On Anger

Joshua Putnam

April 2000

“When you fight fire with fire, you end up with ashes.” –Abigail Van Buren

On Anger

There is a place deep within most people who have been oppressed, which is to say most people, a place where a secret and malignant anger lives. The hurt that lies buried there is a special kind of pain, the repressed memory of painful alienation from self. This is the alienation which comes from internalizing the negative stereotypes directed at us from the earliest age, labels applied not for who we are, but for where and how we came to be. This is an anger we carry both towards our oppressors and towards ourselves, for internalizing the oppression. We hate ourselves, and we hate those who taught us to hate ourselves.

Working behind the scenes, obscured from direct awareness of its origins, this anger remains a self-defeating force in our lives. Over the last two months I have gained a deeper understanding of this anger as it has manifested in my own life, distorting my highest aspirations.

When I started writing this essay I intended for it to be a perceptive analysis of subconscious racism and homophobia. My motivations for writing, however, were somewhat unclear. I had become involved in an online forum for discussion and debate of issues relating to culture and sexuality, www.onelist.com/groups/crossculturesexology. The group was started by one of my best friends, who I will call Jeremy, someone who I spend time with almost every day. Several other members of our circle of friends were also active participants. Among the topics discussed, rather intensively, was the ethics of male circumcision and how those ethical considerations do or do not differ from those raised by the practice known as female genital mutilation, or FGM.

It is the contention of Jeremy and several of the other contributors that male circumcision is as morally objectionable and as psychologically and physically harmful as FGM. To support these claims, they cite historical sources showing that non-biblical male circumcision, particularly American medical circumcision, arose from a puritanical desire to limit the sexuality of boys and discourage masturbation. They also cite a variety of medical statements criticizing the practice, including the position of the American Society of Pediatricians. From their perspective male circumcision is a misnomer; they refer to the practice as male genital mutilation, or MGM.

Jeremy and the other MGM critics believe that the arguments against the practice of male circumcision are strong enough to justify a ban on both medical and religious circumcisions. They point out that FGM is banned by the UN Convention on Human Rights and by the laws of those countries which are signatories to it, including the United States. They point out that these laws conflict with the religious and parental freedom of certain cultures and individuals, as would a ban on MGM. They state that treating MGM differently than FGM is a form of sexism.

As a person who believes in the fundamental importance of respecting each persons individuality, their absolute freedom to continuously re-imagine themselves, the idea of involuntarily subjecting an infant to any unnecessary or cosmetic procedure, particularly one which involves the most personal and sensitive of the sense organs and which some people clearly resent later in life, seems wrong to me. I would never allow any child in my care to be circumcised. But as a single parent who has raised a daughter past infancy, I am aware of the fundamental differences between infants and adults. Infants can not decide for themselves what is in their own interests; older children have a limited ability to do so. For this reason, I believe that the parent or parents (whether biological or not) of a child should be given wide latitude in deciding what is or is not in the infant or child’s best interest. Nature, common sense and human decency all dictate that this should be so. Any decision a parent makes regarding their infant’s health, such as giving them a new vaccine against a debilitating illness or feeding them a certain type of diet, may ultimately cause more harm than good. However, not acting may also be harmful and as someone must decide it seems obvious that someone should be the person or persons most closely connected to the child.

I am also the son of a German-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. The day Hitler came to power in 1939, my mother was separated from her parents, prominent members of the Communist party and the Underground, until after the war. Because her parents were Communists, my mother did not have a religious Jewish upbringing. Because of the tremendous hardships inflicted upon her for her ancestry, my mother was always vitally aware of herself as possessing a Jewish identity.

When I was a young child, during the Viet Nam War, my parents (who are prominent intellectuals) became active in the peace movement, which they helped to found. As the situation in Southeast Asia worsened, they progressed from liberal leftism to outright Communism. They joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a extremely authoritarian Marxist-Leninist organization. We moved into a commune in Cambridge, Massachusetts and my father became the faculty advisor at Harvard to the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the most prominent campus resistance group at the time. Consequently, like both of my parents I received a Communist, rather than a religious upbringing. Nevertheless, because of my mothers experiences in Germany, she made sure my siblings and I were intimately aware of ourselves as Jewish and of the need to resist anti-Semitism, as well as other forms of prejudice. This correlated well with the Marxist goal of egalitarianism and we were often reminded that Marx himself was a Jew.

