Emotions and Uncertainty

How about merely sick, with the consciousness that whatever the story turns out to be is not going to be very pleasant or edifying? That fits well enough with all the opinions one is supposed to maintain. I don’t see why our emotions are supposed to directly reflect a considered political position anyway, like those self-righteous headlines in the New York Post.

Those ‘conditional expressions of emotion’ are really something different. They are public positions, couched in emotional terms. They are an announcement that we abhor certain types of behavior, yet are also fair minded. For me, the question is why can’t we just speak in those terms – why must it be dressed up in emotion-speak? (That obviously doesn’t answer your question, but I’m also being troublesome).

My primary emotion has been puzzlement. It seems as though a lot is known to a lot of people about DSK’s prior activities, so that it’s much less surprising to those in the know that he’s in this situation than had it been, say, Tony Blair. (If the whole British press corps chimes in that Blair is a notorious skirt chaser, I give up).

But I get womanizing, in the sense of making overtures to lots of possible partners. I don’t get the forcible compulsion aspect here, at least as a one-off; which makes me think that (a) it likely wasn’t a one-off, and (b) what else is out there about other powerful men that is routinely brushed under the carpet?

Andrew Burton: if the story about Tristane Banon is true – and there doesn’t seem much reason to doubt it – it’s not a one-off.

I don’t have an answer for this. There doesn’t a clean separation between our emotions and our judgments when it comes to moral issues like this, which means both that feeling anything risks prejudging the issue, while putting aside feelings risks prejudging the matter anyway (as being one where there wasn’t much of moral consequence). I am myself inclined to think that being objective is probably the way to go, but it’s dishonest to pretend that the fact that we’re terrible at being objective doesn’t have any consequences for the advisability of attempting that route.

I keep being boggled by how the (alleged of course) rape/forcible sexual assault keeps being conflated with “sexual addiction,” “cheating,” “skirt chasing,” etc. Rape/forcible sexual assault is not even in the same category as having an affair, being a womanizer, being afflicted with an unfortunate character defect, or whatever else. Or maybe it just seems categorically different to me because I am female. I’m unable to have the proper objectivity, apparently.

Well, I don’t feel for either side at the moment, except an initial irritation at the rush of people to readily ignore the presumption-of-innocence aspect of the legal system.

The simple fact is that any emotion we feel here will, in all likelihood, turn out to be idiotic and misguided (as I found out already to my disadvantage).

NO. Sympathy, first. And yes, anger, too, but secondarily. Whether or not the court agrees, there is a victim in this case. The woman certainly feels victimized despite any judge’s rulings. It seems natural and just to feel for her. It also seems natural to assume – because she believes she’s been victimized – that DSK did something ‘wrong.’ And that’s where the anger comes in. In my mind, emotions aren’t and shouldn’t be predicated or determined by what may or may not happen in the courtroom.

There is no such thing as conditional anger, but there is such a thing as being angry about the behavior described in the criminal complaint against DSK (in the same way that you might be horrified by the actions of Iago), but unsure that the actual DSK actually performed those actions, and so unwilling to be angry at the actual DSK until such time as you feel confident identifying him with the guy described in the complaint. That’s how I normally feel in cases like this.

I don’t care to have moral feelings. Aesthetic feelings, fine. Ultimately, DSK’s is a boring, banal story. Worse (arguably), it’s ugly. It’s best that he should be killed.

10: a two-off is kind of like a one-off so 10 is not really a full answer to 8. I also wonder: is this a thing that’s going to be like the priest-pedophile thing? Where suddenly one person gets a story through the thick walls of conventional silence and then there are others and others. If so, then we might be in for a rocky ride. It has the potential of a priest-pedophile thing because after all if it is so everybody will be able to say: “It was no surprise. We knew something was off but that it was this ugly and big was something we never came to realize.”

[As to John’s question: curiosity is the right feeling. You want to know as it would be relevant to know so you will remain interested until you know. I think this is compatible with being angry it might have happened.]

Feh, feelings are just feelings. There’s no right or wrong wih the id. OTOH actions, including blog comments, most definitely have a right and wrong.

So the question ought to be how far our actions should reflect particular feelings.

Every time a power individual reveals himself as a psychopath, I accept it as a self-evident truth. I gloat. I am a bad person.

I teach Criminology, and I hear a lot in class about the killings of James Bulger, Stephen Lawrence and a couple of other ultra-high-profile cases: they’re exemplary stories which let us think (and feel) something quite definite. The facts in those cases are well known and pretty much undisputed, but the stories would be just as good if we didn’t know for sure they were true; in fact they’d probably be better (cf. Barry George, Colin Stagg). Similarly, the Tale of the International Bureaucrat and the Chambermaid is a terrific sleazy story with a good moral, irrespective of whether or not it’s true.

