Emotions are information: Audre Lorde vs Jonathan Haidt

“When we turn from anger we turn from insight”

The Book:

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde
Edited and with an Introduction by Roxane Gay
W. W. Norton & Company
2020

The Talk:

In a March substack post, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attempted to give an explanation for the high rate of mental health diagnoses among young liberal women.

The core of his argument was that young liberal women have embraced “Three Great Untruths,” articulated by Greg Lukianoff and inspired by CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy):

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Haidt goes on to say:

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.

It’s first worth noting the assumption here that CBT is right, CBT is great, and it is the “duty” of universities to apply CBT to how they care for students. Although people have benefited from CBT, and its general ideas permeate the cultural air, it’s worth interrogating. CBT is very similar to stoic philosophy. Popular books on stoicism point to CBT successes as validation of stoicism, and promoters of CBT often point to stoicism as validation of its “timeless” wisdom.

It’s also worth interrogating these three "untruths” because Haidt is an influential public intellectual, with a reputation as a centrist, based on his first bestselling 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

I kept thinking of these three untruths while I was reading The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, a recently published collection of the poet’s essays, talks, and poetry from 1970 to her death in 1992. Lorde was a Black lesbian feminist activist and poet who was an international literary figure in the civil rights movements of the late 20th Century.

I kept thinking of Haidt’s untruths because they are what Lorde would simply call “truths.” In fact, I have a strong feeling that the young liberal women on social media that Haidt wants to help are directly inspired by the ideas that Lorde championed.

What’s really happening here, beneath the social science, is the drawing of intellectual battle lines between the philosophy of Audre Lorde and the philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And at the center of that battlefield is an argument about feelings—if they matter, and if they get us nearer to or farther from the truth.

Feelings as a source of knowledge

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

“Anger is loaded with information and energy,” writes Lorde in her talk “The Uses of Anger.” Later in the same speech she writes, “When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.”

For Lorde, emotions and feelings more broadly (such as desire) are sources of information that lead to knowledge. And that knowledge, which occurs when emotions are made explicit and examined, is the only reliable foundation for healing and change.

In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde describes how we come to knowledge:

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a hand-maiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

This was not merely theoretical for Lorde, who found herself excluded in every social situation she found herself in. If she went to a feminist conference, she had to deal with mistreatment by white feminists. If she went to a civil rights event, they excluded her for being lesbian.

She found herself in a society in which all the institutions, hierarchies, ideals, stories, images—even within activist and protest circles—were not designed to support, validate, inspire, or encourage her. Imagine realizing that, at best, society doesn’t care if you exist, eat, or breathe. It’s like a strong wind, always pushing you away from the center of power, that doesn’t know what to do with you. It is what we mean by that word “marginalized”—always pushed to the edge of the main event, the main story, the main focus. At worst, it flattens you and doesn’t even notice. In one of her many sharp, incisive lines Lorde says, “We were not meant to survive.”

So what do you do with a life like that? Do you just fold up and give in to everyone? Do you choose exile? Do you fake every moment of your life? Or do you stand up and say that there’s some things I know, though the world keeps saying I don’t know it, tells me to be quiet, tells me to fit into their categories—I know what I feel. The feelings and emotions we experience (joy, anger, love) are telling us information, says Lorde, information that needs to be acknowledged and (in Lorde’s words) scrutinized, not silenced or suppressed or ignored.

Lorde sees this self-affirmation as a moral duty. To stand up, when it feels like the whole of society passively and actively hates you and everything you are, is to be morally responsible for yourself, to point to one’s own feelings and say: I know this. For Lorde, this is the only ground from which understanding, healing, and change become possible.

It’s easy to imagine how this point of view gives hope and strength to many people who have been abused or mistreated by people and institutions, only to be told that they are overreacting or that they can’t trust their own mind, that what happened didn’t happen, that their feelings are their fault, a mental error.

Feelings as a roadblock to knowledge

In contrast to Lorde, stoics see strong emotions as mistakes in reasoning.

• When someone insults us we feel they hurt us, but we weren’t actually hurt. (Great Untruth #1)

• When we get angry that someone took something from us, we are in fact not seeing reality—that we don’t “own” anything ultimately. Anger blinds us to the truth. (Great Untruth #2)

• If you feel enslaved, entrapped, oppressed, or put down, you actually aren’t, because as long as you have some kind of choice (even a choice to accept things as they are), you’re always free inside your mind. If you accept the choices you’re offered, you’ll see that nobody can victimize you. (Great Untruth #3)

For the stoics, the goal is to disentangle one’s self from emotions through the use of reason. By following certain logical steps, one can undo those emotional knots, and find serenity within external situations that one cannot change.

(Martha Nussbaum, in her book Upheavals of Thought, points out that the stoics give a kind of begrudging compliment to emotions, however, because they believe that emotions are based in beliefs about the world; our emotions change when provided with new evidence. Therefore, emotions are reasonable and interface with our reason. They aren’t irrational.)

