has a real, albeit limited, role to play. But most of the arguments are quite promising.
Particularly valuable is the work’s reminder that the struggle against
anger must be fought inside oneself, as well as in the social realm. In
that sense, the Middle Realm is at times intimate, since people get angry
with themselves over lots of things that do not involve major compo-
nents of well- being. Perhaps, however, the constant self- scrutiny that
Seneca’s method demands is too inquisitorial to be entirely ideal from a
Transitional viewpoint. I’ll argue later that both a sense of humor (self-
teasing) and generosity to oneself have an important role to play.
III. Misattribution and Skewed Valuation in Casual Interactions
Let us now assess the Middle Realm ourselves, armed with Seneca’s
insights, but also with our own analysis— and the experience of life. First,
Seneca is absolutely right to say that a lot of people’s anger in this realm
is the result of mistaken attributions of insult and malice, and that these
mistaken attributions, in turn, result from a hypersensitivity often caused
by a morbid narcissism. His analogy to bodily fitness seems right: people
in good psychic condition don’t weigh every minor occurrence as a pos-
sible slight: they have more important things to occupy their attention.
He is also right to say that a great deal of anger in this realm is the
result of a socially engendered overvaluation of honor, status, and rank.
When much is made of what seat at a dinner table each guest has, some-
thing is amiss in the culture. What was true of dinner parties in ancient
Rome is true now in countless spheres of contemporary life, but perhaps
the Internet offers an especially keen example, offering people the possi-
bility of spending their entire day searching for dishonor and insult, anx-
iously scanning the world for signs of their own ego and its up- ranking
or down- ranking. This is a distinct problem from the problem of misat-
tribution, because people sometimes are really down- ranked by others.
But the problems are closely related. The more you obsess about rank,
the more likely you are to construe some innocent remark as an insult.
And rank is likely to assume outsize proportions in the Middle Realm.
In the intimate realm we choose people out of love, or family concern.
Strangers don’t have these appealing properties. Sometimes they seem
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to be nothing more than a set of tokens of our social reputation or lack of
it. So the Middle Realm must above all focus on containing the inflated
concern with rank that disfigures so much social interaction. The error
of status- focus bulks large, and the payback- error, all by itself, is less
frequently the problem— at least when central elements of well- being are
not at issue.
Seneca is right, as well, when he points out that a great deal of anger
is absurd in two further ways. Some anger attributes malicious intent to
things or people who could not possibly have such intent; other cases of
anger concern things that are just too trivial to take seriously, although
we do. Considering my examples of flying and driving, we can see that
both errors abound: for many inconveniences are not wrongdoing at all,
but we often believe that they are; and we also ascribe great importance
to setbacks that are actually not worth serious attention.
But here we reach a gap in Seneca’s analysis. For, although courteous
and respectful treatment by strangers is not a major constituent of well-
being, it does have enough importance that we are rightly concerned
when it is absent. Society goes better when people are polite and helpful,
and obey a long list of implicit rules of safety, courtesy, fair play, and reciprocity. Is anger appropriate when these rules are violated? On the one
hand, we have Seneca’s correct contention that such things are not worth
our serious emotional energy, and his ancillary claim that we would fill
up our day with unpleasantness if we did get angry every time some-
thing like that occurred. On the other hand, we have the need to enforce
these rules in some way, and not to let things slide that are damaging to
socially useful practices. This is a realm without law, for the most part, so isn’t anger a good enforcer?
This is exactly where Transition- Anger comes in handy. Without get-
ting sidetracked emotionally, or only a little, one can have a genuine emo-
tional reaction whose content is “That is outrageous, and it should not
happen again.” Expressing such an emotion is often useful as a deterrent.
One must be careful, however. Sometimes calmly expressing outrage
makes things worse. I’ve discovered that the men who grab your suitcase
to put it in the overhead rack really hate it when a woman calmly tells
them that this is not a good way to treat another person’s suitcase; such
a reply does not promote social welfare, but only embroils one in further
conversation with these people, which is unpleasant. So I have discov-
ered a way of secretly expressing Transition- Anger without their know-
ing it: I say, “I’m terribly sorry, that suitcase contains fragile items, and I’d rather handle it myself so that, if anything should happen, I would know
that I’m responsible and not you.” Or, sometimes, I have a brief moment
of real anger, thinking that they ought to be put in their place— but then
head quickly for the Transition.
