I Second that Emotion

The danger of pure rationalism

Yesterday I cried three times.

Twice on the phone with various Amazon service representatives, and once in the parking lot of my kids’ school, when another mom who had parked badly started yelling at me about not being able to squeeze into her car. (Later I tried to think the best of this woman, like maybe she, too, was stressed about getting to her kids’ Christmas program on time or maybe she, too, had just had all her kids’ Christmas presents cancelled by the evil cartel that is amazon dot com. But despite my soul searching, I have concluded she was objectively bananas.)

Illustration: pixabay/Prawny

I digress. I don’t usually cry that often. Hey, I can go whole weeks without crying! But my emotions reside close to the surface, so it’s not hard for a hurtful or frustrating interaction to get at them. I cannot emphasize enough how much shame, over the years, I have felt about this. Even as I type this, I am compelled to qualify and qualify and qualify so I cannot be dismissed. I want to tell you I am smart! and normal! and totally in control of my life!

Because let’s say it plainly: criers (cryers?) are not taken seriously. Emotions are not taken seriously. And that’s sometimes warranted, especially if the crier is seeking attention or deflecting responsibility. (I’d argue that Gen Zers, in particular, tend to rely overly on emotions as a means of understanding. Usually their feelings are not wrong, but the trend seems to be that many younger people haven’t learned how to move past them—or told that this is even possible.)

Okay, so we’re holding two things in tension. As one example of a profoundly damaging dichotomy between emotion and reason, consider the rhetoric of American politics.

It is often said by right wingers that “Liberals listen to their emotions. Conservatives are rational.” This works for the conservatives because, if you are older than, say, 25, you have been socialized to value rationalism over emotionalism. If you can convince people that emotion is the opposite of fact, and that, by extension, another group is entirely divorced from reality, you have them in the palm of your hand. And having people in the palm of their hands is precisely the aim of politicians. (By the way, conservatives may not generally fit the “bleeding hearts” stereotype, but ironically, the MAGA narrative relies as heavily on manipulating emotion as the so-called “woke” one.)

But that notion infuriates liberals. That’s because they recognize it is only half the story. Ironically, the same concept is mirrored by left wingers, only with a different spin: “Conservatives are heartless. Liberals actually care about other people.” That’s problematic, too. Often, liberal agendas are premised on the presumption of an attainable future utopia. In a sense, all the caring in the world won’t get us closer to functional justice.

Liberals are getting something right that conservatives aren’t: the way people feel and the way others experience the world matters. Pure rationalism is not only damaging but, taken to its logical conclusion, absurd.

Conservatives are getting something right that liberals aren’t: in a nation as varied as the US, universal agreement and a resulting “perfection” aren’t attainable. Not ever. So maybe a cold-blooded evaluation of the facts is necessary for realistic, enforceable policy.

Not only are both extremes dangerous, the language they use shuts down (or preempts) conversation. People don’t realize how off-putting their rhetoric is for someone who might otherwise be persuadable.

So we are gridlocked.

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But this wasn’t supposed to be about politics. In a post-Enlightenment world, most of us Millenials and Boomers understand the value of rationalism. But I care deeply about Gen Zers in particular, and they too are getting something very right by advocating for feelings. Is it an overcorrection? Maybe. (Are overcorrections sometimes necessary? I could cogently make that argument, yes.)

Unless all the questions were about literature, I would never win at Jeopardy. I do not have a strong recollection of “facts,” the kind that would make me good at trivia. If I read three very long books about the history of the Civil War, I would walk away with a deep new knowledge in the form of a changed feeling or general understanding about causes and effects. If, in a later conversation, you asked me to back up that new understanding with recollected trivia, I would stare at you blankly. (And desperately, certain that what I knew was valuable, but unable to translate it into the kind of knowledge you may think is valuable.)

What I’ve realized over the years is that emotions are my highest form of intelligence. They are a thing at which you can actually be skilled.

It’s understandable to me why people don’t respect this kind of intelligence. It relies heavily on intuition, and intuition can’t be proven or tested or written down. It almost never wins arguments the way trivia does. We have been socialized to believe that invoking “the science” is the ultimate mic drop.

In a sense, emotions live in the realm of mystery. Americans do not like mystery; it makes us acknowledge the reality that we are neither omnipotent or omniscient.

But what emotional intelligence does do is get to people’s hearts. It pushes people past arguments over doctrine or trivia or policy into conversations about respect and love and meaning (words for which I refuse, any longer, to apologize). This, too, is valuable. Jeopardy can get us only so far.

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Let’s revisit the parking lot. I cried not because I am an unhinged, overly delicate human being. I cried because that woman was mean. My heart recognized the injustice and (minor) cruelty and reacted in a reasonable way to that. Some people repress those emotions to their detriment. Mostly I get them out by crying and rage-cleaning my kitchen, and then I’m fine. There is no lingering psychological residue that will, later, cause me to inexplicably yell at someone in a parking lot. (Which is not to say I do not yell in parking lots.)

At the same time I’ve learned to trust myself, I’ve gotten better at talking myself out what I will call the Instant Feeling.¹ I might have an Instant Feeling that you are mean or bad, but this must be held in tension with a cold-blooded review of another kind of fact, which may include what you say/explain in response, or what you have done in the past. This takes practice. It is hard.

So hard, in fact, that it makes me want to cry.

1. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The elephant is feeling and intuition, sort of like the Instant Feeling. It is reactionary. The rider is a person’s rational mind, which can balance the emotion. But elephants are huge and riders are small, so the elephant tends to make the decision on which way the brain will “go.” Which choice the person will actually make. Hence our historical distrust of emotions—they are often more powerful than we can control.