Haidt essentially believes the same thing, that the depression and anxiety of young liberal women are due to a misapprehension of reality. Regardless of what they feel are the sources of their depression or anxiety, the reality is that they’ve taken on wrong beliefs about the world and themselves.

Haidt’s solution is for institutions to influence them so that they feel like they have agency, feel like they aren’t victims, feel like they haven’t been harmed. Because, science says, if you feel those ways, you won’t be depressed or anxious, and that is good. And what makes you feel happy (or feel nothing), so Haidt’s logic goes, is what is closest to reality. And so in reality there are no victims, no oppression, no limits to your agency—

Poof! The problems young liberal women thought they had vanish in a cloud of logic.

This is how stoicism works. It’s also convenient.

CBT for all, stoicism for victims

You can say one nice thing about the stoics: They didn’t try to pressure other people to be stoics. As a survival tactic, it’s fine. But it becomes something completely different when it becomes a normative program or institutional policy used to argue against other people’s emotions, as in the case of Haidt’s argument.

Even stoics said that it was very hard to be a true stoic, and even for someone like Seneca, the “ideal stoic” was purely imaginary. And yet what happens when it becomes normative, when stoic sainthood is consider the baseline for people who are speaking up about injustices done to them?

It’s all too eerily familiar. The only acceptable petition for justice has no emotion—no grief, no tears, no anger, no rage. If only these young liberal women could write about abuse and discrimination in chatty think pieces like people do about universal basic income, then we might be able to have a conversation.

When they get so emotional, it’s difficult to hear them. They are really only hurting themselves.

The real-life consequences of the debate

This dismissal of emotion is common in our culture. And it’s not just the “facts don’t care about your feelings” people. Over the years I have heard a few public intellectuals, mostly from the TED Talk / Silicon Valley set, talk about how maladaptive emotions are to modern life, using science-y language to support it.

Our emotions evolved for hunting and gathering, they say. They are meant to protect us from lions and tigers. They aren’t meant for board room meetings and traffic jams and little league games. All the lions and tigers are gone, but we still have these vestigial things called emotions, just hanging on and reacting to things every day, things that aren’t really that big of a deal.

Great Untruth #2 again—Emotions are not reliable guides to reality. (Thus, everybody needs to learn to meditate to separate their selves from their emotions.)

But this kind of thinking has real-life consequences for real-life bodies:

• Studies show that doctors underestimate the pain of Black patients and are less likely to proscribe pain medications to them.

• Mothers experience higher rates of mortality in America during pregnancy than in any other industrial nation, and black mothers are three times more likely than white mothers to die in pregnancy and postpartum.

• When mass shooting events occur, politicians and pundits say “now is not the time to take action.” The subtext being, Emotions are running too hot. We need to wait until the emotions cool off to address this. And then the shootings continue.

Which all leads to one question: Are the lions and tigers really gone?

The object of emotion is change

Perhaps we are afraid of emotions not because they don’t make a difference, but because they do.

“Anger is a grief of distortions between peers,” writes Lorde in “Uses of Anger.” “And its object is change.”

Here is a great example of Lorde’s scrutinizing of emotions, rather than trying to avoiding them, and how that scrutiny leads to knowledge and insight. Consider this profound description: Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Isn’t that exactly how anger feels? It’s that horrible feeling of disconnection between you and someone you want to be connected to. You are face to face, but in different worlds. And the pain you feel is in the inability to be seen or heard through the distortions. Why don’t they get it? Why can’t the see what’s happening?

Lorde says, “Anger is loaded with information and energy”—and what anger wants is a change to the way things are, a disruption of the distortion in order to affect a connection. Far from being disempowering, anger is the motivation to make the situation different than it is.

What we need for our living

What we decide—if emotions are information or a distraction, if they produce knowledge or obscure reality, if they are energy for change or a source of disempowerment—matters in real lives. And some people are at much more risk than others if we decide emotions harm the truth rather than reveal it.

Voluntary use of CBT as private therapy is one thing. But Haidt’s Three Great Untruths as an institutional policy provide a playbook for how to gaslight victims:

• You couldn’t have been hurt by what someone said.

• Your emotions are lying to you.

• There aren’t any bad people.

For Lorde, the whole point of paying attention to emotions like anger is to get to the truth so we can change the situation we are in, so we can build a better world than the one we have. We have to go through the tough emotions to get to joy, and so the mission is one of risky, dangerous hope.

She ends her poem “Outlines” this way:

I trace the curve of your jaw
with a lover’s finger
knowing the hardest battle
is only the first
how to do what we need for our living
with honor and in love
we have chosen each other
and the edge of each other’s battles
the war is the same
if we lose
someday women’s blood will congeal
on a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling.