Indignation
They are angry. And their anger drives them to extreme deeds. Publicly dishonored by Agamemnon, the outraged Achilles withdraws from the siege of Troy and refuses to take up shield and sword even when the tides turn badly against his fellow Greeks. Only his beloved Patroclus’ death moves him to make peace with Agamemnon so that he can unleash his deadly wrath on the Trojans. Hector’s death alone cannot satisfy the enraged Achilles. He must defile the slain body in horrible ways. Only the gods can protect Hector’s corpse. Likewise, when Hecuba suffers a cruel betrayal at the hands of a guest-friend and can find no justice from her Greek captors, she too must have her revenge at all costs. She blinds Polymestor and coldly kills his children, taking smug pleasure in his suffering. Hecuba is dead but for revenge. And in Medea’s case, anger seems more bestial still. Tossed aside by Jason, the lover for whom she has sacrificed so much, she desperately searches for a way to hurt him back. In the end, she takes her own children’s lives, his children, so that she might have some revenge for Jason’s crime.
Though the stories are ancient, the themes of profound anger and revenge are hardly foreign to modern ears. The fortunate among us have been spared anything along the lines of Achilles, Hecuba, and Medea’s fates. But few of us have lived blessed lives bereft of any just cause for anger. Many people have only to think back to the events of September 11th to locate a wellspring of anger along with the desire to return bad for bad. Indeed, horrific examples present themselves only too readily: senseless murders; brutal rapes; horrific child abuse; vicious racism; the obscenity of genocide. At first glance there seems little way around the conclusion that those devoid of any feelings of anger and desires for retribution in such cases must simply not care, at least not in any ordinary sense. And yet, when we consider how anger and the thirst for revenge have figured in human history it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that they have been a very mighty contributor to what might easily be seen as a history of inhumanity. We have visited horrible things on each other down through the ages and anger has been at the very heart of much of the carnage.
I wish to share some thoughts here about the proper place of anger in a human life and character. I am not interested in the entire landscape of anger. People can get angry for all sorts of reasons, some silly, some shameful, and some lamentable even if understandable. I am interested in deep indignation, profound anger in the face of serious wrongdoing in some sense. Moreover, I mean plausible indignation, where convictions about wrongdoing are sensible. Whatever one may think about Achilles, Hecuba, and Medea, surely we can agree that they were wronged. And surely the 2830 or more killed in the World Trade Center were wronged. A fuller picture of the history of this violence, a better view of what drove some human beings to do these things to other human beings, might complicate the details of these events in all sorts of ways. But such details would not dissolve the sense of wrongdoing for the victims of the World Trade Center. Nothing these victims might learn about al Qaeda or America’s behavior could lead Americans to the conclusion that the people in the World Trade Center had it coming.
Of course, calling anger by the name of indignation doesn’t necessarily sanitize it, much less sanctify it. For this reason, many philosophers are suspicious of anger even in what might seem like its most innocent form. In The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum considers Seneca as a possible balm and corrective for the excesses and dangers of anger in all its forms. Like Seneca, she fears that “Anger hardens the spirit and turns it against the humanity it sees.”[1] The concern seems reasonable. As she sees it, indignation sees only evil; the evildoer becomes nothing more than an extension of evil itself. Lost in anger’s eye are all the complications of what led the wrongdoer to the vile deed. Anger’s eye cares nothing for any keen attentiveness to all the particular, concrete details that might explain, soften, plead for mercy and compassion. Anger sees a beast, and seeing only a beast can bring out the beastly in those who would return bad for genuine bad. Even if beastly revenge is denied, anger can still eat away at the soul, consuming and corroding character in the process. We know that angry people can eventually lose themselves to anger. No doubt we all understand what Odysseus means when he tells the brooding Achilles, “…give way from the anger that hurts the heart.”[2]
So let us consider whether indignation might be a force for bad when all is said and done, an unwitting ally of evil and darker elements in human character. The first thing to notice in this vein is that extreme anger doesn’t necessarily equal excessive anger. Understandably, we are all uncomfortable and maybe even frightened in the company of a great anger we do not share. In one sense, enraged people really are not themselves. There is nothing amiable or inviting about angry people, even when an angry person is a friend and we are no party to the anger. Generally, we keep our distance and tread carefully around angry people and we are wise to do so. But discomfort and fear alone do not entail that anger is too great. We mustn’t reject or vilify anger simply because we wish there were never a good occasion for it.
