We live in a society in which emotions are king. Feel something? Do it! Desire something? Pursue it!

In fact, our contemporary age almost seems to chaff at the idea of doing something in which your emotions are not invested. How can you do something out of duty and still “be yourself”?

The Cultural Novelty of “Emotions”

Thaddeus Williams, in his book “Don’t Follow Your Heart,” emphasizes the cultural novelty of our society’s attitude toward their emotions:

For most of human history, feelings could be embraced, resisted, ignored, celebrated, chastened, silenced, trained, or challenged. Our ancestors could do a whole lot with their emotions. The ‘freedom’ of our day is far more limiting. You have one option when it comes to your heart—follow it.

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It was unthinkable to historic humanity to grant our emotions our unwavering obedience. They understood what ten seconds of honest introspection reveals—our hearts can be wrong. Our ancestors tried to conform their disordered emotions to the world around them, not conform the world around them to the emotions.

Here, Williams gives several examples. Aristotle, for instance, urged his students to cultivate affections that fit properly with their objects. Augustine said that various loves should correspond with the object’s worthiness of love. And Islam, early Hinduism, the Chinese tradition, and Christianity all advocate for people to fight wrong desires inside them.

Why Emotions?

Culture’s obsession with emotions is intriguing, to say the least. After all, focusing on one’s internal world is a relatively recent cultural value, only arising in the last several hundred years. By some historical accounts, the inward turn began with René Descartes, who first chose to look inside himself for the source of truth. The inward focus intensified with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an Enlightenment thinker who promoted the “natural man” as somehow more pure than the man that had been corrupted by society. Kant later worked to intensify this inward focus.

During the times of these thinkers, too, religious systems were crumbling. The Protestant Reformation had undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, a religious institution that held sway for centuries. New models of the solar system seemed to contradict biblical truth, and Charles Darwin’s work in evolution suggested that humanity need not have a divine source. The standard sources of truth – Scripture and the church – were being questioned, and society needed somewhere to turn.

At first, intellectuals embraced the supremacy of their own minds. The Enlightenment proffered rationality, along with the intellectual tradition of past generations, as the prime path to truth. But society quickly grew disillusioned with the rigid logic of rationalism. Eventually, they turned inward. Rationalism bled into romanticism, and William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats became the prophets of society’s new god.

Focus on Emotions: A Good Thing?

But is the shift toward focusing internally helpful? Abigail Shrier, in her book “Bad Therapy,” suggests that it may be causing undue harm, especially for kids:

Placing undue importance on your emotions is a little like stepping onto a swivel chair to reach something on a high shelf. Emotions are likely to skitter out from under you, casters and all. Worse, attending to our feelings often causes them to intensify. Leading kids to focus on their emotions can encourage them to be more emotional.

In an individualistic society like ours, we incline toward the erroneous belief that feelings accurately signal who we are in the moment. But in fact, ‘feelings are responsive to so many cues, and because of that, so often are off.’

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Adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be, Chentsova Dutton says. Very often kids, should be skeptical that their feelings reflect an accurate picture of the world and even ignore their feelings entirely. (Gasp!) You read that right: a healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression.

Shrier’s idea that emotions should be trained, not followed, finds parallels in C. S. Lewis. Lewis points out that in education “the little [child] will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.” In other words, nobody’s born with “true feelings,” and those feelings must therefore be trained. And yes, this will, sometimes, involve suppression.

A Lesson From Grandma

Recently, a 70-something woman in my church was telling me about her first job. It was tedious work, from what I could tell – certainly not something I’d want to do 40 hours a week.

“Did you enjoy it?” I asked.

She paused, as if trying to understand the question. “It was my job,” she said simply. “So I did it.”

This attitude, I’ve gathered, is not uncommon to our grandparents’ generation. They learned to do their duty – regardless of what their feelings were telling them. In fact, it seems sometimes that considering their own emotions was simply off the table. The inclination to dwell on them just wasn’t a part of the cultural milieu.

Certainly, in certain circumstances, plowing forward without processing may have been harmful. And yes, paying attention to one’s emotions can sometimes helpfully alert us to nuances of the situations we’re in. It’s not as though this God-given part of us should be unequivocally repressed.

Still, it’s worth considering that the cultural craze around our own emotions isn’t normal: humanity survived generations without glorifying their untrained feelings as the primary indicator of reality. Beyond that, our feelings don’t always correspond with the reality of the world around us. Regarding our internal world, then, we’d do well to realize that emotions should not be – and are not – king.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Picryl