When I read the arguments by Jeremy and the others, some of them Jewish, against male circumcision, I was reminded of this powerful and deeply personal charge my mother laid upon me—to resist injustice in all forms and, especially, to ensure that there would never be another Holocaust. I became concerned that some of the things being posted in the discussion were distorted and inflammatory. I was particularly concerned that any attempt to ban or vilify religious circumcision might lead to anti-Semitism.

These concerns were heightened when Jeremy, who is neither Jewish nor circumcised, posted a letter by another circumcision critic who he did not personally know, a letter that contained passages with a distinctly anti-Semitic tone. The letter contained the libelous charge that Jewish rabbis secretly consume the foreskins of male infants after the ritual of circumcision. That this is patently untrue hardly needs to be said. Blood is manifestly unclean in the Jewish religion; the Torah specifically prohibits the eating of meat which has not been thoroughly drained of blood. Also, the Jewish ritual of circumcision, or Bris, is performed by a specially designated person, the Mohel, who is generally not a rabbi. This lie is also particularly troublesome to any Jewish person with a sense of history as it calls to mind the infamous blood libels of the Mediaeval and pre-Modern Europe, when Jews were repeatedly massacred for allegedly eating Christian babies.

It was at this point, when Jeremy posted the circumcision libel, that I decided to write this paper. Because I know Jeremy so well, I knew he did not intend to be anti-Semitic, though his forwarding of the letter to our discussion group was extremely insensitive. I knew that Jeremy defines himself as an “anti-racist intellectual.” A strong and active commitment to resisting racial, cultural and individual oppression of all kinds in central to Jeremy’s character. The commonality of these concerns between me and Jeremy is one of the many strong foundations of our friendship. I correctly identified Jeremy’s insensitivity as coming from unconscious rather than overt racism.

I decided to write a careful, well thought-out essay dealing with the problem of subconscious and unconscious racism. I planned to approach the subject from a variety of angles, but to lead into it with an analysis of my own sub-conscious racism which I had discovered in years past. I specifically wanted to lead in with an experience I had as a tourist on a bus in Mexico, where I found myself resenting the apparently German tourists seated behind me. As the trip passed and I half-listened to their Germanic voices discussing who knows what, I was troubled by the memories of Holocaust stories my mother had told me which their voices evoked. This was especially troubling as my mother has always rejected the idea of collective guilt as applied to any people, including the Germans. She even took us to live in Germany for four months when I was fourteen. The racist, stereotypic character of these ruminations was brought into stark relief when the bus reached it’s destination and, as we disembarked, the two “Germans” struck up a conversation with my companion and me during which we learned that they were two Gay lovers from the Netherlands on vacation together. The trip became the occasion for much soul searching.

I also had an emotional blow-up at Jeremy.

I did not just become angry with my friend for his insensitivity, I became enraged. In a fit of anger, I not only denounced the post Jeremy had forwarded, I denounced Jeremy. I accused him of being a overt racist, an intellectual fascist. Burning with animosity, I committed that all too common sin of the digital age, the email flame. I drafted an open letter to Jeremy where I not only impugned his entire character, I also threatened to report his bigotry to the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, even to graduate schools to which he was applying for a degree in anthropology,.

Jeremy, who has himself been known at times to become a bit overheated in intellectual arguments, took this all unbelievably well. Not only did he apologize to me privately and publicly, denouncing the objectionable portions of the email he had forwarded, he never even got mad at me for having gotten so mad at him. This was more amazing because I posted my flame of Jeremy after he had already posted his retraction (though before I had seen it or heard his personal apology). No doubt some of Jeremy’s inspiring composure during this interlude in our friendship was based on the strong bonds of love between us; it is inconceivably ridiculous to think that we could ever not be friends.

Time passed and, although I was no longer mad at Jeremy or considered him a racist, I continued to work on this essay. I reconsidered my experiences with racial, sexual and gender prejudice. I meditated on the concept of internalized racism, sexism, homophobia. I wondered at the way some Gay men casually refer to one another as “faggot,” as in “Hey, faggot!” and at the way young African-American males referred to each other as “nigger,.” I wondered if these represented innocent examples of oppressed groups turning their slavery into bonding, or if they represented a more sinister internalization of one’s own oppression.