What interests me is the question of how much difference there is between a vicarious moralistic reaction to a grubby story which may or may not be true, and the same kind of reaction to a grubby story that’s been made to stand up in court. I suspect the answer’s “not a lot”, and I wonder how much of our emotional response is really keyed by sympathy with the people involved and how much by the appeal of a story with a good moral.

Andrew Burton wrote: (b) what else is out there about other powerful men that is routinely brushed under the carpet?

Isn’t that kind of backward? After all, this powerful man is now in a notoriously brutal prison without bail, based on the accusation of a single person – a poor immigrant woman working in a low-status profession at that. We found out immediately too, not three months after due to a hush-up campaign. He will almost certainly lose his job and political prospects, even if he’s found innocent. As I see it, this is evidence against the idea that powerful men can do as they like and get away with it.

And frankly (couched and restrained) anger toward Banon, as well.

Disagree with glenn here. If we believe what Banon is saying now, she was very young at the time of the attempted rape and was put under intolerable pressure by people she might suppose to have her interests at heart, including her own mother, not to report it. Mainly, as far as I can see to safeguard the mother’s political career aspirations. So there’s one person in the story I have absolutely no problem with being angry at: Banon’s mother – on balance I prefer Grendel’s.

“What is the appropriate emotional state to have” is a bad question: people either have emotional states or they don’t. At best you can make them feel guilty, shamed or excluded if they have the “wrong” emotional response.

“What is the appropriate emotional state to express publicly” is what’s going on here, hence the hedging.

Chris y – I see your point and partially agree, which was why my anger was couched and restrained. But Banon was an adult at the time, and yeah ceded to her mother’s wishes, apparently. But in the end, it was her choice all the same. If her story is true then her mother was callow and entirely self-centered. But Banon allowed her to be.

The accepted wisdom from modern neurobiology is that emotions are heuristics – neural shortcuts to allow us to decide how to behave without time-consuming reflection. They evolved to help us deal with dangerous situations – such as when we are threatened by predators, or otherwise have to act quickly. Clearly, there is ample time for reflection in this case, and so it seems to me that the appropriate response is to stop, take a breath, and think things through. In fact, the presence of uncertainty in the absence of any required action should only act as a brake on us relying upon emotions. At least if we profess to be rational people, and not just slaves to our emotions.

Let me go right back to David Kaib at comment 4. These very public utterances — ‘I angrily deplore the conduct of the guy, but demand that justice be evenhanded’ — are really invitations to join the speaker (and so to legitimate them) in moral positions which are known to be unassailable and whose expression beautifies the speaker. Though the utterances could interpreted as an invitation to take up a balancing act internally, trying to be mad and fair at the same time, they are better interpreted as the speaker doing political work on their own behalf (or maybe on behalf of some project).

But there’s something else too, namely a sense of sentimental education, of the rehearsal of moralizing narrative: the story hits the news, then the story is rehearsed with various colours and spins. The story works because we can all add our more or less appropriate reactions to great basic material (‘if it bleeds, it leads’). So out there in bars and across breakfast tables people are exercising their moral imaginations, trying out various versions on each other. And if some people don’t find the exercise edifying, that may be because we’ve had too many opportunities to work this through already.

Surely Matt McIrvin is basically right and what’s going on here is a bit of equivocation. The sense in which we “can’t feel conditionally angry” is one in which we’re talking about something that’s more like a physical event happening in the body – the rush of adrenalin, etc. But this isn’t something that it makes sense to think about whether we should or shouldn’t; it just happens, for the reasons set out by Peter in #40.

The sense then in which your emotions can be considered to be correct or incorrect is one in which you “take ownership” of them by endorsing them as correct. And that can be as conditional as you like – it’s perfectly sensible to say “I have an immediate emotional reaction of rage to this news, which will be perfectly correct and appropriate if he is found guilty, but which I will regret having and unendorse if he turns out innocent”.

I’m not sure we can afford emotions about news items concerning people we don’t know, and likely will never meet

That is a strange idea, because people have such emotions ALL THE TIME, such that it seems to be a significant part of how humans behave.