The only way to judge whether anger is excessive is to consider whether the anger in question is proportionate to the wrong in the particular circumstance. In this light, notice that some cases of anger can be excessive without being extreme; people can get too angry over small slights and wrongs. And in other cases, the problem with anger can be deficiency rather than excess. If I supposedly care about someone or something and I endure the defilement or destruction of what I love with complete equanimity or only mild protest then something is amiss. Of course, shock or denial can explain such phenomena. In such cases, the mind cannot process the horror and anger is thereby interrupted. Likewise, anger can be overshadowed by other powerful emotions. Overwhelming grief can block anger; sometimes there may not be enough room in a psyche to experience two profound emotions at once. In this case, anger must wait its turn. No doubt there are other plausible explanations to reconcile genuine caring with an absence of anger in a particular instance. Moreover, anger needn’t function in precisely the same way in each person. Two very angry people may not look the same from the outside and there can be important differences on the inside too. But this much is clear: If I can hold such wrongdoings in my mind’s eye and endure them without anger then I do not care in the way that most of us wish to care and be cared for. In this case we are at best talking about some kind of detached concern. Any talk of detached “love,” whether Stoic, Buddhist, Christian, or otherwise, is ultimately a euphemism for trading love as most of us cherish it for a vastly different form of regard. One may argue for such an exchange, but if so, one should be honest about it. The fact is that we cannot have personal love without the potential for anger.
Since we have no trouble thinking of real and fictional cases of excessive anger, perhaps there is something perilous about every case of anger even if not every instance of extreme anger is excessive. Maybe Medea is different only by degree rather than kind. Maybe all great anger is simply Medea in waiting, just a small slippery slope away from beastly anger. If so, then the line between proportionate and beastly anger grows very blurry and we should be wary of taking refuge in the false protection of the former.
The appropriate response here is that anger can never be better than the angry person. Medea’s excesses are a telling indictment of neither anger nor love. A good person in her shoes might think of a thousand ways to punish Jason. But killing one’s own children would not be one of them. Medea’s attachment to Jason is such that she cannot genuinely acknowledge the importance of any competing concerns and loves. When her love is thwarted her children become little more than a means to exact terrible revenge on the lover who has wronged her. This is twisted love, a form of madness in its own right. As such, it inspires revulsion, not pity. Medea proves nothing about anger except that great anger can widen preexisting cracks in a faulty character.
On the other hand, consider Euripides’ Hecuba. She has lost almost everything in the fall of Troy and she has borne these losses nobly. She even finds some comfort in the noble way her daughter Polyxena faces her execution. In the midst of her profound grief she takes some small comfort in the supposed immutability of good character and the enduring moral order of the cosmos. At this point Hecuba is no bloodthirsty monster bent on avenging her loved ones; she is simply a woman who has suffered beyond imagination, someone hanging on by an understandably thin psychological rope. Only when she learns of her son’s cruel murder and is denied any justice for Polymestor’s abomination does she suffer the death of everything save revenge. Everyone she cares about and everything she can have faith in has been destroyed. Unlike Medea, who acknowledges nothing important but Jason, Hecuba’s many loves are systematically destroyed until she has nothing left. In the end, Hecuba has certainly changed for the worse. However, she inspires pity rather than unmitigated revulsion. But for chance and fortune we could all be Hecuba. The sad fact is that Hecuba was wrong about goodness. Even good character is corruptible. As she herself noted, Polyxena was merely fortunate enough to die before she too might somehow be corrupted.
