ANALYSIS OF "THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE" (part 17)

The Risk of Cutting Ourselves Off from Others

by

Charles Lamson

Michael Schwalbe contends in his book The Sociologically Examined Life, that our emotional responsiveness to others gives us incentive to treat them with respect, and to try to get along peacefully. Knowing that our feelings are in the hands of others, and their feeling are in ours, we have good reason to be kind and gentle with each other. It is possible, however, for our responsiveness to break down. Under some conditions, we may cut ourselves off from feeling with and for certain others.

In war, for example, people in one country define those in another country as enemies. But that is not all. For war to be carried out, people in opposing countries must stop feeling with and for each other. This emotional cutting-off is what enables ordinary and otherwise decent people to kill in cold blood. If people on both sides could feel the anguish of those who were shot, cut, blinded, burned, and maimed, there could be no war. Politicians and generals who gave orders to kill might then be banished to a place where they could do no more harm.

Even in war people remain emotionally responsive to some others: fellow citizens and comrades in battle. In the face of a common enemy and the prospect of death, emotional bonding can be intense. If people lack this kind of intense connection in everyday life, they may find war attractive. It is as if the price of temporarily loving one's neighbor or fellow soldier is the mass killing of others.

Part of the problem is that we become too responsive to the judgments of some audiences, and thus feel compelled to do things we know are not right. Our desires to be accepted and liked by people in one group, can lead us to hurt people in other groups. Being sociologically mindful, we are alert to this danger. If we sense that our allegiance to one group is leading us to treat members of another group as less than human, we can ask ourselves what will the consequences be if I disregard the humanity of others, just to be accepted here? That is a question that should be posed aloud to other self-regulating humans.

People do not have to be at war for a cutting-off of emotional responsiveness to occur. If members of one group feel there is no way to gain respect from members of another group. members of the disrespected group may stop caring about the feelings and judgments of members of the other group. Often this kind of situation arises between dominant and oppressed groups. For example, in the United States, centuries of white disrespect for blacks has led to contempt for white people and a disdain for things defined as "white" on the part of many black people. This is not reverse racism, but rather a rejection of a dominant and disrespectful culture.

Not responding emotionally to others can thus be an act of self-defense. It may simply be too painful to care about the judgments and feelings of those who will not respect us in any case.

There are, however, other reasons why this cutting-off might occur. It may be that members of a dominant group feel shame and guilt at the suffering they have caused others. To listen to and feel with those who have been abused and deeply hurt may be too painful to bear. "Perhaps this is why many whites in the United States have such a hard time listening to blacks describe the pain caused by racism," says Schwalbe. "It is too much for whites to feel this pain and sadness, and to admit they are partly responsible for causing it."

A similar thing can happen between between people who love each other. If someone else hurts a person we love, we rush to be sympathetic and empathic. We try to feel with and for the person who is hurt. But if our actions are the source of the loved one's pain, we may be unresponsive emotionally. Perhaps, we use reason to avoid dealing with feelings. We might say, "It's too bad you feel hurt, but if you just think carefully about the situation, you will realize that you have mistakenly interpreted my actions, therefore you should not feel the way you do."

Few of us want to feel the guilt that comes with knowing that we have hurt a person we love. So we might try to define them as irrational, overly sensitive, or wrong about our intentions. Ironically, we do this because we are so emotionally responsive to others. If we were not, we would not have to be so clever in using reason to avoid the unpleasant feelings that can be induced in us by others' suffering. Sometimes it is our fear of how others can make us feel if we open ourselves to feeling with and for them, that pushes us apart.

In Conclusion

Reason is not the enemy of emotion. Reason helps us sort through our feelings and choose the best course of action - perhaps the one that best respects the feelings of others. Precisely because we sometimes have impulses to lash out at others, we need reason to be peacefully self-regulating. For instance, reason is being used here to argue for the importance of being emotionally responsive to others. A problem arises only when we use reason to avoid listening to others when we do not know how to deal with their feelings or our own.

*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PHS. 74-76*

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