In the face of it there are obvious attractions.
You don't need to know anything about the issue you choose to be outraged about. You can share your outrage on social media and indeed mainstream media. You might build a following of others who are looking for a lazy hobby to while away their time. You can choose virtuous outrages, or the downgraded taking offence category.
You can choose almost anything to be outraged about. Recently in the ODT people have been outraged about issues as diverse as an American billionaire setting off fireworks, a stretch of native forest being cleared, children being scared by anti-vax protesters and a family wrongly detained in a search for someone with a gun. And then Posie Parker.
But being outraged or offended is a peculiarly unhelpful way of responding to the world. It masks the lack of discussion about whether we need to change our world by making new rules or encouraging different behaviours. And it encourages us to respond to the world emotionally and to set some people apart as behaving in an unvirtuous fashion while covering up the intolerance in the person being outraged.
We behave better when we think about our reactions and whether diversity and tolerance will serve us better.
Outrage, according to the online Cambridge Dictionary, is to feel very angry, shocked or upset. A feeling of outrage is described through the sentences "Outraged viewers jumped on to social media to complain about the ending of the series" and "She became outraged by poverty".
This is not the most useful way of responding. And showing outrage to teach children to mimic the behaviour will not serve the children well as they try to make sense of the difficult choices people are making to help us all live in this uncertain world.
For example, being offended/ outraged by how people pronounce Māori words is a poor and unthinking response to attempts by people to use te teo. The point of saying something to someone is to communicate. If we attempt what to us are foreign languages those we talk to try their best to figure out what we want to say. Even my most basic dos cervezas, por favor will usually result in two beers arriving quickly. I want the beer, they want the payment.
At home we seem to be wanting to be offended by how we say Māori words.
Interestingly we are not expected to criticise the pronunciation of English words, such as the "d" sound where there are "t" spellings, or the lovely Southland sound. We are not consistently offended, only when we seem to want to signal virtuous outrage.
Recently people have been outraged by what has been written by acclaimed authors, and there have been attempts to expurgate passages from books. Apparently those who choose to open a book are to be protected from possible outrage.
And now outrage can be caused by calling someone by a pronoun that is not the one preferred by the person. Those who have a long history of using words grammatically are faced with being required to avoid outrage by putting everything they know about what singular and plural words are and attempting to make sense of the idea incorporated in the sentence "My pronouns are she/ them".
Radio New Zealand was outraged that private childcare institutions should be looking for more money to pay their longest-serving staff, while they are already receiving significant funding. Apparently the idea of private childcare was a problem, while there was no suggestion that, for instance, funding GP practices (private primary healthcare) was equally providing funds to private institutions.
The use of offence and outrage to show ourselves as virtuous isn't the biggest issue, but it does highlight why it is important to step back from emotional response and towards rational, consistent and practical rule-setting.
We can discuss what rules we should have about felling native trees, speech inciting violence, whether the government should provide all healthcare and education and what behaviour should properly be sanctioned, or tolerated or encouraged.
Once we look at how we use words to communicate we could start with the idea that the more people share their ideas and express their view the more we have the chance to rise above cheap put-downs and to understand each other.
Recently the ODT published an editorial entitled "Please don't upset anyone", which finished with the view that celebrating diversity of people requires diversity of thought.
If we can also be decent to each other, even those of us who want to choose a virtuous path and have other people acknowledge their virtue, we will get along better.
The older woman in Opoho who was chastised on National radio for the way she pronounced the suburb she had lived in for many years was not a military target.
As Immigration NZ advises new immigrants, try not to be offended by what people say in day-to day work chat.
And we can always think of something more useful than outrage.
- Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and DCC councillor.
