Where Philosophical Purposes Clash
This week, our cohort experienced a time of heavy emotion, cultural conviction, and maligned core concerns... People, I believe, felt as though they could not be heard - so they repeated their positions louder. While responding to the lack of being heard, our own hearing is effected.
People were hurt where central passions were not shared. Yet we all have passions. We all entered this program because we each care about some perceived injustice so deeply. This was a tragic day and is one we will feel the effects of for days and weeks to come.
We all lost something...
… I keep thinking about whether or not things could have gone down differently, if the class could have been softer, more loving, etc… and, I don’t think we could have. I think it was right, even though it was ‘not the way things ought to be’. In part, I think that many folks gripped by the emotional experience of it all suffered from the emotional condition that Ekman speaks about:
Emotions can prevent us from having access to all that we know, to information that would be at our fingertips if we were not emotional but that during the emotion is inaccessible to us. When we are gripped by an inappropriate emotion, we interpret what is happening in a way that fits with how we’re feeling and ignore our knowledge that doesn’t fit. Emotions change how we see the world and how we interpret the actions of others. We do not seek to challenge why we are feeling a particular emotion; instead, we seek to confirm it. We evaluate what is happening in a way that is consistent with the emotion we’re feeling, as justifying and maintaining the emotion. In many situations this may help focus our attention and guide our decisions about how to respond to the problems at hand and understand what is at stake. But it can cause problems, for when we are gripped by an emotion we discount or ignore knowledge we already have that could disconfirm the emotion we’re feeling, just as we ignore or discount new information coming to us from our environment that doesn’t fit our emotion. In other words, the same mechanism that guides and focuses our attention can distort our ability to deal with both new information and knowledge already stored in our brain. (pp38-39, Emotions Revealed)
I think this should be called “emotional blindness”.
Thinking about why the cohort had not ironed out these differences and forged a strong working relationship earlier in the year: Coming into a doctorate where you know individuals have been selected because they are “bright” or “special” in their own right – builds what I would call an “others-oriented bias”… If someone starts going off the edge or pushing the acceptable limits, the observer first considers that this person was selected for some reason … and perhaps what they are saying is just smarter than what the observer is thinking about the statement/actions/etc… an others-oriented bias combined with personal fears of looking stupid - can be crippling. Very interesting.
There may well be a time of sober reflection for many of my colleagues in the coming weeks. Perhaps good things will come of it.
Perhaps there is no better training ground than this hugely vivid lived experience of the challenge we all face as we seek to transform ourselves and our chosen areas of research and passion. I often use one sentence in working with youth which always provides a call to introspection:
Circumstances don't make or break you, they reveal you.
How did we all respond? How might we define 'success' in difficult situations? Were we able to navigate this microcosm of the larger landscape of transformation?