Healing the Reason-Emotion Split

Scarecrows, Tin Woodmen, and the Wizard

Daniel S. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000334296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Healing the Reason-Emotion Split draws on research from experimental psychology and neuroscience to dispel the myth that reason should be heralded above emotion.

Arguing that reason and emotion mutually benefit our decision-making abilities, the book explores the idea that understanding this relationship could have long-term advantages for our management of society's biggest problems. Levine reviews how reason and emotion operated in historical movements such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism and 1960s' counterculture, to conclude that a successful society would restore human connection and foster compassion in economics and politics by equally utilizing reason and emotion.

Integrating discussion on classic and contemporary neurological studies and using allegory, the book lays out the potential for societal change through compassion, and would be of interest to psychologists concerned with social implications of their fields, philosophy students, social activists, and religious leaders.

1

Minds to Match Our Challenges

In 2004, many people felt that President George W. Bush of the United States was vulnerable to losing his bid for reelection. The national unity Bush had achieved three years earlier by bringing us together in the face of terrorist attacks had dissipated with the war in Iraq that divided the nation in spite of our early victory. His tax cuts that mainly benefited the rich were unpopular. So were his and Congress’ efforts to cut social programs. Americans were ambivalent about “handouts” such as welfare programs and food stamps but tended to support strengthening Social Security and federal programs to provide jobs and job training.¹

The Democratic candidate who opposed Bush was Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who had been a hero in the Vietnam War but lately come to oppose our involvement in Iraq. His party thought that his military record would make him a formidable candidate against the war President. Yet Kerry’s campaign made a number of mistakes that kept him from winning, mistakes of overreliance on reason in an arena that thrives on emotional appeals.²

First of all, after polls showed voters disliked negative campaigning, the Kerry campaign largely avoided direct attacks on Bush. This was later turned against Kerry by Bush’s campaign who attacked Kerry’s war record and criticized him for being weak when he did not fight back. So many voters were more susceptible to negative ads than they thought they were. Second, Kerry highlighted his desire to give something back to his country after being given privileges like going to Yale. This enabled Bush to paint him as an Ivy League liberal who was out of touch with the common people. Kerry was closer to voters on many policy issues but Bush’s greater personal appeal enabled him to get reelected.

Does this election story mean we should try to encourage voters to be more rational and less emotional in their choices? Surprisingly to some readers, I don’t believe so! More rational, yes, but not less emotional. Emotional connection with our leaders and with the democratic process is part of what holds civil society together, so we don’t want to lose that connection. Rather we should encourage voters, and people in general, to channel their positive emotions as much as possible toward people and policies and events that will really help them and be beneficial to society. In other words, reason and emotion should be in harmony rather than one defeating the other.

This book will argue that the social myth that emotion and reason are opposites, with reason being superior to emotion, is harmful. Furthermore, it’s a myth that recent results in the relevant areas of science–neuroscience and experimental psychology–do not support. And science can also suggest ways of thinking that can substitute for that myth.

Can Science Help Us?

Our understanding of the human brain has taken off explosively in the Twenty-First Century. Results of recently developed techniques enable us to see what areas of the brain are active during the performance of particular mental tasks. Now the fund of knowledge about human mental function is larger than it has ever been in history.

Because the human brain is arguably the most complex organism in existence, the study of brain and mind is often called the last frontier of science.³ As we learn more about our brains, can we direct our reasoning, emotions, and attitudes for the benefit of society and the planet?

Advances in science and technology in the last 400 years have made more people on Earth lead longer, healthier, and better lives than in most, if not all, previous history. Yet the benefits of science have not gone to everyone. Moreover, global communications and technological advances have created some problems of their own. It’s now well established that human activity has led to increased greenhouse gas emissions that have raised average temperatures.⁴ The result will increasingly be more variable weather conditions including flooding in some places and drought in others, both of which threaten the settled ways of life of millions of people. Also, rapid growth and encroachment of human populations and their artificial products threaten species that are vital to our ecosystem, like the bees that pollinate agricultural crops and other plants.⁵

Technological growth has also created cultural challenges due to the linking of distant countries via advanced communication and transportation. Inhabitants of poorer and developing countries have become more aware of the economic growth in other places and increasingly strive to get a share of the action, which further adds to the worldwide strain on natural resources and energy. Richer nations are also under more strain due to increased immigration from those in poorer nations seeking either asylum or a better life.⁶

During the period of writing this book, a global pandemic has been added to the challenges humanity needs to face, making it more important than ever to seek solutions that benefit people as a whole. All these societal challenges are technically difficult but not impossible (yet, anyway) to meet. Yet even when technical solutions are available, human attitudes often get in the way of applying those solutions. This book focuses on some of our attitude barriers. And it focuses on what the sciences of the mind, neuroscience and experimental psychology, say about how to break those barriers.

