Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Moral Necessity of Rage

Marc LiVecche on February 4, 2015

A memory invades: it is of my first significant, disequilibrating confrontation with the reality of human evil. At four or five-years-old I had descended the stairs in our old family home to find my father watching a telecast of what I would realize years later to be Les Miserables. Unsettled by the depiction of a savage-looking, chain-bound convict toiling in backbreaking labor, I took him to be a “bad man.” When I learned, rather, that he was imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his starving family I was distressed, bewildered, threatened, and angry, and did what a child can do in such moments: I made a noise like a muffled howl and stumbled away in tears. I intuited, though I could not have then articulated, a three-tiered indication that all is not right in our world: that what-ought-not-to- be often is; that I yearn for the way things ought to be; and that there resides within me a consequent moral indignation that strikes like tinder at what-ought-not-to-be and determines to find remedy.

Rage matters. I am not talking here about a directionless passion lashing out without scruples and destroying everything within reach. There is a rage, a white-hot indignation, which does not initiate but is ignited by, directed toward, and proportionately reactive to a profoundly disordering injustice. This is to say that, on particular occasions, rage is appropriate because it is rational. Following Augustine, the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain understood emotions could be a mode of thought, embodied thought, that bore epistemological significance – helping us to know what we cannot help knowing. She understood we must not end with emotions but neither ought we to discount them. We need to pay attention to what we find “offensive,” “repulsive, “and distasteful” for it might signal to us that something really fundamental has been violated.

What am I going on about? I have just viewed the horrific recording of the burning of 1st Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, the Jordanian pilot murdered by ISIS. And it is time for rage.

In the days to come there will be much discussion and decisions made about proper responses. One can hope it will be proportionately, discriminately, and effectively retributive. What I want to consider here, however, is a different debate. CNN’s Tony Maddox has given several interviews explaining the network’s decision to not show the video. He rightly calls the spectacle “obscene” and insists there is “absolutely no editorial justification for showing it at all.” To be sure, it is not that CNN is trying to hide what has happened, certainly not entirely, as they have fully reported what occurred and described the video to a degree that, in Maddox’s view, “is deeply and profoundly disturbing…out-and-out appalling.” But to show the video itself, he persists, “makes one despair…nothing can be gained from showing that.” I understand this position and it’s not entirely unreasonable. But I don’t agree.

My personal experiences, both living abroad and domestically, suggest that many of the dominant western ways of thinking – even or especially within Christian communities – are increasingly maudlin and desiccate our resolve to deal effectively with evil. We need to be reminded about what it is we’re talking about when we talk about malevolence – what we mean when we say that ISIS is evil. Moral evaluation is embedded in our descriptions of reality; to describe is, itself, a moral action. We need help getting the descriptions right. Observe the rancor over American Sniper and the accusations that Chris Kyle was a racist because he called the enemy insurgents ‘savages’. He was referring to enemies who shielded themselves with children, used children as mules for IEDs, pressed children into retrieving weapons from fallen insurgents in the open streets. Savages exist and we need to call them what they are: they are those who desecrate kids, they are those who burn caged prisoners to death. Other people’s descriptions of events do not appear to be enough. I believe this, in part, because we are not yet angry enough. We feign anger, we talk about red lines not being crossed, or listen to others do so, but, when crossed, we largely prove our bluster. I am not saying watching a video will bring clarity to a complex situation or steel our resolve to press for remedy. But if it makes us mad, it might prove the lie to the CNN executive’s claim that there is nothing to be gained by showing the film. Rage, here, is a decent place to start.

There are those who insist that because ISIS wants the media to show the video we should do all we can to avoid doing that. They point to the technically slick production, the thumping music, the terror-chic of it all, and insist we imbibe their propaganda by viewing it. But that’s just it – ISIS has made murder a dog and pony show. To see the video is to witness the arrogant demeanor of killers indulging in deliberate sadism, the swagger of criminals who take extraordinary pleasure in death, who celebrate atrocity. As with viewing Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, we are made to recognize that, like the fascists, ISIS is not interested in justice, or the deployment of force for the end of peace – they are after subjugation and self-glory. It is important that we know this and important that we are cognizant of the costs of that subjugation. It is important that we feel it viscerally. The video makes all these things clear.