I also continued, both in the crosscuturesexology group and elsewhere, to debate a variety of intellectual, moral and spiritual issues. Sometimes these debates became quite heated, though never as intensely personal as the circumcision argument with Jeremy. Nevertheless, I became increasingly concerned with my own propensity to become angered at those I disagreed with and, as a result of anger, to use confrontational language in my arguments. I came to feel I was perpetuating dissent with persons I might otherwise have been able to achieve consensus with. I wondered if my rhetorical style was defeating my own arguments.

A random discussion with an old friend provided a key to understanding what was going on. He explained to me the psychological concept of free-floating anger.

Free-floating anger is the result of psychological repression. When, as a child or later, we are exposed to situations that anger us but we feel unable to express the anger, we repress it. This repressed anger stays inside us, but the source of the anger, the memory of what caused it, is buried by the mechanism of repression. The anger, however, still needs to be released. It persistently seeks an excuse to do so, attaching itself to whatever it can find in our psyches, seeking a way to be heard.

In this was things, either personal or philosophical depending on our temperament, become “hot button issues” for us. We become testy, agitated, even enraged.

The original anger we repressed is never fully released by this process. It is only placated. As a result we can remain angry for a long time, even for decades, without ever realizing what we are really mad about.

It is only by recovering the memory of the events that originally angered us that we can make peace with them and so remove the anger impinging on our psyches and our lives. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways: by meditation, therapy, hypnosis, even spontaneously.

This is not to say we will never become angry again. If someone assaults or insults us in some fundamental way, we may still feel hurt and angry. However, this anger will be less intense than that which we felt before resolving our issues of free-floating anger, transforming small sleights into grave injuries that require a response.

As we resolve issues of repressed anger, we are also likely to become more compassionate, more willing to “cut slack” all around, because recovering the repressed parts of ourselves and making peace with them entails practice in forgiveness.

The weekend before my friend explained free-floating anger to me, I took a drive to the ocean with Jeremy. As we pulled up to the beach, Jeremy said: “I think we should start a group for the most emotionally explosive issues to be discussed in.” Now, as I tried to apply the concept of free-floating anger to myself, I was reminded of Jeremy’s idea. It occurred to me that the most emotionally explosive issues vary from person to person and that the reason for this has to do with free-floating anger.

I realized that most of the recurring argument between Jeremy and myself about male circumcision, parental responsibility and cultural diversity was not about those issues at all, nor was it about our friendship. It was about free-floating anger.

For me, anti-Semitism, intolerance and interference with parental choice are hot-button issues. For Jeremy, male circumcision is a hot-button issue. This means that our free-floating anger complexes have adopted these issues as justifications for releasing their explosive energy, even though our disagreements on the issues are relatively small. I know that Jeremy is not really an anti-Semite or a bigot and I can not imagine him actually using force to prevent a Jewish or Muslim circumcision from taking place. Jeremy knows that I actually agree with him that male circumcision must be at least somewhat harmful and that I agree that it violates the principle of consent. He knows I would never allow a male child in my care to be circumcised.

When I stepped back and examined what was happening to Jeremy and to me in our ideological arguments, my rational mind could clearly see that the more anger and invective we allowed to creep into our arguments, the less likely either one of us was to influence anyone in any way that we would deem desirable. I saw that all we were doing was stirring the passions, fed by their own sources of free-floating anger, of people who already agreed with us. It then seemed extremely improbable to me that Jeremy would ever convince any Jewish person to stop circumcising by posting false stories about blood drinking rabbis or that I would convince anyone that anarchism is a sound social philosophy by calling my fellow anarchist and spiritual brother a bigot.

Merely recognizing the existence of free-floating anger allowed me transcend the arguments I was having with Jeremy, to take our conversations to another level. By stepping back and remaining calm, I was able to reach a more complex understanding of issues in our discussions.

