The Place of Emotion in Civil Discourse

Every argument has some level of emotional charge to it. The amount of emotion in an argument can vary from just enough to keep people interested in it to enough to cause murders. Obviously, having barely enough emotion to keep a people interested in an argument is not enough to engender a good discussion, while having enough to cause someone to become homicidal is too much. This begs the question; what is the proper amount and role of emotion in civil discourse?

"Its only logical"

Based on my experiences, I believe that the proper amount of emotion in an argument is enough to keep both sides fully invested in argument but not enough to cloud the facts and logic that are needed to have a reasonable and productive discussion. When this level of emotion is involved in civil discourse, every party involved is invested enough in the discourse that they will continue the discourse until one side has conclusively won the argument. This is the best point for any argument or discussion to get to because anything less than this will essentially lead to nothing new being determined during the discourse and all but ensuring that further discourse on the same topic will occur at a later time. Discourse is even more effective when this point can be reached without emotion becoming involved in the arguments themselves because this allows logic to rule the discussion, which allows for better overall arguments.

                                                                                                                                                           

When there is too little emotion to involved in a discussion, everyone will lose interest but those few people who can argue about anything for hours. Being one of those people, I have seen many times where someone has lost interest in a discussion and accepted my point even though it was completely ludicrous. This leads to ineffective discourse.

On the other hand, when too much emotion is involved in an argument, the discourse will be incredibly lively and involved, but many important details will be missed and the rationality of the arguments will suffer. This can be seen in the Deflategate controversy when fans and the NFL itself rushed to conclusions about whether the balls had been deflated instead of considering important details that could be very important to the situation. This glossing over of details because of emotions was highlighted when the NFL investigation of the incident did not consider that balls pumped up in a warm locker room will lose some pressure when they are introduced to cold weather. This lack of rationality that excess emotion can cause is just as destructive to effective discourse as too little emotion is.

Even if the proper amount of emotion for civil discourse could be known and measured, it would still be nearly impossible for that exact amount of emotion to be present in every discussion. Human emotions are too volatile and unpredictable to be controlled in a precise manner. Which means that how do we control our emotions?  May be a better question than how much emotion should we use?