Emilie’s Reviews > Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion > Status Update

“I’mma get medieval on your ass,” says Marcellus to Zed in Tarantino’s
cult movie Pulp Fiction (1994), before dispatching his groveling victim.
Barton points out that “getting medieval” could mean, to the contrary,
anger defused and amity restored.

Monks and lords were medieval society’s elite. Peasants might rage, but
their anger was never appreciated as righteous. As Paul Freedman has
noted, “anger was an essentially noble prerogative.”

Lactantius, like Tertullian, disparaged a God with no feelings; he
would be uncaring, immobile, deaf to prayers. [...] For Lactantius, “anger is the emotion that is aroused in order to restrain sins.

The Semai god is the opposite of loving; it is ugly, cruel, and willful,
delighting in havoc. Th e Semai see god in the terrible thunderstorms
that ravage their hills and valleys: lightning crashes, thunder roars, rain
pours down in sheets. Mothers use the occasion to teach their children
the right response: “Fear! Fear!”

Neostoicism was incorporated into the justifications that rulers of the early modern state used in order to control social behavior, including emotions of every sort.

We often equate anger with the instances of violence that we
censure. The corollary is that when we approve of violence—when we
lock people up in jail, support capital punishment, or proudly march off
to war—we rarely deem these acts to be galvanized by anger.
Does anger always imply violence? Not invariably, as we shall see.
But many emotional communities make the link.

The idea that killing a bad person may be a form of compassion was
further developed in Vajrayana Scriptures, which sometimes saw killing
as “liberating” the unvirtuous from the consequences of their bad actions
(karma).