Since Hecuba offers us an example of a good person seemingly done in by anger, the relevant question is whether her example provides any general lessons about anger. Perhaps the greatest lesson that Hecuba’s example provides is that we should beware of complicity in any world where whatever provides a person’s most cherished reasons for living can be annihilated with no shared public avenue for recourse. So long as Polydorus lives, Hecuba can have some comfort in the world, albeit mixed with unimaginable loss. Though her son’s life can hardly erase her suffering and desolation, at least she can live for Polydorus in a key sense. Once he is murdered, what could possibly sustain Hecuba? Can we really imagine buoying her spirits? What might we offer her? Books? Hobbies? Travel? Old memories? A “fresh start”? Faith in a loving God the father? No doubt many have been sustained through hard times by such a faith. Frankly, one wonders whether such people have simply had it easy compared to Hecuba. We have the example of Job but he seems like a whimsical feat of biblical imagination rather than a plausible example of human psychology in the face of pervasive, unjust suffering. Consider the real life descendants of Job for a moment. Few Jews emerged from the Holocaust with an unshakeable conviction that what they had gone through was all part of a benevolent God’s master plan. Fewer still would have made it at all without the hope that someone would care once their story might be told. Yet Hecuba doesn’t even have the “luxury” of a sympathetic audience. Facing the life she faces is surely bad enough. But the refusal to grant her public justice adds profoundest insult to profoundest injury. In effect, what this says to Hecuba or anybody else is that the world refuses to acknowledge your loss and share in your outrage; you are utterly, completely alone in your anger, so do what you will. We should not be surprised if such a world with such a message brings out monstrous anger in those who are wronged. In such cases, beastly rage can be the last gasp of a dying life.
I hasten to add that anger does not do in Hecuba in any sense that should leave the impression that there would be much left without her monstrous anger. Hecuba is a good person with loving attachments and commitments. Grief by itself would be enough to desolate her character. People who lose everything and can no longer sustain the conviction that there is a trustworthy moral order are never more than a shell of themselves. They may not slide all the way into vice but surely they cannot hold on to all their good qualities either. Hecuba’s anger simply completes a disintegration that is integrally tied to being a loving woman.
The all-important question here is whether Hecuba’s fate is an example of anger at the tragic fringes of experience or whether all great anger follows in Hecuba’s wake. Is great indignation inherently inclined toward monstrous excess and inhumanity? If you look at anecdotal evidence from everyday life there is little reason to think that all angry people are poised at the brink of Achilles, ready to lash their Hectors to the back of their chariots for a spin around the walls of Troy. Everyday examples of anger great and small do not systematically slide into beastly excess and inhumanity. Again, this is not to deny anger’s history. As I have said, anger has certainly had a great hand in mind-numbing inhumanity. But we must be careful not to indict anger itself for how it operates in bad people, nor should we confuse the extreme for the norm.
Of course, while most angry people do not seek dramatic revenge in everyday life, many people fantasize about doing violent, brutal things to people who have done bad things. How else might we account for the great popularity of revenge films from cowboy westerns to the hugely successful Death Wish series in the United States in the seventies and eighties? Provided people can see righteous vengeance from the safety of a cinema seat they certainly seem to empathize with angry good guys giving villains what they deserve. But ultimately, fantasy falls short of the deed itself. Anger never gets this far in the vast majority of us.
Yet this concession about fantasy may seem to prove a point about anger. One may argue that as soon as anger induces us to lose sight of the humanity of villains and take satisfaction in their suffering that we have already lost some measure of our humanity. Maybe this is nothing short of the dangerous seed of inhumanity. Even if fear, prudence, lack of opportunity, powerlessness, or some other force prevents us from converting fantasy into deed perhaps this is still the beginning of a corrosion of character. If so, maybe the Stoics were correct and what we need is a dispassionate concern for duty, one that transcends anger and embraces a conscientious but detached administration of justice and the like. Thus, the crucial question is whether we might do best to say goodbye to anger, assuming that we can do so through some form of therapy, Stoic or otherwise.
Looming in the background here are two rival perspectives that are deeply at odds. With the first, the aspiration is always to understand the roots of wrongdoing, to understand what brings this particular person to do this particular bad thing. The emphasis is on the eternal possibility for redemption, remorse, and change for the better; the evil deed itself is seen against the larger context of the whole person and the potential for goodness. The hope is that there might be some common ground of understanding where people who are deeply at odds can come to a shared understanding of justice and an eventual reconciliation born from the mutual commitment to do right by one another. This is a view that hopes to take victims and victimizers and beat their swords into ploughshares as the different parties come to see each other as human beings worthy of respect and compassion. On this view, anger as we know it is an affliction, a suffering voice crying out in the wilderness for the restoration of human solidarity, a voice that laments the terrible rift that wrongdoing inflicts on the moral order and between human beings. Compassion and understanding mean to heal this rift.
