Thursday, July 18, 2019
The Traumatic Fragmenting of Emotion and Reason
[I posted this yesterday on Facebook]
"[E]motion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to experience and thus are the foundation of reason. Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we 'feel like ourselves.' However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently...
When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict (as when we're enraged with someone we love, frightened by someone we depend on, or lust after someone who is off limits), a tug-of-war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience - your gut, your heart, your lungs - and will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery."
- from: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.
This is a book about trauma and its treatment. To me, Ben Shapiro is (merely) a figure head. I hear this voice represented in many who intend to tear down the arguments of their enemies with "facts and logic."
What's especially interesting, however, is that I frequently hear this battle cry from BOTH liberals AND conservatives.
So, again, I just quoted a book on trauma. What this says to me, then - if he relies on "facts and reason" over and against the "emotions" of liberals - is that, according to our neurology, Ben Shapiro isn't coolly, objectively, and neutrally building an argument in a peaceful and respectful debate so much as participating in a long, violent, and bloody history of trauma at the heart and foundation of our national narrative. His presumption that reason and emotion don't generally function harmoniously is his presumption that we are constantly in a war zone of traumatic crisis in which our survival is at stake.
By the same token, if liberals are doing the same when they hang their hat on the logical contradictions in conservative positions - such as how conservatives claim to be pro life while being war mongers, or claim to hold the moral high ground in general and on sexual ethics in particular while Christians show no statistical difference in divorce rates and support a serial abuser and adulterer - they are living into and embodying the same exact trauma as Shapiro and his followers. (This doesn't mean that the contradictions have no import; only that, in and of themselves, they only say we're suffering PTSD)
Perhaps justice doesn't look like being right in a debate so much as the healing of a long and bloody history of trauma in relation to our familial enemies.
When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict (as when we're enraged with someone we love, frightened by someone we depend on, or lust after someone who is off limits), a tug-of-war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience - your gut, your heart, your lungs - and will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery."
- from: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.
This is a book about trauma and its treatment. To me, Ben Shapiro is (merely) a figure head. I hear this voice represented in many who intend to tear down the arguments of their enemies with "facts and logic."
What's especially interesting, however, is that I frequently hear this battle cry from BOTH liberals AND conservatives.
So, again, I just quoted a book on trauma. What this says to me, then - if he relies on "facts and reason" over and against the "emotions" of liberals - is that, according to our neurology, Ben Shapiro isn't coolly, objectively, and neutrally building an argument in a peaceful and respectful debate so much as participating in a long, violent, and bloody history of trauma at the heart and foundation of our national narrative. His presumption that reason and emotion don't generally function harmoniously is his presumption that we are constantly in a war zone of traumatic crisis in which our survival is at stake.
By the same token, if liberals are doing the same when they hang their hat on the logical contradictions in conservative positions - such as how conservatives claim to be pro life while being war mongers, or claim to hold the moral high ground in general and on sexual ethics in particular while Christians show no statistical difference in divorce rates and support a serial abuser and adulterer - they are living into and embodying the same exact trauma as Shapiro and his followers. (This doesn't mean that the contradictions have no import; only that, in and of themselves, they only say we're suffering PTSD)
Perhaps justice doesn't look like being right in a debate so much as the healing of a long and bloody history of trauma in relation to our familial enemies.
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