It calls for action. When you can't act – and there is essentially nothing that we or even our government can do to help fight the terrorists in Pakistan – this is somewhere between cheap and actively corrupting.
Source/Credit: The Guardian | Blog
By Andrew Brown | September 25, 2013
Calls for greater anger over the massacre of Christians in Pakistan, or any other heinous crime, promote self-righteousness and seed more violence
An article in the Times today asks why there isn't anger (paywalled link) about the massacre of Christians in Peshawar. Pakistan's Express Tribune talks of "collective outrage" while the Washington Post talks of the Church of Pakistan receiving "calls of outrage from religious leaders from across the globe". The implication, particularly in the Times piece, that there ought to be outrage is clear. But when you think about it, outrage is an almost wholly pointless and destructive emotion and the world would be better with much less of it.
The murder of 80 or more Christians, men women, and children, some of them queueing for food, is a completely horrible crime. It is not remotely excused by the drone campaign against Islamists in the mountains. It's not diminished by the comparable atrocities committed by Islamists against other minorities in Pakistan, Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslims. Those have passed with even less mention in the western press, although one detail of the campaign against the Shia was in a way more shocking even than the use of suicide bombers against church congregations: at one stage the Sunni extremists were deliberately assassinating Shia doctors on the grounds that to kill a doctor is also to kill many of the patients she would otherwise have saved.
But even that is a crime to provoke shock and revulsion. I'm not sure that it calls for outrage. The proper response, as to almost all catastrophes, is immediate unstinting humanitarian aid, and a sober recognition that there are many bad things we can't as a matter of fact do much about.
It calls for action. When you can't act – and there is essentially nothing that we or even our government can do to help fight the terrorists in Pakistan – this is somewhere between cheap and actively corrupting. It becomes a kind of emotional masturbation which never actually touches anyone else.
It wears out. There are so many things which ought to outrage us if we could do something about them – almost certainly there are things about which we could do something, in all our lives, if we weren't so busy being outraged about something we had read or heard about in someone else's life. It is in any case a limited and limiting emotion. There is only so much of it you can feel. Some emotions, like hatred, or even love, can find fuel anywhere, but outrage takes time to regenerate.
But of course it is pleasurable. That's why the media are constantly stimulating it. Fear and anger are pleasurable only in small doses: the ideally frightening media story is about a very ghastly disease that you know you will not actually catch – a rare cancer, a flesh-eating bacterium rather than unglamorous heart disease or dementia that everyone ought to be properly frightened of.
But outrage is more like cocaine. There's hardly any dose that isn't pleasurable. Like cocaine, it disturbs the judgment, too. Where it ought to act as a stimulus to our own action – I was outraged to see the woman begging in the street, so I gave her some money – the outrage in newspapers acts as a stimulus to other people's actions: I was outraged at the story in the paper, so I wrote to a politician demanding that he do something about it.
In private life, it promotes self-righteousness. In public life, it promotes war. In both cases, it plants the seed of more futile sputtering outrage in the future. We should be a little shocked at this, and saddened. We should resolve not to give, nor to take outrage when the media demand it.
Read original post here: Outrage is the wrong reaction to outrageous crimes
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