On Anger, via Plutarch

To see oneself in a state which nature did not intend, with one’s features all distorted, contributes in no small degree toward discrediting that passion.—Plutarch

I don’t know how it came about, but somehow, for some reason, Debbie, my wife, surreptitiously took a video of me getting worked up about something. That happened some time ago now, during an overseas trip. When I stumbled upon it a couple of years later, I was taken aback. The facial contortions, the unpleasant wining, the huffing and puffing over some inconsequential thing—what a spectacle to behold! I am still ashamed to think of it. Mortified, actually. And then the thought: “How often have I looked like that in my life, oblivious to the imprint I was leaving on the world around me?”

That experience primed me to read Plutarch’s “On the Control of Anger” (Moralia VI) with keen interest. As one is right to expect, he comes down hard on anger. What intrigued me most, though, is a practical solution he suggests, which is a strategy and statement about human nature in equal measure. In short, he proposes that we should pay a person to walk behind us with a mirror in hand. The only task of the said companion would be to put the speculum in front of our face the moment we lose our temper. The intuition behind that somewhat facetious thought experiment is that if we could only see our visage in such ignoble moments, we would be forced to concede the ugliness of our reactivity and perhaps nib it in its bud.

As I think about that video, I see what Plutarch is after. The mere remembrance of those images has had a deterring force in many a moment. The thought, “I don’t want to look and sound like that,” has stopped me dead in the tracks more than once. One could name this the moral force of negative self-exemplarity. And sometimes, that’s all we need.