On the subject of human behaviour I often marvel at a phenomenon I witness regulary in supermarket cafes. There are tables that have just been used by customers and they haven't been cleared. They have trays and plates and cups etc. Next to them there are tables that have been cleared and cleaned. People will go to a table that is cluttered with trays and plates etc. and start clearing the table and placing everything on a clean table next to it so that they can sit at that particular table rather than simply sitting at the clear table. I never get used to seeing that and still marvel at it. It is completely irrational behaviour, but is quite normal and happens regularly.

David Hume tells us how reason is the slave of our passions and always must be so. For Hume our passions are such things as our natural drives of hunger, thirst and lust, but they also embrace our emotions, many of which are social, such as pride, envy etc. They are the likes and dislikes we experience that motivate our behaviour. What Hume argues is that we do not have the feelings we do because we reach them through the application of reason, but rather that we reason on the basis of our feelings, which are the result of our passions. As a result, the collective beliefs and moral codes of our society are the result of the dominant feelings on any particular matter. Most of the rules and norms that guide our behaviour in our society are not determined by cool detached reasoning over what is good or bad, but are the result of our feelings towards any particular social phenomena. In the UK as these feelings are the result of the dominant forces in society, they are class feelings. That is why we often uncritically accept the dominant views that denigrate working people and their organisations, immigrants, Muslims and the disabled. 

These feelings are, of course, the result of our socialisation, and so, most of our feelings are not our own, they have been given to us by external forces, such as parents and other powerful influences on us, that we internalise without really considering them.  As a result most of us operate through a normative system that we have never really considered with reference to its influence on us, or to whether it is correct or incorrect. How often have you asked people if they would like something to eat and they tell you that they don't like it, and then admit that they have never tasted it?

Thus, moral, political and ethical convictions are positions we choose, not because we have reasoned them to be right or wrong, but simply because we feel that they are right or wrong, and, if asked to explain why we think something is right or wrong, we cannot really give a satisfactory explanation, we just feel it. We can then understand that they are not logical conclusions reached from the application of reason, they are the result of desire or aversion.

Sigmund Freud supports Hume's thesis arguing that we are motivated by what he terms our affective interests. Our affective interests are what Hume calls our passions, our emotional faculties. Freud writes that

Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will requires.

and that

the shrewdest people will all of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but that they will completely regain their understanding once that resistance has been overcome.

So, why do we clear a table when there is a better option available? Because we want to sit at a particular table and not one that is on offer. If we sat at the other table our meal would not be so enjoyable, would it? It would taste different. Food is therefore affected by our choice of seating in a restaurant, just as all disabled people are benefit scroungers and all Muslims are potential suicide bombers, it stands to reason doesn't it? It must because if the government and its henchmen in the tabloid press say these things are reasonable, then they must be, simples!


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Doktor Kommirat