As much as I loved Star Trek: TNG, I never wanted to be Data.
He was an android incapable of emotion, running on pure logic. And he spent much of his time trying to discover or attain emotion because his logical brain realized he wasn’t fully human without emotion.1
We live in a bizarre age in which, to fight against the overreaches of some parts of feminism, we embraced caricatures of male and female, and then assigned value to the qualities (most often the lesser value was given to “female” qualities).
Emotion. Empathy. Sympathy. Run amuck, they are ugly. But removed or discredited? It is also ugly. We end up preferring brute strength, stoicism, individualism, and bootstrapping. Never mind the discussion on the wedge such an approach puts between you and a close relationship with Jesus and how God seems to prefer working with the broken and weak; the question is one of balance between emotion and non-emotion.
Emotion is given to us by God, who himself has emotions. We learn in the Bible that He feels grief, anger, joy, and sometimes makes decisions based on them—just like we do, since He created us in His image. Denigrating emotions, or categorizing them as weak or harmful, does Him a disservice. Emotions must be controlled—that’s basically the fruit of the Spirit when you think about it—but we aren’t to pursue becoming logical robots.2 Controlling emotion doesn’t mean dispelling them, or denying to yourself that they exist in your life.
Emotions have value; they serve a purpose. I think it was John Wayne who said that courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway. In other words, there is no such thing as courage if there is no such thing as fear. They go together. Courage is the action of facing fear and moving forward. If you have no fear, you aren’t courageous; you might just be YOLO stupid.
But think about Wayne’s statement.
Fear is an emotion. Depending on how you control it, it can save your life, drive you to take action or achieve something, strengthen you as you work at controlling it, or cripple you. Other emotions of similar value are love, anger, joy, sadness, and competitive drive. When we use medications, drugs, or coping mechanisms (like denial) to squelch our emotions instead of exercising control over them, we become unbalanced in other areas. Perhaps we are no longer depressed, but we also have no drive or joy. Perhaps we’ve pushed particular emotions down so deeply we’ve gutted our own humanity. Perhaps we’ve denied our emotions so much in pursuit of logic and stoicism that the relationships around us suffer because we are unreachable to other humans.
And then there is the fool—yes, the fool, and I say it knowing I’ve attempted this myself—who tries to claim she is not a “victim” of emotion, but a voice of pure reason, despite all around her seeing that the emperor has no clothes. In my own life and in my experiences with others, those who loudly claim one thing is true tend to live the opposite. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, in other words, or basic projection.
A few weeks ago, I had an interaction on Facebook that clarified the unsettled rumblings I’ve had about how people handle the topic of emotion and logic.
I’ve written about the danger in making laws based purely on emotions and victim experience, in particular, after the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash, in which, prompted by emotional response, the government passed laws based on the pressure to “do something quickly” that:
Wouldn’t have solved the problem that caused the crash.
Would actually make the situation worse going forward.
Oddly, the laws that would have fixed the problem could still have arisen from the emotional outcry—much like the city ordinances, we kind of operate on a complaint-based system in which we tend to respond defensively after-the-fact, not offensively before-the-fact—but they likely wouldn’t have made various lobbying groups happy, been understood as a fix by the public that didn’t understand aviation, and might have angered the public when the real fix raised the cost of airline tickets or reduced flight availability.3
Is there never any value in considering emotions in decision-making? What is the value and proper balance of emotions and logic in making decisions? Because both must be present—and both are present—whenever humans are involved.
Who gets to define what an emotional response looks like, or which ones are valid or not? These are the moments when one person sees a response as reactionary or defensive (emotional), while the other sees it as wisely offensive (logical). “You don’t have enough proof!” vs. “We know this pattern and see a trend and we’re trying to head something off before the plane crashes!” is essentially the fight.
People telling you to stop being emotional and to be logical instead should certainly cause you to do a self-inspection to check to see if you’re out of balance. But it’s important to understand a couple of things in that moment:
Emotion is not the opposite of logic. Emotion is an indicator of what matters the most to us. Emotion helps us identify the things that concern us (faith, liberty, health, justice, safety, freedom), and logic helps us understand the information and claims associated with those important things. They exist together, not against each other. A balance of both, not the removal of either, is necessary.
Emotion is how we stay human. While we love to say that facts don’t care about feelings, the truth is that every human has feelings. Facts don’t care, period, because they can’t. They’re just facts. What we do with them is something we should care about. Selective application, biased collection, and pragmatism can be ways facts are used to harm people. While we can’t make massive policy based on the lowest common denominator of feelings, as individuals we should certainly appreciate that emotions help us spot gaps that facts and data miss. In an age when it feels as if artificiality and machines rule the earth and human connection is shredded in it all, staying human is important. At the very least, we can genuinely acknowledge the emotions of others even if we do not choose to let someone else’s emotions rule our lives. (See also: the Pandemic.)
Emotion can be the quiet caution we can’t explain away. For myself, I have come to realize that sometimes the Holy Spirit’s gentle whisper and prodding of my conscience can read as emotional. To disregard that immediately, without slowing down and praying, is a terrible idea. More than once, a perfectly logical argument (e.g., people in a vegetative state should be removed from life support because they aren’t productive humans and are using up resources) lands so wrong in the pit of our stomach that we know something is amiss, even if we can’t yet retort with a logical argument. Perhaps it’s emotion, perhaps it’s God, or, as often the case for myself, it’s an unconscious clash in which, while I don’t know in the moment what the hole in the argument or information is, I can sense that there is one and that I need to put on the brakes and provide time to evaluate further.
Often, the person shutting down arguments (or fueling them) by laying claim to being the one mastering logic is not using logic, but instead, using what’s called rhetorical positioning. It’s a way we strategically construct our identity and authority, using context, tone, voice, confident language, and even pronouns to shut down resistance to our conclusions and desired policy action.
