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Anger in a Perilous Environment: María Lugones

2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19446489.19.1.03

1944-6489

Mariana Alessandri,

Cultural Differences and Values

in a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and why it is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Plato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion.I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to homeschool them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a fan of right action, he suggested that we train our souls to react beautifully even to an ugly mess. There have been times when, instead of threatening my younger son with a punishment for not getting dressed, I have helped his weary body walk over to the dresser to pick out clothes. This is beautiful action.Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle mercifully rejected "shoulds" when it came to feelings, since feelings are natural and harmless if we do not act on them. Feeling angry and resentful when you are burdened with homeschooling on top of working and chores is acceptable, but venting that anger is not. As Mister Rogers so charmingly put Aristotle's point: "Everyone has lots of ways of feeling. And all of those feelings are fine. It is what we do with our feelings that matters in this life" ("Imaginary Friends"). Still, it was too hard to live up to Aristotle's (or Mister Rogers's) expectations.My experience with lockdown anger left me caught between two bright lights: the Stoics, who told me I should not let myself become angry, and Aristotle, who said I could become angry as long as I did not act on it. But every time I had what the Greeks called a "temper tantrum," I felt like something was deeply wrong with me (Marcus Aurelius 15–16). The haggard-looking woman stuck in the house looking at me in the mirror was ugly, irrational, and crazy. So said the ancients, and so said I.Whether you believe you can stop yourself from getting angry (like the Stoics) or you believe you can become angry as long as you do not act on it (like Aristotle), chances are good that you inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans a bias against anger. They did not leave us a helpful lens through which to see or challenge structural injustices that are making us so angry.During the pandemic, women lost a million more jobs than men. Black, Latina, and Asian women lost the most out of everybody. We can fight to change this world—to widen the hallways of existence for Women of Color—but we never will if we are convinced in advance that our anger is irrational, ugly, or crazy. Feeling guilty about feeling angry has kept too many of us distracted and obedient.It is time for a demolition and a rebuild, a renovation in our thinking about anger and a widening of the emotional walls that surround us. If we want equity, we can start by giving ourselves more room to be angry. What would change if we derived our ideas about anger not from ancient Greek and Roman men, but from twentieth-century Women of Color like María Lugones?Lugones was not always a defender of anger. Like Seneca watching Rome burn, Lugones had reason to be skeptical about anger, specifically political anger. In her youth, she saw the kind of anger that manifests as violence: "I relocated to the United States from violence. My location is that of someone who relocated away from battering, systematic rape, extreme psychological and physical torture, by those closest to me. I relocated in the sense of going for a new geographical place, a new identity, a new set of relations" (19). In the 1960s, Lugones fled from Argentina to the United States, where she remained until her death in 2020 (Carleton Office of the Chaplain; Micale).Lugones worried about what anger said about her, who it made her: "On the one hand, I find myself angrier and angrier; on the other, I have always disliked being overwhelmed by emotion" (106). "Most of all," Lugones wrote, "I have disliked myself in deep overwhelming anger" (106). Few angry women can look in the mirror while they are enraged and like what they see. Maybe it is because anger is a stereotypically masculine emotion that we are not supposed to feel, let alone express.And yet, as women become increasingly angry, we are starting to resent the knee-jerk assumption that it is ugly. By retraining our eyes to see in the dark, we might one day conclude that our anger is beautiful. In time, though, when we have really progressed, we will step beyond the merely aesthetic realm, as we already do for some groups. We do not typically call a white man's anger ugly or beautiful; we only ask if it is justified.Lugones offers three pieces of wisdom about anger in the dark.First, stop talking about anger in the singular. Lugones was not the first philosopher to suggest that anger has many names. The Greeks distinguished between angers and gave each its own term. Nemesis is the daughter of Justice. She flies around, dagger in hand, making things right. She rights wrongs. She demands restitution and gives the hurt party what they are due (Potegal and Novaco 18). Orgē is intense anger that borders on madness, the one that Seneca and Cicero were so afraid of. There is also menis (wrath), chalepaino (annoyance), kotos (resentment), and cholos (bitterness, from "bile") (Potegal and Novaco 13–14). Not only are there different terms describing different angers, but in the Greek, some of them are portrayed as spirited feelings instead of downers (14). When Lugones reminds us that there are multiple angers, she is tapping into a long tradition that we have forgotten, one that at least respected anger's diversity.The idea that there are various angers explains a lot. It explains why some people can still feel ugly even while agreeing with Lorde that anger is a healthy and rational political tool. The nagging voice in my head that reminds me of how nervous I used to become going to the dinner table as a child, the voice assuring me that I inherited my father's anger, is not always wrong. My anger sometimes does damage to my kids and sometimes to myself. Simply reversing positions on anger and concluding that dark is the new light will not help. Taking our cue from Lugones, we might start talking about kotos versus nemesis instead of just "their anger" versus "our anger." It is not true that rage is rage is rage: each anger needs to be studied for its history, source, effect, and productivity to determine whether it is justified or not.Second, Lugones agreed with Audre Lorde that some angers are "full of information." Lugones had observed women in "hard to handle anger," who she said were also "outrageously clear-headed" (107). Their words rang "clean, true, undiluted by regard for others' feelings or possible reactions" (107). When you stop spending energy managing how you sound, you can use that energy to find the right words. I am often most articulate when my anger surpasses my concern for optics.Finally, Lugones left us two philosophical categories to help us see anger more clearly. They are not types of anger like nemesis and thumos, but rather two ways to use anger. The first she calls first-order anger. It is "resistant, measured, communicative, and