Surenchérissement
I have never, that I recall, experienced anger on my own account (on others' account? sure, but that's a cheap thrill, overfished to the brink of banality by Hollywood and the entertainment industry). First-person anger is (alas?) inaccessible to me, since it is predicated on the belief that you have some rights, or that you deserve better than you've just been served. Those of us who were brought up to believe that we (unlike other people) have no rights cannot be angry. We can, however, experience rage.
It works like this. Someone pisses you off. For example, they slap your bum. The instinctual part of you, the one that doesn't need permission to feel things, erupts in response. The emotion attempts, again instinctively (?), to enlist support from the cognitive area of your brain. It wants to feel "justified". In many people, esp. those of the "entitled" sort, the sense of justification is instantly forthcoming. The other has wronged you, and you are in the right. Self-evident! In my own case, there is rarely any sense of justification available. It's not that I think I am in the wrong, or not necessarily. It's more that perhaps no one is, or at least not so clearly. (This deep-seated reluctance to ascribe definitive blame or to vindicate one's own emotional responses is, I suspect, a hallmark of a Catholic upbringing.) Anyway, since the emotion has nothing routine and ritual to latch on to, no coherent accusation that will lend it social specific gravity, it bypasses that civilised-response stage and heads straight for the crudest sort of physical expression: throwing something, kicking something, howling, letting loose a gust of imprecations. It rages. Or at least, it wants to. Hopefully, it will be headed off at the pass by a sense of elementary decorum and a dose of learned self-discipline. After which, it can do little more than simmer. That, and plot some dastardly revenge.
So no, I can't get angry, as such, but I can dig the inflationary nature of common or garden outrage - anger and rage's common by-product. Like perhaps most people, if you scrabble enough in the dirt, I'm the sort who, in the heat of the moment, wants to (but can't and doesn't) punish a double parking situation with fisticuffs, a firing squad, or an evening with Abbes Garcia. Rage doesn't understand proportionality or moderation. Obviously, rage (anger for that matter) is a crap counsellor.
I'm not sure, though, whether something as unstable as an emotion can explain the anomalous sentence of the anonymous Evryman in the story. Was the woman angry? Plausibly, but not necessarily: it was the bus driver's decision, not hers, to make a thing of it, as far as one can tell. Was the judge angry? It seems unlikely (pace Kavanaugh, judges are not famed for their emotionality). OK then, were the people, whoever they were (ignorance alert), who wrote into French law the possibility (or necessity) of a three month jail sentence for "sexual aggression" (sic) angry? Maybe, but maybe not. What to me is more truth-seeming is that the disproportionality of the sentence reflects what one might call a fossilized anger: this, in turn, the fossilization of the anger, its transubstantiation into law and into pious nods from serried ranks of Guardianistas, would derive from the superstitious awe in which we hold any such surenchérissement of emotion, provided only that it be entertained by a female. As for that last proviso, anecdote alert:
The last time I was slapped on the bum was maybe twenty years ago: I was in Catalonia at the time, in the teachers' room of a small language school, bending towards the water cooler. The slapper was a large, loud, relentlessly jovial American woman, a sort of younger Roseanne Barr, who had just been hired as a teacher: I can't remember if I had been formally introduced to her, but to all practical intents and purposes she was a perfect stranger. The unannounced, unprovoked slap didn't hurt, but it was let's say robust, and I spilled my water. I don't remember how I reacted, but then again I don't need to: I know what I'm like and how I react to things, and since I lack imagination (somewhat) and spontaneity (utterly), there's little available variation. When I don't have a tried and tested, socially sanctioned stock reaction available, I react by not reacting. It's the safest thing, after all. So I would have straightened up, glanced at her on the off chance the slap was intended as a prelude to some verbal interaction, and seeing that it was not (memory supplies a goofy grin), I would have departed, dumbly and expressionlessly. And naturally, I scrupulously avoided any proximity with her for the rest of the year, or however long it was she continued working there. We didn't exchange another word, which is perhaps why I don't even remember her name.
