One of the enduring legacies of the Enlightenment is the view that everyone is entitled to their opinions, even stupid ones. At some point, however, this morphed into the belief that everyone is entitled not to have their opinions challenged. The rights of responsible citizenship slowly became the rights of citizenship, period.
The Enlightenment was an age of reason, but in many countries more recent years have seen the arrival of an age of emotion. It’s now received wisdom in the UK that the death of Princess Diana in 1997 marked a watershed moment in this transition. The outpouring of collective grief (which many of us found bizarre at the time) signalled that Britain was no longer the country of the stiff upper lip but of the watery eye. There years later the last bastion of macho stoicism fell when England’s brightest young football talent cried at the Word Cup finals.
When emotions became as important as opinions, they also gained the same social protections. Everyone now had a right to their feelings and also the right not to have them challenged. This seemed even more obviously just and fair than the respect given to points of view. After all, you can’t help having the feeling you have, so how can we criticise anyone for having the wrong ones?
A Royal Institute of Philosophy talk on Thursday by the always interesting philosopher Owen Flanagan challenged every aspect of this contemporary common sense. The core of his argument is simple: we know from cross-cultural comparisons that the emotions people typically feel in different situations vary depending on cultural norms. Take anger, his key example. There cannot be anything natural or uncontrollable about people regularly erupting into road rage in America when it hardly ever happens in Japan. Anyone who thinks that teenagers can’t help but scream at their parents clearly hasn’t lived in one of numerous times and places where it is unheard of.
Some say that the emotions are universal, it’s just that in some cultures they are repressed and in others they are expressed. In fact, there’s no evidence for this popular cod-Freudian repression thesis. Flanagan suggested in the Q&A that in fact, the evidence is that therapies that encourage people to vent only make these feelings more intense.
One reason why the simple repression thesis is implausible is that emotions are not raw, primitive, pseudo-physiological reactions. Emotions are tightly related to beliefs and values. Anger, for example, is often provoked because someone is perceived to have acted unjustly. In such cases, anger without a tacit concept of justice is impossible. And we know that these tacit concepts change. That’s why people don’t get angry at injustices they don’t perceive as unjust. Not so long ago, many women weren’t at all angry at not having the same rights as men because they assumed they were indeed the fairer and weaker sex.
Call it confirmation bias, but what Flanagan said supported my view that differences across cultures are matters of degree rather than of kind. I have used the metaphor of the moral mixing desk to describe this. The desk is what is universal, with sliders for values such as equality, happiness, cooperation, duty, reverence and so on. What varies is how each culture sets the levels. In East Asia, for example, the dial on social solidarity is set high, while in the West, autonomy is turned up to eleven. But that does not mean social solidarity is absent in the West, or autonomy in East Asia.
Against the background of different values, the same emotions can have different meanings depending on the culture in which they are manifest. For instance, Flanagan pointed to research showing that anger is considered bad in the West mainly because of its negative effects on individuals: it raises our blood pressure, stresses us out and so on. In Asia, it’s bad primarily because it ruptures social relationships. Again, this isn’t a sharp divide. Both aspect of anger’s badness are present in each culture but a different one is most salient in each.
Sometimes, it is not just the meaning of emotions that changes but their prevalence. Guilt, for instance, is more evident in the West, shame in most other parts of the world. Shame, as Flanagan says, is an essentially social emotion, while guilt can be entirely private. You can see how this maps onto Western individuals and the Eastern relational idea of selfhood.
Again, however, the mixing desk metaphor warns us against making this divide too sharp. In the UK right now, one of the most common criticisms of our prime minster is that he is shameless. We may not have a shame culture but when someone goes so egregiously far in disregarding social norms, shameless becomes the only word to describe them.
Looking out for how less common emotions manifest themselves in your own culture can help to make the cultures of others more understandable. For example, many Westerners were baffled when Koreans felt collective shame for the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in which 326 died, mainly schoolchildren. It was puzzling why people should feel responsible for something that they were not involved in. But it isn’t difficult to find examples of similar emotions in the West. Most obviously, many Westerners are patriotic and so feel pride in their nations’ achievements, even when they did nothing to contribute to them. We take the collectivist pleasures of pride and ignore the related pains of shame. But it’s also true that people do sometimes feel collective shame. Many pro-European Union Britons say they feel embarrassed when they now go to Europe. Germany still suffers from some collective shame because of the Nazi era.
Common reactions to these emotions also show that people believe that there is a ‘normative’ dimension to emotions, meaning that there are times when we think we ought to feel or not feel them. For example, many think it is wrong not too feel patriotic pride and we are very quick to criticise people who don’t feel appropriate remorse, shame or guilt.
Flanagan’s talk invites us to be more challenging about our emotions and not just accept them as expressions of feelings beyond our control. At an individual level, it may be that we’re limited in how much we can change them. But as a society we can take steps to encourage some emotions and discourage others, and perhaps more importantly to judge when certain emotional reactions are appropriate and when they are not. Demanding shame from our prime minister is not just a matter of wanting him to feel the right emotions. It is a way of signalling to everyone that if you break the social contract, you really ought to feel bad.
Do watch Owen’s talk. It would be a shame not to.
New at JulianBaggini.com
The second of a three-part mini series on why the debate over trans rights is such a fraught one, with guests Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Mary Leng, is now out on my website and Apple podcasts. Supporters can also get an exclusive preview the third part along with a lot of other content in the supporter-exclusive area of my website.
The next supporter-exclusive online Cafe Philosophique will be on Sunday February 6th at 8pm UK time. It’s an hour of conversation on a topic of the attendees’ choice. This time I’m asking for suggested topics in advance so people have time to gather their thoughts in advance.
I’ve written a few pieces that editors are sitting on which I’ll put up links to as soon as they are published.
On my radar
I think Asghar Farhadi’s new film A Hero is his best since A Separation. Farhadi is a deeply philosophical director. His films show rather than tell the complexities of both ethics and truth in ways which make theory seem insipid in comparison. In A Hero, for example, there is scene in which a charity has to decide whether to admit to an embarrassing incident or cover it up in order to protect its reputation and so go on to do good work. You could give a philosophical commentary on this and talk about the conflicting priorities of consequentialist, Aristotelian or Kantian ethics, but it is the very specificity of the circumstances which makes the dilemma so difficult. Theory is less useful than carefully attending to the situation, as Farhadi does.
The BBC podcast series The Coming Storm is quietly terrifying. It reveals that the roots of QAnon and the Capitol Hill uprising have actually spread widely across American society. If you thought we’d got over the worst, Gabriel Gatehouse’s programme will be a worrying challenge.
I’m finding it hard to work out why The Green Planet isn’t as engaging as I think it should be. I think the answer is that, as with too many documentaries, the wow-factor has taken precedence over the why-factor. Key information like how photosynthesis works or why fires help some plants to grow is left out while we’re overwhelmed with stunning visuals. These include the overuse of time-lapse which leaves you asking the question: how long is that in real time? Plus there is too much dramatic music and obviously fake sound effects: if a leaf unfolds over hours it doesn’t make a scrunching noise. Am I too hard to please?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for your interest. Until next time, if nothing prevents…