Given we’re discussing emotions and being frank, the following left me unconditionally irked, even if qualified as being “couched and restrained”:

glenn: And frankly (couched and restrained) anger toward Banon, as well. I can understand her not wanting to get involved, press charges, etc. but if she’d done the right thing then, perhaps this woman would not have been a victim. Because DSK allegedly got away with it then, more or less, he’s empowered and willing to engage in such behavior in the future.

I will move away from alleged victims and proceed on the basis that actual victims of sexual violence do genuinely exist so that I can lose some of the necessary conditionals for a paragraph or two. Given the appalling statistics worldwide for convictions in cases that make it to court; the cases which are reported and believed but which never make it before a jury because of little confidence that a conviction could be secured; the lack of understanding that still exists surrounding the crime, even amongst those who should know better (nice to see your hammy fist flailing about, Ken Clarke); the casual, often unconscious, victim-blaming that constantly pervades discussions of the crime and the myths that still persist, it would seem more appropriate to readily understand why there is such underreporting than to feel anger towards those who choose not to subject themselves to the further trauma or invasiveness of medical examination, police interviews, court proceedings and public scrutiny when there is little statistical chance of success and a profound fear of not being believed or of being harshly judged. And why add even more to victims’ misplaced, culturally-conditioned sense of guilt by chiding them for not “doing the right thing” or criticising them for empowering an attacker when they are wrestling with the aftermath of physical disempowerment and trying to regain a degree of decision-making and sense of control? In my own country, the chances of securing a conviction after reporting a rape is a nice, stark, squat seven percent, so I don’t believe in levelling criticism at victims who may not want to battle those odds.

If an attacker is an international figure possessed of financial and legal resources and a fan base, it hardly becomes an easier decision to report, knowing that the world’s media will direct its gaze to your doorstep, and the viral online world will breach your anonymity and happily hunker down to trawl through the minutiae of your life (what you should/shouldn’t have done; possible motivations; what you should/shouldn’t have reported)? Even in cases where convictions are secured or guilty pleas entered, there is still reluctance to believe victims in many quarters and a desire to minimise their experiences: search the web for discussions of any high-profile convicted rapist or one who actually entered a guilty plea and examine what is written, the ambivalence about whether a crime was actually committed, and from whence it comes (it’s not all courtesy of online trolls salivating for a reaction).

Also, I am in agreement with CRW in that it constantly confounds me how, in the media and elsewhere, an allegation of sexual violence is conflated with allegations of someone being a bit of a “libertine/womaniser/seducer”, being prone to “peccadilloes” or having “a problem with women”.

OK, you get the point. So what is the appropriate emotional state to be in now, when you are in a state of uncertainty?

As usual, I’m in a state of but someone on the internet is wrong! The “conditional anger” of people appears to me to be some sort of dishonesty that reminds me of that scene in Casablanca: I’m shocked that gambling is going on here!.

On another note, DSK appears to be housed in the west facility in Rikers. Normally this is for inmates with contagious diseases, but a NY Post article claims that the victim was living in an apartment complex that only rents to HIV+ people. That article contains other details that may bother people with squeamish sensibilities (as do almost all other articles by the Post). For people who want to parse that article and pick on the living arrangements of the victim, I think this quote from Harlem United’s website is appropriate:

The program is the lease-holder of each apartment for the first 12 months, with the expectation that each client will graduate the program 12 months after admission, at which time the lease is moved into the client’s name and supportive services cease.

source

John Holbo:

Either you are angry or not. It’s not as though you will find out how you are actually feeling now only at some distant point in the future when the facts are in.

This statement is incorrect. If one feels anger at Strauss-Kahn, when only limited ‘facts’ have been brought to light, it can only be because one has made some guesses re: The Accused’s culpability. One would not feel anger at the man, if one’s guess was that he is innocent of the charges.

Of course, people get angry all the time at various ‘enemies’ of their country, based only on the rumors re: the enemy’s intentions/motivation/etc. that various politicians have passed on to the public. It simply depends upon what you are assuming re: the as-yet-unknown facts.

I feel no anger at the man simply because I fear making a hasty, ultimately-mistaken guess about individuals accused of such acts. We can only hope that public officials share the same kind of fear.

“What is the appropriate emotional state to express publicly” is what’s going on here, hence the hedging.

But what is the point of addressing these issues in the language of emotions, hedged, conditional, or otherwise? Why not simply say: “I don’t know what happened here, but if the accusations are true, the conduct is horrible and DSK should be severely punished.”? If someone then insists on asking “well, how do you feel?”, I would answer, depending on how I felt at the time: “None of your damn business”, “I don’t have any particular feeling at the moment”, or “I don’t have anything to base any feelings on”, or “I don’t have any reason yet to make an emotional investment in this case,” or, if I had some feeling, whether baseless or not, simply report what the feeling happened to be?

