A Biological Understanding of Feeling as the Basis of a New Social Framework?
A historic transformation of human social thought and action on a scale comparable to Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment has been set into motion. While those transformations were based on a new understanding of reason, this one will be based on a new understanding of feeling and emotion.
For over two thousand years we have overlooked feeling. The neglect of feeling — scientific and cultural — can be traced through the Enlightenment period, back to Ancient Greek efforts to identify which aspects of mental experience could actually be known to be objectively true versus those which might appear to be true but could not in fact be known. The prevailing conclusion was that physical features of the external world could be known objectively and trusted as bases for action, while subjective mental phenomena such as perceptions, feelings, and emotions could not. Questions about the truth of the physical world could be answered by reason and science; questions relating to feeling remained the purview of religion.
The critical mistake in this thinking has been revealed only recently, with the invention of neuroimaging technologies capable of looking inside an alive and conscious brain and identifying objective physiological events that correspond systematically with subjective, mental events. While identifying brain correlates of mental phenomena is not enough to “explain” feeling, it does reveal their grounding in physical processes.
In recent decades, neuroimaging and neurobiology research led primarily by Antonio Damasio has rewritten our understanding of feeling. We used to think that feelings were constructed in the most recently evolved parts of the brain, and that they were human-only phenomena. We also thought that reason was incompatible with feeling, and that to make effective rational decisions one needed to be as unemotional as possible. Damasio’s research has amended the record on both accounts. Now we know that feelings depend for their construction on much older brain regions such as the brainstem, and that they are not likely to be exclusive to humans. We also know that effective rational decision-making requires the good function of brain regions involved in feeling. We have a new way of defining feeling, as the mental expression of biological processes of life-regulation occurring within the experiencing organism and orienting us toward survival and flourishing.
This new understanding of feeling has uncovered a significant, longstanding, and until now invisible oversight in the existing conceptual frameworks which guide social thought and action. Consider that even today we almost exclusively credit the creation of our social institutions, devices, and technologies to our capacity for reason. While it is largely true that reason has been critical in enabling modern human society, it is also true that (1) reason is grounded in emotion and feeling, and (2) emotion and feeling are grounded in biological processes supporting survival and flourishing. Behind the scenes of reason, biology has been the driving force all along. Medicine, government, economics, philanthropy, education, and military defense are all cultural instantiations of life-maintaining processes. The fact is, we have created social institutions, policies, and technologies under the guidance of feeling and biology, but we have not recognized the forces motivating their creation.
This oversight in our frameworks for thought and action may underlie the many serious problems of the modern world. Human thought and action is largely predictable, in that it is guided by culturally engrained conceptual frameworks for interpreting reality. We have a limited set of possible actions largely inherited from our primate ancestors — approach, avoid, give, take, compete, and cooperate — and we determine which of these actions to deploy based on our understanding of how the world works and how we fit into it. Different interpretations result in different actions. A social system in which actions are selected based on a mistaken interpretation of reality would be expected to develop serious problems over time.
Solving the many problems of the modern world will likely require a new conceptual framework for social thought and action that reflects a biological understanding of feeling. In particular, several “orienting principles” for human social life can be derived from a biological understanding of feeling: (1) we all have common ground at the level of feeling, (2) we have an intrinsic orientation toward the common good, and (3) each individual has inherent and unique value in this common effort. Upon this basis, a new social framework can be constructed around out-group empathy, social trust, and cooperation:
(1) A biological understanding of feeling suggests that we all have common ground at the level of feeling. We are all intrinsically oriented toward survival and flourishing and this orientation is mentally expressed as the appeal of positive feeling and the aversiveness of negative ones. If feelings mentally express biological processes of life regulation, then my joy and my fear are very likely to feel like your joy and your fear, although we may experience them in different situations. This common ground at the level of feeling runs far deeper than any racial, cultural, or generational differences, and offers a new justification for out-group empathy in the language of biology.
(2) A biological understanding of feeling suggests an intrinsic orientation toward the common good. In general, positive and negative feelings mentally express, respectively, improving or deteriorating states of life. We often consider “the state of our life” to refer only to our own individual life, but this understanding has a problem. It neglects the fact that our own individual wellbeing is limited by the condition of the broader living systems of which we are part and upon which we depend for survival. To flourish, we depend on other humans, as well as plants and animals for air and food. Our own flourishing is inextricable from the condition of these broader systems, and a compelling case can be made that our intrinsic orientation toward positive feeling is simultaneously an intrinsic orientation toward improving the condition of this broader system, e.g. “the common good”. Establishing an intrinsic orientation toward the common good is important for social trust.
(3) A biological understanding of feeling suggests an inherent and unique value of each individual, by virtue of two aspects, feeling and a subjective mental perspective. If feeling orients us toward the common good, our subjective mental experience gives us a unique perspective on how to go about it. We each have a limited perspective, we can only see the world out of our own eyes, and no one person can see all of reality with all of its detail. However, our limited perspective is also augmented — we each see more than is really there because our experience in any situation includes projections from our past experiences. As a result, we each notice different aspects of social problems, and different approaches to solving them. We will not always agree on what problems are most important or on how best to go about solving them, and that is precisely the point. We need each other to fill in our blind spots. All social problems have theoretical solutions, but each of us can only see parts of them. In order to have the best chance of solving the problems we collectively face, we will need to integrate as many different perspectives into as multidimensional an understanding as possible. If we each work to create the solutions we see most clearly to the problems that we care most about, then through co-operation with others doing the same, we can defeat our common challenges by a thousand small cuts.
It is important to note that these “orienting principles” are not new; they have appeared around the world and throughout human history, in the words of wise teachers and in revolutionary movements that have advocated equality, justice, and self-governance. But when they have appeared in the past, they have been supported by moral intuition or philosophy alone. This is the first time in human history that we can justify out-group empathy, an intrinsic motive to do good, and the value of each individual, in the language of biological processes of life regulation aimed at survival and flourishing.
The development of a new framework for social thought and action based on a biological understanding of feeling is an unprecedented opportunity for social progress, with significant implications at all scales of society. It can aid individuals in understanding their feelings and translating them into constructive and fulfilling actions. It can revitalize organizations and institutions by adjusting their policies, operations, and communicated aims to better reflect their natural role in supporting the flourishing and integrity of the broader living system. At the level of nations and society everywhere, it can support a historic resurgence of such universal ideals as equality, liberty, justice, togetherness, and opportunity.
The new era that we will soon find ourselves in will be shaped by those individuals, organizations, and institutions which undertake to apply a biological understanding of feeling to their operations; and those that do so will find themselves best-positioned within it.
Originally published at https://www.maxahenning.com.
