Fact and Feeling

The 2017 film Chasing Coral contains scenes that may surprise some viewers. The setting is not a promising one for high drama: a lecture theatre filled with scientists, gathered at a conference. There are pens, laptops, cups of coffee. 

The scientists are watching before-and-after footage of the reefs they research, killed by rising sea temperatures. Colourful scenes busy with fish give way to the ghostly emptiness of bleached ecosystems.

As the camera pans around the room, we see their faces streaked with tears.

This is not how scientists are supposed to behave. Scientists are supposed to be objective, unemotional. Emotion belongs in the realm of poetry and religion. Right?

The myth of the emotionless scientist dates back to the late nineteenth century, set out in a famous speech by the scientist John Tyndall to his own roomful of colleagues. Tyndall, a fierce opponent of religion, thought that eradicating emotion from science would also keep it  safe from faith. 

Tyndall gave Darwin as a good example of science stripped of emotion.. ‘He moves over the subject [of evolution] with the passionless strength of a glacier’, Tyndall noted approvingly. Continuing with the glacier metaphor, he compared Darwin’s ‘logical pulverization’ of people who disagreed with him to a glacier’s impassive ‘grinding of…rocks’.

Killing emotion was something that the Victorians excelled at. Their future leaders were sent to public schools where vulnerability was literally beaten out of them. Physiologists and doctors were systematically desensitised through training in vivisection and a bantering culture of human dissection. Army naturalists, posted in Africa, shot animal specimens on their days off and presided over human cruelty when they were on duty. 

The decoupling of emotion and science enabled terrible medical experiments in the twentieth century, not just by the Nazis but also by many other nationalities. In the US, Black men were deliberately infected with syphilis between 1932 and 1972, to watch the progress of the disease. During the Cold War, populations were exposed to radiation from bomb tests to see what their effects might be.

Detaching emotion from science also separated scientists from the moral and political consequences of their research. This was one reason why many of the world’s top climate scientists were able to work for fossil fuel companies during the mid to late twentieth century. They were not professionally equipped to address any emotional qualms they might have felt about the questions they were asked to research or the uses to which their objective findings were put. 

Tyndall’s myth was also deeply damaging  to religion. Religion, in this way of thinking, becomes ‘mere emotion’, something suitable only for people ruled by their emotions - especially women and children. This also made it possible for any critique of science on moral grounds to be dismissed as religious hysteria.

By linking faith with feeling, the myth has had a second damaging effect. It can lead people to a spiritual crisis when they worry that they don’t ‘feel’ anything in worship or prayer.

Many traditions of Christianity place less demand upon individuals to sustain their faith through emotion. The church and its rituals carry the community, whatever they may feel.

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Thankfully, both scientists and religious leaders are beginning to realise how damaging the feelings/facts myth can be.

Astronauts and other space scientists were amongst the first to begin articulating their emotions. Seeing Earth from orbit seems to be a powerful experience that triggers awe and wonder in most people. 

And today, medical students are no longer trained to suppress the emotional unsettlement of human dissection through a culture of locker-room banter. Instead, they are encouraged to think about the personhood of the body which lies before them. 

Emotions come in all forms, and are not necessarily good or bad in what they contribute to the activity of science. There can be joy at a discovery, glee at potential profitability, sadness at a disease that is as yet untreatable. There can be frustration and impatience in the research process. There can be envy or pride in personal success.

Emotion is the missing link in science. It motivates scientists to study their chosen topics. It shapes how they research, and for what purposes. 

By being honest about the role of emotion in science, we can have more productive conversations about what science we want to see in the world, as well as the significance of ritual and tradition in worship. Faith isn’t all about feeling any more than science is about not feeling.