Crossing Long Distances

Or Not

Reading along today, I rediscovered the work of Rob Boddice. Boddice is an historian of emotions who has written a lot in a field that is relatively new as such and who blows up an old idea that human emotions are consistent and recognizable through historical time.

If you can’t get a hold of Dr. Boddice’s books right now, you can read these snippets from the History of Emotions blog. Here, he is speaking with the blog’s editor, Professor Thomas Dixon:^[1]

RB: “Underlying this book as well as The History of Emotions is a deeply critical stance in opposition to a still powerful psychological orthodoxy that emotions in humans are universal, automatic, non-cognitive, natural, and so on. There are good reasons to think that the foundations of this orthodoxy have been thoroughly undermined, but it lingers nonetheless in the popular imagination, not least because it’s just so convenient. The premise that we understand something about human feeling in the past because, after all, we are human too, is almost overwhelming, but it’s fraught with problems. In A History of Feelings I reconstruct the felt past episodically in order to present past human experience as something unfamiliar or alien, understandable only through an appreciation of carefully reassembled context…. I suppose the last big message is connected to this. I am exhorting historians and general readers alike to become more critically reflexive about our own emotions: where do they come from? Who has a stake in shaping or directing them, and to what ends?”

Dr. Boddice offers many examples across several books of emotional states that have disappeared or, worse, have been mistranslated. One is “tender feelings,” a complex emotional phenomenon from seventeenth-century France. Another is Aristotle’s “eudaimonia,” which we are delighted to translate as “happiness” but are only misunderstanding when we do so, as happiness is famously a category invented during early modern period, however it’s changed since then too. I suspect “chivalrous love” of the Middle Ages falls into this category of things we are willfully misunderstanding too.

I remember coming across this sort of language phenomenon for the first time as I was reading eighteenth-century primary sources in the history of science. I was very young in this activity and had been reading for a thousand pages at that point, but I suddenly stopped at the word “nature” and realized that despite the several clear facts about my linguistic ability in this research - that I was reading my native language, that the 1700s is really not that long ago, and that I am an American that has inherited the cultural and political traditions of eighteenth-century Britain – I did not understand what they meant, exactly, by that word. I experienced in that moment, and then again later with words like “improvement” and “sympathy” from the same period, a kind of dissociation. The uncanny valley crept in, pulling me up hard in my understanding that although these words were familiar to me, they were in fact alien language in the mouths of people who were deeply other, culturally and emotionally distinct from me in more ways than they were similar.

I think that any person who trains in history long enough comes to this moment. It’s not simply misunderstanding, it’s a strong feeling of foreignness, of alienness. A suspicion that you have made a terrible mistake and something well-camouflaged has snuck right up on you without you realizing what it was. Not that eighteenth-century treatises on natural history themselves are dangerous, rather the notion that your comprehension, your trust in the shape of the world and the language that represents and informs it, your faith in your own powers of perception, gets shook up and you realize things are not what you thought for the last thousand proverbial pages. Your certainty has been a house of cards. It’s been a farce and worse, you proceeded as if you had a clue, but you didn’t. Time to go read those thousand pages again with this new eye.

I believe that as regular people we encounter this alienness often in others who are not of our culture. Is the distance between an eighteenth-century Briton and myself less or more than the distance between myself and, say, a modern North Korean?Both distances are considerable and the way we cover them is the same: through a big lie. The way to cover it, to render the alien familiar, is usually through willful misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the other’s motives, concerns, and morals. Morals they might die for, but which we could find baffling or reprehensible, and therefore, under the guise of tolerance, we misunderstand. We project a universal morality onto them, and perhaps they do the same to us.

Good historians are trained, just like good scientists, to minimize the projection of their identities onto people in the past. It works well enough, but it’s deeply imperfect. There is no view from nowhere except in the hardest of sciences. That’s what makes them hard – the study that which is true for everyone regardless of how fragmented the everyone’s perspectives are. Without scientific method through which to know our fellows’ hearts, we are left only with eyes to see and ears to hear and boy, we rarely see the same things with all these different eyes.

I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge, so I just sit on it. It makes me deeply suspicious of universalizing models of politics and claims of essential moral principles, even though I despair as to what we might become without them. We could become anything at all, and indeed we have. As a result, I have to choke back hysterical and irritating monologues every time someone tries to attribute something to “human nature.” There is so little – from objects of disgust and perspectives on the desirability of violence to our very biological sensoria – that hasn’t changed drastically within even a few hundred years. English going back five hundred years is unreadable and I would argue the minds of the people who wrote it were also largely unreadable. It’s a plausible argument that the mutiny on the Bounty happened because Captain Bligh didn’t beat his sailors enough and so they didn’t respect him. Imagine that, today. Similarly, try to read Plato with the eye of a Greek instead of an American in order to find yourself very confused and eventually deeply offended by the moral implications of the cave metaphor in the Republic. No one tries to read beyond the cave part, because only the cave part allows us to close the gap between Plato and ourselves. The rest is just weird and it doesn’t serve us, so we just put it aside. We see similarity by deliberately blocking out the foreignness. It’s how we get on with each other and make Plato means something to us.

The political implications of what I’ve just said are pretty scary. It means we can mold ourselves – or be molded – into anything within a couple of generations. We can. Consider the Cultural Revolution, where children turned on their parents in the streets, the Holocaust ripping the humanity away from an entire generation, or way people who lived under the USSR just are when you meet them. Consider how absolutely insanely foreign raving Pentecostals on late night TV in the 1990s seem to you, and how compelling and honest they seemed to someone else. Think of how used to their surveillance state Chinese folks are and how intolerable we would find it, at least for now, to live like that. Humans can be taught anything, believe anything. They can rip each other apart with horses in the public square and find justice and humor in it, or find this activity repulsive, depending on their training. The propagandists of the twentieth century knew it and so do historians, time traveling and losing their minds in the process.

I guess each coin has two sides and maybe it could be hopeful. If we can obscure everyone’s foreignness, focus on shared ground, we might stop fucking each other over about it. We might, if “we” were every one of us in agreement about the value of that kind of morality, which “we” aren’t.

I don’t know what my conclusion is here. I know this truth and it doesn’t help me. I think that this shit, like thorough knowledge of molecules, how mirrors work, or the shortcomings of cloud formation models, hardly fucking matters to ordinary people.

What I have done, though, is place a short letter in the comment box at the public library. It thanks the extremely patient woman at the adult services desk behind me for what she’s doing right now. She has spent an absolutely grueling hour trying to assist an older woman who has early stage dementia and no idea what the internet is in finding a way to get her car emissions tested. Maybe this little chain of sincerity is the only answer there is today.

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^[1] https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2019/10/rob-boddice-a-history-of-feelings-qa/