The source of my own free-floating anger, however, remained inaccessible to me. An experience in psychotherapy helped me to finally understand it. When I did, I realized that the sources of my free-floating anger, the way that it manifested in the argument about anti-Semitism with Jeremy and the project of writing this essay, of understanding the nature and effects of sub-conscious and internalized racism and homophobia, were inextricably linked. By understanding my own anger, I came into contact with my own self-hate and prejudice.

The therapeutic medium through which my free-floating anger was released was the process of hypnosis. I have always been a excellent trace subject. Generally, I slip into a deep trace quickly and easily attain states of deep relaxation and inner awareness. The day I told my therapist about my arguments with Jeremy and about my revelations about free-floating anger was different. Although I tried several times, I just could not relax. Something in me was blocking my entry into trance. It then occurred to me that perhaps the obstruction was the source of the free-floating anger I had been expressing at Jeremy,

I went back into trace and asked myself what I was really mad about that was coming out in my exchanges with Jeremy about circumcision, anti-Semitism, etc. At first I just got these jumbled images of my brother, my father and my mother. It didn’t make much sense.

Then I started visualizing the anger I felt as a knot and started untying it in my mind. My psychologist asked me what I was doing and I told her. She then asked me to try tying the knot tighter, intensifying the anger, instead of untying it. As I did, I had a flash of comprehension. I remembered the source of that particular rage.

What I recalled was the issues I had with my parents growing up, issues which were finally aired during my adolescent rebellion. These were issues of abandonment, both materially and spiritually. I noted in the introductory paragraphs of this essay that as a young child I was raised to be a Communist revolutionary, like my parents. By the time I reached adolescence, however, my parents , along with my brother and sister, had transformed into liberal-Democratic and semi-observant Jews. I felt totally isolated. When, in high school, if finally felt empowered to voice the pain my parents conversion had caused me, I accused them of counter-revolutionary heresy and cruelty. Eventually, we were able to heal many of our differences, which involved movement on all sides.

However, although these issues were exposed during my adolescence, I never traced them to their origin. In therapy, as I worked to tie the knot of my anger even tighter, I suddenly realized where my rage began.

It was when I was 11. After the Viet Nam War ended my parents lost faith in authoritarian Communism. as a solution to the social ills of the world. Because of a personality quirk (neurosis) of my father’s, he needed to feel he belonged to some larger, organized group. During this period he considered converting to Catholicism and my mother, who had many painful memories of things done to her and to other Jews by German Catholics during the Holocaust, considered a divorce.

My parent’s marriage was saved by my brother, Sam, who is a year older than me. Out of the blue, Sam decided he wanted to connect with his Jewish heritage by getting a Bar Mitzvah. This meant Sam would have to start going to Jewish services all morning long every Saturday for a year, so he could complete the Hebrew and Torah studies required for the ritual of initiation into Jewish manhood. While not wanting to go so far as full orthodoxy, Sam wanted to connect to a fairly traditional Judaism. Like many other observant American Jews, Sam elected for a Conservative Bar Mitzvah (Conservative Jews eat Kosher and keep the Sabbath, but do not wear yarmulkes except at synagogue or during observances. Reform Jews, the most liberal of the major Jewish sects, do not follow any of the Kosher laws and interpret all of Judaism as they see fit.)

It would have been very difficult for my brother to fulfill his sudden desire to become an observant Jew, except for the fact that his desire intersected fortuitously with my parent’s need to find a way to save their marriage. Discovering their Jewish roots (roots which my parent’s own Jewish-Communist parents never in their lifetimes showed any interest in) was acceptable to my mother, as Catholicism could never be. My parents joined the egalitarian Conservative minyan (the word for a Jewish prayer group) at Harvard. My sister, Max, who is only a year younger than me but was always treated as the baby, was brought along to services with the rest of the family

I, however, was different. Always having been a more avid reader and a more philosophic thinker than my siblings, I had become more involved in my parent’s world and in their revolution than had my brother and sister. While Sam and Max seemed to somehow go through our radical upbringing without coming out too different to relate to their public school peers, I fared quite differently. For me, the philosophy of dialectical materialism and anti-Capitalism was a deeply held belief system, almost my religion. The Rally of Millions in Washington, D.C. and the Harvard Square Riots, both of which I attended, deeply affected me, as did Harvard’s failed attempts to fire my father for his Communist beliefs. Later, I endured years of persecution by my public school peers for my refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance, join the Cub Scouts or other patriotic groups or acknowledge the existence of God. Because of my adherence to the worldview my parent’s invested in me, I was alienated from the other children who should have been my peers.

