Much Ado About Clicking
I vividly recall, in the not so recent past, being in one of those meetings where the participants sit in pre-allocated places around tables and listen to a procession of key speakers. Like a wedding reception with slightly less heckling. You can imagine that despite his best intentions your Director was of course in his usual mild fugue state. This however was suddenly interrupted by a colleague to my left reaching across and violently grabbing a pen out of the hands of the chap next to me. I turned fearfully to espy the snatcher’s identity and was confronted by eyes full of, if not sound, definitely fury. And what was the crime which had caused such a grab and snatch, I hear you ask? Well, my colleague had apparently been clicking his pen.
Of course your Director, off on another mental flight of fancy, had been oblivious to the sound from my neighbour to the right. And yet there are, I am reliably informed, few sounds quite so capable of inducing a disproportionate emotional response as the repeated clicking of a retractable pen. Not a loud sound. Not an offensive sound, in any obvious sense. And yet, given sufficient repetition, it can begin to assume a kind of metaphysical significance. It is no longer merely a pen; it is an affront to order, to reason, perhaps even to civilisation itself. One wonders whether this is how it all ends: not with a bang, but with a biro.
There are, it seems, few things more abundant at present than anger. It flares across headlines, seeps through political discourse, and can settle into the background hum of everyday conversation. Public life has acquired a certain temperature: permanently heated, faintly combustible, and rarely inclined toward cooling. One is reminded, perhaps, of poor old King Lear out there railing against the world, although, mercifully, most staff briefings stop short of heath-bound stormy existential despair.
At this point, we must of course check in with old friend of the Column, psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!)
McGilchrist notes that anger is one of the few emotions that consistently lateralises to the left hemisphere of the brain. This is not, perhaps, where most would probably place it. Emotion has traditionally been seen as a right-brain affair: expansive, intuitive, a little unruly. But the left hemisphere, as McGilchrist repeatedly argues, is the specialist in grasping. It is the predator’s hemisphere. It likes linearity, tools, sequence, and certainty. It wants to pin the world down and, where possible, to master it. As teachers we hear regularly from our brilliant SEND department on the whys and wherefores of our students who can at times become dysregulated, and I often recall McGilchrist’s thoughts in this context.
When our students or indeed any of us, become angry or overwhelmed, the left hemisphere effectively stages a coup. The world narrows. The broader context, which as we have discussed is the domain of the right hemisphere, falls away, and attention fixes, with almost predatory intensity, on a single target. Thus the clicking pen ceases to be a minor acoustic byproduct of a mildly bored colleague and becomes a problem to be solved. The left hemisphere edits out the inconvenient details (for example, that the colleague is generally a decent sort, that the room is warm, that everyone is slightly tired) and replaces them with a single, intolerable fact: this must stop. In that moment, one is not especially interested in understanding the pen-clicker. One is interested in correcting the error in the machine.
This predatory focus is not merely an inconvenience; it is a fundamental shift in our relationship with reality. In the left-brain state, we view the world as a collection of parts to be manipulated rather than a whole to be experienced. When we apply this grasping logic to human beings, we inevitably strip them of their complexity. This is why dysregulation feels so total. Whether it is a student overwhelmed by sensory input or a Director overwhelmed by a staff meeting, the brain has switched from the empathetic, holistic view of the right hemisphere to the narrow, defensive, and ultimately aggressive stance of the left. It is a biological survival mechanism that has, unfortunately, found a regular home in the modern office and classroom.
But surely, I hear you ask, sometimes anger is perfectly justified? Ah yes, the good old righteous anger. This is the variety that allows us to feel morally elevated while being, at the same time, perhaps rather less generous than we might otherwise be. It feels good precisely because it presents itself as principled and convinces us that our fury is not a lapse in judgment, but a badge of honour.
I am often minded of our old friend Carl Jung when it comes to those righteous anger merchants so frequently encountered these days in both the real and virtual worlds. Before we can determine if anger is truly principled, we probably ought to try to understand where it is coming from. Jung offered a profound perspective here, suggesting that anger is often a primary encounter with our own Shadow. Jung believed that when we react with disproportionate heat to the behaviours of others, it is frequently because they are manifesting a trait we have suppressed in ourselves, or perhaps because they are treading on a boundary we haven’t had the courage to defend. For Jung, anger was potentially very important; it was a signal that a part of our psychic territory was being encroached upon or that an internal truth was demanding to be heard. It was not a glitch, but a call to self-reflection.
