The age of rage: know a time by its sickness
One way to know an age is to chart its cultural pathologies.
A lot can be understood about the European Middle Ages, for instance, from its flagellation cults, whereby believers would whip themselves into a frenzy with steel-tipped thongs until their backs were soaked in blood, their flesh in shreds, believing that this self-punishment would cleanse them of sin, which in turn would stop them catching plague, sent as punishment by God. The Christian Crusades were rampaging invasion and mass slaughter driven by a fanatical religious quest for redemption.
Closer to today, Sigmund Freud arguably has proved the 20th century’s most influential thinker. Psychopathology was his relentless focus, leading to a systematic theory of neurosis, repression, unconscious motive, ambivalence and a string of terms that have entered everyday usage. He launched what was to develop into an ever-expanding, now pervasive, social presence: psychotherapy and counselling. His term the “worried well” came to characterise middle-class malaise. It has been said that we live in the age of authenticity – in which being genuine, honest and true to oneself are the leading values. It may just as well be said we live in the age of anxiety and psychotherapy.
The Covid-19 years, on the surface, have been defined by pathology, literally so in terms of an actual physical condition, or disease, that can prove fatal. My concern here is rather with the cultural and psychological consequences. The most visible appear in disturbed behaviour, with individuals losing their bearings and composure. Streets, parks, shops, hospitals, cafes have been the scene of abnormal, erratic and irrational acts from the public that were virtually non-existent in the years before 2020.
Notably, and above all, there has been explosive rage, from red-hot smoking fury to reflex bad temper. In terms of the classical seven deadly sins, all of which related to individuals losing impulse control, anger is the one to have risen into ascendancy.
Road rage has transformed and expanded into pandemic rage. Demonstrations regularly have erupted into assaults on police and their horses. Paramedics and ambulance officers are subject to aggressive insult while carrying out their normal caring duties. At a northern Melbourne hospital, a family that was refused admittance violently attacked security guards and police – bones were broken.
Shopkeepers routinely report frontline staff being abused by angry unvaccinated customers who have been turned away – yes, the term frontline is being used, as if the local boutique and florist have become war zones. A young assistant in a bookshop was pushed down an escalator. A veterinary nurse recounts being constantly harassed, frequently reducing her to tears, and by people who pretend to love animals.
A leading Australian risk management firm has been inundated by reports of workplace violence as people returning to their offices bring residual unrelieved stress in with them. In a US parallel, airlines report, post-lockdown, a 300-fold increase in passenger aggression on aircraft. This is happening alongside strife in families, with minor disagreements blowing up into chronic rifts.
There were the shocking news pictures from Parliament House in Melbourne in mid-November, when demonstrators had erected gallows on which to hang a large effigy of Premier Daniel Andrews. Echoing public guillotining in Paris during the French Revolution, an ugly slur was being cast on the Australian civic conscience, even if it was intended only symbolically. This is alien to a country that has held to the values of a fair go, the easygoing tolerance of difference, dislike of extremists and fanatics, and “no worries”.
The size and persistence of recent demonstrations reflects in part the virulence of another pathology – anti-vax conspiracy theories. What might be called the apocalyptic temperament has sprouted like mushrooms, erupting across the field of social life.
People who by disposition are inclined to read the world as a warring dichotomy between good and evil, with nothing grey in between, see the black hand of the devil at work among politicians and even scientists. The rhetoric of the “end time” is surging on social media, indicating we are approaching the apocalyptic finale, with extremist Christian groups believing the Second Coming of Jesus is imminent, as signalled by Covid.
Radical environmental groups express similar pseudo-religious panic, as with the aptly named Extinction Rebellion campaigns to avert a natural implosion destroying the habitable Earth.
With the pandemic itself, paranoia may be read in widely held beliefs that there is a world conspiracy of scientists promoting dangerous vaccines and covering up their lethal effects, exaggerating their efficacy, and that vaccines contain a secret microchip allowing evil governments to track citizens. Some still believe Covid is a hoax. Delusions of persecution feed into the more widespread fear that governments are using the pandemic to increase their powers to transform themselves into dictatorships.
But, to keep this in perspective, 95 per cent of the Australian population is agreeing to vaccination. And, at least in Victoria, more of middle Australia has been turning up to recent demonstrations, seemingly fed up with disproportionate lockdown.
The apocalyptic temperament in outrage can be seen too among those much greater numbers who want to censor opinion they don’t agree with. Paranoid anxiety leads to a type of mental derangement that invests wrong opinion with the supernatural power to corrupt the world – it must accordingly be treated like super-noxious poison.
The increasing influence of the new moral crusades seeking to shut down, sack and banish from public view has been well documented, especially in the columns of this newspaper. I simply want to reflect here on a recent example that seems to me to add a new dimension of illiberal indecency.
A grand Harry Potter reunion has been planned in London next month to celebrate 20 years since the first film was released. But the author is not going to attend. JK Rowling, the creator of the seven-volume epic that has influenced children around the world across the past quarter century like nothing else, now or ever before, has produced arguably the literary masterpiece of our times, selling 600 million copies. The rumour is she has not been invited to the reunion. Whatever the case, there is little doubt she will not attend because of hostile reaction to some of her views.
Rowling has become a victim of the foul social-media inquisitors of the time, censored and hounded because of a 2020 essay she wrote on sex and gender – a sane and balanced reflection drawing on painful personal experience. She recently mused that she could paper her house with the death threats she has received.