Though logic is considered a part of good rhetoric, you can be very good at rhetoric and still be illogical. Many politicians are highly skilled at rhetoric, particularly when on the campaign trail. Often, persuasive arguments work because they appeal to emotion, which sits more readily at our disposal on our surface brain rather than the slower logic that’s buried a bit further down, requiring thought and pause.
Powerful rhetoric, in the wrong hands, uses techniques that can purposefully mislead. For example, someone might purposefully overwhelm you with data (whether or not it supports their conclusion), use leading questions, or use speed and frequency of response to drown out your attempts to slow down and ask thoughtful questions. When the goal is to shut down dissent rather than foster clarity or reasonable discussion, rhetorical techniques cease to be a useful tool and become a weapon.
I made a document to show one way to approach what you read online, particularly if you’re confused by the clash you’re feeling between your mind and your gut feeling, or if someone is insisting you are a fool for pushing back. Please keep in mind that a flaw in reasoning does not always mean the conclusion is false; additionally, two very reasonable, self-controlled people who think carefully may arrive at different conclusions because of their foundational worldviews.
As you’ve probably realized by now, it is hard to balance emotion and logic, and to decipher which is working on you when faced with a powerful argument. The internet, in particular, rewards fast or emotional responses and encourages comment-section pile-ons where masses of people insist something is so to the point of silencing that still, small voice inside telling you otherwise. Suggesting a pause to think doesn’t work; slow responses are seen as “losing” an argument.4 Waiting a few days to respond means everyone is on to the next outrage already.
Since we mostly get our information from the internet, you see the problem.
Balance in life is a lot of purposeful work; we can’t go on autopilot long before we get out of balance with our emotions or with our logic. God is clear in His Word that maintaining control of our mind and emotions is a daily effort.5 It has always been hard for human beings not to veer to the extremes. God reminds us that it takes prayerful effort, and that we are to work out our salvation by walking in fear and trembling, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. (See also: Why JFK said we go to the moon.) Self-control has no cruise control setting; our hand must always be at the controls, regulating direction and speed.
In online discussions, it takes effort, self-control, a lower temperature, and a slowing down of thought and response. Sometimes you have to pause, or let someone else have the last word. That’s not a list of how the internet economy works; it prefers to reward clickbait, the fastest response, incessant engagement, and heated rhetoric.
So a couple of words of caution, in light of all of this.
First, anyone with a public platform who has positioned themselves as a voice on a particular matter is banking on their expertise or thought leadership. Examples might include someone laying claim to being a patriot, or a friend of liberty.
They are asking you to come and withdraw and trade in the currency of their knowledge for the greater purpose. When they make bold or aggressive claims, you have every right (and obligation, in some cases) to question it before making a withdrawal and running with what they have told you to be true. The burden is on them, not you. How they receive and respond to that pushback tells you a lot about the person.
Second, in light of the first point, name-calling and circling the wagons indicate a poor position of this supposed thought leader.
If they put the burden back on you, dodge the question, use name-calling (e.g., “Karen”) to negate you as a person and therefore your arguments, or encourage their followers to mock or harass you, do your information banking elsewhere and, by all means, question their claims across the board. While they may get some things right, they cannot be trusted with your information account.
And third, anyone who mocks emotion or claims to not be under the spell of emotion should be treated with caution or completely abandoned.6
Why? Because anyone who simultaneously mocks their opponent with name-calling or other derisive language while saying they are not emotional is lying to themselves and cannot be trusted not to lie to you.7 They are responding emotionally and pretending that they aren’t. They lack legitimate self-awareness, meaning they are probably more susceptible to emotion because it operates under their radar. They may even somewhat understand that, to their great frustration, and that’s why they keep accusing others of it. We tend to despise in others the thing we despise in ourselves.
I don’t make that three-point list easily. I’ve been writing and responding online for 30 years, and I know, from experience, what it’s like to do it right and wrong from both sides, the one purveying the information and the one receiving it.
Over the next few months, off and on, I’m going to discuss what it means to be a patriot from the perspective that part of patriotism includes our ability to evaluate information and how we think and act on what we choose to consume. This series stems from a disappointing interaction I had recently on Facebook, which, while giving me something worth discussing in broader terms here, also reminded me to just use Facebook to see what the meteorologists are saying about the local weather.
Counselor Deanna Troi was the opposite; she felt everyone’s emotions around her. Awful.
And we freedom-loving Americans actually prefer after-the-fact rules and laws; if a new rule or law comes into being before there’s an issue, the outcry is loud. Yet the “why are you infringing on my rights for something that isn’t a problem” quickly becomes “why didn’t someone do something before this happened?”
I’m writing this several weeks after the fact, while traveling, because I’ve been thinking carefully about a response for that much time. Yet the discussion that spurred my thoughts has long since moved on. We are a thoughtless people because we do not leave space for thought to germinate, grow, and come to fruition.
Part of that is determining which information sources to abandon because they pollute the mind, which is why understanding information sources and arguments matters so much. See Philippians 4:8.
This is the easiest one of all, and if you are too weary or overloaded to do any of the rest of the things I’ve written about, this is the marker to watch for that reveals the most and will make the biggest difference in your life if you walk away from them. It’s a marker that reveals the heart quickly: any person using name-calling or attacking another person (“you are too emotional” or “you are a Karen” or “you are illogical” or “all politicians are idiots who can’t be trusted”) to establish their conclusion can be put in the dust bin. Whatever else they get right is packaged with too much poison.
People who use ad hominem attacks, which is a logical fallacy, do not get to also claim a pure foundation in logic. The two are mutually exclusive. I daresay not one single human being can claim full purity when it comes to avoiding logical fallacies because we are emotional beings.