Without a doubt, this is an attractive view. In an age of random suicide bombers the prospect of indignant people sitting down at the same table and reaching a peaceful understanding regarding their differences seems sublime. Of course, the thought of incorrigible evildoers changing their ways as a result of such negotiations is pure nonsense, at best a piece of philosophical fantasy. The Khmer Rouge would not have been moved by heartfelt appeals for respect and compassion. But anyone with any sense of history knows only too well that many horrible things have been done by decent people caught in tragic cycles of angry violence. We fool ourselves if we think that only pervasively evil people do beastly things. First and foremost, this perspective targets decent people caught in the throes of potentially destructive, corrosive anger.
The second perspective is darker but no less human. On this view, our deepest attachments and commitments define us in the deepest sense. Our loves shape our orbit and fuel our passage through life. Serious threats or harms to what or whom we love are an attack on us at the very center of our being. Such attacks close the door to any compassionate yearning to know those who harm us or those we love. Achilles sees just one thing when he sees Hector on the battlefield: This is the man who has killed my beloved Patroclus; today he must pay the price. Achilles has no interest in seeing the world from Hector’s point of view. He does not want to think about the suffering that Hector’s family will experience when they hear of his death. He does not want to be Hector’s friend. He cares nothing for any remorse Hector might have. When he kills Hector he is not driven by a detached, impersonal attachment to some principle; he is no Stoic concerned with conscientious fidelity to some detached moral order. He is simply a man driven by love and honor to avenge his friend’s death.
Of course, Hector’s crime is not injustice. He has killed Patroclus on the battlefield and this is nothing more than we could reasonably expect from any warrior in his shoes. One might say that he is a party to Paris’ theft of Helen. But quite frankly, this has nothing to do with Achilles’ wrath. Again, no abstract principle fuels Achilles’ rage. Hector has wronged him only in the sense of killing his friend. For this Hector must die. Some people may be inclined to reject the idea that what Hector has done is some kind of wrong. But surely we can understand how Achilles experiences this as a wrong in the most basic, fundamental sense. After all, Hector has slain Achilles’ closest friend.
I suspect that the conventional philosophical view is that Achilles’ great wrath is a moral strike against him. Maybe I am wrong about this. But if I am right I would temper any confidence in any simple judgment against Achilles. Before I do, I should say that it is a very good thing that we do not let revenge run rampant. Locke was right about a great many things in this vein: We are often lamentably partial in judging our own case; we often tend to mete out more punishment than is warranted; those in the right haven’t always the might to exact punishment; the assurance of impartial judgment and punishment can prevent a cycle of retaliation. And though Locke didn’t mention it, sometimes we are done a favor when we are prohibited from acting on our great anger. Generally speaking, we would all be a lot better off with a bigger world with bigger people who are slow to anger, particularly where the stakes simply aren’t that high.
But sometimes the stakes are high. I do not know what more to say to anyone who might deny this. And when they are, then great anger really is a reflection of who we are at our very core. Consider this. Anger and grief drink from the same source and neither is comfortable to experience or witness. Grief can change a person episodically or constitutionally just as surely as anger can. When it does we hope that the loss can be limited, that something can be salvaged from grief’s wreck. But if we love and respect a grieving person we do not dismiss the grounds of grief. We do not, unless we are grossly insensitive, ask the mourner to “get over it” and “move on.” Provided we really care, we hope that there is enough left in life to sustain and heal the mourner. But grief should not be seen as an affliction in the same way that disease is an affliction. The price of immunity from this affliction would be the obliteration or distortion of love. Paying this price or asking anyone to pay it would dishonor what is at the center of the mourner’s self. Grief should command solemn respect.
As it is with grief, so it is with appropriate anger. And because anger is so integrally tied to our capacity to care, I can understand Achilles’ wrath and even identify with his seething rage. I too have people I love, loves that could call forth extreme anger in extreme circumstances. My guess is that you do too. Mind you, I am glad for Achilles’ return from darkness at the end of the Iliad. Homer’s scene with Achilles and Priam is equal parts grace and insight. The sight of a grieving Priam stirs Achilles’ compassion by occasioning thoughts of his own father. And these thoughts bring Achilles back from his dark world.
