I was once asked to use one word to describe my emotions in that particular moment. It took me longer than I thought. As I scanned the data available to me through the mystery of my own sentience, I came up with an answer that I believed was ultimately wrong. In the setting where this question was asked, there were no right or wrong answers; no quizzes or tests. It was simply a means to gauge where I was on the emotional spectrum in that moment.
Like anyone who struggles with emotions, I never feel quite at ease with my own emotional seas. Despite our tendency to pre-package emotions as single use, I usually seem to have a myriad of feelings all at one time which requires more than a little internal bandwidth to work through. I’m never just angry. I’m often angry because I’m frightened, outright scared, sad, or experiencing a sense of clear injustice or righteous indignation. I’m never just happy. I’m happy in the moment, but there’s always an underlying and far more nuanced realization that soon I won’t be happy. Trying to find one word that fit all my feelings and half-explored reactions, fears and hopes into a nice package for the experiment didn’t seem possible.
The cynic in me decided to respond ironically. “My emotions refuse to be labeled. They lack conformity and solidarity. They roil, they swirl. They are indefinable.” I know my answer because I jotted it down and I’ve looked at it often since.
This description of my personal emotional state fits almost universally. There is always strife and division within me. I think this is true for everyone. Human emotions are the belligerent teenager of the human psyche. We’re always divided, experiencing qualified emotions; happy but ambivalent, angry but scared, excited but also indifferent. No one is ever “of one mind” within their own particular internal idiolect. This is what makes us so unpredictable.
Humans are like this internally, but we are also like this as a whole species. With very few exceptions we are rowdily uncooperative outwardly as well. 2020 has served as a good example of my point. Thinking in terms of the human race as an organism, never has one group so wildly differed from itself in so many directions at one time. As a species, humans are pathologically incapable of real cooperation or singularity of purpose for very long, as one might find in other organisms on the planet.
Some single-celled organisms have recently been discovered to have “quorum sensing” abilities. They will wait to accomplish a goal until there are enough members to significantly outweigh the dangers of the particular goal. On the cellular level, this is incredibly sophisticated behavior that does not require sentience. Even multi-cellular organisms can act as a group to protect the whole. In fact, to me, this is what’s so fascinating about nature. Most biodiversity can be squinted at enough so that we can see one segment of the web of nature coming together to overcome or protect itself from another segment.
I’m oversimplifying things for the benefit of my example, but it seems a worthy illustration, generally. Humans are primates. We know that primate social structures are competitive, violent, complex, nuanced and also cooperative, giving, nurturing and always building strong bonds and relationships. Humans, too, are capable of this complex balance of interaction. Some may say that we’ve needlessly overcomplicated things by adding other forms of communication to our basic evolutionary tools, and I might agree, but generally, we’re pretty good at being, well, human.
Nevertheless, it is important to look at humanity as it has progressed through history. Some small groups of proto-humans (hominids predating or coexisting with homo sapiens) managed to survive all the bestial and weather-related dangers long enough to reproduce and grow their family units into larger, hunter-gatherer groups. We slowly emigrated from our Mesopotamian spawning grounds to cover the earth over millennia, spreading our numbers over gargantuan distances. During all that growing and moving, there was violence, death, tribalism, barbaric rituals and xenophobia (we may have even purposefully killed off all the other proto human hominids). Even so, there was also incredible cooperation. Humans coming together to build civilization, write laws, compose music and art and even, eventually, put our footprint on the Moon.
All of this progress has been slow and always mired by our primitive and atavistic blood-thirstiness, yet it has happened. Ancient humans were no less sophisticated than we are now. As a whole, they held the potential for computers, space exploration, discovery and sequencing of the human genome, self-government, rationalism and a hope for enlightenment. The entirety of the human historical record thus far can be boiled down to a dogged race with ourselves to outpace our own worst impulses and to come together for the good of the species. A kind of moral quorum sensing.
This oversimplification of our shared history doesn’t fail to provide evidence of what we have actually accomplished. Yes, there are still wars, tyrants; still slavery, genocide, chemical dependence, greed, lust for power, land disputes and to an extent unimaginable to our future selves, we’ve also managed to create a means to wipe out our own history by harnessing the atom. But we have still managed to bring ourselves from a meager band of hunters dying from cuts or from their teeth or from exposure to weather or ‘the world of tooth and claw’, to a mind-numbing populace that coats all but the most frigid or arid parts of this little blue backwater planet. When you weigh that incredible accomplishment against the disasters and cataclysms that we’ve caused and committed against ourselves, it seems like Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that the moral arc of human history bends toward justice.
For better or worse we are all we have on this planet. No one is coming to save us. No one ever has (except ourselves). Now more than ever, our internal emotional state can only be described as chaotic. We’re far more worried about how someone else voted or where they attend worship to think about human solidarity. But the very human characteristic that has allowed us to get to this current extremity of tribalism within our species is the same one that put us as the most densely-populated sentient species on the planet (that we know of).
We are often our own worst enemies, but at this time of year, I like to think that we’re also our own best friends. Our chaotic nature, as a whole, makes us uniquely capable of dealing with the challenges that we present ourselves. Now more than ever, we can turn our minds inward, to perform a little emotional inventory. We can choose to see what really matters to us. We can come together, right now, as Lennon and McCartney once so eloquently put it, and have all the world to gain from our momentary unselfish look at our own heart.
We don’t have to like what we see, but we can certainly work with the information we gather. And, since we’re facing a holiday season without being able to gather beyond those members of our homes, it might enhance the meaningfulness of this time of year to practice a little mindfulness for our own good and for the good of others.
One way or the other, humanity constantly faces its own internal dialog, just as each of us does individually. Without regard for the labels we employ or the false boundaries that we adhere to, just once, it would be nice if we could come up with one word to describe our accomplishments as a species that worked to bring us together. If I had to think of a word to describe that state of internal emotions, I might choose solidarity.
