Scarecrows, Tin Woodmen: Where is the Wizard?
Dan Levine
Sermon at First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church, Fort Worth
August 3, 2008
At times of personal tragedy like the present, it is hard for me to write about general
themes, and probably hard for you to focus on them. Yet this gives us all the more cause
to look back and ask: what is it about our society, or any other, that might make such
tragedies possible? I’m still a utopian after all these years, and believe we can challenge
some of our unconscious cultural assumptions that harm people.
Teaching the course on evolution and religion brought some of our cultural
assumptions home to me. The books we studied in that course were by academic
scholars who were either behavioral biologists or psychologists – Richard Dawkins,
Andrew Newberg, David Wilson, and Jonathan Haidt. We looked at their scientific
analyses not of the truth of the claims of religion, but of what drives people to become
religious. Is there a universal need in the human makeup, with varying strength across
both cultures and individuals, which motivates people toward forming communities of
worship? If there is such a need, can it be met just as well by a liberal religion such as
ours as by an authoritarian religion centered on a supernatural being?
All these authors had different answers, but one of their common themes was that
religion has important social functions that are independent of the truth of its claims.
Religion seems to facilitate bringing people together to act as a community, and
sometimes to sacrifice their individual interests for the benefit of a larger group. Also,
religious communities often provide emotional support and a sense of meaning to their
members. Unfortunately, the majority of religious communities are authoritarian, based
on a supernatural deity and the power of a priesthood or kingship that intervenes between
the deity and average people. The anthropologists Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta,
studying communal living arrangements, found that the communes that lasted the longest
tended to be religiously based and to impose strict rules, frequently enforced and
administered by charismatic leaders.
But the most common arrangements are often not the best arrangements. Can we
do better? Can we provide meaningful emotional and social support to large numbers of
people without making them suspend their critical judgment?
Answering this question is urgent not only for our society, but the world as a whole.
If we can’t answer “Yes” to emotional support PLUS intellectual freedom, to community
WITHOUT conformity, we run the danger of more and more susceptible individuals
being attracted to terrorism, or intolerance, or directing their frustrations toward the
wrong targets as Jim Adkisson in Knoxville did toward “liberals.”
Too many of us sacrifice one or the other, either emotion or reason. We become
either like the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz who lacked a heart, or the Scarecrow in
the same novel who lacked a brain. On re-reading the book I discovered that metaphor is
not perfect, because in fact neither one of those people was well equipped with the other
organ. But others use the same literary metaphor in the same way I do. Last week, in a
bizarre synchronicity, one of my graduate students called my attention to an article by
psychologists George Lowenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and Deborah Small of the
University of Pennsylvania in a 2007 issue of Journal of General Psychology entitled
The Scarecrow and the Tin Man: The Vicissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring.
How did we become this way? How did we develop a cultural myth that people
who think don’t feel and people who feel don’t think? Where did we come up with
phrases like “act rationally, not emotionally” ─ which neglects the possibility of
deliberately planning to increase future happiness? Where did psychotherapists dream up
instructions like “get out of your head and into your feelings” ─ which neglects the wellestablished role of several brain regions in fear and in pleasure?
The roots of the myth that emotion and reason are opposites go far back in the
history of thought. Aristotle contrasted the passions of the body with the reasons of the
mind, and darkly hinted that the mind was superior to the body. Many of Aristotle’s
intellectual heirs, from the medieval Thomas Aquinas through the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, said that human betterment depends on reason triumphing over passion.
Indeed, the idea of reason triumphing over passion was very much tied up with the
growth of scientific understanding of nature and the ability to improve our standard of
living through technology.
But there has also been throughout modern history a counter-trend that celebrates
passion instead of reason. This is what powered the 19th century romantic movement, the
music of Beethoven and Brahms, the poetry of Goethe, then the mysticism of Emerson
and other transcendentalists, the mid-20th century Beat Generation, and finally the 1960s
with the Summer of Love, Woodstock ─ and even some of the environmental movement,
which said technology had gone too far and we needed to stop trying to subdue nature.
Experimental neuroscientists and psychologists have taken the hint, and
discovered that emotion is less the enemy of reason than its partner. The clinical
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes’ Error, discussed several patients
who were damaged in an area of the frontal lobes, called the orbitofrontal cortex, which
processes emotional and social stimuli. One of these patients, named Elliot, had been
professionally successful before his brain damage occurred. After the damage he not
only retained a high IQ but scored well on tests of cognitive flexibility. Yet he lacked the
normal emotional responses to many situations. For example, he could describe driving
on an icy road and not feel or express any fear about it. Also, he was a terrible decision
maker. He couldn’t hold a job for any length of time, and couldn’t decide which of
several restaurants to eat at, even after going back to the vicinities of the restaurants to
help him decide.
If emotion and reason were really opposites, Elliot, being emotionally detached,
should have made wise, rational decisions. The truth is that because he lacked emotional
involvement in the possible outcome of a decision, he lacked a basis for deciding on one
reasonable course of action over another. His evaluation and comparison of possible
outcomes was Aflat.@ From patients like this one, Damasio concluded that effective
decision making not only isn’t hampered by emotion: it requires emotion.