So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving
for his own father. He took the old man’s hand and pushed him
gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam huddled
at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor
and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again
for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house. Then
when great Achileus had taken full satisfaction in sorrow
and the passion for it had gone from his mind and body, thereafter
he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand, and set him
on his feet again, in pity for the grey head and grey beard,
and spoke to him and addressed him in winged words: “Ah, unlucky,
surely you have had much evil to endure in your spirit.
How could you dare to come alone to the ships of the Achaians
and before my eyes, when I am one who have killed in such numbers
such brave sons of yours? The heart in you is iron. Come, then,
and sit down upon this chair, and you and I will even let
our sorrows lie still in the heart for all our grieving.[3]
Compassion and a sense of honor quiet Achilles’ great anger, but they do not silence it entirely. Achilles has the presence of mind to have his servants wash Hector’s body before Priam can see it for fear that Priam might cry out in anger and so reignite Achilles own anger. Even in the midst of his pity and admiration for Priam Achilles knows well that should Priam say certain things he might be driven to kill the grieving father.
In this scene we see the uneasy tension between the two perspectives identified here. Both perspectives are at the heart of our humanity. Take away our capacity for compassion entirely and you twist and deform us. We should mourn compassion’s death in Hecuba. In her case a good woman has been laid bare and stripped of everything save anger and hate. But take away our capacity for great anger in the face of threats and harms to what or whom we love and you threaten our capacity to care as we cherish caring and being cared for. Of course, one can always try to construct a psychology that reliably defuses anger by creating various compartments and labyrinths where anger is meant to get lost or spend itself. For instance, one may insist that it is good for us to be people capable of great anger, but even better still for us to renounce acting on such anger. In other words, one may contend that good character includes a capacity for great anger but the best resolution is always one where great anger is somehow defused. Thus, if rightly angry people might somehow defuse their anger pharmaceutically or through therapy, this would always be for the better.
Practically speaking, I have my doubts about the wisdom of such strategies. I suspect that anger silenced or driven underground usually finds some fault line to escape eventually. If so, we run the grave risks of misplaced, misdirected anger. Today’s denied anger can be tomorrow’s explosion. Certainly we know well from all sorts of empirical examples of grief that thwarted grief usually reverberates in the recesses of a life and character.
Yet even if I am wrong and some such strategy works just fine, the strategy dishonors anger and disfigures human integrity. Both grief and anger testify to what a particular life is ultimately about on the deepest level. If tragedy befalls me and my loved ones meet with a bad end, whether through vile wrongdoing or bad luck, my anger and grief will be expressions of my most fundamental commitments and attachments. In other words, my anger or grief will express who I am. True enough, there is nothing poignant, beautiful, or beneficial about living through such a tragedy. Watching a good tragedy is one thing; living one is another and every tragedy is nothing but hell. In fact, the suffering that loving people experience when what they love meets with a bad end is so profound that one might ask why we should ever put ourselves through such hell if we could avoid it, whether the escape might come through therapy or pharmaceuticals. Yet, even in the midst of such hell no loving person would choose to escape such suffering by forgetting the loved ones who begat such pain. So doing would be nothing short of a recipe for the destruction of character. Take away what my life is ultimately about and you disintegrate me in the most basic sense. Profound anger of this sort is neither pretty nor pleasurable; such anger is simply an essential element in any character with commitments and attachments that define the self.
In the same breath, it is worth stressing that much of the anger we witness in everyday life is a mark and sometimes a grave mark against the angry person’s character. For instance, Agamemnon is an excellent example of petty indignation and destructive macho anger. With the siege of Troy going very badly, the Greeks learn that Apollo is punishing them for Agamemnon’s refusal to ransom his concubine Chryseis back to her father, Apollo’s priest. Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to return her but only if a suitable replacement is found since he above all should not go without a prize. When Achilles assures Agamemnon that there are no such prizes left to give and asks him to trust that he will be repaid many times over when Troy falls, Agamemnon dismisses this promissory note and threatens to take payment immediately in the form of some fellow Greek’s concubine. Agamemnon is driven here by nothing better than petty indignation: He cannot bear to suffer any blow to his status by going without a prize when others have theirs. At a time like this such thoughts should be the furthest thing from a good commander’s mind. Achilles quickly and responsibly warns Agamemnon against dishonoring a fellow Greek by making good on such a threat. He reminds Agamemnon that these men are fighting the Trojans as a favor to him and his brother Menelaos. As Achilles points out, no Trojan has ever wronged him and yet he fights for Agamemnon, always contenting himself with a smaller share of the prizes even though he does the lion’s share of the fighting. If Agamemnon persists with his ungrateful and selfish plan, then Achilles sees no point in fighting on his behalf. Achilles’ words are nothing more than a justified reproach to Agamemnon’s rash threat. But far from seeing the wisdom of Achilles’ words, Agamemnon takes direct aim at Achilles. His response to Achilles’ justified reproach is macho anger at its worst.
