J. Colannino/My Amygdala Made Me Do It!

This week our class viewed a video about emotional intelligence and how to harness our emotions for good rather than ill. We took a test to assess our emotional intelligence (EI). I learned some things and, for the most part, I agreed with nearly all that I heard. But what’s the fun in agreeing? So I’d like to focus (perhaps unfairly) on some pseudo-intellectualism that has been popular for the last hundred years or so, and which I heard in passing in both the video and the answer key to the EI quiz. But first, allow me to digress to consider amygdalas and almonds.

Amygdala means “almond” in Latin; it is the almond-shaped gland in the brain that is thought to be the “seat of emotion.” Some have called it our “lizard brain” – the “primitive” part of our “meat computer” that is very close the brain stem and which, in an evolutionary paradigm, evolved very early on for Homo sapiens. In contrast, and according to the same paradigm, our neo-cortex (the “seat of rationality”) supposedly developed much later in evolutionary time. Thus, we are conflicted creatures – our amygdala and neo-cortex at war in our heads.

The video took the class back in time to “the beginning” … Charles Darwin, who (we learned) finally gave an explanation for why emotions exist: they are an evolutionary trick to enhance our survival: our sexual urges, our base instincts – they are the near literal-fruits of the almond in our attic; our neo-cortex tries to keep a lid on things, but our amygdala has a hair-emotional-trigger.

I beg to differ.

First of all, there is nothing primitive about emotion or advanced about rational thought, nor is there a shred of evidence that we ever had one without the other; love is arguably the most noble, uniquely human, and advanced quality of all despite being an emotion.

Second, emotion has been the subject of serious inquiry for millennia; Darwin was hardly “the beginning.” The ancient Greeks considered the matter in detail. Humankind’s most ancient mythology, meta-narratives, and religious scripture are full of emotion, explanation, and insight. Christianity, also articulated genuine explanations for emotions (creation by a loving God), counseled the need to control them (fall narrative), and offered tangible and intangible benefits for doing so (redemption narrative). And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with the evolutionary explanation: it is… well … too religious. Going back to “the beginning,” Darwin postulated that from some “warm little pond” the primordial ooze became self-replicating (creation story); from agar to animal to ape we struggled for existence (fall narrative) until finally and fatefully – we became women and men. Now, enlightened by evolutionary theory, we can finally live up to our hope and promise as a species if only we can learn our evolutionary lessons (redemption narrative).

But what has evolutionary psychology added to our understanding? What explanatory power does the evolutionary meta-narrative have? Why do we hate? We became hateful because it increased our chances for survival. Then why do we love? We became loving because it increased our chances for survival. Likewise, we became selfish; we became altruistic. We became self-centered; we became social. We can “explain it all” – even mutually contradictory things – via the evolutionary meta-narrative. At core, this is neo-religious, mystic, and certainly irrational. Outright contradictions are not only tolerated but embraced. There is a word for this: nonsense.

We would be wise not to retread this path. Historically, the embrace of contradiction resulted in the complete stultification of the scientific method for centuries. In place of logic’s either/or decision tree, Eastern religions substituted “both/and” contradiction. Despite the fact that “Arabic” numbers originated in the Indian subcontinent, they were virtually useless for developing science in a “both/and” Hindu worldview. The numbers migrated through Arabia before reaching Western lands, but the religious fatalism of Islam stunted any exploration of the universe through them, despite journeying through the land of the greatest astronomers of the world. It wasn’t until the 16^th century that the scientific method finally exploded in Western lands. Historians generally regard the advent of the Reformation in the 15^th century (and the Judeo-Christian tradition in general) as seminal for the development of science. These traditions expected (actually, demanded) a rational and understandable universe as the product of a rational and loving God. That is why I am baffled to see such discredited religious concepts reappearing long after history has shown them to be the enemy of both science and the university.

Even our text book appears to prefer Eastern mysticism and first century Gnosticism to Western tradition. It is one thing to abandon a pure religion for science; it is quite another to abandon science for a discredited religion. For example, our text offers a bizarrely novel knowledge-management structure in its explanation of the knowledge-value chain: data... knowledge...™ understanding... wisdom... enlightenment. (This is different than the traditional hierarchy: data... information... knowledge [... ™ wisdom], the latter being left out as often as it is left in. The traditional view is that data are bare facts, information is organized data, and knowledge is information systematized and applied to a purpose.)

Historically, wisdom is knowledge plus a moral dimension per the wisdom literature of many ancient cultures. Knowledge tells one how to go to war; wisdom tells one whether he should. This normative distinction can be included in a knowledge framework, but just as often, it is relegated to “ethics” and considered separately. (This is why wisdom is often not included in a traditional knowledge-management hierarchy.) I have no problem with either approach.

On the other hand, I do have a problem with cramming “understanding” and “enlightenment” into an organizational scheme for codifying objective reality. First of all, understanding and knowing are synomous; to rank one above another is epistemological nonsense. Moreover, the idea that knowledge or gnosis will lead to some form of enlightened existence is a foreign import; it resulted from the imposition of Eastern mysticism on fledgling Christianity in the first century A.D. The concept that gnosis would lead to enlightenment is thus pseudo-scientific. It is certainly antithetical to any fact-based approach. Likewise, evolution with its both/and tolerance of mutual exclusives is nothing more than neo-mysticism (or Western mysticism if the reader will allow me to coin a phrase).

Well, perhaps this is just an emotional outburst. Or perhaps I am completely wrong. If that were true, I could hardly be blamed, being that I am (as necessarily follows) rearranged pond scum. What can one expect from such a fellow? My amygdala made me do it.