This Jungian idea that anger serves as a vital, if volatile, messenger helps us navigate the ancient debate regarding its place in a virtuous life. If anger is indeed a signal that something matters, then we are forced back to the challenge of how to use it without being consumed by it. This is where dear Aristotle enters the room. To his credit, he does not suggest we should be emotionless statues; rather, he argues that the problem is not anger itself, but its mismanagement. It is possible, he suggests in his Nicomachean Ethics, to be angry at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, and for the right purpose.
This is, admittedly, a rather exacting set of criteria. Most of us struggle to satisfy even one of them at a time, let alone all five simultaneously while sitting in a stuffy classroom. Nevertheless, between Jung’s psychological signal and Aristotle’s ethical aim, we find a compelling suggestion: that anger might, under the right conditions, be a form of moral perception. It posits that our red mist might occasionally be the necessary, if somewhat untidy, start of an important conversation with ourselves.
We must of course be wary of how easily the left brain adopts this Aristotelian mantle. It is very easy to convince ourselves that our anger is to the right degree when our biological hardware has already filtered out any evidence to the contrary. Seneca, the great Stoic, was far more suspicious of this compromise. He described anger as a form of temporary madness, noting that while other vices may be subtle or hidden, anger is utterly transformative and visible. Seneca’s concern was that anger is a tool that always ends up commanding the person who tries to use it. You cannot, he argued, use a fire to put out a fire. The moment we allow the short madness in, we lose the very reason we claim to be defending. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, anger can turn us all briefly into the more unhinged moments of The Incredible Hulk, without the redeeming advantage of being eight feet tall and therefore difficult to ignore.
Literature, as ever, is rather more candid about this than we tend to be in our own polished biographies. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s anger burns with a kind of terrible grandeur. He is at turns, defiant, rhetorically magnificent, and some have argued, admirable. That is until one begins to notice that Satan’s anger feeds primarily on itself. It is sustained less by the injustice he has suffered than by the refusal to relinquish the grievance over it. His anger becomes a way of preserving a particular vision of the world in which he remains central. It is the ultimate left-brain trap: a self-consistent logic that has lost all connection to the wider, right-brain reality of grace and proportion.
In Othello, we see anger as a form of fatal distortion. Iago is the ultimate left-brain operative, feeding Othello ‘evidence’ and ‘logic’ until the hero’s right-brain intuition is completely silenced. Iago understands that if you can focus a man’s attention on a single proof, such as a misplaced handkerchief, you can make him ignore everything else he knows to be true about a person’s character. Anger here is not clarity; it is a lens through which reality is systematically misread. Othello’s tragedy is the triumph of the narrow, predatory gaze over the broad, empathetic one.
And then there is dear old Hamlet, who perhaps represents the opposite problem. Hamlet suffers from a right-brain glut. He sees so much context and so much ambiguity that he becomes paralysed. He is the only man in Denmark who could have used a little more left-brain decisiveness, a little more of that narrowing focus to actually get the job done. But then of course we would have an entirely less wonderful and very much shorter play. Hamlet’s hesitation is the price he pays for refusing to simplify the world. He refuses to allow the coup of anger to take place, even when it might be justified, because he is too aware of the shadows and complexities that anger would erase.
Between these poles lies something recognisably modern. We are increasingly encouraged toward a form of anger that is less concerned with resolution than with display. It is declarative. It announces itself. It seeks, to your Director’s eyes, not so much to understand or even to change a situation as to position oneself within it: to be seen to be on the right side, to have responded appropriately, to have felt the correct feeling at the correct intensity. The left hemisphere, one suspects, rather enjoys this. It offers a reassuring narrative in which one is, quite clearly, in the right. It provides coherence in a confusing world. But it does so at a cost. It requires us to ignore something rather important: that anger is almost always relational. No surprise there, because of course, everything is relational.
