The Emotions of Protest

James M. Jasper

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226561813
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In Donald Trump's America, protesting has roared back into fashion. The Women's March, held the day after Trump's inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump's tweets and the march's popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again.There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain—a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies—and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper's work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest, Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro- and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel.This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.

1: Beyond the Calculating Brain

Because we don’t understand the brain very well we’re constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

JOHN R. SEARLE

Among the supreme moral heroes of the twentieth century are those who stood up to the paramount evil of the century, the Holocaust. Many men and women risked their lives to save those, especially Jews, whom the Nazis were hunting down for extermination. Kristen Monroe, an expert on these admirable people, was surprised that none of those she interviewed expressed any sense of choice in their arduous rescue activities. “Normally, you don’t teach a mother how to love her baby,” commented one rescuer. “She has that naturally. . . . So your instinct that you develop in yourself is to react in that way. And so it was a quite natural development. Not, ‘Should I do it or not?’” Even at this fateful moment, and despite the risk to their own lives, the rescuers were thinking and acting through their feelings. They knew what they had to do without any calculations, based on the characters they had become over their lives, on their empathy for beings whom they viewed as fellow humans: “Character counted more than the influences traditionally said to provide the impetus behind moral action, and emotions and feelings trumped the cool and impartial calculus of reason.”1 If we feel our way through momentous actions like these, then we probably do so through most of the rest of life. Our brains—or rather, our nervous systems—do more than calculate.

Thinking through Emotions

If we stop thinking of emotions as sudden disruptions, we can ask what they do for us as well as to us. There are not many things we can say about emotions as a whole, but we can usefully analyze most of them as forms of feeling-thinking. Or rather, we can think of feeling-thinking processes as the ingredients in emotion episodes. There are all sorts of processes going on in our bodies and nervous systems at any time. We are accustomed to calling some of these processes “thoughts” and others “feelings” or “emotions,” depending on what triggers them and (if we are neurologists) on what parts of the brains are activated and what chemicals released. We also look for different bodily changes with thoughts and with emotions. This approach is less dependable, since some thoughts trigger visible bodily changes (the excited “ah-ha” expression when we grasp an idea), while most emotions do not. Our main clues come from our knowledge about the situation we are in.2

According to dictionaries, thinking consists of mental processes that integrate new information into what we already know, allowing us to model the world and to deal with it according to our plans and desires. Once we stop thinking of “mental” as some ethereal, unemotional activity—an echo of the traditional Christian idea of an immaterial soul—then we can see that emotions fit the same definition, leading psychologists to speak of “the wisdom of feeling.”3

Psychologists have gone wild in recent years over the many feeling-thinking processes that allow us to process information without even being conscious of it, especially in the notion of fast thinking. At one extreme, Gerd Gigerenzer believes that the intuitive heuristics we deploy are typically better than the calculations we make when we stop to think things through consciously. In familiar situations, we usually arrive at the best response first, but when we are given time to think up other possibilities, we begin to imagine less worthy ones, partly because we begin to rely on irrelevant bits of information. Gigerenzer believes that our brains’ evolution has left us with a number of forms of fast thinking that pick out the information most relevant to our choices. He criticizes the view of the brain which “assumes that minds function like calculating machines and ignores our evolved capacities, including cognitive abilities and social instincts.” He prefers to view the mind “as an adaptive toolbox with genetically, culturally, and individually created and transmitted rules of thumb.”4

Others remain skeptical, pointing to the large number of cognitive illusions people have. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky created prospect theory out of hundreds of experiments (now thousands) showing the decision-making biases that people tend to employ unless carefully trained to avoid them.5 Often, the examples of useful fast thinking involve catching a fly ball or reaching for something in our peripheral vision—physical reactions that are poor exemplars for political decisions. Most psychologists prefer to see two distinct ways of thinking, fast inferences and slower calculations; in many cases we make snap judgments but then correct them as we gather more information. Kahneman observes, “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.”6 (Of course if there is no time to collect more information, as in some strategic interactions, jumping to conclusions based on feelings is inevitable.) For other psychologists, this sounds too much like the age-old effort to exclude people from decision making on the basis of their emotions, leaving policies such as nuclear energy to slow-thinking experts. But it turns out that experts, too, have emotions.7

There is a vast continuum from the least conscious to the most conscious feeling-thinking, another from the fewest to the greatest bodily changes that accompany the feeling-thinking. Working my pencil through a crossword puzzle may not be very different from jumping when I am startled by a loud noise or a sudden movement in the shadows. The two activities both activate many different parts of our bodies, especially but not exclusively in our brains. In what passes for cognition as well as what passes for emotion, we are perceiving the world around us, processing that information, and working up an appropriate response, based on many feeling-thinking processes. Thinking is an engagement with our physical and social contexts, whether the suitable action is to sit and look over the finished puzzle or to jump up and run. Moving my pencil from square to square and forming letters is every bit as preconscious—and speedy—as my jumping when startled.

We can expand this image of feeling as thinking into feeling as communicating with ourselves—or signaling, as Sigmund Freud said. Emotions are rough-and-ready evaluations of what is happening, alerting us to what is important. First, what is happening inside our own bodies through urges: when we are hungry, tired, excited. Second, as in the case of startle and other reflex emotions, what is happening in our immediate physical environment.

Feeling-thinking also tells us about our social environment: my emotional displays tell others what is going on with me, and my feelings tell me what seems to be going on with them. According to neurologist Antonio Damasio, feelings “serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them. And feelings are neither intangible nor elusive. Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts.”8 If emotions were elusive rather than predictable, they could hardly play this communicative role. Social life would be impossible.

