I'm trying, really trying, to draw together my thoughts on this, but, well, it's like herding cats. I keep on having flashes of inspiration that would be part of the case I want to state, but it's so big and it feels that there's so much to explain and defend and suggest and state that I don't know where to begin.
Maybe I can try a precis. If we were not feeling beings, who could suffer, nothing would matter at all. The only moral requirement would be, do not cause physical pain. If we did not have emotions, there would be no desire for revenge, no forgiveness, no compassion. So would there really be any concept of 'justice'? Without desires and urges, would there be a concept of 'freedom'? Indeed, without grief or compassion, would anyone even care that physical pain was caused to another?
For those who are not professional academics, discussions about abstract nature of these concepts surely seems like a waste of time. What matters to us, to real people in the real world, is how we feel about our lives. And while how we feel may often be related to what we belief, it seems to me that what we believe is what we believe because of how we feel.
It does not, at root, come down to reason. It comes down to emotion.
How else can we explain that fact that there are sound arguments for an egalitarian concept of justice, a libertarian view, a needs-based view and a merit-based view? Reason can support any of them - people choose their colours based on how they feel. But being good academics, brought up in a tradition that treats emotions like the poor and uncouth relations of reason, they can't admit that. They just argue across each other. All with their founding axioms that are the root of their preferred position - preferred because of what? Yes, an emotional preference for egalitarianism versus merit or whatever.
And why should we be surprised? We know from primatologists that apes show anger at injustice and compassion for those who have not been fairly treated. We know from Christopher Boehm that the hunter-gatherers need to co-operate was maintained by resentment leading the blame and blame leading to shame or fear. We know from developmental psychologists that infants show a sense of justice - compassion for victims and a distaste for 'naughty' puppets. We know from Jonathan Haidt that different weighting of emotional responses is evident in Republicans and Democrats. We know from Will Davies and the authors of National Populism and The Inner Level that people feel anger, resentment, frustration, depression and more in the face of perceived and real injustice and inequality.
Yet our academies and institutions insist of going on and on about reason.
Antonio Damasio's research demonstrates that emotion is at the root of cognition - yet those coming up with social policy talk about people as if they were automata. We are not robots, functioning with a binary, digital, reason based system. We are complex, multifarious, multi-dimensional. We can hold two contradictory beliefs. We can deceive ourselves - and others. We feel wronged without being able to articulate it.
And we know that the GDP and the mortality rates and the percentages of this and that and the rate of inflation versus growth and all are so many numbers - whereas we live as flesh and blood bodies with emotional reactions and, frankly, that matters more to us than all the axioms and codes and statistics that those in power fling out to us.
Policy makers need to learn that if they want institutions to be trusted they have to listen. They have to deal with the public's feeling responses and felt needs. They have to communicate in a way that makes some goddamn sense. They have to get out of the airy world of the abstract and inhabit the earthy, the concrete, the real.
And philosophers should be leading the way. They should be exploring how emotions play into political and social beliefs; how they can help in living the good life; how they can assist in understanding ethics and in communicating ethical codes. They should not treat emotions, as Bob Solomon suggests, like the lumpen proletariat. But right now they - and governments - often treat normal emotional people as exactly that. No wonder there's so much political dissatisfaction, so much distrust in science and institutions, so much dislike for the Humanities and the liberal elite (of which I am one but in rebellion) with their statements about rights and rules and abstract principles. They, the philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, should engage - because philosophy has to be practical as well as theoretical. It has to be about more than privileged white men arguing about whether p = not p can ever be valid.
Wisdom is the goal of life - of LIFE, not of masturbating in a booklined study. Life is the thing that happens among living beings and to living beings. It's about bodies as well as minds. It's holistic not divested from society and family and politics.
If people are going to buy into anything, they have to want it. And they don't want to be lectured on principles and statistical trends. They want to know how they can feel safe and confident and, fuck it, maybe even happy.
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