Yesterday, former Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson picked on Obama for publicly complaining that fear gets in the way of rational thinking, and that the electorate isn’t thinking straight because people are scared.
Gerson accuses Obama of intellectual snobbery, of falling prey to pseudo-science (“Human beings under stress are not hard-wired for stupidity, which would be a distinct evolutionary disadvantage,” insists Gerson – more about that in a moment), and most of all, that Obama is not a very good politician because a good politician would connect with fear, rather than rationalize it away.
Of course, anyone who has read one of the many recent behavioral psychology books explaining why we humans do many stupid things not in our best interest would get what Obama is talking about. As Professor Obama correctly notes, when we get frightened, we tend to not be as good at stepping back and thinking things through rationally.
And this makes sense, from an evolutionary psychology perspective. There is no time for planning when you are being attacked by a predator. In moments of real emergency, one needs to act on instinct. Moreover, if you’re in a fight-or-flight moment, you need to focus all your energy on survival. No sense being rational about the future when the future might not even exist.
Though we are no longer on the predator-infested savannah, in modern society, we still experience extensive stress that produces much of the same fight-or-flight feeling, like, say, if we are worried about losing our jobs and providing for our families.
Moreover, human beings are also hard-wired for instant gratification because for most of our existence as a species and a proto-species, we never know if we were going to be alive tomorrow. We are also hard-wired to get mad and throw temper tantrums to demonstrate that we mean business when we don’t get what we want. That’s why it feels so good to act out and demand justice.
But a society of instant gratification and lashing out does not hold together well. Instead, much of the history of civilization can be seen as an attempt to find ways to sublimate our more destructive desires (those of the evolutionary old, reptilian brain) by using our ability to plan into the future (using our evolutionary new neocortex – the human brain) by enacting laws and teaching morality.
Obama, like many in the liberal tradition, believes in the collective ability of humans to reason and think past the immediate needs of what Freud called the id, and to achieve something bigger than our base desires.
But it’s a delicate balance. And Gerson is at least partially right: Obama hasn’t done as much to connect with the emotional concerns of everyday citizens (Clinton and Bush were much better at this)
Still, there’s also an important difference (that Gerson ignores) between honoring the fear and acting on the fear. Gerson writes: “There is fear out there in America – not because of the lizard brain but because of objective economic conditions.” His mistake is separating the two. Yes, economic distress makes people afraid. But the “lizard brain” is the part of the brain that amplifies this fear and leads people to lash out in ways and demand things that may feel good in the moment but defy long-run logic.
Fear and anxiety may be natural human conditions, and we have probably evolved to be quite prone to them (being happy and calm was presumably not a great strategy for avoiding predators and stockpiling food once upon a time).
But we can also overcome our fears. There is, in fact, a long tradition of mindfulness meditation that teaches inherently anxious humans to accept their emotions without acting out on them. Obama seems to be much more able to allow intellect to triumph over emotion than most, but perhaps too much so that he doesn’t understand intuitively how might have a hard time. Gerson seems to assume that fear is always valid and shouldn’t be overcome through the intellect. Somewhere in the middle is a successful approach to coping with our emotions and making productive, rational choices about our collective future.
photo credit: JJ Judes
