How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures

by Owen J. Flanagan

An expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shameThe world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better.Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot.How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

314 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 2, 2021

About the author

Owen Flanagan, Ph.D. (born 1949) is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Flanagan has done work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, ethics, contemporary ethical theory, moral psychology, as well as Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of the self.

Flanagan earned his Ph.D from Boston University and his Bachelor of arts degree from Fordham University.

Flanagan has written extensively on consciousness. He has been realistic about the difficulty of consciousness as a scientific and philosophical problem, but optimistic about the chance of solving the problem. One of the problems in a study of consciousness is the hidden way in which conscious states are dependent on brain states. Flanagan has proposed that there is a "natural method" to go about understanding consciousness that involves creating a science of mind. Three key elements of this developing science are: 1) paying attention to subjective reports on conscious experiences, 2) incorporating the results from psychology and cognitive science, and 3) including the results from neuroscience that will reveal how neuronal systems produce consciousness.

Flanagan is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Flanagan's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Fla...

Reviews

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent most of my life as a slave to my emotions, and I’ve worked really hard on my emotional regulation. Today, as I look around, I see so many people who struggle with the same issue, so I enjoy books diving into the topic. In this book, Flanagan takes a philosophical approach to explaining emotions like anger, guilt, and shame as well as how we can manage them. The book also has a touch of anthropology as he covers how emotions are similar as well as different among different cultures and why that is. There are some great discussions from this book that I think a lot of people can benefit from if they want to lead a better life and have better relationships with the people we encounter on a daily basis.

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative book, using small samples of monocultures to recommend big changes in increasingly diverse multicultures, primarily in North America. Flanagan commented on the scaling issues himself, no need to worry about that. My takeaway from this issue, is that change starts on an granular level, the 'self' and since we are gregarious beings, the change, if stemming from the right place, will often multiply into change beyond our control.

Flanagan's arguments are well-rounded and rooted in studies, philosophies, anthropology, theology, and even personal experiences. I learned a lot in this book; it managed to show the entire picture of our 'global village' (an exaggeration) and showed me what we could all be doing better. I found the flaws in psychological studies to be especially gripping. The actual writing in this is nothing spectacular, but that was not the point of this book. I would recommend it if you have any interest in cultivating a better life for yourself.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parts of this book were amazing; parts were only good. Unfortunately the only-good parts were repeated several times, which meant I skimmed through a good chunk of the book.

When he's fired up, his writing is exceptional. Exhibit a:

The internet has allowed an epistemic free-for-all in which truth is not aligned with facts but with what various influencers or interest groups say are the facts. There are very dark places on the web that convince unsuspecting souls that they are seeing the light, when, in fact, they are rummaging around at the bottom of Plato's cave.

...We are, as a people, angrier than ever -- at least angrier than I have ever seen. We model for one another and our children a "passionate intensity" that is overly confident, narcissistically demanding, demeaning of those with whom we disagree, noisy, unwilling to listen, and often embedded in cruelty. How we collectively do anger needs work.

Simultaneously, there is also a loss of a shared sense of shame. People ought to be ashamed if they disregard what's true, good, and beautiful. But they aren't. Shamelessness is common, and it reflects a situation in which many values are weakly held, and in which norms suited for a common life that aims at the common good yield to precepts for winning friends and influencing people, gaming, and getting ahead.

Whew!

In How to Do Things with Emotions, Flanagan surveys global cultures to show how anger and shamed are displayed and to what ends to help us think through our options. Emotions, he writes, are not just the internal feeling states, but a host of cultural beliefs about what those internal states mean, when it is appropriate to experience them, and a variety of cultural scripts about how to express them and what kind of resolution is appropriate.

Flanagan argues that there are many good varieties of anger, particularly those that are dedicated to ending injustice, but two kinds in particular come in for heavy criticism: payback anger (revenge) and pain-passing anger (venting at someone who doesn't deserve it to make yourself better, thereby making them feel worse). He sees these varieties pretty much everywhere, in every social strata and all over the political spectrum, though many deny it in themselves or their social circles. There is a tension, he agrees, in that legitimate anger may involve some pain-passing, but as long as pain-passing isn't the point, in his view it's ok.

He criticizes the view WEIRD North-Americans have that how they feel and express anger is natural and biological, by discussing how and why anger is done elsewhere, from cultures where it is believed to be always bad and never justified to one that feels rage against children is how you bring them up properly.

Carol Tavris describes the dominant American view among psychologists and psychiatrists and, thanks to them, also among laypeople, as the "ventilationist view" (1982...). Anger must be released, otherwise there will be addiction, eating disorders skin disorders, migraines, divorce, and general mayhem -- except when one examines the evidence, it is all bullshit in the technical, philosophical sense (Frankfurt [1986]...). The message is designed to persuade, but with complete disregard for the truth and evidence. Ventilating anger models self-indulgent expression, allows people to practice how to have an outburst, and increases rather than decreases the total amount of angry expression, especially among people who are receiving "anger management" treatment (Barash and Lipton, 2011).

If I had to sum up, I'd say he argues how we do anger is bad because it is based on individualistic, entitled and narcissistic cultural values that overly emphasize the self. Can't say I disagree.

On shame, he argues that the literature stating that shame is always a 'toxic' emotion with destructive effects has confused "shame" the emotion with "humiliation and shaming" the practices and "self-loathing" the state, which makes sense to me. Shame does not have to be applied to the self in a global sense, in fact it usually isn't even in our own cultures, and it does not need to inspire toxic responses like addiction or lashing out; as proof, see the many cultures globally who see shame as proof of maturity and use it extensively to maintain social relations and socialize children. Moreover, he argues, the distinction between guilt and shame (made so much of by some authors/speakers) is blurry; most people use the terms interchangeably; the research instruments 'proving' shame is bad are deeply flawed; and we still do expect people to feel shame at character flaws or particularly serious breaches of social mores.

Shame has an undeserved bad rap in WEIRD countries. This bad rap has nothing, exactly zero, to do with any natural features of shame as a complex social emotion.... shame's bad rap has to do with appalling values that result in people being taught or encouraged to be ashamed of things that no one should ever be ashamed about--the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their gender, their whole self. The badness of these kinds of shame has to do with their terrible content ... Shame about breaking promises, or about being rude to service workers, or for being a malicious gossip, or shame at being a racist or a sexist are all fine, because one ought to feel ashamed of these things.

(I've been arguing with friends for years about this -- that shame is fine, that there are pro-social and anti-social types of shame, and we should embrace the former and not the latter; it was good to see this echoed here.)

The only problem with these sections is that he repeats them so many times. However the central arguments and their lines of evidence make sense. I wish he had come up with more defined proposals for these emotions, but I understand that his aim was to inspire reflection and discussion. It certainly has done so for me. I'm going to be thinking about the role of pain-passing anger in social justice and advocacy for a while in my own life.

~~~~~

The book also helped me reflect and better understand other, unrelated situations, and I'll try to briefly summarize them here since I know some of my review followers are interested in these topics (not that you're likely to have read this far, but oh well):

Child abuse:

Emotions are socialized; we are born with internal feeling states, yes, but not with the interpretive and socialized components of emotions. We feel bad (or good) and our caregivers label that feeling for us and instruct whether it and our expression of it are appropriate or not. In this way, competent caregivers bring children into the culture in which they live.

Flanagan describes this process without much commentary in order to develop his own thesis, but I couldn't help but think of my own experience and that of many others I know, in which feeling states were labelled and evaluated by caregivers with bad intentions to manipulate and dominate the child. No wonder the effects are so long-lasting and so pervasive. In my own case, I can't remember exactly what was said as it began in infancy, but as an example my mom criticized and and complained through my 30s that I stayed up and cried at night as an infant intentionally to keep her up and hurt her. I can only imagine the words and reactions she used at the time, but to have whatever emotional experience I was having labelled as a selfish attack on someone -- no wonder I still struggle with insomnia. No wonder this kind of abuse results in self-loathing.

Emotions and gender

Flanagan mentions this -- that scripts for emotions, including what it is appropriate to feel in what circumstances and how it is appropriate to express -- are not monolithically described even in a single culture, but will vary on things like gender, income, caste, age, etc. WRT gender, with the classic division of anger=male and shame=female, and the author's linking of anger t0 individualism and entitlement and shame to failed social expectations ... yep. Then I kept thinking about how these emotions flip back and forth for men and women depending on what they're supposed to feel.

So if men have greater scope for entitlement and women have obligations, and this leads to men being more angry and women more ashamed in the same or similar situations, this explains why a man's shame could flip to anger (I am not supposed to be made to feel bad! I am entitled to feel good about myself! How dare you!), and a woman's anger could flip to shame (Oh no, I am not supposed to feel entitled to this thing. My anger means that I have failed in my obligations. How could I!).

[Wing · Rating 3 out of 5]

Using the method of comparative philosophical anthropology, Professor Flanagan has made a strong case for damping down anger and rehabilitating shame to bring about societal good in the contemporary American multicultural milieu. Moral outrage, which should be encouraged, is one thing, but payback and pain-passing anger have no place in human flourishing. Likewise, autonomous, as opposed to heteronomous, shame that is non-global and value specific can be beneficial if not vital. Emotions are generated actively to achieve goals and are formal. Their scripts are plastic. Whether they are good or bad depend on the values that they serve. Negative valence itself is not on its own a problem. Also, the centrality of the ecology/subecology cannot be overemphasised. Protoemotions need cultivation to be sculpted into healthy emotions. Flanagan also draws our attention to the importance of using evidence in philosophical arguments and the harm that biased studies and pseudoscience can produce. A variety of moral possibilities through anthropological observations are used to illustrate his arguments. They are fascinating and remind us what is actual is also possible. A very timely book indeed.

[Billie Pritchett]

A cross cultural depiction of anger and shame that concludes that anger is almost always bad and shame is sometimes good. According to Flanagan, the two dominant versions of anger, revenge-seeking and venting, harm others. The first is done with the intention to harm others and the second is done typically with the intention to show that one feels pain but nevertheless inadvertently harms others. Regarding shame, Flanagan admits that the term is often confounded with guilt but however one uses the terms what he seeks to designate in its mature form is the internalization that one ought not to do certain actions because they would reflect, would seem to be evidence of, a poor character. It is, on Flanagan’s reading, a form of self-cultivation. This book is an excellent intervention into moral topics especially as it draws upon global sources to do a comparative ethics.

[Cal Davie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely thoughtful and well written.

Flanagan utilises contemporary research on the neurological foundations of emotions to argue how we can utilise these for an ethical purpose. Anger at injustice has a place, and so does shaming those who create injustice (in a way which brings hope for redemption). A definite must read.

[Elizabeth]

As seen in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...