De Ira 2024
It was a kind of parable of our time- a young man, isolated and bullied, hides his anger until it bursts forth as he takes his father’s gun and commits the horrendous act of trying to kill the former President. Not so dramatically, but rather at a cotidian level, we can discern an uptick in anger around us.
I recently listened to a presentation by Raskin and Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, who laid much of the blame at the feet of social media (which, they believe, will be made exponentially worse by AI). They spoke of what they called the ‘down the brainstem’ factor. They point out that Facebook had at the outset a fairly simple algorithm. It rewarded more attention, and attention was won by the baser passions, lust, anger, shock, etc. So social media ignited the pursuit of success in this harsher way, down the brainstem, as it were. This has been both dynamo and metaphor for our time. The problem of course is that anger is a vice.
It is also a mobile passion. It moves down generations- try Greek tragedy, if you doubt. It moves outward from ourselves, dramatically in hostility to the other, the outsider. It hides itself within from our own eyes, so that we are incensed by the mote in the neighbor’s eye and not the log in our own. In fact its origin, in Cain and Abel and yet further back into the mist of pre-history, is as mysterious as original sin itself. Finally anger doubles down, puts down roots, shouts down empathy and moderation, its virtuous counterparts.
The place to start is with an inventory of ourselves. The New Testament is infuriatingly clear on the subject.
‘’’Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord’ (and hence it does not belong to us.)
“Do not let the sun go down on your wrath, and give no opportunity for the devil.’
‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’
These mandates do not inhibit us from speaking the truth, only we must do so with agape, that is, self-sacrificing live, Paul tells us. Proclaiming these exhortations out of season, wrestling with them ourselves, and confessing when we fall short, are an important part of the vocation of the Church in our time.
Let me add an addendum of a more practical tenor. Here are some practices which repel wrath: play (e.g. displacing my ire upon those New York Yankees!), neighborliness, for example in clubs or public occasions, penitence, when we can lay our wrath open and have it cauterized, and ‘rest and quietness’, (from Isaiah 30:16, in a passage addressed to an ‘obstinate nation.’)
Peace,
+GRS
