Defending the Tram

In re David Brooks’ new book, The Social Animal, the issue is not really about the conscious or the unconscious mind, and which predominates, but ultimately about the presence or the absence of a genuine agent who may be held responsible.

One reviewer (Will Wilkinson in Forbes) quotes Brooks summarizing the thrust of his book. It is “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” These are supposed to be (and no doubt they are), the revolutionary discoveries of modern psychology and brain science.

I note here the incoherence of this characterization, so prevalent everywhere these days. If we have multiple selves, who has the emotions? How do we define the character (singular) of multiple selves (plural). I know, I know. We also speak about public opinion, as if it were something tangible, the national interest, as if there was a concrete something actually capable of having an interest. But now we find it projected backwards into the individual who, on close inspection, turns out to be a crowd.

If someone hired me to defend this characterization on rational grounds, I’d want to be paid in advance—because my chief argument would be, “Well, I don’t mean that precisely, but you know what I mean.” I would, in other words, appeal to a presumed understanding in my public that modern science denies the actual presence of a soul, an individual, an agency because science can’t decant it, hold the glass beaker up to the light, and then, pointing, say: “There it is! Can you see it? It’s swirling in there.”

The presumption here is that belief in an actual conscious person capable of genuine choice is a “traditional” belief, meaning old, pre-scientific. Also obsolete, hoary, dated, primitive. Therefore the discovery that we are a more or less cohering, continuous, but ever-changing phenomenon—but inhabited by a multiplicity of selves generated by the phenomenon—is “revolutionary.” But if we really are this phenomenon, then there isn’t really anyone there to notice that a discovery has been made. The “revolutionary” modern theory may be rendered as a street-car line in which the real objects are the power lines and the car that runs on rails. The passengers who come and go, our multiple selves, are not really what it’s all about. The revolutionary theory is about as easy to defend as this description of a streetcar line.

(If you’re inclined to read more on a single soul or many (my take, that is), I suggest this post on Borderzone. And here a post, also on BZ, on the actual interactions between understanding and intellect. Understanding is a feeling, isn’t it? A feeling is an emotion. Are there different kinds? Do they mean the same thing?)

Where is the Rage?

There are at least two approaches to this question, and today I’ll take a physiological route. Rage is an emotion. It is viewed as negative if it’s directed at us—positive if directed at some perceived enemy—whence, of course, comes the popular question, asked in frustration: “Where is the outrage?” Viewed from another angle, rage is a natural reflex to threats. For this reason our bodies are constructed so that we respond reflexively, very rapidly—more rapidly than our intellectual brain-cycles can.

Experts tell me (there are lots of articles on anger management on the web) that rage is set off by the amygdala. That’s the singular name for a complex structure of nuclei located in the mid-brain but linked to the temporal lobe. We have two amygdalae; their purpose is to process emotional stimuli. They interpret incoming perceptions, relate these to memories, and set off spontaneous reactions to threats. They cause the release of catecholamines (flight-fight hormones), adrenaline, and other neurotransmitters that prepare us to act—and violently if need be.

Rage is therefore a response to something that threatens. Threats may signal mortal danger, hence the body has no time to waste on thought. The processes set off by the amygdalae bypass the usual bureaucratic brain-procedures and lead directly to action—or at least to preparation for action. Rage is a reflex—and the body is stimulated. Rage acts like a drug. The emotion may be negative, but the body feels good.

To be sure, the amygdalae evoke memory, first of all; they look in memory for appropriate responses based on our past behavior. This suggests that over time we can educate our own reaction to all kinds of stimuli, not least to threats. Thus it’s possible to develop very exaggerated reactions to threats that have not the least potential of immediately harming us—as well as very cool reactions to stimuli that threaten us with immediate, actual, physical harm—sang froid, as the French call it. In the long run, you might say, over time, we can develop optimal reactions to threats.