The question I am leading to is: did she deserve to go to prison for three months? To my mind, you only have to ask the question to see how absurd it is. In fact, I don't think she deserved anything beyond what she got, which was unspoken contempt and wary avoidance from me thereafter - which, given how socially dispensable I have always been, can't really even be construed as a punishment. She didn't do anything that ought to be illegal. What she did was simply (a) cause momentary, avoidable distress to a perfect stranger, and (b) in consonance with the preceding, reveal herself to be a rather unpleasant, unempathetic, socially repellent individual, the sort whose company sensible folks quickly learn to avoid. That's all.
OK, there may have been aggravating circumstances in the case of the French bus passenger: the fact that the slap was accompanied by an "insulting comment about her breasts", and that it was done in front of what may have been a busload of onlookers certainly changes things. In fact, if I had been the bus driver in question, I might have jammed the doors shut and called the cops too, given the various problems posed by the sort of drunken lout whose dogged unpleasantness can quickly escalate through various shades of boorish into criminal vandalism and beyond, possibly veering into actual bodily harm, if not stopped in time. But had I done so, had I called the cops, I would have expected them to respond sensibly: a night in the cooler, a caution, maybe a fine, and in the event of any truculence, a physical, no-visible-marks rebuke of the sort the police are traditionally supposed to be good at handing out on request. Yet had I known, in advance, that the drunken man's life was going to be destroyed by my actions, I might have thought better of closing that door.
"Destroyed"? Well, I don't know anything about the French justice system, but it's a safe bet it's not so different from others closer to home: three months' free tuition in Crime School, with the attendant desensitisation and clinical empathectomy, followed by the condition of social and occupational pariah that generally accompanies a criminal record with the word "sexual" in it. Once you've discarded as legally and judicially irrelevant the incontrovertible fact that the guy was a piece of shit, this to me seems disproportionate (though apparently not to readers of Le Monde). Even if we accept the controversial view of incarceration as proxy vengeance ("punishment"), anyone capable of emerging unscathed from the inflationary spiral of outrage mentioned above will appreciate that a "punishment" that multiplies the harm of the original offence by several orders of magnitude doesn't make a lot of sense, either poetically or practically; and I don't think even the most sensitive person in the world could claim ever to have been deeply or permanently traumatised by a slap on the bum - as opposed to prison, which only fails to traumatise those who have already been traumatised by it and are now into their second or subsequent tour of duty.
There is, of course, another argument, which has to do with deterrence, i.e. with stopping people coming back for more. There again, though, I think there is a principle of proportionality which needs to be followed for the sake of social efficacy. Just as "punishing" a harm of severity 2 with one of severity 10 is both unjust and conducive to a feedback loop of vengeful surenchérissement, so I would argue that attempting to deter harmful action A (2 harm-points) with nasty consequence Y (10 nastiness points) will, while effectively deterring potential offender Q1, likely lead to offender Q2 (the one who is stupid enough not to be deterred) substituting harmful action C (8 harm-points) for A, on the basis that nasty consequences Y and Z (10 and 11 nastiness points, respectively, accruing to actions A and C, respectively) are practically indistinguishable. A Google search tentatively offers "penalty gradient". I hope that's a familiar concept to Law students: I think it ought to be. Sheep and lambs look remarkably similar in the shadow of a gallows. That's why penalty gradients, or differentials, ought to be respected. Especially when we are sexist enough, as a species, to only visit the penalty on one gender (the one that's been taught it has rights, and can therefore be "angry" with a clean conscience).
There's a lot more to say about this - about how we are encouraged (probably not by "the media", more likely by the monosodium glutamate in our soup) to adopt the penal instincts of loudmouthed, squawking dullards rather than, say, our mild and magnificent older sister with her retinue of grown-up scruples and intimate familiarity with the English literary canon; or about the vertiginous elevation of Anger into Cardinal Virtue from its previous stint as Deadly Sin; or about the fact that you can almost guarantee that any one member of the Baying Horde will, upon questioning, candidly admit to the view that a properly constituted judicial system ought to penalise people simply for being jerks. There's a lot to say, but why bother? No one reads this stuff anyway, and writing about it is no fun at all.
