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.
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