For example, biologist Mary Clark⁷ identified several common attitudes in European and American culture that interfere with preserving our environment. These are the belief in the dark side of human nature; the belief in the inevitable scarcity of resources; and the belief in cumulative progress over time, which tends to disparage the accomplishments of earlier and “primitive” societies. Clark suggested replacing these with their opposites: beliefs in the “bright side” of human nature, in abundance of resources, and in adaptation to changing circumstances.

Belief in the dark side of human nature feeds a perceived need for social control; that is, a belief that social stability requires rank orderings in which some individuals or groups dominate others. Several books by feminist historian Riane Eisler⁸ document that while societies throughout much of history have been based on rank orderings, both within families and in the larger society, an alternative model based on roughly equal partnerships often emerges and creates better social health. Moreover, partnership or domination in intimate relations tends to mirror partnership or domination in social and political relations. So it is important to remember that the partnership model is just as much part of the human evolutionary makeup as the dominator model. In Eisler’s words, “what we think of as natural and inevitable–destructive personal and social patterns such as domestic violence, chronic warfare, racial and religious prejudice, the domination of women by men–are not natural or inevitable at all.”⁹

We need to explore what neuroscience and experimental psychology can tell us about the roots of human attitudes and how best to encourage the kinds of attitudes that will meet the challenges of our current world. The title of this chapter, Minds to Match our Challenges, is borrowed from a motto used in the past by one of the scientific enterprises in the scenic university city of Boulder, Colorado: Minds to Match our Mountains.

Some people are pessimistic about the earth’s current population and believe we need genetic engineering to make people “smarter.” Or else, some believe, we need to accept the fact that artificial intelligence devices will soon be smarter than humans and gradually hand over control of vital decisions to machines. On the contrary, I believe that most of us carry within ourselves the potential for either constructive or destructive attitudes. So we have less need for genetic engineering than for social engineering. That is, we need to structure society to increase the incentives for constructive attitudes–incentives that are sometimes called nudges.¹⁰

To make sense of the different aspects of our mental function and how they relate to one another, it helps to understand the brain processes involved in all those functions and the anatomy and physiology of the relevant brain regions.¹¹ When I mention the connections between brain and behavior, people occasionally get uncomfortable with the idea that biological processes in the brain “cause” behavior, because they think it denies human responsibility. But this book avoids the philosophical controversies over whether mental events can cause physical events or whether all the causation is in the other direction, from physical to mental events.¹² Without knowing the exact chain of causes, we can still confidently say that certain brain processes accompany, or correlate with, the mental processes of interest to us.¹³

The opening statement of the United States’ brain research initiative launched in 2014¹⁴ is: “President Obama is making new investments in the ‘BRAIN’ Initiative—a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.” More recently, there has also been wide interest in what neuroscience tells us about how people learn, leading to “brain exercising” software such as Lumosity and “brain-friendly” curricula in many schools.

Applying neuroscience to mental illness treatment and to education is vitally needed and welcome. Yet equally important, and the focus of this book, is applying neuroscience to structuring society. We need to consider social structures both at the formal level of social and economic policies and the informal level of social customs and mores, in so far as we can try to direct them. In 2015, President Obama also issued an executive order asking federal agencies to incorporate behavioral science in making their decisions. In response, several experimental psychologists wrote a proposal for a “council of psychological science advisors” to the president.¹⁵

Attitudes cut across different human pursuits. If a mental outlook emerges in politics or the family, it is likely to emerge in different forms in religion, language, literature, psychotherapy, economics, and a variety of other endeavors. In an online book,¹⁶ I mapped out some relationships between attitudes in these different walks of life and tied them to sciences of the brain and mind. This book focuses more specifically on attitudes about reason, emotion, and decision-making.

As our technology and standard of living have increased, we have looked more and more to reason for solving our challenging problems. Our pursuit of reason often leads us to put down emotion as something that is always present but needs to be overcome. This book argues instead that emotion and reason should be treated as partners. Moreover, it argues that recent advances in neuroscience, experimental psychology, and computational modeling of neural systems support the existence of, and the need to encourage, partnership between emotion and reason.

The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow

The relationship between behavioral brain activity patterns and social organization may seem remote to some readers. Yet this book argues that the ability of societies to address social, political, economic, and environmental challenges is tied closely to beliefs and attitudes about human interactions, and that neuroscience and psychology have lessons about which attitudes are helpful or harmful.

Specifically, the belief in domination rather than partnership and the perceived need for tight social controls blind us to the possibilities for human cooperation that will help to address our challenges. As Riane Eisler points out,¹⁷ partnership between different people is enhanced by partnership within each of ourselves. That is, the different aspects of each of our psychic makeup, all of those products of human evolution, need to be working together as much as possible, rather than in conflict. In particular, we are rational beings with the instinct to learn as much and as accurately as possible about ourselves and our environments, which some authors describe as either a drive to comprehend or a knowledge instinct.¹⁸ Yet we are just as much emotional beings who try t...