Back to emotions. I've written a lot about emotions... as reasons, as critical to ethics, as actions, as intelligence, related to passion, how to reflect upon them and set ourselves up for ethical ones. Not to mention love and epiphanies and trust and relatedness. In fact, I suspect that about 99% of my posts are really about emotions. Anger and blame, shame and loneliness, wonder and awe, frustration and confusion.
But what I wanted to think about today was how reliable much of what we feel is? In effect, how authentic are our emotions? How appropriate are they? How accurately do they map onto reality?
So, I am happy to accept a revised Robert Solomon view of emotions, namely, that emotions are a complex of feelings, behaviour and cognitions.
Here's why I think they can be mismatched with reality:
That we are primed toward the negative - a hunter-gatherer who mistakenly experiences fear and runs from a snake will live; one who feels no fear will not.
That negative experiences in childhood can lead to us being excessively reactive.
That the news and media act as a powerful fear inducing device - the news emphasises what is bad and due to the availability bias we will recall more easily episodes that give rise to fear, anger, suspicion and resentment.
That social inequality leads to increased status anxiety and stress in societies.
That we are, as a species, very new to the lifestyle we inhabit and evolution has had no time to adjust our affective responses to cope with the way life is.
That who knows what impact non-species appropriate diet and lifestyle have on our hormonal systems.
That many of us don't sleep enough, which impacts stress.
That many of us regularly consume mood altering substances like caffeine and alcohol.
That many of us lack the kind of social cohesion that is necessary for human flourishing.
That interpersonal relationships have greater impacts than we might think (for example, women with rheumatoid arthritis have less good coping strategies if their husbands are critical rather than supportive).
So what does all this mean?
I think it means that inevitably our emotional responses will be out of kilter. And it's even more of a factor for certain personality types: those high in Neuroticism will be titled to the negative; those high in Extroversion titled to the positive.
But all in all, hoping for an 'apt' response seems a matter of hoping in vain.
Now, one could say, OK, so individually we might be twisted in all these ways by environment and personality, but the responses are still authentic.
No, I reply - because the effects caused by inequality and the media are external manipulations of which we are not even cognizant. George Gerber, who studied the effects of the media (in terms of news coverage and dramas) claims that television encourages us to be fearful, distrustful and anxious. He writes:
Persons, groups and causes stigmatised are obvious targets, but the real victim is a community's ability to think rationally and creatively about conflict, injustice, tragedy.
[...]
Television cultivates exaggerated beliefs about the prevalence of violence and heightens feelings of insecurity and mistrust amongst groups of heavy viewers and especially among women and minorities.
[...]
Contrary to charges of liberal bias, our research shows that the political correlate of television watching is the virtual collapse of liberal orientation.
Those who watch a lot of TV, says Gerbner, buy more guns and more locks for their houses, are more likely to call for capital punishment and harsh incarceration and to approve of 'wars' on drugs, crime and terrorism. TV makes us cede the power of violence to the state for our protection. In turns us into Hobbesian creatures handing control to the Leviathan.
Apparently, reality TV shows increase tendencies to both aggression and narcissism. the effect seems more profound that with drama - perhaps because these are 'real' people so their behaviour is more likely to be imitated? But also because we see people behaving badly and acting in self-serving ways become famous and admired. This research has been done by Bryan Gibson et al.
Inequality makes us anxious and distrustful. It encourages defensiveness and increases a sense of alienation.
Robert Frank and his colleagues have shown that those who study economics become more self-interested and less co-operative - which seems to be related to thinking about people as self-serving beings. And isn't that how public discussions encourage us to regard each other? We see others as worse than they are and become worse than we otherwise would be. On a similar theme, Richard Easterlin has shown that investing time in family and health is more likely to make us happier than investing in our careers and earning money. But as we believe we are in a rat-race, even those who get success and wealth come to respond less positively to the world that they otherwise would. Because they have been sold a myth.
I have to admit here that this was in large part inspired by me starting to read Rutger Bregman's Humankind. Yes, I know - I was pissed off with him some months ago. But actually, he's making a strong case. That case is much like the one made in The Inner Level: yes, we have all the aggressive tendencies of chimps, for example, but we domesticated ourselves - becoming friendlier because co-operation was our 'niche'. That was our means to survive. In the way that dogs are not like wolves, so we are not like chimps. Blushing (we are the only animal that does that) is related to social interaction: we show when we have wronged another and they can see (it's related, of course, to the force of shame). So too the whites of our eyes: we show others where we are looking. These two physical adaptations made us transparent to each other. Here's the key: they made us trustworthy. We cannot deceive as well as chimps can.
In addition, we are also not that smart: our brains are not faster processors nor do we have more working memory. What we have is culture and communication. Language and cooperation.
We became strong by being friendly. Being trustworthy and trusting.
And now, with all that we are doing to ourselves - the media, the inequality, the polarisation, the alienation - we are reversing that virtuous cycle. We are losing trust, losing co-operation, losing the one strength that we have... and replacing it with technology, power structures and the market.
The other inspiration was a piece by Guy Kahane (who will be one of my tutors) in a book called Enhancing Human Capacities. He was making the case that our emotions are awry already (through the negativity bias and 'emotional setpoints') and so drugs that change mood may be 'correcting' us rather than enhancing us, even if we are not classified as having a specific mood disorder. That's what I want to get on to next time.
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