rage involves not targeting solely the person, which means their humanity, but the attitudes you can extrapolate from all those wrongdoers (Cherry, 34). That is because those with Lordean rage acknowledge that those wrongdoers are also human beings, and they have the capacity not to develop those unjust attitudes. I think those identities are much harder for us to keep intact when we are infuriated by our friends. The difference between the possibility of cultivating Lordean rage and potentially righteous anger with our friends is really the target. Lordean rage directs toward the racist attitude, which will cover a large population; however, when speaking of friends as such, not friends as racists, classists, or elitists, it seems to be very difficult to pull apart their identities as humans and friends from the unjust attitudes themselves. When we are angry at our friends, we seem to predispose our targets as mainly our friends themselves, not so much the unjust attitudes. This, I believe, is because those friends’ all-rounded identities as themselves are too significant in our heads compared to a random racist we do not know at all. When friends irritate us, their comparatively positive images are challenged, or their already challenged images are worsened even more. On the contrary, when discriminated against by a racist, we may only think that we are maltreated due to his identity as a racist. Hence, I think it would probably be very difficult to pull their identity as our friends and as themselves apart. If the anger toward our friends focuses more on the friends themselves, then it seems that the aim and action tendency are both more or less negative. Although we may not aim at destroying the relationship or our friends in any way, the action tendency will motivate us toward that, therefore threatening the relationship. More importantly, no matter in what way we feel angry, our friends may not perceive our anger as what we intend it to be. Even though we ourselves can think that the cause of our anger is a part of their identity, they could still think that we are directing at they themselves despite we telling informing them of our intention. Since the relationship between friends is two-way and connects very few people, I prefer to be more cautious about being angry.
If my reasoning sounds appealing, then maybe we should try to avoid getting angry at our friends. Well, if we really need to change their thoughts or behaviors on a certain thing, probably becoming angry is still strategically necessary. A lot of times, rhetorical and emotional persuasions are more effective than rational resolutions because people can be tied to their own thinking patterns that would not allow them to be convinced rationally. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I talked with another about avoiding extravagance and devoting some of our better living conditions to those in need. When she insisted that she wanted a more comfortable life, I appealed to anger to cool her down—at least the conversation then shifted from slightly contentious to more peaceful afterward. However, the situation was that she knew I would try to persuade her to become more frugal, and she probably thought that her position was less virtuous and righteous and, perhaps, somehow ashamed of my anger. Therefore, I cannot conclude that anger is a good strategy, unless you really have to and knows that this will not end a relationship. Cultivating emotional intelligence is a huge topic, so I cannot get to discuss it more extensively here. However, my conclusion is that I still recommend controlling your anger when arguing with your friends.
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Image Credit: Joe Haupthttps://www.flickr.com/photos/51764518@N02/14310575817/in/photostream/