David Egan Philosophy

The United States presidential election is scheduled for November 5. If that information is news to you, I envy your innocence. Polling suggests it’s a dead heat. Partisans on both sides construe it as a battle for America’s soul. And given the United States’ outsize influence on the rest of the world, the state of its soul will affect you wherever you are.

One of the fundamental values enshrined in a democratic system—at least in theory—is intellectual humility. Politics is messy and complicated, it involves decisions that affect thousands or millions of people with outcomes that are very hard to predict. Anyone who says they know exactly what a city or country or the world needs is a charlatan or a huckster. I might disagree with your prescriptions but I should recognize that I might be wrong and that you might have a point. Democracies try to muddle through by welcoming a plurality of voices, in contrast to more authoritarian systems that have fewer checks and balances, fewer safeguards, and fewer opportunities for self-correction.

That, as I said, is the theory. In practice, you may have noticed that democratic politics these days is a little more zero-sum. This is certainly true in the United States but the trend seems much more general. Politics has become more polarized, political rhetoric has become more uncompromising. I don’t mean to suggest that politics has ever been a peaceable exercise in friendly compromise (Make America Genteel Again) but the combative edge that characterizes healthy politics has become dangerously sharp.

I don’t pretend to any kind of special political wisdom so I won’t try to diagnose the causes of this heightened polarization nor propose solutions. Instead, I want to focus on a political emotion that’s become very prevalent and that I think is subtle and much misunderstood. I want to write about outrage.

Outrage is closely tied to a sense of justice. Outrage isn’t just a response to things not going your way. It’s a response to things not going your way unjustly. And since justice lies at the heart of politics, outrage clearly has a place in our politics.

Like fire, outrage is hot and it’s dangerous to play with. In particular, outrage is resistant to compromise. In theory, as I said, democratic politics requires opponents to reason out their differences and work toward a middle ground. But there’s no reasonable middle ground to work toward if your opponents are on the side of injustice. To compromise with evil isn’t a mark of maturity; it’s a mark of cowardice.

The uncompromising stance of outrage can have all sorts of bad effects. It makes us tribal and stubborn. It makes us prone to demonizing our opponents rather than trying to win them over. In my experience, it makes people dumber: more willing to believe any fantastic report that feeds their sense of grievance and less willing to think laterally or creatively about political solutions. It’s hard to be nimble on your feet when your heels are dug in deep.

Outrage is peculiarly addictive. Recall what I said a moment ago about how people tend to believe the worst about their outrage-inducing opponents. I’ve noticed this in others and, if I’m honest, I’ve noticed this in myself. There’s a special thrill when you hear that the people you hate have lived up to your worst expectations of them. It’s as if we look for opportunities to be as outraged as possible.

We tend to think of outrage as a negative emotion and people for the most part try to avoid negative emotions. So why are people so drawn to opportunities to fuel their sense of outrage?

Here’s my hunch: outrage is the pleasure that dare not speak its name. As much as it’s bound up in feelings of anger and slighted justice, feelings of outrage are deeply satisfying. “Sweeter than dripping streams of honey” is how Homer describes outrage.

If I have to debate a reasonable opponent over subtle differences and carefully articulate my worldview, it takes a tremendous amount of effort. If it turns out my opponents are cartoon villains, there can be a feeling of tremendous relief. What’s required of me is quite simple: I simply have to defeat them. When the Death Star threatens to blow up planets, you don’t need to hash out the most equitable tax policy. First you blow up the Death Star; tax policy can come later.

The relief in having the battle lines so clearly drawn is pleasant. It eases the burden of thought and brings clarity to the fog of politics. But we also can’t admit that outrage is pleasant. “Pleasant outrage” is an oxymoron and so to admit to pleasure would undermine the feeling of outrage. So we have to avoid acknowledging the pleasure in outrage even as that pleasure is a large part of what fuels the outrage.

In this respect, I think outrage has a strong tendency to hypocritical self-deception. You have to pretend it’s unpleasant in order to enjoy the pleasure that it brings.

And that can make outrage sticky. On the surface, it looks like a thirst for justice. But it can work on me like a drug, blurring my vision, distorting my judgment, and leaving me hankering for another fix. So long as I pretend this hankering is a pure-hearted hankering for justice, I can’t confront its more self-interested aspect. I can work to amend my vices, but only if I recognize that that’s what they are. In short, outrage risks being a vice that masquerades as a virtue.

