What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [59]
The question of what happens to anger when you control the attack phase is an area of major controversy. It is fundamental to Freudian psychology that emotion is hydraulic (the very meaning of dynamic in Freudian psychodynamics). Emotion is like a liquid in a closed system: If anger is dammed up or pushed down in one place, it will inevitably push its way up in some other, unwelcome place. If you don’t vent your anger when you are angry, it will increase your blood pressure, or eat an ulcer into your stomach, or cause self-hate, or be displaced until you come across a less dangerous victim—like your three-year-old daughter. Anti-Freudians claim that anger unexpressed simply dissipates. If you count to four hundred or turn the other cheek, before you know it the anger will be muted. Then it will be gone. Before this chapter is over, we will have a better idea of which view is correct.
What Anger Does for You
Your anger has a long history, one that goes back before your childhood and before your parents’ childhoods. It goes back to the life-and-death struggles of your early human ancestors, and further still to our primate ancestors and their forebears. Nature “red in tooth and claw” is a popular view of survival of the fittest. And while not completely accurate, the human capacity for anger is one of the principal reasons we—and not some other primate line—are the dominant species on earth.
Robert Ardrey, a theorist of human evolution, argued that our primate ancestors were not the peaceful vegetarian apes whose big brains were adaptive because they made tools, a sentiment so dear to the politics of most anthropologists. Rather, our forebears succeeded because they were carnivorous apes, selected because they made weapons and had the explosive anger to wield them well. Ardrey’s school of thought holds that we are descended from a line of nonpareil killers. In the two poles of the evolution of intelligence postulated in the musical, cooperative spacemen of Close Encounters of the Third Kind versus the supreme predators in Alien, Ardrey’s theory claims that the human species embodies the latter.2
This kind of anger is most effectively aroused in defense of our own territory, and this is the principal thing—never to be forgotten—that anger does for us. The focal thought is, after all, “My domain is being trespassed against.” It is a military postulate that people attacked on their own territory will defend themselves with vigor—nay, with astonishing ferocity. When we defend our children, our land, our jobs, our privileges, or our lives, we are transformed from shepherds, teachers, accountants, and mothers into street fighters and terrorists and Amazons. When we are drafted to fight on somebody else’s turf, we are just doing a job, weighing the likely outcome of each move, quite ready to cut and run when the fight seems lost. Not so when it is our domain and we are desperate and angered. Vietnam, Algeria, the Warsaw ghetto, and Ireland are memorable lessons of this postulate.
Another benefit is that anger aims for revenge and restitution—for justice as we see it. It helps to right wrongs and to bring about needed change. When we fight with our spouse, for example, we usually think, “I am right and he is wrong.” Anger, unlike fear or sadness, is a moral emotion. It is “righteous.” It aims not only to end the current trespass but to repair any damage done. It also aims to prevent further trespass by disarming, imprisoning, emasculating, or killing the trespasser.
When someone advises us to turn the other cheek, to “acknowledge it and let it go,” or to weigh the cost versus the benefits of fighting, we may resist this advice. We think that it would be wrong, that if we didn’t fight, we would be sacrificing justice. We would be cowards, and evil would triumph again.
There is another moral aspect to anger. We deem it honest to express our anger. We live in an age that tells us to “let it all hang out.” If we feel anger, we