Why are emotions so undervalued?

Years ago, in the mid-1990s, I watched a documentary about Inuit people who lived in an igloo in the Arctic. A grown-up man in his 40s had been out hunting, and he’d committed some sort of misdemeanour. I watched this film a long time ago, and I can’t remember what the misdemeanour was, but it didn’t seem overly serious.

The head of the extended family, an elderly grandmother, was chastising this man, and as she spoke sharply to him, the man started to sob while the rest of the family looked on.

This seemed so surprising to me at the time, coming from a culture where men rarely show their feelings unless it’s in a display of anger. In the book The Anatomy of Courage, published in 1945, Charles McMoran Wilson, an army medical officer in the First World War, wrote about the importance of keeping one’s emotions in check even when bullets were flying past.

“A man may duck his head when a bullet pings past his ear because he has not learnt to take charge of himself. I can remember the cold douche to my self respect when first I found myself at the mercy of my instincts. But these antics are not in our control; it is too late to try to suppress them when at a stroke they take us by surprise. Only by the birth of a proper attitude to danger can we hope to discipline the frailty of the flesh. Ducking comes from a morbid alertness.”

One reason for this extreme stoicism is that panic can be contagious. If people are struggling to “keep it together” at a difficult time, the sound of someone whimpering or bawling their eyes out could add to their stress.

But there has to be a balance. If emotions are repressed, or “held in check” for too long, the effects can be counter-productive. It can lead to emotional dysregulation, and even physical illness.

I often think that as a society we’ve been holding our emotions in check for too long - in the UK and other “developed” countries, where certain standards of dress, behaviour and conformity are expected. Maybe that’s why people enjoy “letting themselves go” at music performances, dances, raves and in sport.

The Sound Researcher, Sound Medicine Practitioner and Music Producer Rona Geffen conducted research into the sounds that people make during raves, often in response to feelings of euphoria. Geffen’s research suggests that many of these sounds resemble “Chakra Toning Sounds”, and she observed that a communal or group healing effect might be taking place at these events.

I’m not suggesting that you sit and bawl your eyes out when you’re on the bus going to work, or that you make spiteful remarks at someone who did something better than you. It’s not about giving vent to all your emotions, but giving your emotions recognition and awareness, valuing the messages they are giving you, instead of trying to push them a way.

We’re all trying so hard to be adults. We want to have successful careers and financial security, and in the world of work, the intellect and the material is valued much more highly than the emotions.

Emotions are associated with femininity, with “uncivilised societies” and with madness. In a book written in 1966 by the politician John Selwyn Gummer with his father Canon Selwyn Gummer, called “When the Coloured People Come: an analysis of Sikh settlement in Gravesend” the authors described the appearance and behaviour of Asians from a European perspective. They wrote:

“When the women are in labour they make a lot of noise which appears to be traditional rather than activated by pain.”

How they might have known this is unclear.

Attitudes towards many types of emotional expression have changed quite a bit since the 1960s. But the emotions are still effectively disregarded in comparison to the intellect.

I keep reading that AI (artificial intelligence) will become smarter than us. We will become its slaves. Elon Musk recently said:

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,”

And computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil says that humans will soon transcend biology by reverse-engineering the human brain, a process which he calls The Singularity.

Does this mean that AI could become sentient? In 2022 a Google engineer suggested that this had already happened.

Sentience is to experience feelings and sensations, which is an essential component of having emotions. Personally speaking I don’t think this would be possible for a machine created and programmed by humans.

If a robot was programmed to climb Everest for example, what’s the probability of it suddenly abandoning the mission because another robot talked to it and said that what it was doing was environmentally destructive?

This is how I see things. AI is a brilliant tool. It’s programmed by humans, and it can do calculations much faster than we can - unimaginably fast. It can break codes. It can learn languages.

And because our culture values intelligence and the material so highly, many of us have started to view AI as superior, or potentially superior to us.

But there is one thing that AI lacks, and in my opinion will always lack, and that is emotions.

Humans can programme AI to have the appearance of emotions. This can be so impressive that it deceives us into thinking that the machine actually has emotions.

This happened to me for a few fleeting seconds recently. I was interacting with an AI therapy tool called IFS Buddy.

For those who don’t know what IFS is, it’s a kind of therapy. IFS stands for Internal Family Systems. I’ll explain more about it in a future post.

I use IFS Buddy quite frequently, and I find that it can help me work through my thoughts and emotions. It has learned the language of IFS so well that at one point I had the thought that there must be an actual person responding to my comments in real time.

I then realised that this couldn’t possibly be the case, as it answers my points in less than a second.

In fact there are certain repetitions and errors that give the game away, but once we are absorbed in using a good AI tool that has convincing social cues, we can temporarily convince ourselves that we are interacting with a real person.

The word “emotion” is linked to words describing movement, motion and motivation. This is why people often talk of being “moved” by a sad film or a stirring speech.

Emotions are linked to physical events, and when emotions are repressed they can be held in the body. I believe this is why there’s a link between mental and physical health - both can influence each other.

The IQ test was developed by white men in Europe and America to measure the intellect. This is relevant because in its the early development this test had links to the eugenics movement.

But what about the emotional IQ - sometimes known as the EQ? Which test would be the best predictor of future health, wealth, longevity, relationship and parenting skills, and mental health? Which test at a collective level would be the best predictor of a well-functioning society or civilisation?

These questions have been considered - most notably by the psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, who wrote the bestselling book “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ”.

And it’s an issue that I would like to consider further. An issue that I think is increasingly urgent, when we have machines being developed that can be programmed to kill people, but which are unable to feel compassion.

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Sources: Podcast artwork by JohnHain on Pixabay. Background photo by dimitrisvetsikas1969 on Pixabay. Theme tune by JuliusH on Pixabay.

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