I have nothing to complain about and I should actually give up my place in the newspaper today to someone who is bursting with indignation. Not that I’m sick or anything, I just don’t get excited about anything. I know that pilots are allowed to unsubscribe in a similar case. Not fit for duty: unable to fulfill your duty to people and country.
It is healthy for democracy that I am not angry about anything this time. I learned this week from an artificial intelligence researcher that software programs are trained by feeding them angry texts. In this way they learn how to recognize human anger. On their instructions, the police and investigative services can then intervene if the mood online is dangerously high.
Suppose you want to prevent a storming of parliament, then you let algorithms scour the internet in search of heated noises. This is called turmoil forecasting. Conflict prediction. And of course it is nice if you avert political violence, but there is a danger that you will stare blindly at good Feyenoord supporters who blow off steam after a loss. Or, even worse, committed citizens who are right – but what is right? – express their anger at policy.
So it is crucial to recognize the difference between rightly and wrongly indignation. Between dangerous and harmless rage. And this is where researchers contradict each other. According to one online anger is never really dangerous and is a poor predictor of real world conflict. When people become physically violent, they don’t have the time or inclination to verbally harass them first. Economic crisis and the climate crisis are much better predictors of violence.
According to the other online conflicts are indeed dangerous and analyzes exacerbate those conflicts even further. Tech companies make money from polarization and therefore stoke the fire. This commercial revenue model, the inflation of anger, which forces people to make increasingly worse statements to be heard, gradually leads to real extremism and eventually to violence.
Be that as it may, in all cases it is wise to remain in control of yourself and your urges and hence my serene mood. At most, I feel a sense of justified annoyance when a serious organization sends me a message of unity to share with my followers. Damn it, I guess, I don’t have any fucking followers, I don’t even want unity. But what could have become dangerous anger quickly fades today.
It is crucial for democracy to keep open the possibility of criticism and contradiction. If we are to teach software programs the difference between useful harsh criticism and undemocratic anger, we must first understand the difference ourselves. It is then noticeable that in the current anger debate people quickly become angry about other people’s anger, which automatically leads to the idea that your own anger is democratically justified and other people’s anger useless.
For the sake of peace, let me use a foreign example. Cultural scientist Catherine Liu describes in her book Virtue Hoarders the class of managers and professionals who hoard, hoard, accumulate virtue. They claim all excellence for themselves and are disturbed by the manners and customs of other layers of the population. The highly educated are not prepared to understand the differences from the perspective of history or capitalism, but are mainly indignant about it. “For them, any conflict is moral, not intellectual or political.”
The conflict is thus not only a stage for one’s own excellence, the very existence of the conflict is itself the proof of that excellence, which is not a small advantage of it. A conflict has much value to offer to those who think they are justified in their outrage.
So far it is still just to follow. But after that, critics point out that Liu, in turn, is unreasonably ranting against the university-educated class. In her ideological zeal, she fulminates against the attitude to life of the professionals without understanding the circumstances in which it arises. For example, she sketches a conflict that she herself stirs, which is a good revenue model, but a lousy way of intellectual interpretation.
In short, if you want to update the software programs on the anger debate, you have to show them all the layers of moral outrage I find in my mailbox these days. A downward spiral of endless nagging, which you can only escape by skipping once.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 28, 2022