The title of the present essay is from Wordsworth (Dion, 1816):

Your Minister would brush away
The spots that to my soul adhere;
But should she labour night and day,
They will not, cannot disappear;
Whence angry perturbations, –and that look
Which no Philosophy can brook!

The angry perturbations I lament are those expressed by readers of internet news sites, day after tiresome day.  I am talking about yahoo.com, citizen-times.com, pgatour.com, and just about any dot.com that allows public comment.  Here are various sad examples.  I’ve wallowed through them so that you don’t have to.

• From yahoo.com, comments on a news item about Tropical Storm Lee:

I am praying that no believers will be hurt or killed. And I suggest all you atheists and agnostics should do what ever you do to protect your kind.

Gee, the New Orleans Police Department didn’t even have a chance to murder anyone or do any looting. Couldn’t have been much of a storm.

• From our local newspaper, citizen-times.com, a comment about the same storm:

I’m sure that as a result of this … these Yahoos who have built their “McMansions” on our slopes, will get them washed away and start whining and wanting to sue somebody (try God maybe!)

• In another citizen-times.com article, Asheville residents who moved here from New York  shared their recollections of September 11, 2001.  This elicited the following comments:

Asheville has enough troubles of its own without hearing New York tales and problems.

If you have to be in a group called the “Asheville Ex-New Yorker community group” then it should be obvious you are not welcome here.  Even you admit to the very traits that we southerners cant stand.  You will never be accepted here.  So stay in your little group and chatter yourselves silly.  Just don’t tell the rest of us how to live.  NOW GIT!

• Even at pgatour.com, many commenters sound like they are ready to drive a golf ball down someone’s throat.  From an article on Phil Mickelson’s performance in this week’s tournament:

Phil is a PGA darling who can do no wrong in the eyes of the pinko ribbon crowd — you know, the ones addicted to home shopping networks and their prescription medications … we know good ol’ PsoriaticArthritisBoy is sure to end up choking his way … out of contention in the 4th round.

Another reader rises uneloquently to Phil’s defense:

the only people that would have something negative to say about phil are the ones that cant get there lips off tigers butt and let there kids parade around in kobes jersey.

• Even nytimes.com — which moderates its comments — cannot filter all the resentment coming its way, such as this reply to an essay about the decline of the middle-class:

The government safety net is TOO large and too comfortable.  There … were plenty of lower paid jobs to be had but they were eagerly taken by illegal immigrants.  Why worry about getting a job if you have 99 weeks of unemployment and those worry-free foodstamps?

Yes, why do anything at all when there are food stamps to be had, for free?  But I digress.  I’m not here to disagree with what is being said (though I do) but to express some awe at how it is being said, how freely the anger flows and how easily it turns to meanness.

In “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-tree“, Wordsworth disdains such base emotions:

Stranger!  henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe’er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy.

But the poet and critic Henry Taylor disagrees, in his 1834 review of Wordsworth’s work:

The moral government of the world appears to us to require, that in the every-day intercourse of ordinary man with man, room should be given to the operation of the harsher sentiments of our nature — anger, resentment, contempt.  They were planted in us for a purpose, and are not essentially and necessarily wrong in themselves, although they may easily be wrong in their direction. …  Anger, resentment, and contempt, are instruments of the penal law of nature and private society, which, as long as evil exists, must … be administered[.] … That Man, so far as he is liable to evil inclinations, should fear his neighbour, is as requisite for the good of society as that he should love his neighbor, and that which he will commonly stand most in fear of is his neighbour’s just contempt.

Taylor defends anger and contempt directed toward another, if the contempt serves as a moral deterrent, holding at bay the evil tendencies of the other.  Taylor regards criminal penalties and societal judgments as double edges on the same sword of justice.  But while there is due process in dispensing criminal penalties, there is none for social punishments.  This is why your neighbor’s anger is to be feared — it abides only by its own rules.  And your neighbor’s rules are only as sensible as your neighbor is.

There seems to be a large (enormous? endless?) pool of angry, bitter people on this planet.  I don’t think the internet created these people but it has certainly made them more visible. In fact, there is a site called justrage.com (“The Internet Anger Sponge”) which encourages the mad multitude to blast away.  Here is one post (with my bleeps) typical of that site:

Your best approach would be the school…. Work with these people to f* the bullies over.

Henry Taylor was right in one respect — we should be frightened of our neighbors.  But not because they are the standard-bearers of a moral society.  We should fear them (or better yet avoid them) because we have no idea what is knocking around inside their heads, and when they may turn thought into action.  The internet gives us only a taste of the anger and contempt that roils out there — the totality must be worse.  On the web, we see only what people type, not what they say spontaneously to friends and family about who or what riles them.

And every man I chanc’d to see,
I thought he knew some ill of me.
No peace, no comfort could I find,
No ease, within doors or without,
And crazily, and wearily
I went my work about.

— from “The Last of the Flock”, Wordsworth (1798)

In the year The 100 Billionth Person has existed, I have published many posts that were, shall we say, critical — of people, politics, corporations, concepts.  While I use sarcasm and satire rather than raw contempt and anger, I must admit these all sit on the same side of the see-saw.  Not that every day is just beautiful in this neighborhood, but one thing it does not need are more angry, dissatisfied people spouting off.  As such, I intend to make this blog a bit more positive place to visit in its second year.  More Wordsworth, less Taylor.

But doubly fortunate my lot; not here
Alone, that something of a better life
Perhaps was round me than it is the privilege
Of most to move in, but that first I looked
At Man through objects that were great or fair;
First communed with him by their help. And thus
Was founded a sure safeguard and defence
Against the weight of meanness, selfish cares,
Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in
On all sides from the ordinary world
In which we traffic.

— from “The Prelude” Book VIII, Wordsworth (1805)