The modern tendency to raise the emotional above the rational—expressed as “sensitivity” and demonstrated by fictional heroines like Diana Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation who always empathically asks, “But how do you feel?”—produces the widespread cultural message that “rage” and “anger” are appropriate—and human—responses to the endless flow of sewage that spews from the media. Not quite. Rage and anger produce reflex responses. When the threats are vague and nebulous, when most of the news are trial balloons, when the messages, especially in an election year, are designed to rouse and aim the public rage so that it will express itself without the least bit of thought—why then the consequences are worse than all those things that cause us to flare up in righteous indignation. But that indignation feels good, you see. It makes us think that we are real somehow. Thought is so . . . so thin, so nebulous…

The Culture of Emotion

We speak not strictly and philosophically, when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. [David Hume, Of the Passions]

This well-known passage by Hume (1711-1776) should be read in its full context to bring out its full bouquet. That context may be perused here, but I will try to give the highlights. As Hume understands emotions, they are basic and prior to reasoning. They are produced by the prospect of pain or pleasure; they are comprehensive intuitions of the totality of a situation in which reasoning is summoned only to illuminate causes and effects. “A passion is an original existence,” as he puts it, thus not a concept; it is akin to facts like feeling thirsty, sick, or being more than five feet high. Reasoning, by contrast, rests on concepts; these Hume considers as mere representations, “copies” of authentic reality—like (as we might say) photographs rather than flesh and blood. Let me sharpen this. Hume arranges reality in such a fashion that conscious reasoning becomes a secondary activity, subservient to raw reality. The last, the raw, he considers authentic. After a lengthy elaboration of this point, he concludes this passage by saying:

In short, a passion must be accompanied with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then, ’tis not the passion, properly speaking,which is unreasonable, but the judgment.

Welcome to Modernity. I discovered the quotations cited, and read the richer context in which they are embedded, in trying to understand what may be the roots of our modern “culture of emotion.” I have something of an aversion to the Enlightenment and have not studied its luminaries, least not Hobbes and Hume, but one is sometimes obliged to look. I came this way because, in another context, I was again reminded of pop culture’s favorite question, especially when it wishes to signal sensitivity. That question is “How do you feel about that.” Feeling is authentic. Thought and feeling are opposed. And the implication of the question, almost always, is that in some way the gruffy hero, doing his usual insensitive rampaging, is not “in touch with his feelings” and needs to be—gently—reminded.

As I encountered Hume’s views on passion, I thought: Well, well, well! Wouldn’t you know it! What philosophers scribble gradually soaks into the soil and becomes reflexive wisdom two, three hundred years later. Not surprisingly, the entry on “Emotion” I found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, while it mentions Plato’s and Aristotle’s views (barely), relies entirely on figures from the Enlightenment—and their modern elaborators. Not a single prominent thinker of Christendom is so much as mentioned. These are the experiences which cause me to agree with writers like Pitirim Sorokin and, more generally, with the cyclic historians.

Not that, mind you, the modern analysis of emotion is “all wrong,” or anything like that. This is a vast and complex subject, almost permanently vexing because the body-soul duality is so effectively resistant to conceptual parsing. My point here is cultural. In spiritual (ideational) periods, the higher aspects of soul-function are stressed, in materialistic (sensate) times those closer to the physical and sensuous get the nod. If the two were absolute equals, this wouldn’t matter, but if a hierarchical order places one above the other, demoting the higher will have tangible consequences for social well-being.

But the most ironic and meaningful aspect of this modern tendency—this emphasis on emotions—is that in many, many cases the motive behind this invocation of emotions in popular art is nobler than its expression. It has become impossible to appeal to the spiritual ranges in humanity; the impulse to do so, however, is still present. Therefore a word like “feelings” is used to point at something that really transcends mere feelings. Conversely, in media commentary we also encounter frequently characterizations of events or performances as “spiritual” when, in actuality, they are just emotional. My sense of discomfort arises, I think, because I’d just as soon hear a spade called a spade.