backward looking" (117). First-order anger is meant to be heard and understood.You expressed first-order anger as a child when someone stole your toy and you screamed "It's not fair!" You use it when you need to communicate something to someone who may not know what is going on but who would believe you if you could adequately articulate your complaint. First-order anger describes the anger of the Capitol rioters. But it also describes the anger of Black Lives Matter protesters. Both groups claim to seek justice, and both parties have a point to make. We cannot know ahead of time if first-order anger is virtuous—that will depend on reasoning, evidence, and precedents—but it is always communicative. First-order anger is always trying to tell us something. The trick is that it makes sense only to people who are willing to listen and/or who speak the same language. For people who do not understand the argument of Black Lives Matters protesters, for example, the anger is nonsensical, literally. Critics cannot make sense of why black people are so upset. Of course, some of them do not try, caught up as they are in the narrative that black anger is crazy.When a woman communicates first-order anger and her demand to be heard is rejected, second-order anger can flare up. If your anger has ever started off as measured but then becomes increasingly desperate and loud as you realize that the person you are talking to is not listening or does not care, you may have strayed into second-order anger. When you feel you're not being understood, you try to make yourself clearer, to articulate your argument with more precision. Surely, you assume, the other person will hear you if you speak more clearly. But when even that does not work—when the effort exerted has left you sweating from mental strain, emotional energy, and wasted faith—you might find yourself "going off." With Lugones near, though, you need not be ashamed of this moment anymore. Your anger is simply adopting a different aim: self-protection.Second-order anger is not about communicating anything. Lugones described it as "resistant, raging, uncommunicative, and forward looking" (117). You use it when first-order anger fails to be heard, understood, or paid attention to, when you are painted as someone who is ranting and raving. If the person you are talking to cannot see or understand the reason for your anger and instead calls you "crazy" or "emotional," then hope for communication is typically lost. You have been cast as an emotion rather than as a person with a coherent claim. Here is where second-order anger can help.Lugones called second-order anger a "knowing experience" rather than a communicative one. She called it a form of self-care (105). In second-order anger, you are no longer trying to convince anyone that your anger is justified. You stop declaring that you deserve better, that the world is sexist, that you need a break or are fed up. Second-order anger protects us from a world in which we do not make sense to the people we wish we made sense to. It is the anti-masker in the heat of COVID blowing up as she is escorted out of the grocery store. She is saying words but has lost hope of being understood, so instead she writhes, trying to insulate herself from a perceived injustice. Second-order anger is intent on resisting a world where she shows up as crazy, the very world her friend, boss, or fellow shoppers are trying to convince her is the one she occupies. She is wrapping herself in the darkness of anger to get out of the blinding light of social convention. Just like first-order anger, second-order anger is not necessarily virtuous, but it can be.We employ second-order anger when we are in danger of believing we are crazy (111). Upon realizing that you literally do not make sense to a person or group, you stop communicating and start preserving your sanity. When a woman is gaslit—told there is no cause for her anger when there is—the last thing she needs is to believe that her anger is irrational, crazy, or ugly. Calling an angry woman any of these things is an attempt to shame her into conformity. Second-order anger rejects shame, thus allowing us to stay on our own side. Instead of allowing ourselves to be convinced that we are being nonsensical, second-order anger shuts out the nonbelieving world. In second-order anger, you might be screaming and pointing your finger, but your verbalizations and gestures are not intended as communication with others but as a means of driving naysayers away and protecting yourself from them. It only looks like communication.The clearer we can be on what kind of anger we are feeling—first-order nemesis, or second-order kotos—the better we will be at knowing how to use it. "Know thyself" is an ancient philosophical commandment that still holds today. Recognizing and naming our angers can help us see which are good and which are bad, which are useful responses to injustice and which are fear in disguise. If I am employing first-order nemesis in my interaction with another person, it means that I think I can gain traction by talking to that person about the injustice. If I am employing second-order kotos, then it means I am aware at some level of my resentment at not being taken seriously.When I decided to trust in Lugones, I learned to stay on my own side. I identified my anger as the "knowing" kind of anger that Lugones talks about. It was recognizing and resisting the extra expectations being placed on me. My anger had been taking the form of second-order kotos—resentment at my unfair situation with no intention of trying to communicate. Listening to my anger helped. Instead of wasting another minute berating myself, I began requesting, demanding, and creating more time for myself. I began communicating my needs, transforming second-order anger into first-order anger. Fortunately, I was able to secure satisfaction. I stopped doing the dishes, cut the homeschooling demands in half, and had a three-day reprieve from childcare by asking my in-laws to watch our children.Not everyone will find the relief their anger is demanding. But to turn against your anger simply because you cannot secure satisfaction would be a mistake. Anger functions to protect us, to keep us grounded in the reality of our unfair situation. To anyone who says that anger is useless if you cannot change your situation, Lugones would disagree. One of anger's functions is to preserve dignity. Women who are married to partners who tone-police or gaslight them need to shift their anger from first-order, in which they hope to find results, to second-order, in which they give up on satisfaction but preserve their sanity. Knowing this difference could help them decide whether to stay or go.The next time we find ourselves in the dark of anger, let's try not calming down, counting to ten, or punching a pillow. Let's not breathe or do yoga in order to get into a better mood. Let's stay in the dark for an hour or two and listen to our anger. To stay on our own side, we will need to learn to replace "What's wrong with me?" with "What's wrong with my situation?" Thanks to philosophers like Lugones, those of us who have traditionally not been allowed to become angry, much less express it, have a chance to know anger in the dark.