EMOTION AND REASON

Humans are not rational beings.  Reason is usually employed after the fact to justify behavior that is emotionally motivated.  Efforts are often made to eliminate or reduce the effects of emotion in decision-making.  The ability to display emotions, however, rather than manifest robot-like reactions to lifetime situations, is what makes human beings human.

Feelings have value in interpersonal relations or they would have, through time, been deselected as a survival trait.  Empathy for the plights of others is clearly a characteristic that promotes the long-term well being of a family, tribe or nation.  Anger, when directed against a group’s foes, stimulates responses of a protective nature.  Pleasurable reactions to events generated by the family or extended family, which can include members of the same tribe, race, religion, or geographical area, encourage loyalty and a willingness to work for common causes.  The emotions generated when in the presence of the opposite sex are clearly important for the promulgation of the species.

Some emotional responses do not have a logical basis.  Feelings of pleasure gained from listening to music, viewing a work of art, or walking through a beautiful garden do not, on the surface, heighten a person’s abilities to confront nature’s challenges.  They are more sophisticated reactions to one’s environment than a basic urge to physically overcome or escape a dangerous situation.  Over thousands of years, as man has tamed his surroundings, sensibilities have developed which only marginally, if at all, have given him a higher likelihood of survival.  Yet these characteristics, for many, are what make life worth living.

At the same time, strong emotional inclinations that are based on faulty logic can produce behavior that is inimical to the healthy state of a society.  An individual who feels threatened by someone of the opposite sex or from another ethnic or cultural group is more predisposed to engage in actions damaging to others than a person who does not have those biases.  Members of religions who feel strongly that their views on how life should be lived are the only correct ones are more prone to engage in combat to prove the validity of their beliefs than people who are not as emotionally involved.  Natural feelings, such as love, hate, or happiness can be molded and distorted by cultural conditioning so they become weapons that are utilized by religious or political leaders to achieve specific ends.  Such actions usually are to the detriment of others who do not think and act as they do.