Aristotle's Challenge
Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the
right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right
purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy.
ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics
It was an unbearably steamy August afternoon in New York City, the kind
of sweaty day that makes people sullen with discomfort. I was heading back
to a hotel, and as I stepped onto a bus up Madison Avenue I was startled by
the driver, a middle-aged black man with an enthusiastic smile, who
welcomed me with a friendly, "Hi! How you doing?" as I got on, a greeting
he proffered to everyone else who entered as the bus wormed through the
thick midtown traffic. Each passenger was as startled as I, and, locked into
the morose mood of the day, few returned his greeting.
But as the bus crawled uptown through the gridlock, a slow, rather
magical transformation occurred. The driver gave a running monologue for
our benefit, a lively commentary on the passing scene around us: there was
a terrific sale at that store, a wonderful exhibit at this museum, did you hear
about the new movie that just opened at that cinema down the block? His
delight in the rich possibilities the city offered was infectious. By the time
people got off the bus, each in turn had shaken off the sullen shell they had
entered with, and when the driver shouted out a "So long, have a great day!"
each gave a smiling response.
The memory of that encounter has stayed with me for close to twenty
years. When I rode that Madison Avenue bus, I had just finished my own
doctorate in psychology—but there was scant attention paid in the
psychology of the day to just how such a transformation could happen.
Psychological science knew little or nothing of the mechanics of emotion.
And yet, imagining the spreading virus of good feeling that must have
rippled through the city, starting from passengers on his bus, I saw that this
bus driver was an urban peacemaker of sorts, wizardlike in his power to transmute the sullen irritability that seethed in his passengers, to soften and
open their hearts a bit.
In stark contrast, some items from this week's paper:
• At a local school, a nine-year-old goes on a rampage, pouring paint over
school desks, computers, and printers, and vandalizing a car in the school
parking lot. The reason: some third-grade classmates called him a "baby"
and he wanted to impress them.
• Eight youngsters are wounded when an inadvertent bump in a crowd of
teenagers milling outside a Manhattan rap club leads to a shoving match,
which ends when one of those affronted starts shooting a .38 caliber
automatic handgun into the crowd. The report notes that such shootings
over seemingly minor slights, which are perceived as acts of disrespect,
have become increasingly common around the country in recent years.
• For murder victims under twelve, says a report, 57 percent of the
murderers are their parents or stepparents. In almost half the cases, the
parents say they were "merely trying to discipline the child." The fatal
beatings were prompted by "infractions" such as the child blocking the TV,
crying, or soiling diapers.
• A German youth is on trial for murdering five Turkish women and girls
in a fire he set while they slept. Part of a neo-Nazi group, he tells of failing
to hold jobs, of drinking, of blaming his hard luck on foreigners. In a barely
audible voice, he pleads, "I can't stop being sorry for what we've done, and I
am infinitely ashamed."
Each day's news comes to us rife with such reports of the disintegration
of civility and safety, an onslaught of mean-spirited impulse running amok.
But the news simply reflects back to us on a larger scale a creeping sense of
emotions out of control in our own lives and in those of the people around
us. No one is insulated from this erratic tide of outburst and regret; it
reaches into all of our lives in one way or another.
The last decade has seen a steady drumroll of reports like these,
portraying an uptick in emotional ineptitude, desperation, and recklessness
in our families, our communities, and our collective lives. These years have
chronicled surging rage and despair, whether in the quiet loneliness of
latchkey kids left with a TV for a babysitter, or in the pain of children abandoned, neglected, or abused, or in the ugly intimacy of marital
violence. A spreading emotional malaise can be read in numbers showing a
jump in depression around the world, and in the reminders of a surging tide
of aggression—teens with guns in schools, freeway mishaps ending in
shootings, disgruntled ex-employees massacring former fellow workers.
Emotional abuse, drive-by shooting, and post-traumatic stress all entered
the common lexicon over the last decade, as the slogan of the hour shifted
from the cheery "Have a nice day" to the testiness of "Make my day."
This book is a guide to making sense of the senselessness. As a
psychologist, and for the last decade as a journalist for The New York Times,
I have been tracking the progress of our scientific understanding of the
realm of the irrational. From that perch I have been struck by two opposing
trends, one portraying a growing calamity in our shared emotional life, the
other offering some hopeful remedies.