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It’s good not to congratulate oneself prematurely, however. On my
flight home from delivering the Locke Lectures, I was just hoisting my
small carry- on (heavy luggage already checked) into the overhead rack,
and it was already 90 percent in, when a very large man asked whether
he could help me. I said, “No thank you,” and was about to thank him
for asking— when, and by this time the bag was already in, he grabbed
it and shoved it in further. I said, politely, “If you were going to do it
anyway, why did you ask?” He said he was a German trauma surgeon
and had “lots of experience with patients who …”— then he stopped,
seeing something in my face, perhaps, that reminded him that I was not
his patient. I said, somewhat less politely, that I do not spend hours lift-
ing weights in the gym each day only to be insulted, and I bet I could
overhead- press more weight than he could (since, though large, he was
not in good shape). Obviously he was the sort of doctor, and surgeons
are often of this sort, who has no interest in the individual history of
the patient. He must have been thinking of all those faceless women—
necks and shoulders merely— who had injured themselves in such activi-
ties, very likely without daily weight training. Nonetheless I really was
angry, and my response was pretty stupid. I was so mad that I asked the
stewardess if she could change my seat, since I thought that flying home
from the Locke Lectures I ought to enjoy my flight with no temptations to
anger. But then it turned out that he had taken someone else’s seat any-
way (he was that kind of surgeon), s
o, as he was replaced by a cheerful
and amusing British man, my problem was solved!
Still, such are the obstacles posed by one’s own psyche. I continued
to seethe, even two weeks later. I found myself imagining little German
conversations in which I pretend, ironically, that we simply have a lin-
guistic misunderstanding, and I tell him in perfect German that in English
when one says “no” that means “Nein,” and if one wants to say “Ja” one
says “yes”— thereby insulting him, since his English was actually perfect.
Clearly I was still angry, in a way that deserves teasing. But much though
I would have enjoyed teasing by a friend, I found that I had no capacity
for self- teasing in that instance, and no desire to undertake sober medita-
tive exercises to get rid of my quite ridiculous and disproportionate anger.
And notice this: had I chosen to forgive this rude man uncondition-
ally, my forgiveness would have had, very likely, the moral difficulties
I identified in chapter 3: a smug superiority, and a failure to think con-
structively about the future (an easy failure, when you won’t be seeing
the person again).
One difficulty of the Middle Realm suggested by this story is that
one’s sole encounter with a stranger may reveal irritating properties
without ever showing other aspects of the person that might be good
to focus on if one wants to achieve non- anger. (A surgeon with similarly
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irritating characteristics who is a leader in my Chicago temple revealed
a rich basis for non- anger when he repaired the hand of one of our most
talented students.)
What about a performance of anger? Sometimes, when anger is not a
real temptation, a performance achieves good results, particularly in our
litigious culture. One Saturday my hair stylist, as I was leaning back with
my head in the sink for a wash, reached up for the shampoo, opening an
ill- organized cabinet out of which various bottles fell, and one— plastic,
luckily— hit me on the brow. I was startled but not really hurt or upset.
But I thought it was useful to signal to others the significance of this event, since someone else could be seriously hurt in future (if a heavier bottle
had fallen, or it had broken). So I gave a display of polite outrage, add-
ing that they really should install a rack in that cabinet to hold the bottles securely. Yes, the hairdresser replied, we’ve told that to management for
weeks. So, I repeated the performance with heightened vigor at the front
desk, perceiving that this would help both the employees and the custom-
ers, and relying on the usual American fear of a lawsuit. This case seems
to me similar to the Utku interpretation of Jesus in the temple: giving the
culturally expected performance, in order to produce good results. Let’s
give Seneca credit again: the further it is from real anger, the easier it is to control and modulate. The performance achieved the result that anger-as- signal- to- others might have achieved, with more reliability. Even a
brief moment of real anger could have inflated itself into an attempt to
humiliate those people and make them feel awful. A performance aimed
at good social outcomes carries no such risk. Transition- Anger, poised in
the middle, is another reasonable response, but it is a little riskier than a mere performance, capable of sliding imperceptibly into real anger.13
Here’s a case where I didn’t entirely avoid the risk. At the Frankfurt
airport security checkpoint, being selected for an additional body
patdown, which was then administered by some unusually rude and
ill- trained staff, I decided to speak calmly in my best German and tell
them that “Est is wirklich viel besser, höflich zu sein.”14 But when I uttered these words it came out sounding like a parody of German rigidity and
obsessiveness, especially as I tried to bite out all the consonants in my
jet- lagged state (I had just flown in from India)— and I realized that real
anger was in there, since I evidently wanted, at some level, to mock them
and put them down.
