That some emotions are wrong
I want to go to bat for a view that it seems almost no one holds. Some emotions are wrong. To be clear, I don’t just mean the way you react to them (although that can certainly be wrong too), I mean emotions in and of themselves can be invalid, and it can reflect (somewhat) poorly on you that you feel them.
When I was in high school, I was knocked out of a relatively unimportant competition that I’d initially been told (mistakenly) I’d made the finals for. I was absolutely devastated- wrecked by it. Then, after some reflection, I came to the conclusion that it was not appropriate for someone my age to feel that way, and I was right. That emotion wasn’t contributing anything, it was detracting from the good I could do, the fun I could have, the learning and growing I should be focused on. The emotion was having a bad effect, I had some degree of control over the emotion, therefore to the extent that I had not exercised control to quench the emotion, I had acted wrongly.
Now there’s a couple of objections you could run against young me, and some of them have limited merit, but on the whole I think young me had the right of it:
“But you can’t control your emotions, so it’s not appropriate to attach praise or blame to them.”
I disagree with the empirical premise. I think we absolutely can cultivate dispositions to feel or not feel certain ways- so over the long term we have some degree of control. I also think that, even in the moment, we often have the capacity to at least partially “buck ourselves out of it”.
“But wouldn’t it be better to criticize how you respond to the emotion, rather than the emotion itself?”
These things will never be fully detached. You’re not going to feel furious rage at person an interact kindly and sweetly with them, at least not in the long term. You’re never going to feel devastated about some triviality and still be able to do what you need to do.
“But won’t your doctrine lead to a sort of neuroticism, as people constantly self-criticize their own feelings?
The solution is simple don’t take it overboard. I hold that some emotions can be wrong, but I don’t advise neurotically combing away at your emotions. There’s no shortcut to good judgment on these matters. We need to try to walk a golden mean of self-cultivation without self-obsession. To be sure, wrong-feeling is certainly not the worst problem out there, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
“But aren’t you engaging in a kind of very western, very cartesian contempt of emotion, conceptualizing it as lower than other kinds of cognition?
No. On the contrary, I would argue that by recognizing emotions can be wrong and right I am giving emotion the kind of respect it deserves. Treating all emotions as equally valid tends to make them all equally meaningless. By distinguishing between more and less appropriate emotions we recognize emotion as a vital part of thought, worthy of dialogue and analysis. “All emotions are valid” smacks of a kind of “soft bigotry of low expectations”.
“What about the flipside- the view that sometimes you are obligated to feel certain things?”
I endorse that too, although I will concede that it is more difficult to make yourself feel something than to make yourself not feel something.
“I have X emotion that is destructive, but that nonetheless I can’t stop feeling that way despite trying. Does your view make me blameworthy?”
No. You’ve tried your best, that’s all anyone can ask.
I agree completely with this; it is *obviously* true, even though many people don't yet recognize it. For a trivial example, just spend a little time around small children, and wait for them to have an absurdly overblown meltdown in response to the smallest imaginable bit of "adversity", like not getting to have a second treat after an entire day of play dates, birthday parties, mini golf, etc.
We all went through that phase, and (nearly) all of us now recognize, at least implicitly, that those meltdowns were simply wrong, unreasonable emotions, that were both wildly out of appropriate scale to the objective magnitude of the disappointment, and wildly unhelpful to our well-being and ability to move forward productively.
Almost anyone who objects to the idea that emotions can be invalid, would also be shocked and disgusted if an adult had a preschooler's meltdown, crying and screaming and laying on the floor, because, say, there was no more coffee in the pot right now. If we can recognize that, we should be able to recognize that there are also some more common adult emotions that are sometimes wrong too, whether in scale, circumstance, or functionality, and also that some people are clearly much more emotionally healthy than some others.
In fact, if you disagree with this post's thesis, just ask yourself honestly who you personally know is the most emotionally healthy, and who is the least. People will immediately come to mind; why, and what are they doing differently from each other, and how do you feel differently about them?
God damn this stupid app, second time it ate my comment. <- See, that right there was probably a wrong emotion. What I wanted to say in my lost comments is that I am utterly gobsmacked that you think this position is uncommon. It seems trivially, obviously true to me and I can not recall ever arguing with anyone about it either. So at least in my circles I would expect that almost everyone would agree with this (except perhaps for certain contrarian types who just disagree for the sake of an argument). But maybe there is a cultural difference here?