It works like this. Someone pisses you off. For example, they slap your bum. The instinctual part of you, the one that doesn't need permission to feel things, erupts in response. The emotion attempts, again instinctively (?), to enlist support from the cognitive area of your brain. It wants to feel "justified". In many people, esp. those of the "entitled" sort, the sense of justification is instantly forthcoming. The other has wronged you, and you are in the right. Self-evident! In my own case, there is rarely any sense of justification available. It's not that I think I am in the wrong, or not necessarily. It's more that perhaps no one is, or at least not so clearly. (This deep-seated reluctance to ascribe definitive blame or to vindicate one's own emotional responses is, I suspect, a hallmark of a Catholic upbringing.) Anyway, since the emotion has nothing routine and ritual to latch on to, no coherent accusation that will lend it social specific gravity, it bypasses that civilised-response stage and heads straight for the crudest sort of physical expression: throwing something, kicking something, howling, letting loose a gust of imprecations. It rages. Or at least, it wants to. Hopefully, it will be headed off at the pass by a sense of elementary decorum and a dose of learned self-discipline. After which, it can do little more than simmer. That, and plot some dastardly revenge.
So no, I can't get angry, as such, but I can dig the inflationary nature of common or garden outrage - anger and rage's common by-product. Like perhaps most people, if you scrabble enough in the dirt, I'm the sort who, in the heat of the moment, wants to (but can't and doesn't) punish a double parking situation with fisticuffs, a firing squad, or an evening with Abbes Garcia. Rage doesn't understand proportionality or moderation. Obviously, rage (anger for that matter) is a crap counsellor.
I'm not sure, though, whether something as unstable as an emotion can explain the anomalous sentence of the anonymous Evryman in the story. Was the woman angry? Plausibly, but not necessarily: it was the bus driver's decision, not hers, to make a thing of it, as far as one can tell. Was the judge angry? It seems unlikely (pace Kavanaugh, judges are not famed for their emotionality). OK then, were the people, whoever they were (ignorance alert), who wrote into French law the possibility (or necessity) of a three month jail sentence for "sexual aggression" (sic) angry? Maybe, but maybe not. What to me is more truth-seeming is that the disproportionality of the sentence reflects what one might call a fossilized anger: this, in turn, the fossilization of the anger, its transubstantiation into law and into pious nods from serried ranks of Guardianistas, would derive from the superstitious awe in which we hold any such surenchérissement of emotion, provided only that it be entertained by a female. As for that last proviso, anecdote alert:
The last time I was slapped on the bum was maybe twenty years ago: I was in Catalonia at the time, in the teachers' room of a small language school, bending towards the water cooler. The slapper was a large, loud, relentlessly jovial American woman, a sort of younger Roseanne Barr, who had just been hired as a teacher: I can't remember if I had been formally introduced to her, but to all practical intents and purposes she was a perfect stranger. The unannounced, unprovoked slap didn't hurt, but it was let's say robust, and I spilled my water. I don't remember how I reacted, but then again I don't need to: I know what I'm like and how I react to things, and since I lack imagination (somewhat) and spontaneity (utterly), there's little available variation. When I don't have a tried and tested, socially sanctioned stock reaction available, I react by not reacting. It's the safest thing, after all. So I would have straightened up, glanced at her on the off chance the slap was intended as a prelude to some verbal interaction, and seeing that it was not (memory supplies a goofy grin), I would have departed, dumbly and expressionlessly. And naturally, I scrupulously avoided any proximity with her for the rest of the year, or however long it was she continued working there. We didn't exchange another word, which is perhaps why I don't even remember her name.
