Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Hotheads | 369the trivial rather than the informing sense. It may tell you the officialrules, but it won't tell you how life is lived." Emotions, in particular, areoften regulated by the official rules, because they are assertions of a person'sinterests. To me it's a confession of my innermost feelings, but toyou it's bitching and moaning, and you may very well tell me to put a lidon it. And to those in power, other people's emotions are even moreannoying—they lead to nuisances such as women wanting men as husbandsand sons rather than as cannon fodder, men fighting each otherwhen they could be fighting the enemy, and children falling in love witha soulmate instead of accepting a betrothed who cements an importantdeal. Many societies deal with these nuisances by trying to regulate emotionsand spreading the disinformation that they don't exist.Ekman has shown that cultures differ the most in how the emotionsare expressed in public. He secretly filmed the expressions of Americanand Japanese students as they watched gruesome footage of a primitivepuberty rite. (Emotion researchers have extensive collections of grossoutmaterial.) If a white-coated experimenter was in the room interviewingthem, the Japanese students smiled politely during scenes that madethe Americans recoil in horror. But when the subjects were alone, theJapanese and American faces were equally horrified.FEELING MACHINESThe Romantic movement in philosophy, literature, and art began abouttwo hundred years ago, and since then the emotions and the intellecthave been assigned to different realms. The emotions come from natureand live in the body. They are hot, irrational impulses and intuitions,which follow the imperatives of biology. The intellect comes from civilizationand lives in the mind. It is a cool deliberator that follows theinterests of self and society by keeping the emotions in check. Romanticsbelieve that the emotions are the source of wisdom, innocence,authenticity, and creativity, and should not be repressed by individualsor society. Often Romantics acknowledge a dark side, the price wemust pay for artistic greatness. When the antihero in Anthony Burgess'AClockwork Orange has his violent impulses conditioned out of him, heloses his taste for Beethoven. Romanticism dominates contemporaryAmerican popular culture, as in the Dionysian ethos of rock music, the