Rages of the Age: On 'road rage,' 'air rage,' 'rink rage' - Brief Article

Whatever happened to bad temper? When I threw a tantrum as a child (which as I recall was quite often), I was thought to stand in need of some correction: and so a terrible punishment, such as not being allowed out into the garden for an afternoon, was inflicted upon me.

Nowadays, however, I'd be thought to be in need of treatment. There'd be something hypothetically wrong with the limbic system of my brain (the result of birth trauma perhaps), I would suffer from episodic dyscontrol syndrome, I'd be regarded as an invalid. "Poor Theo, he has these fits, it's not his fault, he was born like that." Heads would nod or shake in commiseration with parent and child alike.

But rage is all the rage these days, as a quasi-neurological explanation for outbursts of aggressive and violent conduct, especially among adults. Numerous everyday situations are said to bring on an irresistible impulse to attack others: road rage, air rage, grocery- cart rage. Even a man, Thomas Junta, who killed a fellow father at their sons' hockey practice in Massachusetts, was thought by some to be suffering from a variant of the rage syndrome (rink rage).

Violent incidents on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly reported as examples of specific rages, which take on in the popular imagination the attributes of epilepsy. As the inmates of the prison in which I work often put it, to explain why they thrust a screwdriver through their victim's skull, or some such deed, "My head just went," "I lost it," "I went into one."

"One what?" I ask.

"I just blacked out," is the usual reply. O epilepsy, what crimes are committed in thy name!

The sequence seems to be this. A pattern of conduct is noticed and given a name: "road rage," for example. It then becomes a bona fide medical diagnosis. (How long can it be before road rage is recognized as a disease in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association? The sufferer will, of course, have to fulfill at least three of the following criteria: He was driving legally; he has experienced insensate or disproportionate rage directed at other drivers on at least three occasions; he has experienced his urge to attack them as being beyond his control; he has not exhibited uncontrollable urges to aggression in other circumstances; and he was not under the influence of alcohol or psychoactive drugs at the time of his rages.)

A diagnosis becomes an excuse, and an excuse becomes a justification. Since all of us, when we are about to commit an act that we know in advance to be wrong, rehearse justifications for our ensuing wickedness, it is clear that by increasing the repertoire of justifications available to us for our own misconduct, the process I have described leads to a general deterioration in social behavior. The more rage is a diagnosis, the more rage there will be.

Let us not lose sight of how pleasurable and gratifying, at least in the short term, it can be to lose one's temper. As I know from my own experience as a bad-tempered child, there are few sounds more pleasing to the ear than the smash of broken crockery, the tinkle of shattered glass, the thud of objects, both hard and soft, against the wall. What balm to the soul, and what a soothing of the savage breast! Alas, there is-as with overindulgence in wine or whisky-a price to pay, a kind of hangover afterwards, at least for those with a semblance of a conscience or who are liable to punishment. One vows never to do it again, at any rate not until the next time.

Our increased susceptibility on various occasions and pretexts to expressing our rage is, in fact, only a particular instance of a wider phenomenon: a collective loss of self-control. Indeed, the very idea of self-control came under philosophical and ideological attack in the latter part of the 20th century, with devastating practical effects. We now find it difficult to control our appetites, for food, drugs, alcohol, chocolate, indeed for anything that we can consume. We ascribe the blame to others: to the manufacturers of what we consume, to the advertisers, the government, or even to our own brain, which we conceptualize as a kind of alien object within our skulls. As prisoners sometimes say to me, to inveigle me into prescribing something for them, "My mind's playing games with me, doctor."

There is a clear example of a collective loss of self-control in Britain: the destruction of the taboo against eating in the street. The British can hardly have become hungrier or thirstier in any purely physiological sense in the last forty years, yet they now seem unable to progress further than a few yards in public without taking sustenance: Some, indeed, eat and drink in the middle of their consultations with me in the hospital. From the amount of detritus they leave behind them after thus refreshing themselves, which makes British streets by far the filthiest in the Western world, one might even suppose that the street was the only place they ever ate. The British are now a nation of Pooh Bears: For them, it is always time for a little something.