What else are we supposed to do with all this anger?
It’s almost a reflex to glance at the person standing two feet short of six behind you at the grocery store. It’s even more tempting to speak up when you see maskless diners through the windows of restaurants, eating out as though the pandemic never happened. When it comes to pandemic anger — the frustration that comes from seeing people ignore Covid-19 safety rules, often followed by an impulse to shame them — I’ve noticed a lot of Americans are speaking in different languages. |
I write the Debatable newsletter here in Opinion, where I surface expert views on issues that are divisive, but whose divisions aren’t always clear cut. In this case, the question for many of us may be: To shame or not to shame? After all, what else are we supposed to do with all this anger? |
If you ask a public health expert, they will probably tell you that anger and shame aren’t effective. As Aaron E. Carroll wrote recently, shaming can actually make controlling an outbreak more difficult because it discourages people from disclosing their symptoms and seeking treatment. But ask another health care professional, and you may get a very different answer. |
“With due respect, I have no patience for those refusing to socially distance or wear a mask, as it is my life that is on the line,” one reader, who identified himself as an E.R. doctor, commented on Carroll’s Op-Ed. “There is no nuance here, and no need to dance around the issue, and frankly those who do not comply should absolutely be ashamed, and be shamed.” |
For me, at least, this reader’s response raised questions about pandemic anger that epidemiologists aren’t really meant to answer: Anger may not work as a public health strategy, but working isn’t all that anger’s good for. |
That was one of the insights I found in the work of the Oxford philosophy professor Amia Srinivasan. One of Srinivasan’s areas of study is the ethical and political character of anger — what conditions make us entitled to it, why feeling it can be intrinsically valuable, and how unjust social arrangements can put our right to express anger in conflict with other moral obligations (saving lives, for example). |
Srinivasan’s work can’t necessarily tell us how to resolve these conflicts — in fact, her point is that doing so may be impossible — but it might help us to better talk about them, and perhaps even to find a better place to direct our anger. |
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