When Sam announced he wanted to become Jewish and the whole family went along with him, I thought they had all gone crazy. “But, I thought ‘religion is the opiate of the masses!’” I reminded them. “Don’t be impertinent!” or some other authoritarian response was all I would get from my father. I refused to participate in what I could only see as a meaningless and backward endeavor. My parents were not hypocritical enough to try to force me to go to services. They just started going with the rest of the family, leaving me alone on one of the two days of the week we had used to spend time together.

Moreover, because the new rule of the Sabbath required my parents to do no work on Saturday, they were now more busy than ever catching up on Sunday. I went from little attention to barely any.

Naturally, this turn of events resulted in tremendous anger and frustration inside me. It was anger I had to turn inward and repress, because expressing it would make me my mother’s tormentor, the repeater of anti-Semitic messages she had been exposed to far too much as a child. In this way, I became an internally anti-Semitic Jew. Although consciously I identified with my mother’s childhood persecutions and rejected prejudice of all kinds, sub-consciously I was enraged by my family’s embrace of what to me was an irrational and archaic superstition which isolated me from them, even as their earlier beliefs had isolated me from others my own age.

Fast forward twenty three years to my friendship with Jeremy. We love each other and both know, deep down, that our hearts are turned towards fundamentally harmonious goals. Then we start talking about circumcision and I hear Jeremy making remarks which I find to be anti-Semitic. However, I know that Jeremy does not intend his remarks to be anti-Semitic, that he is not really, at heart, a racist.

Obviously, if I considered the situation with Jeremy calmly, without reference to my inner level of free-floating anger, I could find a way to help Jeremy realize that anti-Semitic rhetoric does not further his arguments about circumcision, without myself becoming enraged. Even if I felt compelled to express disagreement with Jeremy about the degree of harm caused by circumcision or the wisdom of various forms of action to prevent the practice, I could have done so calmly and gently, instead of getting all worked up. Or, since my rationality tells me this is not anywhere close to becoming a major issue for most people, I could have continued to let Jeremy express his view in whatever tone he chose and spent me energies elsewhere, where I really think they can be of service.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that the free-floating anger from the repressed memories of my family’s conversion to religious Judaism left me particularly susceptible to another psychological process whenever the issue of anti-Semitism seemed to arise: projection. I projected my own anti-Semitic rage onto Jeremy’s arguments and emotionality, interpreting all his arguments about circumcision and religious freedom through the distorted lens of my own unremembered anger at the Jews for “taking” my family from me.

This leads me to believe that this is likely an issue for quite a few other members of oppressed groups, such as homosexuals, ethnic or racial minorities and women. Unable to fully express their own rage at finding themselves members of a group that society tells us is in some way inferior, their anger may at some point have turned in on itself, as internalized homophobia, racism or sexism. This self-hating prejudice is almost always repressed, because the guilt associated with feeling it is so strong. So it lurks within, finding opportunities to lash out whenever it finds an echo of itself out there in the world.

This is especially problematic because, when the free-floating anger of our own prejudice matches up with the perceived (and possibly real) prejudices of others, we are likely to feel completely justified in letting loose on the other person because the prejudice in those we are attacking is so clearly an evil. Yet by using violence instead of love to approach our sister or brother who is in error we most likely strengthen that other person in their prejudicial views. In any case, even if we change others with anger we are leaving our own prejudice, which most immediately affects us, untouched. It is like Jesus’ metaphor; we are casting out the mote in our brother’s eye before we have cast out the beam in our own.

This is obviously a very difficult argument to make with oppressed people, that some of their anger at their oppressors has roots in the oppression they have internalized within themselves, that even though the hatred which has kept them down is evil, so is the righteous anger that fights against it with more hatred, instead of with love. This is why Jesus advises us to “turn the other cheek” and why Buddha says “hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love alone.” Until we break the cycle of anger, hatred and violence within ourselves, we can never hope to create peace in the world outside.

