Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need to learn,
because we’re stupid and easily damaged. We can die. That’s not good, and we don’t feel
good about it. If we did, we would seek death, and then we would die. We don’t even feel
good about dying if it only might happen. And that’s all the time. In that manner, negative
emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed
and disgusted so we can avoid damage. And we’re susceptible to feeling such things a lot.
In fact, we feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the
same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.
Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated variants.
Satisfaction (technically, satiation) tells us that what we did was good, while hope
(technically, incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain
hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation (as
loneliness is also, technically, a form of pain). Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful
people and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. All these emotions must be balanced
against each other, and carefully judged in context, but they’re all required to keep us
alive and thriving. We therefore do our children a disservice by failing to use whatever is
available to help them learn, including negative emotions, even though such use should
occur in the most merciful possible manner.
Skinner knew that threats and punishments could stop unwanted behaviours, just as
reward reinforces what is desirable. In a world paralyzed at the thought of interfering
with the hypothetically pristine path of natural child development, it can be difficult even
to discuss the former techniques. However, children would not have such a lengthy
period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be
shaped. They would just leap out of the womb, ready to trade stocks. Children also
cannot be fully sheltered from fear and pain. They are small and vulnerable. They don’t
know much about the world. Even when they are doing something as natural as learning
to walk, they’re constantly being walloped by the world. And this is to say nothing of the
frustration and rejection they inevitably experience when dealing with siblings and peers
and uncooperative, stubborn adults. Given this, the fundamental moral question is not
how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never
experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge
may be gained with minimal cost.
In the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty, the King and Queen have a daughter, the princess
Aurora, after a long wait. They plan a great christening, to introduce her to the world.
They welcome everyone who loves and honours their new daughter. But they fail to invite
Maleficent (malicious, malevolent), who is essentially Queen of the Underworld, or
Nature in her negative guise. This means, symbolically, that the two monarchs are
overprotecting their beloved daughter, by setting up a world around her that has nothing
negative in it. But this does not protect her. It makes her weak. Maleficent curses the
princess, sentencing her to death at the age of sixteen, caused by the prick of a spinning
wheel’s needle. The spinning wheel is the wheel of fate; the prick, which produces blood,
symbolizes the loss of virginity, a sign of the emergence of the woman from the child.
Fortunately, a good fairy (the positive element of Nature) reduces the punishment to
unconsciousness, redeemable with love’s first kiss. The panicked King and Queen get rid
of all the spinning wheels in the land, and turn their daughter over to the much-too-nice
good fairies, of whom there are three. They continue with their strategy of removing all
dangerous things—but in doing so they leave their daughter naive, immature and weak.
One day, just before Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, she meets a prince in the forest, and
falls in love, the same day. By any reasonable standard, that’s a bit much. Then she loudly
bemoans the fact that she is to be wed to Prince Philip, to whom she was betrothed as a
child, and collapses emotionally when she is brought back to her parents’ castle for her
Perimmäinen syy asioiden olemassaololle on asia jolla on kyky luoda itse itsensä tyhjästä. Minä kutsun häntä Jumalaksi. Mikä se asia sinun mielestäsi on?
