Emotional Baggage

I’ve recently been accused of lacking empathy and not valuing emotions enough when considering issues great or small. In due course, this question was posed to me which had already been on my mind: Is it better to live a life where one reacts to life’s issues or events with emotion or with reason? To rephrase it ever so slightly, should emotions be valued ahead of reason when it comes to dealing with life’s issues or events? Most basically put, should we more often go on gut instinct or would it be better to philosophically shred every issue to bits? I will not deny that emotions certainly are valuable regarding our experiences as individual human beings but when another person or persons enters the equation, I believe reason ought to trump emotion.

This is certainly not how the world has answered the question put to me, not now and not historically. Even many people I regard as otherwise intelligent place a premium on emotion and not enough value on reason. To them and the rest of the world, I would like to take a moment to consider the toll reacting to the world on a visceral level has taken…

Racism and ethnic pride (code for advanced tribalism) surely dates back further than written records. What is racism usually based upon? A feeling that people who looks different and/or act differently are somehow inferior to the racist without any examination as to whether the opposed group is actually inferior. Consider the Nazis: If black people were as inferior as Nazis claimed, how could black people have defeat Nazi athletes at the Olympics? And, did the Nazis conduct any studies to conclude Jews were the cause of Germany’s problems in the 1930’s? (They may have, but were those studies conducted without biases clouding the facts?) Racism continues today in its many instances, even subtly, such as with parents who demand their children marry within their race or culture, and not for any other reason than their emotion. 

Homophobia is similar in nature and history to racism; it is based in emotion. Homophobes have long invoked the ‘ick factor’ in their argument against homosexuals. The problem is that when you reason about the ‘ick factor’ the argument falls apart. The ‘ick factor’ can be used against any group of people whom one dislikes, even the ones claiming homosexuality is ‘icky.’ Or, at least here in The United States, many homophobes employ The Bible to condemn homosexuality as they feel The Bible is the word of God. Of course, The Bible as the word of God cannot be proven any more than The Koran is the word of Allah which may lead us to think we shouldn’t condemn groups of people for reasons not based in reason. Several states in The United States now allow homosexuals to marry just like interracial couples before them because as time marches on, it becomes ever more clear that the arguments against homosexuals are emotionally derived and not rationally driven. 

Then there are the Charles Ponzi- and Bernie Madoff-type scoundrels who prey upon everyone’s desire to get rich quick in order to steal from them. That over-riding desire to become rich has made people vulnerable to even the most ludicrous scams, such as Nigerian “princes” who fleeced many people when that scam first appeared. The second Bush administration used fear to sell the American public the invasion of Iraq; fear and tragedy is likewise used by American news outlets to keep viewers tuned in. “If it bleeds, it leads,” has long been the U.S. media’s unofficial protocol. There are also crimes-of-passion whose most notorious figures include John Hinckley, Amy Fisher, and Amy Nowack, to say nothing of other domestic abuses that are committed out of anger or the pursuit of power. Even now, in 2013, emotionally driven insanity has expelled a child from school because the sign-language he uses to say his name apparently looks too much like a gun.

To be fair, we might ask what has reasoning done for humanity? For one thing, it has advanced science over religion as a way of knowing how the world works and this has resulted in a much more comfortable lifestyle for much of humanity. Medicine is a scientific invention and science is the noble child of philosophy. (Even many so-called holistic medicines work, having been shown to work by reasoning medicine men of ages past.) Reasoning has also allowed for social justice, as previously mentioned. As you’ll notice of our day and age, where there is little social justice, there is also little reasoning. If we, as a species, took time more time to reason, it seems likely many of the greatest tragedies in history could have been avoided. 

If we think about the Nazis again – it always comes back to the Nazis; they’re just so useful in thought experiments – if they or the nation of Germany had stopped to think about whether the Jews and gypsies were actually the cause of the country’s problems, if they had taken the time to really come to the right conclusion or if they did come to the right conclusion think about a solution that didn’t involve genocide, incredible suffering could have been avoided. I feel similarly about the invention of the atomic bomb; there was little doubt that it could be built but how much debate took place over whether it should be built? Even if it should have been built, how much reasoning went into dropping not one, but two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians at the end of WWII? Today, a similar lack of conscience has gone into the invention of genetically modified foods, as short-term profits are driven by the emotion greed with no consideration for what the long-term effects of such food might have on humanity or the environment that supports human life. I’m not sure the world would improve greatly by stopping to think once in a while, but not stopping to think has already proved to be disastrous. Why not go down that other road and see where it goes?