I realize that ISIS releases such videos as warnings – not just to their near neighbors but to the United States – and, with this one, US fighter pilots. They mean to frighten us into keeping out of the fight. But if the anger and protests against ISIS in Jordan, and insufficient US resolve, prove enduring, there is reason to hope they have overplayed their hand. One might recall the execution of Miguel Pro, a Mexican Jesuit martyred by a firing squad in 1927 during Mexico’s wave of anti-Catholic persecution. Pro declined a blindfold, forgave his enemies, and held his arms out in imitation of the crucified Christ. The government blundered by publishing photographs of Pro’s execution to serve as a deterrent to potential adversaries. However, the photographs turned out to be so popular among Mexican Catholics that within a week it was illegal to possess one. While these are vastly different cultural moments and while video will never be a thing venerated, it might be remembered and it might be a goad toward a unified response to the ISIS threat.

Indeed, the video ought to be remembered. And when we begin to forget about it we ought to view it again. While there are good things in the world that we must never forget, such occasions as the present one reminds us there are some terrible infamies that also must always be remembered. Such things, too, ought to be fixed in our minds and hearts, and talked about when we sit at home, or lie down, or rise up, or pass from our houses and walk along the road.

Marc LiVecche is a PhD student at University of Chicago Divinity School and protégé of the late Jean Bethke Elshtain.

  1. Comment by Orter T. on February 4, 2015 at 1:40 pm

    John Wesley rightly viewed ALL emotions as being necessary and helpful. Properly channeling the energy generated by anger or even rage can yield a positive outcome.

  2. Comment by James G C Fredericks on February 4, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    I do not understand the point. If their motive is subjegation and self glory, then that alone proves viewing has nothing to be gained. We all can imagine how horrible this man’s final moments were. We can only imagine how callous, arrogant, sadistic and cut off from G-d these people are. Rage is an effect, but is it productive? Isis actually wants us to engage them, to validate their value. To fight egos, maybe you need to lift up the alter ego of the victim. As in the Mexican priest. But I personally find some sickness in wanting to watch the product of evil, and the process of murder.
    Peace

  3. Comment by Nonovecchio on February 5, 2015 at 11:08 am

    Mr. Fredericks,

    Thank you for your comments. Responding to the last point
    first, there are different kinds of ‘wanting.’ If I am a conscientious surgeon who wants to remove the gangrened leg of a child, I do not ‘want’ to cut away the leg in an active desire for the thing itself. Rather, it is something I choose to do because, in fact, I want
    something else – here the health of the child gained by the life-saving procedure of amputation. Contrast this with my being a sadist who wants to remove the child’s leg simply for the prurient thrill of cutting away his limbs – with no interest in any good end beyond my own kicks. In this sense, I do not want to see the video, I choose to see it – one can choose what one ought never to want.

    On the question of whether rage can be productive: of course
    it can. First, Any of the emotions can produce activity – love compels acts of other-centered self-donation, compassion produces acts of charity, etc. When emotions are felt in excess or deficiency, of course, what they produce can be destructive. Emotions, including rage, are also productive when they correspond to reality. When we feel love toward that which is lovable or when we find joy in that which is worthy of joy or when we rage against that which ought to
    produce rage, we are habituating ourselves to respond rightly to the way things really are. The production is our acquisition of virtue. No one says any of this better than Lewis in The Abolition of Man.

    Finally, just to be sure I was clear on what ISIS wants. When I say they want “subjugation” I mean our subjugation, of course, not their
    own. The problem with this is that they have the aspirations of being a State, or at least of having the power of one. While they haven’t a valid claim to this they do have an awful lot of firepower and the will to press for it. Moreover, their aspirations are clearly not limited to the territory they have already acquired – as the recent raid on the terror cell in Belgium may conclusively prove. The 20th Century clarified the problem of totalizing fanatics wanting global domination. I’m afraid the only thing that tends to halt such militant aspirations is counterforce.

    shalom,

    Marc LiVecche

  4. Comment by EqualTime on February 23, 2015 at 1:31 pm

    I watched this video in horror as well, and would love to know the right response. I am fairly certain it is not rage. I think it is to treat ISIS as a criminal gang for all of the crimes they commit, and minimize the religious and terrorist themes. I believe ISIS, like OBL was on 9/11, is trying to provoke an overreaction to these horrendous, criminal acts, in a recruitment tool for more disaffected youth. It seems clear that there are more “terrorists” about today than on 9/10/01, so we must ask why, and what can be done to change this course. Islamic leadership will be part of the solution, but if not 1000% supportive of bringing these criminals to justice, they are part of the problem.

  5. Comment by Leigh Gillette on June 3, 2015 at 12:41 pm

    Marc, while I agree with everything you’ve said, we must remember that we live in a country where Obama was elected TWICE. The electorate maintains an entitlement mentality and has forgotten the sacrifices our fathers and grandfathers made so they could be so entitled. The group I am talking about have NO intention of sacrificing anything, for ANY reason.

  6. Comment by Nonovecchio on June 18, 2015 at 11:49 am

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