These stories raise a question: for anger is so much a part of the fabric
of social life that responding non- angrily is often itself misconstrued as
insult or disrespect. I’ve found that women are expected to react emo-
tionally, so when they talk calmly and analytically guys get annoyed,
and feel that someone is talking down to them (as indeed I probably
was talking down to the German agents). We have two questions here: is
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151
non- anger therefore ethically problematic? And, can it sometimes make
things worse? I think the answer to the first question is no, though one
had better be sure that it really is non- anger and not anger with a rational surface; but the answer to the second, unfortunately, is yes. I’m afraid
that I have to say that when men get mad because a woman is calm and
analytical (particularly, no doubt, when she speaks with an unnatural
accent that she could have learned only in Bryn Mawr), that is really their
problem, and it is not my responsibility to behave like a child in order to
avoid their annoyed response. But sometimes, knowing the likelihood
of that response, it could be better to give a performance of annoyance,
or some other emotion, in order to humanize the interaction, even if one
does not wish to humanize the interaction. I think that this also helps
avoid the genuine error of using one’s rationality to put them in their
place, a temptation from which such encounters are rarely free.
Still, I cannot avoid one more observation. Men in particular think
that they have achieved something if they can make a woman mad,
particularly if she is calm and intellectual. Often, they use the attempt to
make you mad as a way of flirting, no doubt thinking that unlocking the
pent- up emotions of such a woman is a sexual victory. (And note that
they assume these emotions are pent up in general, not merely unavail-
able to them!) This exceedingly tedious exercise shows that they have
few or no interesting resources for flirting (such as humor or imagina-
tion), and it really has the opposite effect from the one intended, boring
the woman, who has certainly seen this before, and making them look
very silly.
As we know, however, the devil has many guises, and while I have
learned to avoid anger in the suitcase- lift scenario, one virtually irresistible lure into anger is behavior in the Middle Realm that makes no sense
at all. Of course this realm is filled with irrationality, and its forms are so manifold and so staggering that it is difficult to anticipate them, whereas
the behavior of suitcase- lifters is boringly predictable. Internet service
agents contradict themselves with stupendous inventiveness; bank offi-
cials, besides being barely able to speak English (whether educated in the
United States or not), parrot absurd policies that make no sense. Here’s
one such occasion: I received an email notice of a possible fraudulent
charge on my credit card. I called the bank, and, after being on hold for
twenty- five minutes, was connected to an agent in the fraud department.
The charge, we quic
kly agreed, was not mine. But it had also not really
been charged: the number had evidently been random- dialed, and the
party didn’t have the other information (expiration date, CVC code), so
the charge was declined. Nonetheless, the fraud agent insisted on giv-
ing me a new credit card, something that entails horrible time- waste and
inconvenience. I resisted: If one number could be random- dialed so could
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another, so I and the bank were getting no improvement in safety. But,
says he, he is required by rule to give a new card whenever there is fraud.
Actually, I said in my most legalistic manner, there was no fraud because
the charge was declined: at best an attempted fraud. Because I was about
to go on a long international trip, and all bookings had been made with
the old number, meaning a slew of international phone calls, I dug in and
argued, pointing out that (a) his decision was not entailed by the rule
he cited, which mentioned fraud and not attempted fraud, and (b) his
behavior was bad for business and had no purpose. After over an hour of
this, I lost (and slept badly later).
Should one yield immediately to the irrationality of life? The world
often poses that question. But the belief that the world ought to be ratio-
nal, and that simply pointing out that something is irrational will effect
change, is a Senecan recipe for constant anger, and for dreams filled with
irritating people who ought to be no part of one’s inner life.
Sometimes, however, insults in the Middle Realm are not just personal
slights: they target group traits that are used to stigmatize and subordi-
nate. At this point they are not just slights, they can under some circum-
stances constitute assaults on our equal dignity as citizens and on the
terms of political cooperation, as in the torts of sexual and racial harass-
ment defined under U.S. Title VII. At this point, insults implicate serious
aspects of well- being, since political equality is very important, and some
types of denigrating behavior constitute illegal discrimination. So I post-
pone that type of insult for the next section, noting, however, that we see
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