A short fiction, with emotion

 A drill instructor was dressing down recruits in bootcamp. He woke the barracks up at 2 a.m. screaming. He stepped in front of each sleep-stunned teenager, nose to nose, and screamed.

Recruit A didn’t flinch. Before signing up, he’d taken a course in philosophy. As the drill instructor screamed, the recruit told himself he ought not to worry about the opinions of others.

Recruit B didn’t flinch either. He was a backwoods fellow whose family didn’t count an argument a feud until it had gone on for four generations. He quietly endured the berating but promised himself that if he were ever in the field with the drill instructor, he’d drop a grenade in his tent.

Recruit C swore at the drill instructor. This was exactly the type of undisciplined behavior that the drill instructor and the military were trying to ferret out. The recruit was assigned to Punishment Platoon.

Recruit D burst into tears. This, too, was one of those undisciplined behaviors that the military wanted to root out.

In my day, the military was not much interested in recruits, but it was interested in how individuals managed anger and fear.

What kind of grades would you give these recruits? All were subjected to the same stimuli. But what would you say of the responses?

I’d say two got angry — but in different ways. One lost his temper and got into a dustup. The other, in a cold fury, planned revenge. Of the others, one was afraid, perhaps, and one didn’t feel much at all, if the inquiry is limited to anger and fear.

This is my problem with talk of emotions. Each of the recruits in this story had some kind of feeling that was distinct from the others. But since we are social creatures and communicate with language, we must fit these feelings into categories.

I’m not sure it’s helpful to say that the fellow who lost his temper and the fellow who thought of murder were both “angry.” One was cool, and the other was ready to fight. Their vital signs were different. Would you expect to find neural activity in the same parts of their brains for such dissimilar thought processes, just because we use the word “anger” in both cases?

One of the basic errors in logic is called a categorical error. It seems to me that we’re prone to making such mistakes when we talk of emotions.