I’m not going to say there are never times when we shouldn’t revel in emotion. If I’m sitting on the beach alone watching the waves, feeling a breeze, the sun warming my skin, listening to the birds…no reasoning is necessary since I’m not dealing with other people and taking no action. I am able to be and enjoy the esthetics of my surroundings. Likewise, I can listen to music and let whatever effect it is going to have me take its course because it’s just between me and the music. Unless the stereo is loud enough to disturb my neighbors, there is no reason to restrain what the music I prefer does to me. Sex, of course, is also most fun when it is uninhibited, but such is a situation where there is someone else to consider and reasoning must come into play should an otherwise consensual partner no longer consent (or not consent at all). Emotions do have value, just not at the expense of other people.

Your thoughts?

This Argument is a Little Bit Gay

Here’s an old salvo making new rounds in the anti-homophobia multi-media campaign…When Did You Choose to be Straight?

 

The point is to get straight people to think about when they chose their sexual orientation. By illustrating that heterosexuals never did choose their sexual orientation, the same must be true of homosexuals. If that’s the case, homosexuals cannot and should not be blamed or ostracized for who they are. (Ironically, the people who think this is an effective argument at the same time feverishly cling to the concept of Free Will. But, whatever.)

While I do not think anyone besides a Scientologist should be blamed for their sexual orientation, I do think this “simple question” that portends to be some kind of panacea for homophobia is not the ingenious argument everyone seems to think it is. This is because it is quite easy to imagine someone who is otherwise heterosexual to choose a long term sexual partner of the same gender. [We’ll disregard solitary instances of homosexual behavior as “experimenting,” especially for women since that’s really hot.] I can easily imagine someone with a long history of physical or mental abuse by an opposite sex partner switching teams, so-to-speak. I can also use myself as an example: Given a do-or-die choice between partnering with another man or a 400lbs Samoan woman, I’m probably going to choose partnering with a man because a 400lbs Samoan women is much less likely to turn me on than another man. (Naturally, this all assumes the man is a good-looking billionaire philanthropist with mommy-issues who flies his own helicopter.) Of course, this might raise the question of whether the person who switches teams is actually a homosexual, but only if one thinks narrow definitions trump real world actions. Such a person may be bisexual, but such definitions obscure the point seeing how bisexuals have been maligned almost as much as homosexuals throughout history. But I digress…Not every heterosexual who may have been abused in some fashion might be tempted to switch teams, but I’m quite sure it’s happened more than one time. I’m not saying it happens more often than people born with an inclination towards their preference in partners, just that it does happen.

I realize my hypothesis can only remain as such because it is too difficult to empirically verify. While scores of homosexuals could be interviewed as to whether they chose homosexuality or homosexuality chose them, we couldn’t be sure – without elaborate brain monitoring – that such interviewees weren’t lying. Besides, any fundamental theist worth their salt will tell you all homosexuals are liars, so what’s the point of conducting a study? (I’m not singling out homosexuals as liars, it’s just that everyone lies, especially fundamental theists.) We cannot verify exactly how many times people are “born” gay. Does it matter, though?

I do believe asking people when they chose to be heterosexuals is a good way of demonstrating that it is possible that homosexuals never had a say in whom they find attractive. Such a demonstration may advance the idea that homosexuality is not a highly unusual anomaly, but to what end? Such a demonstration doesn’t do much to defeat a passionate homophobe since the demonstration doesn’t address the societal or moral implications of a homosexual acting upon their impulses, even if those impulses are natural. It may be shown that homosexuality may be a natural inclination for a certain percentage of the population but that doesn’t mean accepting homosexuals is necessarily good for society. That’s an entirely different argument.

I do understand that by getting people to consider homosexuality as something not completely unnatural is a stepping stone towards discussing the real issue, such as I have just posed it. I do giggle a little bit though like Harvey Fierstein imagining La Cage aux Folles in IMAX 3D when people take this homosexuality-is-normal argument as the killing blow (no pun intended) against homophobia. The argument is just a baby step towards the greater discussion and if one can’t see the argument as only a baby step, they’re in no position to tell you why there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.