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Emotional Rationale
How experiences during our early years form life-long emotional responses...
I remember the butcher's fierce eyebrows and the way he had pressed the pistol between the cow's eyes, the click of the hammer and the sharp crack and the bullet crunching through the skull. The massive cow, which had been standing unsure in the yard, slumped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. I was seven or eight then, clutching my dad's leg and peering fearfully through the V of his legs. My nose was crinkled against the acrid tang of warm, curdling blood that mingled with the smell of dead flesh. When we drove away on the Vespa I held tight to my dad's midriff and shot one or two glances over my shoulder.
For years afterwards, I had nightmares about that childhood experience. I saw a narrow, winding road, and it became a reality quest: I had to find that place again to see if it looked as bleak and desolate as it did in my dreams. It took me ten years to locate the old abattoir at the bottom of a snaking road in Fontana, Gozo - this time it was an old, attractive building.
Everything we call our personal values, every strand of our worldview, every complex emotional reaction in our lives - fear, hate, anger, disgust, love, joy, desire, and so on - can be traced to a specific incident in our childhood. Later, in life, any related or identical sensory experience triggers the emotional memory of that childhood incident to produce an already-cast emotional reaction. Paul Theraux wrote about this in his essay The Object of Desire, but he limited himself to the imagery that shaped the nature of his sexual desire - the same applies to every other emotional reaction we experience. Call it an emotional trigger.
We may pretend that our beliefs and opinions stem from rationale, but reason in this sense is like an alibi - the motive is one of those emotional triggers. We can just about argue for, or against, anything. Building a rational argument is easy if you follow the path of logic - all you have to do is select the reasons to support your point. Any point.
The imprint of that childhood experience at the abattoir, for example, has forever made me a helpless defender of animals. In the world I came from hunting meant manhood; toting a gun symbolised libido, virility. When the song thrush I had shot fell gasping blood, I slammed it against a rock to end its suffering, but I was shaking and I never picked another gun. At eighteen I visited the abattoir again as part of my course in agriculture. The stench of blood, the screaming pigs, the whiff of death in the air - it pulled my emotional trigger and I had to run out to avoid throwing up. When I arrived home, I found a pork chop on my plate. I turned to my mum and said: "I'm not eating this.actually, I am not eating meat anymore."
I could give you ten valid reasons why we should not eat meat, but deep down my aversion to meat is a complex emotional reaction activated by my emotional trigger. After all, five years after I stopped eating meat I relapsed, which says something about forgetfulness as the initial surge of emotional fallout recedes into oblivion - that is, until another incident pulls that trigger again. Reason has the value of reinforcing our views and beliefs, but it's very hard to convince oneself with wisdom only if there is no emotional predisposition. With reason alone, I can't become a pure vegetarian again. On the other hand, locate the imagery of a person's emotional trigger and he is yours.
We all have a unique set of emotional triggers that can neither be changed nor erased. For one of my friends, for example, the sight of a handicapped person does it: each time he sees someone in a wheelchair he would give œ100 to a charity that looks after the disabled. For Paul Theraux, it's that image of his friend's mum wearing bra and shorts and playing the guitar that set the imagery that forever afterwards, in his words, "gummed my mouth shut with panic and desire."
Benetton understood the nature of emotional keys when several years ago they launched an ad campaign that bombarded us repeatedly with shocking billboards. Media and civic leaders criticised their crude sensibility, but Benetton knew that by putting up shocking images, changing their nature every few weeks, chances were they were hitting the widest spectrum of emotional triggers. The UK government has recently got wind of this. In recent years their drink-and-driving TV ads have been gory - they show twisted mass of cars, flashing sirens, and lifeless blood-smeared bodies. Sickening? That's the point.
When I was in Birdlife Malta, I argued against the director's decision not to distribute a poster of a bloodied heron in schools. He said it would improperly shock youngsters' sensibilities - I argued that that was exactly my point, to shock youngsters against hunting by etching in their heart that bloodied image that would seize their stomach each time they hear a gunshot. Set a child's emotional trigger and he is yours forever.
© Victor Paul Borg
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