This week I was having a coffee with a couple of colleagues (all properly socially distanced) and we were talking about how important it was to be ’jolly’ during this difficult time. We weren’t being flippant, knowing tragedy has hit many households as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, but thinking about how to raise our own and other’s morale at a time of stress and anxiety when it would be so easy to be overcome with pessimism and depression about the future: it is just that we don’t know what is going to happen and when it looks as if the numbers catching the virus were falling and life was returning to some sort of normality the disease surges again and the Government talks about ‘circuit break’ restrictions being introduced. This uncertainty is worldwide but sometimes feels overwhelming for the individual!
In my last blog I identified uncertainty as being one of the chief causes of anxiety and how Covid-19 has resulted in a significant increase in anxiety disorders across the whole range of the population (https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/anxiety-and-uncertainty-in-the-time-of-covid-19-what-does-it-mean-for-humanity). My approach in the blog was to examine a rational explanation proposed by the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jasper as to both the meaning of uncertainty for humanity and how we can manage it.
I have, however, also described how anxiety has had a powerful evolutionary purpose in keeping homo sapiens alert to the dangers that beset our species during its prehistoric past (https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/the-guide-to-successful-photography-blogging).
Anxiety can be seen as fundamentally an emotional - you could say autonomic (involuntary or unconscious; relating to the autonomic nervous system) response to uncertainty that will defy reason. If that is true and anxiety is a natural feeling, an emotional response to an uncertain situation then the Greek philosopher, Aristotle got it wrong. He believed that humans were naturally rational creatures but the evidence from evolutionary psychology is that we, in fact, are driven by a set of emotional reactions to our environment. Emotions then are the key drivers of human behaviour, underpinned by the evolutionary impulse of survival. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his magnum opus Leviathan expounded the theory of a 'social contract', where by individuals surrendered some of their freedoms and submitted to the authority of the state in exchange both for protection of their recognised rights and the maintenance of social order but it also enabled government to keep its citizens safe from their own primal, emotional, instincts.
The Hobbesian view of humankind and the argument for a 'social contract' was epitomised for me as a child when I was given William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. The book tells the story of a group of young schoolboys who become stranded on an uninhabited island and how left to their own devices, without the constraints of adult authority and rules, their behaviour reverts to basic animal instincts of survival, which are selfish, violent and morally despicable. The theme is that human beings must have laws and government in order to maintain a safe environment otherwise we return to the brutality of ‘the survival of the fittest’.
This conflict between ‘basic instincts’ and ‘civilised behaviour’ can be seen as a tension between the emotional and the rational. Humans are constantly reacting in an emotive fashion when the situation really requires a rational response. The example of irrational behaviour which I constantly wheel out (no pun intended) is ‘road rage’. The rational action when faced by dangerous driving, for example being ‘cut-up’ by another car, is to recognise the other driver is dangerous and to be avoided but what regularly happens is for anger to boil over which can even go beyond blasting the horn and shaking a fist and result in reckless behaviour. What has happened is the autonomic fight or flight survival mechanism has taken over, and so often it is the fight mechanism, especially with testosterone-fuelled young males!
In ways that impact on society and affect us all evolutionary emotions can also be exploited in all walks of life; for example, democratic politics relies on rationality and reason but survival mechanisms often dominate the political environment in times of crisis and that emotional state can be manipulated psychologically through a false authoritarian certainty which can explain both popularism and absolutism (https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/something-big-is-coming). A crisis creates uncertainty and popularism and absolutism provide explanations and predict certainty, playing on emotional responses to a worrying state of flux.
On the positive side emotions, however, are not just reactive states but can also be creative in fashioning the human environment. A marvellous and often mysterious emotion is falling in love and it is also true that the emotion of happiness and jollity can be contagious and elicit spontaneous responses from us all.
Back in 1988 the neuroscientist Peter Sterling and his colleague Jonathan Eyer proposed the concept of 'allostasis', a term coined from the Ancient Greek which described a state of mind and body created through the process of reestablishing stability in response to a challenge. This process is perceived as immensely important to our health, both physical and mental. All sorts of challenges affect humans on a daily basis and threaten our stability and it is important for us to both physically and mentally rebalance ourselves.
A present challenge is the anxiety caused by the uncertainty of Coivd-19 we need to reestablish our stability and a positive frame of mind and one way is to face our uncertain world with the uplifting mood of jollity.
Comments