Reason and emotion are almost inextricable in politics, not least because human emotions affect people's views about their own reasonableness.
A polling survey on this compelling and controversial theme by Ekos Research, for the 2010 Walter Gordon Massey Symposium at the University of Toronto, which this year was titled "Private emotion, public policy," is evidence that Canadians place a high value on reason in politics, but are subject to a significant degree of irrationality in their assessments of themselves and their fellow citizens. This suggests that Canadian admiration for rationality is strongly coloured by such emotional factors as self-regard, vanity and indeed narcissism.
Eighty-six per cent of the respondents said that their voting decisions are mostly influenced by reason and thinking, rather than by emotional considerations, but 89 per cent said that the politics would be better if voters put greater emphasis on thinking, thus implying that most other voters fall short in this respect. They found federal Canadian politics to be too emotional rather than too rational, in a proportion of close to four to one.
But political reason and political emotions can have a complementary relationship, as well as an oppositional one. More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle recognized this by placing his study of the emotions in his book The Art of Rhetoric, rather than in his volume on the human psyche, where one would expect it.
The first of the book's three parts argues that persuasion - primarily a political activity - is based on a subordinate, fuzzier version of logic that deals in probabilities, not on precise propositions. He calls the rhetorical equivalent of syllogisms "enthymemes," which are less than logical proofs, yet are the results of a kind of reasoning.
The second part of the book contains what now would be called a textbook on affective psychology - because political (and courtroom) persuaders have to understand the emotions of their audiences, if their rhetorical enthymemes are to get accepted.
In other words, people's views of what is politically persuasive is usually based less on logical deductions or mathematical calculations, than on some mixture of their common sense and their emotional commitments.
The Ekos survey may well help Canadians to be more self-critical about their own thinking and to be more respectful toward their fellow citizens' emotions. Humans are, and will remain, both thinking and feeling beings.