Feel Your Feelings

An embodied look at one of my debates on Substack

Part 1: You are not a bodiless mind.

In his book, ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion’ Jonathan Haidt points out that as human beings, our gut reactions come first and strategic reasoning second. He compares our gut reactions to an elephant and our conscious reasoning to a rider on top of the elephant that rationalizes the elephant’s decisions. Our strategic reasoning is not an impartial judge making decisions for our gut but is driven by our gut.

Those of us who participate regularly in debate-land (including yours, truly) tend to believe the opposite. But this is not our personal fault. It is the result of centuries of conditioning.

Just as our minds are in-formed by our actual bodies, complete with a nervous system, lungs, heart, and spleen, our perception of reality has been shaped by a longer historical past lived and molded and telegraphed by our ancestors. We still sit in their web and we co-create it. To pretend as if this web does not exist is to participate in delusion.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the transition in the Western (translation: European) perception of human flesh and of the human body. Marion Woodman puts it like this:

Prior to the 1300s, studying the body was perceived not merely as a medical exercise but as something that could bring you closer to God. But in the 1300s that changed because of The Bubonic Plague. The disease brought terrible suffering complete with symptoms of vomiting, swollen painful lumps, fever, and severe pain and resulted in the death of between 50 million and 200 million Europeans; it was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history.

Due to the plague’s scourge and devastation, Europeans began to perceive the human body as an evil extension of nature that needed to be mechanistically controlled and tamed. It is no co-wink-a’dink that the scapegoating of women, Jews, and others in the margins of society was a response. Anyone perceived as dark, mysterious, or inhabiting their body needed to be sacrificed to try and keep the disease at bay.

We still carry that superstition about the human body today. Try to bring up the feeling function in a corporate board room and watch people’s eyes glaze over.

Through subsequent years, this mental model of the body as a hideous thing to be repressed and tamed continued to shape European thought, including René Descartes’ mind-body duality model. Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist writes about in his book, ‘The Master and his Emissary’ and he says that Descartes’s disposition was close to schizophrenia which is not, as some may believe,

“characterized by trusting the senses — [but] rather by an unreasonable mistrust of them. It entails…a wholesale inability to rely on the reality of embodied existence in the ‘common-sense’ world we share with others and leads to a dehuaminized view of others, who begin to lose their intuitively experienced identity as fellow humans and become seen as devitalised machines. One’s own body becomes no longer the vehicle through which reality is experienced, but instead is seen as just another object, sometimes a disturbingly alien object, in the world that is validated by cognition alone.”

We carry this schizophrenic model with us in the present day. You can feel its impact whenever you see someone roll their eyes whenever the topic of emotion comes up or you hear Ben Shapiro say “facts don’t care about your feelings,” a scientifically inaccurate statement disproven by neurobiologists and psychologists alike. (It turns out you can’t reason without emotion. If emotion isn’t informing your reasoning, you might be a psychopath.)

I want to lay the groundwork of all of this for you before I dive into the next section of this article. As someone who has over-identified as a debater in the past, I’ve noticed how tempting it is place anyone who is feeling and who expresses feeling during a conversation about policy or politics or whatever in the “irrational” camp.

And yes, I know that some people have wanted to place feelings outside the realm of “objective” reality because some have used their feelings to manipulate and connive; but that displacement is an extremity in the other direction. We cannot selectively numb, disassociate, and compartmentalize our feelings.

I’ve watched debate videos, particularly on the right, and in the so-called “manosphere,” where someone will scoff at another person for feeling “triggered” in a conversation — all while failing to realize that their scoffs are proof of a trigger, a moving of energy in their own gut, moving up through their nervous system, and expressed by them by blowing air out of their mouth.

Part of my own learning journey is to dispense with these old outdated Cartesian mental models as they are neither accurate nor healthy for the cultivation of a civic society and an all around good life.

Part 2: Tracking My Expansions & Contractions

A few weeks ago, I read an article about Zionism and Jewish Nationalism that was written by Joseph (Jake) Klein and passionately defended by Salomé Sibonex. Their argument was that folks on the center right like Bari Weiss, Coleman Hughes, and Douglass Murray were all hypocrites because while they rightfully criticized identity politics in contemporary DEI in the United States, they took up the banner of Israel which, by definition, is a form of identity politics.

Now, I am a Zionist and I support Palestinian statehood. I think people with a shared history, culture, and way of life have a right to national self-determination — especially if that history, culture and way of life is shaped by way of relationship to a very specific location in time and space. And though I agree with Klein’s critique of the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians and I also agree that those on the center right who ignore those violations must be called in, that is very different from saying that the existence of Israel is inherently unjust.

If you like, you can read some of our back and forth’s here and here. It’s a fascinating debate that raises questions of what identity means in the first place, how its shaped, and to what extent individual human beings can just dispense with the history, place, and rituals that shaped them. I also think just as its incorrect to say that the American project is inherently evil because of its history of slavery, its also wrong to say that Israel is inherently evil because of the occupation.

