Rages of the Age: On 'road rage,' 'air rage,' 'rink rage' . . .

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.

I described this collective loss of self-control to a group of polite and intelligent middle-class students a few weeks ago. They laughed: and it took me a few moments to realize that what they found amusing was that their recent forebears had been so primitive as to expect people to curb their appetite for the sake of social propriety. Could anything have been more ridiculous, or indeed oppressive? Never had I felt so old: and it occurred to me that, despite their apparent docility, I had before me a class of youngsters who might be susceptible to all sorts of rages.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. The idea of rage as giving rise to an uncontrollable impulse-and therefore to exculpatory temporary insanity-is hardly novel. It was put forward as an argument by Lord Ferrars in 1760, during his trial for murder before his peers, the House of Lords. Their Lordships were not taken in.

Ferrars shot a man called John Johnson, the steward of his estates, whom he had invited to his house, and against whom he had certain grudges. Johnson subsequently died, though not straight away. At his trial, Ferrars argued that he had always been of such choleric disposition that, at times when his blood was up, he knew not right from wrong. And indeed the evidence was that, from a very early age, Ferrars was of a vile, ungovernable, abusive, threatening, and ill- tempered disposition, because of which many would avoid his company altogether. In effect, Ferrars argued that-as the prisoners would no doubt put it-his head just went, he went into one, he lost it. He was therefore not responsible for his actions, and could therefore not be found guilty of the capital offense of murder.

It is certainly true that people differ in their temperaments, probably by constitution. But, said the prosecuting attorney general in his final address, "If the Law were to receive such excuses, it would put a sword into the hand of every savage and licentious man, to disturb private life and public order."

The attorney general also dealt in his closing speech with the idea that to lose one's temper was a kind of exculpating insanity:

My Lords, in some sense, every crime proceeds from insanity. All cruelty, all brutality, all revenge, all injustice, is insanity. There were philosophers, in ancient times, who held this opinion as a strict maxim of their sect; and, my Lords, the opinion is right in philosophy, but dangerous in judicature. It may have a useful and noble influence, to regulate the conduct of men; to control their impotent passions; to teach them that virtue is the perfection of reason, as reason itself is the perfection of human nature; but not to extenuate crimes, nor excuse those punishments, which the law adjudges to be their due.

Ferrars was unanimously found guilty and was sentenced to death by public execution, thereafter to be anatomized by the surgeons (dissection in those days was legally confined to the corpses of hanged criminals). The noble earl behaved at his execution with more dignity than he had managed at any other time in his life, though a squabble broke out on the scaffold between the executioner and his deputy as to who was entitled to the gold coin that the earl gave the latter. A scuffle also broke out after his death for relics from his body, thought to have magical, medicinal, and monetary value. His corpse was then removed to the Surgeons' Hall for public dissection.

All this might seem brutal to us now, but it is doubtful whether our understanding of the issue of man's moral responsibility for his actions has advanced very much since 1760, if at all. Indeed, the attorney general of those days would make short work of road and other kinds of rage as an excuse: and he would be right to do so.