“What’s the right way to feel, under uncertainty?”

Uh, uncertain?

Seriously, there is no right or wrong way to feel, is there?

“What’s the right way to feel, under uncertainty?”

There is no right or wrong way to feel, but there are right and wrong ways to understand and explain your feelings.

Re: “Would it be more morally ideal to try not only to set our emotions aside, when we have them, but never to have them, to begin with?”

Well, the Stoics certainly thought so, as do the Buddhists, albeit only with what we might call “negative emotions,” like anger, greed, envy and so forth, while “positive’ emotions like loving kindness and compassion are to be cultivated. With a neo-Stoic theory like Martha Nussbaum’s, anger has an indispensable cognitive function as a judgment of value: “Emotions view the world from my own point of view of my own scheme of goals and projects, the things to which I attach value in a conception of what it is for me to live well.”

I don’t see any compelling reason why a state of epistemic uncertainty cannot be emotionally “neutral,” which in this case might be supported by a corresponding belief in the legal presumption of innocence until the outcome of a process of adversarial adjudication. However, I can readily imagine myself being angry should I discover during the course of a trial or as a result of a plea that Stauss-Kahn is indeed guilty (more or less) as charged. Such anger no doubt differs in intensity from the sort of immediate and deeply visceral anger that arises in situations where one is a witness to or victim of egregiously immoral or criminal behavior.

Given the spate of high-profile cases of politicians and other individuals in power behaving badly, I may have a sort of diffuse anger directed not so much to Strauss-Kahn as an individual (at least for the time being), but toward a cultural ethos and social system that attracts and often rewards individuals who publicly display many of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. The object of such anger would include my fellow citizens who vote for these politicians or fawn over the powerful (as part of a compensatory and malign power relations for which we share responsibility, i.e., we are complicit in their creation and persistence).

Patrick S. O’Donnell @ 58: “I may have a sort of diffuse anger directed not so much to Strauss-Kahn as an individual (at least for the time being), but toward a cultural ethos and social system that attracts and often rewards individuals who publicly display many of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder.”

I would go further than that: our social system, especially in its advocacy of unrestrained capitalism, tends to reward individuals who publicly display many of the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder – in other words, who are sociopaths.

The field of economics seems to be dominated by people who are high-functioning autistic at best, and flat-out sociopathic at worst.

I’m okay with being upset with someone because I think they did something, and then discovering they didn’t do what I thought they did and then being [less upset with them / completely unupset and remorseful for my error in rough proportion to how stupid I was being / even more upset with them / furious] depending on what I discovered they actually did.

I’m also okay with signaling a rough quantification of my level of uncertainty by focusing more attention, or less attention, or no attention, on these hypothetical projections of my likely future emotional state.

It’s less “conditional emotional response” and more “I’m implicitly including in my statement a prediction of my emotional response under a few different projections of what might turn out to be true.” Which, yes, is intentionally signaling that I’m uncertain of my judgment, it’s signaling that my intuition is quite fallible. Really, it’s [a] giving listeners information about what sort of person I am, and what sort of emotional reactions I tend to have, [b] acknowledging and reinforcing some level of publicly sustained self-awareness, that I know myself well enough to provide good information for [a], and [ c] implicitly acknowledging my respect for the validity of a wider variety of intuitions and emotional responses that others may express.

I will trollishly hope that anyone who feels ornery about the language we use to talk about ourselves and our self-hypothesized responses to new information are similarly rigorous in their interpretation of the question “how are you?” (nah, I don’t mean it.)

14. I’m more interested in how a smart person, who must clearly understand the risks he is taking can get to such a point. I submit that the average smart person isn’t excluded from developing a personailty disorder that can eventually get them into big trouble, if they don’t recognize it. I really don’t think DSK was acting rationally, but was playing some sort of fantasy that had been building for years. Some fantasy he probably thought justifiably was just innocent enjoyment, no-one will ever have to know I can entertain myself by imagining. But, then with constant repetition, those inappropriate brain connections grow stronger and stronger, till eventually they start coming out in real life…. The lesson for the rest of us, is that when we enjoy fantasies that we know would be highly dangerous/unacceptable in real-life, we should stop and think “do I really want to reinforce this inapproriate (emotional) connection?”. Not doing so puts one at risk of eventually developing some really nasty personality traits.

