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Anger

Twilight of the Emotions: The End of the System

Our social emotions evolved in bands, but they no longer function as a system.

Key points

  • The human emotions of envy, righteous anger, guilt, and gratitude evolved in foraging bands over hundreds of thousands of years.
  • These emotions functioned as a system that fostered equality and cooperation and held greed in check.
  • We still have those emotions, but the environment in which they exist now is profoundly different, and they no longer function as an integrated system.

In our series of posts on the emotions, we have attempted to show that certain emotions—notably envy, righteous anger, guilt, and gratitude—played an important role in regulating social relationships, promoting cooperation and maintaining solidarity in our ancestral environment, and why those same emotions no longer perform that function today. The reason is clear: the social environment has changed profoundly. As evolutionary psychologist John Tooby writes (2020), “modern humans live in a vastly expanded arena of interacting billions, while our systems of situation representation are designed for the ancestral world of foraging bands involving hundreds.”

Before the physical and social environment got transformed by the relentless action of human intelligence, the emotions functioned as a system; triggering one emotion affected the operation of the others. Together they kept behavior in bounds, away from extremes that could threaten the ability of the band to survive. It was, an American might say, a system of checks and balances.

We can see how this system worked if we pair some of the emotions:

  • If you were too envious or greedy, you were likely to feel guilt and/or encounter anger.
  • If you weren’t grateful enough, you were likely to feel guilt and/or encounter anger.
  • If you experienced too much guilt or too little envy, i.e., if you were too self-effacing, you risked not getting your share of resources.

This set of emotions helped to produce equality as well as the cooperation that was essential for survival.

Our hunting and gathering ancestors carried this system around the world, but while the emotions survived, their regulating function didn’t. Agriculture and its fellow travelers—private property, inequality, class and caste, nations, kings, laws, investment, delayed gratification—shattered the system.

Envy was uncoupled from equality and fostered resentment. If someone had more than you, there was little or nothing you could do about it. Expressing righteous anger about unfairness did no good. Those with more than you were usually more powerful than you, so voicing dissatisfaction could be dangerous; it was often wiser to suppress anger, no matter how righteous, which caused resentment and frustration.

Diversity—political, religious, ethnic—replaced the general consensus that resulted from close genetic relationship and shared interests. The “righteousness” of one’s anger came to depend on one’s affiliation. Ambitious political and religious leaders learned early on how to infuse their oratory with righteous-sounding anger.

The result of what might be called “conflicts of righteousness” were the wars and unspeakable violence that have gone on and on and on into the present day. The people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th felt that their anger was righteous, even though it caused senseless injury and death and was condemned by the larger society.

Today, one can still observe how at least one of the emotions was designed by evolution to work. In happy families gifts still produce gratitude and an urge to reciprocate. The exchange creates and tightens bonds. If someone feels slighted and shows anger, the anger is likely to cause the “offender” or the group to take corrective action. Unfortunately, many families today are riven by divisions and don’t benefit from this process.

The original shape and function of gratitude and anger are still discernable, but guilt has been denatured beyond recognition. Opportunities to experience guilt have expanded exponentially as religions manufacture ever more prohibitions and states manufacture ever more laws, many of them having nothing to do with reciprocity or cooperation. Guilt keeps people in line, but to what end? Often the real goal is maintaining the authority of the church or the state, and the actual effect is to produce shame.

Already, by Greek and Roman times, society was not organized in a way that made spontaneous emotional reactions useful and/or appropriate. For the Stoics, for example, being controlled by the emotions was an obstacle to the true goal of life, which was to live “virtuously.” The negative emotions were seen as a disturbance, not useful components of a system. Such emotions, the Stoics maintained, arose from false judgments; a wise person would not experience them at all. We can see here the origin of the idea, so common today, that thought and emotion are fundamentally opposed.

So, here we are 11,000 or 12,000 years after the demise of the emotional system that evolved in foraging bands. We still have the emotions that made up that system, but they are not able to foster social stability and cooperation in large societies. Are we, therefore, doomed to simply stew in our envy, view gifts and favors as manipulations, look for affiliations that make our anger righteous, and wallow in a mix of guilt and fear?

References

Tooby, John. 2020. “Evolutionary psychology as the crystalizing core of a unified modern social science.” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. vol.14, issue 4.

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