We are angry with someone, about something, in response to a perceived breach of the small, often unspoken agreements that make shared life possible. Even the trivial irritations; the pen, the poorly judged email, the meeting that might, with a little imagination, have been an email, are not really about the objects themselves. They are about expectations, about the quiet structures that hold our interactions together, and about the ways in which those structures occasionally give way. When we fail to see this, we fall into the trap of the closed loop, where our anger becomes a monument to our own rectitude rather than a bridge to a solution.
If one follows Iain McGilchrist’s lead, the task is not to eliminate anger but to resist its narrowing. To move, as it were, from the grasping left to the perceiving right. This requires a certain discipline: a willingness to pause, to widen the frame, and to entertain the uncomfortable possibility that one’s initial certainty may not be entirely reliable. Anger, in this sense, is a signal rather than a conclusion. It tells us that something is not as it should be, but it does not always tell us where the problem lies. Sometimes it is in the world, sometimes in other people, and occasionally, though one mentions it only in passing, in oneself.
It is perhaps worth noting, in this context, that the word anger derives from the Old Norse angr, meaning grief or sorrow. What presents itself as heat and fury may, at root, have rather more to do with hurt than we are always inclined to admit. The colleague who snatches the pen in a moment of fury may, in fact, be responding to something altogether less theatrical: fatigue, frustration, or the quiet strain of a long day. If we can see the grief behind the anger, the left brain’s grip begins to loosen. We move from a world of problems to be fixed back into a world of people to be understood.
Before we succumb to the next small eruption, then, it may be worth inviting the rest of the mind back into the room. The part that can see context. The part that recognises that other people are not, in fact, malfunctioning machines. The part that understands that we are all, in our own ways, clicking our pens whilst sitting at tables in seating plans we never chose. It is also, helpfully, the part that can see the humour in one’s own outrage. It is surprisingly difficult to sustain righteous anger once one has noticed that the situation and one’s role within it, is, at least in part, faintly ridiculous.
For all their faults, which we have discussed, the postmodernists did after all have a good line in pointing out the inherent absurdities in our desires to shut down possibilities and fashion universes in our own images that were always controllable. They delighted in deconstructing the grand narratives we build to justify our own central importance. There is something profoundly Beckettian about somebody losing his reason over a retractable pen; it is a scene that could sit comfortably in Waiting for Godot, where characters find themselves trapped essentially by themselves.
The absurdists were often very funny about our desperate need for a coherent, mastered reality. I am reminded of the late, great Peter Cook, whose characters would often deliver spectacularly confident monologues on subjects they clearly didn’t understand, or Spike Milligan, whose brand of surrealism suggested that the world is essentially a chaotic joke that we take far too seriously. They understood that the moment we attempt to impose a total, unyielding order upon the world; to fashion it into an image that is entirely controllable, we become the joke. Our anger, in this light, is merely the scream of the frustrated architect whose house of cards has been disturbed by a slight breeze.
Nevertheless, after the incident with the pen, I surreptitiously purloined it. Your Director, despite his numerous flaws, has nimble fingers and a good sense of misdirection. It sits on my desk as I type these paltry words as a reminder of the fragility of our hemispheric balance. A modern day memento mori perhaps. It is a very ordinary pen, entirely unworthy of a metaphysical crisis. But then, most of the things we lose our tempers over usually are. The next time I find myself drafting an email with Incredible Hulk levels of intensity, I shall look at that pen and wait for my right brain to return from its lunch break. It usually has much better things to say than the part of me that just wants to hit Send. We must remember that the biro is mightier than the sword, but only if we remember to put it down once in a while. Let us try to keep our focus wide and our pens still. If you find yourself reaching for someone else’s stationery in a fit of metaphysical despair, take a moment to breathe. The right brain is waiting for you to come home; it is the only part of us that remembers that we are meant to be living in the world, not just auditing it.
Until next time, Happy reading/being absurd!
Director’s Detritus #12
There are, however, things more dangerous than a retractable pen. The smallest book in the world, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, is printed on a single crystalline silicon page measuring 70 micrometers by 100 micrometers. It required a focused ion beam, a terrifying, predatory left-brain tool, to write. It cannot be read without a microscope. This effectively proves that when we lose context and focus too narrowly on small, invisible grievances, we render the big story of our lives completely illegible.