Virtue and the Consequences of Anger

[talon]

Aristotle said: "Anybody can become angry -- that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way -- that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."

Marcus Aurelius said, "How much more grievous are the consequences of anger, than the causes of it?"

People haven't changed all that much through the centuries. Sure, we'd like to think we have, but really, all we've done is change our toys. Our character hasn't altered all that much. Approximately 380 years before the beginning of the common era, people like Aristotle were commenting on human behavior. A hundred years before him, Plato covered the same behaviors and 200 years later, Marcus Aurelius made similar comments. Every philosopher, every student of human behavior through the ages has made the same observations. Some people hit the ideals, but the vast majority of people fall far short of those ideals.

People aren't bad. In most circumstances, without any mitigating factors, people are good. In groups, though, people tend to act with the lowest level of behavior, a "herd mentality" that has been commented on over and over, reported on in the news once newspapers came about, and reported with video footage now that technology allows it to happen. People, in groups, behave like the worst person in the group. "Such-and-so is doing it, so I might as well" or perhaps "I have to go with the flow or I'll be singled out" or even "No one will notice if I'm the one that does this if we're all doing similar things". In a group or a mob, people do what they perceive others to be doing. It's a weakness, a flaw in the human character.

No one wants to stand out, or to be the one doing something different, even if what everyone else is doing is wrong. To do the right thing under these circumstances is difficult. High integrity values are hard to maintain in the face of a group of people who are engaging in low integrity behaviors. It takes discipline and constant review of one's behavior to keep doing the right thing. It's exhausting.

But some people still do the right thing. They make the 911 call, they put themselves in harm's way, they make the gracious apology, they say the hard words, they do what has to be done. If they didn't, we wouldn't have people like Plato, Aristotle, and Aurelius commenting on it. The people with high integrity standards are noticed, and in a functional society, others emulate those standards and encourage others to do so as well. When considerate, responsible, empathetic behaviors are common, people find it easier to be good.

Unfortunately, it seems it takes very little to push people astray from high integrity values. Just a nudge, a spoken, "I'll get mine!", and people weaken. They weaken faster the larger the group is. My son has a button he sometimes wears that says, "Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups." It says a lot that this is a cliché so well known that it appears on bumper stickers, T-shirts, buttons, and signs. It says a lot, too, that even though this is a common saying that it doesn't really inspire us to be better people.

Aristotle said, "Virtue is a character concerned with choice."

What he doesn't say is that it is a constant flow of choices, minute by minute, day by day, until the end of life. You can't be good once and be considered good forever. We have to always be good, always make the high integrity choices, always assess our responsibilities through constant self-examination. There comes a time when the process is fast and virtually painless, but it takes many years to reach that point - much longer if we are not exposed to and taught high integrity values from birth. We can all achieve high integrity values if we work at it.

It takes what Aristotle calls "the virtue of discipline" to do the right thing and to be a good person when the going gets rough. Mircea Eliade spoke of the virtue of discipline as a neo-stoic and Christian value, but really, it preceded Christianity and I believe it is a human virtue, one we all long for in our inner heart of hearts. We all want to be good, brave, responsible, strong. We all want to do the right thing in the right way at the right time. Joseph Campbell addressed this in "The Power of Myth". Stories that tug at us the most are tales of people who live their ideals, who submit to the virtue of discipline in their behavior and treatment of others - the Code of Chivalry from the Middle Ages, the codes of behavior taught with martial arts, the fictional heroes who most capture our imaginations.

We aren't born virtuous. We have to work at becoming so. And once we integrate virtue into our lives and behaviors, we have to re-evaluate it under new circumstances. If it's virtuous face-to-face, is it still virtuous on Twitter? If it's ethical at work, is it still ethical on FaceBook? If it's responsible at home, is it still responsible in a blog post? If you wouldn't do it to your grandmother, would you do it to your daughter? Technology doesn't really change what is virtuous, it only changes how quickly we can act and react to others - and it sometimes propagates it to a far wider audience than intended and makes of it a permanent record. Worse still, technology can pull it out of context and make it far worse-sounding - or noble-sounding - than it actually was. Each day, each new techie innovation, is another opportunity to stretch ourselves and discover just what virtue is and how it works.

Virtue is the ideal towards which we strive all our lives long. Sometimes, I think learning what virtue is and becoming as virtuous as we can be is the purpose of our lives. Death is the price of living, but virtue is the reason to live.

Let me go back to the first two quotes. We live in an angry world right now. That article earlier about the woman who cut in line demonstrates the worst of human behavior when it is influenced by anger out of control. The original inconsiderate act led to a whole slew of rude behaviors, partly because it was a group setting and partly because humans are weak - it looks like everyone there chose to follow the worst behaviors.

I wonder how the event would have played out if the line cutter had exercised the virtue of discipline and either stayed in her original check-out line or had courteously asked to cut in line to be with her cousin? I wonder how it would have played out if the woman the line jumper cut in front of had exercised her virtue of discipline and refrianed from engaging in an exchange of angry words? I wonder how it would have played out if, at any step of the entire confrontation, just one person had chosen to the path of higher integrity and virtue?

We can only speculate.

What we do know is that Marcus Aurelius was right - the consequences of that outburst of anger far exceeds the cause of it.