Adam Kirsch: The Trouble with Anger
[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor for The New Republic.]
In the brief national soul-searching that followed the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, many observers, including President Obama, reflected on the troubling excess of anger and moral indignation in our political discourse—the kind of indignation that turns opponents into enemies, and campaigns into crusades. Yet, even as responsible figures on the right and the left in America are urging their fellow-citizens (in Roger Ailes’s surprising words) to “tone it down,” the best-selling book in France is a pamphlet titled Indignez-vous!—roughly, Get Angry! This tract, about 15 pages long and priced at 3 euros, has sold close to one million copies since October.
The American press has not paid much attention to Indignez-vous!. But British newspapers have been fascinated by the human-interest elements of the book’s success. For one thing, the book’s 93-year-old author is a genuine hero. As a member of the French Resistance, Stephane Hessel parachuted into occupied France, was captured by the Nazis, and spent time in Buchenwald before escaping. After the war, he became a diplomat, serving on the commission that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
His biography is central both to the success of Indignez-vous! and to what has so far received much less attention: its actual argument. The book is explicitly designed as the deathbed charge of a World War II hero to today’s youth, urging them to cast off their feckless indifference and reclaim the righteous indignation of the Resistance. “I want all of you, each one of you, to have your grounds for indignation,” Hessel writes. “It is precious. When you get outraged the way I was outraged by Nazism, you become militant, strong, and engaged.”
It might seem hard to object to Hessel’s message, which, on one level, is as platitudinous as a high-school graduation speech: care about the world you live in, fight injustice, cherish non-violence (“I am convinced that the future belongs to non-violence, to the reconciliation of different cultures”). Yet there is actually something quite troubling about the huge popularity of Indignez-vous! and about the political use it makes of the Resistance legacy. For what defined the years 1940 to1944 in France was, precisely, the absence of politics: a country under foreign occupation is deprived of the opportunity, and the responsibility, of self-government. This is a source of humiliation and suffering, but it can also, to those brave people who continue to engage in public life, be a source of exhilarating clarity. Especially when the occupier is as unmistakably evil as Nazi Germany, and especially when the resister is half-Jewish, like Hessel, the compromises and uncertainties of ordinary politics are abolished. “Resisting, for us, meant refusing to accept German occupation and defeat. It was relatively simple,” Hessel recalls....
Read entire article at The New Republic
In the brief national soul-searching that followed the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, many observers, including President Obama, reflected on the troubling excess of anger and moral indignation in our political discourse—the kind of indignation that turns opponents into enemies, and campaigns into crusades. Yet, even as responsible figures on the right and the left in America are urging their fellow-citizens (in Roger Ailes’s surprising words) to “tone it down,” the best-selling book in France is a pamphlet titled Indignez-vous!—roughly, Get Angry! This tract, about 15 pages long and priced at 3 euros, has sold close to one million copies since October.
The American press has not paid much attention to Indignez-vous!. But British newspapers have been fascinated by the human-interest elements of the book’s success. For one thing, the book’s 93-year-old author is a genuine hero. As a member of the French Resistance, Stephane Hessel parachuted into occupied France, was captured by the Nazis, and spent time in Buchenwald before escaping. After the war, he became a diplomat, serving on the commission that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
His biography is central both to the success of Indignez-vous! and to what has so far received much less attention: its actual argument. The book is explicitly designed as the deathbed charge of a World War II hero to today’s youth, urging them to cast off their feckless indifference and reclaim the righteous indignation of the Resistance. “I want all of you, each one of you, to have your grounds for indignation,” Hessel writes. “It is precious. When you get outraged the way I was outraged by Nazism, you become militant, strong, and engaged.”
It might seem hard to object to Hessel’s message, which, on one level, is as platitudinous as a high-school graduation speech: care about the world you live in, fight injustice, cherish non-violence (“I am convinced that the future belongs to non-violence, to the reconciliation of different cultures”). Yet there is actually something quite troubling about the huge popularity of Indignez-vous! and about the political use it makes of the Resistance legacy. For what defined the years 1940 to1944 in France was, precisely, the absence of politics: a country under foreign occupation is deprived of the opportunity, and the responsibility, of self-government. This is a source of humiliation and suffering, but it can also, to those brave people who continue to engage in public life, be a source of exhilarating clarity. Especially when the occupier is as unmistakably evil as Nazi Germany, and especially when the resister is half-Jewish, like Hessel, the compromises and uncertainties of ordinary politics are abolished. “Resisting, for us, meant refusing to accept German occupation and defeat. It was relatively simple,” Hessel recalls....