Reflex emotions in particular are easily read by others, allowing them to prepare their own responses. They may get out of our way, come to our aid, or scan the environment to see what has startled us. Emotional displays allow humans to coordinate what they do, whether for cooperation or competition with each other. Body language and facial expressions are ways we communicate with others, who understand this somatic vocabulary without necessarily becoming conscious of it. Prosody is all the variations in intonation or melody, the pauses and stresses, the intensity or timbre of our speech—all of which is also crucial in displaying emotions intelligibly to others.

Finally, emotions tell us about the moral and (for some) spiritual worlds, about our connections to the very meaning of life. Robert Solomon, an existentialist philosopher, argues that emotions give life whatever meaning it has, since “they are ways of seeing and engaging in the world, our ways of ‘being tuned’ into the world, in Heidegger’s delightful metaphor.” According to Solomon, “An emotion is a basic judgment about our Selves and our place in our world, the projection of the values and ideals, structures and morphologies, according to which we live and through which we experience our lives.”9 Feelings tell us about the state of our gut and our place in the world.

An extremely sociological philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, has elaborated a sensible framework for understanding emotions that recognizes their close connection to thought, in a number of books but chiefly Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. There have been the inevitable scholarly quibbles over her portrait, but the main outlines have stood up well, particularly as a starting point for social scientists.10

Emotions, Nussbaum begins, “involve judgments about the salience for our well-being of uncontrolled external objects.” To understand emotions, we must examine human attachments in all their diversity: to our own bodies, to the physical world, to concrete and abstract others, taken singly and collectively, to ideas and moral principles, to places and things, and to our own self-images. But emotions are not just a catalog of what we value, they tell us how we are doing in relation to what we value. They “are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning self.”11

Her view contains three central components: “the idea of a cognitive appraisal or evaluation; the idea of one’s own flourishing or one’s important goals and projects; and the idea of the salience of external objects as elements in one’s own scheme of goals.”12 She stresses the role of imagination and active interpretation in our emotional experience, which “contains rich and dense perceptions of the object, which are highly concrete and replete with detail.”13 Our imagination brings alive the object of our emotion (moods, lacking objects, are an exception; and with urges our own bodies are the relevant objects).

Among our feeling-thinking processes, the imagination is central in politics, as it helps us react to mediated events as well as to face-to-face interactions. Symbols and words that are remote from our present situation can still arouse various feelings, and they are rhetorically crafted for that very purpose. It is our emotional reactions that keep us reading a novel or watching a political speech on television. These reactions depend especially on our ongoing emotional commitments. Plus, imagination is central to the empathy that allows us to communicate and coordinate with others.

Nussbaum distinguishes usefully between background and “situational” emotions. Her background emotions correspond to what I call affective and moral commitments. “One loves one’s parent, children, spouse, friends, continuously over time, even when no specific incident gives rise to an awareness of the love.”14 She also mentions fear of death and anger over a persisting wrong: these seem to be reflex emotions but in fact become ongoing concerns or (in the case of anger) moral judgments. By placing two major categories of feelings in the “background,” Nussbaum avoids confronting exceptions to her view of emotions as judgments about how well we are doing in the world at a given moment.

Although we can have emotions about goals that are not well articulated or not even conscious, the focus on goals and appraisal is especially apt for approaching the emotions involved in politics. Although it includes many murky motivations as well, politics frequently calls on us to articulate our goals when we try to persuade others. Affective and moral commitments are crucial references.

Whether we exclude nonconscious goals or not, we must include a variety of nonconscious feeling-thinking processes, such as biochemical changes. In fact, this helps us see how emotions, our verbal labels, are only one component of feeling-thinking. There may be dozens of feeling-thinking dynamics at work before I realize I am “afraid,” and that emotion label does not put an end to them. But it does transform some of them, as feeling-thinking processes interact. However, nonconscious does not mean unpredictable, irregular, or even complicated. Nonconscious feeling-thinking processes (which are the vast majority) are still subject to analysis.

We might better understand feeling-thinking processes by reflecting on the amazing sensitivity of many dogs, which pick up all sorts of cues in—obviously—a nonverbal way, and perhaps nonconscious, too. We don’t hesitate to recognize these sensitivities in canine companions, but we are reluctant to acknowledge the same feeling-thinking mechanisms in ourselves. As pack animals, dogs need to be aware of what other creatures around them are doing, much as humans need to. We can think of this as what William James described as a stream of consciousness. (By the way, in humans this flow has been estimated, to borrow at least once from computer analogs, to reach the astounding volume of eleven million bits of information per second.)15 It’s a fair guess that other mammals use all the feeling-thinking processes that we do except for one, verbal labels, and a few apes have learned even those when forced to interact with humans.16

Except for moods, emotions are about something, and they are closely tied to our beliefs about that thing. Emotions can be inappropriate, unjustified, or unreasonable (when they are based on false beliefs), so that new information creates, modifies, and (quickly or slowly) extinguishes them.17 Emotions are also more or less intense depending on how central to our lives their objects are. And in a good example of their intelligence, our feeling-thinking processes occasionally surprise our conscious selves—for instance, leading us to realize that we care more about something or someone than we had realized.

Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative approach challenges the contrast between body and cognition. “Human emotions are all bodily processes,” since we are always embodied, but bodily sensations alone are not sufficient to define an emotion. For that we also need cognitive activity. A person’s own experience is central to labeling an emotion. If a person says she is sad but a brain image does not show the activity neurologists associate with sadness, we would probably agree with her and not with them. Given the complexity of the human nervous system, individuals have...