In particular, the three actors who played the lead children in the Harry Potter films came out in strong terms on Twitter attacking Rowling’s views. Who do Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, now in their early 30s, think they are? Without Rowling, they almost certainly would be unknown today. They luxuriate in extraordinary fame, wealth, status and, in Watson’s case, successful acting careers. The three have become heroic superstars in the eyes of generations of children.
Where is the gratitude? Where is the respect? Key character virtues have gone missing. Worse, in an act of tone-deaf presumption, Watson twittered an apology to fans of the books who might be upset, books that may have become tarnished by the author’s views on transgender identity, as if she, Watson, were now the self-appointed custodian of Rowling’s work. What has happened to the moral compass of a Twitter generation that is all puffed up with self-importance and helter-skelter righteous indignation, where there should be some modesty and reserve? Two of the leading older-generation actors from the films came out publicly to defend Rowling, displaying common decency.
Let me turn to the quite different domain of politics. When it comes to the pathologies of the times, it has long been the case that enthusiasm for combating climate change has spawned folly, costing the Australian Labor Party more than one election. Currently, it is the Coalition government that, pirouetting itself into a dizzy spin, has lost its normally cool and worldly political head. As it mouths conformity to the cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy, held dearly by Western elites, of net-zero carbon emissions by whenever, the global reality is that two of the largest air polluters, China and India, are desperately trying to increase their coal imports. Their electricity generation will be dependent on coal for decades to come, with both countries continuing to build new coal-fired power stations.
Unless there is some magical technological breakthrough that can produce a baseload power alternative to coal, gas or nuclear, then, in the words of The Castle, tell the net-zero enthusiasts they are dreaming. Scott Morrison here looks like a weak leader scrambling for cover under a tarpaulin of virtue signalling. It’s hard to recall a previous example of fantasy politics to match this hot-air balloon.
Returning to anger as the pathological emotion of the time, the most widespread eruptions of uncontrolled rage against others may be hidden. All Australian social agencies have reported a rise in domestic violence during lockdowns. It is not unrelated that 2021, setting aside the shadow of Covid, has been the year of female outrage about harassment and assault. From the choice as Australian of the Year of a survivor of child sexual assault, Grace Tame, to Brittany Higgins, the allegations against Christian Porter and Prince Andrew, there is now Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, giving an impassioned speech against the cultural normalisation of sexual violence – noting that a woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK.
The male mistreatment of women and children has become the moral issue of the times, following high-profile American cases involving film producers, actors, and billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The dam has finally broken in terms of public acknowledgment of a deep scar on the fabric of modern life. The problem is not new; the response is.
Crimes against women, notably sexual assault and harassment, have shown little sign of diminishing, even factoring in the unreliability of statistics in this area. Also, workplaces remain in which hyper-masculine harassment of women is the norm, such as parts of the military, police, construction, firefighting and some sports coaching. And in other workplaces across the employment spectrum, harassment is common – from hospitals to corporate offices. Parliament House in Canberra has been rife with punitive misogyny, as exposed in Annabel Crabb’s 2021 documentary series, Ms Represented, and now further detailed in the Jenkins review into parliamentary workplaces.
It may be that Parliament House is just the tip of an iceberg, now exposed, reflecting much more widespread workplace behaviour. Surfacing here is the recidivist male tendency that claims ownership of women and children – to be treated as personal property, unworthy of respect, a discrimination that was enshrined in English property law until 1882. In combination with power insecurities, it continues to drive a significant minority of men.
And the epidemic rise in pornography in recent decades suggests it casts its shadow more widely. Ready access to violent pornography depicting the brutal humiliation of women only furthers a social climate in which harassment and assault are taken as legitimate, even normal. “Boys will be boys” and “It was just a bit of fun”, the old rationalisations excusing male harassment of women, seem never to have completely died out.
There is an odd contradiction here. Female liberation, emancipation and equal rights have led to a steady march of progress since 1945. The face of public life slowly continues to change in the direction of gender equality. In the case of employment, greater numbers of women have continued to move steadily into senior roles in corporations, professions, politics, administration and the media – if not in residual pockets of resistance such as the Catholic Church. Fathers are playing larger roles in family life. Yet, on one key front, the modern female quest has hit a roadblock. The dichotomy between female emancipation and ongoing sexual harassment has reached crisis point. It is little wonder that feminist groups become resigned to the seeming intractability of gender intimidation and the pointlessness of crying: “Enough is enough.”
At the end of the day, the only ultimate protection for women and children is the ethic of courtesy developed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to check male predation – designed to turn the brute into the gentleman. Courtesy, of course, needs to be made contemporary, with men not only understanding lack of consent but becoming alert to behaviour on their parts that may make women uncomfortable. Courtesy was a virtue lacking in the Harry Potter actors.
Moral crusades, flagellating others and uncontrolled rage all signal the breakdown of civility. At the core of what is civilised is the quality of how people live together. That quality begins with the texture of feelings that draws them together, especially men and women, and the emotional chemistry that binds them. The wider public arenas of work, sport and casual socialising further reflect the ways of interaction.
All in all, the civilised is a kind of charm that softens and harmonises relations, favouring a sensitive attentiveness, courtesy and respect for others. It has been all too visible in recent times in its breach, rather than in its observance.
John Carroll is professor emeritus at La Trobe University.
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