Bad Words: Emotional

Among the bad ideas shared among Russians and Americans is the notion that there is a strict dichotomy between logic and emotion. It would take plenty of ones, zeroes, and sundry other figures to count how many times I’ve heard someone, usually a male student, say something like:

I am not emotional. I am logical.

Oftentimes they’ll add that since they work in IT or the pseudo-science of economics, or some other such related field, they have no interest or patience for emotions in any context, including in art.

That isn’t to say that female students are immune from this disease. After viewing a news clip that I showed in class, many preferred the uninformed but less vituperative Megan McArdle to the righteously angry Matt Taibbi in a segment about Wall Street malfeasance. McArdle even admits that she hasn’t read the relevant material concerning the story she’s commenting on, yet my students still disapproved of Taibbi’s tone.

Watch the clip for yourself! This was back when Taibbi was a good journalist. Wall Street remains garbage.

So much stupidity is packed into these statements against being “emotional.” One is the implicit valuing of logic over emotion, and even then, that requires accepting the premise that emotions are not “logical.”

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains where this point of view may come from:

The classical view of emotion is the idea that somewhere lurking deep inside you are the animalistic engine parts of your brain…Everyone in the world makes them and recognizes them without learning or any experience at all.

However, Barrett argues that emotions are formed actively:

Your brain is organized in such a way as to [make] anticipatory guesses about what is going to happen next. And this is happening entirely outside of your awareness. You have past experiences, and those experiences become wired into your brain, and then your brain uses those past experiences to make guesses about the immediate future.

In Sex and Social Justice, Martha Nussbaum’s essay “The Feminist Critique of Liberalism” further challenges the idea that emotion operates without reason. Responding to feminist Nel Noddings’ inversion of the hierarchy — where Noddings recommends valuing emotion over reason — Nussbaum observes that emotional reactions are contextual and not instinctual.

Martha Nussbaum defines a muscular and liberating version of liberalism in Sex and Social Justice.

Here’s Nussbaum’s response to an anecdote from Noddings:

There is the joy that unaccountably floods over me as I walk into the house and see my daughter asleep on the sofa. She is exhausted from basketball playing, and her hair lies curled on a damp forehead. The joy I feel is immediate. . . There is a feeling of connectedness in my joy, but no awareness of a particular belief and, certainly, no conscious assessment

Nussbaum doesn’t buy it, responding thusly:

Doesn’t Noddings have to have, in fact, the belief that her daughter is alive and asleep on the couch, rather than dead? Change that belief and her emotion would change from joy to devastating grief…Assuming things are as she thinks, her joy is fine, and her maternal reactions appropriate

This critique is quite similar to one that could be made about “common sense.” Many things people believe and hold true are held without good reasons or awareness of how limited, unavailable, or even non-existent the bases for them are. Perhaps more generously, such certainty is based on beliefs that they have never before bothered to interrogate.

Now, think about where people are accused of being inappropriately “emotional”: conflicts over rights, privileges, power, etc.

Why wouldn’t one feel emotions when such issues are in dispute? Now consider how those who criticize “emotional” protesters or activists take for granted that existing hierarchies are natural and/or desirable.

The mainstream media has gladly put well-dressed Nazis before television cameras and in lengthy magazine profiles so long as they sounded educated and “rational.” They present themselves as reasoned, not emotional, activists, conforming to an ideal of what a public person ought to look like.

Richard Spencer modeling for BrooKKKs Brothers

Consider, on the other hand, how often criticisms of feminist activists begins with the color of their hair, their “emotionality,” and other violations of mainstream decorum.

Feminist blogger in hiding after men’s rights death threats (and her hair looks great, for the record)

What people are praising when they pit emotion against logic is not thought but passivity.

Their opponents have got both the right idea and feeling when telling them to fuck off.