Emotion is an integral part of a person’s rationality and vision—literally—of reality. From studies on people who lost a part of their brain’s frontal cortex to researchers at the University of Toronto testing how emotion influences vision, neuroscientists are demonstrating that emotion affects every aspect of cognition. Indeed, without emotion human beings find it difficult to be rational.
Historically, from Plato to Descartes to most modern economists, it has been assumed and argued that logical decision-making excludes emotions and feelings. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio upends that historical assumption. Damasio’s research on people with brain damage to their frontal cortex clearly demonstrates that emotion plays an important role in logical reasoning. In the preface to his seminal work, Descartes’ Error, Damasio writes::
…the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process…When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions…[I] see emotion as at least assisting reason and at best holding dialogue with it…I view emotion as delivering cognitive information, directly and via feelings…the brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and decision-making are generally involved in the management of social cognition and behavior.
Logical decisions are made when emotions are a part of the reasoning process. If emotions are taken out of the reasoning process, as occurred in Damasio’s patients, irrational behavior increases. One of my favorite television and movie characters, Commander Spock of Star Trek, is now tarnished after reading Damasio’s various studies. For how would Spock respond to Damasio’s finding that “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior”?
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” Our feelings about (rather than for) people even determine if we see them as attractive or not. The more honest we believe someone to be, for example (and reported by Robert Sapolsky), the more likable they are to us “and the more likable, the more physically attractive” we see them to be (and vice versa). The reason, according to neuroscience, is that we do not ‘see’ with our eyes; rather, we see with our brains. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions define our vision of reality.
Shouldn’t we be trying to create more positive environments at home, school and work, simply based on neuroscience, if we are interested in attaining our goals? If positive values such as compassion and trustworthiness increase your awareness of the world around you and your likability, wouldn’t that also increase your probability of achieving success? It appears as though the color of success is rose; for the argument of wearing the proverbial rose-tinted glasses just became stronger.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 2005).
Robert Sapolsky, “Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty with Truth,” The Wall Street Journal (January 17, 2014).
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009).
9/11 is a day when memories of patriotism and compassion come to life. The world witnessed not only the compassion of first responders rushing into burning buildings to save lives but the patriotism of young men and women volunteering to enter the armed services. It was a day where two values that are sometimes contradictory to one another became blended to such an extent that their combination created a moment in history where the world, however briefly, became one; an iconic symbol of that moment was France’s Le Monde headline that read “We are All Americans.”
On this day of remembrance and in honor of all those who have fallen in pursuit of their patriotism and compassion, I am making a clarion call for bringing compassion into patriotism. The mixture of patriotism and compassion creates a sum far greater than its two parts; for compassion eliminates the negative factor of patriotism (exclusiveness) while multiplying its positive factor (inclusiveness). The combination (a new form of being a ‘compatriot’) unites rather than divides.
Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has written a well-known and in-depth essay about the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of patriotism. She writes: “Patriotism is Janus-faced. It faces outward, calling the self, at times, to duties toward others, to the need to sacrifice for a common good. And yet, just as clearly, it also faces inward, inviting those who consider themselves ‘good’ or ‘true’ Americans to distinguish themselves from outsiders and subversives, and then excluding those outsiders. Just as dangerous, it serves to define the nation against its foreign rivals and foes, whipping up warlike sentiments against them.”
The difference of simple patriotism versus patriotism with compassion is the difference between ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq & Syria) and ISS (The International Space Station). While ISIS excludes to horrific extremes, ISS is about taking inclusiveness to new heights. Where members of ISIS consider themselves patriots of a particular cause without compassion (extreme exclusiveness), astronauts of ISS represent a patriotism that transcends geographic borders and single-minded causes; they represent all humanity (expansive inclusiveness). Compassion, in essence, mitigates the weakness of patriotism (its exclusiveness of facing inward) by enlarging its strength (its inclusiveness of facing outward).
The evolutionary history of human beings is an inevitable walk toward an inclusive patriotism where compassion for all human beings is the norm rather than the exception. We keep taking steps toward making such a norm a reality but some who feel as though it is a purely “Utopian dream” and antithetical to their beliefs such as ISIS are only delaying and not stopping the rise of humanistic patriotism. 
Deems Taylor (seen here), a composer and essayist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and commonly referred to as “the Dean of American music,” addressed the idea of the broadening of patriotism in 1917 (near the end of World War I) when he wrote the following words in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine:
“It is all a matter of what we mean by patriotism. We are all patriotic, but not always for the same thing. We have stopped thinking first about our state, or our town, or our neighborhood, and are putting the United States first. If we would only do that a little oftener we wouldn’t have to insist that this is the finest country in the world; other people would tell us so. Patriotism is a loyalty to something bigger than our immediate interests, and the history of the world is the history of the broadening of patriotism, the widening of the field of men’s loyalties. Cavemen were loyal to their families. Then they came out of their caves and formed tribes, and were loyal to those. The tribes settled down in villages, and the members of one village would defend it to the death against members of another. The villages became clans, and men were loyal to those. The clans united and became little kingdoms, or states, or duchies. Late in the Middle Ages the little kingdoms and duchies became fused into bigger ones, and men found that they belonged to nations. The great war came, and the nations of Europe split into great camps. Half the men in Europe were loyal to one side and half to the other. Now we are talking of a League of Peace after the war, in which whole nations will be patriots. For they will be loyal to something bigger than they are. Some day, I think, some day very far in the future, we are going to be world patriots; we are going to be loyal to the human race. But that, of course, is what people call a Utopian dream.”
My clarion call is really a call to modernize the definition of compatriot from one focused on being a citizen of a country (exclusive) to another that recognizes each person as a citizen of the world (inclusive). It is similar to President John F. Kennedy’s famous call in his 1961 inaugural address where he stated “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man” (we seem to forget that second line more than we remember it). Are we not more than citizens of a state but aren’t we also citizens of the world?
The world’s reaction to 9/11—as highlighted by Le Monde—showed that we have compatriots in every corner of the globe. The definition of compatriot should not be limited to just the people who share a country but it should include all who share in humanity. We are all compatriots of this world, shouldn’t we all be patriots of the human race? On this day, where so many sacrificed for the common good, let’s not ever weaken our patriotism by turning inward with hate and exclusion; rather, let’s honor our fallen heroes by strengthening our patriotism by looking outward with compassion and inclusion. Let’s honor those who sacrificed and continue to sacrifice for the common good by not limiting who can be part of the common good.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 357 (The Law School at The University of Chicago, July 2011).
James A. Pegolotti, Deems Taylor: Selected Writings (New York, NY, Routledge, 2007).
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