I’ll drop the disinterested language here and tell you what you can probably guess about me: I really, really don’t want Trump to win the presidential election. I do think something more is at stake than worse policies versus better policies. I don’t think there’s much room for compromise with a candidate and a party that demonize their opponents, dehumanize large swathes of the population, and talk openly about using the powers of government for nakedly partisan and anti-democratic ends. How can one not feel outrage about a candidate who has total disregard for the truth and doesn’t even bother with dog whistles on the racism front?

This isn’t pleasant. It’s deeply unpleasant. So why am I writing about the pleasures of outrage?

Part of what I find unpleasant about the current political moment is all the stuff I said above about the dangers of outrage: it makes people tribal, it makes people stubborn, it makes people dumber. But I don’t think those effects are necessary consequences of outrage. I think there is clearly a form of open-hearted, open-minded, clear-sighted outrage. I can’t think of a movement for social justice that hasn’t been driven in part by outrage.

Outrage makes us smaller when we don’t see it for what it is. When outrage is fuelled primarily by the pleasure it brings rather than the injustice it addresses, it becomes decadent and self-involved. To avoid scratching that itch, you first need to recognize the pleasure that scratching brings. Only then is it possible to direct your outrage in a measured and productive way. 

1. Until 2015, the Westfjords district of Iceland had a law on the books stating that it was legal to kill Basques on sight. The law was originally written up after a bloody encounter when some Basque whalers washed up there in 1615. (source)
2. Water doesn’t automatically turn to ice at 0°C. For water to form ice crystals, it needs some sort of surface to from the crystals around—usually particles or impurities in the water. Highly purified and undisturbed water can stay unfrozen at temperatures lower than -40°C. (source)
3. During the interwar years, an International Workers’ Olympiad competed with the Olympics organized by the IOC. The Workers’ Olympiad resisted the social, racial, and gender exclusiveness of the IOC, as well as its nationalism: national flags weren’t used and mass participation was encouraged over elite achievement. The 1931 Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna drew larger crowds than the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Mostly a European affair, the Workers’ Olympiad was snuffed out by the rise of fascism. The Olympics we know today are the fascistoid, nationalistic, capitalistic games that won out. (source and source)
4. Roads in the United States are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as in other parts of the rich world. The main culprit is that the heavier SUVs and pick-ups that Americans prefer make collisions much deadlier. (source)
5. The scientific body in charge of standardizing the names of genes issued new guidelines in 2020 to change the official names of genes whose names previously contained acronyms that sounded like months (e.g. Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type Finger 1 had been MARCH1 and Septin 2 had been SEPT2). These names had become a problem, messing up data analysis in multiple studies, because when they were entered into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Excel had autocorrected the names to dates. (source)
6. There’s far more nautical terminology in common English usage than you might suppose (or at least more than I did). In addition to expressions with obvious nautical origins like “even keel” or “cut and run,” there’s a variety of other less obvious ones: “overwhelmed,” “headway,” “ahead,” “underway,” “taken aback,” “aloof,” “by and large,” “skyscraper,” “slush fund,” “hot pursuit,” and “junk” all originated in sailors’ jargon. (“Junk” in the sense of garbage, by the way, is etymologically distinct from the word for the Chinese ship—“junk” in the garbage sense originates from a term for useless rope.) Maybe most surprising is that “bitter end” doesn’t derive from bitter tastes but from a rope fully uncoiling from a bitt, which is a post on a dock or deck for fastening mooring lines or cables. (source)
7. Iron rocket artillery was first invented in the kingdom of Mysore in southern India in the 18th century and used against the British to devastating effect. The “rockets’ red glare” from the American national anthem alludes to British rockets fired during the American War of Independence, which they had reverse-engineered from Mysorean rockets that had been used against them. (source)
8. By one estimate, it costs OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, 36 cents every time someone asks ChatGPT a question. (source)
9. If Taylor Swift were a country, her economy would be larger than that of 50 other countries. (source)
10. The total value of all economic activity in the world—goods and services and the like—is estimated at $105 trillion. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity—that’s all the shifting around of money by brokers, bankers, and investors gambling on the future profitability of that economic activity—is estimated at $667 trillion. (source)
11. Earth has over 6000 distinct species of mineral, far more (like more than an order of magnitude more) than the moon, Mars, or Mercury. This is due in large part to microbes breaking apart and reshaping rocks and the high-oxygen atmosphere created by aerobic life forms. Earth’s mineral riches were brought into being, directly and indirectly, by living organisms. Microbes, plants, and fungi may have also played a critical role in the formation of continents. (source)