But I want to surface some of my interior feelings that emerged while typing my points. It’s a good exercise in transparency. And since I believe that evolution of human consciousness will only come when we learn how to honor our feelings, it’s good to practice what I preach.

As a note, you might be tempted to read the words on the screenshots and immediately ask yourself whether you agree or not. I invite you to ignore that voice. The point of this exercise is to surface the feeling behind the content not argue with the content. Human feeling is always shaping our thoughts but we’ve been trained to ignore that. This exercise directly challenges that and I want to model that change.

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1st Feeling: Expansion

This is in response to the article itself and “expansion” here means I have a desire to engage socially. According to Polyvagal theory, that social engagement system is constellated by the ventral vagal mechanisms in my body, and is part of a system that is the most evolutionarily evolved (i.e. the newest system, roughly 200 million years old) in the human species. I wasn’t in fight-or-flight nor was I experiencing a dorsal vagal collapse as a response to fear. My desire was to connect, human to human. You can tell because I start by stating my agreement and because the subject of my focus is on the human experience as a whole.

2nd Feeling: Contraction

This was in response to something Jake wrote in the thread. This is the “fight” in my fight-or-flight reflex activating and that reflex is part of my sympathetic nervous system; this is a system which is roughly 500 million years old. It is older than my social engagement system and far more ingrained in my animal body. You can tell by my snarky tone that I’m responding to something Jake has said with a desire to fight, to destroy his argument, and to win.

Another note: You might feel tempted to label fight-or-flight as “bad” and label the social engagement system as “good”; try to avoid this. Again the purpose of this exercise is to simply surface what is. All the parts of our nervous system are there for a reason. Sometimes we need to fight in order to survive. Sometimes fight can be a form of play (see martial arts). Sometimes fighting also activates our social engagement system, especially when we feel connected to others that we perceive we’re fighting for and whose community we’ve formed bonds with. Sometimes it can be hijacked in that you perceive fighting as a form of connection but only because of the follower counts you get from it (hehe).

It is important not to stigmatize tribalism here because, again, in order for a human being to thrive, a healthy dose of tribalism is actually necessary. It creates connection and the feeling that something exists which is bigger than one’s self. Too much tribalism and you get jingoism; too little and you get nihilism.

3rd Feeling: Expansion

Here, my social engagement system is activated again. I genuinely want connection and even though I was snarky earlier I don’t want Jake to misinterpret my snarki-ness as taking offensive to his response.

Through this back-and-forth, you can also see how severely handicapped communication is on social media. If this exchange had been communicated in person, face to face, I would be able to tell through facial cues, tone, and body language whether Jake was offended and he would be able to tell whether he should take my snarky fighting spirit as a sign of danger or more playfully. None of this is possible on social media.

Okay and now for the final round: an exchange between me and Salomé:

4th feeling: Contraction

Fight for surreeee. I was pissed.

I was pissed because Salomé (or at least, this is my perception) went from responding to me directly to re-stacking something I wrote and adding commentary vaguely referring to people who hold the views I hold as “those people sitting in the United states with its individualism who have the audacity to hold a more collectivist view and who disagree with my position.” [a paraphrase].

At that point it became a tit-for-tat. You re-stack? Time for me to do the same. UNO, bitch! The sarcastic drip at the end is just an extension of my feeling of contempt in that moment. The feeling is not, “Let’s exchange.” It’s no longer social at all. It’s

”You’re trying to make me look stupid. So I’m going to destroy you and I will do so by showing how stupid you are to everyone.”

The passion, the rage, the seething ‘how dare you’ underlying the message derives from a deeper subtext of ‘you’re not listening to me, you don’t actually care about me, all you want to do is win, so I will win first.’

The likelihood that these kinds of exchanges will happen again and again on social media is high because our social engagement system is mostly unavailable in a system like our ironically named “social media.” How so? The SES involves the cranial nerves that control facial expressions, eye contact, vocal tone, and middle ear muscles which are important for hearing human voices. When we feel safe, the SES activates and allows us to connect and co-regulate with others.

In other words, being social actually requires the human body. I couldn’t see Jake or Salomé’s faces and they couldn’t see mine. We weren’t inhabiting actual physical space with each other, reading each other’s body language, or responding in real time.

It is nearly impossible for us to be really social on social media, at least not in a sustained way. We need to be with each other, and fully in our bodies. But that requires a shift in the way we relate to our bodies as a society. It requires replacing our bodily shame with honor and reverence and devotion.

This will take time and patience.

But we can all start by tracking or noticing moments when we expand and when we contract, when we feel socially connected and when we feel fear, when we feel euphoric and when we feel anger — not just online but as a regular practice throughout the day. If we do this, one day we may just find ourselves returning back to the simple inhale and exhale of our breath and to the simplicity of chopping wood and carrying water.