October 14, 2010

HEART MURMURS - Beyond The Tyranny Of Compulsive Thinking

By: David Edwards

It is one of the wonders of the internet that anyone can communicate with pretty much anyone, more or less instantly. Over the last decade, we at Media Lens have received thousands of emails from readers, supporters and critics all over the world. We can’t help noticing trends in the flood of human communication passing through our inboxes.

Surprisingly perhaps, we tend to receive more criticism from people who fundamentally agree with us than from people who think we’re ‘loony lefties’ (we don‘t get much emailed criticism from the right). Among these critical supporters, some of them very reasonable, we encounter a small number of a broadly similar personality type. These are intellectuals (by which I simply mean people who clearly spend a large part of their day thinking and writing about intellectual problems) - their analyses are meticulous, detailed and articulate, but also (from our perspective) wildly irrational. They might best be described as clever rather than intelligent.

Their style of communication is relentless, insistent and cold, characterised by an almost complete lack of human feeling. The sense is of people who live entirely in their heads - they are thinkers, analysts, above all else. It is as though their minds have been completely hijacked by their egos. And the ego’s primary concern, as we all know, is to be ‘right’, ‘the winner’, ‘special’.

Thinking is of the ego, feeling is of the heart. The reason I’m mentioning these critics is not to hit back at them, but because they indicate a risk in activism, dissent, and intellectual work generally, especially in the age of the internet, to which I also am not immune. If we live too much in our heads, if we devote our lives to thinking, analysing, to writing endlessly critical commentaries and emails, the emotional supply lines to our hearts can become stretched, strained, even broken.

Excessive thinking has a constipating effect on our emotions: there is a dry, lifeless quality to it. Just as our digestive systems need fruit and vegetables with a high water content to work happily and well, so our souls need juicy emotions and feelings. If we live in our heads all day, every day, we can become rational monsters - mechanical, cold, relentless, almost inhuman.

The risk in political activism is that we can lose connection to the emotional centre that acts as our moral compass, that acts as a navigational corrective to our ego. The ego doesn’t give a damn about moral direction; it just wants to win the argument. So we can easily lose sight of the bigger moral picture, becoming obsessed with being ‘right’, even though it is of almost zero moral significance, or even harmful, in the grand scheme of things.

READ FULL ALERT  

What is Media Lens?

CONTINUE