One of the things that make ancient theories of anger management unpalatable to the modern reader is their single-minded focus on the mind of the master. Seneca is no exception to the rule: like other writers in the genre, he draws the better part of his historical examples from the annals of master-slave interactions. Seneca takes it for granted that one of the obligations of mastery is to discipline slaves, in many cases by corporal punishment. Most or all situations that call for such punishment are also likely to provoke the master to an anger which, as Seneca sees it, threatens to undermine the whole disciplinary project. The reason why is probably that, according to an Aristotelian dictum that Seneca also accepts, anger arises primarily between equals. To punish while angry is to erase the status distinction separating master from slave, and thus to convert what should appear as a disciplinary action imposed legitimately on a subaltern into an act of “mere” violence.
The same logic dictates that you should never try to discipline an angry friend (“castigare irascentem,” De ira 3.40), because this attempt to impose your authority over a notional equal would come as a slight bound to intensify the ira that you want to quash. For the Romans, anger is a privilege among equals, in other words the unpleasant cost of a class solidarity that maintains itself by distinction from, and as superior to, an underclass with whom one simply cannot get angry.
An interesting permutation on this scenario is the office of the principate, notionally primus inter pares but, as early imperial writers were prepared to admit in their darker moments, really standing in relation to “free” Roman citizens as these stood in relaation to their slaves. Seneca highlights this new wrinkle in his account of Vedius Pollio, an arriviste who threatens to have a clumsy slave fed to the eels in Augustus’ presence. Augustus saves the slave, then punishes Pollio by having his eel ponds filled in. This, says Seneca, is an instance in which you can “castigare irascentem:” “[si] forte tanta persona eris ut possis iram comminuere.”
For Greek and Roman writers alike, anger is all about power relations. Anger marks out a certain domain of equality and measures deviations from that equality, whether negative (slave) or positive (emperor). Its function thus seems static and, as we would think, rather different from the kind of anger that has accompanied transformative social movements from the French Revolution on.
Here is the rare place, though, where we should be cautious about assuming too much distance between present and past. The anger that brought Trump into office (and, more generally, the whole phenomenon chronicled by Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger) is fundamentally an anger of the ancient, static kind, one that lays claim on the part of one group to mastery over an opposing group that “should” be an underclass. In this sense, even the economically-distressed and mobility-troubled voters described by Arlie Hochschild are really white supremacists, though they may not be aware of it: they claim the right to be angry at others for having the temerity to act as their equals. The only advice that Seneca would have for voters like these is that their anger, as such, is counterproductive, that they should exercise their dominion calmly so as to achieve a greater disciplinary power.
In a world of “negative solidarity” where hostility is the only universally comprehensible form of political engagement, that advice no longer makes much sense. The script has flipped: anger creates media presence, voter turnout, and (in a feedback loop of which we are yet to see the worst consequences) profits for social media sites like Twitter and Facebook which thus have an incentive to stoke anger higher. George W.S. Trow said we should be suspicious of anyone who invites us to an event the whole “event” status of which consists in our being there. That was a perceptive warning against the modern anger culture, but Trow (having had the luck to die before the internet came along) never told us what to do if an event like that came to us, if we couldn’t escape it.
The enlightenment and the French Revolution show us one way forward. Both drew their motivating force from anger, on the part of those lately disillusioned, at social structures and cultural institutions that had aimed to keep them dumb and in bondage. The anger of a Rousseau was totalizing and, as such, did not spare Rousseau himself. A total anger, including hatred of what we are (and hope soon not to be) has revolutionary potential. It’s not spectacular, it’s badly-suited for radio call-in shows, and that’s what differentiates it from ira. In that sense at least, Seneca’s advice – noli irascere – may still have something to it.