Crisis Averted

My friend over at Pave the Whales recently mailed me the book “Love, Love, Love” by Charles Taliaferro, who is a university professor that writes about love, poetry, his dog, and ethics. As you can see, it’s something right up my alley! The book is a collection of short essays and I’ve been flipping through the book over the last few days. I’m sure it will provide a good bit of blog-fodder over the next few months.

One essay that I found particularly interesting was entitled, “Are we in Crisis Yet?” Judging from the title, I was expecting something resembling a checklist designed to determine whether or not your relationship was headed down the drain, or, at least, when it was time to pony up for some couple’s therapy. That would be a handy tool, indeed. Of course, that’s not at all what the essay was about. The essay is actually about his fear that we have grown accustomed to using the wrong amount of emotion at inappropriate times, and that sometimes, we’ll even use the wrong emotion entirely. Thus, people will suggest, for instance, that they are in ‘crisis’ over the most rudimentary things, when, in fact, they are only slightly troubled or perturbed.

He refers to the writings of St. Augustine, who discussed Ordo Amoris, or the order of love. This is the notion that some emotions are meant to ‘fit’ certain circumstances. So, for instance, witnessing cruelty should engender a call for justice, displays of vulnerability should rouse a desire to protect, etc. Something is dis-ordered in your psyche if affection is met with contempt or if disease is met with envy. Obviously. This speaks to feeling the right emotion at the right time. As to the notion of proportionality, GK Chesterton defined sanity as the ability to treat big things big, and small things small. To the extent that we, as the saying goes, make mountains out of mole hills, drum up drama into our lives unnecessarily, or as Taliaferro puts it, set the threshold for crisis too low, we are again fall short of the ideal and are emotionally disordered.

Taliferro’s short essay is largely descriptive – noting that the misuse of emotion is quite prevalent and that it is to our detriment, because habitual misuse sabotages our ability to genuinely feel a given emotion where appropriate. I tend to agree. He doesn’t, however, discuss any reasons why we have come to misuse emotion in such a manner nor does he discuss what we might do to avoid said misuse. I’d like to take a few stabs at causality and prevention, or at least discuss some related issues.

I believe that the breadth of human emotional experience is quite broad. Meanwhile, our language is wholly inadequate in expressing our feelings. It was once said that Eskimos have 57 words for snow. Apparently, there are fine distinctions to be made among snowflakes; no two are alike, after all. (It turns out that this is not true of Eskimos, but it’s a useful analogy nonetheless.) I am of the opinion that similarly fine distinctions exist in the realm of human emotion. We often overlook this fact, because our language only presents us with relatively few words to express emotions. You “love” your mother and you “love” your girlfriend and you “love” chocolate pudding. There are, I imagine, (I hope!) distinctions between the three. Indeed, I often find the need to borrow from other languages when it comes to describing emotions. For instance, the Greeks speak of Agape, meaning a divine, self-less love. Or, the Germans talk about Schaddenfreud, which is to take pleasure in the pain and misfortune of others. There’s really no good way to concisely express those notions in English, even though English speakers feel such emotions, presumably. However, I imagine that even one with a firm grasp of every language in history would still not be able to precisely express the expanse of emotional experience.

If the first problem is that our language doesn’t have enough words, the second problem is that we do not have enough of our language’s words. That is to say, we have an increasingly small vocabulary. Two studies conducted in the early 1990’s found that an average high school senior has a vocabulary of somewhere between 5,000 and 17,000 words. Another statistic (but I can’t locate the study) reported that over the last 50 years the average working vocabulary for 14-year olds has dropped from 25,000 to 10,000. This is an important statistic even for adults, because most of what we read – newspapers and magazines – are written at the middle school or high school level, apparently bouncing around the same 10,000 words every issue. Frequency of word usage studies on adults has shown that the 10 most commonly written words account for 25% of all written words and the 1,000 most commonly written words account nearly 70% of all written words. Even if the average adult vocabulary pushes 20,000, I don’t imagine words past 5,000 would be used very often. For the sake of comparison, the complete works of William Shakespeare alone contain well over 30,000 different words. Point is, we no longer talk with the precision that we used to. No one seems to be particularly worried about it either.

The trouble, as Taliaferro points out, is that we’re saying we’re in crisis or in love or in-whatever when we’re not. Maybe it’s because we’re lazy. Maybe it’s because we don’t know the right word. Whatever the cause, when we abuse such terms, we’re propagating misinformation as to what these things really are. Concurrently, we’re growing increasingly reliant on our misused language to teach us key ethical points. This is one of the negative effects of the democratization of information in cyberspace. People are beginning to understand the world through bad writing (case in point!) in a medium that relies on words almost exclusively.

This point grew apparent after I watched “Three Times,” a Chinese indie flick in which the same two people fall in love in three different periods in Chinese history – 1911, 1966, and 2005. I picked up the movie, because Ebert and Roeper said that it was “the reason cinema was created!” While I didn’t find the movie to be that great, I was impressed by how little dialogue the movie had. The viewer is really left to feel his or her way through the scenes. It really made me cognizant of how reliant our movies are on dialogue to advance the plot. It was refreshing to be permitted to complete the sentences myself, without relying on the writer and director. It was as though the raw emotions associated with courtship were laid bare before my eyes without any of the fancy window dressing of pop songs and saccharin dialogue. It also drove home the point that much of the dialogue you’ll find in a movie is largely superfluous, if not outright misleading.

OK, so I’ve argued that newspapers, blogs like this one, the internet, and poorly written wordy movies are to blame for the marginalization of our emotional experience to one extreme or the other. But the greatest culprit of all is your television. TV shows are designed to introduce the characters, cause conflict, reach a climax, have a resolution, and tease you for the next episode all in 20 to 40 minutes. Now ask yourself, given those parameters, how deep can the emotional experiences being portrayed afford to be? To the extent that we rely on TV to teach us the ethics of human emotion (and don’t think people don’t!), we would expect to see, as we have, a flattening of human affect. Three minute pop songs have the same short comings. The result is that everyone is either in deep despair or extreme elation, when, in fact, all but the exceptional is lived in the middle.

What’s to set us back on kilter, then? The first key would be to increase one’s emotional vocabulary. When one has to talk about emotions, try to do it precisely. To that end, try to read material with greater than 20,000 words in rotation. Also, as a general rule, live plays should be preferred over film with TV being only a last resort. Finally, now that you have gained the capacity to speak intelligently about emotion using no less than 60,000 words, don’t. Words will only make a mess of those thoughts you're thinking. Instead, just stop and listen to the human body, the familiar home of subtlety, where whole encyclopedias are contained in every look and touch, where I know what you mean well before you ever find the words to say it.