“Run away by all means if your heart drives you. I will not
entreat you to stay here for my sake. There are others with me
who will do me honour, and above all Zeus of the counsels.
To me you are the most hateful of all the kings whom the gods love.
Forever quarreling is dear to your heart, and wars and battles;
And if you are very strong indeed, that is a god’s gift.
Go home then with your own ships and your own companions,
Be king over the Myrmidons. I care nothing about you.
I take no account of your anger. But here is my threat to you.
Even as Phoibos Apollo is taking away my Chryseis.
I shall convey her back in my own ship, with my own
followers; but I shall take the fair-cheeked Briseis,
your prize, I myself going to your shelter, that you may learn well
how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back
from likening himself to me and contending against me.”[4]
Agamemnon’s blow strikes home with a vengeance. The threat to take Briseis, a woman that Achilles genuinely cares about, is the bold exclamation point to a humiliating public affront. Agamemnon’s speech cavalierly dismisses Achilles’ valor and his prodigious sacrifices. Consider its venom: Achilles can run away if he hasn’t the heart to fight and it won’t bother Agamemnon because he has real friends who are up to the difficult task, along with Zeus’ favor; Achilles is perverse, a twisted and somehow uncivilized soul who is only at home in quarrels and battles; Achilles’ strength is merely a gift from the gods rather than something he can claim as his own; Achilles means nothing to Agamemnon and his anger means even less; Agamemnon will come and personally take Briseis away just to emphasize the point for all to see that Achilles can never measure up to him.
The Agamemnons of the world would give anger a bad name. Achilles’ anger is fearsome but he is no Agamemnon. Good people can certainly disagree whether his anger over Agamemnon’s public outrage persists too long. Given the fact that his Greek brothers were dying at Trojan hands, perhaps Achilles should have laid aside his anger before Patroclus felt compelled to don Achilles’ armor to drive the advancing Trojans back from the Greek ships. Of course, the prophecy that Achilles would die soon after killing Hector surely factored into his reluctance to leap back into battle. Certainly there is nothing to glorify in Achilles’ horrific rage when he mercilessly wades through Trojan blood to get to Hector. Solemn respect and understanding for anger and glorification of the same are two very different things. Knowing what we know about warfare’s effects on soldiers in our own time, we should refrain from painting Achilles as some kind of aberrant monster. Take a person with deep loves and a sense of honor and induce prolonged stress accompanied by a deep sense of being terribly wronged and you are likely to get an Achilles. We should learn from contemporary warriors and helpless victims who suffer this fate.
There is no doubt that we would all be better had we never any good reason for anger. But given our actual world, the capacity for anger, even extreme anger, comes with the territory of being creatures capable of great loves. Put simply, some things should make us mad and some things should make us very mad. The more seriously we take anger, the more likely it is that we shall minimize its root causes. Were we to take the capacity for anger in the face of wrong more seriously, no doubt we would be more careful about how we live. Obviously, bad people are unlikely to change their ways simply because they know that their victims are capable of anger. And yet, for all the palpable advantages of a world where justice is impartial and impersonal, perhaps we have also lost something by way of a world where justice can be so slow and remote. Perhaps if people with bad designs knew that an angry response would be swift and sure, they might be less inclined to take advantage of others. The most likely advantage of taking anger seriously is that those of us without bad designs are more apt to pay more attention to what we say and do in life.
Ultimately we can lament and honor anger just as we do grief. We can lament the losses that give birth to grief and anger but honor these reactions for what they manifest about us. And if we are lucky, we can be spared from the evils that can push good people beyond anger’s point of no return. We should not ask for more.