Twilight of the Emotions

In The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism (1971), Robert Trivers writes that many aspects of the human emotional system evolved to regulate the reciprocity system:

"… friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system" (Trivers, 1971, p.35).

Reciprocal altruism is, of course, the system that characterized hunter-gatherer societies during the period which saw the formation of the human genome. That’s when we humans acquired our taste for such principles as “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” In hunter-gatherer times, human emotions were able to regulate social behavior because so much depended on person-to-person, face-to-face interaction. The emotions provided incentives to behave in ways that were acceptable to the group, provided relatively clear signals of intent, and made cheating difficult.

Human emotions clearly do not regulate modern socio-economic systems such as capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, autocracy, and fascism, which long ago replaced hunting and gathering.[1] Nevertheless, these emotions are still present and often create problems.

The market system, for example, operates according to explicit rules and well-understood principles. If you operate in the system, you have to conform to the principles, two of which are “It’s up to you to pursue your own interests” and “Don’t get caught doing something you shouldn’t.” How you feel about the system isn’t going to change anything. Your emotions are not part of the equation.

Here’s another example. At the end of a typical transaction—say the purchase of a product—in a society based on money, the typical outcome for the people involved can be summed up as “we’re quits.” Buying something in a store, or online, or from a dealer does not necessarily create or strengthen a relationship, nor will either side’s feelings about the transaction have any effect on the price. This “independence” promotes behavior that often fails to provide emotional satisfaction even when it leads to material gain.

Functionless emotions create emotional dysfunction. The relegation of emotions to the periphery of socioeconomic life is the origin of much personal distress (Glantz & Bernhard, 2018). Furthermore, the fact that these modern systems are not regulated by emotion and, indeed, are often impervious to the full range of human emotions can explain some of the failures of those systems as well as the opposition to them by some segments of the population.

For example, the “one-child” system, imposed in China for 35 years, seemed like a rational response to overpopulation; however, it went against powerful human emotions. People found ways around the restriction (e.g. high-level party officials could have more than one child), thousands of women were sterilized against their will, and a preference for male children led to the abortion of female fetuses, creating an imbalance of males and females in the society. China ended the policy in 2015.

Finally, the common tendency to set reason up against emotion and to think of emotion as something that has to be held in check rather than something that guides choice and action, stems, at least in part, from this decoupling of the emotions from their regulatory function. A society that takes no account of the emotions is like a dog that has lost its sense of smell.

In an upcoming series of posts, we will take up this theme as it applies to specific emotions: greed, envy, guilt, shame, righteous anger, and gratitude.