Rage Multipliers: Orlando

Less than twenty-four hours after the Orlando massacre, people are struggling to understand what in the hell happened (and to whom – the heart-wrenching job of identifying the dead and notifying their families evidently is not yet complete).  The murderer has been identified.  His motives have not, although the leading candidates are homophobia (the shooting occurred at a gay nightclub) and radical Islam (with which the killer apparently has some connections, and/or sympathies).

One thing is clear, however.  He was fueled by rage.

Rage is a complex phenomenon. It’s usually seeded by anger, but full-blown rage is actually a physical state, characterized by a huge spike in adrenalin that manifests itself corporeally in hallucinations, feelings of burning and excruciating contortions, negation of cause-and-effect reasoning ability, manic gestures (and, unfortunately, bigger actions, particularly when rage-enabling weapons are available), even unusual feats of strength or pain-negation.  In other words, rage is acted out through the body, and the body’s destructive actions to itself or to others.  The Sanskrit root for the word “rage” is rabhas (violence) – surviving today in the Spanish word rabia, the Italian word rabbia, and the English word ‘rabies’ (all from the post-Sanskrit Latin: anger, or fury).

Personification of rage: detail from Church of Ste. Madeleine, Vezelay, France, c. 1130. Note the physical contortions and the flame-like hair.

What causes anger (which almost all of us feel at times) to mutate into rage?  My guess is that there need to be multiple motivators, additional factors that justify and magnify anger, causing it to morph from the emotional to the somatic.  In the case of the Orlando mass murderer, his family says that he was upset at seeing public gay affection; the FBI says he was already (vaguely) on the radar for pro-ISIS sentiments and perhaps connections.  It’s unknown, at this time, whether homophobia or westernculturephobia came first.  Either way, though, both sources of anger seem to have melded to produce horrendously lethal rage. Similarly, the Charleston church shootings of a year ago appear to be a deadly amalgam of personal anger and a White Supremacist ideology that provided cover and fuel. Or San Bernardino: an amalgam of workplace resentment and militant-Islamicist rationalization.

The illustration heading this hastily-written commentary is 'Rage,' from the Tacuinum Sanitatus (“Maintenance of Health,” Lombardy, 14^th century), a translation of an 11^th-century Iraqi medical treatise.  That this tractate was reproduced in multiple versions in Lombardy, at that time in history, is telling.  Lombardy was a nexus of competing cultures -- German, Italian, Islamic, growing 'global' mercantile – that harnessed traditional learning to its self-aggrandizing cause.  Also notable is the manuscript’s choice of a furiously distraught woman (rending her own garments) to represent ‘rage.’  ‘Rage’ is ultimately an emotion/action belonging to ‘the (lesser) other,’ particularly endemic in a time of cultural conflict -- but that can bring about the end of days.

                                                         Hieronymous Bosch, Dies Irae

(Days of Wrath, detail), c. 1500

In Medieval times, Christian and Islamic theology consigned ‘rage’ to the register of deadly sins or to the destructive devices of Shaitan.  At the same time, theologians lauded ‘righteous’ anger/wrath/rage – patterned on the thundering punishments of an infuriated supreme deity and the corollary excoriations of a purity-upholding theocratic establishment. 

So . . . today.  Punitive (and, to some, righteous) Christian rage exists mainly rhetorically, in screeds against gays and abortionists and and and.  Punitive (and, to some, righteous) Islamic rage does the same thing, in screeds and fatwas against apostates, homosexuals and and and.  But actively odious Christian rage does not have a semi-legitimate ‘state’ to ratify its agendum.  Actively odious Islamic rage does – in the influential social media ISIS presence and in the fragile and minoritarian ‘Caliphate,’ which nonetheless stages public executions of homosexuals.

In Afghanistan,Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, homosexual activity carries the death penalty.

Back to the Orlando tragedy.  We don’t know, yet, what really motivated the murderer.  We do know, however, that it was a devastatingly deadly rage . . . and I suspect a complicated, multi-sourced rage.  This rage is not only shaped by Islamic and Christian ‘ethical’ teachings, of course.  It is also buttressed by current political discourse in the United States – a vilifying-of-the-other insultfest that does nothing except make acceptable the raging calumny, or annihilation, of people one doesn’t agree with.  And by the easy accessibility of rage-fulfilling instruments.  All of which makes me (and, I suspect, many of you) really angry.

Righteous anger, however. is not the same as ‘righteous rage.’  We need to mobilize the former to combat the latter.