As soon as I realized the source of my anger in my own self-hatred, I felt a wave of joy and calm wash over me. An irresistible smile broke my lips. I emerged from trace and share my happy realization with my therapist. We celebrated together the tremendous progress I had made.

Two months have passed since that day in therapy. I continue to be amazed every day by how much calmer, how much more at peace with myself I feel. While I continue to engaged in thoughtful discussions of sociopolitical issues with people who I sometimes strongly disagree with, including Jeremy, I do not find myself becoming angered by or emotionally entangled in our exchanges. As I step back and view my interactions with others in the light of my own self-understanding, I recognize that even when other people seem to be angry with me or with my beliefs, really they are just venting repressed frustrations buried deep inside their psyches. I am more caring and much more careful in my responses.

Upon reflection, I suspect that the psychological processes of free-floating anger and of projection, fueled by the repression of the sources of my internalized self-hatred, led to my becoming akin to that which I thought I despised. Because of the hate I learned to internalize, I became an angry person. I now believe that the degree to which a person has been able to resolve their inner issues of repressed anger, from whatever sources, the more likely that person is to be able to respond to present situations calmly and constructively, even when those situations involve conflict.

I believe that this may explain why two people, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, who both responded actively to the oppressive evil of racism, did so in such radically different ways. King, although witness to, and ultimately the victim of, terrible racist violence and oppression, eschewed hatred and violence. He preached a gospel of love, of non-violence and of reconciliation. Although constantly confronted by those who denied his fundamental humanity,. King never dehumanized or disrespected his opponents.

Farrakhan, on the other hand, has preached a gospel of hatred and of racism. He has referred to Whites as “blue-eyed devils” and to Jews as “hymies” and worse. Farrakhan’s rage at oppression is so great, it has even led him to justify, on several occasions, the murder of his former comrade in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, because Malcolm had left the Nation and denounced its philosophy and leadership. Malcolm, like Farrakhan, had once embraced racial hatred and separtism. But before he died he transcended those beliefs. He journeyed to Mecca and was profoundly changed by the experience of seeing Muslims of all colors answering the call to prayer as one. Like Martin, Malcolm was martyred for his embrace of the path of peace.

Yet in the judgement of history, it is Martin Luther King, Jr. and those like him, including Malcolm, who will be remembered as great, as having not only sacrificed, but succeeded in expanding and protecting the dignity and liberty of every human being. The Twentieth Century has only recently ended and, although TIME Magazine declared Albert Einstein, inventor of the Atomic Bomb and of Relativity Theory, to be the “Person of the Century,” I am certain that as time passes more and more people will come to realize that the one truly great and defining advance effecting all of humanity in the last hundred years was the development of the idea of “human rights.” This idea, barely developed at the turn of the century, came to real prominence after World War II. The realization of the evils which racism, in the form of the Holocaust, had unleashed lent new strength to the Civil Rights movement in the United States and to anti-Colonialist movements around the world. The vastly expanded spheres of individual liberty which post-War Supreme Court decisions and legislation, including the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and the UN Convention on Human Rights, guarantee to all people in all places is truly impressive, even though the universal enforcement of those guarantees is still a distant dream. Martin’s work remains unfinished, but there are now more people that ever before who appreciate the gifts he gave us and stand ready to carry on where he left off.

I am sure that in the clear light of hindsight it will one day be obvious to everyone that human rights and the respect for the dignity of every human being is a far greater gift, even if incompletely given, than scientific theories the majority of humans have little or no comprehension of and weapons that threaten to obliterate all life on Earth.

I offer these reflections, which I know are highly personal, in the hope that they may inspire some soul-searching on the part of others, like myself, who have been wounded in their oppression and from their wounding, have learned to lash out. If I can help one person with these words to become less angry and more understanding, within and without, to work against hatred and prejudice through love instead of through violence, then I have done my work. When we learn to speak the language of peace, to walk the path of peace and, most importantly, to partake of the inner harvest of peace, then we are ready to set out to carry this peace to the world. This was the work of Martin, of Jesus, Isaiah and Buddha, of all the peacemakers. This is the work they have left to us to complete.

I look forward to meeting you upon this way.

This essay is dedicated to “Jeremy”, who has been both a true friend and a wonderful mirror for me.