Americans, a goodly number of them anyway, are angry. Opinion
polls and both parties' primaries are evidence of that. But
will this anger be put to good use or squandered? At the
moment, squandering appears the better bet.
A passage I stumbled across while reading Josef Pieper's
wonderful little book The Four Cardinal Virtues got me
thinking about these matters. Pieper, a philosopher of note
in his own right, was a brilliant expositor of St. Thomas
Aquinas whose deeply Thomistic virtue book is a masterpiece.
Still, someone might reasonably ask what does the
13th-century Angelic Doctor possibly have to say to
21st-century America? Judge for yourself. The following
passage from Pieper, in a chapter on the cardinal virtue of
temperance, caught my attention:
"The combination of the intemperateness of lustfulness with
the lazy inertia incapable of generating anger is the sign of
complete and virtually hopeless degeneration. It appears
whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization is ripe
for its decline and fall."
No sober observer of today's America can ignore the presence
of intemperate lustfulness in a broad swath of popular
culture. But what about the anger of the people who have
given vociferous support to some of our presidential
candidates? Is their wrathful discontent a kind of blessing
in disguise - a bulwark against the decline and fall of which
Pieper warns?
Following Aquinas, Pieper leaves no doubt that intemperate
anger is as bad a thing as intemperate sexual passion. Yet
"anger is 'good,'" he writes, "if in accordance with the
order of reason, it is brought into service for the true
goals of man" among them the righting of wrongs and the
elimination of injustices.
But aren't righting wrongs and remedying injustices just what
the anger of candidates' supporters want? Underlying their
disgust with "the establishment" and "the system" is
well-founded disgust with a political system that has become
visibly dysfunctional and an economy in which a handful of
lucky CEOs are rewarded with multi-million-dollar
compensation packages even as debate rages over a proposed
$15 hourly minimum wage.
If you think that the anger widely felt in the face of these
disturbing circumstances has the potential of becoming, with
proper guidance, an engine driving reform, you may reasonably
find that anger encouraging. In which case I regret to tell
you that the chances of reform happening are not good.
There are several reasons for that. Among them is the fact
that candidates have tapped into a reservoir of public wrath
in order to win support without offering practical reform
proposals that they would pursue if elected. It's also highly
probable that the presidential campaign of 2016 will be an
unusually ugly affair of mutual defamation and personal
insult aimed at stoking still more anger without directing it
to a positive outcome. The result: whoever wins will enter
the Oval Office facing an ocean of resentment in the country
and in Congress - and anger, yes, but of a destructive,
unfruitful kind - making our recent years of stalemate look
like a golden age of political comity and creative dialogue.
Pieper joins St. Thomas in naming the forms of intemperate
anger as blind wrath, bitterness of spirit and resentment
bent on revenge. If that is where America is headed, instead
of celebrating anger in the service of noble goals, we need
to pray. Pray what? That's obvious: God help the United
States.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of
American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and
Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius Press).