The Pleasure of Outrage
Consider the following Twitter (X) exchange this week:
The wag who posted the reply meant it as you would hope: satirically. The comments that followed made it clear that as usually happens online, a great many young people did not get the satire memo and took the question painfully, tediously seriously. How can one masturbate in light of what’s happening in Gaza? How can one enjoy ice cream with a child when global warming is destroying our planet? (Have you checked the temperature in Uttar Pradesh this week?) How can one go on a date when one considers Khan Yunis? How can we get excited about the NFL draft, or the new Taylor Swift record, or graduation, in light of the ongoing dreadfulnesses in South Sudan or the Central African Republic or Kharkiv or Ciudad Juarez?
When I was in college in the 1980s, there was a ubiquitous slogan on bumper stickers and t-shirts. It was very popular on the left: “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention.” The implication was that anguish and anger were signs of what the romantic age called “sensibility” — a keen awareness of the world. Joy was permitted in small doses, the way that hell week for the Navy SEALs permits minute amounts of sleep — but for the most part, one demonstrated one’s empathy for the downtrodden through a mixture of self-sacrifice and public displays of simmering discontent. (Bonus points for loudly telling your roommates to boycott things they liked, because they were made in the wrong places by the wretched and the wronged.)
It takes one a long time to realize that the bumper sticker proposes a total falsehood. You can be paying attention, but also recognize that outrage is almost always more performative than productive. You can grieve without anger. You can note that the world is not, in fact, neatly divided into categories like innocent victims and ruthless genocidaires. You can say the truth: “These issues are complicated,” and calmly stand your ground when your interlocutor splutters in fury and declares that it’s not complicated at all, that it’s all really simple, and tries to convince everyone in earshot that acknowledging complexity is, in fact, just complicity with evil. (You smile and ask them to consider their tone, and they scream something about civility being the rope used to strangle their ever-so-precious and always justified outrage.)
I read a lot of news. I ask for subscriptions to things for my birthday, and I save up my pennies to purchase my way past paywalls. I read the right-wing (National Review, Compact, American Conservative, Claremont Review). I read the left-wing (The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept.) I read the papers of record: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal. I read of horrors aplenty. I am reasonably up-to-date on what is going on. My failure to be outraged is not a consequence of refusing to pay attention. If you wish to attribute its absence to malice, privilege, or trauma you may do so, but I don’t think you can reasonably declare me ignorant.
Also when I was in college — back when that shirt about paying attention was hip — the Australian band Midnight Oil had an international hit with a very angry song, “Beds are Burning.” All my Gen X readers will remember the chorus:
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
This was in 1987. I remember the glorious irony — if that’s the right use here — that the song topped the dance charts in several countries. I heard many a remix in the clubs, as this was an era when I went to dance clubs. Millions of people the world over, gyrating and pogoing and discoing to a song that asked how we could do such a thing. A song, of course, written with a particular melody and beat designed to make sure that you danced when you heard it. Midnight Oil had a reputation as a band filled with serious activists — the lead singer ended up as a minister in the Australian government years later — but they clearly also had the good sense to understand that there was money to be made off making outrage danceable.
I don’t know if we needed Rolling Stone to tell us that a young pop star really loves to masturbate. I do know that we live in a world where a lot of people get a lot of attention by shouting very loudly that we are in a crisis so grave and so monstrous that we must forego our joys and our comforts and throw our bodies onto the machinery of injustice until the gears themselves catch and stop on our torn flesh. Okay maybe they don’t say quite that, but they do have a very high sense of their self-importance, an overinflated sense of destiny, and a deep despondent desperation about the human future. I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off following Miss Eilish’s recommendation. Or just going on a date, kissing someone cute, dancing with abandon, and considering the possibility that outrage is not a very helpful yardstick with which to measure either empathy or virtue.