A general psycho-neuro scenario of anger:  It begins outside you, with some sort of trigger – injustice, humiliation, betrayal, dishonor, frustration, negligence, restraint, physical threat.  It moves inside, into the pre-human depths of your brain and lights up a bunch of neurons called the amygdala.  The amygdala and some of its neural associates analyze the trigger’s shape, sound, and outrageousness, and decide to get angry.  They send out chemicals — serotonin, noradrenaline, and dopamine — which fly all over the brain and raise your blood pressure, increase your heart rate, turn your face red, intensify your alertness, narrow your attention, and screw up your judgment.  Whatever is in control now, it’s not you.  You cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.  You lose it.

“If this were the worst of this passion, it were more tolerable, but it ruins and subverts whole towns, cities, families, and kingdoms,” wrote Robert Burton, the seventheenth century scholar, in the remarkable Anatomy of Melancholy.  The history of nations, he continues, is the history of anger:  “Look into our Histories, and you shall almost meet with no other subject, but what a company of hare-brains have done in their rage!”

Anger isn’t inevitable, of course.  The psycho-neuro scenario has alternatives.  Those chemicals can eventually make it to the pre-frontal cortex which then advises the rest of the brain that all this hoo-ha needs regulation.  Situational awareness, analysis, and re-assessment kick in and maybe you decide you don’t like where this is going.  Or maybe now you’re just irked.  Or maybe you’re still angry but you’re in control.  Whether you’re better off venting the anger or stifling it is not clear; psychological researchers contradict each other.  In fact, when psychological researchers aren’t contradicting each other, they’re being vague with their definitions, and even if their definitions were specific their conclusions are not news to anybody, and after reading enough of them I don’t know what to believe and I must say, I’m pissed off.

However, I govern my impulses.  So do scientists.  Though I think I’ve heard scientists express every other deadly sin, I don’t think I’ve ever heard one being angry.  I’m sure they do get angry – at their idiot, lazy, preening, grabby colleagues; at fossil hunters and meteorite smugglers; at funding bodies and money spent on the space station; at the enthusiasts on behalf of animal rights, intelligent design, and denial of climate change – but they remain civil and rational.  In fact, climate scientists are in the midst of disagreeing over whether they’d be more effective with the public if they sounded madder.  I think civil rationality is part of scientists’ culture and for a good reason:  their careers are spent disagreeing and being disagreed with over the things they care about most urgently, in a closed system with limited money and jobs.  But they’re not hare-brains; they control their anger, they direct it.

I’m going to argue that regulated and directed anger is the world’s most effective force for getting things done.  I’m sure you have examples of this yourself:  something bad happens; you get enraged and furious; time and your pre-frontal cortex work their magic; and your rage and fury get condensed, refined into something reasonable but unrelenting, aimed at righting some wrong by God and you’re the person to do it and nobody should even think about getting in your way.

One of my examples, and she’s not that unusual:  I interviewed a woman I’ll call Louise about her son’s death.  He was 24, and six months into his first real job, he surprised an escaped convict on a construction site and was shot.  It had happened many years before and I asked her if she thought she was over it.

She didn’t answer right away and instead talked about going to the murderer’s trial.  “Of course I was going to kill this person,” she said.  “I was, I was going into the courtroom with a gun and kill him.”  She didn’t; the murderer was sentenced to 67 years.  Three weeks after her son died, she said, “I went to Washington to see why an escaped convict would have a gun and what was being done.  I’m still doing that.”

She has worked on national political platforms, run for state office, won awards, and organized a gun control group.  Thirteen years after her son died, in 1988, her state banned Saturday-night-specials, partly through the efforts of her organization.  In 1996, when the murderer was about to be paroled on a technicality, she xeroxed a truth-in-sentencing form and got 8,000 signatures, and the parole was denied.  In 2001, when she was 73, she was writing newspaper articles on gun control.  In 2006, age 78, she was being quoted in national news stories about the cruelty of the death penalty:  “Give them a sedative?  Give me a break,” she said.

Back in 1996, when I was interviewing her, she eventually answered my question:  “I was a follower, never a leader.  I think I’m still that way,” she said, “but if I see wrong, I have to get it right.  I think about how angry my son would be.  And his voice is silent.  Yet you say, ‘are you over it?’   No.  You just don’t.  I don’t think ‘over it’ is the word you want to use.”

That’s anger even a raging hare-brain would back away from.

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Photo credits: fire –  Fir0002/Flagstaffotos via Wikimedia Commons; assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, triggering the 1994 Brady Bill, a national law that among other things, bans convicts from having handguns – cliff1066â„¢ via Flickr, Ron Edmonds, AP