I am puzzled by the metaphysics of rage, which seems to radically exceed the unfussy physiology of anger.
I vaguely understand that there are chemical neurotransmitters, which excite our “fight or flight” response. Heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration increase. For a brief spell, the mind becomes more alert, and quicker.
An animal will do something similar; he will fight or fly. Indeed, we seem to be most like animals when we are angry. Yet also, at least in theory, more in control. A human person can, from hard training and experience, more or less control the degree and quality of his anger, and adjust it to its cause. Whereas, the animal has a more limited repertoire. He may, however, show tactics.
What I don’t understand, except as a manifestation of evil, is maintaining rage in a permanent state. I doubt that an animal can do this, and suspect it is a human specialty. How to stay “triggered” day and night?
This seems the opposite of a thoughtful moral condition. The human becomes more like a wary animal; in fact much like a dangerous machine. He can hate, apparently, without being threatened. He merely needs the vicinity (including the imagined vicinity) of some persons or things that he is resolved to despise.
Living as I do in one of the more degenerate parts of a North American city, I become aware of this condition of perpetual rage in many of my neighbors. I was briefly able to blame the proliferation of cell phones, and portable “music”; chiefly the former because most seem to be enraged by a fantasized companion. What they are saying is generally an unending narrative about being oppressed. This is varied by intervals of swearing and menace.
Their rage is continuous. How do they keep it up?
Pills and other medications are sometimes used to artificially silence them, and make them harmless and “sedate.” These work on many of the most obviously diagnosable “mental cases,” who are then released on the street. As well, there are criminal trades that distribute the various opioids, and analgesics like Fentanyl. At the extreme, these cure a perpetual rage, by bringing about a prompt death. I gather Americans are dying from such “overdoses” at the rate of 100,000 a year; this strikes me as a medical problem.
But there is worse. The moral brakes, once familiar to our society, have been released, and we are racing downhill. The young seem more endangered by university attendance, than by addiction.
Yet it is less possible to address, than the medical issues. We do not have, or no longer have, the intellectual equipment to confront it. Curiously, it may be because we have lost the facility for conventional anger in the presence of evil.
I began writing this column as news was breaking of an Israeli bombing of a hospital in Gaza. While media such as the New York Times and the BBC were announcing, glibly on the authority of Hamas, that “500 have been killed,” I immediately realized that the story was a lie.
Sure enough, as the day has progressed, I learn that this was a Christian hospital in the Muslim enclave, but more urgently that the damages were much less. Also, in the absence of any Israeli aircraft, a misfired Hamas rocket was identified as the cause. Proof of this was easily available.
Further details emerge, and are very telling. The opposite of the media story has turned out to be the truth. In order to believe the unchecked and improbable first report, however, journalists had to be, themselves, infected with Leftist and Islamist fanaticism and “phobias.” They were now sustaining their mistake, with knowing lies.
For there is nothing subtle about the pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic demonstrations that have happened all over the world. Israel, and Jews, are accused of crimes, from the historical to the current, that are for the most part not even plausible. “Explanations” are given from regional history, that are luridly false.
“Days of rage” are conducted throughout the Islamic world, and Islamic migrant communities, where Jew-hate has been preached as a kind of religious value; but also wherever the secular Left has become ensconced in Western politics.
The scenes of “outrage” in London, England and in Sydney, Australia (where crowds were chanting, “Gas the Jews!”), were particularly appalling. The mobs were quite unhinged.
This may grow, as Israel is obliged to defend herself, with lethal arms, through the coming weeks and months; the war in the Middle East may also spread from its “sandlot” dimensions.
It spreads as the result of the permanent rage that is the legacy of our Enlightenment; of the age (now ages) of totalitarian, atheist ideologies that are a distinctive feature of modern life, both East and West.
This is what the Catholic Church is facing, along with all other religions that have regard to truth, and the divine. We are passing through a time, as we have passed before, where the illusions that govern us in peacetime are ripped away. Godliness is in direct confrontation with the Satanic, even in this mortal and material environment.
And we are lost, who are not prepared to face this reality down.
Two weeks ago, as the Hamas agents on their paragliders came to murder many more than a thousand, their challenge was broadcast. I noticed it in the declaration of a sweet little five-year-old Palestinian girl, in one of the media presentations. Already the product of political indoctrination, she expressed her happiness that Jews were being killed.
That, and not a synod on synodality, is the news of the moment. The complexities of theological and environmental controversy yield to a moral reality that is shockingly simple.
On one side, the seemingly eternal rage, and vicious, purposeful murder. On the other, the longing if not the accomplishment of peace. The reader may see this, unless he is blind.
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