The anti-angry brigade
Anger management is all the rage these days. Brendan O'Neill says it's a sign of emotional correctness gone mad
Imagine if Arthur Seaton, the fictional factory hand created by Alan Sillitoe for his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, had been around today. Sillitoe was the angriest of the Angry Young Men, and Seaton — a tillygoat trying to screw the world.. . because it's trying to do the same to me — the most rebellious and unforgiving of his creations. He was a womanising wide-boy who worked in a Nottingham factory by day and drank himself stupid by night, spending his time 'fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government.
In New Labour's New Britain, Seaton would he carted off for a short, sharp dose of anger management therapy, perhaps courtesy of the courts or as part of a workplace stress-relief programme. From schools and colleges to workplaces and prisons, the management of anger has become big business. Anger, or at least the unmediated expression of it, has effectively been outlawed. The emotional police have declared war on anyone who remotely resembles an angry young man (or woman). The aim, it seems to me, is to turn the 'billygoats' into sheep, yet barely an eyebrow has been raised in response to this insidious campaign of emotional conformism.
If the Fifties were 'The Angry Decade' (the title of Kenneth Allsop's 1958 study of the AYM), then the noughties are the Anti-Angry Decade. Ours is an age which elevates emotion over reason — provided our emotion of choice is on the approved list. We are encouraged to open up, confess, break down, weep, show compassion, and the more publicly we do it, the better. But anger? That is stigmatised. The British Association of Anger Management has a team of coaches who offer advice about this 'powerful' and potentially 'dangerous' emotion to the general public, children and teenagers, government bodies, corporations, the education sector, personnel managers and anyone else 'dealing with their own or another's anger'. Its aim is to 'extinguish the flames' of anger, which, if left unmanaged, can apparently have 'massive social implications on your family, your career and ultimately YOU'. (At 1110 per hour for a one-on-one phone session with a BAAM anger coach, it can also have massive implications for your bank balance.) BAAM, like the many American anger management groups that preceded it, focuses on helping individuals to find an 'acceptable' way to express their anger. There's a right and a wrong way, apparently. BAAM concedes that anger is a 'valid' emotion, but warns that it can also be 'dangerous and destructive'. The American Psychological Association says you should aim to 'inhibit or suppress your anger and convert it into more constructive behaviour', while always being 'respectful of yourself and others'. So to rage against the world Seaton-style is bad, whereas politely and respectfully declaring, 'I feel quite angry' is fine (if perhaps a little unrealistic in the red heat of an angry moment).
This is emotional correctness gone mad, where we are told which emotions it is OK to express and how we should express them. It is also a recipe for manipulating the individual at the most intimate level, perhaps explaining the attraction of anger management to the authorities. Across the UK, courts regularly force offenders on to anger management courses, alongside dishing out more traditional punishments. Last month Aylesbury Crown Court sentenced an 'angry husband' who sent threatening texts to his wife's long-term lover to an 80-hour community punishment and anger management classes. When a 15-year-old tearaway used a four-letter word in Scottish Judge Roderick MacDonald's court recently, he put her on probation for a year and had her enrolled on an anger management course.
Prisoners, especially of the young male variety, can also expect to have 'bad' emotions corrected. In 2000 the then Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham called for new powers to enable judges to place offenders on treatment programmes, including anger management courses, while in jail. Bingham claimed, rather simplistically, that persistent offenders' long record of offending can often 'be traced to a single unaddressed failing, most often addiction to alcohol or drugs or an inability to control temper'. If crime is a consequence of an individual's emotional failings, then the solution becomes the management of individuals' emotions. Bingham warned that 'if the offender refused to cooperate in such treatment, that could be reflected in an extended penalty'. Apparently it is not enough to reprimand or reform an offender today; we also feel the need to reshape his very emotional make-up.
Anger management is creeping into the modern workplace too. The California-based company Anderson and Anderson, describing itself as the 'first global anger management training provider', has Certified Anger Management Facilitators in the US, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Ireland, Italy and England. They offer anger management training, complete with David Brent-style video and audio presentations, to corporate executives and other employers. The government's website for teachers advises that anger management in the workplace 'can help to reduce the likelihood of discussions degenerating into disputes, and disputes collapsing into violence'. New Labour seems to see anger (a natural reaction at work, surely?) as a slippery slope to blind violence, and the only solution as therapy for the labour force.
Others go so far as to claim that being angry can kill you if you aren't careful. According to a study carried out by Johns Hopkins university in 2002, young men with 'hot tempers' are at 'three times the normal risk of developing premature heart disease', The most important thing angry young men can do is get professional help to manage their tempers,' warned the Johns Hopkins researchers. What a turnaround! Where an angry young man was a cool thing to be in the Fifties, today anger is seen as the root of all evil, as the cause of crime and violence in the workplace and of sickness and disease in the young. It's a wonder that the original Angry Young Men lived as long as they did, and that some (Sillitoe, Waterhouse, Wilson) continue to flourish.
The war on anger suggests that we live in a society that cannot tolerate the rebellious streak. What the anti-angry brigade overlook, of course, is that anger is not merely a 'valid' emotion that is apparently best expressed with the help of an expensive coach; it is also a positive emotion, sometimes moving individuals to change their lives and even achieve great things. How many political campaigns and social movements must have had their origins in the anger felt by individuals? From Christ's assault on the moneylenders in the Temple to the suffragettes' demand for the right to vote, to black Americans' marches for civil rights, to the hunters' storming of Parliament, where would society be without the spur of anger? We should screw the anger management lobby, because it's trying to do the same to us.
Brendan O'Neill is assistant editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com)
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