Elliot is an exaggerated Tin Woodman. The Scarecrows include people who
emotionally feel empathy for another person but lack the cognitive ability to understand
the other person’s viewpoint. Empathy has a cognitive side as well as an emotional side
─ and our language recognizes that with the adjective “thoughtful” for someone who
considers another one’s feelings. Psychologists distinguish between an automatic and a
controlled form of empathy. Automatic empathy is more likely to occur when the person
we are trying to understand is a friend or is similar to us. Controlled empathy is more
necessary when the person is of a different race or gender or religion or ethnicity. That’s
what Native Americans call “walking a mile in their moccasins,” and it takes a lot of
cognitive effort. Without effort it’s easy to fall into what’s called the actor-observer
error. The actor-observer error means that when we explain why someone else performed
well or badly on a job, or acted pleasantly or unpleasantly toward us, we say “she’s nice”
or “he’s lazy.” But when we explain our own actions, we say “I had a bad day” or “I was
feeling successful.” We know what stresses we were under, or what situations we had to
deal with. But we don=t usually know about another person=s stresses and situations ─
especially if the other person is very different from us.
The bottom line is: to be effectively rational, we’ve got to be emotional, and to be
effectively emotional, we’ve got to be rational! The solutions to our social problems,
particularly at this stage of overpopulation and global warming, are partly psychological.
But they don’t consist of “helping reason triumph over emotion.” Rather they consist of
enhancing the effective partnership between reason and emotion. Both the linguist
George Lakoff and the neuropsychologist Drew Westen wrote books about how political
progressives need to change their strategies. Lakoff and Westen argue that progressives
have been shooting themselves in the foot by relying on sweet reason in the form of facts,
figures, and programs to make their case to the voting public. Instead, they need to
appeal to our emotions by bringing out our values and our sense of fairness. Once the
values are out in the open, then progressives can talk about how particular practical
programs enhance the cause of social justice.
There are many harmful consequences of the split between reason and emotion,
some of which I’ve talked about in other sermons. As Rabbi Michael Lerner discusses in
The Left Hand of God, valuing of reason over emotion has led to judging people mainly
by quantifiable, measurable standards. Many people pursue their individual economic
interests at the sacrifice of community involvement and close personal relationships.
This has meant a widespread loss of meaning, as people feel they are valued only for
their ability to produce for a job, or to meet the needs of a partner, and fear they will be
expendable if someone else comes a long who can meet those needs better. People who
feel they are not appreciated for themselves as people, and only for their market value,
are vulnerable to the appeal of right-wing religions and authority figures, including
terrorist leaders, who promise to give their lives meaning and purpose.
The ranking of reason over emotion, paradoxically, doesn’t mean that people as a
whole become more rational. The English-speaking world has developed a priesthood
whereby people who have technical or scientific skills are considered a breed apart, both
admired for their intelligence and mocked for their strangeness. There is a cult of the
expert, but the average person understands little about science or technology. Computers
and software have become more user friendly for more people, which helps, but the
average user still doesn’t understand how they work.
Finally, the belief that reason and emotion are separate, and reason is superior to
emotion, easily degenerates into a rank ordering where some people who are “rational”
are superior to other people who are “emotional.” This provides one excuse for racism,
sexism, and homophobia. Blacks, women, and gays are held to be “more emotional” than
whites, men, and straights, therefore more primitive and less able to make decisions in
their own interests.
How do we heal the split between reason and emotion? Well, let’s ask: How did
the Wizard of Oz finally give the Tin Woodman a heart and the Scarecrow a brain?
While he gave them phony objects that could represent a heart or brain, he convinced
them they had what they needed already. He was a “humbug” but he was also a
successful faith healer. In the same way he made the Cowardly Lion drink a liquid but
convinced him he already had the courage he needed. The Cowardly Lion who needs
courage represents all of us, and society as a whole. All too often we fall into the tried
and true paths of reason OR emotion, and community OR individual integrity, because
we lack the courage to try new ways of thinking, feeling, and living.
Combining a sense of community with individual freedom is more difficult than
having either one without the other. But difficult is not impossible, and I have seen the
combination in action and been part of it. In the Houston chapter of Lorraine’s and my
democratic socialist group in the early 1980s, there were heated arguments at meetings,
but they were arguments among friends. Differences got resolved with compromises, and
after the meetings we hugged each other and went out for beer. In my current research
laboratory at UTA, students are encouraged to set the course of their own research as
long as it basically fits with the common goals of the group. Again there is passionate
intellectual debate, on issues that impact on daily life as well as science, combined with a
high level of mutual emotional support.
The Wizard has no preconceived formula. We won’t save society from the twin
dangers of meaninglessness and terrorism by a detailed set of plans such as: do this thing
in Japan by 2013, that thing in Minnesota by 2015, and the other thing in Bolivia by
2017. That would be much too rigid. Instead, like the Wizard, we just need to have faith
that the heart and brain can work together, put on some disguises every now and then,
and keep on improvising as long as we live.