My theory for the event, is that he had made some sort of arrangement with an escort service to play out his fanatasy, and the poor maid showed up at his door instead and became the victim. KInd of a mistaken identity of another sort. If such is the case he’s more like a raunchier version of Eliot Spitzer, with really bad luck/judgement.

Then there may be a pissed-off escort service worker who was done out of a paying gig. Probably out her expenses, too.

@CRW, 14 I keep being boggled…

Things have changed a lot in the past few decades, but not for every one, nor every where. To observe the “old way” of thinking, I refer you to any James Bond film: where the most unwilling, hostile, woman becomes magically transformed into an ally and sex partner of Bond by the “right” kiss and the “right” sexual encounter. This attitude overflows into other areas, such as the condescending attitude towards lesbians along the lines of “you just haven’t met the right man yet”.

I think that there’s a big “maybe” category, and people aren’t very sensitive to probabilities as long as it’s in the maybe category. So believing that there’s an 80% that he’s guilty feels a lot like believing that there’s a 20% chance (although a little bit stronger), since they’re both in the maybe category, and they both feel different from seeing it as 100% or as 0%. See:

Rottenstreich, Y. & Hsee, C. K. (2001). Money, kisses, and electric shocks: An affective psychology of risk. Psychological Science, 12, 185-190. pdf

Intrade says I should be 84% outraged. That’s the lower bound. As I estimate large portion of this 16% is various ways to not be found guilty legally (settling out of court, plea bargaining something unrelated, being able to afford much better lawyers, dying before it all ends etc.) in spite of actually being so, I’m pretty much 100% outraged.

What a contrast with Garret FitzGerald!

I don’t have any feelings whatever toward DSK or his accuser. I think if it turns out that DSK is guilty, I could become very angry at DSK or myself that my attempt not to rush to judgement (when it sometimes seems like I am the only one who hasn’t) has turned out to have been shielding a crook. This is how it turned out in 1974 after I had campaigned for Nixon, presumed his innocence, and defended his innocence before my friends who mostly called me foolish. A key step on my personal journey toward socialism. But now very ironically I join those who look back at the Nixon somewhat fondly, as Chomsky says, the last liberal President, and wonder if people like Woodward’s friends had an extra agenda to bring an end to moderately socially democratic conservatism.

I do have considerable anger, however misplaced, toward those who have rushed to the judgement that DSK is guilty, and worse anger toward those who say this is just how men are generally. I just finished my 3rd posting on Katha Pollitt’s blog, not defending DSK (though having suggested there may be alternatives to the accusation made against DSK) because I fear he might indeed be guilty, as Nixon was, but rather pointing out the hypocrisy of her literally concluding that DSK is guilty while simultaneously accusing French media of a rush to judgement blaming the accuser.

Honestly I find it hard to picture how a man such as DSK could make attacks such as have been alleged (or proven?) and still be nearly in position to have been elected President of France, after having been one of the least antisocial chiefs of the IMF. Can someone point me to movies to help educate my imagination on things like this?

This is not at all comparable to (at least how I have imagined) priestly pedophilia because that is in some sense consensual, just that we don’t extend the authority to consent to the victims. Rape is non-consensual period; that is definitional. It seems hard for me to imagine DSK as a violent criminal. He seems more like the boring kind.

I perceive a kind of gray area involving lack of communication or differing cultural norms that is yet another kind of unproven hypothesis. Need I ask permission to touch my date’s hand? Normally, I now think not, though she is certainly entitled to refuse, and if done politely I should not be in the least offended. But I have had dates (even one continuing sets of dates with one woman that had gone on for a month) where the first such touch led to lectures, denunciations, or realized or nearly realized threats of dissociation (that in one case required vast apologies to overcome). Apparently I was supposed to have asked permission, though with others that might be seen as fatal weakness: an avoidance of risk taking that some women demand.

In this grey area, if you concede that it exists, it also makes me wonder why *attempted* rape, if quickly shunned or avoided without injury, need be seen as a crime of the same magnitude as murder. Clearly it is a matter of dignity and respect for the victims that we view rape as so evil, though sometimes I wonder if the premature executioners don’t protest too much. But what about the other side in cases like I described above. Say if a hand touch leads to a lasting ostracism and a long lasting personal crisis. Couldn’t that also be seen as a violation of dignity and respect? A crime of love rather than a crime of sex?

It seems to me that some feminists are sexist, and that the masculine role is a lot more difficult and complicated than they perceive. This kind of news brings them out, and that makes me angry, and also makes me angry at men who don’t recognize that this is going on, and might therefore be inclined to join the chorus of those calling me a misogynist.