The question I am leading to is: did she deserve to go to prison for three months? To my mind, you only have to ask the question to see how absurd it is. In fact, I don't think she deserved anything beyond what she got, which was unspoken contempt and wary avoidance from me thereafter - which, given how socially dispensable I have always been, can't really even be construed as a punishment. She didn't do anything that ought to be illegal. What she did was simply (a) cause momentary, avoidable distress to a perfect stranger, and (b) in consonance with the preceding, reveal herself to be a rather unpleasant, unempathetic, socially repellent individual, the sort whose company sensible folks quickly learn to avoid. That's all.
OK, there may have been aggravating circumstances in the case of the French bus passenger: the fact that the slap was accompanied by an "insulting comment about her breasts", and that it was done in front of what may have been a busload of onlookers certainly changes things. In fact, if I had been the bus driver in question, I might have jammed the doors shut and called the cops too, given the various problems posed by the sort of drunken lout whose dogged unpleasantness can quickly escalate through various shades of boorish into criminal vandalism and beyond, possibly veering into actual bodily harm, if not stopped in time. But had I done so, had I called the cops, I would have expected them to respond sensibly: a night in the cooler, a caution, maybe a fine, and in the event of any truculence, a physical, no-visible-marks rebuke of the sort the police are traditionally supposed to be good at handing out on request. Yet had I known, in advance, that the drunken man's life was going to be destroyed by my actions, I might have thought better of closing that door.
"Destroyed"? Well, I don't know anything about the French justice system, but it's a safe bet it's not so different from others closer to home: three months' free tuition in Crime School, with the attendant desensitisation and clinical empathectomy, followed by the condition of social and occupational pariah that generally accompanies a criminal record with the word "sexual" in it. Once you've discarded as legally and judicially irrelevant the incontrovertible fact that the guy was a piece of shit, this to me seems disproportionate (though apparently not to readers of Le Monde). Even if we accept the controversial view of incarceration as proxy vengeance ("punishment"), anyone capable of emerging unscathed from the inflationary spiral of outrage mentioned above will appreciate that a "punishment" that multiplies the harm of the original offence by several orders of magnitude doesn't make a lot of sense, either poetically or practically; and I don't think even the most sensitive person in the world could claim ever to have been deeply or permanently traumatised by a slap on the bum - as opposed to prison, which only fails to traumatise those who have already been traumatised by it and are now into their second or subsequent tour of duty.
There is, of course, another argument, which has to do with deterrence, i.e. with stopping people coming back for more. There again, though, I think there is a principle of proportionality which needs to be followed for the sake of social efficacy. Just as "punishing" a harm of severity 2 with one of severity 10 is both unjust and conducive to a feedback loop of vengeful surenchérissement, so I would argue that attempting to deter harmful action A (2 harm-points) with nasty consequence Y (10 nastiness points) will, while effectively deterring potential offender Q1, likely lead to offender Q2 (the one who is stupid enough not to be deterred) substituting harmful action C (8 harm-points) for A, on the basis that nasty consequences Y and Z (10 and 11 nastiness points, respectively, accruing to actions A and C, respectively) are practically indistinguishable. A Google search tentatively offers "penalty gradient". I hope that's a familiar concept to Law students: I think it ought to be. Sheep and lambs look remarkably similar in the shadow of a gallows. That's why penalty gradients, or differentials, ought to be respected. Especially when we are sexist enough, as a species, to only visit the penalty on one gender (the one that's been taught it has rights, and can therefore be "angry" with a clean conscience).
There's a lot more to say about this - about how we are encouraged (probably not by "the media", more likely by the monosodium glutamate in our soup) to adopt the penal instincts of loudmouthed, squawking dullards rather than, say, our mild and magnificent older sister with her retinue of grown-up scruples and intimate familiarity with the English literary canon; or about the vertiginous elevation of Anger into Cardinal Virtue from its previous stint as Deadly Sin; or about the fact that you can almost guarantee that any one member of the Baying Horde will, upon questioning, candidly admit to the view that a properly constituted judicial system ought to penalise people simply for being jerks. There's a lot to say, but why bother? No one reads this stuff anyway, and writing about it is no fun at all.
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